Hacker News: johneth

New comment by johneth in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

johneth — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:10:44 +0000

Are you forgetting that you need to launch from one of those "suffocating regulatory states"?

New comment by johneth in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

johneth — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:07:33 +0000

So it's a lot less dumb if 50 really difficult and borderline physically impossible things happen. On the word of a conman. Right.

New comment by johneth in "The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly"

johneth — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:41:01 +0000

> The people who control the capital are building autonomous armament to protect themselves against both foreign and domestic enemies.

Rich people can build all the fortified bunkers they want, but they still need to get their food, water, and air from somewhere. It would be very easy to cut them off or smoke them out.

(I'm not advocating for violence in any way, I'm just pointing out that nobody's invincible, no matter how obscenely wealthy they are).

Apple Faces £3B UK Trial over iCloud Lock-In Claims

johneth — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:51:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/07/apple-icloud-lock-in-uk-lawsuit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48092202

Points: 11

# Comments: 2

New comment by johneth in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

johneth — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:51:10 +0000

It may be incompetent malice.

New comment by johneth in "Trump says 'a whole civilization will die tonight' if Iran does not make a deal"

johneth — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:13:33 +0000

> Anyway, there is no sense to listen to Trump. TACO is a thing.

It's never a good idea to disregard something just because you want it to be true.

Trump's done a lot of shit that he said he'd do (tariffs, capturing foreign leaders, wars of choice). He's incredibly stupid. You can't predict stupid people.

New comment by johneth in "UK Government unveils rules to end subscription traps"

johneth — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:19:41 +0000

It's easy to cancel a direct debit / standing order from internet banking.

New comment by johneth in "SpaceX files to go public"

johneth — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:57:39 +0000

> Providing Internet to the entire world that's faster than fiber.

Bullshit. You're not going to be faster than fiber from orbit, with congested bandwidth.

> Providing space launch capability that's 1/10th what NASA charges.

NASA isn't in the commercial launch space.

> Providing quite good AI at 100 tokens/sec.

It's the weakest of the slop machines.

New comment by johneth in "The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine"

johneth — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:14:50 +0000

I would assume most sites that block access to your AI assistant do so because they want to show a human ads, i.e. not run at a loss. Seems reasonable.

New comment by johneth in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

johneth — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:10:33 +0000

> This is ultimately just going to give them training material for how to avoid this crap.

> The arms race just took another step, and if you're spending money creating or hosting this kind of content, it's not going to make up for the money you're losing by your other content getting scraped.

So we should all just do nothing and accept the inevitable?

New comment by johneth in "Go Naming Conventions: A Practical Guide"

johneth — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:49:53 +0000

> this seems anachronistic, written for a human artisan laboring over each naming choice directly

Some of us want to write well thought-through code, rather than letting an AI just spew poorly thought-through unmaintainable shit.

New comment by johneth in "Can I run AI locally?"

johneth — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:17:49 +0000

Re: the design of the site. Please use higher contrast colours, especially the barely visible grey text on black background. It's annoying to try to read.

New comment by johneth in "Put the zip code first"

johneth — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:41:40 +0000

I think the county list is set in stone because Royal Mail refuses to update them (for some idiotic reason they still control the postcode database, which I guess lots of websites use and therefore use the old county names / boundaries). For example, it's still Humberside, even though that hasn't existed for decades.

New comment by johneth in "You can use newline characters in URLs"

johneth — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:17:30 +0000

RFC 1738 was superseded by RFC 3986 (URIs) 19 years ago, and the URL Living Standard.

New comment by johneth in "Payment fees matter more than you think"

johneth — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:33:27 +0000

> Revolut works similarly. You don’t pay any fees on transfers to other Revolut accounts, but you do for other bank accounts.

Does it? I'd be surprised if it does in the UK at least, as all banks do free transfers to every other bank in the UK via Faster Payments. I thought it was the same in the EU?

New comment by johneth in "WebMCP is available for early preview"

johneth — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:05:06 +0000

Or just use in the first place and save humans and machines a whole bunch of time.

New comment by johneth in "Facebook's Fascination with My Robots.txt"

johneth — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:04:26 +0000

The only downside I can think of is that links to your website that are shared on Facebook / WhatsApp / Messenger won't be able to show a rich preview because they won't be able to access the OpenGraph tags on the shared page.

Rich previews are known to cause higher clickthroughs than non-rich previews (if you care about that).

New comment by johneth in "AI is going to kill app subscriptions"

johneth — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:09:26 +0000

Comments as short-sighted as this give me confidence in the future job security of people who actually know how to write software.

> the gatekeeping has now been removed

'Gatekeeping' being 'knowing'... nobody was stopping you from learning.

> The security and maintenance aspect of apps is just a claude skill away to be a solved problem.

Incredible joke. Got a good laugh from me.

New comment by johneth in "The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA"

johneth — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:51:25 +0000

It's a classic American worldview.

New comment by johneth in "India and EU announce landmark trade deal"

johneth — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:27:45 +0000

UK-India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_C...

UK-EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93UK_Trade_and_Cooper...