Hacker News Reader

damanamathoson DeepSeek v4.1 Flash is now available for internal beta testing

Wow, it's fast.

damanamathoson Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root

dhh understands what a good user experience is. Installing in a couple minutes and getting right into it is an amazing start compared to most operating systems that take ages to setup.

Plus, many pre-installs (like Zoom) are web-apps that take no space (30 lines of text) and are easy to remove if you don't want them in the menu.

damanamathoson Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root

A lot of the "pre-install bloat" are just web apps, including Zoom. Zoom is just an 8 line file so it appears in the menu and to point it to a 22 line bash script to launch the app.zoom.us website at the right address.

Easy to remove. Can even open your favourite AI assistant and ask it to remove it, since it comes with an Omarchy skill and knows how to change everything.

damanamathoson Show HN: Arcane Agents – A visual control room for terminal AI agents

Glad you like them! :)

damanamathoson FastHTML – Modern web applications in pure Python

FastHTML has a NotStr(X) component that renders X as HTML.

I just copied a big HTML Tailwind component to a NotStr() and it worked fine.

I then split it in two, before and after, so I could make the dynamic bit from natural FastHTML components and it worked fine returning Div(before, dynamic_parts, after).

Plan to convert most of my smaller websites to FastHTML in the next few days before it's much more enjoyable for me.

damanamathoson Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

Most people don't know what their home is worth, and if you get two appraisers or realtors to give you an estimate they'll likely be quite different.

Similarly, if you think a house is worth $500k but you list it for $600k, you don't know if someone will decide they love that house and they're willing to pay that amount or not.

That's one reason Opendoor tends to list houses at a fair premium to what they paid, as sometimes someone decides it is worth it and they make 20%+ on homes like that.

damanamathoson Zillow lost money because they weren't willing to lose money

I think Opendoor still does poorly in new markets, but then it improves as they work out the quirks of the local market and start asking the right questions and collecting the right information.

A big part of Opendoor is creating the right apps and processes to collect this information to feed their models. The machine learning part is important, but can give the false impression it's just about data scientists crunching numbers at head office, when in reality there's a huge real-world operational machine that's driving it.

damanamathoson Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, including non-paying

Zoom claimed they had to remove Chinese participants from the US-hosted meeting but didn't have the functionality to do that so (wrongly) banned the US hosts.

They said it was wrong to do, reinstated those accounts, and are building the functionality to enforce those Chinese laws without ever impacting users outside China.

That's from their blog. https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/06/11/improving-our-poli...

damanamathoson Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, including non-paying

I think their concern is paedophile rings using large group E2EE for live child abuse with completely anonymous accounts.

damanamathoson Zoom to bring end-to-end encryption to all users, including non-paying

What makes you think they're abusing the term? Did you read their whitepaper?

https://github.com/zoom/zoom-e2e-whitepaper

damanamathoson Zoom says it won’t encrypt free calls so it can work more with law enforcement

Zoom has said that employees can enter a meeting, but there's no way to do that without being seen on the participant list and there is no way to record a meeting secretly. They've also said they wouldn't build these things.

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/05/07/zoom-acquires-keyb...

>We also do not have a means to insert our employees or others into meetings without being reflected in the participant list. We will not build any cryptographic backdoors to allow for the secret monitoring of meetings.

damanamathoson Zoom Acquires Keybase

They bought Keybase to bring on a strong security team as they try to build end-to-end encryption into 1,000 person meetings which is currently not possible with any solution.[1]

They'll either deliver that or they won't.

[1] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016

damanamathoson Zoom Acquires Keybase

You're absolutely right that past decisions focused on ease-of-use over security.

For evidence that they've changed their focus you can see their April 1 blog post[1] and the weekly video AMAs they do that are summarised in their "90-Day Security Plan Progress Report" blog posts.[2]

They're making a lot of progress.

The Keybase acquisition is about building out a strong security team that will help them implement end-to-end encryption in 1,000 person meetings, which currently isn't possible anywhere.[3]

[1] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u... [2] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/category/announcements/ [3] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016

damanamathoson Zoom Acquires Keybase

Why not look at their recent actions instead?

On April 1 the CEO basically said they messed up and would pause all feature development and focus exclusively on security & privacy for 90 days.[1] They've also done weekly video AMAs that are summarised on their blog under the 90-Day Security Plan posts.[2]

They've made a lot of progress.

The Keybase acquisition is absolutely about helping to build a security team that can help them implement end-to-end encryption across 1000 person meetings. You can see that from this Twitter post[3] from Alex Stamos and this interview[4] with him.

[1] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u... [2] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/category/announcements/ [3] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1258405729720918016 [4] https://cheddar.com/media/zoom-acquires-keybase-beefs-up-sec...

damanamathoson Zoom Acquires Keybase

They do have a large R&D presence in China.

As of January 2020, they had 2,532 full-time employees. Of those, 1,396 were in the US and 1,136 were in international locations. Within the 1,136 is "more than 700" employees in R&D in China.[1]

A LinkedIn search for "engineer" working for "Zoom Video Communications" in location "United States" shows up 558 results.[2]

Their entire management team is in the US, and of their 17 data centres, only 1 is in China.[3][4]

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/0001... [2] https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetCurrent... [3] https://zoom.us/team [4] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/05/04/navigating-a-new-c...

damanamathoson Zoom admits some calls were routed through China by mistake

China did block Zoom for 2 months last year.

https://status.zoom.us/incidents/xbmxyfpnv4jq

damanamathoson SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns

It was one of the fastest-growing SAAS companies before coronavirus hit despite all the free competition.

The reason? "It just works."

It's clear their singular focus on making it "just work" for even the least tech-savvy users has led them to prioritise user experience over security/privacy. I imagine a rebalancing is coming.

damanamathoson SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns

Webex also has a large engineering team in China too.

The senior people are all in the US though.