Hacker News: jhpacker

New comment by jhpacker in "With a 5x increase in Show HN, who sees what you build?"

jhpacker — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:49:09 +0000

You could well be right, though I think whatever the mix of Show HN spam vs. ham is the point that almost all it gets no attention remains the same.

With a 5x increase in Show HN, who sees what you build?

jhpacker — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:55:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantable.com/ai/attention-is-all-you-need/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249356

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

New comment by jhpacker in "Yes, OpenAI Scrapes Google Search"

jhpacker — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 23:15:21 +0000

No worries & thanks! Yea I didn't expect to get them with the excerpts too, that was a surprise bonus.

New comment by jhpacker in "Yes, OpenAI Scrapes Google Search"

jhpacker — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:58:59 +0000

Unlinked domains can definitely be found in a lot of ways, but like I show in the article there was literally no fetching of the page except for Googlebot. So even if the hostname was leaked somehow the contents of the page require fetching the page, which was only done by Google. Also like I show in the article the content that ChatGPT knows identically matches what's in a Google search snippet, down to where a word-break is.

Yes, OpenAI Scrapes Google Search

jhpacker — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:36:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantable.com/ai/openai-scrapes-google-search/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45889354

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

DHS authorized to merge SSA data into SAVE

jhpacker — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:27:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.propublica.org/article/dhs-social-security-data-voter-citizenship-trump

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45889198

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

New comment by jhpacker in "Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google Analytics tool"

jhpacker — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 15:57:18 +0000

What I am saying is that this was a glitch where the full prompt rather than a translated prompt was sent to Google Search. OpenAI says they fixed the glitch, so yes it was definitely an error on their part. My research doesn't show how to repro that error, just that it existed.

New comment by jhpacker in "Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google Analytics tool"

jhpacker — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 15:52:51 +0000

I definitely wouldn't! Beyond the "glitch" I'm reporting here where full prompts are seemingly sent to GSC, it may still be that searches are scraped... meaning that while it's less obviously personal than a raw prompt it still could leak user intent.

New comment by jhpacker in "Oddest ChatGPT leaks yet: Cringey chat logs found in Google Analytics tool"

jhpacker — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 15:49:23 +0000

GSC does filter and threshold what shows, but that doesn't always work 100%. Also those filters are built to work against traditional keyword searches, not prompts. It's also supposed to threshold low volume queries which should have kept a lot of things prompts out of GSC, but for whatever reason that wasn't very effective.

I've worked in many GSC consoles over the years, and I've never seen anything like what I saw in this case. (I'm the original author)

ChatGPT search prompts leak into Google Search Console

jhpacker — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:27:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantable.com/ai/the-old-rules-are-dead/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45752594

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by jhpacker in "The dueling truths of AI, both grift and revolution"

jhpacker — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:44:30 +0000

Ok this is pretty funny. Just like any good internet commenter this bot didn't actually read the article... which doesn't actually say "AI is a tool, not a panacea" anywhere.

The dueling truths of AI, both grift and revolution

jhpacker — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:14:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantable.com/ai/the-duality-of-chatgpt/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433106

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by jhpacker in "A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met"

jhpacker — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:53:27 +0000

I agree with your take. I've definitely owned and played some excellent sub-$1000 guitars, but at the lower price points things it can be frustrating to deal with things like low-quality tuners, improperly shielded components, etc. I'd say 90% is about pickups, strings, and frets. Most of the 60s guitars I've played were not great tbh.

New comment by jhpacker in "Open source Google Analytics replacement"

jhpacker — Thu, 08 May 2025 07:21:35 +0000

Yes, it's very much like HotJar, focused on session capture & heatmap.

New comment by jhpacker in "Open source Google Analytics replacement"

jhpacker — Thu, 08 May 2025 07:17:52 +0000

Unlike Plausible and Fathom, it looks like Rybbit is NOT salting by default ( (but that it's an option to enable per site: https://www.rybbit.io/docs/enhanced-privacy). Which is why they can offer retention reporting.

This seems incompatible with ePD.

New comment by jhpacker in "[dead]"

jhpacker — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:29:07 +0000

I don't trust tools that don't disclose precisely how they track you. They say:

Combining Inputs: We combine key session details (which shall not be named for security reasons) with a cryptographically secure secret value. SHA-512 Hashing: This combined input is hashed using SHA-512, producing a highly secure, anonymized session ID.

They know that we can see what they send in their tracking payload right? They send: hostname, language, referrer, screen resolution, page title, url, and a website id.

So I would presume their highly secretive & secure user session id is: hash(salt + website id + ip + HTTP user-agent + screen resolution? + language?)

I don't see that it says how frequently the salts are rotated, which is one of the key points on which the "no consent banner required" tools like this claim that consent isn't required.

New comment by jhpacker in "'The Endless Refrain' asks: Do we even want new music anymore?"

jhpacker — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 12:30:04 +0000

I recently wrote an article on this topic, focused on the power law dynamics that leave such a small amount of room at the top of the industry: https://www.quantable.com/analytics/power-laws-why-our-new-a...

I don't personally think it's new vs. old as much as the power law distribution coupled with the fact that old music is more available and promoted than ever. Plus the algorithms are focused on giving us more of the same thing we have shown it we like rather than new music discovery.

More streams, but a dwindling number of pro musicians

jhpacker — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:57:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.quantable.com/analytics/power-laws-why-our-new-album-wont-make-any-money/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42188018

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Google Analytics Missing Data from Nov 13

jhpacker — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 18:38:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-missing-data-nov-13-38432.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42186726

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jhpacker in "Nearly 90% of our AI crawler traffic is from ByteDance"

jhpacker — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 18:26:41 +0000

Cloudflare radar, which presumably a much bigger and better sample, reports Bytespider as the #5 AI Crawler behind FB, Amazon, GPTBot, and Google: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=ai.bots And that's not including the most of highest volume spiders overall like Googlebot, Bingbot, Yandex, Ahrefs, etc.

Not to say it isn't an issue, but that Forture article they reference is pretty alarmist and thin on detail.