Hacker News: edelbitter

New comment by edelbitter in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

edelbitter — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:13:57 +0000

Has there ever been a GDPR fine that actually exhausted all applicable legal challenges within a sufficiently short delay from initial violation to actually matter?

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

edelbitter — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:53:08 +0000

> If you don’t use Copilot this will not affect you.

How does this work for a private repository with access granted to additional contributors? Which setting is consulted then?

New comment by edelbitter in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

edelbitter — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:50:23 +0000

> dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes

Quite literally this is what first raised the alarm bells for me. Dependency resolution complexity is more of a symptom. If that delay ends up being the point where Ops finally agrees that things have gone very wrong, then fixing that delay is not really helping hire the maintenance folks that can make those dependencies.. well, "dependable" again.

New comment by edelbitter in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

edelbitter — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:15:58 +0000

Have you looked at the .github/ folder of any actively developed python packages lately? It has become difficult to find one where there isn't a few interesting people with code-execution-capable push/publish/cache-write access somewhere along the blown up transitive dependency/include chains.

New comment by edelbitter in "Give Django your time and money, not your tokens"

edelbitter — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:17:53 +0000

Its weird that still so many consider bug triage a problem to be circumnavigated, somehow in the way of "actual" contributions. Those are actual contributions! Even if they never make it into structured documentation or even python code. And especially so since that work can less usefully be augmented with newly available tool use.

A number of times now, I have found real value in someone just dropping into the bugtracker to restate the bug description in clearer terms or providing a shorter reproducer. Even if the flaw in Django had been fixed right away, I would not have pulled patches from master anyway. So the ticket comment was still a useful contribution to django, because I could use it in resolving the issue in how my software triggered it.

New comment by edelbitter in "Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe"

edelbitter — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 04:10:01 +0000

This is not a regulators move. This is the industry slightly adjusting their recommendations to parents. Will this change anything? Maybe it will help the industry avoid being targeted by actual regulation.

New comment by edelbitter in "Malus – Clean Room as a Service"

edelbitter — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:05:03 +0000

>whatever that library is called

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

New comment by edelbitter in "Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy"

edelbitter — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:14:36 +0000

To complete your analogy: To this day there are humans who have never in their life exceeded 300km/h outside of an airplane. Mostly people in places that had become used to driving. Used to subpar travel times, safety, efficiency and cost. In hindsight, those that saw the horses swapped for electric ones with the carriages mostly unchanged should have been more protective in their transport planning. Could have saved us from the 110 year detour that scarred almost all urban centers.

New comment by edelbitter in "Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users"

edelbitter — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:20:58 +0000

For commits you author.

Kernel guidelines now have a more verbose section about tagging: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-pa...

New comment by edelbitter in "What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust"

edelbitter — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:56:01 +0000

One particular chasm to keep an eye on, possibly even more relevant than Ubuntu using Rust: When it comes to building important stuff, Ubuntu sticks to curl|YOLO|bash instead of trusting trust in their own distributions.

https://github.com/canonical/firefox-snap/blob/90fa83e60ffef...

New comment by edelbitter in "Mozilla's latest quagmire"

edelbitter — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:02:15 +0000

Mozilla suggests policies [1] (which, in turn are capable of default-setting or enforcing most prefs and has proper release notes) and has removed a bunch of pages that previously recommended directly editing prefs.js or shipping user.js (which had been changed in backwards-incompatible ways before when the parser was swapped).

[1]: https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/

New comment by edelbitter in "Mozilla's latest quagmire"

edelbitter — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:55:08 +0000

To be fair, Mozilla-affiliated developers have accomplished some serious cleanup in recent years. New & redesigned features are fake tabs with special permissions instead of that unholy intertwining of web standards and local UI in C++. Storage is almost-proper sqlite3. Dynamic linking against system libraries old&new just works(tm). Even the vendored Rust packages more or less build fine, now even across multiple compiler versions. Plus, AMDs new-ish CPUs with ginormous L3 brought recompile (and thus, bisect) times to almost reasonable levels, so that is not as pressing of an issue any more. I would guesstimate only 25 years left at the current speed till Firefox can be considered maintainable again.

New comment by edelbitter in "Mozilla's latest quagmire"

edelbitter — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:16:02 +0000

Its not just that each new "feature" is unnecessarily difficult to disable, and already active-with-privacy-side-effect by the time you notice.

Most new "features" are by now covered by an existing setting and/or policy. Yet I recognize a pattern of introducing new "but did you opt out of THIS NEW thing?" or "but did you opt out of VERSION TWO of this previously rejected thing?" setting/policy. It has become unsafe to upgrade to new Firefox releases, because each one will disrespect previous user choice in another unexpected way.

New comment by edelbitter in "Mozilla's latest quagmire"

edelbitter — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:02:37 +0000

This new "please accept cookies and scripts to prove you are running Google Chrome without Adblockers" Internet does not exactly look like mission accomplished to me. And that is before we even get to the part of the Internet that goes straight to "please run this Android app so we can ask Google who truly owns your device".

If Mozilla was not busy "offering" (renamed the no-thank-you setting once again) so many "experiences" they could be doing much of the same stuff they did back in the day.

New comment by edelbitter in "My friends and I accidentally faked the Ryzen 7 9700X3D leaks"

edelbitter — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 17:07:18 +0000

I sometimes use lwn.net as an exemplary showcase of things non-tech journalists should learn (e.g.: add references whenever paraphrasing material some or all readers might have direct access to)

New comment by edelbitter in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

edelbitter — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 14:56:57 +0000

As long as grid upgrades & maintenance continue to work reasonably well across western Europe, bad examples from the US are not particularly worrying. Economics of scale still very much apply; there is a point in maintaining expensive grid infrastructure. Especially so when using it to improve other expensive infrastructure, such as electric high-speed passenger rail.

New comment by edelbitter in "72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study"

edelbitter — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 12:58:53 +0000

I would love for steam to offer even the complement: Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power).

Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.

New comment by edelbitter in "Resolution limit of the eye – how many pixels can we see?"

edelbitter — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 07:53:44 +0000

One would expect the results to be highly correlated to corrected vision which is all over the place.. but they get suspiciously tightly grouped results.

Did they maybe not measure how many pixels we can see.. but rather how laughably bad COTS IPS are at contrast, as the examined pattern approaches their resolution? I wonder what happens if you repeat that with a reasonably bright 16K OLED.

New comment by edelbitter in "Cryptographic Issues in Cloudflare's Circl FourQ Implementation (CVE-2025-8556)"

edelbitter — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 01:36:53 +0000

Bernstein also published a simple checklist [1] of what people are likely to do wrong if not ruled out by design. Bullet point 2 on that list was:

> Your implementation leaks secret data when the input isn't a curve point.

[1]: https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/

New comment by edelbitter in "The zipper is getting its first major upgrade in 100 years"

edelbitter — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:47:53 +0000

Having your customers suddenly require proprietary machinery (only sold/licensed by you) to unlock the full potential of your upgraded product line.. does seem compatible with the SF startup way of thinking.