Hacker News: stuart78

New comment by stuart78 in "Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered"

stuart78 — Fri, 08 May 2026 03:59:12 +0000

The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.

New comment by stuart78 in "Write some software, give it away for free"

stuart78 — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:56:14 +0000

I just interviewed somebody who works for mac productivity app that has been around forever. For many years it worked as a simple one to two person operation and then they took some money and started to try and scale the business. But it is an idiosyncratic product that has a small number of highly passionate users. They tried to make it a platform. They tried to sell it in bulk. None of this makes sense for the product and the team responsible for it knows it will never work.

New comment by stuart78 in "Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game"

stuart78 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:07:35 +0000

This doc is great, I love this game. So much so that I built a Tempest-insipred audio visualizer [0] for the EYESY platform as one of my first projects on the platform.

[0] https://signalfunctionset.com/projects/tempestuous/

Intro to Synthesis

stuart78 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:20:29 +0000

Article URL: https://signalfunctionset.com/projects/intro-to-synthesis/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774301

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by stuart78 in "Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser"

stuart78 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 04:28:40 +0000

Very pleased to see Abuse in there, but unfortunately it didn't load for me. I spent way too many hours in that game back in the day.

New comment by stuart78 in "How "Night of the Living Dead" Accidentally Became Public Domain"

stuart78 — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:16:43 +0000

The Best Years of Our Lives is a genuine classic. Complex narrative, brilliant cinematography and performances. It is a much more difficult film than It's A Wonderful Life, and absolutely worth watching.

New comment by stuart78 in "DJ With Apple Music launches to enable subscribers to mix their own sets"

stuart78 — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 15:59:46 +0000

FWIW, I've never had an issue with playlists synching between mobile and desktop. I have had other issues in Apple Music, most annoyingly when tracks are randomly replaced by other versions of the song, but you might reach out to Apple support on this one if it happens regularly.

New comment by stuart78 in "Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar"

stuart78 — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 03:45:59 +0000

I would guess this is, to some degree, a generational shift. The Animated category has only existed for ~30 years and was born from the resentment many in the academy felt toward Beauty and the Beast being nominated alongside supposedly serious films for Best Picture. Each generation following that one has grown up with a more diverse slate of animated films available.

The Oscars are the slowest possible reflection of social change, and I’m sure the perspective you share is still held my many members, but this win holds out some hope for sure.

New comment by stuart78 in "The True Costs of Being on YouTube"

stuart78 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:44:23 +0000

I don't know her or her content, but the theme that comes up over and over in that post is the elusive 'big deal' from a streamer or network. I get the impression that she thought this production approach would lend itself to that kind of transition. Her background seems more 'traditional media' than 'DIY native', and I would guess that framed her perception of what a production looked like.

In contrast, somebody like Maangchi took the opposite approach. Her earliest videos are still up and you can see the truly homemade approach. Granted, she was in early and it is surely massively more competitive now.

New comment by stuart78 in "How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop"

stuart78 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 19:34:21 +0000

I think it say something about the relatively low-effort nature of this genre that it could be so easily codified and displaced by AI. The human-produced examples in the article follow simple and predictable rules and already sounded pretty artificial before the robots got involved.

New comment by stuart78 in "HP Tries Desperately to Make 'Printer as a Subscription' a Thing"

stuart78 — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 17:37:34 +0000

There are so many other good printer alternatives. Brother has been brought elsewhere, but I recently bought a Canon laser printer which has been fantastic. Great color reproduction, fast, easy. And, you know, I just own it so I can do whatever I want.

New comment by stuart78 in "The Cassette-Tape Revolution"

stuart78 — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 04:38:10 +0000

I grew up with tapes and have reconnected with them in recent years. I have plenty of vinyl as well, but tapes have a nicer nostalgic feel for me (and don’t require as much careful handling). I particularly like shopping for tapes. In most shops used vinyl is many times picked over and overwhelming. But tape sections are smaller and more efficient to browse. For me, there is a certain feel to the old tapes I want (and certain labels, particularly Moon Glyph, for the new stuff) and finding a fit has a very specific thrill I don’t get elsewhere.

New comment by stuart78 in "Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it"

stuart78 — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 05:36:49 +0000

Commerce led by mega aggregators has a long history in the US. Walmart and Sears to name two that were dominant in earlier generations. Both of those companies pushed suppliers to adhere to high / punishing standards as well. While those companies were dominant in their time, a key part of the reason all three have done so well is that they serve the actual customer better than the alternative. Sears was like the internet on paper. Walmart radically expanded the inventory available to shoppers across the country. Amazon does both of these things 10x more efficiently.

I am not naive to the many valid critiques of all three, but the customer benefit is an important part of the discussion that seems consistently forgotten. It is so critical because customer preference and changing market dynamics are what ended the reign of both Sears and Walmart and they are what will do the same to Amazon. But until then, Amazon has figured out how to deliver stuff to my door quickly and inexpensively.

One small example. When I was young I loved music and in my medium sized town there was one record store with two locations. It was fine, and they would order in anything you asked for, but limited inventory available browsing. In the 90s Best Buy, Barnes and Noble and a few other now-forgotten big box retailers came to town. The impact was immense. Inventory went up ~100x over this period and price went down. And the breadth was amazing. Huge classical and Jazz sections, neither of which had much presence at the independent shop. The independent shop survived too. They had Ticket sales, hippie merch and a more specialized catalog. Wonderful differentiation in offerings. Now markets have shifted many times over since those days. Some retailers (including the record shop) have adapted others have not. So it goes.

New comment by stuart78 in "Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it"

stuart78 — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 04:29:26 +0000

The Amazon case in this article seems to fall flat in the same way the Apple as Monopoly argument does. It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple). No seller is forced to sell on Amazon, as demonstrated by the thousands of Shopify and Etsy-hosted sellers out there. Yes, within the world of Amazon, Amazon sets the rules, but if the users leave, so will the sellers.

Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, Magento and the dozens of other ways to sell goods online offer an alternate path, and while Amazon may dominate today, tomorrow is never certain.

(Edit: spelling error)

New comment by stuart78 in "The MP3mobile (1998)"

stuart78 — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 18:12:38 +0000

I used a series of those for iPod for the first few years, but lived in Los Angeles, so there was a ton of interference, both from radio stations and other devices broadcasting on the same frequency. It created some pretty chaotic drives from time to time...

Building a healthy culture in an all-remote company

stuart78 — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 15:12:30 +0000

Article URL: https://tigereye.com/blog/remote-work/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37705431

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by stuart78 in "Goodreads is terrible for books – why can’t we all quit it?"

stuart78 — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 14:50:04 +0000

I entirely agree, and that is how I use it as well. Really it is just a log of the books I've read and my progress against my annual challenge. I appreciate that I can see the opinions of others, and I ignore 100% of their recommendations.

I don't want or need it to do more.

New comment by stuart78 in "Apple says it'll remove iMessage and FaceTime in UK rather than break encryption"

stuart78 — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 13:09:39 +0000

The FBI has a history of illegal wiretapping as old as the organization itself. To keep it relevant to one of this weekend's big film openings, you can read all about how illegal recordings fed the hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance. And the tradition extends to many other prominent figures including Martin Luther King. And today, this kind of surveillance continues through through more modern guises [0]. The volume of these 702 searches is dramatically down, which is good, but there is no reason to assume that it will stay that way.

Point being, one shouldn't assume that government agencies will adhere to the standard we might wish them to when choosing means of investigation or surveillance.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fbi-warra...

New comment by stuart78 in "The end of the magic world’s 50-year grudge"

stuart78 — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 06:31:04 +0000

This article was so bad. The comparisons to AI were forced, and the idea that tricking mining companies out of millions is somehow morally superior to tricking individuals is ridiculous. Both involve the exact same deceit and poor character.

New comment by stuart78 in "Half of vinyl buyers in the U.S. don’t have a record player: study"

stuart78 — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 04:01:56 +0000

It’s great that musicians can sell a high cost item (vastly greater revenue vs streams per customer), but I do worry the labels are over-indulging here and heading the market towards a Funkopop like crash. Most record stores I go into have reoriented towards very mainstream new releases and overpriced ‘rare’ vintage albums. Meanwhile the more serious collectors market has moved to Discogs and Bandcamp/direct. So when the market turns on vinyl, physical stores will be the biggest direct losers. And even an average shop in the neighborhood is better than none at all.