Hacker News: ZedZark

New comment by ZedZark in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

ZedZark — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:34:32 +0000

Say all you want about the inferior efficiency and so on, but if nothing else they have proven that it's viable, even commercially. So the rare earths are really not as vital as they have been made out to be.

New comment by ZedZark in "AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere"

ZedZark — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:02:34 +0000

If you compare this situation to before AI could successfully pretend to be human, it's not THAT much different. FOSS projects have always had to be mindful of the possibility of contributions from hostile parties wanting to add back doors and such. The only difference now is that an AI can overwhelm a maintainer with slop, in either commend or code form, or both.

New comment by ZedZark in "FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs"

ZedZark — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:19:31 +0000

A voluntary model would be nice - what X (more or less) does currently. You can elect to be verified by X, and it will show the badge, or you can opt out and not get the badge, but you can still use it.

If phones could reliably tag an incoming call as "ID provided" or not, then people who cared could screen calls appropriately, and people who wanted to protect their identity could still have a phone.

New comment by ZedZark in "Hyperspace"

ZedZark — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 16:39:24 +0000

I did this with two scripts - one that produces and cached sha1 sums of files, and another that consumes the output of the first (or any of the *sum progs) and produces stats about duplicate files, with options to delete or hard-link them.

New comment by ZedZark in "Trump Admin Emails Air Traffic Controllers: Quit Your Jobs"

ZedZark — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 07:23:36 +0000

The full message, if released, will paint a very different story.

New comment by ZedZark in "Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)"

ZedZark — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:30:08 +0000

Yep, this is a variation of "check the plug"

I find myself doing this all the time now I will temporarily add a line to cause a fatal error, to check that it's the right file (and, depending on the situation, also the right line)

New comment by ZedZark in "Ask HN: How do you maintain personal annotations for code you don't control?"

ZedZark — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 14:58:52 +0000

Maybe a combination of private fork with comments and separate markdown files with notes (maybe in the same private fork)

Consider using special "symbols" in comments like "MYDOCS_XXX" that you search for in your modified version of the code base, and refer to in other places. These will survive renames of function names etc by the upstream authors.

New comment by ZedZark in "Google's Shadow Campaigns"

ZedZark — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 13:23:11 +0000

Anyone remember that time Microsoft covertly gave SCO a bunch of money to wage lawfare against Linux vendors?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Mic...

New comment by ZedZark in "Google's Shadow Campaigns"

ZedZark — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 13:16:06 +0000

(Not saying either of of them are Nazis or Communists per se, just that neither of them is the Good Guy™)

New comment by ZedZark in "Google's Shadow Campaigns"

ZedZark — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 13:15:16 +0000

This is like reading an open letter from Stalin to Hitler

New comment by ZedZark in "Ask HN: The Required Fundamentals for Self-Taught Programming"

ZedZark — Thu, 30 May 2024 23:53:16 +0000

Feeling slightly called out right now