<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: colimbarna</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=colimbarna</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:34:02 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=colimbarna" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "DOJ filed paperwork to US District Court to force Google to spin off Chrome [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Google will be prohibited from doing that under the DOJ's proposal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2024 03:54:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42211032</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42211032</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42211032</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree with you, but I go one step further: I am disappointed by OSM raster tiles and especially Google's digital tiles because even they show barely enough information, if you compare them to old style printed street directories. I think they also have a tendency to avoid crowding by omitting important things in busy spaces and showing useless things in empty spaces, whereas the correct thing to do is to show the important things in the busy spaces precisely to indicate that they're busy spaces. And I think there are better things that can be done than just showing trivia if you consider the local area (e.g. a private tennis court might be better off not shown in especially if there's not a great density of mapped objects, but perhaps it's relevant at a resort).<p>But that's a lot of work, and whereas it's easy to add extra trivia to OSM it's much harder to add extra detail to tiles.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Nov 2024 03:45:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190655</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42190655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sometimes the alternative blows up in your face though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Nov 2024 22:55:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178034</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178034</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42178034</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "SQL Injection Isn't Dead: Smuggling Queries at the Protocol Level"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree, I also dislike the term SQL injection. But the problem isn't that there is a query, there problem is that the source code of one program is constructed by string manipulation in the source code of another program. XSS issues (where javascript can be embedded into a string that is supposed to be a value in a HTML document) are the same. Also occurs with shell scripts. The goal has to be to avoid such manual processes. Between lower level languages, it's customary to export a function call in a standard ABI. It should also be the same here: regard queries as function calls in a foreign language. Javascript is basically there, but query languages only have fits and starts (e.g. you often have some syntax like `SELECT * FROM "tbl" where "field" = ?` which can then accept the parameter in a form that is intended for transferring user values) and generally rely on good hygiene and ORMs to protect the end user.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Aug 2024 03:31:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41252912</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41252912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41252912</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "GitHub was down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you mean you switched to self-managed GitLab, or you have a self-managed GitLab that you keep around as a backup plan?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Aug 2024 02:17:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41252571</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41252571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41252571</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "GitHub was down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's closer to the truth than you usually get. They're having a bad day, it's completely true. It's the start of my day, but I guess this is the middle of the night for them. There's no such thing as unicorns, but that just highlights the metaphorical nature of the remaining claim - getting Unicorns under control means solving their problems. Normally "professional" corporate speak means avoiding saying anything whose meaning is plain on its face and disconfirmable while avoiding the implication that the company is run and operated by humans. This is a model. (Obviously the came up with the message in advance, which just goes to show that someone in the company is well enough rounded to know that if it is displayed, they're having a bad day.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2024 23:51:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251929</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251929</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251929</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Google Pixel 9 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hold for me is pretty good. I've never used the phonetree feature, but I think it's often the case that I don't know which button I need to press: I have to listen to them all first, then decide which one. Commonly I have to listen to the tree twice: once to decide, and once to find out what to click. I'll probably look for the phonetree next time, so I can just read over it and find what I want. I agree it would be much better to preload it, but that might not be plausible due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2024 02:45:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242069</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242069</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41242069</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't it entirely dependent on the airlines, what counts as one itinery? How could I contractually obligate them to something they didn't agree to be contractually obligated to?<p>(BTW: I've had multiairline itineraries many times. I think a lot of airlines are perfectly happy to do it because they can't fly domestic in that country and the domestic airline doesn't fly international. Also, there have been times when I haven't been able to, and I've been worried about it, and I got to the airport for manual checkin, and they've said "oh, i see you have an ongoing flight to such-and-such, do you want me to check you in for the whole journey?")</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2024 07:08:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158796</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158796</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158796</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can't believe they haven't started using three digits and an emoji.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2024 06:52:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158700</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158700</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158700</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cookie disclaimers are not GDPR. They're also completely optional; you can have a fully functional modern website that stores state in cookies and not put in a cookie banner. Businesses make choices not to do that and we've become stuck at a local suboptimum.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2024 06:12:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158538</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158538</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158538</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes please! Firefox used to have a fantastic feature where I could crash it, and it would have a tab that contained my previous session within it. It would be there forever, between restarts and restores. I could have a kind of chain of sessions. Sometimes, I would deliberately crash the browser because there were too many, but I still had this bunch of tabs which I wanted to be nearly active. At some point, they deleted the feature - you get one chance to restore your previous session, and after that poof - gone. (I think that decision was pure evil on their part - who goes around and decides to delete a users data? And what's wrong with letting me decide how much of my drive I want to dedicate to storing open tabs? But whatever.)<p>The experience made me realise that what you describe is exactly what I'm trying to do. I have pages I care about. I want them findable when I get back to it, even if that means three years hence. And there are other pages which I just visited once, like a news article, or which occupied me for three weeks, like documentation for a problem I've now solved. The act of closing a tab is a communication to the web browser. I wish it would listen to it.<p>I could also do with a searchable, browsable list of open tabs. I was recently searching for a car. Then I bought one. So I need to go back and find all the tabs about cars and close them. I want a fully interactive window like an oldschool history window that lets me find all my open tabs about cars and close them, no matter which window they're in - unless I see that it's my car's user manual or my service schedule, in which case maybe I want to keep it open for the next five years.<p>On the other hand, when I learnt about % in the searchbox, it was a gamechanger. Finally I could find and reuse the tab that is open, instead of the way by default Firefox prioritises search results over open tabs.<p>(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign. What's the point? Because their designer couldn't handle the idea of a slightly smaller font each time an order of magnitude is exceeded? Why not let me live with the costs of my actions? Also, an easier way to manage tabs on Firefox mobile. But maybe just better tab management in general.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2024 03:58:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158082</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158082</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158082</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "SnowflakeOS: Beginner friendly and GUI focused NixOS variant"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you want to go beyond writing a configuration.nix then you don't want a beginner friendly anything. Configuration.nix does at least as much as any user-friendly operating system does.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2024 03:39:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125936</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125936</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125936</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> On the other hand, the goal is to get away with fraud, not to convince an international community who will likely look for any confirmation of their suspicion.<p>Despite my joke in a sibling comment, this is key. When you're a politician everything is power relations. Sometimes it's necessary to show that you have the power to semi-obviously rig an election. Your bargaining position is different if it requires military force to remove you vs just an unhappy electorate. You can achieve different things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jul 2024 23:37:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124687</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124687</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124687</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks. Note to self: Next time I want to rig election results, generate a random integer between 54.2% and 54.3% of the vote and count it as the winner's vote, subtract from total pool, wash rinse repeat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jul 2024 23:26:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124618</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124618</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41124618</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most countries with presidential systems and FPTP have third party runs to such an extent that it's impossible to decide who the first, second, third... party is. It's more than such and such a famous politician runs for the presidency and sets up a party if they can find one to support their bid.<p>The US does not have successful third party runs because of the uncertainty and difficulty of getting onto the ballot, the possibility of getting onto enough ballots that you will harm your allies but not enough ballots to win, and the fact that the electoral college means you can't rely on running up the vote in your home regions in order to get yourself into the running on a national level. It's not FPTP that prevents third party presidential runs in the US, but state electoral administration, state primaries, and the electoral college.<p>In any case, the effect is the same. It doesn't matter why the US only has two major candidates at this presidential election and the last presidential election and the next presidential election. It just matters that the US only has two major candidates at this presidential election and the last presidential election and the next presidential election. Abstention is nothing more than half a vote against the candidate closest to you. It's not a motivator for an extra candidate to run next time.<p>In this reading, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will probably have a bigger consequence than Ranked Choice Voting, because it will allow candidates to run up the vote in home regions, which will create new paths to the White House. Ranked Choice Voting just allows voters of the least favored candidate to make a protest and then come home. If you had had Bernie, Biden and Trump running at the last election with RCV, then Biden would have won if Bernie voters had preferenced him, and Trump would have won if they didn't. There's no actual alternative in which Bernie wins. So why would you stand if you're guaranteed to lose? It costs money and burns bridges. The extra candidates want a lower hurdle to winning (for instance, 38% in a field of four), not a higher hurdle (like 50%+1 in a field of four).<p>The consequences are different at the level of an individual district, because a member of Congress is a very different role than a national president.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2024 03:46:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41030760</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41030760</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41030760</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Why is Chile so long?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Desert, n, stress on the first syllable, means a place without much rain, but it comes from the notion of being deserted so sometimes it just means an unpopulated area.<p>To desert, v, stress on the second syllable, means to leave/abandon something.<p>Desert, n, stress on the second syllable, is what you deserve "he got his just deserts"<p>Dessert, n, stress on the second syllable, is a sweet course of a meal that follows the main course. It has an extra s because of its etymology not its pronunciation.<p>I'm quite sure this mess was designed to be as confusing as possible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jul 2024 04:48:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862801</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862801</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862801</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In addition to the UK, it's almost certain that this had high level political influence between Australia's prime minister and the US president. I don't think the perspective that the US would be willing to damage their relations with Australia and the UK over this especially while the US is<p>Considering the lengths Assange has gone to to avoid entering US custody, I think he's weighed up the ability to trust the US on this one with probably more information than we have.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Jun 2024 07:39:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785595</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785595</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40785595</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "North Yorkshire apostrophe fans demand road signs with nowt taken out"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a fair number of apostrophes in fact. Here's an example: <a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZSVi4GfuAgcUspm2A" rel="nofollow">https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZSVi4GfuAgcUspm2A</a> (Note that Google's database seems to lack the apostrophe in that name). Rules such as the following (NSW GNB) are common:<p>> The following types of punctuation as used in Australian English shall not be included as part of a geographical name: period (.), comma (,), colon (:), semi-colon (;), quotation marks (“”), exclamation mark (!), question mark (?), ellipsis (…), hyphen (-), solidus (/) and parenthesis (()). For surnames or other names that include a hyphen, the hyphen shall be omitted when used for a geographical name.<p>> 5 An apostrophe mark shall not be included in geographical names written with a final ‘s’, and the possessive ‘s shall not be included e.g. Georges River not George’s River. Apostrophes forming part of an eponymous name shall be included (e.g. O’Connell Plains).<p>The explanation in the NSW GWB guide is that it allows for consistency and predictability. If you know that a river is pronounced "Georges River" and its official name followed customary rules, you wouldn't know how it was spelt unless you knew if it was named for George or for Georges. Honestly, I'm sceptical of all explanations. It's more that they find them annoying.<p>Until 2015 the standard font used in Australian road signs AS 1744-1975 didn't have a apostrophe or a hyphen defined, but at least hyphens and slashes were defined in the related AS 1743 or state-based augmentations of it because they were used in signs like O'Briens Rd or time ranges on parking signs. The current AS 1744:2015 standard does have punctuation - and the standard punctuation for citing standards has changed in the interim.<p>The attached article says that apostrophes have special meanings to computer databases, but this comment (which uses various bits of punctuation) will be stored in a computer database even with apostrophes. It's not like we programmers are incapable of handling them.<p>But I also find the counter arguments to be a bit ad hoc. Are Australians so much worse at literacy because of a lack of apostrophes on road signs? Does the correct use of apostrophes materially affect literacy in any way at all? They want the apostrophes because they're used to them.<p>I wish we could just state the actual reason for decisions and preferences, instead of trying to make our reasons seem more logical and neutral.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2024 07:52:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40340747</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40340747</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40340747</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Show HN: Dotenv, if it is a Unix utility"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>See my comment sibling to yours for some concerns with `env $(cat file)`; I would have these and then some with sourcing the file even in a subshell. You can do whatever you want in a shell script which can have effects outside of the subshell.<p>Another advantage of env is that you can type `man env` and learn something useful; sourcing and subshells via syntax is a little bit harder.<p>Finally, I think the major point of this branch of the discussion is to explicitly decorate a command with a special environment. Starting up a subshell isn't the same thing. It might have the same effect, but you can see that you're creating a subshell, running a builtin in the subshell, and then running a command in the subshell. It is something of a difference between declarative (dotenv/env) and imperative (sourcing in a subshell) approaches, and inherits all the pros and cons of the imperative approach.<p>If it works for you, I make no recommendation against it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2024 04:52:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194576</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194576</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194576</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by colimbarna in "Show HN: Dotenv, if it is a Unix utility"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Further addition, I haven't investigated dotenv deeply, but I suppose it would be a command that specialises in making sure the contents of .env are just environmental variables that get defined. The `env` command as I wrote it is probably not the sort of thing you want to just trust on a file in a git repo shared with colleagues. Anyway, like my ETA above suggests I'm in two minds about whether env and dotenv should be the same thing with different arguments or not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2024 04:40:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194504</link><dc:creator>colimbarna</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194504</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194504</guid></item></channel></rss>