Hacker News: ksenzee

New comment by ksenzee in "Bucketsquatting is finally dead"

ksenzee — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:51:10 +0000

That’s not what’s being described here. What OP described is the much more common situation where employees use a personal phone for MFA. Sure, some places issue hardware dongles and disallow authenticator apps on your personal phone, but IME most places default to just having people use their phone.

New comment by ksenzee in "What AI coding costs you"

ksenzee — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 21:21:00 +0000

> It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your ideas out of thin air

I think that's true for some developers, and not for others. My guess is that one subset of developers has more ideas than they have time/resources to implement, and they enjoy programming because they love seeing the finished product emerge. I think this subset is more likely to go into management, because it's a force multiplier for them. They're the ones getting joy out of seeing AI make their ideas into reality.

But there's another subset who enjoys programming not because they love to see a product emerge, but because they enjoy the process itself: the head-scratching, the getting past "why won't this work" to the moment when the build starts working again or the site comes back up or the UI snaps into place. It's the magic of finding, among all the possible wrong answers, the exact right combination of bits that solve the problem. This subset is not getting any joy from AI: they're seeing AI take away that whole process and turn it into the kind of work their managers and their project owners do. It's made even worse because their managers don't even understand why they're so unhappy. I think managers would do well to consider how they're going to keep these folks happy and engaged and productive, because they're the ones who are going to be fixing the production bugs introduced by their teammates' AI commits. If they've all gone off to retrain as electricians, we're going to have a problem as an industry.

New comment by ksenzee in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

ksenzee — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:56:27 +0000

They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.

New comment by ksenzee in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

ksenzee — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:33:23 +0000

This isn't how I read his conclusion. He's saying English will be different in fifty years, but he's not saying it'll be unrecognizable. Look how little difference there is between the 1900 passage and the 2000 passage.

New comment by ksenzee in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

ksenzee — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:23:46 +0000

This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.

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

ksenzee — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:43:41 +0000

No, it’s pretty clear to me that people are getting wildly different results from LLMs, depending on how novel their work is.

New comment by ksenzee in "Yawning has an unexpected influence on the fluid inside your brain"

ksenzee — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:27:48 +0000

It is! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9332820/

New comment by ksenzee in "Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89"

ksenzee — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:42:52 +0000

This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.

New comment by ksenzee in "Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)"

ksenzee — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:03:34 +0000

Has anyone tried this from the applicant side? Just send in a cover letter and resume, old-school?

New comment by ksenzee in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

ksenzee — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:10:27 +0000

The problem is that a computer science degree isn't the right training for most software engineering jobs.

New comment by ksenzee in "Response Healing: Reduce JSON defects by 80%+"

ksenzee — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:39:31 +0000

> We trained users to treat their devices like unruly animals that they can never quite trust. So now the idea of a machine that embodies a more clever (but still unreliable) animal to wrangle sounds like a clear upgrade.

I wish I didn't agree with this, but I think you're exactly right. Even engineers dealing with systems we know are deterministic will joke about making the right sacrifices to the tech gods to get such-and-such working. Take that a step further and maybe it doesn't feel too bad to some people for the system to actually not be deterministic, if you have a way to "convince" it to do what you want. How depressing.

New comment by ksenzee in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

ksenzee — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 22:35:25 +0000

If you’ve ever spoken to employees of a public company that was sold to private equity, you’ll know how much of a difference there is. It is a significant difference.

New comment by ksenzee in "A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S."

ksenzee — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:44:28 +0000

If you’re really poor, you can get Medicaid. It’s the working poor who earn too much for Medicaid who are really shafted. The ACA tried to fix that for as many as it could, by expanding Medicaid to households making more money; the Republicans shut down the government to fight that expansion. It’s maddening.

VA staff flag dangerous errors in Oracle-built electronic health record

ksenzee — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:32:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/12/03/veterans-administration-va-hospitals-health/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46135661

Points: 102

# Comments: 41

New comment by ksenzee in "Advent of Code 2025"

ksenzee — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 04:19:43 +0000

This type of problem has very little resemblance to the problems I solve professionally - I’m usually one level of abstraction up. If I run into something that requires anything even as complicated as a DAG it’s a good day.

New comment by ksenzee in "Post-mortem of Shai-Hulud attack on November 24th, 2025"

ksenzee — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:42:49 +0000

a) ok whippersnapper, b) new community members have the most energy. I’m not actually sure there’s much need for volunteer mods on HN tbh, but the best volunteers are often the newest folks around.

New comment by ksenzee in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

ksenzee — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:44:00 +0000

I respectfully submit you might feel differently about it if your child were suicidal. When someone has to be watching them 24/7 already for fear they'll hurt themselves, the black box warning is a lot less worrisome. SSRIs prevent more suicides by far than they cause. It's that first few weeks where they can have a paradoxical effect.

New comment by ksenzee in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

ksenzee — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 01:53:33 +0000

Fluoxetine has received FDA approval to treat major depressive disorder (8 and older), obsessive-compulsive disorder (7 and older), panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia), [and] bulimia nervosa...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK459223/

New comment by ksenzee in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

ksenzee — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 01:50:42 +0000

Okay, but nobody is paying doctors to prescribe medications like sertraline and fluoxetine that have been generic for years and are cheap as dirt.

New comment by ksenzee in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

ksenzee — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 01:35:38 +0000

It sounds to me like you're saying suicidality in children either doesn't exist, or shouldn't be treated, or should only be treated with talk therapy. If what you're saying instead is "this SSRI is especially dangerous" then ok, you and I just disagree about what information sources are reliable, and that's probably not a difference we can resolve. But if you're saying suicidality in children shouldn't be treated with medication, I'm curious whether you've ever met a six- or seven-year-old who wants to die. It is terrifying. It needs treatment. And talk therapy in children that age is honestly a joke. In the OP's place I would give my child an SSRI without any hesitation.