Hacker News: jwrallie

New comment by jwrallie in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

jwrallie — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:10:31 +0000

Interestingly, I remember that the clean interface of old Reddit, not so different from current HN, was one of the nice things when coming from Digg back in the day.

It started dying for me when they started censoring posts and comments to appeal to advertisers, followed by killing non-official clients, then the light mobile website. Killing old.reddit feels like the last nail in the coffin.

Unfortunately, we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration.

New comment by jwrallie in "FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers"

jwrallie — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:15:43 +0000

You need Android in that case, but that defeats the simplicity of these devices.

New comment by jwrallie in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"

jwrallie — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:33:19 +0000

Here is a different opinion. I’m always looking forward to see the pelican whenever a new model is released. It’s plain simple to understand, memorable, subtle enough in terms of details, and my favorite part is that you have been doing them consistently long enough for it to be useful for comparing almost everything with anything.

New comment by jwrallie in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

jwrallie — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:25:54 +0000

503 and then rate limit here for refreshing once.

New comment by jwrallie in "Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader"

jwrallie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 23:02:46 +0000

My guess is that they identified two different groups of consumers, the ones who want to buy the cheapest product in China and the ones that want it hackable. If they sell it cheaper (and open) they kill the profits coming from the second group.

New comment by jwrallie in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

jwrallie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:54:29 +0000

I guess it’s becoming harder for MS to define malware in a way that would catch this behavior but does not flag their own products as well.

New comment by jwrallie in "Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader"

jwrallie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:56:22 +0000

I was just looking into it, with coupons and ongoing sale, it is possible to buy the Chinese version for about 7,500 JPY (45 USD) on Aliexpress, while on the official website (and Amazon) it is 13,900 JPY. I am not sure if this applies everywhere.

While there is an "unlock" option, it seems it is strongly implied that you should stick to mainstream custom firmware or risk getting stuck with a firmware forever [0].

[0] https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader#usb-l...

New comment by jwrallie in "TP-Link Kasa cameras leaked home GPS via unauthenticated UDP for 6 years"

jwrallie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 03:34:23 +0000

Better to buy devices that can work without internet and just blacklist them at the router level. Price or origin is not a good metric to ensure no leaks.

New comment by jwrallie in "Good Tools Are Invisible"

jwrallie — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:16:33 +0000

Exactly, not everyone is using Arch, btw. Fedora with Gnome just work to the point it is boring.

New comment by jwrallie in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

jwrallie — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:38:42 +0000

Not gonna argue with the point that we need to support authors, but “can be purchased” is a relative concept.

New comment by jwrallie in "Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation"

jwrallie — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:12:35 +0000

Arguably there was not much interest on those platforms. I believe you will be right eventually when physical access of the actual machines are kept away from us, so it’s a matter of solving the latency issue.

New comment by jwrallie in "Claude Code is steganographically marking requests"

jwrallie — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:24:42 +0000

I mostly program with Vscode/Copilot, where such commands require confirmation, but usually LLMs does not try it, since my prompts tend to be focused and not mentioning it.

New comment by jwrallie in "Claude Code is steganographically marking requests"

jwrallie — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:31:32 +0000

You are not alone, for me committing something it means I am signing my responsibility for it. I may not type a password, but I am always the one pressing the enter key.

New comment by jwrallie in "WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)"

jwrallie — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:41:40 +0000

Something like the Pocket 386 but with a regular size keyboard could be the perfect device for this purpose.

New comment by jwrallie in "Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash"

jwrallie — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:53:42 +0000

The table select option in Okular is also great, as you can manually rearrange the divisions. For low volume, of course. Tabula will work better otherwise. I also suggest Libreoffice Calc, the .csv support is leagues ahead of Excel.

New comment by jwrallie in "AI's Affordability Crisis"

jwrallie — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:14:35 +0000

Not a heavy user but I got a feeling for this early since I have a Copilot subscription I get for free as an educator.

I used in a day or two the limit that would last me a month. Downgrading from Sonnet to Gemini Flash was the only way to keep the limit longer, and who knows when cheaper models will be discontinued for something more expensive.

I don’t know if the prices will remain low, but at least Chinese models being open make them have no control over when it is discontinued, I think learning to work with open models is a good direction, even if not running it on your own hardware.

New comment by jwrallie in "AI's Affordability Crisis"

jwrallie — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:58:39 +0000

That is an area where the article did not touch, how realistic are token prices with Deepseek and the likes of it? Is it being subsidized?

New comment by jwrallie in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

jwrallie — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:04:08 +0000

Usually there were two answers that sounded like the word If read by someone unfamiliar, those were short, then either one or two long versions.

If one long versions you choose that, if two, then you choose the one that would be more useful to have a word assigned to it.

New comment by jwrallie in "The AirPods Effect"

jwrallie — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:28:47 +0000

That could be an advantage if your work requires some kind of sustained concentration, for the other party at least.

I like using by headphones (which are big and over the ears) as a way to signal when I’m on concentration mode and don’t want to talk, but I do that maybe 30-40% of the time.

New comment by jwrallie in "Your ePub Is fine"

jwrallie — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:04:35 +0000

> When I started out, I dreaded the moment when I hit the validate button on my finished book after months of work, because it would always find something to cry about.

I remembered one particular master student on the verge of tears trying to compile his LaTeX thesis draft, he took the “write and think about formatting later” too literally and was trying to compile it for the first time very close to the deadline.