Hacker News: stevebmark

Drop, formerly Massdrop, ends most collaborations and rebrands under Corsair

stevebmark — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:24:49 +0000

Article URL: https://drop.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47656981

Points: 118

# Comments: 64

New comment by stevebmark in "Music for Programming"

stevebmark — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:17:05 +0000

Wow I've never thought about listening to music I like before?????

New comment by stevebmark in "Music for Programming"

stevebmark — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:34:51 +0000

This seems focused on one very particular taste in music of droning semi-random lo-fi synthesizers. I find this unlistenable without any kind of percussion.

New comment by stevebmark in "The most-seen UI on the internet? Redesigning turnstile and challenge pages"

stevebmark — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:18:50 +0000

37 em dashes :(

New comment by stevebmark in "Microservices are a tax your startup probably can't afford"

stevebmark — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:36:29 +0000

> In reality, business logic doesn’t directly map to service boundaries

Love this quote, it should be a poster on the wall of any dev who pushes Domain Driven Design on an engineering team.

New comment by stevebmark in "We fell out of love with Next.js and back in love with Ruby on Rails"

stevebmark — Sat, 03 May 2025 21:35:41 +0000

Is this article comparing apples and oranges? For example

> loading the entire homepage only takes one query [if you're logged out]

You can do this with Next.js SSR - there's nothing stopping you from reading from a cache in a server action?

They also talk about Vercel hosting costs, but then self host Rails? Couldn't they have self hosted Next.js as well? Rails notoriously takes 3-4x the resources of other web frameworks because of speed and resources.

New comment by stevebmark in "Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model"

stevebmark — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 02:13:12 +0000

"Hi, how many words are in this sentence?"

Gets all of them

New comment by stevebmark in "Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water"

stevebmark — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 16:16:05 +0000

Decades of science show it’s beneficial, and we keep seeing the outcomes validated in practice. Calgary removed fluoride from drinking water, saw a significant increase in dental carries in children, and is adding it back. [1]

Hawaii does not fluoridate and has high rates of children’s tooth decay [2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/12/13/nx-s1-5224138/calgary-removed...

[2] https://www.civilbeat.org/2016/10/hawaii-children-have-highe...

New comment by stevebmark in "Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water"

stevebmark — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 16:03:42 +0000

Which part of Europe are you in? Countries in Europe add fluoride to water, salt, milk, and Italy has naturally fluoridated water.

> The European Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (EAPD) recently called water fluoridation "a core component of oral health policy" and adds that salt fluoridation "is suggested when water fluoridation cannot be implemented" due to technical, logistical or political reasons.

https://static.spokanecity.org/documents/citycouncil/interes...

New comment by stevebmark in "ATProto Isn't What You Think"

stevebmark — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 05:14:35 +0000

Bluesky is currently a terrible product with a paltry number of users. The small dev team can’t compete with social media platform features. React Native means bad mobile UX.

New comment by stevebmark in "ATProto Isn't What You Think"

stevebmark — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 04:41:13 +0000

I believe the Bluesky experiment is already over, and it was not successful.

1. Bluesky was advertised as a very open, resilient platform because of AT, impossible to fully censor, with moderation at the user level, not platform level. In reality, "Bluesky Social" is what everyone uses (not AT), which performs bans at the core levels (PDS / Relay / user account level). So it's just like any other social media platform. Still better than the Mastodon Reddit-style mod abuse problem, but not fundamentally more open than other social media platforms.

2. The second promise is that if anyone hosts their own PDS, anyone else can build their own relay and their own social media app that gets around the bans. In reality, I don't see much appetite for using someone else's distributed key-value JSON schema design. The value add isn't clear enough. Other social media platforms build their own systems, which is an intuitively natural choice.

If Bluesky is not a highly open platform, and AT has low adoption (no killer app, hasn't realized the promise/benefit of being able to aggregate data from multiple publishers) then I don't think it has a future.

New comment by stevebmark in "Idiomatic Go (2016)"

stevebmark — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 21:42:52 +0000

Idiomatic Go is using shortened variable names, not what's in this article. I thought that was common knowledge and part of the Go ethos? I also wouldn't consider grammar in comments part of the language idioms? This is an unusual and very light take on Golang language idioms.

New comment by stevebmark in "Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?"

stevebmark — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:14:19 +0000

I don’t know what your intentions or hypothesis are, but this is a dangerous place to be a novice in. Eye health is misunderstood and most people are ignorant of the basics. If you don’t know what emmetropization is, if you don’t know who Bates is, and if you don’t know why Bates is a quack, then I strongly discourage you from experimenting with user surveys.

New comment by stevebmark in "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)"

stevebmark — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 16:16:26 +0000

It’s very telling that most of the comments on the article are about Bell Labs, almost none of the comments are about the article. Few have actually read it! The writing is terrible and verbose.

New comment by stevebmark in "I'm done with coding"

stevebmark — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 01:49:06 +0000

What? How much money did this person make working on software they consider surveillance, before deciding they were comfortable enough to leave? Looks like they made enough money to live off “dividend income.” Something about their dad? The hell is this?

New comment by stevebmark in "A computer can never be held accountable"

stevebmark — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 22:33:06 +0000

I don’t know if this is being shared intentionally given the timing of “The Gospel” AI target finder, but it is truly horrific that AI is being used this way and as an accountability target

New comment by stevebmark in "It's OK to hardcode feature flags"

stevebmark — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 18:45:30 +0000

This blog post is irrelevant. Stub the feature flag system in code and write tests for both cases.

New comment by stevebmark in "Do any languages specify package requirements in import / include statements?"

stevebmark — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:40:19 +0000

It does sound painful to have to update a package version by updating an import string in hundreds of files

New comment by stevebmark in "All Lisp indentation schemes are ugly"

stevebmark — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 23:20:35 +0000

Lisp is an objectively goofy language,* I appreciate someone pointing out the pain points around trying to cobble together readability via indentation.

* Not a bad language - well, maybe bad by today's standards, but undeniably a very important language - just goofy

New comment by stevebmark in "Why I Chose Common Lisp"

stevebmark — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 05:58:27 +0000

I don't understand the "Requirements Met" section, that reasoning applies to almost any programming language. You chose Common Lisp because there's a JSON library?