Hacker News: xaphod

New comment by xaphod in "Dropbox Data Breach"

xaphod — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:22:45 +0000

I got this same email about an hour ago.

About two weeks ago I received a notification from Dropbox that somebody signed in that I did not recognize. I immediately changed my password and enabled 2FA. There were no open unknown sessions or any activity that seemed suspicious other than that one login.

One odd thing at the time: the Dropbox login page had started offering 'Continue with SSO' for my email even though I never created a Lenovo ID.

New comment by xaphod in "Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]"

xaphod — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 10:13:20 +0000

This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135

New comment by xaphod in "Why are you so sure I'll lose?"

xaphod — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 08:50:02 +0000

chess.com has different "AI players" with personalities that you can play against.

New comment by xaphod in "How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)"

xaphod — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 04:53:25 +0000

Interesting, for me it happens sometimes if I'm badly hungover. Instantly after closing my eyes, I start seeing cartoon-like shapes that rapidly mutate to something different. Usually it's faces of people. The shapes are very dim, and black and white. But I really do "see" them as they were there.

Now I want to attempt using the technique in TFA to improve this "skill", also interested in using this for falling asleep faster and maybe even to successfully using the WILD technique for lucid dreaming, which I was never able to do.

New comment by xaphod in "DALL·E 3"

xaphod — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 14:06:46 +0000

I think they mean peloton. It's not English, I believe it is French, meaning a group of bicyclers. In this context it refers to the peloton leading the race.+-

New comment by xaphod in "Google Maps has become an eyesore"

xaphod — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 06:00:42 +0000

>I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?

You can, actually. When you click it, all of the roads that have street view are highlighted with blue color. In this mode you can just click on the roads to go to street view.

New comment by xaphod in "ChatGPT 4 saved my dog’s life"

xaphod — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 08:01:35 +0000

Oh you were able to google the exact thing after reading what it was? Great job!

New comment by xaphod in "We updated our RSA SSH host key"

xaphod — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 07:04:17 +0000

I saw once a support person from $COMPANY_I_WORK_IN ask a client to send their private key in email, so they could troubleshoot something. I pressed "Reply all" and called it out, and was yelled at later.

New comment by xaphod in "Show HN: AI explanations for other people’s code"

xaphod — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 06:42:35 +0000

I wonder what model this site is using. FWIW I tried with ChatGPT (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 versions), and it does a better job (tried multiple times). On one attempt it even said the Floor name is misleading:

The given code is a C-style implementation of the "fast inverse square root" algorithm. This algorithm computes an approximation of the inverse square root of a given number (1/sqrt(x)). The code does not actually compute the floor of a floating-point number, so the function name "Floor" is misleading.

New comment by xaphod in "ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?"

xaphod — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:20:35 +0000

Text is broken into something called "tokens" [0] for GPT. It doesn't work on individual characters. That explains why it always fails these character counting questions.

[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/4936856-what-are-tokens-...

New comment by xaphod in "IBM Common User Access"

xaphod — Thu, 20 May 2021 19:56:38 +0000

The Windows key is a tragic misstep in computer evolution. It should not exist.

New comment by xaphod in "Psytrance Guide"

xaphod — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:48:48 +0000

At least they got Hallucinogen up there.

New comment by xaphod in "You probably don’t need input type=“number”"

xaphod — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 04:53:52 +0000

I completely disagree. When I see embedded Google Map I always try to zoom it by scrolling, but then get frustrated when it scrolls the page instead and I'm supposed to press control for zooming.

New comment by xaphod in "Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations"

xaphod — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 22:43:23 +0000

I'm sorry if I sound rude. I don't mean to be. I'm just saying that backing up your git workspace to recover from rebases or merges gone wrong is not necessary. Those are not "surgical tools", they don't modify existing commits. (edit: yes you can "edit commits", but they only create new commits, the old commits are not deleted in the process and they can still be found easily)

When you commit in git, that saves the whole project as a "snapshot". If you find yourself lost in some rebase hell or whatever, just reset HEAD back to a previous commit. It's simple as that! (git reset --hard )

Why I decided to reply to your comment was because this is a very crucial part of learning git. When you realize that you can always go back to what was before, you can start experimenting more freely.

New comment by xaphod in "Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations"

xaphod — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 20:52:19 +0000

This is so wrong. :) With git you exactly do not have to backup your local workspace, because it already is backed up in git.

If it is committed, it is safe. You can go back to it. If you messed up your branch, just reset it to something that was good. No need to do manual backups.

New comment by xaphod in "The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious"

xaphod — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 07:34:51 +0000

AFAIK apple varieties don't change over time, because the same genes are used over and over by grafting the trees instead of growing from seed. This is because seedlings produce wildly different characteristics from their parents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding

New comment by xaphod in "Great Programmers Write Debuggable Code"

xaphod — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:16:29 +0000

One important aspect of logging is to include enough information when something fails. This sounds like it should be common sense, but I have seen this too many times:

java.net.ConnectionException: Connection refused ...

Why not include at least the hostname and port? And what connection is this exactly that failed? You might be able to find out what it was trying to connect to based on the stack trace, but that requires knowledge of the internal structure of the software.

This seems to be a common problem in software written in Java, I don't know why exactly. Maybe something to do with the way exceptions are handled, so that the relevant information is not available when printing the error?

New comment by xaphod in "HBO No Go"

xaphod — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:50:40 +0000

I'd like to think that's his point.

New comment by xaphod in "How to secure an Ubuntu Apache web server"

xaphod — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 07:26:45 +0000

I hate the praise that fail2ban gets. It is useful, but it is not securing anything really, unless maybe you run a public ssh box that has other users who have bad passwords. It will keep the logs cleaner though. A better way to secure SSH on a web server would be to restrict access by firewall and/or disallow password logins.