Hacker News: jolt42

New comment by jolt42 in "An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet"

jolt42 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:51:30 +0000

The recipes are a little bit too clever i think. Turning the text on the actions saves space but it makes the instructions off-putting.

New comment by jolt42 in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

jolt42 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:35:22 +0000

I used to type in the programs from Commodore 64 Magazine back in the day. If you just touch type them in you learn very little. If I wanted to understand them, I wouldn't do it while typing. Sure a bit rubs off and probably more if you have to understand where to put the code rather than just start typing from the top, but still not enough. If you "make it your own" then you're probably at the right level of understanding.

New comment by jolt42 in "China's open-weights AI strategy is winning"

jolt42 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:18:34 +0000

Windows - pfff, Microsoft charged companies like Dell for an install on computers they didn't even install it on !!!

New comment by jolt42 in "Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files"

jolt42 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:15:35 +0000

I think the progession is like 1) Oh, I can break stuff by changing a config value - it doesn't protect me. 2) Oh, I didn't think X would need to be configurable. 3) With code I can colocate the values with the code that uses them - easier to understand, and I can "configure" anything I want. 4) Why are we using configs?

New comment by jolt42 in "How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going"

jolt42 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:43:18 +0000

My realization first time with Eclipse/Java.

New comment by jolt42 in "Who Is America's Homer?"

jolt42 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:09:06 +0000

Odd to include Chapman and not Dylan. Much like leaving out Twain - seems like the defacto choice to me.

New comment by jolt42 in "Collection of Digital Clock Designs"

jolt42 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:28:42 +0000

yeah, that's the one. Yep it doesn't seem as intended.

New comment by jolt42 in "Collection of Digital Clock Designs"

jolt42 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:20:36 +0000

I think the one you are calling "figure hands"... if you mean the one where hands are numbers could just use better styling overall. Two colors, different sizes, better choice of font.

New comment by jolt42 in "A road to Lisp: Why Lisp"

jolt42 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:43:23 +0000

But with Clojure and immutable by default, hot reload is a real thing, it sounds like not just on JVM but even among lisps.

New comment by jolt42 in "Solid and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me"

jolt42 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:18:46 +0000

I've yet to find a panacea. For example, I thought DRY was, but found its not the case (test scenarios). I've yet to find altruisms past "everything in moderation". If you do choose a style and stick to it though at least it's consistent.

New comment by jolt42 in "The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming"

jolt42 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:27:23 +0000

I've feel like AOP is Spring on steroids. Same downside for both IMO.

New comment by jolt42 in "Rebuilding the Computer Room"

jolt42 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:40:34 +0000

I didn't carry a cell phone for long enough (I do now) that people looked at me like I was nuts. I viewed a cell phone the same way most people thought of a pager (remember those things?) - for other people's convenience, not mine. If I am talking to someone in the hall, they will answer their phone, like people that call are more important? Thankfully I think people have realized that - some of the time.

New comment by jolt42 in "After AI takes everything"

jolt42 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:32:07 +0000

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

New comment by jolt42 in "The history of butterfly swimming"

jolt42 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:25:56 +0000

Agreed. Wasn't track barefoot back in the day? I mean even shoes are an advantage. Swimming sped up after goggles and swimcaps were accepted. I think it's all just where do you decide to draw the line? I've thought badminton is an odd sport, the shuttlecock is so slow anyone can (normally) play it - it's very inefficient. And don't get me started on equestrian if grandpa can win it then shouldn't the horse get the medal?

New comment by jolt42 in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

jolt42 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:51:50 +0000

Eh, I like MacBooks because they've been bulletproof. Any PC I suspect it might just go kaput whenever it feels like it, except for maybe a ThinkPad, but they cost more than a MacBook.

New comment by jolt42 in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

jolt42 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:18:53 +0000

I suppose you could chalk this up to an oversight. I don't see how Meta gained from this. They've been purposeful about collecting user data and lying about it, eg: 2025 Android Tracking Incident. Shouldn't just be an embarrassment, should be much worse than that.

New comment by jolt42 in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

jolt42 — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:17:14 +0000

I like the qualification of "large-ish". When someone says code is not the bottleneck, I assume they work for a large company. To be fair, at a start-up developers think they code at least 4 hours a day, but it never averages that either.

New comment by jolt42 in "What Do Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems Mean?"

jolt42 — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:02:07 +0000

We really want to believe that we can understand everything, yet we know we cannot.

New comment by jolt42 in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

jolt42 — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:52:03 +0000

When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.

New comment by jolt42 in "Google changes its search box"

jolt42 — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:23:32 +0000

Yep, really advanced Google searches were never that good. LLM, yeah, it halucinates, it's never spot on but as sure as heck it knows what I'm trying to ask. It doesn't give me arborists if I say something like "list tree searches".