Hacker News: spelk

New comment by spelk in "Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache"

spelk — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:43:15 +0000

In a similar vein: A while ago, Chinese adolescents were bypassing age restrictions for playtime in Mainland China by using the published national ID numbers of insolvent debtors (which are apparently published online to ensure that no financial institutions extend credit to them) to sign up for accounts. From what I understand, they started partially masking these national ID numbers in response to that.

New comment by spelk in "All Four Sentinel-1 Satellites Are Now Live"

spelk — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:16:46 +0000

>We're exploring using the SAR data for conservation / deforestation monitoring. Anybody else working in this space who has blazed the trail?

Dr. Naomi Schwartz and her lab at the University of British Columbia comes to mind for remote sensing applications in relation to deforestation monitoring.

New comment by spelk in "US Job Market Visualizer"

spelk — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:04:24 +0000

I would speculate that careers that require Master's degrees tend to be more saturated, and the result of that is qualification creep. Examples of this include teaching, social work, library sciences, etc.

New comment by spelk in "Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester"

spelk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:50:10 +0000

Is this a gut feeling, or is there a basis for this claim? My comment referenced solely due process in relation to the state.

New comment by spelk in "Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester"

spelk — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:02:42 +0000

In what sense? Germany has among the strongest judicial oversight for invasion of privacy in Europe. Due process is followed when securing search warrants that provide access to subscriber data (Germany does not have administrative subpoenas like in the US and other countries).

Former attempts at surveillance have been struck down in the Bundesverfassungsgericht, and the right to privacy has even been affirmed for foreigners (as opposed to other countries like the US that reserve that foreign nationals have zero due process rights for invasion of privacy).

New comment by spelk in "Show HN: Online OCR Free – Batch OCR UI for Tesseract, Gemini and OpenRouter"

spelk — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:31:34 +0000

Very glad to see Bangladeshi developers represent. Keep up the great work.

New comment by spelk in "Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"

spelk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 22:38:26 +0000

Does anyone know of an effective alternative for Android?

New comment by spelk in "Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"

spelk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 22:37:58 +0000

Whispering [0] is Windows compatible and has gotten a lot better on Windows despite being extremely rough around the edges at first.

[0] https://github.com/EpicenterHQ/epicenter

New comment by spelk in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

spelk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:48:32 +0000

ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking yields the same answer - walk.

If I append 'think carefully' to the end of the prompt, it returns driving as the correct answer.

New comment by spelk in "Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts?"

spelk — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:00:59 +0000

They're probably talking about ServaRICA. They post deals on LowEndTalk.

New comment by spelk in "We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole"

spelk — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:37:59 +0000

It may just feel that way because we're less likely to look at SO directly now that there are better alternatives.

New comment by spelk in "Keeping Syria connected during war: Surviving ISIS and Intelligence"

spelk — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:20:24 +0000

Thank you for sharing.

This actually scratches an itch I've had on and off over the years. Over a decade ago, I remember reading a Quora post along the lines of 'How does ISIS still have internet? Who maintains the infrastructure?', and the only response was from an alleged ISIS propagandist (or an internet troll) with vagueries about the reach of ISIS, and that they couldn't answer for "security reasons".

That question lived in my head on and off throughout college, and I'm glad to have gotten a bit closer to understanding the reality of what was happening on the ground.

New comment by spelk in "I DM'd a Korean presidential candidate and ended up building his core campaign"

spelk — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 20:54:59 +0000

Political campaign staff often keep hours way past what a volunteer with a 9-5 job has. It's a terrible life, terrible profession but it still draws in people that are willing to find meaning in being a workaholic and seen as "politically savvy".

New comment by spelk in "Mozilla says it's finally done with Onerep"

spelk — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:54:37 +0000

I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

New comment by spelk in "The government has no plan for America’s 300 billion pennies"

spelk — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:57:53 +0000

In Canada, I've only ever seen these in grocery stores, operating for a fee (and they don't accept commissions) and a singular credit union branch (because they serve the underbanked at that particular location).

New comment by spelk in "FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is"

spelk — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:58:33 +0000

>According to this, Archive.today uses a botnet with changing IP addresses to circumvent anti-scraping measures.

Archive.today uses Tor exit nodes when all of its main server IPs are blocked, so I believe this to be a disingenuous claim.

New comment by spelk in "Hacking India's largest automaker: Tata Motors"

spelk — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:35:15 +0000

Sorry to be pedantic but I think you mean 'cost center', not loss leader (something sold at a loss to attract customers into your ecosystem/store). You are entirely right otherwise.

New comment by spelk in "A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down"

spelk — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:54:38 +0000

If you've ever dealt with financial institutions in a meaningful way, you'd know that the self-service variety, or the HSBC variety, will create hurdles and enforce policies arbitrarily with no recourse, care or concern for your well-being.

New comment by spelk in "A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down"

spelk — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:50:19 +0000

Not too long ago, I transferred the equivalent of $12 USD from a Fintech chequing account and immediately had my Wise account flagged for sanctions. I had to spend 2 hours drafting and collecting documentation that I was indeed, not a sanctioned entity.

New comment by spelk in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"

spelk — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 20:02:48 +0000

Then it'll come down to an individualist vs a collectivist take.

Triage priorities in referrals are an acceptable trade-off for broadly improved access to health care. The reality is that my eczema doesn't need to be seen before someone else's melanoma.

While I appreciate being able to see a specialist earlier in the US with my health insurance, I know that many ordinary American citizens aren't able to at all and that my insurance displaces incentives to serve underserved communities. I'm not yet an American citizen so I will not preach what the US should or should not do, but I do think it is unfortunate that is the case and I hope that improves.