Hacker News: ptmkenny

New comment by ptmkenny in "The Amazon tax"

ptmkenny — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:23:16 +0000

Costco shipping is "free," but the prices on the website are more than in the store. I'm pretty sure it's based on weight; heavy stuff has a more pronounced markup. But, it saves you a trip, and the prices are low to start so it still may be significant savings. There's also a web-only deals section for clearing out inventory (I picked up some Philips Hue lights for half off).

New comment by ptmkenny in "Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones"

ptmkenny — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:56:05 +0000

There's also the Monk Skin Tone Scale by Dr. Monk and Google (available under a CC attribution 4.0 international license). It was developed for machine learning, so it's not exactly the same use case, but it provides 10 colors in a variety of formats, including hexadecimal. https://skintone.google/get-started

New comment by ptmkenny in "Apple's hostile App Store rating system"

ptmkenny — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:23:11 +0000

In Settings -> Apps -> App Store, I have “In-App Ratings and Reviews” toggled off. Nevertheless, I still occasionally get shown a review prompt, even for paid apps. You can bet I leave a one star review in this case; I paid for the app, and I opted out of reviews. If you want to ask me to leave a review without respecting my time and stated preference, you deserve one star.

New comment by ptmkenny in "Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?"

ptmkenny — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:42:52 +0000

The trend that bothers me the most is excessive use of the em dash accompanied by awkward use of semicolons.

> Cooperators who are scattered among cheaters get eaten alive — the lone honest man in a crooked ward is not noble, mathematically speaking; he’s lunch.

There's also the not-quite-right logical link between clauses (I see this a lot in Opus output):

> Parasites are a constant; every era grows them to maximum greed, because that’s what parasites do.

("era grows them" doesn't fit with "that's what parasites do." If the era grows them, the parasites aren't doing their own growth.)

New comment by ptmkenny in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

ptmkenny — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:07:31 +0000

As for Reddit licensing their data to llms, that day already arrived in 2024: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/reddit-has-already-booked...

New comment by ptmkenny in "Teaching Claude to QA a mobile app"

ptmkenny — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:12:06 +0000

It’s interesting to see the solution that the AI came up with, but WebdriverIO and Appium already exist for this use case, are open source like Capacitor, and come recommended from the Capacitor developers. https://ionic.io/blog/introducing-the-ionic-end-to-end-testi...

$500M Zappos mystery will

ptmkenny — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:17:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/the-500-million-mystery-will-signed-by-ghosts.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387105

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ptmkenny in "Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art"

ptmkenny — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:05:12 +0000

I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign.

Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.

So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.

Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.