Hacker News: laserbeam

New comment by laserbeam in "Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising"

laserbeam — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:25:12 +0000

Amazing how it's offensive to everyone involved. Both to be replaced and to be represented by an AI rendition.

New comment by laserbeam in "PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)"

laserbeam — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:09:22 +0000

I'd say the reason for this is that PDFs are not viral like images or videos. I don't think any of the technical arguments are strong enough.

If you want to forge a PDF, you do it because you have a private target in mind. Financial fraud, corporate espionage... There are other settings but people don't just share PDFs around for you to see a deluge of fake ones.

New comment by laserbeam in "OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability"

laserbeam — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:57:52 +0000

Yes, those 2 are the same. But our KGB is saying “the microphone in your house is spying on you, it’s not us, the microphone broke containment”.

New comment by laserbeam in "OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability"

laserbeam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:32:52 +0000

There's no such thing as "OpenAI agents" attacked RubyGems. It's someone used agents to attack RubyGems. If they work at OpenAI then it's someone at OpenAI. And if they did it unintentionally, they still did it.

Analogy: if a someone's involved when a person dies, it's manslaughter or murder based on intent. They're different, but they're both crimes.

New comment by laserbeam in "We Replaced MMAP with Io_uring in Our Rust Query Engine. It Got Slower"

laserbeam — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:03:56 +0000

The problem is not the LLM writing. The problem is the ragebait title which is unsubstantiated, because of part 2. And they know that because they published it in two parts.

This is basically how you write fake news. And you only publish like this for extra clicks.

New comment by laserbeam in "We Replaced MMAP with Io_uring in Our Rust Query Engine. It Got Slower"

laserbeam — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 07:55:35 +0000

The real issue here is there's a part 2 (linked at the end of the article) where they get the io_uring implementation to be twice as fast as mmap. So it's a clickbait title for a part 1, which gets resolved in part 2.

So they crunched out 2 articles, one of which is just ragebait. And they both seem LLM written. Maybe they have some cool advice, maybe not... but it's not a format I enjoy reading.

New comment by laserbeam in "How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads"

laserbeam — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:31:15 +0000

The real issue is local business know about google maps and are often happy to update schedules themselves. The effort for them to know/care about OSM is too high and the payoff low (most clients are on google maps).

New comment by laserbeam in "iPhone Duo"

laserbeam — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:09:54 +0000

> subsidized by the carrier

You misspelled “you’re overcharged for your mobile subscription and get a phone”.

New comment by laserbeam in "Copyright does more harm than good and should be abolished"

laserbeam — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:20:55 +0000

Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.

New comment by laserbeam in "Audacity 4.0"

laserbeam — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:27:06 +0000

Quit Sibelius

New comment by laserbeam in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

laserbeam — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 04:48:04 +0000

> But most people aren’t willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs.

Keyboard shortcuts should be an _optional_ way to interact for accessibility and power users! They should never be required!

This is what TUIs get wrong, they make it the required way to navigate and often don’t even let you use the mouse.

New comment by laserbeam in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

laserbeam — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 04:44:04 +0000

Most TUIs give you keyboard but mouse is a second class citizen, most GUIs give you mouse but keyboard is a second class citizen. To that extent, I’ll take the mouse only any day. I really want to learn over time the 5-15 shortcuts that speed up my day, not be forced to learn all of them day 0. And I say this as a power user, a casual user will use 2-3 shortcuts per app at most.

New comment by laserbeam in "Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap"

laserbeam — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:39:13 +0000

Is there a path forward to writing a guide for how users can contribute back to OSM if they wish? A "thank you for your contribution, if you wish to learn more about OSM and how our maps are built click here" => go to a blog post which describes the relationship with OSM, why Book Corners can't be liable for contributing data back to OSM, and how a user could do that if they wanted.

New comment by laserbeam in "Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America"

laserbeam — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:25:08 +0000

It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.

New comment by laserbeam in "Orion Browser by Kagi"

laserbeam — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 07:50:55 +0000

> Orion uses WebKit and _I assume_ they try to track as close to the release branch as possible. So if you trust WebKit, you can trust Orion.

The problem is you're stuck at assuming, but can't verify.

New comment by laserbeam in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

laserbeam — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:11:17 +0000

> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.

If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

New comment by laserbeam in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

laserbeam — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:21:51 +0000

This sidesteps xochitl and the normal remarkable display adapter. You should assume this thing can't render anything a remarkable normally renders, but does smooth fades instead.

New comment by laserbeam in "Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration (2025)"

laserbeam — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:58:46 +0000

I saw 2-3 flavors of this news. None of them include a basic “how do I check if I need to do anything” guide that a linux newbie can do.

New comment by laserbeam in "Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents"

laserbeam — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:53:35 +0000

> I really want to find reasons to like this

But why? Why would I want to like a project which seems to invent problems rather than solve any? I don’t want to like this.

New comment by laserbeam in "Midjourney Medical"

laserbeam — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:32:36 +0000

No, water filtration sounds like the first part the device will cheap out on to cut costs.