Hacker News: sevensor

New comment by sevensor in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

sevensor — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:15:18 +0000

The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: Like this :))

New comment by sevensor in "The Misuses of the University"

sevensor — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:17:30 +0000

I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?

New comment by sevensor in "Read Locks Are Not Your Friends"

sevensor — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:00:29 +0000

Thanks, that’s what I was afraid of. The ping ponging described in the article seems hard to avoid regardless of what language you’re using.

New comment by sevensor in "Read Locks Are Not Your Friends"

sevensor — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:04:17 +0000

Does this apply also to std::shared_mutex in C++? This is a timely article if so; I’m in the middle of doing some C++ multithreading that relies on a shared_mutex. I have some measuring to do.

New comment by sevensor in "Georgian wine culture dates back, uninterrupted, approximately 8k years"

sevensor — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:39:57 +0000

Stalin is said to have gifted a large amount of Georgian brandy to Churchill at Yalta, which made Churchill more pliable during the proceedings. Until now, this is all I knew about Georgian food and drink.

New comment by sevensor in "How close are we to a vision for 2010?"

sevensor — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:57:04 +0000

There’s a palpable assault on expertise afoot in the Anglosphere. It’s been going on for decades, at least since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s, but what’s new is how pervasive it feels. Even software companies, once the nerdiest of institutions, would now rather fail to produce functioning software than identify and cultivate expertise. Ten years ago, we, or at least I, failed to recognize “nerds are cool now” as the cultural trojan horse it was. Nerds, experts, were never going to be cool; the cool kids saw money and power accumulating around nerds, and they muscled their way in.

New comment by sevensor in "I Don't Like Magic"

sevensor — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:36:07 +0000

A good abstraction relieves you of concern for the particulars it abstracts away. A bad abstraction hides the particulars until the worst possible moment, at which point everything spills out in a messy heap and you have to confront all the details. Bad abstractions existed long before React and long before LLMs.

New comment by sevensor in "Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking"

sevensor — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:38:47 +0000

What then am I meant to take away from the piece on Zoroastrianism? I don’t know enough about the subject to navigate to the point around the distortions.

New comment by sevensor in "Gitas – A tool for Git account switching"

sevensor — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 13:13:16 +0000

Fair point. This makes much more sense when you make it about your git identity + ssh configuration.

New comment by sevensor in "Gitas – A tool for Git account switching"

sevensor — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:00:33 +0000

Github account switching. A git account is not an idea that makes sense.

New comment by sevensor in "Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking"

sevensor — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:21:26 +0000

It’s an interesting blog, he seems well read, but surely he knows better than “Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world.” Plato lived through the execution of Socrates, the fall of the Athenian democracy, the tyranny of the Thirty, the humiliation by Sparta, the demolition of the walls. I’ll grant him “aristocratic”, but that’s all he gets. Makes me wonder whether he mischaracterized Zarathustra too, and my suspicion is yes.

New comment by sevensor in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

sevensor — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:37:59 +0000

Unfortunately, hoppy IPA seems to constitute the majority of the survivors. I have no interest personally in suffering through another hazy sour grapefruit triple ipa, but that seems to be about 90% of craft brewery output these days.

New comment by sevensor in "Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990"

sevensor — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:25:00 +0000

Gotcha: once you get into it, hacking the game gets to be way more fun than actually playing it. Way back in the day I used the DOS debug utility to edit my Bard’s Tale savegames. But once everybody has 127 hit points and -10 AC, the game gets way less interesting.

New comment by sevensor in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

sevensor — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:56:14 +0000

And like the article says, early computerization produced way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion, we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users were able to produce for themselves exactly the computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets became widespread. LLMs haven’t had their spreadsheet moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward, as if more noise meant more productivity.

New comment by sevensor in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

sevensor — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:50:38 +0000

I switched from Fedora in 2013 because the ArchWiki was answering all of my questions. It’s very, very good.

New comment by sevensor in "You can't trust the internet anymore"

sevensor — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 23:16:10 +0000

Hams, by and large, despise pirate radio.

New comment by sevensor in "Using an engineering notebook"

sevensor — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:17:44 +0000

This is my process as well. I find it’s a good way for clearing out bad assumptions. Usually I’ve committed to my first idea, and writing it down gives me space to consider the alternatives. Usually I have a better idea that I haven’t worked out because the first one was lodged in my brain, and once that first idea is out on paper, I don’t have to worry about losing it anymore. The second idea is almost always better.

New comment by sevensor in "Parse, Don't Validate (2019)"

sevensor — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:46:21 +0000

Making illegal states unrepresentable sounds like a great idea, and it is, but I see it getting applied without nuance. “Has multiple errors” can be a valid type. Instead of bailing immediately, you can collect all of the errors so that they can be reported all together rather than forcing the user to fix one error at a time.

New comment by sevensor in "Oxide raises $200M Series C"

sevensor — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:16:18 +0000

Yeah. I tried that at the eight week mark, but I heard nothing back. Obviously not a process-heavy company, but that’s part of their appeal.

New comment by sevensor in "Oxide raises $200M Series C"

sevensor — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:57:32 +0000

A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.