HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

johncoltrane

1,580 karma · joined May 20, 2010

submissionscomments
johncoltrane··on Ask HN: What YouTube channels should I let my kids watch?
Don't let them watch YouTube/TV on their own for hours on end. Instead, set a dedicated daily slot and be with them for answering questions, providing perspective… and most importantly having fun with your kids.
johncoltrane··on Ask HN: Which books did you read at least twice?
J.R.R. Tolkien: The lord of the Rings (lost count)

Philip K. Dick: Ubik, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, etc. too many to count (many more than twice)

William Gibson: everything at least twice

Neal Stephenson: Snow crash (three times, I think)

Clifford D. Simak: City

H. P. Lovecraft: everything at least twice. There is a French compilation of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Silver Key, and Through the Gates of the Silver Key that I've read countless times. I've used two editions and I'm at my third.

Maurice G. Dantec: Babylon Babies (three times)

Possibly many others.

johncoltrane··on Ask HN: What's the oldest software tool you still rely on every day?
Notational Velocity's last update was in 2011. Still works like a charm 15 years and 14 macOS releases later.
johncoltrane··on School protests send shivers down French government's spine
Using high-schoolers and students to stir things up has been a traditional MO of the french "left-of-the-left" for decades. It's not particularly hard to convince a group of teenagers to skip class and join a "manif'". From there it's all just a walk in the park for "agitateurs" to turn them into cannon fodder and set up the good old "bavure" trap for the government.
johncoltrane··on The new Firefox design is here
The big selling point is that everything stays in the same window.

- The split view is a special looking tab you can come too easily. - You can have several split views in the same window. - Selecting what tab you want in the split view is much cleaner than tearing off tabs into windows. - No conceptual switch between "tab" and "window".

johncoltrane··on I made a site to show good news
The _real_ problem with news is that, positive or negative, they are mostly irrelevant to one's real life and non-actionable. The negative stuff pushes you down and you can't do shit about any of it. The positive stuff pulls you up but it's all about people, places and things that don't actually matter.

Filtering out the negativity only leaves you with useless positivity.

johncoltrane··on Canceling Emily
Well, engaging in subversive activities comes with some level of risk, Emily, you should have known that.
johncoltrane··on Where to Draw the Line Which decisions should not be handed over to LLMs?
Easy: do not hand _any_ decision to LLMs.
johncoltrane··on Show HN: My PM kept asking "is this shipped yet?" so I automated release notes
Everywhere I worked, PMs were ultimately in charge of deciding what gets shipped and when so "is this feature shipped yet?" is the last question I would expect from them.

It's probably a good thing that you build this but there definitely are deeper issues at play, here.

johncoltrane··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
Yes, "just". Because the Morocco bit of the article is mostly inconsequential. Those unsolicited telemarketing calls are extremely annoying no matter who is calling and from where. That's what this is all about.

> Or is it deliberately done because it is cheaper?

Well, of course it is.

> Why not have these in France proper giving jobs to French people?

Because you would have to pay them French wages, which would make no economical sense. If anything, the fact that most of that industry is abroad probably makes it easier to pass such a law.

johncoltrane··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
Morocco is just where lots of french-speaking call centers are located. The industry generates a non-negligible part of Morocco's GDP and most of the clientele is from France. So yeah, Morocco may be right to be concerned by an eventual shrinking of the market.

The call centers themselves are in Morocco but the calls never come from +212.

johncoltrane··on Ask HN: After 20 years of coding it is not a fun hobby anymore. How about you?
Coding _as a job_ stopped being fun a long time ago and I think it has a strong effect on my hobby choices. After a day of dealing with issue trackers, AI-generated accessibility reports and all that crap I find it harder and harder to switch to my side projects.

I've been logged out of my personal GitHub account for months, actually… and that's probably a good thing: more outdoors, more photography, more drawing, more reading, etc.

johncoltrane··on The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
Everything in Blade Runner is amazing.
johncoltrane··on If another civilisation lived on Earth before us, would we know?
There have been lots of civilisations before. Some that we know of and maybe some that we don't know of yet.
johncoltrane··on Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.
johncoltrane··on A free, browser-based interactive Vim trainer
Or you can learn to use Vim directly in Vim with :help user-manual.
johncoltrane··on What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works
Parent said "impartial", which rules out both The Economist ("pro") and Jacobin ("anti").
johncoltrane··on Show HN: Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line
Group policy sadly doesn't like newly registered domains so I can't check this one out right now but it immediately reminded me of this one, that I favorited 4 years ago:

https://yamanote.style/

johncoltrane··on Ask HN: Why do programmers watch medical shows given that it is debugging?
Well, debugging is the only intellectually stimulating part left in my job so I enjoy it, a lot, while it lasts.

To each their own, I guess.

johncoltrane··on Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van
hjkl AND the cursor keys equally suck for moving the cursor because they only move by one line or by one character.

jjjllllljjh is just as bad as <Down><Down><Down><Right><Right><Right><Right><Right><Down><Down><Left>. There are much better ways to move around and touch-typists and non-touch-typists would be better off learning them instead of obsessing over hjkl: :help motion.txt.

johncoltrane··on Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van
jkl; are (on QWERTY keyboards). hjkl are not.
johncoltrane··on Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van
hjkl are more of a cult/status thing anyway because they are not _that_ touch-typing-friendly to begin with, and they suck just as much as the cursor keys for moving the cursor around.

Insisting so much on hjkl is silly. No one is using an ADM-3A in 2026, so the official documentation should let users use the more intuitive cursor keys and downgrade hjkl to what they have always been since vi: __ham-fisted alternatives to the cursor keys__.

johncoltrane··on Ask HN: What would you say to Elon Musk on his 55th birthday TODAY?
Happy birthday!
johncoltrane··on Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way
Capitals are good. Use capitals.
johncoltrane··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
The entirety of 1999 and 2000 was a nightmare. "No, buddy, we won't change millenium next january." "Nope. We are still in the 20th century." And so on...

I think that's more or less when I lost faith in humanity.

johncoltrane··on The oldest surviving animated feature film at 100
What's the problem, here?
johncoltrane··on The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid
ext in tonga
johncoltrane··on Ferrari's New Jony Ive–Designed EV Is Swathed in Glass and Aluminum
When will that "dashboard with tacked-on tablets" trend stop?

It can somehow be excused in cheap models because new versions are generally incremental evolutions, which would make proper integration of the touchscreen harder/more expensive. But not in a brand new model of a luxury brand.

johncoltrane··on The Economist prepares for a two‑track Web: one for humans one for AI agents
That would be a third track since the current Web is already (at least) "two-track": humans and search engines.
johncoltrane··on What happens when we lose a language?
The world goes on.
Page 1 of 34Next →