Hacker News: LocalH

New comment by LocalH in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

LocalH — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:34:45 +0000

1984 ended up being a playbook rather than a warning

New comment by LocalH in "Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026"

LocalH — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:06:00 +0000

It's been mostly solved since DeCSS

New comment by LocalH in "Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code"

LocalH — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:43:52 +0000

There are tons of tools the blog author could have used before resorting to using AI to convert an existing library to Python.

AI isn't "just a tool", the whole reason it exists is to offload thinking. I wish I'd noticed this needed "recovery" before this person did, I'd have extracted the files and been done with it. AI was not necessary for this at all

The ad was well past the lede

New comment by LocalH in "I don't want my search engine to think for me"

LocalH — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:39:19 +0000

But is anything you said any more than heuristic?

New comment by LocalH in "I don't want my search engine to think for me"

LocalH — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:24:58 +0000

Explain your reasoning beyond "oh they used em dashes"

New comment by LocalH in "I don't want my search engine to think for me"

LocalH — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:24:28 +0000

But I'm sure you understand that AI-driven "AI detectors" have an error rate of probably 90%, right?

I've heard of people taking old writings from 30 years ago, feeding it to an AI detector, and being told "this is AI"

New comment by LocalH in "My Students Can't Read"

LocalH — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:21:53 +0000

The US has a really bad problem with parents thinking they should have deity-level say over every single aspect of how their kids are raised. This is very ironic, since the US also has a really bad problem with other parents thinking they can tell people how to raise their kids (witness all the "free-range" children who have innocently gotten their parents in trouble because some other parent saw them alone and called the police).

New comment by LocalH in "The advertising cartel coming to your web browser"

LocalH — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:10:36 +0000

Coming? The advertising cartel has been coming for the web browser since Google bought DoubleClick in March 2008 and then released Chrome in September.

"Eternal September II" is when Chrome was first released to the public.

New comment by LocalH in "Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code"

LocalH — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:30:42 +0000

I just wonder why he didn't boot up an Amiga emulator and copy the files out that way. Could even run DiskSalv on the disk image to look for data in the slack space. Or he could have used a tool like what comes with ADFlib (https://github.com/adflib/ADFlib) to do it. This seems like a thinly-veiled ad for AI and for this person's company, at the end.

Edit: I loaded the ADF into WinUAE and ram it through DiskSalv to check for deleted files. There were none.

New comment by LocalH in "Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code"

LocalH — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:25:53 +0000

"Recovering"...from an ADF file that was already on IA, which many tools already exist to work with, both native Amiga tools and other-platform tools.

This blog post should be titled "Extracting files from an Amiga disk image with generative AI Python"

New comment by LocalH in "Linux/M68k"

LocalH — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:42:43 +0000

There are files for it in mainline:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

New comment by LocalH in "GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits"

LocalH — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:21:12 +0000

It's a journal replay attack

New comment by LocalH in "Real wages start to shrink in developed countries"

LocalH — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:49:39 +0000

The company town never died, it just evolved

New comment by LocalH in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

LocalH — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:22:18 +0000

I still use it (sometimes 1.x, sometimes 2.x) in terminals and IDEs to this day

New comment by LocalH in "Hawaii just found a way around Citizens United. Other states are following"

LocalH — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:46:13 +0000

Corporations, as an entity, deserve no Constitutional rights. Only the individuals that make them up, and as individuals, not as a group.

New comment by LocalH in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

LocalH — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:38:56 +0000

I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.

No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).

New comment by LocalH in "CBP Directive 3340-049B: Border Search of Electronic Devices"

LocalH — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:50:26 +0000

Tell that to the US Government:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46601

New comment by LocalH in "Ask HN: Why didn't the C64 come with Simons' BASIC in the box from 1983 onward?"

LocalH — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:33:24 +0000

It was in the early 80s. It got to the point where Commodore offered $100 trade-in value towards the C64 for a competitor's machine, and near the end the TI 99/4a was deeply discounted to $49.99. So people would literally go buy a new 99/4a, then trade it in to Commodore to get $100 off. Tramiel likely felt it was worth that loss of revenue to get competitors' machines out of the market and replace them with Commodore's.

New comment by LocalH in "Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers"

LocalH — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:17:49 +0000

You can get HDMI to analog converters for pretty cheap for use with streaming devices. You can also get devices that will receive digital OTA signals directly and output them to analog signals.

New comment by LocalH in "CBP Directive 3340-049B: Border Search of Electronic Devices"

LocalH — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:58:43 +0000

> The CBP cannot deny an American citizen entry into the country for any reason. They cannot compel a citizen to unlock their devices.

Don't worry, they're working on ending birthright citizenship