Hacker News: trgn

New comment by trgn in "What happens if you put work into the second dimension?"

trgn — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:05:57 +0000

didnt know, it's on my watchlist now!

New comment by trgn in "What happens if you put work into the second dimension?"

trgn — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:31:45 +0000

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.

It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.

Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

New comment by trgn in "New cars are getting 1.2cm longer and 0.5cm taller each year"

trgn — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:57:16 +0000

weight is the easiest measure. wear&tear on road, mpg, damage in accident all scale with weight

New comment by trgn in "Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere"

trgn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:37:20 +0000

I consider myself reasonably competent, reached conventional milestones in a career in tech, did a thing here and there, and I'm reading this, sort of nodding along, and barely understand what's the issue again with cut&paste, there was one, which one ?, anyway, middle age you guys, it's real.

New comment by trgn in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

trgn — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:02:09 +0000

dont know the laws well enough, but would be crazy indeed if companies could borrow against their own stock when they're issuing first new ones with sbc and then buy back on open market.

New comment by trgn in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

trgn — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:58:21 +0000

yep, clearly, just meant they're not cash strapped.

New comment by trgn in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

trgn — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:23:04 +0000

vacationing/digital nomading in belgium atm, it looks erhm rich. traveling between brussels, leuven, ghent, bruges, soon antwerp... people dress well, never been anywhere with so many german luxury cars on the road, meals cost about the same as US.

I'm sure statistics this and that, but something doesn't translate, sanguine reality is different.

New comment by trgn in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

trgn — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:19:29 +0000

i dont think this announcement will boost the stock either, for the same reason we are wondering here why 7% is noteworthy for a globocorp.

New comment by trgn in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

trgn — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:08:48 +0000

but none of this applies to elastic. it's cash flow positive, and has such a cash hoard it's doing stock buybacks.

New comment by trgn in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

trgn — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:00:15 +0000

i dont understand this either. just dont hire for half a year or so, a generic globocorp gets to that 7% easily.

New comment by trgn in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

trgn — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:47:37 +0000

isnt that just a temporary bottleneck? a self-confident generation might make the sacrifice. plus, the opposite of increasing isnt necessarily decreasing, stabilizing is another one.

New comment by trgn in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

trgn — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:33:05 +0000

absent productivity increases, population growth is just there to maintain the welfare state for retirees, it's a perpetuum mobile. apart from that, i dont even know what the benefits of a growing population would be. switzerland is trying a different tack through democratic means.

New comment by trgn in "India's surprise baby bust"

trgn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:47:00 +0000

yeah make sense, we do things, rationalize them later, i get it, i certainly am sensitive to it.

New comment by trgn in "India's surprise baby bust"

trgn — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:17:57 +0000

i put off children because it takes longer to establish a foothold. not because i loved to travel or eat out necessarily, or felt i needed to prioritize hedonistic activities over building a family. but, during that time of getting my degree, figuring out my career, get some savings, etc.. those were the things to fill up time with.

i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.

New comment by trgn in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

trgn — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:35:19 +0000

i'm probably pretty dumb but i don't really get what's so mathematical about sql.

New comment by trgn in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

trgn — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:21:46 +0000

the AI companies make way way too much revenue to be f*cked, and people are hooked and they have not tested limits of their pricing power yet.

New comment by trgn in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

trgn — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:20:35 +0000

i feel like starlink could be huge, why not the default internet connection for everybody. similar to how people abandoned landlines for cell phones.

New comment by trgn in "No Raise, No Promotion: 1 in 4 White-Collar Workers Are Stalling Out"

trgn — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:53:54 +0000

Anecdotally it's true imho. accrual of benefits, sbc and wage-indexing, ... job hopping puts you at the ground floor of each, and salary jumps have narrowed.

New comment by trgn in "High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building"

trgn — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:08:11 +0000

that seems like a reductive truth in the other direction, i'd even say it's largely false.

the wealth explosion in the high middle ages and significant rise in standard of living was fully accompanied by (and maybe precisely because of) the flourishing of urbanity as well. there were great jobs in the city. proto industry and cottage industry, specialized trades, guilds, ... would you rather be a farmer, subject to the whims of your lord and the weather, or instead weave cloth at a more individualized pace, as a band of brothers?

that city was also a much more calm and verdant atmosphere than we now image as well. gardens, high intensity cultivation, markets, plazzas, all within city walls, not to mention a very accessible country side outside in walking distance ... no noise pollution from cars. i think people tend to forget this aspect a lot more, because they imagine the crowded industrial city. that machine-environment wasnt the norm for the hundreds of years preceding it. we should image bruges in 1370 here as the norm, not manchester in 1870.

sure, the city could be filthy, but farmlife was miserable in its own ways. and sanitation was bad in the city, it was just as bad as on the farmstead.

New comment by trgn in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

trgn — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:46:10 +0000

i agree it's overestimated, and it's not "as bad" as many believe it to be. but it is worse.

i get the lightbulb stolen from my garage light every month. that sort of petty crime is non-existent when you live in a nice suburb. but it's only a lightbulb, not that hard to replace.

am i worried me or my family will get shot? no, my neighbors are actually all very nice. but the family pizza place on the commercial strip a block over has a shooting once every year or so. in the integration of everything, it's somewhat of a non-issue, but it i real, and again, something that never happens for many decades if you're out in the burbs.

there's a real stark difference between the two. how a place feels in your gut, is different from what the numbers show, and it's not always clear what's real and what's not.