Hacker News Reader

drozyckion Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones

Broadband Map tracks priority levels for the big three US carriers' plans and the MVNOs they support. I paid $225 promo pricing for one year of Visible+ Pro with unlimited priority Verizon data and all taxes and fees included ($18.75/mo), so I can pay full price for a flagship phone and end up ahead of any carrier phone deal.

https://broadbandmap.com/priority

drozyckion YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers

Have you looked at https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV ?

drozyckion Qwen3-Next

The latest SSDs benchmark at 3GB/s and up. The marginal latency would be trivial compared to the inference time.

drozyckion The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

Is this true? Kraken and Bitfinex both seem to support XMR <-> USD

drozyckion We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

Victims can spend hundreds of hours over the course of years navigating corporate and legal bureaucracies before their account balances and credit scores are restored. The system absolutely makes a bank error the victim’s problem to solve. Guilty until proven innocent.

drozyckion AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending content hunger

I asked Google AI Mode “does Google ai mode make tens of site requests for a single prompt” and it showed “Looking at 69 sites” before giving a response about query fan-out.

Cloudflare has some large part of the web cached, IA takes too long to respond and couldn’t handle the load. Google/OpenAI and co could cache these pages but apparently don’t do it aggressively enough or at all

drozyckion GitHub was having issues

How would a server-side NAT know which Hetzner customer it should route a request to? It has an encrypted packet arriving at this shared address on port 443. You can route a shared address to the proper service based on the HTTP Host header but that can only be done by the customer using their encryption key, so no sharing an address between customers. Home LAN NAT only works because the router can change the source port used by the request so that responses are unambiguously routed to the right client.

drozyckion Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

DC is a city, not a state. You seem to be aware of this distinction in this comment [1] and yet you conflate the two here..

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871583

drozyckion Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords

She follows same reset flow as before. Passkeys are identical in this respect to the passwords of yore.

drozyckion Gemini 2.5 Deep Think

I don't have access but I wonder whether a dog on a jetski would be nearly as good

drozyckion Atlassian terminates 150 staff

Why bother with a text? Just lock them out of their accounts. They'll figure it out.

The termination ritual is for the people that stay and who the company may wish to hire in the future.

drozyckion Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations

The problem is hyperlocal news is what keeps local government accountable. The internet has starved these local newsrooms to the point where NPR was often the only one left.

drozyckion Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/01/cpb-npr-pbs-corporation-pub...

Some stations will lose 2%, others 98%.

drozyckion Fervo Energy Drills 15,000', 520 F Geothermal Well in 16 Drilling Days

There are 13 million exajoules (3,611,400,000 TWh) of energy within a couple of miles of the earth's surface [0], enough to cover 100% of 2023 worldwide energy use (181,000 TWh [1]) for 20,000 years. Its environmental footprint is non-negligible but probably better than solar+storage per unit energy generated. It uses 5% of the land area and provides base load.

[0] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/MITEI-The-... (see section 2 on page 1-4) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

drozyckion xAI's Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure

Gemini gave me a yt-dlp command two weeks ago without complaining. Can you share your log to compare?

https://g.co/gemini/share/638562c1a8f4

drozyckion M4 MacBook Pro

It happens in Safari and Music.app. I find that Airpods exacerbate the issue too.

drozyckion You're Not Smiling Enough

Reminds me of the old “Please drink verification can to continue” meme https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF

drozyckion Smartphone Tethering: A Bigger Grind Than It Needed to Be

But the water utility charges per unit consumed

drozyckion Ask HN: How does my school block DoH?

Hopefully their parents trust them to use a cc. Not sure if anyone offers a free tier without payment info.

drozyckion Escaping from Anaconda's Stranglehold on macOS

Pythons and anacondas are snakes which catch and kill their prey by strangling them and inducing cardiac arrest. It’s a pun.

drozyckion Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking

Just geofence their lots and disable the horn

drozyckion How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

Isn’t one OLTP and the other OLAP? I don’t understand why DuckDB is often suggested as a drop-in replacement.

drozyckion New technology could reduce the amount of energy for air conditioning

I believe this software is widely available to hvac contractors for accurately sizing a system. Haven’t seen it for mere mortals though

drozyckion Batteries: How cheap can they get?

23000 TWh, or 23 PWh according to your link

drozyckion Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

You probably can (although I haven’t tried). The trunk is accessible and you can flip down the seats and ride in the front.

drozyckion Kiosk mode bypass for an Ariane Allegro Scenario Player based hotel check-in te

It’s hugged to death at the moment

https://web.archive.org/web/20240605075458/https://www.penta...

drozyckion 'WebAssembly Is Finally Usable, Almost'

Where can I learn more about this?

drozyckion Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel

And what is a walk? Gödel lives an hour north and Einstein needs to pick up the kids from school. Traffic is pretty bad, no time to talk.

drozyckion 'WebAssembly Is Finally Usable, Almost'

Figma has been using wasm in production since 2017.

Wasm in the browser has its niches, but JS remains the best choice when considering load time and transfer size. JS is not the pinnacle of dev experience, but any other language has megabytes of runtime or libraries which need to be fetched and loaded before your application code. All browsers have JS batteries included, for better and for worse.

drozyckion Engineering for Slow Internet

I get 400 Mbps down standing at the door of that same diner. My understanding is that 4G bands are repurposed for 5G in rough proportion to the usage of 4G vs 5G devices at that tower, plus there’s some way to use a band for both. In any case I was having these indoor performance issues back in 2019. I’m pretty sure it’s an Intel issue, and any Qualcomm modem would be fine.