Hacker News Reader

Sai_on CBS Canceling 'Late Show with Stephen Colbert' After Next Season

At some level, it is worse. The Indian press never sold us citizens koolaid about freedom, talking truth to power, and patted themselves on the back about winning Pulitzer Prizes for journalism.

The Indian press knows it is a bottom feeder and doesn’t try not to be which gives space for critical thought to emerge (even if it masked as extreme cynicism - “everyone is corrupt”) which results in extreme skepticism of everyone.

Sai_on Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

I don't quite understand this comment. Are you encouraging us to use your comment as some sort of template and insert our own preferred corporate names?

Sounds like some crazy level of meta where your brilliance is applicable to any pair of mega corps...which I don't buy.

Sai_on Judge mulls sanctions over Google's destruction of internal chats

Send Pichai to jail for a week and watch the CEOs of the biggest companies fall over themselves to comply with court instructions.

Sai_on Geoffrey Hinton: AI models have intuition and spot analogies unseen by humans

Unrelated but I’ve seen and appreciated your posts on some totally unrelated topics - like Vietnam politics and Indian ghost cities and now, Hinton’s history in Compsci. How the hell do you know so many different things and in, what looks to me, considerable depth?

Not trolling, genuinely impressed.

Sai_on Cloudflare acquires PartyKit to allow developers to build real-time multi-user

Your clients control the number of messages they exchange with each other via the DO.

You still have to protect the DO through some sort of auth and/or rate limits.

Don’t see how any of these issues are unique to DOs.

Sai_on Why quantum entanglement doesn't allow faster-than-light communication (2016)

> You got yourself a one-way single-use FTL byte.

But you don’t.

If I have the entangled version of the MEASURED byte and measure, only I know I’ve measured it. The corresponding MEASURED particles on your side still appear fuzzy to you because you haven’t measured them. If you measure them, they will reveal their state which correlates to mine BUT that doesn’t tell you if I have already measured my side of byte or not.

In effect, the heads/tail coin on your side is still spinning even after I have grabbed my side of the tail/head coin.

You may get HEAD as your result but that only tells you that I will get TAIL when I measure on my side, not that I have measured it already.

If you and I agree to measure at the same time, then I will know your state by determining mine but this is the same as knowing your state because I know how a two sided coin works, not FTL.

Sai_on Show HN: magick.css – Minimalist CSS for Wizards

https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css

Lots of options here.

Sai_on Is Cosine-Similarity of Embeddings Really About Similarity?

Apart from an ESL class explaining antonyms, I can’t think of any use case where an API which could equally return “ugly” or “beautiful” can be used.

We need embeddings to give relatedness across axes like synonymity etc.

Sai_on Show HN: Fructose – LLM calls as strongly typed functions

Maybe I’m not the audience for this but how is this a “product”. Coercing LLM outputs into a function call is built into OpenAI itself.

What is fructose doing extra here? It’s like productising copy&paste which every modern OS has, no?

Sai_on Comparing Postgres Managed Services: AWS, Azure, GCP and Supabase

Supabase is alpha testing column level security as a Feature Preview that you have to enable in your project. I’m using it now. Works well.

Sai_on Comparing Postgres Managed Services: AWS, Azure, GCP and Supabase

Thanks for sharing. Wasn’t aware of this. Will check it out today.

For now, I figured I’d have an BEFORE UPDATE trigger which compares the md5(NEW.privileges::text) with md5(OLD.privileges::text) and raises an error if they don’t match.

Not sure how to bypass the trigger for service accounts.

Sai_on Comparing Postgres Managed Services: AWS, Azure, GCP and Supabase

I’m using Supabase for similar reasons but there’s one specific situation I’m trying to sort out.

Say you have a user “profile” which includes their privileges - like say a column named “privileges” which is some JSON object denoting what they can/can’t do.

Even with RLS, how do you ensure that a user can’t simply make a curl call with their own JWT to elevate their own privileges?

Basically, how to enforce column level security?

The best thing I can think of is to place “privileges” in a child table and only let the service account update that table.

Sai_on How to be a good listener

(Since we're discussing counterfactuals and could-have-beens)

In a macabre way, maybe suicidal ideation due to suppressed emotions is nature's way of managing male populations? What if men stopped killing themselves because they felt safe sharing their feelings? What if that led to testosterone fueled "musth" rages where men started to go on rampages just to let off steam? That world would be worse for everyone involved.

Sai_on Hallucination is inevitable: An innate limitation of large language models

If LLMs can self reflect and accurately score themselves on your three dimensions, why are they spending money on RHLF?

They wouldn’t be wasting all that time and money if the machine could self reflect.

Sai_on U.S. to invest billions to replace China-made cranes at nation's ports

> The bank here had no complaints

Didn't they, one by one, stop doing business with him? That's pretty damning. Plus, his guilt was proven in a court of law. Does it matter that no bank took him to court before this? Look at the size of punishment - some $350M over the course of the lifetime of his company.

Could a bank have looked at the number and decided that going after Trump for an average amount of 5-10 million dollars every year wasn't worth it? It's just better to stop doing business with him. It isn't like Trump was stiffing them for a billion dollars a year.

> TDS having judge

NOW we are reaching banana republic status when regular people like us start doubting the trustworthiness of institutions like the court system with no evidence of corruption.

Wondering if you have the same concerns about the Delaware DA (Trump appointee) prosecuting Hunter Biden or Richard Hur (R lawyer) claiming Biden has poor memory and is easily confused. Are they suffering from BDS or are they just telling it like it is? And what makes you sure that either answer you choose will not be contested by someone else like you?

> neither should you

Like I said before, I'll take a judge's opinion on this than wakawaka28's.

Sai_on U.S. to invest billions to replace China-made cranes at nation's ports

I’ll take a judge’s verdict on the topic over yours, if you don’t mind.

Trump is on record - in the 2016 presidential debates, no less - claiming that gaming the system (by not paying his fair share of taxes) makes him smart.

Not prosecuting him and holding his feet to the fire is a worse look for NYS/NYC. Not showing undue deference to a former president is actually something the state should be very proud of.

It’s the opposite of banana republic level corruption when you realise that they’re aiming for the (former) king and can’t afford to miss…which they aren’t.

Sai_on Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

Wow, really puts things into perspective.

Sai_on Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

I like to classify what to prioritise by how many standard deviations from the happy path a certain issue is.

For example, I’m working on a pay-as-you-go SaaS - so the probability of using the SaaS while your account balance is low is 1-SD away from the happy path.

Figuring out if the user has JavaScript enabled (SaaS is an SPA) would mean the user first signed up with JavaScript enabled, then disabled it. Id put it at 3-SD away from the happy path.

Keep doing this and work on the bugs nearest to the happy path.

Of course, the 1-SD, 3-SD estimates are just hunches.

Sai_on Stop Basing Your Self-Worth on Other People's Opinions

So the article doesn’t say not to base your self worth on others, it says to recognise that you are basing your self worth on the opinion of others and to plan accordingly.

Sai_on Let me clear a huge misunderstanding

Just a random thought - maybe Musk was/is so hell bent on removing censorship because he wants more robust data, covering a larger array of thoughts, for his AI plans.

Sai_on Show HN: Aldi Price Map

How is anyone supposed to divine that a general English statement about a European MNC was restricted to just America?

It’s like me saying “McDonalds has stopped selling hamburgers” and expecting you to magically understand that this statement is about Indian McD’s and not American McDs.

Sai_on Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

I can sense the truth in your reply. Can you suggest some blue oceans where AI can come handy?

Sai_on The dating app paradox

Socially, we have to reduce “riskiness” of IRL approaching people with the intent to date.

Right now, it’s scary to want to approach someone only to risk getting roasted for being a creep, barking up the wrong tree, and the myriad other reasons why people you want don’t want you.

It has to be thing everyone does - somewhat like bar hopping on a weekend. You know you’re at the bar to find someone and so is everyone else.

Sai_on The dating app paradox

Funnier cos alcohol as a beverage is a solution in the chemical sense.

Sai_on Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity

Would be interesting if someone made a hardware device to be placed in classrooms which took periodic photos of the board and transcribed it into searchable text using an LLM.

Sai_on Sign and Verify Messages with HMAC Using the Web Crypto API

Found this post directionally useful while trying to implement JWT token verification in a Cloudflare Worker.

Sai_on How to write stuff no one else can

You may have missed the point of this article. Here, we’re being exposed to the “how”. Then why is unrelated to the why. If you have a why, the is the how to follow.

Sai_on Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform

Source code is a bunch of lambda functions to extract content from emails, then present that information in blog posts.

There are quite a few moving parts -

1. Route 53/AWS SES rules to handle Inbound emails

2. S3, Lambdas, and Step Functions to process emails into json objects

3. Cloudfront distro and behaviors to handle content delivery

4. Aws Cognito to handle login

This probably needs an accompanying blog series just to explain how everything works with each other.

If you’re interested, I’ve written a bit about it on https://pretzelbox.cc/blog which dogfoods the above product.

If there’s genuine interest, I’ll be happy to open source it.

Sai_on Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform

I built my blog to publish via email.

It’s got everything you need except it’s not possible to edit posts. You just have to email yourself a new, updated version and make that version public.

Taught me a lot about serverless, SES, css, and htmx. 10/10 would recommend trying this route if you don’t want to use the standard toolsets.

Sai_on Opt Out of Hulu's New Binding Arbitration Clause

Lob.com API-fy’s US postal mail. But I think it’s more popular in the B2C context, aka marketing mail, not C2B context.