Hacker News Reader

stigzon GPT-6 Astra

If they can't get the blocking and tackling right, it doesn't lend confidence they are doing the more complicated stuff well.

stigzon A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage

> We, ngrok, have sponsored Mac to write this post because we think it’s an underexplored perspective on the topic of reliability.

Uh, okay. Were there any reliability perspectives gained from this 30-year-old postmortem that would help us in the modern age? After reading the article, I feel the answer is "none". Not that I'm complaining I love this era of the internet. But I fail to see any importance here.

stigzon APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs

Price? If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

stigzon With One Call, Trump Alters the Fate of a Contested Power Project

https://archive.ph/Z97N7

stigzon Startups: Bookeeping / Accounting Tasks

At my company, we have been using Ramp.

https://ramp.com

stigzon Grok is making AI companions, including a goth anime girl

Is there any market/demand for AI companions for females (i.e. https://jaimee.ai), or has this trend of AI companions vastly for males? I suspect the latter, but curious if anyone has evidence beyond Jaimee AI of the former.

stigzon Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

I experienced something similar. My use case is I need to summarize bank statements (sums, averages, etc.). Gemini wouldn't do it, it said too many pages. When I asked the max number of supported pages, it says max is 14 pages. Attempted on both 2.0 flash and 2.0 pro in VertexAI console.

stigzon 'The Brutalist' Director Speaks Out After AI Controversy Erupts

We've been using technology to touch up movies for years. What's the big deal - just because its the AI boogey man? Accusations the director is deliberately using AI to squeeze artists out of jobs is silly, he is simply perfectecting the scene using the tools at his disposal like every director before him.

stigzon Full $71M breakdown for The Village by M. Night Shyamalan (2003) [pdf]

This is neat. I take it these these accounting breakdowns for films are hard to come by? Would love to see more for some of my favorite films.

stigzon We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

A firm handshake. They had no time to ink a benefits package, my dude.

stigzon Bottlerocket – Minimal, immutable Linux OS with verified boot

I think Nix intention is more general purpose OS and tooling. Bottlerocket is about being just enough of an OS to run containers, and that's it.

stigzon Bottlerocket – Minimal, immutable Linux OS with verified boot

That's a good point. And it sounds like it would work to me as well. I don't know the answer either.

I guess my point is the project should be providing a clear path that doesn't involve AWS instead of just stopping short.

stigzon Bottlerocket – Minimal, immutable Linux OS with verified boot

This seems to still be very much an AWS/Amazon project with no clear path to becoming its own independent thing. For example, you want vulnerability scanning on the OS? Well you can use an Amazon product for that, otherwise *shrug* [1]. So I guess as long as you plan to run Bottlerocket in AWS, you're fine.

I wish the Bottlerocket team would do 1 of 2 things. Either own up that this is just an AWS project, or start to solve for things like this and actually be a product that "runs in the cloud or in your datacenter" as they suggest on their website.

[1] https://bottlerocket.dev/en/faq/#4_2

stigzon Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk

In a similar vein, here's an analysis of the illusion in Radiohead's Videotape I found interesting.

https://youtu.be/p_IHotHxIl8

stigzon Show HN: Phind V2 – A GPT-4 agent that’s connected to the internet and your code

One thing - Consider leaving the URL in your post blank so it routes to this HN discussion instead of your homepage. I completely missed this post of yours announcing V2 and its features until I clicked 'discuss'.

Rooting for you guys. I find myself using phind over other searches (google/chatgpt) more and more.

stigzon Tarsnap outage postmortem

The service is a layer on top of S3 if that helps answer things.

https://www.tarsnap.com/faq.html#is-tarsnap-reliable

stigzon Tarsnap outage postmortem

Why would I use your service over restic?

God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

stigzon ServiceNow Insecure Access Control to Full Admin Takeover

No, judging from the Disclosure Timeline at the very bottom, it appears the lengthy remediation is due to ServiceNow dragging their feet. Took them over a month, plus a followup email, just to get them to respond to the initial report.

stigzon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://www.netsplit.dev

I need to write more.

stigzon NASA puts jet propulsion lab on blast over Psyche mission failures

Those engineers blamed themselves for the Challenger all these years? What a shame,

stigzon Linux security hardening and other tweaks

This article starts with an Arch-based system. I think it should be noted that the Arch wiki also has its own recommendations for hardening. [1]

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Security

stigzon Patch OpenSSL on November 1 to avoid “critical” security vulnerability

Speaking of go, it looks they will be patching this as well.

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce/c/dRtDK7WS78g

stigzon Why your next home computer should be an old Xeon workstation (2019)

It's not about you, bud. Speaking at a global level it is more efficient.

stigzon Lukol – A “Privacy” Search Engine

Can't vouch for Lukol, but I have been using Searx and really enjoy it. You can self host or use a public instance.

https://searx.github.io/searx/

stigzon Ask HN: Why are people in real life so different?

I agree with you that a given person typically has a different personality online vs. offline.

However, I disagree with you that people are more "kumbya" in person than online.

My experience has been people are much more aggressive and mean in person. People are constantly shit-talking, passing undue judgment, road raging complete strangers. It's absolutely terrifying.

Online, I still feel there is ugliness, but I tend to find people will put together clear and reasonable arguments. Especially in communities like this one.

stigzon Run your home on a Raspberry Pi

Sometimes it's not about power efficiency, but repurposing hardware you already have instead of buying new.

stigzon How SHA-256 Works Step-by-Step

> Append a single 1:

Just begs the question, why?

stigzon Request your personal information

Yep CCPA

stigzon Slow Money Movement

The main CTA is DONATE, that's a pretty clear spade signal to me.

stigzon GitHub was down

Great advice, thank you.