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Re:Ask HN: Why aren't Americans rising up against tipping? on Saturday October 10, 2026 @09:08PM (#50038783)
I think many Americans feel a moral obligation to tip when asked, and when presented with the opportunity it suddenly becomes a decision between spending a few bucks or wondering if you won't be welcome to come back next time.

It can be insulting to be considered "cheap" and that's the label you might gain if you stop tipping.

We've heard from waitstaff and restaurants for decades that this is part of their income.

I think the only way this changes is through regulation or a seismic shift in this mentality causing people to stop tipping, resulting in waitstaff retention issues, resulting in restaurant owners paying better.

I wish the "morality gun" would point back at those who ask to be tipped, the same way a beggar who asks if you have some spare some change is castigated (in most places)

Re:I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots on Saturday September 12, 2026 @01:09PM (#49674554)
How to get affiliates, and more importantly how to get affiliates who don't make the brand look shoddy?
Interesting way to lay it out. For us understanding is obviously crucial for prod and repeatable business functions.

Velocity to solution is default for almost everyone else, especially one-off or low impact / low consequence of failure projects.

1. Download ollama and give it a try. It doesn't have to be that one but it's an easy on-ramp. Just get a feel for what open source/open weights is capable of

2. Mention it whenever it comes up. Most people have no clue this is a thing and I think it's useful to make people aware. We need access to uncensored / unbiased LLM models - information wants to be free but there are plenty of businesses gunning for regulatory capture as these are very powerful tools.

3. If you're in a position of developing any project that makes use of AI in any form, check the open source models first, unless you absolutely require the best of the best, these other models are pretty dang capable of almost everything any commercial model can do.

4. If your state or {insert legal jurisdiction here} attempts to regulate access to open source tools for this, oppose it with your vote and your voice.

5. Opposed laws that grant commercial AI suppliers any priority or premium access under government purchasing programs.

I'm sure others will chime in, those are a few that pop the mind.

That's exactly how they do it.

There are ML models that do the reverse and output image to text, which assist quite a lot.

The better the text represents the unique thing in the photo, the better the model understands what that text means.

Re:Show HN: I Built an Accent Changer App on Thursday July 16, 2026 @07:00PM (#48941402)
Voice cloning failed (403): {"detail":{"type":"authorization_error","code":"forbidden","message":"You have reached your monthly limit of voice add/edit operations (95). Please consider upgrading your subscription to increase your limit.","status":"voice_add_edit_limit_reached","request_id":"zzz"}}

I think we burned up your tokens

Re:ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2 on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @06:25PM (#48753951)
A strategy that can backfire. An unpredictable tool is worse than a bad tool.
I cannot de-Google fast enough.

So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?

No thanks

Is there no value in how the training was done such that it's accessible via inference in a particularly useful way?
Re:Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:33PM (#47020802)
Did Microsoft never run Microsoft Mail internally?

It was an email system that ran on top of file system. If I recall, mail clients connected over a networked drive to access mailboxes. So it was never regarded as being very scalable.

A common complaint coming from many Amazon sellers.
We did this a lot in the early 2000's. At the time I worked for a company with offices in Bellevue and we put our own hardware in full sized racks at a datacenter in the komo4 building in Seattle.

Because of proximity it was easy to run over and service the systems physically if needed, and we also used modem based KVM systems if we really needed to reboot a locked up system quickly (not sure that ever actually happened!).

I'm sure customer owner hardware place in a datacenter rack is still a major business

Re:Google flags Immich sites as dangerous on Thursday October 23, 2025 @09:05AM (#45681348)
We really need an internet Bill of Rights. Google has too much power to delete your company from existence with no due process or recourse.

If any company controls some (high) percentage of a particular market, say web browsers, search, or e-commerce, or social media, the public's equal access should start to look more like a right and less like an at-will contract.

30 years ago, if a shop had a falling out with the landlord, it could move to the next building over and resume business. Now if you annoy eBay, Amazon or Walmart, you're locked out nationwide. If you're an Uber, Lyft, or Doordash (etc) gig worker and their bots decide they don't like you anymore, then sayonara sucker! Your account has been disabled, have a nice day and don't reapply.

Our regulatory structure and economies of scale encourage consolidation and scale and grant access to this market to these businesses, but we aren't protecting the now powerless individuals and small businesses who are randomly and needlessly tossed out with nobody to answer their pleas of desperation, no explanation of rules broken, and no opportunity to appeal with transparency.

It's a sorry state of affairs at the moment.

Re:Bezos says AI is in an industrial bubble on Saturday October 04, 2025 @12:23PM (#45474476)
I'm not so sure about this.

First were the models. Then the APIs. Then the cost efficiencies. Right now the tooling and automated workflows. Next will be a frantic effort to "AI-Everything". A lot of things won't make the cut, but absolutely many tasks, whole jobs, and perhaps entire subsets of industries will flip over.

For example you might say no AI can write a completely tested, secure, fully functional mobile app with one prompt (yet). But look at the advancements in Cline, Claude code, MCPs, code execution environments, and other tooling in just the last 6 months.

The whole monkeys typewriters shakespeare thing starts to become viable.

Re:Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin on Saturday October 04, 2025 @12:13PM (#45474384)
This reminded me of Gates' "The Road Ahead" book (late 90s if I recall) prediction that marketers would eventually be able to pay a dime to get an email in your inbox, if only the future economy could figure out micro-transactions.

I agree with you that we're moving away from banner ads to some novel way of monetizing traffic, and therefore content published by authentic human beings.

Re:Commodore 64 Ultimate on Saturday July 12, 2025 @10:05AM (#44542152)
In going to follow this project closely. This is looking like a case of aiming for the moon and actually getting it.

Let's see!

I empathize with this, at the moment it seems pretty obnoxious.

I hope the current strategy is to prove demand and when it's time lean into efficiency and hopefully non-obtrusiveness. If they don't, the volume of complaints is a threat to the whole business model. A drone delivering lunch potentially takes a combustion engine off the road for dozens of minutes and leaves more room on congested streets for other traffic. If the tech can be optimized to sound like a bird (essentially inaudible), we've probably gained something overall.

Fellow hodlers unite!
Re:Malaysia backtracks on DNS redirection decision on Sunday September 08, 2024 @08:02AM (#41479914)
I'm an American working from Thailand for the past decade or so, and this strategy is relatively common for the governments around here.

It's chaotic. They will usually have mid level officials announce some new policy as if it's a done deal.

Then, if there's no public outcry, a higher level official will confirm it and maybe, eventually, details will roll out.

If the public responds very negatively, the idea will just disappear or the higher level guy can distance himself from the low level guy "who was misinformed".

I think it's how they test the water and decide if it's worth the effort.

I feel like this is the beginning of the end for all captchas
Re:First post: A history of online public messaging on Monday April 29, 2024 @12:27PM (#40200482)
Seems like there are a lot of BBS nostalgia pieces recently. Times were definitely simpler.

I fondly remember my first few experiences after the family PC got it first modem and computing has never been the same since.

Surprisingly the author skipped over CompuSERVE, Prodigy, and AOL, all of which had very active messaging forums and early chat systems.

Klaviyo. I know they have been around a long while but I just implemented it for the first time today on a new ecommerce project.

The signup and setup flow is quite lengthy because they need to implement email flows, abandoned cart reminders, sms flows, push messaging which of course it needs to be highly customized. All of this is needed just to unlock some of the basic features of the tool.

I was surprised and delighted to begin setting up an email series only to discover it had already scanned my website and used AI to write the content of all the messages to be applicable to our tone and messaging.

Highly impressive and it makes getting it up and running super fast.

Some kind of an app store concept on a VPS that le's you just plug in these self hosted projects, like installing an Android app, is really interesting. I think docker is the closest thing we have but I could be wrong, and it's much too technical for any average person.

I've been slowly moving everything to self hosted to reduce the pain if/when I'm ever randomly banned from Google or some other huge network and can't get it re-enabled.

The downside is that I'm now my own IT department and need to perpetually monitor these things.

Re:Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase? on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @01:49AM (#38851453)
BinkleyTerm - it was a front end to my BBS that enabled it to participate on FIDOnet.
Why is the cost of drilling so high?

I'm sure the rigs are an expensive capital outlay, but do the operators require advanced skills?

Once a hole is drilled, does it have a limited lifespan, or is that investment something that can be hypothetically used for eternity?

The reddit fatfire sub is full of middle managers at FAANG who are pulling a few hundred k to a mil in W2 income for the foreseeable future. Their eyes are set on riding off into the sunset at the earliest opportunity. They would probably have more fun working harder if the results benefited them directly but I'm sure many aren't serious risk takers. For those who are, I think they are already off doing their own thing.
Re:What's Going on at Google? Massive Search Engine Spam Attack on Saturday December 23, 2023 @07:19AM (#38743689)
Love finding a Yogi Berra quote in the wild
Re:X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com? on Friday December 08, 2023 @05:14PM (#38575330)
>All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable

Isn't that the truth. The amount of stupid ideas that have turned out to be wildly successful.

Our economies have become so hyper efficient that we've lost our ecological sustainability.

It's like the universe said wait a minute, slow down. I'll tell you when that container ship can move.

I'm mid 40s and will say that this productivity/recharge cycle has been in my life for as long as I can remember.

I think it's natural and speaks to the reality that we cannot operate at an all-out 100% continuously.

Use the downtime as an opportunity for self care, physical health, and low mental output tasks so that when the peak comes again you're not distracted by trivial things.

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