HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tananaev

1,538 karma · joined January 21, 2015

My project:

https://www.traccar.org/

About me:

https://www.tananaev.com/

submissionscomments
tananaev··on Passkeys are not a trap
You're arguing theory and not practice. In theory they're better of course. The problem is the implementation. And implementation is a mess because everyone is trying to lock you into their own little ecosystem.
tananaev··on JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
For Android development I still prefer Android Studio (IntelliJ based). Maybe just a habit because I don't really write code there anymore. For everything else usually VS Code.
tananaev··on Gravity seems holographic. What does that mean for reality?
I think the box explanation is misleading. There isn't literally a box whose surface you measure. The idea is that the state of a higher-dimensional gravitational system can, in some cases, be completely described by a theory in one fewer dimension.
tananaev··on MCP was always a bad idea?
The article completely misses the main MCP point - it's authentication handling. Sure you can login via CLI, but it's much more clunky to manage.
tananaev··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
I think inconsistency is really annoying. Hard to rely on it. Most of our reviews clear with a couple hours, but sometimes it gets stuck for days.
tananaev··on Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers
Finally some evidence that the system is working. Most countries are borrowing like there's no tomorrow, so obviously rates should go up to compensate the risk of not paying back.
tananaev··on Live map of public transport in Belgium
I believe it's at least partially powered by my open source GPS tracking project - Traccar. Nice to see public access for this data.
tananaev··on A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
I also see quite a bit of traffic from China and Singapore. I wonder if it's some scraping for AI training. It doesn't really bother me too much because traffic is still fairly low, but it skews all the analytics for me.
tananaev··on Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress (1.5mil users)
Presumably the whole point of AI is that we can start reducing that number. I am sure there's a significant number of people just working on various administrative tasks processing data and documents.
tananaev··on US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%
All of the increase is from energy. Oil prices.
tananaev··on We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued
It doesn't mean it's a good investment. It's just a personality cult. I suspect it might take a generation or more to settle on some reasonable price.
tananaev··on S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic
Wait until you hear about float multiple Nasdaq is doing.
tananaev··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
You're misrepresenting things a bit. S&P 500 has not approved those changes yet and they have some other protections as well. Nasdaq and FTSE Russell definitely sold out and should not be trusted as good indexes going forward.

Most popular passive indexes are S&P 500 and some total markets. Total index, like the one used by VTI, is likely the best spot in this case. They have not changed any rules, as far as I know.

tananaev··on The OSS Sabotage Manual Became Corporate Best Practice
Excellent article. I agree with a lot of points. One think that wasn't mentioned is globalization and bailouts. Companies are getting bigger and more concentrated than ever before. And we bail them out when they fail due inefficiencies. There's no purge in the cycle. And all technological gains are eaten by bureaucratic inefficiencies.

I want to believe AI is the solution, but it's far from certain.

tananaev··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
I did a bit of research on this some time ago and it's not as bad as I originally thought. Index funds would need to count only liquid float of the company. So if Space X total valuation is 2 trillion, but float is 5%, then they need to count it as 100 billion for the purposes of index weight. Still more than I want, but not catastrophic.
tananaev··on Laws of Software Engineering
With modern tools it should be pretty easy to build scalable solutions. I take premature optimization as going out of your way to optimize something that's already reasonable. Not that you should write really bad code as a starting point.
tananaev··on Open Source Isn't Dead. Cal.com Just Learned the Wrong Lesson
Of course everyone should do their own due diligence, but my point is mostly that open source will have many more eyes and more effort put into it, both by owners, but also community.
tananaev··on Open Source Isn't Dead
I have an open source project and started receiving a lot of security vulnerability reports in the last few months. A lot of them are extremely corner cases, but there were some legit ones. They're all fixed now. Closed source software won't receive any reports, but it will be exploited with AI. So I definitely agree with the message of this article.
tananaev··on Hyper-optimized reverse geocoding API
Good catch, thanks. Updated the readme. The planet can be downloaded directly from OSM.
tananaev··on Hyper-optimized reverse geocoding API
Most or all existing solutions are universal (not just reverse geocoding) and rely on database. The purpose of this project is to make it super fast to do one thing. The result is 100x - 1000x speed of Pelias and other universal tools like that.
tananaev··on Hyper-optimized reverse geocoding API
It took about 8-10 hours for me on a 192GB Hetzner cloud machine. The resulting index was just 18GB, so once the index is created it's really efficient and you can easily run it on a small VM.
tananaev··on Hyper-optimized reverse geocoding API
Self-hosted reverse geocoder with sub-millisecond query latency. C++ builder parses OSM PBF files into a compact binary index using S2 geometry cells. Rust server memory-maps the index and serves a Nominatim-compatible API. Docker support with automatic HTTPS.
tananaev··on Traffic from Russia to Cloudflare is 60% down from last year
I've been using WeChat. My hope is they won't dare to block Chinese messenger. China is pretty much the only remaining lifeline for Russia.
tananaev··on Traffic from Russia to Cloudflare is 60% down from last year
Russia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.
tananaev··on Open Camera is a FOSS camera app for Android
No link to source and just says "The source code is available from Open Camera's SourceForge page." Why not link it?
tananaev··on Facebook's Fascination with My Robots.txt
Maybe they’re trying to DDoS it, and once an error is returned, they assume that no robots.txt file exists and then crawl everything else on the site?
tananaev··on Why I don't think AGI is imminent
I think it's really poor argument that AGI won't happen because model doesn't understand physical world. That can be trained the same way everything else is.

I think the biggest issue we currently have is with proper memory. But even that is because it's not feasible to post-train an individual model on its experiences at scale. It's not a fundamental architectural limitation.

tananaev··on A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
Are you serious? It's open source. And there's less than 1000 lines total. Get Codex or Claude to review it if you're paranoid.
tananaev··on Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance
I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened.

Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.

tananaev··on GPT-5.2-Codex
I was very skeptical about Codex at the beginning, but now all my coding tasks start with Codex. It's not perfect at everything, but overall it's pretty amazing. Refactoring, building something new, building something I'm not familiar with. It is still not great at debugging things.

One surprising thing that codex helped with is procrastination. I'm sure many people had this feeling when you have some big task and you don't quite know where to start. Just send it to Codex. It might not get it right, but it's almost always good starting point that you can quickly iterate on.

Page 1 of 8Next →