Hacker News: thehours

New comment by thehours in "Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin"

thehours — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:24:56 +0000

Alexander the Great visited it in 334 BC: https://greekreporter.com/2025/09/07/alexander-the-great-vis...

Edit: this was also mentioned in the article

New comment by thehours in "Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem"

thehours — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 07:37:10 +0000

I added this to `~/.claude/settings.json`:

"env": { "CLAUDE_BASH_MAINTAIN_PROJECT_WORKING_DIR": "1" },

> Working directory persists across commands. Set CLAUDE_BASH_MAINTAIN_PROJECT_WORKING_DIR=1 to reset to the project directory after each command.

It reduces one problem - getting lost - but it trades it off for more complex commands on average since it has to specify the full path and/or `cd &&` most of the time.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/tools-reference#bash-tool-be...

New comment by thehours in "Atuin v18.13 – better search, a PTY proxy, and AI for your shell"

thehours — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:01:54 +0000

Update: I gave it a try and it does exactly what I hoped. However one (minor) annoyance I immediately realized was that with `hex` enabled I will get this warning whenever I close the terminal window:

> The terminal still has a running process. If you close the terminal the process will be killed.

Hopefully there is a workaround for this (I'm using then Ghostty emulator).

New comment by thehours in "Atuin v18.13 – better search, a PTY proxy, and AI for your shell"

thehours — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:35:49 +0000

The PTY proxy looks pretty neat! Excited to give that a try.

Losing some of the scrollback was a minor nuisance that I kind of lived with until now.

New comment by thehours in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

thehours — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:26:50 +0000

Sony WH1000XM5 headphones are my daily driver, mainly Zoom calls and music. I'm generally pretty happy with them, but one big gripe I have is when I'm on a call and briefly take off my headphones to e.g. chat with someone in the room, there is like a 90% chance they stop working and I have to reconnect them.

It happens so often I even wrote a script to switch to the MacBook internal speakers then back to the headphones.

I've used wired headphones before (and the Sony even has a wired option), but I didn't like how the cord was constantly getting the the way of my arms.

edit: Another big gripe is with the Bluetooth codec itself, and how the quality changes depending on if the mic is active.

New comment by thehours in "One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household"

thehours — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:10:24 +0000

How are investments modeled in this system? e.g I buy $100 of an index fund which can fluctuate in value.

New comment by thehours in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

thehours — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:00:33 +0000

I use the Raycast + Whisper Dictation. I don't think there is anything novel about it, but it integrates nicely into my workflow.

My main gripe is when the recording window loses focus, I haven't found a way to bring it back and continue the recorded session. So occasionally I have to start from scratch, which is particularly annoying if it happens during a long-winded brain dump.

New comment by thehours in "Guideline has been acquired by Gusto"

thehours — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 07:06:27 +0000

I worked for a company that went bankrupt. They ended up taking several thousand dollars out of my account to cover IIRC unpaid fees to the provider.

New comment by thehours in "You are how you act"

thehours — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:09:23 +0000

This reminded me of this passage from Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang:

> None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you're shaping yourself into someone who's more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.

New comment by thehours in "SQL Anti-Patterns"

thehours — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 18:03:34 +0000

> Mishandling Excessive Case When Statements

User Defined Functions (UDFs) are another option to consolidate the logic in one place.

> Using Functions on Indexed Columns

In other words, the query is not sargable [0]

> Overusing DISTINCT to “Fix” Duplicates

Orthogonal to author's point about dealing with fanout from joins, I'm a fan of using something like this for 'de-duping' records that aren't exact matches in order to conform the output to the table grain:

    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY  ORDER BY ) = 1

Some database engines have QUALIFY [1], which lends itself to a fairly clean query.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargable

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/r_QUALIFY_cla...

New comment by thehours in "How to turn liquid glass into a solid interface"

thehours — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 20:52:03 +0000

I have an iPhone SE 2nd Generation. After a recent repair I was forced to upgrade to iOS 26.

My biggest gripe is the buggy keyboard. It shrinks a bit horizontally every time I open it. When using a mobile browser (I tested on a few), website footers and similar elements will get stuck above where the top of the keyboard would normally be, as if there was an invisible keyboard.

These tweaks to minimize the glass effect go a long way, such that I'm not as put off by the overall design as I was in its stock configuration.

New comment by thehours in "Nine things I learned in ninety years"

thehours — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:06:08 +0000

I was hoping for more of the author’s own perspective over those ninety years. Instead, it read more like a stitching project of other people's ideas. In particular the barrage of quote fragments disrupted the flow and made it harder for me to engage with the main point of each section.

New comment by thehours in "macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support"

thehours — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 07:39:10 +0000

I also use stow on MacOS and have been pretty happy with it.

> […]although macOS will regularly replace your symlinks with copies of the destination files

I’m curious about this claim from the article - to what extent is this true?

New comment by thehours in "Show HN: Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?"

thehours — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:10:57 +0000

I really liked the display showing me climb the leaderboard in realtime. I found it particularly motivating, albeit a bit distracting for a game where I need to keep my eyes elsewhere :)

New comment by thehours in "I couldn't submit a PR, so I got hired and fixed it myself"

thehours — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 21:28:40 +0000

FYI this autoplays full screen video when I visit on iOS + Firefox.

Edit: then switches into dark mode after a lag of a few seconds

New comment by thehours in "Binary Wordle"

thehours — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 04:11:11 +0000

Feedback: I'm unable to input with keyboard after typing anything but '0' until a full refresh (and selecting the input area with mouse).

New comment by thehours in "Ask HN: Is Slack Down?"

thehours — Mon, 12 May 2025 22:38:19 +0000

Yes, briefly for me. I also lost access to Fastmail.

New comment by thehours in "Pixel is a unit of length and area"

thehours — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:24:49 +0000

Reminds me of this Numberphile w/ Cliff Stoll [1]: The Nescafé Equation (43 coffee beans)

[1] https://youtu.be/3V84Bi-mzQM

New comment by thehours in "Tech terms I was pronouncing wrong"

thehours — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 20:53:58 +0000

The 'correct' way to pronounce NumPy is 'num-pie', but my brain delights in reading it as 'lumpy' with a leading 'n'.

New comment by thehours in "Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL"

thehours — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 02:18:45 +0000

Does 'pure SQL' have a specific definition (or reference spec)? The author doesn't mention it, except to say he tested it across Umbra, Postgres, and DuckDB. Even then, some days weren't 'supported by DuckDB due to a missing xor operator'.