Hacker News: ajnin

New comment by ajnin in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

ajnin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:41:13 +0000

Maybe they wouldn't care about the ads but the residential proxy is another story. I'm sure lots of problematic stuff goes through that and you take the risk of being associated with it.

New comment by ajnin in "Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly"

ajnin — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:36:18 +0000

Not to pile up on the negativity, but looking at the SDK, first reaction is it's fucking C++ ? Can't wait for my watch to crash in the middle of something. And second reaction, when I see signatures like this :

  void TrackFaceTotal::setDistance(float dist, bool isImperial);
  void TrackFaceOverview::setPace(float pace);

and

  bool     unitsImperial;

littered everywhere, it makes my heart sink a little. Can't we have some data types and data modeling in 2026 please ? And leave unit conversion at the front end where it should be and not have to worry about it in every single core API ?

New comment by ajnin in "Our position on open-weights models"

ajnin — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:04:33 +0000

I feel like this whole discussion boils down to one question (as commonly when considering political issues) : do we want a framework that favors progress globally for everyone, or do we want to ensure superiority of some above the others ?

Sure that's simplistic, but human behavior is not that complex, there are a few basic needs and wants that drive everything. In that specific case, those currently in a dominating position (Anthropic, the US) want to put hurdles (regulations) to make it more difficult for others to catch up, and everyone else want to join forces to overtake them.

New comment by ajnin in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

ajnin — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:27:00 +0000

Latest venture of the ilk behind all that : device attestation for Linux (Amutable). Yes, they clearly have an agenda and are being quite successful at pushing it.

New comment by ajnin in "Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere"

ajnin — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:08:17 +0000

It's called cut and paste (2 actions), not "move" or otherwise. Being consistent with decades of software usage is more important that whatever you think is "broken" or not, because that's not actually the case, just another model of how to do things. The Excel example is particularly interesting, Excel does something similar, so when you "cut" ("ghost" version) and paste in a cell that overlaps with the range being cut, it breaks completely, which it wouldn't if it did the simple "remove cells, put them somewhere in memory, paste them to new location".

New comment by ajnin in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

ajnin — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:34:41 +0000

12k is obviously a large number of preventable deaths, especially, and it's a huge difference with diseases, when you consider that some of those deaths are people getting killed by drunk drivers. I don't think there is any acceptable number of people that did absolutely nothing wrong getting killed by a drunk or inattentive driver.

New comment by ajnin in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"

ajnin — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:17:44 +0000

This is part of a large movement to end personal computing as we know it, and give all control over our digital lives to the mega corporations. It is already impossible to use some national ID or banking apps on non-Apple and non-Google phones. (say GrapheneOS), giving them an immense edge in the market, and they're using that domination to add more restrictions like installing non-play store apps on Android. This goes bit by bit, try to add a restriction, go back enough to quiet the backlash, try again. This new law is a foot in the door to achieve the same restrictions on PCs. PCs are the last open computing platform and bastions of personal digital freedom and thus they must be destroyed by capitalists and governments. Once the technical means have been put in place to restrict access to some services, the system can be hardened : impose that the age checks can't be tampered with by using a TPU module, impose a link to the individual's identity so that all online activity can be traced to anyone. Pretenses are easy to find : protect children, block sex offenders from accessing dating sites, and so on. At this point I'm pretty convinced we're geared towards a global totalitarian regime, and there's a lot of evidence.

New comment by ajnin in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

ajnin — Sun, 17 May 2026 03:12:14 +0000

Your two paragraphs are completely contradictory. I agree with the first one.

New comment by ajnin in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

ajnin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:58:25 +0000

It definitely feels like there's a dedicated core of people insisting on removing choice from the Linux ecosystem. RedHat, Gnome, fredesktop.org ... they have an ideology and a strategy to make it dominant in the Linux world and it does not feel nice to many people.

New comment by ajnin in "RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one"

ajnin — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:50:02 +0000

This article is using "fake" for click-bait purposes, implying some kind of scam, in fact it's just a filler RGB stick to make pretty lights inside your case, nothing nefarious about it and it's clear when you buy, but probably wouldn't be featured on HN without it.

New comment by ajnin in "RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one"

ajnin — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:48:29 +0000

"I'd like 32G but I can't afford 2x16G right now so I'll buy a single stick and keep a slot open for later when prices are better or I get more available money". Seems pretty easy to understand.

New comment by ajnin in "As US missiles leave South Korea, the Philippines asks: are we next?"

ajnin — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:26:54 +0000

I'm amazed by the lengths Americans will go to try to convince themselves they're the good guys. America never has and never will go to war to liberate a people from oppression and spread democracy or other fairy tale. America goes to war for one thing and that is defend the interests of America and its proxy in the middle East, Israel.

So the interests of the US are the continuation of its imperialist control over the world through oil and the dollar, and those of Israel the expansion of its hegemonic domination over the middle East.

However this time, while Israel does indeed extend its hegemonic ambitions over the region by invading and bombing Lebanon, the US seem not to be in total control of what's happening in oil markets, the strait of Hormuz, and the toppling of the Iranian regime. There are many factors why, among which the fact that the regime has prepared for years for such a scenario and can not easily be killed by decapitation, and that it actually has partisans and the Iranian people is not going to simply revolt as one.

This war is also a highly assymetrical one, and that's why the comparison with Vietnam is valid.

New comment by ajnin in "No right to relicense this project"

ajnin — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:54:19 +0000

Interestingly the original author ported the code from the Mozilla C++ version which is licensed as "MPL 1.1 or LGPL" (it's a bit unclear as the readme says that but the license file mentions only MPL). So the author did already relicence the project in a way by licensing the port as LGPL only.

New comment by ajnin in "Microgpt"

ajnin — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:15:46 +0000

The future right now looks more like everything in remote datacenters, no autonomous capabilities and no control by the user. But I like yours better.

New comment by ajnin in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

ajnin — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:56:20 +0000

That's a non sequitur. Creating long-term professional politicians is not going to create legislators competent in the various domains they legislate on. It's going to create politicians competent at being elected long term, whatever the means.

New comment by ajnin in "DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation"

ajnin — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:27:39 +0000

DNSSEC is encouraged ("SHOULD" wording) in the RFC draft : https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-acme-dns-pe...

New comment by ajnin in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

ajnin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 04:10:43 +0000

I guess what they're saying is that, for example, a password of length 12 has about 71 bits of entropy if using an alphabet of 62 characters, and 76 bits with an alphabet of 82 characters. But if you only increase the length by 1 you already get 77 bits with 62 characters only. So length beats adding special chars in that sense.

New comment by ajnin in "Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code"

ajnin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:46:25 +0000

> I was tempted to try it until I saw the curl | bash pipe, then no

I don't quite get that argument. It's the same as the old download installer from random website, double click to run that people have been doing for decades. It only skips the download step. And it's arguably better since at least you can review the contents. When building a Go program it will also happily download stuff from github but I've seen way less complaints about that. And to be fair it's also been an infection vector, from people installing things from shady places (or reputable places but with ill-intent like installing unwanted browser toolbars, DRM rootkits ...), but it's nothing new. Same advice applies, know what you're doing, use reputable sources.

What's a better alternative ?

New comment by ajnin in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

ajnin — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:30:32 +0000

This coating looks like it can selectively make parts of the satellite radiators or insulators, as to regulate temperature. But I don't think it can change the fundamental physics of radiating unwanted heat and that you can't do better than black body radiation.

New comment by ajnin in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

ajnin — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:27:20 +0000

Some people just can't stop making other's lives more miserable, can they.