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Re:Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @10:02AM (#50071931)
Please share an example of a two-speaker podcast that it has generated, add support for spoken Thai, and I will pay & use it weekly.
If you look at page 12 here (https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-09/...) the USPS estimates 30,000,000 fraudulent labels are/were used per month. The accused sold 5 million labels via Labelsbank.com over a ~2 year period (https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164928/https://labelsban...). That's ~208,000/m so his scam would represent 0.7% of fraudulent labels.

These numbers are rough but there you go. Your intuition is correct. Roughly 100X.

Re:People Hooked on Vapes Try a New Way to Quit: Cigarettes on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @10:26PM (#49810903)
It's a very psychological addiction. Obviously willpower and compulsiveness vary depending on the person, but whether you believe it is easy to quit or hard to quit, you are right.

The misery of quitting comes from wanting something you cannot have. The trick to avoiding that misery is to truly not want it. Then the only remaining struggle is a few days of noticeable physical symptoms (like having a mild flu, at worst) and the long struggle of trying to not forget why you don't want to smoke or vape or snus.

Anyone wishing to quit should read Alan Carr's book. Don't worry about whether everything in the book is literally true; the point of the book is not to be a list of pedantically true statements; the point of the book is to get you to quit smoking.

Re:PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022) on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @12:21AM (#49796766)
Offtopic but the damage caused to an entire generation by Gwern's nicotine article is truly astounding. Obviously he's not responsible for the actions of others and it was written with good intentions but wow.
Re:Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader puts Silicon Valley to shame on Monday September 07, 2026 @08:41AM (#49597694)
I have one and am very happy with it. I vibe coded a bilingual ebook reader, which is what I bought it for. However a Kindle is a way better deal and is much better as far as screen quality etc. But I like how small my XTEINK X4 Pro is.
Re:Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @02:19PM (#49525800)
Is there an ad blocker for Chrome on iOS?
You know how you sometimes see an article and realize quickly it was written by an LLM so you close the tab instead of reading it? I just had my first experience doing that with an entire website.
Sure but porn is a separate category. It's not really a scam.
Re:More German than many Germans on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @02:19AM (#49164906)
Can you elaborate? I don't quite grasp what you mean. Do you mean that the first three quarters of your life were more formative/adventurous and the last quarter was more driven by inertia and routine? I can relate if so, just not sure if that's what you mean.
Every french person I've talked to IRL, for example, calls Claude "him." It's partly a language thing.
Re:Unitree As2-W on Friday July 24, 2026 @11:07PM (#49044134)
The answer to both your questions, and the poster's obvious implication, is that somehow they stole information from Boston Dynamics. (I'm not saying I believe that.) Seems like they must've stolen the information at the exact point in time when advances in AI made these physical robots much more easy for anyone to engineer without theft...
Isn't this a crime that someone is liable for? What happened is that someone hacked into a computer system without permission. Maybe it wasn't intentional -- sure -- and that would be a factor at sentencing. But it sounds like they've admitted to a crime, and obviously our legal system considers the humans involved to be the liable parties; otherwise everyone would just say "my computer did the hacking" and wouldn't get in any trouble.

I don't expect any prosecution here, but is the above legally accurate?

Re:Who's Afraid of Chinese Models? on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @09:34AM (#48992151)
There are really only two factors at play here: people trying to protect their massive investments, and governments fighting over who gets backdoor access to all of your chats.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?

Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.

I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.

Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.

(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)

How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.

What in the zuck is this?
$423 billion*
It actually works pretty well.
Re:Study reveals what people see when they read lips on Saturday July 04, 2026 @08:22AM (#48784893)
I just realized the government probably has a lip reading AI model trained. Training one would be super easy. Download youtube videos with uploader-provided captions, cut to just scenes where only a single face is detected, and then use the lip points and facial landmarks and subtitle text (which has word-level timings) as training data. Then you can point a camera at anyone from a distance and know what they are saying. The longer they talk, the more accurate the output will be, as additional context is provided.
Re:Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:23PM (#48677353)
This is really really awesome
1. Dictator gets loans for his country 2. Dictator puts the money in his Swiss bank account 3. Government is overthrown 4. The populace has to pay off the debt

Perhaps him being in custody will lead to some of the money being found and returned.

A fun little game I made. You will get better at the game quickly.

Swipe or use the arrow keys to make pairs orthogonally adjacent in as few moves as necessary. If you make an unnecessary move, your score resets to zero.

It's not perfect and unfortunately isn't perfectly responsive on old phones. Have fun!

Re:How many of the 170k English words do you know? on Saturday June 20, 2026 @07:01AM (#48608291)
I am building in the language learning sector, and this test is almost certainly not accurate (depending on what you want to measure). It's fun and cool though. But basically this is all based on a frequency list, which itself depends on the corpus. I have not been able to find a good corpus of English which is representative of modern spoken English. Spoken english depends on your age range and subculture and and changes every few years. Example: https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words

Most of the corpuses I've found heavily over-represent newspaper articles and books, obviously. So the frequency ranking is biased towards academic/crime/geopolitics, not spoken english. But even then, it depends what you most commonly speak about!

There's no better way to do it, though. I'm just providing context.

Re:A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @03:07AM (#48551646)
Something I've always wondered, because I'm a bit of a contrarian and I wonder if we're really any different: Could an American citizen hack and steal from Iranians and Russians with impunity from America? The issues that prevent the US from extraditing Russians who hack us -- don't they work both ways?
I grew up playing Warcraft II. Thanks for all of those great times.
Re:The SpaceX Squeeze on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:49PM (#48373635)
This site rarely works anymore, including now, at that link. Are there any good alternatives?
It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information.

In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.

Is this good?

I manufacture/buy electronics in Shenzhen and have visited my factories. They seemed fine to me.
Thanks for listing all this out. I took issue with it in theory, but now that I see it written out, I don't find any of it objectionable. People act we though the nonprofit doesn't exist anymore.
The main reason this is an issue is that it's a lemon market. Many sellers claim their sites will require "no time to maintain" and that future returns will likely continue, but it's often a lie and thus you don't get the multiple that is truly justified. Even without lies, no one knows the truth of your business like you do. The unfortunate result of this -- and I've been in a similar position in the past -- is that you are incentivized to lazily run things into the ground slowly rather than find a new owner who may bring new passion.

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