salgorithm's comments

On: Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

[salgorithm]

I'm making a site for up-to-date train/bus times that's bookmark-able. Currently I have a few San Francisco Bay Area agencies.

https://transit.directory/

On: Instagram data breach reportedly exposed the personal info of 17.5M users

[salgorithm]

I have a masked email* for Instagram and have received two password reset requests in the last five days. Obviously, this is just an anecdote.

* https://support.1password.com/fastmail/

[netsharc → salgorithm]

So what if you have masked emails...

Whoever it is, they just entered your Instagram username in the "To recover your password, enter your username, and we'll email you a reset link" field...

On: MCP server for Ghidra

[salgorithm]

Block has an open source tool called Goose that invokes MCP. https://block.github.io/goose/

[hedgehog → salgorithm]

Is there a trick to making it work well? I tried Goose briefly but it seemed very flaky compared to Open Web UI with hand-configured tool calling.

On: Ask HN: Great maker projects for 8th grade kids and above?

[salgorithm]

You can have a lot of fun with a tiny traffic light using an Arduino and three different color lights. There are bunch of things you can do to build on it.

- 3d print a stand (here's one I did https://github.com/SalvatoreT/howmm/blob/master/week06/Traff...)

- incorporate an infrared sensor + infrared light to simulate triggering the red -> green flow

- make an intersection with each of the lights working together to show the right thing at the right time

- add a crosswalk

On: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

[salgorithm]

A while back I wrote this useless site where you put in a string and it gives you a Ruby one liner to output that string.

https://monkeynumber.xyz/

i.e. "bird" gives you

ruby -e "srand(267343);puts 4.times.map{rand(97..123).chr}.join"

which will return "bird" if you run it from your command line

I do a brute force attempt at it, but (maybe one day) will peel back Mersenne Twister and get a more optimized implementation.

On: Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays

[salgorithm]

HN hug of death. Here's the Wayback link. https://web.archive.org/web/20231220091455/https://buttondow...

On: Halfsies

[salgorithm]

I wonder if growing up with similar-aged siblings gives you a natural advantage at this game.

On: Jazz² Resurrection: Open-source Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation

[salgorithm]

https://web.archive.org/web/20230820203915/http://deat.tk/ja...

On: Tokenized Tokens

[salgorithm]

I could imagine developers using something like this to get credentials off laptops.

On: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

[salgorithm]

If a lot of ChatGPT users were students, I would expect a drop during summer vacation.

I predict another article from the Washington Post in August/September about how ChatGPT is seeing a rebound in usage.

[lagniappe → salgorithm]

Not a student, but getting constantly cloudflare-blocked and models seeming less capable every update has been giving me pause.

[kccqzy → lagniappe]

In fact I've been using Google Bard more and more because of exactly this. At least Bard doesn't ever block me and its responses are on par with GPT-3.5. Probably not as good as GPT-4 but reliability is important too.

[drexlspivey → lagniappe]

You need a static custom front end, there are tons around. You only have to enter your API key once and no more login-cloudflare-auto logout loop

[copperx → drexlspivey]

Here's a collection of front ends: https://github.com/billmei/every-chatgpt-gui

[ChatGTP → drexlspivey]

You’d be ~ 1% of their target market.

[ca_tech → salgorithm]

The article only addresses the website and application. I expect that what we will see is a shift from individual users to enterprise usage. Individuals are not going to subscribe indefinitely, but I expect corporate access to the API will continue to be healthy.

[ben_w → salgorithm]

What odds would you give that said autumn term article will be written by ChatGPT? :)