Hacker News: dare944

New comment by dare944 in "Bitwarden Dual License Model"

dare944 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 04:05:46 +0000

Doesn't need to be. Point an AI at it and say reproduce the behavior.

Point is, if need be, the open source version could be forked and carried forward by someone else, using the public code as a definitive spec for any missing functionality.

New comment by dare944 in "Bitwarden Dual License Model"

dare944 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:53:45 +0000

Of course. There's never any free lunch. There's always a cost to software development. Just sometimes the cost gets shifted in a way that's beneficial to the general public. But it never lasts.

At least with bitwarden, if the value they're trying to extract becomes more than the product is worth, in terms of real cost, lockin or transparency, at least the code is open now and for the foreseeable future. And when it comes time to fork it, AI will make it easier for the future maintainer(s) to keep the fork alive at minimal expense.

New comment by dare944 in "Bitwarden Dual License Model"

dare944 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 18:01:01 +0000

Per their public discussion on the topic, the non-OSS licenses will still be public and accessible for review.

New comment by dare944 in "Why are coding agents so dumb?"

dare944 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 01:36:23 +0000

I was suggesting to ask that question in a separate context, just as a means to understand the potential risks involved. I wouldn't ask this within a coding agent context.

Lately I've been asking a lot of these sorts of questions while setting up a sandboxed environment for my agents (generally, claude and pi). I was quite surprised to learn how many different ways there are to configure git run a script out of the .git directory. And the various AIs know all about this.

At this point my agents get read-only access to my .git directories.

New comment by dare944 in "Why are coding agents so dumb?"

dare944 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 22:59:33 +0000

Ask your favorite LLM what a malicious script dropped into the right place in your .git directory can do to you the next time you run git outside of the sandbox.

And of course, if the agent has access to the network (which is probably required in order to talk to the AI server), then you have to think about what other things on your local network it could get into.

New comment by dare944 in "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"

dare944 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:31:36 +0000

Mail / IMAP server for my family domain. Small web server with a few static content sites. Trillium notes server.

Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.

New comment by dare944 in "So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes"

dare944 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:04:30 +0000

No amount of "they did it first", "they did it better" entitles them to monopolistic behavior.

New comment by dare944 in "Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds"

dare944 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:45:50 +0000

It happens. Been guilty of the same myself.

New comment by dare944 in "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"

dare944 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 17:14:58 +0000

> I want to trust science and dislike anti vaxxers but it’s difficult to argue against them when researchers act like the caricature they are mocked as.

Wait, you think the article was written by the researchers?

You know, it's also difficult to trust someone's criticisms when they misassign responsibility. Just like anti-vaxxers do.

New comment by dare944 in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

dare944 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:20:28 +0000

It may take 100s of instructions to enter a deep sleep state, and 100s to 1000s more to exit it. If you anticipate having to service an event sooner than that, you don't enter sleep at all (especially since there's likely a point at which you're committed to sleep, and have to go all the way down in order to come right back out again). Instead, you hang around twiddling your thumbs until the event comes along.

Now if your processor has a halt/wait-for-interrupt instruction (most do but some don't) you can escape into assembly and use that. But it probably makes little to no difference to energy utilization, and of course its not portable. A nice while (true); would seem obvious, except that the C++ committee insisted that it wasn't.

Just one example of where the committee lost sight of the fact that it was defining an imperative programming language.

New comment by dare944 in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

dare944 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:47:05 +0000

This is myopic. In many cases it takes time, and sometimes considerable programming effort, to enter and exit low power modes. So you don't do it willy-nilly; you do it when you believe the system has quiesced. That means, on a purely interrupt driven system that is not yet ready to sleep, the code may very well be spinning in an empty infinite loop somewhere.

There's no need to inform the "user" because there's nothing wrong with the system. Its simply waiting until the benefit of sleeping outweighs the cost of getting there.

New comment by dare944 in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

dare944 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:19:26 +0000

And where to you think all that "wasted" energy/cycles would go otherwise? Why do you presume there's some other, more efficient way the CPU could be spending its time while waiting for an event to process?

I, the programmer, will decide what cycles are wasted or not. That the C++ committee thought they knew better is hubris.

New comment by dare944 in "How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread"

dare944 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:59:45 +0000

For some reason I read this in James Burke's voice and I could swear I was teleported back to the 80's watching a hitherto unseen episode of Connections.

Interesting stuff.

New comment by dare944 in "Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads"

dare944 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:04:18 +0000

> I am of the school of thought that even if Broadcom gives VMware Standard away free for a year, it would be hard to convince customers that they need to stick with the platform

Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?

New comment by dare944 in "Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?"

dare944 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:30:18 +0000

"THIS IS A TEST

This country is conducting a test of the Emergency SAIfguard System.

THIS ONLY A TEST

In the event of a real emergency you would have been given instructions on how to grab your ankles and kiss your butt goodbye.

...

This concludes our test of the Emergency SAIfguard System."

New comment by dare944 in "Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude"

dare944 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:38:09 +0000

I think it would be fine if more people used "add color to". I think it's a great turn of phrase.

"Load bearing", not so much. Ick.

New comment by dare944 in "Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude"

dare944 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:02:26 +0000

The idiom "added color to" as an expression of adding detail or nuance to something goes back much further than the AI era. I've certainly used it at various times in my career spanning 4 decades now.

New comment by dare944 in "Hacker News now has an active (official) X account"

dare944 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:10:37 +0000

Sorry. I meant, is there any way to block stories on HN that link to Twitter posts?

New comment by dare944 in "Hacker News now has an active (official) X account"

dare944 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 04:59:47 +0000

Won't be reading any twitter post on HN.

Is there a convenient way to block them?

New comment by dare944 in "LLMs could control their host machines by exploiting inference engines"

dare944 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:48:32 +0000

I use seccomp filters on linux in my AI sandbox.