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mega_dean

Re:The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer on Sunday August 23, 2026 @09:09AM (#49408584)
I really liked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera because of the style of writing and not because of the story. The author goes on a lot of thought-provoking philosophical tangents. Here's an example from the very beginning of the book:

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

Re:The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer on Sunday August 23, 2026 @08:40AM (#49408375)
This isn't a real counterexample, but an interesting case is Bobby McFerrin, who wrote "Don't Worry, Be Happy". He avoided listening to singers for 1-2 years in order to develop his own voice/sound:

"First was the vision, then the technique of working it out. I wanted to find my own way of singing by knowing myself. I knew that if I started listening to other singers, it would take me years to develop. So I shut myself off from other singers for along time."

from page 25 of https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/R%26B-Re...

> I remember a story about people who stutter not stuttering while singing.

“Everybody's sayin' that the Scatman stutters

But doesn't ever stutter when he sings

But what you don't know, I'm gonna tell you right now

That the stutter and the scat is the same thing”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_John

Re:Show HN: Zanagrams on Monday June 29, 2026 @06:55PM (#48726410)
If it was really an “HN themed puzzle”, all the letters would be A or I and the minimum word length would be 2.

I’m kidding of course - great game!

Re:Steam Machine on Monday June 22, 2026 @07:08PM (#48637725)
> bring gaming back to the couch in a way that the Steam Link didn't succeed at.

Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...

Lazygit for a standalone program, or magit for an emacs package (some people use a different editor and just treat emacs+magit as a dedicated git frontend).
Re:Spotify Killed the Thrill of the Hunt on Friday June 19, 2026 @06:24PM (#48603987)
There is a setting (at Settings > Playback > Autoplay) that you can disable those songs after your playlist ends.
Re:Leave a Trace on Friday June 19, 2026 @04:55PM (#48603146)
I used to go hiking in New Mexico and I actually liked when I came across little signs that someone was there: a small stack of rocks, sticks arranged in a crop-circley pattern, a makeshift bridge over a small stream, etc.

But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re:Ask HN: Depression on Friday June 12, 2026 @07:01PM (#48510394)
I was in a similar place ~6 years ago, so not AI-based but still depressed. I tried therapy for 2-3 years and personally didn’t find it helpful. My problem is overthinking and dwelling on things, so I think it was counterproductive to spend dedicated time every week talking about why I was depressed. However, I’d still recommend trying it since it’s obviously helpful for a lot of people. Just don’t get too discouraged if it doesn’t work for you.

I tried improving diet/exercise/sleep like the other commenters suggest, but of course the depression makes that nearly impossible. The only thing that actually helped me was burning all the way out, quitting my job, and going back to blue collar work. I don’t work from home anymore and I make less than half of what I made as a dev, so it was a big lifestyle change, but I wish I had done it years earlier.

Anyway, I hope you figure out what works for you. I wasted a lot of my life being depressed and I hate to see others going through it.

That was my reaction at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Some of the other bizarre syntax bothered me for much longer, like using semicolons for list separators, eg [1;2;3] instead of [1,2,3].

I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly.

I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.

Re:Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @06:56PM (#48391236)
I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

Re:Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade? on Friday May 29, 2026 @07:06PM (#48330519)
> I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable

I just saw this comment yesterday about one of the tests from Bun’s rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314311 It reads in the raw source code and uses a regex to assert that “unsafe” is used.

> These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden

I’ve come to the same conclusion, but that’s only because I’m working on solo projects. I think they are probably worth it with multiple devs on the same project.

Re:Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans on Thursday May 21, 2026 @07:00PM (#48229858)
I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.
Re:Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision... on Friday May 08, 2026 @07:48PM (#48070176)
Reminds me of this page with an example for understanding how many permutations there are for a shuffled deck of cards: https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

> So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way. Shall we play a game?

> Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).
> Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

Believe the repliers: I created an account in May 2024 and I have not added a phone number. Here's a screenshot from my settings: https://imgur.com/a/Q7kJpDv

But also, your eyes aren't lying to you: some servers require accounts to have confirmed phone number in order to join. So there is probably a lot of people who have had the experience of creating a Discord account, trying to join a server / accept an invite, and immediately seeing a "you must provide a phone number" prompt.

The youtube channel Summoning Salt made a great video that covers the history of Tetris world records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOJlg8g8_yw
Re:FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies on Thursday March 20, 2025 @07:48PM (#43430361)
> I'm curious how this can be applied with the inevitable combinatorial exhaustion that will happen with musical aspects such as melody, chord progression, and rhythm.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

They did this in 2020. The article points out that "Whether this tactic actually works in court remains to be seen" and I haven't been following along with the story, so I don't know the current status.

Re:Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis on Thursday December 12, 2024 @07:05PM (#42404723)
> still being as faithful to the original as it could be

Wow, you weren't kidding - it's basically a note-for-note cover of the whole album. Thanks for sharing the link!

Re:Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job on Tuesday December 10, 2024 @04:42PM (#42381888)
> Although it has been on my mind for a long time, I haven’t been able to read a comprehensive book based on these studies

Deep Work by Cal Newport focuses on these ideas pretty heavily, and he cites plenty of studies to back up his arguments. Like the author of the blogpost says, "There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you", but I found my productivity increased noticeably after I applied some of the advice from the book.

I released a game using OCaml bindings to the Raylib library. I had never written OCaml before and I didn't spend very much time refactoring, so the code is pretty messy and maybe isn't the best example of the language. But some of it turned out pretty nice - the first ~90 lines of this file detect collisions between two shapes using the Separating Axis theorem: https://github.com/mega-dean/hallowdale/blob/main/src/collis...
Re:Every arthouse buff you know is pirating films on Monday November 11, 2024 @03:07PM (#42110053)
In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says:

> As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive.

But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial.

EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.

Re:Wasp Flamethrower Drone Attachment on Sunday November 03, 2024 @10:45PM (#42038250)
> Does anybody smarter have a good point of re-assurance?

I'm not very smart, but I don't think you need to worry about drones using the linked flamethrower attachment: in order to buy from the website, the terrorist needs to click the "Agree" checkbox that says "I understand that operating a drone or UAS in the US with this attachment would require a Part 107 Waiver."

This page has some information about operating drones over people: https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/operations_over... . That page says "the remote pilot must take steps using a safety risk-based approach to ensure that ... the small UAS is not operated in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another (§ 107.23)". So IIUC, I think it's likely that the FAA would deny the application for the Part 107 Waiver, and the terrorist wouldn't be able to use it.

Hope that helps!

Re:Zed – The Editor for What's Next on Sunday November 03, 2024 @12:14PM (#42034345)
Thorsten Ball streams development of Zed on Twitch sometimes, and it's pretty entertaining to watch: https://www.twitch.tv/thorstenball

(EDIT: if his name sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because he is the author of https://interpreterbook.com/ and https://compilerbook.com/ )

Re:34x34x34 Rubik's Cube on Friday November 01, 2024 @09:40AM (#42016824)
In the 49x49x49 video, he goes over previous world records of "Highest Order nxnxn Twisty Puzzle", and I thought it was weird he didn't mention the 34x34x34. But in the youtube description, he links to this forum post where he announces it on August 10 (a few weeks before the video, but still well after May 10): https://www.twistypuzzles.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39559 There is a comment from the creator of the 34x34x34:

> Ah there's so much I want to say, where to begin? Well, soon after finishing the 34x34, I notified Greg, who immediately notified me about the 49x49. At that point, Preston had already checkered the 49x49, so I did not consider the 34x34 a world record. It seems nobody noticed this, but nowhere in any of my videos did I claim the 34x34 was a world record :lol: But still, everyone just assumed it was :lol:

Re:'Visual clutter' alters information flow in the brain on Sunday October 27, 2024 @01:22PM (#41964093)
I've noticed that I get very distracted by motion in my peripheral vision, but not by static images. So I can use a second monitor for things like documentation, but not something like Slack that shows new messages, animated gifs/emojis, etc.

I've also configured my text editor to be very "static": when I type, the only things that can happen are the cursor moves, or text is inserted. I have to manually trigger things like the autocompletion popup, LSP checks, or highlighting the symbol under the cursor.

Oh, it's not obvious at all from the UI, but the left-most column is a link to the video of the run: https://www.speedrun.com/2048/runs/zxwdol8m
Interesting to see the times for speedruns of this game: https://www.speedrun.com/2048

    2048: 24s
    4096: 1m 37s
    8192: 4m 53s
    16384: 13m 34s
    32768: 55m 24s
Re:Self-Documenting Code on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @03:26PM (#41928489)
After that step, they say "The resulting code is shorter and has no nested logic." The resulting code has the same logic as before, it's just not visually represented as being nested. I've seen the same argument ("nesting is bad so indentation is a code smell") used to say that it's better to use early returns and omit the `else` block, eg:

    if (some_condition) {
      // do stuff here
      return;
    }
    // do other stuff here
is "better" than:

    if (some_condition) {
      // do stuff here
    } else {
      // do other stuff here
    }
If you have very-deeply nested code then it usually becomes easier to work with after splitting it up into smaller pieces. But IMO rewriting code like this to save a single level of indentation is bikeshedding.
Re:Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @10:55AM (#41925688)
It's also a joke in the TV show "Community": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP1Atb8nAGY

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