Hacker News Reader

MrWiffleson Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death

So wait. There’s a literal DEATH involved here and it still went to arbitration?!

MrWiffleson LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

Assuming one even believes this drivel…

It doesn’t matter how it’s done at all, this is still 100% scumbaggery.

I blame two parties: the company, and the lack of law enforcement that goes after that company with fines large enough to end its existence and/or jail time for its executives.

Corporate veil blah blah blah. Antitrust or pierce it. Enough is enough.

It’s high time for an entirely new branch of legal theory and code in the United States: Corporate Criminal Law.

MrWiffleson ICE Has a $2M Contract for Spyware That Can Hack Phones Without a Click

Modern American version of the SS.

MrWiffleson Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

They’re also more dependent upon the state.

MrWiffleson Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond

This is the way.

MrWiffleson U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

> (has anyone checked who is providing terrorists with electricity?)

Or for that matter, where they get their air?! Oh gosh golly darn, gee, if Earth is providing air to those commie bastards…

I may not agree with their political views, but to say that the tool is the problem is equivalent to saying guns kill people instead of people that use guns. The problem isn’t the tool or their point of view, or then even speaking about it - the problem comes from humans not controlling themselves. Any actor taking any adverse or malicious action inspired by words or ideas isn’t the fault of the ideator or author, but of the actor failing in self control.

Gotta reign this insanity in.

MrWiffleson I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

THANK YOU! This is why I hate security questions that ask for my “favorite” whatever. That’s going to change! My favorite movie, or supervillain or whatever is going to change - hopefully - within a couple years if good artists are out there making good art. So why the hell would I answer that question the same 5 years from now as I would today?!

MrWiffleson The August 17 outage

We used to be able to afford two! Acronym letters cost as much as houses nowadays!

MrWiffleson Why remote roles are region specific and not 100% remote?

This is usually due to taxation and legal reasons. In the US for example, even a US based company out of, say, New York has to have paperwork set up with each state they want to hire in. So if this hypothetical company wanted to hire their first employee in, say, Texas, they’d have to do some kind of legal stuff with the state authorities in Texas to legally hire someone remotely there. Once that’s done they can hire more without much if any additional paperwork with the state, but that initial setup has to be done so they could pay employment taxes to the state. This goes for every state the company hires an employee in, based on where the employee does their work from. So if they later hired their first employee out of say California, more paperwork specifically for California.

Going internationally, particularly in today’s geopolitical climate, gets even more complicated.

It generally boils down to law, taxes, government issues when you get down to it.

MrWiffleson Google's New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand

With high resolution cameras, indefinite data retention and third party data leaks being a matter of when, not if, this seems like a perfect way to get your fingerprints stolen by organized crime syndicates worldwide. If not next year, then in 5-10 years. And when they get used for “something”, what happens when you go on vacation somewhere and you’re detained at that country’s border for a crime that happened N years before your very first entry into that country ever happened?

With as many Ph.D.s as there are at Google, you’d think they’d be smarter than to come up with this. Which is how you know the PMs are in charge, not the smart people.

MrWiffleson Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water

https://archive.ph/47ra0

Edit: seems even this is just the summary first two paragraphs.

MrWiffleson I'm So Tired of Ads

“[…] moral argument […]”

I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.

Moral argument. Right.

MrWiffleson The Ask

There’s a common phrase in English: “what’s the ask?” As in, “what is the other party requesting?” “What does this person want?”

I can see how that would sound/read a bit strange to one coming from another culture. It’s just another way of stating the concept of the purpose behind the reason for a person’s request, actions, statement, or in this case, why they requested a meeting.

Getting to “the ask” here meant, for the author, “what the hell does this fool REALLY want out of me?”

I prefer Walt’s approach. When I was 19, I worked for a small business up in Colorado. They had this contractor named Walt that did all their email, website, all that stuff (very early 2000s). Every time he answered the phone, it wasn’t a polite “Hello?”, no! Walt got straight to the point with one loud, gruff word that immediately set the tone for all his conversations:

“WHAT?!”

MrWiffleson First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5

Wait a minute - clearly I missed something here. Last I read, Mythos was only available to a handpicked list of megacorps under project glasswing. Did the hourly changing AI soap opera air yet another plot twist that I missed amidst my quest better known as “trying to find a job”?

If not, how’d a small time outfit get access to something the rest of us can’t have because we’re (apparently) not trustworthy enough?

No shade on these guys - I’m thinking it’s just another plot twist in “Hours of AI’s Lives”.

MrWiffleson Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs

I was not aware of this loophole. Thank you. I’ve got some strong opinions but I’m just going to keep those to myself right now. And my dog. She’ll hear me as I scream profanities into the void…

MrWiffleson Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs

What I’m not clear on - how many of these H1B hires are subject to the EO that jacked up the fee to $100k per person? Assuming even just 100 of them were, that’s still ten million USD (assuming I didn’t visualize the zeroes in my head wrong…), and a really large fee to justify to the board if you’re otherwise paying “roughly the same” in salary. Productivity is going to basically break even anyway after a few years.

This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?

No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!

We’re missing something here. Or, at least, I am.

MrWiffleson Ask HN: When do you start considering to 'separate' service designed with DDD

I can’t answer this directly, but it may be helpful to others if they have an example (be it real or fabricated based on what you’re working with) to work from.

MrWiffleson UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence

Please, for the good of humanity, and of HN, report back.

MrWiffleson UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence

I’ll remind us all that the subject of human flatulence has been one of interest for some of history’s greatest minds - and humorists - for several centuries at the very least:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-32-02-02...

MrWiffleson Your phone is an entire computer

This. The more locked down, the less in control we are, the higher margins they command. This is why app stores exist - it has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monopolizing the distribution supply chain from soup to nuts. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s fully locked down and cracking it is a (potentially) criminal offense, so whaddayagonnadoaboutit?!

MrWiffleson YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they'll be unskippable

Zero. Email & calendars replaced with totally separate paid provider that doesn’t run ads at all. Search through Kagi. No domains or hosting. No docs/presentations, and only use meet when forced to.

MrWiffleson Returning to Rails in 2026

Something I never quite understood: differentiate between BEAM process and operating system process. The OS has launched one (in theory) BEAM Erlang VM runtime process with N threads; are we saying “process” here to try to emulate the OS process model internally within the BEAM OS process, when really we’re talking about threads? Or a mix of threads and other processes? I’m imagining the latter even cross network, but am I at least on the right track here?

MrWiffleson YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they'll be unskippable

Privacy rights. Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk, so I’ll not willingly reward this behavior.

MrWiffleson Ask HN: Can we stop talking about Elon Musk for a while please?

The first rule of Elon club is: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ELON CLUB!

;-)

MrWiffleson LLC legal challenge what do we do?

I’m having trouble understanding how that second amendment passed. The first one didn’t so the total number of shares didn’t change, right? So how did he get the second one through, legally speaking?

Not at all trying to argue here, I’m trying to understand how this all works. It sounds like he just spoofed his way into diluting your shares which will fall apart in 5 minutes before a judge, should be an open and shut case but given the other comments here, it’s clearly not, which means I’m missing something.

MrWiffleson Ask HN: How do you handle 2FA during development?

Good question. I’d expand on this and ask a bonus question of, how do you write tests for your 2fa implementation code? Same thing for third party auth (sign in via GitHub/Google, etc); you can’t spam them every time you run your test suite, but is mocking responses from them really a wise move when testing authentication?

MrWiffleson I found a bug in SQLite

Props to the author, this was well written. Clear and concise, it was easy to follow. Not like my ratings and ravings! ;-)

MrWiffleson Ask HN: Why doesn't archive.today get shut down?

To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge on the subject, they're relatively new so most news sites aren't terribly aware of them yet, and most people aren't technology-savvy enough to be aware of their existence and ability to make use of them outside circles like ours here on HN and related occupations/sites/etc. That said, they're also not doing anything shady to get by the paywall either. The version they're presenting you is the exact same version the news sites are presenting search engines in order to grab search engine traffic. The news sites are literally participating in an intentional bait-and-switch scheme to bait people with relevant search results that are NOT paywalled, then when a human browser gets there, they throw up a paywalled version in your face via user agent detection, mandatory javascript, etc. (various means are used). archive.ph simply mimics a search engine indexer to get an un-paywalled version, same as Google or any other search engine, in order to retrieve the cleaned up version of the article without a paywall there, and serves that content to the end user. It's not stealing content not already offered in other forms anyway, it's just removing an artificial dark pattern that's literally intended to bait and switch people in the first place. Kind of makes for a weak argument if they do bring it to court in the first place; glass houses, throwing stones and all that.

MrWiffleson Ask HN: If you could move anywhere in the USA, what would be your top criterias?

I see what you did there ;-)

MrWiffleson Ask HN: If you could move anywhere in the USA, what would be your top criterias?

Reasonable cost of housing

Low to nonexistent state income tax

Balanced state legislature between the two parties

Strong consumer and renter protection laws

Aggressively pro-competition legislative agenda from governor

Rate of construction of new low to moderate profit margin housing that just slightly outpaces population growth

Availability of high speed internet, preferably fiber, but cable with 1gbps down mandatory

Low crime, but without a draconian/malicious prosecutorial system and culture

Large percentage of population with higher education

And finally what matters most of all (drumroll please)…

Really great Mexican food!