Hacker News: 55555

New comment by 55555 in "U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels"

55555 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:43:28 +0000

If you look at page 12 here (https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2026-09/...) the USPS estimates 30,000,000 fraudulent labels are/were used per month. The accused sold 5 million labels via Labelsbank.com over a ~2 year period (https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164928/https://labelsban...). That's ~208,000/m so his scam would represent 0.7% of fraudulent labels.

These numbers are rough but there you go. Your intuition is correct. Roughly 100X.

New comment by 55555 in "People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes"

55555 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 02:26:40 +0000

It's a very psychological addiction. Obviously willpower and compulsiveness vary depending on the person, but whether you believe it is easy to quit or hard to quit, you are right.

The misery of quitting comes from wanting something you cannot have. The trick to avoiding that misery is to truly not want it. Then the only remaining struggle is a few days of noticeable physical symptoms (like having a mild flu, at worst) and the long struggle of trying to not forget why you don't want to smoke or vape or snus.

Anyone wishing to quit should read Alan Carr's book. Don't worry about whether everything in the book is literally true; the point of the book is not to be a list of pedantically true statements; the point of the book is to get you to quit smoking.

New comment by 55555 in "Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader puts Silicon Valley to shame"

55555 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:41:44 +0000

I have one and am very happy with it. I vibe coded a bilingual ebook reader, which is what I bought it for. However a Kindle is a way better deal and is much better as far as screen quality etc. But I like how small my XTEINK X4 Pro is.

New comment by 55555 in "Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS"

55555 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:19:18 +0000

Is there an ad blocker for Chrome on iOS?

New comment by 55555 in "Show HN: Vibez – Open-Source Rust Based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)"

55555 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:40:36 +0000

You know how you sometimes see an article and realize quickly it was written by an LLM so you close the tab instead of reading it? I just had my first experience doing that with an entire website.

New comment by 55555 in "AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol"

55555 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:43:52 +0000

Sure but porn is a separate category. It's not really a scam.

New comment by 55555 in "More German than many Germans"

55555 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:19:27 +0000

Can you elaborate? I don't quite grasp what you mean. Do you mean that the first three quarters of your life were more formative/adventurous and the last quarter was more driven by inertia and routine? I can relate if so, just not sure if that's what you mean.

New comment by 55555 in "Opus 5 is currently #1 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Leaderboard"

55555 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:47:37 +0000

Every french person I've talked to IRL, for example, calls Claude "him." It's partly a language thing.

New comment by 55555 in "Unitree As2-W"

55555 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 03:07:52 +0000

The answer to both your questions, and the poster's obvious implication, is that somehow they stole information from Boston Dynamics. (I'm not saying I believe that.) Seems like they must've stolen the information at the exact point in time when advances in AI made these physical robots much more easy for anyone to engineer without theft...

New comment by 55555 in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

55555 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 02:33:31 +0000

Isn't this a crime that someone is liable for? What happened is that someone hacked into a computer system without permission. Maybe it wasn't intentional -- sure -- and that would be a factor at sentencing. But it sounds like they've admitted to a crime, and obviously our legal system considers the humans involved to be the liable parties; otherwise everyone would just say "my computer did the hacking" and wouldn't get in any trouble.

I don't expect any prosecution here, but is the above legally accurate?

New comment by 55555 in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

55555 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:34:00 +0000

There are really only two factors at play here: people trying to protect their massive investments, and governments fighting over who gets backdoor access to all of your chats.

New comment by 55555 in "Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family"

55555 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:08:01 +0000

The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?

Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.

I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.

Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.

(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)

How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.

New comment by 55555 in "AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region"

55555 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:15:33 +0000

What in the zuck is this?

New comment by 55555 in "Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T"

55555 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:08:30 +0000

$423 billion*

New comment by 55555 in "Generate parametric, manufacturable 3D models in seconds"

55555 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:54:53 +0000

It actually works pretty well.

New comment by 55555 in "Study reveals what people see when they read lips"

55555 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:22:14 +0000

I just realized the government probably has a lip reading AI model trained. Training one would be super easy. Download youtube videos with uploader-provided captions, cut to just scenes where only a single face is detected, and then use the lip points and facial landmarks and subtitle text (which has word-level timings) as training data. Then you can point a camera at anyone from a distance and know what they are saying. The longer they talk, the more accurate the output will be, as additional context is provided.

New comment by 55555 in "Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike"

55555 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:23:31 +0000

This is really really awesome

New comment by 55555 in "Venezuela reveals $240B in debt it cannot pay (~$100B more than expected)"

55555 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:42:09 +0000

1. Dictator gets loans for his country 2. Dictator puts the money in his Swiss bank account 3. Government is overthrown 4. The populace has to pay off the debt

Perhaps him being in custody will lead to some of the money being found and returned.

New comment by 55555 in "Fruit Slider – an optimal path finding match-2 sliding puzzle"

55555 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:31:56 +0000

A fun little game I made. You will get better at the game quickly.

Swipe or use the arrow keys to make pairs orthogonally adjacent in as few moves as necessary. If you make an unnecessary move, your score resets to zero.

It's not perfect and unfortunately isn't perfectly responsive on old phones. Have fun!

Fruit Slider – an optimal path finding match-2 sliding puzzle

55555 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:31:56 +0000

Article URL: https://fruitslider.surge.sh/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660574

Points: 2

# Comments: 1