Hacker News: bmelton

New comment by bmelton in "You Rename My Lake – I Move My Hosting"

bmelton — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:14:19 +0000

> The breathtaking speed with which Google Maps happily gets on board with this lunacy

Something interesting I learned at National Geographic is that they have a geographer (titled: "The Geographer", which always seemed impossibly cool to me) and that the geographer maintains several maps of certain areas so that their field photographers and agents are aware of where they are in relation to "the real world", to know when they're in contested territories, and also to be able to theoretically show the wrong map if they get in trouble to show "It wasn't me, blame my shoddy map!" to provide cover

Nothing I know about Google informs me that anyone there is thrilled about the change either, but it's probably one of the easier compliance-swaps they have to engage in, despite how inane it surely is

New comment by bmelton in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

bmelton — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:20:56 +0000

If they were just chopping them up without scanning them first, then sure, but I think that scanning books and burning books are polar opposites

New comment by bmelton in "RamenHaus"

bmelton — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:49:43 +0000

Hawaii would be another place (or set of places, depending on how you want to collate)

New comment by bmelton in "Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law"

bmelton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:10:08 +0000

> which is very different

If you say so

New comment by bmelton in "Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law"

bmelton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 01:01:02 +0000

Thanks for the answer! It wasn't a gotcha, I was genuinely just curious.

New comment by bmelton in "Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law"

bmelton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 01:00:16 +0000

> The GDPR doesn't try to remove anything from the global internet

GDPR Article 17 expressly requires the removal of things from the global internet

> You're free to not serve your site in the EU

Geoblocking is functionally impossible

New comment by bmelton in "Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law"

bmelton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:48:21 +0000

How do you feel about GDPR?

New comment by bmelton in "A font that humans can read but AI cannot"

bmelton — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:51:21 +0000

and I cannot

(so either I am AI at a level less than Opus 4.8 or just all-round defective as a human)

New comment by bmelton in "Fox to buy Roku"

bmelton — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:26:26 +0000

Thanks for the response. As a lifetime Plex passer, I am inured to having to re-learn the navigation UI with every new release, so that part can't be too bad.

But yes, I would be thrilled to just pay $250-300 for a hardware device that just did quickly did what it was supposed to do and didn't look too ugly in doing it.

New comment by bmelton in "Fox to buy Roku"

bmelton — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:03:54 +0000

I was also super-early Roku customer, but frankly I have been mostly disappointed with Roku for the past year or so.

The hardware on the top tier devices doesn't seem to keep up. Interacting with it is slower and more laggy than it originally was.

They've tried to keep them unobtrusive, which I appreciate, but the mere existence of ads is disappointing. I almost give the Roku City ads a pass, because frankly that's clever, and mirrors the real world enough that it seems logical to me -- but ads in menus is grating.

CEC has been super flaky with the latest revisions as well, so for the past couple of weeks I've been relegated to using either the Roku remote or my phone instead of my TV's remote.

I'm a big fan of waiting to see before prejudging, but I can't imagine anything gets better post-acquisition, and I was already on my way out the door. I guess I'm buying an Apple TV now? Are there any other recommendations? I haven't kept up with the space at all, so if anyone has suggestions I am super happy to receive them.

New comment by bmelton in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

bmelton — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:18:12 +0000

It _can_ be tedious those 9 times, or especially when it pushes back on something that it thinks is wrong but isn't wrong but it actually has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

But yeah, overall I'm fairly certain that it saves me more significantly more time than it wastes.

New comment by bmelton in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

bmelton — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:31:06 +0000

My system prompt tells it to first challenge my assumptions, and to feel free to be a dick about it where it thinks I'm off on something, or have assumed facts that aren't actually facts. I sometimes wonder how much of my total spend boils down to forcing LLMs to argue with me, but I do feel like it's yielded better outputs than letting it implement things incorrectly because I told it to.

It's a completely dispassionate exchange tho, because you're absolutely right -- there's no winning or losing here, there's only efficiency to be gained or lost, and I'd prefer to lose some up front to gain it back later than the other way around.

New comment by bmelton in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

bmelton — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:25:56 +0000

I agree with you that the AI market is greatly undervalued, but I also agree with the field that these companies are overvalued

New comment by bmelton in "Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs"

bmelton — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:03:14 +0000

I would guess they're worried about breaking something, but thanks for the clarification (and apologies for not having RTFA)

New comment by bmelton in "Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs"

bmelton — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:39:39 +0000

Well, I won't claim to know the answer, but "please do not move between different airlocked sections while this work is underway" sounds a lot like the definition of "shelter" to me

New comment by bmelton in "Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts"

bmelton — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:17:07 +0000

Meteor Chelyabinsk suffered catastrophic fragmentation, a rapid, violent release of energy accompanied by a pressure wave with debris, which would satisfy the definition of an explosion (an in fact the energy released was equivalent to 400-500 kilotons of TNT.)

New comment by bmelton in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"

bmelton — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:32:48 +0000

A bad law that only affects other people might be a win for me, but it's still a loss for society

New comment by bmelton in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

bmelton — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:39:33 +0000

That I wouldn't know. I only know the above from the one employee I helped (successfully) immigrate to America

So, at least one

New comment by bmelton in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

bmelton — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:52:51 +0000

If it seems too interesting it's because it isn't true. There are five functional categories of immigrant visa in America, each with several subcategories: Immediate Relatives (IR), Family Preference (F), Employment Based (EB), Special (S), and Diversity (D). The last one is basically done by lottery.

New comment by bmelton in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

bmelton — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:38:04 +0000

The core holding was this

> "congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each state is free to act on its own."