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darthwalsh

67 karma · joined June 23, 2023

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darthwalsh··on A graph that should be front-page news
Oops you're right. I double-checked both from the hacker News app preview (Harmonic), and mobile Chrome. No "show more."

I must have confused it with another article, sorry.

darthwalsh··on The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News
There's probably an economic incentive to get visitors to read past the show more button?
darthwalsh··on The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting
Because it's a common phrase? Same as "get carded"?

English is flexible; almost any combination of words can start to have meaning.

darthwalsh··on The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
> Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one)

That's basically the California law! I hope other states adopt the "ask nicely for age but no online verification." OS setup asks for birthday, but you can just say January 1.

I also thought it should just send the flag, but I've heard there's good reasons not to. There's normally an affirmative prompt from the user to agree to send the age bucket data.

darthwalsh··on The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
Could you have a Trusted Platform Module tied to fingerprint reader, while the phone is rooted?

Nobody here complains that you can't install apps onto your TPM.

darthwalsh··on Changing how we develop Ladybird
AU is just as effective as humans at contributing to sqlite: they don't accept contributions.
darthwalsh··on A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous
Thanks for sharing that nuance. It seems one court weighed in that Claude chat wasn't accepted:

> In February 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that a defendant who pasted information—including details conveyed by his lawyers—into a public, consumer-grade AI chatbot (specifically Anthropic's Claude) completely waived his attorney-client privilege.

But maybe if you are using a transcription tool that happens to send your audio through the Anthropic APIs, the ruling would be different?

darthwalsh··on The Future of Obsidian Plugins
Like what cloudflare does in EmDash (the spiritual successor to WordPress).

But almost all plugins would need to be rewritten?

darthwalsh··on SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
A production app with customer data needs a data backup/restore strategy. I'm guessing a random app server writing to a local sqlite file isn't doing that either.
darthwalsh··on Ti-84 Evo
In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do.

I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.

darthwalsh··on Laws of Software Engineering
I couldn't find the source on GitHub, but somebody has helpfully scraped them a few hours ago: https://github.com/pascalandy/dotfiles/blob/main/docs/refere...
darthwalsh··on Atlassian enables default data collection to train AI
I have a small CLI script that runs JQL `text ~ "$1"` (with per-repo filters on project/component).

I don't have to switch to the browser most of the time!

darthwalsh··on Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
So in the trolley problem, you would abstain from supporting either side? I think that's actually a choice of supporting the status quo.
darthwalsh··on Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
I was there when the SDET role was eliminated.

Our team of 8 SDE and 5 SDET became a team of 8 devs who also owned tons of QA frameworks. It was awful, except each tiny we deleted a test suite for not being valuable; that was awesome!

If the Azure org was flooded with senior engineers who did not have senior-level experience architecting production software... That explains a lot.

darthwalsh··on If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
My work was careful to explain: if you associate your personal GitHub account with their work org copilot, then they are the ones who manage copilot.

If you wouldn't use your personal email account on your work computer, I don't see why you wouldn't create a new GitHub account only for work.

darthwalsh··on If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
Not private repos.

Now, anything that gets referenced in a copilot chat is fair game

darthwalsh··on Our commitment to Windows quality
Seems to acknowledge that windows 11 launched without expected features from 10.

Maybe they thought they could get away without taskbar location customisation, but now they have to put that complexity back in.

darthwalsh··on Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system
There's a CLI tool that writes the agent skills into the right folder. The other option would be to have everybody manually unzip a download into a folder which they might not remember.
darthwalsh··on Show HN: enveil – hide your .env secrets from prAIng eyes
Jenkins CI has a clever feature where every password it injects will be redacted if printed to stdout; `enveil run` could do that with the wrapped process?

Of course that's only a defense against accidents. Nothing prevents encoding base64 or piping to disk.

darthwalsh··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
This is kind of backwards .

GitHub's privacy statement [1] says > GitHub personnel does not access private repository information without your consent except as provided...

Do you have any evidence that private repos on GitHub are being used for training?

In the opposite case, if you have a public repo on GitHub then you should expect it to be laundered through LLMs :\

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...

darthwalsh··on Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance
Sounds like authentication is working great, but their authorization design may be flawed.
darthwalsh··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Maybe you could create a ballot initiative for the next election, that would disband the lobby? See how the people vote.
darthwalsh··on We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)
I think our corporate VPN doesn't send zoom video traffic through the VPN. As you enabled the VPN, you didn't see any dropped frames.

Split tunnelling means the UDP packets just go through the normal internet.

darthwalsh··on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
I'd rather you attribute your facts to an LLM vs. rephrase a hallucination that sounds right.
darthwalsh··on Zig's new plan for asynchronous programs
Zig doesn't make it simpler! Now in a single function, using async won't spawn threads, while using sync might.

But I'm digging this abstraction.

darthwalsh··on WinApps: Run Windows apps as if they were a part of the native Linux OS
I really liked using parallels, but when I got my apple silicon MacBook it was too much headache trying to get apps to compile on ARM. I meant to look into x86 VMs but it was experimental last I looked.
darthwalsh··on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg
Do you have evidence the accounts are fake? That all those accounts are fake?
darthwalsh··on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous
The biggest mistake was running Linux programs over files created by Windows programs. Anything you move between those worlds is suspect.
darthwalsh··on Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
Isn't midair refueling notoriously difficult to get right? The headlines would become "airliner crashes after crew couldn't thread the needle for 45 min"
darthwalsh··on Kurt Got Got
The ability to autofill by domain is a critical function of a password manager. It sounds like this tool is performing a lot worse than your browser's built-in password manager -- maybe that's enough to encourage a switch?
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