Hacker News: blater

New comment by blater in "ChatGPT Is Throwing 404"

blater — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:24:59 +0000

MCP client for `codex_apps` failed to start: error: unexpected server response: HTTP 451: {"message":"no_biscuit_no_service"}

Quick! Someone call a caterer, This AI needs a biscuit NOW!!!

New comment by blater in "ChatGPT Is Throwing 404"

blater — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:13:08 +0000

The obvious question: is there a single point of failure / common piece of infrastructure involved with failures across all these providers?

Its interesting that codex/gpt-app are screwed because their APIs (including auth) fail, but gpt web still appears to be working.

Even AI Slop Deserves to Be Handmade

blater — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:44:35 +0000

Ever feel your writing sounds too human ? How can you fit in on LinkedIn? How can you speak the language of AI without _using_ AI?

https://github.com/blater/claudify

Carefully hand craft your prose, then hand it to Claudify. It uses non-AI deterministic heuristics to warp, crush, pulverize, and algorithmically dehumanise into beautiful, fluent Claudish.

LinkedIn-ready, instantly, with no AI. Because using AI to generate AI slop would just be embarrassing.

Every slice lands, every seam is honest. It's load bearing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537104

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by blater in "Ethereum crashed from $319 to 10c on GDAX after ‘multimillion dollar’ trade"

blater — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 13:20:30 +0000

exactly the same thing happened to me with Litecoin on GDAX.

They sold off my entire holdings for $0.01 - $0 after fees. At the time LTC was trading for something like $25/LTC.

It took about 3 weeks to get anything but an automated response from their support team.

This was the response:

"After further review, this sell was due to a margin call of your margin position on the LTC/BTC order book. A series of large sell orders were placed on the LTC/BTC order book on May 21, 2017 around 1am UTC causing a large price decline which triggered a margin call of your position when your maintenance margin ratio was exceeded.

The trading engine and margin call functioned as designed. The large price decline was due to the relatively low liquidity on the order book at that time."

They eventually refunded the coins.... but a couple of days later removed half of the refund with no explanation. I'm out of pocket by about $1200. I'm still waiting for a response from them on that one.

New comment by blater in "Scientists Predict Star Collision Visible to the Naked Eye in 2022"

blater — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 13:16:18 +0000

TLDR; Northern hemisphere:definitely, Southern:Maybe.

It's in cygnus, which is always visible in the northern hemisphere, and visible in a lot of the southern hemisphere low on the horizon in the winter months.

The event is not certain, but is highly likely to occur. The date is "2022 give or take a year", so if it occurs in Southern winter then it will likely be visible to the Southern hemisphere.

New comment by blater in "PMD source code analyzer"

blater — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 12:56:00 +0000

yeah, nice to see PMD still getting some love. A very well implemented tool that just does what it does awesomely well.

Uncertain Propulsion Breakthroughs?

blater — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 18:37:32 +0000

Article URL: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36830

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286160

Points: 162

# Comments: 94

New comment by blater in "NASA just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft"

blater — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 09:30:21 +0000

Because the orbital ship is structurally unable to cope with higher atmospheric density so must be assembled and maintained at altitude and never go below the height of the station. There's a few challenges there...

New comment by blater in "NASA just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft"

blater — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:37:12 +0000

Why bother with the rocket? It sounds mad, but you can actually just send the balloon. to orbit... http://www.jpaerospace.com/atohandout.pdf

New comment by blater in "The Manhattan Project Fallacy"

blater — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 23:53:13 +0000

I honestly couldn't finish this. Who exactly is comparing today's startups to the manhattan project? Yes many projects are aiming for more ad clicks, but so what? In the 30's movies and radio were doing the same thing and what? Why are they being compared to the manhattan project, or to apollo, or to the search for the Higgs boson, or world peace, or whatever?. Is there anything to this beyond the obvious strawmab cllckbait?

New comment by blater in "In His Own Words: Gary Kildall"

blater — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 20:24:35 +0000

Depends on context. In the early days many s100 users assembled the boards themselves and doubtless wouldn't have blinked any eyelid at hacking 8080/z80 bios code if they needed to (I remember the first kid at school to get a computer around that time, programmable with physical switches, binary LED display). By the time the commercial software market for CP/M became established with killer apps like word star, the users would have been rightly horrified by bios hacking.

New comment by blater in "MXE: Windows cross-compile environment for Unix"

blater — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 06:46:32 +0000

From the history page: 2007-06-12 – Project start

It's pretty cool seeing these long lived projects going from strength to strength

New comment by blater in "SpaceX misses landing on a drone ship, breaking the company's streak"

blater — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 22:26:39 +0000

For context, this launch cost around $60mil and carried $200mil of satellite (spacenews http://spacenews.com/spacex-successfully-launches-2nd-pair-o... ) Spacex are aspiring to a 30% discount https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/03/31/spacex-hopes-to-sell-u... Until the tech is well proven this would seem to only be a compelling offer for lower cost sats. Theres also the catch 22 that the first mission will be almost uninsurable. I reckon we'll see an LEO demonstration launch maybe with some cubesats n the first one.

New comment by blater in "SpaceX lands rocket at sea second time after satellite launch"

blater — Fri, 06 May 2016 20:32:59 +0000

More like a Pepsi can with a bloody big brick in the bottom 9*470 kg merlins). Main threat to stability would seem to be wind, but doesn't seem to be the case in practice

New comment by blater in "78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis"

blater — Wed, 04 May 2016 22:39:51 +0000

First rule of the Internet : all comment threads tend towards comparison to hitler. Multiply by 20 for YouTube.

New comment by blater in "Telomere lengthening via gene therapy in a human individual"

blater — Sun, 24 Apr 2016 15:52:13 +0000

Not sure about that with the HN audience. I have only the most passing interest in biology and aging research but I automatically made the association.

New comment by blater in "Show HN: Booleans as a Service (BaaS)"

blater — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 16:12:08 +0000

Amazing technology, but we are finding it a little limiting in production. True and False values are good, but we're finding that often the data value is in an in between state. We believe that a quinary operator would give significant advantages over the current binary booleans (TRUE/FALSE). Is it possible to implement a quinary boolean along the lines of TRUE/FALSE/MAYBE/MOSTLY/KINDA.

for example earth_harmless:FALSE is not quite true, whereas earth_harmless:MOSTLY is exactly what we need.

New comment by blater in "The day I did something"

blater — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 18:45:47 +0000

Wow tough crowd :(

I for one appreciated it. Good actionable advice with minimal bs. There's a pint waiting for you next time you're in London.

New comment by blater in "Ask HN: What are the biggest API development issues that you face?"

blater — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 13:38:32 +0000

Are you doing model driven development for the contract - building the contract artifacts first (e.g. the wsdl/wadl/whatever) and generating documentation and some of the code off them? If you can then the documentation problem goes away. You just regenerate the docs from the contract as part of the build.

Mocking takes time but means other teams can develop against your API before you've written any code, so while your coding effort is a little more, the elapsed development time across all teams is shorter. That can be a big win.

New comment by blater in "Becoming a contractor programmer in the UK"

blater — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 14:04:33 +0000

Meeting clients is more about freelancing, and some of the meetup groups are useful for networking there. For contracting I'd say the majority of people use jobserve. They advertise fixed term mostly fulltime contracts, usually 3-6months initial contract, and usually with at least 1 or 2 renewals expected if your work is ok.