HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ezst

1,951 karma · joined August 20, 2019

submissionscomments
ezst··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
Every success story and happy conversion to jj is evidence that hg should have won the DVCS war, but more importantly, that VCSes and their inherent merits and tradeoffs were always secondary to the social networks underpinning them. GitHub as a defacto monopoly really killed innovation in the VCS space, but also shifted the focus and attention elsewhere. That's why I don't think there'll be so much of a "post-git" without as much as a "post-github".
ezst··on France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
Wasn't CATIA running on unix even before it ran on Windows?
ezst··on France pulls last gold held in US
I obviously don't have a horse in this race, but this seems... more correct this way? And with Holland being a region (or two) and not the majority of the territory, how do the Dutch not living in Holland feel about it? It would seem like referring to Canada as "Québec", way to piss-off the non quebecers...
ezst··on France pulls last gold held in US for $15B gain
Why not?
ezst··on "Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds
Or you were just reading confabulations, without a way to tell, corrupting your knowledge in the process.

In general, I believe the problem of our time (sociopolitical divide, echo chambers, propaganda, people getting pulled to extreme viewpoints ...) isn't so much about the difficulty to access truthful information (most people would know how to fact check their beliefs and assumptions given enough time and motivation), but about the constant information overload that makes this process impractical. You are essentially softening your brain into accepting large volumes of information as facts, unchecked, and pretend that it's a good thing. You essentially don't know anymore the extent of what you know. Worse, you no longer know how you came to know, because the underlying principles and processes of knowledge (natural laws, models, theories, ...) were not involved in the learning (you could assert that day means light, and that night brings darkness because you have seen it repeated extensively and convincingly, but you wouldn't internalise this knowledge through the model of the earth orbiting the sun, and so you wouldn't know how to generalize from this knowledge into thinking about seasons or do any abstract reasoning on your own).

That is to say, we should be much much more cautious about what and how we read and learn about stuff.

ezst··on Google releases Gemma 4 open models
Have you tried paperless-ngx, a true and tested open source solution that's been filling this niche successfully for decades now?
ezst··on The Claude Code Leak
> Why we need these careful thought, abstraction and architecture?

your answer focused on maintainability, but you are overlooking what I think is the bigger problem: those components will eventually interact with one another (technically, by nature of living in the same code tree, sharing the same storage backend, framework, common libraries, …, or logically, by referencing the same entities for slightly different and complementary features). With that comes the need to centrally control what they should/can/cannot do. There is no shortcut to having to clarify (with your customer) and formally document what those layered interactions are, or, before you know it, you have multiple incompatible user access controls, row-level access policies, competing master/reference data, or different parts of the application interpreting differently the same data.

It's a pretty bad value proposition, if you ask me, to have to do so much hand-holding for a result that comes with no guarantees whatsoever (you will never know the extent of which your clean spec "made it in").

ezst··on The Claude Code Leak
I can totally wrap my head around that, and it's an interesting thought experiment, though:

- building functionalities as components that are swappable on a whim requires a level of careful thought, abstraction and architecture that essentially is the exact opposite to ai slop

- in this day and age we still don't make software for the sake of it, and who's financing it doesn't generally require such levels of functional flexibility (the physical world commandeering the coding isn't nearly as volatile as to justify that)

- this comes loaded with the implication that "stuff needs to work": if you are developing software that manages inventory, orders, resources, ... you just can't take the chance to corrupt your customers data or disrupt their business processes. Shipping faster than you can test and with no accountability and no oversight is a solution to a problem I've personally never encountered in the wild

ezst··on My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
Any mid- to high-end pro-line laptop from the usual manufacturers (dell latitude series, lenovo T series, hp pro/elitebook series) gives you that, really (rigidly built body using magnesium/aluminum alloys, good input devices and IO, high-end config, …) and some practical perks (hot swappable batteries, repairable/expandable, on-site warranty, …)
ezst··on Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)
That people on this forum convinced themselves that it's a reasonable take to vibe code a useful geometric kernel is profoundly depressing.
ezst··on My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
I haven't used a laptop in the last decade that wouldn't last a whole day on battery, or would hold any of those qualifiers for that matter, from Apple or other manufacturers. Not that Apple are bad devices, but they are flawed like the rest of them (often less, and sometimes more in areas that may matter less to you, the software being a major and increasingly one to me).

Also good to remember that Apple is a company of good devices and tremendous marketing, not a company of tremendous devices per se. That entails a lot of subjectivity and awkward tribalism.

ezst··on Make macOS consistently bad unironically
> After I got used to working in windows instead of full screen all the time, I can't really go back.

Sorry if this comes across as disrespectful, but it smells like Stockholm Syndrome. You are choosing not to use the full extent of your screen estate, and that is your fine choice, but that is no excuse for making it hard. If you compound the whitespace, the thick borders and the generally oversized UI controls, not much of "productive space" remains available to get the work done. I am not interested in macOS as a content-consumption-first vehicle, though that's clearly where Apple is steering.

ezst··on Make macOS consistently bad unironically
I don't understand how we keep hearing so often here about Apple OSes being so amazingly simple, approachable and cleverly designed with a lot of attention paid to detail, while every practical productivity advice involves some undiscoverable trick, or combinations of tricks, that seems so arbitrary and obtuse. I don't like Mac, in large parts because of that. No amount of marketing and peer pressure will convince me of the superior elegance and sophistication of something that hates you for wanting windows maximised. Those hidden tricks only add insult to injury as pervasive reminders of your presumed inadequacy, that you need to suffer to have things your way, and that Apple is magnanimous to even let you have them.
ezst··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
>> This was costing us ~$300K/year in compute, and the number kept growing as more customers and detection rules were added.

> For something so core to the business, I'm baffled that they let it get to the point where it was costing $300K per year.

And this, this is the core/true/insightful story the executives will never hear about.

ezst··on iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM
Probably the one elephant in the roomy thing that matters: failing to say they don't know/can't answer
ezst··on Atuin v18.13 – better search, a PTY proxy, and AI for your shell
it seems indeed better in some ways, but the scoring is still way off,

for example, for my second criteria:

> - works on partial matches (e.g. inputting "ma in" matches ("make install", "cd main")

typing "ma in" I would expect "make install" to come before "cd main" to come before (what's currently the very first hit) "cd Binaries/Multimedia".

I'm now reading about https://docs.atuin.sh/cli/configuration/config/?h=fuzzy+daem... while not managing to really get what would seem natural. Sigh.

ezst··on Atuin v18.13 – better search, a PTY proxy, and AI for your shell
I never found a satisfying search algotithm with atuin (iterating over time between fuzzy, skim, fulltext, and maybe others). Is there one that is both:

- case insensitive (e.g. inputting "make" matches ("make install", "vim Makefile")

- works on partial matches (e.g. inputting "ma in" matches ("make install", "cd main")

?

ezst··on Chest Fridge (2009)
Wouldn't a solution be to have the opening on the side and pull it toward you, like a "box on wheels"? As long as the sides of the "box" are thermally insulated, it seems like a sound solution for the stated problem (but certainly not one that's mechanically the cheapest/simplest).
ezst··on Nightingale – open-source karaoke app that works with any song on your computer
What the name reminisces me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightingale_(software)
ezst··on Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'
> when our 3 month old baby is settled for the night

Seemed a credible comment till that point! (/s)

Congrats :-)

ezst··on 1B identity records exposed in ID verification data leak
Or the tech executives barring their children from using social media.
ezst··on The MacBook Neo
> You're comparing a $1254-minimum laptop[0]

No, I'm not: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...

And I still stand behind the fact that, for that price, you've got a very competent device that is better specced for light use and friendlier for mom and pop (look, it has a HDMI, you can straight up connect it to the telly! Look, it has USB A ports, so that old camera, hard drive with the family pictures, old weird ergo mouse just works out of the box !).

ezst··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
Does that extend to generated/AI-edited articles? I don't see why the same rationale wouldn't apply.
ezst··on The MacBook Neo
I broke that circle by having a sibling ultimately follow my recommendation of getting a ThinkPad T at a discount (prev-gen during a sale) and then letting them advertise it to the rest of the family.

If you ask me, for a comparable price range, the ThinkPad still is a much better pick than the MacBook Neo: that thing has no IO and not even enough RAM for nowadays light web browsing.

ezst··on The MacBook Neo
Same here, MacBooks are decent hardware but nowhere near so superior as to justify all the downsides and increasingly dark patterns Apple has been pushing left and right.
ezst··on Russia targets Signal and WhatsApp accounts in cyber campaign
How long have you been around to still believe Matrix's empty promises?

Sorry, this is admittedly a harsh response, but not out of the blue…

ezst··on Russia targets Signal and WhatsApp accounts in cyber campaign
Reminder if one was needed that the future of your instant messaging shouldn't be above all "the same thing, but with more crypto" (e.g. Signal), but "less centralisation, then a reasonable amount of crypto" (federation e.g. XMPP or P2P ; though I don't know a P2P solution that's recommendable).
ezst··on A decade of Docker containers
hg and git came weeks apart and fossil shortly after if that counts
ezst··on Global warming has accelerated significantly
> OECD countries' past emissions are causing the warming we see today.

China passed EU's cumulative emissions in 2014, if I remember correctly. It's totally fair to blame industrialised countries for their share in causing global warming, irrespective if that happened in the early days of industrialisation and was propped up by dirty energy sources. Though, it's morally much harder to give a pass to countries polluting now using the same sources.

ezst··on The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying
No it hasn't. Work mechanisation throughout history has resulted in a shift from manual labour to one that's more intellectual in nature. Modern AI believers pretend that it will take over those jobs soon as well.

This would essentially bring us to a cross-roads between, on one hand, a utopia with UBI and people not needing to work (because their labour is unnecessary), or a dystopia, where few technocratic "lords" own the means of work automation and rule over a submissive world.

I don't think it takes a genius to guess where this is heading in our current political climate.

Personally, I'm not scared about any of that, because I don't believe LLMs to be very potent as an AI tool. Robotic militias (remotely controlled by BI or AI) seem a much more tangible threat.

← PreviousPage 9 of 28Next →