Hacker News: klik99

New comment by klik99 in "Not buying another Kindle"

klik99 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:03:16 +0000

Again, this is after 13 years, so the subsidized price is worth it for me (personally) for at least 13 years of use. In the original article it compares it to kobo and says “Meanwhile, when you buy a Kobo, you are buying a tool that can be maintained for a decade or more”, so 13 years either way. That said, I don’t like Kindles approach, this is purely a cost benefit calculation and Amazon subsidizing the hardware makes it worth it (for me). I only use ereaders for reading and don’t want/need any more features.

New comment by klik99 in "Not buying another Kindle"

klik99 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:36:28 +0000

I have several Kindles for me and my kids, I have never bought a book on the Amazon store, instead I side load everything. Amazon basically subsidized a cheap and tough e-reader assuming it would drive everyone to the store, which I actively do not engage with. If it gets bricked in 10 years, I still think it would be worth it.

New comment by klik99 in "A Brief History of Fish Sauce"

klik99 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:55:46 +0000

Ketchup also has origins from fish sauce

New comment by klik99 in "The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment"

klik99 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:49:03 +0000

I find it weird because I've seen traces of it before in people who believed in the singularity 20 years ago, people who really believed that anti-AI was pathological. Back then the stakes didn't seem as real and immediate as now, and now you can see it on pro-AI reddit subs. But I agree that language and attitude is co-opted for marketing purposes, for example last year when there was a lot of talk about doomerism.

New comment by klik99 in "The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment"

klik99 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:23:56 +0000

The company whos blog it is is "AI-assisted clinical documentation" - I feel this is an attempt to explain anti-AI sentiment as an unreasonable aversion to AI rather than the real reasons for anti-AI sentiment. There's a weird trend in the AI industry to pathologize people who don't like AI.

New comment by klik99 in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

klik99 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:26:23 +0000

I mostly agree with you - he seemed happy for the chance to play the victim. When the system is working, war is different because it has democratic process behind approval (Iran is obviously showing the system is breaking down)

But just because horrible people exist in positions of power doesn’t mean I have to become horrible myself. I accept that there is a threshold where that changes, but I think we would disagree that we’ve hit that threshold. If anything violence now just gives more excuse to justify further consolidation of power (look I got attacked! The anti AI people are crazy, any criticism of me is just encouraging them!) Imagine if it was a serious attack on sama, they could spin it into some serious gains for them.

New comment by klik99 in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

klik99 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:31:39 +0000

Genuinely surprised at the extreme comments against sama here. I don’t think he’s a good steward of the technology, but I don’t think violence is funny or justified. I also don’t think it’s justified for him to use it to say that a negative article about him is correlated to this event. Seems to imply that an “incendiary article” led to this and that criticism is tantamount to calls to violence. He drives the conversation with apocalyptic terms, and both investors and crazy people buy into it.

New comment by klik99 in "Obsolete Sounds"

klik99 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:22:28 +0000

Yes, I came to say the same thing, not just typewriter - it's a great idea but I wish they had the original recordings by themselves and not overlayed with ambient music.

New comment by klik99 in "Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage users at California trial"

klik99 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:11:37 +0000

I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.

I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.

New comment by klik99 in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

klik99 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:26:44 +0000

Presumably the amount of fact checking was "Well it sounds like something someone in that situation WOULD say" - I get the pressure for Ars Technica to use AI (god I wish this wasn't the direction journalism was going, but I at least understand their motivation), but generate things with references to quotes or events and check that. If you are a struggling content generation platform, you have to maintain at least a small amount of journalistic integrity, otherwise it's functionally equivalent to asking ChatGPT "Generate me an article in the style of Ars Technica about this story", and at that point why does Ars Technica even need to exist? Who will click through the AI summary of the AI summary to land on their page and generate revenue?

New comment by klik99 in "Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%"

klik99 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:12:55 +0000

This plus stretching / yoga has been amazing as I'm entering my 40s. For a while I was just lifting and I had strong muscles but they were short and tight. Not everyone has that problem, but just noting strong muscles are half the picture, being strong and flexible makes life feel effortless and years of being a desk jockey.

New comment by klik99 in "The Startup Graveyard"

klik99 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:29:08 +0000

I think it's a great idea to highlight that companies that fail in the VC context aren't necessarily bad ideas for companies - there is just a specific business model that thrives with VC funding (extremely high scalability, reliable unit costs) and companies that don't fit that or fail to develop in that direction may still be great businesses but get driven into the ground by VCs trying to find the one unicorn out of 15 in the profile.

New comment by klik99 in "Eat Real Food"

klik99 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:32:13 +0000

Is there any effort to make real food more affordable for most Americans?

Is there any proof that "much of chronic disease is linked to diet and lifestyle"?

Is our bar so low that we give RFK credit for saying "eat real food" which everyone knows, while cutting vaccination recommendations, defunding public health and making our health care worse? The implication that chronic illness is a "lifestyle" problem is victim blaming, sure you can point to a lot of individual cases where this is the case, but the main issue is access to good, affordable food. I'm convinced the one thing that ties the varied MAGA coalition together is a belief that the problems of modern America are moral failings of the masses. Many of the coalition truly believe it, and the people rigging the system are more than happy to fund them to distract from their looting, just as the sugar industry funded blaming fat for obesity.

I don't like to be this righteous on HN, but RFK wagging his finger about how "diet and lifestyle" causes most chronic disease, which is where 90% healthcare costs go to, just upsets me. If you truly believe that, then who cares if people suffer from chronic disease. Go ahead and gut public health and the CDC, most people with chronic diseases brought it upon themselves! Doctor says "Eat Real Food".

The only hope I have is that he's committed enough to battle lobbyists and introduce more food regulations, like he did with food dye. That's the tough work, against entrenched power structures and real risk. Until then, it's all just talk.

New comment by klik99 in "I canceled my book deal"

klik99 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 03:48:58 +0000

There may not be many people whose professional job is using a typewriter, but there are still tons of writers.

New comment by klik99 in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

klik99 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 23:10:01 +0000

Are there video "thumbprints" like exists for audio (used by soundhound/etc) - IE a compressed set of features that can reliably be linked in unique content? I would expect that is possible and a lot faster lookup for 2 frames a second. If this is the case, the "your device is taking a snapshot every 30 seconds" sounds a lot worse (not defending it - it's still something I hope can be legislated away - something can be bad and still exaggerated by media)

New comment by klik99 in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

klik99 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:28:13 +0000

The actual story wasn’t anything special, but I thought how it told the story through mechanics was really well done. It wasn’t the first to do that but did it a larger scope than anything else at the time.

New comment by klik99 in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

klik99 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:25:03 +0000

Yes, I agree with this - as an expression of learning by wordless doing it was a really profound experience. The ending video of real life was great, reminded me of when I played a lot of Katamari and started seeing the whole world as things to roll up. I share the sentiment in these comments about Blow himself, but The Witness is a great game - though I get why people don’t like it: it’s a slow burn and requires a tolerance for pretentiousness. I don’t feel it was too long, it was as long as it needed to be, it’s just a big game

New comment by klik99 in "Collaboration sucks"

klik99 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:00:14 +0000

There's no one size fits all - what they're saying would absolutely fail at the company I'm currently at, but sounds like it works for them. The key thing is to have a process that works well for the people who are there, and hire people who work well under those conditions. The people who do well at our company would not do well at their company, and vice versa. I don't like how this article makes a claim about what works well for them is actually a universal truth. It really depends on the people there.

New comment by klik99 in "Starbucks: Location closures and elimination of roles"

klik99 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:39:12 +0000

I agree the coffee at starbucks isn't great, but I feel the coffee at dunkin and mcdonalds are both better than starbucks. I like black coffee though, and Starbucks drip or americano just isn't good - I see starbucks more as a desert place than a coffee place, and judged on that they're good. I think more people want sweet milky coffees, and that's fine. That plus the environment is a big pull of Starbucks. It's not my thing, but I get why people like it

EDIT Also, I'm pretty sure the better coffee at mcdonalds happened after starbucks, IIRC they put a lot of effort into improving their offering after starbucks exploded

New comment by klik99 in "Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over"

klik99 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 17:57:15 +0000

I've instinctively been avoiding hospitals run by PE, and now I have a good reason to.

I'll never forget with my first kid they tried to scare us into genetic testing - I mean, they had a pamphlet and video they were required to show us that were meant to scare us into it, but I could tell from the doctors face that she wasn't into it and felt like she was apologizing when she said she had to play this video and leave the room. We switched to a different hospital almost immediately.