Hacker News: obeattie

New comment by obeattie in "You know more Finnish than you think"

obeattie — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 05:32:22 +0000

He speaks Finnish too (though I believe with an accent). https://youtu.be/Pt-X82HZlOU

New comment by obeattie in "Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment"

obeattie — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 06:24:24 +0000

It’s helpful to put this issue into perspective. But dismissing issues as not worth caring about on the grounds that there exist larger problems is fallacious and, to me, quite a dangerous way to live life.

“Why worry about your town’s water quality when some countries don’t have access to clean water?”

“Why go to the dentist for a cavity when some people have no teeth?“

“Why campaign for animal rights when there are some many human rights abuses going on?”

New comment by obeattie in "Ghost artists on Spotify"

obeattie — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 17:26:33 +0000

In principal, neither do I. What I take issue with is crafting elaborate but completely false bios to make these sound like real artists. That seems slimy to me.

New comment by obeattie in "Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples?"

obeattie — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 22:29:35 +0000

At Monzo we stuffed cards into envelopes by hand, printed mailing labels on thermal printers using slapped-together Python scripts, and filled up mailboxes in the local area every night. We kept doing it pretty much like this until we were sending out several thousand cards per day.

https://monzo.com/blog/2017/06/09/journey-of-a-card/

New comment by obeattie in "Show HN: Make your PDF look scanned in browser"

obeattie — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 15:48:14 +0000

You are right about performance, but does it really matter?

It feels like this is the sort of tool one needs (very) infrequently, and those cases don’t seem like the sort of thing where seconds really matter. I think it’s plenty good enough.

I prefer to focus on how grateful I am that the author has made this and published it for free.

New comment by obeattie in "No_color"

obeattie — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 08:56:05 +0000

Without understanding the minutiae of this, couldn’t someone just write a program that we can pipe any output to, which strips colour commands from its input before writing it back out? Does such a program already exist? That wouldn’t require every program to add support for an environment variable.

New comment by obeattie in "The great resignation is coming?"

obeattie — Tue, 11 May 2021 15:26:58 +0000

TIL. Such a useful tip, thanks.

New comment by obeattie in "The fingerprint inside photos"

obeattie — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 08:00:04 +0000

We have very different expectations. I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't browse and sort my photos by date taken.

New comment by obeattie in "Notion for everyone"

obeattie — Tue, 19 May 2020 17:37:38 +0000

I think Notion might actually work best in personal/small environments, and this seems like a smart move to encourage more of that kind of use. My exposure to it is at a large company, where it really does not work well.

New comment by obeattie in "Text exceeding maxlength will no longer be truncated when pasted in Firefox 77"

obeattie — Sat, 16 May 2020 17:56:47 +0000

You just typed your comment into a

New comment by obeattie in "My blog is now generated by Google Docs"

obeattie — Sun, 10 May 2020 19:33:30 +0000

I’ve been thinking about going the other way a bit recently: having bots consume input from and add their output to a Google Doc.

There are so many processes in most businesses which involve many humans collaborating on templatised documents. Google Docs/Sheets fits into these workflows very well, but there’s often scope for some partial automation in there too - pulling information from databases and outside sources and keeping it in sync, etc. Developing custom web apps for each case is too much effort for too little reward, takes users out of a familiar (and well-liked) interface which updates in real-time, makes you reimplement permission models, etc.

Not something I’ve explored properly yet so I don’t know if the APIs are rich enough to make this easy, but I would really like to give it a look.

New comment by obeattie in "A Third Solution"

obeattie — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 02:39:22 +0000

That post, which was very popular, immediately came to my mind too.

It also feels like the logical next step to the very widespread testing found in countries like South Korea.

New comment by obeattie in "Building a Better Go Linker"

obeattie — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 19:44:37 +0000

I think the parent is talking about compilation speed not runtime speed.

New comment by obeattie in "Y Combinator invests in Monzo through its Continuity Fund"

obeattie — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 08:59:13 +0000

I don't think an equivalent of the Current Account Switch Service exists in the US, which is a shame.

But I don't think this is crucial. We had around 5,500 switches via the Current Account Switch Service in May, but added around 200,000 new customers.

New comment by obeattie in "Google Cloud Is Down"

obeattie — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 01:42:16 +0000

Many millions of dollars per year. I care about how my providers behave when they have issues, and I can't see why you think it's not at all relevant.

New comment by obeattie in "Google Cloud Is Down"

obeattie — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 01:04:28 +0000

I mean, I care. All else being equal I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want good communication to your customers.

New comment by obeattie in "Google Cloud Is Down"

obeattie — Sun, 02 Jun 2019 20:28:48 +0000

I really don’t get this. There’s a huge number of complaints about poor communication from companies like Google and AWS during every outage. Yet they remain seemingly indifferent to how much customer trust they are losing, and the competitive edge the first one to get this right could gain.

New comment by obeattie in "Third fatal Tesla Autopilot crash renews questions about system"

obeattie — Fri, 17 May 2019 11:12:08 +0000

The question of whether the driver should have had their hands on the wheel (clearly they should have) is distinct from the question of whether the Autopilot should have avoided this crash.

New comment by obeattie in "Credit cards automatically providing updated card info to subscribing merchants"

obeattie — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 13:25:56 +0000

The amount of fraud in the system is eye-watering. Everyone pays the price of that whether they realise it or not.

New comment by obeattie in "Credit cards automatically providing updated card info to subscribing merchants"

obeattie — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 09:44:22 +0000

Yes, though your bank has to also support it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...