Hacker News: thestu

New comment by thestu in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

thestu — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:39:14 +0000

It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.

For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.

A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.

The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.

I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?

New comment by thestu in "Western Sahara"

thestu — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:18:38 +0000

Skeletons on the Zahara is a fantastic book related to this part of the world -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletons_on_the_Zahara

New comment by thestu in "GPT-5-Codex now available via API"

thestu — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 23:09:17 +0000

I'd like to see the ability to save and reload chats. Also the newline key combo doesn't work when running in a terminal inside VSCode.

New comment by thestu in "Ask HN: Is discrimination to promote diversity okay?"

thestu — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 21:42:20 +0000

Is this perhaps an opportunity for some companies to explicitly do blind hiring, or something along those lines? I'm thinking of Coinbase (and others) who have taken a somewhat contrarian approach and said that the workplace is just for work, and not politics. They've taken flak for it, but are also probably(?) attracting people for whom that kind of workplace is a positive. A company that goes out of their way to say "We don't discriminate in our hiring, positively or negatively" and follows through on it could probably pick up talented engineers who are otherwise being filtered out of the hiring process due to their skin color / gender.

New comment by thestu in "Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)"

thestu — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 04:49:21 +0000

This is my general feeling as well. People enjoy catastrophizing, and also fail to appreciate that we as a species are actually fairly good at solving problems.

New comment by thestu in "Forest Service officials close all California national forests"

thestu — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 04:06:38 +0000

if you hit play in the bottom left of the webcam image it gives you a little time lapse video.

New comment by thestu in "Possible climate futures–from the optimistic to the strange"

thestu — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 18:52:36 +0000

I think the most likely future is one where we do mostly nothing for a long time, until things get quite bad, and then one nation or a small group of nations does some kind of solar geoengineering to very quickly lower the temperature of the Earth. Mostly this takes the form of pumping aerosols in to the atmosphere to block out some percentage of sunlight. As far as I understand it we already have the technology to pull this off, and it's not so expensive (tens of billions per year) that a single very rich nation couldn't bear the cost themselves.

At the very least, I can't imagine a nation like China or India or the US staring down a relatively imminent existential climate change threat and not at least trying geoengineering. At that point what do you have to lose?

New comment by thestu in "What if a deadly heatwave hit India?"

thestu — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 18:50:11 +0000

I'm halfway through the book. That opening bit is so great, and the rest has been a big letdown so far. Really feels like that opening was written as a short story and then the rest of the book was just tacked on. Maybe the second half will be better.

New comment by thestu in "Ask HN: What kind of chair are you using for WFH?"

thestu — Mon, 24 May 2021 16:46:53 +0000

HAG Capisco. I think a big detriment to many chairs is that you end up in one position and never move. The Capisco seems to encourage a lot of fidgeting around, in a good way.

New comment by thestu in "Scientists break through the wall of sleep to the untapped world of dreams"

thestu — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 22:36:34 +0000

They verified via brainwaves that he was in the REM stage of sleep. I don't really know anything about brainwaves, but this seems like the kind of thing that's fairly definitive.

New comment by thestu in "The most important part of modern government is database management"

thestu — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:17:08 +0000

Govt's adoption of technology seems to lag society as a whole. What I wonder about is, is the lag a steady 20 years behind for example, or is it that the pace of adoption is just slower, which would imply that the lag (or gap between technological adoption in govt and society as a whole) is getting bigger and bigger.

Is Earth going to be at war with the planet state of Mars, in the great water wars of 2150, and the Earth forces VA department is still processing injury claims on paper?

New comment by thestu in "Show HN: Reddit Wallstreetbets Top Leaderboard"

thestu — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:42:57 +0000

Would be cool to see this in bar graph form, broken down by day.

New comment by thestu in "Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store"

thestu — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:01:13 +0000

Assuming this is all true, it still just feels like they're picking winners, which is probably the thing that's going to matter more than anything else going forward. People can and will point to a laundry list of rules violations by institutional investors (is a 140% short of a stock completely and unambiguously within the rules?) that show the hypocrisy of the little guy getting screwed.

New comment by thestu in "AMD Launches Ryzen 5000 Mobile: Zen 3 and Cezanne for Notebooks"

thestu — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 16:46:21 +0000

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/NX.HULAA.003 They mention an optional 2560×1440 monitor but it's right alongside a mention of an Intel CPU, which is incorrect, so maybe the 2560×1440 is incorrect also.

New comment by thestu in "James Damore and three others end Google suit"

thestu — Sat, 09 May 2020 15:43:15 +0000

This post does the best job that I've seen of laying out the 'less inclined' argument: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

New comment by thestu in "Ask HN: Intellectually simulating Podcasts/conversations/Talk"

thestu — Sat, 02 May 2020 14:48:27 +0000

Tyler has spoken in the past about the huge amount of research he does for his podcast, and it shows. Always an interesting conversation.

New comment by thestu in "Shopify CTO: our platform is now handling Black Friday level traffic every day"

thestu — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 19:31:25 +0000

I went to my local big box store maybe three weeks ago and the whole fitness section had been cleaned out. It seems like bikes are getting very popular (at least here in PNW) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's very hard to find a decent bike in 2 or 3 months. As we cycle through the seasons different items / categories are going to get unexpectedly popular. Nobody really knows how to keep themselves sane during August in a pandemic, but there's probably a product or product category that will help with that.

New comment by thestu in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)"

thestu — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 18:57:48 +0000

ChartGuys | Fullstack Developer | Vancouver, BC, CA | ONSITE | https://alerts.chartguys.com

ChartGuys does education and technical analysis around various financial markets (currently mostly crypto-currencies).

We're looking for a full stack dev that can make back-end contributions and take the lead on front-end development. Stuff we use: Rails / React / Postgres / Redis / Heroku / websockets. Familiarity with candle sticks and technical analysis algos a plus but not necessary. We work remotely but do the occasional IRL meet-up, so a strong preference for developers in the greater Vancouver area.

Apply: https://angel.co/chartguys/jobs/407852-software-engineer

New comment by thestu in "Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game"

thestu — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 18:24:21 +0000

Don't know about him, but I use -- https://www.sync.com/

New comment by thestu in "The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation"

thestu — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:31:33 +0000

It was a political science class, so you're probably right; but how exactly does it apply?