Hacker News: plaidphantom

New comment by plaidphantom in "Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI"

plaidphantom — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:34:09 +0000

Only if the student even cares to proofread for something like that in the middle of a big, probably poorly formatted, block of text pasted into a small-ish text box.

New comment by plaidphantom in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

plaidphantom — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:15:53 +0000

Here's another for the pile. https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4?si=yTB_dICMqnLjqVEi

New comment by plaidphantom in "Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain"

plaidphantom — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:14:50 +0000

They explicitly address this in the article:

"Initially, we experimented by building this as an app on Pebble, since it has a mic and I’m always wearing one. But, I realized quickly that this was suboptimal - it required me to use my other hand to press the button to start recording (lift-to-wake gestures and wake-words are too unreliable). This was tough to use while bicycling or carrying stuff."

This interacts directly with the Pebble App, so I would be shocked if the watches never get an equivalent app.

New comment by plaidphantom in "Show HN: SQLite Online – 11 years of solo development, 11K daily users"

plaidphantom — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:14:41 +0000

Alternate opinion: these URLs read as "spammy" to me and I would be less likely to click on them.

It would be apropos to at least have an "about" dialog somewhere, or maybe one of those "quick tour" popups.

New comment by plaidphantom in "The Tongue Is a Fire"

plaidphantom — Mon, 19 May 2025 14:48:05 +0000

Winning with a 49.8% popular vote is hardly a "mandate".

New comment by plaidphantom in "The tragedy of running an old Node project"

plaidphantom — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 23:42:44 +0000

And Nativescript.

New comment by plaidphantom in "Ternary Operators"

plaidphantom — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 21:44:07 +0000

How about SQL joins? "foo JOIN bar ON foo.id = bar.fooid"

New comment by plaidphantom in "A List of Ternary Operators"

plaidphantom — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 21:37:08 +0000

I don't think they're saying that such a range function is itself a ternary, but using that as a lead-in to discussing the Frink ("1 to 100 step 15") and Elixir ("1..10//2") syntaxes.

New comment by plaidphantom in "418 I’m a teapot"

plaidphantom — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:24:01 +0000

Dangit, I had finally gotten good at The Game.

New comment by plaidphantom in "We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem"

plaidphantom — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:29:09 +0000

For those who don't know, DuckDuckGo provides an app tracking blocker for Android that implements itself as an on-device pseudo-VPN and blocks known tracking services. No containerization/sandboxing, but it's a start.

https://spreadprivacy.com/introducing-app-tracking-protectio...

New comment by plaidphantom in "Why Are Sloths So Slow?"

plaidphantom — Sat, 25 May 2024 02:35:00 +0000

A harmful attribute on its own can be advantageous when combined with others. Think of it as finding a new "local maxima" in the sum total of evolutionary traits. Being (probably randomly) near-blind may have led to being slow and careful, which was the temperament needed to survive climbing trees, which got them away from ground-based predators and found them a lot of leaves ground sloths couldn't reach.

Evolution is basically a random-walk algorithm to find combinations that work.

New comment by plaidphantom in "What’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy? (1986)"

plaidphantom — Thu, 16 May 2024 03:07:20 +0000

I've definitely seen high school seniors get a big head!

New comment by plaidphantom in "Why you can hear the temperature of water"

plaidphantom — Mon, 13 May 2024 07:07:57 +0000

I'd guess much of this difference is also due to the fats in the cheese & meats solidifying at cold temperatures, and thus less readily coating taste receptors.

New comment by plaidphantom in "Is .NET just miles ahead or am I delusional?"

plaidphantom — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:09:10 +0000

For me, .NET Core has been largely solving this problem over time. In classic .NET Framework it was nearly impossible to make something without Visual Studio's arcane templates. The `dotnet` command simplifies a lot of that, and projects have a lot less boilerplate.