Hacker News: marssaxman

New comment by marssaxman in "Woman who rescued injured crow keeps getting 'thank-you gifts' from birds [video]"

marssaxman — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:46:36 +0000

That is not so much an assumption as a conclusion, backed up by research:

https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...

https://crowlingo.org/journal/marzluff-mask-experiments-expl...

New comment by marssaxman in "Ask HN: In the age of AI does your boss still ask you for time estimates?"

marssaxman — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:14:53 +0000

I have not given time estimates for years, but that has nothing to do with AI.

New comment by marssaxman in "The return of phones with physical keyboards?"

marssaxman — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:17:25 +0000

I've been waiting for the Clicks Communicator a good while now. If it ever ships, I'll probably buy one. I hadn't heard about the Minimal phone: an interesting concept.

I have never been able to really love a phone without a keyboard; typing on glass frustrates me so much that I tend to just avoid using the device.

New comment by marssaxman in "Why people don't want to have children any more"

marssaxman — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:12:53 +0000

I wonder why people downvoted you. My story is much the same: I could give a long list of reasons why I chose not to have children, but the simpler truth is that I never saw anything on the "pro" side of the ledger.

New comment by marssaxman in "Why people don't want to have children any more"

marssaxman — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:01:02 +0000

Why is it necessary to own a house before you can have children?

That was not the case for the families I knew growing up; homeownership was the exception, not the rule. My parents had eleven children, and never got around to buying a house.

New comment by marssaxman in "Ask HN: Is the Future of IDEs Bleak?"

marssaxman — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:24:29 +0000

I gave up on IDEs years ago. The terminal is fine.

New comment by marssaxman in "Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand"

marssaxman — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:47:04 +0000

Managing humans is hard work. Team dynamics are complicated. Communication is uncertain. Relationships which have power imbalances can be fraught. People's lives get messy, and that leaks into their work. Performance is sometimes uneven, and you have to deal with it.

Robots are much easier.

New comment by marssaxman in "Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand"

marssaxman — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:24:00 +0000

My account is seventeen years old, and I've been coding more than forty years; is that enough to meet your standards?

I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.

New comment by marssaxman in "ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons"

marssaxman — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 02:15:01 +0000

I've been automating myself out of a job as long as I've been a coder, which has become a considerable span of time; that is my job.

New comment by marssaxman in "On social reality in China"

marssaxman — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:09:33 +0000

This is a common experience with any unfamiliar genre: it all looks or sounds the same at first, because the point of a genre is to express variation within a specific, familiar structure. As a newcomer, the structure dominates your perception, until you've exposed yourself to enough instances that you can filter out the common features and notice the details, which are where the actual creativity lies.

New comment by marssaxman in "Suits Are Better Tech Than Modern Clothes"

marssaxman — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:33 +0000

You can get a shirt made to measure from https://www.hockerty.com, in your choice of material and at quite a reasonable price. I have a few of them. It's basic construction, not high-end luxury fashion, but it feels really good to have a shirt which fits you exactly.

New comment by marssaxman in "SDF vs. MSDF vs. Slug: GPU Text Rendering"

marssaxman — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:59:30 +0000

I wonder if you are more or less tired of reading LLM-generated writing than I am of reading complaints about LLM-generated writing.

New comment by marssaxman in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

marssaxman — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:46:22 +0000

> The other fell from an installation.

I'd like to know more about that incident, if you have any information. So far as I'm aware, it's the first time someone has died after falling off a structure at Burning Man (though plenty of people have been injured, of course).

New comment by marssaxman in "Ask HN: Any nerds out there who've read a lot of research papers?"

marssaxman — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:25:30 +0000

"SSA is functional programming" changed the course of my career. Memorable indeed.

New comment by marssaxman in "Serious editors are a commitment (at least for me)"

marssaxman — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:55:40 +0000

I just wrote my own, tailored exactly to my preferences, and I've been using it ever since. Editors are not trivial, but the scale is reasonable for a single-developer hobby project.

New comment by marssaxman in "Ask HN: What do people do with Android phones once security updates end?"

marssaxman — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:29:29 +0000

I have literally never spent a moment worrying about this. How do you even know that this is the case for your phone? If my phone gets security updates, it never tells me about them.

New comment by marssaxman in "What Sun got wrong"

marssaxman — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:25:59 +0000

I wonder how effective it really is, over the long term, to generate short-term profit by consuming trust like this.

New comment by marssaxman in "Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md"

marssaxman — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:10:22 +0000

Consistency with `robots.txt` seems like a reasonable choice.

New comment by marssaxman in "Stallman: Thousands Dead, Millions Deprived of Liberties (2001)"

marssaxman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:37:50 +0000

Not only that, alterslash.org still exists.

New comment by marssaxman in "A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs"

marssaxman — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:36:31 +0000

If I'm lining up to order from a shabby old school bus with a menu in the window written in sharpie on a piece of cardboard, I know I'm a couple minutes away from tucking into some banging tacos.