Hacker News: costco

Adverse Selection and Markouts

costco — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:57:01 +0000

Article URL: https://machow.ski/posts/markouts_and_adverse_selection/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49522092

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by costco in "Show HN: Automatically hide flamebait/shallow/political comments on HN"

costco — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:00:04 +0000

Wow that was quick :) Meh, I feel like comment points have become somewhat untethered to comment quality (at least assuming threads are roughly sorted by comment score). It’s a good heuristic usually but it’s wrong often enough for it to be difficult to rely on.

I want to improve the classifier scores too. There’s some parameters in the loss function I could play around with more when training which basically optimize for more false negatives or false positives. Problems with no ground truth are very frustrating lol (though I suppose dang/tomhow’s manually written warnings could be treated as labels instead of using labels from GPT, but I suspect there’s not enough of them).

New comment by costco in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

costco — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:55:02 +0000

This is the last time I will engage in self promotion for a while but the above comment and some of its replies are a perfect demonstration of my latest guidelines violations project… https://classify.stylometry.net/violations/49458425?threshol...

New comment by costco in "Show HN: Automatically hide flamebait/shallow/political comments on HN"

costco — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:29:23 +0000

That’s very nice. Feel free to integrate if you want :) Just request https://classify.stylometry.net/violations/49458161 or whatever item ID (as long as it was posted later than a few weeks ago) and it will return the scores for that post/comment and all its children.

Show HN: Automatically hide flamebait/shallow/political comments on HN

costco — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:00:51 +0000

I love HN, but lately I have been sick of reading the same dismissive criticisms over and over again. Along with political arguments that have been litigated to death, people's issues with smooth scrolling on blogs, etc. Many of these comments do not get flagged for whatever reason. So I made a service to automatically classify whether comments violate (a modified form of) the HN guidelines automatically. In addition there's a Chrome extension to collapse these comments (if they violate your score thresholds) so you don't have to read them too. You can also just watch guideline violating comments come in as they are posted on the website.

Here's more info on how it works: https://classify.stylometry.net/how-it-works

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49452362

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

Show HN: Classifier and browser extension to detect rule violating HN comments

costco — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:04:30 +0000

Here's more info on how it works: https://classify.stylometry.net/how-it-works

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333213

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by costco in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

costco — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:23:12 +0000

I'm pretty sure you would get into Berkeley with that profile. Also you can just major in math and get a job as a software engineer anyways. I agree that the system has reached the point of absurdity though. ETH Zurich and KU Leuven have the best solution to this issue in my mind, which is to let everyone in but make the classes ridiculously hard so that 50% leave in the first year.

New comment by costco in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

costco — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:54:51 +0000

Very interesting. Hunter S. Thompson described the same technique for learning to write. I'll try it even if it only gets applied to technical blog posts...

New comment by costco in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

costco — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:31:01 +0000

If you put important Anthropic blog posts like the Fable announcement or J-Space through Pangram, you get 100% human written. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the code there is written by AI, I think this is an admission that AI writing is slop and AI code is pretty good.

New comment by costco in "To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system"

costco — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:00:01 +0000

https://gamozolabs.github.io/metrology/2019/12/30/load-port-...

New comment by costco in "Security through obscurity is not bad"

costco — Sun, 03 May 2026 23:44:34 +0000

reCAPTCHA is a great success story of security through obscurity because probably less than 100 people have reverse engineered it and much less than that have produced a working solver for it that doesn't require a headless browser. Snapchat would be another good example - almost no one is going to put in the work to understand this [0]. Most companies just half ass it though and accordingly achieve nothing with the obscurity at all besides worse performance.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201128060507/https://hot3eed.g...

New comment by costco in "Airline adds bunk beds for economy travelers but bans snacks, smells and cuddles"

costco — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:15:55 +0000

I wish we lived in a world where price wasn't the only way to filter out annoying passengers... if this experiment works maybe it will prove you can offer amenities more widely if you set high standards. I want an airline where at the end of the flight you rate the people next to you thumbs up or thumbs down and if someone gets >= 3 thumbs downs they are banned from the airline for 5 years. Eventually ordinary people would be able have the serene experience that only those in first class can presently enjoy as the people who get up thirty times to retrieve items from carry on or eat obnoxiously are removed.

New comment by costco in "Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage"

costco — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:36:06 +0000

This is an interesting idea... it'd be a fun side project to implement enough of a CSS engine to undo this

New comment by costco in "Xweather Live – Interactive global vector weather map"

costco — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 22:48:53 +0000

This is awesome and very fast especially given all the data displayed!

New comment by costco in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

costco — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:05:26 +0000

This wouldn't have helped here but there is a related field of research called hotel recognition. Many of these videos are filmed in hotels so being able to recognize if it was a Mariott or even better a non chain local hotel can be very helpful to investigators. They basically train CNNs that learn to pick up on the bathroom fixtures or kind of bedding used by different hotels. One researcher in particular has done a tone of work on this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mNoB9SgAAAAJ&hl=en

I wonder if you could get the interior of every house from Zillow/realtor websites and then do something like this for every house in the country... Clearview for bedrooms?

New comment by costco in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

costco — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 21:23:23 +0000

I think he's referring to CPU mitigations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_execution_CPU_vulner...

New comment by costco in "Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]"

costco — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:09:46 +0000

Protip: Settings -> Personalization -> Base style and tone -> Efficient largely solves this for ChatGPT

New comment by costco in "Counter Galois Onion: Improved encryption for Tor circuit traffic"

costco — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:08:10 +0000

The malleability of the ciphertext matters because it enables certain circuit tagging attacks as the article explains. It means that the exit relay could confirm you are using a guard relay also controlled by them and thus discover your origin IP address.

There are many reasons that these cryptographic tagging attacks are a lot worse than just the timing correlation attacks that are possible if you control the guard and exit of a client: https://archive.torproject.org/websites/lists.torproject.org...

A deep dive into QEMU: The Tiny Code Generator (TCG), part 1 (2021)

costco — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:42:43 +0000

Article URL: https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/tcg_p1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46121105

Points: 83

# Comments: 2

New comment by costco in "Building a Minimal Viable Armv7 Emulator from Scratch"

costco — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:45:01 +0000

Nice article and especially so for including the parsing that most people just outsource. What's great about using an emulator is that you can also do fun things with the syscalls like implementing your own "virtual filesystem" instead of just translating directly to the x86_64 equivalent syscall: https://github.com/gamozolabs/fuzz_with_emus/blob/master/src... (not my code but basically something like this)