Hacker News Reader

ezston Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?

ezston Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage

Quite the opposite actually, way too many people treat LLMs as oracles, all the while they are fundamentally unreliable at knowledge storage and retrieval. If there was legitimate doubt in the early days as to whether a collaborative encyclopedia could self organise and self censor into a reliable source, the engineering of LLMs makes the opposite a certainty.

ezston When hardware goes end-of-life, companies need to open-source the software

If that's one way to get to Microsoft abusive planned obsolescence and absurd e-waste, I take it

ezston AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

You stream the music you own, it uses the subsonic protocol/API, and so is compatible with countless clients, letting your enjoy your lossless music on fancy hardware at home or cached on your mobile device when on the go.

ezston Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

Yoto is quite amazing, well thought-out product, for both parents and kids.

ezston The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

I need evidence that sufficiently large organisations don't eventually devolve into… whatever that is. And then, names, so I can apply there, while there's still some work ethics left in me.

ezston I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too

CachyOS? That distro asking you to pick one out of 5 bootloaders and one out of 13 desktop environments? That is rolling and so comes with the implicit contract that you would have your eyeballs liking every package's release notes for any one of them that you ever update?

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against CachyOS (I really couldn't care less), but if this is where we collectively set the bar for what is "user friendly", we are doing it wrong.

ezston Changes to Android Open Source Project

Hope there's a timeline in which banking and corporate apps can run/be enrolled on that. If the current geopolitical mess from the USA isn't a good-enough reason to make it happen, I don't know what is.

ezston IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware

Certainly.

ezston Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

You know what that reminds me very much of? That email client thing that asks you "did you forget to add an attachment?". That's been there for 3 decades (if not longer) before LLMs were a thing, so I'll pass on it and keep waiting for that truly amazing LLM-enabled capability that we couldn't dream of before. Any minute, now.

ezston Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

It's even worse and sadder. Consumers already paid a premium for that, because the monopolists in place made it unavoidable. And now, years later, engineers (who usually are your best advocates and evangelists when it comes to bringing new technologies to the material world) are desperate to find any reason at all for those things to exist and not be a complete waste of money and resources.

ezston IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware

Just to be the pedant here, LLMs are fully deterministic (the same LLM, in the same state, with the same inputs, will deliver the same output, and you can totally verify that by running a LLM locally). It's just that they are chaotic (a prompt and a second with slight and seemingly minor changes can produce not just different but conflictual outputs).

ezston AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

My guess is, the bubble popping means the demand wasn't real. No amount of price reduction will motivate it. Anybody who has to get theirs will be in for a steep premium.

ezston AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

That's fallacious: enterprise stuff doesn't always make sense at consumer level and doesn't always "drop down" for that reason. We've yet to see whether that particular stuff makes consumer sense.

ezston AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.

ezston Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

Every major DE had its very own compositing implementation back in X11, so what was "easy" got to be more standardized, and what was hard remained so.

ezston Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Trust me, I really want that to happen, but who has the billions to burn (and the will to use them at that) to build a solid alternative? Most probably, the EU will have a misguided shot at it, out of desperation from the USA, and will subsidise some inadequate local actors. I'm not sure whether it will be good, timely nor sufficient.

ezston Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

I feel the same, but in hindsight it makes a ton of sense once you consider that Microsoft customers have not, and for a very long time, been its end users. Instead, it's been those (mostly technically incompetent) FortuneXXX middle/top-managers and IT support department managers that they hooked on to Azure & al. via obscene service agreements (for no better cause than "everyone else is doing it anyway" and "nobody ever gets fired for placating MS stuff everywhere").

Microsoft is just profiteering off of their defacto monopoly, selling more is their only metric, the "what" is secondary.

ezston Tally – A tool to help agents classify your bank transactions

Dude, common, we won't be reaching "AGI" with that attitude. /s

ezston 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

> is of zero consequence to me

It is inconsequential, until it isn't. In front of me I've got a 2017 lenovo thinkpad running the latest Fedora+KDE, as well as a 2025 HP elitebook running "last corporate-friendly-stable version of W11". I can pop open the lenovo, key in my session password and hit enter, and I'm instantly productive, with shortcuts like meta+E giving me a working file explorer within milliseconds. On the Windows' side, there are several seconds of delay between typing my password and the on-screen feedback. Once finally unlocked, I've got a laggy environment where OS-essentials like the start menu and file explorers take whole seconds to render and respond.

It's a shame, if you ask me, that a dozen-or-so CPU and "general hardware" generations between those two devices got to waste due to poor software engineering and practices. And I'm not even talking about quality/reliability which is another sore point for Windowses of late.

ezston How we lost communication to entertainment

I agree with you, and with GP for that matter, I think this is both human nature AND we've been conditioned by algorithms to seek and produce this style of communication. I'm really hopeful we can eventually grow out of this.

I feel terrible for the kids currently growing up with tiktok, Instagram & al., I only hope we will build the social and legal framework to safeguard the next generations from this, until they reach a certain age at least.

ezston Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

> you are at best grasping at straws to find some semblance of justification for you irrational dislike.

You seem so emotionally-involved that the whole point whooshed above your head. JS is a language that gives me no joy to use (there are many of those, I can put Fortran or SQL in there), and, remarkably, gives me no confidence that whatever I write with it does what I intend (down to basic branching with checking for nulliness/undefinedness, checking for edge-cases, etc). In that sense it's much worse than most of those languages that I just dislike.

> Not only is JavaScript way more than a webdev thing, you are ignoring the fact that most of the mainstream programming languages also support things like automatic type conversion.

Again, you are missing the point. JS simply has no alternative for webdev, but it's easy to argue that, for everything else, there are better, faster, more expressive, more robust, … languages out there. The only time I ever have to touch JS is consequently for webdev.

ezston Why We Abandoned Matrix (2024)

XMPP just works and has matured substantially in the last 5years or so. You may or may not like it, but that's all I've been using/needing for a decade, and because of that, I ended up onboarding a bunch of tech-illiterate friends and family members along the way. It just works for them, too.

ezston Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/comments/qdmzio/dif...

or anything that touches array ops (concatenating, map, etc…). I mean, better and more knowledgeable people than me have written thousands of articles about those footguns and many more.

I am not a webdev, I don't want to remember those things, but more often than I would wish, I have to interop with JS, and then I'd rather use a better behaved language that compiles down to JS (there are many very good ones, nowadays) than deal with JS directly, and pray for the best.

ezston Why We Abandoned Matrix (2024)

> [federation] offers a degree of censorship resistance, as the messages or images are replicated across multiple servers, making it difficult for any single entity to censor or control the content.

That's the way Matrix goes, but that's not an inherent property of federation (XMPP doesn't leak nearly as much metadata as Matrix does, for instance)

Also, there is no free lunch in this space: p2p is slow and inefficient (bandwidth as much as battery) for modern mobile usecases, the workarounds generally consist of having edge servers to act as caches or preferred routing points, and that brings us back to the exact same set of tradeoffs found in the federation model, except with less control.

In short, I agree with the premise that Matrix is terrible, but not that federation is necessarily bad, nor that P2P is clearly superior.

ezston Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS

Not OP, but the case can be made that it's still the same very ugly language of 10 years ago, with few layers of sugar coating on top. The ugly hasn't gone anywhere. You still have to deal with it and suffer the cognitive burden.

ezston Show HN: I designed my own 3D printer motherboard

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/positron-upside-down-... and here you got an interesting form-factor

ezston LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted

Till yourself get hacked because the connected-to-the-internet TV is running an insecure software version. We should legal action the hell out of such practices.

ezston Nokia N900 Necromancy

Same HN niche that wants smaller iPhones, just not commercially viable they say.

ezston Nokia N900 Necromancy

Did it? I mean, even when you compare it to its contemporary devices (it took a while for Android to get close to smooth animations and fluid navigation, even without the type of true compositing and multitasking the n900 had).