Top all-time · #17197
G
Generation 5
Personal blog · gen5.info · on HN as PaulHouleprogrammingdata
Generation 5 is a personal blog at gen5.info about programming and data. Since 2009, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times. The last post was in 2012, but the archive is still widely read.
33mentions?
4HN people?
2009–2026first – last linked?
What Hacker News says?
This fills about 1/3 of a wall in my office https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ and is made of 8″x8″ cards. That's the first constellation I made, most of the output is either stand alone 4″x6″ cards or constellations. I'm working now on my third constellation from images published by Ukraine's MoD. I've been dragging on my feet about blogging a manifesto for the three-sided cards, first because the system was ch…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Please stop disabling zoom”Submitted Stop Catching Exceptions as a story · 32 points
HN discussionStrikes me as so so. defer is the kind of thing I would mock up in a hurry in my code if a language or framework lacked the proper facilities, but I think you are better served with the with statement in Python or automated resource management in Java. Similarly I think people should get over Optional and Either and all of that, my experience is that it is a lot of work to use those tools properly. My first experien…
Comment linking /q/2008/08/27/what-do-you-do-when-youve-caught-an-exception/
on “Learning C3”Submitted Putting Freebase in a star schema as a story · 9 points
HN discussionOne of my hobbies is printing "three-sided cards" that frequently have anime characters as subjects, these have a description of of the image in English at the bottom left but I pull out proper names in Japanese and set them vertically on the upper right. Here is one example https://gen5.info/$/Q.AEW.3FW2XIZUINQ/BACK800/0278.PNG which is part of this group of cards: https://gen5.info/$/Q.AEW.3FW2XIZUINQ/ I had to wr…
Comment linking /$/Q.AEW.3FW2XIZUINQ/
on “Requirements for Japanese Text Layout”Submitted What do you do when you've caught an exception? as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIt seems to be obscure that QR codes have an "alphanumeric" character set that includes everything you need to make URLs IF you use only uppercase characters. This increases the data density considerably. I make URLs that look like https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ (That is the digital twin of an installation on the wall behind me as I type, each square is 8 by 8 inches; the barcodes on the back of the cards ar…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “QR error correction helps and hinders scanning”Submitted Punched Card Decoder as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome people will say the opposite. https://gen5.info/q/2008/07/31/stop-catching-exceptions/ Checked exceptions don't cause people to write good error handling code, they just cause a crisis for no good reason when you are writing code that people will answer with some lame answer like try { action(); } catch(ActionException x) {} or try { action(); } catch(ActionException x) { throw new RuntimeException(x); } or try…
Comment linking /q/2008/08/27/what-do-you-do-when-youve-caught-an-exception/
on “Learning C# and .NET after two decades of programming”Submitted First Class Functions And Logical Negation in C# as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI would say the opposite. Whenever I have started a serious side project it changed my life in 18 months or so. It goes from "not getting called back" to recruiters (not from Amazon) contacting me. Usually my side projects involve finding some use of a new technology that other people aren't doing that doesn't seem that hard. Some examples are * In the late 1990s I made a Java applet that knocked off Apple's Quickti…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Ask HN: What kind of projects make a junior candidate stand out from the rest?”Submitted Loading A Database Of Everything Into A Star Schema as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCommunicating that you know what you are talking about and that you're different is a lot of work. I think being visibly "anti-AI" makes you look as much of an NPC as someone who "vibe coded XYZ." It takes care, consistency and most of all showing people something they've never seen before. It also helps to get in the habit of doing in person demos, if you want to win hackathons it really helps to be good at (1) giv…
Comment linking /demo/biofeedback/
on “Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning”Submitted The Semantics of Dictionaries, Maps and Hashtables as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere are many books on the subject https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-0-387-3561... https://www.amazon.com/INSPIRED-Create-Tech-Products-Custome... https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Exploring_Requirements.html There is a lot to say for having conversations with possible users, it helps to have some "visual aids" such as a low fidelity mockup, printed-out screenshots, etc. My current "side project" is…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Ask HN: Can you train yourself into having good ideas?”Submitted The New Common Sense: Beyond Freebase and DBpedia as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI edit text with PyCharm and check it in with GitHub. I almost like Markdown and almost like Restructured Text. What kills the deal for me is that every dual-mode editor is slow. (e.g. like driving nails with a hammer which has a 4 to 6 second delay between the strike and the recoil) I have a hobby of printing cards on an inkjet printer and I've written a "book" that gives step my step instructions for the whole pro…
Comment linking /$/X$Q-01:$ZG*XHWPM6/
on “Ask HN: Do you have a personal wiki?”Submitted Javascript, Closures and the Arrow Of Time as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLately I am having the best time making worlds like https://gen5.info/xr/mars4/ which you can visit in a web browser or with a VR headset. This is based on A-Frame https://aframe.io/docs/1.5.0/introduction/ which like HTMX on drugs: you bring some Javascript in from unpkg, React and three.js are under the hood, but you don't need webpack or any of that. It defines new HTML elements similar to the elements of VRML, b…
Comment linking /xr/mars4/
on “Web Development Is Getting Too Complex, and It May Be Our Fault”I've been doing my own personal research on HRV and getting to the bottom of it. The literature is bewildering because of course there are many ways to measure it. If you measure it over the course of the day it is influenced by things like the activities you do. Of course your HRV is going to be higher if you alternate intense activity that raises your heart rate with rest and since activity is so important in it I…
Comment linking /demo/biofeedback/
on “Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety”See https://gen5.info/q/2008/07/31/stop-catching-exceptions/ and https://gen5.info/q/2008/08/27/what-do-you-do-when-youve-cau... It's very important to minimize the burden of handling errors in code with simple control flow. Frequently I see people try very hard to handle errors with monads in languages like Scala at the micro level and they are so burned out by this that they don't put any effort into handling erro…
Comment linking /q/2008/08/27/what-do-you-do-when-youve-caught-an-exception/
on “I love building a startup in Rust. I wouldn't pick it again”Personally I am a big arangodb fan. It has never gotten as fashionable as some databases but I use it for many routine applications that I'd consider using a relational db for. For instance: * store the temperature and humidity readings from sensors, * pull out all the pictures from 'The Met' art gallery that have a near square aspect ratio and swipe right or left to select them to become part of something like http…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Why do NoSQL databases not support joins?”(1) I've somewhat stumbled on a persona as a Fox-photographer who strongly communicates that he is a public affordance which (a) helps me get better photos of people, (b) gets me flagged down by people telling me about interesting things going on like https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116021033821248982 and (c) results in handing out several business cards a day https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115901190470904729 and I'm wit…
Comment linking /demo/biofeedback/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”My beefs: (1) The iPad has an NFC terminal but is locked down so it can only be used for payments (2) NFC competes with QR codes for many applications. iOS support for QR codes is great because it is built into the camera app so you can give simple instructions for how to read the codes. On Android you usually have to download a third-party app. Usually I have to try two or three before I find one that really works…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “NFC tag scan on iPhone is (almost) useless”I was writing a manifesto but haven't gotten finished because my practice has been changing so rapidly (e.g. I talked about all kinds of problems that I used to have but felt like I had to fix them instead of complain about them publicly) There are 48 of them on the wall opposite my workstation https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ there is a placard which links to that URL. Those are 8 inch squares and it covers 3…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Ask HN: Been job hunting for two years. No luck. Do I need a personal project?”I think your motivation is wrong. I don't know if it came from my work getting a PhD or from my work in startups [1] or earlier than that but I think any side project that "hasn't been done before" is not worth doing. For me any side project has to be something I can demo to an audience that, with a dash of showmanship, will knock their socks off. For instance I knew a machine-learning based RSS reader was possible…
Comment linking /demo/biofeedback/
on “Ask HN: How to find joy in writing/learning about tech in this AI world?”Here is one I took with the Ego https://gen5.info/$/6-*XERJ0LO3S1GNQP/ For a long time my photography has been secondary to printing things onto cards, that is an 8.5x11 card with a QR code on the back, if you scan it you go to that page. I have a bunch of cardboard anaglyph glasses so of course I give one out when I give out an anaglyph card. Lately I've been getting into "straight-to-web" publishing again since I…
Comment linking /$/6-*XERJ0LO3S1GNQP/
on “Nintendo DS cameras are the best lo-fi photo trend”I've been doing a project that involves making cyberphysical objects "three-sided cards" and constellations of those cards... This one takes up at least 1/3 of the wall of my office: https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ I am getting pulled into making "constellations" that tell a story or describe some domain (say games related to Killer 7, weapons used by Ukraine and Russia, characters that Tara Strong voiced, ..…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Ask HN: Tools for exploratory analysis of 10-100GB graphs”Both. My current side project leans heavily on "iterate". I started out with the goal of "print something everyday so my inkjet printer doesn't dry out". Along the way I discovered new problems (I can't give away images unless I document them) and new goals (interactive cards that can change the environment and transform how I relate to people.) I built a grid of 8x8 squares that covered about 30% of a wall and disc…
Comment linking /$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/
on “Ask HN: Do you iterate or do you plan?”