Hacker News: towledev

New comment by towledev in "Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers"

towledev — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:24:31 +0000

Was the fruit tree important for its fruit? Surely there are other fruit sources, no?

New comment by towledev in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

towledev — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:41:15 +0000

As a kid, I dreamed of doing this. Some of my earliest googling was related to rocket fuel, probably right after October Sky came out.

What differentiates High-Power from the other options?

New comment by towledev in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

towledev — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:06:31 +0000

The fact that unsympathetic targets are the first to be targeted need not be viewed as strategic. Other targets would be defended, which is a reason not to target them. Unsympathetic targets lack defenses and are therefore most likely to be targeted, all other things being equal.

We grant fully that it’s a slippery slope, ofc. But is the end of the slope in mind at the outset? Maybe, but not certainly.

New comment by towledev in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

towledev — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:05:15 +0000

I ran into the same problem. Tried using ChatGPT as a scrum manager. It was really good at checking off todos through conversation, but as I fleshed out the details of the project it would forget critical information - not necessarily todos, but critical information constraining the implementation of the project. In the initial stages, it was great, but it lost usefulness over time.

New comment by towledev in "How we lost communication to entertainment"

towledev — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:05:25 +0000

We need a Caesar who will ban all advertising. Lacking a Caesar, we could start with publicly funded NFL stadiums e.g. MetLife to get a foot in the door and go from there. Something must be done.

New comment by towledev in "What medieval people got right about learning (2019)"

towledev — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:06:48 +0000

Very true, but the benefit to one-on-one instruction is so enormous that we should find ways to apply it fractionally if we can’t apply it fully. One thinks eg of the one-room schoolhouses of the 1800s, with younger students learning from older students.

New comment by towledev in "Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI"

towledev — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 11:59:52 +0000

>Instruct them in how you want them to code

They don't always listen.

Writing SQL, I'll give ChatGPT the schema for 5 different tables. It habitually generates solutions with columns that don't exist. So, naturally, I append, "By the way, TableA has no column FieldB." Then it just imagines a different one. Or, I'll say, "Do not generate a solution with any table-col pair not provided above." It doesn't listen to that at all.

New comment by towledev in "Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC"

towledev — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:18:59 +0000

It's funny, we've watched for two decades as the click-driven dynamics of the internet have degraded the meanings of words. At first, I was outraged on a daily basis. Then, as we all did, I learned, against my will, to forgive. "Can't blame them for chasing clicks! Who among us wouldn't cheapen a word if it meant a view?"

But - and this is the funny part - I feel like my teen-angsty self has been vindicated. I'm so burnt out on exaggeration, not a single news site has gotten regular clicks from me in over a decade, nor do I comment or read comments. I listen to a little history dork YouTube before bed, or for tutorials. I'm free.

New comment by towledev in "LibriVox"

towledev — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 22:43:57 +0000

Haven't listened to Librivox in years and years, but I still fork over the annual $2.99 because I feel I owe it.

It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."

New comment by towledev in "Strengths Are Your Weaknesses"

towledev — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 01:42:49 +0000

You’re selling your point short.

In my time in management, I found that the commonplace psychological descriptors we use failed to adequately describe what I was seeing. Two employees may both be “detail-oriented,” but there are subcategories within that depending on where the motivation comes from and those subcategories behave differently. Some people want that A+, some people like their squares square and their circles round (and it gives them anxiety when they’re not). Those groups are different, and I don’t know what to call them.

At bottom, there are ‘simple machines’ of psychology that, in combination with each other, produce behavioral traits at the top level. We don’t really have words for them, or at least not words I can think of for the ones I see.

New comment by towledev in "Oldest DNA from domesticated American horse lends credence to shipwreck folklore"

towledev — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:14:57 +0000

Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to

Ask HN: Have you had success with improving your reading speed?

towledev — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 13:02:33 +0000

I’d like to read books faster, but I’m skeptical that the methods available will do anything beyond teaching me to skim - and I’m just the sort of person who finds a lot of magic in minor word choice. The idea of reading only 5 words in 8 repulses me.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31798938

Points: 62

# Comments: 79

New comment by towledev in "Sokrates – a lightweight (yet powerful) software documentation and analysis tool"

towledev — Sat, 07 May 2022 01:29:48 +0000

Let me just congratulate the author on describing a newly written library without using the word ‘modern’. Truly, you are the 1%.