Hacker News: woodrowbarlow

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Show HN: Rickub – The Smartest Git in the Universe"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:50:00 +0000

yet another gitea/forgejo instance with some extra plumbing, hosted in the EU. this is a github alternative, not a git alternative. rickub's conflation of the two seems deliberate.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:57:34 +0000

100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:20:48 +0000

fun fact: the first mass-produced consumer in-car live navigation (1981) was all dead reckoning and gyroscopes. at this point, the GPS network was operational but not available for consumer use until 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "We are rebuilding Monica"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:34:01 +0000

what? my impression is that it's truer than ever and this is why so many open-source projects are limiting ai contributions. and the reason GitHub can't seem to stay online for more than a day.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:13:53 +0000

so, skeuomorphic

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Run Minecraft in a Windows sandbox for computer use agents"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:58:13 +0000

for minecraft in particular, there is: https://github.com/mindcraft-bots/mindcraft

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID"

woodrowbarlow — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:09:37 +0000

do you believe this should be mandated by regulation, or voluntarily offered by manufacturers as a value-add feature? ("all" implies the former.)

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:54:29 +0000

"become accessible to anyone that has permission to access it" is a nothing-burger sentence.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

woodrowbarlow — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:17:09 +0000

gitea/forgejo both do an 80% job of covering these needs, ime. they have mostly-GH-compatible APIs.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

woodrowbarlow — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:49:42 +0000

oh hello, thank you for your work on an excellent product! one small difference i ran into last weekend is that foregjo forwards the FORGEJO_TOKEN in the environment to composite actions so that they don't need to have a required "token" input.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

woodrowbarlow — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:01:50 +0000

no; gitea and foregjo both support actions-style CI/CD and both serve mostly GH-compatible APIs and have GH-style apps. it's not 100% compatible (forgejo is a little more compatible than gitea [^1]), but many of your workflows might "just work" without even renaming the .github folder.

^1: in my recent experience, for my particular use cases

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:54:16 +0000

my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.

pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "License plate reader searches should require a warrant"

woodrowbarlow — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:10:59 +0000

the argument is that they should be called traffic surveillance cameras.

for the record: whatever they're called, and in fact even if they just POSTed txt license plate numbers, i'd still be opposed because they're collecting info about people who've done nothing wrong (unlike red light cameras).

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "License plate reader searches should require a warrant"

woodrowbarlow — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:45:08 +0000

i see it more like an argument against increasingly networked solutions. red-light cameras used to just upload when an incident occurred (or maybe required routine physical downloading?). the object itself did one thing. now it's cheap to feed continuous live feeds to a centralized processor... and once it's there, it's cheap to do a lot more.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion"

woodrowbarlow — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:28:55 +0000

letting companies train on books for only the price of a paperback and then forcing them to destroy their scans would truly be the worst of all worlds. (ps: the scanning process typically destroys the book too; they chop off the spines.)

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

woodrowbarlow — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:26:49 +0000

also, as this scales, what would this mean for closed-weight hosted models? i imagine it's possible (but difficult) to re-derive model weights by de-lidding and inspecting the die... so will this only ever be used for open-weights models?

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:52:54 +0000

not OP but yes, i consider the tech sphere's dive into mass surveillance to be war profiteering and have eliminated or minimized several in my life including amazon and spotify.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Mario Meets Pareto"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:16:09 +0000

is this also true when the irrelevant details are (by coincidence) interesting (to you)? it sounds to me like GP is interested in mario kart and you simply aren't, so this is a perfectly natural result.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

woodrowbarlow — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:46:33 +0000

for real. if you want to make the web safer for children, start by holding ad networks to a higher accountability. it's painfully obvious "protect the children" is not the real goal.

New comment by woodrowbarlow in "We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars"

woodrowbarlow — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 03:44:47 +0000

wrapping text at 55-75 characters per line is often recommended in digital typography by UX. research implies that an optimum length exists to maximize reading speed, and although it depends on many factors 55-75 is often parroted as a universal rule.