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GauntletWizardon How YouTube won the battle for TV viewers

I ditched Chromecast recently. They made YouTube too heavyweight for the Chromecast Ultra, to the point it regularly crashed. The new "Chromecast With Android TV" is barely more specs and has broken the interface by being... Android TV. Rather than take a well deserved second place, they chased Apple's design and ruined their niche.

Worse still, the best replacement I could find... Was Apple TV. So now I'm on that ecosystem.

GauntletWizardon Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025

I only read Shakespeare in the original Klingon

GauntletWizardon New study offers clues about what makes someone cool

This makes a ton of evolutionary sense. Success begets success. Those that don't need outside help are successful; those that cooperate and build on it are more successful. Unfortunately, it also leads to local maxima- those that are good at gathering from neighbors and happen to have good neighbors reach highest success, regardless of their own intrinsic ability.

Neither "Attempt to split success equally so everyone gets the same results" nor "Give all the resources to those that have the most" are good ways to run a society, or good long term evolutionary strategies.

GauntletWizardon In a Milestone for Manhattan, a Pair of Coyotes Has Made Central Park Their Home

Dingoes are a good percentage smaller than Coyotes on average and maximum (Dingoes 22 – 33 lbs, Coyotes 20 – 46 lbs). Dingoes are small, to the point where "Dingoes ate my baby" was a common and sarcastic joke after a reported attack - And yet that attack was extensively proven[1].

Yes, a small group of Coyotes could easily corner or snatch a small child and pose a danger to such. Is it likely? No. Is it reasonable to relocate the coyotes? Absolutely. It might also be reasonable to manage and not relocate the coyotes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton#Ev...

GauntletWizardon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2025)

SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks.

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizardon Resurrecting flip phone typing as a Linux driver

I'd take multitap any day over the terrible systems that we have now, with faux QWERTY keyboards displayed on screen (or worse, the whole alphabet in a line on Apple TV devices)

GauntletWizardon Alpha Centauri

What really set Alpha Centauri apart for me was the fictional history and how it is presented. Civilization's tech tree is a form of human history, accompanied by famous quotes contextualizing the importance of the discoveries.

Alpha Centauri presents its tech to you the same way, but it's inventions are science fiction, and likewise the quotes [1] are fictional, from the important characters, the major players of the various factions within. You get a real sense for the groups involved and the major players from such. You get a sense of the civilizations involved, sometimes presented in their folklore or humor. For example, the militaristic Spartans quote a variation of an old marching cadence - "I don't know but I've been told / Deirdre's got a Network Node / Likes to press the on-off switch / Dig that crazy Gaian witch!"

My favorite, though, and feeling ever more prescient:

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Commissioner Pravin Lal U.N. Declaration of Rights"

[1] A good compendium of them - https://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html

GauntletWizardon Twitch Is Down

Twitch is having issues loading the carousel and list of live streamers. Streams are working, if you can remember how to spell your favorite streamer's handle.

GauntletWizardon Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one track missing?

I just ripped a small collection (only ~200 discs), and I encountered all of the problems that have been complained about in this thread. I still used Musicbrainz, because it was easier for me to double-check and fix the entries in their DB than to manually type all the data myself.

When bandcamp releases were available but nothing was in the database, I found it quick and simple to copy+paste the track listing into MB and create a new release. Combining it with the TOC I'd already been searching for, I got perfect rips every time without much issue.

Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.

GauntletWizardon Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees

Everything humans do to make our environment better for us is an "Affront to Nature". That's what makes it worthwhile. Nature is a petty, vicious bitch. The more we tame her the better.

GauntletWizardon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2025)

SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizardon The Zach Attack Scratch 'N Solve Puzzle Pack

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

Dang manually curates some submissions that didn't get enough initial interest, and gives them a "second chance"

GauntletWizardon The Zach Attack Scratch 'N Solve Puzzle Pack

Apparently it got second chanced, so I'll take a stab at adding some context here in the comments:

Zach of Zachtronics (Spacechem, Inifinifactory, Opus Magnum) has a new passion project - A set of Scratcher games. Like a combination of a choose your own adventure book with those lottery tickets - But with meaningful choices and puzzles to solve!

GauntletWizardon Sesame Scheme: Unintended Consequences of Allergen Food Labeling

I have never had a hot dog fall out of a side cut bun. Every time I've used a top cut bun I've felt like it was going to fall out, and it has on at least one occasion that I can remember - and it's not like I remember the details of eating foodstuffs.

The side cut gives you easy gripping surfaces. The undisturbed tops and bottoms of hot dog buns are easy to grip. The sides are inherently less structurally sound because they're "inside" portions and spongy, and when you grip them you're likely to grip the bun very well but apply pressure to the hot dog itself from direct points at your fingers rather than the bun distributing the pressure evenly through the structure.

Gripping a top-cut hot dog bun is like squeezing a baseball half in a mitt - The ball just pops right out the front, and so does the dog. It launches straight upwards and then falls where it may.

GauntletWizardon Ending TLS Client Authentication Certificate Support in 2026

I strongly disagree with this change. You should probably never accept client certificates signed by Let's Encrypt, but I think that it normalized something very healthy in the ecosystem: issuing one certificate that acted as both server and client certificate. I have spent surprisingly little time on making this work in the TLS ecosystems of my clients, automatically building per-service TLS certificates - allowing a robust internal infrastructure of whitelisting client services while being simple enough for devs to implement themselves.

What I really wanted to do, and have proof of concept'd with only slightly more time, is per pod certificates, identifying a service account. It looks like this is progressing in mainline - https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/issues/4317 - albeit very slowly.

GauntletWizardon Energy drinks linked to rise in colorectal and blood cancer

But these cancers are naturally occurring, happen all the time, and are usually caught by the immune system before they become large and problematic. Adding a bunch of fuel means it's far far more likely that they are growing too big too fast. It may or may not cause cancer, but it causes cancer to be a problem more often.

GauntletWizardon I was a Theranos whistleblower. Here's what I think Elizabeth Holmes is up to

> “Do you think Haemanthus intends to revolutionize health care, or do you think it’s another fraud?” Once again — neither. I think it’s just another chapter of her narrative.

This is fraud. We need far more accountability, and that means not letting people who have failed and lied about it "narrative" their way out of consequences. Elizabeth Holmes should not be allowed anywhere near healthcare ever again, and that does mean that even people who are merely close to her should be regarded with great scrutiny.

GauntletWizardon Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

I've been to the new space, and it's gonna be great - though there's a lot of work ahead in moving.

GauntletWizardon Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions

https://oldbytes.space/@bloopmuseum

GauntletWizardon Heat stress mitigation by trees and shelters at bus stops

Yes, and road maintenance is proportional to the fourth power of the axle load. Busses are typically loaded at 4-8 times the per-axle weight of passenger cars.

GauntletWizardon Stringly Typed

An API that uses JSON isn't "Stringly Typed". An API that lacks any validation on the JSON you pass to it is. Under their definition, nearly everything is stringly typed if if passes a system boundry, because serialization transforms everything into a string - Sometimes a byte string, sure, but you end up with transport-neutral single object whose interpretation is understood by metadata, and that's a good thing, because you don't need to waste time interpreting it at every layer it passes through.

The modern advice to "Use a serialization library" is actually encoding several hard pieces of learning into one. There was a time when save files for most games were just memory dumps of large sections of memory. You dumped raw C-objects, including pointers to other objects, directly. You ended up with a tangled mess of references, but it was simple to write code for, cheap to write to disk, cheap to read from disk, and easy to break. Basically every update to a game broke all of the save files, because the most minor of tweaks could change the object layout generated by the compiler. The first change was to put magic strings at the beginning to inform the version - So at least you displayed an error message rather that executing some unexpected part of the save file as code.

This lesson was hard learned as we entered the networked age, where you couldn't trust the incoming messages weren't malicious - And you certainly couldn't trust, with all of the terribly-behaving middleware, that they were well-formed. Writing serialization/deserialization code is not hard, but it's annoyingly rote, and you would need it for dozens upon dozens of classes. So instead we switched to standardized libraries for serialization and deserialization.

Java and Python both had serialization libraries where whole objects could be serialized - Along with everything they referenced. This lead to massive security holes, because it was easy for them to take a huge chunk of working memory with them, because circular references to root objects allowed them to grab parts of other operations, or even application secrets. Python was worse, as the pickle library allowed serializing whole bytecode; Meaning every load was an arbitrary code execution.

Modern serialization libraries have come to a compromise. They serialize data only in primitives. You have to rebuild the tangled web of cross object references yourself. This often sucks, but it's far better than the alternatives we've found.

GraphQL is popular for precisely this reason. You can avoid most of the serialization and deserialization steps and query what you want directly, allowing you to access deeply-linked properties of deeply linked objects without the expensive round trips and security barriers being checked and rechecked; But the expressiveness comes at a distinct cost in terms of getting those barriers on the server side really right, because the default allow permissions make it easy to leak.

GauntletWizardon Getting tired of Helm – any better way to handle deployments in Kubernetes?

I handle deploy time dynamic variables with `sed`. You shouldn't need more complexity than that.

(Not that I haven't had the need, I've use jsonnet with libk8s at scale. But if you're asking the question this simply, you probably don't need it)

GauntletWizardon Getting tired of Helm – any better way to handle deployments in Kubernetes?

I'm a huge fan of Kustomize. I'm ambivalent towards argocd, but Kustomize is as close to a DWIM tooling as it's possible to get for Kubernetes.

GauntletWizardon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2025)

SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK

My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/

My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard

GauntletWizardon More Everything Forever

Here's the New York Posts' investigation: https://nypost.com/2019/02/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-no...

The actual land records that prove this are impossible to link, for reasons that are charitably described as "Monstrous incompetence of government officials".

GauntletWizardon More Everything Forever

AOC was an intern for Ted Kennedy before being strategically placed in a "bartending" position as part of her background grooming. Her family owned multiple New York Brownstones in the rich part of the city. She has as much claim to humble background as Trump.

GauntletWizardon Why the Ultrarich Are Unplugging from "Smart Homes"

Ethernet cable is low voltage. You don't need an electrician to install it in most building codes.

GauntletWizardon Peru's ancient irrigation systems turned deserts into farms because of culture

I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page.

Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they be about how to interact with others, how to motivate and treat yourself, or of outside dangers.

Religion serves an important teaching purpose. Most have converged a lot; There's a lot of truths that are universal. Still, they're not all created equal. You probably shouldn't hate someone just because of their religion... Unless they're part of a death cult.

GauntletWizardon You cannot have our user's data

Your drone makes a loud buzzing sound, and blocks the street for anyone else trying to get in, and does not move on its own. This is where it escalates from "Taking advantage of public information" to "Harassment".

Crawling source hut once is public information. Crawling it once a day using deltas might still be that. What these AI companies are doing is not that.

GauntletWizardon Mandatory short duration TLS certificates are probably coming soon

There are already security professionals that are pushing for 5 minute or less certificates, with mandatory OCSP stapling at even shorter intervals.