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esterna

62 karma · joined October 15, 2025

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esterna··on Why is Hacker News like that?
Almost any moderation system working under consistent rules will be stable, because the people and topics disadvantaged by the moderation will simply leave your platform.
esterna··on Physically Immutable Optical Archive Libraries
Silica uses femtosecond lasers for writing and supposedly mostly ordinary silicate glass as the medium. This would probably mean more costly drives and severely cheaper media (Folio claims $3/TB now, $1/TB eventually. I wager Silica would be at least 10x cheaper). If Silica keeps its promises, we might be looking at archival prices cratering. But it's been in development for over a decade, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Really interesting would be R/W speeds.

esterna··on Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
> All type parameters have an implicit bound of Sized. The special syntax ?Sized can be used to remove this bound if it’s not appropriate.

, which HashMap does not do, i.e. the keys and values have to have a statically known size.

esterna··on Self hosted email continues to steeply decline
This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.
esterna··on Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
Read the article. The elaborator (where metaprogramming is evaluated) is not part of the trusted computing base. The security model is that bad proof terms get rejected, not that they're never generated.
esterna··on EYG: A Programming Language for Humans
And it has array programming features, logging, and (time-travel!) debugging all intuitively graspable for most non-technical people.

I sincerely think there are lots of unlearned lessons in studying Excel.

esterna··on EYG: A Programming Language for Humans
There is one example that succeeded and became the most widely used programming paradigm on the planet: Spreadsheets

Though you might argue that the "programming language" part was rather accidental

esterna··on Exploiting Volvo/Eicher's fleet platform to gain control over all users/vehicles
> How's this any different than say, not bringing your wallet with you, because 95% of the time apple pay works

Apple Pay involves at least a third party (your bank) as a part of its function. This entity has to be reachable.

Unlocking my car needs me, and my car.

> when the payment terminal randomly decides to not accept apple pay?

I would be justified in being mad if, randomly, my BMW car would decide to not accept a BMW key (virtualized or otherwise).

> Not to mention there are plenty of other ways a phone can fail. It can [...]

"I will not accept this Euro bank note. You could have dropped it into the gutter on your way here, so it's strange for you to be mad at me if you don't have a backup."

esterna··on EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
Why should be? I think it is abundantly clear by now that market competition alone will not fix this. Though that does not stop people from claiming "Yes that failed and people suffered/died, but that was not real capitalism! If only we had a real free market, it would have been better!"
esterna··on EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
NIS2 allows for the arrest of managers in case of cybersecurity incidents resulting from negligence. I think it's a step in the right direction, but we'll have to see how it plays out.
esterna··on Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%
Once I start a conversation about Postgres query plans, maybe 95% of the knowledge will be almost certainly not needed, and for an inference provider there will be many more concurrent queries with reasonably large overlap. Maybe future architectures will be able to take advantage of this so not all parameters are needed in memory for almost all instances.

If we are talking about all knowledge, then I agree that the compression ratio is very impressive already.

esterna··on EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services
I wonder if the EU will someday figure out a patch for this "Deteriorate everyone's user experience in a way that is technically compliant and blame the EU" behavioural exploit...
esterna··on EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application
Once once they are rejected by charities, they can be destroyed just like before this law. EU regulators are flawed humans, but you can be assured that any argument you can come up with in 10 minutes has been considered.
esterna··on Prefer strict tables in SQLite
... than by surprise, when you find your integer column contains "[object Object]"? Jokes aside, breaking backwards compatibility is obviously a non-starter.
esterna··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Their boss hired GP over others for a reason. The person who is finally desperate enough to do it might be just a little worse at their job, a little more expensive, ... It will have a cost.

German has a related expression "vorrauseilender Gehorsam" (anticipatory obedience), where people will do evil long before they are forced to because of such strategic considerations. You must never rush to give up your morals, there will be plenty of time to do so later.

esterna··on New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Be here long enough and you will find people bragging about their captcha solving services, or how they found a clever loophole in anti-gambling laws. Posts about certain unmentionable topics are flagged minutes after being posted, post titles are changed to protect in-groups, and human rights are sometimes up to debate.

The rule is that you have to be polite about it all.

esterna··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
Of course, what they charge $39.95 for is in the public domain. So it's a sort of double scam.
esterna··on Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck
You can also buy licenses to use AV1, a royalty-free codec.
esterna··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
While I won't dispute that 6 months is outrageous, OP has not spent them to "please the bureaucracy", they spent them to escape personal liability should the company go bankrupt. The rest of the post is bemoaning the fact the German government won't let them also permanently reduce the company liability below 25k.
esterna··on Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards
Debit cards usually also use the Mastercard or Visa payment networks.

Even though I and the supermarket I go to are both part of SEPA and I can issue a bank transfer that will clear ~instantly, today cashless payments still involve EMV for various reasons.

esterna··on My Mathematical Regression
The sequence numbers of problems on Project Euler only represent the order of publication. They aren't deliberately connected except for a few problems that have one or two follow-ups.

Most of the first 100 problems can be solved without any understanding of the problem, should you so desire.

esterna··on Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures
This hinges on two misunderstandings:

- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:

- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.

esterna··on 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building
There is certainly a lot of demand at the current price of free or subsidised subscriptions. It remains to be seen what the demand is at profitable prices.

If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.

esterna··on A new way to build chips: Sequentially stacking silicon to extend Moore's Law
Capillaries cannot defeat the divergence theorem: If you have a volume where heat is produced but the temperature does not increase, the heat has to leave via the surface. It is true that the surface area available to diffusion can scale at any rate (eg. Menger sponge), but the heat still has to leave the volume via its boundary. In the case of capillaries, this is by convection which means that the product of coolant temperature differential and flow speed has to scale.
esterna··on Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue
On the one hand, you can set up a proxy that supplements secrets for API calls. On the other hand, you can whitelist what you need, in the simplest case with iptables (The devcontainer in the claude code repo is an example of the latter).
esterna··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
And yet we cannot stop time, and a decision has to be made. It seems natural to involve the child in this decision.

Of course, the next best thing (if a decision can't be made now) after stopping time are puberty blockers. Which are not completely without risks, but this applies to the other two options just as well (if not more so).

You can't not make decisions, and to claim so is to frame choosing one particular option as not-a-decision.

esterna··on Generating All 32-Bit Primes (Part I)
Very nice! One small note: In an Eratosthenes sieve, you can start crossing out numbers from p^2, since i*p for i<p will have already been crossed out in step i at the latest. You can simply replace

  for (size_t i=2; i <= 0xFFFFFFFF / p; i++) {
by

  for (size_t i=p; i <= 0xFFFFFFFF / p; i++) {
esterna··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
I also live in the EU. betfair.com is not blocked by my ISP here. Rather, they are blocking my ISP ("[...] you may be accessing the Betfair website from a country that Betfair does not accept bets from [...]"). That the website not only prevents betting but also does not show any odds is a technical decision on their part. Gambling regulation is also usually domestic, and not EU law.

Websites deciding EU users are not valuable enough to comply with GDPR is, as you say, also not censorship. It is again the technical decision of some website owners to provide their content only in conjunction with illegal processing of your data.

I have not had issues accessing torrent indices from the EU. This too is usually handled domestically and has little to do with the EU.

There is legitimately dangerous (current and upcoming) EU legislation (Chat Control, eIDAS, age verification, previously the Data Retention Directive), so I don't think it necessary to weaken your argument by listing non-examples.

esterna··on Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch
Do you have advice how I could get someone to do a (possibly paid) review of PCBs for small hobby projects?

Being new to this space, it's hard to learn quickly when the feedback cycle involves having PCBs manufactured, shipped, soldering them and then finding out what could have been better. (Or it works and you never find out what you did wasn't the right way to do it)

esterna··on It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change
Isn't that in violation of GDPR?