Hacker News: jdonaldson

New comment by jdonaldson in "Music for Programming"

jdonaldson — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:28:22 +0000

Sharing a spotify link for one of my favorite playlists : https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jQQ19MndPFIVqsvDrvJyG?si=...

New comment by jdonaldson in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

jdonaldson — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:14:18 +0000

It's a different kind of fatigue, but it's something a felt I got stronger at over time. Beats waiting IMHO, but be sure to give yourself a chance to rest.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Why We Abandoned Matrix (2024)"

jdonaldson — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:59:41 +0000

People here always want to run the software themselves first, but then the next day they want to pay someone else to host it. If you're running into people throwing security flags, the silver lining is you're also a stone's throw away from offering a hosted option.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Texas Attorney General sues Tylenol makers over autism claims"

jdonaldson — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:53:57 +0000

Honestly, yeah, makes sense to me. If we value freedom at all we value the right to tell the government to stuff it with their legally binding nothingburger deals.

New comment by jdonaldson in "A classified network of SpaceX satellites is emitting a mysterious signal"

jdonaldson — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:56:51 +0000

I'm quite sure that's what's already going on. LEO is big and empty and pretty boring, but it's also resilient to increasing trends of natural disaster, war, and civil unrest. Having a foothold there matters more and more every day.

New comment by jdonaldson in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

jdonaldson — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:16:47 +0000

I don't think this quote is in the book.

New comment by jdonaldson in "America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy"

jdonaldson — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:09:34 +0000

I thought that book was pretty dull, and had a terrible romance subplot. But I do have to say it pops in my head more and more often, just like Idiocracy. Someone should definitely do a movie so the illiterates know what they're missing at least.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Prefix sum: 20 GB/s (2.6x baseline)"

jdonaldson — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:04:40 +0000

While that sounds like a dealbreaker, I can't help think "yeah but if a decoding method took advantage of prefix in a similarly scalable way, one would reap the same benefits".

New comment by jdonaldson in "New lab-grown human embryo model produces blood cells"

jdonaldson — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 19:12:03 +0000

I'm an organ donor, and I have no problem giving my organs away after I'm quite positive I won't feel it. I think as long as there is no sensation, there is no pain, and certainly no formal concept of "self". But still, with matters of exploitation of our bodies, we should tread very very lightly.

New comment by jdonaldson in "SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades"

jdonaldson — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:38:35 +0000

throw in discreate as well :)

New comment by jdonaldson in "SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades"

jdonaldson — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:37:02 +0000

The issue isn't that there's a lot of change coming from inside the markets, it's that there's a lot of change coming from outside the market, and it's all interconnected.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Social anxiety isn't about being liked"

jdonaldson — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 16:43:34 +0000

I always chalked that up to being around people that were new to the country and hadn't yet wrapped their head around the latest fashionable American cynicism. Generally takes a few decades to kick in, but when it does it's usually worth the wait (see Kumail Ali Nanjiani).

New comment by jdonaldson in "Data Viz Color Palette Generator (For Charts and Dashboards)"

jdonaldson — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 14:33:12 +0000

I also recommend Color Brewer, which is integrated already in a lot of visualization tools, and has great options for display variants and accessibility options : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorBrewer

New comment by jdonaldson in "His psychosis was a mystery–until doctors learned about ChatGPT's health advice"

jdonaldson — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:46:32 +0000

Humans make mistakes too. Case in point, the hallucination engine didn't tell the person to ingest bromide. It only mentioned that it had chemical similarities to salt. The human mistakenly adopted a bit of information that furthered his narrative. The humans touting and bigging it up are still the problem.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Journaling using Nix, Vim and coreutils"

jdonaldson — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 22:33:00 +0000

Nix always felt like an OS on the blockchain. It's fine if you value verifiability above everything, but becomes very burdensome if you find yourself tweaking your dev environment often. Still, I think it probably teaches good discipline.

New comment by jdonaldson in "I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains"

jdonaldson — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:01:27 +0000

I didn't think very deeply into this, but it would involved these steps:

1. You send me a pdf 2. I print it out on white sheet cake and deliver it. 3. Profit?

New comment by jdonaldson in "I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains"

jdonaldson — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 14:09:30 +0000

I once owned both cakefax.com, and faxcake.com. I was going to corner the market.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Maine police caught lying about using AI to alter drug bust photo"

jdonaldson — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:41:38 +0000

If it were just a simple copy/paste job with the patch, that's one thing. But the whole image has been turned into AI slop, with certain items moved, changed, or excluded. This just isn't an acceptable pattern for law enforcement communication of any kind.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Virtual cells"

jdonaldson — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 19:33:21 +0000

Lol! Overriding basic scroll functionality on esoteric cell simulation software documentation pages is such a pointless gamble. Really calls the quality of the software itself into question.

New comment by jdonaldson in "Radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica"

jdonaldson — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 19:33:59 +0000

Are these the kind of high voltage events potentially near geothermal vents that are one of the leading explanations for biogenesis?