Hacker News: rgovostes

New comment by rgovostes in "[dead]"

rgovostes — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:19:02 +0000

The topic could be interesting but there's no chance this was written by a human. It's 25 pages long printed and goes into far too much detail and at the same time almost no detail at all, with sections like:

> The CONFLICT_THRESHOLD constant in the source is set to 5:

> [code excerpt proving that, indeed, the CONFLICT_THRESHOLD constant in the source is set to 5]

(Edit: Even more apparent looking at the blog's git repo: https://github.com/nooscraft/personal-blog)

Flagging this kind of content is getting old.

Wizards of Leroy (and Wrico) Lettering

rgovostes — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:47:43 +0000

Article URL: https://kleinletters.com/Blog/wizards-of-leroy-and-wrico-lettering/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657105

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by rgovostes in "My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack"

rgovostes — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:35:31 +0000

If you read the transcript it repeatedly made the incorrect assertion (hallucinated) that it’s totally normal for Claude Code to use Base64 armoring.

It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would.

nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.

New comment by rgovostes in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

rgovostes — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:13:46 +0000

To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.

New comment by rgovostes in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

rgovostes — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:35:44 +0000

I'll admit ignorance here, but I've been skeptical of the claim that new construction drives rents down. What I actually see is: a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on.

Maybe if you flood the market with 30% more housing units like Austin you get the Econ 101 effect. On the other hand, apartment owners realized intentional vacancy is a profitable strategy, which alone seems to defy that basic interpretation.

New comment by rgovostes in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

rgovostes — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 05:15:39 +0000

It is a fantastic book. The author was a spectator for much of the treasure hunt. The adulation of Thompson is amusing in light of the fact that, 15 years after publication, he was arrested for defrauding his investors.

Thompson himself published a coffee table book about the find, "America's Lost Treasure."

Treasure hunter freed after decade of refusing to reveal site of shipwreck gold

rgovostes — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:36:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tommy-thompson-treasure-hunter-ship-of-gold-missing-coins-released-prison/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329627

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by rgovostes in "Exploring the ocean with Raspberry Pi–powered marine robots"

rgovostes — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:09:16 +0000

CUREE, the Curious Robot for Ecosystem Exploration, is another autonomous underwater vehicle built around the Raspberry Pi 4: https://warp.whoi.edu/curee/

New comment by rgovostes in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

rgovostes — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:55:14 +0000

It's hard to find any fault with the M1 models released 5 years ago. According to second-hand listings on Swappa, US$1200 would get you a capable M1 Max; the equivalent M5 Max is US$3600.

New comment by rgovostes in "iPhone 17e"

rgovostes — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:46:02 +0000

I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.

New comment by rgovostes in "Layoffs at Block"

rgovostes — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:23:50 +0000

My recent experience with Cash App made it apparent that something is really going awry at Block: My decade-old account was suspended, despite no suspicious activity and being in my full legal name and address and connected to the same checking account I've always used. I appealed, but of course they upheld their opaque decision, which is now permanent. I'm not surprised they're struggling if this is how they treat users who have plenty of alternative options.

New comment by rgovostes in "Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel""

rgovostes — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:28:49 +0000

> I wrote SQLite, and I think it should be pronounced "S-Q-L-ite". Like a mineral. But I'm cool with y'all pronouncing it any way you want. :-)

— D. Richard Hipp

New comment by rgovostes in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

rgovostes — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:46:54 +0000

Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.

Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.

New comment by rgovostes in "FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson Issues Warning Letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook"

rgovostes — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:27:01 +0000

Always try to consume a balanced news diet of The New Yorker and The New York Post.

New comment by rgovostes in "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish (2005)"

rgovostes — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:13:19 +0000

Not to be overlooked: The "Related Artifacts" section at the bottom has 8 drafts written between January and June 2005. https://stevejobsarchive.com/artifact/steves-drafts

New comment by rgovostes in "Bugs Apple loves"

rgovostes — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:39:30 +0000

And if you use it long enough you'll get reminders to celebrate grandpa's 113th birthday because the only way to remove entries from that calendar is to delete useful data from your contacts.

New comment by rgovostes in "Bugs Apple loves"

rgovostes — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:30:32 +0000

I had eSIMs get screwed up on my iPhone a year or two ago when I deleted an expired eSIM. It asked me "Do you want to update contacts to use ?" and I knew I was in trouble.

I did successfully use a backup editor, iMazing, to exclude the telephony data from a backup in order to fix it, but it cost me $30 and hours (transferring my Signal data to a second device and back). For 99.999% of their customers this would require a total erase-install. All because Apple has an off-by-one error somewhere.

New comment by rgovostes in "Replacing Protobuf with Rust"

rgovostes — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:36:24 +0000

What the hell happened to Protobuf anyway? Go look at their repo; it’s positively byzantine. There are two or three different Python backends.

New comment by rgovostes in "Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones"

rgovostes — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 04:29:28 +0000

Sadly it is true. It’s called Flex Lock or US Carrier Flex Policy: https://www.usmobile.com/blog/what-is-flex-lock/

The gist is that it allows a third-party seller to stock a bunch of identical, not-yet-locked phones and offer a choice of carrier plans. The phone binds to whichever carrier the user first activated on.

So if you’re buying a phone, verify it is not one of these units.

New comment by rgovostes in "Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results"

rgovostes — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:04:22 +0000

I have a few app subscriptions that are under $5/yr, like Parcel, and always purchase the latest release of Acorn for around $20/yr. I use those apps frequently and hope those rates are supporting the independent developers who make them. I would gladly pay more for tools I use to make a living.

A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.

On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.

I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.