Hacker News: astolarz

New comment by astolarz in "Apparently Google hates us now"

astolarz — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:57:45 +0000

Try searching for a type of food that has a place in it's name, like "Nashville hot chicken". It'll either center the map on Nashville, TN, and show you results for "hot chicken", or sometimes will zoom all the way out and show you results for "hot chicken" in both where the map was originally centered and in Nashville, TN.

New comment by astolarz in "ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V SoC with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and Advanced HMI"

astolarz — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:25:08 +0000

I've found that it does have some issues with the number 4096 though...

POC: https://github.com/astolarz/piper-cannot-select

New comment by astolarz in "A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors"

astolarz — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:57:47 +0000

Randomly mousing over it I noticed "Trunks hair" (#9b5fc0) and had to look it up to be sure I wasn't crazy...

New comment by astolarz in "Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Microprocessor – Version 1.1"

astolarz — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:38:08 +0000

I feel like Raymond Chen [0] might be a good place to start.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin...

New comment by astolarz in "I use zip bombs to protect my server"

astolarz — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 23:29:57 +0000

Bad bot

New comment by astolarz in "Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model"

astolarz — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 23:06:51 +0000

>Social media sites should give users an explicit lever to see political content or not

Facebook does sorta have this, under Settings & Privacy > Content Preferences > Manage defaults. Note that the only options for "Political content" are "Show more" and "Default". The other categories listed also include "Show less". There is no "off" option for any of the categories.

New comment by astolarz in "Halide rejected from App Store because it doesn't explain why it takes photos"

astolarz — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 17:54:34 +0000

That's on you for adding NSFW* content to your app.

*Not Safe For Widescreen

New comment by astolarz in "Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later"

astolarz — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:55:04 +0000

Bots used to just take other popular comments and repost them either in whole copies of threads, as in the example here, or taking a top comment in a new thread and reposting it elsewhere in the same thread. Now they're using LLMs to rephrase comments to try to avoid detection (though they often come across sounding a bit off so they're sometimes easy to spot).

New comment by astolarz in "Why won't Meta do anything about the "I can't believe he's gone" scams?"

astolarz — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 07:05:12 +0000

I've edited the title to more accurately reflect the point I'm trying to get across.

New comment by astolarz in "Why won't Meta do anything about the "I can't believe he's gone" scams?"

astolarz — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 06:15:31 +0000

Ok, some questions:

Where do these posts show up for the page owners, in case they want to delete them? (Or in case these posts were posted to their account without their knowledge because their account was compromised)

Why isn't Facebook doing anything to combat cases where users accounts are posting obvious compromising content to their accounts in a way that should be easily detectable and prevented?

Why won't Meta do anything about the "I can't believe he's gone" scams?

astolarz — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 06:00:11 +0000

Lately I've been seeing a bunch of posts from compromised accounts on Facebook composed of an inner and outer post, with the outer post stating something like "I can't believe he's gone " and the inner post being a link to what is obviously a scam site with an image made to look like a YouTube screenshot for a local news report about a tragic vehicle accident.

This simple pattern alone should be simple enough for Facebook to shut down immediately, yet not only does it continue but every time I report it Facebook claims it does not violate their community standards (usually a week or two after the initial report). Until recently, where the posts are deleted before Facebook's slow process gets around to actually looking at it.

Because of Facebook's complete inaction in this case, I've mostly just resigned to commenting "DO NOT CLICK" on these posts. On one such occasion, I got a response from one of the account owner's friends that mentioned that it doesn't show up on their timeline. That didn't immediately register with me as being any more suspicious than the rest of the post, but eventually I realized that all these posts are marked as public. So I went to this person's public profile (of whom I am not a friend) and was not able to find this recent "public" post. Both the inner and outer posts are marked as worldly public, posted March 14, 2024, yet the most recent public post on their profile is from October 2017 (logged into my own account, in a private window I can't even view their account).

This is either a security flaw or exploit that is being used to attack Facebook users and needs to be addressed ASAP.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39723702

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

New comment by astolarz in "Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up"

astolarz — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 21:58:15 +0000

Personal anecdote: A few years back I left my car at a dealership for some warranty work that was going to take a few days. It has a soft top and they left it in their gated lot overnight, where it got broken into (slashed the top, ripped open the glove box, stole a cheap machete I got from a white elephant exchange). They claimed that they weren't liable at all since I signed a waiver and should go through my own insurance. After a little push back, they caved and covered it under their insurance like they should have from the beginning. I don't go to that dealership for anything anymore, for that and other reasons.

New comment by astolarz in "Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threats to supes, police reports"

astolarz — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:40:47 +0000

You can say anything as long as you add a footnote saying "This is not intended as a threat" apparently.

New comment by astolarz in "Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threats to supes, police reports"

astolarz — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:21:10 +0000

They also think their voter information was "leaked" when they registered to vote, so it doesn't sound like they're very civically informed...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206679

I can't believe he is gone, I'm gonna miss him so much

astolarz — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 04:30:56 +0000

Ive seen these obvious fraud/phishing attacks posted on Facebook so much in the past few weeks. I report them every time. Every time Facebook responds (presumably through some automated system) that it doesn't violate their community standards, so I request another review. I know it will be denied again, but I mostly do it out of spite. So I've taken to posting links to these posts in comments on posts on Facebook's company pages. My comments calling them out on their complete disregard for their users' safety then get removed because they're "spam" or "trying to get likes". It's absolutely ridiculous.

The posts in question are almost always the same format: User A sharing post X to User B with the comment "I can't believe he is gone, i'm gonna miss him so much " (sometimes the emoji will be different). This post tags a bunch of other users. Post X is a link to a shady URL with a fake thumbnail that looks like a YouTube thumbnail for a news report of a fatal car accident. I assume that clicking the link will compromise your own account and spread the message further, along with who knows what other malicious actions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997479

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by astolarz in "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy"

astolarz — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:20:28 +0000

Here's a really good one https://www.amazon.com/FOPEAS-Language-Context-referring-Inf...

New comment by astolarz in "Jailbroken AI Chatbots Can Jailbreak Other Chatbots"

astolarz — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 22:37:21 +0000

I think they mean this from yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530207

New comment by astolarz in "Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP"

astolarz — Tue, 16 May 2023 21:41:33 +0000

The thread also has an example of ChatGPT claiming to have written one of the professor's own papers.

New comment by astolarz in "Microsoft Transitions U.S. FTEs to “Discretionary Time Off”"

astolarz — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 22:04:53 +0000

To be fair, that's sorta wrong. Only >4 consecutive weeks of vacation need manager and GM approval. Less than that consecutively is still technically at the manager's discretion, but at least on my team the culture has been "you've earned it, and there's never a good time from the business standpoint to take it so you might as well take it when you feel like". Granted I get the feeling that my team/org is much better culturally than most of the rest of the company.

New comment by astolarz in "Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?"

astolarz — Fri, 13 May 2022 00:02:45 +0000

In Outlook, go to Options > Mail > Editor Options > Advanced > Cut, Copy, Paste > change the drop downs for the various scenarios to "Keep Text Only" to always strip formatting.