Hacker News: cyberrock

New comment by cyberrock in "Allow Carriers on Planes"

cyberrock — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:41:01 +0000

If they do then I hope there is an additional rule forcing the guardian to purchase an adjacent seat, so there's no risk of someone (me) being guilt tripped into swapping seats.

New comment by cyberrock in "Transit rewards"

cyberrock — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:42:10 +0000

>fostering a clean & safe transit environment is practically a solved problem internationally.

In your opinion, what is that solution? If we take a survey of the highest ranked transit systems, it seems like most solutions involve not allowing drug users to use transit systems, whether it's the unthinkable in Asian countries or peppering the system with officers and cameras in Berlin and London. Is that really treating them with love?

Considering how much often I smell alcohol and weed in Waymos, maybe it's actually the most tolerant solution.

New comment by cyberrock in "Attention is all you have"

cyberrock — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:59:00 +0000

Browsers should've had tab groups decades ago, and bookmarks in a group should've gone into that group's corresponding bookmark folder by default. Voluntary tab groups use time at the user's convenience, while organizing bookmarks into folders tend to be a distraction or chore.

New comment by cyberrock in "PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand""

cyberrock — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:45:43 +0000

I've seen kiddies take advantage of homebrew developers to develop game piracy many times, but this is the first time I've seen kiddies do it to fix the exploit for the bug bounty. How the times have changed.

New comment by cyberrock in "Chopping up books when they're physically too big"

cyberrock — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 02:18:49 +0000

This does really seem like satire, but in case anyone wants to do this, most (all?) spine glue like PVA can typically be melted by a standard hairdryer. I find that method to be slightly more gentle.

New comment by cyberrock in "Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?"

cyberrock — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:41:53 +0000

Also a self-hosted server with opinionated defaults. The year is 2026, and most users expect persistent history without having to add mod_mam themselves. Discord won from zero because it's IRC with history. I cannot believe that chat history, mentions, etc. is still not settled.

New comment by cyberrock in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

cyberrock — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:08:44 +0000

Looking at it from the glass-half-full perspective, I'm impressed that pilots declare go-around as often as they do. As someone who sometimes can't decide whether I should declare a production incident (even if it's not my change), I wonder if it's possible to learn that decisiveness.

New comment by cyberrock in "My Feed, My Way"

cyberrock — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:49:44 +0000

Maybe he's right, but there are way more issues with Bluesky that affect user retention. For example the app seems to love logging users out if they have intermittent Internet or are using a VPN, or just because the app feels like it. It's an insane bug or security stance.

Meanwhile, Setlog is gaining popularity in east Asia, which definitely indicates there is some demand for friend-only social media. I think many Discord users are basically using Discord like that too. Giving users the choice is the right move.

New comment by cyberrock in "Play Store blocks AuroraStore, hurting GrapheneOS users"

cyberrock — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:41:57 +0000

My understanding is that F-Droid is hosted out of some home servers (instead of some universities like other similar package managers) so the bandwidth leaves much to be desired. But the UX is definitely a big part of the problem. I don't understand why it tends to abort downloads when I background it, and I don't understand why it doesn't show a toast that it aborted the download.

I very much prefer Obtainium these days despite the setup steps. I don't think it's a coincidence that Obtainium, Aurora, Zapstore, etc. are gaining mindshare over F-Droid, just like how Brave has explosive growth over FF.

New comment by cyberrock in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

cyberrock — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 01:01:14 +0000

Most Coke On machines do support Suica/Felica but you have to press IC on the blinking pad. The problem is that the pad doesn't seem like a touchscreen and it can be difficult to precisely tap. However Suntory does have app-only machines now.

It's not really mentioned in the article, but Suntory and transit operators out in Hiroshima etc. are turning away from Felica simply because the licensing fee is too high for them. That's also why Samsung and Google don't enable it on non-Japanese phones. Sony and JR missed the part where they have to generous first to eliminate all competition before jacking up fees, and now they're getting eaten by QR payment and Visa.

New comment by cyberrock in "An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation"

cyberrock — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:14:09 +0000

Setting aside printer capability, to a lot of users, wifi would be a top requirement for "working out of the box", and unfortunately i3 MK3S+ didn't have it before Bambu hit the market. On one hand, I understand how they ended up there, because their contemporary rivals Creality and Anycubic didn't include it either, and most of their userbase understood that they needed to run Octoprint on a Pi Zero or buy Prusa's wifi module. But on the other hand, if anyone did any bit of market research, they would realize this is quite an abrasive purchasing experience for a $10 wifi module. It just felt stingy.

New comment by cyberrock in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

cyberrock — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 03:42:51 +0000

>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here

Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA.

[0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...

New comment by cyberrock in "Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms"

cyberrock — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:29:26 +0000

Safari using the reference implementation is meaningless because they don't even seem to turn on all features in it. Mozilla and Chromium declared that progressive decoding was the main blocker, the authors added it to libjxl-rs earlier this year, then now they're shipping it. Safari hasn't enabled progressive decoding or animation even though it's been in libjxl since 2022. If I wasn't in the trenches of Cordova/React development a decade ago, I would say I'm baffled.

New comment by cyberrock in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

cyberrock — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:17:07 +0000

Some of my books were literal pennies, and they would vanish too if neither of us nor the companies bought them. Again, this is just confusing where these books are with the Louvre. Just because they were available for purchase doesn't mean they were a shared community resource, because the community didn't care about their fate until now. I just don't appreciate the lack of self-awareness.

New comment by cyberrock in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

cyberrock — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:11:48 +0000

Looking at my modest shelf of weird midcentury travel logs, I just want to be spared from this moralizing. This is just another case of everyone seeing store shelves as an extension of themselves, just like the decline of other physical media. If their knowledge was so precious then why was it not on the used bookstores and libraries to save them, especially when scanning has become so accessible in the last decade? Why did I find some of these books rotting in overpacked shelves and boxes?

New comment by cyberrock in "Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker"

cyberrock — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:22:46 +0000

Firefox Android also doesn't have the WebExtension history API which is insanely annoying: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330161

New comment by cyberrock in "Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things"

cyberrock — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:06:53 +0000

Dense ones like this are more bandwidth-hungry, so you want to try MoE ones like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (35 Billion params but only 3 Billion Active) or Gemma 4. Unfortunately it seems like we might not be getting a 3.8 MoE.

New comment by cyberrock in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"

cyberrock — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:15:26 +0000

After watching them butcher their own side tabs implementation, I don't know if we really want that, unless they're actually hiring the uBO team directly.

New comment by cyberrock in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

cyberrock — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:39:32 +0000

Small specific complaint: whoever is making Opus love using git checkout to mutate test, please stop. IME it's a footgun that it shoots itself with every single day. I'd rather it pollute git stash than watch it git checkout and forget the reverted file.

New comment by cyberrock in "Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us"

cyberrock — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:41:38 +0000

I've heard similar logic to excuse Steam from this mess, because they grant (5000 with no guarantee of more) keys to publishers and developers to sell on other stores. But it really doesn't address the biggest concerns of digitization, like control and second hand market. Sony will just copy Steam and this will fizzle.