Hacker News: Anon4Now

New comment by Anon4Now in "Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)"

Anon4Now — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:23:06 +0000

It's gone. So are many services that the city provided.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)"

Anon4Now — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:21:06 +0000

I'm with you there, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't impacted residential prices.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)"

Anon4Now — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:26:01 +0000

If the property is devalued, the property taxes lower accordingly. Portland, Oregon has been facing this problem recently. The devaluations caused the tax revenues for the city to drop, which in turn has caused budget issues.

For example, "Big Pink" is an office tower in downtown Portland. It's last sale was for about $370 million. Out of desperation in a saturated market, the owners sold it last year for about $45 million. No one - the owners, the city, or the citizens - wants to have the vicious downturn of values, and there is no easy solution. Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.

New comment by Anon4Now in "What Happened to Fry's Electronics"

Anon4Now — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 05:02:40 +0000

If you find business autopsies interesting, YouTuber Michael Girdley does pretty decent videos about them. Here's his Fry's one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxPRkOdBmck

New comment by Anon4Now in "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward"

Anon4Now — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:02:34 +0000

From the operator post:

> Your a scientific programming God!

Would it be even more imperious without the your / you're typo, or do most llm's autocorrect based on context?

New comment by Anon4Now in "15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram"

Anon4Now — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:50:55 +0000

> everything is moving very fast right now

Now that's an interesting comment for him to include. The cynic in me could find / can think of lots of reasons from my YouTube feed as to why that might be so. What else is going on at Microsoft that could cause this sense of urgency?

New comment by Anon4Now in "Over-regulation is doubling the cost"

Anon4Now — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 04:27:27 +0000

Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Who still uses cash?"

Anon4Now — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 04:36:43 +0000

They didn't speak English, and I speak a little Spanish. I got to know a lot of these guys, so I asked them. My boss immigrated from Mexico, and he explained the under-the-table pay setup. Many landscapers and contractors in the area pay workers under the table because a lot of them under report income to the IRS. Plus, my stepmom was illegal before my dad and her got married, so it's no big deal to me.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Who still uses cash?"

Anon4Now — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 04:29:55 +0000

I only brought it up to customers who had tap symbols on their cards. The surprising part wasn't that they didn't realize that they could tap, it's that they didn't even know that the technology existed.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Who still uses cash?"

Anon4Now — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:07:42 +0000

During Covid, my business slowed way down, and I took a part time job at a gas station convenience store (because selling cigarettes made be essential). The store was in a suburb of Portland with an average household income in the top 10 of Oregon, but there were also a lot of trade workers, undocumented immigrants, and generally a good mix of income levels.

Some relevant observations:

- Lower income customers used cash much more than higher income.

- Men used cash way more than women, with the exception of retirement-age women buying their smokes / wine / beer.

- Undocumented workers almost always used cash. Most were paid in $100 bills on Fridays, so they were probably paid under the table.

- Phone tap-to-pay was almost exclusively iPhone. In fact, I don't think I ever saw an Android user pay by phone tap.

- A surprising number of people didn't realized they could just tap to pay instead of running the chip.

- If the till ran out of pennies for change, no one gave a shit.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Google Workspace Updates: Send Gmail end-to-end encrypted emails to anyone"

Anon4Now — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:24:01 +0000

All I want from Google Workspace is a single-user email account tied to my domain name. Instead, I have an overly complex system where I need to grant my own phone permission to watch YouTube videos. It would be nice if they had a more basic version.

New comment by Anon4Now in "The importance of offtopic"

Anon4Now — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:25:14 +0000

It's a phrase coined by Shakespeare in his play Cymbeline. As far as I know, it never had a basis in science but was a common belief.

During the Cold War, with the possibility of fighting in the USSR, the US Army conducted experiments with soldiers doing extended bivouacs outside in cold weather to see whether there was increased likelihood of sickness. They couldn't find any evidence that it did.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees"

Anon4Now — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 01:20:36 +0000

Let's not over-complicate the issue. It's 98F today where I live, and I'm sitting comfortably in my room, without any AC, because I have a big tree outside blocking the sunlight. Shade works wonders.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Chairs, Chairs, Chairs"

Anon4Now — Wed, 28 May 2025 10:13:26 +0000

I'm not going to milk this joke any further, but that would be a good Veo 3 prompt.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Chairs, Chairs, Chairs"

Anon4Now — Wed, 28 May 2025 09:01:23 +0000

Nice site, but where's the 'Add to Cart' buttons?

New comment by Anon4Now in "Show HN: I built a word game. My mom thinks it's great. What do you think?"

Anon4Now — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 07:54:39 +0000

> - Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.

You've essentially described the Jumble puzzle, which appeared in daily newspapers. It's been around since 1954, but I'm not surprised to see it reinvented since few people get a daily newspaper anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumble

New comment by Anon4Now in "Hacker News for Gamedev"

Anon4Now — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:18:30 +0000

> hacker news aced it with the clean look

It's the old school magic of nested

's.

New comment by Anon4Now in "Making the video that made Gorillaz"

Anon4Now — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:32:00 +0000

I loved that song and never saw the video. I don't think a video made any band famous since the MTV era.

New comment by Anon4Now in "A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)"

Anon4Now — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 03:43:23 +0000

He had to close down his cooking school during Covid, so he started making YT videos. I watch a number of chefs on YT, and he's easily my favorite. He's a wonderful teacher, and I've learned more from him than any other because he always reinforces concepts without being repetitive and dull. It also helps that his meals are practical for home cooks, and, overall, he's just a charming guy.

New comment by Anon4Now in "A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2021)"

Anon4Now — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 02:47:04 +0000

I prefer the Chef Jean-Pierre method [1] because he keeps it simple. He also shows why the horizontal cut really doesn't make much sense.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjZ1LFqNWRM&list=PLnujfCpADf...