Hacker News: scubbo

New comment by scubbo in "We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars"

scubbo — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:22:17 +0000

I salute your dedication to understanding and fixing a problem that bothers you - but I must add my voice to those who think that this is not a good design for general use. The viewport is the region within which content should be positioned, and thus within which they should be centred. By your logic, left-aligned content in a browser with a left sidebar should be deliberately covered.

New comment by scubbo in "Show HN: ssh ssh.place"

scubbo — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:41:30 +0000

> People understand that reverse hacking can happen when connecting to random ssh server, right?

No, actually, I've never heard of such a vector. How would that work?

New comment by scubbo in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

scubbo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:12:41 +0000

Yep, exactly.

New comment by scubbo in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

scubbo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:19:59 +0000

I was amused and irritated in equal measure when a senior manager at $LAST_JOB demanded that documents include "no jargon", then went on to use many terms like those you've listed here with no indication of awareness of the contradiction.

Just like the famous observation that "anyone driving slower than me is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than me is a maniac" - "jargon" is just any term-of-art that you're not currently familiar with. Attempting to communicate like Up Goer Five is inefficient. The solution is not to ban jargon - it's to:

* Cultivate a glossary for any terms that were introduced _within_ the domain/company, which are not in common usage outside

* Normalize a culture that does not shame asking what something means

New comment by scubbo in "Show HN: One More Letter"

scubbo — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:53:30 +0000

TIL the word (ROT13 for spoilers) "fgbcvat" :)

New comment by scubbo in "Pseudpocalypse"

scubbo — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:36:04 +0000

I'd seen the articles making claims about LLM-idiom being unconsciously imitated by humans, and reassured myself that _I_ couldn't possible be so impressionable.

Then during a presentation I was making today, a coworker wrote in chat "If says 'You're absolutely right' one more time, I'm checking his house to see if we're actually talking to an agent".

They got me.

New comment by scubbo in "My Homepage Has a Pulse"

scubbo — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:02:35 +0000

TIL the term "streetlifting"

New comment by scubbo in "If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe"

scubbo — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:00:36 +0000

In such a situation, I'd really hope that I have my handy copy of https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ available!

New comment by scubbo in "Show HN: One More Letter"

scubbo — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:26:30 +0000

I guess I'll check back later and try to remember that I can't have the tab open in the background? :)

EDIT: OK, I found the previous puzzles link. Cute! Though I got a bug on the second one - (ROT13 for spoilers) apparently the answer was "tenavgr" but I put in "grnevat" and it still accepted it (but other prompts had not accepted alternate-but-valid words)

New comment by scubbo in "Grok 4.5"

scubbo — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:51:03 +0000

> Yes. We only need one AI company. Max two. Good idea.

Nothing in the original comment suggested that fewer AI companies was inherently a good thing - just that this _particular_ AI company is a bad one.

> Deciding who is more moral has a great history.

I think you're being sarcastic, but, uhhh...are you honestly advocating for the converse, of making no judgements based on morals?

New comment by scubbo in "Cloudflare Drop"

scubbo — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:52:10 +0000

I was always under the impression that that was referencing the notion from spycraft.

New comment by scubbo in "The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work""

scubbo — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:20:07 +0000

Even if they're saying something bad about it?

New comment by scubbo in "Herdr: One terminal to rule them all"

scubbo — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 23:31:05 +0000

Conductor is a more fully-featured app rather than a TUI (some people might prefer one or the other), and is Mac-only.

New comment by scubbo in "Waveloop: What Fable left me"

scubbo — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:33:02 +0000

> steady stream of promotions until they cap out at L5

Am I missing a joke? L5 is just a single promotion away from hiring-out-of-college, at least for the FAANG that I was at.

New comment by scubbo in "Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal"

scubbo — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:44:48 +0000

https://vercel.com/blog/how-conductor-moved-parallel-coding-...

New comment by scubbo in "Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal"

scubbo — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:40:52 +0000

Tried this for a couple days, but conductor.build is way better IME. Running _in_ the terminal is a flex, but doesn't actually bring any advantage.

New comment by scubbo in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

scubbo — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:09:38 +0000

New comment by scubbo in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

scubbo — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:50:02 +0000

God, I loathee the use of "moreso" as a synonym for "more" (rather than as "having the previously-mentioned property to a greater degree"). I'm convinced it's a hypercorrection by people who want to sound educated without actually thinking about the meaning of the words they use.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/211458/more-so-o...

New comment by scubbo in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

scubbo — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:42:14 +0000

Indeed. "Lethargic" meaning "affected by lethargy" would hardly be difficult to guess!

New comment by scubbo in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

scubbo — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:41:26 +0000

Can you elaborate? Who are the imagined "they", and in what way are they conducting experiments with or monetizing this investigation?