Hacker News: snicky

New comment by snicky in "Travel locally, where you are"

snicky — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:14:22 +0000

I usually prefer to make a detailed plan for my trip, but I allow myself to break free from it anytime I find something more interesting to do. This way I'm more sure that I won't waste too much time or money staying in wrong places, choosing wrong means of transport and falling for some tourist traps or common scams.

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

snicky — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:52:42 +0000

It sounds weird indeed, but maybe some higher-ups decided this is a way to go in case people need to be isolated again or when it's necessary to hire some remote coworkers who shouldn't be left behind, etc.

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

snicky — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:46:04 +0000

I use this default context in ChatGPT and it works pretty well for me:

"Tell it like it is. Don't sugar-coat responses. Be concise. Short answers only. No bullet points. One paragraph max. No over-explaining."

New comment by snicky in "A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft"

snicky — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:30:52 +0000

I still don't quite get it given I have never worked high enough or in a big enough corp. What kind of mission a person earning $19k a day have to do at the destination to justify the cost? I imagine to earn this much their main responsibility is to lobby / influence someone important (at dinners, golfing and such). Otherwise, if there are no outsiders involved the whole thing could be just done online. If it's about lobbying though - does it have to be done immediately and 3-4 times a week?

Another example that comes to my mind is a highly skilled expert in repairing some important machinery, e.g. ship engines or factory lines.

New comment by snicky in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

snicky — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:36:41 +0000

> People never wanted to visit your website; they just wanted the information that your website held.

Well, no. It is a boomer talk, but in the 90s the web was so fragmented and unpolished that websites usually looked very different from each other. People were writing their own HTML (and CSS came later). "Home pages" were some form of an art. Not the highest one to be frank, but the ecosystem was quite interesting. People did visit those websites not only to get the information, but to enjoy those quirky forms.

New comment by snicky in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

snicky — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:19:00 +0000

Maybe he keeps more plates spinning ... in his side projects. Clearly, developers are expected to produce more results with LLMs and switch between contexts quickly. It shouldn't be surprising that everyone may be running their own thing(s) on the side now.

New comment by snicky in "Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone"

snicky — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:00:45 +0000

God, those self-indulging posts on LI are the worst. Sometimes it feels like half of the world's compute is wasted on that.

New comment by snicky in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

snicky — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:35:30 +0000

I played it years ago and sorry, it didn't rock my world even for 5 minutes. It's a very naive story with a jump-scare sort of ending that totally didn't work for me, because it was well expected. The story felt very underwhelming comparing to most books, movies or games even. IMHO a complete waste of time.

New comment by snicky in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

snicky — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:26:58 +0000

Cool, but unfortunately, it has the same same drawbacks as cash. If you get scammed, accidentally pay too much or lose your wallet you will never get it back. I sleep safer knowing that there is some protection in the banking system against losing money all of sudden.

New comment by snicky in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

snicky — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:18:22 +0000

IIRC BLIK asks you if you want to skip the verification next time you buy from the same merchant.

New comment by snicky in "Ask HN: Hiring in the age of AI-assisted coding: what works?"

snicky — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:31:45 +0000

> * take home assignments where they say "we recommend you to not spend more than x hours on this", but then, they expect a very sophisticated work and will reject you if you turn-in a "simple" implementation. Maybe they expect speed and quality?

I never finished a take-home assignment within the given time frame. Once I even spent a whole weekend working on a solution to something that was described as a 2h problem. I feel it's just a way for the companies to make it look like it's a small commitment and they are not wasting your time excessively. If you decide to spend 2 days instead of 2 hours then "it's on you" ... But if you don't you'll fail.

New comment by snicky in "Everything Changes, and Nothing Changes"

snicky — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:49:04 +0000

I'm in a similar age and career point and have similar feelings about my SE job atm. Can you share more about your transition to the researcher role? What field are you in, how did you get there, what problems did you encounter, etc.

Ask HN: Is there anyone working at Meta who could help with a stolen FB account?

snicky — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:46:16 +0000

A friend of mine has lost access to his FB account due to malware. Is there a way to get hold of a human being who could help to retrieve it? He runs a couple of businesses that rely on their FB pages heavily and all that is becoming a wall of random spam now.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125786

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by snicky in "I hate AI side projects"

snicky — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:39:47 +0000

I agree with you in general, but come on - learning is easier (unless you need to dive into highly specialized stuff), writing shorter chunks of code is faster, simple photo editing ("remove this and that from the background") doesn't need any skills now. Image generation isn't terribly too if you put some effort and don't stick with the same 3-4 drawing styles that all the cheapskate companies use.

New comment by snicky in "Show HN: Off Grid – Run AI text, image gen, vision offline on your phone"

snicky — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 01:12:56 +0000

GitHub Releases link is broken.

The dash in "off-grid" is missing.

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

snicky — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:25:32 +0000

A friend of mine owned a site once. At some point he couldn't figure out how to fix a frontend bug that appeared on IE only. In the end he was so pissed that instead of fixing the bug, he decided to stick a couple of additional Adsense banners . His revenue went up drastically.

New comment by snicky in "Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones"

snicky — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:56:01 +0000

> 2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).

This is an interesting observation. Another one that I sometimes mention to my friends who didn't have an occasion to learn Chinese before is that in this language speaking, reading and writing are actually 3 separate components. You can read characters without knowing how to write them properly or even remembering them entirely. Lots of my Taiwanese acquaintances forget how to write certain characters, because nowadays most of the text they write is in bopomofo on their phones. Bopomofo represents sounds, so basically knowing how an expression sounds and being able to read the character (pick it from a set of given characters for the chosen sound) is enough to "write" it.

New comment by snicky in "East Germany balloon escape"

snicky — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 01:22:15 +0000

This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...

New comment by snicky in "Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)"

snicky — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:59:45 +0000

It could also explain why most of us can eat like pigs in all-you-can-eat buffets.

New comment by snicky in "Ask HN: Is anyone aware of a LinkedIn mirror like xcancel.com for X?"

snicky — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:39:46 +0000

And it feels like half of the world's compute is wasted on those self-indulgent cringe posts now.