Hacker News Reader

danielsamuelson US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

OK, and how does changing your desktop OS help with that? Does NixOS grant you access to a locked bank account where Windows 11 doesn't?

danielsamuelson US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

> [...] its chief prosecutor lost access to Microsoft services, including email

> [...] the program was aimed at refreshing the technologies used by the Dutch government in such a way that it would no longer be in a situation where it could lose access to critical systems at the whim of a foreign country

How does switching desktop OS help you retain access to email and payment services, neither of which care about your OS?

danielsamuelson GPT-5.6

It's worth noting that OpenAI recently came out saying, "We don't think SWEBench Pro is worth reporting any more" - https://openai.com/index/separating-signal-from-noise-coding...

danielsamuelson Choo Choo Words: Spell words to make train tracks, stop the train from crashing

There's an annoying bug where, if you're building off the word the train is currently travelling on, it marks the prior word as invalid, so you can't continue building your extension (even if the train hasn't reached your intersection point yet). This means you auto-fail if the train reaches the current latest word while you're working on the next one.

danielsamuelson BYD Seal 08 debuts with Blade Battery 2.0: 1,000km range, 5-min charging, 684hp

1MW/800V architecture = 1250A

danielsamuelson Claude Opus 4.7

Interesting that despite Anthropic billing it at the same rate as Opus 4.6, GitHub CoPilot bills it at 7.5x rather than 3x.

danielsamuelson Copilot edited an ad into my PR

It's a setting that causes an extra prompt to be placed into the system prompt.

danielsamuelson AI-Powered F1 Predictions

This Formula 1 season, I'm putting frontier models to the test - can they use their research capabilities to accurately predict outcomes of races?

danielsamuelson Where things stand with the Department of War

It's worth reading his recent comments on this whole affair: https://www.a16z.news/p/emil-michaels-holy-cow-moment-with

danielsamuelson Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth

Ironically, the site would probably say you can see 20 km from inside the basement.

danielsamuelson Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth

I'm assuming that when the project says you can see 24 km from a given location, that you can see 24 km from that location. That's not the case. Fundamentally, it doesn't do what it claims to do.

Why allow the user to select any arbitrary location on a map and give an answer when you know the answer is most likely nonsense? You don't need to compute for 2 days to accomplish that; you could just make it up.

danielsamuelson Show HN: Algorithmically finding the longest line of sight on Earth

The website claims the longest line of sight in my city is 24.7km from someone's garden that is surrounded by houses. I walk past this particular spot on my way to the gym. I walk downhill from my house to get there. I seriously question the reliability of this data.

danielsamuelson Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model

For reasons that should be obvious, that's not going to work on Windows.

danielsamuelson Starlink Direct to Cell

There are already services like Firsty[1] that use an eSIM to achieve this.

1. https://www.firsty.app/

danielsamuelson Ask HN: How do you security-audit external software using NPM packages?

You would, of course, preserve the copyright and license notices too. Otherwise that would be a violation of the license.

danielsamuelson Ask HN: How do you security-audit external software using NPM packages?

> It would be great if there was a "single small file packages" movement so that more lean open source software will be created.

There are certainly npm authors doing this already, feross[1] is a good example. That means you get packages like is-buffer[2].

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/~feross [2]: https://github.com/feross/is-buffer/blob/master/index.js

danielsamuelson My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day

Can it?

> Service Unavailable

> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

danielsamuelson Billionaires-in-space critics are 'largely right', Bezos concedes

I think it's a shame that people have bundled Elon into the Bezos / Branson battle. What Musk is doing is far more useful (and has been for a while now) than the measuring contest that's happening between the other two.

danielsamuelson Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?

> ...do we all have telemetry in our cars, really? I mean, we have data that can be read via ODBII, but it's not exactly connecting via the cell network, it has to be retrieved with a plug.

Nissans do, my Leaf does. They connect to a mobile network or WiFi and upload data.

https://www.nissan.co.uk/ownership/nissan-infotainment-syste...

danielsamuelson No support Linux hosting shutting down from hack

They don't help anyone, including themselves

danielsamuelson Barcode scanner app on Google Play infects 10M users with one update

It's built into the camera app

danielsamuelson Teamspeak 5 to be based on the Matrix protocol

Hmm, their developers seem to imply otherwise:

> TS.ChrisR - TeamSpeak Staff - 30d

> We use the Matrix protocol only for the messenger part.

https://community.teamspeak.com/t/beta-signup/13749/50

Other mentions of it here:

https://community.teamspeak.com/t/teamspeak-development-stat...

Matrix themselves talked about it: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/09/this-week-in-matrix-2020-...

danielsamuelson Slack Running Slow / Hanging?

They probably scaled down their infrastructure over the holidays, but now that everyone is back at work they're underprovisioned.

danielsamuelson Google Poly is shutting down

> We appreciate you trusting us to host your assets and provide a space where they can shine.

I doubt they will in future.

danielsamuelson Google Widevine Content Decryption Module DMCA

What on earth does that have to do with this topic?

danielsamuelson Amazon Price-Tracker with Alerts

Do you have any plans to support non-US suppliers?

danielsamuelson Spam in Your Calendar? Here’s What to Do

Which is not what's being discussed here.

danielsamuelson Ask HN: What VPN service are you currently using?

> Errr, I can't think of any others.

My home network is not exposed to the internet, but can be accessed remotely when VPN'd in.

danielsamuelson Extended Validation Certificates Are Dead

It's like when you go to aka.ms, it redirects you through sftools.trafficmanager.net before dropping you on a Microsoft oAuth screen. Looks super dodgy, even though it's legit.