Hacker News Reader

Tomteon Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet

It is, but that‘s why I trust Honest Achmed (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959). He is a man of integrity and will not be bought!

Tomteon Walking Men

Even better: Emden, Germany.

https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/otto-waalkes-enthuellt-ot...

https://www.wn.de/welt/kultur/hupf-otto-hupf-emden-ehrt-komi...

Tomteon Ask HN: What are you reading?

Back issues of The London Review of Books.

Tomteon How to Write with an LLM

I found his description of Classical Style very confusing and disorganized. You‘re much better off reading the original, Thomas & Turner.

Tomteon How to Write with an LLM

It‘s been available under different variations of the title, you don‘t need the latest one, and amazon.de should have a used copy for five Euros or so.

Tomteon Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit

The coolest thing about some apple cultivars is how their story is "someone found an apple tree at the side of a road with tasty apples", and people kept grafting them to this day. Boskoop, for example.

Tomteon CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3

We don‘t support Ukraine because we‘re very good and selfless people. We support Ukraine (still too little!) because we don‘t want the Red Army at the Rhine.

Tomteon We do modern frequentist statistics: Using fake-data simulation

You were just one click away from finding out:

"Figure 2. Using a sample of 2,972 respondents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, each of whom had been rated on a five-point scale of attractiveness […]"

Tomteon We do modern frequentist statistics: Using fake-data simulation

Gelman (2018, and reiterated 2024): "Bayesians are frequentists." (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/06/17/bayesians-...)

Tomteon EU Floats Canada Becoming the Bloc's First 'Associate Member'

America is a big importer of toilet paper from Canada. :-)

Tomteon EU Floats Canada Becoming the Bloc's First 'Associate Member'

Months ago: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canadians-s...

Tomteon EU Floats Canada Becoming the Bloc's First 'Associate Member'

You don‘t want to have any level of association with us, as you‘ve made clear repeatedly over many years, involving many insults.

Don‘t expect the EU to actively offer anything again. Do the first step (after getting a clear view what proportion of your population actually wants that).

The United Kingdom would be a great member, as you had been. But that ship has politically sailed.

Tomteon Why EAV Sucks

I love their "Geld oder Leben" album so much.

Tomteon Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs

But they won‘t buy a second personal phone to protect their privacy in a chat group.

Tomteon Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs

Is there a messenger that allows anonymous group chats, i.e. for union organizing in a company?

As far as I can see, you can invote people to a group chat using QR flyers, but your Signal profile is visible to everyone in a chat, so everyone knows what Tina in marketing thinks about it.

Because nobody is going to have a burner phone with a data plan for a separate Signal identitiy.

Tomteon Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?

The Erlang front page was nice, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

Tomteon Textream – A Free Teleprompter for Mac, iPhone, and iPad

I would have thought, mirror-imaging would be a must-have feature for a teleprompter app.

Tomteon DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

If only they managed to tell the mobile app to tell the model to reply in English to English prompts.

I suffix everything with "Reply in English", and even so I‘m getting lots of Chinese.

Tomteon [dead]

Karma farming with predictable URLs about to become interesting. Simply flag it.

Tomteon iPhone Duo

This page does not exist at the time of this comment, and I‘m so sick of people submitting predictable URLs before they go live, just to be first. We also see that with LLM model releases regularly.

Tomteon I changed my license

Licenses are contracts, just like an EULA.

And if you expand the acronym EULA you will actually find that it is… a license agreement.

Tomteon I Changed My License

> BUSL is OSI-approved

Of course it isn‘t.

Tomteon Meet the Ig Nobel Prize Winners

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567241

Tomteon Quarto 2

> Quarto 2 is a full rewrite of the Quarto CLI, written from the ground up in Rust

Tomteon Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior

Richard McElreath: https://bsky.app/profile/rmcelreath.bsky.social/post/3muofvc...

> In the actual candy study, the participants were all students, status was manipulated in the lab by telling some students they were better than others, and "nearly twice" means 1 piece vs 2 pieces.

> oh and the researchers told participants they could take some candy. There was no stealing!

Tomteon Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

Good luck finding an advisor/a department that awards PhDs for that.

“It’s not novel”.

Tomteon Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad-Zuse-Museum_H%C3%BCnfel...

Apart from a quite a few museums having his machines (or replicas).

Tomteon Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

So we have automated Thomas Pornin?

Tomteon The Twelve-Factor App (2025)

Every time it gets posted I read through the list and think "export services via port binding… of course a web server binds to a port, of course it‘s decoupled that way, what else would you do" and "treat backing services as attached resources… huh, is that really only about not linking in a database, but connecting using a JDBC string, for example?"

So let me ask for once: what am I missing? Why is that interesting and not trite?

Tomteon Sydney Marathon medal mistakenly depicts Munich stadium

And when a FIFA world cup is hosted the stadium gets renamed for the duration if the stadium‘s sponsor isn‘t a FIFA sponsor.