Hacker News: cbdumas

New comment by cbdumas in "The UK's new under-16 social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents"

cbdumas — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:24:44 +0000

If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)

New comment by cbdumas in "10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module"

cbdumas — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:51:31 +0000

There are probably still a lot of cases where you would want PoE though right? Cameras, WAPs, etc.

New comment by cbdumas in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

cbdumas — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:12:52 +0000

The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense

New comment by cbdumas in "In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?"

cbdumas — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:16:11 +0000

> It's like math was forced to run on assembly language despite there were more high-level languages available and more apt for the job.

I'm not a mathematician but that doesn't sound right to me. Most math I did in school is comprised concepts many many layers of abstraction away from its foundations. What did you mean by this?

New comment by cbdumas in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

cbdumas — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:57:40 +0000

That may be true but the sense I get from Gen Z folks who I've talked to is that for them Discord is almost more of a social network for interacting with a community. Their activity might be centered around gaming but they're using Discord to find people they don't already know to play with, talk about the game, etc. For those folks, Mumble will not be even close to an alternative to discord.

Myself, though, I basically only use it to talk to the same guys I've been gaming with since we met in middle school 20-some years ago, and for that Mumble seems perfect.

New comment by cbdumas in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

cbdumas — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 05:12:41 +0000

I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.

I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.

New comment by cbdumas in "Why did containers happen?"

cbdumas — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 20:32:58 +0000

What does the 'ad network and search engine' have to do with it? Wouldn't any organization who serves lots of traffic have the same cost cutting goals you mentioned?

New comment by cbdumas in "Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy"

cbdumas — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:13:38 +0000

> Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web.

It seems your confusion stems from this premise. Is it possible this is not a correct assumption?

New comment by cbdumas in "Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft"

cbdumas — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:19:36 +0000

As I commute on a motorcycle (often in the rain, causing lower visibility) this is terrifying to me and I hope regulators in my state don't let it happen here until Tesla can prove their "camera only" approach is safe.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...

New comment by cbdumas in "Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync"

cbdumas — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:52:32 +0000

In that case wouldn't you be better off just disabling 2FA? The problem with the cloud sync is that users like the one in the article think they have 2FA but in fact if their Google account is compromised all their accounts using Google Authenticator TOTP second factors are also compromised.

New comment by cbdumas in "Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync"

cbdumas — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 19:39:49 +0000

Typically you print out recovery codes and keep them somewhere safe

New comment by cbdumas in "Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync"

cbdumas — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 19:37:25 +0000

> The attacker already had access to ... my Google Authenticator codes, because Google had cloud-synced my codes.

This was such an obvious mis-feature I can't believe they actually rolled it out. For those using Google Authenticator you can and should disable cloud sync of your TOTP codes.

New comment by cbdumas in "Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World"

cbdumas — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:06:06 +0000

> And then there’s the code that we rely on for bank transactions, package deliveries, medical results, satellite launches, airline flight paths, self-driving cars, mortgage payments, and nuclear power plants. This is durable code, and it’s going to stay that way.

I can tell you from first hand experience that, since long before LLMs were invented, critical software supporting these industries is held together with duct tape and baling wire (and Excel). "Durable" does not mean "good". In my experience production code is often ugly, poorly abstracted, full of special cases and hacks, but most importantly it works.

New comment by cbdumas in "Notion releases offline mode"

cbdumas — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 19:40:51 +0000

> I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.

I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to

New comment by cbdumas in "The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know"

cbdumas — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 22:57:07 +0000

A few years ago I came across (probably on HN) this little Firefox extension that I quite like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fraidycat/ . Seems like it could help you fill this use case although as other commenters are saying I'm not sure I understand the distinction with RSS

New comment by cbdumas in "Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction"

cbdumas — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 23:06:41 +0000

I don't know anything about this startup but this is definitely an important problem worth solving https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...

New comment by cbdumas in "What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?"

cbdumas — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 22:29:41 +0000

How does this square with the fact that fertility declines as income rises, both within and across societies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

New comment by cbdumas in "FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores"

cbdumas — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:06:35 +0000

NYTimes publishes a fantastic calculator [0] to help make this kind of rent vs. buy decision. It's not always that clear cut.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

New comment by cbdumas in "FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores"

cbdumas — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:03:28 +0000

NYTimes has a great calculator for doing just that https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

New comment by cbdumas in "Gig Companies Violate Workers Rights"

cbdumas — Tue, 13 May 2025 00:12:07 +0000

My taxi driver on my last time in France (in 2022 I believe) almost made us miss our train from Marseilles to Paris as he drove us around looking for an ATM because he insisted he "left his credit card reader at home". I do not miss taxis and their scummy drivers one bit.