Hacker News: thenoblesunfish

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:57:36 +0000

Very interesting! An aside and fishing lazily: I am one of those people where caffeine has a very strong and long lasting effect. I don't have caffeine after about 9am or it affects my sleep that night. I love drinking coffee, and fortunately for me it seems like decaf got way better and widely available recently. Did something happen there?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Restoring the first recording of computer music (2018)"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:59:05 +0000

"This audio is embedded from SoundCloud and requires cookies to function. To view this content, please enable analytics and marketing cookies using the cookies opt-in at the bottom of your screen." - lame!

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:42:02 +0000

I still use Vim a lot, even though for work I use a fork of VSCode, like most people. Why? Because it's something I feel I can understand - it's simple and runs everywhere. It's the world of shells and text files. The work setup is a huge GUI with dozens of extensions, and now a whole other layer of non deterministic AI stuff. Useful, but it's a different kind of tool, one which relies on constant support from a large system.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:53:40 +0000

People don't like these checks. Ok. But. Parents worry about their kids being exposed to porn and social media. They want someone to do something about it. That political force is real, and someone is going to take advantage of it. What tools can they ask for if not these checks everyone agrees they hate? That's what I hope for in these types of comment threads.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:20:04 +0000

Just to make sure it's somewhere in these comments: the fundamental issue is people trying to measure something they don't understand. That is not new. The article gives an interesting exploration of how things break down in a new way when people focus too much on metrics instead of (IMO) the more robust approach of getting people who care to try to make something that feels quality. We're building crap, yes, but I blame the people who spend their time measuring "velocity" like it's a well defined term, not the coding tools being used to play the game.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:22:55 +0000

I was hoping for more on "... The only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely." What do the laws say on this? What data is this? I would have assumed that just like a bouncer can check my ID and hand it back to me, a digital system can verify my identity and not hold onto everything (e.g. the actual photo of my ID).

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:01:06 +0000

Okay, funny. What does it prove? Is this a more general issue? How would you make the model better?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "“Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:34:18 +0000

I personally find the same approach very effective. It forces me to know where to look for things, and to document things because I cannot hold onto the fiction of being able to hold it all in mind.

But the real advice here is "think about what you're doing". Any system, whether it's "clear your workspace" or "arrange absolutely everything so its visible" probably works, because you're acting deliberately.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001)"

thenoblesunfish — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:58:14 +0000

This location in Switzerland reminded me of some placeholder Python code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Pass

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Product and design are the new bottlenecks"

thenoblesunfish — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:00:36 +0000

From my team's PoV, I reject the premise. The non-eng people can scale their ambitions and asks even faster than AI has accelerated the engineers' work. In fact, they always have a bunch of stuff that ends up below the line, they always would have wanted to go bigger and faster.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:56:21 +0000

He doesn't get into why he didn't switch to Apple. Kind of a middle ground - it's still got the maddening things about being from a corporate behemoth, but it's closer to Unix and you can run your audio software there. (I would be using Linux instead of Apple yesterday if it weren't for a single music program I can't live without).

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

thenoblesunfish — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:16:45 +0000

Be a part of (IRL) groups.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:08:19 +0000

I think the commonly used platforms, ISPs, etc. make this just annoying enough that most people really don't know how easy this should be.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:07:07 +0000

Is being able to SSH into your home machine that easy these days? I never had a strong enough reason to spend more than a few minutes trying, but I always suspected that my ISP would make this harder for me than I would hope.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:56:31 +0000

Good advice, in general. But there is a risk here, which is that you're encouraging people to do something which isn't their job.

Are you sure you don't want this person working on the things they are supposed to be working on?

Further, even if it all goes well, you're encouraging someone to do a more stressful job and not (yet) compensating them. Given the fact that you can't practically promote everyone you want, this risks your senior-with-junior-title feeling taken advantage of and prone to look for their title elsewhere.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 16:48:33 +0000

This article is aimed at younger kids, before normal Lego is appropriate. I like Duplo more than magnatiles - slightly harder to clean up I suppose, but that's because they hold together better than magnatiles, which create quite fragile structures.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:51:59 +0000

Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:53:30 +0000

People do the New York Times crossword every day for years..

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:52:09 +0000

These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don't care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it's good.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 06:51:05 +0000

Fun! Would love a "style 4" where you see the thin lines e.g. within the solid squares.