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owl57

Re:The End of an Era on Friday July 31, 2026 @09:51AM (#49123152)
> Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.

Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.

> just looking at the pics it is impossible to gauge whether it is 400sqft or 900sqft

Those are not good pics. Probably* for the same reason, to hide size and maybe something else.

*Depends on culture and I don't know about NYC. I've seen another landlord's market where quite a few landlords just post one or two useless photos — and even heard advice to pay attention to such postings as they're definitely not prepared by a professional agent.

If you have a service that shares information between people all over the world, a few big companies and one government is for most cases an improvement over all the involved ISPs and all of their respective governments.
Re:1-Click GitHub Token Stealing via a VSCode Bug on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @11:25PM (#48379527)
If the malicious-npm-package-of-the-week is reading arbitrary files on your workstation, isn't it usually able to run git clone/push/whatever with your current credentials anyway?
But then why change the renewal process for the people who were already fingerprinted for the original visa?
Re:The vi family on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @04:40AM (#48119320)
I often use vim despite knowing only a few basic commands because I'm already running various commands on the remote machine in the terminal and don't want the context switch. And because connection / file path completion in TRAMP is annoyingly slow if the server is far enough.

As an extreme example, today I needed to combine parts of two files into one and decided that

  cat foo bar > foobar && mv foobar bar && vim bar
of all things will better keep me in the flow than either googling how to insert one file into another in vim or starting up TRAMP.
Re:Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision... on Sunday May 10, 2026 @01:41AM (#48081313)
This idea of everyone producing absurd amounts of git objects is less fantastic now [1]. We're still far from these numbers, but an order of magnitude less far than last year [2].

Also an interesting bit of history here: apparently there was a time when people were already writing books on Git but "one enormous Git repository" wasn't yet the most common mode of using it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422

[2] https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

Re:Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit on Sunday May 10, 2026 @12:19AM (#48080972)
And the U in GNU, while we're at it.
And most of them are pretending to be Chrome. If Google had a good case against someone reusing their user agent, maybe they would already have sued?

Or maybe not. Got some random bot from my server logs. Yeah, it's pretending to be Chrome, but more exactly:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

I guess Google might be not eager to open this can of worms.

> scrapers can ingest them and say "nope we won't scrape there again in the future"

Do all the AI scrapers actually do that?

> Hey I wonder if there is some situation where negative SEO would be a good tactic. Generally though I think if you wanted something to stay hidden it just shouldn’t be on a public web server.

At least once upon a time there was a pirate textbook library that used HTTP basic auth with a prompt that made the password really easy to guess. I suppose the main goal was to keep crawlers out even if they don't obey robots.txt, and at the same time be as easy for humans as possible.

Re:If You're Remote, Ramble on Monday August 04, 2025 @02:41AM (#44782718)
> search still can't a.) rank the alert bot that is just spamming the alerts channel as "not relevant"

I find "Exclude automations" toggle to be good enough. But we might have very different workspaces, as I usually don't see the point of "sorting by relevance" at all: for my purposes, relevance is almost always better approximated by date than whatever Slack's ML team comes up with.

Re:Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @06:24AM (#44105553)
But it's not about that. I don't like this decision either, but the other side of the trade-off is not just about some abstract concepts or implementation, it's about complexity of the model you need to keep in your head to know what will a piece of code do. And this has always been a priority for Python.
Re:Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp on Monday May 26, 2025 @11:05PM (#44103618)
Most people writing any language without a linter are holding it wrong.

When a linter warns me about such an expression, it usually means that even if it doesn't blow up, it increases the cognitive load for anyone reviewing or maintaining the code (including future me). And I'm not religious — if I can't easily rewrite the expression in an obviously safe way, I just concede that its safety is not 100% obvious and add a nolint comment with explanation.

Re:Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp on Monday May 26, 2025 @10:40PM (#44103502)
Interestingly, I think this is one of the cases where both the "For context…" comment and yours add important context for the parent comment that some readers may be not familiar with. Although that second one serves this purpose better, not because of the subject but because it's more directly informative.
Re:I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022) on Thursday April 24, 2025 @11:41PM (#43789902)
> Legal size folders exist and are widely used by people who use ... legal size paper.

Sure. But I didn't know I use legal size paper or even what it is before I asked the apartment complex to print the lease agreement, and it didn't fit in their own folder with the other move in papers. In my rank of weirdness discovered upon moving to the US, this is at about the same level as the different ounces.

Re:I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022) on Thursday April 24, 2025 @09:15AM (#43782339)
> legal (letter but longer)

This one surprised me quite a bit. I think most people have A4/letter-sized folders. Why does anyone think that papers slightly longer than those folders are a good idea?

Was it like a temporary assignment to another team? Did the manager at least know what team that was? Or have any idea when the employee is going to return full-time to the tasks of their primary team?
Re:Schemesh: Fusion between Unix shell and Lisp REPL on Sunday February 16, 2025 @12:21AM (#43065568)
By the way, that's a regionally cool name. I read it at first as "shemesh", that means "Sun" in Hebrew.
Re:Schemesh: Fusion between Unix shell and Lisp REPL on Sunday February 16, 2025 @12:16AM (#43065545)
Note this part:

> That said, background processes invoked from Eshell can be controlled the same way as any other background process in Emacs

I haven't used Eshell much, but this makes a simple "command &" arguably much saner than in a traditional Unix shell.

I imagine that a new feature would be accepted only if someone can make it play nice with existing features. And in case of job control, I have a bad feeling about the complexity involved.

Re:Leaking the email of any YouTube user for $10,000 on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @07:41PM (#43031464)
That's definitely a factor at least some people consider when choosing their job.

> Pretty much everyone in tech is responsible for great harm by this logic.

We're also responsible for great good. The question which is greater is tricky, case-by-case and subjective.

Re:Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008) on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @09:17PM (#42190253)
Loops nested deep enough that you need an ultrawide to avoid truncated lines!?
Re:Zig's (.{}){} Syntax on Saturday November 09, 2024 @04:45PM (#42097089)
I believe that if most foo's users should just call it with [], the Pythonic way is to make the argument optional.
Re:10B Integers Walk into an Array on Thursday October 17, 2024 @01:57AM (#41866819)
All the numbers in that array are different.
IIRC Anton Nosik, a pioneer of Russian web, explicitly said that he chose Livejournal user name "dolboeb" (~"dumbfuck") because he didn't want traditional media to cite him.
Re:Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn on Sunday September 15, 2024 @02:28PM (#41549311)
Is it likely that these particular private keys were wiped ~immediately after creation?
Did you notice that the piece of software in question was apparently installed mostly in companies where regulations and inspections already override sysadmins' common sense? Are you sure the answer is simply more of the same?
Re:Just Disconnect the Internet on Thursday August 01, 2024 @03:31AM (#41126934)
> if your process are invalid, you can also fail in off-line scenario

Online amplifies failure at least as well as it amplifies success. Offline maintenance is quite unlikely to bluescreen 8 million devices before anyone has time to figure out something's going wrong.

Re:CrowdStrike's impact on aviation on Tuesday July 30, 2024 @08:33AM (#41108488)
I wouldn't overestimate FAANG's immunity to crash-the-world config updates. Facebook had everything including engineers' access to the datacenter down for hours in 2021:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750894

> infrastructure as compared to an OS

By the way, I don't think quality of Microsoft's infrastructure is relevant here.

Re:Delta to Seek Damages from CrowdStrike on Monday July 29, 2024 @11:33PM (#41105843)
The lower estimate divided by the number of refunds is (suspiciously?) close to $2000. Do they sell tickets for this much on average or is there some other major cost?

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