Hacker News Reader

benjedwardson AI on Australian travel company website sent tourists to nonexistent hot springs

Yes, it's a big problem. I call it "agency laundering" and I first mentioned it in this article last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/is-ai...

Treating AI models as autonomous minds lets companies shift responsibility for tech failures.

benjedwardson Lee Felsenstein

That's really neat. I had no idea there was a Byte Shop in Greensboro. My wife's family is from that area. I live in Raleigh, NC. Now I am wondering if my nerdy father-in-law ever visited it back in the day.

benjedwardson Lee Felsenstein

Are you related to Paul? I noticed the last name. :)

benjedwardson It's time to make computing personal again

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.

benjedwardson To preserve their work journalists take archiving into their own hands

I agree. Archives shutting down creates a huge risk for what I call "historical context attacks" in the future, similar to what you're describing.

It's about generating false historical context to support falsified digital artifacts.

I wrote an article about it for Fast Company in 2020:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90549441/how-to-prevent-deepfake...

benjedwardson I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game

If anyone is curious, in 2009, I discovered that Jim Storer was the author of the first Lunar Lander game and interviewed him about it (and also chronicled the history of the game beyond that). He later provided the source code, which was awesome.

https://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/index.html

My favorite part is this:

“After leaving high school I never thought about the game again,” says Storer. “Until about a couple of months ago when someone e-mailed me about this, I was completely unaware of any Lunar Lander game other than the one I wrote in high school.”

benjedwardson When you're driving you're re-enacting an ancient space combat SIM

This is a fun post, I appreciate the mentions. Matt missed my later piece from How-To Geek where I talked to Stan Honey and the Etak engineers again, then interviewed Asteroids designer Ed Logg, and he sent he his original sketch for the cursor. Indeed, his inspiration was Space War.

https://www.howtogeek.com/696738/did-you-know-the-gps-triang...

benjedwardson Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home

If you enjoyed this, back in 2015 I wrote a feature about Lore Harp McGovern and her business partners for Fast Company that goes into the creation of Vector Graphic in detail: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047428/how-two-bored-1970s-hous...

benjedwardson Some strange Macintosh computers

Fully-human author here. I wrote it as a joke (a play on a common phrase), since numeric keypads were often used as data entry for accountants and people using spreadsheets.

benjedwardson Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

I dislike this too, although I can understand arguments for it in software that keeps iterating and (hopefully) improving over time.

I wrote an article about this issue for How-To Geek earlier this year that explores the reasons why the subscription model has become so prevalent: Why Is Everything a Subscription Now?

https://www.howtogeek.com/817963/why-is-everything-a-subscri...

benjedwardson Lost something? Search through 91.7M files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s

Those dates were typos and have been fixed. Discmaster launched on Oct 18th.

benjedwardson Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

I asked Woz about the TV Typewriter before. In an email to me once, he said he had not heard about it at the time.

https://twitter.com/benjedwards/status/1303784698662055936?s...