Hacker News: esterna

New comment by esterna in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

esterna — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:10:26 +0000

> All type parameters have an implicit bound of Sized. The special syntax ?Sized can be used to remove this bound if it’s not appropriate.

, which HashMap does not do, i.e. the keys and values have to have a statically known size.

New comment by esterna in "Self hosted email continues to steeply decline"

esterna — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:33:54 +0000

This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.

New comment by esterna in "Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576"

esterna — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:05:26 +0000

Read the article. The elaborator (where metaprogramming is evaluated) is not part of the trusted computing base. The security model is that bad proof terms get rejected, not that they're never generated.

New comment by esterna in "EYG: A Programming Language for Humans"

esterna — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:45:35 +0000

And it has array programming features, logging, and (time-travel!) debugging all intuitively graspable for most non-technical people.

I sincerely think there are lots of unlearned lessons in studying Excel.

New comment by esterna in "EYG: A Programming Language for Humans"

esterna — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:19:17 +0000

There is one example that succeeded and became the most widely used programming paradigm on the planet: Spreadsheets

Though you might argue that the "programming language" part was rather accidental

New comment by esterna in "Exploiting Volvo/Eicher's fleet platform to gain control over all users/vehicles"

esterna — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:08:31 +0000

> How's this any different than say, not bringing your wallet with you, because 95% of the time apple pay works

Apple Pay involves at least a third party (your bank) as a part of its function. This entity has to be reachable.

Unlocking my car needs me, and my car.

> when the payment terminal randomly decides to not accept apple pay?

I would be justified in being mad if, randomly, my BMW car would decide to not accept a BMW key (virtualized or otherwise).

> Not to mention there are plenty of other ways a phone can fail. It can [...]

"I will not accept this Euro bank note. You could have dropped it into the gutter on your way here, so it's strange for you to be mad at me if you don't have a backup."

New comment by esterna in "EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services"

esterna — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:41:46 +0000

Why should be? I think it is abundantly clear by now that market competition alone will not fix this. Though that does not stop people from claiming "Yes that failed and people suffered/died, but that was not real capitalism! If only we had a real free market, it would have been better!"

New comment by esterna in "EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services"

esterna — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:38:08 +0000

NIS2 allows for the arrest of managers in case of cybersecurity incidents resulting from negligence. I think it's a step in the right direction, but we'll have to see how it plays out.

New comment by esterna in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

esterna — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 11:27:50 +0000

Once I start a conversation about Postgres query plans, maybe 95% of the knowledge will be almost certainly not needed, and for an inference provider there will be many more concurrent queries with reasonably large overlap. Maybe future architectures will be able to take advantage of this so not all parameters are needed in memory for almost all instances.

If we are talking about all knowledge, then I agree that the compression ratio is very impressive already.

New comment by esterna in "EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services"

esterna — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:49:26 +0000

I wonder if the EU will someday figure out a patch for this "Deteriorate everyone's user experience in a way that is technically compliant and blame the EU" behavioural exploit...

New comment by esterna in "EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application"

esterna — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:38:56 +0000

Once once they are rejected by charities, they can be destroyed just like before this law. EU regulators are flawed humans, but you can be assured that any argument you can come up with in 10 minutes has been considered.

New comment by esterna in "Prefer strict tables in SQLite"

esterna — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:57:55 +0000

... than by surprise, when you find your integer column contains "[object Object]"? Jokes aside, breaking backwards compatibility is obviously a non-starter.

New comment by esterna in "New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices"

esterna — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:09:10 +0000

Their boss hired GP over others for a reason. The person who is finally desperate enough to do it might be just a little worse at their job, a little more expensive, ... It will have a cost.

German has a related expression "vorrauseilender Gehorsam" (anticipatory obedience), where people will do evil long before they are forced to because of such strategic considerations. You must never rush to give up your morals, there will be plenty of time to do so later.

New comment by esterna in "New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices"

esterna — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:10:10 +0000

Be here long enough and you will find people bragging about their captcha solving services, or how they found a clever loophole in anti-gambling laws. Posts about certain unmentionable topics are flagged minutes after being posted, post titles are changed to protect in-groups, and human rights are sometimes up to debate.

The rule is that you have to be polite about it all.

New comment by esterna in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

esterna — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:24:32 +0000

Of course, what they charge $39.95 for is in the public domain. So it's a sort of double scam.

New comment by esterna in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

esterna — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:22:01 +0000

You can also buy licenses to use AV1, a royalty-free codec.

New comment by esterna in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

esterna — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:42:55 +0000

While I won't dispute that 6 months is outrageous, OP has not spent them to "please the bureaucracy", they spent them to escape personal liability should the company go bankrupt. The rest of the post is bemoaning the fact the German government won't let them also permanently reduce the company liability below 25k.

New comment by esterna in "Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards"

esterna — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:24:23 +0000

Debit cards usually also use the Mastercard or Visa payment networks.

Even though I and the supermarket I go to are both part of SEPA and I can issue a bank transfer that will clear ~instantly, today cashless payments still involve EMV for various reasons.

New comment by esterna in "My Mathematical Regression"

esterna — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:22:20 +0000

The sequence numbers of problems on Project Euler only represent the order of publication. They aren't deliberately connected except for a few problems that have one or two follow-ups.

Most of the first 100 problems can be solved without any understanding of the problem, should you so desire.

New comment by esterna in "Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures"

esterna — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:36:23 +0000

This hinges on two misunderstandings:

- That data processing always requires consent. There are exactly six reasons for storing or processing data: consent, contract fulfillment, legal compliance, vital interests of a natural person, public interest/official authority, or legitimate interest. Collecting IP addresses can be a legitimate interest, but:

- The real interesting question is what you do with the IP addresses after they're stored in a file. Securing your server is a legitimate interest. Tracking your users is generally not. Having lawfully collected data is not a carte blanche to do anything you choose with it.