HN user
I just had GPT reverse engineer, from scratch, some ancient Corel Draw documents and turn them into perfect PDFs. None of the open source libraries helped. In fact, GPT didn't make any progress until I told it to ignore them.
LibreOffice was a big part of the problem. Their import code was half-baked, and silently changing Arial to Liberation Sans wasn't particularly liberating, either.
"The optic cortex is the biggest area of the brain by far. When everything is saturated in fluorescent light, as it is in small studios many times, the fluorescent light is going on and off at 60 times a second, or ideally at 120, but more roughly 60 and it’s shutting off your brain 60 times a second. The brain is kind of a fluid thing and everything is coupled with everything else, and when this happens – no matter where you take the EEG – if the subject is looking at fluorescent light, you see 60 cycles from the fluorescent light."
https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/don-buchla-pass...
I suppose it's worth double checking if the 60 Hz was just leaking into the measurement rig. Or autism, for that matter. But Don was great and I've always loved this interview, so I'm sharing.
Archives have not taken a consistent stance on this. Preservation, removal, restricted access, de-indexing, and “right to be forgotten” sit on a spectrum.
Good archival practice has to include judgment, context, and humility.
Sometimes that means preserving. Sometimes it means limiting access. And sometimes it may mean "honoring" a removal request or court order, even if you're just setting a flag.
From http://bbslist.textfiles.com/
Perhaps Dude is among us.
206-246-6647
White Center, VA RaT City BBS
(1993-1997) Dude Renegade
"Primarily a demoscene board with a vast collection of Impulse Tracker music and ANSI art.
Used to meet IRL at Seattle Center to take field recordings for use as samples.
Members included Dude, Catspaw, Geo, and Infamouse." - Dude"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, replied:
"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...
It started failing two days ago, when it suddenly couldn't access gmail threads reliably. Then it started popping up warnings that I was over quota when I wasn't. It even let me use Fable briefly, or pretended to. Meanwhile search finally started working, so there's that.
This video, wow: https://www.threads.com/@founder__growth/post/DZz_9Ikj3Wx
Out of desperation, I moved to ChatGPT and it's working better than I remember. All these companies are playing games under load, under failure. No wonder we can't agree on what's good for what.
Exactly. They're both very expensive and prone to surprising you. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. I'd rate them 85%, but you have to run a test because they both fail in different ways on the 15%.
The physical version of that magic wormhole is called a slide rule.
The first section is the good part.
The later reuse of “log” across valuations, dimension, vector fields, orders of vanishing is not so good. Those may be related ideas, but each needs a type signature: from what, to what, and preserving which operation?
This essay needs a type system. Every time it says “log” it should say: log of what, into what?
It’s like audio where people say "dB" as if it answers the next question. Relative to what, measured how, and weighted for whom?
Author should brush up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_theory
If it didn't work sometimes (in other cases), we wouldn't call them sociopaths.
Andrew Carnegie funded 2,500+ public libraries and many were built with lecture halls, auditoriums, and meeting rooms on purpose. The public library was a civic institution from day one.
Much Claude, very 4.7: "Heavy lifting... single most useful thing... the careful claim is narrow... there are three outcomes, not two... honest caveat... honest oddity... honest verdict... honest shape."
It's the weekend on HN, prime time for lost souls, so I'll dare to post that.
If you're going to prompt out an essay, at least take a minute to set up the prompt so that a hint of your personality, or even an invented one, comes through.
PayPal does it. Synchrony Bank does it. Use your eBay credit card to buy toner, shipped to the address on your card, just like you do every 90 days? Must be fraud.
They email you an alert. You click "this is okay." Card still doesn't work, you call. Rep asks ID questions, still not enough. Says he has to text a QR code linking to some wonky app that videos your face, no other option.
You can't even login to pay the card off and cancel without going through the process.
Ah yes, the financial services company that runs a travel agency, allows me to book my hotel and rental car weeks in advance, registers a hold for incidentals for both the hotel and car when I check in, then blocks the card when I try to buy dinner that night in that same hotel due to fraud detection.
Last week it required me to take pictures of my face from multiple angles to regain membership privileges. I suspect this may be part Palantir data collection and part Peter Thiel dating service.
Finance has always run on both: an asset that produces something has a floor. An asset that produces nothing does not. Between the two lies human nature. One way to get rich is to focus on fundamentals. One way to get rich or poor faster is to bet on human nature.
If you're in a market that requires using C++, many of these decisions are made for you by the platform above you, and you're screwed. Turn on RTTI, build a fort to deflect the random exceptions they'll throw at you, and may the gods allow you to recoup your R&D before some well-intentioned yokel in some media or game vertical changes everything and requires you to change everything.
On the other hand, if you control your own destiny and care about velocity and code quality, many of these choices eventually become self-evident.
If you are messing around with the latest and greatest esoteric C++ stuff in 2026, bless you, you beautiful nerd. But it may be time to start evaluating where you are in life, and how you got here. (And if you're on a C++ committee, I revoke those blessings.)
For those who remain: if you have a C++ code base yet somehow have enough time and energy to write opinionated blog posts, it's really hard to imagine why you think you'd have a better take on this than Google.
There is no such thing as fair revenge. It can run for generations.
Retribution is impersonal, proportional, principled, and employs safeguards like time limitations.
You could say "the state channels the impulse toward revenge into a procedure that mostly isn't revenge" but Hobbes figured that out in 1651.
I have strict context in place on what I expect from the final language (C# or C++) and I'm frequently left with my jaw open. Used my preferred json library on C++, used LINQ appropriately in C#. Mapped AWS libraries appropriately and used existing credential stores. Certainly better than what I got when I asked for the native version first, which is why I do the hurdle. It feels hacky but it works. In a year it probably won't be necessary.
My experience a year ago (back when half of HN was still in denial about what was already working, let alone what was to come) was that Python was the linqua franca of LLMs. You could achieve almost anything that fit in 700 lines or less if you told it to write it in Python.
Times change, and I work more in R&D space than on legacy codebases, but I still ask it to write something in Python then convert it to the actual language on occasion. I don't know if I'm tricking the context window, forcing alternate pathways, or both, but it works.
OP says he has movies in his head and doesn't have to pay royalties. I told him that if he produces a derivative work, he has to pay royalties. Your comment doesn't follow, but I'll address it.
A trivia host doesn't have to pay royalties to ask questions, and the players don't have to pay royalties to answer them. If that turns into "movie night" at the bar then they have to pay royalties to screen the full film. If a professor plays clips in film class, he doesn't.
Your implication is that an LLM is little more than an brilliant film scholar or exceptionally well-read librarian, and that the matter is settled. The billions of dollars in play across a dozen active court cases say it isn't.
Some HN readers are blind to this, others are obsessed with it.
ChatGPT claims 900 million active weekly users. You really think a dietician who writes for the Minnesota Reformer (whatever that is), trying to get the word out about his current "evidence-based" whatever, isn't getting a little robo-coaching along the way?
This one sure smells like a human article that went through Claude 4.6 with a "proofread, identify passive voice, increase clarity, adapt to house-style.md, and make it fit in X words" prompt. Maybe the editor did it.
The issue is the quality of the writing, which still needs work whether an LLM was involved or not. Most sources (Forbes, Business Insider) require the author to sign a waiver that indemnifies. That's the chilling effect, not the AI tells.
Hollywood has extraordinarily well-defined controls for keeping things legal and everyone in the chain compensated. Plus a separate Oscars category for it.
Most artists considered it a one to one exchange. They appreciated attribution and were flattered to inspire people. Some got gigs. Some got laid. The money flowed to DeviantArt, hosting providers, and ad providers. The artists were okay with this. They were the ones paying.
Then DeviantArt built a tool to automate the "make a similar image yourself" part and here we are. It removed all the fun parts: the personal contact, the attribution, the inspiration.
Artists realized they unwittingly contributed to the death of not only the community, but the art form they love. Lawsuits pending.
Trillion dollar companies license.
True, they live in your head rent free. But if you produce a derivative work, you have to pay.
I paid tuition. The library bought its books. The theater sold me a ticket. Money changed hands every step, which is the part your analogy skips.
The state isn't in the business of revenge. It prosecutes crimes on your behalf because private vengeance escalates and frequently lands on the wrong person.
I've written essays in this exact format and I recognize specific tells. He's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 Pro (now Adaptive) as a research assistant then tweaking the output. Know it, done it, smell it.
"The piece moves in a pattern that LLMs default to: historical episode, philosophical summary, contemporary relevance, theological application. Each section is self-contained, cleanly closed, and bridges to the next with a meta-sentence. A human essayist leaves more mess in the transitions."
Now that I've pointed it out, you'll see more stuff like this. It's everywhere.
At a minimum, I do see a lot of AI-as-researcher tells here. You can get Claude to draft very similar essays (of surprisingly quality) if you feed it a target market/philosophy, a few articles for style, then ask it to dig up dirt on any published author in the humanities. It connects the dots and writes stuff that feels just like this article, right down to the meandering. The rough edges and sudden shifts in register is the author editing, then asking for a revised draft.
Claude says: "Verdict: Heavily assisted, possibly lightly edited from an LLM draft. The primary sources are real and the Kierkegaard scholarship is accurate, which suggests a human who knows the material. But the connective tissue and virtually all the 'writerly' prose is machine-generated."