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paultopiaon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://gowder.io ---I'm fairly proud of this design, which was meant to be an homage to the old palm pilots! needs some updating though :-)

paultopiaon A university got itself banned from the Linux kernel (2021)

Woah, the thing that leapt out at me, as a professor, is that they somehow got an exemption from the UMN institutional review board. Uh, how?? It's clearly human subjects research under the conventional federal definition[1] and obviously posed a meaningful risk of harm, in addition to being conducted deceptively. Someone has to have massively been asleep at the wheel at that IRB.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/policy-and-compliance/policy-topics/h...

paultopiaon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions.

Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.

Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.

paultopiaon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

A justification for lying to poor people about the prices of things they're trying to buy? Do tell.

paultopiaon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

At a certain point we have to acknowledge that a huge share of our economy is just raw predation.

paultopiaon Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language

It’s been too long since something like this has happened. Kudos.

paultopiaon The end of the rip-off economy: consumers use LLMs against information asymmetry

Interesting—-just a couple of days ago, I actually figured out my new favorite prompt, which was “find me reviews for X by established publications as opposed to SEO-driven content farms”—-seems to work reasonably well to cut out the first several pages of google results for reviews of any product

paultopiaon The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

Hah I still have some Zip disks sitting in a drawer, completely unreadable

paultopiaon StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

I have to shamelessly show off my personal webpage, which is designed to be a rough emulation of how I remember palm OS looking back in the day, at least when you load it on a phone. https://gowder.io --- took me way too long to hack together the CSS for this in like 2017 :-)

paultopiaon StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

Now that Pebble is coming back why not bring Palm back too? I miss my circa 1999 PalmPilot so bad. I even had a gigantic ugly wireless modem for it that I used to check e-mail.

paultopiaon The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

The differences in disk size and software needed to access the Hawking material is typical of the early floppy disk era. "There wasn't one system that dominated the market," Talboom explains. "It was a bit of a wild west out there."

Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?

paultopiaon Apple Vision Pro upgraded with M5 chip

... so does this mean that the rest of us will one day be able to buy the previous model for some price less than your firstborn??

paultopiaon Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

I’m an academic—LLM-detectors can pry the em dashes from my cold dead hands.

paultopiaon AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

I think this may already be happening in job applications---companies using AI to parse them, applicants surely by now using AI to spew them out at increasing volume...

paultopiaon AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

Is it the “workslop” that is causing the problem, or the slop that companies demand and that passes for work in the first place? Really wanna summon the ghost of David Graeber (“Bullshit Jobs”) here: if you’re a manager who demands your employees to produce PowerPoints about the TPS reports, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when you get meaningless LLM argle-bargle in return.

paultopiaon Say Bye with JavaScript Beacon

How about don't instead

paultopiaon I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

“Why I still believe in HP”… why would anyone still believe in HP? How many decades has it been since they’ve produced a good product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP. I’ll be it’s bottom-of-the-market windows laptops and innovation in the all-important space of printer consumer abuse (planned obsolescence, ink-as-a-service, etc).

paultopiaon Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce

Cooking would suck a lot less if physicists who cared about clarity and precision wrote recipes.

paultopiaon Passkey technology is elegant, but it's most definitely not usable security

This matches my experience perfectly. As someone who is technically skilled but has no particular security expertise, I've tried to gradually implement passkeys where available across the most important and frequently used of my accounts, and... I'd have to go read the goddamn spec to have any idea what's going on. Pretty much all I've learned is that sometimes I can use touch ID to log into stuff now, and sometimes I can't, and the reasons are totally damn opaque.

paultopiaon How Boston City Hall was born

Yeah I've always thought that the point of much of the design was to have obvious places to put machine guns to mow down protesters.

paultopiaon Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

The image generator in 18.2 is... honestly kinda pitiful. It doesn't seem to be able to achieve images that match two-sentence descriptions.

paultopiaon Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say

auto insurance definitely isn't a scam. it's not to protect the policyholder, it's to protect the people who the policyholder might run over.

paultopiaon Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say

This is the sort of thing that a decent corporate lawyer ought to be able to handle. Obviously not giving legal advice to anyone's specific situation here (and I don't have a current bar card, though I am a law professor), but generally there's an implied contract law duty of good faith.[1]

Dirty tricks like writing a contract that says something like "you can cancel at the end of a term, but you have to have a meeting with us," and the contract doesn't say anything about availability of meetings... then the company only offers meeting times after an automatic renewal in order to cheat people into giving them more money... well, that smells like a really good excuse for a lawyer to argue that the duty of good faith has been breached. And even if the company is honest that they were just unable to schedule a meeting beforehand, a decent lawyer might be able to come up with enough of a theory for recovery to negotiate something fair.

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...

paultopiaon Apple wins $250 US jury verdict in patent case over Masimo smartwatches

Can someone please explain why Apple doesn't just buy Masimo in a fight like this? Their market cap is like 5% of Apple's annual profit...

paultopiaon Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

EXCITING! Can't wait to give it a spin!

(Does `let` work? I remember that being a barrier for a while.)

paultopiaon Releasing everyone's SSN and the hacks used to acquire them

WTF

paultopiaon The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix (2023)

I love me an overengineered resume. I've been hacking on my academic cv as part of my personal website for years and years, with unholy stuff like live TeX libraries downloaded in the midst of a netlify CI process. Still needs some work on various formatting edge cases, but in case you're curious: https://github.com/paultopia/websiterevision2017

paultopiaon How to think in writing

This is a fantastic essay. As a professor, I routinely work with students on research and writing projects where they're suffering under the common misimpression that they need to know everything they intend to say before writing a single word down; I may start sending this to them to help clear the brain worm out.

paultopiaon Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices

Why does anyone ever give Google money for anything at this point?

paultopiaon Anatomy of a credit card rewards program

It seems pretty clearly implied from his Starbucks example: these rates are negotiated (at least with big merchants).

Presumably, for example, Starbucks is willing to pay higher interchange on the Chase sapphire series than on the Chase freedom series because they believe that the people carrying Chase sapphire cards spend more money. Starbucks would not be willing to pay that for less profitable customers.