Hacker News: washmyelbows

New comment by washmyelbows in "The lasting influence of Netscape Time"

washmyelbows — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:38:55 +0000

its weirdly endearing in the age of LLMs to see a word like company misspelled in a blog post

New comment by washmyelbows in "Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying"

washmyelbows — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:23:42 +0000

I mean, the person is looking for a cleaner in their area. If all of the cleaning businesses in the area slash their marketing budget to 0, the author is not going to fail to find a cleaner. All the marketing budget is doing is funneling people who want cleaning to one cleaning company over another.

New comment by washmyelbows in "If you are harassed by lasers"

washmyelbows — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:21:37 +0000

fantastic username

New comment by washmyelbows in "Bluesky Isn't Celebrating the Death of Charlie Kirk"

washmyelbows — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 21:34:42 +0000

The article goes on to say the exact opposite of the headline. Bluesky users are celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, it's simply not the majority of them

New comment by washmyelbows in "One Million Screenshots"

washmyelbows — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:39:18 +0000

Not much yellow on the web

New comment by washmyelbows in "The Rise of Whatever"

washmyelbows — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 05:39:22 +0000

Couldn't agree more on many of these points. There is so much 'whatever' everywhere on the web that I legitimately don't understand people being interested in the platforms that suck everyone's time. Its frustrating as someone who used to enjoy the early web a lot and it's frustrating to see people that I have a lot of respect for buying into these awful systems with their time and attention. Worse still, I'm something of an outsider in many situations for opting out of them.

The author lost me a little on the AI rant. Yes, everything and everyone is shoving LLMs into places that I don't want it. Just today Bandcamp sent me an email about upcoming summer albums that was clearly in part written by AI. You can't get away from it, it's awful. That being said, the tooling for software development is so powerful that I feel like I'd be crazy not to use it. I save so so much time with banal programming tasks by just writing up a paragraph to cursor about what I want and how I want it done.

New comment by washmyelbows in "Unhooking from Amazon Ebooks"

washmyelbows — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 23:04:34 +0000

so I guess you just don't read ebooks?

New comment by washmyelbows in "Wiki Radio: The thrilling sound of random Wikipedia"

washmyelbows — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 17:27:22 +0000

wow - I've quickly found 2 songs that are better than anything I've discovered in weeks

New comment by washmyelbows in "Sega mistakenly reveals sales numbers of popular games"

washmyelbows — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 16:58:58 +0000

There's also a ton of multi sale per person in overwatch. Especially before role queue existed, it was easier to just spend 10 bucks on a new account to learn a hero than to suffer ELO hell while doing it. People are so toxic in competitive shooters, and playing at the ELO of your best heroes while on a hero you don't even know the abilities of is very very unpleasant. I struggle to think of a person I played with that didn't have multiple accounts, some with as many as 5-10.

This is to say nothing of the rampant cheating in the game, which if a person ever gets banned for, there is nothing stopping them from just spending 10$ on a replacement account.

New comment by washmyelbows in "NexusMods Changes Hands"

washmyelbows — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 13:51:10 +0000

Agreed. It's so painless to use and yet the adoption is so bad

New comment by washmyelbows in "I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected"

washmyelbows — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:40:50 +0000

my favorite stout is 400 calories for 12oz

New comment by washmyelbows in "The Future of Comments Is Lies, I Guess"

washmyelbows — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 13:37:54 +0000

There's a lot of people downplaying the importance of genuine online comments but the reality is that (outside of the bubbles lives in by many HN users) millions upon millions of people are meaningfully participating and forming their viewpoints based on them.

I suspect even the 'well I never trust online comments!' crowd here is not as immune to propaganda as they'd like to believe themselves to be

New comment by washmyelbows in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

washmyelbows — Mon, 26 May 2025 03:54:03 +0000

there is a very large collection of old catalogs on archive.org for people interested in looking at old print advertisements

New comment by washmyelbows in "Hacker News Anti-Paywall"

washmyelbows — Sun, 18 May 2025 13:19:28 +0000

12ft.io seemed to stop being useful almost immediately after gaining any amount of popularity

New comment by washmyelbows in "Heat stress mitigation by trees and shelters at bus stops"

washmyelbows — Thu, 08 May 2025 11:49:24 +0000

Trees good, study finds

New comment by washmyelbows in "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)"

washmyelbows — Tue, 06 May 2025 04:53:15 +0000

the post office scans the exterior, not the contents. That is a significant difference.

New comment by washmyelbows in "The death of the middle-class restaurant"

washmyelbows — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 03:37:32 +0000

Are these types of restaurants actually going away or are crappy chains just going under because better alternatives are a dime a dozen?

New comment by washmyelbows in "What If We Made Advertising Illegal?"

washmyelbows — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 03:34:26 +0000

The inability to get a TV/stream box without some kind of ads cooked in infuriates me to no end, and it just feels like it's getting worse

New comment by washmyelbows in "Extracting content from an LCP “protected” ePub"

washmyelbows — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 23:58:23 +0000

LCP markets itself as an open standard, but has made multiple platforms unusable for me as a kobo user. Aggressively seeking out content like this and trying to bully away fixes for the tiny portion of the market it is helping is reprehensible

New comment by washmyelbows in "Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation"

washmyelbows — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 03:23:29 +0000

I spent a good chunk of time at a small company trying to mitigate spam, it always felt like an uphill battle that google just did significantly better than I could. I'm not one to usually advocate outsourcing services that my department could provide, but it felt like the right call to outsource email so that it would be better for the users.