Hacker News: ro_bit

New comment by ro_bit in "Silicon Valley's Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School"

ro_bit — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:44:38 +0000

> He fueled the nonprofit’s growth partly through unorthodox fundraising. Tessellations offered parents a deal: pay half their tuition as a donation for a tax write-off. “Lawyers say, ‘Please don’t do that,’” Stanat recalled, “I’m like, ‘But is it illegal?’ ‘No, not illegal.’ ‘OK, great, we’ll do it.’”

How?

New comment by ro_bit in "Roblox shares plummet 18% as child safety measures weigh on bookings"

ro_bit — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:39:59 +0000

They have to head off the investor whos going to ask "is child safety bullish?"

New comment by ro_bit in "LinkedIn is scanning browser extensions"

ro_bit — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:14:14 +0000

Why is my Chrome telling random websites which extensions I have installed?

New comment by ro_bit in "Donating Agent Payments Protocol to the Fido Alliance"

ro_bit — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:24:37 +0000

> like securing and purchasing limited-run tickets the moment they’re on sale — based on pre-authorized user instructions.

Glad they focused on the most pro-social use cases of agent payments, like scalper bots. For a moment I feared they lost their way

New comment by ro_bit in "At long last, InfoWars is ours"

ro_bit — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:06:12 +0000

Finally, wojak invocation on HN

New comment by ro_bit in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

ro_bit — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:40:06 +0000

Which fringe puritanical lobbbyist group is going to step up and take credit for this one

(reference https://www.engadget.com/gaming/steam-now-bans-games-that-vi...)

New comment by ro_bit in "What you need to know before touching a video file"

ro_bit — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:42:03 +0000

I edit videos on a hobbyist level (mostly using davinci resolve to edit clips of me dying in video games to upload to a shareX host to show to friends). The big takeaway for me was reading that for quality/efficiency libx264 is better than nvenc for rendering h264 video. All this time I’ve assumed nvenc is better because it used shiny GPU technology! Is libx264 better for recording high quality videos too? I know it will run on CPU unlike NVENC but I doubt that’s an issue for my use case.

Edit: from some googling it looks like encoding is encoding, whether it’s used for recording or rendering footage. In that case the same quality arguments the article is making should apply for recording too. I only did a cursory search though and have not had a chance to test so if anyone knows better feel free to respond

New comment by ro_bit in "Doxers posing as cops are tricking big tech firms into sharing people's data"

ro_bit — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 05:27:20 +0000

> But officers can also make emergency data requests, or EDRs, in cases involving a threat of imminent harm or death. These requests typically bypass any additional verification steps by the companies who are under pressure to fulfill the request as quickly as possible.

How do companies decide which EDRs to fulfill and which ones require a judicial subpoena? Are companies ever even under the obligation to fulfill an EDR?

New comment by ro_bit in "X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run"

ro_bit — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:13:50 +0000

Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic

New comment by ro_bit in "SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search"

ro_bit — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 06:21:53 +0000

I notice a distinction made in the docs for image, video, and "web page" slop. Will there be a way to aggressively categorize filter web page slop separately from the other two? There's an uncomfortable amount of authors, even posted on this forum, who write insightful posts that (at least from what I can tell) aren't AI slop, but for some reason they decide to header it with a generated image. While I find that distateful, I would only want to filter that if the content of the post text itself was slop too. Will the distinction in the docs allow for that?

New comment by ro_bit in "Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025"

ro_bit — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 08:15:27 +0000

The blog post is about the hiring process for a three person game studio

New comment by ro_bit in "Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025"

ro_bit — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 06:34:23 +0000

One note that might be good to highlight in the article is that the take-home is expected to be 2 hours long. From my experience, they are much longer so I was initially surprised to see take-home's being given before an initial call until I looked at the assignment itself.

New comment by ro_bit in "Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left"

ro_bit — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 16:56:15 +0000

> The Boeing 737-800 had just 220kg of fuel left in its tanks when it finally landed, according to a picture of what appears to be a handwritten technical log. Pilots who examined the picture said this would be enough for just five or six minutes of flying.

For reference, passenger airlines immediately declare emergency if their planned flight path would put them under 30 minutes of fuel (at least in the US). Landing with 5 minutes remaining of fuel is very atypical

New comment by ro_bit in "Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays"

ro_bit — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:29:47 +0000

Makes sense. I appreciate the explanation

New comment by ro_bit in "Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays"

ro_bit — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 17:01:50 +0000

The y axis only goes up to 0.4%

edit: see azundos explanation

New comment by ro_bit in "Mexico's welfare policies helped 13.4M people out of poverty"

ro_bit — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 21:59:12 +0000

Why did the “no access to health services” figure double?

New comment by ro_bit in "Open AI announces $1.5M bonus for every employee"

ro_bit — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:31:52 +0000

Are there any news sources corroborating this? Maybe it's early but I'm surprised I can't find any articles from OpenAI or press outlets about this. Googling "openAI bonus" gives some reddit threads, some linkedin posts, and this hacker news post

New comment by ro_bit in "Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market"

ro_bit — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:09:06 +0000

Thanks for your response! I love this forum for how many experts chime in in the comments section

New comment by ro_bit in "Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market"

ro_bit — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 20:45:34 +0000

The title scared me a bit before I opened the article and realized it was talking about restaurant->consumer food delivery services. While that isn't great, I was initially thinking was that the companies that facilitate the food delivery supply chains around the world were massively consolidated (I sure hope they aren't)

New comment by ro_bit in "The 'Arbitrage Consultants' Promising Risk-Free Sports Betting"

ro_bit — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 21:56:20 +0000

What stops online gambling conglomerates from creating terms that say “you can’t hedge your promotional money bet on another gambling site” and cooperate with other sites to enforce it? Casinos already happily cooperate with each other to ban card counters from blackjack

Also for anyone confused by the article, the Wikipedia for matched betting is much better at explaining all this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matched_betting