badlibrarian

7 gün öncediscuss

Archives have not taken a consistent stance on this. Preservation, removal, restricted access, de-indexing, and “right to be forgotten” sit on a spectrum.

Good archival practice has to include judgment, context, and humility.

Sometimes that means preserving. Sometimes it means limiting access. And sometimes it may mean "honoring" a removal request or court order, even if you're just setting a flag.

badlibrarian

7 gün öncediscuss

From http://bbslist.textfiles.com/

Perhaps Dude is among us.

  206-246-6647
  White Center, VA RaT City BBS
  (1993-1997) Dude Renegade
  "Primarily a demoscene board with a vast collection of Impulse Tracker music and ANSI art. 
  Used to meet IRL at Seattle Center to take field recordings for use as samples. 
  Members included Dude, Catspaw, Geo, and Infamouse." - Dude

badlibrarian

7 gün öncediscuss

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead, replied:

"We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

badlibrarian

18 gün öncediscuss

It started failing two days ago, when it suddenly couldn't access gmail threads reliably. Then it started popping up warnings that I was over quota when I wasn't. It even let me use Fable briefly, or pretended to. Meanwhile search finally started working, so there's that.

This video, wow: https://www.threads.com/@founder__growth/post/DZz_9Ikj3Wx

Out of desperation, I moved to ChatGPT and it's working better than I remember. All these companies are playing games under load, under failure. No wonder we can't agree on what's good for what.

badlibrarian

18 gün öncediscuss

Exactly. They're both very expensive and prone to surprising you. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. I'd rate them 85%, but you have to run a test because they both fail in different ways on the 15%.

badlibrarian

19 gün öncediscuss

The physical version of that magic wormhole is called a slide rule.

badlibrarian

19 gün öncediscuss

The first section is the good part.

The later reuse of “log” across valuations, dimension, vector fields, orders of vanishing is not so good. Those may be related ideas, but each needs a type signature: from what, to what, and preserving which operation?

badlibrarian

20 gün öncediscuss

This essay needs a type system. Every time it says “log” it should say: log of what, into what?

It’s like audio where people say "dB" as if it answers the next question. Relative to what, measured how, and weighted for whom?

Author should brush up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_theory

badlibrarian

20 gün öncediscuss

If it didn't work sometimes (in other cases), we wouldn't call them sociopaths.

badlibrarian

20 gün öncediscuss

Andrew Carnegie funded 2,500+ public libraries and many were built with lecture halls, auditoriums, and meeting rooms on purpose. The public library was a civic institution from day one.

badlibrarian

21 gün öncediscuss

Much Claude, very 4.7: "Heavy lifting... single most useful thing... the careful claim is narrow... there are three outcomes, not two... honest caveat... honest oddity... honest verdict... honest shape."

It's the weekend on HN, prime time for lost souls, so I'll dare to post that.

If you're going to prompt out an essay, at least take a minute to set up the prompt so that a hint of your personality, or even an invented one, comes through.

badlibrarian

22 gün öncediscuss

PayPal does it. Synchrony Bank does it. Use your eBay credit card to buy toner, shipped to the address on your card, just like you do every 90 days? Must be fraud.

They email you an alert. You click "this is okay." Card still doesn't work, you call. Rep asks ID questions, still not enough. Says he has to text a QR code linking to some wonky app that videos your face, no other option.

You can't even login to pay the card off and cancel without going through the process.

badlibrarian

23 gün öncediscuss

Ah yes, the financial services company that runs a travel agency, allows me to book my hotel and rental car weeks in advance, registers a hold for incidentals for both the hotel and car when I check in, then blocks the card when I try to buy dinner that night in that same hotel due to fraud detection.

Last week it required me to take pictures of my face from multiple angles to regain membership privileges. I suspect this may be part Palantir data collection and part Peter Thiel dating service.

badlibrarian

23 gün öncediscuss

Finance has always run on both: an asset that produces something has a floor. An asset that produces nothing does not. Between the two lies human nature. One way to get rich is to focus on fundamentals. One way to get rich or poor faster is to bet on human nature.

badlibrarian

28 gün öncediscuss

[flagged]

badlibrarian

28 gün öncediscuss

[flagged]

badlibrarian

28 gün öncediscuss

If you're in a market that requires using C++, many of these decisions are made for you by the platform above you, and you're screwed. Turn on RTTI, build a fort to deflect the random exceptions they'll throw at you, and may the gods allow you to recoup your R&D before some well-intentioned yokel in some media or game vertical changes everything and requires you to change everything.

On the other hand, if you control your own destiny and care about velocity and code quality, many of these choices eventually become self-evident.

If you are messing around with the latest and greatest esoteric C++ stuff in 2026, bless you, you beautiful nerd. But it may be time to start evaluating where you are in life, and how you got here. (And if you're on a C++ committee, I revoke those blessings.)

For those who remain: if you have a C++ code base yet somehow have enough time and energy to write opinionated blog posts, it's really hard to imagine why you think you'd have a better take on this than Google.

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html

badlibrarian

2 ay öncediscuss

There is no such thing as fair revenge. It can run for generations.

Retribution is impersonal, proportional, principled, and employs safeguards like time limitations.

You could say "the state channels the impulse toward revenge into a procedure that mostly isn't revenge" but Hobbes figured that out in 1651.

badlibrarian

2 ay öncediscuss

I have strict context in place on what I expect from the final language (C# or C++) and I'm frequently left with my jaw open. Used my preferred json library on C++, used LINQ appropriately in C#. Mapped AWS libraries appropriately and used existing credential stores. Certainly better than what I got when I asked for the native version first, which is why I do the hurdle. It feels hacky but it works. In a year it probably won't be necessary.

badlibrarian

2 ay öncediscuss

My experience a year ago (back when half of HN was still in denial about what was already working, let alone what was to come) was that Python was the linqua franca of LLMs. You could achieve almost anything that fit in 700 lines or less if you told it to write it in Python.

Times change, and I work more in R&D space than on legacy codebases, but I still ask it to write something in Python then convert it to the actual language on occasion. I don't know if I'm tricking the context window, forcing alternate pathways, or both, but it works.

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