Hacker News: Spivak

New comment by Spivak in "Tailscale Traces Database Corruption to 16y/o SQLite WAL-Reset Bug"

Spivak — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:26:30 +0000

This is a great example of outages looking different from the perspective of the operator vs the user. Because there's many shards the blast radius of failure is contained to a small subset of users but for those users it's an outage. The way it's designed you can't lose any shards without impacting users. Compare to say Elasticsearch where it's possible to lose nodes and lose shards without the user noticing. One approach isn't universally better than the other.

New comment by Spivak in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

Spivak — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:57:43 +0000

You're trying to solve with technology a problem that lives in the abstract human world. Even the simplest possible case, you make a physical unique object that you define as conferring ownership to the person who possesses or controls it. Someone steals the object, now the person in possession of the object isn't the owner. There's this allure of trying to tie this abstract notion of ownership to a physical thing but it's breaks down immediately. It doesn't even work for physical objects.

Automated enforcement of ownership rules is completely tangential to the actual problem you're running into. You own a physical book, you make a copy then sell the book. That's a copyright violation, no "verification" or whatever nonsense needed. What happened in regards to ownership in this case is already clear. Companies sure do like DRM but it's as much a pale imitation of ownership as anything else.

New comment by Spivak in "All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen"

Spivak — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:19:25 +0000

I feel like none of the replies are really cutting to the core of what the problem with your logic actually is—because your way of thinking is incredibly common in tech since it's what we do all day. The fallacy is scale invariance, that the nature of a thing doesn't change when the scale does. Anything you can do you can put in a for loop.

And the equivalence you're drawing is that the fundamental nature of someone recording a video with their phone is the same as a digital panopticon.

New comment by Spivak in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

Spivak — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:37:27 +0000

Films having a moral lesson for the audience is a weird thing to criticize when it's been done since time immortal—it's exceptional when a story doesn't have one. The fact that your cutoff is 2016 I think says more about what specific messages you're sensitive to rather than media containing more of them. I think cultural context is a big factor as well because you don't necessarily notice or react as strongly emotionally to what would have been considered controversial or on the nose at the time.

So like I think your experience is valid, and you're definitely noticing a real thing but I think it's better explained by you having more media literacy for contemporary topics and so you see the mirror being held up by these works way more obviously. Like I think about post 9/11 beginning of the Iraq war films and they're not even a little bit subtle.

New comment by Spivak in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

Spivak — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:12:15 +0000

These kinds of comments are so confusing to me, is the work you do day to day really so trivial that you can be wholesale replaced by an LLM?

New comment by Spivak in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

Spivak — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:59:32 +0000

We must have a very different view of the world because in my neck of the woods companies are desperate for senior talent. And it's become even harder to find seniors now that everyone has access to a machine that can create the appearance of experience.

New comment by Spivak in "You can run a DNS server (2025)"

Spivak — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:35:22 +0000

I mean certbot handles the just issue me a cert via DNS-01 and I'll do the rest flow just fine. Massive overkill of a program for just that use-case but it's been humming along for me for years at this point. What's the selling point for uACME?

New comment by Spivak in "Why I forked httpx"

Spivak — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:11:51 +0000

Do you see yourself taking over httpcore as well as it's likely to have the same maintainership problem? It would certainly instill more confidence that this is a serious fork.

This certainly wouldn't be the first time an author of a popular library got a little too distracted on the sequel to their library that the current users are left to languish a bit.

New comment by Spivak in "Why I forked httpx"

Spivak — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:05:21 +0000

Well, the reason for all the fragmentation is because the Python stdlib doesn't have the core building blocks for an async http or http2 client in the way requests could build on urllib.

The h11, h2, httpcore stack is probably the closest thing to what the Python stdlib should look like to end the fragmentation but it would be a huge undertaking for the core devs.

New comment by Spivak in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"

Spivak — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:56:22 +0000

I think Flock is just a symptom of the underlying tech becoming so cheap that "just blanket the city in cameras" starts to sound like a viable solution when police rely so heavily on camera footage.

I don't think it's a good thing but it seems the limiting factor has been technological feasibility instead of any kind of principle against it.

New comment by Spivak in "Supreme Court declines to review press freedom case"

Spivak — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:38:12 +0000

I don't think Sotomayor's dissent is particularly convincing because you need a new law that hasn't been yet been invalidated for each instance of retaliation against journalists or general 1A violations. And plugging this loophole with QI would put police in a weird situation where they're having to best guess based on some legal test if a law is constitutional or else open themselves to a lawsuit. I would be happy if this loophole could be plugged cleanly but I think the harm is theoretical enough that the 5th circuit's ruling is acceptable. I would rather a streamlined system to strike these laws down without needing to have them be enforced first rather than messing with QI. Then the ACLU and the likes can file a bunch of lawsuits making the QI issue moot as they'll already be declared unconstitutional before they're ever used.

New comment by Spivak in "Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US"

Spivak — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:08:31 +0000

I consider it to be the same as the state having to provide for your food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare while you're imprisoned. The state took away your ability to provide those things for yourself and so now it's their job to do it. In cities with shit public transportation that isn't going to be invested in any time soon the state took away your ability to provide for your own transportation and I think it's on them to shoulder the cost.

Things like house arrest and the breathalyzer interlock are ways to punish that still let people provide for themselves. So I agree I don't think the state should be babysitting adults which is why I don't like punishments that turn adults into babies.

New comment by Spivak in "Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US"

Spivak — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:30:09 +0000

I would agree with you if the state took up the responsibility of driving people with suspended licenses around or making public transportation reliable enough for employment. But they don't and so we're stuck with this as the compromise.

New comment by Spivak in "Is it a pint?"

Spivak — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:09:20 +0000

I think your expected outcome is actually the desired one, to kill shrinkflation in favor of actual price increases. When the measures are all the same you can compare apples to apples across different businesses.

New comment by Spivak in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

Spivak — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:09:17 +0000

Forget cheating, we get entirely fake people applying for our positions.

New comment by Spivak in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

Spivak — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:06:02 +0000

They don't get unsupervised internet access, there's always a supervising adult in between the child and the internet. For the child's devices it's the parent who has access to parental control software which will restrict access no matter where the device is, at the school it's the school, at the library it's the library, and for the friend's device it's that friend's parents. The answer for what pages do you block is that you use a service who does the work of categorizing pages for you. Every parental control software worth their salt will have this. It's basically the entire value proposition of paid filter software.

No matter the enforcement mechanism there is no way to defeat the "Shawn's parents are cool" problem because Shawn's parents will just give him their IDs to verify. And I know this because I'm for sure going to be that parent.

New comment by Spivak in "Liberated Systemd"

Spivak — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:01:53 +0000

They added an optional date of birth field to a user directory. Are you mad at LDAP for contributing to the surveillance state?

Folks have absolutely lost the plot on this one. These laws are stupid, this implementation is fine. Be mad at your legislators, being mad at some swedish guy won't help you any.

New comment by Spivak in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

Spivak — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 01:09:06 +0000

Looks like you'll be able to pause them indefinitely with the new update so we'll see if this prediction comes true. Most computers will spend their entire life never once exposed to the public internet, the firewall does still work even if a cafe is your threat vector, and browsers and AV definitions are still automatically updated so I'm siding with the doubters on this one.

New comment by Spivak in "How to defer US taxes"

Spivak — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:21:35 +0000

Why? Inheritance taxes are kinda stupid anyway, you already taxed it when it went to the parents, taxing again when moving those assets to next of kin is double dipping.

I can understand step up being considered unfair but the alternative is someone inheriting their family's stuff and getting slapped with a potentially huge tax bill they don't have the cash to afford.

New comment by Spivak in "Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service"

Spivak — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:16:17 +0000

The value of SOC2 is that it does take some experience to be able to plausibly fake the evidence which weeds out people that truly have no idea what they're doing. It also provides a blueprint of the stuff you should be doing if you actually care.

But beyond that it's not worth a whole lot.