Hacker News Reader

iudqnolqon Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

When I went browsing through their GitHub I was surprised at how little web-specific code they have. It's basically just their React Native mobile app and a tiny go server. I understand that with a small team they've got to prioritize, I do hope at some point they implement server-side rendering for when you click on a direct link to a post.

iudqnolqon Is Jeff Bezos killing The Washington Post on purpose or by accident?

So far each big, unpopular decision by Bezos has led to significant cancellations of paid subscriptions. Since it's happened more than once I don't think it's safe to assume the remaining subscribers are happy either.

Bezos cancels planned endorsement of Harris: 300,000 paid subscribers cancel in period up to election. (400,000 new paid subscribers over the period, but they offered significant promotional discounts)

Bezos tweets change to opinion policy: 75,000 paid subscribers cancel within four days

With in the order of 2.5 million paid subscribers before all this started that's significant losses.

Edit: Source is https://www.npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5312819/washington-post...

iudqnolqon Is Jeff Bezos killing The Washington Post on purpose or by accident?

The problem is that opinions are way cheaper.

Look at the article currently promoted at the top of Post opinion page: "Trump is off to a good start with an AI action plan" https://archive.is/ERCme

Regardless of what you think of the quality of that opinion, it took very little effort to make.

Compare the sources they used to the work it would take go out on the ground and do novel research:

- Their own news article about it (itself based on press releases and an off-the-record comment that obviously would have come from someone in the White House press office assigned to promote the press release)

- Their own past opinion pieces

- Reuters.com

- WhiteHouse.gov

- Online govt statistics

- CNN.com

- NeurIPS' blog

- Columbia Business School blog

- Matthew Yglesias' blog

- Greg Lukanioff's blog

I could have found those sources based on vague memories of tweets I've seen by following journalists on Bluesky and a few hours of googling. I suspect they did the same, except they used X instead.

iudqnolqon Warp.dev Terminal – Overpriced, Buggy, and AI-Sabotaged My Code

I've found Claude to be terrible at undoing.

It feels analogous to what would happen if you put me in front of a broken project without source control that I've never seen before and asked me to fix it without giving me enough time to actually understand it. It starts from errors and bugs, guesses corresponding source code, and tries to narrowly fix just that snippet. Generally it favors deleting, but not specifically deleting new code.

I would have thought it could record a log of its actions and use that log to think about undoing. I would also think it could annotate lines with git blame so it knows undoing wouldn't involve changing anything more than say a day old. Unfortunately that isn't consistent with what I've seen.

I just make a WIP git commit and run git commit -A --amend --no-edit after manually reviewing each unit of work.

Edit: I also wish Claude implemented undo at a higher level instead of relying on the model. Some combination of snapshotting the whole repo and tracking operations that have precise inverses. But I understand that would have drawbacks.

iudqnolqon Show HN: MCP server for up-to-date Zig standard library documentation

I have a gut feeling that writing this kind of MCP server can't be the future of software development. I'd expect a two year old AI model to need this kind of handholding, but I don't understand why it's still necessary.

Couldn't any modern AI model know that Zig docs are relevant to the question, figure out how to find the docs, write some code to parse it, and guess how frequently to update it's cache?

I expect there to be plenty of problems AI can't write for the foreseeable future but they have a very different vibe from this.

Edit: I just asked Claude Sonnet 4 to pretend it has a tool that makes docs available that has an update frequency parameter. It said the zig stdlib should be updated weekly but the Java stdlib would only need quarterly. Seems reasonable to me.

iudqnolqon An inside look at NSA tactics, techniques and procedures from China's lens

> Second date has capabilities of network eavesdropping, MiTM, and code injection

This is probably a dumb question but doesn't that require an SSL cert? Obviously the NSA can get someone to issue a cert for a domain they don't own but wouldn't that be visible?

Couldn't you have every user device log the SSL certs it sees to detect this attack? What about CT?

iudqnolqon Servo's progress in 2024

Because flexbox & grid are amazing. And you'll probably need it anyway if you ever have to render arbitrary rich text.

iudqnolqon Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything

In what contexts is 0.84 ± 0.16 actually "nearly perfect"?

iudqnolqon Hospitals gave patients meds during childbirth, then reported them for drug use

Why should we question that? The most obvious answer would be that women who have a hard time giving birth are more likely to get painkillers and less likely to want a second child.

iudqnolqon When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk

But do the Houthis?

iudqnolqon When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk

> Over the coming days and weeks they will disperse along their orbital plane, and likely also raise their orbital altitude.

That's historic data

iudqnolqon When a Telescope Is a National-Security Risk

Then tell me where these ones are: https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/usa-354.htm

iudqnolqon Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?

I misread your comment. It wouldn't make sense to have a non-async sleep in a browser, as it is an event-loop based primarily single-threaded JavaScript runtime.

iudqnolqon Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?

    function sleep(ms) {
        return new Promise((resolve) =>
            setTimeout(() => resolve(), ms)
        );
     }

iudqnolqon Up to $41B in World Bank climate finance unaccounted for, Oxfam finds

The money is not actually missing*.

Oxfam attempted to add up all the numbers in various PDFs linked on the World Bank's website and got a total that's less than the headline figure in the World Bank's press releases. (See the actual report at https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...)

Some of that is probably missing data and some of it reflects that headlines like "USA donates 1 billion" don't actually always result in the US making a bank transfer for a billion dollars. For example sometimes it's a simplification of a complicated loan.

Your comment reflects a common misconception about audits. When the books don't add up that doesn't show that money is actually missing.

I don't love analogies to personal finance but a better one would be to suppose you asked a random US citizen what they spent money on last month and then compared it to their bank account. They'd probably be wrong, and you probably wouldn't have enough information to know exactly how wrong they were because they didn't save all their receipts and so on.

*edit: this report provides no evidence money is missing. to be fair it doesn't disprove missing money either

iudqnolqon The Anvil Text Editor

What about holding down the shift arrow, pressing the down arrow five times, then ctrl-r? In most IDEs replace with an active selection will default to replacing only in the selection.

iudqnolqon Show HN: Pocache, preemptive optimistic caching for Go

Is groupcache suitable for current use? I don't see commits in years and the issues have reports of panics due to bugs.

iudqnolqon Nixiesearch: Running Lucene over S3, and why we're building a new search engine

I'm super new to this so I'm probably missing something simple, but isn't a trigram index one of the canonical solutions for fuzzy search? Eg https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgtrgm.html

That often involves recording original trigram position, but I think that's necessary to weigh "I like happy cats" higher than "I like happy dogs but I don't like cats" in a search for "happy cats".

iudqnolqon TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$

Yes, and?

iudqnolqon TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$

I'm quite fond of a little helper like so:

    createElement({
        className: 'p-2 flex justify-end',
        contents: createElement({
          tag: 'img',
          src: '/os-logo-maps.svg'
        }),
      });

I got the idea from Lea Verou's blissfuljs. When you're creating a bunch of nested elements it comes in handy.

iudqnolqon Offline UX Patterns

And yet as a user I sometimes find local-first applications harder to reason about. For some apps I know to force-quit and relaunch the mobile app after reconnecting to the network before opening the website, for example.

Distributed systems are just hard I guess, especially involving user systems.

iudqnolqon SlateDB – An embedded database built on object storage

Using an s3 object per key would be too expensive for many use cases.

The website is a bit fancy but the readme seems to pretty straightforwardly explain why you might want this. It seems to me like a nice little (13k loc) project that doesn't fit my needs but might come in handy for someone else?

iudqnolqon NTSB Issues Urgent Safety Recommendations on Boeing 737 Rudder System

The door plug could also be spun as a supplier issues. Ultimately this points to poor supplier management at Boeing. Boeing realizes this, and is taking steps to address it including purchasing Spirit.

iudqnolqon Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

Interesting! I'll definitely check out Wikimedia.

My project is for planning hiking trips so the areas I'm searching typically are places in the wilderness that don't have many photos. Right now I'm not doing any ranking. I just semi-randomly take ten photos for the search area.

iudqnolqon Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

I see you're sourcing images from Wikimedia. Have you found any other good sources? I'm working on indexing images by place taken for my own project and am primarily very slowly and jankily enumerating the flickr API. (You can see https://plantopo.com/geophotos for a pre-alpha view of where I have coverage. Zoom in where there are blue dots and click the map to search. Don't click Oregon or Washington because of a bug I'm working on)

Are you using opentripplanner for routing?

iudqnolqon Show HN: Selectable – mobile-friendly Postgres client

I like it. A few suggestions;

- When in the table explorer it's odd that the primary action - viewing a table - is behind a dropdown menu. maybe clicking the table name opens the browse rows screen and clicking a column opens with a select prefilled.

- Please default to a limit 500 or something like Jetbrains to prevent me making stupid mistakes.

iudqnolqon Indiana police are seizing FedEx packages containing cash

I respect some of the attorneys working for FIRE quite a lot. They have some great achievements. But I can't support the organization as a whole because their non-legal work is a bunch of nonsense.

Their initial statement on pro-Palestine protests was disgraceful.

Their ranking of best colleges in the country for free speech are completely wrong (and just happen to align with the political views of their big donors).

For example one factor is how many newspaper articles get written about issues with free speech at a school. Tiny private colleges that explicitly say they don't support free speech do great on this metric.

University of Virginia is championed by them as the best school in the country for free speech, which simply isn't true.

iudqnolqon Terence Tao on O1

I tried it for a while and thought it was helping a lot. Then I happened to use an IDE without it and realized it was increasing my rate of syntax tokens per hour but reducing the rate of features implemented per hour. In particular I was constantly rewriting boilerplate instead of ever writing helper functions.

iudqnolqon CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

There are some very specific accusations backed up by non-denials from crowdstrike.

Ex-employees said bugs caused the log monitor to drop entries. Crowdstrike responded the project was never designed to alert in real time. But Crowdstrike's website currently advertises it as working in real time.

Ex-employees said people trained to monitor laptops were assigned to monitor AWS accounts with no extra training. Crowdstrike replied that "there were no experienced ‘cloud threat hunters’ to be had" in 2022 and that optional training was available to the employees.

iudqnolqon Hetzner now throttling shared CPUs if you use >20%

If Google translate is correct your link says CPU, not memory. I would be surprised by a memory trottle because I can't think of a sensible way to implement it and for example AWS limits CPU but not memory.