Hacker News: mdh

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

mdh — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:22:12 +0000

Really liked both of these sites. Some great photos on there.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

mdh — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:23:27 +0000

https://ho.dges.online

I use it as a digital scrapbook of pictures, projects etc rather than a blog.

I clicked on a random sample of the links posted here and really enjoyed seeing the diversity of things people post about and the variety of designs the sites have.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

mdh — Fri, 30 May 2025 09:22:27 +0000

Working on restoring my late father-in-law's Lambretta scooter that he bought new in 1958 and rode all over Europe with my MIL before storing it away in a garage in the mid-60s. Frame and bodywork are solid and it's mechanically sound, but is very tired looking. Have disassembled it and am now stripping the faded and chipped paintwork off of everything ahead of a full respray.

New comment by mdh in "Paul Auster has died"

mdh — Wed, 01 May 2024 07:31:05 +0000

Sad news. '4 3 2 1' is one of my favourite novels with its variations on a theme of a single person's life. The same character's showing up in each thread but in totally different contexts worked particularly well.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

mdh — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:51:06 +0000

Thank you for sharing this. I have nothing but admiration for your resolve to turn your previous experience into a superpower.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

mdh — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:45:52 +0000

Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed (and agree with) the 'Photography In Plato's Cave' post.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

mdh — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:39:40 +0000

Love this. The colour Seoul series is my favourite, but all of the pictures are really interesting and engaging.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

mdh — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 12:24:49 +0000

https://ho.dges.online

Only pictures I made and commonplace book posts. I've tried long-form blogs in the past and just couldn't find a groove that was interesting enough (to me) to pursue. The pictures I've made however, have become a kind of notebook for things that have caught my eye or that have significance to me and mine. The commonplace posts capture things that have struck me as distilling wisdom or a useful perspective on life.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: How do I get into art?"

mdh — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 19:05:45 +0000

Go to an art gallery and look at the art. See what you find beautiful, see what you find boring and see what you dislike. Don’t worry about understanding its deeper meaning - just see how you react. If you find something you like, google the artist and see what words get used in relation to their art, and google those terms to find other artists that cover similar ground. Feel your way forward based on what gives you joy, and don’t worry about what other people think: your personal reaction to art is all that counts.

New comment by mdh in "Generative art using C++ printer commands and a receipt printer"

mdh — Fri, 20 May 2022 15:44:04 +0000

IMO, art may have those characteristics - good art will often obviously have >1 of those.

Art in its most basic form is anything that engages you beyond a strictly functional level.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: What are some life changing quotes?"

mdh — Thu, 12 May 2022 21:31:09 +0000

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they actually do.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

New comment by mdh in "The Education of Melvyn Bragg"

mdh — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 23:03:30 +0000

I love ‘In Our Time’ - it strikes a really good balance between being academic and accessible. The range of topics is so broad too that you find yourself learning about things you didn’t even know you wanted to learn about. For example, scrolling to a random point in the podcast feed, I see than in four weeks in Dec ‘18 there were episodes on the thirty years war, ‘Sir Gawain & The Green Knight’, the poor laws and Venus.

Bragg’s book ‘The Adventure of English’ is a good survey of the evolution of the English language too.

New comment by mdh in "Scan Anything with Scan Thing"

mdh — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 19:52:20 +0000

Very cool. I like that the interface is super simple and it seems to do what it claims to do, both with objects and OCR.

It might help to have an explanation somewhere in the app to explain that documents get saved as pdfs and photos as JPEG’s. Took me a while to work it out.

Oh, and the app icon is really fun too!

Artificial Intelligence – Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate

mdh — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 19:20:17 +0000

Article URL: https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/paul-taylor/insanely-complicated-hopelessly-inadequate

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25804633

Points: 39

# Comments: 15

New comment by mdh in "Olympic medals per capita"

mdh — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 23:00:01 +0000

But all sports are bizarre if you boil them down in this way. They all rely on arbitrary limitation of participants or equipment to prevent them descending into a total free-for-all and becoming pointless. Its the same thing as art being about constraints - its having to deliver within certain 'arbitrary' bounds that make it a challenge and make it worthwhile.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: My infosec auditor rejects open source. What now?"

mdh — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 20:42:29 +0000

Agree with this but I would also ask the auditor to be very specific about the risk that she believes your organisation is exposed to. If its a specific concern about the suitability/support of certain tools in use in your infrastructure, you can respond to/address those. In particular, I would make sure that the risk is clear about the impact it could have if an OSS project was discontinued (as the parent refers to): its unlikely to have an immediate impact as, by definition, you have a working instance of the tool and the source code so nothing stops working. In many ways this is comparable to the sort of escrow clauses that auditors sometimes look for in commercial support arrangements and which are often deemed acceptable mitigation for commercial products. She should also be clear about likelihood. In my experience (I've been an auditor for c18 years), it can be the case that auditors think about the doomsday scenario - e.g. ALL of the OSS projects you use close down - rather than the more likely scenario that one or maybe two go dark. Again, if she can articulate the specific risk it may be possible for you to respond to real likelihood of a key tool's project stopping (which would parent's approach already covered but which can be prioritised according to risk).

If however its a more general/vague concern about OSS support then you'll have a hard time dealing with it and acceptance may be the appropriate route.

New comment by mdh in "Ask HN: "Is that work?""

mdh — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:33:37 +0000

Have you tried taking control of his perception of your working day? I've had bosses in the past where the only way to manage them and their expectations was to maintain a narrative of what you were up to.

Perhaps you could schedule a weekly (daily) catch-up with your boss to explain what you're doing, any issues you've had etc. If he won't commit the time to sit down with you, email him a bulleted list of what you're doing that week/day. Don't get lost in the detail but try to highlight any particular wins (e.g. "the database server we'll need for the quotation site is up and running") and any particular roadblocks ("[web services firm] haven't sent the documentation through I requested. I've scheduled a call for Monday to try and get it sent"). If you're not making the progress you expected/hoped for, always present it in a positive light by explaining what you're doing to deal with it.

If he is always coming to you to find out what you're doing, it might be that he's doing it at the wrong time for him (when he's dealt with all his crises and is tired/stressed) or for you (when you're having a short HN-break in which case you appear to be 'always' slacking).

New comment by mdh in "Is it ok to email buyers of my Android app?"

mdh — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:14:46 +0000

Its a noble sentiment but i think it does risk creeping out the people the who did download it which would rather defeat the object of the exercise.

Why not include a "Thanks to everyone who downloaded v1.0" message in the About screen in the next update of the app or the app info screen on the Market?

New comment by mdh in "What happens when it's all glass?"

mdh — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 20:58:31 +0000

This is assuming that once it's all about glass there isn't anywhere to go...

Agreed. Apple has a patent on multi-touch in three dimensions already[1] so maybe the next i-device will move away from the screen and towards a more touchy-feely :-) approach.

[1] - http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=FUOxAAAAEBAJ&dq=m...

New comment by mdh in "Review: Amazon Kindle 3 Wi-Fi (pics/vid)"

mdh — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:23:12 +0000

horses-for-courses i suppose - i find that i quite like everything gathered into the Instapaper 'magazine' just because it tends to gather up that week's articles. Perhaps i just need the discipline of the old content being archived!(you can re-download it though)

edit: its also perhaps relevant that i don't tend to have much really long content. The DFW/Infinite Jest article from the New Yorker that was posted earlier is about the average for me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730153)