tallytarik (u/tallytarik)

tallytarik commented on When did AI take over Hacker News? zachperk.com/blog/when-di... · Posted by u/zachperkel

tallytarik · 6 days ago

I thought this was going to be an analysis of articles that are clearly AI-generated.

I feel like that’s an increasing ratio of top posts, and they’re usually an instant skip for me. Would be interested in some data to see if that’s true.

tallytarik commented on Gartner's grift is about to unravel dx.tips/gartner... · Posted by u/mooreds

tallytarik · 11 days ago

G2, Sourceforge (yes, that one), and Gartner’s Capterra/GetApp/SoftwareAdvice all have the same business plan: charge vendors $x,xxx+ per month to outrank other vendors in their made up categories.

Of course, you can technically list for free.

But look! For the low low price of $x,xxx per month, now you can show one of 40 tailor-made award icons on your site!

Or, unlock the privilege of showing “user reviews” from our site on your site! (of course if you had managed to get reviews independently, you’re not allowed to use the widget without paying)

Don’t have reviews? Ah, I forgot to mention. The $x,xxx plan also comes with “review generation” — we’ll pay users to write reviews for you!

Oh, and on an unrelated note, the $x,xxx plan just also happens to unlock dofollow links across each of those 40 made up categories, which all rank highly in google. And the $xx,xxx plan means that - user ratings aside - you can end up at the top of those categories.

It’s hard to describe it other than the author says: a grift. Seeing those logos on other companies sites are now a huge turn off to me personally, and I haven’t yet capitulated for my own SaaS, but I suspect this isn’t the feeling of the execs they seek to target. Or maybe it is, and it’s just the price of doing business.

tallytarik commented on OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

bartvk · 22 days ago

I’m Dutch and we’re noted for our directness and bluntness. So my tolerance for fake flattery is zero. Every chat I start with an LLM, I prefix with “Be curt”.

tallytarik · 22 days ago

I've tried variations of this. I find it will often cause it to include cringey bullshit phrases like:

"Here's your brutally honest answer–just the hard truth, no fluff: [...]"

I don't know whether that's better or worse than the fake flattery.

tallytarik commented on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

tallytarik · 2 months ago

SEEKING FREELANCER | Remote | Integration Engineers, Content Writers

IPLocate is on a mission to provide developers with reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use IP address intelligence - geolocation, threat data, network information and more.

We're looking for engineers to write SDKs and integrations to use our APIs with popular programming languages, frameworks, and tools. We would prefer to work with multiple folks who are experts in their respective language/framework rather than a single engineer to write 20 integrations, so we'd love to hear about your experience.

We're also looking for content writers to help write practical tutorials, step-by-step guides, and real-world use cases for our website and blog, and for publication elsewhere (e.g. Medium, Dev.to).

Details and contact links: https://www.iplocate.io/build-for-iplocate

(We've recently launched this page as an open offer to interested folks. Get in touch with your details and we're happy to formalize an offer.)

tallytarik commented on Abusing copyright strings to trick SW into thinking it's running competitor's PC devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/mastazi

tallytarik · 2 months ago

And nowadays we have

  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

tallytarik commented on JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) jonoalderson.com/conjectu... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

kitten_mittens_ · 2 months ago

Why are em dashes a giveaway? They’re auto inserted on Windows for two hyphens still, aren’t they?

tallytarik · 2 months ago

LLMs seem to use them at a rate far higher than the average person, same with the words “delve” and “robust” (and many others)

tallytarik commented on Updates to Advanced Voice Mode for paid users help.openai.com/en/articl... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

tallytarik · 3 months ago

> Additionally, rare hallucinations in Voice Mode persist with this update, resulting in unintended sounds resembling ads, gibberish, or background music.

This would be really funny if it weren’t real life.

tallytarik commented on Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city austinhenley.com/blog/coo... · Posted by u/azhenley

jillesvangurp · 3 months ago

Nice approach. It reminds me of an approach I saw used to resolve coordinates to countries. Instead of loading all country polygons, the team created a bitmap and used colors to map each pixel to a country code. The bitmap wasn't super large and compresses pretty nicely in png format. This worked well enough and it dumbed down the country lookup to simply figuring out the color for a coordinate. Neat trick. And you could probably figure out if you are dealing with an edge case by simply looking at neighboring pixels and fall back to something more expensive if you hit one of those.

And of course with edge cases, there are lots of them but mostly it's fine. One case that comes to mind is that of the border town of Baarle-Nassau On the border with the Netherlands and Belgium. This village has some of the weirdest borders in the world. There are Belgian exclaves inside Dutch enclaves. In some cases the border runs through houses and you can enter in one country and leave in another. Some of the exclaves are just a few meters. There are a few more examples like this around the world.

Another issue is the fractal nature of polygons. I once found a polygon for New Zealand that was around 200MB that broke my attempts to index it. This doesn't matter of course for resolving country codes because it is an island. But it's a reason I implemented the Douglas Peucker algorithm to simplify the polygon mentioned in the article at some point.

tallytarik · 3 months ago

I remember seeing this technique in a video by Sebastian Lague: https://youtu.be/sLqXFF8mlEU?t=787

Really cool

tallytarik commented on Ask HN: Startup getting spammed with PayPal disputes, what should we do? · Posted by u/june3739

june3739 · 3 months ago

Yeah, the UA is pretty consistent but very generic. It reads as a desktop browser.

We did not look up the AS number. Can you describe that we'd be looking for there? Based on how the address was changing, I assume they're using Tor or some kind of VPN that will obfuscate IP so I didn't spend much time looking at them.

tallytarik · 3 months ago

You can look up the AS and other info, like detected proxies or VPNs, using the form on https://iplocate.io/what-is-my-ip (disclaimer: I've run this service since 2017).

If they come from a consistent AS, you can block the AS. If they're using a proxy or VPN, you could try blocking those. If you don't expect to get traffic from hosting providers, you can block where `asn.type == 'hosting'`.

tallytarik commented on Mapping latitude and longitude to country, state, or city austinhenley.com/blog/coo... · Posted by u/azhenley

cyberax · 3 months ago

Use Nominatim: https://nominatim.org/

It can be self-hosted, with constant replication. There's also Photon which is a cut-down version of it: https://photon.komoot.io

tallytarik · 3 months ago

We self-host nominatim as part of the iplocate.io pipeline. It works great, but the requirements are pretty heavy for something to host casually.

An in-between for OP could be something like opencagedata.com, which is still a third-party API but an order of magnitude less expensive than Google. (not affiliated but have previously explored the service)