Hacker News: snarf21

New comment by snarf21 in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

snarf21 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:12:05 +0000

If anyone is interested in why we are bad at estimating, please check out the amazing book Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman.

New comment by snarf21 in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

snarf21 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:08:48 +0000

Most Amish under 30 have secret cell phones. It would only be the oldest generations without them. There are even lots of wink & nod arrangements where they may even have electricity in some outbuilding but they unplug it when elder comes to visit. It also depends on the Order as some are more strict than others. They generally aren't allowed to have electricity in "the house" but batteries and other workarounds exist.

They aren't as isolated these days as they used to be. If you go to Costco, you see them with 3 carts loaded 3 feet high of all the same crap everyone else is buying. A lot of times, they don't even transport it back via buggy but call the "Amish taxi service" which is people who drive them around town in large passenger vans. Even from a work source perspective, a lot have moved on from farm work and work in construction, roofing and other trades. If you go to a gas station in the morning, you'll see work trucks roll up and only Amish rollout to go buy soda and lunches or whatever.

[Source: I live in Lancaster and have for many years.]

New comment by snarf21 in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

snarf21 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:59:03 +0000

The best hiring advice is this: Take half of the resumes you receive and just throw them in the trash. You don't want to hire unlucky people!

New comment by snarf21 in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

snarf21 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:59:32 +0000

No offense, but that is meaningless.

60% support abortion but he we are with no Roe. 70% support gay marriage but the small percentage in charge want to outlaw it.

It takes more than polling to become legislation. Weird indeed.

New comment by snarf21 in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

snarf21 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:27:31 +0000

I think politically it is an easier sell than medicare for all or government only healthcare.

New comment by snarf21 in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

snarf21 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:11:22 +0000

Yeah, what I'm suggesting is that your premiums are funded through your HSA, not just your deductible and medicines. Obviously, the max HSA funding amounts would have to change.

New comment by snarf21 in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

snarf21 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:48:30 +0000

I worked in healthcare start-ups for many years and the main problem is mis-aligned incentives.

The #1 thing we need to do is make it illegal for your healthcare to be tied to your employment. We can still have your employer provide a X% or $Y to an HSA account that the employee can buy health coverage wherever they like. (I'm not optimistic that this will ever happen politically)

The issue today is that NOT healing you makes everyone more money, like a LOT more. There is no incentive for anyone to help people get healthy just to have a different insurance company benefit from the decreased claims.

This is also the only way forward to value based care (for primary) where doctors (providers et al) can take on the risk/reward. They get some amount (say $1K ??) per year and they keep it and submit no claims. However, if there costs go above, they eat it loss. Now the doctor and the insurance company (payer) are all incentivized to get and keep people healthy.

New comment by snarf21 in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

snarf21 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:27:57 +0000

Don't count all those chickens before they hatch. There might be more started but do they all survive? Think back to the dot-com boom/crash for an example of where that initial gold rush didn't just magically ramp forever. There were fits and starts as the usefulness of the technology was figured out.

New comment by snarf21 in "ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

snarf21 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:24:33 +0000

Mostly easier in the sense that it is always in your hand already, not at home on the charger on your desk.

New comment by snarf21 in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

snarf21 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:54:29 +0000

Space/land; you have to displace and buy the four corner properties (at least) to put one in.

New comment by snarf21 in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

snarf21 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:55:34 +0000

It is almost as if this was a planned wealth transfer that was immensely succesful.

New comment by snarf21 in "OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

snarf21 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:07:01 +0000

It is mostly a combination of Sinclair's Law and "I have nothing to hide" mindset.

New comment by snarf21 in "Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS"

snarf21 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:58:31 +0000

I design games and have been working on a Red Riichi variant where one of each number is red and this drives scoring instead of all the myriad of Yaku. All the Yaku are hard for beginners to onboard and a lot of hands have to good path to an interesting Yaku and just depend on luck to be able to call Riichi. I'm still testing it but I find it more interesting.

I also have a card game version that implements some of these ideas (although it doesn't have a Furiten concept).

New comment by snarf21 in "Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools"

snarf21 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:33:37 +0000

I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives.

All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.

New comment by snarf21 in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

snarf21 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:15:09 +0000

Serious question: but aren't there thousands of other guys doing almost the same thing and getting almost no views? Even if there are lots of new channels, there aren't going to be lots of winners

New comment by snarf21 in "iOS 27 'Rave' Update to Clean Up Code, Could Boost Battery Life"

snarf21 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:36:00 +0000

I thought the person responsible was already gone...

New comment by snarf21 in "I asked Claude Code to remove jQuery. It failed miserably"

snarf21 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:18:58 +0000

This one is a lot harder to tell because there are some AI bros who claim similar things but are completely serious. Even look at Show HN now: There used to be ~20-40 posts per day but now there are 20 per HOUR.

(Please oh please can we have a Show HN AI. I'm not interested in people's weekend vibe coded app to replace X popular tool. I want to check out cool projects wher people invested their passion and time.)

New comment by snarf21 in "How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post"

snarf21 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:53:11 +0000

As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.

New comment by snarf21 in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

snarf21 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:53:44 +0000

Correct, and this is meant to attract the same investors and Bulls that already think Mars colonies is a solved problem, just need a few more years to run some tests. As with all, it is only about making himself richer.

New comment by snarf21 in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

snarf21 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:58:10 +0000

If nothing else, an update to the pbxproj file format would be life changing. Most of my time fighting git is dealing with project file merges.