Hacker News: innocentoldguy

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Taste Is All That's Left"

innocentoldguy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:01:19 +0000

Isn’t that expected, though? If 100 of us were to write a five page essay on the chaffing mechanics of an Underoos wedgie, the likelihood that any of them are the same is pretty small, isn’t it?

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Taste Is All That's Left"

innocentoldguy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:56:16 +0000

I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing.

When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians of churning out "calculator slop." A calculator is just a tool to make the complex work of mathematics easier. I now view AI as a calculator for writing, among other things. If the idea is good and the information is sound, I don't let the occasional awkward phrasing bother me. The truth is, most people can't write very well anyway, so if AI helps them communicate better—even if it is obviously generated by AI— more power to them.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

innocentoldguy — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 02:01:19 +0000

Yes. They work fine in Chrome. Mellel is the only app I can think of where they don’t work.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:11:16 +0000

Vitamin D is a lifesaver for me. I'm severely deficient, and if I don't take about 10,000 IU a day, I seem to get colds every five minutes.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

innocentoldguy — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:24:53 +0000

Yes. Basic emacs keybindings work pretty much everywhere in macOS. I have run into a couple of apps that don’t behave correctly, but 99% of the time they work.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

innocentoldguy — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:00:47 +0000

I was going to trade in an old truck and buy my daughter a Tiguan this weekend. I guess I’ll rethink that.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:44:32 +0000

Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "A key remapping daemon for Linux"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:49:46 +0000

I use Karabiner-Elements on macOS, and finding keyd was a godsend on Linux. I cannot deal with standard keyboard mappings and the lack of hold/tap keys.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:15:57 +0000

I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

innocentoldguy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:07:17 +0000

I've found that if I apply for any company that uses Workday, it's an immediate rejection, so I don't bother with them anymore.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:40:08 +0000

Neither do I.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:39:17 +0000

LLMs seem to have an easy time with Elixir and Phoenix in my testing.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

innocentoldguy — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:53:18 +0000

I find Elixir's memory and threading models much more compelling than Go's for web services. There are many great libraries for Elixir as well, but if you need something else, Elixir makes rolling your own libraries very easy. I'd recommend giving Elixir a try, if you haven't already.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS"

innocentoldguy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:58:41 +0000

I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk"? (2023)"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:30:33 +0000

Philips is the company that came up with the term "Compact Disc" for CDs, so we can blame them for goofing up the regional spellings and making the world more confusing.

I think Alan Shugart (or at least his team at IBM) started calling portable data disks "floppy disks," and then "hard disk" emerged to differentiate rigid disks from bendy ones. Maybe we can also blame him and his team.

The important thing is that someone gets blamed. :D

New comment by innocentoldguy in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:07:08 +0000

I have been around for a similar amount of time. Another change I have seen over the years is the shift from programming being an exercise in creative excellence at work to being a white-collar ditch-digging job.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?"

innocentoldguy — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 04:32:02 +0000

I'm currently using Niri+Noctalia just to try them out, but I typically use Gnome and like it quite a bit for its simple, clean interface.

I use macOS and Linux, and the way GNOME works makes switching between them easier for me than when I run KDE, for instance (I'm sure others have a different experience, and that's what is so great about Linux).

New comment by innocentoldguy in "France's homegrown open source online office suite"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:56:40 +0000

Django is perfectly capable. I'd use Phoenix for its scalability and performance, if it were me, but I've built large-scale projects in Django before, and it worked well.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Employee commits suicide after MongoDB fired her during mental health leave"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 21:55:06 +0000

I feel sorry for this woman. Meta did this to me because they're discriminatory dicks, so I know how she felt. Fortunately, I have a tremendous amount of family support.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "T-Ruby is Ruby with syntax for types"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 04:03:05 +0000

I have the same question. I've been in the software industry since the early 90s and I've seen the "static types are the best thing since sex" fad fade in and out repeatedly during that time.

Having used plenty of strongly-typed and dynamically-typed languages, I really can't say strong typing has had any effect on me whatsoever. I honestly couldn't care less about it. I also can't remember ever having a type-related bug in my code. Perhaps I have an easier time remembering what my types are than others do. Who knows?