Hacker News: manwe150

New comment by manwe150 in "My old job feels distant now"

manwe150 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:41:38 +0000

Until either the enter key wears out and breaks, or we get pervasive sandboxes that act according to the users interests. It seems like Windows Vista UAC all over again for a new generation.

New comment by manwe150 in "Passkeys are not a trap"

manwe150 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:53:48 +0000

You know how to feed the site certificate into gpg before every login to check for url phishing attacks? I usually have to ask my password manager to do that (which didn’t exist 25 years ago)

New comment by manwe150 in "Passkeys are not a trap"

manwe150 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:50:21 +0000

I’ve never seen an implementation where passkeys deleted my password or could lead to a situation where it was locked out. They usually just bypass the password+2fa dance when functioning, and otherwise just don’t matter if they don’t function. (Well perhaps except home depot, where it gets mad at me every time I use a password and tries to install a new copy of the same broken passkey as last time, for my convience)

New comment by manwe150 in "God of War on PSP, recompiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser"

manwe150 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 03:29:45 +0000

I asked Fable to write me a small CRUD app recently so I could keep tabs on my todo list and edit it. It chose to write the database as YAML files stored in git. When I asked why not use a database, it defended the choice by saying it would let me edit the files by hand whenever I wanted and sync them to where ever I wanted and get reliable git merges maintaining consistency, so I didn’t have to rely on remote database operations for that.

New comment by manwe150 in "Zig v0.17.0"

manwe150 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 03:21:36 +0000

That’s assuming the reporter reproduced it. I’ve seen so much slop these days. Sometimes people post whole conversations in which the final answer from the AI is that the initial report was impossible to fit to the data after reproducing it, then continues in circles arguing that proves the original reported issue was real and the refuted cause isn’t actually refuted (eg it said there was a bug in function A, in code which never used function A — and that example was with the top tier models just released last month)

New comment by manwe150 in "Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video"

manwe150 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 03:10:53 +0000

About 1700sf with taller than normal ceilings. It’s unnecessary bright in the evening, but blends with sunlight in the day. I feel like our brains must interpret light differently depending on the angle it reaches the eye. I used to rent a place that was 900sf with normal ceilings, which had 4 of those tiny sort of ones in the living room, and it was painfully bright in the way they concentrated the light into spots so we never used them (unfortunately they didn’t have dimmers)

I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)

New comment by manwe150 in "Zig v0.17.0"

manwe150 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:35:09 +0000

A lot of bug reports aren’t valid, or handle a case that can’t realistically happen or realistically be handled (eg what do you do if you detect a crash while the prior crash is crashing and the logging pipe is throwing errors)

New comment by manwe150 in "Zig v0.17.0"

manwe150 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:29:30 +0000

I feel very torn as a maintainer on this, since the only way to respond to the increased noise from AI has been to have AI do the research for me to extract all the links and line numbers I used to have to find by hand to explain why the PR needs more effort to be completed. But I also will be highly dismissive of any submitter who just posts AI text without cleaning it up first. It feels hypocritical, but the alternative is that I just can’t respond to most people instead due to limited bandwidth. I mark if something comes directly from the LLM though and to try to express my degree of confidence in its claims.

New comment by manwe150 in "Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video"

manwe150 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:04:01 +0000

Yes almost 60 sounds right, and I keep the dimmers at about 50% usually since it’s a small condo. But it also very /evenly/ illuminated. The builders chose this, not me. Your typical incandescent hallway or stairwell probably used to have 1-2 lights (60-120W) to cast enough light to get around. Now that same hall in modern LED style might have 4-6, because it eliminates shadows, not because it makes it brighter in a given spot. Same for the kitchen—it probably used to have one central 100W light and 50W over sink, and now a modern style build in the same space might have at least 6 LED ceiling lights+6 under cabinet lights

New comment by manwe150 in "Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones"

manwe150 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 02:49:59 +0000

No, that would fundamentally break the way (good) hashing works if I could add known data and get it to reveal the secret data

New comment by manwe150 in "Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video"

manwe150 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 02:44:00 +0000

Across my house, I think I have about a kilowatt or two of LED lights, mostly in the form of ceiling cans at 16W each. Running everything full brightness would thus be about $0.30-$0.50 per hour. It’s the paradox that the same rooms probably would have used the wattage with the old incandescents, it just would have had a lot more shadowy corners.

New comment by manwe150 in "The great crime decline is happening all across the country"

manwe150 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:44:07 +0000

Seriously? It is also logical to kill anyone accused of a crime, in case they actually might have really committed it and might again. Is trial even worth the risk that one guilty man should go free?

New comment by manwe150 in "Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock"

manwe150 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 03:00:21 +0000

Also seems like it isn’t clear that they ever owned it. There appears to be a mistake in the contract asserting mutually inconsistent clauses, but it appears that both parties agreed on the not-owning interpretation for nearly 30 years, which might already be a far simpler contract resolution (depending on jurisdiction, it can almost immediately binding as soon as both parties accent to that reading) than also having waited out the statute of limitations

New comment by manwe150 in "The great crime decline is happening all across the country"

manwe150 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:42:50 +0000

I’m not sure if either of you are being honestly factual or snarky, but I seem to recall this hypothesis is actually quite highly contested in social circles, and not at all as strongly supported as the parent seems to state it as fact

New comment by manwe150 in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

manwe150 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:56:45 +0000

Why not do both though? I often now write my human summary, then paste in also the content you could get by asking a bot (with markers for which is which). You’re perfectly welcome to ignore the bot text, or ask your own bot, but bots are pretty slow, so I also don’t want to wait for it to “decompress” that 300 bit blob to get the detailed page back. But my human summaries are also only intended to be 50 bits — compressed again to just pass the signal I mean to convey, and not the whole prompt needed to fetch the right info from the right place to substantiate the claim.

TLDR the length was the same curtesy of tl;dr before, just now with a different name.

New comment by manwe150 in "I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture"

manwe150 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:27:19 +0000

Several of my coworkers — it’s not that unusual that if you can max out a couple accounts, the companies will obviously notice you (as a high cost customer), and sometimes offer more

New comment by manwe150 in "Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023"

manwe150 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:58:39 +0000

That only makes sense if money is a durable good destroyed by use. But money is improved by use and lost when put under a mattress. In economics terms, MV=PQ, and your proposal sets V low, which harms Q (goods available for sale)

New comment by manwe150 in "How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language"

manwe150 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:48:26 +0000

It was about lisp ;)

Secret mode: ./julia —-lisp

New comment by manwe150 in "Hacking IKEA Furniture"

manwe150 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:35:25 +0000

I challenge you to dissemble your bespoke furniture and have it still usable after reassembly

New comment by manwe150 in "EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws"

manwe150 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:08:56 +0000

It seems pretty much how law (specifically common law) has always worked though. If Congress thinks the law should apply to them, then Congress's job is to write a law that applies to them. The president and judicial branches are not supposed to make new laws, but rather to enforce the laws as written.

My reading of the EPA's statement here is they also wanted to mildly warn the companies that if they ever in the future want to contemplate connecting to the grid (eg. to bring down costs), they should be aware that bypassing compliance now could have expensive consequences for them later. Of course, Congress (local or federal) could also change the law in the much shorter term, so there's risk to them either way if they design without any forward thought for how to comply. On the other hand, if this inquiry to the EPA was merely requesting clarity on whether they are exempt from the reporting paperwork, but are using otherwise standard and compliant designs, then maybe the law is already working generally as intended.