Hacker News: patorjk

New comment by patorjk in "Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns"

patorjk — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:10:58 +0000

There's a whole industry around suing website owners who have websites that aren't accessible. It's kind of messed up. The WSJ did a story on it a while back: https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/small-business...

New comment by patorjk in "Being overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor"

patorjk — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 19:33:16 +0000

There's something called a "lean mass hyper responder", it's a type of person with high LDL but they're still healthy. You may fall into that category. However, high apob is more correlated to heart disease than high LDL. A lot of the online doctors who say high LDL isn't bad are saying that because some people have large LDL particles, and it's apparently the number of particles that's the problem, not the amount of LDL cholesterol.

I've dug into this topic a lot sense there's a lot of heart disease in my family. I've found that eating a bowl of oatmeal once a day reduces my LDL under 130 (I've been taking quarterly cholesterol blood tests to keep an eye on things). It's probably the fiber content that's doing the work, but I haven't tried other high fiber foods yet. However, I'm not a doctor so make of this what you will.

New comment by patorjk in "Being overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor"

patorjk — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 20:08:22 +0000

This kind of stat is misleading and is seen in many health metrics - blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. In fact, it's sometimes known as the "cholesterol paradox" because people with higher cholesterol have a lower risk of dying. However, it's misleading because blood pressure, weight, and cholesterol often come down as people suffer from chronic disease or malnutrition. The chronic diseases people get are often from their weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, and when this is corrected for, the all-cause mortality curves better reflect what a healthy person's numbers should be. So in reality the lowest point of the all-cause mortality curve for BMI is below 25. 25 is not optimal.

Dr. Carvalho recently made a video on this topic (he even mentions the BMI curve). You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4h135SBebc

New comment by patorjk in "Should You Be Rinsing Your Plates Before Loading the Dishwasher?"

patorjk — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 04:31:41 +0000

I've heard people say you don't need to rinse, but from experience this just doesn't seem to be true, or at least it's based on the dishwasher you have. I had a dishwasher 15 years ago where I tested the idea of not rinsing vs rising, and if I didn't rinse, I would sometimes have dishes that weren't completely clean (ie, hot chocolate residue in a mug, cheese from mac n cheese on silverware, etc).

New comment by patorjk in "YouTube now blocking ad block"

patorjk — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 19:15:50 +0000

For a few days I was getting the prompts and finally the 3 video warning. I went without youtube for a few days, when I tried yesterday my AdBlocker was working fine on it. I watched several videos and got no warnings. It's unclear to me if they gave up, or if they're testing this in waves to see what happens.

New comment by patorjk in "Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?"

patorjk — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:46:30 +0000

I've had tinnitus for around 15 years now. I've followed the research pretty closely. One thing to be especially weary about is the placebo effect. For some reason it's especially bad when it comes to tinnitus. I think that's how so many snake oil products can thrive in this area.

Back when they were doing the OTO-313 study a year or so ago, I read several reports from people who were in the study the drug had made their tinnitus go away (one on the TinniusTalk forums, and a few in a tinnitus Facebook group). However, when the results came back, the drug did not beat placebo. A similar thing happened with the FX-322 drug (that one was for hearing restoration but people were hopeful it could address tinnitus too).

New comment by patorjk in "Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?"

patorjk — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 14:25:58 +0000

I second this resource. Lots of good threads and discussion here. The forums are full of threads where people talk about things they've tried.

New comment by patorjk in "Microsoft to kill off VBScript in Windows to block malware delivery"

patorjk — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 21:32:00 +0000

As an intern 20 years ago I wrote a lot of VBScript code to automate the generation of a bunch of Excel reports. I ran into my old boss 10-12 years ago and he said the scripts were still humming along. I've sometimes wondered how long those scripts would last, I guess they're end of life is coming up (if they haven't been rewritten by a new intern already).

America’s Most Expensive Trailer Park, Where Homes Sell for Millions

patorjk — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 15:41:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-expensive-trailer-park-in-america-3199a923

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35541607

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by patorjk in "Men Without Work (2016)"

patorjk — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:53:53 +0000

I don't understand why some people feel the need to be so snarky in their summary messages:

> I'll bet this clown got paid to write this article and they did a poor job of it, too.

It's really turned me off from contributing. Years ago I got into a spat where someone didn't like something I added to an article and said my sources weren't valid since they were blog posts. I went and found a mainstream magazine article on the topic and they still balked - but eventually relented since they really didn't have a leg to stand on. They silently removed the addition a few months later. However, at that point I was over it and didn't care. The fact eventually made it back into the article a few years later when someone else added it in.

New comment by patorjk in "Honey consumption improves blood sugar and cholesterol levels, study suggests"

patorjk — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 15:26:40 +0000

I wonder if the submitted link should be changed to your link. I can access your link fine but I get an error when I try to access the submitted link.

Gut Bacteria Are Linked to Depression

patorjk — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 18:12:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gut-bacteria-linked-to-depression-11670342342

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33884548

Points: 10

# Comments: 4

New comment by patorjk in "Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?"

patorjk — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 19:27:50 +0000

The first book I ever bought in a computer store was Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus. Back in the mid-90's I saw it randomly while walking by the games section and thought it almost too good to be true. I ended up spending countless hours making my own levels. I was never any good though, and I definitely preferred playing what other people came up with. Every couple of years I'll go back and revisit some of those levels and see if there's anything new. It's definitely awesome that people have kept this scene alive.

New comment by patorjk in "Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile"

patorjk — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 21:23:05 +0000

It sounds like you did the right thing, you were concerned and kept an eye on things. Calling the police would have been overkill and maybe wrecked this kids' family life (like what happened in the article). Other than that, I see no problem with approaching the kid and saying something like "hey, you can get hurt playing in the street, please take this to your backyard", or something like that. As long as you don't try and start a conversation it's not going to be weird. If you have a kid he may even know who you are already. All of the kids in my neighborhood know me as "Edward's dad", even though I wouldn't be able to pick most of them out of a lineup.

New comment by patorjk in "What ever happened to webrings? (2015)"

patorjk — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 21:44:01 +0000

I remember joining these back in the day. They were actually pretty good at driving traffic to niche sites.

I used one about 15 years ago to help promote an ASCII Art app I wrote (I'm still a member too). I just checked and the webring still exists (http://artcode.org/ascii/index.php). Many of the sites that were members are now gone, but some of them still exist. Kind of cool that it's still around, it's a nice look into the past.

New comment by patorjk in "Sleeping longer than 6.5 hours/day can help you lose weight: study"

patorjk — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 14:58:56 +0000

> Researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that study participants consumed on average 270 calories less per day over two weeks if they slept at least one hour more than normal.

When I saw the title I suspected it was related to eating more if you slept less. I find myself doing this when I cheat myself out of a goodnight's sleep.

New comment by patorjk in "figlet – a program for making large letters out of ordinary text"

patorjk — Wed, 25 May 2022 19:35:06 +0000

I have a popular web based ascii text generator (https://patorjk.com/software/taag), it uses FIGlet driver that I wrote (https://github.com/patorjk/figlet.js/). Many of the other ones out there also use their own drivers (I've seen some written in php and python). There are also different types of ASCII text fonts out there other than FIGlet (ex: my app compiles fonts that were made in the AOL days in the Arial font - which is interesting because it's a non-monospaced font).

FIGlet is the most popular spec for these types of fonts though (it's an app and a spec). The mailing list hasn't been active in a decade, but people used to submit fonts there. It was cool to see what people made.

New comment by patorjk in "Twitter accounts dropping “.eth” from usernames"

patorjk — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 18:58:04 +0000

> Like the one where everyone made their avatars be simpson-style

This takes me back. A decade ago I paid someone $5 on Fiverr to draw me as a Simpsons character. She was one of several people on the site doing this. I just checked and she's still at it, with over 8k reviews. A niche market but one that doesn't seem to have completely dried up yet.

New comment by patorjk in "YouTube Kids cleaned up its act"

patorjk — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 14:37:02 +0000

> The feeling among many product managers and engineers was that if a platform was 99% safe, that was enough, according to one former executive. The point was to find a way to avoid human curation, the person said.

I wonder if the initial batch of engineers working on the product had kids. I remember being horrified when I read about some of the stuff people were finding on the app. It seemed unconscionable that a company would be make a product for kids and have that kind of content (ex: cartoon characters committing suicide).

New comment by patorjk in "Google lowered its salaries in North Carolina. Now workers are protesting"

patorjk — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 20:16:45 +0000

> The company set up an internal calculator for workers who left the expensive areas of San Francisco and New York to calculate how much their pay would be cut if they did not return

If you moved based on what the calculator said and then they cut your pay that's pretty messed up. I don't think the workers should expect to be paid the same as higher cost of living areas, but transparency in how these calculations are made should be available to them (especially if the rates can change year-to-year).