thephyber (u/thephyber)

thephyber commented on A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote 404media.co/hack-reveals-... · Posted by u/grahamlee

ipython · a day ago

FWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.

thephyber · a day ago

I don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often.

They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:

Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),

Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),

Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).

Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.

thephyber commented on A16z-backed Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts promote 404media.co/hack-reveals-... · Posted by u/grahamlee

ipython · a day ago

wow... honestly, reading the Twitter feed for Zuhair ("CEO" of DoubleSpeed) makes me sick. https://x.com/rareZuhair and https://www.zuhair.io/.

If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997

"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...

thephyber · a day ago

The risky thing about creating this tool is that someone will inevitably use it against the creator, the employees, and the investors.

thephyber commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025) · Posted by u/david927

thephyber · 4 days ago

I’m trying to build 1 decent iOS mobile app per month.

Most recently released one was My Vocab Quest[1], a vocab mastery app with lots of word packs. It uses some gamification mechanics to make sure the user puts in the reps.

Current apps in the hopper are centered around:

(1) Recovery from cosmetic surgery. There are several balls to juggle for days, weeks, and months after a surgery. The app helps the user follow surgeon instructions, promoting physical and mental recovery, as well as medical and dietary changes. Makes use of phone features including contacts, calendar events, notifications. I’m learning to build an App Clip for it and hope to partner with some surgeons to get it promoted in their offices.

(2) Assisting older Americans to be more independent for a little longer (a parent of mine has early stage dementia). Helping the user maintain a regular schedule, take their medications on time.

(3) A dating ideas / meal ideas and agreement app. It helps increase creativity for date ideas, learns from how predictable you are, and facilitates agreement between the users.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-vocab-quest/id6748546703

thephyber commented on How private equity is changing housing theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/harambae

ReptileMan · 9 days ago

One of the things communism did right was housing - in the Eastern Bloc home ownership was above 90%. The quality was not great, not terrible. But bad shelter is infinitely better than no shelter. I also think that it also excelled in K12 education. Whether because the german style system that was common in europe pre WWII was just left alone - I don't know. But until the mid 90s we really didn't had the school reformers to fuck it up. Right now we are as good as producing illiteracy as the rest of the west.

thephyber · 9 days ago

What does “home ownership” mean in a country where there is no private property?

thephyber commented on How private equity is changing housing theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/harambae

jack_tripper · 9 days ago

Same. I remember growing up in the 90s, after the fall of communism, hearing that capitalism beat communism because in capitalism you can own things.

MFW I now live in capitalism and can't afford to own anything.

thephyber · 9 days ago

The only reason capitalism works is because it turns everything into a struggle for existence, which is the best motivator. Every company is forced to compete (assuming there is no moat created by politics eg. Intellectual Property or contract law) or the company will go under.

But it also means that the people who can’t compete in this type of Darwinism only survive because of the empathy of others who do (whether that be family/friends, politics, or charities).

I’m worried about the breadth of industries that PE has infected in the US.

thephyber commented on How private equity is changing housing theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/harambae

mwkaufma · 9 days ago

Summary: they're pulling "starter homes" off the market, predominantly in nonwhite neighborhoods, and skimping more on maintenance/landscaping.

thephyber · 9 days ago

When a landlord “Skimps” systematically on their obligations as a landlord, we call it a slumlord.

thephyber commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

JKCalhoun · 11 days ago

Here's how shitty of a business person I am: I had no idea that the poor were a "market" you could prey upon.

Somehow I thought that if I presented a business plan that began, "Our target audience are those living paycheck to paycheck…" that I would be quickly shown the door.

thephyber · 11 days ago

Dollar Tree and Dollar General are sometimes located in the poor part of a city, but most of their locations are in areas which are too poor to sustain good margin businesses. Rural towns with a single road and only 1-2 gas stations, etc. their core business is to offer smaller and smaller portions to maintain profits while rival stores go under. They are so prolific, they can get giant companies (think drinks, household items, and pharma) to create smaller and smaller portioned SKUs over time.

The businesses were originally just exploiting a gap in the market, but then PE realized that they could just buy out these local monopolies.

thephyber commented on How long can it take to become a US citizen? usafacts.org/articles/how... · Posted by u/speckx

scoofy · a month ago

Look, the point is that democracy should mean democracy. You don't like our immigration laws. I really don't like our immigration laws. They're still our immigration laws, we should fight to change them. Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.

The entire reason the last 20 years of effective nullification (by blue states ignoring them and even subverting them) is so pernicious is because it's just plain anti-democratic. If, like marijuana, most people were effectively in favor then this wouldn't be a serious issue, but the problem is that nullification undermines rule of law. It's hard for us to argue for a reasonable immigration system when, if we don't get the system we want, we literally just say "fuck it, just ignore the rules."

thephyber · a month ago

> Nobody's human rights are being actively violated because they're not allow to immigrate here.

US law enshrined both refugees and asylum seekers as separate categories of immigration specifically to deal with human rights issues observed in the 20th century. While that doesn’t mean any person anywhere has a right to be a citizen in the US, it is closer to true than your statement suggests.

“Sanctuary policies” are about enforcing the 10th Amendment. The Federal government alone is responsible for immigration policy. The states should not have to participate, and sanctuary policies are a public declaration that they won’t (usually because local law enforcement knows that it makes their primary job of enforcing the criminal code harder if residents won’t testify).

The reason we haven’t reformed US immigration laws is that everyone agrees it is broken, but nowhere close to a supermajority agree on _how_ it is broken or the steps needed to fix it. See “gang of 8” negotiations circa 2013. This is the inevitable outcome of the founders making Congress slow/stagnant by default. Also damn near half of the voters being propagandized with immigration ragebait for decades.

When my family came over to what is now the USA, immigration was as simple as paying for your own boat trip and passing a health inspection. It was hundreds of years of very “open borders” before Congress decided to go hyper racist and xenophobic in the 1870s.

It’s worth poiting out that Republicans have long insisted that “we can’t reform immigration laws without _first_ kicking out all illegal immigrants. It’s neither a reasonable expectation that we can do that, nor is it a reasonable precondition for reform negotiations. It’s also hilariously false that all recent immigrants vote for Democrats — that demographic is FAR more likely to be Evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic Christian, which heavily vote towards Republicans (not to mention all of the Socialism/Communism haters from Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela who think Democrats are somehow equivalent to “far left”).

Nullification doesn’t harm US law. It is the escape valve people in the US use judiciously when US law becomes unruly and malicious.

thephyber commented on US air traffic controllers start resigning as shutdown bites thedailybeast.com/air-tra... · Posted by u/throw0101a

disgruntledphd2 · a month ago

I can't see any rational politician letting this go beyond another two weeks. I can't imagine keeping people away from their families over Thanksgiving is gonna work out well for anyone.

But then, maybe they're not rational.

thephyber · a month ago

I argue that politicians are absolutely rational. I frequently argue that even the dictator of N Korea acts rationally, only by very different rules than we are used to thinking about. Generally I reserve “irrational” to people who are functionally/mentally disabled, severely traumatized, or acting under the influence of mind altering substances (eg. RFK’s drugs history + trauma of 2 men in his life being assassinated during his formative years).

They are acting according to the expected responses to the stimuli they create. The problem is that the culture, society, previous legislation/jurisprudence, and the parliamentary rules they voted in all make the calculus of predicting what is rational for them uncertain.

thephyber commented on Messing with scraper bots herman.bearblog.dev/messi... · Posted by u/HermanMartinus

simondotau · a month ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

About 10-15 years ago, the scourge I was fighting was social media monitoring services, companies paid by big brands to watch sentiment across forums and other online communities. I was running a very popular and completely free (and ad-free) discussion forum in my spare time, and their scraping was irritating for two reasons. First, they were monetising my community when I wasn’t. Second, their crawlers would hit the servers as hard as they could, creating real load issues. I kept having to beg our hosting sponsor for more capacity.

Once I figured out what was happening, I blocked their user agent. Within a week they were scraping with a generic one. I blocked their IP range; a week later they were back on a different range. So I built a filter that would pseudo-randomly[0] inject company names[1] into forum posts. Then any time I re-identified[2] their bot, I enabled that filter for their requests.

The scraping stopped within two days and never came back.

--

[0] Random but deterministic based on post ID, so the injected text stayed consistent.

[1] I collated a list of around 100 major consumer brands, plus every company name the monitoring services proudly listed as clients on their own websites.

[2] This was back around 2009 or so, so things weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are today, both in terms of bots and anti-bot strategies. One of the most effective tools I remember deploying back then was analysis of all HTTP headers. Bots would spoof a browser UA, but almost none would get the full header set right, things like Accept-Encoding or Accept-Language were either absent, or static strings that didn't exactly match what the real browser would ever send.

thephyber · a month ago

In the movie The Imitation Game, the Alan Turing character recognizes that acting 100% of the time gives away to the opposition that you identified them and sets off the next iteration of “cat and mouse”. He comes up with a specific percentage of the time that the Allies should sit on the intelligence and not warn their own people.

If, instead, you only act on a percentage of requests, you can add noise in an insidious way without signaling that you caught them. It will make their job troubleshooting and crafting the next iteration much harder. Also, making the response less predictable is a good idea - throw different HTTP error codes, respond with somewhat inaccurate content, etc