Hacker News: Hizonner

New comment by Hizonner in "Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?"

Hizonner — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:46:45 +0000

Patriotism is soft nationalism, and any of either is too much.

New comment by Hizonner in "Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?"

Hizonner — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:44:46 +0000

Somehow nobody ever bothers to mention to the kids that it's not required.

How many schools still do it, though? Honestly you could tell me it was almost universal or very rare, and I'd have to believe you either way.

Of course, Canada was doing the freaking Lord's Prayer in schools until freaking 1988. I don't know about other countries, but wouldn't be surprised.

New comment by Hizonner in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

Hizonner — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:22:00 +0000

Actually it frequently can, since a modern monitor is often on USB and in a position to impersonate a keyboard and/or mouse.

I wouldn't put it past most of these companies.

New comment by Hizonner in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

Hizonner — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:20:22 +0000

Superior workaround:

1. Reset machine 2. Tap the BIOS setup key (often DEL) during the time before it boots. 3. Insert intallation media for a decent OS 4. ...

New comment by Hizonner in "The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed"

Hizonner — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:15:43 +0000

... and once you take more than the tiniest step beyond the defaults, the difficulty of configuring all that complex optionality exceeds the difficulty of coding your own, and coding the integrations you actually need. And you still get screwed when the vendor decides to make a change, or refuses to support some niche thing you need in favor of some niche thing a few more users need. Not to mention the security nightmare.

SaaS was mostly a bad deal before "AI".

New comment by Hizonner in "The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed"

Hizonner — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:10:05 +0000

This ignores the fact that the bread is poisoned.

New comment by Hizonner in "Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail"

Hizonner — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:07:48 +0000

The line at my workplace was "It's a Unix system... WE'RE SCREWED!"

New comment by Hizonner in "Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history"

Hizonner — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:51:09 +0000

Not a bad idea, except that *WEB PAGES SHOULD HAVE NEITHER ANY ACCESS TO NOR ANY CONTROL OVER THE HISTORY, PERIOD, AND SOMEBODY NEEDS TO BEAT THE MORONS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS "WEB PLATFORM" BULLSHIT SENSELESS*.

It's good that a police department has chosen to do this with the misfeature, but the fact that there are non-abusive applications is not an excuse.

New comment by Hizonner in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

Hizonner — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:50:47 +0000

Few people can do actually do that effectively.

New comment by Hizonner in "IT administrators are "fed up" with Microsoft's "useless" apps and Windows 11"

Hizonner — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:47:52 +0000

Anybody in business who uses the word "partner" in its current sense plots at heart to add the "toxic".

New comment by Hizonner in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

Hizonner — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:46:11 +0000

I am absolutely baffled at the idea that LLMs mean you need less automated verification of correctness.

New comment by Hizonner in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"

Hizonner — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:40:58 +0000

Nobody has tried to limit knowledge of chemistry or physics unless it was directly about doing something illegal, to the point of basically being a detailed recipe. Usually not even then. And when they have tried they've had basically zero success.

The ability for a handful of companies, simultaneously very powerful and easily susceptible to pressure from other powerful actors, to do the same sort of thing with the next generation of core learning and engineering tools, is freaking terrifying.

New comment by Hizonner in "Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches"

Hizonner — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:38:45 +0000

Hey, that scorpion stung me!

New comment by Hizonner in "Espionage Against the European Parliament"

Hizonner — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:09:40 +0000

Can you substantiate your certainty with anything other than the public statements of people whose job is to lie about things like that?

New comment by Hizonner in "Espionage Against the European Parliament"

Hizonner — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:07:06 +0000

> every country on Earth spies on the rest,

It's entirely possible an EU country did this; they're only vaguely guessing Belarus or whoever. In most countries, it's a big deal if the spies are caught spying on the domestic government.

> quite a few private entities do as well.

It's a risky game, doing that. You don't get any of the professional courtesies, and you're not usually eligible for the prisoner exchanges.

New comment by Hizonner in "Espionage Against the European Parliament"

Hizonner — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:24:32 +0000

How is it that any NSO employee is still able to travel outside Israel without getting arrested? Seems like they're involved in criminal conspiracies in like half the countries in the world.

New comment by Hizonner in "Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast"

Hizonner — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:21:21 +0000

> Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter.

That's because you lack imagination. 99 percent chance they are blocking you because they don't want "divisive political rhetoric" on the platform. Allowing a surveillance state is "apolitical" as long as it doesn't involve rocking any boats or making any noise.

... and NSLs don't do that. It would really be nice if people actually understood what NSLs were before blaming everything on them. Trust me, they are bad enough without inventing stuff.

New comment by Hizonner in "EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors"

Hizonner — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:14:57 +0000

But actual protocols are so last century. You might have to think ahead for fifteen minutes because the design has to be staaaa-a-ble. It's haa-a-ard! And you can't sell out to somebody who'll change it and have an exit event.

New comment by Hizonner in "The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online"

Hizonner — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:22:28 +0000

There are a few online bullying rings. A few people get struck by lightning.

... and information isn't really the question. Not that there's actually any good definition for "social media".

New comment by Hizonner in "The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online"

Hizonner — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:36:10 +0000

> Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring.

It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.