Hacker News: hysan

New comment by hysan in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

hysan — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:35:15 +0000

I’ve had a longstanding belief that big tech purposely over-employed because it denied resources to competitors. This gave them a velocity edge despite being big and bureaucratic. In the new AI world, denying resources doesn’t slow competitors down anymore because AI raises the productivity floor. Now that over-employment brings no competitive advantage, we’re seeing huge cuts.

New comment by hysan in "Judge rules DOGE cancellation of humanities grants was unconstitutional"

hysan — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:35:32 +0000

Probably nothing and it’ll also do nothing for the many people whose lives were drastically impacted by those cuts.

New comment by hysan in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

hysan — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:10:35 +0000

Turnstile feels bad as a user. Every site that I’ve seen it long will lock up Safari hard while it’s doing whatever it’s doing. But at least I haven’t run into more than 2 refresh loops.

Ask HN: Forced into Gemini on Google Account?

hysan — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:08:39 +0000

I got two emails from Google recently. One saying, “You’re now using Gemini on web” and the other saying, “Welcome to Gemini”

I never signed up for Gemini and I see nothing in those emails about how to disable or remove whatever it is that I supposedly signed up for. I did find others who have gotten the same thing out of nowhere and who have helpfully pointed me to a settings page to delete and turn off Gemini activity. However, I had done that and gotten that second email. Does anyone know why I’m getting these emails, how to unsubscribe to them, and how to get rid of whatever it is that I supposedly signed up for?

Other info - I don’t use Android. I don’t use Google as my primary search. I do use it as a fallback which is rare. All I really use Google for is Gmail and YouTube.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982934

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by hysan in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

hysan — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:52:01 +0000

Same. Google Maps quality has gotten noticeably worse these past 2 years for me. It routinely tries to navigate me to making impossible turns or taking weird and sometimes more dangerous routes just to shave off a potential minute. I started using Apple Maps at the advice of a colleague and it’s given better directions. This is all local. I have no baseline comparison for using maps while on trips.

New comment by hysan in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

hysan — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 05:24:07 +0000

Took long enough. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see them say how invested they are in tackling this. Promoting a rule is one thing, but everything SEO related becomes a cat and mouse game. I don’t have high confidence that this will work.

New comment by hysan in "Claude mixes up who said what and that's not OK"

hysan — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:45:08 +0000

Oh, so I’m not imagining this. Recently, I’ve tried to up my LLM usage to try and learn to use the tooling better. However, I’ve seen this happen with enough frequency that I’m just utterly frustrated with LLMs. Guess I should use Claude less and others more.

New comment by hysan in "A brief history of instant coffee"

hysan — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:25:08 +0000

Does it? It only takes like 2 min for my electric kettle to boil. If I was a more avid coffee/tea drinker, I’d get one of the always heated hot water dispensers that are common in Japanese households (def one of the appliances I miss since moving back to the US). Then you never have to wait.

New comment by hysan in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

hysan — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:13:35 +0000

Dunno how long this is normally supposed to go but it took me 10+ min of actually seriously considering the fonts at each choice and the final suggestion is a font that I actively dislike. I’m curious how it’s narrowing things down because I noticed that it started to give me only serif fonts which I don’t like. But the sans serif ones that it was using to try and narrow things down had distinct characteristics that I didn’t like like very narrow stems or very narrow or wide characters. But it wasn’t doing that with serif fonts. I’m guessing it began to think I preferred serifs because of that but in reality, I wasn’t picking the lesser of two evils most of the time.

New comment by hysan in "Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights"

hysan — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:51:37 +0000

Yes, at least in my experience on flights in the USA. It’s very rare but it does happen. I was lucky one time that the person doing it sat next to me and I politely asked them to use headphones and no fuss was had.

New comment by hysan in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

hysan — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:18:32 +0000

This is quite wrong? There are some features that get blocked from being implemented because Wayland refused to define a protocol for everyone to implement. Window positioning being a recent example of how progress can get blocked for many years due to Wayland.

New comment by hysan in "Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company"

hysan — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 06:41:56 +0000

Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.

New comment by hysan in "How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?"

hysan — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:56:43 +0000

(Don’t take this as advice. Just writing my own experience with this.)

This is the reason why I take the time to summarize all “why” decisions and implementation tradeoffs being made in my (too lengthy) PR descriptions with links, etc. I’ve gotten into the habit of using to collapse everything because I’ve gotten feedback multiple times that no one reads my walls of text. However, I still write it (with short

s now) because I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been able to search my PRs and quickly answer mine or someone’s “why” question. I do it mostly for me because I find it invaluable as I prefer writing shit down instead of relying on my flaky memory. People are forgetful and people come and go. What doesn’t disappear is documentation tied to code commits (well… unless you nuke your repo).

New comment by hysan in "Put the zip code first"

hysan — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 02:40:49 +0000

IMO, the spirit of the idea is to put higher information density fields first, and let that smooth out the UX for the remaining fields as you go downwards. Yes, there will be exceptions but that only matters if you’re trying to absolve the user of all work for 100% of situations. Trying to do that is a fools errand. Invert the order and use the information gathered to make inputting the rest simpler for 80% of the users. Then make it easy for the other 20% to course correct (ex: don’t disable autofilled fields, highlight all text when tabbing to the next field, etc). I think this pattern is a good one to keep in mind, but not blindly follow, when designing the UX of a UI.

New comment by hysan in "Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations"

hysan — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:48:11 +0000

While I commend Ars and the author for taking responsibility, I am a bit off put by the wording used for the retraction on the original article: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...

> Following additional review, Ars has determined that the story “After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name,” did not meet our standards. Ars Technica has retracted this article. Originally published on Feb 13, 2026 at 2:40PM EST and removed on Feb 13, 2026 at 4:22PM EST.

Rather than say “did not meet our standards,” I’d much prefer if they stated what was false - that they published false, AI generated quotes. Anyone who previously read the article (which realistically are the only people who would return to the article) and might want to go back to it as a reference isn’t going to have their knowledge corrected of the falsehoods that they read.

New comment by hysan in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

hysan — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:26:49 +0000

Another fascinating thing that the Reddit thread discussing the original PR pointed out is that whoever owns that AI account opened another PR (same commits) and later posted this comment: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...

> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?

It’s a bit wild to me that people are siding with the AI agent / whoever is commanding it. Combined with the LLM hallucinated reporting and all the discussion this has spawned, I think this is making out to be a great case study on the social impact of LLM tooling.

New comment by hysan in "Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place"

hysan — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 07:37:46 +0000

Ah I see. That didn’t translate well for me. Maybe because the title primed me into thinking that this was meant to be helpful.

New comment by hysan in "Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place"

hysan — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 07:04:47 +0000

Something about the tone of the article just makes me want to write a retort / criticism instead of praising the advice. Maybe it’s because it feels like an incomplete list or that it’s too generalized but written like the author has learned it all. For example, no mention of learning when and what to do to avoid frozen pipes. Or how to fix things when it happens. Also, shoveling snow isn’t that hard if you have the right snow shoveling equipment and know a bit of physics (which in my experience, locals will gladly teach you).

New comment by hysan in "Bazzite Post-Mortem"

hysan — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:33:23 +0000

Linking related post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818467

AFAIK, removing Antheas from Bazzite opened the door to discussions for forming the OGC. Prior to that, Antheas had created such difficult situations that many of the member groups in the OGC did not collaborate with Bazzite because of his presence. Whether or not the OGC actually works (ex: getting patches upstreamed faster), only time will tell.

New comment by hysan in "Bazzite Post-Mortem"

hysan — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:24:45 +0000

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...