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rexf

1,046 karma · joined October 11, 2010

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rexf··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
working on a convention to organize your own video files on your own buckets https://github.com/xta/keepsake

my goal is to offload phone videos (to free up device space) and persist them in self controlled storage. the convention makes this significantly more useful than a collection of object paths

rexf··on Costco is the anti-Amazon
Also Costco has a really annoying "treasure hunt" strategy where goods are re-arranged around the store trying to get you to explore aisles (aka get lost and waste time) to impulse buy more stuff.

Other stores (Target, Walmart, etc) will let you look up the item's aisle in their app and be considerate of your time.

rexf··on Doctors Warn Accountants of Private-Equity Drain on Quality: You Could Be Next
yes

tons of businesses currently advertise their "family owned & operated" status in America. so in the future, seeing marketing around "not owned by PE" wouldn't be a surprise

rexf··on Google and Meta struck secret ads deal to target teenagers
> Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there".

sounds like a partial retroactive justification to me. sure, you wouldn't get the full experience via a photo or verbal anecdote, but it's not like camera smartphones were ubiquitous in the 80s either.

rexf··on Second factor SMS: Worse than its reputation
just this week, I clicked on the 1st search result ad for "amazon" in google search. It led me to a windows-themed "Virus detected" amazon clone. I'm not using Windows. I was able to close the tab, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for google search results.

(I know I could have just typed "amazon.com" and gone directly. But browser autocomplete makes it a tiny bit easier to use the omni-url bar and just type "amazon" than "amazon.com")

rexf··on Kino: Pro Video Camera
Apple Watch app, widgets, Live Activities, new phone sizes... there are always things Apple wants you to add over time. Do you want meaningful updates or abandoned software? It doesn't take a full time job, but it's significantly more than $1 per install
rexf··on I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened
Paul Graham (@paulg):

I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened:

> People have been claiming YC fired Sam Altman.

> That's not true. Here's what actually happened.

> For several years he was running both YC and OpenAI,

> but when OpenAI announced that it was going to

> have a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam was going

> to be the CEO, we (specifically Jessica) told him

> that if he was going to work full-time on OpenAI,

> we should find someone else to run YC, and he

> agreed. If he'd said that he was going to find

> someone else to be CEO of OpenAI so that he could

> focus 100% on YC, we'd have been fine with that

> too. We didn't want him to leave, just to choose

> one or the other.

https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940

rexf··on Bollards: Why and What
It's entirely possible someone is cycling and has reduced vision (sunset, evening time, sun in your eyes, etc.) or isn't 100% focused for a few seconds (while thinking about something else). Putting any physical obstacle in the middle of a path is a very odd and dangerous choice.
rexf··on McDonald's and other big brands warn that low-income consumers starting to crack
> Then there's a 50% chance that the payment terminal won't work.

where is this? In CA, almost all payment terminals seem to work in retail for me. Businesses would not stay in business easily if their payment accepting device was broken.

(And for McD's, it's not too difficult IMO to select & checkout via their native iOS app.)

rexf··on Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
It's not trivial to do. You have to save rewards points, learn transfer partners (and their booking sites), and be willing to book ~330 days in advance for certain flights.
rexf··on Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right
This is shocking to read. I tried the in store demo and my main take away was that the display wasn’t as crisp or sharp as I expected for a $4k device.
rexf··on Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
TIL Trader Joe's has a website with prices.

(I shop their stores, but I don't use their website at all.)

rexf··on Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly
If you're actually watching content (a whole movie, a series, etc), the total actual usage of the service easily eclipses any time spent bouncing around the UI?
rexf··on Tesla Model Y 2nd in new vehicle registrations in the US, overtaking Toyota RAV4
Can you imagine having a hardware feature disabled during an unrelated service appointment?

> Tesla is going on the offensive for select vehicles that still have radar units installed and unplugging the sensors from customer cars during routine service appointments.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-quietly-disconnecting-ra...

How is that an improvement?

rexf··on Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
agreed. The loss of Apollo was a huge blow to the UX since the official Reddit app is hard to use and has poor design choices (in favor of business choices). Why would the official app have TINY up and down vote buttons? There are countless baffling decisions in the design & functionality in the official app.

Without an alternative to reddit, using the reddit app remains the way to stay informed & engaged in various niche reddit communities.

rexf··on LLMs by Hallucination Rate
"Hallucinations" is too charitable of a term for making stuff up. It personifies "AI" which doesn't need help selling its "intelligence".
rexf··on Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max
> I feel very disappointed that the laptops lack decent i/o. They spend all this time talking about how advanced the GPU is, but it's a $1,600 laptop that can only power one external display or a 2,000 laptop that can only power two displays?

yep. powering 2+ screens on a mac is not a straightforward process. for the prices Apple is charging on their "pro" machines, it should be simple to plug in 2 or even more screens to get work done.

rexf··on Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest
the discussion feels manufactured to me, but I can see how supposedly privacy first alternatives appeal to the HN crowd
rexf··on Hank Asher turned Americans’ private information into a business
> I think the solution to data privacy is to require companies to provide the receipts of where they obtained the data.

In the article, Asher and presumably the rest of their industry has many legal avenues for acquiring data. Such as directly from the government:

> the Department of Highway Safety’s trove of vehicle registrations, an untapped resource held separately from M.V.R.s. These the department sold for a penny a record, a low price (relative to those $2 M.V.R.s)

rexf··on Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
Sure if your customers want to use discord and you're ok with putting your community there, then go for it.

I don't think you can assume everyone wants to be on discord. I certainly loathe adding yet another discord or slack community that frankly I don't check. Nobody has time to keep up with dozens or hundreds of discord communities (it's very easy to join one).

I prefer any online community that is searchable (via Google, site search, etc) so that I can find answers and past discussion without having to ask the same question for the 100th time in the channel.

rexf··on The shrinking number of primary care physicians is reaching a tipping point
Your experience and my experience vary a lot.

My background is CA & NYC. I am able to get same day or same week (if less urgent) appts by calling my primary (PCP). In the event that my PCP has no availability or it's late in the day, I'll consider going to urgent care since it's the only thing open.

I can understand other people posting how hard it is to find a good PCP (or even dentist frankly). I got lucky and found a good, local PCP that I've been seeing for years.

rexf··on I went to 50 different dentists: almost all gave a different diagnosis (1997)
> I've posted this before, but I went to a new dentist one time and though I'd never had a cavity, the new dentist said I had nine, some of which were pretty bad and needed immediate treatment lest they require a root canal.

Once I saw a new dentist who also told me I had several cavities. Look, my teeth health isn't perfect, but any dentist that tells me I have so many cavities is a big red flag. I ended up seeing another dentist and that dentist told me I didn't have any cavities. The inconsistency between dentists is really off the charts (per TFA).

Also this quote from the article was telling:

> At a dental school, I heard about a newsletter, The Profitable Dentist, and became a subscriber. From this newsletter, I discovered that there’s a whole business devoted to telling dentists how to build up the “million dollar practice.” Dentists are flocking to courses on how to generate more profits by maximizing the use of hygienists, extending credit, stepping up collection practices, and persuading patients to accept expensive restoration work instead of fillings.

Look for any dentist trying to increase their bottom line: patients are not idiots. If a dentist tries to upsell me aggressively, I simply find another dentist. The reality is there are nearly endless dentists to choose from in my metropolitan area.

rexf··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2023)
Senior Software Engineer looking for a web developer or iOS role. I've shipped several iPhone & Apple Watch apps. On the App Store, my iPhone apps have 1300+ ratings with a 4.7 star average.

* Location: Los Angeles, CA

* Remote: Yes

* Willing to relocate: Yes

* Technologies: React, Vue, JS/JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, Python, Swift (iOS), Terraform, Docker, AWS, Objective-C * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rexfeng

* GitHub: https://github.com/xta

* Email: rexfeng@gmail.com

rexf··on The Resilience of Costco (2018)
Shopping at Costco is frustrating. It's fine for grocery staples (dairy, fruit, veggies, etc). But when it comes finding specific items in stock (and which aisle in the store), Target and Walmart are way ahead of Costco.

Ordering something at Target for Order Pickup is very straightforward and convenient. For Costco, I guess they don't want you to just order 1-2 items for order pickup and be on your way. Not to mention, the parking lot situation at Costco is a major turnoff to going.

rexf··on Toyota has been developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a range of 745mi
> The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.

That's a disingenuous take. ICE fueling takes significantly less time. So it's not an advantage that you can take a 20-30 minute break away from your car when you can just gas up your car in a few minutes (attended) and be on the road again.

rexf··on Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings
The NYT article does a really good job explaining the difference between converting a prewar and a modern building.

Also, TIL about loss factor:

> As offices, these buildings can also rent 100 percent (or even more) of their total square footage, according to the quirky math of commercial real estate.

https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies...

rexf··on Ask HN: What are your favorite methodologies for organizing digital life
I'm able to backup my files with a similar organization structure.

The problem is that this doesn't scale for immediate or extended family members. I guess the realistic option is for them to pay for cloud storage indefinitely, but that's not really ideal either.

rexf··on Cyberpunk 2077’s Path Tracing Update
It's been playable on next (aka current) gen hardware for a while now. So PS5, Xbox series X, or a powerful PC can handle the game fine. I played after patch 1.5, which contained a lot of bug fixes, and the game was ok. Still minor glitches here and there, but nothing game breaking.
rexf··on Apple Pay’s long road to paying off is getting shorter
Agreed. Both scenarios are similar. I wouldn't say one is inherently better than the other:

1. grab wallet from pocket, find card, align card to tap to pay target

2. grab phone from pocket, double tap phone side button while looking at it, align phone to tap to pay target

It also depends what you already have out. If you already have your wallet or phone out (wherever your store loyalty card is), that mode (wallet or phone) is that much easier

rexf··on Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India
It's mentioned.

> Balwant Singh, 32, runs a grocery store in New Delhi with his mother. He bought a Paytm Soundbox in 2020 after realizing digital payment receipts could be doctored. “[Before sound boxes], people were using apps to create fake payment receipts. I got conned a few times,” he told Rest of World.

The soundbox does seem useful. What you mentioned is all in the article.

> Abbas Ali, a vegetable vendor in an upscale neighborhood in New Delhi, started accepting digital payments in 2021. But every time a customer paid online, the 48-year-old, who can neither read nor write, would need to call his son to confirm that the payment had been received.

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