Hacker News: mitchdoogle

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:51:40 +0000

Why are you even bringing up GDPR? The law requiring cookie banners is a completely different law. Have you not seen a cookie banner? You think all these huge companies with legal departments are just misreading a law? What are you even ok about here?

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:38:37 +0000

If this were true, it would be great, but in my experience, paying for a subscription just emboldens companies to collect more data

New comment by mitchdoogle in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:36:00 +0000

Says who?

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Anthropic CEO says the way for AI to win over the public is to cure cancer"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:55:12 +0000

If we knew the answers to those questions, we would have a cure for cancer.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:49:27 +0000

Because the products these companies produce are extremely popular, and people benefit from them.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

mitchdoogle — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:03:31 +0000

Few employers will even know this is a thing.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

mitchdoogle — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:00:13 +0000

What are you looking at? Economic data shows real wages have trended up over the last 40 years, at least in the United States. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

mitchdoogle — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:42:54 +0000

You're painting this as some sort of hypocrisy but I don't think that's the case. AI has infinite legitimate uses outside of creating slop. Lots of tools are used in the creation and distribution of slop - do we criticize all those other tools too? Do you like slop? Do you want it on the platforms you visit? Personally, I would prefer for AI companies to take the attitude that YCombinator has here and do their best to remove slop from their platforms. It's not hypocrisy - it's ethical business practice.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

mitchdoogle — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:21:04 +0000

When I have AI write things for me, I'm spending a good amount of time on it - certainly longer than it takes to read. I'm also usually editing it quite a bit. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I still don't think it's appropriate to make a blanket statement about using AI to write content violating this social contract you described.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "I guess I kinda get why people hate AI"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:35:12 +0000

Of course the process can be stopped. That's just a lack of imagination.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "LLMs should not replace therapists"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:22:16 +0000

Those are bad analogies. And they shouldn't be in quotes because nobody said them. An LLM tutor is not a threat to anyone's safety or health.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "LLMs should not replace therapists"

mitchdoogle — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:17:36 +0000

Now, I don't think a person with chronic major depression or someone with schizophrenia is going to get what they need from ChatGPT, but those are extremes, when most people using ChatGPT have non-extreme problems. It's the same thing that the self-help industry has tried to address for decades. There are self-help books on all sorts of topics that one might see a therapist for - anxiety, grief, marriage difficulty - these are the kinds of things that ChatGPT can help with because it tends to give the same sort of advice.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)"

mitchdoogle — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:37:01 +0000

I would go for a verb that matches what the user actually is doing, i.e. "Reset Password". Also, I think a panel with a red or yellow background coming up after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to login with a complete sentence, "If you have forgotten your password, please visit this link to reset your password"

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)"

mitchdoogle — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 18:21:47 +0000

Put something better. "Visit our site", "View Results", "Download File", "Next Page". Almost anything is better than "Click here". "Click here" is the result of laziness - think about what the button does for a couple minutes and you should be able to come up with better text

New comment by mitchdoogle in "The Scheme That Broke the Texas Lottery"

mitchdoogle — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:34:41 +0000

It's unfair because they didn't buy tickets the way normal people do. Lottery machines are supposed to be in regular places of business, like gas stations or grocery stores. Companies called couriers popped up years ago that skirt this requirement by having a token storefront, while their real business is selling lottery tickets on the Internet, connected to physical tickets they print in their store. Secondly, the courier the buying group used requested additional ticket printing machines in the weeks leading up to the drawing, an unusual request that seemingly was not scrutinized at all by the TX lottery commission. So not only did the buying group have to use a method to buy tickets that already is unfair (and goes against the spirit of lottery requirements that tickets must be sold out of normal stores), they had to conspire with a courier to get enough machines to print out all the tickets in time. I think it should be obvious this kind of process is not available to the vast majority of Texans, even those with the financial means to do it, so yes - it is unfair.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "T-Mobile users thought they had a lifetime price lock–guess what happened next"

mitchdoogle — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:39:15 +0000

It's definitely influencing my home buying decision. In Philadelphia area, Delaware County property taxes are a significant amount higher than neighboring Montgomery county. I am looking in both, but my budget is about $30k higher in Montgomery county because of the taxes. I would venture a guess that similar houses in Montgomery county generally sell for more than their counterparts in Delaware county.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Nintendo leak:employee accessing private YouTube videos"

mitchdoogle — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:14:22 +0000

People know what "private" means. If a company calls something private, but it isn't, then they're the ones who need to reconsider what it means, and call their service something else.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile"

mitchdoogle — Fri, 17 May 2024 14:10:45 +0000

"Lived experience" usually means first hand knowledge and experience, as opposed to the knowledge or information they would gain from external sources.

So, understanding this meaning, I hope it's quite obvious that lived experience is much different for people today than ancient people. Our technology is far more advanced, more information is available to us. And it is all influenced by the vast amount of information that is external to us which puts our first hand experience in different contexts.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Surge Pricing Is Coming to More Menus Near You"

mitchdoogle — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 16:35:17 +0000

I know right? It's just as logical to frame this as reduced pricing at off-peak times, but I guess that's not so sensational.

Nevermind that many people would be happy to pay a little bit extra to avoid waiting during peak times.

New comment by mitchdoogle in "Ask HN: Did you turn off Google activity tracking?"

mitchdoogle — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 16:30:25 +0000

I had history back to 2012 and accidentally deleted it a couple years ago and I was very saddened at the loss of all those years of data. Every now and then I would look and see where I had been or just how many times I had visited local shops or friends' homes. Since then I have been trying to use Google backup and downloading it, but that feature has been very frustrating to deal with. Many times it fails to backup or fails to download the zipped file.