HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

usrbinbash

4,664 karma · joined December 4, 2021

submissionscomments
usrbinbash··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
That would be a fine argument, if anyone had proof that invasive search practices actually made peoples lifes noticeably safer.

And yet, almost every single time such practices are implemented, nothing about actual safety changes...but a whole lot about surveillance does.

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security will lose both.

-- Benajmin Franklin, paraphrased

usrbinbash··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
> The advice for travelling to the US in my circles is

There's a much simpler advice:

"Don't."

usrbinbash··on Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant
Here's the thing:

People SHOULD be allowed to put their entire lives on phones if they want to.

People SHOULD NOT have to worry about governments using that against them.

usrbinbash··on Show HN: Ledge.sh – Runnable Markdown Notes
Oh great, another Jupyter-esque project...
usrbinbash··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Remind me again, how many orbital refuelings will it take to make starship reach the moon?
usrbinbash··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Uh huh.

Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

usrbinbash··on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
Companies increasingly no longer even care about income.

They care about what boosts investor confidence.

So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.

usrbinbash··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Cut the EU off from ... what?

Technlogy? That would likely result in a US market crash the likes of which has never been seen before. Look at what percentage of the stock market is the magnificent 7. Now imagine what would happen to that if US tech giants were no longer allowed to sell their products/services in the EU. The market is fragile as it is with the AI bubble going on.

Trade? That cuts both ways, and the US economy and cost-of-living crisis doesn't give them lots of wriggle room.

Products? China will be all to happy to step into whatever market is thus competition-free, not to mention the impact this would have on US businesses.

usrbinbash··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
Kinda like what Norway has, I'd imagine.

Eased travel and trade, but not full membership voting rights, etc. So basically, an extensive trade and economics agreement, with options to intensify relationships later on.

Good thing for both sides!

usrbinbash··on Incident with Github.com
> Finding anything was detective work

And in recent years, how is the centralized world of websearch doing?

https://www.techspot.com/news/101560-study-confirms-search-r...

> Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system.

None of that depends on a centralized provider. I have all the features you listed on my self-hosted platform as well.

usrbinbash··on Incident with Github.com
Not even that is really the case.

Even if whoever owns and runs the infra would like that to be the case, the law of wherever they are can put restrictions on this as well.

usrbinbash··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
> Infrastructure should be neutral.

Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.

The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.

I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.

And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.

And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.

usrbinbash··on How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT [pdf]
Sounds like a question the AI labs should answer. After all, they all say they sell artificial intelligence.

So why does that intelligence seem to have a hard time even showing its own usefulness?

usrbinbash··on Apple is getting this wrong
Is public opinion important to an industry whos future depends on datacenters being built for hundreds of billions of dollars, while the people all around them, whos utilities get more and more expensive in no small part because of datacenter buildouts, experience a constant cost of living crisis...

...yeah, that's a tough one...

usrbinbash··on AI in Linux
> Economies of scale -> more energy = bigger electric plants = cheaper energy.

Problem is; power plants are not something that can be spun up with a kubectl invocation.

Power plants need to be built. This process takes YEARS, and in some cases over a decade. And that's just the plants themselves. The grid also has to be built out to be able to handle the new load.

And while this potentially +10year process is ongoing, the current supply is gobbled up, and prices for consumers skyrocket.

Yes, eventuelly, market forces may solve the issue. By then however, it will already be too late for many areas, with residents being priced out of a basic utility.

Or worse, the markets may not solve the issue at all.

Because; all this building out of electrical gear and power plants, requires very specific resources and talent. Whta if the markets decide that these resources are much better allocated (at least from the PoV of company shareholders), in building power generation capacity exclusively for datacenters, and the consumer market is simply ignored?

usrbinbash··on Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
Funny, people used to say the same about Golang.

Turns out, sometimes shedding "functionality" is really shedding cruft that holds the core functionality back.

Is this the case for Codeberg vs. Github? I don't know, and I'm not gonna base my argument on unverfieable predictions of the future.

So we'll have to wait and see. But it sure looks to me like many of the prime arguments for github boil down to "well, it's big and has lots of stuff".

usrbinbash··on Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos

I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.

Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?

usrbinbash··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
> Something else that git isn't good at: permissions.

It doesn't have to be good at permissions. That's what DevOps platforms that integrate git are for.

usrbinbash··on Dehydration's role in learning and memory
Why
usrbinbash··on I still prefer MCP over skills
> what stops the agent from echoing the secure storage?

The fact that it doesn't see it and cannot access it.

Here is how this works, highly simplified:

    def tool_for_privileged_stuff(context:comesfromagent):
        creds = _access_secret_storage(framework.config.storagelocation)
        response = do_privileged_stuff(context.whatagentneeds, creds)
        return response # the agent will get this, which is a string
This, in a much more complex form, runs in my framework. The agent gets told that this tool exists. It gets told that it can do privileged work for it. It gets told how `context` needs to be shaped. (when I say "it gets told", I mean the tool describes itself to the agent, I don't have to write this manually ofc.)

The agent never accesses the secrets storage. The tool does. The tool then uses the secret to do whataever privileged work needs doing. The secret never leaves the tool, and is never communicated back to the agent. The agent also doesn't need, or indeed can give the tool a secret to use.

And the "privileged work" the tool CAN invoke, does not include talking to the secrets storage on behalf of the agent.

All the info, and indeed the ability to talk to the secrets storage, belongs to the framework the tool runs in. The agent cannot access it.

usrbinbash··on I still prefer MCP over skills
And in a skill, I can store the secret in the skill itself, or a secure storage the skill accesses, and the agent never gets to see the secret.

Sure, if I want my agents to use naked curl on the CLI, they need to know secrets. But that's not how I build my tools.

usrbinbash··on I still prefer MCP over skills
> The core philosophy of MCP is simple: it’s an API abstraction. The LLM doesn’t need to understand the how; it just needs to know the what.

Wrong. It needs to "understand" both these things. The only difference is where and how the strings explaining them are generated.

usrbinbash··on Git commands I run before reading any code
> I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages.

We can't.

Why do you think the `man` command exists?

usrbinbash··on Hold on to Your Hardware
As the old saying goes: "This too will pass."

Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for companies who don't see their stock price as their product.

If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure new players will arise picking up their slack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU

usrbinbash··on Miscellanea: The War in Iran
> iran's dickhead move...

Remind me again, which country started this whole mess?

> what choice do the gulf nations, or even all the asian+european (strait users) nations have?

They can go "yeah, you know, the US has been less than reliable as an ally recently, what with absurd tariffs, saber rattling around greenland, belitteling NATO, etc., and they seem unwilling to change, so we're just gonna pay the piper, and get oil, and make arrangements with the Chinese (aka. the worlds most powerful industry), and if they US doesn't like it, that sounds like a them-problem..."

What's very likely not gonna happen, is other countries fighting the US's war for them. NATO already told trump no, other countries won't give different answers.

And anyone who wants to actually invade Iran...well, let's put it this way: Iran is 3-4 times the size of Afghanistan, with even more difficult terrain, and has a standing army of 600,000 men, with over 300,000 in reserve. They have an air force, are proficient in the manufacture of drones, have a working intelligence network. And they've had 4 decades to dig into defensive positions.

In short, it's not gonna happen.

usrbinbash··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Absolutely true, but there is a silver lining:

When people rewriting open source libs with a bot then come crying to maintainers that their rewrites have bugs, and they would like for someone to fix said bugs for free, there is absolutely no one who will feel obligated to help them out.

usrbinbash··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
> Just because they have been made before LLMs doesn't mean it can be done again

Erm...no? That's exactly what that means.

Earth-Ovens haven't been in widespread use for hundreds of years. People can still use them to bake bread however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAJqGVxuJPo

usrbinbash··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
> The submitter is supposed to be the good programmer;

And how will that be assured? Everyone can open a PR or submit a bug.

> The problem is the time.

But not the time spent TYPING.

The problem is the time spent THINKING. And that's a task that LLMs, which are nothing other than statistical models trying to guess the next token, really aren't good at.

usrbinbash··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
None of this counters the argument I made above :-)
usrbinbash··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
> Because it takes a massive amount of developer work

You know what else takes "a massive amount of developer work"?

"any LLM-generated code must be reviewed by a good programmer"

And this is the crux of the matter with using LLMs to generate code for everything but really simple greenfield projects: They don't really speed things up, because everything they produce HAS TO be verified by someone, and that someone HAS TO have the necessary skill to write such code themselves.

LLMs save time on the typing part of programming. Incidentially that part is the least time consuming.

Page 1 of 34Next →