Hacker News Reader

seniorThrowawayon FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Criminal liability for the corporate officers is the correct approach. Can't pass jailtime on to the consumers.

seniorThrowawayon FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

DoD (DoW whatever) has been running the CAC PKI infrastructure for over 20 years, and believe me a good deal of their three quarters of a million employees have no idea what PKI or keypairs are but use it to log into their workstation and do all sorts of online identity validation every single day. https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/

I'm not saying the gov is competent in general btw, but they are actually far better about this area than private industry, in my direct experience.

seniorThrowawayon FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

it would likely be built into the ID, like a PIV/CAC card. I thought about this same thing many years ago, the state DMV's could be in a PKI web of trust with a federal signer/issuer/cross-signer above them. Proving your identity online would mean inserting your ID into your computer so it could be crypto-graphically validated. Yes there are genuine privacy and other concerns, but we'll probably end up there anyway and could have avoided all the mess of having these crappy third party for profit companies involved. The tech already exists, and has existed for some time.

seniorThrowawayon How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

Go ahead and let them try consumer SSD's. It seems to be a lesson everyone has to learn with ZFS once.

seniorThrowawayon Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability

I've had the misfortune of scripting an UE build with perfoce as the VCS, it truly is abysmal.

seniorThrowawayon OpenBSD 7.9

>so much saner than Linux firewalls it's not even close.

This is a big one for me. I've run openBSD and Linux custom boxes as SoHo routers and I just cannot stand Linux firewalls, I've never liked them and IPTables is just terrible. Yes I know there are wrappers around it now but it's still the default everywhere and still used by lots of other software like Docker. I'm using OPNSense now which is FreeBSD based instead of completely rolling my own but I love that it is still BSD under the hood.

One differing opinion I will offer is that I find NixOS to be the Linux distro most in the openBSD spirit despite it being very different from a UX and config management perspective. Alpine is interesting, but it has its own security and compatibility issues, especially around MUSL libc which I have had cause many strange downstream issues over the years, I just hit one recently in JVM GC caused by its memory allocation implementation. I've stopped using alpine altogether because of them.

seniorThrowawayon Why we lose our friends as we age (2023)

Feel the same way about COVID. It damaged the social fabric in ways that have not recovered. I think a lot of people realized that maybe they never really liked socializing as much as they thought they did. I also think it just kind of reset people's expectations around socializing. The other big one to me, that it also unleashed, was inflation. Dining out, sporting events, concerts etc are all way more expensive than they used to be. Places are still busy and games are still packed but the prices are way higher, more evidence of the K shaped economy where only the top stratas are spending. Also, and this is subjective, it feels a bit more performative, as in people are going because it signals they have the means (edit: and the general instagram-ification of our culture.)

seniorThrowawayon Appearing productive in the workplace

If I paste something from an AI into chat, I always identify it as such by saying something like "my claude instance says this:". I also don't blindly copy paste from it, I always read it first and usually edit it for brevity or tone. Feel like this should be the absolute minimum for sending AI content to a person.

seniorThrowawayon Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?

I do use compose for some things, smaller one off type setups, and I’ve done the compose up --build CI/CD approach before. I’m generally not a fan of building on the production node outside of very small deployments. It can work, I just think it tends to blur the line between build and runtime more than I’m comfortable with.

Some of my concerns with compose aren’t purely technical. It makes it easier to lean on local state like volumes, bind mounts, and large .env files. Similar mechanisms exist in kubernetes, but the additional setup tends to force a bit more thought about whether they’re actually needed or just a shortcut.

On the health check side, they exist, but compose doesn’t fully act on them, that's the part that is missing. There’s no built in remediation or orchestration behavior tied to health status, which is why things like https://github.com/willfarrell/docker-autoheal exist. It’s something that was never fully carried through in Docker itself.

seniorThrowawayon Should I run plain Docker Compose in production in 2026?

Extremely debatable. They still have never fully implemented health checks and auto healing. I have had compose itself behave in unexpected ways, weird things like not realizing the tag of an image it is running is actually in use, and letting prune commands yank it out from under the system. Other things I can't remember. I'd rather use something like Nomad or for simpler systems maybe plain systemd. But realistically kubernetes is a superior orchestrator in just about every way, and installing k3s is simple and k3s is actually production ready. I don't like kubernetes all that much as cluster tech, but as a container orchestrator it has a lot of nice features.

seniorThrowawayon Uber Torches 2026 AI Budget on Claude Code in Four Months

I'm a fan of the monorepo in general, even before LLMs. If using git it leverages git's best feature IMO, the commit as a snapshot of the entire repo. I've worked on so many projects where tightly coupled things are split across repos because it's thought of as a best practice, and it just makes it more difficult to figure out what code you are running.

seniorThrowawayon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

Ubuntu has patches out, tested before and after patching.

seniorThrowawayon Your phone is about to stop being yours

>CalDAV, CardDAV, and SMB are baked into iOS, whereas these are onerous to set up on Android

I can only speak to SMB but it is not hard on Android. I use a longtime third party app so not sure what the state of native support is but it works just fine for me, including over VPN

seniorThrowawayon DeepSeek v4

Are you implying only one country does these things?

seniorThrowawayon Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

No, we don't. This is big tech shifting liability off themselves with the added bonus of full de-anonymization. Take a look at who is lobbying for this.

seniorThrowawayon Norway set to become latest country to ban social media for under 16s

The liability shifting and real identity linking to all online usage that big tech wants is proceeding nicely for them I see.

seniorThrowawayon If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-do-americans-feel-poor-because

The gist: the statistics used to define poverty are old and inaccurate.

seniorThrowawayon If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

Housing being expensive because of laws and zoning that constrain it's supply is often touted, but there is good academic research that that isn't the case. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zfsw4iotsn3nqs8vhu8kb/LMW-FAQ...

seniorThrowawayon OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS

Yes, they are good at being coding "interns". They work together in slack which allows management visibility and tasking directly to them. i.e. people who aren't going to be managing a bunch of claude code's all day. I say interns because they are incredibly smart at some things like implementing well defined coding plans and incredibly dumb in other ways, like shipping non-compiling code and asking a human to troubleshoot. To do this requires thoughtful setup, you have to onboard them more like you would a human than a piece of software. Give them their own "workstation", accounts etc. Limit what they can do in those accounts, not in their .md files or skills or anything, they will never follow those 100%, just like a person won't follow directions 100% of the time.

seniorThrowawayon The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

low code / no code, and it's been around in one form or fashion since the 1990's, at least.

seniorThrowawayon GitHub Stacked PRs

>the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control.

I've often thought this about github

seniorThrowawayon Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others

Should really qualify this headline with which backblaze product.

seniorThrowawayon The looming college-enrollment death spiral

I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). AI probably has a lot to do with that, but it's exposing something more fundamental. CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. Maybe we don't need gleaming campus' with huge facilities overhead costs? When storing knowledge required physical books it made sense to build learning facilities around large libraries, but that hasn't been the case for decades now. Should young people really be taking on life long non-dischargeable debt for a glorified high school diploma? I think the answer is no, they shouldn't, and that the entire college bubble needs to be popped.

seniorThrowawayon Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers

Don't know why people think Texas doesn't have natural beauty. It's a huge state.

seniorThrowawayon Show HN: I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++

Having to work around a massive C++ software project daily, I wish you luck. We use conan2, and while it can be very challenging to use, I've yet to find something better that can handle incorporating as dependencies ancient projects that still use autoconf or even custom build tooling. It's also very good at detecting and enforcing ABI compatibility, although there are still some gaps. This problem space is incredibly hard and improving it is a prime driver for the creation of many of the languages that came after C/C++

seniorThrowawayon Slop is not necessarily the future

this submission is basically an ad

seniorThrowawayon Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email

That is really wild

seniorThrowawayon How to turn anything into a router

>Part of the roadmap involved divorcing the routing from the wifi completely

This is the move. Let's you upgrade the different parts of the network separately. I have 3 components, an N150 router/fw/DNS/VPN box with 2.5GB NICs running OPNSense. A cheap but surprisingly good 2.5GB managed switch, and a cheap wifi 6 VLAN tag capable wifi access point.

seniorThrowawayon How to turn anything into a router

SOHO toys don't do routing in a real sense at all