Hacker News: dpifke

New comment by dpifke in "GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone without requiring personal information"

dpifke — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:09:10 +0000

Let me introduce you to California's way of doing things: https://guncad.substack.com/p/special-issue-state-of-califor...

They're suing Florida residents with no ties to California for linking to pictures of guns on the internet.

They will likely lose, but the goal is not to win, it's to score points with their political base and maybe bankrupt the defendants with legal fees.

New comment by dpifke in "We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)"

dpifke — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:18:26 +0000

In the U.S., requiring a login (or any information other than your email address) to opt out is against the law. Additionally, you cannot require any steps other than "sending a reply electronic mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page."

I once wrote to the FTC for guidance as to whether or not this included requiring unsubscribers to solve a CAPTCHA or disable adblockers or enable Javascript, but did not get a response. I believe the law is plain with regards to this, but a lot of companies seem to be willing to risk it.

See: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

New comment by dpifke in "Microsoft mishandling example.com"

dpifke — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:00:06 +0000

In this case, "null MX record" means MX exists, but does not specify a valid server:

   $ host -t mx example.com
   example.com mail is handled by 0 .

Senders should not fall back on the A record in this case.

New comment by dpifke in "Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?"

dpifke — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:48:20 +0000

I use uBlock Origin for this, something like:

  news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^/item\?id=/) tr a.hnuser:has-text(/^dpifke$/):upward(tr)

This mostly works, but only kills the user's comments and not replies, so it sometimes can be confusing.

New comment by dpifke in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

dpifke — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:34:38 +0000

The very first subheading is entitled "What to Submit." I quoted it in my initial reply as rationale for why the people flagging this submission as off-topic were justified.

New comment by dpifke in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

dpifke — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:06:25 +0000

This seems similar to the "Is Github Down?" submission problem, where the submitter simply links to github.com.

That's a poor submission, because by the time most people click on it, Github will no longer be down.

There might be an interesting discussion to be had about outages at Github, but the better submission would be an article or blog post about the outage, not just a link to the site and a three-word title.

If someone wants to write an article or blog post about this news broadcast, which links to "hard facts and analysis not available through popular channels," that seems like it might be a worthwhile submission. But just a link to the broadcast by itself is not leading to interesting or on-topic conversation—the top comment right now is an ad hominem attack against Larry Ellison, without any supporting facts or analysis that he had anything to do with this story at all.

New comment by dpifke in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

dpifke — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:50:35 +0000

Lots of hackers find porn very interesting. In fact, my first "real job" as a hacker was for a company with ties to the 1-900 industry that had decided to expand out onto the internet (not just to sell porn). Stories about porn would be interesting, submissions of nothing but pornography itself ("because it's censored!") are not.

I would be more sympathetic to the argument that this is relevant if the submission was an article about media censorship, or CBS's audience or leadership, and how said censorship, audience, or leadership relates to technology or emerging trends in media.

But this is literally just a controversial TV news broadcast, that people of one political persuasion say was "censored" and people of another political persuasion say was held off the air "temporarily" until it met network fact-checking standards. That sort of political bickering is most uninteresting, and is most definitely not why I've been reading HN for the past few decades.

New comment by dpifke in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

dpifke — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:41:25 +0000

Strong disagree.

Gay porn is censored in a lot of Muslim countries, that doesn't make it on-topic for HN.

New comment by dpifke in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

dpifke — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:37:47 +0000

It's off-topic, per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This submission is literally a TV news broadcast.

There are lots of other places on the internet where this is on-topic, I wish people would have their debates there instead.

New comment by dpifke in "Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025)"

dpifke — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:14:24 +0000

As someone who has moderated online communities in the past, I recognize the value in having a page like this, to which you can point people if they want to enumerate such trifles instead of discussing the episodes or series themselves. Rather than just say such discussion is off-topic, you give them a separate, on-topic place to discuss it.

(I don't actually know if that is how this page came about, but it seems similar to other wiki pages I've seen used for such a purpose.)

New comment by dpifke in "Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe"

dpifke — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 03:18:57 +0000

At an untowered field, saying the airport name at the beginning and end of each transmission is standard phraseology.

New comment by dpifke in "A better zip bomb (2019)"

dpifke — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 01:06:43 +0000

If it causes more than $5k in damage. Otherwise, it's a misdemeanor.

But you probably don't want to be investigated for either.

New comment by dpifke in "Please just try HTMX"

dpifke — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 17:55:16 +0000

https://unpoly.com touts "progressive enhancement."

Third link on the page ("read the long story") points to https://triskweline.de/unpoly-rugb/, which renders as a blank page with NoScript enabled.

Sigh.

New comment by dpifke in "Yep, Passkeys Still Have Problems"

dpifke — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:13:56 +0000

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

(quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

New comment by dpifke in "Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac"

dpifke — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:07:46 +0000

Shouldn't you be out protesting your local chess club instead of posting on HN right now?

New comment by dpifke in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

dpifke — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:06:32 +0000

We do use gyroscopic power storage, see e.g.

https://h-cpc.cat.com/cmms/v2?f=subfamily&it=group&cid=402&l...

https://www.activepower.com/

...and probably others.

(A couple of decades ago I worked for a company that was a tenant at a datacenter that used these instead of batteries; it's not new or particularly exotic technology.)

New comment by dpifke in "Go Proposal: Secret Mode"

dpifke — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:27:41 +0000

Related: https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/subtle#WithDataIndependentTiming (added in 1.25)

And an in-progress proposal to make these various "bubble" functions have consistent semantics: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76477

(As an aside, the linked blog series is great, but if you're interested in new Go features, I've found it really helpful to also subscribe to https://go.dev/issue/33502 to get the weekly proposal updates straight from the source. Reading the debates on some of these proposals provides a huge level of insight into the evolution of Go.)

New comment by dpifke in "Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?"

dpifke — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:04:08 +0000

I recently logged onto LinkedIn for the first time in a while, and found an old job posting from when I was hiring at a startup ~2 decades ago. It's amazing how much it sounds like LLM output—I would have absolutely flagged it as AI-generated if I saw it today.

New comment by dpifke in "Tested: 1981 Datsun 280ZX Turbo (1981)"

dpifke — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:55:26 +0000

My first car (hand-me-down from my Dad) was a 1980s Datsun, that I managed to total within a few weeks of getting my license, much to the consternation of my younger brother and sister who expected it to eventually be handed down to them as well.

The "left door is open" voice alert will forever be ingrained in my memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hJBko3-oV4 It seemed so futuristic when the car was new.

New comment by dpifke in "Testing shows automotive glassbreakers can't break modern automotive glass"

dpifke — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 05:06:18 +0000

If you're in the U.S., you might check if your local fire department has a CERT[0] training course. (I did it many years ago in San Francisco; they call it NERT for some reason.)

It'll give you a chance to practice putting out an actual fire, refresh first aid skills, learn the incident command system, learn basic search and rescue, and other preparedness skills to help yourself, your family, and neighbors in an emergency (in that order).

[0]: https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/individuals-communit...