Hacker News: ro_bit

New comment by ro_bit in "Couple pay >$800k for a gene-editing therapy for their daughter. She died."

ro_bit — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:49:55 +0000

If families paying for experimental treatment is illegal in China, how did these researchers get away with it?

New comment by ro_bit in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

ro_bit — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:29:53 +0000

SF will recover after a few more AI billboards

New comment by ro_bit in "The AirPods Effect"

ro_bit — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:36:35 +0000

The author's going to be floored when he hears about video games

New comment by ro_bit in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

ro_bit — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:18:59 +0000

You can get free profile decorations these days from watching ads (discord “orbs”). It would be interesting to know how many of those users have the nitro subscription badge next to their name

New comment by ro_bit in "Poll: How often do you check "newest"?"

ro_bit — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:13:51 +0000

> We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content

Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead

New comment by ro_bit in "What is a Demand Coop"

ro_bit — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:51:07 +0000

What’s the difference between a demand coop and a consumer coop, like REI? (Or are they the same?)

New comment by ro_bit in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

ro_bit — Sat, 16 May 2026 05:16:01 +0000

Yeah but only one of those actually puts those responsible in prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

> On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty on four of the seven counts related to defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients

New comment by ro_bit in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

ro_bit — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:13:17 +0000

> Everything that relies on a data connection will no longer work. This includes things like over-the-air updates as well as Toyota cloud-based services and SOS functionality

I hate how this is a trade off. It’s totally possible for cars to broadcast their location only if the SOS is pressed or the crash sensor is triggered, but it feels like there’s no way to have that without also having everything else.

New comment by ro_bit in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

ro_bit — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:39:43 +0000

> In 2022, Carelon settled a lawsuit for $13 million that alleged the company, then called AIM, had used a variety of techniques to avoid approving coverage requests. Among them: The company set its fax machines to receive only 5 to 10 pages.

Who are the people who sleep at night after designing these policies?

New comment by ro_bit in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

ro_bit — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:26:19 +0000

Yeah they just finished their series A funding yesterday. Sorry to hear you missed out

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?