Hacker News: jastanton

New comment by jastanton in "Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter"

jastanton — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:34:32 +0000

Love this, simulations are great. My nit pick is around how fast these animations are. You blink and you miss it. I can imagine children having more difficult time with this than myself as an adult. (For context I started with the sound animations: The Invisible Dance -- Shape the Wave & The Journey)

New comment by jastanton in "The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat"

jastanton — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:40:35 +0000

This is the correct answer and is being used by teacher friends of mine with great success.

The structure they chose is in-class work counts for 80%+ of their grade. All work in class is done with pencil & paper. Quite simple in fact to solve a large part of the homework cheating issue.

New comment by jastanton in "Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers"

jastanton — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 22:59:33 +0000

> I can't concieve even the flimsiest of reasons why anyone would ever listen to (or license/sync/track/ ) any of those generated songs once the novelty of "music made by the AI" is gone.

Easy: Independent/single-dev operations needing some quick background music for a project (game, whatever)

New comment by jastanton in "Living with Nausea: My Story in Six Charts"

jastanton — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:26:24 +0000

I cannot believe how exhausting (and expensive) this investigation has been for you. I had a GI surgery and one of the possible outcomes was permanent nausea, and when I woke up I had nausea for about 3 months and it was horrific. The symptoms resolved on their own after a while, and for a time I believe them to be psychosomatic, so I began meditation. In the end I don't know, but that must be scary.

I'm curious if fecal microbiota transplantation has been discussed? From what I can tell the gut biome is under studied and the effects are pretty scattered and wide. Thoughts?

New comment by jastanton in "Let's Quit X"

jastanton — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 18:16:41 +0000

I tried signing back up a couple weeks ago and despite not following and then blocking Elon, and only following non and a-political topics, I was inundated with right wing propaganda. Every 4-5th post was from Elon or similar. It was too distracting to use normally so I deleted my account and moved on.

New comment by jastanton in "100k Stars"

jastanton — Sun, 12 May 2024 17:42:40 +0000

There is such immense stored power in the universe, yet humans are struggling to harness even a tickle of the suns power via solar panels. Put into perspective of our galaxy, there is hardly no power difference between us and ants. Wild!

New comment by jastanton in "Plunge in regional bank stocks triggers spate of trading halts"

jastanton — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 16:24:38 +0000

I'm not very financially literate. How does SVB shareholders getting nothing translate to shareholders of all other banks being in the same situation?

New comment by jastanton in "Show HN: Gitgpt – Natural Language Git"

jastanton — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 20:26:20 +0000

I've been looking for something similar for AI git commit messages... basically feed ChatGPT a git diff and ask it what changed and to write a git message. I've done this directly in the ChatGPT UI with some small changes and it produces some great messages...

I would be very concerned to run this on company code or large diffs. But small simple commits, which should be the goal with commit messages anyways, would take away some of the tedium of the git flow.

New comment by jastanton in "Zoom lays off 15% of employees"

jastanton — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:11:56 +0000

I always thought Xoogler was a moniker that wasn't given but was chosen by x-Googlers.

Source: Me, Xoogler.

New comment by jastanton in "Saying “sup” with `net send`"

jastanton — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:23:52 +0000

I did: "net send * The server room is on fire, please turn off your computer!"

Not only that, but my computer name was assigned to my username so it said my full name next to it.....

I was called up to the office within 2 seconds and immediately suspended. I also got braces that dad. Rough day. :(

New comment by jastanton in "Show HN: I 3D scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza"

jastanton — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 16:55:22 +0000

Here is one called the 10,000 year clock that is currently under construction (by Jeff Bezos). You can read about it here: https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html

New comment by jastanton in "Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana"

jastanton — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 23:10:16 +0000

"The book has been denounced as alarmist and inaccurate in the scientific and medical communities because [the author] claims that cannabis causes psychosis and violence; many scientists state that he is drawing inappropriate conclusions from the research, primarily by inferring causation from correlation as well as cherry picking data that fits his narrative, and falling victim to selection bias via his use of anecdotes to back up his assertions."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Berenson

New comment by jastanton in "Can Lego play the drums? [video]"

jastanton — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 17:00:26 +0000

I've been following his journey for years, it's been a fascinating and some times heartbreaking story not to dissimilar to Sisyphus. Every other chapter is about him renewing his mental strength, grit, determination, and then months later tearing it all apart because of fundamental flaws. Repeat for years. His mental health is an underlying theme throughout the story we're watching and I worry for him.

With that said, he is truly an imaginative and great engineer and musician and while my discipline is primarily software, he's taught me a lot about design principles I apply today. Namely, keep things simple, emphasis on unit testing and measuring results, recognizing and addressing sunk cost fallacy and many many others.

I've grown to really respect and admire him. But I fear this project has a stranglehold over his mental health and I fear for what that means for his future if he cannot get to a place he is truly happy with.

God speed Martin, I hope you can get the boulder up the hill one day.

edit: Update, after some sleuthing, apparently he is moving and taking care of his family right now(?) https://www.reddit.com/r/MarbleMachineX/comments/usk6ru/wher...

New comment by jastanton in "Run Stable Diffusion on Your M1 Mac’s GPU"

jastanton — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 20:31:48 +0000

I tried that as well but resulted in an error:

AttributeError: module 'torch._C' has no attribute '_cuda_resetPeakMemoryStats'

https://gist.github.com/JAStanton/73673d249927588c93ee530d08...

New comment by jastanton in "Imgator: Compress, convert, edit and resize your images"

jastanton — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 00:34:08 +0000

Small bug report to the OP (hopefully you own the website): The light/dark toggle starts off on dark setting but visually the website is on the light setting. So if you toggle it, the toggle goes light, but visually nothing changes, toggling it back to dark, visually it changes to dark. This only works once as settings as persisted correctly. But opening up an incognito browser you can repro.

Edit: Cool website :)

New comment by jastanton in "Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products"

jastanton — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 16:22:16 +0000

The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.

New comment by jastanton in "Google OAuth Is Failing with 500 Error Code"

jastanton — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 20:42:10 +0000

Better now when you can test your error handling then at 3:30am when your high priority service goes down :)

New comment by jastanton in "Minetime.ai – A Calendar for the 21st Century"

jastanton — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 01:19:55 +0000

Why does it need to be able to delete contacts & calendars:

- See, edit, download, and permanently delete your contacts

- See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar

So, I am a bit paranoid, but I bet some on HN will enable this for their corporate calendars. If I were a government-sponsored entity or small organization I would definitely spend a few grand on designers & engineering to create a product like a calendar or a shiny new email client to learn some trade secrets. Just saying... why hack your way into a corp when you can ask nicely to walk in the front door.

New comment by jastanton in "How many keywords I can fit into a single C# expression?"

jastanton — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 05:40:32 +0000

That's because a generator is being returned from `foo` (the yield syntax gives you this).

Try calling next() on the return value of foo.

I get:

  Promise {: TypeError: Class extends value async function () {} is not a constructor or null
    at foo

New comment by jastanton in "Simulating blobs of fluid"

jastanton — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 18:45:47 +0000

This was really satisfying to demo on the bus. I held my phone up as still as I could and when the bus lurched forward or made an abrupt stop the fluid responded accordingly. Something about it was just beautiful. Tech imitating nature. The illusion held pretty well too. Good job Google/Apple for making good sensor data and this algorithm uses it well. Great job!