Hacker News: ksenzee

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:56:46 +0000

This was Washington, D.C. during the Bush years. I could more easily have admitted to an ongoing affair or a cocaine habit.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:50:21 +0000

There's a large middle ground between saying nothing in the face of bigotry and proceeding immediately from "oh you're a member of ?" to an itemized list of hypocrisies, without stopping to find out what the individual person in front of you actually thinks about said hypocrisies. All I'm advocating for is that last: talk to people like they're people, not like they're mindless members of .

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:02:30 +0000

Having previously been a member of such a religion, and having left it specifically over human rights issues, I am delighted to inform you that there are many individuals who identify as members of such religions but who are not personally bigoted, and who in fact may privately be uncomfortable about that aspect of their religious belief. If you already know someone, and you have reason to believe they're not bigoted, but then they out themselves as a member of some such group, you don't have to assume the worst.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:46:56 +0000

Of course people know how to hide things that aren't safe to tell everyone. I do, however, genuinely mean what I'm saying. I worked somewhere once where the nature of the work meant almost everyone was of a particular political persuasion. I was of the opposite political persuasion. I was also one of the most junior employees there. It was a good enough bunch of people that I felt safe mentioning it in passing one day, and it led to a really great conversation. I was not afraid of being fired for it, but more importantly, I was not afraid of being ostracized for it.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:41:57 +0000

I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:34:32 +0000

Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.

New comment by ksenzee in "I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated"

ksenzee — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:48:07 +0000

It's fascinating reading if you're interested in finding out the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)

New comment by ksenzee in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

ksenzee — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 22:52:31 +0000

To clarify my point, I am fairly sure the issue is not fountain pens requiring less pressure to write with than everything else, but rather ballpoint pens requiring more pressure than all earlier pen technology. I have not used a dip pen myself, but I can't imagine it would require pressure to write.

In other words, all of the writing tools in common use since ~1950 make it easy to separate your letters, but before the ballpoint pen became commonplace, every writer had had the experience of using a pen that makes connecting letters easier than separating them. That's the experience most of us today are missing.

New comment by ksenzee in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

ksenzee — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:30:30 +0000

The cursive thing is almost certainly because he's using fountain pens. Pencils and ballpoint pens lend themselves to printing more easily, because they require pressure to write, and when you let the pressure up between letters, the line stops. The first time I picked up a fountain pen and tried printing with it, I found all my letters were connecting whether I meant them to or not, and I suddenly understood why cursive exists. Everyone who's learned cursive in the ballpoint pen era has been unwittingly taught a performance optimization for a tool they're not using.

New comment by ksenzee in "Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS"

ksenzee — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:51:31 +0000

I don’t know whether you wrote this by hand in the most painfully LLM style you could gin up, or whether you got an LLM to do it for you, but either way I tip my hat to you.

New comment by ksenzee in "Vagal cholinergic denervation of the gastric mucosa in Long-COVID-19"

ksenzee — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:31:30 +0000

Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t. If you were lucky enough to get a doctor to diagnose you before you figured it out yourself, congrats. That should be more common than it is. There are way too many doctors out there brushing off obvious signs of small fiber neuropathy.

New comment by ksenzee in "Martha Lillard, last US polio patient using iron lung, dies at 78 in Oklahoma"

ksenzee — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 06:05:30 +0000

Not OP, but this is fairly common knowledge. Here's a reliable source - search the page for VAPP: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-detail...

New comment by ksenzee in "Vagal cholinergic denervation of the gastric mucosa in Long-COVID-19"

ksenzee — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 04:06:28 +0000

Autonomic neurologists are the relevant specialists. I invite you to look for one in your local area and see how rare they are. The last I checked, the Seattle metro area (and in fact the whole state of Washington) had precisely one board-certified autonomic neurologist. Diagnostic delay is, unsurprisingly, around six years. Combine that with the fact that all the equipment you need to do a basic POTS test is a pulse oximeter and a blood pressure cuff, and yeah, you're going to have people self-diagnosing, for good reason.

New comment by ksenzee in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

ksenzee — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:28:12 +0000

I read novels voraciously, all of them on my phone. I haven't bought a paper book for myself in maybe a decade.

New comment by ksenzee in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

ksenzee — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:23:55 +0000

As someone with a degree in literature, I'm gonna disagree there. It depends on both the novel and the programming.

New comment by ksenzee in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

ksenzee — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:08:20 +0000

All of those may be correlated to the rise in obesity. I see no evidence that any of them is causal. I don't even think all of them are correlated, honestly. The rise in the number of calories available certainly is, but cars and suburbs have been around longer than that. And the rise in calories may just be a response to increased demand.

New comment by ksenzee in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

ksenzee — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 02:06:48 +0000

What evidence do you have that it is a cultural shift, rather than, say, a chemical in the environment that wasn't there before, or a difference in the food supply?

New comment by ksenzee in "FDA advisors unanimously vote to approve Moderna's mRNA after agency drama"

ksenzee — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:07:35 +0000

The word you're looking for is "sterilizing."

New comment by ksenzee in "I solved my mystery fatigue with AI"

ksenzee — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 03:44:28 +0000

If you're not vegetarian, I recommend looking into heme iron. It's a lot more bioavailable, even more than iron bisglycinate, and in my experience it's much easier on the GI tract.

New comment by ksenzee in "Chopped, Stored, Secured – The Story of the Hash Function"

ksenzee — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:41:51 +0000

Yes, exactly. I don't object; it's salutary to find out you don't know anything about topic X. It's just disconcerting after having read and understood an article purporting to explain topic X.