Hacker News: andy99

New comment by andy99 in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

andy99 — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:34:51 +0000

I hope you contacted them to explain why. People usually think I’m a nut when I do it, or are too stupid to understand and think it’s a tech support issue, but it’s worth at least trying to make it clear that you are choosing not to use/do/pay something because of their choice to use recaptcha

New comment by andy99 in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

andy99 — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:32:16 +0000

Came here with roughly the same thought. Given the stated importance to many of sovereignty and not being dependent on the US, why isn’t there more opposition? I assume it’s just ignorance?

New comment by andy99 in "Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to"

andy99 — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:51:11 +0000

I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.

Seemingly Conscious AI Risks

andy99 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:02:03 +0000

Article URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6588659&trk=comments_comments-list_comment-text

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911819

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by andy99 in "Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed"

andy99 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:40:11 +0000

You seem to misunderstand the concept of liberal democracy.

New comment by andy99 in "Banned by Anthropic?"

andy99 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 22:59:54 +0000

Is this real? In my browser I couldn’t click on anything, and I find the whole thing questionable - that so many incidents were sourced seemingly so quickly and with such variety. Would like an easier way to verify if this is real and am leaning towards it’s not.

New comment by andy99 in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"

andy99 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:08:13 +0000

Identify who your buyer is. It’s probably not a technical person (and thus HN isn’t a great place to advertise).

Talk to operational people if you are interested in finding operational pain. Tech teams will tell you they are working on it and don’t need help, or at best want to hire an IC. (If that’s what you want then just approach it as a job search)

For the same reason, hours are a bad unit of time and a bad giveaway. You want to be able to offer a free diagnostic or something - nobody’s waiting with operational pain and a plan to fix it that they want to start paying for. You need to help with the plan and show them what they need.

Just my $0.02 of course, circumstances may vary

New comment by andy99 in "Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind"

andy99 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:19:29 +0000

Saw this earlier today, I think it’s very flawed and ideological, unfortunately other posts mentioning this got flagged.

First there’s the idea that “nurturing” is somehow what kids need and better for them automatically, that whatever a stereotypical man does with kids is bad for them, and we need to be rewired by pheromones or whatever to be more sensitive. And as a corollary the idea that a high-T man somehow is a worse caregiver, and that it needs to be reigned in by some adaptation. The whole thing is definitely framed for a certain world view, it’s definitely not the only interpretation.

Chinese carmaker patents voice-controlled 'in-vehicle toilet'

andy99 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:04:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1l92yv4mydo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47807415

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by andy99 in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

andy99 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:20:14 +0000

I don’t find this disingenuous.

The more typical AI fondation model company claim of “it’s so dangerous only we and people that pay us enough should hand access” is what I think is BS.

I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understand something, which is what this seems to be about. I also don’t see anything wrong with an AI operated store generally, and it of course makes sense, and is valuable, to learn about how the limitations.

New comment by andy99 in "Annual exhortation: You should have millions of dollars of term life insurance"

andy99 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:40:08 +0000

This is a question about insurance generally. Insurance for something catastrophic and very rare makes the most sense because individual premiums are low and risk is pooled. The opposite kind of insurance, and the dumbest, is getting a warranty at Best Buy (if they still exist) for 1/3 of the cost of the product, or those wheel rim warrantees. Having the product break isn’t catastrophic, and you’re not really pooling risk because the premiums cost more for you individually than you’d expect to get back if a loss happens. In those cases you’re better just setting aside the premium in the bank. But if you did this with life insurance, you would never accumulate a value anywhere near the payout.

New comment by andy99 in "Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure"

andy99 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:31:12 +0000

It’s not an expansion, they are selling the shoe assets. It’s basically just starting a new business and redeploying capital (if there is any). It’s just a really odd way to announce and undertake it.

New comment by andy99 in "Costasiella kuroshimae"

andy99 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:12:49 +0000

> please note I am not challenging the scientific truth of evolution

Evolution isn’t a matter of faith, you’re welcome to challenge it and try to poke holes in it.

Blurry iPhone Text Picture Problem: Is There an Easy Solution I'm Missing?

andy99 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:17:19 +0000

Article URL: https://onemileatatime.com/insights/blurry-iphone-text-picture-problem/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758651

Points: 20

# Comments: 5

New comment by andy99 in "Sheets Spreadsheets in Your Terminal"

andy99 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:00:44 +0000

If I’m remembering correctly, I had bought a Borland Turbo C++ compiler circa 1994 (for DOS) that came with a demo sheets application you could build and run.

Does anyone remember this, I can’t find it now.

New comment by andy99 in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

andy99 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:20:37 +0000

What does one achieve with 25 GB internet? Are speeds actually usefully faster, or is there some other bottleneck that makes the practical speed the same as in the US?

Also any workload I have that is bandwidth heavy would be on clouds machines between data centres and generally very fast. Are there reasons why someone at home would benefit from 25GB internet beyond whatever is available?

Is this a case of over engineered central planning instead of a blow against the free market?

The problem with 'bringing your whole self to work'

andy99 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:18:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-problem-with-bringing-your-whole-self-to-work?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652878

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by andy99 in "A Claude Code skill that makes Claude talk like a caveman, cutting token use"

andy99 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:14:09 +0000

I’ve heard this, I don’t automatically believe it nor do I understand why it would need to be true, I’m still caught on the old fashioned idea that the only “thinking” for autoregressive modes happens during training.

But I assume this has been studied? Can anyone point to papers that show it? I’d particularly like to know what the curves look like, it’s clearly not linear, so if you cut out 75% or tokens what do you expect to lose?

I do imagine there is not a lot of caveman speak in the training data so results may be worse because they don’t fit the same patterns that have been reinforcement learned in.

New comment by andy99 in "OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says"

andy99 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:09:51 +0000

That is gimmicky and would be an extremely low trust signal.

New comment by andy99 in "LLMs predict my coffee"

andy99 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:53:18 +0000

  Does that seem hard? I think it’s hard. The relevant physical phenomena include at least..,

In most engineering problems, the starting point is recognizing that usually one or two key things will dominate and the rest won’t matter.