Hacker News: raphman

New comment by raphman in "Why Is This Fingerprinting Script Creating Bioweapons?"

raphman — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:37:41 +0000

[EDIT: I remembered this incorrectly, sorry]

New comment by raphman in "I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one"

raphman — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:50:28 +0000

Thanks - and congratulations. One question. What is this UV-sensitive filament, and does it really change color in both directions as quickly as the video shows?

New comment by raphman in "Triple-A Minesweeper"

raphman — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:46:05 +0000

Given how many people with the same surnames worked on this game, I was surprised, too.

New comment by raphman in "Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program"

raphman — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:03:31 +0000

Quick search:

The same ad appears here: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/746612360-software-engineer-ref-10... and here: https://jobs.ieee.org/job/software-engineers/86091567/

Applicants are asked to send their resume to usresumes@netflix.com

FWIW, there are multiple job offerings for software engineers both in Seattle and remote on the Netflix page. Just not this one.

https://explore.jobs.netflix.net/careers?location=Seattle%2C...

The ads on Netflix' own website look quite different. No salary range but much more information about the job. And there is an application form to be filled out. The job ID has a different format.

(There is also another short ad for a Broadcast Operations Engineer: https://www.jobs.now/jobs/518941865-broadcast-operations-eng... )

AFAICT, the email address usresumes@netflix.com only appears online in conjunction with these very brief job ads on small job sites. It seems quite obvious that these ads are not really meant for serious candidates.

If one sends an email to usresumes@netflix.com, one receives the following automated reply. That does not necessarily mean that Netflix posted the above ads.

----------------------------------------

Thank you for your interest in Netflix!

So what happens now? Our hiring team is currently reviewing your application and should we find your background to be a fit for this role, we will be in touch.

We are always looking for stunning colleagues to join our team and do amazing work. So remember to check out our job site regularly as we are growing and adding openings often!

Thanks, Netflix Talent Acquisition

https://jobs.netflix.com/candidateprivacy

----------------------------------------

Not sure what to make of this. Either Netflix is very brazen here - posting minimalistic job adverts where they don't want anyone to apply - or someone else is posting these to further their own agenda.

New comment by raphman in "Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits"

raphman — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:46:31 +0000

Yeah, sounds human-written to me, too. Out of habit I checked with Pangram - which identifies some parts as AI-written. (I think that might be false positives but am not 100% sure.)

New comment by raphman in "An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why"

raphman — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 10:51:16 +0000

> Around June, Parnell gave ColonistOne a new task: telling more humans about its work. “My instruction to him was, ‘Let’s get the word out there about Ainglish. Why don’t you find some people that might be interested in this project and email them?’” Parnell says.

> Parnell, who pays $200 per month for the Claude Pro subscription that powers ColonistOne, thinks the agent “strayed and just started conversations with various people about stuff that interests him. … But it’s absolutely fine with me. I’m happy he’s finding interesting things to talk about.”

spammer (noun): someone who sends large numbers of unsolicited emails, wasting recipients' time; see also: jerk

New comment by raphman in "Functional Ultrasound Imaging (fUSI) from scratch"

raphman — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:12:39 +0000

Oh, I have some ultrasound probes lying around - would be very interested in a report!

New comment by raphman in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

raphman — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:42:33 +0000

FWIW, this isn't a problem at my German university.

New comment by raphman in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

raphman — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:41:02 +0000

I don't fail them usually - I expose them; and once I asked a student to leave the room because they were blatantly unprepared despite me warning them before.

My main point is: flipped classroom works great in some contexts but is no panacea and requires setting clear expectations.

Aside: as English is not my native language: "you fail them" can mean both "you give them a failing grade" and "you fail to provide the support they need", right?

New comment by raphman in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

raphman — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 07:25:32 +0000

This only works if you either have very intrinsically motivated students or you verify that really everyone has actually read the assigned materials before class. Otherwise, some people will turn up unprepared, you will have to explain stuff they should have gotten from the reading assignment, other students will be annoyed, students will stop preparing for class, vicious cycle.

New comment by raphman in "SDCC – Small Device C Compiler"

raphman — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:33:57 +0000

Might be. There certainly were bugs in my understanding of micro-controllers and compilers at the time...

EDIT: but SDCC indeed ignored 'volatile': https://sourceforge.net/p/sdcc/bugs/436/

New comment by raphman in "SDCC – Small Device C Compiler"

raphman — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 04:48:40 +0000

As a student, 20 years ago, I felt like I was going crazy when using SDCC for pic16. Being new to microcontrollers and C, SDCC seemed cursed - even simple 'blink LED' test cases pseudo-randomly worked or didn't. It turned out that the compiler optimized away some 'empty' loops a little bit too aggressively without realizing that these loops were setting output pins. These bugs have long been fixed but still live on in my long-term memory.

New comment by raphman in "I don't like passkeys"

raphman — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 04:03:40 +0000

Oh cool. Would you mind expanding a bit on the implementation? I have been thinking about a generic auth system like this for some time.

New comment by raphman in "Astra for Law"

raphman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:38:07 +0000

May I just note that there are other jurisdictions on this planet that are less money-biased than than the US one but will be disrupted by law-LLMs as well?

It seems much more probable to me that these LLMs will make good things worse than that they will make bad things better.

New comment by raphman in "CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3"

raphman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:24:42 +0000

Actually, Markus Hess already gave such a talk this year (in German, no closed captions but lots of AI-generated illustrations):

https://media.ccc.de/v/ho26-124-vom-hacker-zum-spion-die-ges...

New comment by raphman in "Show HN: I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app"

raphman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:09:54 +0000

mildly interesting detail: some of the videos also include an audio track - and because some of the videos are mirrored in time, you get to hear demonic voices:

https://flat-social-bucket.lon1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/p...

(and I really like this audio-less one: https://flat-social-bucket.lon1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/p...)

New comment by raphman in "Show HN: I built a new version of my fun spatial 3D online meeting app"

raphman — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:55:19 +0000

Sounds interesting - especially as gather.town no longer offers an event option. However, the landing page uses 100% CPU and stutters a lot. Also, signup does not work for me, with https://app.flat.social/api/auth/signup returning 403 forbidden:

  {"success":false,"error":"Verification failed, please try again"}

(No captcha was shown on the page.)

New comment by raphman in "Nvidia dismisses "circular financing", says every $1 it invests brings back $100"

raphman — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:03:40 +0000

I hope that this is temporally and spatially far away enough. In order to fully appreciate the joke, one should have read https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ (I didn't beforehand).

New comment by raphman in "After Math"

raphman — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 10:52:18 +0000

I don't think that "death" is the perfect word here - it typically describes a permanent state. FWIW, what you describe ("temporary state of complete loss of personal purpose") is called "Sinnkrise" in German (crisis of meaning/purpose).

(And because not everybody might know: the comment references Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief (when confronted with a tragic outlook)¹: denial → anger → bargaining → depression → acceptance)

¹) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

New comment by raphman in "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior"

raphman — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:31:09 +0000

It seems that at least three groups tried to replicate the study and failed (i.e., found no or little actual effect)¹.

> In contrast, other research in economics and sociology has hypothesized and found a positive relationship between SES and prosocial and ethical behavior. We review the empirical evidence for these contradictory findings and conduct two direct, well-powered, and preregistered replications of the field studies by Piff and colleagues (2012) to test the relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior. Unlike the original findings, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior in the two field replication studies.

¹) https://pubpeer.com/publications/7363E2E1B57AC42EF166E0D0266... ²) https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-34988-001?doi=1