Hacker News: Whitespace

New comment by Whitespace in "Passkeys are not a trap"

Whitespace — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:54:06 +0000

No, you can't just use whatever passkey manager that you want.

I use Safari, Chrome, MacOS, a Google Pixel phone, and 1Password. I have passkeys in 1Password, but it's a crap shoot if I'm able to login on a device.

Chrome wants me to use Google Password Manager. There's no option in chrome://settings to set 1Password as my passkey manager. If I try to use a passkey to login to GitHub Chrome pops up a modal that lets me choose between iCloud Keychain, Use a phone or tablet, or USB security key. There's no option to use a different credential manager.

Safari wants to use my iCloud Keychain. There's no option in MacOS Settings to set 1Password as my passkey manager. If I try to login to GitHub I get an option to Scan QR Code or Use Security key. There's no option to use a different credential manager.

My Pixel wants to use Google Password Manager. There *is* an option in Pixel Settings to set 1Password as my passkey manager, but it doesn't work in Chrome. All I can do it select "use another device" and it shows a QR code. There's no option to use a different credential manager.

Essentially every OS and browser thinks I want to use a phone for my passkey, and this is exactly the situation that I and everyone else is bothered by. I do not want to tie my login credentials to a phone that can be lost/stolen/bricked and will be replaced in several years.

So no, you can not use your own credential manager.

New comment by Whitespace in "When did Google get so weird?"

Whitespace — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:51:58 +0000

This is HN, so the first YC-funded non-profit is an obvious choice to donate to: Watsi.org

New comment by Whitespace in "I don't like passkeys"

Whitespace — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:04:43 +0000

> syncs across all your devices

My Macbook can sync passkeys from my Android phone?

New comment by Whitespace in "RTK reports token savings, but our cost benchmarks disagree"

Whitespace — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:41:53 +0000

I should not trust their "vibe-coded productivity/token cost saving hacks" but I should trust yours?

    Save 30% token costs when using Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode for free - with open source, local semantic search. Works for small and large codebases and monorepos! Enterprise-ready and fully compliant via Ollama and SQLite-vec.
    Releases v0.0.42 Latest last month

Why should I trust that what you're peddling isn't snakeoil?

New comment by Whitespace in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

Whitespace — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:02:41 +0000

Xet's tech is very interesting and I greatly enjoyed their blog posts and other technical writeups[0]

But in the era of frontier models and hardware designed for fast model loading (eg: LLM on a chip) I can't imagine that this is worth so much. There's *a lot* of competition to improve Git LFS.

So while I agree with you that this plays a role I also have to believe that it's to understand model usage by competition and thus stifle it.

[0] - https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/en/xet/overview

New comment by Whitespace in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

Whitespace — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:36:50 +0000

I have a large CNC router. I can throw a whole sheet of plywood on it and program it to cut it with a level of precision and repeatability that I am physically unable to do with my hands/eyes. In addition to the knowledge necessary to operate the machine, there's a lot of engineering knowledge necessary to design something to be manufactured by a CNC.

A lot of woodworkers scoff at the use of CNC routers; there's a lot that scoff at the use of any power tools at all!

I don't really understand though why folks have this *need* to assert that there is only One True Way to do something and to poo-poo on someone else's interests. It all seems like straw man arguments to me. Even the title of TFA BORN AGAINST, OR WHY HOBBY PROGRAMMING COMMUNITIES ARE AGGRESSIVELY AGAINST LLM USAGE seems like ragebait.

New comment by Whitespace in "Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD"

Whitespace — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:07:36 +0000

main indeed has two commits, but it clearly states the location of the rest of the commits, so I wouldn't be critical of main itself.

  hey claude, do a breakthrough
  You can find the actual git history at the v0.2 github tag.
  
  Co-Authored-By: Fable

Now we see https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/tree/v0.2 has almost 6000 commits in it, with the very first one on 2026-07-02. That's a lot of token momentum!

It's easy to claim AI slop nowadays, but you should still mistrust-but-verify.

New comment by Whitespace in "I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them"

Whitespace — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:35:38 +0000

I think the issue isn't that it's this huge ordeal for a person to do, but that if billions of people have to do this then that's a fundamental design flaw that could have been avoided.

New comment by Whitespace in "I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them"

Whitespace — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:46:57 +0000

I have some that I got to connect to my MBP, which supports TB5. Unfortunately my MSI MPG 321URX doesn't properly support it, so half of the time the DisplayPort over USB negotiation doesn't work, and the monitor doesn't connect properly.

Apparently the majority of non-TB devices will have trouble with it. I can't even use the cable to charge my phone when attached to a wall wart!

New comment by Whitespace in "Pareto Front"

Whitespace — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:33:57 +0000

The last time I tried this was back with Opus 4.6, and it was ok. I tried it with Fable 5 High just now and I was very impressed with the output. It took 7 minutes and one turn.

I'm not one to believe in all the one-shot hype, but this was pretty good.

New comment by Whitespace in "Pareto Front"

Whitespace — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:02:46 +0000

I have a weightlifting spreadsheet with weight on the vertical axis and reps on the horizontal axis. The value of each cell is the estimated 1 rep max if I accomplish that lift. In theory if my e1RM is 100kg then I can lift any permutation of (weight,reps) that have the same e1RM. This is akin to knowing Pareto Frontier of my current strength.

I use conditional formatting to color cells according to the probability that I can lift them—if I lifted 50kg for 10 reps then I can definitely do 50kg for 9 reps, so that cell is green. But if e1RM(50,10) > e1RM(40,15) then I can probably do that too so it's light green. The visualization naturally becomes Pareto-like.

If I'm feeling strong I can aim for higher weight, lower reps. Or if I'm feeling weak I can close out a (weight, reps) that's below my current e1RM but I haven't accomplished yet. The end result is that I'm always "accomplishing" some sort of PR no matter how I feel.

I call this e1RM Bingo.

New comment by Whitespace in "Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft"

Whitespace — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:11:26 +0000

That site would do well to show an image of an actual physical thing you can make with it instead of the same images over and over of a cartoonish dog/wolf head.

Rust Token Killer – High-performance CLI proxy to minimize LLM token consumption

Whitespace — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:48:38 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47081527

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by Whitespace in "Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives"

Whitespace — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:49:33 +0000

I've been with Watsi for almost 12 years now, most of that as a Universal Fund member. Like others, I love periodically checking the "My Impact" page, as it really humanizes my monthly donation.

> You've funded healthcare for 162 patients in 14 countries.

> You joined Watsi on February 26th, 2014. Eleven years ago, you became a member of our Universal Fund, supporting life-changing treatments for a new Watsi patient every month. Your most recent donation traveled 8,500 miles to support Leah, a poultry farmer from Kenya, to fund abdominal surgery.

New comment by Whitespace in "What happens when clergy take psilocybin"

Whitespace — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 14:38:35 +0000

I did not read the study so I don't know if you're referencing a specific claim in it, but I do not understand your comment. What does being immoral have to do with TFA?

New comment by Whitespace in "Show HN: Sourcemeta, high-performance C++ JSON"

Whitespace — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 12:07:23 +0000

If you're looking for the link to the JSON bits it seems to be: https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com/

New comment by Whitespace in "A Eulogy for DevOps"

Whitespace — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 03:38:55 +0000

Is it fair to say that you are in favor of Heroku, fly.io, ECS, etc?

New comment by Whitespace in "Show HN: Dillo 3.1.0 released after 9 years"

Whitespace — Sat, 04 May 2024 22:05:44 +0000

It's in the changelog summary:

> Add support for OpenSSL, LibreSSL and mbed TLS for HTTPS, which is now enabled by default.

Ask HN: What Is the Cardinality of URLs?

Whitespace — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:40:33 +0000

I wonder what the total number of valid URLs including protocol, hostname, path, query parameters, etc. is. A sort of Drake Equation for URLs. This came up when wondering what the cardinality of a single repo on github.com is.

I assume it's more complex than [number of valid characters]^[browser character limit]. Networking equipment, browsers, archaic protocols, etc. all place limitations/requirements on this number.

Feel free to simplify it (ex: a single domain) or make it more complex as necessary. For consistency's sake let's assume I use Chromium stable on 2024-01-01 00:00:01 UTC and the request actually goes out onto the internet (so other hardware touches it)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117395

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by Whitespace in "Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]"

Whitespace — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 19:18:02 +0000

Larry Ellison enters the chat