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polycaster

868 karma · joined November 13, 2018

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polycaster··on Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)
It has not been flagged, at least not visibly. That's the point.

Regarding your question, HN is YCombinator and the article is very much in opposition to YC's business model. Paul Graham is being criticized, too.

Not my hill to die on, but this is very much at odds with the common perception of HN as a platform promoting and enabling the free exchange of ideas and highlights its utility as a VC propaganda machine.

polycaster··on Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)
I suppose this won't work. The mechanism behind it is probably something like an elevated sink rate.

But it would be very interesting to scan for posts with a higher than usual sink rate. Obvious violations against the rules would just be flagged or simply downvoted. If it sinks like a rock despite having good numbers, however, then it is probably extraordinary interesting.

polycaster··on Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)
I guess the author struck a nerve...
polycaster··on Move Slow and Fix Things (2024)
I find it interesting that this moved from the top position within minutes down to the second page. Below a post with 23 points in 11 hours, while this post has 102 points in 48 minutes. It has obviously been moderated down.
polycaster··on Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'
This is not even remotely related in any way to Gaia-X. The only connection is your marketing blitz label, which can be anything that involves public communications, really.
polycaster··on OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework
The code is only part of the specification. It does rarely document the actual requirements to a degree you can rely on for decision making. Sure, the code should speak for itself, but it mostly speaks about the WHYs of the implementation, not the reasoning behind the actual requirement. I found that OpenSpec actually helps a lot in this regard.
polycaster··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
It’s obviously more complex than this, but my intuition is that the previous messages of the conversation define the playing field for the next response in the same way as thought blocks do. consequently, when the model arrives in round n and “notices” a lot of words like “plain”, “genuine” and so on in its own previous responses, then, in its pursuit of continuity, it takes this as a strong trigger that it should not be talking fiction here. If that picture is right, then trying to remove those terms would be a bad idea. At least if you intend to continue the conversation.
polycaster··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
While the post is specific to Claude, interestingly I found the same terms and language patterns appear noticeably more often in recent Open AI conversations as well. Also in the same timeframe as for the Claude models. And I can see two reasons for that. One being that one company is training on the models of the other company, but I highly doubt that because of the apparent similar appearance without noticeable delay. And the other being that there has been some fundamental realization on how to improve and shape conversations.

I see people around here giving advice on how to reduce this vocabulary in the model output. I’m not certain this is a clever thing to do, as it appears to me, the emphasis on certain words is deliberate, and an important step towards overall quality as the words are being played back to the model in the next turn and thus supporting the model shape its own thoughts and stay on course.

polycaster··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
https://forgejo.org/
polycaster··on Incident with Github.com
For Germany it's roughly 1:11 if you go by the self-employment rate (~8% of the workforce).
polycaster··on This Month in Ladybird – April 2026
Sure and Mozilla is arguably the cautionary tale here. They also started as a non-profit taking donations. AOL seeded them with $2M, Red Hat and Sun pitched in too. Within a year they had the Google search deal. By 2006, ~92% of revenue came from Google.
polycaster··on This Month in Ladybird – April 2026
I don't want to dampen the positive vibes around this project in any way, in fact I'm very glad such projects exists. But it just struck me that my immediate associations with the "non-profit" label - which in this project's context is clearly being positioned against Mozilla's for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation - don't quite match reality. Even though it is indeed a non-profit, the website features a not exactly short listing of sponsors, including platinum-tier sponsor Cloudflare.

Platinum, per Ladybird's own sponsorship page, means $100,000+ per year. Money that, per the site, comes from "just people and companies who believe in an open web." Cloudflare, then.

polycaster··on McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash
> However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage - that for many guests this period is 'the most wonderful time of the year'.

Cringe. I suspect the same people who needed social comments and international media coverage to figure out that Christmas might actually be a nice time for some people are the ones who decided that video was appropriate in content and aesthetics. Also, that quote reads a bit like a machine desperately trying to understand humans.

polycaster··on iPhone Pocket
> The socks were jokingly presented by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a "revolutionary new product"
polycaster··on Become unbannable from your email
I‘m following this scheme for years now and frankly never found a site that only accepts selected providers.
polycaster··on Become unbannable from your email
Same experience, but a different perception. I’ve always found it to be a great conversation starter when I did this with my business domain. Of course, it’s mainly about spam control, but some people even felt flattered to have their own personal email address. Then there was that one time I tried to open a new bank account using bankname@mydomain - it ended up involving three levels of management. On the bright side, though, they now greet me by name whenever I walk into the building.
polycaster··on Potential issues in curl found using AI assisted tools
I’m curious what tools that may be.
polycaster··on I made a public living room and the internet keeps putting weirder stuff in it
It’s Gemini for what it’s worth
polycaster··on Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative
I’m sorry, but could someone please elaborate on the significance of this post?
polycaster··on Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils
Yes, I remember. It still shows me how I overestimated the maintenance work distributors do / can do. My unreflected expectation was that in the past 40 years test were developed to secure the very foundation we keep on building on since then.
polycaster··on Ubuntu 25.10 Replaces GNU Coreutils with Rust Uutils
> The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities that are part of Coreutils

…

> Last week, the issue of the package uutils coreutils 0.0.30 successfully passed 507 tests (in the last issue of 506, in a year old – 476) from the standard GNU Coreutils test set.

If I’m reading this right then there are on average only one to five tests per utility (like cat, dd, …) which is a shockingly low number. Particularly when you consider how many options a single command alone might accept. And of course, this alone would not even remotely cover a critical part of all the circumstances that might vary.

polycaster··on Trump exempts phones, computers, chips from ‘reciprocal’ tariffs
Also suspended is not removed.

I assume there is some kind of divide and conquer going on.

polycaster··on Gemini 2.5 Pro vs. Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Coding Comparison
If there'd just be an alternative to claude code...
polycaster··on GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
I've been waiting so long for this. Finally, we can have Epics that are not a pain in the ass!
polycaster··on Wiby – Search Engine for the Classic Web
Not sure about the technique wiby uses to filter garbage, but I could imagine a search index that contains only HTML4 pages could be quite resourceful.
polycaster··on Apple Passwords’ generated strong password format
I’d really love to find this dictionary of filthy terms that exists on Apple device for the sake of cleaning passwords. Is it compiled in the code or encrypted? I can’t imagine it’s just laying around in clear text. In a way, both cases are kind of funny when you think about it.
polycaster··on Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps
The "Comparison" section of the Product Ownership also seems rather ridiculous, where NextCloud is just a questionable "fork" while ownCloud glouriously carries the torch of product ownership. Especially since it's placed directly below the "License" section. Apparently, someone didn't quite understand the idea behind the GPL.
polycaster··on Can reading make you happier? (2015)
After all, reading is mostly thinking with someone else’s brain.
polycaster··on Switzerland Makes Open Source Software Mandatory for Public Sector
You'd get by just fine. It's not uncommon to speak three languages fluently in CH (given it has 4 official languages), and usually English is in the mix. I lived there for a couple of years and while not speaking French or Italian, I got by quite easily in the respective regions.
polycaster··on Germany is No 1 in Europe for EV production, No 2 in the world
I'm not sure where this fax myth originates. I've been living in Germany for most of my life, and I'm no longer in my thirties. During this time, I have sent a total of zero faxes. I can't even remember anyone ever asking me to send one.
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