Hacker News: mwillis

New comment by mwillis in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

mwillis — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:21:06 +0000

We’re in a transitional time. A lot of things will feel off until we figure out what “right” feels like. Critiques like this are correct, but correct only for as long as the circumstances stay as they are. Which they won’t.

New comment by mwillis in "Pike: To Exit or Not to Exit"

mwillis — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:16:19 +0000

A six-week road trip sounds amazing. A six-week road trip with lots of interstate driving does not.

New comment by mwillis in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

mwillis — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:37:06 +0000

maybe it’s just some quirk of how my fingers work, but when typing with two hands, I constantly get the letter “n” where I want a space. Itngetsnquitenfrustrating and it’s really annoying to go back and correct, because none of the intermediate words got autocorrected either. It seems like a) such an easy thing to prevent, and b) such an easy thing to detect and fix after the fact.

Second most egregious issue is how every space becomes a period when typing in the Safari url/search bar. I’m using it for search 90% of the time, and directly entering URLs 10%, but Apple must think those proportions are flipped.

Free the space!

Finally - could we have a simple gesture that toggles words between lowercase, first letter capital, and all caps? Highlight a word and swipe up or something? So much needless input to make a word capitalized.

New comment by mwillis in "Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash"

mwillis — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:30:17 +0000

Why, in this given scenario, does the individual’s mandate to their company automatically trump the mandate given to them by an ethical society, or even their own moral code? Why is this position held up as infallible? The situation could easily be re-framed as “my corporate mandate is to grow revenue, but the larger mandate I have is to my own ethical truth.” Why are corporate desires allowed to get the “shrug, that’s just what I’m supposed to do” treatment?

If the answer is you lose your job and your means to provide for your family if you don’t put corporate desires first, then we’ve constructed the society we want already and no one should be complaining.

New comment by mwillis in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

mwillis — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:56:56 +0000

I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.

At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.

New comment by mwillis in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

mwillis — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 16:25:31 +0000

Fantastic technique and deep dive. I will say, I was hoping to see an improved implementation of the Cognition cube array as the payoff at the end. The whole thing reminded me of the blogger/designer who, years ago, showed YouTube how to render a better favicon by using subpixel color contrast, and then IIRC they implemented the improvement. Some detail here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110930003551/http://typophile....

New comment by mwillis in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

mwillis — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:13:21 +0000

wildly cool, nice job!

New comment by mwillis in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

mwillis — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:11:12 +0000

https://mwillis.com I recently updated layouts and UX but haven’t quite rolled out changes evenly across older content.

New comment by mwillis in "Caltrain shows why every region should be moving toward regional rail"

mwillis — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 01:38:06 +0000

reading is tougher though

New comment by mwillis in "Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop"

mwillis — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 04:35:08 +0000

The “place” aspect of the process needs some refinement. On iOS, it triggers the page bump (and necessitates and extra click) because it’s aligned at the bottom of the page. Having the “place” action hover near the selected object could be an alternative. I really enjoy this pattern. Nice work.

New comment by mwillis in "2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web"

mwillis — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 02:11:07 +0000

say more?

New comment by mwillis in "Things I've Heard Boomers Say That I Agree with 100%"

mwillis — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 15:16:09 +0000

A medal for finishing a marathon is not the same thing as a participation trophy.

New comment by mwillis in "1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)"

mwillis — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:25:18 +0000

Always thought Wordle and similar computer games were just variants of Mastermind, forms of which go back many decades, if not further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)

New comment by mwillis in "Bad UX"

mwillis — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:01:57 +0000

I hate the hate on Comic Sans. It’s not, by itself, bad UX. It’s not really UX at all. And used properly it has an important place in design. Try all uppercase - it’s an excellent simulacrum of comic book lettering.