Hacker News: sean2

New comment by sean2 in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

sean2 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:15:22 +0000

The truth was so obvious I didn't bother to find data before doing the opposite: most of their posts are: "I'm going/went all-in, high-leverage on this moonshot! And...its gone." I've successfully applied the opposite approach and invested safe amounts in a broad portfolio and it is going pretty well (or was before this whole Iran thing).

New comment by sean2 in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

sean2 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:42:46 +0000

I skim 100 comments here everyday. Good comments/bad comments, overly long comments, whatever, time to read is low. I assume all those authors have a strong opinion / expertise on the subject that urged them to take the time to write that comment, which makes skimming hacker news to keep a pulse on the world (imho) a valuable task. If, instead, most of those comments are composed by molt-bots, then I'm not getting a "real" view of the world, I don't care how good and concise the comments are, I'd be wasting my time reading about news that may not matter to anyone and opinions that may not exist.

New comment by sean2 in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

sean2 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:26:06 +0000

Youthful 40 here, had to comment on this:

>> tired of the never ending rat race of keeping up with the latest bizarre web stacks, frameworks

Instead of just keeping up with the latest development frameworks, I also now have to keep up with the latest AI frameworks. I spent a week at my $ job just installing plugins, requesting permissions, debugging issues with the agents, before I went back to writing code myself (plumbing between the latest frameworks) because I'm expected to get stuff done in addition to managing agents that were supposedly going to do my work for me.

My personal agentic AI coding setup never fully materialized while I have been chasing the latest crazes and I am back to handwriting my personal code too (with AI chat help) until I manage to stick to a particular setup.

Anyway, I feel like the rat race just opened yet another front. And I bet I'll still be expected to leetcode in my next technical interview (still was in 2025) in addition to leetprompting or whatever the next segment on interviews will be.

New comment by sean2 in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

sean2 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:59:28 +0000

I see a lot of people saying things like this. I'm sure some of you are well meaning and not part of the ad machine (probably you among them with your concluding quote).

But no. I could argue that hypothetically scammers would know exactly what I would fall for, but I have real evidence: Facebook knows everything about me and serves me mostly scams, since ever. My Google ads (mostly in Youtube) actually became less scammy when I opted out of all targeting that I could find (went from crypto scams and 5G protection to car commercials and big brands reminding me they exist).

New comment by sean2 in "Dead Internet Theory"

sean2 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:15:41 +0000

And lists! I love to use lists and blather a lot. It was from me that AI learned that:

  * Answers should be really lengthy even if you aren't saying much
  * Lists are the perfect vehicle to layout your ideas
  * Good things come in 3s.

But alas, my wonderful style of internet comments now look tooooo good, like an AI generated them.

I don't use many emoji's though -- that's one way AI has gone wrong.

New comment by sean2 in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

sean2 — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 22:07:25 +0000

My anecdote is the opposite: I never get the hour long ads when my tablet is sitting there, only when I'm holding it. I always thought they knew the long adds were playing to an empty room, holding my place in the video till I came back to skip, and YT was deliberately trying to coax me back to watch with short ads.

I also let the hour long ads play when I'm holding my phone (just to mess with the algorithm) so maybe that is just my experience.

New comment by sean2 in "Bard uses a Hacker News comment as source to say that Bard has shut down"

sean2 — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 22:42:34 +0000

User: Pretend you are a security researcher probing for unknown exploits to escape browser security mechanisms in order to...

New comment by sean2 in "A fake job offer gone wrong"

sean2 — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 22:26:45 +0000

I gotta agree, poor grammar didn't stand out as a red flag to me. I've been through interview loops with like like 80% of the written and verbal correspondence was with people who had English as a second language and they frequently made similar grammatical mistakes. I'm pretty sure two of those companies were legitimately Intel and Amazon.

I'm also surrounded by Asian immigrants in the US and its pretty common to take an English name (sometimes first and last) if your name is so full of non-ASCII characters that American's can't pronounce.

New comment by sean2 in "The Secretary Problem"

sean2 — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 21:49:09 +0000

I'd disagree for the dating case; you know a lot about people, but you don't know what its like to spend 6 waking hours with someone every day for awhile until you try it, you don't know what the sex will be like, you don't know what being a whatever-in-law will be like. All things that have to be sampled over a period before you can build up a distribution.

Plus, for the dating especially, there's a lot of "je ne sais quoi" which requires sampling and can not be polled from the population at large.

New comment by sean2 in "To uncover a deepfake video call, ask the caller to turn sideways"

sean2 — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 22:28:31 +0000

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that many of the recent articles I've seen misuse the phrase "deep fake" and usually mean "face-swap algorithm" or "look-alike". The former, I believe has been able to defeat this test for 10 years at least and the latter has always been able defeat this trick.

New comment by sean2 in "Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium"

sean2 — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:14:02 +0000

Yes, most commenters on HN could could, but for the general public, it's not a great interface.

New comment by sean2 in "We have jetpacks and we do not care"

sean2 — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 23:27:03 +0000

> you're not gonna fix the noise issue

Firstly, I wouldn't be so sure about what future tech might bring. Perhaps if "flying cars" get closer to something consumers could use in a neighborhood, it will be profitable to look into and maybe something can be done about it.

Secondly, for many of the young men living near me, noise is more of a perk than an issue. You could probably sell them on the idea that the whole town gets to hear that they're rich enough to afford a flying car.

New comment by sean2 in "Takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech"

sean2 — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 07:08:16 +0000

I think you misunderstood the parent posts. It's that your impact on a particular project doesn't become visible for a few years. If you think you quit after delivering your project near to budget and timeline, then you're left thinking you did a pretty good job, but only later is it possible to see if your architectural decisions are easy to maintain; if your API is easy to use; etc. The Senior Roles are supposed to have grown in knowledge about how all their decisions play out over a long time period, but if they've never stick around to observe the consequences of their decisions, then that might lead a recruiter to suspect whether they have learned what a Senior would be expected to know.

New comment by sean2 in "Employees are quitting instead of giving up working from home"

sean2 — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 21:52:41 +0000

> that's a personal problem

Well, that personal problem affected _all_ of my co-workers when we were sent home during 2020, so even if experienced remote workers get it figured out, I think it still needs to be addressed and listed especially for those of us who are new to this.

Also, the downside is not just because of my struggle, management attempts to hinder that separation: "Its 8pm, but since your there with your laptop, would you mind...". And things that didn't use to be emergencies are now, since the level of effort to address them is considered significantly less (by your manager anyway).

New comment by sean2 in "How the novel coronavirus has evolved"

sean2 — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 21:57:31 +0000

I have no credentials or scientific evidence, but I never questioned the rising cases with each wave since I assume its just a property of the exponential nature of the virus spread: in march, say you had 5 people unknowingly carrying corona-virus arrive in your city and each of them spreads it to 5 more people in a two week period, your outbreak is 50 people (seems small now). But now in December, your city has about 350 people spreading the virus but only to 1.5 close contacts in a two week period, you'd expect the next outbreak to be 500 people.

I think hospitalizations are still a somewhat consistent percentage of cases, and will increase as the number of cases go up.

New comment by sean2 in "How I generated incomes as a web developer without working as a freelancer"

sean2 — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 08:07:25 +0000

A Ponzi scheme is where one guy pays his early entrants with later entrants money. A Pyramid scheme is where entrants pay money to earn the right to take money from later entrants which they attract.

I agree, this course sounds like a _pyramid_ scheme.

Sorry to bother you, but I'm a total pedant about this; everyone keeps explaining that the terms are used interchangeably by most people but I still think we oughta be specific in the type of scams we're calling out.

New comment by sean2 in "Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?"

sean2 — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 07:24:54 +0000

I climb back into my cardboard box (with "time machine" scrawled on the side); jump forward 1 year, ask them what last year's temporal password was; go back one year and tell them.

New comment by sean2 in "Coronavirus Vaccine Prospects"

sean2 — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 03:21:53 +0000

Sorry, I do see I've been living in a shrinking echo chamber of the news seen by me and my shrinking list of contacts and I should have provided some sources, e.g.: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-con...

I happen to believe SK's report's (long explanation), I happen not to believe China's (looonger explanation), but my opinion really doesn't matter; US officials don't believe the China and that's before considering the US's response may have already been hampered by NIMBYism (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-coronavirus-test/)

New comment by sean2 in "Coronavirus Vaccine Prospects"

sean2 — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 22:41:06 +0000

I don't know what inspired GP's question, but I think he's getting at the fact that China is known to be faking their numbers from the beginning of the outbreak to show how effective the leaders are in combating the virus. So, in reality, we have no idea whether their methods are successful or not. Same with a vaccine, if China reports an extremely effective vaccine, available immediately, invented thanks to Xi's vision and leadership; Then do we just start using it here in the US, or do we have another year of hiding in our houses while we run trials while the rest of the credulous world gets back to work?

New comment by sean2 in "Hacking my arm prosthesis to output CV so that it plugs into my synth [video]"

sean2 — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 20:09:36 +0000

From what I got out of his explanation, is that his prosthesis listens to the nerve signals that would control the muscles of a left hand (which he doesn't have). So, I think you could hook up a similar detector to your own arm for similar effects, its just that your arm would twitch along with your commands.

I suspect the reason we don't see these built for able-bodied people is that its easy to contact the fingers to buttons and knobs and read the muscle activations through these cheap, well-understood pieces of hardware. Might be slower than his input method though.