HN user
Conman: "Nah, this data center's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea."
Mayor: "Just a minute! We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville! Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it!"
I had mine done in Rio de Janeiro, not in Turkey, but I understand the costs are similar for both. I had 2 sessions performed 6 months apart, total cost of about USD $5,000. In the US it might have been $20,000 or more. Each session was about 10+ hours, but with the local anesthesia it went by surprisingly quickly. I take dutasteride and apply topical minoxidil daily.
This was in 2023, and I'm largely happy with the results since then. If I had my 20s to do over again, I would have tried to go just the medication route and avoid the procedure. I do think that would have resulted in a more natural appearance vs. what I have now.
Their carnitas super taco was life-changing for me. Perfectly-cooked meat, generous helpings of avocado and sour cream. It was too big to fold at first, I had to eat it down to a manageable size with a fork before I could pick it up.
Still chasing that dragon to this day.
Note for others - "ATH" => "All-Time High"
100%. One can't advocate for the dismantling of the Dept. of Education, the tearing down of "educational elites", and the wholesale banning of books, while at the same time crying foul when people say they have the intellectual capacity of a 12-year-old.
I mean, this kinda pushes them past the "in between" phase and squarely into "overtly evil" IMO:
Every day I grow more and more glad that I turned down a Meta offer. It was probably a hire-to-fire offer anyway, not based on any engineering prowess on my part. Still, I couldn't be more relieved I dodged that bullet.
all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike)
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
Your comment made me ask myself: "Then why remove it? If it really is just a system prompt, I can't imagine tech debt or maintenance are among the reasons."
My best guess is this is product strategy. A markdown file doesn't require maintenance, but a feature's surface area does. Every exposed mode is another thing to document, support, A/B test, and explain to new users who stumble across it. I'm guessing that someone decided "Study Mode isn't hitting retention metrics", and decided to kill it. As an autodidact, I loved the feature, but as a software engineer I can respect the decision.
What I'm wondering about is whether there's a security angle to this as well. Assuming exposed system prompts are a jailbreak surface, if users can infer the prompt structure, would it make certain prompt injection attacks easier? I'm not well-versed in ML security, and I'd be curious to hear from someone who is.
Odds are we'll find out before his term is over.
Indeed- if they'll hire you via AI, they're likely to fire you via AI, when the time inevitably comes.
They meet with customers as often as they meet with each other. Another one of those necessary evils IMO- it's not fun but it needs to get done.
As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to.
I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what I’m good at and what I’m not. And long, drawn-out “alignment sessions” are not in my wheelhouse. If my PM and design friends are happy to take that bullet for me, I’m happy to let them do so.
The surface area of the Earth is roughly 510 million square kilometers. Of which you occupy a, let's say, small portion. You also seem to be ignoring every data point in between 100 years ago and today.
So out of 365 days per year * 100 years * 510 million square kilometers, you're basing your beliefs on... 2 data points? 100 years ago, and today? Really?
Keeping one's side of the street clean is the right move, regardless of what anyone else does.
You asked for names of countries. That was provided. What you're doing here is called moving the goalposts.
They were literally taking tourist photos in front of the "Alligator Alcatraz" sign. [1][2][3]
They knew what they were voting for. The cruelty (and the authoritarianism) is the point.
1. https://theday.com/photo-single/1006536/?mode=team
2. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/people-take-pi...
3. https://www.wusf.org/courts-law/2025-12-22/attorneys-urge-ju...
I mean, if you want to quote the guidelines [1]:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
"Most" leaves some wiggle room here, and I'd say CBS's censoring of Colbert post-acquisition is evidence of an "interesting new phenomenon". You might not find the story interesting, but that just means you're not the target audience.
From their Bluesky post [1]:
Want to investigate something using open sources but not sure where to start? We’ve gathered some of our go-to resources for learning, practicing, and collaborating on open source research - whether you’re brand new or sharpening your skills, good investigations start with the right tools.
1. https://bsky.app/profile/bellingcat.com/post/3meygaebds22r
Roger Ebert was a national treasure. The saga of his review of director Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" [1] always makes me laugh:
American critic Roger Ebert has hit back at Vincent Gallo in the latest round of a public spat over whether the actor-director did or did not apologise for his derided Cannes contender The Brown Bunny. Earlier this week Gallo denied having apologised and claimed the critic was "a fat pig" for saying that he had. He added: "The only thing I'm sorry for is putting a curse of Roger Ebert's colon."
Yesterday, in his column for the Chicago Sun Times, Ebert stuck to his guns - quoting the editor of trade magazine Screen International, who says that they have Gallo's apology on tape. On the question of his cursed colon, Ebert said: "I am not too worried. I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."
The critic rounded off his article (as it were) by casually conceding that he is overweight. "It is true that I am fat," Ebert wrote. "But one day I shall be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."
Later on, Gallo went back to the editing room and cut a quarter of the film. Ebert re-watched it and actually ended up giving it a thumbs' up.
The liberty at stake here is freedom of movement without a permanent, searchable record. There's a meaningful difference between "a person can see you in public" and "a corporation logs your plate, location, and timestamp thousands of times a month and makes it queryable." The Supreme Court moved in this direction in Carpenter v. United States, when it ruled that accessing historical location records constitutes a search even when the individual data points were shared with a third party, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Some real-world examples of "the whole being greater than the sum of its parts":
- If your plate and another person's plate consistently show up at the same locations at the same times, that's evidence of a relationship. Now multiply that across everyone. You can map social networks, figure out who's meeting with who, identify affair partners, figure out who attends the same AA meeting every Tuesday.
- Regular trips to a mosque, a church, a union hall, a gun range, a protest staging area, a political campaign office. No single trip is meaningful, but the pattern over months tells you someone's affiliations and beliefs.
- Repeated visits to an oncology clinic, a methadone clinic, a fertility specialist, a psychiatrist's office. That's health information that would normally be protected under HIPAA if obtained through medical channels.
- When you leave for work, when you come home, what routes you take, when your house is empty. This is exactly the kind of information a stalker would want, and it's sitting in a database that (depending on the jurisdiction) may have minimal access controls.
The key point is that none of these individual observations are particularly sensitive. It's the longitudinal aggregation that transforms mundane location data into an intimate portrait of someone's life. And importantly, that portrait exists for essentially every driver, not just people under investigation.
You could argue that the 4th Amendment constrains state action, not corporate behavior. But it's not like Flock is collecting this data for some independent commercial purpose and the government occasionally subpoenas it. The product is government surveillance, just privatized. Outsourcing surveillance to a private contractor to avoid 4th Amendment scrutiny is arguably worse than the government doing it directly, because it bypasses the oversight mechanisms that keep the government in check (or at least, are supposed to do so).
I was introduced to Mulatu Astatke's music from Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" soundtrack. [1] He's now one of my favorite African musicians.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yulnyGZ4d3Y&list=PLHrPP0rObV...
Speaking of Afro-rock, I'll take this opportunity to plug the Zamrock sub-genre, and specifically the bands WITCH [1], Ngozi Family [2], Chrissy Zebby Tembo, [3] and Amanaz [4].
The first 3 tracks are very garage-y. The 4th is more mellow. All 4 are tracks I come back to often.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqFhpe3ZBlg&list=RDOqFhpe3ZB...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzwFtRaB4Fk&list=RDAzwFtRaB4...
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfrKVOS1AvI&list=PLwVQppKVOQ...
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjUOYLJ8IYI&list=RDGjUOYLJ8I...
"Thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic and capitalistic society where we can fight in court."
Of course he's "thankful" for that, since in our "beautifully democratic and capitalistic" society, Flock can use their $658 million of VC funding [1] to wage lawfare against the have-nots with their armies of lobbyists and lawyers. [2]
1. https://websets.exa.ai/websets/directory/flock-safety-fundin...
2. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
Not only will there be no punitive action taken by this admin, but I fully expect Trump to extend the current flurry of lame-duck pardons to most if not all members of his administration, for any and all actions they may have taken, before his term is out.
I hope I’m wrong, but in his 5 years as President he has yet to display any hint of restraint or ethical compass, so I would be very surprised if this doesn’t happen.
EDIT: “to punitive action” => “no punitive action”
Thank you for posting this. I lost my father over the weekend, and I had a similarly traumatic relationship with him. Reading this could not have come at a better time.
Oddly enough, the similarities extend to geography as well. My dad was living in Spain when he died. Not Portugal as in the article, but right next door.