Hacker News: hyperjeff

New comment by hyperjeff in "Permacomputing Principles"

hyperjeff — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:24:58 +0000

clearly not a reader of Mondo 2000 back in the day. i do miss real hacker culture.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

hyperjeff — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:54:32 +0000

This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

hyperjeff — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:57:33 +0000

Pardons should be changed to be subject to congressional approval (and rate limited). It’s clearly been demonstrated that the temptation to abuse it is too great.

New comment by hyperjeff in ""Our programs are fun to use" – Beagle Bros"

hyperjeff — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:01:45 +0000

Everything they did was amazing. Hackers in the best sense.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Scott Adams has died"

hyperjeff — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:08:15 +0000

As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.

Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.

New comment by hyperjeff in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

hyperjeff — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:35:07 +0000

I'd love to hear more! Have you collected stories on a blog or to places like Folklore.org?

New comment by hyperjeff in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

hyperjeff — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:16:22 +0000

Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)

New comment by hyperjeff in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

hyperjeff — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:50:35 +0000

I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.

New comment by hyperjeff in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

hyperjeff — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:47:56 +0000

i haven’t had my coffee yet, but i’m going to need to see this sentence diagrammed out.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

hyperjeff — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:36:48 +0000

Average users have no idea what of their information is in the cloud or not. Even if they did, they have no idea of the implications.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Making macOS Bearable"

hyperjeff — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:28:34 +0000

One can make Spaces deterministic by turning off Automatically rearrange Spaces. Add keyboard shortcuts for quick access to each. On multi-display setups, you can have the whole group of displays work in lock-step on a project by turning off Displays have separate Spaces. These are the first two things I uncheck on a new system. Each Space can be dedicated to different projects using any number of apps instead of trying to correlate Spaces with specific apps. (Sadly, you can only have up to 16 Spaces.)

Side plug, I have a utility that lets you associate names with each Space: https://github.com/hyperjeff/NameSpace (Apple should’ve made naming Spaces standard, but no.)

New comment by hyperjeff in "Show HN: WhatHappened – HN summaries, heatmaps, and contrarian picks"

hyperjeff — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:12:47 +0000

Nice. It’d be cool if you could tap on the subject tags to filter for the latest posts with that tag.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks"

hyperjeff — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:41:01 +0000

Bikes and scooters aren’t legal on sidewalks in Chicago, and these little robots are just clogging up what little pedestrian space still exists. Totally apart from the questionable ethics of gratuitously using tech for tasks that could be a job for someone.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Bad Dye Job"

hyperjeff — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:00:38 +0000

+1 for the return of TouchID, but it’ll never happen. Having to orient the phone and stare into a bright screen all the time is sub optimal.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain"

hyperjeff — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:44:52 +0000

Back when I used to meditate regularly, I would find that an extra meditation in the middle of a sleepless night would go a long way toward pushing off the need for sleep. Generally, meditating always left me in a slightly heightened awake state. Perhaps the help with brain fluid regulation is a core reason for both effects. (I should go back to meditating again.)

New comment by hyperjeff in "Pornhub says UK visitors down 77% since age checks came in"

hyperjeff — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:00:06 +0000

relevant Dilbert: https://www.flubu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/wpid-p...

New comment by hyperjeff in "TextEdit and the relief of simple software"

hyperjeff — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:42:29 +0000

Early releases of the dev tools even included the TextEdit source for you to learn from.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2014)"

hyperjeff — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:04:15 +0000

These days “classical” just distinguishes all things quantum from non-quantum. General relativity is considered a classical theory, for example.

New comment by hyperjeff in "Bear is now source-available"

hyperjeff — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 22:05:19 +0000

Apple often goes to great lengths to avoid anything GPL.

New comment by hyperjeff in "What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?"

hyperjeff — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:58:00 +0000

At a minimum, an education should leave you with an ability regardless of the tools at your disposal. There may come a time when whatever tool you have grown accustomed to will not be available. (If a war breaks out, for example, don’t count on any of your electronic devices to work.) By all means learn to use tools effectively, but that’s not enough.