Hacker News: bobbiechen

Groupon founder Andrew Mason's farewell letter to employees (2013)

bobbiechen — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:19:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/01/groupon-andrew-mason-fired-letter

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289062

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Interview with Amit Patel (Red Blob Games) on Making Things

bobbiechen — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 01:57:18 +0000

Article URL: https://digitalseams.com/blog/amit-patel-on-making-things

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227694

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bobbiechen in "The Valley of Webhooks"

bobbiechen — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:57:49 +0000

Is it accurate to say this is something like long polling except you continue to hold the connection open for subsequent updates? Does this mean a server potentially needs to hold open a very large number of connections (one per client) even if there are no updates?

And why formalize on HTTP rather than on a similar protocol over websockets?

New comment by bobbiechen in "Trusted URLs via Cryptographic Signatures"

bobbiechen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:03:06 +0000

It looks like this is a project for nicer signed attestations. But it doesn't seem very opinionated about:

1. What is the attester (signer) attesting to, exactly?

This URL example is exactly this problem. And if you're really precise about it, they get less and less useful: "I attest that when I accessed this site at XYZ timestamp, it contained ABC content, and I saw ABC happen in person." or maybe alternatively to get away from the URL control, "I attest that these three non-malicious archives of this URL at this timestamp..."

And 2. Why should I trust the attester?

Keyboardion

bobbiechen — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:10:43 +0000

Article URL: https://ianthehenry.com/posts/keyboardion/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101695

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bobbiechen in "San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing"

bobbiechen — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:06:37 +0000

I had an interesting conversation with an coworker recently -

If you give an agent a budget of $500 to buy a flight, and the airline knows this and bumps your price to $499 even though it will offer the same flight at $300 to someone else, is there harm done? I argued it feels unjust. He said it's totally fair, it's within budget so what's the problem?

Naturally this trends towards a sort of principal-agent problem where the airline is incentivized to bribe your agent for up to $198 to max out your budget (which is a problem if you're not running your own agent).

But for general personalized pricing, there is the same dynamic to posture that you have a limited budget so that companies offer you better prices (regardless of whether you really do or not). This is haggling culture at scale.

I worry about a world trending towards this sort of thing and away from clearly universal prices and wrote about this at the beginning of the year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-behavioral-cost-of-persona...)

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding

bobbiechen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:04:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/heuristics/differential.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079995

Points: 350

# Comments: 40

New comment by bobbiechen in "Most Googlebots Are Fake"

bobbiechen — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 01:16:21 +0000

That's a shame, I wonder where he draws the line.

While herding to the majority of latest Chrome makes his life easier, there really is a very long tail of real users who are not there. I get way too many challenges on my personal laptop running Firefox on Ubuntu (including infinite redirect loops).

Most Googlebots Are Fake

bobbiechen — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:46:37 +0000

Article URL: https://digitalseams.com/blog/most-googlebots-are-fake

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063536

Points: 9

# Comments: 3

Zero-defects code: the prescient Microsoft memo from 1989

bobbiechen — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:44:23 +0000

Article URL: https://digitalseams.com/blog/zero-defects-code-the-prescient-microsoft-memo-from-1989

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49059851

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by bobbiechen in "Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers"

bobbiechen — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 05:27:50 +0000

The vast majority of Googlebot user agents are lying. Real Googlebot is pretty well behaved in my experience. You should use reverse DNS or IP lists to check: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...

New comment by bobbiechen in "Proving a Human Wrote Something"

bobbiechen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:53:16 +0000

Here's another similar project: https://writetrack.dev/

There's plenty of microbehavioral analysis we can do that is initially effective but will get bypassed (with GANs being the purest way, or something more domain-specific).

You could imagine a livestream that's permanently published somewhere. But the verification of the livestream takes longer than reading the piece itself (and is itself vulnerable to faking).

Personally I think it comes back to something like writing under your real name - staking your reputation - as the most trustworthy indicator. At least people in your circles can trust you.

New comment by bobbiechen in "Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds"

bobbiechen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:01:40 +0000

I've used Merlin for a while and I'm still impressed by Merlin's sound identification, it continues to inspire me.

I wrote about it last year: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...

New comment by bobbiechen in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

bobbiechen — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:41:20 +0000

AWS saw Anthropic billing a guy for $16 million on zero usage and thought, why stop at the millions?

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...

LLMs and Shaders

bobbiechen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:35:02 +0000

Article URL: https://amitp.blogspot.com/2026/07/llms-and-shaders.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885572

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bobbiechen in "TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)"

bobbiechen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:02:36 +0000

TK is a very standard term, see William Safire's usage in this 1996 NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/06/magazine/of-hacks-and-tk....

New comment by bobbiechen in "Remote Attestation"

bobbiechen — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 05:34:13 +0000

Oh yeah, just like all cryptography is just a way for bad people to hide their criminal activity.

I'd read the confidential computing post! (used to work in this space myself)

New comment by bobbiechen in "Lost and Found"

bobbiechen — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:23:38 +0000

He's right up there with Neal Agarwal (neal.fun) and Nolen Royalty (eieio.games) for me. I recently got to interview Nolen on keeping the internet fun and creative for my blog: https://digitalseams.com/blog/nolen-royalty-on-making-things

Zero-defects code: the prescient Microsoft memo from 1989

bobbiechen — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 17:02:41 +0000

Article URL: https://digitalseams.com/blog/zero-defects-code-the-prescient-microsoft-memo-from-1989

Hacker News: bobbiechen

Groupon founder Andrew Mason's farewell letter to employees (2013)

Interview with Amit Patel (Red Blob Games) on Making Things

New comment by bobbiechen in "The Valley of Webhooks"

New comment by bobbiechen in "Trusted URLs via Cryptographic Signatures"

Keyboardion

New comment by bobbiechen in "San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing"

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding

New comment by bobbiechen in "Most Googlebots Are Fake"

Most Googlebots Are Fake

Zero-defects code: the prescient Microsoft memo from 1989

New comment by bobbiechen in "Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers"

New comment by bobbiechen in "Proving a Human Wrote Something"

New comment by bobbiechen in "Cornell's Interactive Wall of Birds"

New comment by bobbiechen in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

LLMs and Shaders

New comment by bobbiechen in "TK, or the secret to effortless writing (2024)"

New comment by bobbiechen in "Remote Attestation"

New comment by bobbiechen in "Lost and Found"

Zero-defects code: the prescient Microsoft memo from 1989

When anything is possible, how do you decide what to create?