Hacker News: maxgashkov

New comment by maxgashkov in "Japan implements language proficiency requirements for certain visa applicants"

maxgashkov — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:37:50 +0000

Not sure why your comment is downvoted, because it hits the issue dead center, namely it's completely possible to pass either of the required tests (N2/J2) and not being able to speak a single word of Japanese in a live conversation.

That's why at least one category of applicants abusing the visa (Chinese) will continue to do so without any issues.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth"

maxgashkov — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:34:31 +0000

None of them are 'good'. Execs at Anthropic just perceive the long-term damage from a potential Snowden-level leak showing how their model directed a drone strike against a bunch of civilians higher than short-term loss of revenue from the DoD contracts.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days"

maxgashkov — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 01:32:38 +0000

Thank god. The only remaining failure mode I’ve seen with LE certs recently is API key used to manipulate DNS records for the DNS-01 challenge via some provider (Cloudflare etc.) expiring or being disabled during improper user offboarding.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in drone attack deep in Russia"

maxgashkov — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 23:26:20 +0000

According to videos published they still seem to be flying drones manually, so won't additional latency introduced by the cellular network & repeaters make this really hard / impossible?

New comment by maxgashkov in "Japan Post launches 'digital address' system"

maxgashkov — Thu, 29 May 2025 01:33:16 +0000

Japan Post represents only a portion of shipping providers in Japan, for our idea to work others will need the same privileged access to the system: Yamato, Sagawa etc.

This will also require to alter the package label on the last mile because requiring the courier to scan every package or letter before they could even see an apartment number will slow things down to a crawl.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Japan Post launches 'digital address' system"

maxgashkov — Thu, 29 May 2025 01:29:18 +0000

It solves an issue of Japanese addressing system being a total mess. There is basically a wild wild west when it comes to the address part on most of the ecommerce sites in Japan: some offer address auto-complete via zip code, some don't; some require a building name, some don't; and the address itself may be written down in different ways. Having a source of truth in a form of a provider which has vested interest in keeping the address uniformly correct on entry is god sent here.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful"

maxgashkov — Sun, 18 May 2025 22:51:00 +0000

> almost all employers will pay for employees to commute by public transport but not by car, because the government heavily incentivises them to do so

Could you clarify this? To my knowledge only 2 things that could qualify as incentive exist:

- commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee

- commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business

But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.

My understanding is that commute is universally covered as this is an expected job benefit in Japan, and commuting by car is disencouraged in cities due to the increased insurance liability (as commuting time could be considered work time and injuries incurred to 3rd party will expose the company to liability as well).

New comment by maxgashkov in "Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful"

maxgashkov — Sun, 18 May 2025 22:43:20 +0000

Not only more expensive to produce and recycle, but the gates have to be extremely complex to handle paper tickets (some railway museums in Japan have them cross-cut on display!).

New comment by maxgashkov in "Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful"

maxgashkov — Sun, 18 May 2025 22:39:53 +0000

Please don't read too much into it. Outside of the peak demand at least here, in Kansai area, gates will close when they sense you approaching to indicate that you actually need to touch the card or insert a ticket. They stay open only if there is a continuous flow of passengers going one after another.

Another interesting fact is that gates' actuators are not super rigid and it's completely possible to force enter not realizing in time your card has failed (you will be approached by station attendant though).

To summarize, culture may play a role but the main differentiator is the high traffic volume.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]"

maxgashkov — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 12:07:53 +0000

It's nowhere near the 'same form factor'. I'm taking switch to me in almost every trip and I have taken steam deck once and had regret it deeply (too bulky, too noisy, hot and barely lasts a couple of hours).

New comment by maxgashkov in "The Cheapest NAS"

maxgashkov — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 01:13:45 +0000

I had a (dis)pleasure of running multiple Synology units in a business setting. They do die out on you like everything else if not more frequent, the QC is generally non-existent.

New comment by maxgashkov in "A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates"

maxgashkov — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:08:52 +0000

It never really went away. Last decade is truly a golden age marked by the *arr suite of tools, most of them are better maintained than an average streaming app.

New comment by maxgashkov in "The Matrix Trashfire"

maxgashkov — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 22:58:43 +0000

Oh wow, since when there is an option to "pay up" into the Matrix ecosystem and get a solution that just works? Could you point to it?

New comment by maxgashkov in "Switch off bad TV settings"

maxgashkov — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 23:14:23 +0000

Obligatory PSA to enable the setting to set correct framerate of the content from the source you're playing if you have at least 120hz-capable panel.

E.g. if you're playing 24fps movie from a device that's reporting 60fps uniformly across all content, you will have a bad time.

For Apple TV it can be set like this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102277

New comment by maxgashkov in "Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone"

maxgashkov — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 14:35:41 +0000

You don't even need Firefox or anything privacy-oriented. These checkboxes were forever hit-or-miss for me on a Chrome with the default settings (!). My ISP is using IPoE tunneling which has a side-effect of a shared IPv4 address among bunch of households and surprise-surprise no one in Cloudflare is aware that countries beyond US exist.

At this point I'd honestly take CAPTCHA over this bullshit.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Why scalpers can get tickets"

maxgashkov — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 04:05:29 +0000

It's extremely easy to get multiple virtual debit cards numbers. The only way around this is to maintain some allowlist of BIN/IINs for the known banks/services that do not have this kind of product which may severely limit conversion rates I guess.

New comment by maxgashkov in "SteamOS 3.5 Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains for the Steam Deck"

maxgashkov — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 07:39:54 +0000

Even if they announce it today no way you're getting it within at least half a year given current shortages, waitlists etc.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Don’t Talk to Police (2012) [video]"

maxgashkov — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 23:17:36 +0000

Regular reminder that this is strictly true for the US. For other countries YMMV by following this approach.

E.g. it's generally a bad idea to shut up completely once you're in a police station in Japan, as they may hold you up for 23 days w/o pressing charges and allowing you to communicate with the outside world.

New comment by maxgashkov in "First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good"

maxgashkov — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:44:27 +0000

It's no more a laptop replacement than iPad is. Almost 4 years down the road after the release of iPadOS and it's still a failure as a laptop replacement save for a few well-selected niches.

And the new VisionOS (or whatever Apple will decide to call it) will have to be even more restricted than iPadOS was compared to MacOS just because of the tighter coupling to your body.

New comment by maxgashkov in "Ask HN: Suggestions to host 10TB data with a monthly +100TB bandwidth"

maxgashkov — Sun, 28 May 2023 03:47:02 +0000

They have released this updated to their ToS recently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

The whole point of R2 is to remove predatory practices of egregious charging for egress, and if somehow they went back on this promise that would be a very bad PR.