Hacker News: hobbescotch

Show HN: StarDate – a daily game where you guess celebrity ages

hobbescotch — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:48:02 +0000

Buddy and I used to do this thing where we tried to guess the ages of celebrities on the IMDB birthday page each morning.

Made a simple game out of it - it's sort of a mashup of wordle + geoguessr

Enjoy & happy Friday, gang

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366045

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by hobbescotch in "Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year"

hobbescotch — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 21:09:06 +0000

Have you been to Finland? It is a very safety conscious culture. This isn’t just some fluke.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Cloudflare Connectivity Issues in Eastern US and Central Europe"

hobbescotch — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 19:11:37 +0000

Having lots of random issues with gcp today as well

New comment by hobbescotch in "Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'"

hobbescotch — Fri, 10 May 2024 14:27:34 +0000

Their Apple vision ad was very dystopian feeling and to me looks like the same team did this one. They seem really out of touch. Very negative vibes in these recent ads.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Daniel Dennett has died"

hobbescotch — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 16:55:17 +0000

Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP

New comment by hobbescotch in "Google Workers Protest Cloud Contract with Israel's Government"

hobbescotch — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:06:56 +0000

Wonder why the second discussion was flagged

New comment by hobbescotch in "Analysing the Twitter User Exodus to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads"

hobbescotch — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 10:21:52 +0000

I would say that they all have stable user bases which is nice to see. Though some are weighted towards different niches. I recommend checking them all out.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Argentina's Milei Devalues Peso by 54%"

hobbescotch — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 20:15:23 +0000

Although his style would seem off putting, I would not discount him so readily. He is an economist with many published papers under his belt and has worked for the WEF. Whatever happens, hope the outcome is positive for Argentinians.

Edit: bio from WEF website

Licentiate in Economics, Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina; two Master's in Economics, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and CEDES/IDES. Former: Head Economist, Estudio Broda and Máxima AFJP; Senior Economist, HSBC, Argentina; Adviser of the Argentine Government, ICSID. Currently, Head Economist, Corporación América. B-20/G-20 Adviser and Member, Group of Economic Policy, ICC/G-20. Since 2012, leads the division of Economic Studies, Fundación Acordar, a think tank of national scope. For more than 20 years, University Professor of Macroeconomics, Economics of Growth, Microeconomics and Mathematics for Economists. Has written over 50 academic papers.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?"

hobbescotch — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 14:06:14 +0000

Modelling natural gas consumption. I don’t think it’ll be actually useful and certainly not as nuanced as professional models for trading, but adding the necessary data to my data warehouse and then working on it has been a fun experience.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Low serotonin levels might explain some Long Covid symptoms, study proposes"

hobbescotch — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 13:20:38 +0000

I had a globus / lump in throat sensation that was my first symptom of COVID and persisted months after. It went away somehow after I started going to the gym. Obviously can’t say if it’s connected or not, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Python: Just Write SQL"

hobbescotch — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:14:39 +0000

I’ve been a data engineer for many years and have lots of practice optimizing SQL touching many parts of the language and I still enjoy using SQLAlchemy for its tight, elegant integration with flask/django. Of course some queries make sense to optimize with raw sql but I think here, like with many other things, there’s no black/white conclusion to draw from these situations.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Threads and the social/communications map"

hobbescotch — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 12:54:16 +0000

Twitter doesn’t default to the “For you” tab. It remembers which one you spend most time on (I think Elon tweeted this at one point). I use chrono exclusively and it doesn’t default to the algo feed when I open the app.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway"

hobbescotch — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 09:02:52 +0000

I haven’t looked at the data, but junior mining and exploration is a bit of the wild west in terms of honesty and would not in the least be surprised if some trickery is at play to produce that result. Also a reason why it’s not advisable for new investors to get into this sector.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering"

hobbescotch — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 07:02:12 +0000

You would think that but the Nintendo Switch controller still has analog stick drift many years after being discovered.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks"

hobbescotch — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 06:43:33 +0000

3rd party app developers are the freeloaders I would argue. They contribute no revenue to reddit, are exempt from displaying ads but incur OpEx costs. Some are as big as 1B reqs a month but act as though they are the victim. Not only that, instead of being a professional business partner, they go on their respective subreddit to complain about reddit management… on reddit. Kind of hilarious actually.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks"

hobbescotch — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 06:16:15 +0000

I am going to take a different stance here but these platforms do provide HUGE value. Hosting is a massive cost and so is moderating the volunteer moderators. These 3rd party apps were free loading, some getting billions of requests in a single month and acting like victims, while reddit bears the burden of OpEx costs. On a CPM basis reddit API fees are actually quite cheap and fair for 3rd party devs. 3rd party apps can turn a profit with app redesign, but, from their comments seems like something they were not willing to do.

Reddit has just laid off employees and is probably paying 4-5x it was before for financing due to interest rates and has to find new sources of revenue, and quickly, IPO or not. Users are great for building communities but they can just as easily turn into a non-rational mob like is being done here.

New comment by hobbescotch in "US solar market is projected to triple in size by 2028"

hobbescotch — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:27:56 +0000

Yes 100%

New comment by hobbescotch in "US solar market is projected to triple in size by 2028"

hobbescotch — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:17:13 +0000

I would check out some videos of the Kivu cobalt mines where children work to mine for our cobalt. There are north american mines that are shut in because we chose to instead use child labor in incredibly dangerous mines that frequently have landslides because it’s cheaper. It seems that many only care enough about climate change to greenwash and not think about anything else. There are hopefully new battery compounds on the way but it should be allowed to criticize elements on the energy transition if there are problems. How else do we get nice things without encouraging open discussion? Perhaps it’s an american thing to associate these views with certain labels but I don’t see how it’s related to any political affiliation or gender to have these concerns.

New comment by hobbescotch in "My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated"

hobbescotch — Tue, 16 May 2023 08:13:14 +0000

I learned Java Applets in school in 2009 and it was clear to me then that they were sort of… awkward. Java itself is fine and I still do a little Java work from time time and it’s a breath of fresh air from the daily python work.

New comment by hobbescotch in "Unlighthouse: Like Lighthouse, but it scans every single page"

hobbescotch — Tue, 09 May 2023 07:38:06 +0000

Reminds me, I had to once set up lighthouse scans for thousands of sites and the only way to do this fast enough was to run the tests concurrently on a single machine. But the test results also depended on cpu load of thr machine running the tests, so we had to sample cpu load live and adjust a multiplier in the lighthouse tests to handle this so that lighthouse would not think it is the site that is being slow. I understand it’s a complex tool, but I wish lighthouse results with the cli were more reproducible!