Hacker News Reader

newman8ron AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

I assume AI assistants would be able to prevent a lot of this

newman8ron Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree

I think just because you've studied something for years doesn't mean you're good at it. I've interviewed plenty curious hackers with no degree who are miles ahead of CS people with degrees.

Of course that's just anecdotal and may be the exception. And there's plenty of CS grads who have been passionate about the space their entire lives.

I studied Spanish for 3 years in high school, coasted by. I'm a complete beginner though. Nowadays I have a bit more curiosity in learning it again, and I'd probably make more progress in a few months than I did in all those years.

newman8ron AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

Yeah that's my opinion on the matter. Lots of unskilled people have creative thoughts right this moment, and want a way to express them, and share them - they just lack the skills to do so, and aren't able to dedicate the time to become a skilled musician.

newman8ron AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

Disagree. Producing electronic music with a DAW still takes considerable skill. I've used all of those and open source alternatives as well.

newman8ron AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

I feel like I appreciate good music and I've been into the underground DnB scene in LA for a while.

> nobody cares about your individual consumption choices

Not sure if I agree though - mentioning that I use gen AI for any use case can cause some very hostile reactions.

newman8ron AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

Agreed, I'm just pondering the general attitude around the space rather than bandcamp itself

newman8ron AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression? Obviously AI isn't entirely capable of that, but eventually with BCI devices it might be.

I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.

newman8ron Google is dead. Where do we go now?

They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google newspaper archive.

Not happy with google.

And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.

newman8ron Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations

reminds me of trip reports from people trying Salvia Divinorum - there's even a name for these tiny people, 'Smelves'

newman8ron Size of Life

I got the reference, it's just the 'not technically alive' part that I was calling out

newman8ron Size of Life

It claims a banana isn't technically living, but a banana has living cells so I'm not sure how accurate that is. I'm not sure when they're all considered 'dead' after harvesting though - maybe some wiggle room there.

newman8ron I don't care how well your "AI" works

> Web 1.0 was full of weirdos doing cool weird stuff for the pure joy of discovery. That's the ethos we need back, and it's not incompatible with AI.

True. And to some extent, I've seen more 'useless but fun' projects in the last year because they can be done in an afternoon rather than a week. We need more of that.

newman8ron I don't care how well your "AI" works

> And we wouldn't show respect to the latter person either.

Not respect as a carpenter, but perhaps respect as a businessperson or visionary.

newman8ron Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

True. and if you know what you're building, and don't explicitly say you're trying to "hack" something, you could easily build what you're looking to build. for now.

newman8ron Show HN: A better Hacker News front end

Not better IMO but I can appreciate the attempt. Seems messier than the real thing. The icons don't really do anything to help. Takes more time to read.

newman8ron Apple M5 chip

What's sad is there's still no asahi support for m4. I have one and I barely ever use it for that reason.

newman8ron Noise cancelling a fan

> which he explained were for air circulation intended to work in harmony with interior modifications which I can't remember.

That's intriguing. Along those lines, I've also been interested in the idea of using pressure sensors and anemomenters to automatically open/close different windows in my house to create optimal airflow. Unfortunately the house I'm in is 100 years old, so for now it's just a daydream.

newman8ron Meta Ray-Ban Display

That was the day I stopped developing for VR completely. Kind of dodged a bullet because the space didn't explode the way I thought it was going to.

newman8ron Noise cancelling a fan

https://grapeejapan.com/66162

Theirs probably isn't silent, but you certainly could figure out how to make this very quiet and gentle sounding, building tension in a spring between strokes with some kind of silent linear actuator

newman8ron Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah

Are you trying to argue that killing Charlie Kirk was justified?

newman8ron Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah

What does 'preaching violence' mean to you? Because to some people, simply supporting the talking points of the political party they don't like counts as violence.

Your comment HERE could even be interpreted by some as preaching for violence - because you're implying that there's a line you can cross where the opinions you share justify your death.

newman8ron Google to obey South Korean order to blur satellite images on maps

Probably possible to cross reference bing and google imagery to get a complete list of the spots they don't want people to see.

newman8ron We hacked Burger King: How auth bypass led to drive-thru audio surveillance

> I’m curious about the legal/reputational implications of this.

The comments and headlines will be a bit snarkier, more likely to go viral - more likely to go national on a light news day, along with the human interest portion of not getting paid which everyone can relate to.

Bad PR move

newman8ron 23andMe is out of bankruptcy. You should still delete your DNA

Best case scenario is it's used to identify unknown remains, or help locate a murder suspect who's probably distantly related to you (i.e. a 5th cousin you never met). More of these samples makes it harder for serial killers to stay hidden for too long.

newman8ron The hidden cost of AI coding

what sort existing of projects do you think couldn't have been created with an AI-heavy workflow?

newman8ron Show HN: Psychedelic animation generator; (p)art of your next trip

So cool! Would love to be able to easily make it full screen (maybe I'm missing the button for that)

Bookmarked

newman8ron Show HN: Timeline-Based Citizen Journalism

I love the idea of forking timelines, thanks for the feedback

newman8ron Show HN: Timeline-Based Citizen Journalism

I'd love to get a little feedback on the project - right now all the events are populated with an LLM pipeline and a crawler, just to demonstrate how the site will look - but the quality of the timelines would ideally be much higher if there was more actual journalism involved.

It's still fairly incomplete and I'm aware of a lot of the UX and functionality issues.

newman8ron Ask HN: Any of you going to be at the Texas eclipse festival?

Viewing the eclipse from an actual hot spring would probably the perfect viewing scenario.

newman8ron Ask HN: Any of you going to be at the Texas eclipse festival?

Nice. I wonder how many people will end up being in the path of totality but not able to see it anyway - like mission critical jobs at a power plant. That would be painful!