Hacker News: masfuerte

New comment by masfuerte in "Phones should have a 'guest lock' feature"

masfuerte — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:06:17 +0000

Because you need to prove you have insurance to drive and the proof is on your phone rather than a piece of paper.

I don't know about America but in the UK, if you can't provide proof immediately the officer will give you a "producer", which is a legal notice requiring you to provide the evidence at a police station within some time limit (typically a week or two).

Edited to add: I'd guess this is less common these days because the British police have access to a database of motor insurance anyway.

New comment by masfuerte in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

masfuerte — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:54:20 +0000

User name checks out!

New comment by masfuerte in "Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas"

masfuerte — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:09:12 +0000

Factories were originally located near housing (or vice versa) because the factories needed lots of workers. This doesn't apply to data centres. They don't need to be near anybody's home, so why should anyone be obliged to suffer their externalities? Just build your data centre somewhere else.

New comment by masfuerte in "Over 181,000 AI meeting recordings left wide open in note taking app"

masfuerte — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:52:11 +0000

What's the alternative? Seriously. He's spent six months trying to get them to fix it. The risk is already there.

New comment by masfuerte in "Dithered QR Codes"

masfuerte — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:01:41 +0000

You'd think. My local authority is reorganising refuse collection and did a mailshot to let everyone know the new collection rota. Then they did another because the dates on the first one were wrong. The incompetence is staggering.

New comment by masfuerte in "The AI Billboards Are Killing SF"

masfuerte — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:52:35 +0000

Yes. Billboards that condition you to stop looking at them sound awesome.

New comment by masfuerte in "Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer"

masfuerte — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:50:55 +0000

The National Garden Scheme is still a thing.

https://ngs.org.uk/who-we-are/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/

New comment by masfuerte in "The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and You"

masfuerte — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:12:07 +0000

It's very much related because the technology provides an excuse to ignore the infrastructure problems even when it isn't good enough.

New comment by masfuerte in "SwiftUI After 7 Years"

masfuerte — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:40:35 +0000

Yeah, I like WPF and I still use it for my own apps. In fact, my own software is the only thing keeping me on Windows now. I really should take a look at Avalonia and port my stuff over to Linux.

New comment by masfuerte in "Norway became a global salmon behemoth. Now it's facing the consequences"

masfuerte — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:46:26 +0000

But Norway is part of the EEA and is therefore bound by many EU regulations.

New comment by masfuerte in "When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)"

masfuerte — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:58:53 +0000

This design also serves a business purpose. You can see at a glance if someone has this week's pass without carefully checking the date. Our local bus company does something similar - the day passes have a random word for the day so you can't just print one at home, at least not without colluding with someone who's already bought a ticket.

New comment by masfuerte in "Atom is better than RSS, in ways that matter"

masfuerte — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:57:29 +0000

There is precedent. The HTML title element cannot contain markup. Titles may be cited in many places and formatting may not be available. If a title requires formatting to convey its meaning it's a bad title.

(Not that I want to defend RSS. In early versions valid RSS wasn't necessarily even valid XML. It is very poor.)

New comment by masfuerte in "The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago"

masfuerte — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:43:21 +0000

I've been forced to use github projects recently. If I change the label or status, say, of a task, the change takes its sweet time to propagate through the UI. Creating multiple new tasks is a huge chore because every action is really laggy. It's hard to believe that anyone at github uses any of this junk.

New comment by masfuerte in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

masfuerte — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:51:37 +0000

Being pedantic, the COM vtable layout is defined independently of C++. The Windows headers used to (and maybe still do) have macros that could declare COM vtables as explicit structs so you could use Windows COM interfaces from C.

That used to be the case anyway. It's possible they binned the C support in the switch to 64-bit. I haven't looked since.

New comment by masfuerte in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

masfuerte — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:08:11 +0000

I like this map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_cup_winners.svg

New comment by masfuerte in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

masfuerte — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:16:35 +0000

Money is power. That is the problem with extreme wealth. It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process. It is not surprising that an already powerful man wants even more power, but I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.

New comment by masfuerte in "What's Under Your Feet in New York City?"

masfuerte — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:00:13 +0000

It's quite frustrating. The story ends with:

> four defendants refused to accept a plea deal and were set to be tried in April 2025

I can find loads of stories reporting those facts, but I can't find an account of what happened next. Did they change their pleas? Were they tried?

New comment by masfuerte in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

masfuerte — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:49:43 +0000

> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?

And the way we understand the maths is to do the maths. You can't outsource the maths to AI and continue to understand it. I don't believe we can have it both ways.

New comment by masfuerte in "Ah, the Codeberg Drama"

masfuerte — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:09:02 +0000

There was a quicker tell: opening with "Ah".

New comment by masfuerte in "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI"

masfuerte — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:54:05 +0000

Yes, but if a company publishes its trade secrets on the web you are entitled to read them and use them.