Hacker News: nonfamous

New comment by nonfamous in "How long-distance couples use digital games to facilitate intimacy (2025)"

nonfamous — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:19:30 +0000

My husband and I play Wingspan together when I’m traveling for work. He likes board games in general, so it’s something familiar for both of us. And Wingspan is complex enough to reward skill, but also random enough that the outcome isn’t guaranteed when players are of different levels.

New comment by nonfamous in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

nonfamous — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:16:33 +0000

How would an architecture with a highly-optimized hardware implementation of EML compare with a traditional math coprocessor?

New comment by nonfamous in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

nonfamous — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:10:13 +0000

As pointed out in the sibling thread, this isn’t DDG’s fault. Reddit has an exclusive agreement with Google [1] to index Reddit content, and other web search sites are blocked.

[1] https://redditinc.com/news/reddit-and-google-expand-partners...

New comment by nonfamous in "Disrupting malicious uses of AI: An update, February 2026 [pdf]"

nonfamous — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:03:39 +0000

Direct link to the report that includes the case studies: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/df438d70-e3fe-4a6c-a403-ff632def8...

Correcting the Financial Times Report about AWS, Kiro, and AI

nonfamous — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:15:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-service-outage-ai-bot-kiro

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47096373

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by nonfamous in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

nonfamous — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:41:36 +0000

Kaggle is part of Google.

New comment by nonfamous in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

nonfamous — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:48:48 +0000

The system prompt is there if you use a chat app like ChatGTP. The system prompt is one of the things that controls the behavior of the app.

If you use an LLM endpoint in Azure OpenAI, no system prompt is in effect unless you provide one.

New comment by nonfamous in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

nonfamous — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:37:13 +0000

Veeery interesting. I have a personal domain that forwards to a @gmail.com account. There are several companies I interact with, from banks to retail to just about anything, that send mail to my personal domain that never arrives in my Gmail account, but I can see on the hosted mailserver. For those companies I have to use my @gmail.com address instead for the mail to get through.

Maybe there are more companies than we think that send malformed emails?

Amazon Found 'High Volume' of Child Sex Abuse Material in AI Training Data

nonfamous — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 08:37:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/amazon-found-child-sex-abuse-in-ai-training-data

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821955

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by nonfamous in "Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water"

nonfamous — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:34:23 +0000

A lot of it gets converted to water vapor in the evaporative coolers, so it doesn't flow out -- it becomes humidity or clouds. The coolers do also produce waste water, but with all the minerals left behind after evaporation it's not suitable for drinking.

New comment by nonfamous in "What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025"

nonfamous — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:33:50 +0000

That’s how it works for us here in Australia. We have 16Wh of solar and 40KWh of battery, and pay (and receive) wholesale rates for electricity. During the say electricity prices are very low or negative, and we run off the solar and charge the car then. In the evenings when demand is high electricity prices can spike, and our system will automatically sell to the grid then. Sometimes we may need to draw from the grid in the early morning to make up for that, but the price we pay then is insignificant compared to what we make selling the day before.

Locked out: How a gift card purchase destroyed an Apple account

nonfamous — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 02:01:38 +0000

Article URL: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/12/13/locked-out-how-a-gift-card-purchase-destroyed-an-apple-account

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297336

Points: 70

# Comments: 41

New comment by nonfamous in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

nonfamous — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 02:07:49 +0000

In the US, all persons under 21 are banned from purchasing cigarettes.

New comment by nonfamous in "Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document"

nonfamous — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:17:27 +0000

Typing hyphen-hyphen-space is hardly exotic — I've been doing that since well beyond the advent of generative AI.

New comment by nonfamous in "Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia"

nonfamous — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:37:16 +0000

I noticed the other day that ChatGPT will now cite Grokipedia as a source (and presumably uses search there to ground results). That makes me trust ChatGPT even less than before.

New comment by nonfamous in "For rural Californians, unreliable power has become the norm"

nonfamous — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 03:17:31 +0000

Part of that cost is decommissioning and removing the existing tower-based system. But PG&E made the call years ago to use that fire-prone implementation to boost profits, and now we are paying for that short-sighted decision.

New comment by nonfamous in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

nonfamous — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:55:52 +0000

There are plenty of other countries with car accidents, homicide and cardiovascular disease. They also do worse than the US in life expectancy.

New comment by nonfamous in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

nonfamous — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:04:49 +0000

>>> And for most people, the healthcare system works fairly great. There are exceptions, like the denial described in this thread, and they usually get lots of attention because holy hell is that a messed up situation. But the everyday care that most people get is better than adequate.

As an individual who has lived in multiple countries in three continents, I dispute that “the care most people get is better than adequate”. Perhaps better than the world average, but certainly not better than in most first-world countries. And that’s not even counting the impact of delayed decisions and denied care, and the stress of dealing with the system overall.

And if you’re looking for more than anecdotes, there are plenty of studies that show that Americans have lower expected lifetimes than citizens of peer countries, despite much higher per-capita health care costs.

New comment by nonfamous in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

nonfamous — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:00:10 +0000

One thing that's hard to understand from the outside is that almost nobody actually pays those mind-blowing $200K hospital bills. US hospitals charge on a sliding scale based on the applicants' families' ability to pay.

(I don’t mean to belittle your comment about universities which is factual and helpful. I’m just pointing out that US education system is just as fucked up as the US healthcare system the OP is talking about.)

New comment by nonfamous in "Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region"

nonfamous — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 12:16:47 +0000

Airline safety is a special case I think — THE NTSB does incredible work, and their recommendations are always designed to improve total safety, not just reduce the likelihood of a specific failure.

But I can think of lots of examples where the response to an unfortunate, but very rare, incident can make us less safe overall. The response to rare vaccine side effects comes immediately to mind.