Hacker News: Semaphor

New comment by Semaphor in "Die Zeit Built a Searchable Database of Nazi Party Members"

Semaphor — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:06:18 +0000

My sister used it, and is currently requesting documents, but it looks like my grandad (over 2 decades dead) might not just have been in the NSDAP, but instead a member of the SS, and either they hid this from my mother and her siblings, or they all decided to never talk about it. Bit of a shock.

New comment by Semaphor in "Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader"

Semaphor — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:16:37 +0000

Same for the kindles, but the buttons used to be much better. I'll probably buy a used (they are discontinued) oasis some day just to get buttons.

New comment by Semaphor in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

Semaphor — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 06:25:21 +0000

Not just for children, many "narrative style" TTRPGs encourage exactly stuff like this. If the item is not majorly important (a sausage), then you can just assume you have it on you (though a GM might want you to do a short explanation why you have a sausage with you).

New comment by Semaphor in "The lost joy of music piracy"

Semaphor — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:10:06 +0000

The paragraph following that explains what I mean. It’s technically not always all on Friday, as Japan doesn’t join in, and smaller labels or non-labels sometimes also pick others days, but the bulk of releases happens every Friday. For tomorrow I have 9 albums on my list, plus an extra one that releases on Sunday.

New comment by Semaphor in "The lost joy of music piracy"

Semaphor — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:41:24 +0000

A lot of old stuff was also encoded way worse than one might think from the alleged bitrate. A while ago I went through a ton of old files, and everything that sounded shitty (or, far more commonly, stuff I downloaded but didn’t care about) got yeeted.

New comment by Semaphor in "The lost joy of music piracy"

Semaphor — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:11:48 +0000

I loved OiNK (and had the t-shirt), but neither What.cd nor waffles ever were a proper replacement for me.

What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening.

I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I care about the genre enough to search for a single on YouTube), and then I have maybe a hundred links, I sample everything for a few seconds and decide on yay or nay, and about 10 - 20 % go onto my excel sheet. Then on Fridays (up to Sunday, depending on how busy the release day is) I start listening to all those albums to see which of those I’ll buy (usually 1-2).

It’s some effort, but my appreciation for music was never this high.

New comment by Semaphor in "The lost joy of music piracy"

Semaphor — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:03:41 +0000

But bandcamp is only 128 kbit MP3 for free streaming, now that’s not a mystery, but probably also not worse than whatever YT offers.

New comment by Semaphor in "Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources"

Semaphor — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:48:57 +0000

That is what keeps confusing me when people hype wero. It essentially (I think some limited trials?) doesn't exist for B2C, and sending money to friends is a very minor use case.

So once it has really broad support and can be used as merchant, is when it'll maybe become interesting.

New comment by Semaphor in "Stop Using reCAPTCHA – It's Not a Real Captcha"

Semaphor — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:09:51 +0000

No, please do keep using them if you use any requiring puzzles (like hCaptcha) at all. It’s the easiest captcha to solve automatically, with many extensions available.

New comment by Semaphor in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

Semaphor — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:54:12 +0000

I plan to eventually get there, just need to find the time. It’s a lot of code, and a lot of it is not set up for testability.

New comment by Semaphor in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

Semaphor — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:16:54 +0000

I work on a codebase from the early 2000s, a lot of it using webforms, a long abandoned .NET technology. A rewrite preserving all behavior and making no observable changes whatsoever would be amazing. But it’s also tested exactly as well as you’d expect from something like that so I’d rather not let AI go wild.

New comment by Semaphor in "YC CEO says he ships 37K LoC AI code per day. A developer looked under the hood"

Semaphor — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:08:33 +0000

I’m not a huge AI fan, and was ready for some Schadenfreude. But with every paragraph I thought "so, just like modern human-created websites?"

New comment by Semaphor in "OfficeCLI: Office suite for AI agents to read and edit Microsoft Office files"

Semaphor — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:03:59 +0000

Personally, I like the elastic (and similar) license… as long as, as you did, it’s chosen upfront. Being open source as a marketing strategy and later switching to source available licenses is what I find highly [0] problematic.

[0]: With a bit of an understandable carve out if it turns out no one else ever contributed anything of significance.

New comment by Semaphor in "It's not me, it's the compiler"

Semaphor — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:57:04 +0000

Still looking fondly back to when I was studying back in ~2006, and my C program on some (I think?) ATMega device (probably not the latest version of the compiler? I really can’t remember the details anymore) device didn’t work the way I thought it should. Called the professor over. He looked at the assembly and realized the compiler was modifying a variable outside the loop for some reason that was modified inside with the C code. So before I even heard of "It’s never the compiler", I learned that sometimes it actually is the compiler ;)

New comment by Semaphor in "The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore"

Semaphor — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:01:57 +0000

> what requires the internet or becomes tedious if we opt not to use the internet

> Listening to music

Isn’t that just their choice? The most tedious it can get is if you want to stay completely offline, then for acquisition you have to buy the CD or Vinyl in person, which makes it about exactly as tedious as it used to be before the internet. Listening offline? Extremely easy. Works the same way it always had, but the software is better.

There are a lot more examples like this, where the tedious part is simply how it used to be, and using the internet instead is making it easier.

It doesn’t become tedious, it always was, and the internet simply offers an easier alternative. Granted, there are some other examples on there, but not that many.

They shortly after say "joking aside", but that seems like a lot of text for a "joke".

New comment by Semaphor in "Wayfinder Router: deterministic routing of queries between local and hosted LLM"

Semaphor — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:17:22 +0000

This is not choosing between different models, really. You should check the (interesting, yet sadly very slop-padded) readme. It’s about trying to make a binary decision: Is this a hard or easy question, and about making that decision extremely fast. They suggest putting another router that chooses the model behind it. I’m not sure how well it would work, but the idea is interesting and different than other routers.

New comment by Semaphor in "Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning"

Semaphor — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:45:21 +0000

I don't think forbidding that is legal in Germany

New comment by Semaphor in "Pledging Another $400k to the Zig Software Foundation"

Semaphor — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:53:06 +0000

OTOH, that’s probably how they got rich, and why I’ll never be.

New comment by Semaphor in "Deno Desktop"

Semaphor — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:46:07 +0000

We are a very small company, and have always had far more Firefox than Safari users. And though they get by via dominance, IE style bundling of the browser to the OS is toxic, so good riddance.

New comment by Semaphor in "Deno Desktop"

Semaphor — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:49:35 +0000

Depends on the region, no one where I work has an iPhone or a current Mac, so stuff gets tested on FF and Chrome, and Safari gets thoughts and prayers. We would test on Safari if it were simple, but alas.