Hacker News: thenoblesunfish

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Why Common Lisp is now the best programming language"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:21:46 +0000

It seems like an assumption here is that any language will be equally performant at runtime, for a given number of tokens burned to produce the code. I have never used any functional language for anything real (except maybe Mathematica). Is that true?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Show HN: Audionaut – an open-source cross-platform multitrack audio editor"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:54:23 +0000

Cool! As the other comments suggest, I could think of plenty of ways you could do this, probably much more efficiently than having a GUI, once you figured it out. But I would still like something that felt like less software engineering or data science and more "this is how I would do it manually in Audacity, do this for me automatically on a batch of files"

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Show HN: Audionaut – an open-source cross-platform multitrack audio editor"

thenoblesunfish — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 11:05:27 +0000

Task I want but have been too lazy - I have a favorite podcast, that I often fall asleep to. Certain parts with music etc. wake me up. I'd like to chop those parts out as automatically as possible. Can I do that here by e.g. giving some example edits to a few files, and asking to remove similar stuff from other files?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "How Singapore's government-run dating service works"

thenoblesunfish — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:54:36 +0000

You know what's are great goverment run (or supported with money) dating programs? University. Erasmus. Things like Americorps. Even if the literal match is on the apps I feel like those sorts of environments are great.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:40:16 +0000

It's the same problem as when a journalist or nonfiction author writes a thoughtful, nuanced piece of work, and some editor slaps a catchy title and subtitle on.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:16:59 +0000

They are rich. But then again plenty of people have multi-million dollar homes. I am sure there are some in your city. In some cities a million dollar home is becoming a normal price. Many people have hobbies and pastimes that they spend many tens of thousands of dollars on. Think about boats. Or how much some hotels and resorts, full of people, cost. These people are, again, rich, but so are millions of other people who don't tell you the details on the internet.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:00:48 +0000

I hope that this will expose the true value of education. It's a new scale perhaps, but not a new problem. We sit in classrooms even though books and YouTube videos make available the teachings of far more illustrious teachers than the one in front of us. We watch things written out agonizingly slowly in chalk. We learned to do algebra and calculus even though we had our TI-86s and Mathematica. We learn in Haskell and Scheme even though those are rarely used later. We write toy compilers and write essays and repeat experiments with known outcomes in labs. We do it to learn how to think, how to build. We just have to be even more deliberate about it now.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:25:05 +0000

My point is that nihilism and egotism are coming for you with or without children.

(And I, like many more than will admit, didn't want children, but my partner did)

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:17:22 +0000

Yup. Several of these people I know left it too late and went through a lot with IVF or adoption of just not having the kids they wanted.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:15:57 +0000

True - ultimately I will have to, as that is the only escape from suffering.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:14:15 +0000

You are probably right! But you might be assuming I wanted kids before I realized it wasn't all I'd hoped. I never really wanted them but said ok to my partner. I figured that most of the nicer and more fulfilled older people I knew had kids. Then again now I wonder if that's because there are plenty of older fulfilled people without kids off doing their thing and not interacting with the likes of me.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:54:48 +0000

One is 6 years, the other is 6 months.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:42:03 +0000

Once you have kids you quickly discover that you get forced into it. You have to engage. If you don't, they scream. They get in trouble at school. They are unhappy and it breaks your heart. Once you have no choice but to do something, you will find it's better to find meaning in it. Meaning is ultimately something you create for yourself.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:38:30 +0000

I feel a lot of regret having had children. Not 100%, but it's always going to be more than 0%. I adore my kids but it's too much for my brain and it makes me miserable a lot of the time. I don't bring it up except to counsellors (or anonymous internet bros, apparently) because (a) it's not actionable - there is no going back (b) it's a bummer and no one has anything to say about it.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:32:59 +0000

I think it's social pressure in some cultures, but even in those (sub)cultures which don't have the explicit pressure to have kids, people have a drive to procreate. I cannot tell you how many couples I know who decided they would not have kids, or would only have one, and at a certain point one partner (usually a woman in their late 30s or early 40s if I am being honest) decided this was the most important thing and no amount of money or career setbacks or relationship turmoil wouldn stand in the way.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:26:26 +0000

If we are talking about points people don't make, how about this: your life is going to get harder and worse as you get older. Your dreams will very likely die. Having kids will make that more clear, but honestly I know plenty of people with and without kids and they all struggle with the not fulfilling their ambitions (or realizing those ambitions and finding they weren't what they imagined), the fading of youth, disenchantment with their jobs, etc. Kids are all the horrible things you have heard, but it is a way to grow, it is a very concrete reason to live, at least until they move out. I very much feel the author of this post and I hope that they (and I) keep the fire that drives ambition, but grow enough to enjoy the fire itself, not care quite so much about being productive or scoring points in whatever game.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:03:36 +0000

I got a new MacBook Pro recently. Sure seemed expensive to get more RAM. But actually I don't know enough about the chip - it's an M5 system on a chip - is Apple ultimately buying the RAM parts of that from the suppliers AI is overwhelming, or do they "make the RAM with the rest of the chip" in some way?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "How to Exist"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:27:54 +0000

"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement! Many people struggle greatly with falling asleep. Personally, while I agree with you, if you are the type of person who struggles with clearing the mind, it's hardest to do when exhausted (hence common advice to practice mediation early in the day)

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "How to Exist"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:24:14 +0000

It's a catchy but, yes, inaccurate term. Then again, this is an area which ultimately wants to escape terms (enter infuriatingly meaningless other terms like "ineffable"), so consider letting go of linguistic pedantry part of the exercise. Maybe a better framing for you is to think of your brain as a computer (which it is) and try and let it run the programs it's going to run when the "user" stops launching processes (or practically most of the time when meditating, runs a script which runs ps and then kills threads). The idea is that like clearing your desk or letting your system run some background tasks, you'll end up with a better system if you periodically practice making space in this way.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Elevators"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:08:35 +0000

Fun! I hate those new kiosk style elevators, because I can't reconfirm that I actually pressed the button, remember which one I am supposed to wait for or press the button again while I'm waiting to make sure I really pressed it. Also don't like that I can't change my mind inside the elevator. All in theory not problems if you were a rational person and the system WAI but I am not and things like elevators rarely do. The up/down buttons are more brainless and I like that. Interesting to hear that they might not even be more efficient!