Hacker News Reader

zigzag312on ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones

My recent experience when roaming was that calls only worked on 2G even though 4G and 5G were avaliable. After a call, phone would sometimes stay stuck on 2G which meant internet was not working. I had to disable 2G to force the phone to switch to 5G. But if I forgot to enable 2G again, calls didn't work. I checked this with multiple people and they all had the same issue.

zigzag312on Using Deno as my game engine

Impeller renderer is about 100 KB [0]. You still need to add things like text layouting library and image codecs to that size. A few MB in total I guess, but much less than a full web engine.

While Flutter could be used to draw UI to texture, Impeller could also be used by other UI frameworks. Recently, Avalonia team experimented with replacing Skia and a Flutter developer asked, if they are interested in using Impeller and even offered some help [1].

This would probably be suitable, as a more lightweight alternative to WebView, for integrating into game engines.

[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/flutte...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1nv3snm/comment/nh7...

zigzag312on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

You can use accelerants to speed up migration

zigzag312on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

The cloud has materialized

zigzag312on What .NET 10 GC changes mean for developers

Rendering glitches may be due to completely new, lightweight rendering engine made from scratch, that has replaced Skia. Shoudn't be a problem when it matures a bit.

zigzag312on The Digital Markets Act: time for a reset

> Time for a reset

> We have proactively made many changes to our products to comply with the Google Play Store ToS, including... But we and other companies still face considerable uncertainty and unpredictability...

Fixed :P

zigzag312on SedonaDB: A new geospatial DataFrame library written in Rust

Looks interesting for more efficient geospatial operations. Congratulations!

zigzag312on What's New in C# 14: Null-Conditional Assignments

I don't get this argument as it really doesn't match my practical experience. Using new C# features, the code I write is both easier to read and easier to write. On top of that it's less error prone.

C# is also much more flexible than languages you compared it to. In bunch of scenarios where you would need to add a second language to the stack, you could with C# still use just one language, which reduces complexity significantly.

zigzag312on Human writers have always used the em dash

Dead keys unfortunately cannot be used for shortcuts. This has caused a lot of issues when I was using local kb layout. Especially problematic are programs that don't support remapping of shortcuts.

zigzag312on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

People in power pushing their ideology is a common thing. Not exclusive to religious people.

zigzag312on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

Shame, shame, shame... is that really the way we should be dealing with things, or is there any better way?

zigzag312on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)

Just remember that XML was more established than JSON for a long time.

zigzag312on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)

Among other things, I don't like that they won't support nullable getters/setters:

https://protobuf.dev/design-decisions/nullable-getters-sette...

zigzag312on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)

This actually looks quite interesting.

zigzag312on Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)

It looks similar to how vint64 lib encodes varints. Total length of varint can be determined via the first byte alone.

zigzag312on SQL needed structure

What I'm proposing doesn't change that. It's just to information necessary to keep strongly typed data in sync between the database and dtos. To help with serialization and mapping. Compile time type safety.

When querying db for schema you don't get enough information to be able to generate very good code in all cases.

Language-first way (define schema in language and generate database schema/migrations) ties you to just one language. And usually these tools don't support using all database features.

zigzag312on SQL needed structure

I think data definition schema needs to have better type system which not only defines database schema, but contains all necessary data and allows annotations to be able to generate quality language specific code from it. Single source of truth for data structure, which is used both by database and code.

zigzag312on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

Look at non-tech related warnings targeted to laymen. Do you or your parents have trouble understanding most of these warnings?

I'm not saying better UX would help in all cases, but there's a huge heap of issues with security warnings from operating systems which, I think, are largely responsible for effects you're observing. If a warning requires that a user is tech competent, it's a bad warning.

zigzag312on FreeDroidWarn

> how does relinquishing control of the hardware help us

It's not relinquishing control, but separation of concerns for hardware.

Bank should manage their hardware, not your hardware.

zigzag312on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

You are overblowing it out of proportions. Majority of people are capable of understanding warnings just fine, you're not that special. When they can't, it's usually because it was communicated poorly. More often, they choose to ignore it, because of too many useless and overblown warnings.

Why aren't your family members sending money to the Nigerian prince? I bet your parents and brother are able to perform money transfer, so the tech isn't blocking it, but they don't do it.

Windows has very poor security model. It fails all security requirements I mentioned in my previous post. Needing elevated permissions to move a shortcut to a subfolder on their desktop just trains users that a lot of warning in Windows are useless.

A lot of dangerous and stupid activities are legal. Experts influence laws, but they don't have the power to prohibit laymen around them from doing legal things. Running software of your choice on your devices is legal last time I checked.

zigzag312on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

You provided an alterative solution yourself. Make protection harder to disable, so non-tech savvy users can't disable it easily, always inform them of the consequences of disabling it and make it that it's only needed in exceptional cases (there a lot of room for improvement here).

If they want to climb over the protection fence, they should be able to do it as they clearly WANT to do it. Why should you have control what they can or cannot do? (Unless they are your kids.) Should experts in other fields also be able to control over what their layman family members are allowed to do?

zigzag312on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android

The Play Store doesn’t protect your grandma from installing malware. Using that as an excuse for transferring control is weak and carries much bigger consequences.

Owner having full control over the device does not prevent a company to offer same benefits and restrictions. But these restrictions need to be optional, so the owner can decide whether to enable or disable them.

zigzag312on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android

Computing devices hardware and operating systems should be treated as essential digital infrastructure, with laws in place to ensure that the owner of the device retains full control over it and to prevent manufacturers or developers from over-imposing their control.

zigzag312on The future of large files in Git is Git

> for storing images or MP3s, binary diffs are usually worse than nothing

Editing the ID3 tag of an MP3 file or changing the rating metadata of an image will give a big advantage to block level deduplication. Only a few such cases are needed to more than compensate for that worse than nothing inefficiencies of binary diffs when there's nothing to deduplicate.

zigzag312on The future of large files in Git is Git

2-3x reduction in repository size compared to Git LFS in this test:

https://xethub.com/blog/benchmarking-the-modern-development-...

zigzag312on The future of large files in Git is Git

Xet uses block level deduplication.

zigzag312on Vibechart

Oh, I did miss it. Thanks!

zigzag312on Vibechart

There's only one error, bar height for o3. Somehow height uses value from 4o, which seems like some sort of copy paste error.

EDIT: I was looking just at the first chart. I didn't see there's more below.

zigzag312on Open models by OpenAI

I'm waiting too :)

50xx series supports MXFP4 format, but I'm not sure about 3090.

zigzag312on Open models by OpenAI

https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=gra16_512&hloc=uk&v=e&hloc=at&h...

5070 Ti Super will also have 24GB.