<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: idoubtit</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idoubtit</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2026 02:22:18 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=idoubtit" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Hittite royal archive found in Turkey"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This article rephrases and shortens the original article: <a href="https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-184-tablets-unearthed-in-central-turkiye/news" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-1...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:28:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069981</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069981</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069981</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> "paramilitaries terrorizing the Ostjuden."<p>From what I've read, the antisemitism during the Weimar Republic was mostly verbal. The government tried to fight it, but it was still growing. The situation changed very quickly in 32-33 when the NSDAP won the elections, built alliances to claim the power, then ended the Weimar Republic. But its first victims were the Communists, before the Jews.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:33:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50064020</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50064020</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50064020</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Passkeys are a trap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>> They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.<p>The expression was wrong, but the real meaning was described further in the post. The author meant that sites with passkeys can render unapproved software useless, in contrast to TOTP where any client is compatible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:00:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052947</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052947</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052947</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €.<p>Are you sure of these values? Because that's different from what I was told, which was that CB was cheaper for transactions of more than 10 €, because their fees were fixed, not rates like Visa and Mastercard.<p>From what I've just read (not counting the possible extra tax by the bank of the seller):<p>CB: 0.20% + 0.00117 € ⇒ 0.00317 € for 1 €, 0.20117 for 100 €<p>Visa: 0.20% + (0.01% to 0.014%) ⇒ up to 0.00214 € for 1 €, 0.214 € for 100 €<p>Mastercard: 0.20% + (0.15 to 0.17%)<p>The 0.20% is for the "interchange" described in the article. So it applies only when the seller and the buyer do not have the same bank. The maximal rate is fixed by the UE, and AFAIK everyone use the max value.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:52:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49634097</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49634097</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49634097</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The U.S. scores are interesting.<p>Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with  the USA for the PISA studies.<p>The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:07:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611455</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611455</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611455</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "bzip3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, bzip3 compresses that 1GB text file into 170 MB while zstd needs 213 MB (SI units, from my own tests with the "enwik9" file of the GP's page, and the latest releases of both programs, same commands). But the decompression (memory and speed) is a different story.<p>On my desktop, decompressing with zstd requires 128 MB and 1 s, while bzip3 uses 3.2 GB and 90 s.<p>Without `-b 511`, bzip3's ratio decreases and decompression requires about the same memory as zstd. But the decompression is still two orders of magnitude slower.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:38:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602743</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602743</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602743</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe in Japan it will be effective. Since their "zone 30" creation was apparently a success, it seems probable that people will generally comply. My experience in France differs.<p>I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.<p>My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.<p>[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:33:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49548270</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49548270</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49548270</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "A Note from LWN"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you realise that almost no one can understand what you're alluding to? So the comment looks not only vindicative but also stupid.<p>Just a reminder that may be relevant to your gripe: allowing free speech is perfectly compatible with forbidding abuse and hate speech.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:18:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537630</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537630</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537630</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The average American voter does think the USA play a positive role for the world, while the average non-American think otherwise. In details, a 2026 study from the Pew Research Center states that:<p>- 57% of A. think the USA contribute to peace in the world a great or a fair amount.<p>- Republicans and supporter think so at 82%.<p>- Outside of the USA, the median is at 35%.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:21:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507966</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507966</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507966</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "How would you know whether an ancient culture had zero?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, that implication is not automatic. The Babylonian numeral system evolved over milenaries, and the simple space noting the absence of a digit between two digits was later noted by a "0" digit. But this symbol was never used by itself, so it did not mean "nothingness". In the same way, a civilization having the concepts of addition and subtraction does not automatically induce the concept of negative numbers.<p>On the other side, ancient Egyptian numerals did have a zero, but it was only for nothingness. But they did not have a placeholder zero, because their systems was similar to Greek and Roman numerals.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:45:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507188</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507188</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507188</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "How would you know whether an ancient culture had zero?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The question is the title is left unanswered by this shallow article. At least it's not AI slop since there are spelling mistakes ("You’re best hope").<p>> Say you’ve found 17 numeric symbols. You might infer that the writing used a base 20 system<p>Reals numerical systems are much more diverse than that. For instance, Babylon used a base 60 (hence our minutes and hours). But there were much less than 60 numeric symbols, since they had a symbol for 1 and 10. So 2 symbols for a base 60!<p>>  never appears at the beginning of a number, you might infer that  is a zero<p>In the later times Babylonians had a kind of zero, but it was very limited, only used to point the lack of a number between two, i.e. "2∅1" but never "21∅∅" which was written "21" (so numbers were ambiguous if the context didn't give the magnitude).<p>And Babylonians had floating numbers. So "4" could also mean 4/60.<p>What I mean is that Babylon had a zero, but it only covered a part of the positional modern zero. They could not write 0 - 3. And if their zero had been fully positional, there would have been numbers beginning with it, i.e. sexagecimals floats.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:05:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506540</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506540</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506540</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Same here. I immediately visualized one of my juggling balls (the hard kind, pastel blue) on my kitchen table, so the scene was clear. But I was focused on the ball, so I only felt someone approaching and saw their hand pushing the ball, which rolled and fell.<p>I tried to visualise a scene with more unfamiliar objects (a box in the street then a flood wave arrives) and I also built the scene from my own memories. But I'm obviously biased after the first test.<p>With objects that I've never seen myself (e.g. a handgun), I have a hard time imagining them and placing them in my imaginary scenes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:53:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468645</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Fuzzing the Gleam Compiler"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm sorry, but I can't understand how AFL++ could be applied to the Gleam case.<p>The main presentation of the tool lacks any description of its coverage, but from deep inside the documentation[^1] I gather that AFL++ is only relevant for GCC/LLVM languages. Gleam is not one of those.<p>[^1]: <a href="https://github.com/AFLplusplus/AFLplusplus/blob/stable/docs/fuzzing_in_depth.md#a-selecting-the-best-afl-compiler-for-instrumenting-the-target" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AFLplusplus/AFLplusplus/blob/stable/docs/...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:31:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446184</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446184</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446184</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The fact that 62% of Americans have little or no understanding of statistics may be related to those 40% of Americans that believe in Creationism, i.e. human (and fossils) were created by God a few thousands of years ago, and not of randomness and evolution over millions of years. I think no other industrial country has that disbelief in science.
<a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...</a><p>This problem with science is apparent in another survey: in 2009, a Pew Center publication showed that 33% of scientists in the USA believed in God (and 18% in a transient power), which is much lower than the 80% belief of the general American population at the time. Of course, this is not a proof of causality in either direction, but scientific knowledge is seemingly inversely correlated to religiosity. And the USA are still more religious than any other industrial more-or-less-democratic country.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:02:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445051</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445051</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445051</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "France's tax agency got hacked (in French)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm surprised. The stolen data had two parts: some relevant to the income taxes paid, some detailing the real estate (houses and lands) owned by the household. Are both of them public in Norway?<p>Anyway, the main problem is that the breaches into the many French national data stores seem increasingly frequent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:58:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434258</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434258</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434258</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "France's tax agency got hacked (in French)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The post is verbose, but lacks substance:<p>- The last two sections (≈20% of the article, 5.Cloud and 6.IA) are barely relevant.<p>- Some comparisons are questionable. It claims that, since some taxes data was compromised, the trust in the national Federated Identity is eroded "as if Facebook Connect was hacked". That's strange, I think it should be "as the trust in Facebook Connect would be eroded when Facebook is hacked". Anyway, I think most people won't care.<p>- Some sentences make no sense: "Le piratage de Ficoba semble en être l'exemple type"... But "Ficoba" is not mentioned anywhere, and, though I know what the word means, I can't guess what the sentence points to.<p>The OP should have mentioned another important hack of French national structures that happened in december 2025 and which is well documented. IIRC, through phishing, a keylogger was installed on a teacher's computer. Then the hackers got credentials to an internal training platform for teachers. Then they exploited multiple security breaches and connections between Ministries to get access to the national police files.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:46:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434019</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434019</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49434019</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "PostgreSQL for Everything"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why write a fanboy text with unfair comparisons that hide the Postgres limitations?<p>For instance, for many simple needs MySQL is simpler than Postgres, with similar performance and consistency.<p>* No need for a connection pool, while many use cases with Postgres require PgBouncer and Co.<p>* Easy sort (and basic search) of multilingual text, because MySQL has case insensitive UTF8 collations.<p>* No need to VACUUM, which can be a hard problem (it was, the last time I used Postgres).<p>For full text search, I once worked on a project that considered several alternatives for this, including Postgres. Manticore Search was finally chosen because it was more performant, with better search results.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:13:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361914</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361914</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361914</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "Show HN: Laptop is the last place your secrets are still in plaintext"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>* Dealing with encrypted files is easy, and more versatile than a generic wrapper. E.g. to load a secret environment: `eval $(age -d -i secrets.env.age)`. With the added bonus that it only relies on a trusted tool, age.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:52:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49317828</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49317828</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49317828</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Decades ago, I was taught to use `!` and Co, by a Linux user who was fond of the `sudo !!` trick. Then I switched from this implicit interpolation to explicit shortcuts, and I'm glad I did.<p>As suggested in the FAQ at the bottom, instead of !… you can use ctrl-r. Or better, optionally type the first letters then alt-p or "up". It's more powerful and more extensible. Other shortcuts, like alt-., allow navigating into the past parameters.<p>With up, alt-p, alt-. and such, the command line displays the real command. The !… magic is more error-prone and ambiguous; with zsh, I'd suggest hitting TAB to expand the magic into a static text.<p>I would add other entries to the FAQ: When I enter `sudo !!` will it be stored unchanged in the shell history, or stored after interpolation of `!!`? When I start a command line with a space, so that zsh does not put it in the shell history, will !… also ignore that line? Is `!$` recursive?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:27:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270208</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270208</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270208</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by idoubtit in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> not the best design [...]<p>So those engineers at Shopify worked hard for months on a more performant system, but they missed the obvious structure? They chose a complex denormalization for no good reason?<p>It may be true, but I think it's presumptuous to belittle their work when we have only partial information. My guess is that they had good reasons to think that the more obvious ways would not scale.<p>And from reading your comments in this thread, I believe your structure would fail at their scale. A SQL query that uses 2 sub-queries with "group by" is probably too heavy. From the post, at peaks there would be millions of active shopping carts.<p>BTW, I suspect most orders are just for 1 or 2 of each item, so the denormalization is not as heavy as it seems.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:32:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228943</link><dc:creator>idoubtit</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228943</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49228943</guid></item></channel></rss>