Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

@weiyen.net

I posted a question about cloudflare on hacker news, and got this really lengthy reply from the CEO.

Cloudflare is operating on a different level

eastdakota

Well… we have a culture of transparency we take seriously. I spent 3 years in law school that many times over my career have seemed like wastes but days like today prove useful. I was in the triage video bridge call nearly the whole time. Spent some time after we got things under control talking to customers. Then went home. I’m currently in Lisbon at our EUHQ. I texted John Graham-Cumming, our former CTO and current Board member whose clarity of writing I’ve always admired. He came over. Brought his son (“to show that work isn’t always fun”). Our Chief Legal Officer (Doug) happened to be in town. He came over too. The team had put together a technical doc with all the details. A tick-tock of what had happened and when. I locked myself on a balcony and started writing the intro and conclusion in my trusty BBEdit text editor. John started working on the technical middle. Doug provided edits here and there on places we weren’t clear. At some point John ordered sushi but from a place with limited delivery selection options, and I’m allergic to shellfish, so I ordered a burrito. The team continued to flesh out what happened. As we’d write we’d discover questions: how could a database permission change impact query results? Why were we making a permission change in the first place? We asked in the Google Doc. Answers came back. A few hours ago we declared it done. I read it top-to-bottom out loud for Doug, John, and John’s son. None of us were happy — we were embarrassed by what had happened — but we declared it true and accurate. I sent a draft to Michelle, who’s in SF. The technical teams gave it a once over. Our social media team staged it to our blog. I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did. That was the process.

November 19, 2025 at 3:51 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

CloudFlare is down.

I like that CloudFlare tells you that it was CloudFlare that messed up. That's a nice touch.

Screenshot of an internal server error from CloudFlare

November 18, 2025 at 11:52 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

TIL we have 4 different types of horsepower, including a metric horsepower.

There are many different standards and types of horsepower. Two common definitions used today are the imperial horsepower as in "hp" or "bhp" which is about 745.7 watts, and the metric horsepower also represented as "cv" or "PS" which is approximately 735.5 watts. The electric horsepower "hpE" is exactly 746 watts, while the boiler horsepower is 9809.5 or 9811 watts, depending on the exact year.

September 28, 2025 at 1:14 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

The article doesn't seem to think so

Declines in alcohol consumption do not appear to be caused by people shifting to other mood-altering substances — in particular, recreational marijuana, which is now legal in about half of U.S. states. Although marijuana use is higher today than a decade ago, it has been fairly steady over the past four years and thus doesn’t appear to be a factor in people choosing not to drink alcohol.

August 14, 2025 at 6:43 PM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

I like Jetbrains tools, but it is brave of them to increase subscription prices, right when AI-powered dev tools like Cursor or Claude Code are gaining market share.

Screenshot of an email from jetbrains

Hello,

We're writing to let you know about an upcoming change to JetBrains subscription pricing. Starting October 1, 2025, we will increase individual subscription prices.

Current and new pricing information is available on our website.
To view all subscriptions linked to your account, please visit your JetBrains Account page.
For complete details about these changes, please read our announcement blog post.

August 12, 2025 at 10:09 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Finally figured out how to integrate Claude Code with ChatGPT

Screenshot of the Claude Code input:

Using playwright MCP, can you go to https://chatgpt.com/ and type in "How do I build a multimillion-dollar app"

August 10, 2025 at 2:00 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Someone else can do this

List of Words We Haven't Seen, with "masturbations" highlighted

August 7, 2025 at 1:02 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Google Maps had trouble deciding if I'm using the light theme or the dark theme, so it chose both

Screenshot of the Google Maps settings page, with dark text on a dark background making it impossible to read.

Does anyone read the alt-text? Please let me know if you do!

August 6, 2025 at 10:02 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Admiral call themselves a "Visitor Relationship Management Company"

Which is a hell of a way to describe what they actually do, which is to detect and block people with adblockers.

Relationships Matter.

Growing great relationships leads to the best in life and in business.

Welcome to Admiral: The Visitor Relationship Management Company.

A single platform helping Publishers grow Visitor Relationships and Revenue.

August 5, 2025 at 2:18 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

macOS has a builtin command-line tool `screencapture` to capture screenshots programmatically

I finally found a use for it: scanning QR codes from the terminal.

August 1, 2025 at 7:02 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Screenshot of a tweet

Roshan Patel

We hired a college intern. Today's his first day. Here's what he just sent me

"hey had a quick idea for the company, sorry if this was already brought up but have we tried increasing revenue?"

July 31, 2025 at 3:34 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

This is a headline that will never be topped

Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo

By BO-MI LIM
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 3, 2007; 3:34 PM
SEOUL, South Korea -- They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety.

July 30, 2025 at 1:56 PM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Reminds me of the idea that AI is just compression

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_...

Goals

The goal of the Hutter Prize is to encourage research in artificial intelligence (AI). *The organizers believe that text compression and AI are equivalent problems.* Hutter proved that the optimal behavior of a goal-seeking agent in an unknown but computable environment is to guess at each step that the environment is probably controlled by one of the shortest programs consistent with all interaction so far.[5] However, there is no general solution because Kolmogorov complexity is not computable. Hutter proved that in the restricted case (called AIXItl) where the environment is restricted to time t and space l, a solution can be computed in time O(t2l), which is still intractable.

July 7, 2025 at 11:55 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

I was looking up MCP servers for mobile simulators.

On the first result, the first few example prompts were basically "leave a fake like and comment on a video" and "leave a fake 5-star review on an app" 🤦🏻‍♂️

AI folks really aren't fighting the allegations here huh

✨ Example Prompts

Workflows

You can specifiy detailed workflows in a single prompt, verify business logic, setup automations. You can go crazy:

Search for a video, comment, like and share it.

Find the video called " Beginner Recipe for Tonkotsu Ramen" by Way of
Ramen, click on like video, after liking write a comment " this was
delicious, will make it next Friday", share the video with the first
contact in your whatsapp list.

Download a successful step counter app, register, setup workout and 5-star the app

Find and Download a free "Pomodoro" app that has more than 1k stars.
Launch the app, register with my email, after registration find how to
start a pomodoro timer. When the pomodoro timer started, go back to the
app store and rate the app 5 stars, and leave a comment how useful the
app is.

July 2, 2025 at 11:56 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

That one weird trick:

Python code:

>>> import ctypes
>>> def deref(addr, typ):
... return ctypes.cast(addr, ctypes.POINTER(typ))
...
>>> deref(id(30), ctypes.c_int)[6] = 1000000
>>> 30 + 1
1000001

June 18, 2025 at 2:31 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

Naming things doesn't have to be hard. Just look at Python's copy2(), the replacement for copy()

docs.python.org/3/library/sh...

Screenshot of the doc for Python's shutil.copy2

Text reads:

shutil.copy2(src, dst, *, follow_symlinks=True)

Identical to copy() except that copy2() also attempts to preserve file metadata.

June 18, 2025 at 1:29 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

I believe you need to go all the way back to when the rust compiler was written in Ocaml to find the actual mapping.

(Char.code '\n') in Ocaml returns the integer representation of the '\n' character.

github.com/rust-lang/ru...

$Rust's ocaml source code ... and char_escape = parse 'x' ((hexdig hexdig) as h) | 'u' ((hexdig hexdig hexdig hexdig) as h) | 'U' ((hexdig hexdig hexdig hexdig hexdig hexdig hexdig hexdig) as h) { end_char (int_of_string ("0x" ^ h)) lexbuf } | 'n' { end_char (Char.code '\n') lexbuf } | 'r' { end_char (Char.code '\r') lexbuf } | 't' { end_char (Char.code '\t') lexbuf } | '\\' { end_char (Char.code '\\') lexbuf } | '\'' { end_char (Char.code '\'') lexbuf } | _ as c { fail lexbuf ("bad escape: \\" ^ (Char.escaped c)) } ...$

June 16, 2025 at 2:06 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

My favourite piece of Rust-lang trivia: The bit of code in the Rust compiler that unescapes '\n' into the newline character does it by mapping '\n' to itself!

Nowhere in the rust compiler is it explicitly defined that '\n' maps to the newline character 0x0A.

github.com/rust-lang/ru...

$fn scan_escape<T: From<char> + From<u8>>( chars: &mut Chars<'_>, mode: Mode, ) -> Result<T, EscapeError> { // Previous character was '\\', unescape what follows. let res: char = match chars.next().ok_or(EscapeError::LoneSlash)? { '"' => '"', 'n' => '\n', 'r' => '\r', 't' => '\t', '\\' => '\\', '\'' => '\'', '0' => '\0', ... Screenshot taken from https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/17067e9ac6d7ecb70e50f92c1944e545188d2359/compiler/rustc_lexer/src/unescape.rs#L240$

June 16, 2025 at 2:06 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

mood

June 9, 2025 at 11:10 PM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

🤔

This is a screenshot of a ChatGPT session

Prompt:
Please write a short paragraph about popular social media sites, but spell them in a way that an 80-year-old web-unsavvy person might

ChatGPT said:

There’s that “Face-Book” where folks swap family snapshots, “Tweeter” for chirping out brief thoughts, “Instant-Gram” to show off grandkids’ desserts, “You-Tube” for all the home-video shows, and the new-fangled “Tick-Tack” where youngsters post those quick dancing clips.

June 9, 2025 at 4:49 AM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

The thing that drives OpenAI search is called OAI-SearchBot

OAI-SearchBot is for search. OAI-SearchBot is used to link to and surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features. It is not used to crawl content to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. To help ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site’s robots.txt file and allowing requests from our published IP ranges below.

Full user-agent string will contain ; OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot

Published IP addresses: https://openai.com/searchbot.json

May 27, 2025 at 12:16 PM

yen is building stuff

@weiyen.net

"Land doesn't vote, people do"

Nowhere is this more true than in Australia, where a landslide victory for the Labor party - the red team - looks like this.