HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

stonewhite

775 karma · joined January 4, 2013

submissionscomments
stonewhite··on Motorola Signature 27 with GrapheneOS support
I also remember Samsung hiring the CyanogenMod lead dev and they only released nightlies afterwards, until they even stopped that.
stonewhite··on California-bought cars can be hijacked via Bluetooth
You pay extra for an anti-theft system, turns out it is an unintentional theft system.
stonewhite··on Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products.

They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up. Antigravity IDE cannot even have poweruser subscriptions now from Google Workspace an Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform cannot be attached to Antigravity IDE.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform has an incredibly abysmal setup process, and if I want to limit spending per-user I have to create projects per user. The fact that you cannot activate Anthropic models on it if the billing still has free credits is almost a joke.

I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions. Forced us to buy $200 subscriptions directly from Anthropic/OpenAI.

stonewhite··on I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
If the kid is bright they'll be bored anyway. This is something you cannot avoid, so teaching them to behave in a boring environment is more productive.
stonewhite··on Shell-ish scripting in Go with ease
Good points. 3rd one reminds me of the Knuth vs McIllroy story about 10+ page pascal vs 6 bash pipes[1]

[1]: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/

stonewhite··on The Retreat to Muskworld
This is a good practice to reduce at least some amount of dependency to outside US. Also this is the definition of innovation; making high tech out of low tech.
stonewhite··on Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it
VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.

For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.

stonewhite··on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet
In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_deri...

stonewhite··on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet
NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.

But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.

I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.

I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.

stonewhite··on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet
I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.

Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.

stonewhite··on Archaeologists find intact medieval gauntlet
I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.

Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here, yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old tea shops in Japan.

stonewhite··on I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
I think the idiosyncratic command names are rooted in the fact that git is designed as a peer to peer distributed system as opposed to how it is generally used right now, the server/client workflow. Github even follows and adds to this tradition with the always weird sounding "pull request", since the pull request is normally a mail to a mailgroup with the description of the changes and an actual request to pull that person's changes to the maintainers local repositories.

I'm not sure what is currently being done at developing git, but adapting/creating some porcelain commands accommodating a more centralized workflow even mainly on a semantic level could help with the UX friction.

Also, the obligatory joke "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space"

stonewhite··on Get Offended More (2020)
My motto is "Follow the Dread". If I dread public speaking I should do it, if I dread setting up IPsec VPNs I should do more of it, if I dread working with money and run a business as opposed to working solely as a technical person I should do it, so on and so forth.

"The Dread" is a good north star for discovering what to improve next, since most Dreads are somewhat common/shared among peers, communities and colleagues. Being able to do something nobody likes to do is a good edge against the world.

stonewhite··on Admin unmasks self as sockpuppet of other admin who was banned in 2015
Makes me think of the "Impaled with Extreme Prejudice" anime trope. I guess sometimes it is necessary

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImpaledWithExtre...

stonewhite··on Pixel 8 Pro
Features do include Face Unlock if you scroll down enough
stonewhite··on macOS Containers v0.0.1
Exactly my experience. After 15 years, I became an apple fanboy in 15 days. I still do hate losing my muscle memory on some bash shortcuts, but I'd say it was very much worth it.
stonewhite··on Curl 8.0.1
Curl more equivalent to cat as a unix tool, making it easier to use in pipes. If your only use case is downloading then wget might look more practical
stonewhite··on Meta lays off 11,000 people
I believe you are talking about amazon hiring 100000 warehouse workers, not google
stonewhite··on Elon Musk Has No Idea What He’s Doing with Tesla Bot
While Musk lost some credibility over cryptocurrency related topics, it is important that he manages to repackage these already "thought of" stuff in an almost Steve Jobs sort of fashion and insert into the public consciousness. Apart from the hiring, many companies start up just to get acquired by Tesla, or to compete with them. Which creates the much needed innovation by itself.

I think he uses his media power for a good purpose even if he himself or his company cannot reach such goals, he creates the stepping stones in a future that I really like to see happen.

stonewhite··on We Replaced an SSD with Storage Class Memory
That also necessitates a matching network bandwidth as well.

It reminds me of the Bugatti Veyron situation, its tires lasting 15 minutes at top speed yet it runs out of fuel in 12.

stonewhite··on Building a patient monitoring system with Go and Vue in 3 days
I think there are some redacted out parts of the blog. The difficulty with the "Realtime Result Interface" not using HL7 remained unaddressed.

I'd like to read about those challenges as well.

stonewhite··on Building a static serverless website using S3 and CloudFront
That is the case for Cloudfront certificates globally. For Loadbalancer or other uses, you should just provision your certs in your own region.
stonewhite··on Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
A future iteration of this product should be a household item that you use it during your morning routine, even before brushing your teeth. Preventative measures like this should be more widely available and built into peoples everyday routines.
stonewhite··on Keanu Reeves will return as Neo in new ‘Matrix’ film
It probably will have something to do with Neo electrocuting Sentries in the "Real World" and the fact that "Real World" is just another matrix.
stonewhite··on What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?
Tavis Rudd gave an inspiring talk about solving this problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

stonewhite··on Reddit Is Down
Reddit statuspage with relevant stats: https://reddit.statuspage.io/
stonewhite··on Give Firefox a chance
I have gone Vivaldi and after a month, I don't see myself reverting to either FF or Chrome. Needs some tweaking in the settings, yet it is fast and neat the in the end.

I don't see myself going back with my current experience.

stonewhite··on Mind-controlled hearing aid allows the wearer to focus on particular voices
I always wonder if hearing aid has military applications, or for non-hearing-disabled people. Is it possible to have an above average hearing with this?
stonewhite··on I Miss Rails
This reminds me of the Rich Hickey keynote talk[1] at Rails Con 2012. Which boils down to: just out of sheer convenience you no longer own your code and, don't make the easy choice, take your time and make the simple choice.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0

stonewhite··on List of dead Google products, services, and devices
This reads more like a dedication to R&D than a list of shame.

I understand why / how people are pissed, I got pissed at some of those too, yet I do also accept my overall quality of digital life is improved by these bold moves in the long run.

Page 1 of 6Next →