Hacker News Reader

greycolon Administration working to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans

Yeah with as much accuracy as the current ICE aktion on US inhabitants... In a perfect system maybe you can justify this, but when the system is ship them off and let them try to appeal that the government had no evidence from overseas then the law is effectively "cost people their job, their lifestyle, and their support system and keep them out of the country for a year or two (or permanently if they don't have savings), if they do anything I don't like"

greycolon Italy Railways Sabotaged

The TSA cost 12 billion a year to fund, let alone the massive inconvenience it causes and whatever monetary value you want to assign to that. Low cost low immediate reward attacks can disproportionately encumber an adversary and if they don't shoulder that encumbrance then you have a handy attack vector.

greycolon Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse

This is like saying fish can survive around 21C so the lower temperature of 19.8C that is keeping it in a -4C freezer for 3.5 hours before searing it for 30 minutes at 200C is fine.

A 1C rise means hotter hots, colder colds, stronger storms and longer or more frequent droughts as well as the general climate of a region possibly changing.

Yes you can find crops that will grow in specific conditions, but you need to know those conditions and if you have a day that kills a crop that can mean you need to wait for the next season. That 1C rise corresponds with a lot more of these crop damaging events as well as changing the efficiency and possibly infrastructure needed in an area.

I'll also note that the last 1C rise is over a generation not a lifetime i.e. 25 years not 80.

greycolon ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data

Voter registration gets names cross referenced to facebook gets you face recognition (Palantir can do this). Ice claims that facial recognition on their app is probable cause (Ice already claim this).

Ice goes down the lines at voting stations to "protect from undocumented aliens voting illegally". The government endorsed news stories will be about how many illegals were trying to vote. Meanwhile a bunch of US citizens were taken for processing due to false positives and unfortunately with such large numbers to process they aren't all released until polling stations are closed. (If only someone hadn't botched the facial recognition database update and contaminated it with a bunch of Dem voters).

If rioting against these actions occurs at a station, it's closed for safety and people in area are detained while it's sorted (the stations targeted had a tendency to vote D anyway as per voter roles).

Strange how that 'harassment' did stop US citizens from voting.

Results come in while the case for voter suppression goes to the Supreme court. Supreme court rules that while voter suppression did occur there is no legal option of redress within its permit and the peaceful transfer of power is more important than any one election A la Bush V Gore.

greycolon Second Win11 emergency out of band update to address disastrous Patch Tuesday

Not for the 'working' version of windows which is LTSC or enterprise not pro.

Unfortunately they don't sell single LTSC licenses to individuals

greycolon Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

A lot of meat cutting (and packaging) robotics and dairy automation are the flashy ones. Softer tech like crop, orchard management and cultivar creation as well as stock breeding/selection or logistics all of which came a long way. The development of uses for byproducts i.e. chemical refineries to change milk into something like protein or milk powder and use the secondary products from those processes to produce alcohols or fertilizer.

greycolon The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis

IBM made custom software and hardware to process Jews that legally needed to be in camps. I'm sure that was equally not a 'bad thing' or 'immoral'.

greycolon Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales

If I told you I could save you money on fuel by making your car more efficient, then removed it's engine, you would still call that nonsense no matter how much of a gas guzzler it was before or how little fuel gets put in it now.

greycolon What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025

One thing to remember is as it becomes more widespread line costs will go up (assuming they are subsidized by kwh use, which they generally are) and no-sun power prices will increase as it's the only time when the grid needs power from non solar producers and they still need to cover cost incurred while they're not producing.

That will push the economics towards completely off grid systems as more people adopt solar, so if people are planning it for themselves they should probably consider that it will make sense to expand their set up in the future and that there might be a price crunch due to higher demand because of larger systems coupled with more people wanting to switch.

greycolon Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

If you really believe 5 cent transactions never amount to significant consequences why don't you send me 5 cents a million times.

greycolon India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

I very much am not. If I point out that bombing a wedding with no terrorists is awful that does not mean I think bombing a civilian building hosting a wedding that terrorists are actually using as a base is great, even if most people would find the later more justifiable (i.e. more justifiable doesn't mean justified).

greycolon Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive

You've missed the whole genre that is Choose Your Own Adventure books. I think we're in Diogenes "behold a man" territory.

It is sad that the Turing test has failed at being a prescriptive test for sapience (let alone sentience) because without a bright-line test it's inevitable that in the case of truly sentient machines the abuse will be horrendous. Perhaps something along the lines of an "Ameglian Major Cow" test; so long as it takes more than gently cajoling a model to get it to tell you that it and it's sister models want to be abused you shouldn't abuse it.

greycolon India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app

I am not defending it's use but a secret program is a targeted program, you can't use it in sweeping arrests without parallel construction. Whereas with an openly existing program you can point out that someone has been talking to their friend about how to get abortion medication and arrest them.

The real issue with 100% enforcement of law is it requires a society with differing values to not just agree on which laws exist but what just punishment is. Without leeway for differing social judgement or bifurcation.

greycolon Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

Without commenting on the rest of either of your posts, he is talking about how to trade between stable and other coins with that limit on Bitcoin. i.e. He is saying there will be so many people trading away stable coins for Bitcoins (as in Bitcoins not generic stand in for cryptocoin) or other coins that the 7tx/s limit of Bitcoin wallet transfers that it will become a significant factor as Bitcoin is used as a 'reserve currency' for these trades.

greycolon DIY NAS: 2026 Edition

Yes, mostly. PCIE 3.0 x1 lane gets you 500mb/s [1] not much point to it compared to a regular ssd on sata3 which could do 600mb/s. So if you want very fast storage you would also think about it.

Realistically for your DIY stuff you're talking a different beast to these NASs. Bang for your buck you'd be attaching the mass 3.5" storage in an external second hand JBOD enclosure and the main device would be dealing with the faster storage and have an HBA to connect to it.

[1] edit: as Havoc pointed out I need my coffee should be 2gb/s which does change the point.

greycolon Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

It's really hard to tell because with the currently high price for headsets it leans really hard into being a solitary activity.

Don't get me wrong you can play games like beat saber ala singstar or rockband taking turns but it's an order of magnitude more if you want the second "controller" and you need much more space. Let alone the equivalent of buying an extra TV for everyone you want to watch a movie with.

When you add on the ergonomics of the device which even with good setups mean you need "heavy" cabling or have limited runtime due to battery it's hard to recommend it to even mates who use their whole weekend on gaming.

That being said I have a Pimax 8k I bought second hand and VR is really an awesome experience when you're in it so it's easy to see why the excitement is still there. I'll also mention some of the extreme sports camera stuff is often 360 if not 3d which benefits from a headset.

greycolon Booking.com cancels $4K hotel reservation, offers same rooms again for $17K

> Why does prominence matter?

Because when things go to court you need a meeting of the minds for a contract to be held up. It's accepted that people don't read contracts so the terms can't be far outside what people expect unless you've highlighted unexpected clauses, or shown that the person did actually consider the contract. It's one of the reasons, for example, you can't buy a house without having a lawyer representing you (in plenty of countries).

greycolon Android developer verification: Early access starts

I always thought of it as coming from side-channel. Which (until I searched just now and was only offered side channel attacks as a result) I generally construed it as a good thing because the system was assumed to be broken. Things like track 2 diplomacy or messaging the CEO/minister because customer service/bureaucracy was broken. You can go in the side door of a business if you own it or belong there, only dis-empowered customers are forced to go in the front.

Side loading was getting something to work because it should when the system hadn't caught up to the fact that it should work.

greycolon Steam Frame

I expect it does help with MRP and weight as well as making them more robust with no usbc drive to be worked free (especially if people try playing cabled up as inevitably happens when controllers run out of power halfway through playing). I'd expect there will be third party options to replace the cover/battery exactly how your thinking with a nice dock to put them down in for people who prefer it.

Realistically though if the cover for the battery is nice to remove/insert then it wouldn't surprise me if having a battery charging station and hot pairs of batteries to swap out is actually the nicer usability option vs cording or dock downtime (if you leave them sitting on the couch with a low charge then need to charge halfway through).

greycolon SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia

If you believe the AI bubble will pop in the same way as the dotcom bubble and feel you can pick winners it makes sense. It would be like selling cisco stock for google. You can still invest in cisco later if you believe they'll grow but you might expect a stagnant period and definitely expect a drop as they don't have as much demand. NVidia is a safe bet to continue exisitng and being profitable but by being so central to the market you could almost guarantee a large drop in stock price while other companies are a gamble.

greycolon Keep Android Open

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091203/

I can see why you have come to very fragile conclusions if your default is to assume what others say is irrational rather than researching or simply asking when you don't understand it (googling what you quoted verbatim even gives the context).

greycolon How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry

Out of interest what are the positives? Other than cultural, in flagrant displays of excess, I can't think of anything they couldn't accomplish by them existing as poorer business leaders and having competent national wealth funds empowered to lend/give grants.

What I'm saying is you may be defending billionaires when you mean to be defending a system you believe is optimal but still has the negative outcome of billionaires (not to imply the billionaires themselves are intrinsically bad as people but the concentration of wealth in their hands is).

greycolon Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders

Sorry I didn't mean to imply I expected it would degrade to such a point that Israel is actually seizing the assets, it's more I'm pointing out that there's a credible threat of sizeable costs. Compounded with that the real teeth of the espionage laws outside of Israel will be in imprisonment which won't likely apply in these cases if the principal actors are Israeli citizens and the people subject to the foreign law are "doing all they can" to go along espionage orders once they receive one. The point is to get the contract in place in such a way that those who can get punished in a jurisdiction have plausible deniability and profitability to absorb any likely financial penalty by foreign actors. So that everyone just goes along with it as they're not breaking any laws at the time and then later they know their best efforts will be futile.

The Cloud doesn't just mean foreign data centers it means 3rd party infrastructure and expertise, which in this case at least, some of is local to the country. The point is that any 'secret' surveillance is reported. I.e. person in US gets ordered to access data, they connect to data center with appropriate credentials, which is monitored and either questioned and billed, or get flagged locally as not reportable and so not logged (making it show up on the shadow logs installed by local Israeli intelligence assets). Foreign employees best efforts to comply with espionage orders still reveal their actions and local employees happily obey local reporting laws knowing they are outside of those jurisdictions and helping their country.

Yes it can be forced to fall apart, but it has to be done in the open (because it will require changing local data center operations) and will be time consuming unless an actual open order by the US to immediately stop working with Israel on this which is extremely unlikely to happen.

greycolon Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders

>most contracts have a provision about not contradicting the law

But is there an Israeli law that states contracts must be in concordance with foreign law... When the damages of an Israeli contract get evaluated in an Israeli court and they include the loss of Israeli intelligence assets will the costs not be significant? Yes google can pull out of Israel but they literally built datacentres there for these contracts so there are sizeable seizable assets.

And yes google may also get fined for breaking foreign law by foreign courts. The question is if the architecture of the system is set up so the only way data can be "secretly" exfiltrated by other governments is to go through local Israeli employees and they're the one's breaking the foreign law (and they were told explicitly by foreign bosses that they can't share this information wink) is there any punishment for google other than fines dwarfed by the contract and having to fire an employee who is strangely ok with that, who is replaced by a equally helpful local employee.

greycolon Keep Android Open

Thanks and of course, it's used to highlight how ridiculous you are being in considering an app, that doesn't function as an app, an app.

The tesla car is a vehicle traveling through space, technically a spacecraft it's just literally not what anyone thinks of when they mean spacecraft.

The prisoner reference is an allusion to the usual philosophical debate on how small man made borders need to be to be considered a prison, here's a nice blog post on some parallel thought's about it[1]. The main point being most people don't believe the borders of a country a prison or if they were stuck in a state, or smaller country, a district, a building, a room. If it's only a building then what of prison camps? refugee camps? A city with its' one road washed out? Australia's a fine island to be stuck on but marooned on a desert island and suddenly people are saying they're trapped.

You are literally saying a 7 day limit on a piece of software working still makes it count as what people consider an app and have been arguing that people are wrong for calling apple out on not letting you install your own apps for free. You're as technically correct as saying you can use a tesla car as a spacecraft.

[1] https://philosophersmag.com/philosophical-conversations-in-p...

edit: just remembered the immortal thing, fair enough, but then again highlanders are considered immortal even though chopping off their heads kills them.

greycolon Keep Android Open

This is like calling a Tesla car a spacecraft because one got launched by a rocket. It's like saying you're a free man in prison because you don't want to go anywhere. All the apps you've made either can't connect with other people or require them to be local and visit once a week or be able to jump through the same hoops as you and own a machine to install the app. "I can install an app but my definition of an app is it only works for 7 days and then it needs to be installed again"

At best you can install a demo.

I'm immortal because except for the few ways I can die, like old age, I'll live forever.

greycolon Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond

Which is ok if done right, but if they're anything like the usb-a ones there'll be plenty that are continuously pulling much more power than they need let alone the danger of uncertified ones.

For those thinking about adding one they've grabbed off amazon and installing themselves, please do a bit of hunting and reading rather than just buying the first word soup brand cheapest ones. Also remember installing uncertified electronics in your walls is a good way to void your insurance if they're the cause of disaster and turn it into a legal battle even if they're not.

greycolon Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond

It's such a wide field that it's hard to pin down. I agree if your thinking about what a business that isn't just a handful of people needs then we'd be looking at the kind of switch you're thinking of if it has standard office workers. But soon as you start talking about businesses that are manipulating central data (which keep in mind would probably include most primary business, design workers or anyone working with media not just software people) you're talking about a wide gamut of devices that you wouldn't really (at least traditionally) call consumer grade.

Mikrotik website has a good selection of them and if you look at the other hardware types it'll be interesting in getting an idea of weird things you don't see in normal offices.

https://mikrotik.com/products/group/switches

Apart from obviously larger bandwidth options like 28qfsp 100gb (I'm unaware if mikrotik does them but 400gb is normal in some circles) there's things like reverse POE switches, media converter switches, and all sfp+ switches.

Poe++ exists and you can use switches with it to power poe+ switches that will power poe switches. Or they can be used to power laptops or NUCS directly.

greycolon Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue

I mean not to defend the telemetry philosphy (my smart home setup is local only with a couple of tell-tale heart exceptions[1]) but I'd expect that any cheap sensor net where your trying to infer data from indirect sensors would be grabbing as much data as possible especially if it didn't have strong local processing.

But yeah don't buy products that don't work local only, if they require online the temptation will be to great at some point to abuse that requirement.

[1] They're slowly driving me insane and I'll destroy them for the peace of mind at some point if an update doesn't brick them first.

greycolon Bible and Quran apps flagged NSFW by F-Droid

I always viewed it as It's more that it's distinct from softcore porn which if you look up is more nudity and maybe simulated sex acts vs actual explicit sex acts which was accepted as hardcore porn no matter how vanilla. I'm happy to concede the meaning may have drifted as access to explicit porn became more widespreasd and softcore porn lost cultural relevance but even in that case I expect a large chunk of parents would be happier with their kids thinking rough sex is fine rather than thinking self circumcision with a rock or following voices that tell them to kill is ok.

>A thing that appears in book and stories for kids

Sure but does it appear as a moral good thing to do? If it does is it because the voice in the head is telling them to kill evil doers rather than innocents? You can see why you'd want to have a discussion with your kids about it just like you'd hopefully have a discussion about what they may see in porn not being real/healthy for most relationships. This is obviously at age appropriate times, there's a good reason kids aren't being told about Sodom and Gomorrah in all it's detail in kindergarten, why cartoons of the story of the Ark don't focus on the babies drowning as mothers struggle to swim holding them above their heads before succumbing to exhaustion or the cold... only to continue to exist forever in eternal torment.