Hacker News: mrbadguy

New comment by mrbadguy in "What dating apps are optimizing"

mrbadguy — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:23:27 +0000

Arranged marriages are not the same as forced marriages. Your family simply plays matchmaker and it’s up to the prospective couple to decide whether they want to be together.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Can you slim macOS down?"

mrbadguy — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:10:36 +0000

Man you got me on readability. Just yesterday I had to input a random string WiFi password in a printer with only arrow keys to select each character. The password had an upper-case I in it but the moronic designers of the little password label that came with the router selected a font where “I” and “l” are indistinguishable. Took me like ten minutes to get the damn thing connected.

I only got it right because I looked up the password on my Mac, whose keychain app displays them in gloriously readable monospaced font. FFS

New comment by mrbadguy in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

mrbadguy — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:10:38 +0000

You’re right. My point was more about the idea that “higher frame rate = better movie because the number is objective” rather than “all art is subjective”. In other words, I don’t think we should try to value art on narrow physical axes. I’d like to think that the people you’ve mentioned would agree on that. The traditional notion of “objectively beautiful art” isn’t tied to technocratic things like that and, for what it’s worth, I agree with it.

New comment by mrbadguy in "UK Expands Online Safety Act to Mandate Preemptive Scanning"

mrbadguy — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:14:49 +0000

If people don’t report crime then we have to leave it. The answer can’t be just to invade everyone’s privacy looking for crimes (before they’re even committed!)

New comment by mrbadguy in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

mrbadguy — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:09:29 +0000

Agreed, the idea that there’s anything “objective” about art is kind of hilarious. Yes, it may be technically better in that there are more frames but does it make a more enjoyable film?

New comment by mrbadguy in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

mrbadguy — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:07:20 +0000

Your film, too?

New comment by mrbadguy in "Ask HN: What tech purchase did you regret even though reviews were great?"

mrbadguy — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:28:19 +0000

Yeah bone conduction headphones are awful, I don’t know how people tolerate them.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Reminder to passengers ahead of move to 100% digital boarding passes"

mrbadguy — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:16:46 +0000

For now

New comment by mrbadguy in "McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits"

mrbadguy — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:55:08 +0000

Keep at it, friend. You are not alone.

New comment by mrbadguy in "A mechanic offered a reason why no one wants to work in the industry"

mrbadguy — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:51:31 +0000

It’s even worse than that: someone else shipped the bug and you have to work without pay to fix it.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available"

mrbadguy — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:10:05 +0000

Yeah the comments here are slightly surreal; the issue was that they didn’t have an off-site backup at all, not that it wasn’t on AWS or whatever.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Benefits of choosing email over messaging"

mrbadguy — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 15:41:07 +0000

Agreed, a single thread is painful if it’s actually spawning off multiple sub-topics. I suppose the better answer is to start a separate thread in Slack in that case but it can flow weirdly where the topic originally arises in one place but is continued elsewhere; it relies on someone linking on the original thread to keep context. In a mailing tree, that context is still there.

All of this depends on having a sane email client though, doing it via outlook or gmail is a nightmare and I suspect this is the root of many people’s aversion to email.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

mrbadguy — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:47:19 +0000

Maybe you should try it

New comment by mrbadguy in "Ryanair may increase commission to staff identifying oversized cabin bags"

mrbadguy — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:21:08 +0000

Their latest sham is the bag sizing box that has one side open. So, even if your bag would actually fit into a volume of the required size, if any of it is loose (often the case with soft bags)then it’s “too big”.

I recently saw a lady try to make this point to them, only for the staff to keep repeating “but it sticks out”. In the end, the lady had to take the belt off her jacket and wrap it around the bag just to make the point. What a waste of time.

People who defend this airline “because it’s cheap” are just degrading themselves quite frankly. It’s awful and we shouldn’t be accepting of it.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Why training AI can't be IP theft"

mrbadguy — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 23:51:52 +0000

Nailed it. All of the “progress” in the last, say, 20 years is exactly this. They call it “disruption” and wear the title “disruptor” as a badge of honour.

New comment by mrbadguy in "The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)"

mrbadguy — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 16:12:40 +0000

Well said. There’s a noticeable lack of judgement in many places these days; people think they can abdicate it to metrics and data but this is mistaken.

New comment by mrbadguy in "To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell"

mrbadguy — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 07:32:57 +0000

That’s simply untrue. The old way was definitely better because, with OTA, the manufacturers will succumb to the usual web-software bullshit of “we don’t have to sell them something that actually works now, we’ll just push the update later”. I mean, it’s a car, I can easily take it to a garage and do so for anything else that might be wrong (if I can’t fix it myself) so I don’t see the problem in doing so for software patches. OTA doesn’t solve many issues for me but it sure as hell will create new ones.

New comment by mrbadguy in "Single cigarette takes 20 minutes off life expectancy, study finds"

mrbadguy — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 10:56:56 +0000

These kinds of announcements are quite misleading IMO. It’s not like smoking a single cigarette immediately takes off 20 minutes, it’s a cumulative effect caused by years of heavy smoking. It’s not particularly meaningful to average that out over the number of cigarettes smoked.

New comment by mrbadguy in "The paper passport's days are numbered"

mrbadguy — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 21:42:25 +0000

What?

New comment by mrbadguy in "The paper passport's days are numbered"

mrbadguy — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 08:56:20 +0000

This is an odd complaint. It’s not a waste of anything to update a record on an official document. Indeed, it’s more frustrating when they don’t because now I can’t see my full travel history by looking at my passport. Yes that exists somewhere in a DB but I don’t have access to that.