Hacker News: hamburglar

New comment by hamburglar in "Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation"

hamburglar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:40:12 +0000

I think the long term solution to the privacy problem is going to be to switch to a vehicle marking system which can only be usefully used by law enforcement. Example, if instead of license plates you had a transponder that sends out encrypted metadata about the vehicle in a way that only law enforcement could decrypt it. Obviously there are still problems of abuse of law enforcement keys but it raises the bar significantly and it prevents private companies from building a business out of collecting the data.

You introduce a new problem, which is that eyewitness reports of crimes etc can’t identify the vehicles as easily, but that could be viewed as an acceptable loss. Or the problem could conceivably be solved with more technology if we can have dynamically changing license plates (which, again, require law enforcement keys to map back to a real identity for the vehicle).

The only other way I see is that we change laws so that a company like flock collecting this data and then offering it to the government is treated the same as if the government collected it itself. But now that the cat is out of that bag and there is big money behind it, I don’t really see it going back.

New comment by hamburglar in "Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables"

hamburglar — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:53:20 +0000

This is exactly why my reaction to this was “who has one box of cables? Doesn’t everyone have an array of 18 stackable bins of cables sorted by function and vaguely grouped by vintage?”

Don’t ever let anyone take away your wildly overengineered cable shrine.

New comment by hamburglar in "Show HN: Mador – Make any DOM reactive with a tiny 80-line Proxy state tuple"

hamburglar — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 21:48:12 +0000

> Hey HN! I wanted to see how far you can push modern JavaScript Proxies without all the heavy overhead of a traditional framework. The result is Mador: a tiny ~80-line reactive state tuple ([r, w]) that lets you make any DOM element reactive using a simple CSS selector, automated dependency tracking, and batched microtasks. No build steps required—just drop it in. I built this over the weekend just to experiment with clean, zero-dependency reactivity. Would love to hear your thoughts or see where you'd run into limits with something like this!

Unsure why this comment from the author was flagged/dead but it certainly doesn’t seem to run afoul of HN guidelines.

New comment by hamburglar in "Select * from Internet.blogposts"

hamburglar — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:36:03 +0000

I’d have a lot more sympathy for Twitter’s position wrt profit had they not explicitly told advertisers to go fuck themselves.

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:06:01 +0000

Well I certainly hope. I have my suspicions that if you pre-wiped your key but left the data “intact” but unusable, you open yourself to the law declaring that as somehow withholding evidence. Actually wiping the entire phone and restoring is certainly the safest in terms of how others may interpret it.

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 01:14:31 +0000

Not a fair comparison at all. If you know your backup failed you can simply try again.

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:57:15 +0000

That's not the scenario I'm talking about at all. I'm considering entering the duress code before you approach the border and before the border guard gets anywhere near it, on the assumption that you have a byte perfect backup which is trivial to restore somewhere in the cloud.

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 17:28:30 +0000

One can’t help but wonder if a motivated DOJ could twist a “destruction of the evidence” charge out of someone dumping a kilo of cocaine just before traveling to the US.

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:24:04 +0000

> Well, once you have been told to unlock the device, you're already in a legally binding process

In none of my scenarios am I describing actions to be taken after you have been told to unlock the phone. I’m talking about before you ever approach the border. There is no functional difference between wiping a key which encrypts the entire device (but leaving the encrypted data in place) vs wiping the entire device, from a security point of view, except one requires twiddling fewer bits to restore the data.

My point is that the law is unable to see that equivalence, but it is also unable to compel a different result. If choice A and B are identical for security purposes but the government can technically prosecute A but not B, all they have accomplished is forcing people to choose B.

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:38:22 +0000

The interesting thing is that the "don't carry the data" scenario of wiping your phone and restoring it after you're across the border is not functionally different from the "just don't carry the keys across the border" scenario. I would be comfortable with a dd archive of my encrypted phone contents in an short-lived S3 bucket that I could restore with a simple passphrase-derived key, for example. It's hard for the law to recognize that they haven't achieved anything useful by forcing me to do that instead of just lose the key.

One thing this case makes me wonder is if the government would have a problem with someone walking across the border with a completely virgin phone. They must have wiped it, right? Would they try to prosecute? How could they possibly know the defendant in this case actually had anything on his phone before the duress code was entered?

New comment by hamburglar in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hamburglar — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:58:51 +0000

I like the idea of a phone that automatically wipes itself if I don’t act to stop it. I wonder about the legality of that if the duress code is considered “destroying evidence.”

New comment by hamburglar in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

hamburglar — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:57:56 +0000

If all you want to do is host repositories, “just” is the appropriate word here. For lone wolf work, all I care about is having a remote that mirrors all the changes and branches I create locally. It’s just redundancy. A git bare repo and SSH are all that’s needed.

I don’t do pull requests to myself, and I don’t need a bug tracker or CI.

New comment by hamburglar in "Claude: System Prompts"

hamburglar — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:11:01 +0000

Perhaps if you are prone to conspiracy thinking you should not be tracking your downvotes down to the minute.

New comment by hamburglar in "Claude: System Prompts"

hamburglar — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:42:44 +0000

> Never had a case where suddenly within a minute you get 4, 5 downvotes?

Well, no, I never have, but if I did, my first reaction would be to think I struck a nerve and had a bunch of people react, not that there was a conspiracy.

New comment by hamburglar in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

hamburglar — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:23:25 +0000

People wanted them because mobile web sites sucked, and because it was difficult to build a decent mobile UX using early mobile web tech. That’s not true anymore but people still reach for apps by reflex even though it makes absolutely no sense most of the time. I don’t want your native code running on my device if a website serves the purpose just as well.

The “why are you making me use an app” backlash will come eventually and nobody will be saying “people want apps” anymore.

New comment by hamburglar in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

hamburglar — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:48:55 +0000

I sincerely hope not. That would not have the intended effect on me: I’d stop using bluesky. I’m just not that addicted to it.

New comment by hamburglar in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

hamburglar — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:17:10 +0000

I notice that the stat the article repeatedly quotes is MAU for usage of the mobile app, but one of the things I love about Bluesky is that you don’t need to use a mobile app to have a good UX. I use the mobile browser to access it, so I’m not in that MAU number. Perhaps bsky has a larger number of active users that don’t use the app?

New comment by hamburglar in "Run Android ARM64 VR APKs on Apple Vision Pro"

hamburglar — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:33:04 +0000

The Lightning port is also incredibly physically robust. You can use it as a phone stand without worrying about damaging it. You can’t say that about USB-C.

New comment by hamburglar in "Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If"

hamburglar — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:20:51 +0000

I think I need to build “Hacker News Except All Arguments About Whether Or Not Something Is AI-Written Are Filtered Out”

New comment by hamburglar in "Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard"

hamburglar — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:53:17 +0000

This looks incredible but I’m skeptical you can actually produce it for $250 and maintain the level of quality and features that you claim. And it appears you’re offering $100 off of that (or is that the post discount price? It’s hard to tell). I guess I will wait and see.