Hacker News: vlunkr

New comment by vlunkr in "Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers"

vlunkr — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:31:01 +0000

I use 2 different email apps for exactly this reason. I can check my work email if I need to, but I don’t want notifications.

New comment by vlunkr in "Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction (2016)"

vlunkr — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:38:20 +0000

But it’s never going to be 1:1 duplication is it? Sometimes it’s better to copy code as a template for something new, rather than try to immediately force a new abstraction.

I agree with you that it’s a truism, but it’s useful advice for people who have a habit of trying too hard to DRY their code. IIRC the author comes from the Ruby world, where DRY was a big thing, and this talk was part of the pendulum swinging back away from this DRY obsession that sometimes just resulted in convoluted code.

New comment by vlunkr in "Can we have the day off?"

vlunkr — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:51:57 +0000

Fired on the spot? The hyperbole doesn't help your argument.

What inspires me to work harder is getting to work on things that I enjoy.

New comment by vlunkr in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

vlunkr — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:37:13 +0000

Yeah this is how I feel. People who like AI music seem to be a same people who would just throw on random "deep work" or "lofi" youtube playlists and let them run all day. That has never appealed to me. I like to learn about the artists and history.

New comment by vlunkr in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

vlunkr — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:31:37 +0000

You can spend your time looking for music or you can spend it prompting Suno. Personally I'll always take the former, I enjoy it, but to each their own.

New comment by vlunkr in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

vlunkr — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:25:27 +0000

Was that video supposed to convince us that AI music is good?

New comment by vlunkr in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

vlunkr — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:22:42 +0000

I’ve had good luck with gnoosic. Or taking artists I like as a starting point and finding out who influenced them, and who they influenced.

New comment by vlunkr in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

vlunkr — Wed, 27 May 2026 23:29:45 +0000

There are millions of people making music in an ever-expanding set of genres. The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd. I guess she can listen to slop but maybe just look around a little instead?

Edit: slop not slob

New comment by vlunkr in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

vlunkr — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:06:57 +0000

It makes sense. It hard to think creatively when your environment is stagnant. You need some new sights and sounds to kick things along, especially when you’re stuck on something.

I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasn’t from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.

New comment by vlunkr in "Project Glasswing: An Initial Update"

vlunkr — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:29:15 +0000

Great analogy. The problem is the incentive structure. Anthropic would nothing nothing more than for all of us to write big sprawling slop codebases so we can spend endless tokens reading, rereading, fixing, refixing forever.

New comment by vlunkr in "Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

vlunkr — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:29:17 +0000

Blackboard got a lot better in response to the flood of customers heading to canvas.

New comment by vlunkr in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

vlunkr — Thu, 07 May 2026 03:46:14 +0000

It’s simple but contains all the necessary info. You can say “build an endpoint to get user data” and it will absolutely do something, but it might be stupid, and when you compound 1000 stupid prompts like that you get spaghetti.

New comment by vlunkr in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

vlunkr — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:45:19 +0000

This almost the plot of “minority report.”

New comment by vlunkr in "AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?"

vlunkr — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:39:15 +0000

If you want to watch Shakespeare on your TV you are welcome to. But also I don't think that's the point at all. If it's my job to hammer 100 nails a day, and then my boss gives me a hammer that is 10x more effective. I don't get to go home early, I'm just expected to hammer 1000 nails now. Maybe the work becomes more pleasant, maybe it doesn't. But either way it definitely benefits the boss and the person who makes the hammer.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:04:28 +0000

There was plenty of movie tie-in shovelware that sold well. ET is obviously the infamous example, but this continued to go on into the 3D era. Sports games too. They aren't universally bad, but often they succeeded just because they have the official license. It's just like any kind of media, bad stuff can succeed because of deceptive marketing or slapping a familiar name on garbage.

This is all a vast oversimplification. There are obviously hundreds of games coming out every year without gacha mechanics.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:39:46 +0000

I'm pretty similar. AAA games are very similar to modern blockbuster movies. They're playing to the lowest common denominator, and often aren't motivated by any central vision besides making money. But just like Hollywood, sometimes a really creative project makes it through all that machinery. A series that has worked for me are the modern Doom games. Could have been a lame cash grab but they nailed a really interesting formula and continued to tweak it in each game.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:59:33 +0000

Sure, I didn’t say all old games are bad, we just have to be aware of nostalgia as a factor. It’s difficult for a game to match the ocarina of time for me, because I had simply never experienced something like that. As an adult I recognize that it is a good game, but also that someone who wasn’t there at the time isn’t going to see what I see in it.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:47:14 +0000

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough because I agree with everything you said lol. What I take issue with is the parent comment trying to assert that the SNES (or any console) is the greatest of all time. There’s too much subjectivity in art to make a statement like that. I’m trying to say that it’s nostalgia informing their opinion, even if they’re disguising it with technical arguments.

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:36:29 +0000

You have to consider that it’s easier to create a genre when there are fewer games in existence. On Atari you’d make a game called “basketball” and bam, new genre!

New comment by vlunkr in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

vlunkr — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:22:15 +0000

To each their own, but I don’t know how you can call it bleak. This is a golden age of gaming if there ever has been one. So many phenomenal games, amazing sales, way more cross-platform games. Yeah there are assembly line AAA games, just don’t play them.