Hacker News: wodow

New comment by wodow in "First, make me care"

wodow — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:39:47 +0000

> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever...

I would be interested in a study on how long popular accounts do use their one hook -- or set of hooks, or rotate them...

New comment by wodow in "In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)"

wodow — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:50:43 +0000

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... for how Stephenson considered the essay obsolete five years later.

New comment by wodow in "Denmark's Justice Minister calls encrypted messaging a false civil liberty"

wodow — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:12:20 +0000

Something I think is often missing in this evergreen debate: governments have banned encryption before, in amateur radio. See e.g. https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/72/encrypted-traffic...

(Obviously, the difference is in number of users -- not many hams, and lots of internet users, and "a sufficiently large difference in quantity is a difference in kind")

New comment by wodow in "Show HN: Stagewise (YC S25) – Front end coding agent for existing codebases"

wodow — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:01:20 +0000

Does it work with Node/JS/TS front ends only, or can it work with other languages and web frameworks?

New comment by wodow in "XML Summer School, Oxford. 14th to 19th Sept 2025"

wodow — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:05:51 +0000

> 508 Resource Limit Is Reached

HN hug workaround: https://web.archive.org/web/20250711042802/https://xmlsummer...

Reddit starts verifying ages of users in the UK

wodow — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 21:46:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4ep1znk4zo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44565711

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

Using Apple Private Cloud Compute in macOS via Shortcuts

wodow — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:18:55 +0000

Article URL: https://selkie.design/blog/the-shortcut-to-integrating-PCC/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331679

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wodow in "Steve Jackson Games Is Bringing the Fighting Fantasy Books to the US"

wodow — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:00:26 +0000

If you haven't read and/or prefer an app format, the "Sorcery!" series was made into a wonderful set of games by Inkle in 2013: https://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/

New comment by wodow in "Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design)"

wodow — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:04:24 +0000

Thanks for taking a look.

Wikipedia pages are really just the core, and they're a good signal for "notability" given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

I am definitely planning to expand to more sources, both timely and less so.

New comment by wodow in "Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design)"

wodow — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:41:05 +0000

Thank you! I've heard of Slow Journalism, but not Delayed Gratification, which is really beautiful.

New comment by wodow in "Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design)"

wodow — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:24:42 +0000

OP here. One thing I don't have a good answer for yet: this mostly uses Wikipedia as a source. How can I pay back to volunteer editors ("Wikipedians") if this is at all successful? I've seen other sites like newsasfacts.com suggest giving a proportion of profits to the Wikimedia foundation, but obviously they are ultimately separate from the volunteer base, and its fundraising appears increasingly controversial [1, 2].

I slightly balk at the idea, but is a cryptocurrency token possibly the answer? Generate, distribute to editors and have donations come inbound somehow? I see the dangers here!

[1] https://unherd.com/newsroom/the-next-time-wikipedia-asks-for... [2] https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

Show HN: A News Service That Almost Never Emails You (By Design)

wodow — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:36:52 +0000

Hi HN,

I’ve been working on Notably News – a short-form news service that delivers micro updates by email. Instead of constant notifications or daily digests, you get just a few key updates per year on a subject, covering only the most important events.

I follow a lot of different topics but don’t want to rely on social media, Google Alerts, or traditional news sites that flood me with updates, clickbait, or opinions. I just want concise, neutral updates on the most significant events.

I first tried to build something similar ten years ago, leveraging my (very minimal!) academic experience in text summarization. But at the time, I couldn’t get it to work well. Now, modern LLMs make doing this feasible.

HOW IT WORKS:

1. Pick a public figure (or several) to follow

2. We use (mostly!) Wikipedia to watch for updates, then summarize them.

3. Receive short, neutral updates via email – just a couple of sentences when something big happens

WHAT NEXT?

Right now, I’m focusing on tracking famous people. When I first attempted this in 2014, I tried to cover everything at once (which was… a mistake). This time, I’m taking more of a step-by-step approach.

I’d love your feedback, inc what topics or categories should I add next?

Try it out: https://www.notably.news/

Minimal sign up: Just choose who you care about and enter an email address; no spam

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43011217

Points: 4

# Comments: 5

New comment by wodow in "Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost Its Faith"

wodow — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 10:47:00 +0000

Are you able to say more on your startup story, through the exit?

Boardy – the AI "superconnector" that phones you up

wodow — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 16:55:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.boardy.ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587254

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

DOJ has demanded Google sells off Chrome

wodow — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:39:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp81ppr3l9go

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42202914

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Semantic Builders – commercial Wikidata mirror

wodow — Thu, 02 May 2024 15:33:29 +0000

Article URL: https://semantic.builders

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40237414

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

EURISKO Lives

wodow — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 03:50:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.funcall.org/lisp/2024/03/22/eurisko-lives/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40128285

Points: 129

# Comments: 97

New comment by wodow in "Show HN: I made an app to use local AI as daily driver"

wodow — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:22:07 +0000

By George, ItsMattyG is right! After editing a question (with the "stylus"/pen icon), the revision number counter that appears (e.g. "1 / 2") has arrows next to it that allow forward and backward navigation through the new branches.

This was surprisingly undiscoverable. I wonder if it's documented. I couldn't find anything from a quick look at help.openai.com .

New comment by wodow in "Show HN: I made an app to use local AI as daily driver"

wodow — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 12:41:36 +0000

> * The main thing that makes ChatGPTs ui useful to me is the ability to change any of my prompts in the conversation & it will then go back to that part of the converation and regenerate, while removing the rest of the conversation after that point.

Agreed, but what I would also really like (from this and ChatGPT) would be branching: take a conversation in two different ways from some point and retain the seperate and shared history.

I'm not sure what the UI should be. Threads? (like mail or Usenet)

New comment by wodow in "The Case for Memory Safe Roadmaps"

wodow — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 14:11:03 +0000

Their "Appendix: Memory Safe Languages" lists:

C#, Go, Java, Python, Rust & Swift