Hacker News Reader

nebezbon List of domains censored by German ISPs

Wow that’s intense.

I remember hearing someone complain on HN of their site getting blocked because it shared an IP with an illegal soccer livestream. I can’t imagine they’re doing this to IP blocks owned by CDNs like Fastly, CloudFlare, or CloudFront though. Or are they? Does this regularly break most of the internet for UK customers?

nebezbon Exe.dev

I thought it was pretty clear from their documentation. And it solves an issue I have. They’ve found a customer in me.

nebezbon Games’ affordance of childlike wonder and reduced burnout risk in young adults

Seems like n=11 should have been n=1. Use 19, 21, and 1 as a numerator of /41 and you end up with all the same percentages written in the abstract. A typo that should have been caught, but surely nothing more than that and certainly not substantive enough to qualify the claim below:

> This paper is very bad. The numbers in the abstract don’t even add up, which any reviewer should have caught.

nebezbon When compilers surprise you

Learning something old can be surprising. Enjoying that learning can be delightful.

Seems like the author is both surprised and delighted with an optimization they learned of today. Surely you’ve been in the same situation before.

nebezbon When compilers surprise you

https://www.npopov.com/2023/10/03/LLVM-Scalar-evolution.html

“basic and essential” are interesting ways to describe the field of compiler optimization research.

Are you suggesting that the discovery and implementation of SCEV in LLVM is basic and essential? Or that summing integers in a range is basic and essential?

nebezbon Show HN: TinyPDF – 3kb pdf library (70x smaller than jsPDF)

Wow you’re not kidding. That was fast.

https://github.com/Lulzx/tinypdf/commit/961e6b602f19e125f210...

nebezbon Show HN: CommerceTXT – An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt)

Ah, so dark patterns then. Baked right into your standard.

nebezbon Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

I get the frustration. And I’m no GitHub apologist either. But you’re not being charged for hardware you own. You’re being charged for the services surrounding it (the action runner/executor binary you didn’t build, the orchestrator configurable in their DSL you write, the artefact and log retention you’re getting, the plug-n-play with your repo, etc). Whether or not you think that is a fair price is beside the point.

That value to you is apparently less than $140/mo. Find the number you’re comfortable with and then move away from GH Actions if it’s less than $140.

More than 10 years of running my own CI infra with Jenkins on top. In 2023 I gave up Jenkins and paid for BuildKite. It’s still my hardware. BuildKite just provides the “services” I described earlier. Yet I paid them a lot of money to provide their services for me on my own hardware. GH actions, even while free, was never an option for me. I don’t like how it feels.

This is probably bad for GitHub but framing it as “charging me for my hardware” misses the point entirely.

nebezbon Go is portable, until it isn't

> “in commercials where such effects appear”

Good thing this isn’t a commercial then.

nebezbon Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant

The lack of comparable regulation isn’t a good argument for (or against) regulation. All regulation was born at some point. It’s not all-or-nothing.

You example about trading equities (gifting? sharing?) is wrong. You owe tax on trading your stock for another stock. Even if you circumvent a broker and deal in literal certificates. This is a disposition in the eyes of every major tax authority. There are very few exceptions (rollovers or corporate reorganization are some examples). Difficulty in calculating the FMV of the disposition is entirely your problem.

nebezbon Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

Where’s the threat? Be specific.

nebezbon Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming

For those of us who aren’t seeing the threat as clearly as you are, are you possibly misinterpreting things?

I don’t interpret “an upstream change would make this project impossible to maintain” as a “threat”.

nebezbon All it takes is for one to work out

All it takes is one.

nebezbon Crypto investors face tax crackdown as 70% non-compliant

This is a very normal rule. Which part of the world do you live in, and do you hold public equities?

nebezbon Brazil charges 31 people in major carbon credit fraud investigation

People have been buying fake carbon credits for a long time. There’s very little incentive to validate the authenticity of the credit/offset. The press release is usually all the value they’re looking for.

I’ve only just now heard of someone getting in trouble for selling them. It’s about time.

nebezbon Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs

> Passport or ID card scans would never be be stored alongside general KYB information

How do you qualify this statement? Did you mean “should never”? Even then, you’re likely overstating things. Nothing prevents co-locating KYC/KYB information. On the contrary, most businesses conducting KYB are required to conduct UBO and they’re trained to combine them both. Register as a director/officer with any FSI in North America and you’ll see.

nebezbon A definition of AGI

Ah, I understand the statement now.

nebezbon A definition of AGI

I’m certainly not informed enough to have an intelligent conversation about this, but surely the emotions bit can’t be right?

My emotions are definitely a function of the chemical soup my brain is sitting in (or the opposite).

nebezbon Asbestosis

> Of course the capitalist cares about harming customers, she needs to sell to them

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...

Internal memos from 1970s - 2000s reveal knowledge of asbestos traces. Executives, better known as caring capitalists, resisted disclosure.

In case you think this isn’t a pattern: Purdue and Oxy, General Motors and their ignitions switches, DuPont and “confirmed animal carcinogen” Teflon, Philip Morris’ cigarette campaigns, VWs dieselgate…

Each of them found to be suppressing knowledge knowingly harming consumers.

nebezbon Ask HN: What are some impressive vibe coding projects?

Cool project!

One suggestion: your “open now” toggle is confusing. I can’t tell what state it’s in without relying on inspecting one of the aggregates decreasing from 7 to 6. Use a non-color visual indicator (icons or words).

nebezbon When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

> But 1 is smaller than 9, so file-10.txt should be first in alphabetical order. Everyone understands that, and soon people learn to put enough leading zeros if they want their files to stay sorted the way they like.

No. Not “everyone understands that”. Natural sort happens in real life and everyone understands that. Only those who understand ASCII — not the average user of graphical file managers — will deduce the reason for your definition of “alphabetical order”.

> Now that I know what the issue is, I can solve it by renaming the files with a consistent scheme.

Intensely ironic given the previous suggestion.

nebezbon When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

> the expected behavior is not there

The expected behaviour is ambiguous (and thus subjective). Older versions of windows shipped with alpha sort. New versions ship with natural alpha sort. According to the UX designers over at Microsoft (and surely the user feedback), natural sort _is_ the expected behaviour.

I certainly agree with natural sort being the expected behaviour too.

nebezbon When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”

It’s not magic. It’s called natural sort and it doesn’t require gobs of memory. Most (all?) modern OS file managers will natural sort on file names.

nebezbon Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync

Yes, and it’s the best way to get support too! They’re real helpful.

nebezbon Grok Code Fast 1

How would you know that?

nebezbon Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider

You’re describing insurance on the merchants side. The post I was referring to described insurance on the consumer side.

nebezbon Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider

> This "insurance" could be offloaded to a neutral third party that isn't controlled by the credit cards.

I had not considered this. My first thought is how technically and operationally complex it would be for an insurer to underwrite these transactions "on-the-fly" from merchants they don't know, but it is probably a great idea.

nebezbon Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider

> Moving the money is the easy part and is not the main set of problems that the card payment schemes have solved.

Nailed it. Anyone can move money.

As a consumer, I always opt to pay for credit card where available. The safeties provided to me facilitated by everyone in the network – from issuer to acquirer and everyone in between – is exactly why. I don't want to consider waiting 12 months in line at small claims to get back $200 sent over Interac for services that were never provided by a shoddy business owner.

The cost of those consumer safeties and convenience is incurred by the merchant. This is the cost of business.

nebezbon Linux address space isolation revived after lowering performance hit

Every CPU that isn’t pegged at 100% all the time is leaving money on the table. Some physical CPU capacity is reserved, some virtual CPU capacity is reserved, the rest goes to ultra-high-margin elastic compute that isn’t sold to you as a physical or virtual CPU. They sell it to you as “serverless,” it prints cash, and it absolutely depends on juicing every % of performance out of the chips.

edit: “burstable” CPUs are a fourth category relying on overselling the same virtual CPU while intelligently distributing workloads to keep them at 100%.

nebezbon URL-Driven State in HTMX

He’s being downvoted because suggesting cursor pagination in an example describing sorting by price (descending) is plainly wrong. While neither is bookmarkable, cursor pagination is much worse. The UX went from “show me _almost_ the most expensive items” to “show me everything less expensive than the last item on the page I was on previously — which may be stocked out, more expensive, or heavily discounted today”. The latter isn’t something you’d bookmark.