Hacker News: etatoby

New comment by etatoby in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

etatoby — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:36:54 +0000

Something I've never understood about DRM is, if the content is ultimately played on my device, what stops me from reverse engineering their code to make an alternative client or downloader? Is it just making it harder to do so? Or is there a theoretical limit to reverse engineering that I'm not getting? Do they have hardware decryption keys in every monitor, inside the LCD controller chip?

New comment by etatoby in "Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking"

etatoby — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:58:52 +0000

For what its worth, all of my local banking and e-government apps work flawlessly on GrapheneOS. The only unsupported feature or app I've found so far is Google Pay. (I'm from Italy)

New comment by etatoby in "Language models are injective and hence invertible"

etatoby — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:31:36 +0000

> Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

Which, incidentally, is the main reason why deep learning and LLM are effective in the first place.

A vector of a few thousands dimensions would be woefully inadequate to represent all of human knowledge, if not for the fact that it works as the projection of a much higher, potentially infinite-dimensional vector representing all possible knowledge. The smaller-sized one works in practice as a projection, precisely because any two such vectors are almost always orthogonal.

New comment by etatoby in "Zoo of array languages"

etatoby — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 12:42:30 +0000

Came here to say the same thing. Uiua is my favorite language by far. BQN is also a cool "Nu-APL" but Uiua is just a full generation ahead.

New comment by etatoby in "No Start Menu for You"

etatoby — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 08:38:09 +0000

> I have a good understanding of the problem, but I do not have a solution

REALLY

Just don't call background services, unless the user explicitly requested a remote service! My Linux installs and (to a lesser degree) my Windows LTSB/LTSC installs don't have these issues, you know?

New comment by etatoby in "Show HN: Cosh – concatenative command-line shell"

etatoby — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 17:57:15 +0000

I'm very puzzled by this language. Why put the verbs at the end of the sentence, for instance? Was this shell inspired by Japanese or German?

New comment by etatoby in "Show HN: Cosh – concatenative command-line shell"

etatoby — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 17:56:15 +0000

Even after perusing jq's manual multiple times and having written several complex incantations, I still have no idea how to properly combine `|` and `.[]` except by trial and error, or why `select()` needs to be used inside `map(select(...))`

Recently I needed to extract some data, and after fighting with jq and its manual for half an hour, I solved the problem in 30 seconds with node.js

I appreciate the idea behind jq, but its language is horrible. Even XPath was easier and cleaner.

New comment by etatoby in "A Full List of Denied Vanity License Plates – Oregon DMV 2021"

etatoby — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:24:46 +0000

They should all be either allowed or denied. Why are UR-MOM or F-YOU considered offensive, while newer memes and slang that may be even more offensive can probably pass through the radar? Either allow everything, or deny vanity plates altogether.

New comment by etatoby in "Space anemia"

etatoby — Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:44 +0000

IIRC a spinning space station would only be beneficial if it was very large and thus far from Earth and expensive.

Otherwise the difference in gravity acting on different sides of the body and more importantly the Coriolis forces would wreak havoc and cause more harm than good.

New comment by etatoby in "I love coding in C"

etatoby — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 17:25:45 +0000

Have you considered Nim?

Much better type system than C, syntax is very similar to Python, compile times are excellent and speed analogous to C++.

New comment by etatoby in "The Great Cannon has been deployed again"

etatoby — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 20:04:07 +0000

Yes, it will complain and for good reason: it has no way of knowing whether the kid next door is spoofing your router's IP or Mac address and presenting their own self-signed certificate.

I wouldn't go as far as calling it «capricious constraints imposed by the system of "certificate authorities"» but at the same time, I agree that it's not a fundamental limitation of the technology.

Better protocols could be developed to allow a browser to trust a server without (all) the limitations of the current system.

New comment by etatoby in "Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong"

etatoby — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 19:05:08 +0000

> Futurama was right: nuclear winter cancels global warming

I'm not sure it does (I'd love to read an accurate model of it) but I get your point. It's a very compelling point.

I wish humans didn't need the threat of nuclear weapons to keep the basic needs of other humans in mind, but since they do... there you go.

New comment by etatoby in "Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong"

etatoby — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 18:53:20 +0000

It was definitely not. It was in the food we interested.

Trees and other plants take carbon from air, energy from the sub, and use it to build themselves. We take carbon from them and put it back into the air, using the excess energy to move and think.

New comment by etatoby in "Twitter prepares for cull of inactive users"

etatoby — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 07:24:20 +0000

Does European privacy law have the same provision? They are removing non-US accounts first, after all.

New comment by etatoby in "Instagram is deleting the accounts of hundreds of porn stars"

etatoby — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 14:05:08 +0000

That's exactly the taboo aspect of it.

New comment by etatoby in "Instagram is deleting the accounts of hundreds of porn stars"

etatoby — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 14:03:42 +0000

I agree. It probably got fixed into our instincts and our culture a long time ago.

New comment by etatoby in "Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved (2006)"

etatoby — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 14:06:25 +0000

To play devil's advocate, such a thing as transcribing Western names phonetically using Chinese characters does exist, both in contemporary Chinese and in other historical or minority Chinese-derived languages, as well as in old Japanese.

Here are the current rules for standard Chinese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_cha...

And here is some information about the same thing historically done in Japanese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji

That being said, I have only glanced at that tattoo table and it seems wildly inaccurate and simplified. But the underlying concept does exist.

New comment by etatoby in "Eigenvectors from eigenvalues"

etatoby — Fri, 15 Nov 2019 13:19:47 +0000

I recommend the Linear Algebra series of YouTube videos by 3blue1brown.

New comment by etatoby in "The war against today's dangerously dull playgrounds"

etatoby — Sat, 02 Nov 2019 11:21:03 +0000

By "older kids" you mean "moronic young adults," I agree:

https://youtu.be/JA7jc4rpTns

New comment by etatoby in "Gitlab ‘rethinking’ third-party telemetry"

etatoby — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 15:53:25 +0000

With the second party (Gitlab in this case) I have a contact, give them money regularly, and have other such leverage in case they screw up. Third parties generally could not case less what damage they may cause.