badlibrarian
badlibrarian on Hacker News
To anyone else who had to parse early KiCad file formats, where the parentheses and quoting on S-expressions was more of a guideline than a rule, I salute you.
Girl in Atlanta got chopped into pieces on a DoorDash delivery. I predict the same outcome once private equity gets its hand on this mess in 5 years.
If you can't cheat 'em, join 'em.
Yes, since 7.3. But in that typical verbose and awkward PowerShell way. My quip about PowerShell is that if they called it PowerScript, you'd realize it was bad Python.
Great tool for Windows admins who haven't realized they can write quick and dirty C# scripts cross platform for a decade now.
> Math is about clear communication between people first and foremost.
I can't imagine I'm the first one to point out that this is perhaps the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics.
> Where's the clear communication explaining it to the satisfaction of other mathematicians?
Coming in about a year for $20/month, sure seems like.
Opus 5.5 rewrote an awful, legacy Drupal app from scratch in my preferred stack in four hours. This included handling abandoned plugins, migration to a not-insane database schema, and content fixups from a Drupal 4 backup that fixed truncated cells somewhere in a botched Drupal 6-7-8 upgrade I wasn't part of.
If you want to know everything you need to know about Drupal, have a peek at the community discussion around sitemaps. There are genuine reasons behind the complexity, but a CMS that cannot generate a list of its own URLs, leaving thousands of people baffled, is quite an achievement.
And yet... 10 straight quarters of ARR decline. CEO leaving. Market prices you like a company in decline.
Besides, you're on HN, we don't value revenue here because we're idiots. But even the market agrees. Stock down 64% from peak.
Tootsie Roll Industries heats sugar and has nearly triple your P/E.
Indeed. I can't imagine I'm the only one signing amended returns this week after having LLMs take a peek at the last three years of tax filings.
All the camera companies offer custom software that works better (mathematically) than the Adobe versions. They're just trapped in godawful UX. It's a one day job to do the brain transplant.
By running a Tax Summary report and looking at it, just like I always did. Except this time, with fresh eyes and in a good mood. It's still just a bookkeeper and frankly does a more thorough job than I did.
I chose "both shall fall" (future tense) on purpose. And likely in the same manner: a self-destructive period of reactive fascism, followed by becoming a nostalgic name noted for its crumbling architecture.
I have a business. Sometimes I buy things on Amazon. At tax time, I search for the big business items and categorize them in QuickBooks until I give up.
You know who doesn't give up? Claude, who doesn't seem to realize how shitty and slow QuickBooks Online is. It's even happy to click 19 times to do a split because I dared to add a router and shampoo to the same Amazon cart in a weak moment of convenience one night back in February 2025.
Some so-called skills are worth letting atrophy. Whatever I used to do with a janky browser plugin and two monitors full of Excel windows at tax time is one of them.
Or maybe you'll have better luck in a week when somebody familiar with RAW and a 20 year grudge against Adobe chooses to spend a day of tokens on the problem. Maybe me.
Rome wasn't built in a day, nor Adobe destroyed in a single git push. But they both shall fall.
If this surprises you, remember that Cloudflare doesn't cache HTML by default.
The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.
Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.
Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
Different site, different backend, different problems. GP was talking about wayback.archive.org, which threw a 429 error just now when I verified the URL.
Which archives? Wayback is different from Archive. Which is different from Archive-It. And the problem with Wayback was power poles being set on fire by homeless people, then SF power in general, then "upgrades," then "bad actors," then hot weather causing the machines to slow down because they don't have air conditioning, evil AI companies, and now seems to be the fact that an organization backed by someone with nearly a billion dollars, founded 30 years ago, cannot source hard drives.
https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c
Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.
If you use the site, support them. If you are a technical person, offer to help them. But maybe cash, or even the proxy of being able to say they have a large number of cash supporters, isn't really what's needed here?
Set up after the lawsuits that nearly wiped out his personal assets, Brewster Kahle's latest foundation shows $743 million in assets.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991...
“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc...
"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"
John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead: "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."
https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...
Depending on when you click his feed, the ongoing downtime is due to DDoS attacks, bad actors, AI scrapers, power problems, or now an inability to source hard drives.
https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c
He doesn't do much better on the other example. Term-frequency saturation is the important part, and he ignores the 1972 paper by Karen Sparck Jones.
"One of the early victories for me was persuading a young boy of 14 or 15 years of age, named Aaron Swartz, to become the technical architect of the Creative Commons. It took a little persuading, but I told him that this is what he had to do." --Lawrence Lessig
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Cost_of_...
Doctorow, Kottke and others didn't seem to think it was odd that a 14 year old was being flown around the country without his parents present. They pre-gamed at a house instead of a bar because Aaron was too young; the host, then nearly twice his age, later dated him. Didn't end well. And then things really didn't end well.
Epstein made his first contribution to MIT that same year (2002). Lessig arranged for Joi Ito to meet Aaron a year later. According to MIT, Joi Ito met Epstein for the first time one month after Aaron died in 2013.
In the most charitable reading of the situation, Aaron was robbed of his childhood.
His profile says he wrote for Wired, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack. He spent 4,000 words and six Pantone colors talking about SMS for logins, but never found time to write that powerful, 40 year old men were flying a 14 year old around the country without his parents present, so maybe not.
Sickly Jewish kid has his childhood stolen, gets radicalized, hangs himself is a much more painful story to read. More importantly, it demands actual answers. No wonder it never got told. It's not exactly Brighton Beach Memoirs.
I don't like talking about this, but first hand knowledge is rarer by the day, and there are entire organizations profiting off this mythology. It's pissing me off. Aaron is not a data point to build stupid metaphors around. He was a bright and broken child.
Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw.
I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands.
It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.
It can and does and may choose to do so unprompted. That was one of my "holy shit" moments. Previously I watched it spit out nonsense to get around edge cases and avoid tests and uttered many of the things I read in this thread. Then the new models hit.
Find some code you're proud of. Find someone else's code you admire. Find something that's been stable for 20 years with no bugs reported. Feed it in, ask it to look it over, and prepare to be humbled.
I can specifically and directly state that is false.
Ah, the classic HN "I keep Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies on my bookmark bar" retort.
“No true Scotsman” would require me to redefine “senior developer” to exclude people who disagree with me. I didn’t.
And “you’re holding it wrong” is a strange objection to a tool that, like Git, rewards learning how to use it. The question is whether that learning pays off.
Long bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it?
I've tried. It's like trying to teach squirrels how to Google. Really, you just have to figure out what works for you. You will be rewarded.
Very, very senior dev here who has never taken a shortcut in his life. Don't mean to sound like a prick but you're doing it wrong. You have to find your own path through this stuff. It works, promise. I was in your shoes six weeks ago.