Hacker News: squokko

New comment by squokko in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

squokko — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:21:51 +0000

Time to start learning Mandarin

New comment by squokko in "Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art"

squokko — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:18:06 +0000

The law has always been able to recognize a distinction between Hunter S. Thompson reading Ernest Hemingway and learning from his style and a billion GPUs reading a billion books to be able to produce it on demand. It takes time for the law to catch up to the technology but it will.

New comment by squokko in "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"

squokko — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:10:19 +0000

Is this open source? Is there a GitHub repo?

New comment by squokko in "Amazon One palm authentication discontinued"

squokko — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:17:28 +0000

People don't want to give Amazon their biometrics?

New comment by squokko in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

squokko — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:41:13 +0000

It's not a hard problem to solve, you scale the punishment for the cases you prosecute so high that it makes the expected value of stealing a suitcase negative

New comment by squokko in "San Francisco Graffiti"

squokko — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:39:32 +0000

You jail 100 and the thousands stop doing it.

New comment by squokko in "Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC"

squokko — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:14:25 +0000

Very cool! What's your license on this stuff?

New comment by squokko in "Feds: Brothers stole $25M in crypto in 12 seconds. Defense: outsmarted bots"

squokko — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:45:09 +0000

What does it mean to steal crypto if "code is law"?

New comment by squokko in "Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap"

squokko — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:15:00 +0000

I can't imagine that contrails are a significant percentage of cloud cover.

New comment by squokko in "Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs"

squokko — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 05:52:02 +0000

One thing that's interesting about these regional laws is that they all necessarily use geolocation, but the regional laws are jurisdiction-based. Geolocation is inaccurate in many circumstances and also just insufficient in some circumstances (VPN, near a state border, proxied requests, embedded content, etc.)

New comment by squokko in "Show HN: Tinder but it's only pictures of my wife and I can only swipe right"

squokko — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 05:15:50 +0000

Does this use Apple's face-recognition tech to automatically populate pictures of your spouse, or do you have to add them manually? I was under the impression that third-party apps couldn't access the People albums in PhotoKit.

New comment by squokko in "MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions"

squokko — Mon, 06 May 2024 07:50:20 +0000

There was a very simple reason for them: to hire more non-Asian minority faculty. Just as with SAT scores, if you evaluate candidates numerically, Asian faculty will take ~50% of the spots and Black faculty will take ~1% of the spots. But if you add a job requirement of "has helped do DEI woo for Black students" then it's a lot easier to justify hiring the Black candidate.

New comment by squokko in "T-Mobile employees across the country receive cash offers to illegally swap SIMs"

squokko — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 21:03:58 +0000

When you have $15/hr employees who can enable a $100,000 scam this is bound to happen.

New comment by squokko in "Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case"

squokko — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 07:01:33 +0000

In banning the death penalty for rape, the US Supreme Court explicitly... in black letter text... left open the possibility of executing major drug traffickers. We should use that door more often.

New comment by squokko in "Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case"

squokko — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 07:00:38 +0000

Naw, the death penalty is much harsher penalty (seeing as how almost all death row inmates use every means possible to avoid it). Particularly so for white collar people who never thought they would be tied to a tree and shot 10 times in the heart. Just the thought of that happening can deter a lot of people, and even if it doesn't, it's what she deserves.

New comment by squokko in "Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case"

squokko — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 06:57:17 +0000

Stealing 6% of a large country's GDP causes more aggregate harm than murdering ten individuals (which would be an obvious death penalty case).

New comment by squokko in "Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case"

squokko — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 06:55:59 +0000

If that happens, it will come to resemble an Indian or Indonesian city.

New comment by squokko in "Microchess for the Kim-1 (2006)"

squokko — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:49:31 +0000

Crazy in this age to look at that hex dump and realize that it is a chess playing program. One way of thinking about it: the first image on the web page is 27 times the size of the program.

New comment by squokko in "A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing"

squokko — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 07:27:10 +0000

Zuck's take on the Apple Vision Pro is mostly aligned with my own (disinterested) take, having tried both the Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro.

New comment by squokko in "Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras"

squokko — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 09:12:34 +0000

Yes, all of those should be legal. And other voters can oppose them. For example, by electing national politicians who can pass laws like the Civil Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act.