Hacker News: bitmasher9

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:30:37 +0000

Sometimes it is a cause vs causation. Sometimes the scientist didn’t adjust for a variable that clearly would impact both fields they were measuring. To make such a claim, I think it’s appropriate to name that hypothetical third variable. Otherwise the comment is so general it applies to all statistical studies.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:11:27 +0000

I think that’s a difference in implementation details, not a difference in what it fundamentally is.

I’m not arguing that there aren’t differences between the two, I’m arguing that they are fundamentally the same solution (gather all of the software in one location with) to same problem (how can I safely download some software).

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:08:08 +0000

I don’t understand how they aren’t both generalized to “distributes software with versioning at a large scale”

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:06:38 +0000

Debian stable has over 69,000 packages, which is more then some languages have…

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:15:29 +0000

It’s foolish to feel safe because your package management solution hasn’t been attacked yet.

The attack vector is generalized.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Dependabot version updates introduce default package cooldown"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:14:25 +0000

They are literally solving the same problem, it’s just that distro packages operate on a lower level and thus receive more scrutiny. There have been plenty of examples of poisoned Linux packages, both at the source level and at the package level.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

bitmasher9 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:13:49 +0000

Self study can only go so far, and often when someone self studies there are obvious gaps in their education compared to someone that entered a formal program.

Studying in a university has the advantage of learning from experts and being surrounded by people that are also learning from experts. This has significant advantages.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

bitmasher9 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:11:09 +0000

> I would argue that a child has a right to a certain number of years of education.

I would also argue society is better if its people are more educated.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Grok 4.5"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:53:36 +0000

How is this any different than the browser wars? We use to have a diverse market full of choices, and now we have Chromium (almost all market share) and Firefox/Safari on the edges.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

bitmasher9 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:58:20 +0000

I wonder how hard they would press an estate. It’s bad PR to go after widows and surviving children, and the data has already escaped.

This is something they’d want to settle quietly, so the family would have leverage.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "CarPlay Is Additive"

bitmasher9 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:52:01 +0000

Additionally self driving vehicles are promising to reduce the total number of collisions, and collision associated repair is a significant portion of all auto mechanic activity.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Virginia bans sale of geolocation data"

bitmasher9 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 04:21:51 +0000

Yeah, someone is at risk of trafficking the gps data out of Virginia initially.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "CarPlay Is Additive"

bitmasher9 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 04:14:06 +0000

The car companies need to stay in their lanes on this one. You’re risking selling a >$40k piece of hardware that requires professional service every six months in order to sell me $240/yr in software subscriptions.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "OpenAI ‘in early talks to give 5% stake to US government’"

bitmasher9 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:23:16 +0000

In a proper capitalist society the government defines the rules of the market, aligned with the interests of several parties, and then companies compete within that well regulated and fair environment. The only incentive the government should have is to grow the entire market, so that they can collect more tax. There might be minor exceptions to protect key industries like food production or defense, but these should be a small as possible to ensure healthy competition.

It’s something entirely different when the government starts taking a stake in individual companies instead of the market as a whole. This can easily bias the government to pick OpenAI for certain contracts, or enact laws that benefit OpenAI more than its competitors. It reduces competition which hurts the overall economy, and it is an obvious vector for corruption which hurts the efficiency of the government.

It’s great if we can leverage AI to design the next great government system. A 5% stake feels more like a bribe to help push through some of these datacenter projects and enact friendly laws.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:25:49 +0000

Except Sony is notoriously bad at actually securing their consoles.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

bitmasher9 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:09:55 +0000

512GB unified memory is targeting local inference of large models, or local training of non-frontier models.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:09:51 +0000

This is the most uncharitable outlook on the increase of PRs. It may be true for some contributors, but any company reviewing their GitHub will see that the code is largely spam.

I think most AI generated code is people that want to help the project, but maybe aren’t familiar with the standards and norms.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Steam Machine launches today"

bitmasher9 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:03:24 +0000

I was a bit confused by the term “disk” until I realized you’re talking about NVMe.

A relic from “Hard Disk Drive”, which was about two persistent storage technologies ago.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Steam Machine launches today"

bitmasher9 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:50:38 +0000

It’s always fantastic to read a success story of migrating to Linux gaming from Windows. As Windows gets worse and worse there will be more people joining us.

Even without buying you can send Linux gaming signals by playing on Linux and participating in the hardware survey.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Identity verification on Claude"

bitmasher9 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:35:12 +0000

Net neutrality was about processing network traffic differently based on who was sending the packets.

It’s not entirely dissimilar.