Hacker News: madmountaingoat

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

madmountaingoat — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:53:25 +0000

For guitar I followed Justin up into his intermediate level stuff but then switched to in person lesson and they made a big difference for me. I think I got lucky with my first teacher though, as I've not really gelled with teachers I worked with later.

I'm obsessed with Strongman style functional lifting.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

madmountaingoat — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:13:20 +0000

One side of my brain agrees that's a dumb way to judge anyone but then when I think about the accepted filtering mechanism they really aren't any better or any worse. You cannot interview everyone and ultimately you're looking for some combination of competence, alignment, drive and social fit. Filtering on where you worked previously or where you went to school or whether you can pass some coding challenge only partially fills in the matrix. And the size and shape of the organization can drive how much people in the hiring loop look at each data point. This senior engineer's ideal for alignment and social fit probably favored people who think like them or their department's head.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "This is not the future"

madmountaingoat — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:33:56 +0000

I don't think you're wrong so much as you've tread into some semantic muddy water. What did the OP mean by 'inevitable', 'political' or 'everything'?. A lot hangs on the meaning. I lot of words could be written defending one interpretation over another and the chance of changing anyone's mind on the topic seems slim.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Eating stinging nettles"

madmountaingoat — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:08:51 +0000

I've had them. They're fine. But this is overselling the variety angle. The meat eater equivalence of forage like this would be game animals. In my experience and extrapolating, the taste difference between game and farm animals is generally greater than among the green vegetables.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Trump pardons convicted Binance founder"

madmountaingoat — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:41:41 +0000

I think most actually know and don't think it's all that much different from what other have done for decades. I'm not saying they are correct to think it, just that they do think it. They think it's refreshing that the corruption is in the open. It's a societal boy-cried-wolf numbness. People are tired of the of finger pointing and screaming about every thing and now don't listen when the real stuff goes down.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?"

madmountaingoat — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:36:04 +0000

I believe it was always more myth than fact. There's always been rough edges in Apple products line. If anything its more an indication of where the real focus is now. And it's not iOS.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"

madmountaingoat — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:17:56 +0000

The standard screen was 80 by 25. There were two addresses you needed to know 0xb000 for monochrome displays and 0xb800 for color. For monochrome you could just blast characters/attributes to the address and everything looked great. For color you had to add a little bit of assembly so writes didn't happen when the monitor was doing certain things (or else you would get some flickering). The little hacks were all well known. Then you could build your own 'windowing' system by just maintaining separate screen buffers and having a little bit of code to combine for buffers when writing the actual hardware. In the early days everyone code was synchronous and code would start listening for keyboard events and react and repaint in a very ad hoc fashion. Mouses made things a bit more complicated as you needed to maintain a persistent model of the UI to process their events. So the UI code was simple and easy to work on, but you had to squeeze these programs into tiny memory footprints so you would spend a lot of time trying to find more memory. One of the bigger projects I worked on had a memory manager that relocated blocks to create contiguous space but since there was no OS support for things that like the code was actually updating pointer in the heap and stack - which was a great source of complicated bugs. Whoa onto anyone that tried to use a linked lists in such an environment. But yeah, it was a fun time.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Toxic Origins, Toxic Decisions: Biases in CEO Selection"

madmountaingoat — Fri, 30 May 2025 20:05:55 +0000

I believe the pedantry label was sufficient acknowledgment of fact, while also pointing out that in the context of the larger conversation we are really talking about whether his leadership decisions led to success.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Getting things “done” in large tech companies"

madmountaingoat — Tue, 06 May 2025 15:28:54 +0000

I hope this was more of a philosophical musing than career advice. I've not worked at every big company, but I have worked at a few. I agree that in the context of a big companies, "done" is a metric; and career success at that big company depends on moving the metrics those leaders track. But in my experience modern big companies also look at peer review and if you're always committing junk, those reviews are not going to be kind. So like everything, it's a balance. Please your boss by closing tickets. Please your peers by writing good code.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative"

madmountaingoat — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 17:30:19 +0000

Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.

The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "But what if I want a faster horse?"

madmountaingoat — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 13:56:39 +0000

In those early days the Spotify user experience needed to try and differentiate and put up barriers to being copied. Later it suffered from being purely metric driven and tracking things like user-engagement thinking it's a proxy for happiness with the platform. And then later still they start to mostly care about the cost of delivery.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted"

madmountaingoat — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:45:07 +0000

I think this specific quote from the article deals with this situation.

> U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."

New comment by madmountaingoat in "I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days"

madmountaingoat — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 02:25:28 +0000

The different mindsets exist, but I agree these are bad words to differentiate them. Back when I started in software in the 80s a common expression was: there are two types of programmers, nerds and hippies. The distinction falling along similar lines - nerds needed to taste the metal, while hippies were more interested in getting stuff done.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Show HN: I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass"

madmountaingoat — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 14:24:33 +0000

Of course no one needs an app to do any of this, but the general idea of getting out and touching a tree, climbing a snowbank, going out without a coat or hat for a few minutes when it's freezing are all the sorts of things that keep me happy during in the winter.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end"

madmountaingoat — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:37:31 +0000

Turbo Pascal wasn't just a good tool, it was a pioneer in how it was marketed and priced. It was relatively affordable, only $49, at a time when tools generally cost in the hundreds. And they ran monthly ads in nearly every computer magazine. If you wanted to hack on things on your PC, and you didn't already work for a company that would buy you to tools, you really had two choices, BASIC and Turbo Pascal.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach"

madmountaingoat — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 20:51:00 +0000

Magical realism. The edges of any "genre" is going to be very fuzzy.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Reasons Not to Refactor"

madmountaingoat — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 21:56:36 +0000

It's all solid advice but that exchange in #5 that the author found delightful, drives me bonkers. If you talk to the people on your team like that, you're not being helpful, you're being an a-hole. I realize its just making a point in the context of the article, but this industry seems to collect pedants, so it seems worth pointing out as an anti-pattern.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop"

madmountaingoat — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:04:28 +0000

I do not dispute that Spotify creates "perfect fit content" tracks. What I will dispute is that, artists with generic bios and AI sounding tracks, are always Spotify tools.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "A marriage proposal spoken in office jargon"

madmountaingoat — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 21:22:54 +0000

There has only been one company I've worked for where 'learnings' was used extensively. It was Swedish. Not sure if that is relevant.

New comment by madmountaingoat in "Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?"

madmountaingoat — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:01:46 +0000

Planetfall.