Hacker News Reader

tremonon Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

> a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit

> How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion

One of the first useful things that philosophy teaches you is how to construct a well-rounded argument in support of any position. Following up "philosophy is useless" with "I don't know how to argue my own opinion" demonstrates quite a lack of awareness.

tremonon Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

Certainly! And probably a multitude of other devices and phone apps as well.

tremonon Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

It's not that useful to single out Flock for that purpose. Google Nest and Amazon Alexa are also in that category.

tremonon Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium

Indeed, this is a great example of how the EU manages to grow its internal market.

tremonon Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

> Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps

That's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?

tremonon Fastmail offers EU data region

E2E encryption is meaningless for an e-mail hosting provider; they are by necessity one of the E's.

tremonon Fastmail offers EU data region

Which means that not even a European subsidiary will prevent data exfiltration by FVEY. Australia can just issue a TCN to the parent company to add a backdoor to the software used by the European subsidiary.

tremonon “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

The English term "software engineer" is not a protected title anywhere, FAFAIK. However, the local language equivalent of "engineer" is protected pretty much everywhere in Europe because it was awarded solely at technical colleges and universities. The title is (mostly) equivalent to a Master of Science degree, except that technical colleges could also award it (the English equivalent being Master without field designation).

tremonon Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

> this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks

> this was not sponsored in any way

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.

tremonon Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

For anything more complex than linear shell scripting, I prefer ruby --disable-gems these days. As you say, Python is horrible for composing and executing shell commands, but Ruby's FileUtils#sh (combined with %W{} array literals, %x{} output capturing and regular #{} string interpolation) provides a pretty low-impedance interface.

tremonon I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them

> You'll frequently see white and blue

I've never seen white; in order of prevalence, I've seen black, blue, red, and yellow. But such colour coding is not standardized, every manufacturer is free to choose their own rainbow.

tremonon I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them

That's still an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason. Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs? There is zero reason why 480mbps USB-C should exist when we already had 480mbps USB-A, except for misguided designers prioritizing aesthetics over usability.

tremonon Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Rather, this is institutional crime. Organised crime is when crime operates its own control structures in defiance of government enforcement; this is the government actively allowing the crime to proliferate.

tremonon Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

A corporate death penalty does not necessarily imply all jobs are lost. The government can simply nationalize all assets, use standard vulture capital methods to restructure the business, them auction each business unit off to competitors. Only first-tier management and investors would be directly impacted.

tremonon Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

> never understood why that didn't work on the past

AIUI, Android simply didn't support it. The original way for apps to install other apps was via ACTION_INSTALL_PACKAGE, which is a user-visible action. The InstallPackage API did not support silent updates until sdk version 31: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P...

tremonon The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

The images don't load without javascript, which sadly is customary for the modern web experience.

tremonon GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2

Ok, I'll bite. Which parts of the kernel should not be there, given that Linux is not a microkernel? I maintain that most of the code is there for hardware support, for security, or to support user-space application models.

I'll grant you the in-kernel nfs server and ipsec implementations, but those are not tens of millions of lines of code. The only way I can reach that number is by lobbing off a huge part of device drivers into userspace, but that's not really an interesting discussion as it seems purely subjective.

tremonon The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing

I'd say like Bach and Rossini. Rossini was perfectly aware of the form of traditional opera, but deliberately chose to engage with it in a much less reverent style.

tremonon The software group Palantir paid just £2M in corporation tax in the UK in 2024

It's working as designed, not working as intended.

tremonon ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

> IF there was a secure and trustable way that a trusted government could retain DNA information

How long does that government need to stay trusted and secure? For the lifetime of the born person only, or should that requirement also extend to the offspring of said person? Can you point to any current government that has been consistently trusted and secure for the past 100 years? How much are you willing to risk on the theory that a government (your choice, pick one) will stay trusted and secure for the next 100 years?

tremonon ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

The babies, obviously.

tremonon The AI bubble is popping; we just don't know it yet

I expect Nvidia to survive the crash on its own, and everyone else except Softbank to be bailed out with US taxpayer money.

tremonon Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

Blending is just one of the functions of a food processor. A food processor can usually also do kneading, mincing, and slicing, or (depending on extensions) even rolling (pasta) dough and squeezing citrus fruits.

tremonon Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

> unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change

My entire reason for switching from vim to neovim was that vim did change its UI, by neutering /etc/vimrc in a major update a while ago.

tremonon Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

A short-lived credential would reduce the risk that the key is still valid when an agent gains access

How does that work? If the agent is reading the credential from the live configuration, how short does the lifespan of a key need to be to prevent it from being used by an unauthorized process?

tremonon The Absurdity of Albert Camus

> Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy

Huh? Do you mean that in a literal sense, that Camus doesn't give instructions on how imagination works? To me, the quote certainly does explain how Sisyphus could be happy:

His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing [..] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart

tremonon UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

> a new national league in the US, say called the National Football League

How thoroughly un-American. A proper US national league would have "world" in its name.

tremonon Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption

With a bit more structure, you could change that to: every package in AUR is actually registered as foo/maintainer under the hood, and installing the package without maintainer name pins it to the currently active version. Package adoption can then be formalized as a new maintainer publishing their own version of the package, and users of an already-installed package need to issue an explicit command to switch over to the new maintainer's version.

tremonon UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

Off in the distance, an app store rings its 30% bell.

tremonon UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

...and Infantino was the UEFA secretary under Platini before taking Blatter's place as head of FIFA.