Hacker News: bretthoerner

New comment by bretthoerner in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

bretthoerner — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:54:44 +0000

Oh, lol. My Tesla Robotaxi children. I meant swap human drivers.

New comment by bretthoerner in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

bretthoerner — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:07:31 +0000

Where do you live that humans are punished for "accidents"? You can run someone over in America and it's basically an "oopsie, do better next time!"

New comment by bretthoerner in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

bretthoerner — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:03:24 +0000

It's a pool. If all the drunks switch to autonomous vehicles then we all win. If all the school teachers switch to autonomous vehicles then the drunks lose.

In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.

New comment by bretthoerner in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

bretthoerner — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:57:44 +0000

You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US.

Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want.

I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen.

If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.

Durable Objects Are Made for Agents

bretthoerner — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 01:10:47 +0000

Article URL: https://calv.info/durable-objects-are-made-for-agents

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015615

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bretthoerner in "Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026"

bretthoerner — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:51:49 +0000

> even if the client had passed a value it would have still done exactly the same thing, as the value of "v" (or anything from the request) is not used in that block

If they passed in any value, they would have entered the block and returned early with the results of FetchPrefixesPendingDeletion.

From the post:

> this was implemented as part of a regularly running sub-task that checks for BYOIP prefixes that should be removed, and then removes them.

They expected to drop into the block of code above, but since they didn't, they returned all routes.

Mozilla's Response to Proposed Remedies in U.S. vs. Google LLC

bretthoerner — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 13:20:12 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/proposed-remedies-browsers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43332154

Points: 9

# Comments: 7

New comment by bretthoerner in "Global EV Charging Points with Open Charge Map"

bretthoerner — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:53:48 +0000

We had the same experience going ~800mi in a day (each way; so we did this twice). We also had 3 kids in the car, so 5 people total... or to put it another way, approximately 500% more people in our EV than the big SUVs driving next to us.

A guy at one stop in TX was in a huge Excursion and was walking his dog near the charger, laughed and said "you're going to be here a while." We were in and out before he was. The FUD is extremely strong still. Our drive (CO to North TX) has to be one of the least populated (and anti-EV) drives in America and there was still no range or charge speed anxiety.

New comment by bretthoerner in "FTC announces rule banning noncompetes"

bretthoerner — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 19:37:11 +0000

My attorney friends tell me that the FTC doesn't really have the ability to do this, since contract law is part of state law. (My poor paraphrasing, not theirs.)

I've been surprised I haven't seen this mentioned on social media or in the news. Are my friends wrong, or are people celebrating because this is just a step in the right direction even if it may not do anything yet?

New comment by bretthoerner in "Our biggest ever river catch?"

bretthoerner — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 02:00:07 +0000

> Because they would then trade those like carbon offsets or find away to ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage.

Isn't that the point?

I'm not arguing (or not arguing) for this solution, but charging people the cost of cleanup and allowing them to "ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage" seems like an improvement on the status quo? Because the local government collecting the tax would now have funds to put toward the solution. This is classic internalizing of what were externalities.

New comment by bretthoerner in "TinySSH is a small SSH server using NaCl, TweetNaCl"

bretthoerner — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 14:00:55 +0000

> how do you make sure the boot has not been compromised and that you are not just sending the password to the bad guys?

In my case, I can't. This is a NAS in my house and this is mostly to prevent me from having to go to another room and plug in a monitor and keyboard. (Also, I've done this from across the country after a power outage.)

The threat vectors I'm protecting against are I guess mostly theft of the entire machine, or forgetting to wipe the drives when I eventually toss them out. Mostly, it's just fun practice because I'm a nerd and every drive should be encrypted.

For my use-case, the auto-unlock-by-polling-a-specific-LAN-IP linked in this thread would probably be fine, for example.

New comment by bretthoerner in "TinySSH is a small SSH server using NaCl, TweetNaCl"

bretthoerner — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 13:39:36 +0000

All fair, I guess I just landed on mkinitcpio-tinyssh first and it was my introduction to the idea, and only took a few seconds to setup. I'll switch to openssh if I ever have issues, but this has been working fine for many years, so I'm no rush.

New comment by bretthoerner in "TinySSH is a small SSH server using NaCl, TweetNaCl"

bretthoerner — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 13:29:36 +0000

Ah, I've never used DropBear. I don't know how one could be better than another for my simple use case, honestly.

New comment by bretthoerner in "TinySSH is a small SSH server using NaCl, TweetNaCl"

bretthoerner — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 13:16:41 +0000

tinyssh is great. One use case for it that people may not know about: using it during Linux boot so you can remotely unlock encrypted drives. I have a headless NAS server that uses dm-crypt/LUKS under ZFS. When I update my kernel/ZFS I remotely reboot the server, wait a few seconds, and then ssh into a tinyssh powered encryption key prompt to unlock the drives. (I am immediately booted from ssh, as tinyssh exits.) I can then ssh again a few seconds later and I'm hitting openssh on a fully booted machine that wasn't able to open the drives without my intervention.

https://github.com/grazzolini/mkinitcpio-tinyssh