Hacker News: lph

New comment by lph in "They see your photos"

lph — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:19:48 +0000

Yeah, I know the point of this site is to give us a dystopian shock by showing us how much information Big Tech extracts from our photos, but it's inadvertently a pretty good advertisement for Google's Vision API. It did a fantastic job of summarizing the photos I threw at it.

New comment by lph in "Hacker in Snowflake extortions may be a U.S. soldier"

lph — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:23:18 +0000

I wonder how unique those floor tile patterns are? If that's taken on a military base in Korea, it might be possible to find the exact location of the photo.

New comment by lph in "Who Would Support Deploying the Military to Domestic Protests?"

lph — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 18:00:12 +0000

> The military’s professional norms are a check against a potential abuse of power.

Right. And norms might be a bulwark for six months or two years, and then they'll crumple against relentless assault. It's the same progression we've already seen play out in many areas of government with Trump's first term.

New comment by lph in "What it's like to staff the home of a billionaire"

lph — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 19:03:39 +0000

It sounds like a debutante ball for the newly-minted ultra wealthy

New comment by lph in "Temu's ad spend soars as it embarks on a marketing blitz"

lph — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:58:28 +0000

Every ad I've seen from Temu is either AI-fabricated non-existent products, or real products with impossibly low prices. I wish somebody would sue them into the ground for false advertising.

New comment by lph in "TV Detector Vans"

lph — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 03:23:47 +0000

Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads... now there's a band from the days when the bin man was hard

New comment by lph in "Oculi Mundi collection of rare and ancient maps"

lph — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 07:29:30 +0000

If you flip it from "Explore" to "Research", the UI becomes a lot more practical.

New comment by lph in "Miyazaki's 'The Boy and the Heron' makes clear the world is a fragile place"

lph — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 22:24:08 +0000

It's a shame, the Ameristan near-future dystopia parts of Fall were quite good, but the virtual world plot became increasingly silly. My mood would pick up whenever I landed on a chapter that got back to the "real world" plot.

New comment by lph in "Scammers posing as customer service agents on X as companies leave platform"

lph — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 19:22:46 +0000

I call it "trust arbitrage"

New comment by lph in "Demo-driven development (2021)"

lph — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 04:05:09 +0000

Such bad memories of the team where everything was oriented around the weekly demo: One day a week spent on throwaway work to make a demo run, and then getting yelled at for not being productive enough.

New comment by lph in "I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it"

lph — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 23:06:08 +0000

No. Most companies have employees sign paperwork that prohibits them from doing exactly this.

New comment by lph in "I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it"

lph — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 22:28:48 +0000

Excel is an ancient and complex beast. I get the appeal of building this project---it sounds fun---but trying to duplicate the Excel engine to the level of producing identical outputs is, frankly, bonkers. The author caught the one discrepancy they noticed, circular reference handling, but how many did they miss? How do they know different inputs won't cause it to deviate from Excel? I didn't get the sense from the blog post that this had extensive test coverage. Putting it into use for a business-critical financial calculation is a massive risk, but I guess that's how Uber rolls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It would have been less fun but way, way less risky to wire a headless Excel up to a javascript front-end.

New comment by lph in "Google says it can’t fix Pixel Watches, please just buy a new one"

lph — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:37:42 +0000

Same. I had a terrible experience with Google CS and the original Pixel, which I ended up throwing in the garbage after less than a year because it was defective and they wouldn't do anything about it. Will never make that mistake again.

New comment by lph in "The Fall of Stack Overflow"

lph — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 06:30:29 +0000

The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.

New comment by lph in "Buddy Pond Cloud Desktop"

lph — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 05:53:02 +0000

This is lots of fun! Reminds me of Windows '93 [1]

[1] https://www.windows93.net/

New comment by lph in "PhD Simulator"

lph — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 23:43:52 +0000

I took so many damn showers in grad school.

New comment by lph in "Infinite Mac: Classic Macintosh system releases and software on a web browser"

lph — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 15:38:37 +0000

You can emulate Amiga software in-browser from the Internet Archive's collection [1], but AFAIK there's no emulated web system that's has a bunch of stuff installed on a hard drive like Infinite Mac does. The Amiga Forever [2] package comes with a lot of software you can run locally, but not through a browser.

[1] https://archive.org/details/lynx_Shadow_of_the_Beast_1992 [2] https://www.amigaforever.com/

New comment by lph in "Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)"

lph — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 17:26:31 +0000

...and the same folks who rail against immigration can often be found lamenting the low national birth rate. It makes one suspect their complaint isn't with the rate of population growth, but with its hue.

New comment by lph in "Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking"

lph — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 16:21:17 +0000

This is outstanding. And the limitations of its speech recognition are actually a feature - it forces me to really concentrate on pronunciation. Now do Mandarin and take my money please :)

New comment by lph in "Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer"

lph — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 22:27:00 +0000

> 3,500 seems SO worth it if this can be used to comfortably replace external displays

Agreed, but that's a huge IF. The ergonomics problems with VR headsets are well documented - has Apple really managed to transcend them? I'm not gambling $3500 for a thing that probably ends up sitting in a drawer because it gives me neck cramps or eye strain or motion sickness.

If Apple wants to drive adoption they need to lower that risk. A way to have a trial period or a one-week rental would help.