Hacker News: ar0

New comment by ar0 in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

ar0 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:17:20 +0000

To be clear this is only for the standalone Copilot chat or app and website; not for the “Copilot” services integrated into Office 365 etc.

New comment by ar0 in "Ask HN: Distributed data centers in our basements"

ar0 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:01:05 +0000

Not the same, but there are data centers that feed their excess heat into district heating, e.g. here:

https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...

New comment by ar0 in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

ar0 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:43:30 +0000

I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.

With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.

New comment by ar0 in "Apertus: An open, transparent, multilingual language model"

ar0 — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:05:07 +0000

It can be tried here: https://publicai.co/

The model and training data sets are on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/swiss-ai

Apertus: An open, transparent, multilingual language model

ar0 — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:03:17 +0000

Article URL: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/09/press-release-apertus-a-fully-open-transparent-multilingual-language-model.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45100638

Points: 16

# Comments: 4

New comment by ar0 in "Tariffs in American History"

ar0 — Mon, 26 May 2025 09:10:12 +0000

Yes, this statement is so old and wrong that it gets boring real quick…

You can just look at the roads of any country that has the same tariffs for U.S. and European cars and you will still not see all that many American cars there.

New comment by ar0 in "Is the use of reCAPTCHA GDPR-compliant?"

ar0 — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 10:45:29 +0000

This is a very shady website and thus not a good source for legal advice of any kind… they call themselves “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Datenschutz” (German society for data protection) but are actually located in Bulgaria. They are not any kind of “official” data protection organisation.

New comment by ar0 in "Major Microsoft 365 outage caused by Azure configuration change"

ar0 — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 14:10:36 +0000

The German BSI (Federal Office for IT Security) quotes the advisory from CrowdStrike (which is behind their customer login portal) as saying you need to roll-back to snapshots prior to 04:09 UTC:

https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Cybersicherheitswarnungen...

So your Redditor saying 05:00 UTC seems to be close.

New comment by ar0 in "How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business"

ar0 — Thu, 30 May 2024 08:01:57 +0000

I don’t know… I think a very big reason why people don’t take taxis is because they are very expensive especially for longer rides. This seems like a thing robo taxis might change. If the driver goes away, they shouldn’t be much more expensive than e.g. car rentals.

The Apple curl security incident 12604

ar0 — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 21:59:07 +0000

Article URL: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/03/08/the-apple-curl-security-incident-12604/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39647025

Points: 15

# Comments: 2

New comment by ar0 in "Thanks FedEx, this is why we keep getting phished"

ar0 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:45:41 +0000

I do not read this court decision like that at all: the point of contention there seems to be that the customer was just sent a link to a webpage (where the contractual terms can be changed from under him at will by the company, thus this not being durable). The court makes it pretty clear in my (non-lawyer) opinion that attaching a PDF to the email would have been fine.

New comment by ar0 in "Roundcube open-source webmail software merges with Nextcloud"

ar0 — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 14:27:06 +0000

I don’t know… the overall tone seems to be a bit too negative for me here.

I have used Nextcloud at home for years now without issues and we also used it at a large university where it worked just fine (from a user perspective; I don’t know if it gave the administrators nightmares). I do agree that they should invest more time in polish and stability and less in swanky new features that many won’t need, but that would not lead me to discourage anyone from using (or at least trying) Nextcloud.

New comment by ar0 in "Teen-age fentanyl deaths in a Texas county"

ar0 — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 06:19:33 +0000

This thread is an interesting example on how not very well defined terms can let people talk past each other… the original poster suggested “let’s try to be more like France, where this problem is solved”, the next one said “no, more liberalism is not the solution” (apparently implying that liberalism is what France does) and now someone states you can’t get more liberal than California, listing as examples things none of which work like that in France!

Regardless of the merits of each argument (I am doubtful if you can easily transfer examples from one country to another) we obviously have people arguing with each other here based on completely different definitions of key terms in the discussion.

New comment by ar0 in "Stripe increases price for business in the European Economic Area"

ar0 — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:16:56 +0000

There are lots of other ways credit card companies can make money: - Higher interchange fees when you purchase something outside of the EEA - Currency conversion when you buy something not in EUR - High interest payments when you do not pay off your balance in full on time

On average, it will also not be a 60 day interest free loan: the "average" transaction will happen in the middle of the billing cycle, so that gives you 15 days until the invoice is sent, and many people I know pay their invoices much earlier than after the 30 days payment term.

New comment by ar0 in "Stripe increases price for business in the European Economic Area"

ar0 — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:13:17 +0000

The answer is in the original Stripe article: The merchant pays much higher fees when you pay with your US credit card than when you pay with a EEA credit card because the interchange limits only apply to purchases within the EEA made with a "standard" EEA credit card (corporate cards are also exempt, which is why Stripe is charging higher fees for them as well).

New comment by ar0 in "Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS"

ar0 — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 13:37:17 +0000

> I’m using productivity as a measurement. Ideally, productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more productive in this sense, so it’s more than just butts in seats.

Actually, the differences are quite small and in 2017 Germany overtook the US in labour productivity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

New comment by ar0 in "Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges"

ar0 — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 05:11:26 +0000

I don’t know. Switzerland works the same way and they have votes more often than every 6 months. (Also the average German will vote more often than just every 4 years due to European, national, state-level and regional elections.)

New comment by ar0 in "Show HN: Fruits – Sell digital products via your website, newsletter, etc"

ar0 — Fri, 13 May 2022 11:08:43 +0000

Great idea. However, I think you need to be careful in the VAT area not to overpromise: I selected “selling from Switzerland to Switzerland” and your calculator quoted a VAT of 0%, which is of course false (selling stuff in Switzerland requires deducting 7.7% VAT).

My guess would be that you only cover VAT within the EU, but of course there are VAT regimes outside of the EU too; so “we also take care of VAT collection for you” does not seem to apply in all cases.

New comment by ar0 in "Cities with Nice Weather"

ar0 — Fri, 13 May 2022 09:03:15 +0000

Yes, that also immediately focussed my attention… We have friends from Iceland and I have since added Reykjavik to my weather app — to feel good that weather there is even more miserable than where I currently am, wherever that may be.

An obvious topic that seems missing from “good weather” is the amount and duration of rainfall.

Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today

ar0 — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 21:44:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ns.nl/en/travel-information/calamities/sunday-3-april-no-more-ns-trains.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30901009

Points: 651

# Comments: 355