Hacker News: sxg

New comment by sxg in "AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights"

sxg — Sat, 02 May 2026 21:19:09 +0000

I'm a physician and have recently been on both sides of the hiring process for new physicians and residents at a few different institutions. It's absolutely not meritocratic--you'd be shocked at how strong a role connections and pedigree play. The hard requirements are just table stakes, but the selection process from there is completely subjective and susceptible to all kinds of problematic biases. Generally people don't want to rock the boat and discuss this stuff openly, but it's absolutely a problem that needs to be pointed out.

New comment by sxg in "AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights"

sxg — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:30:04 +0000

Take a look at how things worked before (and still do): employers decide who get jobs based on a combination of personal biases, nepotism, and ulterior motives while applicants present distorted versions of themselves and network/pull strings to put the odds in their favor. That seems more problematic.

New comment by sxg in "OpenClaw is a security nightmare dressed up as a daydream"

sxg — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:59:03 +0000

Some of it is lack of imagination, but some of it is because many truly visionary examples would largely sound stupid to most of today's audience. Imagine it's 2007 and you're explaining how the smartphone will change society over the next 20 years:

- A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world

- The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other countries in ~4 years

- We'll replace taxis and hotels by getting rides and sharing homes with strangers

- Billions of people across the world will never need to own a desktop or laptop

- A short video sharing app will kill TV

- QR codes become relevant

Most of these would be a hard sell at the time.

New comment by sxg in "The MacBook Neo"

sxg — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:42:29 +0000

KDE was far less mature than macOS and Windows 10 years ago. Of course it’s come a long way.

New comment by sxg in "Medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are fiction"

sxg — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:42:10 +0000

I think you may have missed the original commenter's point. Residents (and medical students) are highly incentivized to publish unrealistic numbers of papers and case reports. One case report doesn't cut it—you need literally dozens of publications to match into some of the most competitive residency and fellowship programs. The NRMP (match organizer) publishes a document every 2 years that summarizes all of these stats. The 2024 version is in the link below, and page 12 supports what I'm saying.

https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Charting_Out...

New comment by sxg in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

sxg — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:19:16 +0000

How can you determine whether it's as good as Opus 4.5 within minutes of release? The quantitative metrics don't seem to mean much anymore. Noticing qualitative differences seems like it would take dozens of conversations and perhaps days to weeks of use before you can reliably determine the model's quality.

New comment by sxg in "How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?"

sxg — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:04:35 +0000

Yes, you could early-detect something, but the likelihood of this thing being life-threatening are extremely low. If you choose to manage this thing aggressively anyway, you have to undergo more invasive testing (e.g., biopsies, surgery, anesthesia, etc.) that all have small risks of catastrophic events. In most cases, the risks of more invasive testing outweigh the risks of just not pursuing any further workup.

Nothing in medicine comes for free—everything is a tradeoff.

New comment by sxg in "Claude Opus 4.6 extra usage promo"

sxg — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:08:41 +0000

The underreported story is how we over-trust human-coded software.

New comment by sxg in "Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux"

sxg — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:20:45 +0000

Just curious: what browser do you currently use? Firefox, Zen?

New comment by sxg in "The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025"

sxg — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 17:18:32 +0000

Interesting how Stratechery (Ben Thompson) is #15 in the last 5 years but not even top 100 in 2025. Similar with Julia Evans: #5 in the last 5 years but not in the 2025 top 100.

New comment by sxg in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

sxg — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:42:21 +0000

This sounds super cool and useful to me, but how does this work with a partner who's non-technical? Managing personal finances is something that we do together and having a nice clean UI that makes sense to her is important. Is there a way to achieve that with beancount? Currently we're using YNAB, which is mostly great although sometimes unstable and limited in ways.

New comment by sxg in "If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app"

sxg — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:13:23 +0000

There's also an orange light for the microphone.

New comment by sxg in "If you care about security you might want to move the iPhone Camera app"

sxg — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:50:05 +0000

I think you're missing the point of the post, which I actually also initially missed based on the misleading title. The author isn't saying that the camera app activating the camera and green light is a problem. The author is saying that he's unknowingly activating the camera app by simply touching the app icon, which in turn activates the green light and makes him think something nefarious is going on. However, this is a false positive that can contribute to alert fatigue and cause users to entirely ignore the green light.

New comment by sxg in "Spaced repetition for efficient learning (2019)"

sxg — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 01:04:19 +0000

Mochi.cards

Very similar to Anki but with a sane UI.

New comment by sxg in "Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows"

sxg — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:20:05 +0000

Are you comparing residents to specialists? They're not at all comparable. Residents in the US are typically within 3–7 years of graduating med school and are not able to practice independently. Specialists have typically finished 6–9 years of training after graduating medical school and are independent practitioners.

Source: am a US physician.

New comment by sxg in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

sxg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:54:53 +0000

Anecdotally, it's worked out for a number of friends and people on /r/PSLF. There's definitely poor communication around PSLF, but it is a real program.

New comment by sxg in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

sxg — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:25:25 +0000

Public service loan forgiveness (PSLF) exists and a huge number of people in medical professions actually take advantage of it. I know of multiple medical students and residents with over $500k in debt that are in the process of having all of their loans forgiven after 10 years in training and a total cost of approximately $75–150k for their entire education. Sure, that's still a decent amount of money, but it's very much worth the ROI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Service_Loan_Forgivenes...

New comment by sxg in "OpenAI acquires Sky.app"

sxg — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:50:30 +0000

https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview/

This is what you need to know.

New comment by sxg in "Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed"

sxg — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 19:29:52 +0000

I thought the same, but I gave Helix a shot for fun a couple years ago and never looked back. It really does feel better/more ergonomic, but the greatest benefit is that almost everything you need is built in. I spent way too much time fiddling with Vim and NeoVim configs.

New comment by sxg in "Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025"

sxg — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:14:37 +0000

Siri is the default and only voice assistant that has access to all the data on your phone. It doesn't matter if I have ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another SOTA model on my iPhone—I can't easily activate them in the car or another handsfree situation or use them with any other app or data on my iPhone.