Hacker News: AlexAplin

New comment by AlexAplin in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

AlexAplin — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:56:14 +0000

>the mere knowledge that a solution exists "contaminates" efforts by both humans and AI to find alternate routes to the problem that reveal additional insights

This really expresses the heartburn you see across all fields, not exclusive to careerism. I certainly have friends in decomp and fan translation spaces that have been demotivated by the current rash of efforts happening there.

The rush to be "first" has always been over-celebrated, but it would be nice to believe there's a way to get beyond that thinking.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"

AlexAplin — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:24:18 +0000

We do have some unique carve outs already for what we consider intellectual theft e.g. trade secrets. In this case the original artifacts might remain, but admitting the market that created them could go extinct is enough definition to be infringement at least. Fair use has been really resilient in these training cases so far but it is pretty damning to admit a negative market effect and that you're a direct substitute (see Warhol v Goldsmith recently).

New comment by AlexAplin in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

AlexAplin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:57:14 +0000

Democracy, even at its most ideal, is often about overriding preferences. Netflix helps to float an entire industry of creators and a tangible pop culture. It's not entirely clear (or softened, maybe not clear to communities) what AI build out floats currently except AI companies and the tangible negatives of generative AI.

New comment by AlexAplin in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

AlexAplin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:08:22 +0000

They aren't my indicators, but they read as sweat against the observable metrics being in decline. There is a perception that they want to pull on users outside of Bluesky that I don't really think exist, and I guess I share in that feeling when I believe the core still has so much basic parity missing with X et al that would demonstrate confidence in the current users you already have. Still interested to see what they ship as.

New comment by AlexAplin in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

AlexAplin — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:29:07 +0000

It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.

New comment by AlexAplin in "US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters"

AlexAplin — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:47:47 +0000

The attendance was clandestine and performed by actors that misrepresented themselves to gain an intelligence advantage. I'm not sure what else you would call it.

AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

AlexAplin — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:43:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ohiostatefair.com/p/get-involved/arts/poster-contest

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149188

Points: 142

# Comments: 186

New comment by AlexAplin in "How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)"

AlexAplin — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:44:42 +0000

Feeds still have a lot of inertia, at least. Most blogs generate them out of the box, and Wordpress being as predominant as it still is means you can still find them even where you don't expect to. Even social media profiles can compress into feeds with a little help from solutions like Nitter (or in Bluesky's case, offered natively). What I think is really missed is the social component that Reader had, which you still can't really find even with the variety of great readers that came in its wake.

I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Google kills Earth AI generator after one day"

AlexAplin — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:37:14 +0000

Any boast about AI accelerating the development lifecycle comes with an equal or greater stock that examples like this become more frequent when there are less opportunities for someone to interrupt them with a smidge of common sense.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Show HN: Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line"

AlexAplin — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:31:04 +0000

I should have specified I meant the custom melodies. My understanding was that they're now all generic. https://sheets.works/the-bells-of-tokyo is a good reference for the transition.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Show HN: Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line"

AlexAplin — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:53:06 +0000

JR East is already in the process of eliminating departure melodies as they transition to one-man station operations, so these will unfortunately be gone sooner than later. The Nambu and Joban lines got rid of them last year and it looks like the Yamanote is scheduled for them to be gone by 2030 [1].

I'm sure they can figure out a way to trigger custom melodies with RFID or similar eventually. Keikyu figured out how to recreate their departure boards [2]. JR might be less willing to come up with something immediately given the optics around automating someone out of a job.

[1] https://japantoday.com/category/features/travel/jr-east-axes...

[2] https://soranews24.com/2026/07/04/japanese-train-company-bri...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Toshifumi Suzuki, founder of Seven-Eleven Japan, has died"

AlexAplin — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:30:03 +0000

Besides the context in the other comments, they pushed the Japanese fresh food angle in a media blitz pretty hard last year (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/business/7-eleven-ceo-ste...). Egg sandwiches seem to be the most reliably available in the contiguous states, but you can also spot egg rolls and onigiri. They're also now bracing to close hundreds of stores and reopen a fraction of that number to match the new model: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2026/04/17/7-eleven...

New comment by AlexAplin in "The best is over: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

AlexAplin — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:08:12 +0000

Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.

I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.

New comment by AlexAplin in "EFF is leaving X"

AlexAplin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:13:22 +0000

The advertisers that evaporated and left behind a lot of no label dropshipping scams seem to think so. Did a lot of them eventually come back because there is some audience to squeeze numbers from? Sure, but I also wouldn't negate that many didn't and aren't coming back because it is Elon's playground now.

New comment by AlexAplin in "EFF is leaving X"

AlexAplin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:00:20 +0000

We have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF.

https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Goodbye to Sora"

AlexAplin — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:00:04 +0000

Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/

Not a great look that either the teams responsible for Sora didn't know this was coming or the decision was so brash that things changed overnight.

New comment by AlexAplin in "Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version"

AlexAplin — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 02:49:31 +0000

I'm pretty forgiving about accessibility (I'm able to say this at all because I don't have to rely rigidly on accessibility tools) but nav menus feel like a baseline we shouldn't muck with. Tabbing doesn't seem to respond very well in the live example, and at least in the limited demo you can't expand the listing without using a mouse (I thought it would respond to a space with the :checked pseudo, but seems not).

New comment by AlexAplin in "AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos"

AlexAplin — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 08:55:11 +0000

The current utilization of generative video is almost universally horrible, which this article does suggest, so I'm not too surprised there are players trying to differentiate themselves. Slop for thee, not for me.

New comment by AlexAplin in "TikTok Deal Is the Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse"

AlexAplin — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:28:53 +0000

Comparing views cross-platform is not a very useful study and YouTube routinely adjusts what a view means. Shorts changed earlier this year to count all playbacks and loops without a minimum watch time requirement. https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/333869549/a-change...

New comment by AlexAplin in "Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark"

AlexAplin — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:55:01 +0000

For what it is worth, they have communicated that they do eventually plan to retire the domain themselves [1]:

>Re-enrolling your security key will associate them with x[.]com, allowing us to retire the Twitter domain.

[1] https://xcancel.com/Safety/status/1982278858457174522