Hacker News: kinleyd

New comment by kinleyd in "Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer"

kinleyd — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:45:03 +0000

Well, lucky you anyway - I'd give up a lot to be able to instantly play Jimi Hendrix in my mind!

New comment by kinleyd in "I Am Mark Zuckerberg"

kinleyd — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 10:28:46 +0000

OK. I avoided this post for a while, and then had to find out what was up. It was worth it. Ha ha, it brought a bit of levity to my afternoon.

New comment by kinleyd in "Why Koreans ask what year you were born"

kinleyd — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:28:43 +0000

It was in the early '90s, sometime before South Korea broke out as a dominant economic force. Yes, I'm convinced he thought I was a western educated Korean brat prancing around in his shop and was having none of it. Looking back, I still feel a sense of relief I didn't get beaten up.

New comment by kinleyd in "Why Koreans ask what year you were born"

kinleyd — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:11:32 +0000

As a young man many years ago I happened to be in Seoul, in a shoe store. I was casually asking prices in English and noticed the salesman or owner was getting visibly angry with me. So much so that as I went around the corner of the store I clearly saw that he had begun advancing toward me, with every intention of physically attacking me. I put my hand forward to stop him and as I did, I shouted loudly, again in English, "Stop. Let me outta here!" To which he suddenly hesitated, stepped aside and let me go.

I wondered for years what I might have done to upset the bloke - he was a well built man and I did not want to fight him! It was only after the KAL crash and the coverage it gave the Korean focus on seniority and age that the penny dropped. He thought I was Korean - I do look very Korean (and Japanese and Chinese) - and was clearly offended by my not respecting his age.

At least that is what I would like to think. The alternative is that I was somehow very offensive anyway and I'd like not to think that.

New comment by kinleyd in "Where has all the productivity gone? (2021)"

kinleyd — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:57:45 +0000

I'm usually overwhelmed beyond 10-15 open tabs.

New comment by kinleyd in "Where has all the productivity gone? (2021)"

kinleyd — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 11:56:16 +0000

Oh, when will you ever learn? Oh, when will you ever learn?

Marlene Dietrich

New comment by kinleyd in "Taking my diabetes treatment into my own hands"

kinleyd — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:22:21 +0000

It took me a long time to get there, but I eventually did - I agree with every one of things that you listed. Fortunately, I have also learned that there are a whole lot of things that you can do to overcome each of those challenges. It does require a good bit of time to research, understand and apply them - as well as some luck.

New comment by kinleyd in "Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)"

kinleyd — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:29:06 +0000

I had a slightly better experience. For the thrill of it, I spent hours preparing for a couple of test papers making a number of little cheat sheets in tiny handwriting. At the end of the exercise I found I didn't need the cheat sheets - the stuff had gone right into memory and I did quite well in the tests.

New comment by kinleyd in "Double-entry bookkeeping as a directed graph"

kinleyd — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 09:16:17 +0000

I don't think that is the case. I think it would have to take a deeper understanding of double-entry accounting to really appreciate its genius. The key lies in the double entry that is made for each transaction. While each entry is simple, the beauty lies in how it provides the basis for detecting errors even in very large datasets simply by comparing totals - they must balance. In this context negative numbers do not provide any meaningful information at all.

New comment by kinleyd in "Double-entry bookkeeping as a directed graph"

kinleyd — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 16:32:17 +0000

I tried using John Wiegley's Ledger, which uses negative numbers. Everything was great about Ledger except for that part - I just couldn't wrap my head around it.

New comment by kinleyd in "Double-entry bookkeeping as a directed graph"

kinleyd — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:46:00 +0000

I'm not sure if that's the reason for it, but I'm pretty certain introducing negative numbers would confound the accounting process.

New comment by kinleyd in "Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code"

kinleyd — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 03:50:26 +0000

I have always lamented the loss of the tail. Every time my dog, though almost entirely asleep, wags its tail to acknowledge my presence, I always say to myself "Now, THAT is efficiency."

I'm not a furry, but I'm open to the possibility of getting that back!

New comment by kinleyd in "Hyprland Crash Course"

kinleyd — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 09:02:23 +0000

Hyprland can do that, quite easily. It has windows rules that allow you to place everything just so.

New comment by kinleyd in "VeraCrypt: Free open-source disk encryption for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux"

kinleyd — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 07:53:36 +0000

Ah, you're right. I realized that was probably what was meant after I'd posted.

I never realized there was so much history - just thought the app had been orphaned for the usual mundane reasons. I've got to read that book!

New comment by kinleyd in "VeraCrypt: Free open-source disk encryption for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux"

kinleyd — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 05:50:31 +0000

Veracrypt works on Linux too. I switched over when Truecrypt was orphaned.

New comment by kinleyd in "Ask HN: Do you still use a hand held/desktop calculator?"

kinleyd — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:34:32 +0000

I was distracted by the charms and features of the HP-19B for a while, but yeah, the HP-12C is my old faithful.

New comment by kinleyd in "The Open Buddhist University"

kinleyd — Tue, 23 May 2023 14:00:10 +0000

That is as sweeping a statement as one could make about Buddhism.

New comment by kinleyd in "BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout"

kinleyd — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 13:04:22 +0000

You'd be surprised.

New comment by kinleyd in "Show HN: A version control system based on rsync"

kinleyd — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 04:20:05 +0000

Sounds very useful to me. rsync is my go to tool - I use it to manually maintain versions of my workstation as I find it the most reliable and usable among all options I've tried.

New comment by kinleyd in "The Shit Show"

kinleyd — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 13:16:43 +0000

Me too. And now I find it so invaluable.