Hacker News: fatal94

New comment by fatal94 in "Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice"

fatal94 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:48:52 +0000

atproto is very promising here, being able to separate personal data from social platforms will make it far easier for people to mass migrate to other services. Unfortunately this selling point is more focused towards tech savvy people but with personal data and privacy becoming more of a concern to the average user online, and social platforms which are working towards keeping bots away its possible.

New comment by fatal94 in "Starbase, LA"

fatal94 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 19:58:43 +0000

This sums up my and many others timeline of his understanding of engineering diciplines: https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958

New comment by fatal94 in "Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative"

fatal94 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:24:04 +0000

Point your ire towards actual decision makers and leaders who aren't making themselves available for questions. Trying to gotcha a IC who is bound by non disparagement clauses and risks loss of employment for speaking out over the decisions of those far above him is ridiculous.

New comment by fatal94 in "Incident with Github.com [resolved]"

fatal94 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:06:43 +0000

The Linux kernel team

New comment by fatal94 in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

fatal94 — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:18:44 +0000

You're being downvoted because you're pushing punishing a company for having a better product. They do not engage in anticompetitive practices, there is no enforced barrier to entry in the market nor do they gate entry like the companies you have listed. They are only a monopoly because they have the best product.

New comment by fatal94 in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

fatal94 — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:15:37 +0000

This will surely bring new energy into opening these platforms, as it did in days before

New comment by fatal94 in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

fatal94 — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:17:27 +0000

Relevance isnt anti competitive. Comparing them to Microsoft who not only monopolized but enforced it via product bundling is not the same at all.

They simply have the best product and won the market.

New comment by fatal94 in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

fatal94 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:38:21 +0000

The fact they were able to strike a deal in the first place hours after Anthropic was declared a supply chain risk should make this obvious. Their employees are smart people, the only way they can reason past this is their compensation.

New comment by fatal94 in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

fatal94 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:44:40 +0000

Extrajudicial means something not legally authorized. The surveillance apparatus in the US for decades has operated outside the confines of legality. By definition, they cannot be stopped by legislation that bans them.

New comment by fatal94 in "US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives"

fatal94 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:26:11 +0000

No amount of legislation can stop subpoenas, wiretapping and other extrajudicial means the US has used for data surveillance since the inception of the Patriot Act. With data privacy increasingly becoming a critical matter of national security, strengthening data sovereignty laws and holding corporations accountable was always the way forward.

New comment by fatal94 in "Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study"

fatal94 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:33:44 +0000

Driving towards a solution of "imprisoning more people" as punishment rather than other punishment have never succeeded. Many states already have first time drug offender and strike programs, people are already imprisoned over a weekend for things even as simple as misdemeanor possession until they can get a bail set. Rehabilitative forms of punishments such as severe fines, community service or mandatory classes and broadcasting them is much more effective in actually driving down rates of impaired drivers.

Whats more, police officers already have a wide authority of judgement when considering these factors around marijuana impairment currently. Relying on subjective evaluation from FST and physical presentation will only result in a higher rate of non impaired drivers being imprisoned.

New comment by fatal94 in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

fatal94 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:17:43 +0000

Ofc, and not everybody needs or cares for all the features Kafka has. Then use another known and tested messaging system. Use NATS or ZMQ. Or any cloud native pubsub system

My main point is, I have zero interest in creating novel solutions to a solved problem. It just artificially increases the complexity of my work and the learning curve for contributors.

New comment by fatal94 in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

fatal94 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:26:37 +0000

What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.

Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.

New comment by fatal94 in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

fatal94 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:42:35 +0000

Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume.

The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.