Hacker News: teapot7

New comment by teapot7 in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

teapot7 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:40:54 +0000

Ok - bear mode activated: I'll add 'The Star Bear' by Michael Swanwick, where a man's series of encounters with a bear in Paris echo his feelings about being a Russian emigre.

https://reactormag.com/the-star-bear-michael-swanwick/

New comment by teapot7 in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

teapot7 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:07:34 +0000

Similar to when someone said that the rule of thumb should not be DRY (don't repeat yourself) but WET (write everything twice) - that is, be happy to repeat similar code once or twice, and wait for the need for abstraction to become evident.

It's advice I like, as I'm prone to falling into design paralysis while trying to think of the One True Abstract Entity.

New comment by teapot7 in "Floor796"

teapot7 — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:59:05 +0000

I'm pretty sure I've seen that one in a list, by a French person, of things they wish other people wouldn't say!

New comment by teapot7 in "I played 1k hands of online poker and built a web app with Cursor AI"

teapot7 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 02:23:47 +0000

> I don’t believe it. There are just as many variables involved in writing a short story.

Surely you're not implying that writing a good short story is a solved problem for computers?

New comment by teapot7 in "Always Invite Anna"

teapot7 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 02:34:28 +0000

Or because they're shy and antisocial but it's nice to think that they're part of the gang - as the original article was all about.

New comment by teapot7 in "You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here"

teapot7 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:13:21 +0000

For me the followup was the most obviously AI bit of writing - it's exactly the tone you get when the AI admits it's been utterly wasting your time.

New comment by teapot7 in "A bubble that knows it's a bubble"

teapot7 — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:29:19 +0000

My ex boss read too much Ray Dalio and it ate his brain.

New comment by teapot7 in "Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz"

teapot7 — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 03:29:53 +0000

Yes! The number of lousy articles and blog posts I've seen that talk about "imperative, oo and functional programming"...

New comment by teapot7 in "Dev Compass – Programming Philosophy Quiz"

teapot7 — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 01:50:03 +0000

Oh a bug, surely. How is the quiz supposed to give you insights when it's unanswerable?

New comment by teapot7 in "Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)"

teapot7 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:53:00 +0000

Cron is definitely not the biggest problem in my life. I've never had a problem with its format. I think this is a solution to a problem I don't have - and I tend to find that "English like" formats don't do me any favours.

New comment by teapot7 in "When Did Apple's Obsession with Design Stagnate?"

teapot7 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 01:17:19 +0000

I remember how much I liked my old iPhone 4. I liked the straight edges and crisp look and feel. I upgraded eventually to an iPhone 6 and hated the roundness - the design language of the phone said one thing to me, and that was "drop me on the ground and break me". I got a case for only minutes after I bought it so it would have a chance of survival.

Currently on an iPhone 12 mini and happy both that the clean straight edges came back, and that Apple's still making the occasional small phone.

New comment by teapot7 in "Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others"

teapot7 — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 05:30:18 +0000

I'm closing in on 62 and I've been saying for a while now that as soon as I turned 60 my body sent me a note saying "That's it - I'm done now. The rest is up to you".

I feel validated by this study.

New comment by teapot7 in "Developer angry that App Store is removing game that hasn't been updated in 7 yr"

teapot7 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 05:49:46 +0000

The comments on the apple insider piece are quite something - apple fans have the most amazing cases of Stockholm syndrome.

New comment by teapot7 in "Developer angry that App Store is removing game that hasn't been updated in 7 yr"

teapot7 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 02:33:27 +0000

Yeah. Bloody Apple. Google too.

Like (I'm sure) plenty of other people here I've written an app and put it up on the Apple and Google app stores. It does what it does with no problems and it amuses me. Occasionally someone buys it.

It is as good or bad today as it was on the day I wrote it. It provably works as well on older phones as well as new.

Every now and then I drag myself through the process of making new builds and putting them up on the net. This isn't as easy as it could be, as the tool I used to make it is now semi-dead and I no longer own a mac, but I'm stubborn.

New comment by teapot7 in "Lead pigment in turmeric is the culprit in a global poisoning mystery (2024)"

teapot7 — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 11:27:41 +0000

> We attacked Iraq because we were attacked on 9/11

Yes, by 15 Saudis, 2 from the United Arab Emirates, one Lebanese and one Egyptian.

Funny old world.

New comment by teapot7 in "Voxon: Real time interactive volumetric holograms"

teapot7 — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 08:46:45 +0000

Thanks - I got annoyed with their site for not (as far as I noticed anyway) mention what their gadget actually was.

New comment by teapot7 in "Only buy a magnetic keyboard for gaming"

teapot7 — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 06:53:59 +0000

I got a nice numpadless mechanical keyboard to conserve my deskspace, and because I never used the numpad anyway. Then I promptly got into Blender, which makes great use of the numpad for zooming, rotating etc.

Off to buy another keyboard...

New comment by teapot7 in "AI makes tech debt more expensive"

teapot7 — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 08:32:19 +0000

"A product should be owned by a lean team of experts, focused primarily on the architecture of their code rather than the implementation details."

Sheesh! The Lizard People walk among us.

New comment by teapot7 in "Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?"

teapot7 — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 07:21:00 +0000

"Ayn Rand exists as a roundabout litmus test for assholes" is a pretty widely held idea. I've never read a book of hers, but the extracts I've read... well, I can see why people say that.

New comment by teapot7 in "Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?"

teapot7 — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 07:09:14 +0000

Though not as dull. Rand's writing can send you off to sleep in no time - and then if you're reading in bed you risk having the book fall on your head.