<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: david_allison</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=david_allison</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 06:02:14 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=david_allison" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I'd happily share if "share" still meant "drop a gist." It doesn't, anymore.<p>It still does. Feel free to use <a href="https://unmaintained.tech/" rel="nofollow">https://unmaintained.tech/</a> on your repo.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 01:24:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201895</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201895</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201895</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Ask HN: Do you know the ethics of Developers?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics" rel="nofollow">https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics</a><p>1.1 Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.<p>1.2 Avoid harm.<p>1.3 Be honest and trustworthy.<p>1.4 Be fair and take action not to discriminate.<p>1.5 Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts.<p>1.6 Respect privacy.<p>1.7 Honor confidentiality.<p>2.1 Strive to achieve high quality in both the processes and products of professional work.<p>2.2 Maintain high standards of professional competence, conduct, and ethical practice.<p>2.3 Know and respect existing rules pertaining to professional work.<p>2.4 Accept and provide appropriate professional review.<p>2.5 Give comprehensive and thorough evaluations of computer systems and their impacts, including analysis of possible risks.<p>2.6 Perform work only in areas of competence.<p>2.7 Foster public awareness and understanding of computing, related technologies, and their consequences.<p>2.8 Access computing and communication resources only when authorized or when compelled by the public good.<p>2.9 Design and implement systems that are robustly and usably secure.<p>3.1 Ensure that the public good is the central concern during all professional computing work.<p>3.2 Articulate, encourage acceptance of, and evaluate fulfillment of social responsibilities by members of the organization or group.<p>3.3 Manage personnel and resources to enhance the quality of working life.<p>3.4 Articulate, apply, and support policies and processes that reflect the principles of the Code.<p>3.5 Create opportunities for members of the organization or group to grow as professionals.<p>3.6 Use care when modifying or retiring systems.<p>3.7 Recognize and take special care of systems that become integrated into the infrastructure of society.<p>4.1 Uphold, promote, and respect the principles of the Code.<p>4.2 Treat violations of the Code as inconsistent with membership in the ACM.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 May 2026 10:21:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093152</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>  Location: Isle of Man/Europe
  Remote: Yes - Experience working with US/International teams
  Willing to relocate: Yes - For the right role. Happy to be on-site for onboarding
  Technologies: Kotlin, Android, TypeScript, React, .NET, Java, CI/CD, Accessibility, i18n
  Email: davidallisongithub@gmail.com
  GitHub: https://github.com/david-allison
</code></pre>
Open source maintainer/top contributor of AnkiDroid: Android client for Anki. 10M+ downloads.
~10 YOE, with 6 YOE open source (4,000+ commits). Ready for stability after years of contracting and maintainership.<p>I lead a global volunteer team and take full product ownership: setting direction over multi-year horizons, planning and implementing architectural migrations, and keeping a project moving via community engagement, triage, fixes, reviews and mentorship.<p>Highlights:<p><pre><code>  - AnkiDroid now releases in tandem with upstream, rather than lagging behind by years
  - Migrated a 15-year-old codebase from Java 7 to Kotlin, maintaining git blame
  - Migrated to a common Rust-based backend. Android contributors are fully isolated from this complexity
  - Improved app rating from 4.5 to ~4.8 stars, dramatically reduced crash rate
  - Mentored hundreds of contributors and co-launched AnkiDroid's Google Summer of Code programme
</code></pre>
AnkiDroid continues as a hobby; my day job is fully separate.<p>Looking for: full-time or contract. IC or EM, I'm nontraditional so I'm open to a conversation about which fits. Drawn to work that makes people's lives better, in any stack.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 15:01:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975590</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975590</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975590</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:44:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764946</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764946</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764946</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> How could Stack Overflow succeed in a post-chatgpt eta?<p>As a data source for LLMs, and by becoming the place someone goes where ChatGPT can't produce a sufficient answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:07:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653356</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653356</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653356</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's $50,000 per statement</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:13:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646299</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646299</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646299</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "The Claude Code Leak"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What if it's used for training data? It seems like there's no penalty for training on copyrighted materials.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:54:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611311</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611311</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611311</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Oh wow, thank you so much!!!!!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:27:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582755</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582755</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582755</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is this available online? I'd love documentation of my prompts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:03:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581924</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581924</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581924</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.permission#USE_BIOMETRIC" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...</a><p><a href="https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.permission#USE_FINGERPRINT" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...</a><p>Fear-mongering. Not even dangerous permissions. Granted on install</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:04:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581185</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>IMO: That's just due to the speed of responses.<p>Hardware will continue to improve, and eventually you'll have the choice of reaching a flow state with 2026 models, or using frontier models at our current level of performance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:27:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568078</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568078</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568078</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "I decompiled the White House's new app"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very unusual: 47.0.1 is showing these permissions when on my MacBook viewing the store entry.<p>The Play Store doesn't show these permissions when viewed on my Pixel 9 Pro, and the APK doesn't have these permissions when downloaded/extracted.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:12:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558561</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558561</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558561</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "I decompiled the White House's new app"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You need to state the permissions you *may* request/use in AndroidManifest.xml. This data can then be displayed to users pre-installation.<p>From the (limited) article, it doesn't seem they do this: <a href="https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app#permissions" rel="nofollow">https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app#p...</a><p>----<p>EDIT: I'm mistaken. From the Play Store[0] it has access to<p>* approximate location (network-based)<p>* precise location (GPS and network-based)<p>[0] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.whitehouse.app&pli=1">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.whitehouse...</a><p>This seems to disagree with:<p>> The location permissions aren't declared in the AndroidManifest but requested at runtime<p>*shrug*, someone should dig deeper. It looks like the article may not match reality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:16:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557010</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557010</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47557010</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cheers!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:31:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47524159</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47524159</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47524159</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have GitHub Copilot Pro. I don't believe I signed up for it. I neither use it nor want it.<p>1. A lot of settings are 'Enabled' with no option to opt out. What can I do?<p>2. How do I opt out of data collection? I see the message informing me to opt out, but 'Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training' is already disabled for my account.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:49:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523743</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523743</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523743</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Show HN: Passport Globe (See where your passport takes you)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is not using current data, which is a huge risk to take when it comes to travel.<p>You can travel visa-free (30 days) to China on a UK passport.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:27:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477862</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477862</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477862</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes<p>Belkin make a number of surge protectors which offer a connected equipment warranty in the UK. Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection, but I felt it was worthwhile for the peace of mind.<p><a href="https://www.belkin.com/id/p/6-outlet-surge-protection-strip-with-2m-power-cord/BSV603vf2M.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.belkin.com/id/p/6-outlet-surge-protection-strip-...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:27:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370815</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370815</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370815</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Show HN: A retention mechanic for learning that isn't Duolingo manipulation?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Millions, just on the AnkiDroid side</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:43:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327217</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327217</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327217</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Ask HN: How Do Emergency Alerts on Phone Work?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Might as well start with the source code[0] and dig deeper:<p>* CMAS <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts</a><p>* ETWS Earthquake and Tsunami Warning System<p>[0] <a href="https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/main:packages/apps/CellBroadcastReceiver/src/com/android/cellbroadcastreceiver/CellBroadcastAlertService.java" rel="nofollow">https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:29:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234845</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234845</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234845</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by david_allison in "Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As an eligible maintainer: absolutely.<p>In the past week (besides the constant slop), there are models which have misattributed the copyright of new files to me, and stripped my copyright from existing files. It's sapping up time, energy and motivation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:54:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184117</link><dc:creator>david_allison</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184117</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184117</guid></item></channel></rss>