Hacker News Reader

mikeryanon Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production

Actually from Tahoe to Sac is probably one of the better stretches to pull that off, it’s all downhill.

That doesn’t change the gist of your comment however - which is correct. (I’m a happy Bay Area Rivian owner who’s made that trip often)

mikeryanon BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter

Hyundai and Kia are being hit pretty hard by tariffs, and the expiration of the EV tax credit.

https://www.carscoops.com/2026/03/tariffs-kill-kias-hottest-...

mikeryanon BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter

Is it supposed to do that?

mikeryanon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

Ironically the DOJ isn’t great at this. Infamously they just gave California an encrypted thumb drive with 20,000 names of, allegedly, non-citizens registered to vote.

The password was included on a sticky note in the package.

mikeryanon After 28 years walking across the globe, he's almost home

The article says he would “decamp” to Mexico at times and then pick up where he had left off. I read this as he’d take a break and fly (presumably) to Mexico and then fly back to where he left off.

Depends on what you mean by “unbroken”.

I’d assume that when he ran into legal issues like after crossing the Bering Strait the authorities would transport him via a car or bus so it’s not like he never took a motorized transport.

mikeryanon Root shell on Samsung TV

All the ad tracking in smart TVs has driven prices down. Tracking and ad data has turned a customer from a one time purchaser to a revenue stream for as long as the device is in use.

If you want a high quality TV for the best price your best bet is either disable/opt out of all the tracking data, or even better just never hook it up to the internet at all and plug an AppleTV or Chromecast on it.

If you look for a Samsung TV without “smart” features you pretty much have to find them under “commercial displays” and you’ll pay a premium for it.

mikeryanon Root shell on Samsung TV

Not really, that said it’s trivial to disable, you can opt out either via their settings or just by not connecting the TV to the internet.

I will say that how “completely” disabling ACR via settings works is not terribly clear and there are a few lawsuits questioning wether “opting out” actually works as presented.

mikeryanon Root shell on Samsung TV

Yeah I don’t disagree, but should clarify that I’m just referring to the security policy that provides access to the ambient mic. How the app/platform handles that audio is a different path that I’m not entirely familiar with.

mikeryanon Root shell on Samsung TV

So a bit of background I spent the last 17 years going Smart TV app development.

Not a lot here is any sort of surprise to anyone in the industry.

Always on audio is common on a whole swath of devices - any that want to do Alexa style voice prompts need it. ACR is table stakes for modern TVs reselling viewer data has driven down TV prices to the point where there is no going back.

The policy file here is how you build Tizen apps. It’s a list of specific features your app needs access to and certain levels of access (controlling the TV For example) require different levels of contractual relationships with Samsung.

Everything Samsung collects should be covered in their, very dense, TOS.

mikeryanon The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving

While not criminal like Homes this seems to describe a lot of the most currently vaunted tech CEOs

Musk, Altman and Zuckerberg all are able to somehow ignore the harm they cause and have an amazing ability to justify it in pursuit of some “greater good”.

mikeryanon Tesla Roadster

Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and accept your statement as true, who cares?

Telsa board doesn’t, they need moonshots to justify their valuation. Elon doesn’t care, the engineers sure as shit don’t.

Maybe a midline quality control and reliability person? That’s not likely where many of the engineers for this project came from though.

mikeryanon Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr

No. I’m a casual arr stack user with general trackers only and had two episodes be exes yesterday.

mikeryanon Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts

TBF that characterization was mine. It’s not been Ledger’s response AFAIK.

mikeryanon Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts

Selling Ledger wallets or compromised Ledger wallets? My understanding was a reputable reseller (Cryptobilis) was bought and then the wallets were modified via the reseller chain. This isn’t on Ledger it’s a (literal) supply chain attack. Unless MediaMarkt was buying via the reseller?

mikeryanon I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall

I own a home in Berkeley which loves transfer taxes. They’re creative about it though they tax at different rates based on the home sales price. Starting 1/1/27 the transfer tax goes from 2.5% to 3.5% based on the selling price of the home.

It’s been attractive to voters since most homes sell in the first tier.

You can reclaim some of the transfer tax by performing seismic upgrades which is actually something I support in a town with some houses that can be 100 years old.

mikeryanon Cloudflare acquires Deno

NX Monorepos work that way. Broadly speaking (and with many exceptions) all packages end up in the root. It “builds” release distributions with the correct package.json files and transpiled js.

It helps keep all your related packages on the same dependencies. It’s hell for react native sometimes though.

mikeryanon Decisions API is in public beta

Manufacturing quality control. There are automated tools to pull things like dented cans off a line.

mikeryanon California closed the Montana license plate loophole

The cars are registered in MT but they’re under CA jurisdiction if they are primarily driven here. That’s the literal loophole. CA is not trying to force people to pay CA registration and sales tax on cars kept and used primarily out of state.

mikeryanon California closed the Montana license plate loophole

The core of the law, ie who is expected to register their car in CA and what state sales taxes need to be paid has already been in place for years and likely already challenged. This is just a modifier to address a particular loophole.

As long as nothing about this crosses state lines (ie they’re not trying to regulate out of state businesses or property) there’s not a lot to go on. Several states have taken similar steps to close this loophole. Famously the YouTuber whistlindiesel got arrested in Tennessee for this and the case is still pending

https://www.thedrive.com/news/is-the-government-making-an-ex...

mikeryanon Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

Just reading the title my initial thought was “this is just a strange semantic argument”. But I’ve made those assumptions in the past and been pleasantly surprised.

Not today. IMHO Documentation is just a form of structured memory and it’s all just context. Getting that context right is a hard problem and there’s a lot of different ways to skin that cat.

mikeryanon I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records

Sounds like he’s gotten bug bounties from MS in the past. Might be forward thinking to keep the relationship amicable going forward.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to Microsoft it seems like a pretty complete write up. If the changes weren’t material that might have been part of it too.

And he’s 16. Parents might have had a say.

mikeryanon U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels

They probably distinguish between what they think and what they know. It could very well be they ran a “sting” and made a few transactions through the site and are only charging against those transactions to get extradition started while they assemble the larger case.

mikeryanon What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

We do, but they tend to be clustered around urban areas. There’s vast swaths of CA that lean much more conservative and more economically challenged that are under served.

I think a lot of people don’t realize you can go 2-2.5 hours out side of SF and be in CA MAGA country.

mikeryanon Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA

Fun Fact. My first “tech job” was tech support at EA in the late 90s. Serious Sam was the FPS of choice for late night LAN parties for the EA tech support and QA teams. Tech support and QA were shared resources. They’d shift people from support to QA in summer for fall/winter holiday releases and back to support around the holidays.

Serious Sam was the one FPS that would run decently on our workstations.

Long story but I got promoted to maintainer of the EA game tech support site which is what got me into coding.

mikeryanon LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

I can’t speak to how LG does this now but I ran an agency that built Smart TV apps and built one of the first ACR powered apps on LG about 10 years ago. We were working with a company called “Cognitive Networks” which later was bought by Vizio and is now their Inscape product. At that time one use case wasn’t just tracking but actual interactive “sync to broadcast” apps (you can still do this, no one does, and I don’t know why)

At that time during testing Cognitive could literally see what we were playing on our TV (not full video but the frames used for fingerprinting)

They don’t use Cognitive anymore for obvious reasons and there are several audio based ACR solutions but they always had issues with sections of video without much audio to work off of so we’re always considered inferior. They are fine for usage data however.

Anyway my $0.02

mikeryanon Rivian's gambit for full autonomy

Rivian has actually split out the software side to a joint venture with Volkswagen Group (the group independent of the car company which the group owns with others like Audi and Porsche). I think the goal is to have a platform other brands can license

mikeryanon Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger

Agreed. The synergies mentioned above are there but it’s not like one HR team can suddenly handle having twice number of employees and open reqs. HR and accounting tend to scale somewhat linearly to the size of the business. Not to mention that both those orgs have massive tasks to take on as a result of the merger so at least for the next year or two those efficiencies will be hard to realize.

In the case of media orgs like this those efficiencies are even less pronounced because it’s not like you can consolidate product lines.

mikeryanon Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger

This is wrong

Which part exactly? Seems you just described why the layoffs happen? Two things can be true here, the new company can find cost savings by eliminating redundancies and have to cut deeper than desired to be able to service debt.

mikeryanon New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.

mikeryanon Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]

I just scanned the doc but I think your question is the core argument of the doc. It explicitly says that United is using standard accounting practices and proposes the “pass through” mechanism as a “better” metric.

Based on the source I, personally, don’t find it to be a credible argument