Hacker News: procaryote

New comment by procaryote in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

procaryote — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:29:58 +0000

As you know this, why don't you fix it?

What is forcing you to doom scroll rather than putting the phone in a different room before going do bed?

New comment by procaryote in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

procaryote — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:19:36 +0000

Can you give an example of something useful you get from commits following the CC convention?

New comment by procaryote in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

procaryote — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:15:17 +0000

Arguably "fix memory leak" is why you free the array; freeing the array is just how you fixed it and less interesting as that is also in the diff

New comment by procaryote in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

procaryote — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:09:08 +0000

Perhaps it's useful to ask why?

What does the jira ticket give you that a longer PR message can't do better?

New comment by procaryote in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

procaryote — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:03:17 +0000

One of many problems introduced by monorepos

New comment by procaryote in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

procaryote — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:02:42 +0000

Giving accomodations during a test kind of invalidates the test as a measurement of relative ability, or aptitude for further studies, so perhaps the solution is to stop doing that

New comment by procaryote in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

procaryote — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:41:21 +0000

Best of luck to him, I hope he finds what he's looking for!

What's not completely clear from the post is what he dislikes with AI / technology. Does someone know?

New comment by procaryote in "YAML? That's Norway Problem"

procaryote — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:16:37 +0000

You need to misplace a in a way that still produces a valid xml document. Just forgetting one or adding an extra one will throw an error.

New comment by procaryote in "YAML? That's Norway Problem"

procaryote — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:12:30 +0000

Write json5, which gives you most of the brevity of yaml without the terrible ideas

I find even plain json easier to write than yaml. Especially when you factor in the scope of mistakes. Tiny mistakes can completely break the structure of a yaml document in ways that are still valid yaml. With json I'll catch that because auto-indenting will follow the actual structure

New comment by procaryote in "100 Best Novels of All Time"

procaryote — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:16:23 +0000

I often suspect lists like these to be more of a reflection of what books people have been told are great, than any quality of the book itself.

Ulysses being in the top three is a good example... I wonder how many of the people voting for it have read it.

New comment by procaryote in "Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact"

procaryote — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:06:57 +0000

I feel the field of microplastics has done itself no favours by referring to everything < 5mm as a microplastic particle. 5mm is huge. In american terms, it's amost as wide as a .22 calibre bullet, or a popcorn kernel

New comment by procaryote in "Networking changes coming in macOS 27"

procaryote — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:14:46 +0000

I gave up on timecapsule because performance has gotten worse and worse year over year. I replaced it with a periodic rsync backup to a NAS that is in turn backed up in other ways

The upside is that it's dead simple when it comes to how the backup is stored. In 10 years time, having files in a filesystem will still work, but I imagine restoring an old time machine backup will require quite a bit of work

If you wanted to you could probably figure out how to do apfs snapshots before rsyncing

If you exclude pointless stuff like browser caches it's also pretty performant compared to timecapsule, and the transfer is properly encrypted

New comment by procaryote in "Flickr: The first and last great photo platform"

procaryote — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:18:02 +0000

Turning it into a copy of facebook

New comment by procaryote in "Spiral staircase with a single guardrail once led to the top of the Eiffel Tower"

procaryote — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:52:12 +0000

FWIW, on android with firefox + ublock origin it's clean from ads.

On iOS with firefox it's filled with ads; with firefox focus it's mostly clean but you get a dismissable "please disable adblocker" style prompt I didn't get on android. I don't know if there's a browser with a good adblocker allowed in iOS walled garden, but I'd be happy for suggestions

New comment by procaryote in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

procaryote — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:46:09 +0000

You can have humour and children at the same time...

New comment by procaryote in "Codex for almost everything"

procaryote — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:07:20 +0000

If you can assume "a sufficiently smart piece of technology" that doesn't exist now, a lot of problems become trivial

New comment by procaryote in "Codex for almost everything"

procaryote — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:58:54 +0000

It's interesting how differently people can think.

I couldn't imagine thinking "I'm gonna do this 0.1x as fast as I could, wasting my life away with pointless extra work, to spite my employer"

New comment by procaryote in "Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight"

procaryote — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:59:22 +0000

There would be no money floating around the music business, spare or otherwise, if no one paid for music

I guess you could fund it with taxes?

New comment by procaryote in "Helium is hard to replace"

procaryote — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:23:33 +0000

It all depends on what you care about. People dying waiting for an MRI doesn't end society as we know it, but someone will probably be sad about it

New comment by procaryote in "Nowhere is safe"

procaryote — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:28:08 +0000

Why do we insist on building cars to be safe in a collision when it would be so much nicer to not have accidents? Why do we build cancer treatment when not getting cancer is a much better option?