Hacker News: ryandrake

New comment by ryandrake in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:08:12 +0000

Alan Dye here. I'm coming back to Apple, and the next versions of the operating systems will not even have visible controls or icons. You just have to click on the beautiful, clear windows and hope you're interacting with the right UI elements.

New comment by ryandrake in "Helium is hard to replace"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:31:03 +0000

"Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular take in the USA.

New comment by ryandrake in "Tech job relocation market is recovering. The competition is growing faster"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:09:17 +0000

We need to Make Billionaires Millionaires Again.

New comment by ryandrake in "Tech job relocation market is recovering. The competition is growing faster"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:08:46 +0000

I don't want to hear anyone talk about "fraud in government spending" until the defense department passes an audit.

New comment by ryandrake in "Tech job relocation market is recovering. The competition is growing faster"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:42:13 +0000

This kind of vague innuendo, excused by a belief that you're under threat of censorship, adds zero value to the discussion.

New comment by ryandrake in "Tech job relocation market is recovering. The competition is growing faster"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:39:03 +0000

I'm American, and I've been working alongside a professional staff that is ~90% brilliant foreign researchers and software developers for 15+ years of my career. I would not characterize this as "a problem." It's only a problem to Americans who feel they are somehow owed these jobs due to where they were born.

New comment by ryandrake in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:17:37 +0000

Thanks for the reply. I know it feels noble to do it that way, and I admit I get dogmatic over this one principle: a computer should first and foremost obey the user. It shouldn't have its own agenda. It shouldn't second guess. It shouldn't "did you mean?" I command the computer, and the computer executes that command and then waits for the next command. If I command it to not display a particular output (notifications), then I expect it to never display them, full stop.

I don't see my computers as partners or helpful assistants or eager interns. I see them as tools for reliably performing computation, and I expect them to operate that way.

I fully understand that this means that fewer and fewer developers are "building their software for me" and I find that pretty disappointing.

New comment by ryandrake in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:04:21 +0000

"Consent" has become this mystical foreign concept to software developers. If the world of computing was a night club, "Silicon Valley" would be that creepy guy who goes up to everyone asking "Do you want to dance? [YES | Ask Me Later]".

New comment by ryandrake in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:02:36 +0000

It's hard to convey to today's generation, who think Ivy Bridge to Haswell was a big jump or whatever, how awesome the 286 -> 386 -> 486 changes were to personal computing. It felt almost like what going from a NES to a Super Nintendo to a N64 felt like. The improvements were astounding.

New comment by ryandrake in "FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages"

ryandrake — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:54:24 +0000

> why does it keep asking?

Why does any software keep asking you to do things you explicitly told them you don't want to do? Because it's in the software developer's best interest to get you to do them, not yours. We've gotten way past the point in software where we no longer expect the software to serve the user's interest and solve the user's problems. Now, the expectation is that the user gets nagged and coerced into serving the software's interest and solving the developers' problems.

EDIT: Looks like a developer confirmed this in a sibling comment already: It nags you because that solves their support problem.

New comment by ryandrake in "Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:57:40 +0000

This is why totalitarian surveillance and increased police power is also part of the billionaires' agenda: When 99.99% of us are economically irrelevant, they'll need to more and more insulate themselves from the "Nothing To Lose" people.

New comment by ryandrake in "Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:29:01 +0000

Microsoft constantly tries to trick[1], annoy[2] and coerce[3] users into using their software.

1: https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...

2: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-...

3: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-defaul...

New comment by ryandrake in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:26:12 +0000

Is that really the primary concern about datacenters? Their aesthetics? I thought the major problem with them was that they muscle in on valuable resources like water and electricity, consuming what would otherwise be used by people, and driving the prices up.

New comment by ryandrake in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:16:40 +0000

We need an update to the HN posting guidelines that addresses this. We already have:

    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

I'm not welcome to complain that the website is a tiny vertical strip down my screen with 6 inches of whitespace on each side, so we should also not welcome the boring, common "The article is written by AI" criticism, which is going to apply to 99% of articles by the end of 2026. It's already too common to be interesting criticism.

A World Without People

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:07:09 +0000

Article URL: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708245

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by ryandrake in "EFF is leaving X"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:05:32 +0000

Anyone who doesn't think what Musk did was a Nazi salute, I encourage you to watch the video over and over, enough times so that you can memorize and replicate it, then go into work and do it in front of your manager, and see what happens.

Of course, as expected, the Elon Musk Defense League showed up right on time. Does he give out $100 for every post defending his honor online?

New comment by ryandrake in "Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:25:00 +0000

That's a pretty wild take, but ok. I think you really have to be digging deep and "looking for trouble" to take issue with a fun and relatively wholesome movie like Fifth Element.

New comment by ryandrake in "Claude mixes up who said what"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:54:45 +0000

It always feels like I just have to figure out and type the correct magical incantation, and that will finally make LLMs behave deterministically. Like, I have to get the right combination of IMPORTANT, ALWAYS, DON'T DEVIATE, CAREFUL, THOROUGH and suddenly this thing will behave like an actual computer program and not a distracted intern.

New comment by ryandrake in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:51:12 +0000

6.5 years. What helped most was doing a little bit every day. Taking time off the project would probably have slowed my motivation. Also, at some point, you have spent a lot of money on a project like this, to the point where you kind of have to finish it or you've lost a lot of sunk cost.

New comment by ryandrake in "I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue"

ryandrake — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:03:32 +0000

The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.