Hacker News: semanticist

New comment by semanticist in "eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible"

semanticist — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:43:31 +0000

GameStop's idea behind using their physical locations isn't for ease of shipping so much as ease of verification. People buying brand-name stuff off eBay (and Vinted, etc) pay for verification services to make sure that it's real. The idea - which is the only good/sane part of this entire takeover proposal - is to have retail locations that do the verification in person instead of shipping items to a central location for verification on sale.

But if eBay thought that would bring in more sales, I doubt it would be hard to find empty retail outlets in every city/town in the US and Europe since high street retail has been on a death spiral for years.

You can already use lockers for delivery/drop off with eBay through their courier company partners, at least in the UK.

New comment by semanticist in "Man finds $1M worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster"

semanticist — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:30:31 +0000

Not even ill gotten, the guy had legitimately pre-ordered them and was sent them early. They turned up at his door and threatened him and his wife, awful stuff.

Code for Cats – or how your LLM is a cosplayer

semanticist — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:16:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.colincornaby.me/2026/01/code-for-cats-or-how-your-llm-is-a-cosplayer/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544419

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by semanticist in "Standalone Meshtastic Command Center – One HTML File Offline"

semanticist — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 21:41:12 +0000

There’s no reason to think this works fine given the readme mentions the author is waiting on their first meshtastic device to test against and the install instructions include ‘insert download link here’.

It’s a shame this is just slop, an approach like this could be interesting, using web APIs instead of native apps… but iOS Safari doesn’t support Web Bluetooth so it’s not going to work on iPhones at all which is a big unmentioned limitation.

Probably because it’s untested AI slop.

New comment by semanticist in "BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive"

semanticist — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:33:06 +0000

There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.

I'm sure BMW would love to not be liable in those cases if they could just decide not to be liable, but inspections and fuses presumably turn out to be cheaper than the settlements they'd otherwise be paying.

New comment by semanticist in "Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall"

semanticist — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 10:44:14 +0000

"Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat."

They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.

New comment by semanticist in "That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus"

semanticist — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:36:43 +0000

The left accuse the BBC of bias because, eg, the new Green Party leader has not been on any relevant BBC politics programs while Farage and other right wing politicians are regular fixtures.

The right accuse the BBC of bias because they fact-check them when they lie.

These things are not equivalent.

The BBC has lost a lot of credibility over the last decade or so. I can completely understand why they rolled over (often pre-emptively) to placate a Tory government that talked a lot about defunding them, but ultimately it has not served them well.

The newspaper situation in the UK is diabolical for sure.

New comment by semanticist in "Why Koreans ask what year you were born"

semanticist — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 23:35:40 +0000

With 'ned' in the username I might've thought Glaswegian. :D

New comment by semanticist in "How can traditional British TV survive the US streaming giants"

semanticist — Sat, 17 May 2025 15:39:35 +0000

Red Dwarf used practical effects in the era when VideoToasters were a thing. For some reason the BBC replaced the lovely miniature shots of space ships with crap CG in a mid-2000s remaster.

New comment by semanticist in "Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral"

semanticist — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:13:37 +0000

The OP isn't talking about iPhone devs, they're talking about a decade before that when Apple was called 'Apple Computer' and had mad a series of bad business choices (confusing product line up, allowing other companies to make Mac clones, etc).

Developers had started to abandon the Mac OS platform - or at least start making Windows versions of previously Mac-only software - and getting developer confidence back was one of the key things that kept the company alive to grow into the consumer electronics manufacturer that it is today.

China just turned off us supplies of minerals critical for defense and cleantech

semanticist — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:28:39 +0000

Article URL: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/05/china-just-turned-off-u-s-supplies-of-minerals-critical-for-defense-cleantech/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43597959

Points: 65

# Comments: 27

New comment by semanticist in "Flame – BBS and MUD"

semanticist — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:22:12 +0000

If you're not familiar with MUDs than perhaps a system based on "being a MUD" just isn't aimed at you?

New comment by semanticist in "Buy once, use forever A directory of one-time purchase software. Add yours"

semanticist — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 02:40:00 +0000

Literally the first piece of software I looked at there does not have any option I could find for paying once, just one and three year subscription plans. (NanoCAD.)

So it looks like they'll list anyone who pays the fee, making the whole exercise a waste of time.

Interview home coding tasks: my policy

semanticist — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 13:25:47 +0000

Article URL: https://hunsley.io/posts/2024/interviews-home-coding-tasks/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43183416

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by semanticist in "“The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson"

semanticist — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:28:40 +0000

There's no ad breaks on the BBC.

New comment by semanticist in "Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities"

semanticist — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 10:13:12 +0000

Oh, that's a pity. I'm pretty bad at keeping up to date on MacOS releases, but I should probably start figuring out `wdutil` so that my muscle memory is adapted before I've got no choice!

New comment by semanticist in "Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities"

semanticist — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 08:44:53 +0000

Want to scan the local wifi networks from the command line, and get useful information like signal strength?

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -s

I set a shell alias so I can just do `airport -s`. I've no idea why this is hidden away inside some framework and not in a directory which is in the normal path, but there you go.

New comment by semanticist in "New Mac Mini with M4"

semanticist — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:31:14 +0000

Apple offering expensive upgrades for storage and memory pre-dates the existence of iCloud storage by decades. It was entirely standard before MobileMe, or Apple offering any kind of "cloud" services.

Apple just charge a lot of money for upgrades, even did when it was trivial to do them yourself, and they're not going to change once they made it impossible to do any kind of internal upgrade.

New comment by semanticist in "OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B"

semanticist — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:40:21 +0000

That doesn't sounds like brilliant margins, to be honest. You've left out the entire "running a business" costs, plus the model training costs. They need to pay their staff, offices, and especially lawyers (for all the lawsuits over the scraped content used to train the models).

It's not unusual for a startup to not be profitable, and they're obviously not as the company doesn't make a profit, but I'm not sure why isolating one aspect of their business and declaring it profitable would justify the idea that this company is inevitably a good investment "even if the company went defunct tomorrow".

Perhaps you meant "win" in the sense of "being influential" or something, but I'm pretty sure the people who invested billions of dollars use definitions that involve more concrete returns on their investment.

New comment by semanticist in "OpenAI completes deal that values company at $157B"

semanticist — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 21:39:03 +0000

I don't think it really matters how much people love their product if every person using it costs them money. I'm sure people would love a company that sold US$10 bills for 25c, but it's not exactly a sustainable venture.

Will people love ChatGPT et al just as much if OpenAI have to charge what it costs them to buy and run all the GPUs? Maybe, but it's absolutely not certain.

If they "went defunct" tomorrow then the people who just invested US$6bn and lost every penny probably would not agree with your assessment that it "ended well".