Hacker News Reader

gravitateon Is Something Going on with Archive.ph?

'One more step. Please complete the security check to access'

Except I have JS disabled and can't complete the CAPTCHA interstitial.

gravitateon Ex-Meta employee says his warnings of Instagram's harm to teens were ignored

> There's no option to report it specifically for being a deepfake

FB/Instagram is fueled by AI. It makes them money. They're not going to see this kind of 'pink slime' content as being a hindrance.

gravitateon The problem with writing cold emails

> Stop doing "{{ name }}"

Had to laugh at that. The amount of e-mails I received which were boilerplate and mistakenly included the actual template variable as a raw `{{ name }}` is staggering. I hope this tool addresses that.

gravitateon Ask HN: What is the highest hourly billing rate that you have ever heard of?

> Knowing which screw to turn

"It took me ten years to know how do this in 10 minutes"

gravitateon Have you noticed the frequency of ads increasing on free services?

> Dating apps are designed to keep you single forever and owned by a single corpo.

Heard good things about Alovoa: https://alovoa.com/

> Free and open-source dating platform that respects your privacy.

gravitateon Have you noticed the frequency of ads increasing on free services?

> I don't own iOS devices on which blocking is less effective

But if you must use iOS, I recommend ADGuard Pro which intercepts ADs/Trackers at the network level using a pseudo VPN Profile. You can even load up your own custom filter lists.

gravitateon Ask HN: What are you doing to make ends meet?

Boring low paid 9-5 with half of my income subsidizing online side hustles that I work on at the weekends when I have extra time to play with.

gravitateon Ask HN: Do you think Adobe's AI will replace Photoshop?

> you need to know what you want to type

This is why there are 'prompt engineering' roles. AI plays an assistant role, but it has to see human agents being creative with prompts.

gravitateon Seeing like a bank

What about 'neo banks'? I am with Revolut free tier and I know why they have a free tier/basic tier, because I know they monetize my bank statements and purchase habits for 'market research' and other insights.

gravitateon iPhone 15 Latest Revelations

Yeah. Interesting feature. I would like to know how popular it is, or is it just more feature creep from Apple.

https://trak.in/tags/business/2022/07/10/iphone-15-phones-wi...

gravitateon ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP?

'Essential internet infrastructure should be content-neutral':

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/we-need-talk-about-inf...

gravitateon Ask HN: What are you excited about?

The Singularity. At some point dots will be connected, and tech will start to converge. It's too spread out, it needs to be more tightly coupled, and also in the right hands.

gravitateon Ask HN: Did quitting tech lead to a good or bad outcome for you?

Tech is sort of like a Penrose Stairs[0]. You level up your skills, then the whole industry levels up too, and you need to upskill yet again, and this keeps happening until inevitable burnout.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs

gravitateon Ask HN: What do you use your personal site for?

I've been treating Github like a sort of public Dropbox lately. Anything interesting I've built gets dumped there.

gravitateon Study: Inflammation drives social media use

> What are the motivations for people to be daily activate users these days?

The sincere belief that real town squares don't matter and that the real ones are only online now. This is brought on by propaganda in the media that Twitter, etc is where things 'happen' now and real life should be shunned at every instance.

'If it's not online, it doesn't exist' mentality.

gravitateon Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future

There's also Rachel's Whacker News: https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/hrand/

And Filippo Valsorda's gem:

https://filippo.io/fakenews/

And of course my one (shameless plug):

https://coxomb.github.io/This-Hacker-News-Does-Not-Exist/

I think everyone should have their own fake HN side project lol

gravitateon Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future

I built `This Hackernews Does Not Exist` which is similar to this:

https://coxomb.github.io/This-Hacker-News-Does-Not-Exist/

HN comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33845946

gravitateon Fizz could be the next Facebook on campuses, with users across 80 schools

Strikes me as unsurprising that they shun Facebook because their parents and grandparents are on that and they want to feel 'with it' with the latest up-coming social network.

gravitateon How to 100% Clear your Terminal – Techstacker

https://techstacker.com/how-to-clear-your-terminal/

gravitateon Rhino Linux is a rolling release Ubuntu-based distribution

Vanilla OS is great too: https://vanillaos.org/

The unique selling point is its immutability as described here:

https://documentation.vanillaos.org/docs/almost/

> Immutability is meant to be used as a safety measure to prevent accidental changes to the system, so it should be kept enabled most of the time.

gravitateon Ask HN: Where do you go to chat about your work?

My rubber ducky has heard more https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

gravitateon Ask HN: What website you couldn’t do your job without, and useful to the layman

I use this a lot: https://jsbeautify.org/

It has a downloadable version you can run locally, but it's handy for quick and dirty beautifying of code when you're in a hurry, and don't want to pass the local version on to other machines.

gravitateon Ask HN: Is Archive.is an NSA Honeypot?

NSA already has huge data centers[0] where they collect-it-all clandestinely. They don't need to do it publicly with services like archive.today (I think).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

gravitateon Ask HN: Do you know someone with no online presence? Are they really better off?

The Internet will not replace face-to-face IRL interaction. As humans, we are wired for connection. This is why many lonely people try to make up for their loneliness by being terminally online. It's only prosthetic connection though. (And when I say face-to-face I don't mean video calls).

gravitateon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Not programs, but plenty of virtual machines. Proud owner of 100 custom VMs all for different purposes.

gravitateon What podcast has been most influential on your life?

JRE. But only the intellectuals and not the MMA bros.

gravitateon Jerry Springer has died

> and thought that this was depicting typical average American life

The show was very bizarre. It invariably selected for the lunatic fringe of America. These people and their wild stories were all edge cases and definitely atypical.

gravitateon Ask HN: How do you manage time and execute your plans?

I try not to bite off more than I can chew. This means not taking on too much or going down unnecessary rabbit holes when building something. I should feel adequate enough for the task, and not feel as if the task is insurmountable. Also the time-frame for the task should match the task at hand and not feel like an endless quest.