Hacker News: barnacs

New comment by barnacs in "Cloudflare Drop"

barnacs — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:50:21 +0000

I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!

New comment by barnacs in "GPT‑Live"

barnacs — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:23:58 +0000

This is getting way too dystopian for my taste. People in the know need to stop pushing the narrative that this is somehow anything more than statistical autocomplete.

New comment by barnacs in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

barnacs — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:55:52 +0000

I don't think most people have been inconvenienced enough yet. ID verification is invasive enough and should cause enough friction to push another bunch over the edge.

New comment by barnacs in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

barnacs — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:35:12 +0000

Hopefully this will give yet another push towards decentralized, open source services. Platforms where noone and everyone is responsible and the state does not get to decide the rules.

New comment by barnacs in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

barnacs — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:07:05 +0000

Just a reminder: LLMs are statistical models that predict the next token based on preceeding tokens. They have no feelings, goals, relationships, life experience, understanding of the human condition and so on. Treat them accordingly.

New comment by barnacs in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

barnacs — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:53:17 +0000

Get with the newspeak, it's called "sideloading" now and your corporate overlords get to dictate the terms.

New comment by barnacs in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

barnacs — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:57:25 +0000

In the end, your newly renamed "department of war" is just going to waste a bunch of your taxpayer money to purchase some useless overpriced tech from their cronies. My symphaties to all citizens.

New comment by barnacs in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

barnacs — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:15:36 +0000

I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years.

[0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

New comment by barnacs in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education – Revised for 2026"

barnacs — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:17:48 +0000

I don't think using git should necessarily be taught as a part of a CS education. Any self respecting engineer will be capable and have the curiosity and motivation to dig into it on their own. CS should give them the prereqs to do so, such as hashing, graphs, trees, etc.

New comment by barnacs in "Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust"

barnacs — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 14:51:28 +0000

If the fields of a structure or the string keys of an untyped map don't match then you don't have compatibility either way. The same is not true for restricting the set of valid values.

edit: To put it differently: To possibly be compatible with the nested "Circle" map, you need to know it is supposed to have a "Radius" key that is supposed to be a float. Type definitions just make this explicit. But just because your "Radius" can't be 0, you shouldn't make it incompatible with everything else operating on floats in general.

New comment by barnacs in "Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust"

barnacs — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:29:17 +0000

Every time you introduce a type for a "value invariant" you lose compatibility and force others to make cumbersome type conversions.

To me, invalid values are best expressed with optional error returns along with the value that are part of the function signature. Types are best used to only encode information about the hierarchy of structures composed of primitive types. They help define and navigate the representation of composite things as opposed to just having dynamic nested maps of arbitrary strings.

New comment by barnacs in "Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state"

barnacs — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:18:26 +0000

Agreed. "Be the change you want to see". In this case, both as a user and a professional.

New comment by barnacs in "Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state"

barnacs — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:05:00 +0000

> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products

That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?

This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.

It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?

New comment by barnacs in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

barnacs — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:18:59 +0000

Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the rest of the world.

New comment by barnacs in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

barnacs — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:11:45 +0000

Right, but next time your data may be threatened by some European idiot rather than one from the US.

To quote from my other comment:

> In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.

New comment by barnacs in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

barnacs — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:21:47 +0000

I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what I'm talking about.

But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for Greece when shit hit the fan.

New comment by barnacs in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

barnacs — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:14:49 +0000

> other important aspects

like what?

New comment by barnacs in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

barnacs — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:13:47 +0000

As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.

In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.

New comment by barnacs in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

barnacs — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:08:18 +0000

As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...

New comment by barnacs in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

barnacs — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:50:07 +0000

I remember the good old days when a "vape" was just a sturdy housing for a rechargable battery, some heating wire, cotton and juice. The power was determined by the resistance of the coils you built. Those things would last forever.