Hacker News: dayvid

New comment by dayvid in "Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)"

dayvid — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:19:57 +0000

Seems like it only makes sense if it's a hybrid tablet laptop like the Yoga. Otherwise it's a nice gimmick. I can also see Apple being terrified at someone's dirty fingers smudging the laptop, though they'd have some anti-smudge coating built in at that point

New comment by dayvid in "Juggalo makeup blocks facial recognition technology (2019)"

dayvid — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:33:04 +0000

Ever since Covid, people are obscuring their faces in public more often. I especially see gig workers wearing balaclavas. Partially for sun and wind protection, but potentially for anonymity

New comment by dayvid in "Layoffs at Block"

dayvid — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:59:37 +0000

For a lot of high value per employee businesses it usually makes more sense to hire local. Offshoring is usually for jobs that don’t directly generate profits and more of a necessity. If you’re a programmer you shouldn’t work for a company where coding isn’t a profit center

New comment by dayvid in "Vouch"

dayvid — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 22:49:36 +0000

The project author has the choice of which set of projects vouches to use or to have a project-specific vouching system. People could still object to the vouch system via Issue/Pull-request Tool and off platform. Enough votes would highlight it.

New comment by dayvid in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse"

dayvid — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:42:42 +0000

Windows 8 was an insane product decision to force one platforms UI to be friendly to another (make desktop more like tablet). Mac is doing this now by unifying their UIs across platforms to be more AR friendly

New comment by dayvid in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)"

dayvid — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:52:04 +0000

People have too much to lose nowadays. Having a jail or protesting history gives you a black mark if you're middle class and you have to pursue alternate avenues to provide for yourself and your family. It's a last resort and has allowed a lot of insidious things to grow in US gov't and outside

New comment by dayvid in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)"

dayvid — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:49:40 +0000

They didn't have nonviolence trainings ahead of it. It was an unorganized to loosely organized mob, which is the hallmark of most modern movements today

New comment by dayvid in "ChatGPT Health"

dayvid — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:23:50 +0000

Based on recent experiences guiding my parents and younger brother through the medical world, I'm happy with AI as an alternative or complement. There are good doctors out there, but they're often booked solid or you only see them for 5-20 minutes in your parade of specialists you're forced to see to extract as much money from health insurance as possible

New comment by dayvid in "If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)"

dayvid — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:56:44 +0000

It ultimately doesn't change the advice. Strongly deciding I wanted a career change led me to putting in some extra time and tripling my income. It's easier if you can reduce obligations and noise and focus on what matters to optimize for whatever you want. It may not be easy, but you have some degree of power to alter your trajectory to some extent

New comment by dayvid in "Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?"

dayvid — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 16:34:49 +0000

We were hacking library computers as a kid to access blocked sites. If you put a good enough reward behind almost any OS a kid will figure it out

New comment by dayvid in "Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not"

dayvid — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:56:04 +0000

It's a full PvP server now. Old Social media outrage algos + paying people for posts further broke it

New comment by dayvid in "Free software scares normal people"

dayvid — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:19:07 +0000

For a lot of usecases there is a strong 80% functionality. E.g. For Handbrake, 80% of the time I am reducing the size of my video screen grabs from my computer or phone. Don't need any resolution change, etc.

There are other times I want cropping or something similar, but it's really only 10-30% of the time. If people want to have a more custom workflow they can use an advanced UI

New comment by dayvid in "Free software scares normal people"

dayvid — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:17:05 +0000

I'd argue most software scares normal people. They only learn because of a strong intrinsic motivation (connecting with other people/access to entertainment) or work requirements which come with mandatory trainings and IT support

New comment by dayvid in "Free software scares normal people"

dayvid — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:15:37 +0000

The contributors of free software tend to be power users who want to ensure their use case works. I don't think they're investing a lot of thought into the 80/20 use case for normal/majority or users or would risk hurting their workflow to make it easier for others

New comment by dayvid in "Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI"

dayvid — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:02:33 +0000

A lot of people don't know how to ask for what they want or ask it in different ways. If you can normalize this, you can normalize results. When consistent results are more important, introducing guardrails via UI or a guided flow is more relevant

New comment by dayvid in "Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI"

dayvid — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 23:16:46 +0000

I mean if you’re building for a consumer and you know what most of them may prompt, you can interface it with the UI so it’s not a game of hope you’re good at prompting because if not your experience isn’t going to be good. You could still offer a text panel if it fails

New comment by dayvid in "Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI"

dayvid — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 19:25:35 +0000

Prompt engineering is a transitory phase. Embedding it into existing tools so the 80-90% of regular prompt patterns can be worked into the UI (or contextual UI designed around how a user uses the product) is the next step

New comment by dayvid in "Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI"

dayvid — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 19:23:42 +0000

The article kind of addresses that in identifying what are the best type of problems AI can solve

New comment by dayvid in "Autism should not be seen as single condition with one cause, say scientists"

dayvid — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:53:54 +0000

Same with my little brother. I've seen autism turn into an ignored subject to being hijacked by higher-functioning autistic people who are controlling the narrative. It's good to have more autism awareness, but they're the top 1% of people with discernable autism and can hurt large numbers of lower functioning people with autism who basically have to be taken care of by their families for the rest of their lives.

New comment by dayvid in "US cities pay too much for buses"

dayvid — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:51:26 +0000

This is the most detailed I've seen covering numbers on train stats, especially around revenue per employee and different business models ranging from fully private to government subsidized around the world. I've also seen a number of other Modern MBA videos ranging from ok to good and this is arguably his best video