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drewda

3,009 karma · joined August 24, 2009

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drewda··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
At least they didn't switch to idscan.net /s

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...

drewda··on Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future
This is a paraphrase of https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/how-apple-s-decade-long...
drewda··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.

And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.

So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.

drewda··on Apple Foundation Models
As of this month, everyone has 100+ pages from Microsoft on how they trained their MAI-Thinking-1 model: https://microsoft.ai/pdf/mai-thinking-1.pdf

OpenAI and Anthropic may have gone silent on how they build their models, but other companies have different incentives.

drewda··on Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0
That doc is very useful and confidence inspiring in terms of being mainly about people and process, rather than about one single technical solution.

Relevant parts for those who have cool-downs at the top of mind:

> Across Homebrew’s history far more users have been protected by shipping zero-day fixes quickly than have been exposed to npm-style token-theft or crypto-mining attacks, so a global cooldown would be a net negative for most users’ security. The deeper reason Homebrew does not need a general cooldown is that, unlike language package managers, it already separates publishing from distribution: an upstream release does not reach users until it has passed human review, CI and checksum verification, which is the very review window that language-ecosystem cooldowns are trying to recreate.

[...]

> For ecosystems with a track record of fast-moving supply-side attacks, Homebrew applies a download cooldown: a freshly-published upstream version is not adopted immediately, giving the wider community time to detect and report a malicious release before Homebrew users are exposed. Cooldowns have been added for:

    Bundler
    RubyGems livecheck
    npm and pip defaults
    PyPI resource resolution
    npm and PyPI in bump
drewda··on VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare
In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.

To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.

To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.

drewda··on GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension
This will not reassure you, but the reason it isn't necessarily really bad is because it's only incrementally worse than the really bad news came out last month:

Security researchers identified a series of exploitable vulnerabilities in github.com by using LLMs to review the compiled GitHub Enterprise Server binaries: https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38...

drewda··on Anthropic acquires Stainless
> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

For better or worse, it's an acquihire.

drewda··on GeoJSON
Yup, technically speaking if the coordinates aren't in WGS84, it isn't GeoJSON
drewda··on Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans
This is pretty straightforward compared to the giant universe of companies that resell Microsoft services.

The number of intermediaries that some customers, especially governmental agencies, go through to get just an Azure bill can be wild...

drewda··on People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account
FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...
drewda··on US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement
General Electric has a history of using that exact trick... just with jet engines and power generators and medical devices that can represent much larger amounts of revenue.
drewda··on Claude now creates interactive charts, diagrams and visualizations
When using Claude Code, we often prompt it to draft diagrams in MermaidJS syntax.

Great for summarizing a multi-step process and quick to render with simple tools.

drewda··on Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep
Have you considered seeing an allergist to test if you have some environmental allergies? If so, they may be able to recommend or prescribe meds to moderate the effects of those allergies. (disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, just someone else with sinus issues)
drewda··on A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines
No. A newspaper is in the business of selling you content (or advertising alongside content)

grith.ai appears to be in the business of guiding you click a "request early access" button so they can eventually sell you software (or so they can pitch seed investors on the length of their list of prospects)

Again, I'm not criticizing. Just pointing out a pattern that's becoming pretty common on HN, especially for stories about vulnerabilities written up by companies selling cybersecurity solutions or services.

drewda··on A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines
FWIW, the best way to get your website on Hacker News is to write a content-marketing blog post about someone else's work.

Don't get me wrong. This post is an interesting read. But the company publishing it appears to have nothing to do with the exploit or the people who discovered or patched it.

I tip my hat at their successfully marketing :)

drewda··on Google Workspace CLI
While I prefer Google's productivity apps to the Microsoft world in this case Google is just catching up to the APIs and tooling that Microsoft has provided for a long time: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/microsoftgraph/...
drewda··on We Will Not Be Divided
They put their names to their position publicly. That is meaningful action.
drewda··on I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk
Yes, it's officially still the Department of Defense.

If this were a news outline writing "Department of War" I would be concerned. But in the case of the Anthropic CEO's blog post, I can understand why they are picking their fights.

drewda··on Banned in California
That's exactly why the Bay Area Air Quality Management District exists (established decades before the federal EPA):

> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.

> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.

https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/about-the-air-district/history-of-...

drewda··on Factory-built housing hasn't taken off in California
The reason for most of those fees for parks and schools is because Prop 13 has prevented property taxes from raising with the market on older property owners (and the LLCs that own commercial properties), so cities and school districts have to instead turn to newcomers to get some amount of revenue to cover the costs of providing public services.
drewda··on An AI agent published a hit piece on me
FWIW, there's already a huge corpus of rants by men who get personally angry about the governance of open-source software projects and write overbearing emails or GH issues (rather than cool down and maybe ask the other person for a call to chat it out)
drewda··on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
Please see:

> It's not a lack of knowledge by Caltrans or Santa Clara County's congestion management agency that is keeping that interchange as-is. Rather, it's the physical constraints of a nearby airport (so no room for flyovers), a nearby river (so probably no tunneling), and surrounding private landowners and train tracks.

The most recent budget estimate is $1bn for any changes to this interchange

drewda··on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
Yeah, Google and Apple do probably have much more first-party probe data of passenger vehicles. But it really depends on the type of traffic data product. For some use-cases, it's more than sufficient for the vendor to buy probe data from specific types of fleet vehicles (like work trucks).

Where Google/Apple's coverage is quite valuable is for near-real-time speeds for atypical events -- say like yesterday's Super Bowl. But that's not what this blog post is about -- this post is about a well-established pattern that can be identified with historical datasets.

All that to say that vendors sell a wide variety of data products to transportation planners, but just because Google is now entering this niche market doesn't mean they'll be "the best" or even realize what their strengths are.

drewda··on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
What is the actual use of this?

This research team used Google's first-party location data to identify San Jose's Interstate 880/US 101 interchange as a site with statistically extreme amounts of hard braking by Android Auto users.

But you don't need machine learning to know that... San Jose Mercury News readers voted that exact location as the worst interchange in the entire Bay Area in a 2018 reader poll [1]

It's not a lack of knowledge by Caltrans or Santa Clara County's congestion management agency that is keeping that interchange as-is. Rather, it's the physical constraints of a nearby airport (so no room for flyovers), a nearby river (so probably no tunneling), and surrounding private landowners and train tracks.

Leaving aside the specifics of the 880/101 interchange, the Google blog post suggests that they'll use this worst-case scenario on a limited access freeway to inform their future machine-learning analyses of other roads around the country, including ones where presumably there are also pedestrians and cyclists.

No doubt some state departments of transportation will line up to buy these new "insights" from Google (forgetting that they actually already buy similar products from TomTom, Inrix, StreetLight, et al.) [2]

While I genuinely see the value in data-informed decision making for transportation and urban planning, it's not a lack of data that's causing problems at this particular freeway intersection. This blog post is an underbaked advertisement.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/13/101-880-ranks-as-bay-...

[2] https://www.tomtom.com/products/traffic-stats/ https://inrix.com/products/ai-traffic/ https://www.streetlightdata.com/traffic-planning/

drewda··on An Update on Heroku
Thanks for a capsule tour through Heroku!

FWIW, the team that eventually created "Docker" was working at the same time on dotCloud as a direct Heroku competitor. I remember meeting them at a meet-up in the old Twitter building but couldn't tell you exactly which year that was. Maybe 2010 or 2011?

drewda··on Film students who can no longer sit through films
Here's another recent example:

‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’: What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?

(The Atlantic, Nov. 2025)

drewda··on Film students who can no longer sit through films
From the same magazine that also recently published a piece headlined "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books"

I do have a print subscription to The Atlantic and appreciate some of their coverage, but it's embarrassing how much they're always on the lookout for upper-middle-class panics to milk...

drewda··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
Waymo is intentionally leaving out the following details:

- Their "peer-reviewed model" compares Waymo vehicles against only "Level 0" vehicles. However even my decade-old vehicle is considered "Level 1" because it has an automated emergency braking system. No doubt my Subaru's camera-based EBS performs worse than Waymo's, still it's not being included in their "peer-reviewed model." That comparison is intentionally comparing Waymo performance against the oldest vehicles on the road -- not the majority of cars sold currently.

- This incident happened during school dropoff. There was a double-parked SUV that occluded the view of the student. This crash was the fault of that double-parked driver. But why was the uncrewed Waymo driving at 17 mph to begin with? Do they not have enough situational awareness to slow the f*ck down around dropoff time immediately near an elementary school?

Automotive sensor/control packages are very useful and will be even more useful over time -- but Waymo is intentionally making their current offering look comparatively better than it actually is.

drewda··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Here's a different aspect of utility: The F150 Lightning includes 120V and optionally 240V outlets, so it replaces the need to carry a separate gas-powered generator.

That's probably more relevant to fleet vehicles for construction and maintenance firms than to individuals towing boats. But just to offer an example of how the F150 Lightning is a great fit for certain uses.

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