Hacker News: blakesterz

New comment by blakesterz in "University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk"

blakesterz — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:44:00 +0000

It's 11 THOUSAND searches ON JUST THAT ONE TOPIC in one day when they are used to seeing less than 11 THOUSAND searches in one day TOTAL. None of these systems were built for this type of traffic. The total traffic from these crawlers is many times more than just 11,000. It's more like 11,000 searches on 100,000 topics.

New comment by blakesterz in "University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk"

blakesterz — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:10:38 +0000

What I still don't understand is who is doing it? I assume it's not the big companies like OpenAI or Google or Anthropic, right? So there are a bunch of small things out there doing the scraping and then they sell it to the big places? Or are these just smaller AI models doing the scraping and using it for themselves? Is there an underground ecosystem where people buy and sell this stuff? I understand why it's valuable to the AI companies I'm curious about how all this work, the economics of it all.

University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk

blakesterz — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:13:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/university-libraries-ai-data-scraping-bots-9.7408287

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50392499

Points: 137

# Comments: 61

New comment by blakesterz in "What was a Token Ring network?"

blakesterz — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:34:36 +0000

The "WAS" in that title just made me feel really old. I remember learning about this in college and it being a thing that I would need to work with and understand how it works why it's different than ethernet. And now it's just a big "WAS".

New comment by blakesterz in "Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery"

blakesterz — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:58:55 +0000

First it was Time in 1990, then AOL then AT&T then Discovery and now this. That's 5 owners since 90 for Warner Brothers and none of those really worked out well. I don't know enough to know if this stands a better chance, but if I was going to bet, I'd bet Warner has a new owner before 2030.

New comment by blakesterz in "Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available"

blakesterz — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:33:13 +0000

I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.

New comment by blakesterz in "Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center"

blakesterz — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:28:39 +0000

Reuters has a non-paywalled (short) report with a bit of detail:

https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-cites-force-majeure-...

New comment by blakesterz in "Do Food Trucks Need a Commissary Kitchen? Yes – Here's Why That's a Good Thing"

blakesterz — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:02:40 +0000

That's funny, I guess I always just assumed that a truck was a self contained thing were all the work happened, all that other stuff never even occurred to me!

  "The basics: a food truck commissary gives you a licensed commercial space to fill your fresh water tank, dump gray water, handle grease disposal, wash dishes, deep clean your truck, and store food when you’re not operating."

New comment by blakesterz in "Movie Review: Musk"

blakesterz — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:57:22 +0000

This site has numbers and sources: https://www.tesladeaths.com/

New comment by blakesterz in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

blakesterz — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:55:15 +0000

  "There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "

I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good.

And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?

New comment by blakesterz in "The August 17 outage"

blakesterz — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:41:13 +0000

  "Since April, monthly commits have grown from 1.4 billion to 2.9 billion. "

Wow, that is some incredible growth in a really short time.

New comment by blakesterz in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

blakesterz — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:25:06 +0000

  "When I spoke with Cranor, she was floored by just how often I went to McDonald’s: “This guy eats a lot of McDonald's.” My boss, who was also stunned by my processed-food choices, says I now have to stop eating there. Despite my love of crispy Diet Cokes and greasy french fries, I agree."

I wonder how many of us would stop going not just to McDonald’s, but all the other places if we knew just how much they ALL have in our files. They're not tracking us to be helpful, they're tracking us to increase their profits.

New comment by blakesterz in "Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML"

blakesterz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:23:25 +0000

  "Accessibility failures are near-universal."

Why does it seem like Accessibility is always an after thought? It is usually so easy to do while a site is built. We just don't think about it until someone complains?

New comment by blakesterz in "Show HN: KidScreen, a finite YouTube shelf chosen by parents"

blakesterz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:53:42 +0000

Looks interesting but I would want some public information about how it works and who is doing it, etc... The complete lack of any available details must be stopping many potential users.

New comment by blakesterz in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

blakesterz — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:19:35 +0000

Toni Schneider was just on Decoder last week too talking about this and more

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/974387/bluesky-toni-schneid...

BitTorrent's disastrous, legendary, and controversial story

blakesterz — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:51:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/tech/959848/bittorrent-story-25-years-piracy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48785404

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by blakesterz in "Zero-Downtime Deployments with Docker Compose – No Kubernetes Required"

blakesterz — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:40:41 +0000

The css is ".prose-invert" and there's a ".prose" that looks better, I wonder if something threw a switch to make it "invert" when it should be ".prose" because you're right, this is unreadable as-is. Interesting read though.

New comment by blakesterz in "For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward"

blakesterz — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:09:54 +0000

There's a video of the entire session here:

https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14ej1ucqu?kalturaStartTim...

(if that link doesn't work, it starts about 12 minutes into the start)

New comment by blakesterz in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

blakesterz — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:54:36 +0000

I just started using Claude Code for my work as a sysadmin. For my work, it's great. I don't need to wrestle with MySQL joins, claude gets even the most complex ones right WAY faster than I would. Same with new Terraform stuff. Things that would have taken me a day are cut to less than an hour.

So for my work, it's made me much better at my job. Much faster and more accurate.

New comment by blakesterz in "The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy"

blakesterz — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:32:25 +0000

Are there any defenses I can put in front of my websites that are good for stopping these things? The amount of traffic I see from residential proxies is just killing me. In particular defense against residential proxies.