Hacker News: defaultcompany

New comment by defaultcompany in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

defaultcompany — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:25:34 +0000

Interesting! I can picture how the clients could calculate a hash prior to encryption and that would let the server know those files have the same contents once decrypted but how would that let them save on disk space? They still can’t see the contents of the file itself even if they know it’s the same so how could they deduplicate the storage? If they drop either one they are just left with a single encrypted version using only one clients key which they can’t serve up to anyone else.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

defaultcompany — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:09:55 +0000

They encrypt files on the client before transmission.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Ubuntu 26.04 ends a 40-year old sudo tradition"

defaultcompany — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:49:52 +0000

“shoulder surfing” is not the problem. It’s people making videos or live streaming who will risk accidentally exposing password length.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal"

defaultcompany — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:53:47 +0000

This makes me want to use visidata for my databases.

New comment by defaultcompany in "The Startup Graveyard"

defaultcompany — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:44:24 +0000

Poshmark also is not dead.

New comment by defaultcompany in "It's Always the Process, Stupid"

defaultcompany — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 15:36:33 +0000

This doesn’t ring true to me. Having processes which rely on communication between humans using natural language can of course be either structured or unstructured. Plenty of highly functioning companies existed well before structured data was even a thing.

New comment by defaultcompany in "EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy"

defaultcompany — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 17:26:49 +0000

How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.

New comment by defaultcompany in "This Page Is a Quine (2021)"

defaultcompany — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:30:58 +0000

Not from the same guy but here's a quine embedded in the github contribution chart:

https://github.com/mame?tab=overview&from=1970-12-01&to=1970...

New comment by defaultcompany in "Hiroshima (1946)"

defaultcompany — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 06:22:50 +0000

This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.

New comment by defaultcompany in "How the Sun Enterprise 10000 was born (2007)"

defaultcompany — Sun, 18 May 2025 14:25:58 +0000

This reminds me of the “drop fix” for the sparc station where people would pick up the box and drop it to reseat the PROMs.

New comment by defaultcompany in "MCP: An in-depth introduction"

defaultcompany — Sat, 17 May 2025 16:53:58 +0000

One confusing thing to me was the word "server". An "MCP server" is a server to the LLM "client". But the MCP server itself is a client to the thing it's connecting the LLM to. So it's more like an adapter or proxy. Also I was confused because often this server runs on your local system (although it doesn't have to). In my mind I thought if they're calling it a server it must be run in the cloud somewhere but that's often not the case.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Spaghetti science: What pasta reveals about the universe"

defaultcompany — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 05:42:05 +0000

According to Italo Calvino [1] the universe was created from the impulse to make a bowl of pasta.

[1] All at One Point https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cosmicomics/cWMec8TktW4...

New comment by defaultcompany in "Frink"

defaultcompany — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 05:50:20 +0000

  // Beware the SI's broken definition
  // of Hz.  You should treat the radian as being correct, as a fundamental
  // dimensionless property of the universe that falls out of pure math like
  // the Taylor series for sin[x], and you should treat the Hz as being a 
  // fundamental property of incompetence by committee.

This is all quite entertaining.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Gene Hackman has died"

defaultcompany — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 22:36:44 +0000

“Were you picking your feet in Poughkeepsie!?”

New comment by defaultcompany in "The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster"

defaultcompany — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 22:41:36 +0000

I’m dating myself but it reminds me of when e-mail hit the mainstream and Microsoft jammed it into every product with no thought for how it would really be used. Like in Excel … every email address in your spreadsheet would open the email client when you clicked the cell. Gee what if I want to edit the value in this cell instead of email the person? We’ll make that possible if you hold shift (or something). It was terrible and this feels exactly the same. The purpose is not to give the user a helpful AI assistant it’s just to be able to say “we have AI”. That’s it.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help"

defaultcompany — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 04:43:29 +0000

My parents have saved letters from their parents which are written in cursive but in two perpendicular layers. Meaning the writing goes horizontally in rows and then when they got to the end of the page it was turned 90 degrees and continued right on top of what was already there for the whole page. This was apparently to save paper and postage. It looks like an unintelligible jumble but my mother can actually decipher it. Maybe that’s what the LLMs are having trouble with?

Edit: apparently it’s called cross writing [1]

1: https://highshrink.com/2018/01/02/criss-cross-letters/

New comment by defaultcompany in "Uncut Currency"

defaultcompany — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 07:10:07 +0000

This reminded me of that classic Eric and Tim Show episode "Prices" [1]. "Fine European prices! Buy $35.50... for forty dollars."

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ9yBgTp9UQ

New comment by defaultcompany in "The Invention of Battlezone (2022)"

defaultcompany — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 17:09:17 +0000

Fascinating that the Army Battlezone project is what lead them to develop the controller based on a Bradley tank that was later used on Star Wars.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'"

defaultcompany — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 17:19:42 +0000

On the cassette tape version of The Wall I had if you flipped the cassette over during this phone call sequence it would end up being right in the middle of another song (can't remember which one) which has this recording playing as part of the background. I feel like it couldn't have been intentional but who knows.

New comment by defaultcompany in "Ask HN: How do you manage the risk of losing access to your email address?"

defaultcompany — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 15:51:58 +0000

The ultimate (and often overlooked) failure mode for using your own domain name is death. You will die and at that point unless you have set up and funded a process to renew the domain name perpetually after your death then after some period of time it will expire. Anyone can then register "your" domain name and start using it which includes receiving all the email addressed to it. If your bank happens to send 2FA emails to this account then the new owner will then have access to your bank account. Personally I want my heirs to own my bank account after I'm dead, not whatever random person happens to register a domain name that I was using.

This sounds extreme but it's only the most dramatic example. This scenario can happen any time during your life if your domain is not renewed for any number of other reasons.

So for me I've had to accept the risk which comes from keeping my most important emails on a large free email provider. At least if they ban me they aren't going to let someone else access my email either. For everything else - the less important accounts - I do use a domain name that I "own".