Hacker News: zeitgeistcowboy

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Show HN: 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator"

zeitgeistcowboy — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:56:40 +0000

Warning: if you increase the steps per frame it will break your phone. At least with my iPhone and Safari it stalls the entire phone.

More Terrible Slack Setups

zeitgeistcowboy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:37:28 +0000

I find Slack to be a necessary evil. I guess we have to use it, but it can also generate a lot of mental overhead tracking what was said in what channel. This got me thinking, what are alternative ways to organize Slack? What are the worst ways?

- No channels allowed, only direct messages

- No direct messages allowed, only channels

- Only channels which contain all the permutations of N people and are randomly named

- Only one channel, no DMs, everything happens in threads

- Everyone can create only one channel at a time

- No private channels

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46978061

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?"

zeitgeistcowboy — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:49:25 +0000

I used them in high school in the late 1990s... just to get an extra challenge. I had my dad's and grandfather's and I picked up a couple at garage sales. I still have a collection, but haven't really used them in years. I'll probably break them out again when my kids get in middle school / high school math for fun. They are great for learning the rules of logs.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Which table format do LLMs understand best?"

zeitgeistcowboy — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 15:14:14 +0000

My sentiments exactly. All the formats were so poorly read that they are all effectively useless.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme"

zeitgeistcowboy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:50:36 +0000

The momentum behind vibe coding is driven by an underestimation/misunderstanding of what it takes to build software.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

zeitgeistcowboy — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 23:01:16 +0000

So much about this seems inauthentic. The post itself. The experience. The content produced. I wouldn’t like to be on the other end of the production of this content.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

zeitgeistcowboy — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 22:54:46 +0000

So is using an LLM to write SQL for you like using a mitre saw instead of a table saw? I guess the crux is that you still need to do work either way.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Take the pedals off the bike"

zeitgeistcowboy — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:03:24 +0000

We have Woom bikes. This is exactly what they recommend. Each of my three kids learned at different speeds, though. It basically turns your pedal bike into a strider bike.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "The revival of the beach in twentieth-century Los Angeles"

zeitgeistcowboy — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 11:07:23 +0000

I lived there between 2004 and 2023 and used to walk along the perimeter of the protected dunes. I didn’t know it was an intentional engineering. I thought it was just natural dunes that were protected. They are really beautiful and you get a sense that there’s a lot of life going on. I always wondered why Santa Monica’s beaches were so barren otherwise compared to other beaches on both the West and East coasts. Good read!

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth"

zeitgeistcowboy — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 19:50:09 +0000

This usually means the military.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Mapping 20k ships that sank during WW II"

zeitgeistcowboy — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:36:50 +0000

What a great example of an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym . This guy's last name is Heersink and he's finding out where all the boats sank.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Blood puddles, mold, tainted meat, bugs: Boar's Head inspections are horrifying"

zeitgeistcowboy — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:06:12 +0000

This is disappointing. I thought Boar’s Head was the high quality stuff.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Tell HN: I am going to host "Real Analysis" book club meetings"

zeitgeistcowboy — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 23:20:05 +0000

I was a CS undergrad at MIT and took the fancy math people’s analysis class for a math requirement and they used Rudin and it killed me. We went through like 170 pages of it for one semester. The professor was Sigurdur Helgason. I went into office hours one day and ask him a question. He slowly walked to his window and replied “the ravines in Iceland are deep” and it was at that point that I realized I was an engineer and not a mathematician.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control characters (1968) [pdf]"

zeitgeistcowboy — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 11:40:21 +0000

Character 7 is still a bell! I always loved that when you printed ASCII character 7 on old machines it made a sound instead of printing a character.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads"

zeitgeistcowboy — Sun, 19 May 2024 14:36:00 +0000

I wonder if she also did a Google search for the same genre and if this is why she was retargeted.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "There's a lot of Google AI product in HN right now"

zeitgeistcowboy — Tue, 14 May 2024 22:34:52 +0000

Right now on HN I see Veo (deepmind.google) in #1, Gemini Flash (deepmind.google) in #3, Model Explorer (ai.google.dev) in #5, PaliGemma (ai.google.dev) in #11. I've never seen so many Google products all listed in HN at the same time before.

There's a lot of Google AI product in HN right now

zeitgeistcowboy — Tue, 14 May 2024 22:34:52 +0000

Article URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40360936

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Mathematicians marvel at 'crazy' cuts through four dimensions"

zeitgeistcowboy — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 23:12:09 +0000

I’m sure I’m being naive, but I was expecting at least one “crazy” and interesting graphic in this article.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Shiakaku of the Day"

zeitgeistcowboy — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 22:16:01 +0000

There’s a game on Apple Arcade called stitch if you want a much larger and more difficult version of this.

New comment by zeitgeistcowboy in "Shiakaku of the Day"

zeitgeistcowboy — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 22:12:18 +0000

1 x 5