Hacker News: knuckleheads

New comment by knuckleheads in "Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights"

knuckleheads — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:41:50 +0000

I couldn't get past all the network errors on OpenCode. Seemed smart enough, and was useful when I was low on usage on Claude, but beyond that, really hard for me to say whether it was Good or Bad.

New comment by knuckleheads in "We never use AI. For anything"

knuckleheads — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 10:03:24 +0000

Handcrafted software will find it's own market the same way that handcrafted clothing, furniture and other previously industrialized goods that became commodities did. They'll be more expensive generally and it'll be a smaller market overall, you'll always have some people who will love them all the same. Not my choice, but I can understand why they would want it.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Breaking the WAL"

knuckleheads — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:05:09 +0000

The scheduler in the Linux kernel jumps out to me as a place where it would be cool to find something of this nature.

Tabs, Spaces, Hand Tools, and Seat Belts

knuckleheads — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:09:12 +0000

Article URL: https://newsletter.powderworks.dev/p/tabs-spaces-hand-tools-and-seat-belts

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49276442

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by knuckleheads in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

knuckleheads — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:08:23 +0000

RIP to a real one. Have you considered using one billion Chinese residential ips to address your problem? I’ve heard one billion Chinese residential ips really does the trick here.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Software is about people, not code (2020)"

knuckleheads — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:59:24 +0000

"Software [ought to be] about people, not code"

Related but not quite the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

New comment by knuckleheads in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

knuckleheads — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:46:39 +0000

Previously, I had done a fair amount of research into how Google's monopoly on web crawling further entrenches their monopoly in the search engine market. You can read more about this here, https://knuckleheads.club, there is a long report from ~2020 or so that explains how it worked at the time. The club is mothballed, I am doing other things with my life, and I'm happy to say that we played a very small role in the DOJ ordering Google to share their crawl data with qualified competitors (a work in progress, but it's progressing).

Chatbots have super charged this dynamic though, to the point that it is showing up in the robots.txt data. The last few weeks I've been having Claude rerun some old analysis of Common Crawl from back then, when I have spare usage and time. What I've found is that you can see pretty clearly the rise in people outright blocking AI chatbot related crawlers likely because of how aggressive they have become.

  Quarter  Crawl    GPT     Claude  CC      G-Ext   Byte    Bing    Google
  2023 Q1  2023-06  0.00%   0.00%   0.16%   0.00%   0.06%   0.47%   0.39%
  2023 Q2  2023-14  0.00%   0.00%   0.18%   0.00%   0.06%   0.45%   0.38%
  2023 Q3  none       —       —       —       —       —       —       —
  2023 Q4  2023-40  2.21%   0.00%   2.12%   0.04%   0.11%   0.39%   0.27%
  2024 Q1  2024-10  0.53%   0.05%   0.31%   0.09%   0.18%   0.34%   0.31%
  2024 Q2  2024-18  0.55%   0.09%   0.32%   0.11%   0.24%   0.32%   0.31%
  2024 Q3  2024-30  0.68%   0.22%   0.36%   0.20%   0.38%   0.24%   0.33%
  2024 Q4  2024-42  1.10%   0.50%   0.44%   0.32%   0.50%   0.25%   0.40%
  2025 Q1  2025-05  1.14%   0.66%   0.54%   0.42%   0.66%   0.25%   0.44%
  2025 Q2  2025-18  1.37%   0.93%   0.63%   0.70%   0.92%   0.29%   0.19%
  2025 Q3  2025-30  1.42%   1.07%   0.74%   0.62%   1.01%   0.31%   0.27%
  2025 Q4  2025-43  1.92%   1.51%   1.23%   1.15%   1.52%   0.27%   0.19%
  2026 Q1  2026-04  2.13%   1.76%   1.68%   1.58%   1.77%   0.22%   0.15%
  2026 Q2  2026-17  2.80%   2.38%   2.26%   2.13%   2.50%   0.22%   0.14%
  2026 Q3  2026-30  3.45%   3.01%   2.89%   2.71%   3.16%   0.21%   0.14%

GPTBot is OpenAI, ClaudeBot is Anthropic, CCBot is Common Crawl, Google-Ext is a way for website owners to indicate they don't want their content to be used for AI, Bytespider is Bytedance, Bing and Google are the last two. Take these numbers with a truck of salt, haven't had time to verify them.

It's very clear that website owners do not like getting their content scraped and are indicating to GPTBot et al. that they are not welcome. It's a shame that CCBot is caught in the cross fire, but that's life. Bing and Google are doing just fine though, almost like having significant power in the search engine market gives you an advantage in other markets too. Who knew!

New comment by knuckleheads in "Helsinki Hacker News Meetup"

knuckleheads — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:45 +0000

Long shot, but if there is anybody reading this from Salzburg, lmk if you want to meet up!

What the Bliss Taught Us

knuckleheads — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:19:53 +0000

Article URL: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/08/03/what-the-bliss-taught-us/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166130

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by knuckleheads in "Are We Stuck with Lean?"

knuckleheads — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:02:38 +0000

Reminds me of the idea of Radical Monopolies from Ivan Illich in a way. If a technology or service becomes so wide spread within society, even though many different versions of the technology or service may exist, a Radical Monopoly means that non users will suffer for their non use. Cars and non drivers in cities are the typical example. And I wonder, whether mathematicians who don't user theorem provers will soon suffer under the tyranny of the theorem provers, whether it be Lean or one of the others.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite"

knuckleheads — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:37:21 +0000

Looking forward to seeing how you handle it! I understand the complications of it as an engineer, I hope you figure out something soon!

New comment by knuckleheads in "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite"

knuckleheads — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:54:41 +0000

You should talk with dang, as the email I received about this from him, to my eyes, does not agree with your stance here in the long term. I don’t want to get into the interminable blood quantum debate over Llm authorship either, however, I see substack doing something about it, and, as a long time hn reader, it makes me want to spend more time over there than here.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite"

knuckleheads — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:58:11 +0000

Yes, I am asking if that particular policy could be changed. A little AI here and there is fine, to each their own, but I would prefer not to read posts that are overwhelmingly so.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite"

knuckleheads — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:30:02 +0000

I ran this through an AI checker and it flagged half of it immediately. @dang, I know Substack just enabled Pangram integration, is there anyway you could get Y Combinator to spring for a Pangram subscription for the front page or something ?

New comment by knuckleheads in "Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work"

knuckleheads — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:54:55 +0000

Congrats! I very much enjoyed my time at Recurse Center back when it was Hacker School and idly daydream about returning some time. Thanks for making something so great!

New comment by knuckleheads in "Never argue with your boss (2009)"

knuckleheads — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:51:05 +0000

Did you read the article? It provided a pretty good argument against exactly this attitude.

New comment by knuckleheads in "Opinionated and Easy Pi.dev Configuration"

knuckleheads — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:17:20 +0000

Would you say the same about something like, say, Spacemacs?

New comment by knuckleheads in "My quest to see all of Tetris"

knuckleheads — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:25:46 +0000

Great post! Thanks for the write up, enjoyed reading it and the visuals.

New comment by knuckleheads in "A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage"

knuckleheads — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:41:27 +0000

Yeah I was surprised a while back that ChatGPT was pulling them up (I was doing some research on origins of sudoku and it was pulled up very old threads on Usenet). So now I specifically ask for it and it consistently finds me some gold. Might take a few rounds of saying do deeper research but it often works.

New comment by knuckleheads in "A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage"

knuckleheads — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:42:51 +0000

Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:

>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM

Here's a reporter asking for comments and getting laughed at and trolled: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E

Some more serious reactions over on comp.risks: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3

>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.

nanog on seclists was an interesting read too https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51

Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well > Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down. Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94