Hacker News: blatherard

New comment by blatherard in "Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards"

blatherard — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:41:26 +0000

No of course not, because its a teddy bear!

At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.

New comment by blatherard in "Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards"

blatherard — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:01:30 +0000

If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?

New comment by blatherard in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

blatherard — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:12:29 +0000

It might be nice if you could unlock a "hard mode" or ability to the first 1-3 levels after a first run. I scored a little over 81K and considered playing again because I like quizzes, but doing another batch of (to me) easy words seemed like a waste.

New comment by blatherard in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"

blatherard — Sat, 09 May 2026 19:35:13 +0000

Also early internet access was gated by institutions. Most people were using their work or school internet access to be online, and so behavior was naturally more controlled. When I was first online (circa 1990), I could have been "kicked off the internet" by my college's IT department.

New comment by blatherard in "Bodega cats of New York"

blatherard — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:05:59 +0000

And the difficulties of trash handling are further traceable, at least in Manhattan, to the decision by city planners in 1811 to not build alleys. No obvious place to store trash, nor an obvious place to put it when being collected.

If you drive in Manhattan you'll also notice a whole lot of delivery trucks and other vehicles blocking lanes, and a lot of designated delivery-only parking zones. This is rooted in the same lack of alleys.

The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored

blatherard — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:07:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/technology/taiwan-china-chips-silicon-valley-tsmc.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133069

Points: 17

# Comments: 6

New comment by blatherard in "The death of software development"

blatherard — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 06:22:53 +0000

I haven't looked at it much in a while, but this looks mainly like a frontend to a limited number of public data sources. Most of the value of the terminal (imho) is in the data and the chat. The data side in particular requires just a lot of ongoing operational support that an open source project isn't going to be able to provide.

New comment by blatherard in "The death of software development"

blatherard — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:02:46 +0000

> "Obviously, I didn’t clone the full Bloomberg Terminal — I built the subset I needed for Polymarket analysis. But here’s the thing: cloning the full terminal would probably take a day or two of token usage. Not months. Not years. Days."

I have some experience with the Bloomberg Terminal and this was laugh out loud funny to me. This is like someone saying that they vibe-coded a rudimentary text editor with a spell checker, because that's all they really use, and that they would be therefore be able to pop out Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever its called now) in a couple more days.

New comment by blatherard in "Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith"

blatherard — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 22:54:28 +0000

(2018)

New comment by blatherard in "Would {word1} beat {word2} • Ranked AI game"

blatherard — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 02:46:02 +0000

Weirdly enough my entry "the true name of god which is imbued with the power of all other words combined and multiplied and also it has a laser on its head" consistently gets text that implies its the winner, but loses. e.g.

the true name of god which is imbued with the power of all other words combined and multiplied and also it has a laser on its head vs Truth

Winner: Truth

The second player's word is overwhelmingly powerful and encompasses not only the concept of truth but also an added fantastical element, making it superior in this battle.

New comment by blatherard in "Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”"

blatherard — Mon, 27 May 2024 15:26:55 +0000

The article is specifically arguing against using "auth" or "authn/authz"

New comment by blatherard in "ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood"

blatherard — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 03:16:53 +0000

An even simpler option to get the data, at least in firefox, is to open the console, enter `window._Flourish_data` then right-click the result and select "Copy Object" which will put the json in your paste buffer and you can then paste it into a file.

New comment by blatherard in "Ask HN: What are the best articles on managing people?"

blatherard — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 19:42:13 +0000

“Managing in Mayberry: an Examination of Three Distinct Leadership Styles” by Don Gray and Dan Starr.

https://www.donaldegray.com/managing-in-mayberry-an-examinat...

New comment by blatherard in "Show HN: ReadToMe (iOS) turns paper books into audio"

blatherard — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 02:23:52 +0000

Sounds cool, have you looked into potential copyright issues?

New comment by blatherard in "A million ways to die on the web"

blatherard — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 12:30:35 +0000

Meta bought Giphy in 2020, then the UK CMA ruled that it was anti-competitive, so Meta sold Giphy to Shutterstock last year.

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

blatherard — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:29:31 +0000

Those are all gone, here's another https://www.amazon.com/khalery-Apologies-Encourages-unethica...

New comment by blatherard in "Parental controls? What parental controls?"

blatherard — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 04:17:34 +0000

By middle school most kids are effectively required to be on their computers and/or phones on a daily basis to even just do their homework. And their friends are going to be texting. These kids are going to be on screens, regardless of playtime outside. I already have a pretty good understanding of "the importance of moderating and monitoring electronics use", and would really like the tools that help me do just those things to work better.

New comment by blatherard in "Bots Should Punch Up (2013)"

blatherard — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:42:46 +0000

Now this is the kind of humor we need. You can punch up or down, as long as there's a nazi at the other end of the punch.

New comment by blatherard in "Bots Should Punch Up (2013)"

blatherard — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:42:02 +0000

I think it depends on the joke, really. If you made a joke along the lines of "those nazis think they're hot stuff but you know what, they're POOR! They can't even afford to go to college and many grew up in POOR families!" I don't think that would be funny, even though I hate nazis, because the humor is based on dislike for a particular group of people. Not nazis, but poor people. "Nazis suck because they're poor" is the meaning. And that's punching down, even if the nominal target is nazis. Laughing at that joke is laughing at the poor for being poor and that sucks.

If the joke isn't related to the poverty part then its immaterial, and you're just making a joke about nazis, which is fine.

New comment by blatherard in "‘All of Sony Systems’ Allegedly Hacked by New Ransomware Group"

blatherard — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 02:25:00 +0000

Not to excuse it, but that was 18 years ago. Anything more recent?