Hacker News: maweaver

New comment by maweaver in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

maweaver — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:14:24 +0000

As someone else mentioned above, with jam bands each performance is unique, and people definitely value getting access to every show. For bands repeating the same set as identically as possible on a tour, not sure how much it matters which performance you listen to. Although some people might be into it, for the "I was there" novelty factor.

New comment by maweaver in "Proton Meet isn't what they told you it was"

maweaver — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:30:08 +0000

Using what mechanism? Most Linux updates are not pushed but rather pulled at the user request. You can use Linux totally offline. This is fundamentally different than a webapp, where code is sent with every visit

New comment by maweaver in "Show HN: Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search"

maweaver — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:41:14 +0000

I've been doing some RAG prototypes with hybrid search using pg_textsearch plus pgvector and have been very pleased with the results. Happy to see a 1.0 release!

New comment by maweaver in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

maweaver — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:26:47 +0000

Relevant to this story, laser eye surgery was developed in the late 80s/early 90s and can improve sight to the level that some who were legally blind no longer are.

New comment by maweaver in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

maweaver — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:09:22 +0000

It means that especially those who went to the island but also most of the others don't care about protecting children. They merely see a way to consolidate power and are jumping on it.

New comment by maweaver in "Fluorite – A console-grade game engine fully integrated with Flutter"

maweaver — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:52:22 +0000

I love using AI and find it greatly increases my productivity, but the dirty little secret is that you have to actually read what it writes. Both because it often makes mistakes both large and small that need to be corrected (or things that even if not outright wrong, do not match the style/architecture of the project), and because you have to be able to understand it for future maintenance. One other thing I've noticed through the years is that a surprising number of developers are "write only". Reading someone else's code and working out what it's doing and why is its own skillset. I am definitely concerned that the conflux of these two things is going to create a junk code mountain in the very near future. Humans willing to untangle it might find themselves in high demand.

New comment by maweaver in "Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs"

maweaver — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:37:51 +0000

Jeffrey Skilling, as a major example. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli, just to name a few

New comment by maweaver in "Grok Code Fast 1"

maweaver — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 21:05:02 +0000

I literally saw it on video. I don't care who tells me it didn't happen, it very clearly did.

New comment by maweaver in "Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?"

maweaver — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:11:09 +0000

Being in a database with "dead = false" is not the same thing as being "on social security" (as in, receiving money from the program). Sure it's a starting point for investigation, but it's not by itself evidence of widespread fraud.

New comment by maweaver in "ChatGPT Search"

maweaver — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 12:22:16 +0000

You sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole... you don't have to have ID to vote, but you do have to be registered to vote (which requires ID). So in order for an illegal immigrant to vote, they would need to impersonate a registered voter (and presumably if that person did vote, it would be flagged as multiple votes under the same registration). Not impossible, but not the same as being able to just walk up and vote no questions asked.

New comment by maweaver in "Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?"

maweaver — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 16:25:24 +0000

For what it's worth, I've sent a "stop" before and gotten this:

> NETWORK MSG: You replied with the word "stop" which blocks all texts sent from this number. Text back "unstop" or "start" to receive messages again.

I assumed it was from my carrier (T-Mobile in the US), but now I'm wondering, as I have gotten different replies from other numbers. Maybe it came from the sender's provider? Or is just misleading.

New comment by maweaver in "Uber charges more if you have credits in your account"

maweaver — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 23:57:50 +0000

Funnily enough, that is especially not the case with the market Uber competes with, a.k.a taxis. The fare is pre-advertised and is based on distance/time. Transparent pricing that does not vary by customer was a very important aspect of traditional taxi services, to the point where you could see your fare change in real time as the ride progressed.

New comment by maweaver in "A UK college student explaining congressional procedure to Washington"

maweaver — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 21:19:18 +0000

> “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?”

> Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.

It's not so much that he knows procedures well, it appears that he has some sort of didactic memory that he has focused on this topic. He would have had to basically already memorized this fact obscure enough that a congressional scholar was tweeting for an answer.

New comment by maweaver in "AI or Ain't: Eliza"

maweaver — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 13:12:42 +0000

Seems like the modern definition is something along the lines of an algorithm whose behavior depends on data which was itself machine generated, rather than hand-created by a human like Eliza's rules.

New comment by maweaver in "How I destroyed the company's DB (a stupid SQL mistake)"

maweaver — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 18:53:21 +0000

I've had the "joy" of doing data corrections on production databases before. Things I've learned:

- ALWAYS do the work inside of a transaction, as he mentioned. Rollback is your friend. For final run I always do a rollback and "clean" run just to make sure nothing extra slips in.

- Start by crafting your delete/updates as SELECTS. Make sure it targets the data you want then save the SELECT to run afterwards.

- Export any data you plan to modify off to a spreadsheet and save it somewhere. This is another chance to check it's what you intended to change, it's a record of what was changed, and it can be used to revert the data if needed.

- As the author mentioned, get another pair of eyes if possible. Besides making it less likely for things to go wrong, people are more understanding.

- And it probably goes without saying, but don't just fix the data and move on. Do everything possible to track down the bug that caused the issue in the first place and fix it. This is another place where having previous data available in a spreadsheet (or even a complete database backup) can help with data mining after the fact.

New comment by maweaver in "Two pharmacists figured out that oral phenylephrine doesn't work"

maweaver — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 21:48:50 +0000

Most of them (especially the cold medicines) are not just ibuprofen/acetaminophen but are a "cocktail" that will also include dextromethorphan, guaifenesin, phenylephrine, diphenhydramine, etc in different combinations/amounts depending what they are intended for. I don't personally use them but I could see how it could be useful rather than buying a bunch of individual medications.

New comment by maweaver in "What This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece (2002) [pdf]"

maweaver — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 16:58:38 +0000

One issue they mention is that you lose the simple greedy algorithm for making change. For example, for $0.38 it's better to give 2x$0.18 plus 2 pennies (4 coins), but many might intuitively give back a quarter, a dime, and 3 pennies (5 coins). Besides the added complexity, introducing a new coin solely to reduce the amount of change given is not effective if it is not used optimally.

New comment by maweaver in "Porn company makes millions by shaming porn consumers"

maweaver — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 17:12:08 +0000

Well it's one thing for friends and family to be aware in general that you watch porn. It's another thing for it to become public record for potential employers etc to learn that you sought out "blacked raw" videos, which could be perceived as problematic for reasons beyond sexual prudishness.

Beyond which, fighting a 6 figure lawsuit rather than taking a 4 digit settlement can be a dangerous gamble, especially if the copyright infringement did actually take place.

Not to say that I agree with what they're doing, but I can certainly understand why people just take the settlement and move on.

New comment by maweaver in "Is the Turing Test Dead?"

maweaver — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 15:51:00 +0000

Anyone using Eliza for more than a couple of minutes will quickly pick up on its tricks. Even in their cherry picked example it barely makes it a few messages in before the illusion starts to shatter with awkward lines like "Do you think coming here will help you to not be unhappy?". It might pass the turing test once or twice by sheer luck but it's clearly not competitive with a human conversing in general.

New comment by maweaver in "Climbing 50 steps a day can cut your risk of heart disease"

maweaver — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 23:07:08 +0000

I had a similar thought, but then it says "high intensity" stair climbing, which is not how I would describe my climbing.

Then there's also this:

> Researchers also found that those who stopped climbing stairs daily during the study showed a 32% higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those who never reported climbing stairs.

So I guess if we ever move we're actually worse off in the long run