HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

DavidPiper

2,156 karma · joined December 17, 2017

submissionscomments
DavidPiper··on Everyone's Packing Up
I'm in pretty much the exact same place as you - although I need my smartphone for work.

If you need help with YouTube, like I do, here are some extremely helpful uBlock Origin scripts to hide Shorts: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

DavidPiper··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
Not OP but I've also read and recommended The Comfort Crisis.

Stepping further down the "better personal health" path, there's Outlive by Peter Attia. Stepping further down the "addiction to convenience" path, there's Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke.

Both excellent books and perspectives worth reading. (Both audiobooks are great too.)

DavidPiper··on Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest
Excerpts from a response to "human nature" arguments (source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDCXpEsSZZ)

>>>

Arguments based on human nature are nearly always awful.

...

It's human nature to care about yourself, but it's also human nature to care about others.

Different norms develop around different aspects of our nature.

You can't then use human nature to explain why it's okay to violently enforce social norms related to property,

but an unworkable injustice to violently enforce social norms related to charity.

...

While it might be human nature to consider the wood I chop mine, and the wood you chop yours,

it's probably not human nature to consider the wood as belonging to an entirely made-up legal entity

that neither planted the trees nor cut them down.

The fact of this weird arrangement, which goes against the self-interest of every woodsman,

does seem natural to a lot of people, points to the core of the problem with appeals to human nature.

...

The human nature being appealed to is shaped by the system it's being used to defend.

DavidPiper··on Every Fucking Website (2020)
I agree with you too, but I don't think it's necessarily a gross over-exaggeration: it's possible that the majority of the buying population are extremely vulnerable to manipulation.

"Average" doesn't necessarily mean half way between two extremes - the average human might actually be all of:

- extremely vulnerable to manipulation

- struggling with impulse control

- prone to making bad financial decisions

- the elderly / kids (<16/>60)

Based on age demographics, rampant consumerism and social media addiction, especially in those age demographics, I'd be more inclined to guess the average human is all of those things.

DavidPiper··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
Remember when Firefox was the first browser to have "tabbed browsing"?

Obviously UBO isn't a first party feature - but if only Firefox could generate as much traction about ad blocking as they did with tabs.

DavidPiper··on Hello, me. It's been a while
At the start of this year I wrote down "Get rid of your Airpods" as a New Years Resolution. This was basically my proxy for "stop filling every spare moment with audiobooks and podcasts".

I still haven't done it, and my reflex for listening to something - even after my listening backlogs emptied a few months back - suggests I'm essentially addicted. Especially considering how much better I feel when I don't take my airpods out with me.

So, time to deal with that I guess. Thanks for the push.

DavidPiper··on The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)
> The person [is not super fired up and] doesn’t just want to act as a soldier for their team

This pulled me into a tangential thought:

Has anyone else noticed that a lot of people just CAN'T be wrong? They might be contrarian, cynical, narcissists, experts in their field, experiencing PTSD or other emotional disregulation, extremely online, ... Then the team-based things: political entrenchment, [colour]-pilled, conspiracy theorists, religious, Collingwood supporters (kidding) ...

Finding people who are genuinely interested in learning about things that might change their views in substantial ways is very hard. Even when you find people genuinely interested in learning, it's so common to see evidence take a back seat to political or religious views. It makes you feel crazy sometimes.

DavidPiper··on There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order
and hexaflexagons are the bestaflexagons
DavidPiper··on Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)
When I was 11, I pulled a book off the shelf at the nearby library called "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days". I remember thinking the title was clearly nonsense, but if I could even learn a fraction of it, that would be pretty cool. We didn't have a computer at home yet, so I wrote out the exercises by hand.

I think I got about a third of the way through. I knew (debatably) what inheritance was, that a Dog is an Animal, etc.

School, university, and 10 years of career later across multiple stacks and companies, there's still a heap I don't know, but you can drop me in a lot of codebases and I'll figure it out.

> So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.

True, but it DID change my life.

DavidPiper··on Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL
> Vulkan - I don't even want to know

Almost 1000: https://github.com/Overv/VulkanTutorial/blob/main/code/15_he...

(From Chapter 15 of the Vulkan Tutorial from vulkan-tutorial.com)

DavidPiper··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
Very happy JamCorder customer here. I've started playing in improv shows since I bought it too, and it's nice to have those on record!

It's rare that I come across a product I have literally zero complaints about, or any feedback to offer. Even my concern that it was tied to an app that might disappear one day is of course covered by the fact that it's all just MIDI files on a card.

Thank you so much for making this, it's basically a perfect product for me and I love it. No notes.

DavidPiper··on First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star
FWIW I don't think it's pathetic at all, and I have the same reaction as you to a lot of things on HN. There are a wide variety of topics that bring out various biases and other cognitive blind spots in people, and bots.

Space travel seems to be one of the more harmless ones, but I agree it's frustrating to see people implicitly or explicitly skip over things like near-light-speed travel as solved problem, then reject arguments from others as "not thinking big enough", etc.

In general, divorce from reality doesn't seem to be related to intelligence at all in my experience. I'm sure there are plenty of times when my wishful thinking gets in the way too.

DavidPiper··on The human-in-the-loop is tired
Oh that hit me more than I thought it would, thank you.
DavidPiper··on A retrospective of my time on the internet
> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

DavidPiper··on Pre-2022 Books
And their reputation suffered so much that we're calling it out on an internet forum decades later.
DavidPiper··on Pre-2022 Books
> But I can’t help but feel that the effort meant something.

Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point.

Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling...

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at all, and it's up to the buyer to discover "no, this is bad", but at that point their money is already spent.

DavidPiper··on The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.
DavidPiper··on Stop the Apple Music app from launching
Sadly it doesn't quite go away even when you've turned everything off: https://davids.town/dear-apple-please-fix-ios-music
DavidPiper··on Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion
Everyone got real loud when Windows 10 was killed off. And it happened anyway. I expect the same will happen this time, as do Microsoft.

Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.

DavidPiper··on College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos
Slightly facetiously, but also completely seriously: I thought the speaker was talking about a "solution" that explicitly frames the students as the "problem" - and the students noticed.
DavidPiper··on Ten Signs of Fascism. America has all of them
Not sure I agree with some of your points, but also not sure they're downvote-worthy.

As a non-American, the only thing I could probably argue against in good faith with enough context is Point 2.

I took from the 10 stories that everybody knew what was happening, and still nobody did anything (with one exception after-the-fact). The media today is certainly broadcasting what is happening, but I'm not sure it's actually solving the "let's do something about it" problem.

DavidPiper··on Ten Signs of Fascism. America has all of them
Another opportunity to recommend "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. The audiobook is great too.

A critical but empathetic look at how fascism rises and spreads through, and alongside, ordinary people in ordinary society. Excellent book, incredibly relevant.

An excerpt, if you don't want to commit to the whole thing: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

DavidPiper··on Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
Assembly for the correct architecture is only one part of getting an executable running on a machine.

- Dynamic libraries (e.g. for calling into the kernel, but also user space dynamic libraries) are OS-specific (.so for Linux, .dylib for macOS, .dll for Windows)

- Executable format is OS-specific (ELF for Linux, Mach-O for macOS, PE for Windows)

- Dynamic loading and linkage of both the above are also therefore OS-specific

DavidPiper··on David Attenborough's 100th Birthday
I really enjoyed OP's story, and the way they told it. Knowing the location of Richmond Hill is really not the point.
DavidPiper··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
Who said AI taking your job is "the most likely" case? Even by those extreme estimates of 30% unemployment or whatever - that still leaves ~65% of jobs not lost to AI.
DavidPiper··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
You don't have any idea what job they have, how good they are at it, what their company does, what industry they work in, whether their income is backed by labour, knowledge work, emotional connection, government relationships, capital investments, ...

See above.

DavidPiper··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately:

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

DavidPiper··on Agent - Native Mac OS X coding ide/harness
Nope, looks like someone's angling for some sweet domain parking money.

Or a lawsuit, given macOS is a trademark.

DavidPiper··on AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one.

Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.

DavidPiper··on AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole".

I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".

Page 1 of 17Next →