Hacker News: joshdavham

New comment by joshdavham in "Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?"

joshdavham — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:24:34 +0000

I’m actually incredibly excited for the future!

Individuals are now a lot more empowered to work effectively with computers (including us in the tech industry). Would you honestly wanna go back to pre-LLM?

I now have more fun learning CS concepts and the side projects I can work on now were previously impossible.

On the other hand, if you only got into CS for the money… then I take your point.

New comment by joshdavham in "Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?"

joshdavham — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:30:07 +0000

So perhaps we should be asking Azure engineers, not Guthub engineers?

New comment by joshdavham in "Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?"

joshdavham — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:28:52 +0000

Microsoft acquiring GitHub is not a valid root cause analysis explaining Github’s degraded SLA.

New comment by joshdavham in "Show HN: Learn Flags Quiz"

joshdavham — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:26:26 +0000

Awesome app! I got 14/20.

New comment by joshdavham in "Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)"

joshdavham — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:59:38 +0000

I’ve known about the “new ideas are fragile” concept for a while and it’s why I generally will never criticize someone’s early work or ideas, but rather try to hype them up. Because of this, technical people with new ideas and projects have been more likely to come to me early on when they wanna show what they’ve been working on. Admittedly, I actually do think a lot of the ideas I’m presented with are bad, but a smart person starting with a seemingly bad idea may still end up somewhere very interesting. Never be the shooter down of new ideas.

New comment by joshdavham in "The quirky personal homepages of programming language creators"

joshdavham — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 06:07:34 +0000

Is there actually a good reason for language creators’ web pages being so quirky(/ugly)?

New comment by joshdavham in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

joshdavham — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:52:08 +0000

The author Paul McCann (polm) is one of my favourite programmers out there!

He’s done awesome work in the Japanese NLP space over the last decade which has really helped me in my language learning projects.

He maintains a mecab (Japanese tokenizer) wrapper for Python [0], has a book on Japanese NLP written for English speakers [1] and also worked on Spacy at one point [2].

[0] https://github.com/polm/fugashi [1] https://www.japanesenlp.com/ [2] https://spacy.io/

New comment by joshdavham in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

joshdavham — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:25:56 +0000

I do wonder if language change might start to slow down, however.

Now that we have so much written language from the past, won't that have a sort of fossilizing effect on the language? For example, prior to writing systems, people had no idea how their ancestors communicated. Now with written text and audio recordings, we know in great detail how our language used to be used.

New comment by joshdavham in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

joshdavham — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:24:57 +0000

Before seeing this page, I had always assumed that PIE was a lot older. It’s amazing how much linguistic development has occurred in ~6,500 years!

New comment by joshdavham in "Japan has recorded its ten most popular baby names every year since 1912"

joshdavham — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:58:00 +0000

Cool article! But, as the article is in English, it really should include romaaji. If readers were able to read the names, the article wouldn’t need to be in English :)

New comment by joshdavham in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

joshdavham — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:57:42 +0000

> It's equally dubious to believe that some sort of body (ostensibly run by practicing software developers) would be able to come up with a means to certify proficiency.

I very much mostly agree with you, but I did take the Google Cloud Associate exam a year and a half ago and honestly it felt like a pretty rigorous exam. I definitely could not have passed that exam if I was incompetent in my knowledge of cloud and IT. Exams like these, I think, might become more mainstream in certifying developers in my opinion. (Though whether this is desirable is another question.)

New comment by joshdavham in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

joshdavham — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:43:25 +0000

> people lack the right skills today to wrangle agents into writing good code.

It's actually this that leaves me feeling optimistic. We're definitely bad at this today, but will we always be bad at this into the foreseeable future? I'd like to think not. I'd like to think that we'll get better at working with agents in the future and eventually develop better practices around this new weird technology once it's better understood.

New comment by joshdavham in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

joshdavham — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:36:39 +0000

> dealing with scaling pains

That’s a great problem to have! Keep going!

New comment by joshdavham in "LinkedIn Feed Blocker"

joshdavham — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:16:54 +0000

I guess I really should download the iOS app when browsing LinkedIn on my phone then! Thanks for the tip.

New comment by joshdavham in "LinkedIn Feed Blocker"

joshdavham — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:06:13 +0000

There's another way to get this exact same effect without a chrome extension and requires two steps:

1. Change your "Preferred feed view" to "Most recent posts" here: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/preferred-...

2. Unfollow every connection (N.B., this doesn't mean remove connection, just that you won't see their posts).

If you do this, it wipes your feed clean and will literally display "Something went wrong" where your feed used to be.

This has made LinkedIn truly blissful for me, but this only seems to work on the LinkedIn web app on my PC. Doesn't work on the mobile web app for some reason...

Going Commando – Put Down the Mouse (2007)

joshdavham — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:52:33 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.codinghorror.com/going-commando-put-down-the-mouse/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222972

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by joshdavham in "Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)"

joshdavham — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:20:55 +0000

Maintaining abs doesn’t necessarily require a ton of work time-wise, but does require you exercise consistently and closely watch what you eat. I used to have very visible abs and honestly it didn’t feel worth it. I like bread too much!

New comment by joshdavham in "Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)"

joshdavham — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:02:33 +0000

Old articles frequently reach the top of HN. There are many great articles that people only discover now rather than when they were originally posted.

New comment by joshdavham in "Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)"

joshdavham — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:01:35 +0000

I love seeing these types of articles on HN! I love it when someone smart actually does the math on some silly topic :D

New comment by joshdavham in "Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)"

joshdavham — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:58:27 +0000

Perhaps age might also be a factor? Female fertility peaks in a woman's 20's.

(And yes, I realize we're all being a little shallow and tongue-and-cheek here)