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blenderobon Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog

You can just email hn@ycombinator.com to get help. They can reset your password if there's someway for them to verify that you were the owner of the account.

blenderobon The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie.

Alas, gone are the days when engineers too required specialized equipment like a desktop computer on the desk that you couldn't move with you. Every evening, you left it at office and went home to live a 100% home life. Alas, gone are those days.

blenderobon We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)

> I also do not have a robots.txt so google doesnt index.

That doesn't sound right. I don't have robots.txt too but Google indexes everything for me.

blenderobon We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)

This.

I wonder if it is a generation gap thing. The young folks these days have probably used only Gmail, Proton or one of these big email services that abstract away all the technical details of sending and receiving emails. Without some visibility into the technical details of how emails are composed and sent they might not have ever known that the email headers are not some definite source of truth but totally user defined and can be set to anything.

blenderobon I made my own Git

That's very interesting. Any examples you can share which has those agreeable effects?

blenderobon Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

> Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying.

I'm going on a tangent here but what's with this constant deprecation of mothers to make a point? There are many people here whose mothers can develop software.

blenderobon Is liberal democracy in terminal decline?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

blenderobon Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

Don't know who downvoted this comment but this is correct. Like all matters of speaking, it depends on the tone. Sometimes "quite good" can mean better than good. But the parent is correct that conventionally, unless the tone suggests the opposite, "quite good" means "not as good as good" when an English person says it.

blenderobon Writing First, Tooling Second

> It's a nice piece, but come on, ease off a bit.

I didn't repost it today. I think HN mods did that. If you see your search link, I posted only once 4 days ago. I think HN mods repost some posts.

Also check the FAQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

blenderobon Making a Victorian CSS Border: Dual

This is the type of stuff that makes hacker news fun.

blenderobon The Human in the Loop

Pretty sure they are mocking LLM outputs by making their own comment look like as if it came from LLM. It's sarcasm.

blenderobon Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.

blenderobon I am moving away from Scala

+1000.

A vast majority of posts and comments here shows a classic case of consumerism. I want this. I want that. This sucks. That sucks. Well, what are you bringing to the community?

There is this weird kind of amnesia with open source tools where people forget that these open source projects are a labor of love by small communities. They are developing the projects for themselves, their community. Are you part of that community or are you outside it? If you're outside the community, it shouldn't surprise you when the tool doesn't perfectly work for you. I sometimes feel that many of these people would be better off buying commercial tools and pay for support.

blenderobon Ask HN: Does GitHub Copilot now leave unsolicited PR review comments?

Thanks!

I checked that link. That setting says -

"Show Copilot

Enable Copilot for all GitHub features, including navigation bar, search, and dashboard.

When disabled, Copilot will be hidden and unavailable. This setting does not apply to Copilot search on GitHub Docs."

Does this disable PR code reviews too? The setting description doesn't say anything about PR reviews. If it does disable Copilot PR review comments, which repos does it affect? It cannot disable PR reviews for my PRs on other people's repos, can it?

Anyway thanks for your answer. Much appreciated.

blenderobon The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible

Way to miss the point of the project!

blenderobon It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

This is genuinely disheartening. As I continued reading the fine article, disappointment began settling in. Does nobody care about doing a good job anymore? When even multi-trillion-dollar companies cannot execute projects with some baseline level of quality and craft, it paints a disappointing picture. Very sad and disappointing. :(

blenderobon Ask HN: What are the best personal blogs that you're reading?

Thank you for asking. Really looking forward to all the good blogs that people share here. Can you add "Ask HN:" to your post title please? This will help in getting this post highlighted in the /ask tab.

blenderobon Deliberate Internet Shutdowns

> Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet

No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.

blenderobon Well being in times of algorithms

I want to vent about the way the word "algorithm" is increasingly used as shorthand for AI-driven, attention-sucking systems.

"Algorithm" is a beautiful and very old word. Long before recommender systems and engagement metrics, it meant precise problem-solving methods. Quicksort is an algorithm. Binary search is an algorithm. GCD is an algorithm. Most of modern technology exists because of algorithms in this broader, richer sense. It is one of the foundations of CS.

Yes, machine-learning systems are also algorithms. But collapsing the term to mean only opaque, attention-maximizing mechanisms strips it of its meaning and history. It taints a neutral technical concept as something manipulative by default.

It's more so disappointing when this comes from people in tech. We should be more careful with our vocabulary. Maybe we should call these systems what they are. Maybe "engagement engines", "recommender systems", or "attention-suckers" instead of letting one narrow and disturbing use redefine the word altogether.

blenderobon Constructing the Word's First JPEG XL MD5 Hash Quine

This one didn't show up as "[dead]" for some reason.

blenderobon Constructing the Word's First JPEG XL MD5 Hash Quine

This is an automated bot incorrectly claiming posts are dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=b16m

Looks like it was banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46188453

How is it still posting?

blenderobon Twelve Days of Shell

Worked. Thanks!

blenderobon Twelve Days of Shell

Still doesn't work for me in a new session separate browser. I get the output but I also get this message

  Output does not match expected lines - try again

Does it give you the clue for the next level? Can you or someone else share a screenshot or something so I can compare to find out what I'm missing?

blenderobon Twelve Days of Shell

I tried again to see if they fixed it. No it still doesn't work. You'll get the output but look closer.

  Output does not match expected lines - try again

So you can't move on to the next level.

blenderobon The fuck off contact page

Thank you! 1000 times better after selecting antialiased font.

blenderobon The fuck off contact page

No kidding! Half way down I began to get a headache. Took me a moment to understand that it was the difficult-to-read font that was inducing headache. Switched to "Reader mode" and instant relief!

Excellent design. But not for me. Thank you Reader mode!

blenderobon Bag of words, have mercy on us

> Use your brain and use an LLM for 6 months, you’ll work it out.

That's not a proof. Think harder about the questions people are asking you here.

blenderobon Twelve Days of Shell

Looks nice but it's rejecting valid commands as incorrect. Like when it told me to search for "laugh" I ran

  grep laugh *

There's only one file in the directory. So that's a correct answer but the game wants me to run

  grep laugh night-before-christmas.txt

It's like those weird interviewers who have a specific answer in mind and they'll accept nothing other than the answer they have in mind.

blenderobon Best URL Shortener – super clean / no ads

I've to say that the best URL shortener is none. Sooner or later all URL shorteners will disappear and we'll be left with broken links. Just share full links. If your links are too long, optimize your links. Embrace the original links.

blenderobon We're losing our voice to LLMs

Yes. Appreciate the reply.