Hacker News: jdsnape

New comment by jdsnape in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

jdsnape — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:10:15 +0000

For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.

New comment by jdsnape in "Pint in England"

jdsnape — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:51:58 +0000

I love that I see this on hacker news of all places. As an east-anglian I would definitely second this opinion. Times are a bit harder now but there are still so many great breweries.

New comment by jdsnape in "The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online"

jdsnape — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:53:59 +0000

I didn’t say God only wants people to have sex for reproduction. There are two purposes in this philosophy: reproduction, and the deepening of marital unity

New comment by jdsnape in "Kids act would require age checks to get online"

jdsnape — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:33:54 +0000

I’m not supporting it, but how is it inconsistent?

I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)

New comment by jdsnape in "The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online"

jdsnape — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:46:30 +0000

Because in their philosophy sex serves a purpose (procreation and the deepening of the marital union).

Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.

New comment by jdsnape in "Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests"

jdsnape — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:38:51 +0000

I don’t have hard evidence, but when I was a kid I enjoyed the children’s book ‘Five children and it’, written ~1900

The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.

New comment by jdsnape in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

jdsnape — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:48:02 +0000

I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?

New comment by jdsnape in "Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026"

jdsnape — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:07:39 +0000

That’s great! It’s very much not the norm here in general tho, in my experience two weeks would be the max people would take off contiguously.

New comment by jdsnape in "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s"

jdsnape — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:43:41 +0000

I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.

One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.

New comment by jdsnape in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

jdsnape — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:08:36 +0000

I agree, another example is the line ‘lots of things had to be done by hand’. I think a more human narrative would be describing the discovery that thing X that we take for granted was missing and tell the story of figuring it out.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt though, perhaps they were aiming for brevity.

New comment by jdsnape in "Even light drinking raises risk of cancer, heart disease, and early death"

jdsnape — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:55:48 +0000

Maybe there are different sized pints, but in the uk a pint of beer is about 200 calories.

Depends on your social circle of course, but it’s pretty standard to have two or three pints if you meet up with friends in a pub.

New comment by jdsnape in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

jdsnape — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:48:01 +0000

Thank you for sharing!

New comment by jdsnape in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

jdsnape — Sat, 23 May 2026 10:47:22 +0000

I’m interested in how this works in practise - I guess you’ve written a skill to do code review, then your Claude.md file tells it to use it after every change as a bg task? So does this work as a background task while Claude is working on the next ‘feature’?

New comment by jdsnape in "Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?"

jdsnape — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:50:04 +0000

There are!

https://business.bt.com/public-sector/street-hubs/

New comment by jdsnape in "The two oldest printing presses"

jdsnape — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:15:05 +0000

It’s also a very western view - block printing was a thing in China well before this. I don’t know, but I suspect there are older surviving presses there or in Asia more generally.

New comment by jdsnape in "Nostalgic Kits Central (2024)"

jdsnape — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:26:52 +0000

Yeah I’ve had the same thought. You can get cheap kits but the instructions tend to be vague/machine translated from Chinese.

I think there’s a gap in the market for quality kits with good educational instructions - but I think the market size would be very small

New comment by jdsnape in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

jdsnape — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:27:42 +0000

Plants are nice…but, from your link:

“These results are not applicable to typical buildings, where outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already removes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at a rate that could only be matched by the placement of 10–1000 plants/m2 of a building's floor space.[2]

The results also failed to replicate in future studies”

New comment by jdsnape in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

jdsnape — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:26:51 +0000

I also agree co2 levels are super important, but I’m wondering: in your situation isn’t air pollution from the motorway a concern? Not sure how to balance that one

New comment by jdsnape in "The Gregorio project – GPL tools for typesetting Gregorian chant"

jdsnape — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:43:51 +0000

I am probably one of the few people here that used this ‘in anger’. Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel, and enjoyed typesetting the chant - this tool made it really easy and I could produce IMO beautiful documents.

Most of the time people used bitmaps which would be blurred/pixelated or not resize well

New comment by jdsnape in "Identify a London Underground Line just by listening to it"

jdsnape — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:44:52 +0000

You can…but, won’t the frequency will be stable across the UK grid and these are all in London. Secondly, pretty sure they all use DC motors, so no hum