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svpk

215 karma · joined December 28, 2022

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svpk··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
Another reading is this: CEOs don't quit without notice [1], it's bad form and bad for both the company and for the reputation of the person leaving. Regardless of the value he as an individual was providing it speaks to substantial disfunction in the overall leadership of the company and a major lack of confidence from the person who presumably had the best idea of how the company was doing on the whole. The market suddenly learning those things resulted in a substantial market correction. It doesn't really matter whether he was a particularly good or bad CEO; the situation would indicate something is majorly wrong in either case.

1: Obviously exceptions will exist for unexpected major life events, etc.

svpk··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
I mean the fancy thing about living in a liberal democracy is that they do get to decide this in a limited sense. They get to have an opinion, advocate for it, and if they can convince people through the political process they do get to determine the outcome!

To actually advocate for their position: the US housing market isn't the consequence of natural market forces; it is the consequence of government intervention in the market to force a specific outcome. Housing prices have been rising as a percentage of average income for a long time. That cannot continue forever, so it won't, there will be a breaking point eventually (arguably we're just about at that point which is why it's become a political hot topic). We can choose policies to gracefully reduce prices over time or we can just let prices climb and the housing situation become ever more acute as it becomes increasingly difficult to people to own homes.

Housing prices going down will undoubtedly disadvantage people who made homes their primary investment vehicle. Though those people also just an investment path was dependent on the government creating artificial scarcity combined with interference in the loan market to keep the ship afloat. It will undoubtedly hurt. But it also hurts right now for individuals who did not choose the current set of regulations and suffer under the fruit such regulations have born (sky high prices, a lack of starter homes, etc.) The current housing situation is one without easy answers. It is a crises of our own making, but now that we're in it we will have to rip off the band-aid or just let the wound fester till it's something even worse.

svpk··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
That is actually an urban legend.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/were-u-s...

svpk··on More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older
I don't think anything in their post said otherwise. I assumed they were just adding more evidence on to what the previous commenter was saying.
svpk··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS is not rooted. The phone not being rooted is part of the GrapheneOS' security model.

I assume the issue is it failing the deeper play integrity check which is about it not being "Google approved."

svpk··on Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer
I know that Discover has a card with a 5% discount category that changes once a quarter. Everything not in the category gets 1%. It's not hard to get the card (or at least wasn't) and was frequently advertised to college students.

If you combine that with a card that gives 2% on everything than it wouldn't be hard to average over 2% cashback as long as you were mindful about using the discover card for qualifying purchases and the 2% card for everything else.

svpk··on Fast and Hard Code
That's not really the point of the saying though. The point is more so that if you are the kind of person who is in a position to roll your own crypto you probably have a PhD and have worked with cryptography for years. And the thing that you're setting out to do is to produce a cryptography library.

If you're that kind of person, then sure go for it! But if you're a top person in the field of cryptography you didn't need anyone to tell you if you were fit to make a cryptography library anyway.

And if you're not that kind of person you do need someone to tell you because the whole field is a minefield where subtle oversights break the whole thing. If you want to just implement cryptography as a fun learning experience that's great. But actual implementations that people will actually depend on need to be handled by experts.

svpk··on U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war
I think it's worth pointing out that the US almost certainly could have taken control of the strait. But it would have required boats in the water and boots on the ground. But that puts many more lives at risk, would have been very unpopular (much moreso then the current war situation), etc.

You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).

svpk··on A big win for Android interoperability
> with increased attack vectors.

I don't follow. If you mean against fraudulent spending phone based tap to pay is probably the most secure. It demands user authentication (biometric or code) for any transaction so there's no real way to trigger a fraudulent spend without the user knowing. Pretty much any other system allows for at least some amount of unauthorized spending if it's stolen.

If you just mean it's less private than I don't really know that it's terribly different than using a card. Especially if the ecosystem were open and you could choose your payment provider and not just have to use Google/apple.

svpk··on Fairphone 6 wide camera experimental Linux support
That's a pretty concrete list so it's unclear to me what you mean. They're also going to support some of the upcoming Motorola phones so it's not just pixels.

I think the short answer of what they'd need to do in a practical way is to release a phone that uses one of the latest Qualcomm processors (those have the required hardware security features), make sure they have at least 5 years of driver support and commit to keeping the phone up to date, allow for relocking the bootloater (they might already do that). And I think that's basically it, the Graphene project would be able to take things from there.

Realistically given that they tend to source older/weaker processors for reasons related to their goals it's unlikely they would source a processor with the required security features for their next model, but that's just a guess.

svpk··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
The idea is that you could ban any set of "unhealthy" inputs and give the big food companies some time and they'll come out with something just as unhealthy that complies with your rules.

The underlying issue is some mix of what industrial processes make possible combined with food scientist working with taste test panels to hyper optimize food. When you spend all this time and effort trying to create a snack where people are always left craving just a bit more you end up with the kinds of junk food that we have.

We want there to be some simple answer of "it's these ingredients, or this specific combination" but the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.

Food health science has always had difficulties with just how complicated the actual processing of food in our bodies is and the more we look the more complex it gets. But the "ultra-processed foods" test seems to be working out as a successful heuristic to identify especially unhealthy foods. Given the issues health science has had with coming up with exact answers a heuristic that's pretty reliable (even if imperfect) is a pretty big win!

svpk··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
As far as different payment systems go I think gnu taler is the most compelling. If keeps the payer anonymous while letting the government know how much the payee received for tax purposes.

https://www.taler.net/en/index.html

svpk··on The Disappearance of the Public Bench
I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices.

Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.

svpk··on 3.4M Solar Panels
That's incorrect per the video. It wouldn't cover 80% of the current US grid it would cover 80% more! It would be 180% of total US grid usage.

Timestamp of where he says that: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?t=2198

svpk··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
I think the confusion here is that Signal does in fact encrypt the notification in transit [1]. The FBI had access to the user's unlocked iPhone and went through the notification history on the device. The issue the user faced is that even though they deleted the signal app they were unaware that iOS (and Android by default) retain a database of past notifications even after they're dismissed from the notification pane.

[1] Well actually they just send a blank notification, the signal app then reaches out to the signal server for the actual encrypted message content when it receives the empty notification.

svpk··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
1. I'm not an iOS dev, but I know they have a specific framework for doing calls (CallKit I think), so you'd be using specific APIs that allow for a persistent connection for that purpose. Probably something similar for downloads. But generally iOS kills apps running in the background after a while so there's no way to persist an open connection indefinitely.

2. To be clear it's my understanding that the notifications weren't exfiltrated off the device. The notifications are stored in a database on the device that iPhone and can only be accessed by unlocking the phone. So I wouldn't call it a backdoor. Both Android and iOS retain notifications in a database, in Android you can disable it, I don't know about iOS.

svpk··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
In my recollection, which may be imperfect:

1. On android if Google Play isn't available (or you install the no Google apk version) it'll use a websocket for notifications. Apple doesn't allow a persistent connection except through their own notification framework.

2. In either case Signal doesn't send message contents through the notification framework (not even encrypted). Once Signal receives a notification the app wakes up and reaches out to the signal service directly for actual encrypted message.

3. Regardless when signal shows the contents of your message in the notification menu of your device your device keeps a record on your device of that message content.

The FBI here didn't get anything from apple, once they had the apple device unlocked they looked at the notification database on the device to get the message contents. This isn't really any different from the fact that if the FBI has your unlocked phone they can read your signal messages. The notable bit is that the notification database retains messages even after the app is deleted.

svpk··on Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
> Make 20 year experiments before rolling out any change at scale?

Basically. It wouldn't require a 20 year experiment probably. Looking at whole words vs phonics as an example, you'd get a handful of schools to participate and they'd try phonics in one class and whole word in the other. By the time the kids were in 2nd grade the fact that whole word learning wasn't working and that a higher rate of kids needed remedial lessons to catch up would have been obvious. And if it had worked really well you'd expect to see that performance improvement in reading by 2nd grade too!

So the experiment would take 3 years. Though then you'd probably want a larger scale experiment. I'd think if things were going well once kindergarten finished you could probably start involving more schools in the experimwnt the next year. So like 3-6 years altogether.

We have been successfully educating kids for a long time; if we want to mix things up with some fancy new pedagogy we should absolutely be studying if it actually works before rolling it out at scale!

svpk··on OnlyOffice kills Nextcloud partnership for forking its project without approval
> You can't bake your pie and eat it too.

This seems like a corruption of "you can't have your cake and eat it too." I'm somewhat confused as you can definitely both bake a pie and eat it too. Or are you trying to make some kind of point that I'm missing?

svpk··on Show HN: Red Grid Link – peer-to-peer team tracking over Bluetooth, no servers
Have you looked at Bluetooth LE Long Range? I believe more recent phones have it and it claims communication of up to 1km. In practice less in the woods I'm sure. Still a dramatic win over standard Bluetooth though.

https://novelbits.io/bluetooth-long-range-coded-phy/

svpk··on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
... Your examples seem to undercut your point if I'm understanding what you're trying to say.

In your first example the "cost" in the form of traffic etc. was reduced so more people "buy" in the sense that they go on the road until you reach a new "cost" equilibrium. In practice that equilibrium is quite close to the original cost so it doesn't fix the issue traffic. But if that same number of people had driven before the high way expansion traffic would have been way worse; the cost would have been too high so they previously opted not to drive.

In your second example by increasing the supply of money the money ends up costing less; it becomes worthless due to inflation.

When there's more of a thing it cost less.

To be fair, building more housing can be like highway example. If there's tons of pent up demand of people looking to move somewhere increasing supply dramatically can fail to move the needle on cost because there's many marginal buyers who all have basically the same price. If you've got a million people who want to move somewhere and are all willing to pay up to 500k for a house the price of a house won't fall under 500k until you've built at least a million more homes.

svpk··on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
Not really, it used to be the case that a full third of Americans moved every year. Obviously life is more complicated than econ 101, but it's also obvious that a current undersupply of housing is one of, if not the primary, drivers of home pricing. Admittedly other factors like the governments interference in the home loan space have also had large effects on the market over the last century.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/america...

svpk··on Honda is killing its EVs
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
svpk··on Apple's MacBook Neo makes repairs easier and cheaper than other MacBooks
They mean in the sense of sum, product, difference, and quotient. The comment they were replying to said KW/h (a quotient), but the term is KWh which is a product.
svpk··on SCOTUS to decide if 1988 video tape privacy law applies to internet uses
A fun fact, SCOTUS as a term predates POTUS by over a decade. So actually -OTUS was extended to POTUS from SCOTUS, not the other way around. Though both are well over 100 years old at this point. I think POTUS is probably the more well used term today, but in any legal context SCOTUS gets used more or less constantly.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/scotus-potus-flotus

svpk··on The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café
I'd point out that at least in aerobic exercies (ie running and biking) its generally recommended that you shouldn't be pushing too hard for most of your workouts. If you're going out four days a week it's only on one or two of them that you're generally supposed to push yourself. The others should be at an easier pace. Which I tend to find more enjoyable.

There's also something to be said for seasons of maintaining a level of fitness rather than pushing for the next level!

https://stories.strava.com/articles/a-productive-weekly-trai...

svpk··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
I believe it's just a matter of intuitively useful units. There's simply too many seconds in a day for people to have an immediate grasp on the quantity. If you're using a space heater or thinking about how much power your fridge uses kilowatt hours is an easy unit to intuit. If you know you have a battery backup with 5 kilowatt hours of capacity and your fridge averages 500 watts then you've got 10 hours. If you convert it all to watt seconds the mental math is harder. And realistically in day to day life most of what we're measuring for sake of our power bill, etc. is stuff that's operating on a timetable of hours or days.
svpk··on How getting richer made teenagers less free
As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet?

Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.

svpk··on 72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study
Key distinctions between Steam and similar contenders in other spaces (google play store, the apple app store) are that:

1. Steam isn't bundled with the OS, it must be installed.

2. Steam isn't a gatekeeper to installing software (as the app store is and in a somewhat different way as google has proposed doing with their plans to require app signing).

At least the US, and I assume most legal schemes, require an attempt to monopolize, simply being the best player in town isn't enough. Perhaps if the steam deck, etc. achieved a high level of market dominance you could argue that bundling steam was anticompetitive, but I don't see it yet.

svpk··on In Defense of Car-Centered Society
This person misses the point. They seem to be arguing for their right to own a car and to own a large plot of land. Which isn't what NotJustBikes, StrongTowns, etc. are arguing.

The actual argument is that when developing infrastructure we should be developing it so that people can also safely and comfortably walk and bike, etc. Notably that was historically possible in rural farming communities for thousands of years before the car.

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