Hacker News Reader

ilamonton An LLM Workflow That Reproduces, Improves, Extends Published Economics Research

Across 4,452 published replication packages for five economics journals, the workflow flags discrepancies in 3,460 articles or their appendices.

If this result can be confirmed, and the methodology can be applied to other disciplines, this could really shake up the world of academic publishing. Serious discrepancies can hopefully be flagged and addressed before publication. It may also allow authors take a harder look at earlier papers they're citing.

I would hope that it will also reduce the numbers of subpar papers and fraudulent research submitted for review, but as we've seen throughout history the cheaters always find a way to get ahead.

ilamonton Sonnet 5.5

Thank you for doing this. It is very helpful not just for capabilities but also for costs.

ilamonton Allegations of US interference in Quebec election

The report by Quebecor media quoted two unnamed sources from Fréchette’s government who said American government officials had attempted to negotiate tariffs with Quebec directly.

This incident aside, doesn't Quebec already have special rights within the confederation to manage certain international relationships? E.g. quasi-diplomatic General Delegation in Paris, Francophone offices overseas, certain aspects of immigration to Quebec?

ilamonton Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

The Authors Guild CEO was an experienced IP attorney. The guild's leadership and policy teams, while they are cognizant of optics, think like lawyers, not like PR pros or journalists looking to maximize clicks.

ilamonton Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

I didn't have time to watch the videos, but in the text I didn't see anything that addresses data center operations requiring manual intervention.

Swapping out obsolete or failing TPUs. Rewiring or replacing connections. "Listening" for sounds indicating an equipment failure.

What are the proposals to address these needs?

ilamonton When the FM Band Goes Transatlantic

The same author has an explainer of Sporadic-E and skywave propagation here:

https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/double-hop-drea...

ilamonton DJ Shadow looks back at "Entroducing" and other early work

Thanks for the tip.

I didn't know until reading this that he was involved with U.N.K.L.E.

ilamonton An update on Wayback Machine access

Shouldn't the solution be to gate bulk access for automated services for a price? Not just the wayback machine, any personal or corporate website?

My blogs are getting slammed and there are issues with cloudflare or captchas.

ilamonton iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.

ilamonton Godaddy's homepage is currently throwing a 403

Not for me, 7 minutes after this was posted. US east coast.

ilamonton CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of 9/11

The New York Times summary noted that there was a fear of "alert fatigue" coupled with a lack of confidence about the strength of the signals they were getting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/us/politics/cia-sept-11-i... (gift article)

ilamonton Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?

To see how fast hype cycles can die, check out the NFT archive on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=NFT

Top stories (critical and otherwise) were upvoted hundreds of times 4-5 years ago and had hundreds of comments. Sort by the past year, and no story has more than 9 points. NFTS have effectively disappeared from HN's front page.

AI is a different beast ... the tech and concepts have true value. But we may see the term "AI" start to fade as new terminology and companies and concepts rise to the fore ... the Sons/Daughters of AI.

ilamonton Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) Is Selling Its Original Movie Puppets

Creatively, how is Aardman holding up? I know they had issues working with Hollywood 20 years ago on Flushed Away when it came creative control, and assumed they got their mojo back. But I was disappointed with Chicken Run 2 … I had to bail about halfway through.

ilamonton We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

It’s in the FAQ. Mostly cooperative, not winner takes all. Lots of genres.

ilamonton The safest job from AI may be writing

> It's absolutely shocking to see how poorly companies, and governments, communicate and no amount of AI/LLM usage will change it.

Thank you for saying the first part. It truly boggles the mind to see how badly most organizations communicate, even those with professional staff tasked with communications.

Regarding the second part: AI/LLM usage will lead to improvements for some people/organizations, if only for the simple reason that it removes barriers to communications. All of a sudden city hall or a third-tier supplier can quickly update their websites in multiple languages, process email communications more quickly, and empower staff who weren't good writers.

ilamonton Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash

When the bubble bursts and tens of millions of people see their retirement accounts with S&P holdings drop 30%, that's when the knives will really come out.

ilamonton Hollywood's Video Game Era Is Here. Will It Be Any Good?

TFA starts with a picture of Last of Us. Season 1 was amazing for the most part. Even my spouse who has zero interest in video games loved it.

And then season 2 started. They forgot their core audience (gamers, horror, fans of post-apocalyptic themes) and tried to make it a soap opera that appeals to everyone. At one point the main character spent 5 minutes sitting on a couch talking with a therapist. It was more slick, less gritty ... the cast was wearing brand-new jackets and backpacks and boots, 20 years after the mushroom zombie apocalypse. What a disappointment.

Yet that's pretty typical for Hollywood suits. They want to expand the audience or chase some trend, push the creatives out of the way, and end up ruining it.

ilamonton Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

I have one of these too. I can’t believe how long it’s performed at very high levels of use including two external screens and 10-15 memory intensive applications running concurrently, including three different browsers with multiple tabs open on each. I installed a new video editing application today and was apprehensive it would stumble, but it worked like a champ.

The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.

ilamonton My Friend Aaron

This is like a story from "Big Vern" in Viz, but instead of Vern being a violent London heavy, it's basically Ho from Slow Horses.

https://assets.londonist.com/uploads/2006/12/i875/4998_big_v...

ilamonton Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer

Because merchants charge everyone the same price regardless of how they pay

Not at many gas stations. Cash gets a discount usually $.10 per gallon. I’ve also started to see restaurants either give a discount for cash, or charge extra for credit card purchases. Business suppliers from tiny shops to large national companies tack on 3% for people paying with credit cards, or like T-Mobile, a $5/line monthly fee in order to get people to pay by direct debit.

ilamonton A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more

> somewhere high atop 345 Park Avenue a Blackstone executive is twirling his mustache while saying "gamify the gravesites".

I don't think so.

It's more like "hit the numbers no matter what, we don't care what you do to hit them." They hire managers that are ruthless about following through. IMHO this style of ownership is more likely to lead to otherwise avoidable situations involving lax security, teenaged slaughterhouse workers, and trophy hunters on genealogy sites.

ilamonton A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more

It's Find-a-Grave, an indie genealogy site that was acquired by Ancestry, which itself was acquired by Blackstone sometime in the last decade. Blackstone brought in an ex-Facebook executive to run it, and this was one of the results.

ilamonton A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more

Well, the other notable fact about this story is it's Blackstone, which has a record of giving managers a lot of leeway to do anything to juice the numbers.

Two examples:

1) Hiring 14 year old slaughterhouse workers (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pssi-hired-same-child-t...)

2) Gamifying of one its genealogy websites that tracked cemetery markers, which resulted in people "claiming" victims of mass shootings for points (https://dna-explained.com/2022/06/02/find-a-grave-owned-by-a...)

ETA

People have asked about the second example. In a nutshell, Ancestry purchased Find-A-Grave in 2013, and Blackstone acquired Ancestry in 2020.

Originally, Find a Grave was basically used by amateur genealogists to check the names and dates on gravestones across North America. So, if you want to verify Grandma Smith's burial location and other gravestone data three states away, you could search the database for free. Volunteers could submit photos and other data.

Blackstone brought in a Facebook executive to run its genealogy business, and gamified Find A Grave for engagement/revenue purposes (Find A Grave is top of funnel for Ancestry subscriptions and also is heavily blanketed in ad networks.)

Gamification led to some very ugly situations, and as I recall they barely backed down over this. Per Roberta Estes, an experienced genealogist cited above:

The problem is that finding your loved one’s memorial, often with incorrect information, created by a stranger is unexpectedly jarring, at best. Especially to discover that your family member was only a trophy harvest whose memorial was created hours after they died. Then, having to ask (sometimes beg an unresponsive person) for the transfer of their memorial to you, only to have the creator’s name forever associated with the memorial adds insult to injury. ...

Who in their right mind would think that entering those massacred children into Find a Grave immediately was acceptable by any criteria? Any standards of decency? And why would Find a Grave tolerate this for even a minute? Death is traumatic for family members under the “best” of circumstances and it only goes downhill from there.

ilamonton How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

> I heard in the 50s an american could just startup a business installing septic tanks. But now the same person would need a myriad of regulations to be met, heavy equipment use mandated, all of which raise overhead to a level where its impossible to get off the ground.

You can still do such businesses, but the red tape and other requirements are enourmous: health department and construction applications, soil tests, inspections, manufacturing requirements, and so on. The additional costs and delays are passed on to customers.

It's not just septic tanks, it's all areas of construction and one of the reasons why in many states (like New York and California) it's impossible to make low-cost housing anymore, or (like in Florida) new regulations governing old construction are leading to sky-high reserve requirements and condo fees.

There's also the phenomenon of people just ignoring the laws or bypassing them. For your septic tank example, in Alabama out in the countryside people with low cost prefab houses ("double wides") don't want to pay $10,000 to dig a trench for a septic tank, so they just run sewer hoses deep into the woods or ditches. https://www.epa.gov/septic/surface-discharge-raw-wastewater-...

ilamonton The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)

> The sequels have been disappointing, they had to be.

Scott never owned the rights to Blade Runner and wasn't heavily involved in 2049.

It shows. The script. The choice of actors. Clumsy scenes, like the fight scene at the casino with its stiff choreography. The pointless "virtual girlfriend" subplot. The location for the shoots (Hungary IIRC) which really limited the pool of extras - hardly a single Asian person to be seen.

Some of the people who worked on the film tried their best, including the CGI and set designers and the score (by Hans Zimmer) but I could only watch it once from beginning to end in IMAX. The second time at home I had to stop halfway through.

ilamonton The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)

This came up about a month ago when someone posted a link celebrating the title cards in Blade Runner. I responded then the same way I will respond now: it’s not just the amazing visuals, it’s also the amazing auditory experience, an additional creative dimension to transport the audience into a dystopian future.

The audio consists of two parts: the wonderful minimalist score by Vangelis, and sound effects that include distant booms, twinkling computer notes, dripping rain, strange languages, the whoosh of futuristic vehicles, even small details such as the crosswalk warning. Along with the set design, photography, special effects, acting, and other visual elements, the audio effectively immerses viewers into this incredible world and story.

Keep in mind that a typical viewer entering the local cineplex in 1982 to watch Blade Runner might have just stepped out of a Chevy Nova with an 8-track cassette player loaded with Juice Newton and Kool & The Gang. The visuals, the score, the sound effects, and the story would have been completely novel, and totally mind-blowing.

ilamonton I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

A trend that’s leading to more victims is the wave of boomer retirements. Every year there are millions of new 60 and 70 somethings with lots of time on their hands, many of them loaded to the gills and keen to write that novel/memoir/children’s book they’ve been thinking about for years. They are seldom aware of publishing industry requirements, and may be easily swayed by convincing email pitches, “authentic” social media personalities, or YouTube scammers.

ilamonton I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

Beat me to it. Why isn’t every unsolicited pitch without an unsubscribe link immediately blocked/marked as spam?

ilamonton We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

Copyright office registration. If you or your publisher didn't do it, you don't qualify. Some publishers, even big ones, were exposed as neglecting this basic step when the Anthropic case was settled.

I would check the settlement db just to make sure: https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup

You may entitled to a share assuming the publisher registered with the class action and there is a copyright registration in your name.

ilamonton Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study

There have been studies like this for decades, going back to at least the Clinton administration.

And nothing will come of it. Too many entrenched interests, regulatory capture, and lobbying + political donations.