Hacker News Reader

DerSaidinon “It works better in the app”

Many HN users probably share this distaste for apps that should be websites, but I don't think this is true for the general population.

In addition to choosing not to use needless apps, some HN users here might have the opportunity for a stronger vote: refuse to (or at very least push back on) develop an app that could be a website.

DerSaidinon Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches

strtomem_pad seems redundant with memcpy_and_pad, and also it requires the preprocessor: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/1a3746ccbb0a97bed3c06...

I was curious: Why have it, instead of just using memcpy_and_pad?

AI's answer (paraphrased) was * Avoid possible bugs from manually write sizeof(dest) * Enforces the __nonstring Attribute * signals: "I am converting an actual C-string into a fixed-width legacy memory field." vs copy binary data & pad it.

Interesting to learn about the __nonstring attribute:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/1a3746ccbb0a97bed3c06... https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux+__nonstr...

DerSaidinon Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

If the alternative is "burn more tokens on finding issues than the attackers do", formal verification starts to look comparatively feasible cost. Think of it as setting an upper bound on cost, vs just burning more and more tokens.

AI assistants would reduce effort of verification too.

DerSaidinon Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

> Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now

Imo, cybersecurity looks like formally verified systems now.

You can't spend more tokens to find vulnerabilities if there are no vulnerabilities.

DerSaidinon LittleSnitch for Linux

For me it was Sygate personal firewall back on windows xp

DerSaidinon What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent

Is it a moat if new start ups avoid competing in the space because there is inherently no moat?

DerSaidinon Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does

One difference with Mullvad is VPN traffic is ephemeral. Here, a VPS has a persistent disk attached, that could contain identifying information (if it is necessary to do useful work).

DerSaidinon Servo v0.0.1

Personally I'm more optimistic about Servo - because originating at Mozilla, I imagine more web browser experience and expertise went into its architecture, and also because Rust.

DerSaidinon OpenAI Burns the Boats

I think the "burning the boats" action is releasing very low API pricing. Once consumers see the lower price they would balk if it was raised back up enough to provide some margin on inference. So the article is saying OpenAI won't have a way to switch back to profit from inferences.

DerSaidinon Why does a fire truck cost $2m

https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Ler-ares-industries-bui...

DerSaidinon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

Any connection/collaboration with https://www.plasticlist.org/ ?

DerSaidinon Caddy – The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS

> It did okay. I didn't do any big tests with it but it seemed to work well enough, and was super simple to configure.

What issue/experience stop you from saying "it did great"?

DerSaidinon Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

It was initially opt in for me, then they made it mandatory.

(Sure, I could pay by check but consumer banking technology/US in the US already feels like is is lagging a decade behind other countries without voluntarily going further back. Paying by check every month would be quite inconvenient.)

I'd already decided to avoid bilt as much as possible, but reading this thread prompted me to try going a little further.

Looking through their privacy policy it talks about what California residents can do under CCPA: https://legal.biltrewards.com/policies

> Request to Know... The specific pieces of Personal Information we collected about you.

> You have the right to opt-out from having your Personal Information and Sensitive Personal Information sold to third parties. You also have the right to opt-out from having your Personal Information and Sensitive Personal Information shared with third parties for purposes of cross-contextual advertising

Might as well give this a go.

DerSaidinon The Nix NGI Team: Advancing Open Source with Nix

This looks like a technical decision on where to focus investment.

Using words like "bias" and "descrimination" imply there is some wrongdoing.

From a quick read (maybe I'm missing something) this seems to me to be coming from "You didn't fund the project I care about" rather than any wrongdoing.

DerSaidinon Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb

I've also done a lot of rock climbing. As other replies said, you get comfortable with the gear and the height and loose the fear.

When Covid broke my regular climbing habit. One interesting part of going back to it after a year or so of not climbing - I felt some fear of heights again.

It was mild fear, and didn't have me to hanging on extra tight or something. I remember the odd sensation of observing this fear in myself and thinking something along the lines "Oh that's weird, fear of heights - I don't remember the last time I had this."

Like a muscle, if you start training to be comfortable again it seems to come back quicker if you had trained it well previously. I guess fears have homeostasis too.

DerSaidinon Static search trees: faster than binary search

I think there is an error in 1.7 figure 3: Layer 1 should have a 10 instead of a 12.

Edit: Also, 1.3 figure 1: Should the y-axis label be "Inverse throughput" to match later figures?

DerSaidinon Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens

> Unlike tokenization, BLT has no fixed vocabulary for patches.

iiuc this means: the vocabulary of patches is not known prior to training.

I guess once training has established a vocabulary of patches, that same fixed vocabulary is used for inference (if this is not true I don't see how it could work).

Right?

DerSaidinon Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever

Imagine if they added something like this to UE5 licensing:

If your game has not been updated in N years... 1) Internet Archive can distribute it for free 2) Let people distribute modified versions that does not need license key or whatever copy protection.

Harder but extra cool: To get a UE royalty discount, put source code in escrow set to release it if game not updated in N years.

DerSaidinon From Julia to Rust (2021)

> Linear Algebra and numerics where not a primary focus of Rust when starting out as they were with Julia.

Typo: where -> were

DerSaidinon Lyttle Lytton Contest

> He slammed the door in my face, loud and sharp, like an acoustic lemon.

I think its not really about the sound, it is about the response you might make after a big hit of lemon flavor: puckering up, wincing, pulling your neck back - I can definitely imagine responding to a distasteful and loud sound in the same way.

DerSaidinon Sword Fighting Is Not What You Think

Also, I felt this implies the proper-historically-correct-techniques are much better than the wrong-modern-impression-techniques, and would win in combat.

Makes sense, but it would be cool evidence to see simulated combat to test this.

DerSaidinon The best way to have complex discussions?

> we started searching for a tool specifically built for complex discussions. We found none

What about:

https://www.kialo.com/

DerSaidinon Borgo is a statically typed language that compiles to Go

I like the graph at the top of the readme as a summary.

The rest of the readme focuses on the delta between Go and Borgo. It doesn't say much about the delta between Borgo and Rust.

I think the delta there is mainly no lifetimes/ownership?

DerSaidinon Killer drones pioneered in Ukraine are the weapons of the future

Because 1) WWII was more of a total war scenario for the US, where a country is dedicating as much resources as possible to win (US is not doing this for Ukraine), and 2) developing technological supremacy takes lots of time, and can't be rushed, so it must be done ahead of time (and continue in peace time to maintain supremacy).

DerSaidinon Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

> Bluesky is a public social network.

> The AT Protocol, which Bluesky is built on, is designed to support public conversations.

Ah, ok.

DerSaidinon Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

How does this handle spam?

IIUC the main defense is choice over your own feed + moderators on the feed you choose.

Is this why DMs are not supported? Because there wouldn't be a good spam protection mechanism?

DerSaidinon Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters

Can a server hosting an account read all of the data belonging to that account?

The feature I'd like to see from federated social network like this is encrypt everything to keys only held client side (in the style of keybase), so servers can't read content (only some surrounding metadata so they know which other servers to communicate with about the content).

DerSaidinon First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

What are other options for ships if fossil fuels were phased out?

Big batteries? https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-28/making-waves-e...

Hydrogen fuel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_ship

Yeah, those options seem simpler.

DerSaidinon BrainGPT turns thoughts into text

https://youtu.be/crJst7Yfzj4

Not sure on the accuracy in these examples, but this video may be showing the words/min speed of the system.

DerSaidinon Show HN: My demo for vector embeddings for the Earth's surface

Seems to not handle the ocean well.