Hacker News: pmontra

New comment by pmontra in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

pmontra — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:39:41 +0000

It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.

New comment by pmontra in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

pmontra — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:32:36 +0000

We have that kind of list in Italy too. I registered my number and I keep getting calls, so I stopped answering to numbers not in my contacts list. If I know that somebody will be calling me, I ask for the number and I add it to the list.

New comment by pmontra in "How Golden Is Silence, Actually?"

pmontra — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:42:22 +0000

There are many paywalls that send all the content in the html and then hide it with a script.

However there are many more properly implemented paywalls that send only a few lines of content and you don't find the content even on the archive sites.

There are several variations of those schemes. Sometimes there is text but not images. Sometimes the first party js is fine and you have to block some of the third party js.

Sometimes the content is in a JSON blob.

Sometimes the reader mode trick works but only for a short while before the js paywall removes it (the sibling comment hints about it.)

You have to experiment with each site.

New comment by pmontra in "How Golden Is Silence, Actually?"

pmontra — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:57:24 +0000

Reader mode bypasses it. It's only a JS layer on top of content that's already inside the HTML doc.

Disabling first party JS works too, using umatrix or similar tools. The site works perfectly without JS.

Edit: because of all of that, of course view source bypasses the paywall too and reveals tons of inlined CSS.

New comment by pmontra in "Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age"

pmontra — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:01:52 +0000

I wonder how vim will handle age brackets. Send all text to a LLM on the cloud in real time and refuse to show keystrokes with unsafe content? And censor unsafe text read from disk?

New comment by pmontra in "No one can afford to make Myst games anymore"

pmontra — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:45:04 +0000

Procedural Content Generation?

New comment by pmontra in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

pmontra — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:57:57 +0000

Prices must raise a lot to make self hosting mainstream or at least fairly popular.

Yesterday a coworker posted on a customer's Slack the specs of a box he is planning to buy to run local models. It's about 5k Euro. I am paying 18 Euro per month for Claude Pro and I'm going through a migration (almost a total rewrite) of a web app from Vue 2 / Vuetify 2 / Vuex to Vue 3 / Vuetify 4 / Pinia. I never hit the 6 hours limit. I could consider running an equivalent model on a 500 Euro machine (about 2 years of Claude Pro) but 5k is 20 years and that box will be obsolete or will have failed beyond repair (no spares) much earlier than that.

New comment by pmontra in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

pmontra — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:43:00 +0000

But maybe no customer will be there to actually buy, because cash flows could crash their businesses. So options on chips? Call or put?

New comment by pmontra in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

pmontra — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 05:06:57 +0000

About increasing welfare, I am not sure about that. Workers pay taxes, companies not much. Welfare is often paid by taxes, especially for people that can't find a job. If more AI leads to less workers, than less taxes and less welfare.

New comment by pmontra in "Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029"

pmontra — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:37:58 +0000

So a lot of problems will be solved by 2049 (overpopulation) and probably many others will arise (we never had worldwide decreasing demographics.)

New comment by pmontra in "Show HN: After 23 years, I finished my indie video game"

pmontra — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:05:20 +0000

Ah I see! Maybe that problem of discovery could be fixed by displaying some labels on controls before starting to fight.

Move, Aim, Fly (not boost)

New comment by pmontra in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

pmontra — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:55:25 +0000

I did my socializing in real life but I guess that if kids are not allowed to get out anymore, they must do it with screens.

New comment by pmontra in "Show HN: After 23 years, I finished my indie video game"

pmontra — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:07:51 +0000

I'm attempting to play from my phone. The game says that's better to play from desktop but what can I do?

This is my experience:

The left button is a kind of joystick that seems to move the mech, but not in a predictable way. The right button also seems to move the mech and it flies it too, and it shoots a ton of missiles too. Are they infinite?

The boost is? I don't know.

There are green mechs around. If I ever hit them I didn't notice. Maybe they have a shield on, but it would be nice to see when a missile hits, even if it makes no damages.

Anyway the frustating part is that I don't know how to move, or: I move but I don't know why.

New comment by pmontra in "Horse-Drawn Railway"

pmontra — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:52:31 +0000

The Milan Monza railway too, horse drawn until 1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan%E2%80%93Monza_tramway

New comment by pmontra in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

pmontra — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:17:27 +0000

Two insights. One from the article itself

> In our day-to-day work these threats appear rarely.

Two: IRL the attacker pays a small amount of money to a low salary employee to exfiltrate data.

New comment by pmontra in "What I love about Django"

pmontra — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:51:52 +0000

So Rails or some PHP framework. It was slightly too early to go full Node. Django was a little unusual too among the developers I knew. Java was still a thing but more for finance related projects.

New comment by pmontra in "Position: LLMs Can't Jump"

pmontra — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:06:58 +0000

No way. You get to the rim and only then you realize how huge it is. And then you still have to go down into the canyon.

New comment by pmontra in "Some car companies are operating without regard for a declining customer base"

pmontra — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:40:01 +0000

In any city I saw there are people crossing the road with a green light in front of cars that would have turned right on red so those cars wouldn't go anywhere until they get a green. In areas with little pedestrians, maybe it's OK. Anyway, the general rule of precedence in my country is cars yield to pedestrians and I think it's the same in all of Europe.

New comment by pmontra in "Some car companies are operating without regard for a declining customer base"

pmontra — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:44:49 +0000

> That’s different for small-town low-traffic areas.

The two towns close to my home (10k and 5k people each) have 3 and 2 traffic lights. It's a different world with different problems and different solutions than the ones of the cities with 1M people one hour away. It could be a different country with different legislation.

New comment by pmontra in "Some car companies are operating without regard for a declining customer base"

pmontra — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:54:44 +0000

However I can see my 80 yo self driving a car (I know plenty of them that still drive) but I can't see my 80 yo self riding a bicycle in winter, especially on snow. I know some 80 yo cyclist but not many of them. So there must be some balance. In cities the balance often takes into account metro, buses and trains. In the countryside it's almost only cars.