Hacker News: rdiddly

New comment by rdiddly in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"

rdiddly — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:44:05 +0000

You might be surprised at how many famous professional musicians don't read music notation. Outside of the classical world, session work, and jazz fake-books, it's far from de rigueur.

New comment by rdiddly in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

rdiddly — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:29:42 +0000

Welp, the market didn't like that. GOOG dropped about 5% on that news.

New comment by rdiddly in "The lost civic life of movie rental stores"

rdiddly — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:10:36 +0000

I feel like this overstates the point a bit. The video store was always just a means to an end for me, the clerks always sullen, the process of agreeing on a movie always long & difficult. Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.

New comment by rdiddly in "The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)"

rdiddly — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:19:34 +0000

Interesting topic, but (to immediately veer off of it) I really wish he would find another word and stop misusing "conspiracy." The word has already been through hell.

New comment by rdiddly in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

rdiddly — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:32:32 +0000

I suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more as a hassle (search again) than as a betrayal.

New comment by rdiddly in "Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?"

rdiddly — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:58:54 +0000

Yes it's possible, and yes it's time-consuming.

New comment by rdiddly in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

rdiddly — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:46:43 +0000

I talk about it all the time.

New comment by rdiddly in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

rdiddly — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:48:55 +0000

We want incumbent multi-decade culprits to also pay appropriately.

New comment by rdiddly in "California Bans 'Sell by' Labels, Hoping to Cut Food Waste"

rdiddly — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:22:49 +0000

The explanation is in the subtitle. Didn't even have to read the article on this one.

New comment by rdiddly in "Maybe you should learn something"

rdiddly — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 15:59:26 +0000

So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear naturally as a by-product. Or, you can force the issue a bit by adopting a "punk" ethos: "I suck at this, but fuck you, I'm doing it anyway." And there's your example of doing things in a slacky YOLO way too: listen to early punk rock. They did a pretty good job of channeling their anxiety outward into creativity and energy. And there's a "punk" version of almost anything you can think of. Keep it simple, be a beginner, maybe even mock the experts - some of them need it. Good luck.

New comment by rdiddly in "Half-Baked Product"

rdiddly — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:40:15 +0000

This was exquisitely cringe-laden and I think I may be the Luigi figure

New comment by rdiddly in "Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't"

rdiddly — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:58:40 +0000

The area of just the contiguous US is almost 200 times as big as Switzerland. Where did the 85 come from? Did you divide square miles by square kilometers?

New comment by rdiddly in "Solid and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me"

rdiddly — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:46:55 +0000

The only thing worse than a long-winded explanation that finally gets around to the topic you're interested in (in his case an explanation of SOLID) is a long-winded explanation that never gets around to it (in my case a refutation of SOLID).

New comment by rdiddly in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

rdiddly — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:18:59 +0000

Tempted to hate this guy but he's probably like, 19? Just starting to learn how humans work but still not aware he is one. Ahh the world, full of humans (always with the pronoun "they" and not "we"), full of ego and totally resistant to being wrong, rejecting my noble and completely egoless resistance to being wrong. As well as my compulsive need to best them in an argument, er I mean nobly rescue them from their ignorance! But sadly they will all have to live their lives first-hand without my help, developing reasons for thinking about certain things in certain ways, as if completely unaware that I was finally born and came to save them from all that!

New comment by rdiddly in "Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)"

rdiddly — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 07:09:52 +0000

I'm not caring so much about the Cedrus genus, as the dilution of the word through unimaginative overuse and over-application. But to the extent that it still means anything at all, I would say it means an aromatic evergreen, since those are the two traits that seem to unite all the various trees colloquially referred to as cedars.

New comment by rdiddly in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

rdiddly — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:15:30 +0000

Journalists are supposed to be helping the people by doing it.

New comment by rdiddly in "The Boeing 747 begins its final descent"

rdiddly — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:47:22 +0000

Shoot, I should've replied under this comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48714519

New comment by rdiddly in "The Boeing 747 begins its final descent"

rdiddly — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:40:20 +0000

"Its retirement signals an end to an era of American culture—and ambition."

What'd, fuckin' Putin ghost-write this?

The nostalgia is fine, but calling it "...perhaps the pinnacle of American engineering excellence," well, to paraphrase The Dude: "For you, maybe."[0] My engineering excellence kicks fucking ass, and I still have those values, and I'm an American.

Maybe those who aspire to engineering excellence should've gone to actual engineering school instead of majoring in literature.

[0] Perhaps you thought I was going to choose "That's just, like, your opinion man."

New comment by rdiddly in "Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep"

rdiddly — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:47:57 +0000

Glad I'm able to amaze you.

I can't speak for other cheapskates, but I personally think it's more that YouTube is still so utterly inessential that if ads ever start managing to get past my ad blockers, I'll simply not watch.

New comment by rdiddly in "Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)"

rdiddly — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:05:47 +0000

This article is just a rehash or summary. Check out one of the sources it links to (since the other is broken) for details on the technique: https://mymodernmet.com/kitayama-cedar-daisugi/

The strength & flexibility I would guess are attributable to the lack of knots and the straightness of the grain.

One thing both writers keep doing that's annoying is calling it a cedar. The tree is cryptomeria japonica, known as sugi, which in English is sometimes known by various misnomers such as "Japanese cedar" and "Japanese redwood," both of which should be taken as more poetic than scientific.