Hacker News: dwetterau

New comment by dwetterau in "I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected"

dwetterau — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 03:08:44 +0000

It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.

New comment by dwetterau in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

dwetterau — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:20:06 +0000

I'm shocked that Apple hasn't cracked down on this process through App store reviews. It's such an awful experience.

New comment by dwetterau in "737 MAX crashes “linked” by satellite track data, FAA says"

dwetterau — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 18:39:08 +0000

Here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi

Being skeptical and keeping onself safe is fine, but things can go wrong if people are trying to falsely act like experts.

New comment by dwetterau in "Things I Regret About Node.js [video]"

dwetterau — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 04:48:10 +0000

Does the xi editor use a JSON transport layer for all syscalls though?

Low-friction interfaces for developers are great but I'm not sure I agree with the comparison here.

New comment by dwetterau in "How many people are in space right now"

dwetterau — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 06:25:02 +0000

There are plenty of other programs with "planned" missions to the moon and mars. You can question whether or not they'll happen, but you can do that about SpaceX too.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mission_to_Mars#Current_...

New comment by dwetterau in "Zuckerberg removed a line about monitoring private messages from his manifesto"

dwetterau — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 07:23:15 +0000

If Gmail reads private emails to target ads [1], why would people think that Facebook isn't doing the same thing? Also many companies (including Facebook) have agreed to share hashes and cooperate to "remove extremist content from their websites" [2]. It would be naive to think that they are excluding private messages from their searches.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/15/gmail-sca... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-internet-extremism-databas...

New comment by dwetterau in "Chrome 55 uses 30% less memory than 54"

dwetterau — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 06:23:40 +0000

The "zone memory improvements" however were also significant:

"Figure 5 shows the peak zone memory improvements since M54 which reduced by about 40% on average over the measured websites. "

From: http://v8project.blogspot.ca/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizin...

New comment by dwetterau in "$ cat ~/myfile | curl -X PUT --upload-file “-” https://transfer.sh/myfile.txt"

dwetterau — Sun, 20 Mar 2016 07:10:07 +0000

It doesn't appear so, no. The raw bytes seem to be dumped to temp files, local storage, or S3 [1][2] without mention of any sort of encryption step (or reading of a secret somewhere). As mentioned below, you could encrypt before uploading of course. Someone please correct me if I misread though.

[1] https://github.com/dutchcoders/transfer.sh/blob/master/trans...

[2] https://github.com/dutchcoders/transfer.sh/blob/master/trans...

New comment by dwetterau in "'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007"

dwetterau — Mon, 08 Feb 2016 02:28:20 +0000

I initially fell in love with programming by botting Runescape. If you want to look at some old (and very very poor quality) code to see what the botting scripts looked like, this was my most popular one: http://pastebin.com/WENWkWEW

There were some really interesting "innovations" in those scripts compared to the other free ones that were available at the time. For example, this script would allow the character to harvest and store wood from trees that would regrow / respawn. This script would time each hardcoded tree to count how long it had been de-spawned (dead) in order to move the bot user to wait by the tree that had been de-spawned the longest when all of the others were de-spawned. This was a good way to avoid being reported because most bots would just wait by the last tree to de-spawn and then instantly start moving to the first one that respawned.

Some other interesting tricks could be found in the "antiBan" method in a lot of scripts. Given a random input this script would move the mouse in some random ways, check some random stats, move the camera around, etc. One additional "antiBan" approach that I implemented for this script was to "take breaks". The idea was that a real player would probably not be watching their account and harvest the wood with perfect efficiency all of the time. Telling the bot to "take breaks" meant that it would turn itself off entirely for a short time (maybe a minute?) and just not react to any input, as if you were using the restroom or doing something else.

I could talk about this stuff for ages, it was great fun. :)

P.S. I have a tiny blurb about it on my website too: https://www.dwett.com/projects/#runescape-bot

New comment by dwetterau in "WOOT: an Algorithm for Concurrrent and Collaborative Authoring (2013) [video]"

dwetterau — Sat, 05 Dec 2015 21:01:59 +0000

I read a paper on this (https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/71240/filename/RR-5580...) and implemented it some time ago just for fun (https://github.com/dwetterau/group-edit). You can play with it on Firebase still here https://grouped.firebaseapp.com/

The biggest problem that I ran into with this approach however was checkpointing. I could never correctly reason about a way to prune the log of updates that you apply that still allows (100% correct, intent-preserving) merges from someone that might have been offline since the dawn of time. Does anyone know if this issue with this approach was ever solved?

New comment by dwetterau in "Call me maybe: Aerospike"

dwetterau — Wed, 06 May 2015 04:28:25 +0000

Here is a paper [0] out of Berkeley that explains the chart you're asking about (the chart appears on page 8). For more information on each isolation level you might have to refer to the cited works or other sources.

[0] http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/vldb14-hats.pdf

New comment by dwetterau in "Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?"

dwetterau — Fri, 26 Dec 2014 23:46:03 +0000

A super easy way to keep yourself accountable when doing something like this is with the contribution graph on Github. My desire to not break my streak keeps me working on my projects every day.

(https://www.dropbox.com/s/98kngmtwzrsmvjg/Screenshot%202014-...)

New comment by dwetterau in "Hacking Flappy Bird with Machine Learning"

dwetterau — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 00:13:49 +0000

Neat AI approach to play it. When this first blew up 5 or so days ago I threw together a simple javascript bookmarklet that played the game at: http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/game/flappy/

It's really poorly formatted and has unused code in it but it was fun to automate and watch. http://pastebin.com/yTmdWgfC

To use it just install the bookmarklet, click on it and then start the game. Press space to make it die.