Hacker News Reader

datatrashfireon Why the smart home bubble popped

i have to be honest, each time a friend or co worker has demod or explained their “smart home” setup, i have always been pretty underwhelmed. a lot of complex doodads, money, and seeming never ending troubleshooting, to solve what seem to me at least, as a bunch of narrow frivolous problems that don’t really inconvenience me very much.

datatrashfireon Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

i feel a lot of people in tech have this incuriously deterministic attitude about llms right now… previous <expensive capital project> revolutionized the world, therefore llms will! despite there really nothing to show for it so far other than writing rote code is a bit easier and still requires active baby sitting by someone who knows what they are doing

datatrashfireon Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th

both my kindle and wife's work great and we have been using them regularly. they are actually very well made and durable devices.

datatrashfireon How we give every user SQL access to a shared ClickHouse cluster

as a clickhouse architect, i can’t help but feel they would have been better served by understanding their db’s native capabilities better before jumping into implementing this.

row level access control, resource quotas, scheduling policies, session settings, etc. all could have been used in concert to achieve a very similar outcome with a dozen or so ddl/dcl statements.

datatrashfireon Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns

or just at any point in the last 20 years to the present works too

datatrashfireon Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran

the problem is as a means of cash it’s inferior to existing systems in pretty much every dimension. more expensive, slower, more risk, higher volatility. the cash story for crypto is not good.

datatrashfireon Code is cheap. Show me the talk

premise is wrong. have seen a number of claude/codex disasters that never make it to production with clients, yet consumed an enormous amount of human time and bandwidth.

expertise and effort is and will continue to be for the forseeable future essential.

talk, like this, still cheap.

datatrashfireon Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

i bought a builder license from newegg in 2017. unfortunately i was not diligent about saving the product key. this was actually the third time i had been in this scenario after changing hardware. no idea why it wouldn’t work this time around.

datatrashfireon Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

i recently upgraded a computer. windows 10 deactivated itself due to the hardware change. i tried everything i could to reactivate. microsoft support told me my only solution was to buy a new license. microsoft treats its customer with contempt.

datatrashfireon I'm returning my Framework 16

i think the author is pretty clearly making the point the trade off is not worth it to him. which is not all that suprising given that seems to match the preferences of most people given the popularity of apple hardware which has for a very long time been on the far end of the irreparable, but smaller, quieter, etc, spectrum.

datatrashfireon AI will make formal verification go mainstream

lol no it won’t

datatrashfireon The VPN panic is only getting started

every generation thinks they live in unique times. that there existed some idyllic lost time innocence. it’s a fantasy.

datatrashfireon Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board

Electrifying the economy is not a path to 0 pollution.

datatrashfireon Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board

No sympathy for Larry here! Just the point that development is going to coincide with some level of increased pollution. Even an electrified economy with 0 carbon emissions is going to be ecologically devastating after all the mountain top removal mining has gathered the materials to make it possible.

datatrashfireon Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board

Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.

datatrashfireon User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

It undermines the value of decentralization itself given intermediaries tend to pop up in all of these various platforms and become the dominant way to use them.

datatrashfireon How does the US use water?

Why is water used for golf a waste vs other uses?

datatrashfireon Jane Street barred from Indian markets as regulator freezes $566M

Major city police are typically some of the highest paid public employees of any area. Often with a more generous pension tier than what is given to other public employees. Ie starting pay for SFPD is $115k-$164k https://www.joinsfpd.com/entry-level-program

datatrashfireon I don't think AGI is right around the corner

Am I missing something? Predicts AGI through continuous learning in 2032? Feels right around the corner to me.

> But in all the other worlds, even if we stay sober about the current limitations of AI, we have to expect some truly crazy outcomes.

Also expresses the development as a nearly predetermined outcome? A bunch of fanciful handwaving if you ask me.

datatrashfireon Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)

Except for Finland nobody has actually created a long term geologic disposal site. Like so many problems, the issue is dominated by political coordination, not physical limits.

datatrashfireon Treasury Yields Soar as Ballooning U.S. Deficit Worries Wall Street

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD

Because the deficit was positive between 1997 and 2001, during Bill Clinton’s second term as POTUS.

datatrashfireon By default, Signal doesn't recall

Fedora desktop is actually a really nice experience in 2025. I switched in maybe 2022, after getting annoyed by the surge in nagging. The last time I tried desktop Linux was maybe 2008. Things have come quite a long way since then.

datatrashfireon Ask HN: Has anyone been able to overcome crippling executive dysfunction?

No advice, I just hope you find your way, whatever that may be, to make life work for you. I am sorry you are struggling.

datatrashfireon Scraperr – A Self Hosted Webscraper

None of the institutional market intelligence products I’ve ever worked on in nearly a decade of doing this do. Why? Cause they wouldn’t otherwise work.

Many APIs require specific user agents. Tools like curl impersonate require specific user agents.

datatrashfireon Scraperr – A Self Hosted Webscraper

> - Scraping without a contact method, or at least some unique identifier (like your project's codename), in the user agent string.

This is a very effective way to make sure you won't get any scraping done!

datatrashfireon Curl: We still have not seen a valid security report done with AI help

> I believe that one day there will be great code examining security tools.

Based on current state, what makes you think this is given?

datatrashfireon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)

It’s an independent company with HQ in San Francisco, CA.

datatrashfireon What we know about CEO shooting suspect

Had a similar experience. All our guests at a dinner party were hoping he would escape.

datatrashfireon Dismantling ELT: The Case for Graphs, Not Silos

I missed the part where there was an actionable takeaway about how I as a practitioner am supposed to differently.

datatrashfireon Amazon S3 now supports the ability to append data to an object

Ingress pricing is indeed cheaper. POST is $0.005 per thousand requests on standard and $0.0025 on express one.

Egress and storage however are more expensive on express one than any other tier. For comparison, glacier (instant), standard and express are $0.004, $0.023 and $0.16 per GB. Although slight, standard tier also receives additional discounts above 50 TB.