Hacker News: rjprins

New comment by rjprins in "Using AI to write better code more slowly"

rjprins — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:29:53 +0000

This exactly my process as well. Although interestingly I swap Codex and Claude; having found Claude way more pedantic in its reviews and codex more pragmatic in its implementation. Maybe it differs per programming language.

New comment by rjprins in "Structured Procrastination (1995)"

rjprins — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:29:27 +0000

Evolution is a continuous random branching and selective pruning process. And there is not a lot of pruning going on in the current human explosion. So unless ADHD is an old branch and we see other mammals survive because of their distractability, I remain skeptical.

New comment by rjprins in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

rjprins — Mon, 26 May 2025 06:58:06 +0000

A REST framework for FastAPI and SQLAlchemy, creatively called "fastapi-alchemy". A bit on the ambitious side, but I had the opportunity to open-source work I did for an employer. It is running in production, but it needs extensive documentation and testing still before I'll package it and offer it to PYPI.

https://github.com/rjprins/fastapi-alchemy

New comment by rjprins in "Ask HN: Should I leave the company I co-founded?"

rjprins — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:29:37 +0000

A little late to the discussion, but what I missed in the comments was to properly try to reestablish the relation with your co-founder at least once more.

It sounds like it will take a lot more than a meeting. The two of you should go on a three day retreat to discuss the company situation and strategy deeply and to repair the connection between you two.

If you have completely different views, in a way that is really interesting and you should both strive to fully understand and learn from each other.

Who knows what lies underneath the difference in views?

Once you know that you can make a much more informed decision and if you still leave it will likely be on much better terms.

New comment by rjprins in "Everything about Google Translate crashing React (and other web apps)"

rjprins — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:01:54 +0000

Another solution would be a React-native machine translation implementation that updates the TextNodes without replacing them. It would still have the issues of merging adjacent nodes to get a proper translation, but at least it could update on any state change.

New comment by rjprins in "Dietary restriction impacts health and lifespan of genetically diverse mice"

rjprins — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 15:03:37 +0000

Generated podcast on this. https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/c612a580-2990-44d7-95...

New comment by rjprins in "Quantum researchers cause controlled 'wobble' in the nucleus of a single atom"

rjprins — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 16:25:10 +0000

Some say that it has not been fully proved there are no hidden variables.

https://youtu.be/ytyjgIyegDI?t=86 (Sabine Hossenfelder on Superdeterminism)

New comment by rjprins in "Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid"

rjprins — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 08:44:33 +0000

Don't underestimate the price efficiencies of globalized industry.

New comment by rjprins in "Book Review: "Tidy First?" By Kent Beck"

rjprins — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 09:28:53 +0000

I agree that recovering from VCS is something that never actually happens. Mostly because the code is forgotten.

Still, commented-out code is generally worthless and should be deleted. Unless it is actively being worked on and only commented out to achieve some short-term goal. In which case it should also not be commented out but instead live on a branch.

Occasionally you might have two flows and you're not sure which is best. But in that case keep them in separate functions and one of those will not be used but can still be covered with tests. And all static analysis tools will work on it. Just needs a comment about why this unused code is there.

New comment by rjprins in "Firefox on the brink?"

rjprins — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 14:42:06 +0000

Can recommend Firefox for android, and as a bonus it supports many plugins.

New comment by rjprins in "How the World’s Most Famous Scream Was Recovered"

rjprins — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:14:35 +0000

The director doesn't say "Try an Ow!" he says after a few attempts: "No, no, not an Ow, a real scream of pain"

New comment by rjprins in "Mindfulness-based programs show promise in reducing psychological distress"

rjprins — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 09:07:37 +0000

Stress is all about perception. With mindfulness you can practice changing the way you look at things. If you practice zooming out of things that induce fear and see a bigger picture this will generally reduce stress.

The mind has a natural tendency to zoom in on scary things. I guess that is our prey-animal heritage.

Certainly, for rightfully stressful situations immediate action is needed and mindfulness is not a solution, but in modern life almost all stress comes from the imagination. If you are not conscious of your own thinking fearful thoughts may suck you in indefinitely.

Mindfulness (and psychedelics) can greatly help with becoming (more) conscious of fearful thoughts and that enables you to deal with them constructively.

Clearly it depends on the type mindfulness. From the paper:

> mindfulness is typically defined as “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment”. Core MBP elements are mindfulness meditation training, doing things mindfully such as eating or brushing one’s teeth, and collective and individual inquiry with a qualified teacher, using participatory learning processes.

Probably heightening consciousness while brushing your teeth is not the most direct way to mitigating stress.

New comment by rjprins in "Baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years"

rjprins — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 19:05:36 +0000

So many problems are created because of the huge number of people on earth. A shrinking population is only bad for people with a vested interest in growth; investors and employers, but good for everybody else, including future generations, the climate, and nature.

New comment by rjprins in "Smart Homes Alter Human Behavior"

rjprins — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 11:08:10 +0000

I did not have this experience. Interrupting the automation once cancels it completely in Hue.

New comment by rjprins in "Smart Homes Alter Human Behavior"

rjprins — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 09:18:37 +0000

One of the biggest impacts on my life recently was adding an automation for my smart lights (Philips Hue) in the living room.

The lights start dimming over a span of 2 hours until they are their minimum at 22:00.

The result is that it just feels like it is time to go to bed. I have always struggled with getting plenty of sleep and not staying up too late and this has had a tremendous effect the past two months.

New comment by rjprins in "Dask – A flexible library for parallel computing in Python"

rjprins — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 09:56:48 +0000

Shout out to an alternative to Dask: MPIRE https://github.com/Slimmer-AI/mpire

New comment by rjprins in "Google’s search results have gotten worse"

rjprins — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 09:14:30 +0000

If the ranking algorithm tries to maximize "value for the searcher", then SEO could actually mean "produce value for the searcher". Although that might often not actually be the case, it is probably still better than paying Google directly. That would translate ranking to "maximize the value for Google".

New comment by rjprins in "Free Public Transport in Estonia"

rjprins — Tue, 14 May 2019 10:19:29 +0000

Who the hell thinks "this is for poor people, so I don't use it"? That's some serious small-minded thinking.

New comment by rjprins in "When it comes to internet privacy, be afraid, analyst suggests"

rjprins — Tue, 29 Aug 2017 18:53:05 +0000

Governments are made up of people and what governments want are afraid of or are motivated by is the sum of what those people want, are afraid of and are motivated by.

New comment by rjprins in "Percentage of Europeans Who Are Willing to Fight a War for Their Country"

rjprins — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 15:04:36 +0000

Depends on the invader? What if it's the USA "liberating" Belgium from it's evil government? Who says the current government is better than the one taking over?

What are countries anyway, most of them don't align with cultural or language barriers.

Fuck patriotism, fuck flags, fuck any tribalism that powerful people are using to get others to do what they want.