Hacker News: throwforfeds

New comment by throwforfeds in "My favorite keyboards"

throwforfeds — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:59:50 +0000

Yeah, I bought an ErgoDox EZ and tried to get used to the ortholinear layout, but after a couple weeks things just still felt off. It's been in my closet for years now. This UHK looks really interesting though, thanks!

New comment by throwforfeds in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

throwforfeds — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:06:21 +0000

I've seen a lot of friends and family members almost immediately get offered surgery for shoulder pain. It's just often the default for people that do surgeries for a living.

I also had a pretty painful shoulder issue at one point, where the pain just wasn't subsiding for months. I tried massages and acupuncture as I didn't want to do surgery, but it wasn't helping at all. The thing that fixed it for me was just really focusing on doing pull-ups. I couldn't do them at all when I started, so I began with dead hangs and scapular pull-ups, eventually progressing to regular pull-ups, and then training with a "grease-the-groove" method once I could get a few per set. I stopped the training schedule once I was getting in around 17 pull-ups per set, and now just do 6 sets of about 7-8 pullups 3x per week spaced throughout the day. I'll also do some shoulder mobility drills [1].

Whenever I get lazy about keeping up with them inevitably discomfort will start arising again, but it goes away once I get back to strengthening.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP8YmmRMz6I

New comment by throwforfeds in "The AirPods Effect"

throwforfeds — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:55:23 +0000

I haven't seen showtime on the subway here in NYC in a long time. And even when it happened more often, they generally would dance for all of one stop before moving to the next train car. So, what, like ~3 minutes of your commute?

Much more annoying to me these days are all the people that have decided it's acceptable to stare at their phone and zombie walk out of the train and up the stairs, completely oblivious to the world around them. They're not even making noise, just walking straight into other humans in a busy station while scrolling tiktok.

New comment by throwforfeds in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

throwforfeds — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:46:21 +0000

Were apartments $300/month in the deep suburbs of cities though? Because I'm always surprised to hear my parents tell me rents for 1 bedrooms in the place I grew up in outside of Boston are in the $2-2.5k range (confirmed just now, not an affluent suburb). Census data seems to put the equivalent in Massachusetts at $120/month in 1970, which would be roughly $1k/month in 2026. $300/month in 1970 might even be high for what people were paying in Manhattan in 1970.

New comment by throwforfeds in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

throwforfeds — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:34:58 +0000

I'm also wondering what effect it'll have on all the people that have been declaring their primary residence in Florida for tax purposes yet actually live up here in NYC a good amount of the time. My neighborhood in Brooklyn is filled with cars registered in Florida. If all of a sudden your pied-a-terre condo in Williamsburg is getting hit with $40k+/year in property taxes it might no longer make sense to try and move your residence to Florida to avoid city/state income tax.

New comment by throwforfeds in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

throwforfeds — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:28:30 +0000

FTA: "Although paying for excess hours can cost less than hiring new cops, overtime contributes to future pension costs.

“If your last few years before you retire, you work 300, 400 hours of overtime and bump up your pay by $40,000, that all goes into the salary that your pension is based on,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at New York’s Citizens Budget Commission."

So yeah, it seems like a bad idea to be able to scam the pension system like that.

New comment by throwforfeds in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

throwforfeds — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:40:11 +0000

At least here in NYC, a large part of a NYPD officer's pension is calculated based on a 3-year look back from their retirement date, so there is a huge incentive to work as much overtime as possible in order to bump that number in your last few years of service. There are lots of stories of NYPD handing out easy overtime in massive numbers for each other, particularly when they are about to retire.

Teachers are the easy ones to point to, it is hard to be mad at an underpaid teacher who receives a reasonable pension for life. We certainly can be mad at NYPD scamming the system to get $100-200k/year for life.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-police-overtime-...

[2] https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/newly-retired-nypd...

New comment by throwforfeds in "Congress Wants You to Pay $130 a Year Just to Drive an Electric Car"

throwforfeds — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:29:39 +0000

Now do parking

New comment by throwforfeds in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

throwforfeds — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:06:07 +0000

For sure, and if I'd ever need to use Python I'd want to strictly enforce that across my team (pre-commit hooks or whatever).

New comment by throwforfeds in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

throwforfeds — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:26:26 +0000

> Code readability of Python isn't an advantage during write; it's an advantage while reviewing.

This is completely subjective though. I personally find that Python's lack of static types makes code very difficult to reason about. Yes, some devs will write decent comments and name things in a way that's easier to read, but most devs are lazy (myself included) and things get out of hand quickly.

But this is also a subjective opinion, and you could argue that I feel this way because I spend most of my time in TypeScript, Go, and Rust.

New comment by throwforfeds in "UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)"

throwforfeds — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:20:15 +0000

There's not a lot, unfortunately. This paper is a literature review and the claims are weak, but there's something there that should be investigated further: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12392120/

Paul Stamets has evangelized psilocybin + lions mane + niacin for years in a microdosing format, but again, the research is lacking largely due to prohibition.

New comment by throwforfeds in "UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)"

throwforfeds — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:16:55 +0000

For sure, and lions mane is one of the three things Paul Stamets has been talking about for years to take in combination with niacin and psilocybin (microdose) to support neurogenesis. Low doses of psilocybin have only very mild perceptual changes, much less than smoking weed or drinking alcohol (for me). But again, there's not much science on it which will hopefully change.

New comment by throwforfeds in "UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)"

throwforfeds — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:25:53 +0000

There's (minimal) research on psilocybin doing just that. One of the tragedies of prohibition is that we just weren't able to study these psychedelic compounds easily for 50+ years.

New comment by throwforfeds in "I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI"

throwforfeds — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:04:48 +0000

American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.

New comment by throwforfeds in "California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply"

throwforfeds — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:34:45 +0000

We've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.

New comment by throwforfeds in "New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming"

throwforfeds — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:24:00 +0000

There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

New comment by throwforfeds in "10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home"

throwforfeds — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:49:18 +0000

But Brooklyn is an old city that's hard to wire, unlike those new Italian cities... /s

New comment by throwforfeds in "10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home"

throwforfeds — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:19:11 +0000

And here I am sitting in Brooklyn and haven't had one apartment that has had fiber as an option. I get to pay Spectrum $90/month for "400/20" and in reality get 100/10.

New comment by throwforfeds in "Men who stare at walls"

throwforfeds — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:18:17 +0000

Ah, I see, that's also very common. Taken all the way it can develop into nihilism, which is one of the two extreme views in Buddhism [1]. I fell into that early on and abandoned my practice for many years. I found that once I found the Mahayana teachings on emptiness [2] and then the stories of the Vajrayana masters [3] the practice became joyful again and not bogged down by some narrow view of what meditation is.

[1] https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Two_extremes

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 and particularly as formulated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita

[3] for example Saraha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraha and Tilopa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa

New comment by throwforfeds in "Men who stare at walls"

throwforfeds — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:05:16 +0000

> I've never liked the way meditation makes me feel

This is common. A true meditation practice brings up a lot of stuff, from general body aches and pains to deep emotional things you may be unconsciously suppressing. With time and persistence, and with the right teacher, it becomes liberating though.