Hacker News: 15kingben

New comment by 15kingben in "Bing Wallpaper showing Ad for Harry Potter and Fantastic beasts box set"

15kingben — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:33:36 +0000

Subjectively I like the artwork, and I'm used to way worse ads on Windows like Bing popups when I open Chrome. In fact, that this extension has been delivering genuinely pleasant landscapes, cityscapes, animal photos etc. for many years now makes it so frustrating and jarring to get ads here too. I uninstalled it, but I doubt they care, since if they can't serve me ads how else would they extract value from me using the product.

New comment by 15kingben in "12 Months of Mandarin"

15kingben — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 19:05:59 +0000

DuChinese is a great app for reading stories at beginner levels of vocabulary. It also supports tap-to-lookup and saving words to flashcards, but unfortunately they don't integrate with Anki, only their own app's system.

New comment by 15kingben in "Big media publishers are inundating the web with subpar product recommendations"

15kingben — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:57:48 +0000

Do I have this right?

1. Google is overrun by low quality product reviews and comparisons

2. Google starts to weight highly sites with manual testing

3. All those sites shamelessly lie and say they have manual testing -> back to 1

Isn't this a problem that Pagerank is supposed to solve? Auditing content for quality is basically an intractable problem to scale

New comment by 15kingben in "15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps"

15kingben — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 06:11:07 +0000

> Can you pay for this?

Yes - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en

New comment by 15kingben in "Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?"

15kingben — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 23:24:03 +0000

A related question: what type of software engineering work is the most relaxed? So far I have only worked in live services and while I don't feel overworked, I often have background anxiety that I will break something and cause a huge impact. Are there any product areas found at FAANGs that don't cause this anxiety?

New comment by 15kingben in "Ask HN: Am I the only “unlucky” software engineer?"

15kingben — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:50:13 +0000

I think "wanting to go for a beer" is a pretty bad metric for many reasons, not the least of which is that I don't like drinking beer. A better metric might be: "If I need help would I regret asking this person?" or "If I had a disagreement would it be an overall positive experience?" I have worked with people who excel technically but that skill is largely offset by the negative effect they have on social interactions.