Hacker News: ba1afd89f34cb23

New comment by ba1afd89f34cb23 in "Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation"

ba1afd89f34cb23 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:54:47 +0000

The Solidaritätsprinzip is named that to distinguish it from the Äquivalenzprinzip (equivalency principle) of private insurance: with private insurance, your cost rate is determined by the services you would like to have covered as well as the assessed risk that you will consume these services as calculated by the insurance carrier's actuaries. In Germany (and other European countries), the public option insurance instead only uses your income to determine your rate: the insured risks are common and paid by everyone together instead of by the individual.

"Solidarity" is a pretty good term for that abstract idea. What would you like to suggest instead?

And yeah, I understand that people that do not buy into the concept of a society pooling together such risk to create a model that works best in the aggregate instead of emphasizing individual choice are going to hate everything about this. If you want to be able to save money in exchange for taking on risk, such a society can't let you easily do that because it'll inevitably lead to a tragedy of the commons; such a society would also likely help you anyway if you made the wrong risk trade-offs and become a burden to the state.

Also, let's be clear: this principle is still very popular in Germany. I haven't lived there in a long time so I was curious and gave it 30 seconds. Admittedly the source here is an insurance carrier, but they found in a survey that while 66% of Germans last year were worried about insurance costs and the financial sustainability of the German healthcare system, 73% support the solidarity principle (https://www.aok.de/pp/gg/update/solidaritaet-gkv/)

New comment by ba1afd89f34cb23 in "Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation"

ba1afd89f34cb23 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:30:32 +0000

> The fucked up part is the forced solidarity

Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.

New comment by ba1afd89f34cb23 in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

ba1afd89f34cb23 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:09:08 +0000

Do you have any external references to any commits that matter, for example in your communication platforms (emails, Slack) or your bug tracker? Or, worse yet, in places where they aren't just text format references, but used for things like CI/CD caching decisions or security scans?

Once you rehash the entire repo, every single one of those external references will be broken. Because no, there's no support for looking up old hash -> new hash or the reverse.

New comment by ba1afd89f34cb23 in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

ba1afd89f34cb23 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:05:12 +0000

Her entire section 2 (starting at 6:12) is basically about why git does not and will never allow mixing of SHA1 and SHA256.

The interop discussed is using copybara as a copy tool to move data from SHA1 based repos to SHA256 based repos and vice versa.

New comment by ba1afd89f34cb23 in "Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use"

ba1afd89f34cb23 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:39:34 +0000

You make a very good point. However, in this case, the deadline is two years in the past. From Article 12:

> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality.

> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL...