Viewing profile — keiferski

So many false assumptions about me and my background, and so much false nostalgia. I am Polish-American, I speak Polish, my girlfriend is Polish, so yeah, my opinion is just as val…

I think the majority of Ask HN questions have always been looking for the opinions of the community, not just pieces of information.

I only see 7 posts in the Ask HN section. The other day, there were only 10. Is this due to a cap on Ask submissions, or something else?

I've lived in Poland for the last decade. I'd say 95% of the population looks back on the USSR era with negative views. Poland probably has the best situation it's been in for hund…

Yes, they were, and probably still are better than prisons in Russia.

These kinds of articles are only popular in places that had no direct experience of life in the USSR. No one in Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, etc. looks back on the time with fon…

I think it ultimately just comes down to laziness. People are increasingly loathe to make multi-year plans and stick to them, for various reasons. Building something like a YouTube…

The other day I pasted two links into ChatGPT, both different brands of the same appliance. One was $50, the other $200. I asked to compare the differences. It ended up recommendin…

The idea that longevity = meaningful is a value judgement derived from culture. In nature, many significant things happen in extremely small amounts of time.

And this is true of everyone else, whether lawyers or writers or researchers: increasingly, you are the bottleneck to be optimized away. As long as human workers cannot be removed …

>considering everyone is using MS software one way or another. I don't think I've used a MS product in at least a decade. At least that I was aware of. Edit: did some research and …

I really love etymology, because I like to imagine words having "lives", and then tracking those lives over the centuries. It's fascinating to think that a word might have begun in…

It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ yea…

This is why the chat interface is ultimately not the best option for non-expert users, because they require the user to bring knowledge with them. You can call this the “query” met…

This is only going to replace movies that were already using CGI. If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is se…

The funniest situation is when you’re in a city (Berlin in my example) and one store accepts only cash, while the store next door only accepts cards. Germany is definitely way behi…

That still sounds like you idolized his wealth and ability to use it for philanthropy. Not that you started liking nerdy things because Bill Gates liked them.

Correct. Not to say that intellectuals can’t be interested in physics, but it has always been more associated with culture and politics rather than technical subjects. https://en.w…

I don’t think the author’s thesis is right, and actually his first inclination is correct. No one starts liking nerdy stuff because Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos does, because no one re…

That’s not really what the word intellectual has meant for the last century. Intellectual is more akin to “liberal arts major” in modern language: philosophers, writers, art critic…

Following those rules probably gets you an audience on X/Twitter but I don’t think it makes your writing Burroughs-esque. I’m still pretty skeptical that big co. AI companies are g…

One way to tell is if the tone is hostile, cynical, or otherwise not full of that giddy optimistic tone associated with what I’ll call “California Business English.” The mainstream…

How is that any different than any other profession?

If it includes all ingredients, cooking method, and weight in exact grams, it’s probably reasonably accurate.

Key information: There’s roughly 100 firefighter arsonists convicted every year in North America and all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires,” Nordskog to…