Hacker News: jr_isidore

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: What should I advise my son?"

jr_isidore — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:09:50 +0000

I'd recommend looks or rizz maxxing. I hear there's too many wieners and not enough buns in your country.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Do you thank your agents when they did a good job?"

jr_isidore — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:57:51 +0000

All the time. Sometimes they do an absolutely bang-up job.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?"

jr_isidore — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:18:46 +0000

porn

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Am I missing something with AI"

jr_isidore — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:30:14 +0000

When you join a new company, is it faster to fix a bug rewriting everything from scratch or to modify what's there? Seriously, get your head out of your ass.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Is the hard part of adult friendship the second hangout?"

jr_isidore — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:12:28 +0000

In a town like SF, there's only so much hanging out dudes can do before it starts getting gay.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Please recommend sci-fi books similar to "children of time" or "anathem""

jr_isidore — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:48:09 +0000

Well, then you didn't do it right. The TV show is garbage, the books were sublime (although like LoTR, their pacing was backloaded, so you had to suffer though the first half of each book. The third book is more uniformly paced).

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Please recommend sci-fi books similar to "children of time" or "anathem""

jr_isidore — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:46:09 +0000

Children of Time is nothing like Anathem, but both are so, so bad. CoT was good for about a hundred pages, and then I just got sick of spiders berating each other. Quit around the midpoint.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Emacs, how it all started for me"

jr_isidore — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:19:30 +0000

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. GGP's critique is typical of poor exposition. Read the first chapter of any maths textbook from the 1970s. It doesn't make any sense because the author already knows where everything leads and lest he appear a fool to his peers, will insist the reader does too.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Emacs, how it all started for me"

jr_isidore — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:15:21 +0000

GGP's claim is emacs is better learned as a lisp machine than a text editor, which is akin to saying a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. In other words, it does a neophyte no good to see the matrix without having lived in it first. It's all one can manage learning emacs's editing primitives if you've never seen it before. Reminding them some (but not all!) of these primitives are in fact elisp expressions is just annoying.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Emacs, how it all started for me"

jr_isidore — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:34:21 +0000

No one, including yourself, approached emacs from a Lisp perspective.

New comment by jr_isidore in "U.S. science is in chaos"

jr_isidore — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:08:29 +0000

He means GGP saved GP the chore of reading by pegging the article as a typical Elon hit piece. You know how HN articles can be so longwinded.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Does your mind drift while waiting for AI prompts to finish?"

jr_isidore — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:58:27 +0000

"Flibbertigibbeting" and "Beboppin" are the new i'm waiting for it to compile, but while the binary outcome of compilation (either it compiles or it doesn't) keeps your head in the game, the open-endedness of a Claude response can be disorienting after you've come back from the YouTube/Reddit wormhole -- like how on Monday you ask yourself wtf you were doing on Friday. But it's just a matter of time before prompting is as fast as Googling... and then it's off to collecting UBI!

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: How do open source companies make money?"

jr_isidore — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:24:21 +0000

Get over a million users. Then sell ads, or sell their data.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Ask HN: Do you remember when you gained consciousness? What was it like?"

jr_isidore — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:55:11 +0000

Sucking on dem teats. Unforgettable.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

jr_isidore — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:36:24 +0000

You misunderstand. Every mailing list has their healthy share of drive-by contributions, but emacs.devel contains a handful of dudes for whom *all they do* is emacs. We're talking nights, weekends, holidays. If they were indeed working a job, the inordinate time spent on the mailing list would constitute defrauding their employer.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

jr_isidore — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:19:21 +0000

Half of the obscure features mentioned required the author's massaging to make useful to himself. The history of these "solutions looking for a problem" is common, some guy reveling in a rabbit hole of his own creation, the only difference being that guy was old enough to have a gnu.org email address whereas the rest of us publish our dabblings on github as third-party packages.

This reminds me of the fading but ever present power of institutionalism. For probably good reasons we accord higher respect to the Tonight Show than some rando podcaster. But at least in emacs's case, there really is no quality difference between a "batteries included" mode and one off the rack.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

jr_isidore — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:50:20 +0000

Try asking it a coding question, one that doesn't diminish your self-worth.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

jr_isidore — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:30:49 +0000

Bro, the FSF is an unchecked post office box somewhere in Kendall Square, and besides, do you really think $10 per month makes a difference? I don't know what these guys feed off of, but it's not food or anything else that money buys.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

jr_isidore — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:18:47 +0000

appears to receive stable funding from the FSF

No, about ten underemployed or semi-retired graybeards on the emacs.devel mailing list burn most of their waking hours futzing with emacs. That's not an exaggeration. They receive no remuneration.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Even more batteries included with Emacs"

jr_isidore — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:07:04 +0000

He means time passing, aka bitrot. Emacs is designed for quick hacks which often rely on filesystem and shell behaviors outside itself to remain constant.