Hacker News: Andy_Donner

New comment by Andy_Donner in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

Andy_Donner — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:20:22 +0000

I'm dyslexic and find reading genuinely taxing — my imagination moves faster than I can read, I lose the thread, and I've never enjoyed it. The last book I read for pleasure was when I was fifteen. I don't feel like I'm missing something.

But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.

He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.

New comment by Andy_Donner in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

Andy_Donner — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:37:04 +0000

The distinction that matters isn't AI or no AI — it's whether your thinking went through the response before it reached someone else. I'm building an app almost entirely with AI assistance as a non-technical founder. Half the time it leads me confidently down the wrong path and I spend my time course-correcting back to my original vision. I think that's the new way of working. I don't need to do the act of writing, but I do need to keep the assistant on track to where I want the project to go. The moment you remove that step by just pasting output directly, you've outsourced your judgment, not just your typing and you'll get coherent slop.

New comment by Andy_Donner in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"

Andy_Donner — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:29:03 +0000

My grandmother used to take me to Toys R Us for my birthday every year for exactly this reason — she didn't want to guess what I wanted, she wanted to watch me choose. Walking around that store and seeing what the toys looked like in person was something I looked forward to for days. You can't recreate that with an Amazon wishlist.

New comment by Andy_Donner in "Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated"

Andy_Donner — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:19:15 +0000

The irony of an AI hallucination killing off one of the most famous people to have tracked down a real human with a computer is brilliant. Glad the Klein bottle business lives on — and glad you're here to confirm it personally.