Hacker News Reader

Dotnaughton Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]

See George Lakoff/Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980):

https://george-lakoff.com/books/metaphors-we-live-by/

Took a course with Lakoff as an undergrad and it was compelling.

Dotnaughton Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

What are the chances Mistral used AI for its patented technology, thereby potentially invaliding the claim?

Dotnaughton Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

>Apple offers online, telephone, and of course in-person support for hardware and software

The last time I waited on hold for Apple developer support, I got to enjoy two whole hours of free hold music. So they offer human support, just not very enthusiastically.

Dotnaughton The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale

Perhaps the article's title should be, "The web has become a hostile, largely automated environment and naive hobbyists may find it difficult to coexist with professional scrapers, scammers, grifters, bots, hucksters, and cybercriminals."

Dotnaughton How to setup a local coding agent on macOS

In case anyone is looking for a sandbox to go with oMLX and Pi: https://github.com/Dotnaught/pi-sandbox

Dotnaughton The agent harness belongs outside the sandbox

So, client?

Dotnaughton Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety

>we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.

...when they've made a good faith effort to address harms.

Dotnaughton Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

By "shadowy cabal of European media elites," is Prince referring to elected Italian officials? What have they asked Cloudflare to ban?

Dotnaughton A tech-law measurement and analysis of event listeners for wiretapping

Is there a way, perhaps via extension or user script, to override third-party keystroke event listeners?

Dotnaughton Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah

It has not been conclusively established that COVID came from a lab: https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...

Dotnaughton Chrome extension that replaces occurrences of 'the cloud' with 'my butt'

I wrote a similar generic text replacer, EditoriaLies:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/editorialies/pdokni...

https://github.com/Dotnaught/EditoriaLies

Dotnaughton Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy

AI-generated summaries should not be upvoted.

Dotnaughton This website is for humans

https://localghost.dev/robots.txt

User-Agent: * Allow: /

Dotnaughton Death by AI

You can append -ai to your searches to omit AI Overview replies. It's not enough but it's something.

Dotnaughton Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

In most of San Francisco and parts of the East Bay, there's MonkeyBrains: https://www.monkeybrains.net/

Dotnaughton Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

"Plain was forked inside of PullApprove — a revenue-generating SaaS with Fortune 500 customers."

So...an effort to commercialize open source?

Dotnaughton Osgint – OSINT tool to find information about GitHub user

Seems like its more trouble than just appending .patch to a commit.

Dotnaughton Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after reneging on promises to not sell their data

Brave disables or removes a number of Chromium features: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...

Dotnaughton AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans

We can understand animal emotions (mammals at least) reasonably well if we choose to try, and even in the absence of understanding, we can assume, for example, that caged animals would rather be elsewhere. But self-interest (or economic interest) often makes it more convenient to ignore what's obvious.

Dotnaughton CAPTCHAs: 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service'

Google addressed the claims in this paper last year, and one of the authors challenged the company's responses. See: https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/24/googles_recaptchav2_l...

Dotnaughton Macrodata Refinement

The Bureau is excellent. One of the few shows where the hacking is relatively realistic (as opposed to magic to advance the plot). The Wire is an apt comparison.

Dotnaughton The Zizians (2020)

Related: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'death cult'

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-z...

Dotnaughton Operator research preview

So how much did it cost to do this?

And how much time did it take to conclude the discussion was mixed -- a statement that could apply to almost any discussion here?

Dotnaughton Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video]

Concerns about Honey were raised four years ago by Wladimir Palant: https://palant.info/2020/10/28/what-would-you-risk-for-free-...

Dotnaughton CNN and USA Today have fake websites, I believe Forbes Marketplace runs them

I'd be interested to see whether the Federal Trade Commission sees a problem with privacy policies and disclosures varying on the same website. I think there's a case to be made that the differences in data gathering fall short of informed consent and that the unified branding for different entities constitutes deceptive advertising.

Dotnaughton A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines

FWIW, the post appears to have been restored. The cited original text is visible presently.

Dotnaughton Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race

Apple is often behind. The company's modus operandi is finding ways to improve existing technologies (graphic interface, music player, mobile phone). And it can afford to be slow due to lock-in/customer loyalty.

Dotnaughton Dell Says Remote Employees Won't Be Eligible for Promotions: Report

See: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/20/dell_rto_mandate/

Dotnaughton YouTransfer: Self-hosted file transfer and sharing solution

Partially open source (the crypto) and easy to use. Free though not self-hosted: https://wormhole.app/

Dotnaughton The DeSantis Campaign Texted Me with a Large Language Model

I'd be interested to learn how much each response costs. Setting an LLM lose on the public like this seems like a recipe for cloud bill shock.