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waterproof

324 karma · joined January 20, 2015

just another software guy, who cares about the purpose of his work.
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waterproof··on New iPad Air, powered by M4
How would you handle user switching? Would users have to go through a password screen to use anything?
waterproof··on Show HN: Govbase – Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts
Love the idea. Thoughts from a UI/UX point of view, on mobile:

* Focus on the policy stuff since that's your differentiator. Put it front and center, currently it's below the "trending news". Nobody needs another trending news feed. I'd cut it entirely.

* Make your differentiator hyper-obvious at a glance on the front page. Right now your above-the-fold is dominated by a wall of AI generated text. It should include a tagline for your site and visuals that people won't get elsewhere.

* Your UI screams "vibe coded" which does not build confidence. Look to other authoritative sites for visual cues - consider a serif for headlines, make your spacing more thoughtful and consistent, reduce or remove your border radius.

waterproof··on Show HN: Rowboat – AI coworker that turns your work into a knowledge graph (OSS)
Nice work. I have two questions.

1. Do you see any downsides to storing your graph as markdown files on filesystem, rather than, say, a graph DB? I have little experience with either but I imagine there would be perf advatages to certain operations on a graph DB at least?

2. If you're using Obsidian-like .md files, why not use the Obsidian format? I bet some folks would love to have an AI coworker helping build and maintain their Obsidian vault.

waterproof··on New YC homepage
That also struck me as a pretty weird quote to highlight. Someone who "seems like they’ll get what they want" sounds more like a bully more than a persuader or value creator.

Isn't there something better to aspire to?

waterproof··on Provide agents with automated feedback
"Back pressure" is already a term widely used in computing for something entirely different: https://schmidscience.com/what-does-back-pressure-in-compute...
waterproof··on The State of AI Coding Report 2025
Looks like it's a monthly number.
waterproof··on Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith
The only rationale given for the initial switch to microservices is this:

> Initially, when the destinations were divided into separate services, all of the code lived in one repo. A huge point of frustration was that a single broken test caused tests to fail across all destinations.

You kept breaking tests in main so you thought the solution was to revamp your entire codebase structure? Seems a bit backward.

waterproof··on Microservices should form a polytree
Yeah if services can't be used by multiple other services, then what's the point?
waterproof··on Aisuru botnet shifts from DDoS to residential proxies
About the ethics of residential proxies: Brightdata, which sells a residential proxy, blocks their own proxy when you point it to brightdata.com.

The fact that they don't allow you to use their service to scrape their own domain, tells you something about their ethics...

waterproof··on Hyperflask – Full stack Flask and Htmx framework
I often run my projects on Supabase and then the Supabase UI becomes a backstop where I can teach my admin users to do things if they really have to.

That, or just use Airtable as a backend, if you can get away with it.

Mostly I agree with you though, I got swept up with lots of "recent tools & frameworks" projects and I really miss the Django admin. Django+HTMX has always seemed like a tempting option.

waterproof··on Inkjet printer with DRM-free ink will be launched via a crowdfunding campaign
Since the printer takes flexible roll sizes and cuts its own pages, probably it would work out of the box with letter right?

I do get your point though, it would be nice if this was not an NC license

waterproof··on F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]
On top of security concerns, you're now shipping potentially buggy code with every dataset. And you're relying on adherence to semver to match local binary unpacker implementations to particular wasm unpackers.

I see why you're doing it, but it also opens up a whole avenue of new types of bugs. Now the dataset itself could have consistency issues if, say, the unpacker produces different data based on the order it's called, and there will be a concept of bugfixes to the unpackers - how will we roll those out?

Fascinating.

waterproof··on F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]
Sounds like they're trying to start a chess match with their rival researchers, inside of a sequence of papers. #1 pe4 would indicate a classic king's pawn opening (pawn to e4) [1]

Clever.

[1](https://chesspathways.com/chess-openings/kings-pawn-opening/)

waterproof··on Solveit – A course and platform for solving problems with code
I see a $400 price tag on a five week course. If it takes 5 weeks to learn how to use your product, I am skeptical that it has legs.

Side note: supposedly this is the first cohort of this course, so how do you already have testimonials?

waterproof··on Senators try to halt shuttle move, saying "little evidence" of public demand
Those guided tours are so good though! You can learn so many cool stories and details and it's a different experience every time, so it's always fun to go back.
waterproof··on NSPM-7 labels common beliefs as terrorism 'indicators'
The next No Kings Day is October 18.
waterproof··on Want to piss off your IT department? Are the links not malicious looking enough?
If you want to be privacy focused, include a way to reverse a shortened URL without visiting it
waterproof··on Comet AI browser can get prompt injected from any site, drain your bank account
Isn't there a situation where the agentic browser, acting correctly on behalf of the user, needs to send Bitcoin or buy plane tickets? Isn't that flexibility kind of the whole point of the system? If so, I don't see what you get by distinguishing between agentic and no agentic browsing.

Bad actors will now be working to scam users' LLMs rather than the users themselves. You can use more LLMs to monitor the LLMs and try and protect them, but it's turtles all the way down.

The difference: when someone loses their $$$, they're not a fool for falling for some Nigerian Prince wire scam themselves, they're just a fool for using your browser.

Or am I missing something?

waterproof··on Control shopping cart wheels with your phone (2021)
Right, the real reason isn't to stop theft, it's to avoid the optics of store-branded carts being left around and save management the hassle of retrieving carts from nearby properties.
waterproof··on What is going on right now?
Tools that can build you a quick clickable prototype are everywhere. Replit, claude code, cursor, ChatGPT Pro, v0.app, they're all totally capable.

From there it's the important part: discussing, documenting, and making sure you're on the same page about what to actually build. Ideally, get input from your actual customers on the mockup (or multiple mockups) so you know what resonates and what doesn't.

waterproof··on The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know
Nah an RSS feed has the ability to contain n feed items. This proposed new protocol would have a maximum of 1 item. The closed contract (1 notification only, ever) makes sure that it doesn't become yet another avenue for producers to push content that you didn't ask for.
waterproof··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
Here's a combined file of all the non-locale-specific rules, for easier review: https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

It was generated as part of this PR to consolidate the metadata.json files: https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...

waterproof··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
In Cockney rhyming slang, the rhyming word (which would be easy to reverse engineer) is omitted. So if "stairs" is rhyme-paired with "apples and pears" and then people just use the word "apples" in place of "stairs". "Pears" is omitted in common use so you can't just reverse the rhyme.

The example photo on Wikipedia includes the rhyming words but that's not how it would be used IRL.

waterproof··on Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database
I love the enrichments feature. Have you considered making it available separately from the initial web search?

I often have projects where the enrichments feature alone would be super useful: I would provide, say, a list of company names, and then use enrichments to qualify them based on location, age, founder experience etc etc.

waterproof··on Scanners Beware: Welcome to the network from hell
> Most scanners send three requests per IP address. Our solution observes the first two requests to check if a device exists at that IP

So all an attacker has to do to avoid the tarpit is reduce their retries to 2? And they can detect all your fake devices by seeing who responds on the 3rd try?

I get that this is just one step in the cat-and-mouse game, but the brittleness of this approach makes the grandiose closing statements a little grating:

> Lightweight yet powerful, it empowers you to take control of your network security with minimal effort.

waterproof··on Virtual Shoe Museum
As it happens, this morning I came across an LLM specifically designed to describe shoes: https://ollama.com/injoon5/shoe-explainer

Coincidence?

waterproof··on Show HN: Quick build- Vote Swapping app for more effective democracy
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that vote swapping falls under the right to free association, which allows individuals to join a group that acts in its collective interest.
waterproof··on Show HN: Quick build- Vote Swapping app for more effective democracy
Yes.
waterproof··on The global surveillance free-for-all in mobile ad data
It wouldn’t be too hard to create a physical device that can only be used to set up and retrieve Authenticator-app style 2FA codes.

All you’d need is a camera to read QR codes, a display, a few kB of storage and some pretty basic processing.

But then I guess that storage would need to be encrypted with some sort of authentication. Hmm.

waterproof··on Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
In the article they call that the “greengrocer’s apostrophe” as in “twelve potato’s”.
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