Hacker News Reader

sambeon Apple iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max

I got exactly the same impression. They announced things like improved low light performance (but same aperture).

sambeon Source code for Dutch DigiD app released under Dutch Open Government Act

Create - from the EU - yes. As I said: you cannot add to existing that you already use extensively. And not create new from outside EU. That’s what makes it so shambolic. They clearly have the ability to both do it technically and to verify appropriately.

No problems using similar UK services for EU citizens I know, nor non-EU. Usual bank/address shenanigans at the start, but no issues with government gateway etc.

sambeon Source code for Dutch DigiD app released under Dutch Open Government Act

If you leave the country without setting up SMS you can’t ever use 2FA. They claim to support adding foreign numbers, support people being abroad, support adding new DigiD accounts from abroad, but oh no you can’t just add a number. Not even by going to an office or doing a virtual interview. I would think this violates EU law on discrimination. If you live in the UK post-Brexit it’s now totally impossible, I believe (since you aren’t even allowed to make a new account).

sambeon How to grow green potassium ferrioxalate crystals from iron rust

"Some of you might have concerns that chlorine gas will develop, but because chlorine is so reactive, and because the salt solution is dilute, it’s safe for this setup."

Not sure if that was added later.

sambeon Rust Moderation Team Resigns

Right. It may also be possible that there is some hope of this action restoring normality. i.e. as a result of this protest, the Core Team become more accountable. At that point, I assume the specific incident(s) may be dealt with according to the Code of Conduct, which may or may not involve transparency. Either way, it could be premature and possibly prejudicial to air those now.

sambeon SR-72 ‘Son Of Blackbird’

The article states that it's unmanned and emphasises intelligence capabilities.

I thought SR-71 had some strike capabilities, but I could be mistaken.

sambeon Structural pattern matching in Python 3.10

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3113/

"In order to get all of the details about the tuple from the function one must analyse the bytecode of the function. This is because the first bytecode in the function literally translates into the tuple argument being unpacked. Assuming the tuple parameter is named .1 and is expected to unpack to variables spam and monty (meaning it is the tuple (spam, monty)), the first bytecode in the function will be for the statement spam, monty = .1. This means that to know all of the details of the tuple parameter one must look at the initial bytecode of the function to detect tuple unpacking for parameters formatted as \.\d+ and deduce any and all information about the expected argument. Bytecode analysis is how the inspect.getargspec function is able to provide information on tuple parameters. This is not easy to do and is burdensome on introspection tools as they must know how Python bytecode works (an otherwise unneeded burden as all other types of parameters do not require knowledge of Python bytecode).

The difficulty of analysing bytecode not withstanding, there is another issue with the dependency on using Python bytecode. IronPython [3] does not use Python's bytecode. Because it is based on the .NET framework it instead stores MSIL [4] in func_code.co_code attribute of the function. This fact prevents the inspect.getargspec function from working when run under IronPython. It is unknown whether other Python implementations are affected but is reasonable to assume if the implementation is not just a re-implementation of the Python virtual machine."

I'm not very convinced without further information - it sounds like it was already solved in CPython, and bug in IronPython? The whole PEP reads as if it's looking for excuses for removal.

I find this especially annoying for lambdas.

sambeon Valneva and Pfizer announce Phase 2 study for Lyme disease vaccine candidate

Yes, of course, but you then appeared to query the "unfounded" nature of the claims. I thought you had missed the part where they turned out to be indeed unfounded.

sambeon Valneva and Pfizer announce Phase 2 study for Lyme disease vaccine candidate

"These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints."

sambeon There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

Would you not just have more subtle, harder to debug problems if it were not for versioned symbols?

sambeon Netflix intensifies VPN ban and targets residential IP addresses

People started to get a clue about this 5-10 years ago though. It used to be much worse. I recall having to deal with it daily and I don't think about it much any more - more like a weekly exception.

In fact, now also I get some places trying to be too helpful to the point of being confusing. For example, a trainer store that auto-detects location and lists prices in GBP but sizes in US (without indication) and doesn't actually have an EU/UK distribution centre. So whoops it's going to take ages to arrive, it gets re-listed in USD at the final checkout, whoops again, 3% charge from my credit card, and then the wrong size arrives. But at least I knew the rough GBP amount!

sambeon Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity

No, I'd expect it to mean free refills for me for the duration of my meal, like most people would.

My point is, there is quite an involved pricing model - 5 tiers, each tier has multiple charges in it, none of them obviously correspond to the advertising on the front page. They even repeatedly use the phrase "for X MB" which is unclear to me. I first read it as storage. I assume it means total upload/download? The numbers for this on other devices on the front page are not mentioned on the pricing page. Charging categories also have a mixture of sold-by-the-MB and sold-by-usage, as well as pre-sold - within a single tier.

The front page is selling "look, it's very clear and simple" and it's just obviously not clear and simple. Unclear why that view garners downvotes - this is honest feedback about their marketing and pricing. Even if they are mostly talking about the free tier, it's not clear

sambeon Ray Ozzie's latest venture is a cheap IoT board with flat rate connectivity

I don't get how the front page could be so clearly misleading and not expect to get found out. It's all about nothing hidden and "that's all you pay" until you click pricing and then there are many different charges and models.

sambeon Tracing Uncovers Half-Truths in Slack’s CI Infrastructure

A bit light on the technical details that matter (i.e. the actual metrics added, how they went from data to conclusions, exactly why Honeycomb helped), this reads a bit like an advert targetting managers with purchasing power. Is it a report from attending a talk? That might make sense at least.

sambeon Firefox 90

I don't think my estimate of the cost of FTP maintenance would be as high as yours. Why do you think FTP would still be such a cost at this stage?

sambeon Firefox 90

Does Chrome have better site isolation?

sambeon Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

How did you know to go to those lectures? Reputation or trying the first few lectures? Just the start of the course feels like it might not give a good enough sample.

sambeon I can't stand developing for Safari anymore

Yes

sambeon I can't stand developing for Safari anymore

In principle, yes. In practice my experience is that neither macOS nor iOS is very automatic. All it takes on macOS is for another user to be logged in, or for you not to leave your laptop on charger overnight, or a single app to be open that doesn’t automatically shut down. I don’t understand why iOS can go so long without doing it (I’ve seen it go weeks with an update notification & being plugged in every night)

sambeon Bosch opens German chip plant

I'm not sure about "completely false". The article is mostly about the history of the stereotype, and ends with a couple of examples of things that were not as efficient as they could have been. I don't think anybody is claiming perfect efficiency.

sambeon “AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing”

As I said above, it seems fairly clear if you go to the original article that there is a real problem with the existing systems adapting poorly to different setups - they are trained on one system/hospital and then don't generalise well.

sambeon “AI promised to revolutionize radiology but so far its failing”

Both that and "people refuse to use technology that makes them redundant" indeed seem to be hinted at. However, one of the quotes says that poor performance is the reason and if you click through to the original article, it seems fairly clear that there is a problem with the existing systems adapting poorly to different setups.

sambeon V8 Sparkplug – A non-optimizing JavaScript compiler

A sibling poster suggested it is https://excalidraw.com/

sambeon Loss of myelin is one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration

Look, I don't know anything about this medication. But the grandparent responded to a pure anecdote, including the claim that it is "a poison". It seems an entirely appropriate response to caution against false taxonicity in this context. I don't see why the thread is so full of downvoting and accusations.

If someone wants to claim an approved medication is especially poisonous, the onus should be on them to provide evidence. Note that the great-great-grandparents 3 links are all individual case studies. One of them summarizes the situation: "overall, the frequency and severity of adverse events are rather low".

sambeon Loss of myelin is one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration

The parent is not being flippant - don't be so dismissive. The dose makes the poison. All medications have long lists of side-effects. Most will have a small minority of users who have severe side-effects. We don't go around calling them all poisons.

sambeon SpaceX reveals the grand extent of its starport plans in South Texas

"What is striking about this architectural drawing is its compact nature, largely because SpaceX has limited land to work with at the facility and must include stormwater ponds to mitigate against flooding."

sambeon "World's highest-capacity" solid-state battery developed in Japan

Yes but Li-ion was first, so that's what you now have to beat (including the ways in which world has adapted/overcome its shortfalls).

sambeon Firefox 86.0

I think the parent is primarily referring to the multiple aspect of it (PiP was already supported).

sambeon State Partitioning

I'm not sure why you'd think you should make a statement on behalf of everyone. If you are happy with this trade-off, you are free to make it.

The 30-day timeout is for Storage Access API - cookies expire much more often already.

As I said, there is an accumulation of productivity harms. My claim is that the pro-privacy solutions are not good enough relative to the problems they cause (and their effect on improving privacy is also debatable).

sambeon State Partitioning

Looking at the proposed permission UI, I would - as a programmer and heavy web user - have no real clue what to click/what the implications were. If it were Google - do I know and trust them? Well, sort of. I know them; I trust them in the same sense I don't trust a scammer.

Also: 30 day timeout? I'm getting pretty fed up of re-logging into websites already over the last couple of years. Add on re-allowing various permissions for access to various things (sometimes every single time), trying to figure out why websites are broken (ad-blocker vs browser blocker vs not cross-browser tested vs temporary problem vs just totally broken) and it's rather a big productivity drain.