ReplayTV was the TiVo before TiVo and its commercial skip was the best bar-none. I was sad when it basically died and had to get a TiVo which was a good product made by folks I knew but at the end of the day, nothing could beat ReplayTV's skip not even the secret way to turn on 30-sec skip on the TiVo. Kind of crazy how antiquated all this stuff is now.
I felt similarly about my MythTV setup at the time. It was quite a pain to set up, having to acquire a TV decoder with hardware compression to make reasonable use of disk space without losing frames on the 400mhz boxes of the day. MySQL database, TV programming service subscription, IR remote receiver, etc.
But the commercial skipping used a set of a dozen filters for things like black screens, volume changes, logos in the corner, and bayesian analysis to nail every single commercial transition. It was flawless.
> even the secret way to turn on 30-sec skip on the TiVo
Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select ;-)
Also can't forget the ,#401 dialing prefix to enable the device to call home over the Internet using a USB Ethernet adapter instead of the phone in the early days.
TiVo's whole approach to commercials in recordings was largely informed by ReplayTV though. ReplayTV took a lot of heat and lawsuits for their automatic commercial skip functionality, which is why TiVo never implemented it and buried 30 second skip behind the code.
You want it in a chat with other tools and intelligence so that you can give softer preferences and for it to judge reviews and the like. Perhaps even look at the room layout and photos to see if it is something you would like. There are good reasons to surround the tool you describe with AI.
I don't think such massive amounts of text should be parsed at runtime. Hotels can have 100s or 1000s of reviews. We batch created attributes for hotels based on reviews, and when a semantic search was run, those attributes were matched.
OpenAI has had this opportunity to do this since their meteoric adoption and fumbled it with plugins and then GPTs. Ironically, Anthropic's MCP could be just the ingredient needed to capture this position.
We have been building MCP servers and this looks very good directionally. Fills a bunch of holes in the protocol and gives meaning to something that were kind of like placeholders. Being able to return UI to the client is fantastic and will make lots of things possible. We have been working on these kinds of things assuming that the clients would improve to meet us.
In Finland, and I imagine in most of Europe in general, people just make bank transfers for most of those things. Unlike in USA you cannot just pull cash from someone's account if you know their bank account number, you need to setup SEPA Direct Debit to do that and it requires explicit authorization from the account owner. It isn't even really used much in Finland, most companies just send electronic invoices that you can setup autopay for in your bank. They aren't free for companies but the cost is negligible (likely less than the postage stamp would cost).
Unlike in USA you cannot just pull cash from someone's account if you know their bank account number
People say things like this as if the money taken in a fraudulent transaction just disappears and is untraceable, and unrecoverable. That is false.
It's one of those scare tactics that the middlemen use to sell a vision of financial-techno-secure-utopianism in order to collect a percentage of the money. Don't fall for the marketing.
The money has to go somewhere: Into another bank account, usually, which is easily traceable since banks by law have to know who they're dealing with.
Even if a check gets cashed at a check cashing store, the store requires ID, the person getting the money is on video, sometimes they have their fingerprints taken by the store, and if something still goes wrong, the store is on the hook for the money when the transaction is reported as fraudulent and reversed.
These are all problems that were largely solved last century.
> The money has to go somewhere: Into another bank account, usually, which is easily traceable since banks by law have to know who they're dealing with.
Yes but you actually need to notice that it happened which requires them to actively monitor their transactions on all of their accounts. They then need to use their own time to report these transactions and wait for banks to resolve it. And that's just in the good case where bank doesn't dispute it. If they do, you now need to file official complaint with regulators or sue them. Former can probably be done by highly educated people by themselves (others likely need some legal help), in latter case you are going to need a lawyer. I'm not even sure if you are eligible to recover costs for those.
Why is this better than just not allowing pulls without explicit authorization by the consumer (SEPA Direct Debit) or just asking consumer to actually send the funds (bank transfer)?
> Do they not have account alerts in your country? Any time any of my balances change, I get an immediate push notification.
Just to be clear, I currently live in the US. In Finland some banks offer email/SMS notifications but they often have fees associated with them.
Frequent notifications can create notification fatigue and that's not really great either as I'm sure anyone who gets false positive alerts from monitoring system knows.
One of the many surprising things on that list is that paperboys still exist!
I thought printed papers were all but dead even in the US and can't recall the last time I saw a stand or store where I could buy one. They faded away unceremoniously, like phone booths.
That there is enough money in it to motivate kids to get up in the morning still today I would never have guessed.
Also astonishing are the size and presence of the various fees! Around here a 5 dollar fee for invoicing is the highest I've seen, and it raises eyebrows even among the Mercedes/BMW crowd because everyone knows it doesn't cover any actual additional costs, so it's basically a scam. A way for companies to say "interest free" while still collecting interest.
I thought printed papers were all but dead even in the US
In its last financial statement, the New York Times reported 600,000 print subscribers. (Plus something like 20 million paid online subs.)
Newsstands are mostly gone (though there are a few), but my experience over the last few years is that outside of tourist areas, print newspapers are available at most chain drug stores, book stores, and some gas stations. The more urban you are, the more likely you are to find them. They also remain popular in ethnic communities. I recently picked up a monthly printed newspaper in Japanese that is distributed in the DC area.
I can think of five places with six blocks of me that sell newspapers (two drug stores, two bodegas, and a bookstore).
The latest Superman movie even did a PR stunt where the movie company printed up thousands of Gotham newspapers with Superman headlines and distributed them to newspaper racks. I saw them at Walgreens.
- ? You pay your employer what you were paid for jury service? Bank transfer I guess, but also probably illegal
- would likely be deducted on payslip (because tax & accounting implications of below market value gift) or via a third-party that would most likely accept card
> ? You pay your employer what you were paid for jury service? Bank transfer I guess, but also probably illegal
That happens when you are salaried and your company pays you your normal salary for the time you are in jury duty. They already paid for your time, they are entitled to the (generally much lower) compensation that the state pays you.
Oh I see. It's kind of just reversed here then - it's not paid, but if your employer doesn't pay you (i.e. gives you unpaid time off for it) then you can claim capped loss of earnings.
Seems like it would be easier in US case just to reduce pay though, time off at 80% or whatever rather than full and then request it paid back...
most of these are related to the high credit card fees we have in the US to support the card points programs. in EU for example, the fees are 10% of ours.
> Charitable donations because charities maximize every penny, and electronic contributions eat into that
Charities in Europe very much want an electronic donation, since the cost is far less than handling either cash or cheques. More importantly (I think), it also gives them much more opportunity to get a recurring donation.
Example UK prices (since cheques still exist there)
I'm in Sweden and the only time I've ever come in contact with a check was when an American company sent me one as a refund.
Most of these reasons just sound like fee-issues to me. I use a debit card (or Swish) to pay for everything and there's never a cheaper payment option. The fact that checks somehow cost less to use than debit/credit cards sounds ridiculous tbh, especially with all the added handling that must go into dealing with them (it just seems so inefficient).
My company claims that allowing me to have both my regular pay and the government pay would be considered an over-payment, and the accountants say it triggers all kinds of messy things.
However, at the same time, it is illegal to do this in some American states where we have offices. So it must somehow be possible for the accountants to allow it.
I served on a jury for a week a few years ago and my check at the end was $22. It seems like it wouldn't be worth the company's time to handle and process that check.
I'm sure some jurors got more. My county's jury pay/reimbursement is primarily mileage based and I live 2 miles from the court house.
Given how badly jury duty pays, it seems a wasted effort.
It seems to vary from county to county. When I served, we were given a pamphlet stating that the rate had recently been raised.
I don't remember the exact figure, but it was well above minimum wage. Something like $80 for the first and last day, plus $120 for each day between, plus transportation costs.
Far less than what I make as a super cool tech dev bro, but I can see it taking a lot of the pain away for the average person.
The state made me forego the (grand - for a month) jury duty pay due to being on salary.
However, I still got compensated for daily public transport to the courthouse - which wasn't taxable.
If the "check"/offline payment bounces, I wonder if it's the merchant that is out the money? Or is there any assurance from anyone else, like maybe the network would go halfsies?
Edit: on second thought, that doesn't really make sense and would be a great way to defraud the network of a ton of guaranteed money
I would love it if this were the solution, embossed card imprinters can work without internet and power and are both fast and intuitive. It worked as a primary method in the past, it can work as a backup method in the future.
atleast with cheques tho there was a way to safeguard the payments of a cheques by crossing of cheques and when I had learnt about cheques there were a lot of things that can be done via cheques like endorsing etc.
But there was always a risk of cheques being unsafe so that's why there is bank drafts. It seems that this is more similar to bank drafts than cheques.
If you really try to sum it up, I know I am going to do a grave misjustice but even a cash could be thought of a cheque from the govt. (well a cheque is meant to be unconditional but its based on the banking laws of a govt. and cash is a promissory note which is a promise made by the govt. so yeah....)
As another HN commenter pointed out here,this decision might be partially due to swedish culture of how they view cash which you can find here.
what kind of AI are you using that generates shitty commit messages? This a common kind of message from Claude / Augment:
Fix dynamic channel list by passing auth via metadata
- Pass userId and userEmail in metadata when calling HTTP transport
- AuthenticatedToolsProviderFactory now reads from context.metadata
- Each tools/list request creates a fresh ToolsProvider with authentication
- Execute command description now correctly shows currently online machines
- Tested locally and working correctly
God I can't stand it when I get this kind of output from Claude, they really need to train it out for Claude 5.
"[Tangentially related emoji] I have completed this fully functional addition to the project that is now working perfectly! There are now zero bugs and the system is ready for deployment to production! [Rocketship emoji]"
Then of course you test it out and it doesn't work at all! It's very grating. It would be more bearable if it hedged its claims a bit more (maybe that will negatively affect the quality of the results though - if training a model to output insecure code also makes it a murderous Hitler admirer then, since when humans hedge their output is less likely to be perfect, it may mean it pushes the model to output code that is less than perfect).
> "[Tangentially related emoji] I have completed this fully functional addition to the project that is now working perfectly! There are now zero bugs and the system is ready for deployment to production! [Rocketship emoji]"
This made me laugh so hard. Never trust an AI model saying “There are now zero bugs”! Weaponized incompetence? :)
As a side note, I absolutely am in love with GPT-5 and GPT-5-codex. When I talk to it, it feels like talking to a peer and not an over enthusiastic (but talented) junior with potential. GPT-5-codex on high has been exceptional at debugging insidious bugs.
I hate it when I look at some code, wondering why I added a refresh call at that point, I do a git blame to find the commit message, and it says "add refresh call".
That only works if the code is good enough to be the documentation. In DayJob prefer to cover all the bases:
∞ Try make the code sensible & readable so it can be the documentation.
∞ Comment well anyway, just in case it isn't as obvious to the reader (which might be me in a few months time) as it is to me when making the change. Excess comments can always be removed later (and, unless some idiot rewrites history, can potentially be referred to after removal if you have a “why t f” moment), comments you never write can't be found later.
∞ Either a directly meaningful commit message, or at very least ticket references to where more details can be found.
For personal tinkering, I'm a lot less fastidious.
When the "why" isn't explained, you end up with things like someone refactoring code and spending time (at best) trying to figure out why some tests now fail or (at worst) breaking something in production.
I'd argue that even the "how" sometimes is better explained in plain words than in code (even if that opens the door for outdated comments when code is changed).
Set a PR template up, that demands those sections are filled in. Could probably do that down to the commit level with pre-commit but realistically you'd want that level of detail in the in the PR. Also add issue id to the commits too, that way you can pull them up easily and get more context.
True, you need to instruct the AI agents to include this.
In our case the agent has access to Jira and has wider knowledge. For commit messages i don’t bother that much anymore (i realise typing this), but for the MRs I do. Here i have to instruct it to remove implementation details.
> you need to instruct the AI agents to include this.
The agent can't do that if you told Claudepilotemini directly to make some change without telling it why you were prompting it to make such a change. LLMs might appear magic, but they aren't (yet) psychic.
He's saying that he likely has an MCP connected to jira on the LLM he's developing with.
Hence the prompt will have already referenced the jira ticket, which will include the why - and if not, you've got a different issue.
Now the LLM will only need something like "before committing, check the jira ticket we're working on and create a commit message ...
But whether you actually want that is a different story. You're off the opinion it's useful, I'd say it's rarely doing to be valuable, because requirements change, making this point in time rational mostly interesting in an academic sense, but not actually valuable for the development you're doing
It depends on a ton of factors, and at least I'd put very little stock in the validity of the commit message that it might as well not exist. (And this is from the perspective of human written ones, not AI)
Every time I’ve tried to use AI for commit messages its designers couldn’t be bothered to get it to take into account previous commit messages.
I use conventional commit formats for a reason, and the AI can’t even attempt it. I’m not even sure I’d trust it to get the right designation, like “fix(foo)!: increase container size”.
Google pixel devices have had this for years. It's one of the few things that keeps me glued to this platform.
Just push the button to go to the task switch view and as long as the window preview thumbnail isn't blanked out, I can just get the phone to OCR any part of the screen in real time.
> literally had access to JIRA at Twitter so they could file tickets against accounts
I’m not disputing that they coördinated. I’m challenging that they were coerced.
We wouldn’t describe Fox News altering a script on account of a friendly call from Miller and friends the “government ordering private companies” around. (Or, say, Florida opening their criminal justice records to ICE the federal government ordering states around.) Twitter’s leadership and the Biden administration saw eye to eye. This is a story about a media monoculture and private censorship, not government censorship.
YouTube using its prime homepage real estate for videos telling people to get vaccinated, which also pissed off the target audience, didn't seem like just some opinionated YouTube exec's doing.
It's extremely obvious on twitter. blue check accounts that post every few minutes 24/7 with profiles that say stuff like "true believer, wife, lover, seeker-of-truth. Don't DM me, I don't answer" . They are on there in the hundreds of thousands.
