Hacker News: gbear605

New comment by gbear605 in "Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache"

gbear605 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:47:37 +0000

Engineers are expensive, especially good system engineers who are trained in your code base. Very possible that this just hadn't gotten to the top of the priority list.

New comment by gbear605 in "Tracking Costco gas prices"

gbear605 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:44:25 +0000

At the gas stations near me, at the start of 2025, I could get a gallon of gas for around $1.85. The stations near me are now up to around $4.30, a 250% increase. I don't know if I'd quite call it a crisis, but certainly it's a major shock.

New comment by gbear605 in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

gbear605 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:11:04 +0000

Best of luck with the weather!

New comment by gbear605 in "ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud"

gbear605 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:55:16 +0000

That's true, but then the people you're selling to have to want to buy the shares. And if you're buying YES at 97%, you're not going to be able to sell the YES shares to anyone at much higher - because eventually someone has to hold it to the end.

It's true that this isn't as true for NO, because a small change can give a huge return, but that's asymmetrical. So there's incentive for traders to buy NO, hoping that it moves down, but not an incentive for traders to buy YES, since it doesn't have any room to go up.

New comment by gbear605 in "ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud"

gbear605 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:59:21 +0000

It's worth noting that Polymarket (and all other prediction markets using money) has some fundamental problems that cause inaccuracy. Most notably here, the elections are still several months out, so you're asking people to put up 97 cents to get a dollar back in three months. But for that time frame I could also put 97 cents in treasuries and get 98 cents back, so the market won't be accurate within 1% of reality, and treasuries are considered a good deal safer than Polymarket.

In addition, there can be issues related to fees, Kelly betting (if the correct bet is 98%, don't want to bet all the way to 98% or you have no returns and you definitely don't want to put all of your wallet in on it in case it goes against you), and so on.

So this isn't a "3% chance of the elections happening" it's "3%, plus or minus the rate of return over three months, plus or minus all the other related issues". I don't know if that gets you down to zero percent, but it definitely gets you closer.

(Yes Polymarket has tried to do some things to resolve these issue, no they don't work very well.)

New comment by gbear605 in "The Great Steam Deck Crash of 2026: How the New Pricing Decreased Demand by 80%"

gbear605 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:40:54 +0000

Nintendo is raising the price of the Switch 2 in September by $50. And that’s after the Switch 2 being priced $100 more than expectations on launch.

New comment by gbear605 in "Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds"

gbear605 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:53:06 +0000

In many areas, this is left up to the parents - minors can't buy alcohol at stores, but parents are legally allowed to give alcohol to their children to drink.

New comment by gbear605 in "Late Bronze Age Collapse"

gbear605 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:18:41 +0000

I think it's a great read, but make sure to take it with a huge grain of salt.

New comment by gbear605 in "Upcoming breaking changes for npm v12"

gbear605 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:38:08 +0000

The idea of the parameter is stopping the attackers from getting on your system in the first place

New comment by gbear605 in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

gbear605 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:39:38 +0000

The difference between weight and volume measurements could easily be a 20% or 30% gap. I’ve measured two of my cups of flour before and they were off by roughly that amount.

Maybe I’m just bad at measuring, but it’s a lot more than 5%.

New comment by gbear605 in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

gbear605 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:22:12 +0000

Soccer is extremely widespread and played by both boys and girls at a young age (up until puberty or so), but there definitely is a gender gap after that. I'd guess that there are a lot of other sports that are almost solely played by boys, so boys tend to drift away from soccer, while there are fewer options for girls. (Though there are some - lacrosse and softball for a couple examples.)

New comment by gbear605 in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

gbear605 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:17:14 +0000

It certainly can matter for proper baking (which this recipe seems to be?), though for traditional pancakes I would never bother. But there's a reason that bakeries weigh their ingredients. It's more consistent and allows for different people to get more similar results.

New comment by gbear605 in "Malicious npm packages detected across Red Hat Cloud Services"

gbear605 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:21:55 +0000

As discussed elsewhere in this forum, these exploits are being found by security companies in the first few days after they're published, that's just already too late. For example, the auditor who made the very post that we're discussing! For another, many security-focused AI companies have automated checks on NPM packages. Many people are implementing it on their end by having their client wait seven days before pulling new packages, but that's O(N) rather than O(1), and it's not evenly spread.

If no one reviews it and it still gets out, then we can address it then, but that seems much less likely.

Ideally, the solution is that all of these language package managers need to get serious and have maintainers, but lacking that, at least having the waiting period be built into the server instead of the client is a clear win.

New comment by gbear605 in "NPM packages from RedHat have been compromised"

gbear605 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:03:39 +0000

One easy change would be that before any package can be published, it has to wait a minimum of two weeks in a state where it can be reviewed but it can't be installed without jumping through several hoops with big warning signs, things like "INSTALL_INTENTIONALLY_DANGEROUS_PACKAGES_THAT_WILL_BREAK_MY_COMPUTER=1", selecting yes in a dialogue that asks if they want to install software that likely has viruses, and pointing to a different package repository URL.

If there's some change that must get out sooner, then there can be some fee to pay to npm to have their security team do their own review.

Critically, there must be time for someone to review before it's the default to be selected.

I'm sure there are issues with this, this was off my head, but it seems like a really easy step to at least stem the problem for now. And there are a bunch of ideas like this that would help, but NPM doesn't seem willing to take it seriously as an existential threat to the ecosystem, rather than taking trivial steps.

New comment by gbear605 in "The dead economy theory"

gbear605 — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:37:12 +0000

That’s a should, what makes it a will? Capitalism can just be killed by AI.

New comment by gbear605 in "Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)"

gbear605 — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:32:00 +0000

That was the comparison, yes

New comment by gbear605 in "Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)"

gbear605 — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:15:01 +0000

Pyramid schemes are defined by the price and structure. A business that sells knives is a fine business. A business that sells overpriced knives by promising that you can then find someone else to sell more knives for you at an even higher price is a pyramid scheme.

Selling tulips is a fine business. Selling tulips at an insanely high price by promising that the market for tulips will keep on expanding and increasing the price of tulips is a pyramid scheme. (Well, maybe not quite a pyramid scheme, the structure isn't right. But it certainly wasn't a sustainable business model.)

New comment by gbear605 in "Can we have the day off?"

gbear605 — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:50:59 +0000

At least for my software job in the US, and other salaried jobs I’ve seen, there are explicitly no hours listed, and it’s supposedly based only on your output. In practice though, if your butt isn’t in the seat 40 hours a week or so, and usually more, the boss will be mad.

New comment by gbear605 in "Incident with Actions and Pages"

gbear605 — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:10:13 +0000

My subjective experience was that it got a lot worse post-Microsoft. I could be misremembering though!

New comment by gbear605 in "Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier"

gbear605 — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:40:07 +0000

Two thirds of Europeans want this - https://www.techpolicy.press/almost-two-thirds-of-europeans-...

> The figures were almost universal across all categories: 62 percent of those surveyed across the five European countries said they favored or had considered replacing US data storage and payment services, while 59 percent of respondents said they would back a change from American video-conferencing companies like Zoom.

(Technically only five countries in the EU in this survey, but the five most populous countries, and presumably other countries generally agree)