Hacker News: jhartikainen

New comment by jhartikainen in "To write non-fiction, draw the trunk, then the rest of the tree"

jhartikainen — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:03:28 +0000

Yes please add an obvious method to go back to your homepage - I also attempted to click the circles to do that because there was no link or anything :) I was interested in checking out more of your writing and I had to change the URL to do that.

Your site isn't the only with this "feature" that I've seen lately, not sure what's up with this pattern.

New comment by jhartikainen in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"

jhartikainen — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:20:33 +0000

100%. The term "second brain" is getting kind of a bad rep because of people using the dump+AI method. I don't think Tiago Forte who, as far as I know, coined the term meant doing that, at least based on his book on the subject.

New comment by jhartikainen in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"

jhartikainen — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:00:39 +0000

There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff:

1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc.

2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this

Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I find it helpful to have f.ex. exact quotes from some book at hand (and various other Obsidian-related things)

The Many Faces of a Paradigm

jhartikainen — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:21:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pthenq.io/blog/series/kuhn-at-the-software-industry/part-1-the-many-faces-of-a-paradigm/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379723

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jhartikainen in "Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)"

jhartikainen — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:33:21 +0000

I work in adtech. We actually had to mangle some of our analytics data because it didn't match the broken data a client was used to. Our data was more accurate, but because the numbers didn't match the other analytics suite the client used, so we had to make it worse.

I wish I was joking.

New comment by jhartikainen in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

jhartikainen — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:32:54 +0000

Out of curiosity, I've ran some experiments on Facebook for stuff like this.

Results:

- Reporting a message does nothing no matter how much the content breaks their terms of use. 100% of messages I reported bounced back in a matter of minutes with "no action"

- However, using the "request another review" function, which is available after the initial "no action" response, actually seems to work. How quickly this works seems to vary, I've had actions taken as result of this from 1 day to multiple weeks.

New comment by jhartikainen in "That's Not What I Meant by 'Using AI'"

jhartikainen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:09:19 +0000

Yeah, I'm kind of AI-negative, but I found this very well presented and thought out. I'm not convinced that the fix for AI-heavy workflows is a good harness or an established codebase, but it seems difficult to show it for certain at this point.

New comment by jhartikainen in "The Joy of Obsidian"

jhartikainen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:33:18 +0000

I found out about Obsidian a couple years ago and it finally solved all the problems I've had with notetaking over the years. Something about how you use it to create notes and connect them together just makes sense. I can finally use the notes for something instead of just writing them once and then forgetting they exist because it was too complicated.

I think one underrated feature is its performance. Dealing with multiple notes in other tools I've used in the past was always a pain because using and managing them was so slow, or finding the right note was slow, etc.. Because of this, I would make singular large notes, which became completely useless in the long run. This is just a complete non-issue in Obsidian, everything just works so well.

That's Not What I Meant by 'Using AI'

jhartikainen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:18:54 +0000

Article URL: https://mudlej.com/articles/ai-development-approaches/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112906

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by jhartikainen in "Converting Files into Minecraft Worlds"

jhartikainen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:42:57 +0000

This is pretty neat. I once had the idea of using Minecraft to represent filesystems. If you think of movies with "cyberspace" where they navigate files in a 3D space. So you would generate a world based on files and folders on your PC, which you could interact with. For example, folders would be buildings you enter, subfolders could be rooms, a particularly large file would appear as a large monolith, and a smaller file a small one, or something along those lines.

It would be painful for doing anything in practice, but would be kinda fun as an experiment maybe.

New comment by jhartikainen in "Another Taste of Verse [video]"

jhartikainen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:12:50 +0000

As an Unreal Engine user, the discussion around Verse is curious. It feels like a lot of UE devs don't like the syntax at all, and would have much preferred a more traditional language. And then Epic announces they're getting rid of Blueprints, which causes further frustration with UE devs, because if you want a gameplay scripting layer instead of pure C++, now you're forced to use Verse.

Even as a Haskell enjoyer, Verse syntax looks kind of messy. I'm assuming with all the smart people designing it there must be some reason for it, but I've not seen it yet.

Still, I'm looking forwards to trying it if/when it actually lands in UE-proper. There are definitely a lot of interesting ideas in it.

GTFO VR Postmortem

jhartikainen — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:53:53 +0000

Article URL: https://dsprtn.dev/posts/GTFO-VR-Postmortem/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946218

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jhartikainen in "Good Tools Are Invisible"

jhartikainen — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:05:57 +0000

This is a very interesting idea, partially because I recently wrote about how Svelte is kind of "invisible" as a tool for writing webapps (compared to f.ex. React). Much like gingerBill says here, when I use Svelte the tool "disappears into the background", at least for me.

Something I was hoping this would discuss is why do good tools feel invisible? But doesn't seem like it really went into that.

New comment by jhartikainen in "My Story of 3D Realms / Apogee Part I (2020)"

jhartikainen — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:46:38 +0000

Darn, current 3DR took down the legacy site? Their CEO went on a big spiel a while back about how he's such a big fan of the "original" 3DR, and grew up on their games and whatnot, gave a pretty good impression. But taking the legacy site down gives an entirely opposite feeling about it...

Joe has been pretty cranky about current-3DR on his socials, I guess he was right about it.

New comment by jhartikainen in "Applied Category Theory Course (2018)"

jhartikainen — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:25 +0000

Not sure of your level, but as a beginner, these two were recommended to me on HN previously:

- https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/conceptual-m...

- https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/04/category-the-essence-... (a blog series on CT specifically for programmers)

New comment by jhartikainen in "Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display"

jhartikainen — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:51:06 +0000

I read the title and literally thought "Huh how did they fit that inside the shuttle?"

New comment by jhartikainen in "Nearly half of LG smart TV apps contain residential proxy SDKs"

jhartikainen — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:50:02 +0000

Good point, hadn't thought at all of this kind of perspective. Though the fact it's some dodgy residential proxy provider that runs this stuff makes me feel like it isn't going to become available for something good.

New comment by jhartikainen in "Soccer Arcade Games Through the Years"

jhartikainen — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:55:44 +0000

Not an arcade game but Nintendo World Cup on the NES is excellent fun even today. Its japan-only sequel takes it even further with crazy nonsense, like being able to jump on top of the ball and run around on it

New comment by jhartikainen in "Made a free macOS menu bar app that fixes typing in the wrong keyboard layout"

jhartikainen — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:04:00 +0000

Interesting, I would have expected macOS to have this feature because Windows has supported window-specific keyboard layouts for what feels like forever. I don't use my Mac much nowadays, but gonna have to grab this just in case.

New comment by jhartikainen in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

jhartikainen — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:55:17 +0000

I've read a bunch of what could be considered "self help" and while they often have a lot of fluff, they do have interesting points. Many of them reference actual research studies to back those points.

I just skip the motivational fluff and dig out the useful bits. Makes them very fast reads when you can skip majority of it.