Hacker News Reader

werretton Allow babywearing carriers on planes

As a thought exercise — next time you are are annoyed by being stuffed into a metal tube for 3-15 hours in close proximity to a child who is being annoying try asking yourself:

What’s it like for the child? What’s it like for the parent(s)? What would be the range of reasons that would motivate them to do this? Was I this painful to others at any point? Was it for ‘good’ reasons, or ‘bad’ ones?

Some introspection might at least help pass the time and take your mind of the inconveniences inflicted by others

werretton Allow Carriers on Planes

Do you seriously think that parents are flying with infants for the lolz? The vast majority are not. It’s a major operation for both child and parents.

“What is so important that you need to take a baby on a plane” and “Have you thought about driving instead?” have got to be some of the most clueless and unempathic takes I’ve ever read. Ironic considering that’s what you’re accusing parents of.

werretton Let's make quality the norm again

I love this - super testable experiment. I have this exact desire too. - I can’t stand most cheaply made tshirts or things with crass branding

- there are a few clothing brands that focus on high quality (and in this case english mfg fabric mills).

- it is not cheap. our whole society is warped around “physical goods are super cheap now [because we can manufacture in cn]”. it’s a race to the bottom and we’ve hit the bottom.

- you can buy a black nylon/cotton tshirt for 10 USD

- these tshirts will set you back 130 USD. it feels amazing, was made in a country with health care, ages well, looks high quality.

do you want to pay the price this requires? I do but I think most can’t or won’t https://www.sunspel.com/collections/the-classic-t-shirt

werretton Canada suspends trade negotiations with USA and match tariffs dollar for dollar

> Canadian negotiators also hoped to achieve some relief on softwood lumber tariffs that go back decades and were augmented with additional tariffs from Mr. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/world/canada/trump-tariff...

werretton I Tested 885 Duolingo Chess Puzzles. 24% Do Not Make Sense

Oh cool. This is from the folks behind story time chess.

https://storytimechess.com/

I can thoroughly recommend. I’ve purchased it for my (then) 4 year old and it’s definitely been a great way for us to both get better at the game

On the chess app front I love Noctie.ai. Don’t be put off by the AI bit. It’s a we’ll crafted app with both short form puzzles, and longer scenarios

https://noctie.ai/

werretton U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6

> Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety

Amodei. June 2026 https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential

> We're proposing stronger regulation of the technology, proposing giving the government the ability to, again, in a narrow way, block deployment of unsafe technology

Amodei. June 2026 https://abcnews.com/Business/exclusive-anthropic-ceo-calls-s...

> This is not to suggest that we won't need any regulation or safeguards. We obviously do, urgently, like we have for other powerful technologies

Altman. Feb 2026 https://techxplore.com/news/2026-02-openai-altman-world-urge...

> He gave several suggestions for how a new agency in the US could regulate the industry - including "a combination of licensing and testing requirements" for AI companies, which he said could be used to regulate the "development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities".

Altman. May 2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866

etc. etc.

werretton Who's the smartest corvid?

And the just released “Palaces of The Crow” by Ray Nayler. I just finished it — really moving but also a brutal read in parts (c.f. because of what humans will do to each other not crows)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241392678

> In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl.

werretton Agents need control flow, not more prompts

c.f. Linear for Agents

https://linear.app/agents

werretton Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

Yes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw).

https://iran-cost-ticker.com/

werretton My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker

Yawp. T’was Strava. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

werretton Awakening Bell

There’s Zenitizer by an indie dev

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meditation-timer-zenitizer/id6...

werretton Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

While appalling I don’t think you would find it 'crushing', even ignoring the jibe about expat conclaves.

Costa Rica’s 17 in 100k is ~2.5 times bigger than the US’ 6 in 100k people killed by homicide.

Thanks to gun crime, the US’ homicide rates are at least 7x the rest of the first world, anglophone, countries where rates are sub 1 in 100k.

By that measure it is 2-3x more confronting, to move from the United Kingdom to the States than it is from the US to Costa Rica.

werretton Anthropic revokes OpenAI's access to Claude

You guys are tripping. EULAs have had anti-competition, anti-benchmarking, anti-reverse engineering and anti-disparagement clauses since the late 90s.

These unknown companies called Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, … et al have all had these controversies at various points.

werretton The Myth of Developer Obsolescence

> something being a liability and something having upkeep costs are not the same thing.

What would your definition of /liability/ be then? 'An ongoing commitment to pay future costs' is a pretty good one.

werretton I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

At least one person has been subject to secondary screening and ultimately denied entry on the accusation that they had two phones.

> I thought I was just going to be given my passport and sent on my way, or maybe asked a couple of questions, but they made some pretty outlandish accusations. They said, ‘We know you have two mobile phones. We’ve been tracking your calls. We know you’ve been selling drugs’.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/australian-w...

werretton Accountability Sinks

This is the ultimate nihilistic take on security.

Yes, 'cyber' security has devolved to box checking and cargo culting in many orgs. But what's your counter on trying to fix the problems that every tech stack or new SaaS product comes without of the box?

For most people when their Netflix (or HN) password gets leaked that means every email they've sent since 2004 is also exposed. It might also mean their 401k is siphoned off. So welcome the annoying and checkbox-y MFA requirements.

If you're an engineer cutting code for a YC startup -- Who owns the dependancy you just pulled in? Are you or your team going to track changes (and security bugs) for it in 6 months? What about in 2 or 3 years?

Yes, 'cyber' security brings a lot of annoying checkboxes. But almost all of them are due to externalities that you'd happily blow past otherwise. So -- how do we get rid annoying checkboxes and ensure people do the right thing as a matter of course?

werretton New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer

I’m a fellow cyclist in SF and can only wholeheartedly second this. To add some extra anxiety, I’m usually riding a cargo bike, ferrying a child to or from daycare.

I still remember the first time I went through a four-way stop intersection and saw a driverless car idling, waiting for its turn. It was weird and nerve-wracking. Now… I’d much prefer that to almost any other interaction at the same spot.

werretton Tailscale has raised $160M

I've got conflicted feels about Tailscale. I love their product and a bunch of the people I know use their free tier, including myself.

But their enterprise strategy destroys their good will. I can only assume it's focused on killing old school VPN products. The free tier that we love is a marketing expense. And it’s not even a conversion play.

People are complaining about ~10/user/month -- add basic things that you'd need to manage more than 10 peeps (SAML/SCIM support) and you're talking ~20/user/month. For us, a small sub 200 person company, they immediately lost their chance. We have lots of problems in the security space, some we're willing to spend more than 20/user/month to solve. Legacy network access is not one of them.

werretton ASML's boss has a warning for Europe

I doubt it’s a real threat but it would be a country that would happily unsubscribe from US export bans. So Israel or Singapore would be two good options for the chip industry. South Korea or Switzerland you could argue for but are probably less realistic. Maybe Canada now, lol.

werretton ASML's boss has a warning for Europe

As well as being disingenuous your whole argument is beside the point. ASML isn’t threatening to move to the US.

The current administration has created day light between the US and EU governments and ASML is using this leverage to try and get the Dutch to ignore US export bans.

Here are some choice exerts so you can continue to avoid clicking on TFA:

> The pressure on asml began to build in 2019, when the Dutch government, at America's urging, barred the company from exporting its advanced euv machines to China... President Donald Trump's second term brings the threat of still tighter controls

> Referring to the Dutch government's willingness to follow America's lead on export bans, Mr Fouquet says that Europe must "decide for itself what it wants" and "should not be dictated to by anyone else".

werretton ASML's boss has a warning for Europe

Did you even read the article? ASML is chaffing against American-led export regulations. The Trump government is still very keen on restricting China’s ability to make cutting edge chips.

The threat to move is probably empty. But it’s not a threat to move to the place that is generating their head winds.

werretton ‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut

Here ya go:

King Stingray does Coldplays's 'Yellow' https://youtu.be/sr3iI8gg2fo

Denzel Curry does Rage against the Machine's 'Bulls on Parade' https://youtu.be/ZY4ywyFXdik

Yes. It was probably a maintainer's creds being compromised.

The [malicious commit is masquerading as a commit from Renovate](https://github.com/tj-actions/changed-files/commit/0e58ed867...)((https://github.com/apps/renovate) but it's not a `verified` commit (and so it's trivial for a bad actor to masquerade as them).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67609381/why-do-all-my-g...

werretton Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

I mean maybe! But only if you've removed all of the usage of this compromised `tj-actions/changedfiles` action, across all your repos and their branches.

Otherwise, if you continue to use it and it will run anytime there has been a push. Potentially on any branch, not just `main`! Depending on your GH config.

Unless you've blocked `tj-actions/changed-files` you're banking on the bad actor not coming back tonight and making malicious commit that exfils those secrets to pastebin.com.

werretton Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

You can pin GitHub Actions to specific versions or specific commits. But note you can change version tags arbitrarily. In this specific case, the bad actor changes all of the version tags to point to their malicious commit: https://github.com/tj-actions/changed-files/tags

So to avoid that you'd have to pin your GitHub Action to specific commits as outlined in this SO post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/78905195

No idea. But they didn't do a great job -- they broke the action, which caused build failures that people were going to notice.

The malicious commit only landed at 09:57 PDT today (March 14) in one specific action (out of a number that is quite popular). Maybe they were planning on coming back and doing proper exfil?

werretton Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

Only commit hashes are safe. In this case the bad actor changed all of the version tags to point to their malicious commit. See https://github.com/tj-actions/changed-files/tags

All the tags point to commit `^0e58ed8` https://github.com/tj-actions/changed-files/commit/0e58ed867...

werretton Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

Exactly. And that's what happened here -- the bad actor changed all of those version tags to point to their malicious commit.

See https://github.com/tj-actions/changed-files/tags

All the tags point to commit `^0e58ed8` https://github.com/tj-actions/changed-files/commit/0e58ed867...

werretton Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting

Not to go too much on an AusPol tangent, LNP Nuclear stuff is more about delaying the green-power transition.

It keeps coal / gas power around for a nuclear future that is decades away at best (and never more likely). It’s a sop to the oil and mining companies. https://youtube.com/watch?v=JBqVVBUdW84