HN Best Comments

Re: Do dentists know what they're doing? Like 15 years ago now I had broken a filling. Went in to a new dentist because my insurance had changed. They told me I had 14 cavities, and 3 of my teeth needed crowns - and they were surprisingly rude about the whole ordeal. Reading the reviews on Yelp, someone had said they had a similar experience with their first visit and went to a different dentist and were told they had none. I decided to get a second opinion and heavens am I thankful I did. They replaced my filling right then and there and I think I've had maybe 3 cavities in the 15 years since. I put very little faith in dentists to not be scam artists. The part I find particularly … funny is the disagreements. I had one dentist who insisted I needed to be using a pre-rinse. That dentist ended up leaving, and a different dentist at THE SAME OFFICE told me it was a waste of money and I should stop because it does nothing. I swear they all just make it up as they go. I've had multiple dentists tell me this rough tooth in the back of my mouth needed to be capped because it was "falling apart". I started using imported NovaMin on it out of curiosity and it became super smooth instead of rough and no one has mentioned it since. One dentist I saw for a number of years would try to insist I needed a dental implant for a missing molar and if I didn't all my teeth were going to come out alignment. I didn't have money for it at the time. Not a single dentist before or since has mentioned this. donatj, 6 hours ago

Re: Banks are now trying to offload the AI data center debt they just underwrote To be fair to banks this is what they do with almost all debt their underwrite. They hold it to help stabilize the market for it while its being sold and then offload it once the market has been established. Nothing out of hte ordinary here, but to be fair the original article isnt' a financial site so they would have no real idea about how this work behind the scenes. This doesn't seem like a story at all given how robust this debt is trading. chollida1, 6 hours ago

Re: Passkeys are not a trap I thought "Passkeys are a trap" was going to be about this usability nightmare. Some sites, once connected via passkey, make it all but impossible to connect in another way. Some support multiple passkeys. Some do not. Some support passkey or something else. Some do not. The idea and protocol are pretty solid, though we're back to a "biometrics as password" problem in many device flows, but every time I'm urged by a site to convert to a passkey, I wonder "is this site the sort that would screw this up?" So far, it's about 30% of sites screwing it up... chaboud, 9 hours ago

Re: Things to know when you get cancer – 2026 Edition The second opinion advice is great, and what I tell everyone I know who gets cancer. My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer in 2006 in Idaho. I was a PhD student at MIT at the time and a friend in lab helped me get an appointment at Dana-Farber. I thought it was probably overkill (it was a common cancer) but we did it anyway. They said everything in Idaho was standard of care but suggested one extra test, which Idaho team then reluctantly did, which revealed distant metastasis (stage 4! ), dramatically changing her treatment trajectory. She lived another 15 years (I miss you Mom). Asking for a second opinion sucks. A lot of us are preconditioned from birth to trust our clinicians. But you're going on a journey and your life (or the life of your loved one) is on the line. Insurance often covers it. Your doctor will NOT be offended. Think of it this way : if you were deploying code to the mars rover, and your colleague asked to do a code review before you pushed go, would you be offended? This is even more important than that. stochastician, 4 hours ago

Re: Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men I am 36 and I have been thinking about suicide a tiny bit lately. But I will share my perspective with you, hopefully to draw a picture how different circumstances can be. I live in Ukraine and my optionality in life collapsed the day the war started. I had a good life, good income and traveled a lot. I used to dream of a career in big tech and life in different countries just to give it a taste. Now I am not able to leave the country because I am a male of conscription age. My city is being attacked by drones daily, and ballistic rockets a few times a month. Witnessing your country getting wrecked with rockets and drones is hell of an experience. Businesses, electricity plants, infrastructure, gas stations becoming rubble. There is also little hope in a resolution of this soon. I have to work on a job which provides a reservation from military service if I don’t want to fight, otherwise I will be picked up on the street to join the military. I have it so much better than a lot of my countrymen, but holy shit does this suck and it is not getting better anytime soon. The hopelessness gets you. Software engineering is one of my last remaining pillars of life remaining more or less intact. At least I get to write some code and make computers do things. Life is a strange thing. impostor313131, 3 hours ago

Re: Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts Google is probably the most aggressive anti-privacy big tech company currently operating. No other big-tech company goes to such great lengths to deanonymize users and make its services difficult to use, especially during account creation. The requirement to have a mobile device to scan a QR code to verify that you're human. Reverse SMS verification, where you have to send an SMS rather than receive a verification code. You think of signing up using a VPN server in another country? The phone number you use to send the SMS from must also be from that country. Not being able to watch YouTube videos when using VPN - without signing in to a Google account, all under the guise of "bot protection." Gemini not working in 3/4 of cases when using VPN. It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity. I'm not sure what happened in recent years, but they definitely switched their strategy to maximize data collection and make sure privacy-savy users are pressured via technical solutions to reveal their identities. PS. The first company federal investigators often go for data is often Google maxo133, 6 hours ago

Re: Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif monospace font Iosevka, my absolutely most loved font for years! I've been using a custom version - you can customize the font¹ and build your own ttf (or better yet, ttc) using the build system supplied in the repository². be5invis, the author of the font, deserves a special mention for creating a whole custom DSL called PatEL (Parametric Type Expression Language) to generate the font programmatically! Renzhi, if you ever come around to read this, thank you so much for Iosevka, man! ¹https://typeof.net/Iosevka/customizer ²https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/blob/master/doc/custom-b... wartywhoa23, 12 hours ago

Re: AI agents aren't 'going rogue.' Frontier labs are skipping security basics The fun part is that people seem to forget that we already have laws against "rogue ai". The normal laws, since you are still liable for everything you own. "Rogue AI" is solved by removing the accountability sink "it was AI, not me!" It's your chat, your prompts, and all output that you should read and understand. Don't know how to operate a power hammer? don't care, any problems it causes are still your fault. Luker88, 2 hours ago

Re: ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program "one of the components that caused former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce “network, link and relationship” analyses." Should the federal government be tracking our interpersonal relationships? Should an immigration officer be privy to the timing and manner of communications that I, a citizen, have with other citizens? Why? Why should ICE be able to collect this information when domestic law enforcement generally has to show probable cause to a judge to gather similar information? Who decided to make ICE the country's supreme law enforcement agency? Related, ICE is arresting citizens on fake immigration charges[1]. Some US citizens have been deported. US citizens "can't" be deported, but ICE has supralegal powers. Should we have a law enforcement agency that is not bound by our laws? Why? What guardrails does it have if not law? Who defines those guardrails? 1 - https://projects.propublica.org/american-citizens-detained-d... runako, 2 hours ago

Re: ASML's strong orders ease fears AI spending boom is running out of steam Feb 2000: Record orders for chip gear push SEMI index to four-year high https://www.eetimes.com/record-orders-for-chip-gear-push-sem... > Capital equipment suppliers have been increasing their forecasts for revenue growth in 2000 as chip manufacturers begin to add new wafer fabs and backend assembly plants. Last week, for example, Applied Materials Inc.–the world's largest semiconductor equipment supplier–announced it had increased its forecast for industry growth in wafer fab equipment sales to 46% from a projection of 19% at the end of last year (see Feb. 16 story). > The strong wave of new orders “confirms the strength of the current market cycle,” said Stanley T. Myers, president of SEMI. This time it's different. scrlk, 4 hours ago

Re: Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics. The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc). Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs. I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range. steveBK123, 3 hours ago

Re: Passkeys Are Not a Trap I don't know enough to argue about whether passkeys are a trap or not, but I do know as a user that they appear to be a confusing mess. When a website prompts me to set up a passkey, depending on the device I happen to be using at the time it could end up going to Google password manager, Samsung password manager, iCloud Keychain, or Windows somethingorother. What happens when I go to the same site on a different platform? What if I can't use cross-device authentication because I'm on a locked-down work machine or one that simply doesn't have bluetooth? What if I want to consolidate them all in one platform just for the sake of being organised? What if I lose or simply don't have the device with a certain passkey near me? I don't have the time or patience to work out any of that, which might absolutely be a 'me' problem, but TOTPs are pretty sodding frictionless in comparison. Scan QR in my chosen manager; type number into website; done. Why are passkeys better? bonzog, 53 minutes ago

Re: Iosevka is an open-source, sans-serif and slab-serif, monospace font IMO a font specimen site may be the worst place to use font-display: swap. Was wondering why I was looking at what seemed indistinguishable from Courier, turns out what I saw was exactly Courier. oefrha, 5 hours ago

Re: Redesigning source control at Anthropic Every time I stop reviewing the code from Claude I later find janky crap. Not every review finds janky crap, but often enough that I can't stop reviewing everything. This is my disconnect with this kind of speed, how are they avoiding the janky crap? Or are they just accepting it and hoping it won't be too crappy or be found soon enough? I don't have any insight into Anthropic but it seems like that's the case which is just depressing. duttish, 7 hours ago

Re: The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s There's lots of amusingly Telegraph-esque outrage being posted here. But the article makes it clear that the reduction is due to reduction in demand, due in part to welcome improvements in efficiency, but also regrettable deindustrialization, and (neutral?) increased importing of electricity. Nobody is planning to ration electricity suppies. I also wonder what the contribution of domestic solar and on-site industrial generation is? I'm a dev in a large manufacturing business and two of our three factory buildings are now covered in solar cells which power a lot of our operations. Some big industrial sites have on-site wind-powered generation too. Is that counted as generation in these stats? Or is it just manifested as reduced demand? (Edit: added "being posted", "welcome" and "(neutral?)" for clarity) andyjohnson0, 13 hours ago

Re: OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room > We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation? minimaxir, 14 hours ago

Re: Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome You should ditch Chrome. And switch to FireFox. jacquesm, 18 hours ago

Re: OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room These are not very smart spies: > A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address. simonw, 8 hours ago

Re: New Apple TV 4K I'm a little surprised at the price (especially when their newly-announced HomeView is the same price, and it has a screen!). I love this product: it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data. I have two older ones and was looking to get something that supported 4K but waited for this to come out. $300 might be a decent price if you use it for all of the things that it can do, but if all you're doing is launching streaming apps, $200 was already on the high end for that. $300 seems...a bit much. Anything I'm missing here? The silver lining is that this product is almost certainly still in the "pay money then forget about it for a decade" tier, which is nice. I'm also wondering if/how the "add up to four homepods" feature compares to "getting a soundbar". In the other thread for this someone noted that the HomePods only work with this box; so if you're running a game console that's no bueno. But apart from that, if $600 on an Apple TV + two HomePods mini delivers something comparable to a ~$500 soundbar, that's a decent value proposition. Brendinooo, 15 hours ago

Re: Firefox Enterprise Folks here don't understand how big of a market this is. Island just raised a $400 million Series F at $6.4 billion valuation: https://www.island.io/press/island-announces-400-million-ser... Mozilla is also very, very far behind in this race. But the potential is real. Enterprises have both the budget and the motivation to care about DLP (including preventing employees from copy/pasting sensitive data into AI chat apps), VPN-less access to private intranet apps (including to contractors on BYOD), preventing access to sites that distract employees and have zero business value (pornography, gambling, etc.)... If you care about an open web browser, you should care about it having a sustainable revenue model. Enterprise browsers are exactly that revenue model. The question is not whether this is a good idea; the question is whether Mozilla can catch up. solatic, 7 hours ago