Hacker News: darthwalsh

New comment by darthwalsh in "A graph that should be front-page news"

darthwalsh — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:21:27 +0000

Oops you're right. I double-checked both from the hacker News app preview (Harmonic), and mobile Chrome. No "show more."

I must have confused it with another article, sorry.

New comment by darthwalsh in "The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News"

darthwalsh — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:47:11 +0000

There's probably an economic incentive to get visitors to read past the show more button?

New comment by darthwalsh in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

darthwalsh — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:56:14 +0000

Because it's a common phrase? Same as "get carded"?

English is flexible; almost any combination of words can start to have meaning.

New comment by darthwalsh in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

darthwalsh — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 02:57:00 +0000

> Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one)

That's basically the California law! I hope other states adopt the "ask nicely for age but no online verification." OS setup asks for birthday, but you can just say January 1.

I also thought it should just send the flag, but I've heard there's good reasons not to. There's normally an affirmative prompt from the user to agree to send the age bucket data.

New comment by darthwalsh in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

darthwalsh — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 02:46:31 +0000

Could you have a Trusted Platform Module tied to fingerprint reader, while the phone is rooted?

Nobody here complains that you can't install apps onto your TPM.

New comment by darthwalsh in "Changing how we develop Ladybird"

darthwalsh — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:51:41 +0000

AU is just as effective as humans at contributing to sqlite: they don't accept contributions.

New comment by darthwalsh in "A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous"

darthwalsh — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:46:37 +0000

Thanks for sharing that nuance. It seems one court weighed in that Claude chat wasn't accepted:

> In February 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that a defendant who pasted information—including details conveyed by his lawyers—into a public, consumer-grade AI chatbot (specifically Anthropic's Claude) completely waived his attorney-client privilege.

But maybe if you are using a transcription tool that happens to send your audio through the Anthropic APIs, the ruling would be different?

New comment by darthwalsh in "The Future of Obsidian Plugins"

darthwalsh — Wed, 13 May 2026 02:57:26 +0000

Like what cloudflare does in EmDash (the spiritual successor to WordPress).

But almost all plugins would need to be rewritten?

New comment by darthwalsh in "SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format"

darthwalsh — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:57:09 +0000

A production app with customer data needs a data backup/restore strategy. I'm guessing a random app server writing to a local sqlite file isn't doing that either.

New comment by darthwalsh in "Ti-84 Evo"

darthwalsh — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:02:53 +0000

In my USA high School, they started requiring graphing calculators in the 9th grade math class. You would fail most quizzes/exams without the ability to run the calculations that scientific calculators couldn't do.

I'm struggling to remember using my TI-84 in college though.

New comment by darthwalsh in "Laws of Software Engineering"

darthwalsh — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:22:07 +0000

I couldn't find the source on GitHub, but somebody has helpfully scraped them a few hours ago: https://github.com/pascalandy/dotfiles/blob/main/docs/refere...

New comment by darthwalsh in "Atlassian enables default data collection to train AI"

darthwalsh — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:39:06 +0000

I have a small CLI script that runs JQL `text ~ "$1"` (with per-repo filters on project/component).

I don't have to switch to the browser most of the time!

New comment by darthwalsh in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

darthwalsh — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:38:19 +0000

So in the trolley problem, you would abstain from supporting either side? I think that's actually a choice of supporting the status quo.

New comment by darthwalsh in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

darthwalsh — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:45:49 +0000

I was there when the SDET role was eliminated.

Our team of 8 SDE and 5 SDET became a team of 8 devs who also owned tons of QA frameworks. It was awful, except each tiny we deleted a test suite for not being valuable; that was awesome!

If the Azure org was flooded with senior engineers who did not have senior-level experience architecting production software... That explains a lot.

New comment by darthwalsh in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

darthwalsh — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 03:26:01 +0000

My work was careful to explain: if you associate your personal GitHub account with their work org copilot, then they are the ones who manage copilot.

If you wouldn't use your personal email account on your work computer, I don't see why you wouldn't create a new GitHub account only for work.

New comment by darthwalsh in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

darthwalsh — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 03:23:43 +0000

Not private repos.

Now, anything that gets referenced in a copilot chat is fair game

New comment by darthwalsh in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

darthwalsh — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:59:26 +0000

Seems to acknowledge that windows 11 launched without expected features from 10.

Maybe they thought they could get away without taskbar location customisation, but now they have to put that complexity back in.

New comment by darthwalsh in "Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system"

darthwalsh — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:05:30 +0000

There's a CLI tool that writes the agent skills into the right folder. The other option would be to have everybody manually unzip a download into a folder which they might not remember.

New comment by darthwalsh in "Show HN: enveil – hide your .env secrets from prAIng eyes"

darthwalsh — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:42:10 +0000

Jenkins CI has a clever feature where every password it injects will be redacted if printed to stdout; `enveil run` could do that with the wrapped process?

Of course that's only a defense against accidents. Nothing prevents encoding base64 or piping to disk.

New comment by darthwalsh in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

darthwalsh — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:08:53 +0000

This is kind of backwards .

GitHub's privacy statement [1] says > GitHub personnel does not access private repository information without your consent except as provided...

Do you have any evidence that private repos on GitHub are being used for training?

In the opposite case, if you have a public repo on GitHub then you should expect it to be laundered through LLMs :\

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/privacy-policies/gith...