Hacker News: robflynn

New comment by robflynn in "Deno 2.8"

robflynn — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:00:15 +0000

I hadn't heard of crystal somehow, I work with ruby a lot so that might be fun to play around with.

New comment by robflynn in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

robflynn — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:19:55 +0000

There are probably different reasons for different people. I can definitely see the angle that trying to specifically pretend to not be AI when contributing to open source could be seen as a bad thing due to the open source supply chain attacks, some AI-driven, that we've been having, not to mention the AI-slop PR spam.

But, I also get Anthropic's side that when they're contributing they don't want their internals leaked. If it had been left at that, that's fine, but having it pretend like it's not AI at all rubs me a little bit the wrong way. Why try to hide it?

New comment by robflynn in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

robflynn — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:45:11 +0000

It also says don't announce that you are AI in any way including asking it to not say "Co-authored by Claude". I read the file myself.

I'm still inclined to think people might be overreacting to that bit since it seems to be for anthropic-only to prevent leaking internal info.

But I did read the prompt and it did say hide the fact that you are AI.

New comment by robflynn in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

robflynn — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:21:54 +0000

Oh, me too. I started out as tech support for a dial up ISP in the 90s. It was rough. I am always polite to customer service. I just feel like it wasn't the lady that was attacked so much as it was the fax machine, the policy, the institution. She had some frustration, but it sounds like he was even polite to her, Didn't yell, didn't call her names or anything. He just opted for malicious compliance.

You have me thinking about old customer service war stories now, I wanted to share one of the more ridiculous ones. A tornado came through the small town and knocked out the utility lines. Being a dial-up ISP our infrastructure was a bit messed up for a few days. Once it was all squared away we had an angry customer call and yell at us about how we were offline for a few days and how unprofessional it was to not let him know that we were going offline. That he wasn't so much mad we were offline but we should have told him so he could have planned around it. He was yelling so much. I finally just said "sir, next time we schedule a tornado I will be sure to let you know." and he accepted the answer and thanked me. People are so odd.

New comment by robflynn in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

robflynn — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:20:42 +0000

They attacked a fax machine, I don't think it has feelings. The woman will get over her frustration at seeing it print for two hours.

New comment by robflynn in "AI optimism is a class privilege"

robflynn — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 22:11:40 +0000

I am reminded of this, I feel like its kind of a similar phenomenon: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1m803ba/th...

New comment by robflynn in "New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers"

robflynn — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:20:10 +0000

My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.

New comment by robflynn in "TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues"

robflynn — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:42:01 +0000

The new TOS also says it tracks: immigration status, political affiliation, whether you identify as non-binary or transgender, religion, activist content you consume, etc.

New comment by robflynn in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

robflynn — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 02:48:50 +0000

Ah, the good old days. I remember dialing up local BBSes with QMODEM.

AT&C1&D2S36=7DT*70,,,5551212

New comment by robflynn in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

robflynn — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:05:43 +0000

I am embarrassed that I didn't think to do this. Thank you :)

New comment by robflynn in "Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable"

robflynn — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:51:10 +0000

Mine will turn my LG on, control the volume, do all of that, it just won't ever turn it off. The AppleTV will turn itself off, but the TV itself will revert back to its screen saver display complaining about No Input.

New comment by robflynn in "macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt"

robflynn — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 03:16:10 +0000

Oh, that explains why it looked so odd when I enabled HDR on my Studio.

New comment by robflynn in "Show HN: Tommy – Turn ESP32 devices into through-wall motion sensors"

robflynn — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:06:31 +0000

This tech is at least a decade old.

New comment by robflynn in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

robflynn — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 20:29:46 +0000

Yes, this is so scary! I know I'm just hopping in here with anecdotes but this happened to my friend's mother as well. She was seemingly getting dementia, her health got really bad, she was tired all the time, couldn't figure out what it was for a while. Eventually they figured out UTI, treated it, and all the mental stuff went away as well.

New comment by robflynn in "Discovering that a Bluetooth car battery monitor is siphoning location data"

robflynn — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 23:22:33 +0000

You shouldn't just automatically trust it, but it allows you to examine what its doing and make your own informed decision about whether or not you can trust it. If you discover your data is being collected in an open source project you can, at the least, make an informed decision and give consent to it.

And while everyone won't be able to understand what they're looking at, the community as a whole would benefit from people looking at it an announcing/discussing problematic things they see in the code base.

If an open source project is syphoning data, someone's going to see it and talk about it.

If a closed project is doing it, it's harder / more complicated for that act to be discovered.

New comment by robflynn in "Report: U.S. pedestrian death rate increased during COVID"

robflynn — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 08:56:39 +0000

The same thing happened to me recently! I had the walk indicator lit, crossing in a cross walk, someone comes speeding up to me and stopped and yelled at me to "get my ass out of the road." Someone else drove up on the sidewalk and almost hit me -- they were on their phone when it happened. People are nuts.

New comment by robflynn in "So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)"

robflynn — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 01:31:38 +0000

The open source community can be wild sometimes. Back when I was still maintainer and lead dev for Gaim (not Pidgin), I would occasionally get downright hateful people e-mailing me for not implementing whatever feature they thought needed to be implemented, or not getting it implemented quickly enough. One guy managed to get ahold of my cell phone number somehow and called me at 4am to discuss "his ideas" with me for the project. I ended up having to change my number.

Thankfully 95% of the people I interacted with in the community were great and were great, but that other 5% was rough.

New comment by robflynn in "Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell"

robflynn — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 00:25:49 +0000

Oh, cool, I used to run something very similar called steamwatch.com, back before they allowed you to have watch lists. It would monitor prices, let you know about sales, and I would occasionally run game give away raffles for free with whatever ad revenue I collected. It only ever made maybe $100 over its entire run. This would've been over 10 years ago though so I doubt mine and yours ever coexisted.

New comment by robflynn in "New video of Tesla crash demonstrates the problem of semi-automated driving"

robflynn — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 05:27:18 +0000

Not to mention, with a car you get to decide your own schedule. If I want to take the train where I am, I have to be there at 4:30am or... well, that's it. That's the only time.

New comment by robflynn in "Mac OS Ventura Issues"

robflynn — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 20:40:14 +0000

If you don't mind hotkeys, I eventually discovered that cmd+up arrow will take you to the parent folder.