Hacker News: lawlorino

New comment by lawlorino in "SFO Quiet Airport (2025)"

lawlorino — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:00:59 +0000

I thought you were going to link Brian Eno’s Music for Airports

> intent of defusing the anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal as an alternative to "canned" Muzak and easy listening styles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports

New comment by lawlorino in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

lawlorino — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:14:50 +0000

> The next idea is music to drown out what's left but that just distracts me too.

You could try using white noise, either an app or if you have a Mac or iPhone they have native white noise generation (Accessibility -> Hearing -> Background Sounds iirc)

New comment by lawlorino in "Two Planes Destroyed by U.S. During Rescue Operation"

lawlorino — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:15:02 +0000

Paywall

New comment by lawlorino in "Have mental health labels like ADHD and autism gone too far?"

lawlorino — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:08:49 +0000

Article is behind a paywall

New comment by lawlorino in "Ask HN: Have you successfully treated forward head posture ("nerd neck")?"

lawlorino — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:21:54 +0000

Please don’t actually do this. Forcing “correct” alignment would likely cause more issues.

Foley (Sound Design)

lawlorino — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:12:41 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_(sound_design)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836386

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lawlorino in "Can Walking Be My Whole Workout?"

lawlorino — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:38:22 +0000

As someone with perfectionist tendencies I'd say for some people it's perhaps best to enjoy walking aimlessly rather than seeking to optimise yet another part of life, at least at the start.

Personally I found this with running. It never became a consistent habit and something I looked forward to until I stopped thinking about where, when and how fast I was running and just did whatever I felt like. This realisation came after many years of trying and failing to stick to any kind of cardio exercise, and now a couple of years later I have a few half marathons under my belt and am training for my first marathon later this year. I attribute this entirely to the mindset change I described.

New comment by lawlorino in "What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?"

lawlorino — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 05:06:14 +0000

I like this. To add: It serves as a strict lower bound, since it doesn’t account for the hidden cost of context switching etc.

New comment by lawlorino in "Window cleaner in quest to confirm priceless Shakespeare portrait"

lawlorino — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 10:21:42 +0000

Agreed it's not clear from the article, but I think the reason is the similarity to an engraving called the Droeshout portrait [0]

> It is one of only two works of art definitively identifiable as a depiction of the poet

> ... commentators have used the Droeshout print as a standard by which to judge other portraits alleged to depict Shakespeare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droeshout_portrait

New comment by lawlorino in "ReMarkable Paper Pro"

lawlorino — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:10:43 +0000

I noticed when reading through user reviews for the remarkable 2 that I can find several that are pretty critical of the product, but the rating of the reviewer is apparently 5 stars. https://remarkable.com/store/remarkable-2#user-reviews

New comment by lawlorino in "Show HN: BandMatch – “Tinder” but for finding musicians to create bands/collab"

lawlorino — Sat, 04 May 2024 05:57:41 +0000

IMO English only is better than nothing, support can always be added later. I live in Finland and guess the probability of translation to Finnish is somewhere on the order of 0.1%. It’s also not really needed since a large majority of people here under the age of 50 speak English pretty well.

New comment by lawlorino in "AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an accidental expert on Conway's Game of Life"

lawlorino — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 14:15:21 +0000

I discovered Langton ants and Turmites a couple of months ago, I guess these are a subset of cellular automata. I was talking with a friend about using them somehow for art somehow (music generation came to mind), is this a topic you might know about and could recommend some resources to get started?

New comment by lawlorino in "I am Neal Stephenson, sci-fi author, geek, and now, sword maker – AMA"

lawlorino — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 07:58:15 +0000

This is pretty interesting, I've noticed I find it easier to recall information if I've written it down by hand instead of typing it on a computer. I wonder if it's a similar mechanism to what Neil and Neal find with writing - it means the thing you want to express spends longer in the brain's buffer and this leads to several benefits at the cost of it being slower.

Probably goes without saying I might be talking out of my arse here but it's interesting to think about.

New comment by lawlorino in "Showering at the South Pole"

lawlorino — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 06:39:37 +0000

Quite enjoyed the writing and it’s a fun topic to think about.

Would doing a daily “submarine shower” [0] be the best strategy here for maximising cleanliness? This would be use fifteen seconds with water on to get as wet as possible all over, turn water off and apply soap and shampoo, then water on for the last 15 seconds. (Note I’ve never actually tried this so ymmv)

[0] https://sketchplanations.com/submarine-shower

New comment by lawlorino in "Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?"

lawlorino — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 15:59:15 +0000

Took Andrew Ng’s machine learning course on Coursera back around 2015 as my first taste of machine learning.

I was studying for my PhD in Physics at the time and didn’t know what to do with myself with graduation only a year or so away. I was fascinated by the whole machine learning topic and got me interested in learning more - looking back it was the gateway to my data scientist career, which I’m still doing 8 years and 3 countries later.

I think I got quite lucky that this was around the time that data science was becoming a hot topic in industry, but there were very few qualifications in it (sorry statisticians) so people like me with STEM PhDs and relatively little training could go straight into a job from graduation (with varying results)

New comment by lawlorino in "Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?"

lawlorino — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:20:06 +0000

Same with ginger root as well

New comment by lawlorino in "Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?"

lawlorino — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 14:46:47 +0000

https://github.com/jameslawlor/reddit-playlists

I made a bot last summer to generate and update weekly Spotify playlists from 100 or so music subreddits based on the top submissions of that week. Update operates entirely through a GitHub action so no resource spending.

I don’t often finish my side projects so was pretty happy to have something finally usable and shareable, it’s been fun showing friends!

Scandinavia's Most Metal Sound Systems Are Made of Horse Skulls

lawlorino — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 12:03:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/underfloor-horse-skull-speakers-helped-medieval-house-parties-raise-the-roof

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34465851

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by lawlorino in "Plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop"

lawlorino — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 14:40:22 +0000

Similar story here in Finland, real meat is just so much cheaper than the fake veggie stuff. My theory was this was supply chains (being physically far away from the rest of Europe) and a relatively small market size, but interesting you have the same price discrepancy in France which I guess has neither of these issues.

Just speculating here but do you think it is because of the strong food culture and links to identity in France?

New comment by lawlorino in "Someone stole my car and now I own hundreds of vinyl records"

lawlorino — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:50:34 +0000

Could you expand a bit on what the self-work entailed?