Hacker News: alekratz

New comment by alekratz in "WireGuard makes new Windows release following Microsoft signing resolution"

alekratz — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:31:59 +0000

For something like this, I would generalize a "bug" to encompass both software and human processes. Some decision-maker saw some metrics consistent with spam and enacted a spam-blocking measure. Any decision like this is going to lead to false positives. Maybe they decided "I don't need to confer with anyone", or maybe they did and got the green light even after multiple eyeballs looked at it. I'm not saying that this does any good for Microsoft's already-sullied trust, but mistakes happen and combating spam is a constantly evolving arms race. There's no way any organization is going to get it 100% of the time even after decades of dealing with it.

New comment by alekratz in "Scott Adams has died"

alekratz — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:02:00 +0000

Do you suppose there's any connection between how LLMs write and how humans write?

New comment by alekratz in "The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin()"

alekratz — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 23:49:38 +0000

When I loaded up the page, something like 5 empty HTML files downloaded automatically, did this happen to anyone else? Firefox Linux

New comment by alekratz in "Windows Is Free for Business (2008)"

alekratz — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:05:59 +0000

> (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?)

I know this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but I would argue that the year of the Linux desktop was in 2022 when the Steam deck, albeit a non-desktop machine, was released. It's a pretty popular console and really forwarded the idea of playing video games on Linux being seamless. The state of gaming on Linux is/was one of the main reason why so many people are/were holding out on Windows, and with a few exceptions of massive games like Fortnite, it's basically here. Adoption, however, is a different story.

New comment by alekratz in "Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)"

alekratz — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:40:53 +0000

For anyone curious, MCMC = "Markov chain Monte Carlo" - the article doesn't actually tell you what it stands for until a number of paragraphs down.

(This is a massive pet peeve of mine - if you are going to call something "X for dummies", don't bury the lede! Tell me what "X" is as soon as possible, especially if it's an acronym!)

New comment by alekratz in "Discussion: Reduce error handling boilerplate in Golang using '?'"

alekratz — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 16:46:05 +0000

I'm not a Go programmer, but I feel like I've sort of "grown up" around them as the language has evolved. for a while I thought that the `if err != nil { ... }` was silly to put everywhere. As I've grown and written a lot more code, however, I actually don't see a problem with it. I'd even go as far as to say that it's a good thing because you're acknowledging the detail that an error could have occurred here, and you're explicitly choosing to pass the handling of it up the chain. with exceptions, there can be a lot of hidden behavior that you're just sweeping under the rug, or errors happen that you didn't even think could be raised by a function.

New comment by alekratz in "Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)"

alekratz — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:14:46 +0000

there's this wisdom I read a long time ago: "there's millions of photos of the Grand Canyon. There's only one or two photos of the Grand Canyon with you in it."

New comment by alekratz in "IRC Driven – modern IRC indexing site and search engine"

alekratz — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:59:12 +0000

some of us do not want to be found. obviously the easiest way to opt out of (most) of these things is to use a port other than 6667 and 6697, but when you've been operating on those ports for 10+ years, and you have an old friend who wants to pop in, how do you announce that you've moved to port 12000? adding a server password is another option, but we run into the same problems.

my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our server and left.

I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we want to be left alone.

New comment by alekratz in "Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs"

alekratz — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:29:29 +0000

If you can get a 5090 for that price, I'll eat my hat. scalpers with their armies of bots will buy them all before you get a chance.

New comment by alekratz in "Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer"

alekratz — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 04:57:58 +0000

Hey, I made something like this last year. It wasn't a self-contained unit, it was just a receipt printer with a script that would run every morning at 8am, getting the forecast, word of the day, and quote of the day. The idea was that if something important happened that day, I could hold onto that day's slip of paper and maybe write a note on it? I dunno, I stopped using after a month or so.

New comment by alekratz in "Ask HN: Share your "LLM screwed us over" stories?"

alekratz — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 18:27:24 +0000

one thing that frustrates me about current ChatGPT is that it feels like they are discouraging you from generating another reply to the same question, to see what else it might say about what you're asking. before, you used to be able to just hit the arrow on the right to generate a reply, now it's hidden in the menu where you change models on the fly. why'd they add the friction?

New comment by alekratz in "MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style"

alekratz — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 05:48:00 +0000

I always thought it was because it needed to be rigid and specific.

New comment by alekratz in "Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA"

alekratz — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 01:51:52 +0000

>No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.

I think this is a really cynical outlook, especially for a website that is not run as a modern tech-centric company. 4chan's roots are in that of the Old Internet, where it is a creative and messy and interesting place to be. why would they be banking solely on using a terrible captcha as a method to drive user subscriptions, when they have the option to run circus-tent ads? if making money was their sole purpose, why would they not kick the problematic and porn boards to the curb and ban the use of slurs to make room for more friendly advertisers? there are so many other avenues to increase profitability that most websites have taken which 4chan has staunchly refused to follow. why would they choose only the 4chan pass and ads as their only opportunity at making money?

New comment by alekratz in "Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA"

alekratz — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 23:54:07 +0000

one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?

New comment by alekratz in "Grim Fandango"

alekratz — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 19:10:28 +0000

The remastered annoyed the hell out of me because it was so buggy. I ragequit the game because there was some point that I had gotten to where one of the characters bugged out in a cutscene and wouldn't move the game forward. I had to reload a save and play about 30 minutes just to get back to the same point. This happened multiple times, too. it's a good game, yes, but the remaster is seriously full of bugs that it's difficult for me to recommend.

New comment by alekratz in "Weird Lexical Syntax"

alekratz — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 01:56:27 +0000

I don't think the lexer hack is relevant in this instance. The lexer hack just refers to the ambiguity of `A * B` and whether that should be parsed as a variable declaration or an expression. If you're building a syntax tree, then this matters, but AFAICT all the author needs is a sequence of tokens and not a syntax tree. Maybe "parser hack" would be a better name for it.

New comment by alekratz in "Why anti-cheat software utilizes kernel drivers (2020)"

alekratz — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 23:40:40 +0000

> Why load on boot? -> Because we need to, don't worry.

I believe the reason stated was "because we know it will not be tampered with after boot". Not saying it's a good or bad reason, but this is dishonest paraphrasing.

New comment by alekratz in "Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?"

alekratz — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:31:05 +0000

I love seeing Adam Cadre's name in the wild, I know him through the Lyttle Lytton contest that he's held every year since 2001. It's a fun deep dive of terrible (on purpose) writing. https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/

New comment by alekratz in "IRC technology news from the first half of 2024"

alekratz — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 19:35:04 +0000

it's dead simple early 90s text based protocol, and the servers have a remarkably lightweight footprint. simplicity also means you don't get the modern niceties like built-in media embeds or reactions (things that I really love from discord and matrix). but its simplicity also means it's easy to integrate (client, server, bot). I think it's perfect for 10-50 person channels, anything more it gets a bit too noisy to be useful or carry normal conversations.

New comment by alekratz in "7-Eleven is reinventing its food business to be more Japanese [video]"

alekratz — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 22:15:37 +0000

it's kind of disappointing that they're focusing on food in this. I get that it's a quarter of their revenue, but one of the things that makes japanese convenience stores so convenient is that you can do more than just buy stuff. like, they often have printers and scanners if you need to make a copy of something or print something off. or if you're a tourist and you're taking the train someplace and have too much luggage, you can get it shipped to the hotel at your destination via 7/11. that's the kind of thing I would love to see in a convenience store.