Hacker News: cobbzilla

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

cobbzilla — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:08:01 +0000

I drive my TVs with a locked-down mac mini.

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

cobbzilla — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:49:57 +0000

I never connect any “smart” device to wifi. If it doesn’t work without connectivity, I don’t want it. I use my TVs as display devices. They have HDMI-in and that’s it.

New comment by cobbzilla in "DNS is for people, not for IT infrastructure"

cobbzilla — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:31:16 +0000

FTFY: DNS was for People

Now it’s for machines

Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history

cobbzilla — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:20:10 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/notre-dame-dig-treasures-paris-archaeology-roman-dae41f792c1402faf32a87c154cc9a77

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368725

Points: 179

# Comments: 50

New comment by cobbzilla in "Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers"

cobbzilla — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:12:49 +0000

I must be missing something. Aren’t ~50% of 64-bit integers the product of the number 2 and another 32-bit integer?

A compressed-spring model of spiral galaxy formation

cobbzilla — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:18:04 +0000

Article URL: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/a-compressed-spring-model-of-spiral

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345454

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by cobbzilla in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

cobbzilla — Mon, 25 May 2026 02:34:08 +0000

usually “stdout” is good enough, wrapper/runner routes output to logserver for collation and search. who cares about formats as long as it’s reasonably structured and searchable?

New comment by cobbzilla in "80386 microcode disassembled"

cobbzilla — Sun, 24 May 2026 02:18:41 +0000

beautiful work! any plans for the 80387 coprocessor?

New comment by cobbzilla in "Spanish court declines to fine NordVPN over LaLiga piracy blocking order"

cobbzilla — Sat, 23 May 2026 11:55:16 +0000

i get it, it’s not the canonical “egg shape”, but many eggs (fish/frogs/etc) are spherical.

New comment by cobbzilla in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

cobbzilla — Sat, 16 May 2026 03:24:31 +0000

I love librivox! please add me to your ios release list. my HN username at g mail

New comment by cobbzilla in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

cobbzilla — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:23:33 +0000

By extension, does this imply that all the HLL advocates from decades past were shilling for compiler companies?

New comment by cobbzilla in "I’ve banned query strings"

cobbzilla — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:04:48 +0000

I was responding to:

> Query strings existed before CGI did… There's nothing wrong about having things decided by the server

Sure, but there is also no standard for how to format/parse the query string. And also no server plugin frameworks. So you are inventing your own standard and extending some HTTP server for which you have source. Until CGI forces a standard, bad as it might be; it’s a common ground.

New comment by cobbzilla in "GitHub Is Sinking"

cobbzilla — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:16:18 +0000

I’m in a similar boat, I abandoned ship for Gitea years ago (prior to forgejo fork) and have no regrets.

For things that require GitHub I’ve been able to mirror repos there and get things working. Keeping code in sync is annoying though.

New comment by cobbzilla in "I’ve banned query strings"

cobbzilla — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:52:34 +0000

A post claimed CGI led to bad standards around query parameter formatting and parsing. I was merely pointing out that, prior to the advent of CGI, if you wanted to actually do anything with those parameters on the server, you had to extend whatever primitive HTTP server you were running, write some custom code and invent your own “standard”. There were no server side frameworks or standards.

New comment by cobbzilla in "I’ve banned query strings"

cobbzilla — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:07:56 +0000

Which runs on what computer in 1995?

New comment by cobbzilla in "I’ve banned query strings"

cobbzilla — Sun, 10 May 2026 02:14:18 +0000

sure looks like VB there, what’s the plugin? Didn’t see anything like that before.

New comment by cobbzilla in "I’ve banned query strings"

cobbzilla — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:41:21 +0000

and what server software is running this code in 1995?

New comment by cobbzilla in "I’ve banned query strings"

cobbzilla — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:46:47 +0000

Maybe dumb question: how does the server “decide” anything other than what file to serve? Today we have many choices but back in the day CGI was the first standard way to do it.

So yes query parameters existed before CGI but to use them you had to hack your server to do something with them (iirc NCSA web servers had some magic hacks for queries). CGI drove standardization.

New comment by cobbzilla in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"

cobbzilla — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:36:51 +0000

Federal government spending for Google stuff is probably in the $100Ms. If you pay taxes you’re paying Google.

New comment by cobbzilla in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

cobbzilla — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:48:39 +0000

Sure, and we can’t guarantee you’ll read the safety instructions that came with your chainsaw. That’s orthogonal to the questions of whether those instructions should exist, whether “power tool safety” concepts should ever be promoted in society, and who’s ultimately responsible for the use of a tool.

Absolving humans of all responsibility for the negative consequences of their own AI misuse seems to the strike the wrong balance for a healthy culture.