News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Julesman

Re:Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless on Thursday September 24, 2026 @07:52PM (#49838370)
(Below has nothing to do with people who need surgery due to catastrophic injury or congenital defect.)

Most surgeries are followed by more surgeries.

And the hard truth is that most surgeries happen because most people do not have the discipline to do what's needed over many months to solve the problems they are having with the chronic pain they are in. They want a faster solution and are never really told by anyone that the only real permanent solution is one that will be difficult and take months.

Rather than change their habits and their environments and their bodies, people opt to do things that have surprisingly low rates of success and more often than not result in a state than can never be fixed.

Some people get past the point of no return. For those people, surgery may be the only option. But for most people the only real option is a change in lifestyle that is more or less like deciding you are going to get very fit. It takes months and in the mean time, theres a lot of effort and discomfort.

In addition, most people don't really get how much of their back pain and ailment is due to ergonomics. That their bed is wrong. That they are sitting in a bad office chair or couch.

But more than that, most people don't get how central exercise and core strength are for maintaining the health of your back.

So before you get back surgery, consider getting a new office chair, exercising more, and facing that pain for a few more months. Work toward a real solution.

Re:The revolt of the reader on Saturday September 05, 2026 @10:42PM (#49582799)
AI detection should NEVER be used in an educational setting where the only acceptable false positive rate is 0%. That being a rate that which will never be achieved.
I've been building websites for over 15 years. Soon after I learned, largely from haunting w3schools, I felt strongly that a) the basics were pretty easy to learn and b) there weren't any sites that were very good at teaching it.

Most sites assume too much prior knowledge. Most try to teach you things I've never used on the job. Most assume you need to be tested or want a certificate. Most sites are either for kids or for adults, when I feel the same information can serve both.

When ChatGPT debuted it was clear to me that it was an amazing education and production assistant. And that got me inspired to build out this project. It was clear to me then that while AI could do some coding, that knowing the basics was not going to become irrelevant. Also, that AI could make a site like this more useful than ever.

So I made this happen. And I wrote a solid chunk of the content by hand. It's a curriculum of super basic summaries. Each includes a demo, a code sandbox, and a chat assistant prompted to answer questions in a helpful way.

This is a free tool with no registration and the project is not-for-profit. The best possible outcome would be just knowing people had used it to learn and teach.

I'm hoping for any input people have. I'm certainly aware that there are more lessons to include. I'm more interested in whether people think this could be a useful tool. Why or why not.

Re:A website that lists websites to submit your website to on Thursday June 18, 2026 @02:14PM (#48589258)
I demand a submission directory of submission directories!!! :)
Re:Introducing Waymo Premier, an elevated rider experience on Thursday June 11, 2026 @04:00PM (#48495641)
Zero value. I don't get it.

Priority Pickups: The only ostensible value. I've never waited more than 5 minutes for a car. $360 a year to save a couple minute?

Ride Savings: Pay to save money.

Early Access: Zero value.

Flexible Cancellations: Pay to save money.

Re:Plain Vanilla Web on Sunday May 11, 2025 @10:36PM (#43959141)
GPT agrees with me.

The site positions itself as advocating for simplicity and minimalism in web development—stressing plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but then pivots into building the entire project using React. That’s a contradiction.

If the goal is truly "plain vanilla web," introducing React (with its build tools, dependencies, and abstraction layers) runs counter to that ethos. A truly minimalist approach would skip frameworks entirely or at most use small, native JS modules.

So yes, it's philosophically inconsistent. Want to dig into a better alternative stack that sticks to that principle?

Re:TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale on Thursday April 17, 2025 @11:49AM (#43718602)
TL;DR

If you have a kid, please be a parent.

Re:Zentool – AMD Zen Microcode Manipulation Utility on Thursday March 06, 2025 @12:06PM (#43282526)
I wonder if anyone involved could define 'zen.' I know the answer.
Re:Why so many children in America have ADHD on Saturday March 01, 2025 @01:42PM (#43222228)
An absolute load of evil stinking garbage. Bad parenting gets a medical excuse and shit millenial parents get a pass for having no boundaries.

Neurodivergence is a serious thing and people challenged by that are HURT by this predatory capitalist BS.

No, they don't. We know this already. And failing student on that basis is just a very quick path to losing lawsuits which will shortly eliminate this question as a serious concern.
Re:OpenAI is shockingly good at unminifying code on Thursday August 29, 2024 @12:00PM (#41392199)
"Usually, I would just powerthrough reading the minimized code..."

Huh? Is this a thing? There are endless online code formatting sites. It takes two seconds. Why would anyone ever do this? I don't get it.

Re:Caniemail.com (like caniuse but for email content) on Monday May 06, 2024 @07:48PM (#40280777)
I think it would be more useful to list the few CSS properties that all email clients do recognize. I don't mean to be flippant. I'm serious.

CanIEmail? The answer is generally no.

Only below the 1000px breakpoint for tablets. Suggested videos probably keep people on the site/app longer than comments. They should have shown 5 videos with a "show more" drawer for the rest. But we know they care more about money than our happieness.
Border radius. People are mad about border radius. :/
Re:Snottite on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @12:36PM (#39907736)
Snoticle!

Hacker News is just the gift that keeps on giving. :)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/us/politics/havana-syndro....

"New Studies Find No Evidence of Brain Injury in Havana Syndrome Cases"

This story is from two weeks ago. So which is it?

Re:Pure CSS Website on Friday March 22, 2024 @06:10PM (#39795392)
A self-closing div is not valid HTML.
Re:Designing a Pure Python Web Framework on Friday March 22, 2024 @06:02PM (#39795330)
Fuck it. Let's code the web in binary.
Re:Why It's So Challenging to Land Upright on the Moon on Monday March 04, 2024 @03:55PM (#39595943)
Radical suggestion. Don't make your lander taller than wide. I'm the first to assume that the science nerds have thought of everything and that my uneducated self has nothing to say about it. But then I saw the lander. It looks very tippable.

So then here's my luddite take. Can't they just unfurl wider stabilizers from the legs that increase their footprint? At slow speeds in low gravity it seems like they wouldn't need to be heavy or strong.

Re:Learn CSS Layout the Pedantic Way on Thursday February 29, 2024 @12:01PM (#39552040)
To me, CSS frameworks break the whole point of CSS, generally add a lot of bloat, and aren't useful except in some instances where rapid prototyping is needed.

Tailwind exists largely because programmers don't like CSS. We no longer need frameworks for compatibility. The era of browser testing is over. And we don't need them to do things CSS can't do, as in the past couple of years nearly all browsers are handling the newer features.

My big gripe is simply that it makes a lot of sense to keep your structure, styles, and scripts separated. If something looks off I don't want to have to wonder whether it's classes, CSS, or scripts.

And ultimately, I don't think Tailwind does make things faster. I could come up with custom CSS helper classes AS NEEDED, and avoid all the problems I mentioned above. And the one I didn't mention is that this makes your code look like incomprehensible garbage. Tailwind HTML files using BEM are just not OK.

Keeping my html and CSS separate make everything I do faster and lighter. Most importantly, CSS is now mature and finally does all the things for all the browser that make the frameworks just enough less useful that they become bloat.

My two cents. I'm sure Tailwind is helpful for many. But I gotta preach the basics.

Re:A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 on Wednesday February 07, 2024 @06:10PM (#39295592)
"A small team of [hero] web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it [saving us all from eternal wackness]. - There, I fixed it for you. :)
Re:Macaroons Escalated Quickly on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @05:17PM (#39210204)
Don't let anyone try to convince you that up is down. Word was spelled wrong. Period.
Re:The Best Timed Shot in TV History (Probably) on Tuesday November 14, 2023 @11:35AM (#38265599)
Nah. There's a cut. This has been going around for so long and isn't what it says.
Yeah. I'm glad I figured this one out before getting married. They have no real value. They do look nice and are great for grinding metal. But they aren't rare. The value has always been completely managed. And the notion that you spend a lot on a ring is so insidious.

It rains diamonds on Neptune.

Re:Julia Evans: Git rebase, what can go wrong on Monday November 06, 2023 @06:12PM (#38170543)
Everything. Everything can go wrong! :)
Re:Styling with Classy CSS (2006) on Thursday November 02, 2023 @02:09PM (#38117699)
I will always argue against this. Keep your layout in one file and your styling in another. I've done more CSS than most in heavy web production and I never once had a reason to think something like this would be faster or more efficient.
Re:The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop on Thursday October 26, 2023 @02:06PM (#38029431)
Yeah, agreed. Somehow CSS and a very general concern for UX have become my most valuable skills as a developer. I think the title of the article isn't correct. It should be "The Negative Impact of Responsive Design by People Who Aren't Good At It."
Re:It's Time to Tax Billionaires on Monday October 23, 2023 @02:36PM (#37989741)
Yeah, it's ahistorical. Some of these comments are soooo confident and condescending while ignoring basic history. Many high school kids know that the tax rate has gone down dramatically for the past 40 years. Turning that around even a little isn't some kind of hyper-leftist agenda. Like, is it really that radical to dial it back to where Reagan left it?
Re:First of its kind material can reconnect severed nerves on Tuesday October 10, 2023 @08:38PM (#37839618)
Knowing someone with a spinal injury I can tell you that these constant innovations that won't reach the market for 20 years are kind of continuously devastating.

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