Hacker News: dpkirchner

New comment by dpkirchner in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

dpkirchner — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:26:44 +0000

But not so wrong that they could get their account back in 10 minutes.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

dpkirchner — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:23:03 +0000

I've been wondering if I should be interrogating my friends before allowing them access to my wifi. "Have you or any of your family members ever been banned by Google?"

New comment by dpkirchner in "America's carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy"

dpkirchner — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:27:50 +0000

Those cookie banners aren't required for conversations -- a persistent session cookie would be enough (if you don't want to make the user sign in every time). The cookie banner implementation is a burden companies choose to place on themselves (and then to burden their users).

New comment by dpkirchner in "I want to live like Costco people"

dpkirchner — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:19:03 +0000

Not only are we not all brand conscious, some of us are so brand-blind that we buy clothes with large ads printed all over.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

dpkirchner — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:37:49 +0000

How much power could we get out of the fuel required to launch a 20-100kW rack in to space, if we were to burn it on the ground?

New comment by dpkirchner in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

dpkirchner — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:08:23 +0000

I wouldn't want to use anything that earn them money, if I could avoid it. That it was half the population doesn't change my view.

I understand that it is difficult for me to shun (which is basically what I'm talking about) so many people, or to even know if they should be shunned, but it would definitely be my preference.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

dpkirchner — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:34:41 +0000

Has he apologized?

New comment by dpkirchner in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

dpkirchner — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:49:39 +0000

"Then, I would approach them, wave or tap them on the shoulder to get their attention, and then give them my opening line."

New comment by dpkirchner in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

dpkirchner — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:07:08 +0000

This is absolutely bonkers to me. We're not here to be scientifically experimented on or to make you feel better about yourself. The very idea that OP learned about places and activities that people participate in explicitly to be social and, instead, chose to touch people when they're not clearly wanting to chat is just wild.

What do we have to do to discourage you from touching us?

I mean I guess I'm glad that you're trying to resolve your anxiety. Self improvement is good for some people. I just wish it weren't at the expense of others.

New comment by dpkirchner in "U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP"

dpkirchner — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:34:43 +0000

> I really need some politics-free scholarship on this.

It's impossible to discuss GDP without politics, could you describe exactly what it is about political discussion that you'd want to avoid?

New comment by dpkirchner in "To Protect and Swerve: NYPD Cop Has 547 Speeding Tickets"

dpkirchner — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:31:13 +0000

No amount of child deaths and dismemberments are enough to deny me the right to get to where I'm going 30 seconds faster. Don't you know how important I am?

New comment by dpkirchner in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

dpkirchner — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:56:27 +0000

Apple offers replacement batteries for an 11 year old phone, now -- past performance is no guarantee but they're already way, way ahead of the pack and there's no sign they're going to stop repairing old phones.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of iLearningEngines charged with fraud"

dpkirchner — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:54:01 +0000

What about the fraud that led up to the GFC -- pre-TARP? I think that's what people meme about.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents"

dpkirchner — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:47:05 +0000

It remains to be seen if companies are going to spend more effort in to making AI-accessible design than they do user-accessible design.

New comment by dpkirchner in "€54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs"

dpkirchner — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:44:32 +0000

I've yet to receive an accurate response from Gemini about GCP services, beyond completely trivial topics. The most recent, I think, was Gemini advising me that I could attach an existing pd SSD PVC to a n4 or c4 VM. For whatever unknowable reason, Google doesn't allow this and doesn't offer a migration path, and Gemini doesn't "know" anything about it either. It's wild.

New comment by dpkirchner in "€54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs"

dpkirchner — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:38:47 +0000

That's standard for Firebase apps. It's also recommended by Google (they describe the keys as "public by design").

New comment by dpkirchner in "EFF is leaving X"

dpkirchner — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:55:43 +0000

If we all spent more time listening the guy who called someone a pedophile because he suggested the guy's plan to save people was ridiculous, would that improve discourse? I am skeptical.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Claude Code is locking people out for hours"

dpkirchner — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:05:18 +0000

Not the person you're replying to but yes, sometimes I do tell the agent to remove the cruft. Then I back up a few messages in the context and reword my request. Instead of just saying "fix this crash", or whatever, I say "this is crashing because the string is empty, however it shouldn't be empty, figure out why it's empty". And I might have it add some tests to ensure that whatever code is not returning/passing along empty strings.

New comment by dpkirchner in ""The new Copilot app for Windows 11 is really just Microsoft Edge""

dpkirchner — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:35:52 +0000

Ironic that this link is hosted on Substack, eh? It's always a bummer to see that in the header after opening a page.

New comment by dpkirchner in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

dpkirchner — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:56:39 +0000

I caught it using Parameters[2] the other day. It wanted to avoid importing a type, so it did this nonsense. (I might have the syntax slightly wrong here, I'm writing from memory.)

But it's not all bad news. TIL about Parameters.