HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

chaosharmonic

771 karma · joined March 18, 2019

submissionscomments
chaosharmonic··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
Or, it's because no one can afford spaces to host company:

https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/1-in-3-young-adults-living-wi...

chaosharmonic··on I switched to Brave
> It's worth stating that things not working isn't the fault of Firefox. It's developers not testing their web apps with Firefox, since it has such a small market share.

Um. As a developer who frequently switches between them, it's both. There are animation issues on some of my own stuff that are specific to FF and that I haven't been able to pin down yet. (It's low priority because I'm considering reworking the whole frontend in something other than React anyway and I haven't ruled out this being some state or ref related bug.)

The whole point of initiatives like Interop has been to make browsers' rendering and other functionality more consistent.

chaosharmonic··on Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave
Yeah, I'm left-swiping anything that involves working on it, outside of maybe being interested in helping people migrate to anything else. I don't know enough PHP to maintain one anyway, don't like what little of the language I do have exposure to, and want nothing to do with this toxic ecosystem.
chaosharmonic··on Meta VR Glasses
> The only thing people are spending that much on are phones. But that's something people use all the time for years.

Phones, that can now run your Steam games through FEX.

That's kind of my point. That this thing is important even if you don't buy one, because everything else that they had to build in order to enable it will trickle out into other places.

chaosharmonic··on Meta VR Glasses
I mean, I'm quipping about it myself, because I personally don't have the space or budget for a VR rig anyway.

But that's different from whether it's important that Facebook has real competition, or that there's now a reference device for not just VR on Linux but a bunch of other compatibility tooling and infrastructure for Linux on ARM specifically.

Even if it tanks, I think the Steam Frame will be a big deal outside of VR, sort of like how if you're on Linux you're probably benefiting from the Steam Deck's existence regardless of whether you own one. (I also don't.)

I'm not sure that I could say that about any of Facebook's headsets. They're big for their niche, but making a Para Para game semi-mainstream isn't really the same magnitude for everyone else as enabling you to play PC games on your phone.

chaosharmonic··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
This kind of stuff wouldn't be happening if we regulated jobs like we regulate banks.

Those regulations aren't perfect, but after working at one it became pretty clear that a lot of these things wouldn't fly if a bank did them.

Falsely advertise a financial offering? Pretty clearly actionable.

Ghost someone after they inquire about one? Deny them for some vague reason? Even just give them an unfavorable rate without specifying as much? None of those things would hold up. You have to send notices of any adverse action you take, not just providing clear communication that you're taking some kind of action against them, but giving a clear and objective reason why.

Call around to everyone someone might have worked for or with for references, without their knowledge or consent? See "clear and objective reason why." Also, if you use a third party to do this there are a whole collection of responsibilities under the Fair Credit Reporting Act -- you have to provide people with copies of the information gathered on request, inform them anytime it's used against them, offer some process for disputing incorrect details... And that threshold is from gathering the data, not from scoring it.

Never mind equity compensation, which is somehow special in terms of financial disclosures -- whether that's relative to the same company later offering the same stock to the public, or just more generally to any kind of investment offer.

None of this is any less unreasonable on the employer side.

chaosharmonic··on Meta VR Glasses
Upside: the Steam Frame's price is actually pretty competitive now.
chaosharmonic··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
Also, possibly the government -- depending on where they are and what kinds of tax breaks they could be getting for bringing jobs into the area.
chaosharmonic··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
That seems like something you could pretty easily solve for by just specifying that it's for multiple hires, or that the post is evergreen.

I don't think anyone reasonable is saying that you can't or shouldn't be able to do that -- just that there should be good faith disclosures.

chaosharmonic··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
I think even that's an understatement.

My tinfoil-hat take is that Lepton looks like it's just aimed at Facebook but will ultimately make Google's Android less... uniquely impenetrable. Certain hardware-dependent stuff will probably never fully work here (GPS for instance), but having a registry of what is and isn't compatible with a third-party Android derivative, on a specific reference device, will benefit every third-party Android derivative. And not that it won't have similar anticheat issues, but having a games ecosystem outside of Google Play will also cover some of the infrastructure that would require that dependency otherwise -- including payments.

And not that I don't see a net positive if gacha games never successfully make the jump... but as a Linux device there's also a lot of stuff where you just don't have to care about Play Integrity, because instead you can just run the PC version and/or a desktop browser.

(edit: shameless plug for my recent, longer writeup on this @ bhmt.dev/blog/frame)

chaosharmonic··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Recently:

- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.

- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.

- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.

- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.

chaosharmonic··on GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released
I mean, aside from /e/OS as a first-party option, there are also official Lineage builds[1]. And they're at least a target for PostmarketOS[2], even if that wiki doesn't actually describe something daily-driveable yet.

[1] https://forum.fairphone.com/t/official-lineageos-23-for-the-...

[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_(Gen._6)_(fairp...

chaosharmonic··on Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?
What a company considers to be "performance" or "insubordination" can certainly still be about office politics. Not that I'm saying this is necessarily the case here, but they're not a hard either/or.

For instance: 996 is a form of office politics. Return to office in general a form of office politics. Pay secrecy is a form of office politics. Some of those things become performance metrics, or evaluations of your "attitude."

"Performance" can mean "the quality of your work." It also can mean "theater." Like when you're measuring performance by token usage, or lines of code, or office attendance... or, in a case I once encountered, manual adherence to a style guide, that required two human beings to check every line of code against a set of conventions, instead of just configuring a formatting tool and being done with it.

Regarding LLMs in particular, I don't necessarily think the absolutist stance is it here, but it is a technology worker's job to know when you can and should automate things, as well as to know when it's not an effective use of resources to throw technology at something just because. I don't know parent's company or use case. I don't know if they were doing something with it that actually enhanced productivity, or just tracking tokens. I don't know if it enhanced their product, or just shoehorned AI into it for investor-driven buzzword utilization. So I'm also not an absolutist on what you're saying.

It could be that parent is too rigid, but (as much as I'm not asking for all this context either) I don't think there's enough information here to be certain about that.

chaosharmonic··on K2 Horizon: A connected fleet of six open models
But how much of that synthetic data still ultimately derives from non-open sources? You'd still have to ask what a clean room implementation ultimately is, depending on how granular or aggressive a large publisher wanted to get about it.

That said, I don't necessarily disagree with you. Talkie[1] presents an interesting case for it being at least possible to do this entirely on public domain material.

But even that used Claude somewhere in the course of its training pipeline (it's listed as a contributor on their GitHub), so again, how granular you want to get with that is still a question.

[1] https://talkie-lm.com/chat

chaosharmonic··on Fairphone is now officially available in the United States
> My understanding in the iPhone world is that the most common use case for fast USB-C connectivity tends to be people doing content creation work where they’re generating a lot of high fidelity camera footage rapidly and offloading it into external storage and other professional solutions.

I mean, Apple also enforces a difference in what is an iPhone vs an iPad vs a Mac, at both the OS and the application levels, regardless of what little distinction the internals have. Even without bringing mainline Linux into it, Android is generally looser about that.

> I can’t imagine that a lot of people actually dock their phone to use as a desktop.

It doesn't have to be all the time; there are lots of use cases where big displays are occasional. Pocket gaming, for instance.

chaosharmonic··on Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
One thing that has changed in around that time (maybe) is that GKIs[1] are now standard across (Google-branded) Android devices. Board/SoC support is handled via kernel modules now. The builds are directly from the Android Common Kernel, and an explicit goal is to be able to upgrade kernels on-device. (This has actually been demonstrated on Pixel devices, though I'm not sure how widespread it's been across others.) The Common Kernel also doesn't take contributions, and specifically encourages vendors to just upstream their drivers instead. Not that this fully solves the problems you're describing, but Android as a platform has become more intentional about dealing with kernel fragmentation and making itself more structurally friendly toward mainlining.

For the Pixel specifically, Google actually is working to upstream its hardware drivers and enable devices to boot off mainline. [2]

[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/gen...

[2] https://lpc.events/event/17/contributions/1445/

chaosharmonic··on Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
I mean I guess that's fair (about money I mean), but I more so mean in the sense of official sponsorships or full-on business ventures.

I also, more directly, mean that they do generally have separate versions of core apps.

Anyway I'm not sure that one of the oldest and most longstanding third-party ROMs anywhere in the Android scene would fail to meet the threshold for "serious."

chaosharmonic··on Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
Doesn't LineageOS have modern versions of those things?

I'm not sure it has to have money involved to be serious, and in fact the last time Lineage had money involved it didn't end very well.

chaosharmonic··on AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
The OP doesn't have images.
chaosharmonic··on Ask HN: Any tips for a college freshman enrolled in computer science?
A few... Some about jobs in general. Some through the particular lens of happening into technology work, out of a tinkering habit, from a loosely-related arts field. Not all of them are about actually landing work; some of them are just useful and/or important.

*Build what you want to use.*

You'll have significantly more reason to keep going with the project you can show off later if it personally matters to you, relative to focusing on just a tutorial or a curriculum. Whatever that is will give you demonstrable project management experience, total freedom on what the scope of that looks like for as long as its primary user is you, and excuses to dig into a bunch of new subject matter and tools that aren't beyond just what you're currently being instructed to do.

The overall development of your skillset when you do have a job will actually depend a lot on your ability to find other excuses to tinker on new tools, languages, etc that you don't get to do so with at work.

If you extend this to fixing things that you personally find annoying, you can also end up with valuable open source contributions.

*Know your rights.*

You don't have to tolerate everything you encounter in the workplace, just to have a job. Whether that's bigotry, or wage theft, or workplace cultures that tell you that you shouldn't talk about those things. Businesses frown on you doing it, obviously, but the reason that culture is able to persist is in part because we all collectively allow it.

It's trendy for bosses to trash on Gen Z for what they view as a lack of professionalism, much like how there are written examples of "kids these days" going back to the times of ancient philosophers... but it's important to recognize that "nobody wants to work anymore" also has written examples dating back centuries, and that the onslaught of articles about how Gen Z is unemployable are contemporary with tech company leaders encouraging young people to work for free.[1] You're not uniquely terrible, this kind of talk isn't new, and there will always be someone telling you that you're being unreasonable by having basic standards -- whether it's about 996ing, or adherence to pay transparency laws, or relocating to a place that can lay you off in 3 months, or one-way video submissions, or... Anyway. It really isn't just your "attitude," and you are in fact being gaslit. Not every hoop you're being asked to jump through is about "bar-raising," and while Canonical for example is famous for making jokes about how you can go somewhere with lower standards, and linking to the US government, it's also genuinely insane to ask "what would your high school classmates say about you?" as a question on a job application.

On that note, whatever your opinion of cops, regulatory bodies exist to help you. Their jobs are to address abusive and harmful behavior by businesses. Your experiences with them may vary, but employers aren't exempt from rules just because they might regularly act like it.

And even if you don't choose to take the step of going to them, knowing what you should and shouldn't have to put up with is also a filter for the kinds of places where you do and don't want to spend your career, the kinds of people you do and don't want to spend it working with, and the kind of colleague you ought to be to those around you.

It also means nagging your public officials to pass measures that would improve your conditions. (Ideally together, alongside the kinds of colleagues that you do want to spend your career working with.)

Their job is to represent your interests and help you with your problems. You don't have to listen to those officials call that the "complainer class"; those are people you can, and should, replace.

Low-hanging example impacting your generation: the fact that businesses hold you all up as examples for why we shouldn't do anything about the minimum wage -- and that they're allowed to say, out loud, that they should be able to pay you less because you're younger, and pay everyone else less for the entry-level jobs you all would have right now -- is only possible because our age discrimination laws don't cover anyone under 40. (I'm assuming US here.) That makes it worse for everyone else in a lot of other ways too -- for instance, the hustle culture we push on people in their 20s disproportionately harms anyone with additional healthcare or caregiving needs (whether you're older, or you have a disability, or you have kids, or you're caretaking for any of the above...)

A functioning minimum wage is actually a hedge against abusive bosses everywhere, regardless of whether you have a "good" job. So are accessible healthcare and housing. So are unions.

*Find good colleagues*

See above.

More broadly, find people that you can trust with your professional issues -- whether the problems are about your workplace, or whether they're about the tools you're working with.

Internet research is useful, but you should also have some actual personal connection. Your coworkers aren't your friends, but some of them could be, and at a bare minimum you should care about functioning work environments for each other so that you're not the only one caring about them for yourself.

This does not explicitly mean "spend time in an office." Onsites are valuable, but "culture" is how you treat your staff, and you don't have to be around each other all the time to do that.

It does mean you should hang out (physically and otherwise) in spaces that are related to your work but not actually your workplace. At least occasionally, you should meet people that do what you do (or something adjacent to it), including but not limited to the people you directly work with, in spaces your employer doesn't run.

Community isn't something your workplace should own, and will also regularly surface tools that you haven't encountered before.

Several of my favorite colleagues are Internet friends, and several of my favorite tools are finds from HN and places like it.

*Talk to startups*

If you can get in at a small enough company, you can get your hands in a lot of subject matter outside of what you're formally trained in. If you find something genuinely mission-aligned, or a place that values work-life balance more so than a corporate job, or something else that makes it better for you than just a job, it can also be a great way of finding good colleagues.

*Freelance*

You don't actually have to wait to start doing useful work that makes you money. Your probably already have enough of a skillset to fix things for the people around you. This is the same as with side projects -- a useful way to get experience with stuff that's outside the scope of your primary work.

For a personal example, my first open source contribution actually happened in the course of solving a data recovery problem for one of my friends.

*Technology work != technology company*

You can solve tech problems for people in other settings. Lots of small businesses don't have internal staff who thoroughly understand how their systems work, and rely entirely on their vendors for support. Or they're overloaded with manual tasks that you can automate. Or they don't know how to get actionable data that gives the business or its leadership a sense of direction.

You don't have to work for a big tech company in order to have a tech career. You don't even strictly have to use them for everything.

*Do not depend on cloud services*

Using them is fine, and they can be immensely helpful when you need backups, but your whole workflow should not depend on a tool that can rug pull you at any time. It's important to store as much of your work as possible in an open format that isn't dependent on any one client. I particularly encourage you to use Markdown wherever you can.

You especially should not depend entirely on cloud services for your password manager -- use something open source, that you have the option to self-host if things ever go sideways. Go read some of the stories of what happens if your whole Google account gets banned; they're mundane nightmares.

[1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/20/squarespaces-cmo-cold-called-...

chaosharmonic··on Roblox Officially Supports GrapheneOS
> So the issue with RCS is that google just this last year made the move from their internal implementation of E2EE for RCS to the standard implementation based on MLS (now that the standard impl is actually viable).

> They did this quietly in the background and most people didn't notice but in doing so they released new system/OS level services and started relying on those. And notably they did this rollout staggered such that only some people got it and some didn't which made everything way more confusing.

> From this point on now that RCS is more or less all "standard" stuff now you shouldn't see any major breakages. The only situation where you might see one would be when android inevitably opens up RCS outside of the google services walled garden but even then you should be able to continue relying on the google services version until the non-google version is stable.

Is there anywhere public that there are writeups or roadmaps about this? I'm particularly curious about whether there will ever be an API for third-party clients.

What's left in terms of meaningful technical barriers, that would prevent this all from being baked into Android instead of requiring Play Services?

chaosharmonic··on Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team
To the best of my knowledge Plex has never been open source. It's just easy to mix up because it's been using Kodi as a base the whole time.
chaosharmonic··on Gleam Is Now on Tangled
> something more established like Codeberg, or if f/loss, Forgejo or Gitea?

Codeberg's git hosting is a Forgejo instance, actually.

chaosharmonic··on The state of open source AI
I acutally see the reduced burden that comes with actually sharing resources.

To extend the previous analogy: Valve didn't make desktop Linux viable on their own. A lot of it is owed to another self-interested actor -- Google -- through the reduced need for dedicated desktop apps (largely pushed by Chrome), and various enhancements to wireless and power management that were necessary to make it a viable mobile platform (directly benefiting Android/ChromeOS, but then spreading out to laptops and mobile devices in general, including handhelds like the Steam Deck).

You can see it on a smaller scale in ecosystems like Android -- where handset makers regularly contribute features from their UI skins upstream, so that they no longer need to spend engineering resources maintaining distinct versions of theming engines/notification badges/multiwindow/various other stuff.

On a related note this is an argument for open source models, not just open weights. I think a lot of the diminishing returns relate to the opaque nature of most models.

chaosharmonic··on Mozilla: The state of open source AI
I don't think it needs to be framed purely as generosity. You just need a sufficiently self-interested actor that sees open ecosystems as a necessary part of reducing their own risk profile, relative to the alternative of complete reliance of a third-party business that can take an exorbitant cut and/or Sherlock them at any time.

Valve and SteamOS are a good example of what this idea looks like in practice. (Though they may also illustrate a third thing you need: a privately-run company, that has enough profit, and enough commitment from leadership to the company's vision, that they can make long-term bets without having to eventually bow to investors seeking short-term gains.)

chaosharmonic··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
Fair, I more so mean for digital releases.

Movies, on digital marketplaces, have had this kind of distinction for a lot longer than games have.

chaosharmonic··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
Not to defend this, just to further observe the different nature of their marketing -- games also haven't historically had similar "rent" options in the first place. Timed demos are a newer trend, demos in general have usually been smaller sections of the content, and they typically aren't something you're paying for.
chaosharmonic··on OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe
It kinda feels cyclical, tbh. Bang-for-buck entrant that's friendly to modders shows up in the market, enthusiasts flock to it, it chases a bigger market as it grows, and then it eventually fades out as it loses what made it special in the first place -- assuming it even makes it that far.

I also think of Essential and Poco when this kind of thing comes up.

chaosharmonic··on Bluesky Trademarks ATProto
Notably, from their FAQ:

> We’ve taken inspiration from other open-source projects that have taken a similar approach, including Wikimedia, Red Hat, Rust, Python Foundation, Apache, Mozilla, Linux, and Debian.

chaosharmonic··on Bluesky Trademarks ATProto
Yeah, I had significantly less apprehension about it myself on reading their docs, but thought it was still news XD
Page 1 of 10Next →