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craftkiller

2,796 karma · joined December 27, 2012

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craftkiller··on Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?
Not at all. At this point, I don't see improvement in the future; I'm just hoping I'll be able to maintain my standard of living. We are hurtling towards an economic collapse, an unemployment crisis, and the risk of major war. I thought I was safely beyond conscription age, but the war in Ukraine has shown that when push comes to shove the max conscription age is mutable.
craftkiller··on I used sound waves to make espresso
If you want to really save energy, then they've already made the ideal product: caffeine pills. It's all the wonderful drugs without any of the bullshit. You can have it at any temperature, with any drink or even without a drink at all. It doesn't get cold or give you coffee breath. They're ultra compact and don't require rituals or specialty restaurants. They're also incredibly cheap.
craftkiller··on AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit
> It adds npm as a dependency, to a go build?

Programs often invoke other programs through the exec* family of syscalls. For example, git is written in C but it ships with perl dependencies. It is not unreasonable to assume pass-cli added a runtime dependency on a program written in javascript. Regardless, we're talking hundreds of AUR packages have been compromised, I'd be shocked if none of them were javascript-based programs. Perhaps pass-cli was simply a bad example for me to choose.

> It changes the contributor email?

I think this is the 2nd most sus change, but even so, I have changed email addresses over the years so it isn't completely unreasonable.

> in /tmp?!

And yes, this is the most sus change.

craftkiller··on AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit
True, but looking at a compromised PKGBUILD[0], it looks like it is installing "atomic-lockfile" and "figures". I think 99% of people reading the PKGBUILD would assume those are legit dependencies needed by the program. It's not like it was running "npm install 1337hax0r". Which is why you need to read the source for both "atomic-lockfile" and "figures" (and literally everything else).

[0] https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=pass-cli&id...

craftkiller··on AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit
As much as I hate to say it, the Qubes OS people were right. The solution is aggressively isolating apps into virtual machines. Anyone know how much my battery life is going to suffer if I bite the bullet and switch?
craftkiller··on AUR packages compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit
> The advantage to the AUR is just that you can reasonably review every PKGBUILD for what you're installing

Simply reviewing the PKGBUILD is not enough for the same reason reviewing a Makefile is not enough: You need to review the source code for _everything_ that is being downloaded and executed on your machine. For AUR packages, that means not just the PKGBUILD but the full source code for the program it is building and the full source code for any of its dependencies.

Hypothetical example: you wouldn't have caught the xzutils exploit by reading the PKGBUILD.

craftkiller··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
craftkiller··on Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT
I've seen claims that the wifi 6E spec mandated that 6ghz networks required WPA3, so you would need to have a separate WPA2 ssid for legacy devices which therefore couldn't include 6ghz. A lot of access points now support a single SSID with all 3 bands using both WPA2 and WPA3, but I don't know if that is due to a change in the spec or if access points are violating the spec by offering that.
craftkiller··on Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT
> iPhones, iPads and MacBooks would not switch to another AP

About a decode ago when debugging networking issues in an office, we had the observation that Apple hardware holds onto access points for dear life. Everything else would roam fine, but Apple would stay connected to distant access points with awful signal as if Steve Jobs' life depended on it.

craftkiller··on New York passes pied-a-terre tax
Wouldn't excluding apartments therefore exclude Ken Griffin's 238 million dollar penthouse? That seems like exactly the kind of 2nd home that this should be targeting.
craftkiller··on Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says
The issue isn't that people are trying to change people's minds. There are two issues here:

First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.

Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.

If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.

craftkiller··on Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says
> they won’t want rich people to vote.

I don't think anyone would object to a rich person casting a single vote and maybe putting a bumper sticker on their car or a sign in their yard. The issue people take with the rich and politics is the outsized influence they wield in elections. The whole "one person one vote" thing falls apart when the rich can throw millions at advertisements and millions at the "charities" run by the politicians they bought.

craftkiller··on The real cost of owning a home
Because as soon as you sign that longer lease, the landlord will only ever do the absolute minimum repairs because you're stuck in that lease. We have been reporting our leaking roof for years...
craftkiller··on The real cost of owning a home
> the total settlement costs were about 3% of the value of the home

> That's $12,777.92 to get the loan.

This is something I don't quite understand when people talk about homes: they just bought a $425,930 home. If they're getting a 30-year mortgage with a 20% down payment they will pay a total of $902k at current mortgage rates. The closing costs are such a tiny fraction of what you're spending. You wouldn't go into a store and refuse to buy a $40 item when you realize you need to pay $3 in sales tax, why would you be bothered by having to pay 3% of the home's value or 1.4% of what you will end up paying in the end?

Same thing with property taxes: my home-owning friends complain about property taxes like they're some huge imposition. OP is paying $515/month in property taxes. My rent has gone up by more than that in the past 3 years that I've been in my current apartment.

That being said, I appreciate this post for the breakdown of all the expenses. I'm considering becoming part of the land-owning elite, so this is useful.

craftkiller··on Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data
Wow, if that's actually the intent then that's _deeply_ disrespectful to the tens of thousands of original Americans who died in our revolutionary war.
craftkiller··on Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data
> they have a headphone jack

And an American flag with the incorrect number of stripes. I wonder which 2 colonies they decided weren't worth including on their phone.

craftkiller··on The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map
If they made it interactive, it would be nice to be able to toggle various layers. For example, I was watching it thinking "It's odd that nestorianism is drifting away from the rest" until I realized that empty void in the middle was Islam. It'd be nice if they also had other religions like Islam mapped, and let us toggle which ones we want to see so it doesn't become too noisy.
craftkiller··on Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid
> Fully vaccinated

How long ago? Covid vaccine efficacy drops significantly over time so if you haven't had a booster recently, you are not vaccinated: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/why-pro...

Which that reminds me, I should schedule a booster since I'll be attending a party and a wedding soon.

craftkiller··on Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods
With human drivers: traffic light turns green. The first car starts driving. The 2nd car waits 2 seconds and then starts driving. The third car waits another 2 seconds (4 seconds total) and then starts driving. The fourth car waits another 2 seconds (6 seconds total) and then starts driving. etc.

With computers driving: traffic light turns green. All cars simultaneously start driving. It'd be like a train but without the efficiency.

Similarly, with human drivers: some jackasses drive into the box and the light turns red. Now perpendicular traffic is either fully blocked or must proceeed slower to maneuver around the jackasses. With computer drivers, they shouldn't intentionally break the law and they should have plenty of sensors to figure out that they cannot make it through the box.

craftkiller··on Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit
While we'd all like to see justice, I can understand taking this offer. SPY has averaged 15% APY over the past decade, which means if you dropped the full $835k into SPY you'd have passive income of $125k per year without touching the principal. That's a never-work-again, very comfortable life in large parts of the country. He's in Lexington Tennessee where the median income is less than half of that, and those people actually have to work for their money. I'm sure some of that money is going to pay the lawyers but I'm also assuming he's not starting at $0 savings either so he really should never have to work again, especially considering at his age he'll be raking in that sweet social security and medicare.
craftkiller··on Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently
> And so does SeatGuru.

SeatGuru shut down back in 2025.

craftkiller··on Fragnesia Made Public as Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
I hate that the Qubes OS people were right.
craftkiller··on New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater
Looking at the charts[0], load shifting all the way to winter seems unnecessary. You only need to load shift until ~6pm, in which case there are plenty of better options out there like grid-scale batteries, flywheels, pumped storage hydro, etc.

[0] The 2nd chart on https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.05.28/chart2.s...

craftkiller··on New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater
Assuming we're talking about cars/trucks, one major reason hydrogen doesn't make sense is efficiency: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/OrLRA/s1/efficiency-compar...

If we manage to get enough solar such that energy essentially becomes infinite then the inefficiency would no longer matter. Otherwise, it would only make sense in vehicles that require high energy density like airplanes.

craftkiller··on Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
Yeah, it certainly wasn't the quietest choice for form-factor, but the fact remains: all server grade hardware are not optimizing for noise. They are meant to be running in datacenters, not livingrooms, so noise was never a concern for them. A nice thing about consumer-grade hardware is they are optimizing for both sound and power consumption because those devices are designed to be around humans. So I certainly hope consumer-grade hardware survives.
craftkiller··on Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before shipping it off to a colo, I wrote scripts and had detailed plans of the things I needed to run so I could minimize the time it was making my ears bleed.

craftkiller··on I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search
Ah thank you for your site! Before your post, I didn't know the government auctioned off homes online and through following the links to the auctions I learned about the FHA $100 down payment program.
craftkiller··on Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores
Ah, yeah I don't have an Aldi near me so I didn't know that. Regardless, the same approach could be applied via emailing coupons with barcodes to scan at the register. It'd just be less convenient for the customer than having it automatically applied via a loyalty card.
craftkiller··on Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores
Not necessarily. The easy way to implement this in-person would be to give customer-specific coupons. You could get an email that says "use your loyalty card at checkout and get $2 off eggs". Then you just give everyone a different discount and only the privacy-minded folks end up paying the (inflated) sticker price.

A significantly more complex hypothetical that I don't think anyone is doing yet: With digital price tags and customer tracking you could show different prices to different customers in-person. For example, when Alice goes to the eggs it could say $2 and when Bob goes to the eggs it could say $4. Then you just need to track the customer to the register to make sure you give them the price that was displayed. I believe the amazon "go" stores were doing the whole customer tracking thing so we already have the necessary tech demonstrated in real stores.

craftkiller··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro: Major Upgrades and Linux Front and Center
Just want to add: Also there are multiple riscv boards but I'd want to caution the casual readers: I believe both the ARM and riscv boards suffer from very high power draw so you'll get poor battery life using them as laptops. They would only be worth it for people that have reasons to be running arm/riscv, but for the general consumer you are definitely going to want the x86 boards.
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