Hacker News: totalconfusion

New comment by totalconfusion in "Decades of Effort Restore Steelhead and Salmon Passage on Alameda Creek"

totalconfusion — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:02:07 +0000

IANAS - I am not a Salmon?

New comment by totalconfusion in "Malaysia enforces ban on social media accounts for children younger than 16"

totalconfusion — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:54:39 +0000

We built this city

Claude Onboarding Unnecessarily Painful

totalconfusion — Wed, 20 May 2026 06:37:34 +0000

So I'm on day 2-3 at Claudes onboarding stage. Why does everyone insist on SMS verification? It really is a bridge too far. Is the argument that it's purely there to stop abuse, not identify you, got any legs?

I said a few choice words and put my mobile number in to what can only be described as a terribly ambiguous text box that you can't tell if the country code prefix has been populated for you or not: https://i.ibb.co/mFNHgL6N/Screenshot-2026-05-20-162000.png

After all this the text never comes through and two tries later I get another ambiguous message saying to "Try later" - Like, ok... how much later Claude?

I then spent five minutes wrangling a chat bot that told me to "Something has gone wrong, try again later" halfway through two separate chats trying to find an agent or lodge a ticket.

I somehow managed to lodge a ticket through a chat bot now I'm here 2-3 days later. #101766398 https://i.ibb.co/FLkQtQ0X/Screenshot-2026-05-20-162704.png

Is on boarding for Claude actually this bad or am I just special?

These kinds of automated onboarding pipelines are unnecessarily exclusionary to the tech illiterate and ostensibly there to help but I can't see it.

I guess this is a question, rant and appeal for help all in one. Any decent alternatives? Deepseek isn't cutting it for me for general use/search

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203910

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by totalconfusion in "Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?"

totalconfusion — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 13:45:42 +0000

Charles Stross - Accelerando

Never read anything quite like it since

New comment by totalconfusion in "Vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites"

totalconfusion — Sat, 04 May 2024 18:34:05 +0000

That's interesting, I wonder if this accelerates evolution from environmental pressure massively.

New comment by totalconfusion in "Protein made from a microorganism that can be cultivated with CO2"

totalconfusion — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 03:12:55 +0000

Solein Green

New comment by totalconfusion in "Protein made from a microorganism that can be cultivated with CO2"

totalconfusion — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 03:12:55 +0000

Solein Green

New comment by totalconfusion in "Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging"

totalconfusion — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 09:41:06 +0000

Completely agree, in for a dime in for a dollar. The reality is legalizing drugs is a politically untenable platform to get elected on because economic realities like supply and demand play no role in the deeply entrenched moral prejudice that is so prevalent in the (often older) voting population.

I don't mean to be offensive or ageist and I'm sure lots of older people have been touched both directly and indirectly by drug abuse, my experience is those that have been affected in some way have changed their long held views on drugs being a criminal issue as opposed to a medical one.

New comment by totalconfusion in "Show HN: Linkwarden – An open source collaborative bookmark manager"

totalconfusion — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:08:10 +0000

Amazing. Collaborative bookmark management needed to happen.

Imagine deciding you want to learn a new skill and not having to start from square one learning the lay of the land around your newly chosen subculture but rather it's already been curated for you and you can hit the ground running with great links to various assets and communities like software tools, forums, discords and video tutorials. I love the archiving functionality too.

Your website looks great and all the information I needed was right there. Concise, informative and neat.

I think the real value here is a tool that will allow people of all kinds to aggregate relevant content and help onboard people to the communities they know, live and love.

I feel like a freemium model would allow this tool to reach a massive scale as I see awesome utility in it but I don't expect normal people would self host or pay for it even if it cost 10 cents. It's just too much inertia.

I feel so dirty telling you how to charge for your own product.

Pagerank and SEO killed search. What you have here sounds a hell of a lot better.

Awesome work mate! I'm aways up for a chat.

New comment by totalconfusion in "She Steals Surfboards by the Seashore. She’s a Sea Otter"

totalconfusion — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 22:45:35 +0000

Highly recommend this radio show if this is something you're interested in.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/new-nice

New comment by totalconfusion in "Show HN: Timechief – My Smartclock Project"

totalconfusion — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 18:26:27 +0000

An alarm clock with NTP. Finally. It reminds me of a Pip-Boy. Consider integrating a light source in to it and maybe some USB outs for charging

New comment by totalconfusion in "Reddit Ramps Up Its Threats to Protesting Mods, as Ad Buyers Leave"

totalconfusion — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:04:00 +0000

This is so real. Google's core functionality has become a victim of its own success and is now borderline unusable.

No exaggeration 80-90% of my searches have reddit affixed to the end.

SEO is the devil and page ranks utility died many years ago.

New comment by totalconfusion in "'Incredibly noticeable': alcohol ban cut family violence, crime in Alice Springs"

totalconfusion — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:41:58 +0000

How I read safety/dosing would be standardized weight/volume/concentration of the drug and not the idea of prohibiting sales over a certain amount per person per day. Which as you say would just turn in to a secondary market.

New comment by totalconfusion in "'Incredibly noticeable': alcohol ban cut family violence, crime in Alice Springs"

totalconfusion — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 17:27:53 +0000

Prohibition will lead to abuse of other drugs and empower local criminal elements.

Inhalants, petrol, glue, nitrous oxide. Whatever is available.

There are no opportunities in these places, people get fucked up to make life more bearable.

If you've never seen a remote town in outback Australia before, the film Cunnamulla (2000) is a pretty accurate representation. Might be a little dated but not much has changed.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMyzyZcCJo&pp=ygUKY3VubmFtdWx...

The health of these communities is at serious risk when you force them in to using unregulated black market narcotics and cleaning products to get high.