Hacker News Reader

FreakyTon John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists

> From my PoV, pretending you can feed outputs, test suites or APIs from existing code and have AI "rewrite it" so you can call it your own is just theft.

If you replace “AI” with “a software engineering team”, does that change your argument? It seems like you’re essentially arguing that APIs should be copyrightable, which seems like a Bad Thing to me.

FreakyTon Android and Wear OS are getting a redesign

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, considering that this actually happened:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/google-pixel-4as-rui...

FreakyTon Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals App Govt Uses to Archive Signal Messages

Molly is great; I use it for the same purpose.

I find the Signal devs' attitude so frustrating; they deliberately disable the ability to use Signal in secondary device mode for phone-sized-devices, because they know the Correct Way To Use Signal™ is to only use it on one phone-sized-device.

FreakyTon Qwen2.5-VL-32B: Smarter and Lighter

There are non-Chinese open LLMs (Mistral, LLama, etc), so I don't think that explains it.

FreakyTon US Tests Explosive at Nuclear Site as Russia Revokes Ban on Atomic Weapons Tests

> if it becomes possible in the future to intercept ICBMs during the launch phase using some kind of new technology

This was largely the concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars) in the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

FreakyTon Top Israel/Hamas misinformation spreaders use Elon Musk's paid "verification"

It'd be weirder if they didn't, considering how much X, The Everything App by Elon Musk, prioritizes subscriber posts. The last time I checked my feed on X, The Everything App by Elon Musk, basically every surfaced reply was a paid user.

FreakyTon Air Rage Is Getting Worse, and Airlines Can't Fix It

Parent comment asserted that "flying gets worse every year", which is a very different declaration than "flying got significantly worse after 9/11"

FreakyTon Air Rage Is Getting Worse, and Airlines Can't Fix It

> the flying experience gets worse every year

People always say this, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's true. In my view, the flying experience at least in the US has actually gotten better over the last few years. United, for example, added free seatback IFEs. (About 10 or so years ago, you had to swipe a credit card to watch anything.)

FreakyTon BioNTech Plans to Address Infectious Diseases on the African Continent

That’d be really exciting if they managed to get a working Malaria vaccine out of this research. Would be useful in so many places.

FreakyTon Give to Thunderbird

To be fair, it’s the security team’s idiotic position on IMAP that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround.

It’s like how having super draconian password reset and complexity requirements ends up being less secure because users will start writing their impossible-to-remember passwords on post-it notes.

FreakyTon NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings

Exactly this -- people have just seized on the the "not FDA approved" line because it sounds reasonable if you don't really understand how FDA approval works or what it really means. As soon as it's approved, the goalposts will absolutely move to "well, I don't trust the FDA".

For those "waiting for FDA approval", have you ever taken a vitamin supplement? Guess what, you're putting not-FDA-approved chemicals into your body.

FreakyTon FB users buying Oculus VR headsets to get customer service prioritization

The OG Rift is still pretty great -- unlike the newer products, it doesn't require a Facebook account, and you can use it with SteamVR if you want and not really even bother with the Oculus software.

FreakyTon Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX

It's really a shame what has happened to Blue Origin. They've gone from a promising space startup to yet another purveyor of perpetual vaporware.

Where is the BE-4 engine? Delayed, again and again. New Glenn, the rocket that could actually go into orbit? Same. So far their only functioning hardware (New Shephard) is, in effect, a glorified amusement park ride.

Considering that SpaceX has actually made it to orbit multiple times, any rational actor would clearly choose SpaceX over BO.

FreakyTon Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

> Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

How is this at all obvious? I mean, even if we assume they're definitely fake profiles, wouldn't the more likely explanation be that they're individuals engaged in catfishing?

FreakyTon Amazon ending IE11 support on Management Console and Documentation

I really hope Epic wins that lawsuit against Apple, not because I particularly care about Epic, but because I'd like to see Apple forced to allow alternative web browsers.

Still don't get how it was a problem for Microsoft to "bundle" Internet Explorer, but it's apparently not a problem for Apple to bundle and also actively block any installation of competing browsers.

FreakyTon Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

IIRC, unvaccinated are more likely to get infected and also typically have higher viral loads, which corresponds to higher infectiousness.

FreakyTon Google and Facebook mandate vaccines for employees at U.S. offices

Exactly -- people are still free to not get vaccinated, but they're not free to go to aggregate settings where they might infect everyone there, which seems like a reasonable compromise.

It's the same approach as with antivax parents -- don't want your kids vaccinated? Then you'll need to homeschool them.

FreakyTon Toyota is quietly pushing Congress to slow the shift to electric vehicles

The key difference between Toyota's approach and Tesla's was simple: Tesla built out their own charging infrastructure.

Just like with battery-electric-vehicles, there's a chicken and egg problem: no one will buy a car if there's nowhere to charge/fuel it, but no one will build fueling/charging stations if no one has that type of car. If Toyota was serious about hydrogen, they should have done what Tesla did, and built a countrywide network of hydrogen stations.

FreakyTon Watch Tokyo Olympics 2020 Live

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FreakyTon China unveils 600 kph maglev train

You're getting downvoted, but it's true -- CEQA is a great example of how well-intentioned environmental legislation can be abused by basically anyone to stonewall any project for any reason.

A common-sense change might be requiring minimum quantities of local signatures to limit the potential impact of a small opposition.

FreakyTon China unveils 600 kph maglev train

The key argument against this is that many of the planned highways were also supposed to go through richer neighborhoods, but never got constructed because the residents of those neighborhoods were able to successfully fight against them.

(For one example, check out the incomplete stub at the eastern terminus of I-70 -- I don't believe the cost of the land was a major factor in that case)

FreakyTon China unveils 600 kph maglev train

Exactly -- you can't build big projects without stepping on someone's toes. What we really need is equal-opportunity toe-stepping.

FreakyTon US democracy: The threat in 2024 is 'completely uncharted territory'

People on here seem to be missing the point — one of the (only 2) major political parties in the US has effectively declared that a core party doctrine is “any election that we lose is, ipso facto, fraudulent”.

That sort of belief is what gets you to situations like what we see in Myanmar, with “declaration of fraud” being the only excuse for installing any leadership.

FreakyTon Instagram Has Become SkyMall

IIRC Skymall used to feature Hammacher Schlemmer products pretty often, so it's not surprising that there'd be a lot of overlap.

FreakyTon Return of the Mac (2005)

I feel like Apple's approach to hardware made their job much easier -- they just ensured that every retina Mac had a display with exactly 2x the pixels as its pre-retina equivalent, so they never had to deal with fractional scaling like Windows often does.

FreakyTon Our journey from office-centric to remote-first

I feel like most tech-workers can be divided into two camps:

Type 1: "It's obvious that remote work is the future, and anyone who thinks otherwise is stuck in the past"

Type 2: "Remote work is infinitely inferior to office work due to the lack of socialization/collaboration/food/etc"

Evidently the leadership at Docker is type 1, based on their "step 4". The part I find particularly interesting about this trend is that both camps can't seem to fathom that the other could possibly exist (see: any HN discussion thread about remote work)

FreakyTon AltStore – An alternative app store for non-jailbroken iOS devices

On Android, there's nothing stopping Facebook from doing that right now. Why haven't they?

FreakyTon Watchy: Open-source E-Paper Watch with ESP32

I'm still a bit disappointed the Pine64 folks didn't go for a low-power reflective LCD like the ones used by this or the Pebble.

FreakyTon It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

FB Messenger does have data takeout, it comes in some kind of JSON format. Be prepared for some surprisingly massive file downloads though -- my chat history alone was over 50gb!

FreakyTon Boring Avatars – React library to generate custom avatars

Agreed -- the problem with most dynamic avatar generators is that all the avatars look basically visually indistinguishable, which pretty much defeats their purpose. I prefer ones like Wavatar and Robohash because they generate unique looking avatars for each user with minimal visual collisions.