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coldpie

24,333 karma · joined June 6, 2012

I do software stuff in the computer security space. Former (2009-2022) Wine hacker at CodeWeavers. You can email me on fastmail.com with username coldpie. Personal websites: <https://smokingonabike.com> (video games, gardening, tech); <https://aechairs.com> (woodworking).

Tired of so much AI news on HN? I maintain a browser extension for that: https://github.com/ColdPie1/enough-ai-on-hn

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coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
> But you're going to stop somewhere along that path already, right?

Honestly, no, I didn't. It's only 2 hours. Having to stop for a 30+ minute charge in each direction would add a significant amount of time to the trip.

I don't really understand why you're being so aggressive about this. We are almost entirely agreeing. 300mi is a selling point for buyers because it means an easier time doing 100+ mile road trips, which are not uncommon in the US. More range is a tick in the "pro" column when comparison shopping, and it could convince someone to buy a car other than this one. That's all I'm saying.

coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
> Yeah all of us Americans drive 200mi+ each way nine days a week 'cause the average house is on a 2,000 acre ranch.

I never claimed that.

> People often really overestimate their driving habits.

I agree, and like I said I think 200mi is acceptable. But people do like driving in the US. I used to go up to Brainerd from the Twin Cities regularly; that's 135 miles each way. This is not uncommon, lots of people here like to do short road trips up north on holiday weekends. Sometimes I even did both directions in a single day. My 300mi Ioniq 5 could probably do that whole trip on a single charge, maybe with a short stop to bump it up, which will be fast thanks to the 800V architecture. But the 200mi range would take at least one full charging stop, possibly two, which will also be slower thanks to the slower architecture.

Like I keep saying, I don't think 200mi is a deal killer, but it's also definitely a con for the US market. But it keeps the price low, which is definitely the focus here and means it slots nicely into the 2nd family car budget. Nothing's perfect; I still think it's a cool product and will be keeping my eye on it.

coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
You're kinda right.

Our car (2025 Ioniq 5) gets about 3-4 miles of range per hour on a 120V outlet. If you're home for 10 hours overnight, that's at least 30 miles of range each day. Some random article I found[1] suggests the average commute is about 42 miles. So if you include some extra time on weekends, a 120V outlet easily matches the average commute distance. If you drive less than that, or are home more often due to WFH or whatever, then a 120V outlet is definitely enough.

In reality, probably people drive significantly more than that, eg for shopping and seeing friends and shuttling kids around and whatever. So in the end I do agree with you, lots of people will want to get a 240 line to their garage. But an existing 120V line is probably genuinely enough for a whole lot of people, too. It is for my wife & me.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...

coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
100% agreed, yup :)
coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
That's cool. This is a US market vehicle. The geography of the US is very, very different from Europe, so I don't think expectations for the European market are terribly useful for a US market vehicle. Have a play around with https://thetruesize.com and https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen .

200mi is definitely acceptable in the US, but it's on the low end of the acceptable spectrum.

coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
Probably not, no. Large vehicles are heavy which needs more battery, and good range needs more battery too. Batteries are expensive.
coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
Good criticism. It looks like the car's EV tech is average at best; definitely not outstanding. That's probably why they don't advertise it strongly, and also probably a big factor in why it's so cheap.

They list some details on the Specs page[1]. They quote 200 miles of range, which is not great especially for a small car. They list a 20-80 charge time of 30 minutes so it's probably a 400V architecture, which is becoming outdated as 800V architectures and chargers exist now.

Seems like a fine about-town car, but probably not a great one for road trips. I think that probably aligns with the NVH[2] expectations you should have for a car of this price.

[1] https://www.slate.auto/en/specs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise,_vibration,_and_harshnes...

coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
Not only that, if you have access to an outlet at home (many do; many do not), then you just never have to think about your "gas tank" at all. You start every day at a full "tank". After a month of ownership, your state of charge is just not even something you think about, at all.
coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
Oh wow sure enough, I just needed to scroll down. It does look like a human-scale vehicle. Thank you.
coldpie··on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950
Interested to see how this turns out. I'd like to see a size comparison. Is this actually a reasonably-sized vehicle, like a pre-2000 pickup, or just a cheap modern monster truck? Sadly it's not on carsized.com (yet).

If the company is still around 5 years from now, I could see myself getting one of these to replace our current "compact" (but still enormous) SUV.

coldpie··on Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia
I mean this in a friendly way: you are falling for it. Sanger's goal here is to get low-quality sources allowed on Wikipedia to promote his personal political beliefs. This was relatively politely argued down by Wikipedia editors, but he chose to try to recruit a brigade to swing the discussion in his favor, which is not allowed. There's no attempt to improve Wikipedia going on here.
coldpie··on Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia
I haven't done a whole lot, but I've also never had a bad experience editing on Wikipedia. I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages. Which, yeah, discussing controversial stuff on the Internet is a recipe for having a bad time. The other strong possibility is they are lower quality editors than they think they are. You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
coldpie··on Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia
Guy wanted to loosen rules around Wikipedia's sourcing to allow places like Breitbart and Fox News to be used as reliable sources (they are obviously not). Things were not going his way in the vote, so he asked his large social network following to brigade the vote in his favor. That's not allowed, so he's been banned.
coldpie··on Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year
It's because these are public companies. Public companies are not in the business of developing good products and selling them to customers and having a sustainable long-term vision, they are in the business of selling their stock. Right now, thanks to a very effective marketing campaign driven by people who are invested in AI companies, the stock market wants to see stories about employees being replaced with AI, so that's what these companies are selling.
coldpie··on Jobs and Software Is Fucked
I'm looking to leave working in tech. The local public transit bus agency is always hiring mechanics. Going to a technical school for a diesel mechanic training and working there is high up on my list of things to explore. Thanks for the positive reinforcement.
coldpie··on Die analysis of the 8087 math coprocessor's fast bit shifter (2020)
It's German for

    The
    Analysis of the 8087 math coprocessor's fast bit shifter,
    The
coldpie··on window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world
I used to think like this too, but somewhat surprisingly to myself, I have actually come around to deciding the web API is the most user-forward API that closed-source software can target, and it is actually good for end users for closed-source software to target it. This is because web API software is distributed as plaintext to be interpreted by software under user's control, the browser. This gives a ton of power to the user. We as end users can develop browser extensions, CSS hacks, and so on, to make this closed-source software work better for us.

I frequently do this; why can't I paste into this password text box? Screw it, I go into dev tools and enable pasting into it. Who decided grey-on-grey text was a good idea? Screw it, I got into dev tools and make the text black. Why can't I copy the text on this page? Screw it, I go into dev tools and yank it straight from the DOM. Why does this stupid animation take so long? Screw it, I go develop a greasemonkey script to set the animation timer value to 0. This is all quite easy with web API software, but would be be extremely difficult with a compiled binary.

This is to say nothing about the cross-platform benefits. No one's shipping a HaikuOS binary, but most web apps work just fine there, depending on browser feature support.

I think it is also a good choice for open-source software for the same reason. It provides a common, well-tooled API for users to hack the software they are using. But open-source software has other hackable options that make it less of a strong argument there.

Native toolkits definitely have a lot of nice features that the web API doesn't (yet) have, and there's a ton of value in the consistency native toolkits provide. But I think I've come around to valuing hackability over those features, so I'm actually now a web API fan. Again, surprising myself with this switch :)

coldpie··on window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world
Please don't give trolls attention. Just downvote & move on.
coldpie··on Show HN: Are You in the Weights?
Unless you think Osama Bin Laden[1] is bored and browsing HN, I'm desperately curious to know what you think the risk here could possibly be.

[1] (Yes, I know, it's a joke.)

coldpie··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
I reluctantly agree. I was interested to read the system design doc[1] but it's so many pages long and so full of redundant statements and needless details[2] that I gave up a couple sections in. The numerous "it's not X, it's Y" constructions give the game away. If they can't be bothered to read these docs themselves, why should I?

Anyway it's probably fine software and I am genuinely going to give it a shot for a usecase I have involving large image files. But the LLM-generated docs don't inspire confidence.

[1] https://epicgames.github.io/lore/explanation/system-design/

[2] They literally have a section header "10.1 Revision state as a 320-byte fragment". The byte size isn't even relevant in the code as an implementation detail, much less belongs in a design doc. No one read this doc before publishing it.

coldpie··on Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026
It's a small number of data points, but neither of my two early-career jobs had any expectations like that. I've never explicitly said "I'm not reachable," I just have never worked or responded to work communications outside of work hours, and no one has ever questioned me on it.
coldpie··on Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026
100%, and it extends beyond vacations, too. Unless you have a formal on-call arrangement, then any time you spend doing work stuff outside of your work hours is time you are choosing to donate to your company. It's fine if you want to do that, but you don't have to. I work 8-4 every day. I am not contactable outside that window and definitely not contactable on my days off. I haven't worked at a ton of different places, but at the places & teams I have worked with, I've never had anyone object to this policy.
coldpie··on Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026
This is one of the reasons I work in an office every single day. I leave my work laptop there. I don't have any work software on any of my personal devices, including my phone. If I had the ability to check in on work things while out of the office, I probably would, so I make it impossible.
coldpie··on A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
Your points would come across a lot better if you turned the sarcasm & condescension in your tone down like 15 notches. You're being bizarrely rude & aggressive for a conversation about telcom tech.
coldpie··on A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
> you'd miss a lot of important calls

Like what? Who is both a legitimate caller and also trying to call me through one of these unverified legacy services? If their calls stopped going through to a huge chunk of their customers (this is one of the reasons receiving unvalidated calls should be opt in, not opt out), why wouldn't they switch to a verified service?

coldpie··on A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
> call originates from our network but we're not sure about the number, and call came to us unverified

I'm saying these two categories should be denied by default by my telecom provider, and the user must opt-in to receiving them.

> Now, operators of those legacy links make A LOT of money for operating them since they carry 100% of the country's spam traffic, and they're not going to shut them down just because you think they should.

Those operators are not my concern, they can do whatever they want. I want my telecom provider to block unknown/unverified calls by default. I have no reason to ever receive a call from an unverified source. Some people might, because they have business or relatives or whatever in such a region, and they can opt-in to receiving them if so.

coldpie··on A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
> legacy TDM systems

Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these. I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962 can call her son in New York, but for the rest of us who are not in that situation, we can just blacklist all those calls and lose nothing. This would even fix spam for the people who opt-in, because so few people have grandmas in rural France that it's not worth it for the spammers to bother anymore.

coldpie··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
If you've ever been part of an organization that participated in something like Google Summer of Code, you know this isn't fiction. People really do behave like this.
coldpie··on If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
> I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all.

Please tell me you did the work to validate that the quotes and figures were not made up by the cheap model. These things make stuff up all the time, you absolutely cannot rely on them without validating the output yourself.

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2026/06/its-finally-happened-...

coldpie··on Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May
> It's almost as if the choice between the two parties is no choice at all.

Hi, I live in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. You may have heard about what the Republicans in the federal government did here a couple of months ago! The only appropriate response to your sentiment would, rightly, get me banned from this website. Please think before you speak.

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