Hacker News: pflenker

New comment by pflenker in "Don't become an engineering manager"

pflenker — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:13:12 +0000

I had a similar realization today. I work as an EM, and one important aspect of my work is becoming worthless: experience.

Having been an IC for a long time usually enables me to support my team, or identify risks, lead projects and so on. However, since I never was an IC in the day and age of AI, I find that this experience is less and less applicable.

A significant part of what helps me increase impact of others is that I’ve „been there, done that“ and that’s going away right now.

I don’t mind - it’s exciting! But if I was an IC right now I would not switch tracks under any circumstances. There is so much more to learn directly in the trenches.

New comment by pflenker in "No Bookmarks"

pflenker — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:39:53 +0000

For me, this misses the point of bookmarks - it’s not about remembering where I have been but getting there extremely fast.

New comment by pflenker in "Letting Claude play text adventures"

pflenker — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:23:36 +0000

For a game like anchorhead, which is famous in its niche, shouldn’t Claude already know it sufficiently to just solve it right away? I would expect that its data source contained multiple discussions and walkthroughs of the game.

New comment by pflenker in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

pflenker — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:45:33 +0000

I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research!

While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.

New comment by pflenker in "Show HN: Website that plays the lottery every second"

pflenker — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:21:37 +0000

A teacher of mine used to say:

Lottery is a tax for people who don’t understand statistics.

New comment by pflenker in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

pflenker — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:05:51 +0000

When was that? DB has gotten much worse in the past ~5 years

New comment by pflenker in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

pflenker — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 10:49:02 +0000

All this costs money for little return of invest. As long as the collateral damage is below a threshold that causes reputational damage, there is no business incentive to solve this.

New comment by pflenker in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

pflenker — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:36:57 +0000

I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.

At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult.

To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry solutions are … AI powered.

New comment by pflenker in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

pflenker — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 09:34:00 +0000

Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.

New comment by pflenker in "An Homage to 90s –/Public_HTML Hosting"

pflenker — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 20:03:24 +0000

It’s a well done homage - but no one should believe for one second the actual average page back then looked _that good_!

New comment by pflenker in "Pikaday: A friendly guide to front-end date pickers"

pflenker — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:48:52 +0000

Easy. You have data available which tells you about the most likely travel dates, and you set this as the default. Many booking platforms pick a weekend in 2 weeks or something like that. This predefined field changes the task from entering a date to correcting a date, where the prefilled date is likely close to the desired date and thus requires less input/changes than starting from scratch.

New comment by pflenker in "Gemini 3"

pflenker — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:23:38 +0000

> Since then, it’s been incredible to see how much people love it. AI Overviews now have 2 billion users every month.

Come on, you can’t be serious.

New comment by pflenker in "Pikaday: A friendly guide to front-end date pickers"

pflenker — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:17:01 +0000

The best date picker is the one which doesn’t require picking a date. If done correctly, the browser can auto-fill your birthday, for example. In many other cases it’s possible and makes sense to guess a date and prefill the date field. Phones attempt the same with being biased towards entering the current date or datetime.

New comment by pflenker in "Gmail AI gets more intrusive"

pflenker — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 18:26:55 +0000

Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with „Bug: (…)“ that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines of „X, Y and Z discuss a bug.“

New comment by pflenker in "Wikipedia Seems Pretty Worried About AI"

pflenker — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:06:31 +0000

They should be. Articles have been gotten longer and longer over time, getting an AI summary instead is the logical consequence.

New comment by pflenker in "Commodore 64 Ultimate"

pflenker — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:50:54 +0000

MAD magazine once printed a listing with some non obvious errors in it, introducing my 10 year old self to the concept of a bug.

Maybe now I will have the chance to see a self-made Alfred E. Neuman!

New comment by pflenker in "How to turn liquid glass into a solid interface"

pflenker — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 11:12:26 +0000

I don’t see how your argument applies to Apple‘s transition to Liquid Glass. Apple only did incremental design changes for years, IIRC this is only the third major UI/UX iteration since the early 00s.

UX is not timeless, features emerge or go out of fashion, user behavior and expectations change, the hardware on which the UI/UX is operated changes. You only can incrementally evolve your ui/UX so far, as you can’t know what the future will look like.

New comment by pflenker in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

pflenker — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 10:10:48 +0000

10/GUI did some deep thinking about the limitations and potential of the (then-fairly new) multi touch input method. I wished something more had come out of it, instead it stayed a niche concept art video that is mostly forgotten now.

I’m not arguing the solutions it outlined are good, but I think some more discussion around how we interact with touch screens would be needed. Instead, we are still typing on a layout that was invented for mechanical typewriters - in 2025, on our touch screens.

https://youtu.be/zWz1KbknIZk?si=LWGsLQjFTWBOvzN-

New comment by pflenker in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

pflenker — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 15:07:02 +0000

Same as with other similar agreements. A doctor needs to declare your mental fitness. When in doubt, a court gets involved. As a rule of thumb, if you are able to understand enough to getter law involved you’re likely still mentally fit.

New comment by pflenker in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

pflenker — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 15:05:08 +0000

The same argument would apply to any other kind of will or testament. You need to update it frequently. It’s not uncommon for people to change their mind quite late, and (at least in Germany) that’s perfectly possible even until late. If people dispute this later change of mind a judge needs to get involved, and being married to one I can tell you that they treat each case differently and with the appropriate care.

Arguably the best qualified person to decide what to do with Future You is Present You.