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jsomau

376 karma · joined April 28, 2014

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jsomau··on Show HN: The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake
Thank you for the kind words.
jsomau··on Show HN: The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake
Thank you! This is my favourite comment from the thread. You caught the heart of it.
jsomau··on Show HN: The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake
Thank you! It was a hoot to let my ideas run and have fun.
jsomau··on Show HN: The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake
Thank you for the kind words. I'm not fazed by the discussion. I just hope both teams have fun.
jsomau··on Show HN: The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake
Thanks! I’ll check it out
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Thanks for checking it out!
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Thank you - it's encouraging to get this feedback! Please let me know if you've got feedback or something you'd like to see.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
A small thing I've been building as an antidote to doomscrolling. Open a new tab and see a public domain artwork from a real museum: https://toregard.art

Mostly I wanted more art and colour in my workday - something to look at, learn through and draw inspiration from in the moments between meetings and code. You can create an account to save your favourites and curate your own gallery. Just released collections that you can make public.

Art from: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Institute of Chicago. Rijksmuseum. Cleveland Museum of Art.

jsomau··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
Neon, the Vercel recommended database storage integration, doesn't use the sensitive option for the environment variables it manages including the database connection string/password and need to be rotated then deleted and manually set up as sensitive.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
I built a cooking timer that solves the mental arithmetic of roasting multiple things at once. Pick chicken legs, sweet potato, green beans, etc and it'll give you a simple plan telling you when to put things in, flip them and take them out. Trying to eat more veggies and home cooking so this has helped me a lot!

https://www.roastrack.app/

jsomau··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2023)
Adobe Podcast | https://podcast.adobe.com | New York City, Bay Area, Remote | Full Time

The Adobe Podcast team is looking for a Senior Software Engineer with a passion for creating great product experiences. Be part of a tightly knit team developing cutting edge innovations in the world of audio on the web and help define the future of this medium as it takes over the world.

Senior Software Engineer, Web Audio Products & Services: https://careers.adobe.com/us/en/job/R138749/Senior-Software-...

jsomau··on 3D Cellular Automata and GOL in the J programming language
Self plug but I used WebGL and the texture technique to build: https://www.doorsofdelirium.com/

Click on Random a few times to get a flavour. Uses the GOL concept as a brush to spawn cells combined with some fun shader techniques to colour.

jsomau··on Who rules Earth? Wild mammals far outweighed by humans and domestic animals
I like Carlin. I like the joke. The problem is we're taking a huge number of species with us. That is after all what makes Earth special compared to any other barren rock.
jsomau··on Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.
Adding to this:

> By the time I'm down in the weeds I've forgotten what I'm doing, what the purpose of the actual API call is.

If I can craft tests up front in terms of the higher level goals then when I finish a subcomponent or get distracted by something else the higher level test is there for me to fall back on to figure out what to do next.

jsomau··on Ask HN: What are some must read books?
A Confederacy of Dunces is amazing. It’s in my top 5. Not in the same vein but I read Flowers for Algernon for the first time as an adult and it really touched my soul.
jsomau··on Show HN: My cofounder and I created a social platform for investment ideas
This new wave of social investment platforms is really exciting. Stocktwits is just noise. I'm still shocked Twitter hasn't capitalized on cashtags by at least showing market data. I've recently been a big fan of Commonstock: https://commonstock.com/ it actually allows you to link your broker through Plaid and shows a leaderboard based on actual % gain on positions.

That said, I like you bringing more competition to the scene!

jsomau··on Yuri Gagarin: Sixty years since the first man went into space [video]
If you're in to the space race, don't miss Public Service Broadcasting - Race for Space album. They have an epic track for Gagarin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY-kAnvOY80

The entire album is one of my favourites of all time.

jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Surely you're joking, Mr ambivalents!
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
I just submitted a Twitter support request to figure that out myself :)
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Thanks for trying it! So unfortunately I can't launch an extension popup over top of the checkout, it's just not in the browser extension APIs AFAIK. One alternative was to inject the popup in to the checkout page but I figured if this got any traction it's possible then a checkout page host could read the data (ie, your salary) from that. Thus, I landed on the intrusive redirect. Open to other ideas though!
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
I hear hardware startups are hard.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
The extension also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe it won't help everyone, but I hope that it reaches some.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Thanks for your response. The extension itself won't solve global overconsumption, poverty or climate change in the same way that any one individual won't. I do believe that by being more mindful of our purchases it can influence other parts of our lives though - we start to consider "the machine", consider more closely our impulses against the negative impacts our choices have and perhaps then we begin to demand something more from "the machine". Maybe if enough people become mindful they will vote for politicians that represent an interest in saving the environment, drastically increase environmental protections and incentivize sustainable manufacturing which I hope in the long run benefits all.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
That is actually where I was going to start. Tracking the CO2 output for the production of millions of individual items across the internet is hard but I believe there are some services that can estimate CO2 for deliveries based on country + zip.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
It does not except in a single case. All the data is stored locally in the browser extension storage otherwise. As part of the onboarding flow you can choose to anonymously submit your money saved to the online tally at https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/

You can also read the source code here: https://github.com/jsom/curb-your-consumerism/tree/main/src

I realize there have been browser extension authenticity issues recently with some sketchy things being published like The Great Suspender https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1.... I've got to spend more time investigating a way to remove this question for users, but my intent is to never collect any data beyond the anonymous online tally of the homepage which is opt-in only.

Sorry, I need to replace that email address it is unfortunately a placeholder. Side project has some loose threads. I'll do that tonight.

Edit: email fixed

jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
This is an interesting idea. If people know they should not buy a trashy set of knives that they'll throw away in a year that would indeed reduce consumption. I'll think more on this. Thanks for the idea!
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
I'm stoked you connect with the idea. Feel free to reach out with any feedback.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
It also shows you a random but helpful prompt to reflect on the nature of consumerism and happiness. Maybe they'll decide to not buy all 3. Not guaranteed to save everyone or anyone.
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Haha, I love this - yeah there's lots of incentives available so maybe I allow the user to select which types of metrics are most meaningful to them. This is going on the list for sure!
jsomau··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
A browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you are on a checkout page and shows you how long it took you to earn enough money to complete that purchase.

The idea is about increasing the mindfulness of your purchases and reducing unnecessary environmental waste driven by impulse buying.

Here's what I'm planning next:

- Detecting the checkouts and extracting the checkout total generally across websites still needs refinement.

- Storing the purchases/savings locally in the extension storage to show you a graph of spending and saving.

- Showing a CO2 savings estimate.

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...

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