Hacker News: mindcrime

New comment by mindcrime in "Reservation Apps Have Made Getting into a Restaurant a Nightmare"

mindcrime — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:28:26 +0000

Yeah, I saw this headline and immediately thought "these people are living in an entirely different world than me". Of the restaurants I regularly eat at, I can just walk in and have a table in 5-10 minutes at most, probably 95% of the time. I did hit my favorite Thai place in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago during a busy time and gave up on the wait (and walked to the Japanese place a dozen yards away), but that's extraordinarily rare.

Now if I were pointedly eating at the "hip" places in town, or if I lived in Manhattan or San Francisco, maybe this would resonate more?

EDIT:

OK, yeah, here it is:

In cities across the country, high-end restaurants seem increasingly hard to get into.

"High end" is not a "thing" that I think about. I don't seek out "high end" restaurants because they are identified as trendy, hip, "high end" places. I just go to places that are a. near me and b. serve good food and c. have good service.

What a novel idea, huh?

New comment by mindcrime in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

mindcrime — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:04:59 +0000

Guess it's time for Trump to fire another BLS director and find one who's better at cooking the books...

New comment by mindcrime in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"

mindcrime — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:09:11 +0000

It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.

What can ya do?

New comment by mindcrime in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"

mindcrime — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 02:06:25 +0000

Exactly. That's not just a load-bearing truth — it's a testament to the power of the contemporary zeitgeist!

New comment by mindcrime in "TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past"

mindcrime — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:27:40 +0000

I believe they are referring to the millimeter wave x-ray machines.

Play Neuromancer

mindcrime — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 03:41:52 +0000

Article URL: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Neuromancer_1988

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140873

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mindcrime in "Ask HN: What websites do you visit every day?"

mindcrime — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:33:00 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com

https://phins.com

https://www.linkedin.com

https://news.google.com

https://youtube.com

https://broadcastify.com

https://www.gmail.com

Quadraphonic Sound

mindcrime — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:15:15 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadraphonic_sound

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49014195

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by mindcrime in "The 'absolute magic' of Morse code that still connects people globally"

mindcrime — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:00:10 +0000

Not sure if you're familiar with this or not, but that concept appears as part of the story in the novel[1] and movie[2] "Johnny Got His Gun". The premise is based on a badly injured soldier during WWI who has lost his ability to speak, see, hear, etc. He communicates by banging his head on his pillow in Morse Code. Many scenes from that movie are interspersed throughout the video to the song "One"[3] by Metallica.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun_(film)

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw

New comment by mindcrime in "Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming"

mindcrime — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:53:32 +0000

See, to me, you're just leaning into the outdated and archaic aspect of this. Sure, that's the way encyclopedia's have been for a long time. But none of that means that they need to continue to work the same way. Technologies change, times change, standards change.

And that said... this whole issue may become moot anyway. Perhaps LLM powered AI systems (or whatever comes after them) will take the place of Wikipedia for certain classes of queries, that one might want to conduct. Eg, if a person wants to know about Odin and ChatGPT or Gemini can tell them all about Odin, maybe it's less important that Odin have a dedicated Wikipedia page (note: just an example, I'm not trying to make any particular commentary on Odin per-se).

New comment by mindcrime in "Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming"

mindcrime — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:49:35 +0000

Not really relevant in this case (that the article talks about), but I don't think that it is so cut and dry as "someone spent time on this so we have to keep it".

No, and I'm not arguing for that. Just pointing out that that insidious nature makes contributing to Wikipedia a questionable activity for (a few|some|many|???) people.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for having NO standards at all for what's included, but I think there's room to rethink the nature of some of those standards.

New comment by mindcrime in "Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming"

mindcrime — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:03:20 +0000

Wikipedia seems stuck in an antiquated worldview where things like traditionally-published books with second- or third-hand reports of what happened, and which are frequently incomplete or wholly inaccurate, are nonetheless considered more authoritative than primary sources you can find with a ten-second Google search.

So much this. Wikipedia's processes and policies are - in ways - an outdated and archaic relic of a bygone time. OTOH, I don't have a definitive answer ready "off the cuff" on what the standard should be. But I think everybody involved needs to acknowledge that the current setup is wrong, and needs serious thought and revision.

And the really insidious thing about this, is the fundamental asymmetry of effort between creation and deletion. Creating a Wikipedia article can take hours, days, or longer, of effort. Tagging an article as AfD takes a few seconds. The actual deletion (once whatever discussion happens) probably takes even less time.

It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all, TBH. I mean, you can spend hours on top of hours working on something and have it all mooted in a few seconds.

New comment by mindcrime in "The open source DOCX editor submitted to HN a few weeks ago has been deleted"

mindcrime — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:56:16 +0000

This is why you clone a copy to a machine you have full control of!

New comment by mindcrime in "The open source DOCX editor submitted to HN a few weeks ago has been deleted"

mindcrime — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:52:34 +0000

You're right, I was looking at submissions for userplane.io[1] and over-fixated on it only being submitted twice. My mistake. Nonetheless, the basic principle is the same. Looking at their submission history it appears to be almost all self-promotional and correspondingly many of the submissions are [dead]. As far as I can tell, that's what happens here. (aside: I'm just commenting based on observation of the years, I'm not anybody "official" here or anything).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=userplane.io

New comment by mindcrime in "The open source DOCX editor submitted to HN a few weeks ago has been deleted"

mindcrime — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:42:41 +0000

Nothing weird about it. The HN guidelines[1] make it clear, IMO, that while some self-promotion is fine, the intent here is NOT to use the site primarily (or exclusively) for self-promotion. The account that submitted the userplane.io link had only ever submitted two links, and both were to userplane.io. What do you expect to happen?

Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

> After a few more experiences like that, I've mostly stopped posting because it doesn't feel like the effort is worth it

Ironically this is exactly the wrong response. You should post more, but more stuff that's simply intellectually interesting, and not just to promote your own stuff. But if your only reason for being here is self-promotion, then you're right... not worth it. shrug

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by mindcrime in "A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison"

mindcrime — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:30:57 +0000

Call me nostalgic or whatever, but my laptop to this very day...

https://fogbeam.com/free-kevin.jpg

We Are Witnessing the Slow Death of the Prestige Career

mindcrime — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:46:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/22/consulting-ai-prestige-careers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48642143

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by mindcrime in "Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers"

mindcrime — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:51:00 +0000

Depends on how they address the side fumbling between the Spurving bearing and the Dingle arm, vis-a-vis the lotuso-toroidal damping force.

New comment by mindcrime in "Ask HN: If AI didn't exist, what would you be building today?"

mindcrime — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 06:17:03 +0000

I'd be working on AI.

New comment by mindcrime in "Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?"

mindcrime — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:07:56 +0000

Interesting. I think I see what you're getting at, and I can kinda buy that.