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WA

9,458 karma · joined November 20, 2009

I run a bootstrapped B2C webapp/app. Mostly a lurker on HN.
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WA··on Why so many children in America have ADHD
Yes, and at the end of the day, these diagnosis aren't there to pathologize people, but to actually provide help, even if critics don't believe so.

This is something you only understand if you dealt with neurodivergent people. Suddenly it all makes sense, once you learn that their brains filter and process information in a somewhat different way, resulting in all kinds of different observable symptoms.

WA··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
Many assumptions you make:

- No desire within Ukraine to join the West in/before 2014.

- No meddling from Russia within Ukraine to be pro-Russia since Ukraine became independent.

- The invasion of Russia is "just a reaction and there were no diplomatic alternatives"

Your view of the things seem to start 2014 and neglect interferences and choices Russia made. This is typical for people painting the West as the "true culprits": The West is always painted as a propaganda machine, while meddling with foreign nations. But Russia is a single unit with only the best intentions.

Furthermore, the situation evolved over many years. Even if the West had their hands in play in 2014, a lot happened since then. For example, Russia annexed Crimea. You make it sound as if Ukrainians as a whole are undividedly pro-Russian.

Edit: this article gives more context for the whole situation back then: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/leaked-audio-reveals-e...

WA··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
"NATO expansion" is one point of view. Another is: a sovereign country (Ukraine) prefers the west over Russia and wants to join it.

So what’s the propaganda now?

WA··on Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
You are correct:

    "datePublished":"2020-08-06T07:12:56+00:00"
If an article has no visible date, I often just check the source of the document, because most of these blogs use a generic CMS that puts the date in the code anyways.
WA··on If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
Works in Commonmark:

    Some text and <span style="color:red">this is important</span>
WA··on TL;DR of Deep Dive into LLMs Like ChatGPT by Andrej Karpathy
Regarding 1 - MATH:

Somewhere in the video he says that LLMs have expert (only slightly fuzzy) knowledge about a lot of topics, but fail with simple math questions. Many non-technical people anthropomorphize LLMs and don't know that they can't think or calculate like a real calculator. LLMs compute tokens and you can improve the performance, if you don't put too much computation into a single result token.

I think it's an excellent example to show the capabilities and limits of LLMs. For softer topics, you can argue a lot more about what's considered to be right or wrong. With Math, you have a single correct answer that can be evaluated and people assume that computers are good at computer things, such as calculating numbers, even though LLMs actually aren't good at this.

The takeaway is: Prompting and "computational complexity per token" matter and if you understand how it works for math, you probably understand how it works for softer things like answers about law or whatever.

WA··on Infosec 101 for Activists
Does the same apply for Chromium or does Chrome specifically have better runtime protection than Chromium? Why not mention Chromium?
WA··on Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads
Useless without limiting the kind of data I want to share per contact. iOS asks for relationships for example. You can set up your spouse, your kids, have your address or any address associated with contacts. If I want to restrict app access to contacts, I also want to restrict app access to specific contact details.
WA··on Bypass DeepSeek censorship by speaking in hex
order.php?pizzatype=3&price=9.90
WA··on What Have We Forgotten?
I think you're conflating something here. Whether you send a session ID in a cookie or a JWT makes no difference for the app's general behavior, even when you use multiple tabs or multiple devices.

But I remember a time when especially bank websites added an additional token (like a super strict CSRF token) to their app, which tracked the current page of a user and if you browsed the same website from another tab, this other tab didn't have the proper token and the whole thing just returned "invalid user action" or something like that.

However, this has nothing to do with session cookies.

WA··on Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
> If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.

You probably underestimate the little voice that will show up at some point, aksing what is the point in doing that thing?

WA··on Operator research preview
It will never happen. Same reason why we post screenshots from social network A in social network B. Many don’t even want to put in the simplest of all APIs: a simple link to an external website.

As long as people make money from meatspace eyeballs looking at banners, these agents will be actively blocked or restricted just like all other scrapers.

WA··on Show HN: I organized Bluesky feeds by categories and growth rankings
I think Mastodon will have its place, but won’t grow much. BlueSky will grow more instead of Mastodon. Reasons:

- BlueSky is mostly centralized and easier to understand. No server choice stuff

- BlueSky has the better name

- BlueSky has the cleaner UI

WA··on 417-megapixel Andromeda galaxy panorama took over a decade to make
And even more: Every object you can see with the naked eye in the sky is within our milky way, except for the Andromeda galaxy and a handful of other galayies. If you know exactly where to look, you can see it as a little cloud with the naked eye.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked-eye_gal...

WA··on TikTok goes dark in the US
Laws don't care about technical aspects. ByteDance must comply with the law, meaning, they need to stop offering the service to US citizens, no matter where the servers are hosted, for example, by geofencing their product. If they don't comply, they risk fines. They can only ignore this if they don't care about doing business with the US ever again and their owners never want to set foot in the country again.
WA··on Ask HN: How can I realistically change careers?
How many hours per day do you spend on Fine Art these days?
WA··on A standards-first web framework
Cool, webjsx might be exactly what I was looking for. A simple thing that lets me map state to the DOM to make reactivity easier.
WA··on I have made the decision to disband Hindenburg Research
Very true. If you have the fundamentals right, but the timing wrong, you're still "wrong", because you're broke.
WA··on Hotel booking sites overcharge Bay Area customers
And their insecure platform. You occasionally get completely legit-looking phishing emails from the hotel you wanna stay in, because the hotel‘s account was compromised and attackers now send phishing emails through their side of booking.com.

Booking blames this on the hotels (probably true to some extend), but the problem is quite widespread so that Booking probably bears some responsibility, too.

WA··on Show HN: Kate's App
Since we're talking about regulation here: Your site is accessible from the EU. You do not have a GDPR compliant privacy policy (or one at all). The GDPR does apply to you, if you allow Europeans to sign up.

The primary goal of your site is to store medical data. For this, you'd need a dedicated data protection officer (DPO). Article 37 1c applies to your case: https://gdpr.eu/article-37-designation-of-the-data-protectio...

WA··on An autumn bike adventure down the US portion of the Eastern Divide Trail
You are only a modern bikepacker if you ditch your traditional bags for what us Germans call "Arschrakete" (butt rocket): https://heuer-radsport.de/wp-content/uploads/asgarosforum/8/...

/s

WA··on The Future of Htmx
Question is, can you have a super thin layer that gives you the reactivity we all crave and don’t want to reimplement in vanilla ourselves without using legacy tech React.

In a way, it’s depressing that the thing that holds developer minds hostage gets even more hold over devs, because the frickin AI knows it best.

Just a reminder: React was created as a not-a-framework-but-a-view-library but everybody writes React apps, not JS apps.

WA··on 4.5M Suspected Fake Stars in GitHub
For me, it’s "bookmarking obscure stuff". Why would I bookmark, say, React? I can find this easily. I only star stuff that has few stars and isn’t as easy to find later.
WA··on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
That COVID feature was opt-in. Author is complaining about a lack of opt in now.
WA··on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
> Google photos doesn't have nearly the privacy focus and no HE whatsoever but I rarely see that mentioned here. It almost seems like Apple gets held to a higher standard just because they have privacy preserving initiatives.

What is so surprising about this? If you make big claims about anything, you are held to your own standards.

WA··on More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market
Zero-sum is true for stocks, too, if your goal is to generate alpha. For every alpha-generating stock participant, another one must lose.
WA··on Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?
Post your portfolio alongside please :)
WA··on Isomorphic Web Components
Well, even in a server-side PHP app, you have some client-side stuff for better interactivity and a smoother experience. Custom elements let you encapsulate this stuff. It's really not necessary, but if you want to reuse or redistribute them, they are pretty nice and self-contained (mostly).
WA··on US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19
I agree, western media seems more (self-?)controlled than social media. But this post is specifically about social media.
WA··on US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19
> Do you believe that META does not censor content?

To some degree for sure, simply because they have to by law.

> Or amplify specific views? Or suppress the reach of certain others?

They have the technical capabilities and what Meta in particular does: I don't know. But given the social media landscape as a whole (not only platsforms by Meta) and seeing so many nutjobs having tremendous reach with lies and fake content, I really don't think there is a lot of suppression or view-shaping going on. The views would be a lot more homogeneus if you were being manipulated on a large scale.

Since you mentioned the conflict in the ME: There are proponents of both sides with tremendous reach and depending on your bubble, you either see more of the one side or the other. But of course, since the immediate conflict has been going on for a while, the sentiment changed.

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