Hacker News: yowzadave

New comment by yowzadave in "A queasy selling of the family heirlooms"

yowzadave — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 13:26:10 +0000

> 4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.

What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?

New comment by yowzadave in "Major quantum computing advance made obsolete by teenager (2018)"

yowzadave — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 20:29:18 +0000

There's an interesting series of fantasy novels by the author Graydon Saunders, occasionally recommended on this website, that almost entirely avoids the use of pronouns: https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal . The avoidance of pronouns is a stylistic choice, but not a didactic one—you might not even realize it until you're a third of the way through the book and you start questioning whether a character you'd imagined as male or female might actually be a different gender, or not gendered at all. It's interesting to see how the author achieves this in dense but readable prose, without drawing attention to it.

New comment by yowzadave in "CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems"

yowzadave — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:56:24 +0000

It doesn't even require a big team to be useful—I won't remember how I organized a set of styles a few months from now, and having Tailwind require a minimal set of constraints, and keeping the styles easily editable in the place you use them makes things more maintainable over time.

New comment by yowzadave in "The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015)"

yowzadave — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:15:25 +0000

Does this effect taper off as you get further away from the edges of the pool? Wondering if you could eliminate the unfairness by just leaving a few lanes empty on each edge of the pool.

Tai's Model

yowzadave — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 05:11:01 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44497286

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

yowzadave — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:42:53 +0000

Article URL: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/american-science-brain-drain/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44449614

Points: 134

# Comments: 121

New comment by yowzadave in "More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad"

yowzadave — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 18:07:43 +0000

This is worse. The U2 thing was a "gift", albeit an unsolicited one that many people didn't want and were annoyed by. This is just a crappy ad.

New comment by yowzadave in "I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic"

yowzadave — Sat, 31 May 2025 21:44:18 +0000

I agree with this; I think part of the societal problem is one of poor urban planning. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood in New York (Sunnyside) that has a park that is the hub of everyone’s social life—most nights of the week, people show up, bring some food, and chat/share dinner and drinks while the kids run around playing unsupervised. This is extremely rare in the US, which is dominated by suburban typologies that feature individual homes and relatively few communal spaces. The shared spaces, like restaurants/bars/etc. tend to be places you have to drive to, and therefore have less of a connection to their community and less of a regular clientele. Everyone wants to have their own backyard…which is fine, but leads to people hanging out alone in their own backyard rather than with their friends and neighbors.

New comment by yowzadave in "Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden"

yowzadave — Tue, 20 May 2025 18:26:17 +0000

People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.

New comment by yowzadave in "Show HN: Goboscript, text-based programming language, compiles to Scratch"

yowzadave — Mon, 19 May 2025 11:21:49 +0000

I’m familiar with the Grasshopper visual scripting environment for the Rhino CAD system, and what you’re describing happens there as well…but I don’t really perceive it as a negative. Users who aren’t comfortable with text programming continue to use the visual method, and users who are tend to migrate their more complicated functions to single blocks. There’s a limit of complexity beyond which the visual programming becomes an impediment to understanding. It’s OK if moving things to a text-based block will make the internal logic of that block inaccessible to some number of users, given that those users would struggle to understand the visual version of the function as well.

New comment by yowzadave in "Ghost students are creating problems for California colleges"

yowzadave — Thu, 08 May 2025 15:04:20 +0000

> I worked in retail loss prevention

Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact the business in other ways), so there definitely is an "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and preventive measures.

New comment by yowzadave in "Thank you for holding my duck (2021)"

yowzadave — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 15:11:45 +0000

This is what I do—it can even be a detailed slack message. I start writing the message with the goal of asking for some guidance, but in the process of carefully outlining the problem and what I’ve already attempted (in order to respect the time of my colleague) I usually arrive at the correct solution. I then delete the email without ever needing to send it.

New comment by yowzadave in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract"

yowzadave — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 04:38:07 +0000

They are clueless kids at their first job, following the orders of their hero. You think they’ll resist when the boss tells them, “cut everything”?

New comment by yowzadave in ""Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay": Blue Cross Approved Surgeries Then Refused to Pay"

yowzadave — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:37:35 +0000

It's a much lower bar to sow discord and chaos vs. being able to maintain a stable, functioning, low-corruption society. Just because a country is capable of one does not mean that they are capable of the other; also, the characteristics that lead a country to be effective in the former may prevent them from being successful at the latter.

New comment by yowzadave in "Nice things with SVG"

yowzadave — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:17:50 +0000

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I wish there were an similarly popular vector drawing format that did much much less than SVG. Any time you want to support vector drawings in a project, the obvious approach is to support SVG...which basically means you have to bring in the equivalent of a browser. What is the minimal alternative?

New comment by yowzadave in ""Final Usonian Home" by Frank Lloyd Wright Completed in Ohio"

yowzadave — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:53:54 +0000

Unhinged comment. Is the Parthenon not architecture because it’s not ADA-accessible? If someone installs an elevator does it become architecture again?

New comment by yowzadave in "Obituary for Cyc"

yowzadave — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 01:40:37 +0000

It would be very surprising if the results from this approach were superior to simply machine-translating the entries from another language—because e.g. English already has so much content and contributor activity, and LLMs are already very good at translating. I can’t imagine you’d get more than a fraction of people’s interest in authoring entries in this abstract language.

New comment by yowzadave in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

yowzadave — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 20:44:56 +0000

Meta is a funny one, because there doesn't really seem to be a "pro-Meta" contingent. They have lots of users, but not a lot of people who feel warmly about them as a company.

New comment by yowzadave in "In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants"

yowzadave — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:12:16 +0000

Can you point to any actual real-world cases where something like this has happened? It sounds like a movie concept; we're letting real-world policy be determined by a fantasy people have about a lone gun enthusiast killing a bunch of drug cartel members?

New comment by yowzadave in "U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat"

yowzadave — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:40:52 +0000

What are the odds that Goldberg was included in the Signal chat intentionally by a whistleblower? I.e., someone who had reservations about what was about to take place (either the bombing action itself, or the intentional avoidance of government recordkeeping) and so included him as a witness?