<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jeffmcmahan</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffmcmahan</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 21:38:27 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jeffmcmahan" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Using secondary school maths to demystify AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This. People do not understand the implications of the most basic facts of modern science. Gravitation is instantaneous action at a distance via an "occult" force (to quote Newton's contemporaries).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 23:29:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46250328</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46250328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46250328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It maps state to a set of reasonably efficient DOM updates that you generally don't have to manage or think about.<p>Go play around with Angular 1, or BackboneJS, or try building a working SPA with jQuery, and you'll get a sense of the breakthrough that react represented in 2013.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2024 17:00:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308380</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308380</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308380</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Dependency management fatigue, or why I forever ditched React for Go+Htmx+Templ"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This. Lean on less. I use react and a SQL driver. I have many massive react projects in production.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:57:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308345</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>React is not responsible for the stack of poorly maintained third party packages one chooses to use alongside it. You don't actually need a router, or redux, or other "state management" nonsense. Your application code can/should handle that stuff, and it won't break, and it won't change unless you change it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:56:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308321</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308321</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42308321</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Switch off bad TV settings"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As a former high end audio/video salesperson, I just want to state for accuracy that local dimming, as a feature, is not dynamic contrast.  Dynamic contrast is terrible. By having an LED backlight array dim spots that are darker in the source material, the display achieves better absolute contrast. It is not adjusting the exposure to fake it. It is instead getting closer to the contrast given by the source material. It created some halo issues, but it was a step in the right direction.<p>This is not new tech at all - I was selling Samsung LED TVs with this feature in 2007 or so. Samsung, Sharp, and Sony has little choice but to improve contrast, because their LED sets were right next to Pioneer KURO plasmas that were just absolutely amazing - OLEDs are only catching up their PQ now, 15 years later. First on the scene was the Samsung LN-T5781 - <a href="https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-ln-t5781f-review/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-ln-t5781f-review/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 Dec 2023 04:09:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526994</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526994</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526994</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Took my 7 year old daughter to a dentist. 8 cavities. Gotta get em right away! Went to another one. All good - zero cavities.<p>Many dentists are criminals willing to drill holes in children's teeth in order fraudulently take your money.<p>She's now 15. Never had a cavity ever.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Aug 2023 16:52:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37023925</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37023925</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37023925</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "“Web Environment Integrity” is an attack on the free Internet"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Except that Google and MS search dominate and they can disprefer those not using WEI to "protect" users.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Jul 2023 20:46:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36913066</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36913066</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36913066</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, as usual, our pop science writer with a dim understanding of the issue quotes critics of the Chomskyan paradigm (the study aims to falsify Chomsky’s suspicion that a symbolic operation called “merge” gives humans a unique capacity for deep recursion) and for balance quotes <i>other</i> critics of the Chomskyan paradigm - and never do we hear from the syntacticians (who study recursive grammatical structure as a career).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Nov 2022 15:00:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33493292</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33493292</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33493292</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Why modern software is slow"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Forgive me for having chosen pseudo js for the example - and npm. That conflates the issue. I meant to convey an attitude - let some random package do the work, who cares whether it is deep and complex and handling cases I won't ever need, offering API surface that will go unused, and perhaps doing simple things inefficiently. The language doesn't much matter if "ship ship ship rn" is the ethic that drives decision making.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2022 13:19:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034483</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034483</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33034483</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Why modern software is slow"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No no you're so right. Let's have 500 packages installed to do multiplication. Zero performance impact, I'm sure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2022 03:14:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030457</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030457</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030457</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Why modern software is slow"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why is modern software slow? Because Joe developer's solution to a given problem is to Google up a package that solves the problem, check the license, and then run:<p><pre><code>   > { packageMgr } install { randomPkg }
</code></pre>
Developer Andy, author of { randomPkg }, does the same thing. And so on, ad infinitum. You want to sum two numbers?<p><pre><code>   > npm install node-plus
</code></pre>
And the source code will be:<p><pre><code>   import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promise'
   import { dirname, join } from 'node:path'
   import additionChecker from 'add-check'

   // redundant useless comments

   return function(n1, n2) {
       // redundant useless comments
       n1 + n2
   }</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2022 02:51:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030311</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030311</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33030311</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Ask HN: Why is the printer industry so scammy?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I lol'd at this. :D</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2022 13:36:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32661884</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32661884</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32661884</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Machine Learning (1997)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In 2008 or so, Steve Abney (Michigan, linguistics) suggested this book to me while we were discussing a meaning-is-use theory of semantic content. I went straight to the library to get it but their copy was out. Never did get it. Happy to have it now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Aug 2022 05:33:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479512</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479512</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479512</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Tell HN: You can't hire because you don't post salary ranges"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree with OP 100%. I once went through multiple rounds, got an offer only to discover they wanted to pay me tens of thousands less than I was already making. I'll never engage another company about a job without knowing the salary info ahead of time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Jul 2022 18:59:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183375</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183375</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183375</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's weird to say 'her' once and then switch pronouns. But I hear you. You're picturing me with a peg leg. :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2021 03:01:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563091</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563091</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563091</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Closing web browser windows doesn't close connections"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That was my immediate impression as to what was going on. This guy doesn't know about service workers...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2021 02:55:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563057</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563057</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563057</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Uh, is that intended as a shot at Michigan? Maybe that's not what you meant. I don't know. When I sit on my break wall with friends, sipping scotch and enjoying a half decent cigar, I get to feeling like certain parts of Michigan are pretty hard to improve upon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2021 02:47:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563004</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563004</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26563004</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm a Michigander - across the water from Amherstburg and a tick south.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2021 02:38:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562932</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562932</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562932</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Map shows how fertilizer is choking the Great Lakes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm deeply blessed to live on and own ~100ft of Lake Erie's shoreline. I can hear her waves now. Like all the Great Lakes, she is an inland ocean, enormous, inviting the misapprehension that she will dilute an infinite amount of anything you could drain into her. Alas, around here we know the history: not that long ago the surface of Lake Erie caught on fire and no one could figure out how to put it out. So let's remember that we're doing better than we once did. My backyard is daily frequented by bald eagles chasing one another. The place is in many ways healthy.<p>At the same time, it's quite clear that it's still not good enough - particularly the algae blooms centering on the mouth of the Maumee river (near Toledo) which turn miles of the lake into something looking and feeling like bright green paint every so often. It doesn't come near my place, but you can imagine how I feel when I picture a hundred square miles of toxic green sludge, juxtaposed with Michigan and Ohio Republican politicians proposing "self-regulation" as the solution...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Mar 2021 01:56:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562678</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jeffmcmahan in "Framing 101"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How did this make it to the top of HN?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2021 15:48:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26358129</link><dc:creator>jeffmcmahan</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26358129</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26358129</guid></item></channel></rss>