HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

40four

2,605 karma · joined January 16, 2018

Web Application Developer
submissionscomments
40four··on Meta censored the No Kings Instagram account during a nationwide campaign
Source is the link that I posted. They study this specific topic, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a better data set out methodology I think.

https://americasdigitalshield.com/

The only major tech platform that leans red is Twitter after musk bought it, unsurprisingly.

Mind you, I’m not taking sides here. I gave up on both teams at least a decade ago. I just don’t think this is behavior we should allow from tech companies either direction.

40four··on Meta censored the No Kings Instagram account during a nationwide campaign
Meta can act like they don't know what's happening, but they do. As do all the other tech giants. They've been censoring and curating people feeds for a long time. This story is amusing since it's one instance where a "Team Blue" was affected. In general, it's usually "Team Red" channels are the ones getting censored.

There is an interesting project America's Digital Shield that studies these practices (https://americasdigitalshield.com/). They capture "ephemeral" content from search results and social feeds from volunteers, with a balanced distribution of the political spectrum.

Basically, the idea is that none of the content we get fed from tech giants is unbiased, even search results are manipulated to affect people one way or the other, especially when it comes to politics and elections. It's pretty upsetting once you understand what's happening.

40four··on The EPA Is Quietly Killing Its Web Archive
This isn’t really a Trump thing. It says they’ve been trying to shut the thing down since 2022
40four··on US designates helium as a critical material
Most importantly, semiconductor fabs cannot operate without it. I was unaware, but I saw an interesting 60 minutes piece in it the other day.

I hear what you’re saying, but it’s the same reason a lot of natural gas is flared off or vented at oil wells. Helium is less than 1% of the total feed gas coming off a well and it requires specialized equipment to be able to recover it, on top of a way to distribute it. In most cases depending on the mix of gases coming out, it’s simply not economical for the operator.

Even with the supply being under pressure and prices going up from Qatar’s supply being cut off, that still might not be enough for companies to build the infrastructure. It would be a huge gamble. Once traffic in the straight of Hormuz goes back to normal that could be a losing proposition.

40four··on Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin
Turns out the server was vulnerable, It’s been hacked. I’m not being a jerk, I’m actually curious what made you think the server wasn’t hack-able? I’ve seen other comments in the thread claiming various things, but all apparently were incorrect. Also claiming it’s a “classic” crypto scam didn’t really make sense. Crypto scams typically involve rug-pulls or phishing for wallet credentials. I don’t see how someone could lose their own crypto by attempting to hack a server
40four··on Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin
The amount of Bitcoin appears to be going up with time. It was ~$500 the last time I saw it. Now the wallet is worth ~$2000 at the time of this comment.

So the idea that is not enough money for someone to “give away” their exploit is going to reach a breaking point eventually if it continues. This might get more interesting the longer it goes on. Getting my popcorn ready right now!

40four··on PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says
Laravel is one of the most comprehensive and best developer experiences around. Give it a spin of you haven’t tried it.
40four··on PHP Foundation 'under-funded' with one full-time staff member, director says
I understand why people still have this perception, I imagine due to relics of the past of the PHP 5 (or earlier) era. But those days are long gone, and I believe PHP 8 has some a nice job of adding modern features and improving developer experience.

Wordpress is the obvious answer to your question, but its codebase is admittedly still stuck in the past in many ways. Nobody would write it that way if they were starting from scratch today.

There are plenty of “serious” companies using Laravel or Symfony. Take a look around those codebases if you want to get an idea of what solid modern PHP design patterns look like nowadays. Nothing “cheap or not very technical” about them :)

40four··on Tesla Roadster
I think everyone is getting too caught up in the Thrust and Rocket variants. There aren’t going to be very many of those. But the base model will just be a regular Tesla.
40four··on Tesla Roadster
It’s crazy how many Cybertrucks I see in my hometown, and I don’t live in that big of a city. They are incredibly popular. This car will be incredibly popular to. Peoples are getting bent out of shape about the “thrust” and “rocket” variants, but who cares? Those will be few and far between. For rich collectors mostly. How about just the base model? It looks wild, I’m sure it will be fun as hell to drive. They are going to sell a ton of these things.
40four··on Tesla Roadster
Why are you reposting links to scams?
40four··on Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model
I don’t understand what is wrong with some people lol. It says in the very beginning everything will be opened up by the end of the month. It’s like a bunch of toddlers throwing their milk cup on the ground and pouting because they can’t have their new toy right now!
40four··on Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model
It says in the very beginning that everything will be opened up by the end of the month. Maybe slightly annoying to you but not worthless. I for one am very excited to see some new American open models since we have called so far behind the Chinese. Looking forward to trying it out.
40four··on Our AI Midwife
The human medical system drops the ball all the time unfortunately. What I don’t understand is how they didn’t see that giant fibroid from ultrasound alone. An MRI shouldn’t have been needed. Then the doctor trying to talk them out of the MRI, I hope they were embarrassed after. So upsetting. My wife’s friend had something similar happen after 2-3 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment, then they finally realized she had endometriosis. Seems like that should have been looked into sooner.
40four··on <input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard
Interesting, I didn’t know that. My knowledge of cryptography is admittedly not great. 20 characters limit is pretty aggressive though.
40four··on Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields
The ability to subtract mass is definitely needed. All you can do is click “undo” and try again. You can drag the holes around too. Still pretty fun, I played 5 or 6 levels
40four··on <input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard
I’ve ran into this same issue numerous times on different platforms. They silently enforce a max length, unannounced to you, then you can’t log in later until you figure out the correct length.

I guess I don’t really understand the reasons any engineering team would limit password length, but at least implement in a way that is apparent to the user. Successfully saving a password that is different than the user expects is wild.

Moreover, in the case of a financial institution like Vanguard, limiting password length feels particularly offensive.

40four··on A Privacy Analysis of Web and Mobile Conversational AI Agents [pdf]
It certainly doesn’t expose it to anyone else besides you (when you are logged in), unless you explicitly select the share option.
40four··on Show HN: Koi.rest – watch some fish and regain your balance
I haven’t tried it on desktop, but it’s running silky smooth for me on iPhone. No lag at all. I see some others complaining of that too so not sure what the issue is.
40four··on Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain
They didn’t claim the EU regulations forced Meta to ban anything. They claimed Meta decided “the juice is not worth the squeeze” when it comes to compliance. I don’t know who’s right to be fair, but I haven’t heard about any other instances of this with Meta, have you? What is it about this particular case? Never heard of this happening in the US. Possibly just an isolated incident blown out of proportion?
40four··on Flet 1.0 – Build cross-platform apps in Python
I built a few Kivy apps years ago at an old job. It was a little clunky, but it got the job done. Haven’t heard of this framework yet, I wonder how compares in developer experience? Anyone have any experience with it?

The problem is I don’t want to use Python for everything that bad. If I’m going to reach for a cross platform toolkit these days, I’m personally going to reach for Tauri. Could be useful if you’re really married to Python I suppose.

40four··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
Incorrect. As others have pointed out, BirdNet is a “traditional” neural network. The amount of compute needed to train something like this is many orders of magnitude less than an LLM. Something like this could be trained on local hardware with enough juice, or by renting a handful of GPU’s
40four··on Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Oh thanks for the explanation. Shows you how much I know about law!
40four··on Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Your feeling turned it to be correct. Amazon lost the case in the appellate court.
40four··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
I don’t see why the two are mutually exclusive to be honest. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m a software engineer and whether I like it or not, AI has changed my field dramatically forever. I understand the distaste for the way AI might be affecting the field of mathematics, but the genie is out of the bottle, and it will never be the same. It just took a little longer for it to hit the math community. Software engineers have been debating and coming to terms with the new reality for a few years now.
40four··on New York thoracic surgeon: "For many patients 9/11 is not over"
Reader mode circumvents the pay wall on many news sites, including this one :)
40four··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
Nothing. I’m going to run my 13 Pro Max into the ground. I do find the “Reference images” interesting, but not so much in going to run out and buy one. Other than than it’s the same old “everything is better” marketing shtick
40four··on iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max
The only thing that’s interesting to me about this release are the “Reference Images”. Seems like it could be a genuinely useful feature, especially in a world of AI generated content. I wonder if a similar system exists in other cameras?
40four··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
Not with current technology. That was kind of the physics “trick” in the book ‘Project Hail Mary’, where the astrophage provided enough energy and propulsion to be able to sustain 1G of acceleration.
40four··on Shopify acquires Tailwind
Shopify is a publicly traded company, and they own a significant share of the whole e-commerce market, they aren’t going anywhere lol :)
Page 1 of 31Next →