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notRobot

15,246 karma · joined February 26, 2020

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notRobot··on How Delhi cut electricity loss from 50 to 5 percent
Well the planet is theirs as well, so one may argue that putting up live wires that can electrocute them is quite cruel in the first place, especially given the lack of any preservation of their natural habitats in most places.
notRobot··on Statichost.eu – European static site hosting
To be fair you can have versions and backups even if you don't use a versioning tool like git. Good old _v2, _v3, _v4.
notRobot··on When fruit is scarce, these monkeys hunt animals
> why is it a disadvantage for the males?

Who said it was? Just because males don't exhibit a behaviour doesn't mean it's necessarily an evolutionary disadvantage.

notRobot··on When fruit is scarce, these monkeys hunt animals
> why is it a disadvantage for the males?

Who said it was? Just because males don't exhibit a behaviour doesn't mean it's necessarily a disadvantage.

notRobot··on When fruit is scarce, these monkeys hunt animals
Everything an animal does isn't a selective advantage, sometimes it's just not a disadvantage.
notRobot··on The Loss of Changelogs
I have stopped trusting automatic software and operating system updates, they take away useful features or break functional user flows or introduce unwanted AI slop too often. So I am very much back in the boat of software needing to justify an update for me to install it.
notRobot··on Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome
In my experience it works essentially everywhere to have a single png that's ~256*256px as a linked favicon, perhaps with a single .ico fallback.
notRobot··on London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
Identify attendees and key figures from social media → pick them up when detected on public transport.

The real issue is not (just) this specific use case, rather it's the govt generally knowing where people are going and where they have historically been.

notRobot··on AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
I don't know what you really mean by "cancelling", but I think it's totally fine (and even good) to talk about the flaws in stuff.
notRobot··on GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world
I am genuinely curious:

> I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines,

To do what? How many hours a day do they run? I find it hard to come up with use cases for agents to be doing so much work, but that might just be me.

notRobot··on GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world
I am genuinely curious:

> I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines,

To do what? How many hours a day do they run? I find it hard to come up with use cases for agents to be doing so much work constantly, but that might just be me.

notRobot··on AI's top startups are barely publishing their research
And crucially, you should want to others to build upon it, like you build upon so many that came before you.
notRobot··on Donate to GrapheneOS
> Motorola razr has crease issues that they seem to want to ignore

Details please?

notRobot··on Prefer strict tables in SQLite
SQLite docs: The Advantages Of Flexible Typing: https://sqlite.org/flextypegood.html
notRobot··on Jim's TrueType QR Code Font
This is SO COOL. Works perfectly in FF for me, if it can be made to work in safari then this might be one of the easiest ways to generate and display QR codes on the front-end.
notRobot··on The open source DOCX editor submitted to HN a few weeks ago has been deleted
@mhurhangee also appears to have a mirror of the missing github repo here: https://github.com/mhurhangee/docx-editor
notRobot··on Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at lower cost
Not exactly what you asked for, but this page lists their impact: https://www.cureswithinreach.org/about-us-repurposing-resear...
notRobot··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
Yes, you can have sandboxed Google apps: https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
notRobot··on Domain expertise has always been the real moat
I agree that a consistent QA mindset is rare, but I'm not sure even if present if it's enough to replace an SDE.

I very recently looked at the codebase of a vibe-coded app made by someone with domain expertise but no software dev experience.

It was very clear to me that he had described it from his POV to an AI, and the AI had implemented features in a manner that technically worked, but made future maintenance or expansion extremely tricky, which is why he was now looking for a dev.

For example, in his data schema, for every item on a menu, instead of simply having an array property like so for ingredients:

    items["latte"]["ingredients"] = ["water", "milk", "sugar", ...]
He had individual flags for every item for every possible ingredient it could have or not have:

    items["latte"]["has_milk"] = true
    items["latte"]["has_nutmeg"] = false
    items["latte"]["has_cinnamon"] = false
    items["latte"]["has_sugar"] = true
    ...
This technically worked and passed tests from his POV at an MVP level. But added a lot of complications when actually trying to build more features or when a new menu item had ingredients the founder hadn't thought to include in the schema beforehand.

I totally get how he ended up where he did though. While describing it to the AI, he probably said something like "store info on each menu item's ingredients, they might have milk or coffee or sugar", and the AI created individual flags for them and he didn't think to question it, because he didn't know what's "right" or "wrong", but then as he kept building the AI stuck with keeping individual flags instead of swapping it out with an array mechanism, and he couldn't have known the correct way to implement it.

Only a dev with experience would know how to describe the system to an AI model to get an output that works well, and how to assess the quality of its output beyond what can be assessed through the basic UI. This wasn't a QA failure, it was a design failure.

notRobot··on Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features
You can just click play on a server without having to run one yourself, the enthusiasts do that. Eg: Halo CE, Armagetron, countless others.
notRobot··on Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude
Claude Code is really good at stuff like this. The other day I tried to recover some images from an SD card that had gone bad. I used GetDataBack to recover files, but they appeared to be malformed and didn't open in image viewers.

I tasked Claude to analyze the files and figure out what's going on, and eventually we figured out that each file had a custom metadata header + thumbnail + actual image concatenated. I had it write a python script and was able to recover all the images with their metadata. It's nothing a human couldn't have figured out, but it was definitely WAY faster than doing it myself.

I've also used Claude in the past to figure out how to break into routers with locked down firmware. It's great at suggesting and trying different approaches.

notRobot··on Claude for Small Business
IDK if it's just me, but the rate at which Anthropic and similar are launching (and changing!) features and offerings doesn't inspire confidence. I expect stability from software and platforms I buy into and integrate into my systems.

Feels like they're just using LLMs to produce enormous levels of output, without understanding that quantity ≠ quality.

notRobot··on The Orange Pi 6 Plus
Have you taken a look at armbian? If so, what was your experience?

https://www.armbian.com/boards?vendor=xunlong

notRobot··on LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash
There was a single traffic controller handling the entire airport. This was bound to happen and will keep happening unless things change. It's absurd that the US hasn't been able to fix its ATC shortage in decades.

Currently over 41% of facilities are reliant on mandatory overtime, with controllers frequently working 60-hour weeks with only four days off per month.

notRobot··on Show HN: Cq – Stack Overflow for AI coding agents
We could even call it... Stack Overflow for... Teams.
notRobot··on In search of Banksy, Reuters found the artist took on a new identity
I don't really think it's "journalism" to be doxxing the identities of folks who clearly want to stay anonymous and have their work be detached from their irl personalities.
notRobot··on Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)
"Original research" isn't worth much unless replicated, which is the entire problem being discussed in this thread. Replicating studies are great though because they tell you if the original research actually stands and is valid.

> Replicating work is far more difficult than a lot of original work.

Only if the original work was BS. And what, just because it's harder, we shouldn't do it?

notRobot··on Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise
There are 15 interface admins as per these links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Interface_administra...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ListUsers/interface-ad...

notRobot··on I think WebRTC is better than SSH-ing for connecting to Mac terminal from iPhone
Shell In A Box has been a thing for like two decades now, and gives you a simple web-based interface ssh interface you can use from any device. https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox
notRobot··on CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
Wikipedia is actually the secondary source when someone reads a page on it, and it requires primary sources (like factbooks) to cite to exist.
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