Hacker News: jamesbvaughan

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Picard 3.0"

jamesbvaughan — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:13:56 +0000

I use beets and it works well for me: https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Building the Open Task Light"

jamesbvaughan — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:57:40 +0000

I'm not the creator of the Open Task Light. I'm just a fan of the project and wanted to write about my build.

If you aren't familiar with the OTL, Steven's latest video is a good summary of the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipVFRH6TQfM but the whole series of build logs is great.

Building the Open Task Light

jamesbvaughan — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:55:10 +0000

Article URL: https://jamesbvaughan.com/open-task-light/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49523744

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome"

jamesbvaughan — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:15:09 +0000

That's a great one. It also made me think of Neal Stephenson's _Fall_.

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Last.fm is now independent"

jamesbvaughan — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:45:18 +0000

I hope this is a good change for last.fm! I love the service but it's been trickier to use since I switched from Spotify to Apple Music.

Does anyone have a setup they're happy with for scrobbling from Apple Music across different types of devices?

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`"

jamesbvaughan — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:29:39 +0000

Aside from the article's content, I really like the inline exercise for the reader with the hidden/expandable answer section. It's fun and it successfully got me to read the proceeding section more closely than I would have otherwise.

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander"

jamesbvaughan — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 16:44:57 +0000

+1 to the Voyager. I switched to it a few years ago from the Moonlander and have been really happy with it. I like the smaller footprint, and the fact that it has fewer keys. Having fewer keys has forced me to create layers that keep everything within a closer reach so I'm stretching my fingers out to the edge keys less than I did with the Moonlander.

I split my time about 50/50 between the Voyager and my macbook's keyboard and mostly have no problem with the difference in layouts, but I wish I could set up layers on the macbook keyboard the same way I can with the Voyager.

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max"

jamesbvaughan — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:53:40 +0000

> if that wide shelf will mean the phone doesn't wobble when placed on a table, that is a good usability improvement.

That's what I had hoped too, but from the images I've seen it looks like the cameras themselves bump out past the shelf far enough that it will still wobble.

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Helix Editor 25.07"

jamesbvaughan — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:58:46 +0000

They're actually not videos! They're using asciinema: https://asciinema.org/, which is rendering actual text in the webpage - try selecting some while the recording is playing.

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Code⇄GUI bidirectional editing via LSP"

jamesbvaughan — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:07:17 +0000

I was surprised by this too! I actually did a search for that character in order to check before posting this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%E2%87%84

I was a bit concerned that HN's algorithm might down-weight posts with non-ASCII characters in titles to discourage people from trying to attract attention with them, but it seems like it's fine?

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "Code-GUI bidirectional editing via LSP"

jamesbvaughan — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:50:00 +0000

That's cool! I suspected that someone must have done something like this before.

Code-GUI bidirectional editing via LSP

jamesbvaughan — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:43:19 +0000

Article URL: https://jamesbvaughan.com/bidirectional-editing/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435716

Points: 241

# Comments: 68

New comment by jamesbvaughan in "A surprising scam email that evaded Gmail's spam filter"

jamesbvaughan — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 23:03:18 +0000

I suspect that the strategy I've described in my the post (forwarding a signed email with some modified headers) isn't actually new, and that it's just the first time I've looked closely enough to become interested in how it works.

The whole "put a misleading string in the PayPal name field" thing may be new.

> How would they even validate their new attack vector? I would like to think that there’s scam A/B testing or something similar…

I'm curious about that as well. My guess is that there's nothing as sophisticated as A/B tests with measured results going on, but I'd love to learn more.