Hacker News: Macha

New comment by Macha in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

Macha — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:20:01 +0000

On the seasons front, traditionally in Ireland winter starts on Halloween (at sunset if you want to be really specific), and so you get winter is November till January, spring is February to April, summer is May to July and autumn is August to October.

That said being an English speaking country and absorbing a lot of media from other English speaking countries, there’s been a slow drift towards the American system making its way in, so younger generations are more likely to use American seasons and older people more likely to use traditional seasons, though you’ll find people of all age groups using either. Certainly they taught the traditional seasons in school when I was a kid, I wonder which they teach now.

(Of course, you could make yet another system based on the weather where summer is approximately two weeks in July, winter is a thing that happens every few years and the rest is a sequence of mild weather with occasional wind and scattered showers)

New comment by Macha in "Veracrypt project update"

Macha — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:25:36 +0000

Alternatively they asked copilot to scan for crypto projects and ban them

New comment by Macha in "Someone at BrowserStack Is Leaking Users' Email Address"

Macha — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:54:04 +0000

Is the _very big_ company Amazon, I wonder.

New comment by Macha in "Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?"

Macha — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:03:10 +0000

I would expect that a llm based scraper is going to be better at parsing an email address from your instructions than some of the more inattentive people who's emails you might want to receive. So I think some of the dumber mitigation measures that still block the simple regex bots from this topic are probably a better bet now.

New comment by Macha in "Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?"

Macha — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:00:31 +0000

I have a wildcard address at my domain. The most common email addresses for spam are:

- git@mydomain.com

Presumably harvested from GitHub or gitlab

- contact@mydomain.com / admin@mydomain.com

Not actually an email address ever used, presumably people just guessing these exist from convention.

- @mydomain.com

I mean, if you know my name you can probably guess this but also this has been my primary email address for outbound email and so has ended up in marketing lists etc.

- ap@mydomain.com, finance@mydomain.com

This is a very recent trend but I've been getting emails to made up addresses like these ones quoting forged emails from myself (with various titles like CEO or CFO attached) claiming to authorize payments to other parties, usually backdated, and then asking that I process their invoice ASAP because look how long ago the CEO said it should be paid. I guess my website has ended up in some list of businesses despite being a personal site.

Ironically, the address that was in plain text in my HN profile for like 15 years gets very minimal spam.

New comment by Macha in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

Macha — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:59:15 +0000

I find articles like this a good counter to the idea that typical software used to be better in the past (usually with an appeal to an idea that people were “real programmers” in those days and anything other than C as used in the 90s is a modern extravagance)

New comment by Macha in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

Macha — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:46:57 +0000

AI can produce code that is about 70% as good as median quality code found on the internet.

I would not describe median quality C code as free from these issues

New comment by Macha in "MiniStack (replacement for LocalStack)"

Macha — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:24:01 +0000

Neither does localstack to be fair.

New comment by Macha in "New patches allow building Linux IPv6-only"

Macha — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:33:59 +0000

I honestly think GitHub and AWS are the two biggest blockers to IPv6 left. Sure your public web servers might need IPv4 for a long while yet, but all these backend microservices and CI builds etc could all be v6 only, except they need to pull stuff from GitHub or certain AWS services.

New comment by Macha in "We're pausing Asimov Press"

Macha — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:12:41 +0000

It’s an announcement published for their followers and distributed through their own channels to those people. That it doesn’t make sense when detached from that context and put on HN to people with no knowledge of who they are seems very much irrelevant to the goals of writing the post?

New comment by Macha in "Android Developer Verification"

Macha — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:46:14 +0000

I mean, I’m sure “Fortnite with infinite vbucks.apk” has a much worse malware rate than the play store, but I’m almost certain that fdroid has a lower malware rate than the play store and I honestly suspect even “random apks off github” might have a similar rate to the play store

New comment by Macha in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

Macha — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:54:25 +0000

Is that not appealing to those users _because_ its a subsidised flat rate? Like those users could go and swap to API pricing right now if they wanted to, but at API pricing they don’t want to

New comment by Macha in "Sky Wins Irish Court Order to Unmask 300 Pirate IPTV Users via Revolut Bank"

Macha — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:33:49 +0000

They’re literally calling dodgy boxes here by both the consumers and sellers. Look, make the case in court if you want, you might get off with a slap, and nobody’s rooting for the big bad corporation here either, but nobody is under any illusions that these are legal

New comment by Macha in "OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1"

Macha — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 23:15:33 +0000

Honestly it feels to me that Civ1 - Civ2 is the most direct upgrade in the series. Civ 2 was mostly just a better civ 1. From civ4 onwards, the series was a lot more willing to shake things up in its gameplay.

New comment by Macha in "The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos"

Macha — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:06:07 +0000

Hungary is governed by a Russia aligned autocrat. This generally does not align with the priorities of the rest of the EU.

New comment by Macha in "The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos"

Macha — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:00:18 +0000

In theory these limit the power of the EU, while anything the EU parliament passes can just be undone as easily by a future EU parliament. If you don't believe the EU charter provides any protection, why would you believe an EU law would be any different?

New comment by Macha in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

Macha — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:39:39 +0000

First of all that's only Ubuntu, but also at this stage uutils is way more compatible with the GNU tools than Apple's tools are.

New comment by Macha in "Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)"

Macha — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:02:51 +0000

How would you capitalise it? RipGrep? RIPGrep? You’d need to pick a side and lose the pun. (And of course grep itself would need to be GReP if we took it all the way)

New comment by Macha in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

Macha — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:36:15 +0000

It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.

I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.

Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice

New comment by Macha in "Department of State advises Americans worldwide to exercise increased caution"

Macha — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 01:55:24 +0000

Replacing it with nothing in an orderly fashion? Probably a good move.

Replacing them with ICE as a political gesture? Not so much