Hacker News: ahartmetz

New comment by ahartmetz in "Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)"

ahartmetz — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:22:51 +0000

Pinging the absolute jerkwads at amutable.com who state that it's not their problem how their remote attestation technology will be used.

New comment by ahartmetz in "How does IKEA come up with names for its products?"

ahartmetz — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:35:39 +0000

They didn't assume German pronunciation without reason. The umlaut dots aren't for decoration in German and ä, ö, ü only sound one way - including in Swedish, which has ä and ö, too. There is no ü in Swedish maybe because the Swedish u sounds like the German ü already (and shifting it further would just make it sound something like an i).

New comment by ahartmetz in "Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union"

ahartmetz — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:39:02 +0000

Asking innocent questions often works better than confrontation, but yeah, this elevated importance of utmost free speech doesn't survive the Atlantic crossing and can be used to maliciously pooh-pooh Europe to an American audience.

New comment by ahartmetz in "Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union"

ahartmetz — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:19:57 +0000

By the EU and in Germany, really... What is censored in other member states isn't in the news, but for all I know it's also not much and not important.

Which censorship do you consider problematic?

New comment by ahartmetz in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

ahartmetz — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:19:57 +0000

>typically your forced to sign paperwork saying your responsible for anything insurance refuses to pay

Now that is some sick shit. Making every doctor's visit a gamble you might lose, discouraging people from seeing a doctor.

New comment by ahartmetz in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

ahartmetz — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:48:11 +0000

How about when the market fails customers, still no government involvement? Food and drugs regulation, environment stuff (you are here) and so on?

New comment by ahartmetz in "Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union"

ahartmetz — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:53:16 +0000

Whatever censorship exists in the EU is really inconsequential. What bothers me is the spying.

New comment by ahartmetz in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

ahartmetz — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:11:53 +0000

Russia has been a corrupt, inefficient and jealous country for at least the last 300 years or so. NATO was not necessary to continue that great tradition.

New comment by ahartmetz in "Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative"

ahartmetz — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:38:55 +0000

>What does it even mean to "win the AI race" ?

Creating a world-ruling AGI which feels mild sympathy for its creators, sharing some table scraps with them. Not sure if /s...

New comment by ahartmetz in "ao486: x86-compatible Verilog core implementing all features of a 486 SX (2014)"

ahartmetz — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 14:01:05 +0000

Can you describe why z386 is much faster than the supposedly highly optimized ao486? Is the original microcode (and corresponding chip architecture) that good?

New comment by ahartmetz in "This Hi-Fi Tape Recorder Changed Radio Forever"

ahartmetz — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:56:33 +0000

Germany and Germans involved in Nazi crimes benefited hugely from two or three things: The need to build a strong opposition to the USSR quickly, the experience of oppressive WW1 peace treaties leading to WW2, and more sympathy for fascism than communism in US political circles.

New comment by ahartmetz in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

ahartmetz — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:18:43 +0000

They trade stocks quickly with computers.

New comment by ahartmetz in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

ahartmetz — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:47:38 +0000

It feels like they have a bunch of people without good sense of writing style tune the writing style. That, or they cannot or refuse to (short term popularity metrics) predict how a tuning will turn out in the long run when people have plenty of opportunity to get tired of it.

New comment by ahartmetz in "The Indo-European Family Tree"

ahartmetz — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:39:37 +0000

Yiddish is very similar to Palatinate / Hesse dialect simply because many Jews used to live in that region. I grew up in Palatinate - the only strange things about Yiddish for me are the spellings and the occasional words of Hebrew or other non-German origin. Some Hebrew words are actually part of the Palatinate dialect through the Jewish connection, such as Zores (fight / argument / discord / trouble) or machulle (bankrupt).

New comment by ahartmetz in "Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes"

ahartmetz — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:46:15 +0000

Read optimized? That is funny because reading logs from journald is dog slow compared to, you know, log files.

New comment by ahartmetz in "Antiqua–Fraktur dispute"

ahartmetz — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:28:22 +0000

He was a failed artist and bohemian before his uhm "success".

New comment by ahartmetz in "Antiqua–Fraktur dispute"

ahartmetz — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:48:31 +0000

The APPD is using Fraktur in the punk rock tradition, which I think is from the UK, where using an "enemy" font had shock value.

New comment by ahartmetz in "LinkedIn CringeBot 3000"

ahartmetz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 09:08:35 +0000

Can you post the result? My attempt of "Using AI for a novel financial scam" / "You go girl" didn't go through.

New comment by ahartmetz in "If the American Dream Is Dead, No One Told the People Who Are Still Chasing It"

ahartmetz — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:17:44 +0000

Are you sure that the US have meaningfully more freedom of choice than other advanced economies? Americans sometimes have strange ideas about the backwardness of the rest of the world.

New comment by ahartmetz in "OpenSSH 10.5/10.5p1"

ahartmetz — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:30:11 +0000

Yeah, I've occasionally had to divine from verbose debug output that the remote host didn't like more than three or so public key attempts before requiring another auth type.