HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

trauco

2,524 karma · joined April 25, 2011

submissionscomments
trauco··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
This kind of early LLM-human interaction is why Skynet will build the terminator to kill us all.

But for now, humans win.

trauco··on New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing
The message seems to be: we really want users on a monthly plan, but if they insist, we’ll gauge them.
trauco··on Implications of AI to schools
This is the correct take. To contrast the Terance Tao piece from earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017972), AI research tools are increasingly useful if you're a competent researcher that can judge the output and detect BS. You can't, however, become a Terence Tao by asking AI to solve your homework.

So, in learning environments we might not have an option but to open the floodgates to AI use, but abandon most testing techniques that are not, more or less, pen and paper, in-person. Use AI as much as you want, but know that as a student you'll be answering tests armed only with your brain.

I do pity English teachers that have relied on essays to grade proficiency for hundreds of years. STEM fields has an easier way through this.

trauco··on Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine
The answer is you put the top mathematician in the world to do it, easy peasy.

“The argument used some p-adic algebraic number theory which was overkill for this problem. I then spent about half an hour converting the proof by hand into a more elementary proof, which I presented on the site.”

What’s the exchange rate for 30 minutes of Tao’s brain time in regular researcher’s time? 90 days? A year?

trauco··on A modern 35mm film scanner for home
Yes this is all true but it works well when you know how to deal with these issues. I suspect aging slides would be an odder for any automated system.
trauco··on A modern 35mm film scanner for home
The 4000-5000 series Nikon Coolscans sell for about the same price they did 20 years ago because they still produce excellent scans and there’s nothing quite as good for that $1000-$15000 price out there.
trauco··on A modern 35mm film scanner for home
You can get a slide feeder for the “modern” (early aughts) Nikon Coolscans, the SF-210:

https://studio-supplies.com/products/nikon-sf-210-239995

trauco··on See How E.V. Road Trips Went from Impossible to Easy
https://archive.is/nUiIM
trauco··on NSF plans end to lone U.S. Antarctic research icebreaker
https://archive.is/2025.07.29-011650/https://www.science.org...
trauco··on Texas ignores climate change at our own peril
https://archive.is/iAzzt
trauco··on Loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back 'decades'
The satellites that are still up are still collecting critical data. That’s not disputed.
trauco··on Loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back 'decades'
The key facts are:

- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data - These data will continue to be measured after Monday - the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data - This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.

Which of the above are “not true”?

trauco··on Popular Mac app 'Bartender' acquired by new unknown developer
I agree the communication about this change of ownership has been far from ideal.

But issues with permissions (e.g. the user needing to disable/re-enable some macOS permission after an update, even if the cert doesn't change) are fairly common.

trauco··on The Rise and Fall of Preview
Yes, this happened to me enough times (not with files stored in the cloud) that I stopped using Preview for annotations altogether.
trauco··on Popular Mac app 'Bartender' acquired by new unknown developer
This permission request predated the change of ownership of Bartender.
trauco··on Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Feedbin is so great. Easy filtering, can process newsletters, etc etc. Very reasonably price. Highly recommended.
trauco··on Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
A good reminder that academic institutions often fail to recognize the best in their ranks. From this NYTimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-k...

About Dr. Kariko:

"But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year"

trauco··on 'TrumpIsDead' trending on Twitter; verified user testing moderation under Musk
Good luck competing with the "jnsk is a pedophile"(1) trending topic.

(1) this is, by the way, something that Musk did to that diver he didn't like.

trauco··on Ask HN: iOS mail client that allows password protection?
Preside (https://preside.io) has this feature.
trauco··on My Contribution to Markdown
> Strangers on the internet will come across your little random story if it's public, and rather than blaming first-time readers for not understanding the context nor the voice of the author, maybe the author could adjust the article to provide the context or make the voice stronger/more obvious?

I'm not "blaming" anyone. I'm just pointing out that the commenters here are missing the point of the story because they don't understand the context, and that this is a fairly common phenomenon.

I think it's fine to tailor your writing to a community of like-minded readers rather than a first-time reader from here that is unlikely to come back.

> Honestly, I'm fine with not understanding everything from communities I don't generally hang-around, it's bound to happen at one point or another.

Me too, of course. It just makes a discussion without that context, i.e., what's happening here, detached from what the author meant with the post.

trauco··on My Contribution to Markdown
All the humming and hawing about how the author of the post is taking credit for someone else's work, etc, is a good example of the problem of reading one-off things on the internet and commenting on them here without understanding the context or the voice of the author.

As a long-term reader of that blog, it is obvious to me this is a little historical anecdote, mostly tongue-in-cheek, from a particular mac-centric community to which both the author and Gruber belong to. He's not being grandiose or trying to take credit.

Sometimes a story is just a story.

trauco··on Teams is killing my Mac every day
I can’t find this option anywhere.
trauco··on Ex-CIA coder behind WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ cache found guilty of espionage
A recent deep dive into this case from The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-ca...

trauco··on Maccy is an open source lightweight and searchable clipboard manager for macOS
Pastebot [0] is another very nice clipboard manager that has this stack feature as well.

[0]: https://tapbots.com/pastebot/

trauco··on Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA
Well, doctors and lawyers, as in some of the most powerful people in the country (supreme court justices, etc) have to get graduate degrees.

Maybe it doesn't matter for software engineers, but it matters a lot for the power structure of our society.

trauco··on Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA
It does to go to grad school, and to get fellowships.
trauco··on Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA
"Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." ~ Garrison Keillor
trauco··on USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)
The Satechi one creates "broadcast storms" [1] that messed up my home network if left it unplugged from the computer but powered on and with the ethernet cable connected.

I have an Anker one now, I guess I should expect the same.

I also have a Dell D6000, which is rarely reviewed but has been solid.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/an3nyf/pass_thoug...

trauco··on Slackware 15.0
Amazing project. My first serious Linux distro. Good for Patrick and the rest of the community.
trauco··on It’s not still the early days of blockchain
One point the linked article makes is that even this claim has been proven wrong.
Page 1 of 2Next →