Hacker News: monadgonad

New comment by monadgonad in "Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made"

monadgonad — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:53:50 +0000

The author is "not exactly a train enthusiast" as they say, and nor are the vast majority of the audience . Yet the article presents the game in a way that sounds appealing to such an audience, potentially exposing it to more people than just the train fan niche. I think that alone makes it better than "terrible"

New comment by monadgonad in "Pondering routing more of my traffic via nodes outside the UK"

monadgonad — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 07:55:38 +0000

> "people under 16", you mean children right?

They're still people, don't be weird.

New comment by monadgonad in "The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated"

monadgonad — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:39:13 +0000

> Too much protein can definitely kill you, or at least make you ill, as discovered by the Europeans who explored the northern parts of America and who had initially tried to live from the meat of hunted animals, until they learned from the natives that they must eat enough fat besides the lean meat, in order to survive (most wild animals have little fat, except the bone marrow, which must be extracted).

That's an issue of too little fat, not too much protein. The question is whether, when your other nutritional needs are being met, an excess of protein is an issue.

New comment by monadgonad in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

monadgonad — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:58:21 +0000

> It's similar to my aversion to books like "The Game"

Note that The Game isn't a PUA manual, it's investigative journalism into the PUA scene.

New comment by monadgonad in "Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way"

monadgonad — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:52:55 +0000

As someone who is fluent in Japanese, the thing is that this is not an example of a method that works well, it’s an example of a beginner coming up with an overwrought headcanon (while calling it “simple”, nonetheless!) that ultimately will hinder their understanding, as I will detail elsewhere.

If this was a similar post about programming, it would not get upvoted here because more people would recognise it for what it is: a “Monads are Like Burritos” post from a well-meaning but misguided beginner.

New comment by monadgonad in "Show HN: Trust – Coding Rust like it's 1989"

monadgonad — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:53:04 +0000

Staying on the safe side would be not confirming whether it stands for Turbo Rust or not. "You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment."

New comment by monadgonad in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

monadgonad — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:19:41 +0000

You think that they have “days leading up to consultation”? Please don’t be so disingenuous; I’m sure you know exactly what the person you’re replying to meant.

New comment by monadgonad in "DeepSeek v4"

monadgonad — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:12:54 +0000

"Not about moral high ground. One's an ideology my morals agree with, one isn't."

New comment by monadgonad in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

monadgonad — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:33:43 +0000

The current situation really has zero bearing on the principle that it’s better to inform users of this.

New comment by monadgonad in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

monadgonad — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:47:33 +0000

> The difference is that electricity wasn't being controlled by oligarchs that want to shape society so they become more rich while pillaging the planet and hurting/killing real human beings.

Yes it was. Those industrialists were called "robber barons" for a reason.

New comment by monadgonad in "McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash"

monadgonad — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:44:02 +0000

I think it is humorous exaggeration

New comment by monadgonad in "When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023)"

monadgonad — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:29:33 +0000

> Should I be familiar with every step of Dijkstra’s search algorithm and remember the pseudocode at all times?

Somehow, I think you already know the answer to that is "no".

I've been working as a software engineer for over 8 years, with no computer science education. I don't know what Dijkstra's search algorithm is, let alone have memorised the pseudocode. I flicked through a book of data structures and algorithms once, but that was after I got my first software job. Unless you're only aiming for Google etc, you don't really need any of this.

New comment by monadgonad in "The past was not that cute"

monadgonad — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:19:58 +0000

Antibiotics don’t stop you suffering from poison ivy. At all. In other posts you say you had a broken skin barrier that’s vulnerable to infection, so you presumably know that this is not the same as actually having a bacterial infection, and that antibiotics are only a prophylactic, not a treatment. So stop making out that people are dying to deny you treatment.

New comment by monadgonad in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

monadgonad — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 10:10:07 +0000

> I won't call clickbait on this

But you are going to imply it by bringing it up at all.

> They didn't kill him, they failed to save him.

The post does not say otherwise.

Please give this, of all topics, the respect it deserves, respond to the article as it is actually written, and don't use this, of all things, as an opportunity to get on your high horse about some other article you have problems with.

New comment by monadgonad in "The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)"

monadgonad — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:57:17 +0000

> very well understood and documented by a huge community

Is this article not someone in the community documenting what's understood? I'm sorry if it doesn't meet your expectations, but it's fine for me.

New comment by monadgonad in "The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)"

monadgonad — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:25:40 +0000

Me. I'm a backend developer who occasionally wants to make a web frontend for a side-project but knows essentially no CSS. The solutions are not "well understood" by me because I know no CSS.

New comment by monadgonad in "How can England possibly be running out of water?"

monadgonad — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:56:11 +0000

The article, and especially much of the discussion here, is about how privatisation has led to this situation. Privatisation of a public utility which _even in many other developed liberal capitalist countries_ is not privatised. Yet to you this is not evidence that we are an extreme example of neoliberalism, but somehow “defacto socialist” and your solution is throwing fuel on the fire with more privatisation. You’re living on a different planet, mate.

New comment by monadgonad in "4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak"

monadgonad — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 15:07:29 +0000

Fruiter Aero is a term that retroactively applies to the style of a certain time. Look at Windows Vista. Windows Vista's design is what we now call Fruitger Aero. Windows Vista came out in 2007. It's a retroactive term, yes, but how can you claim the thing it refers to didn't exist before 2007, when Windows Vista is a shining example of it?

New comment by monadgonad in "4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak"

monadgonad — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:15:29 +0000

I'm not sure how you've come to that impression. The boards I used to frequent are hobbyist ones, not political, yet they have people calling each other the n-word all the time. On /fit/ anything done by a large corporation or as a moneymaking scheme is talked about as if it's a Jewish conspiracy, to the point where they call highly-processed food "goyslop". /g/ hates Indians and calls software and technology that it likes "the white man's choice." I could go on. This pervasive background of racism is all over 4chan, and I wonder why you're trying to downplay it.

New comment by monadgonad in "Thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making"

monadgonad — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:12:22 +0000

You're talking about a completely different phenomenon.