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bhawks

2,274 karma · joined October 7, 2016

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bhawks··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
There are many disappointing errors in this article that one would expect an author with such prestige to know better.

Friends don't let friends build decentralized content addressible storage on insecure hash functions. Nor do friends try to convince you to use insecure hash functions. Nor do they appeal to authority. They also warn you against signing the output of insecure hashes. Finally they don't bother making argument that it's not worth upgrading today because we might have to upgrade tomorrow too.

I see someone has raised 17 million for a new ai git frontend.

bhawks··on The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]
If you read further you'll see that in 2025 they spent $40 million additional and served 300000 people - so $130/user?

The metrics for this project don't sell it - the politics do. You'll either love it or hate it.

bhawks··on Roblox is minting teen millionaires
You're missing the parts where:

1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory

1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point

2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still gets 1 robux for each penny.

2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.

3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.

Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.

bhawks··on Roblox is minting teen millionaires
Roblox games are all multiplayer - you get a game server running in their POPs and a generous amount of persistent storage and memory. How is that not a developer operational cost?

Creators don't have to pay any hosting - Roblox will serve their content even if a game doesnt monetize their users for free.

The way this economical is thru the redistribution of games that do monetize their users

bhawks··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
| then they went back and said no, you need to remove those safeguards to which Anthropic is (rightly so) saying no.

So one thing to call out here is that the assumption that DoW is working on specifically these use cases is not bullet proof. They simply may not want to share with anthropic exactly what they are working on for natsec issues. /we can't tell you/ could violate the terms.

It is also dumb that DoW accepted these terms in the first place.

bhawks··on Colorado proposal moves age checks from websites to operating systems
What a failure as a species that parents are not trusted or believed to be capable of raising their children. Therefore let's build out the panopticon.
bhawks··on Show HN: CEL by Example
CEL is useful for any custom computation you want to do on your critical path without having that blow out in a ridiculous fashion.

Yes you can embed other languages however constraining evaluation costs is not a first class feature.

bhawks··on Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database
The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account.

Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.

bhawks··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
The only logical end of this is that they should ban 3d printers and cnc mills to unlicensed individuals. Which, is probably the goal. Things like 3d printers, drones, GPUs, general purpose computers, vpns, encryption, talking to people in private and the like are far too dangerous for the citizenry to be allowed to do without appropriate oversight and approval.
bhawks··on Escaping the trap of US tech dependence
Every service provider dropped them. Cool weapon, let's use it more.

Thanks for proving the point.

bhawks··on Escaping the trap of US tech dependence
New?!

This isn't new. You just haven't been paying attention.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55615214

Or maybe it is fine when it happens to people you disagree with.

bhawks··on Show HN: A simulator for engineers transitioning from IC to management
Id agree if it were a VP of Eng (total mess) or Product (should know and be bought in on the dev process) but this is a VP of sales. Depending on the company they can be much more operational and I would just assume that they asked the individual due to familiarity or happenstance and didn't understand the level of effort to deliver.

Quickly understanding the urgency/importance of the ask while communicating the impact it is having on the deliverable is the right call. Good business people work like this all the time. Seeing the discussion is a good learning opportunity for a junior.

bhawks··on Stepping down as Mockito maintainer after ten years
| My personal take is that folks involved with the change severely underestimated the societal impact that it had. The fact that proper build support is non-existent to this day shows that agents are not a priority. That's okay if it isn't a priority, but when it was communicated with Mockito I perceived it as "Mockito is holding the JVM ecosystem back by using dynamic attachment, please switch immediately and figure it out on your own".

Id like to hear the platform team's perspective on this. As it stands, it is a pretty sad state of affairs that such a prominent library in the ecosystem was made out to be the scapegoat for the adoption of a platform change. It is not a healthy thing to treat the library maintainer community like this.

bhawks··on Scala 3 slowed us down?
J2ME was an alphabet soup of incompatible implementations stuck somewhere between Java 1.2 and 1.3. Getting code to run across device manufacturers was a huge engineering burden. In fact doing something like JetPack for that world would be technically impossible.

If Sun was offering some technically relevant foundation for the smartphone era, it would have been able to actually have some adoption. They were starting from a leading position (obviously - see blackberry or Nokia), and in the space of 3 to 4 years they completely disappeared.

bhawks··on Scala 3 slowed us down?
| Android being Google's .NET, after Google being sued by coming up with Google's J++, Android Java dialect.

The Oracle v Google was specifically over copyright infringement concerning the Java APIs used in Android's original implementation (Dalvik/ART), not about creating a "J++" dialect.

Android never ran a JVM on mobile because it cannot be optimized for resource constrained devices a solution like DalvikVM was necessary. If you want to level critiques about creating fragmented dialects of Java I would recommend starting with J2ME. The only nice thing I can say about J2ME is at least it died.

The Android ecosystem was far too mature for Fuchsia/Dart to be successful without a very compelling interop story that was never produced.

As a technology Kotlin met Android's platform and community needs. Advocacy and politicking played a minimal, if any, role.

bhawks··on The HTTP Query Method
That ship sailed decades ago. Too much software and middleware expects GET to not have a body and who knows how itll break when you start sending one. Obviously you can do it today and it might work and then randomly break when the code between client and server changes.

Adding a new http method is the only way to support something like this safely. If something in between doesn't know what to do with QUERY it can just respond with a 501.

Fun fact - GET and HEAD are the only required methods one needs to implement to be an http server. It is a pretty low bar :)

bhawks··on The surprising benefits of giving up
The author of the article obviously didn't read the paper.

The paper's finding focuses on goal adjustment/flexibility being a functional response when encountering difficulty meeting a goal. Disengagement had correlations with impairment. Which probably tracks most people's life experience.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02312-4

| This interpretation aligns with our finding that dispositional flex- ibility, rather than more proximal disengagement or reengagement, more strongly predicts functioning. Notably, we observed a positive association between disengagement and impairment. Although this could reflect a ‘dark side’ of disengagement—where letting go of goals offers short-term relief but risks longer-term purposelessness and dysfunction11—this pattern was not evident in longitudinal or experi- mental studies. An alternative explanation is that the association is bidirectional, with impairment potentially prompting disengagement as a reactive strategy. Given these complexities, we advice caution in interpreting this finding and highlight the need for further research.

bhawks··on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure
Yeah you're right, Coinbase is definitely insecure as evidenced by this.

The fact that lax security has never caused them to loose billions of dollars of customer funds is just luck and paper covering passwords on a whiteboard.

bhawks··on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure
Coinbase didn't halt trading or withdrawals during the Bitfinex hack.

Somehow I think Nathaniel Popper would have been able to put that fact directly in his NYT article instead of a throw away tweet if there was a material impact. Heck he wasted a paragraph quoting one of Coinbase's board of directors on the risks of unregulated exchanges like bitfinex versus Coinbase.

bhawks··on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure
That's a pretty big stretch of definitions. Whatever operations Coinbase had with Bitfinex were either to support market making activity or as a service for Coinbase's institutional customers to directly access bitfinex via their platform.

As I said, they have never lost customer funds in their custody.

bhawks··on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure
That is a great ancedote.

Not saying it is untrue, but it is definitely true that Coinbase has never lost customer funds while operating in an environment with 0 safety nets and being one of the most lucrative targets.

This leak over customer data suggests that they should treat that with as much obsession as they do with their private keys.

bhawks··on COBOL to Kotlin via Formal Models (IR and Alloy and Golden Master)
Yes no dynamic memory allocation, however there still are many ways to ABEND your COBOL program. The reliability aspect comes from the fact that these systems have been running for 40+ years, and places where it could have ABEND'd probably have been fixed [hopefully].
bhawks··on COBOL to Kotlin via Formal Models (IR and Alloy and Golden Master)
Having COBOL sources which match whats running in production is a load bearing assumption :).
bhawks··on Why aren't smart people happier?
In my journey to Christianity I have found that as my faith grew my anxiety and depression became much more manageable. This really wasn't intentional on my part but Ive transitioned from a decade+ of actively managing with medication and weekly therapy to no meds and monthly psychotherapy over a few years. Looking back I do credit that to my faith giving me a framework to manage my long list of worries, concerns and fears. The people in my Church community generally are happy even despite dealing with many difficulties. I can't say the same for all the people I know through work or other venues.
bhawks··on Free software hasn't won
This is one of the reasons to embrace crypto - having an intermediary with direct control over your finances is absurd.
bhawks··on John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
Id wager high frequency trading applications.
bhawks··on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward
| If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting.

Now that would require the competent configuration of the software by the government and proper usage by the individual. So leak guaranteed.

bhawks··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Somehow I can run a webserver and anyone can browse it but if I make an app I need a DUNS number? What year is it?

Couldn't the CA system, for all its problems, suffice?

bhawks··on Show HN: CasCache – multi-generational cache with optimistic concurrency control
In a data context CAS expands to content addressible storage. CasCache is "compare and set cache" which is definitely cool and useful as well as totally different from what I initially thought it was.
bhawks··on Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?
|Also worth remembering, it’s probably not possible to listen to Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesmen on US media.

I must have missed the news where Hamas or Islamic Jihad had established themselves in the US for decades and had been able to get serious electoral candidates into the federal government.

I am not seeing the parallel here between US policies on foreign based Islamic extremist groups and the UKs handling of the IRA.

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