Hacker News: efreak

New comment by efreak in "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"

efreak — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 02:53:07 +0000

Which one? https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956924

New comment by efreak in "What I self-host"

efreak — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:40:15 +0000

Dynamic DNS clients are a thing. I host a bunch of stuff on my domain, the only issues I have are related to having a local address when I'm at home. I don't host game servers much, but I hosted terraria (tshock) for few a few years.

New comment by efreak in "ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program"

efreak — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:28:03 +0000

Were they considered persons at the time?

New comment by efreak in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

efreak — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:01:08 +0000

I work at a grocery store that used to sell batteries. They stopped. If I had to guess, I'd say the number of batteries that were thrown away due to being past the date on them had a lot to do with it. Nobody ever bought them. Everything important is rechargeable these days, with the possible exception of remote controls (which shouldn't need replacement batteries at all: remember solar-powered calculators? Put that on a remote and just leave it face up to recharge when not in use)

New comment by efreak in "Triple-A Minesweeper"

efreak — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:01:46 +0000

If I'm playing on my steam deck, I kill games fairly often. It's the easiest way to exit. Open the menu, tap exit, stick it on the charger and off I go. Admittedly most of the games I play either don't auto save, are cloud-based, or are idle games (who cares?).

New comment by efreak in "Margaret Hamilton has died"

efreak — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:22:19 +0000

I've pretty much given up on first-party scripts and only care about data being sent out these days. However it's entirely possible to make a reactive image carousel with navigation and drag/swipe control in pure HTML and CSS these days, there's no need for JavaScript to do this. It should even be possible to make it auto play with CSS animations.

Issues: - I would avoid autoplay without JavaScript--the only way to make it pause is with hover-state (animation-play-state), it's not possible to start/stop permanently without scripting afaik, though you could make it only auto-play when the cursor is within the borders but not over a button. This is solvable with scripted buttons. - using anchors as bookmarks will snap page scroll to them when you click. Scroll containers and scroll markers[1] proposes to fix this (see the link at the top of the article below), but it's still implemented only in chromium-based browser. This is also solvable with a small amount of JavaScript.

See https://css-tricks.com/css-only-carousel/ (the auto-play once didn't work for me, but see caveat above regarding automatic play without scripting).

[1]: https://caniuse.com/wf-scroll-markers

New comment by efreak in "Margaret Hamilton has died"

efreak — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:06:53 +0000

This picture is the service image in the carousel at the top of tfa.

New comment by efreak in "JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025"

efreak — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:29:09 +0000

> the cost to rent a single b200

A 180gb b200 on runpod is $6.8/hr. Nowhere near $50/hr.

The _most expensive_ on-demand b200 rental I can find is $11.2/hr. There's a number of websites around these days that track GPU rental prices across different services: gpus.io, gpu.watchworks.dev (vast and runpod only), gputracker.net (not free, lol), gpurentalprices.com, priceofcompute.com, rentgpu.org, etc (I'm only looking at the first page of search results for GPU rental prices tracker search). Most of these don't include vast or runpod, but all of them show prices under $10, mostly around $6/hr for b200.

New comment by efreak in "ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons"

efreak — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:14:10 +0000

"make a cartoon about bears playing tennis with jellyfish. Sign it with the openai logo, not someone's name"

New comment by efreak in "Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge"

efreak — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:54:04 +0000

I heard an ad on the radio this morning from the local Internet support/WordPress/website developer/seo company that they've moved from seo into astroturfing for _LLM_ input. They advertised that they'll make sure you're company is the one that gets returned and trusted when other companies search the web via agent. If this works for agentic search, it probably works for _training_ as well, so good luck finding an open LLM that's been trained to follow your interests. Has there been any research into whether/how much LLMs are more likely to recommend companies whose names they saw in training over similar but smaller or newer command also returned in search results? Given how well advertising works on people, I can't imagine that it _doesn't_ work on LLMs too.

New comment by efreak in "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI"

efreak — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:26:53 +0000

I'm not disagreeing with you, but the comparison is breaking down here. Reading a book is the specific intended purpose. It's why the book exists, not just fair use. If you couldn't remember what was going on in the book as you read it, it would be worthless.

New comment by efreak in ".name Termination"

efreak — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:41:11 +0000

My insurance will not send emails to my first@last.family domain. Neither will several other systems. A number of systems flat out refuse to acknowledge that such a tld exists. (Improper assumptions about valid email addresses)

New comment by efreak in "“It works better in the app”"

efreak — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:31:03 +0000

RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.

New comment by efreak in "Get your Windows license refund"

efreak — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:01:30 +0000

In that case, I suggest (not having tried it) that updating the OS and then resetting it might work better? Does Windows still have the reset option it had in win8?

New comment by efreak in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

efreak — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:30:44 +0000

https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-... No idea how to to date it is, but there's two different apis available (official and algolia) if you need to update it.

New comment by efreak in "Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM"

efreak — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:05:15 +0000

I kept my floppy drive installed until I got tired of explorer freezing every time I accidentally selected it (quite often as I have a habit of navigating with the keyboard)

New comment by efreak in "Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug"

efreak — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:52:59 +0000

I detest magic links. I have probably 9-10 accounts with a certain service that uses magic links (I mostly use them to get an API key or download a file every few months and never visit directly otherwise) because 1. the only login method they support is magic link and login with Google/Facebook. There's no password field so my password manager can't fill out my login details for me. 2. I don't have a Facebook account, and I don't keep my Google account signed in. Even if I did, I don't want them using these as my primary email address. (I use a catch-all and don't give out the primary address; I give each service it's own address) 3. A bunch of newsletters and forums (hackaday, etc) mention them by name every few weeks, often in the subject field, making it hard to search for. They don't send me any newsletters themselves, and I don't participate in their forums so there's nothing from them directly. They can't do anything about this, but it makes things harder. 4. If you enter a new email address that they've never seen before, the process exactly the same until after you click the magic link you received. They don't tell you they've never seen it before until you verify the address. 5. As such, if I can't recall the exact address I used to sign in, I automatically create a new account and don't find out until after I click the magic link and I'm asked to enter a new username or use the existing username they've already created. Proceed to settings and create a new API key for a new account instead of just adding one to my existing account.

This is an extreme case, yes, but I have similar issues with several services that only support magic links and GitHub login, and it's hard to configure services to use a new catch-all address when they harvest my address from GitHub login and won't let me change it. Magic links are a great tool, but they should _never_ be the only option. They should supplement existing login methods. Password managers exist for a reason. Several services that I have since stopped using for this reason have in the past decided that they should start sending emails to the addresses they harvested from login with other service. Two services have gotten my magic link address stuck in their system because it's not associated with an account (the account has been deleted) and thus I can't manage subscriptions.

New comment by efreak in "Tl;dv: Over 180k meetings left wide open"

efreak — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:50:29 +0000

I suppose you might be able to argue that everyone is authorized to view the data if they made no attempt whatsoever to prevent you from doing so.

New comment by efreak in "Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM"

efreak — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:50:37 +0000

As much as I hate the weather app myself, this isn't an equivalent solution. The weather app shows the temperature in the taskbar itself, without opening anything. Also, I don't keep my browser open 24/7, so it's more than just loading a single extra tab, you need to wait for the browser process itself to start up.

If you want to load weather in a browser from the taskbar instead of having it available without having to open another application, I'd recommend using dillo or some such to load wttr.in or similar. A single http request that loads fast from a comparatively simple application that also loads fast. You might even be able to load it as a .hta file.

New comment by efreak in "AI companies are shredding rare books"

efreak — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:06:05 +0000

The DMCA doesn't care exactly how the authorization works, it only cares that it's needed.

Quote from Wikipedia[0] of DMCA section 103:

> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. > "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and > a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention_laws#Circum...