HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

kyrra

9,978 karma · joined February 16, 2012

I do payment things @ Google. Feel free to contact me at <username>@<username>.net.

The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.

submissionscomments
kyrra··on Build files are the best tool to represent software architecture
But there is a lot of C, C++, and Java in the world.

It also helps in a mono-repo to help control access to packages. BAZEL makes it so you can't import packages that aren't visible to your package.

kyrra··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
Copy/paste:

7 things all kids need to hear

1 I love you

2 I'm proud of you

3 I'm sorry

4 I forgive you

5 I'm listening

6 RAID is not backup. Make offsite backups. Verify backup. Find out restore time. Otherwise, you got what we call Schrödinger backup

7 You've got what it takes

kyrra··on Firefox 143 for Android to introduce DoH
But if that request is going to a large provider (GCP, AWS, CloudFlare), without the hostname, the request is going to be close to meaningless for the snoop.
kyrra··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
My point was replying to the OP who said:

> I dont get how you US guys can live in an environment were your next door neighbor, the person beside you in the supermarket etc can carry a lethal weapon that can end your life.

Knife killing can happen for the every-day citizen that doesn't have a security detail. The OP is scared about the neighbor having a weapon to kill them with... and every household already has one in the kitchen.

If you are scared about being killed in a given society, it's more likely a cultural problem rather than a tool problem. Yes, guns make it easier to do. The question is, why are more people doing it now adays? What changed?

Go back a few decades, and you can find plenty of kids in highschool in the US that would keep rifles in the back of their truck in the school parking lot. They would use those guns to go hunting after school. They weren't being used to shoot eachother.

kyrra··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
Has there been a case where a single person killed hundreds with a gun? The worst I know of is the Vegas shooting, which was 60. There have been mass-stabbings that have reached ~30 people killed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_stabbing#Examples_of_mass...).
kyrra··on European Commission fines Google €2.95B over abusive ad tech practices
This is a pipe dream. Advertising always has existed and always will. It comes and goes in different forms, but people like selling things they make or services they provide. Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.

I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.

kyrra··on Jujutsu for everyone
One example: Merge conflicts can be submitted as a proper entry and dealt with later: https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/conflicts/
kyrra··on Code review can be better
Try `jj`, as others have mentioned. It's being built by the team that built/maintains fig, and the are porting all their learnings into that.
kyrra··on Neki – Sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess
They did a interview 2 weeks ago about this on the changelog podcast with Sugu Sougoumarane, the co-creator of Vitess, who is at Supabase now. Watching the competition year will be interesting

https://youtu.be/y1aq8RsnJeI

kyrra··on I prefer human-readable file formats
Protobuf has a text and binary format. https://protobuf.dev/reference/protobuf/textformat-spec/

Google uses it a lot for data dumps for tests or config that can be put into source control.

kyrra··on GPT 5 vs. Opus 4.1 for Vibe-Coded Apps
Microservices don't make it any better. They tend to have a lot of implicit contracts that people don't necessarily express well through the API. All it does is give you a boundary that is fuzzy depending on the protocol used to communicate between the services.
kyrra··on Google suffers data breach in ongoing Salesforce data theft attacks
From the source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/voi...

> The instance was used to store contact information and related notes for small and medium businesses. Analysis revealed that data was retrieved by the threat actor during a small window of time before the access was cut off. The data retrieved by the threat actor was confined to basic and largely publicly available business information, such as business names and contact details.

kyrra··on IRS head says free Direct File tax service is 'gone'
But there was already a free way you could file taxes with Turbotax, FreeTaxUSA, and H&RBlock if you had a simple return. Direct File was a government built alternative to that.

Eg: https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/online/free-editi...

If there was also a free flow available, why would the government need to build an alternative?

kyrra··on Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)
Coerce is likely a better word.

Pix and OpenFinance are extremely chatty APIs with a ton of rules. Being a merchant using the ecosystem is not that bad, but trying to be a participant in the network is complicated.

kyrra··on Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024)
My understanding is that Pix took over because the Brazilian gov did transfer payments during covid and the (only?) way to get those payments was via Pix. So it forced everyone to start using it. And once people had more familiarity with Pix, merchants started pushing for it because it charges ACH level fees.

The chargeback system (MED) is only so-so right now, but expected to get better.

There is a lot to like about Pix, but the spec is extremely complicated and hard to implement.

kyrra··on LetsEncrypt Outage
Many of the cloud providers give free certs via acme.

https://cloud.google.com/certificate-manager/docs/public-ca-... (EDIT: Google is their own CA, with https://pki.goog/ )

The browsers and security people have been pushing towards shorter certs, not longer ones. Knowing how to rotate a cert every year, if not shorter, helps when your certificate or any of your parent certs are compromised and require an emergency rotation.

kyrra··on EU commissioner shocked by dangers of some goods sold by Shein and Temu
Rossmann has made all kinds of videos about this. Be careful out there.

https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU

kyrra··on Nvidia won, we all lost
Frame per watt they aren't as good. But they are still decent.
kyrra··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
> The first Iran deal in 2015 was not perfect, but it would have provided some guarantees for 15 years.

And then what? They have nuclear weapons? Which is what Israel and the US doesn't want.

Also, Iran didn't even let inspector into all of the enrichment sites they had, so they were breaking the original deal with Obama from the start.

kyrra··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
Can you give some context here? You are saying something pretty wild.
kyrra··on Google Cloud Incident Report – 2025-06-13
Sorry, I meant that was unit testing.

The document also doesn't say there wasn't testing in staging or prod.

kyrra··on Google Cloud Incident Report – 2025-06-13
I wish they would share more details here. Your take isn't fully correct. There was testing, just not for the bad input (the blank fields in the policy). They also didn't say there was no testing in staging, just that a flag would have caught it.

Opinions are my own.

kyrra··on Android 16 is here
Sounds like there are lots of causes: the project losing a senior dev who got conscripted to fight in a war. Not getting access to an OEM rom early on. Google changing a lot of the code around lock screen and other features (which makes porting over their custom changes on top of it take more time).
kyrra··on Apple Working to Move to AI Search in Browser Amid Google Fallout
Seeing that AI costs 10x the compute of search (at a minimum today), unless costs come down, AI will have to go subscription or ad supported.
kyrra··on Lessons from Building a Translator App That Beats Google Translate and DeepL
Googler, opinions are my own.

My one issue is that the author does not try to think about ways Google translate is better. It's all about model size. Google Translate models are around 20mb when run local on a phone. That makes them super cheap to run and can be done offline on a phone.

I'm sure Gemini could translate better than Google Translate, but Google is optimizing for speed and compute. It's why they will allow free translation of any webpage in Chrome.

kyrra··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
I'll check these out, thanks!

I learned about File Pilot (whose author posts here: https://x.com/vkrajacic) from Casey Muratori (https://x.com/cmuratori) who pushed it a bunch because he loves fast things.

kyrra··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
If you like fast apps, maybe check out FilePilot, a Windows explorer alternative.

https://filepilot.tech/

It's amazingly fast, though it's missing some features and will be really expensive when it leaves beta.

kyrra··on Waymo partners with Toyota to bring autonomous driving to personal vehicles
This is the choice quote from the article:

"Toyota and Waymo aim to combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)."

kyrra··on Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
I think your analogies are wrong.

There is a direct cost to Microsoft that these companies are pushing on them. Specifically around bandwidth.

Microsoft does not need to provide access for downloading plugins from their servers to anyone else.

kyrra··on Cheating the Reaper in Go
It defaults to the new behavior. If you want the old behavior, you had to set a flag on the compiler. But this applies to all code, so any libraries you include would also get whatever behavior you set on the flag.
← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →