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BHSPitMonkey

4,093 karma · joined January 11, 2012

https://github.com/BHSPitMonkey
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BHSPitMonkey··on Start Doing Graph Theory
Sure, posting under a well-known research institutions own domain is a strong link in the trust chain in this example.

Of course you have to be able to trust that some post you find (which names a real person doing work in the field) really comes from that person and is not simply stealing their authority.

My point wasn't that this specific case is like that, but rather that online spaces are bombarded with claims that take far less effort to generate than it takes to verify or debunk. And once some story is seen by enough eyeballs, no withdrawal or retraction is going to have the same reach (bad actors already know this).

BHSPitMonkey··on DoorDash to acquire Instacart
> What I don't understand is why DD gets any cut of the store's profit. They should be paying retail like anyone else, and their customer paying for the delivery costs.

It's a finder's fee, a very old and ordinary concept in business. The more sales you can bring to a company (or could divert to competitors), the more skin in the game you have. That's not to say I think these companies aren't in some ways anticompetitive to the detriment of merchants and DIY shoppers.

BHSPitMonkey··on Start Doing Graph Theory
The difference in the post-LLM era is that false identities can stand up a cohesive background and online presence with extremely little effort or human input, as many times as desired.

You took a cursory glance at a CV on a website and decided that was probably good enough to keep suspicion at bay, this time. But digging more and more to build up trust requires more time and effort than a bad actor trying to advance an agenda would need to put in; It is asymmetric.

BHSPitMonkey··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
That was before doing so would almost certainly result in immediate retaliation from the executive branch.
BHSPitMonkey··on Start Doing Graph Theory
> The author put his name and reputation to it.

For at least the past 5 years, Amazon.com has been completely flooded with throwaway brand names churned out from random sequences of characters selling white-labelled products. The ones that do poorly get discarded and replaced, and the ones that find traction get to climb the rankings.

Do you think the same doesn't apply to "authors" of books, social media posts, and even academic papers in 2026? It doesn't matter if someone's staked their reputation unless their reputation is already widely known and trusted to begin with.

BHSPitMonkey··on OpenShell – A safe, private runtime for fleets of autonomous AI agents
Well, at least it lacked the delta V to get anywhere else
BHSPitMonkey··on Today's PHP security release, and how we're strengthening security
No... Uncoordinated disclosure meant that attackers were suddenly armed with detailed information about an already-hyped severe vuln hours before the majority of downstream consumers had the means to patch their systems.

Maybe your calculus could hold if Chainguard's registry were the primary distribution mechanism for PHP in use worldwide (such that the benefit of an updated image would at least be widespread compared to the sitting ducks relying on the other repositories), but it isn't.

BHSPitMonkey··on Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG
It's also the Hawaiian goddess of fire.
BHSPitMonkey··on Show HN: Esp32sim – Run ESP32 firmware in the browser
I wonder if this can be used with WLED to preview effects and other configurations before running on a live device?
BHSPitMonkey··on Apple HomeView
The "Apple TV" is not a television set; it's a small always-on computer that sits near one. The newer ones include a Thread radio and serve as a border router / gateway for IoT devices to be controlled and automated through Apple Home (usually managed via a user's phone or tablet).
BHSPitMonkey··on A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't
The street grid south of Market isn't rotated at a diagonal; Literally unplayable.
BHSPitMonkey··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
> It's a firmware flashing app with about 10 buttons total.

What you're saying is it's the ideal kind of application for not obsessing over its background resource consumption, given that it's only going to be running for 10 minutes once or twice a year.

BHSPitMonkey··on Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome
The very point of this topic is that JXL is leaving the "early adopter" realm. If your website begins serving JXL assets next month, you'll simply be an adopter.
BHSPitMonkey··on Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
Obviously, the next logical step is a Home Assistant integration.
BHSPitMonkey··on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead
Sounds quite affordable to me. I'll take a few if you're selling.
BHSPitMonkey··on Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less
Well... the legal route is no longer "far cheaper" than domestic supply.
BHSPitMonkey··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
By that logic, why even spend effort migrating from a known-working implementation to one which is known to have outstanding bugs that there isn't enough bandwidth to fix?
BHSPitMonkey··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
A few excerpts from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html worth a careful re-read:

> In Comments

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

BHSPitMonkey··on Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls
Would mandating the use of CO2 as a refrigerant also somehow economically motivate efforts to capture more CO2 out of the atmosphere, in a kind of virtuous cycle? Or would there be a Cobra Effect in there somewhere? I'm not familiar with the industries that refine and bottle the stuff.
BHSPitMonkey··on iPhone Duo
Of course, if too many people heed this advice there won't _be_ a second version to wait for.
BHSPitMonkey··on .name Termination
I'm not referring to the HN audience; I mean the larger evergreen cohort of people in the world who are still building their mental model of how the web works. They will each eventually be doomed to the same misconceptions because it's a system full of inconsistencies and special cases.
BHSPitMonkey··on .name Termination
Yes, but you have to admit that the existence of these SLDs (like co.uk) is always going to be a point of confusion for anyone with a basic knowledge of how the domain hierarchy _usually_ works.

Needing to be familiar with all the special cases (like the VERY special case of x.y.name which I previously knew nothing about) kind of ruins everything and introduces yet more security risk.

BHSPitMonkey··on Zigbee vs. Matter over Thread:Understanding IoT Protocol Performance in Practice
But Matter _is_ locally-controlled. Matter-over-Thread is better as there's no side channels to abuse; Matter-over-Wifi also guarantees local control though the presence of Wifi means a high probability of some additional onboard software bloat the manufacturer can use to enshittify the product if you're not careful.
BHSPitMonkey··on Why some people mow a lawn better than others
There's always sunrise
BHSPitMonkey··on Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
Under-represent relative to what, exactly?
BHSPitMonkey··on Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
I just think it's highly amusing (in the absurd sense) that you consider a visual artist to be a political ideologue simply for applying color theory to render realistic characters in their art.
BHSPitMonkey··on Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
Why? A dual-hose portable is more efficient than a single-hose, but a PTAC should (in theory) be more efficient (and possibly quieter) on account of having the heat-emitting side of the cooling loop outside of the living space, which is closer to the ideal split system - though I suppose that advantage could be undermined by the unit's age and condition.
BHSPitMonkey··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
I was going to say, neither of those forms of exercise are expressions of a natural talent... they're things you simply do (at whatever levels you can currently manage) to stay healthy. They're good for your mental state, too! (And I could stand to do both a bit more regularly...)
BHSPitMonkey··on PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
On the contrary, I worry about the ability of these grassroots user-generated content distribution systems to withstand the barrage of generated slop uploaded by armies of autonomous agents. Fighting it off is an asymmetric battle that makes it increasingly hard to distinguish the legitimate users trying to share their work.
BHSPitMonkey··on Rocketlab acquires Iridium
That satellite's orbit very clearly did decay, though. The problem in that instance is the descent wasn't controlled, but that's a different kind of failure than the one this thread is worried about (i.e. satellites lingering for many years without active collision avoidance).
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