Hacker News Reader

pschuegron New Alzheimer's Treatment Clears Plaques from Brains of Mice Within Hours

fascinating post, thank you

pschuegron Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

Great turn of phrase

pschuegron Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

Oh boy, this reminded me of university days. I wrote a little servlet which would pop out the CD drive on my friends computer in the lab, and I would trigger it at tense moments in Starcraft games. Good times.

pschuegron Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person (2016)

https://web.archive.org/web/20240203230728/https://www.nytim...

pschuegron How Are We Tracking Toward Climate Change Goals?

Well that's a depressing progress report if I've ever seen one. Honestly I'm boggled at how many people seem indifferent to what could be an existential threat for many of us - obviously many of us care deeply but there's nothing resembling a code red happening in the public consciousness.

pschuegron Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?

https://www.reddit.com/r/outside/

in seriousness though this is a great question and i look forward to the answers. i could not think of one.

pschuegron Google’s newly formed 'Platforms and Devices' team is all about AI

insightful comment. I'd like to think that Google will integrate AI in an at least mostly useful way, but it's clear that large scale reorgs like this around chasing a competitor can and do end badly.

pschuegron Elon Musk confirms that Twitter will charge new users a temporary fee

This is one of those proposals that seriously made me wonder if the conspiracy theorists were right that he's intentionally running it into the ground. I don't believe that but... charging new users? that's an ostentatiously dumb idea.

pschuegron EU tells Meta it can't paywall privacy

Doesn't the EU law have a size requirement for the userbase before it ratchets up? that seems like a reasonable way to apply this law without unduly burdening small companies.

pschuegron Google One VPN will be discontinued

I'm pretty sure that for Google a "multi-million" sized venture is considered a complete waste of time; they probably don't consider it worth pursuing until it hits the hundreds of millions. The scale they operate at financially is beyond comprehensible.

I imagine its frustrating to be working on these projects which would mean untold riches to any individual or small group but having it get shut down because it's not making a half billion or so.

pschuegron Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search

two cups of coffee from Starbucks

pschuegron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)

Not the original poster, but also Canadian. IIUC TN visas don't really require sponsorship, just a job offer in one of the covered fields.

pschuegron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)

The job postings say European time zones only, but this says Americas as well, can you clarify?

pschuegron Ask HN: What's the best way to exit tech?

let's talk! I'm in the same spot

pschuegron Digital Audio Songbook: A Love Letter to My Unfinished Songs

would be great to see a bulk import type operation at some point. i dislike having these kinds of things in multiple places but i'd have to upload a couple of hundred files to get my idea bank into this space.

pschuegron The complete history of Gondar: Africa's city of castles (1636-1900)

This is great, thanks for posting!

pschuegron Musk's Biography: Why It's Interesting

More reasons why it's interesting:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-...

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/very-ordinary-men/

pschuegron Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?

great links, thanks!

pschuegron Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?

Getting UX right is a lot harder than people realize for several reasons:

- You have the usual BigCo problems in software with prioritization and incentives and pressure to deliver new features

- Front-end work is less mathematically complex and is generally undervalued by large companies that rely on complexity as a metric for difficulty/value

- When you use a piece of software all day for months/years, you learn the happy path to get things done and you forget all the rough edges because "it works fine for me"

- It requires a lot of detailed thinking about how other people perceive your work which is not something that software developers tend to excel at

- The user story which led to the UI/UX is not explicit to the user and the ways that users will try to use your UI are almost infinite

- Writing tests for front-end code has historically been more difficult

- There are a large variety of devices out there and testing on them all is time-consuming and painful

- Software is hard. People are hard. Combining them is harder.

- Small companies have a small surface area (people x devices x products) to cover and thus get more focused attention from their devs. Large companies have team reorgs and turnovers and many people who might have different priorities working on the same product

- Large companies know that people will still use their products even if the UX is worse because breaking out of the Apple/Google/Microsoft ecosystem requires significant tradeoffs

- Bug reports from the general public are given lower weight at big companies because of scale. When you have 10 bug reports to sort through it's not that hard to prioritize and ignore, not to mention that early adopters and small software users are more likely to be good bug reporters. When you have 10,000 bugs of which 9,000 of them are filed by people who don't know how to explain the problem: "my X doesn't Y", you become numb to new bugs unless they are show-stoppers, which many UX bugs are not.

pschuegron Ex-Tinder engineer made a dating app for Twitter

it doesn't help that they haven't changed the URL. great work all round

pschuegron Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?

salivate - or possibly not.

signed,

xoogler having just as much trouble as the rest of y'all

pschuegron Ask HN: Where do you live? What's good or bad about it?

Also con: the weather in the winter is miserable for 4-5 months straight. It's turned me into a sun worshipper and as soon as I can get out I will.

pschuegron Why does sleep become more elusive as we age?

Yup likewise. Eating after 8pm is a sleep killer for me.

pschuegron Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds

Very cool!

pschuegron Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

I don't think it's cynicism to realize that people are imperfect creatures subject to the whims of insecurity and ego, not being well slept, yadda yada. To me that's just realism.

pschuegron Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

I'm personally convinced that a lot of arguments in modern life boil down to not going to a sufficient level of detail. Mostly I find that both parties in an disagreement have valid points and simply haven't defined their terms precisely enough or been clear that they are talking about a p95 vs a p5 situation.

pschuegron Elon Musk says the risk of advanced AI is so high that the public needs to know

"Elon Musk says" is a fine indicator that the rest of the sentence has a questionable relationship with verifiable reality.

https://elonmusk.today/

pschuegron Ask HN: Manhattan Project for Climate?

While we're living in fantasy world, why not just skip the faffing around and solve world hunger and world peace next year?

pschuegron Elon Musk's ChatGPT rival to be witty and uncensored

If the standard for witty is being set by Elon Musk, this should be totally hilarious if you're a 15-year old edgelord from 1990.

pschuegron Apple developer boycott of Feedback Assistant

I'm in. Apple Feedback Assistant is absolutely useless.