Hacker News: kwhat4

New comment by kwhat4 in "Copy Fail, Dirty Frag, and Fragnesia kernel vulnerabilities"

kwhat4 — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:25:54 +0000

This is a bit misleading. All of genkernel/, gentoo-kernel/, gentoo-kernel-bin/, gentoo-sources/, git-sources/, vanilla-kernel/ and vanilla-sources/ are all different packages for the same Linux Kernel. There are multiple slots per package for the various supported LTS versions of said kernel but they will all get +/- the same set of patches for these issues. There is some support for other kernels like Darwin, BSD and HURD but your millage will vary.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Packages/en

New comment by kwhat4 in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

kwhat4 — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:37:18 +0000

It has been like this forever and periodically someone complains, but then they just go out and buy another mac and keep producing software for macOS. If you want this to change, stop providing financial support.

New comment by kwhat4 in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

kwhat4 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:30:38 +0000

> 3. Android Auto works!

Does this require installing google play and other google services to work?

Edit: https://grapheneos.org/usage#android-auto

New comment by kwhat4 in "Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89"

kwhat4 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:18:43 +0000

Just in time to roll over in his grave.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android"

kwhat4 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:31:32 +0000

If google really cared about security, they would place ad's for shady apps right above the 2fa or banking app I searched for to install.

New comment by kwhat4 in "The $14 Burrito: Why San Francisco Inflation Feels Higher Than 2.5%"

kwhat4 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:41:59 +0000

My local family owned tacoria now sells a $14 burrito in LA. The rest of the prices outlined in this article are also on par with LA pricing. It's hard to find a more expensive place to live the California.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Californian Roads Could Soon Have Speed Cameras Issuing Tickets"

kwhat4 — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 14:54:24 +0000

https://web.archive.org/web/20230815131255/https://www.nytim...

New comment by kwhat4 in "California looks to target oil company profits in a special legislative session"

kwhat4 — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 03:50:04 +0000

That would make logical sense; instead we will tax oil company profits and disincentivize increasing refining capacity. It's pretty amazing our governor didn't care about this issue until it was an election year. Now all of a sudden he is sick and tired of this price gouging.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Five Eyes nations plus Japan call for Big Tech put backdoors in everything"

kwhat4 — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 19:15:42 +0000

There is no common key in the MITM scenario. It's still securely encrypted using over the counter algorithms, but instead of the end users exchanging keys, you exchange with the MITM and different key sets are used by both parties.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Five Eyes nations plus Japan call for Big Tech put backdoors in everything"

kwhat4 — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 18:43:30 +0000

I think the governments all still want strong encryption, but with a man-in-the-middle style eavesdrop point at the tech company where the NSA or whoever can perform their inspection on all the communication flowing through the service. This is certainly not to protect the children but more likely for terrorist monitoring with the added bonus of vacuuming up your dick pics. It should be more secure than back-dooring AES/RSA/ECC, but it still has the potential to compromise quite a bit of information and basically does away with what little privacy any end user has left.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died"

kwhat4 — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 01:49:08 +0000

Fail to see how that matters in states like California and when the former presidential candidate lost with a surplus of 2.5 million votes. Your vote for president only really matters in a handful of states regardless of how many popular votes you tally.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died"

kwhat4 — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 00:34:18 +0000

I'm sorry but how exactly did they democrats get in the way last time when Obama was president? Rolling over and saying whats suppose to happen doesn't qualify as anything meaningful as far as I am concerned. If the democrats want support, they need to grow a fucking backbone and show us they deserve it.

New comment by kwhat4 in "The software industry is going through the “disposable plastic” crisis"

kwhat4 — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 15:48:51 +0000

May of the design philosophies laid by smart people like Eric Raymond are very well documented:

https://medium.com/programming-philosophy/eric-raymond-s-17-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Unix_Programming

New comment by kwhat4 in "GitHub was down again"

kwhat4 — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 18:05:41 +0000

Honestly I've had the opposite experience. With so many community actions available, I've had little trouble finding anything I could dream up. Sure, some of the actions features are a little immature but they are improving with time. The uptime issues are annoying and I feel like the lack of transparency is not helping that situation, but as far as CI solutions go, I feel like my move to actions has been a great way to get up and running with far less effort than other offerings like Code Pipeline.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Roll Your Own Frameworks"

kwhat4 — Thu, 21 May 2020 03:08:41 +0000

This is one of the primary reasons most people hate PHP. Let me ask a simple question: What does the documentation for your homegrown framework look like? Having worked for several organizations that decided to roll their own framework in PHP, it is an absolute nightmare. No one else knows how it works or how to use it and it usually comes with no documentation. Furthermore, you don't get any updates or bug fixes unless you write them, taking time away from working on the project that is being held up by your homegrown solution. There are plenty of fast, low bloat, PHP frameworks to choose from: Phalcon, Slim, Luman and Silex just to name a few. I guarantee they all have better documentation and support. If you need some custom functionality, extend one of these existing solutions to suit your needs. Please, please stop reinventing the wheel for production code.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Ask HN: Have you been laid off?"

kwhat4 — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 19:12:40 +0000

Got let go about 3 weeks ago now, not sure if my employer saw this coming or if their timing was just spot on. No one is interviewing at the moment and it looks like it's going to be at least another 2 weeks before people are even thinking about hiring. The employment situation is going to get much worse before it gets any better. Hang tight, keep applying and hope for the best.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Software Engineering at Google"

kwhat4 — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 01:38:21 +0000

I think you have a point here, but it was not well articulated in your post. Much of the industry doesn't focus on software engineering only programming which leads to massive unmaintainable garbage codebases. These are the same people that want to save a few dollars by outsourcing the work to low cost places like India and are too ignorant to realize that the development takes 10x as long for a product that is unusable. My best advice would be to avoid these organizations as they will never value the engineering and only seem to focus on the lines of code output as a metric of productivity. Unfortunately this is a lot of the "industry," however I believe the 99.9% is a bit of an exaggeration. As software engineers, we should find value this sort of information regardless of our current employers opinion and hope that we can land at an institution that values engineering.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Tips for the depressed"

kwhat4 — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 17:04:13 +0000

Thank you for sharing your experience. I have had a similar experience where the endless stress and burnout culture in the tech field led to total mental collapse about 5 years ago and I can't say I have fully recovered. How have you dealt with employment post meltdown? I have found better jobs since then, however, they all seem to introduce some level of anxiety to my life and I am contemplating leaving tech after 20 years but find that I am not "qualified" to do much else. Just curious if this is a just me issue or if you or others have found a way out of this mess.

New comment by kwhat4 in "The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer"

kwhat4 — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:07:09 +0000

You are right, they do exist... but they are probably not producing what you expect. I have had the privileged of coming into companies that had a programmer who wrote 10x more code than everyone else at the organization. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this code was not maintainable, riddled with bugs and had several critical security vulnerabilities in it. Good programmers are not programmers that create 1000s of lines of code an hour with no thought to maintainability. If that were the case, we would have 500 million programmers in India cranking out the worlds best code. Any time I hear an organization talk about a 10x/Rockstar/1% developer, I run the other way as fast as possible.

New comment by kwhat4 in "Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)"

kwhat4 — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 22:05:41 +0000

Does this ever not happen? I am being serious... Have any of you worked at a company for any substantial period of time where some for of this has not become the norm?