Hacker News Reader

fenceposton I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Pretty sure the best time to file tax-related stuff is before it's due and the second-best time is immediately after you become aware of it. Filing late is almost guaranteed to be better than not filing at all, and if there was no tax due then I suspect there also won't be late filing penalties.

fenceposton I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Just remember, if you want to put your content on youtube be sure you're demonetized by cursing up a storm.

(not real advice. I think.)

fenceposton I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

I think a related but separate question would be "Can I do these things if the proceeds are going directly to charity instead of to me?"

I suspect it would be important that any funds never reached you, so you couldn't simply receive money then donate that amount. Playing a charity gig where the receipts go directly to the charity would likely be fine, streaming/Spotify revenue I don't know, acting in a movie might be out of the question if it's being professionally shot because the producer might have insurance or other requirements that only paid performers and crew can be on set, etc.

fenceposton Everyone in Seattle hates AI

From someone who's mostly avoided the AI craze so far, I think it comes down to a combination of two things.

1) "AI" is in many ways like the unreliable coworker so many of us have had in the past - maybe someone who talked a good game in interviews, but after you'd worked with them for a while you realize that you have to double-check everything they do for stupid/careless problems. In the worst case, you also have to do some hand-holding as they ask you for help with things that they should know how to do. They can produce good output but they can't be trusted to produce good (or even marginal) output so they're a net time sink.

2) In a frightening number of companies right now, that problem coworker is the owner's or manager's relative and cannot be avoided.

So boom, there you go, bad coworkers and a toxic culture that not just protects but promotes them.

fenceposton France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

Ah, so it's kind of like saying "A distinctive feature of Renault vehicles is that they can be purchased both with cash or through regular financing."

fenceposton How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists

One thing you could do is go and physically look at the camera. https://deflock.me/identify has pictures of cameras from at least the major providers.

fenceposton Laptops with Stickers

I've gone with a few branded ones (e.g. "Lock your fcking computer!" from Zorus), but more from conferences I've gone to, notably bsides conferences.

Place of honor goes to a gift from my wife, a black cat staring at you with "Judging you. Quietly." It seems appropriate.

fenceposton NetHack4 Philosophy

Now now, it's that the game is full of ways to have YASD, Yet Another Stupid Death.

fenceposton Two billion email addresses were exposed

The message I got wasn't related to the number of addresses affected (though I've been using this approach for a couple decades), but IIRC regarded whether the datasets in question were free.

fenceposton Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time

Maybe, but Amazon has one thing that Google seems to take pride in avoiding - customer service.

I can't help but think of the mass banning they did of people who spammed emoji in chat for a game streamer by request to vote on which direction he should choose who only got unbanned because he has a big enough following to cause bad PR. I can't imagine being in a position where you depended on Google not banning you for your livelihood. Sure you'd have separate accounts, but it's pretty much guaranteed Google knows they're connected and what's to prevent the shriek of "circumvention!" followed by banning all of them?

fenceposton Two billion email addresses were exposed

I was mildly annoyed by the handling of this for domains. I have a personal domain, and now I know that one of the generally service-specific email addresses I've used (most likely with a unique password unless it's Palm levels of old) has been breached with its password. I don't know which one because I don't have a high enough (paid) account.

If I'd realized that jumping through the hoops to get onto the site was just going to tell me I'd need a paid account I'd have saved myself a few minutes. As it was it made the whole experience feel like I fell for a sales email.

fenceposton Hacking India's largest automaker: Tata Motors

That was pretty well documented earlier this year (e.g. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uk-shares-sec... about M&S and Co-Op). "the threat actors utilized the same social engineering attack to breach both M&S and Co-op."

fenceposton Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time

There's a reason Google has a reputation of "Don't use it for anything that you can't afford to have disappear with no notice or recourse."

You also can't expect it to get any better, both because Alphabet has never shown any interest in improving things and because you and the services you've been using them for aren't the new AI hotness. Even if you're absurdly profitable for them (and you're clearly not) you're not in an area that their internal people are competing to serve.

fenceposton Hacking India's largest automaker: Tata Motors

Note that M&S dropped TCS in July following the recovery. https://www.ft.com/content/289ec371-2ed4-425a-9bd0-c34e6db39... and elsewhere.

fenceposton Taking money off the table

Paying off if possible, but I'd not put everything into paying it down. Pay a chunk of it down for comfort, and put some into emergency reserves with some reasonable level of return that could be accessed in the future in case of need. Early payments don't really matter that much if you have a period of unemployment/underemployment before it's fully paid off.

fenceposton Taking money off the table

Another voice in favor of "money today good" (though not from personal experience).

I'd even go so far as to recommend putting that money specifically into things that promote your long-term economic stability, e.g. is it enough to let you buy a home that's going to have monthly expenses below what you're paying in rent? There's plenty of economic uncertainty out there right now, but I feel confident in one thing: Even if the entire economy goes into the crapper rent will not go down. In addition the real estate market is pretty soft right now because of uncertainty, so if you're in a position to purchase that may let you basically lock in your monthly housing costs for a decade or more.

fenceposton Knocker, a knock based access control system for your homelab

"We had a secure VPN option set up, but then we had to replace our Ivanti VPN solution so we switched to Fortigate. Then there were some concerns so we jumped to Sonicwall. After that debacle we finally got the budget to go with Cisco and I'm sure everything will be fine now!"

fenceposton Knocker, a knock based access control system for your homelab

Knocking can cut down on grinding. I have in the past created setups where you had to knock prior to establishing a VPN connection, and given the semi-regular problems with VPN implementations I really don't feel bad about that. Fortigate, Sonicwall, Cisco, Ivanti, etc - sure a big part of it is "don't run VPNs based on big legacy codebases" but who's to say there won't be implementation problems found (or introduced given "Jia Tan" style attacks) in Wireguard?

Is knocking incredibly weak security through obscurity? Sure, but part of what it does is cut down on log volume.

fenceposton Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models

I suspect it did happen on the highway for some people, that would explain the disabled Jeep sitting on the (minimal in construction zone) left shoulder of an expressway that I drove past yesterday. I just figured there'd been a fender bender in the already terrible construction traffic and the second vehicle hadn't moved on yet.

fenceposton Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant

That stuff is also made in Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Phillipenes, Korea, India, etc etc etc.

If things get to that level of 'touchy' what makes you think shipping through that area wouldn't be interfered with? South Korea, Japan and arguably the Philippines are the main countries that wouldn't be going through areas that China regularly tries to claim or at least exercise authority over.

fenceposton I'm leaving Ruby Central

As a complete outsider I mostly find myself wondering if there's legal recourse for those who were forced out (noting the clear distinction that one person was commenting on between the service owned by Ruby Central and the code that Ruby Central likely has no legal claim to).

fenceposton What happens when ambassadors are summoned by the host country?

Connotation vs denotation indeed.

But I'll stick by my position that for a lot of people feeling put-upon it's because they're generally unpleasant not because of their ethnic, religious or other background but because of their personalities.

Personally, I'd call the current Israeli government one of the "sovereign citizens" of the world - and while there's a certain "duh" element to that because indeed nations are sovereign, the connotation I'm trying to get at here is that they have the same "doesn't play well with others" energy of the US 'sovcits'

fenceposton Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

No, they're like a completely nontechnical marketing person who has a big library of papers on related subjects and who's been asked to generate a whitepaper by pulling phrases. What comes out will probably have proper grammar and seem perfectly reasonable to another person with no knowledge of the field, but if actually read by someone knowledgeable may be complete gibberish taken as a whole.

Individual sentences and paragraphs may mostly work, but it's an edifice built on sand out of poorly constructed bricks plus mortar with the wrong proportions (or entirely wrong ingredients).

LLM output is "truthy" - it looks like it might be true, and sometimes it will even be accurate (see also, "stopped clock") but depending on it is foolish because what's generating the output doesn't actually understand what it's putting out - it's just generating output that looks like the kind of thing you've requested.

fenceposton Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com

Now just has a memorial page for him. Not sure if it'd qualify as an Internet version of a "spite house" but it doesn't seem that far off.

fenceposton Beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

Even if there aren't (there are cases where individuals fight extradition to other states though I have no idea if that's ever effective, and questions of conflict between states has come up recently regarding interstate prescribing of abortion medications, etc. with some states explicitly stating that they will not cooperate with Texasistan), a civil judgement against an entity operating in one state could likely be enforced without even interacting with the state where that entity exists - e.g. if they're using a bank with a presence in MS, the state might be able to simply go after their accounts held with the national-scale bank.

fenceposton What happens when ambassadors are summoned by the host country?

And of the ones identifiable as Jewish, the ones where it's just because they wear a yarmulke or something similar probably also don't have problems.

And then there are going to be the ones festooned with Stars of David, and pushing for every conflict they can possibly get into so they can claim antisemitism. Those? Those I'd believe having problems, but they're not having problems because they're Jewish - they're having problems because they're assholes.

Is there antisemitism in France? I'm positive there is. Is there anti-Muslim sentiment as well? I'm positive there is. (side note, aren't middle-eastern Muslims generally considered Semites as in descendants of Shem?)

fenceposton Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

Keep in mind that AVG and Avast are owned by the same company now so overlap is likely.

I'm not at my computer but IIRC there was mention of connecting out to a couple of initially unidentifiable domains but a little digging makes it seem they're poorly documented but related to visual studio analytics. I ignored after seeing that.

fenceposton How much do electric car batteries degrade?

There's also something called the "Chargie" (chargie.org) which is basically the same capability but connected on the USB side of things. I assume it's Bluetooth controlled, and it seems to have a bunch of other charge control options including rate limiting. Probably a lot more important back in 2019 when they released it, and probably relevant now for people who want more control (or laptop control with one model, though I suspect a lot of USB-PD laptops can cap charge and you might not want the laptop cycling power on and off).

fenceposton How much do electric car batteries degrade?

For the comparison to phone batteries, it's worth noting that until the last few years few if any phones allowed capping charge below 100% but now iPhones (15 and higher?), many or all Samsungs and unknown others allow capping for battery health. For the Samsung devices, the ability to do this came somewhere around the time they started promising 5 years of OS and/or security updates.

I'm pretty sure Tesla early on 'sold' an optional range extension that simply allowed you to charge the batteries further for extra range, with part of that cost presumably covering an anticipated higher battery failure rate. IIRC there were also some times when there were hurricanes coming during which they OTA unlocked that for everyone in the affected regions as well to facilitate evacuations.

fenceposton Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

More details please? Which installer?

---7.3.0--- This release popped up just a few minutes ago, so VirusTotal results for the 7.3.0 EXE and MSI installers

EXE (still running behavior checks but Arctic Wolf says Unsafe and AVG & Avast say PUP): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/816b21b7435295d0ac86f6a8...

MSI nothing flags immediately, still running behavior checks (https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e022a018c4ac6f27696c145e...)

---7.2.2/7.2.1 below--- I do note one bit of weirdness, the Windows downloads show 7.2.2 but the download links themselves are 7.2.1. 7.2.1 is also what shows on the release from 3 days ago even though it's numbered 7.2.2.

I didn't check the Mac or Linux installers, but for Windows VirusTotal flags nothing on the 7.2.1/7.2.2 MSI (https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/7a2d4fec05d1b24b7deda202...) and 3 flags on the EXE (ArcticWolf Unsafe, AVG & Avast PUP) (https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/a30388127ad48ca8a42f9831...)