Hacker News: mdavidn

New comment by mdavidn in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

mdavidn — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:09:20 +0000

But they do control the routers that peer with external networks.

New comment by mdavidn in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

mdavidn — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:42:42 +0000

The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.

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

New comment by mdavidn in "Postmortem: TanStack npm supply-chain compromise"

mdavidn — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:54:27 +0000

If the payload couldn't execute at install time, it would at runtime? Disabling prepare scripts does not seem like an effective countermeasure.

New comment by mdavidn in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

mdavidn — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:37:30 +0000

They also have a bug where people get randomly suspended: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1b82cpu/where_you...

It happened this year to my one and only personal account. The account was one week old. Unique e-mail address. $5 balance for API credits. No usage yet. Suspended and refunded. Appeal denied without explanation.

I did create the account on a VPN because I was using public WiFi at a tech conference. That's probably what tripped their automation.

New comment by mdavidn in "Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones"

mdavidn — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:32:12 +0000

You are correct, but you omitted one complication: Clients trust Google's and Apple's servers to faithfully exchange the participants' public keys.

New comment by mdavidn in "Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?"

mdavidn — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:47:23 +0000

I recently helped my mother-in-law configure a new Windows 11 laptop. I knew Microsoft did this, I was deliberately looking to avoid OneDrive, and it _still_ burned me. It silently uploaded all of her personal documents that I had transferred from an older computer. I was livid.

Microsoft has permanently lost me as a customer. Every friend and family member who listens will upgrade to something else.

New comment by mdavidn in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

mdavidn — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:47:52 +0000

Look around your town and try a few regular local group activities. See "third place" for ideas. Be patient with yourself. This will take time, and that's okay.

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

Some of my most durable adult friendships started at group ballroom dance classes. The studio was a 15-minute drive from my suburban home, twice per week, and focused on social dancing, not competitive. I don't think dancing was the thing that made it work, but funny teachers and regular faces. That studio closed (pre-pandemic, thank goodness). No studio since has recreated the magic, but other activities have.

New comment by mdavidn in "Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules"

mdavidn — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:32:52 +0000

When a cross-cutting team is responsible for something, it's no longer the product team's problem: Architecture, infrastructure, CI/CD, QA, load testing, security...

New comment by mdavidn in "Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw"

mdavidn — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:18:00 +0000

Welcome to the club. I registered my own domain and moved my digital life off Google services 18 years ago for this exact reason. If you need another reason: They scan all of your e-mail to target ads at you and your associates. Do it. It's not that difficult!

My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.

New comment by mdavidn in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

mdavidn — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:18:51 +0000

It boggles my mind that they need a photo ID to prove that my 9-year-old account with a saved credit card belongs to an adult. The linked Steam account is 18 years old.

New comment by mdavidn in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

mdavidn — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:35:35 +0000

If you want to compare Redis and PostgreSQL as a cache, be sure to measure an unlogged table, as suggested in the article. Much of the slowness of PostgreSQL is to ensure durability and consistency after a crash. If that isn't a concern, disable it. Unlogged tables are automatically truncated after a crash.

New comment by mdavidn in "The Codex App"

mdavidn — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:51:29 +0000

I don’t complain about Electron because I didn’t install the app if I could avoid it.

New comment by mdavidn in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"

mdavidn — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:31:04 +0000

Pipelines are indeed one flow, and that works most of the time, but shell scripts make parallel tasks easy too. The shell provides tools to spawn subshells in the background and wait for their completion. Then there are utilities like xargs -P and make -j.

New comment by mdavidn in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

mdavidn — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:30:47 +0000

This holiday season, hearing my parents rant about AI features unnaturally forced onto their daily gadgets warmed my heart.

New comment by mdavidn in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

mdavidn — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:11:50 +0000

It sounds like you're the one in denial? AI makes some things faster, like working in a language I don't know very well. It makes other things slower, like working in a language I already know very well. In both cases, writing code is a small percentage of the total development effort.

New comment by mdavidn in "“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill"

mdavidn — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:17:18 +0000

Insider trading is a form of theft. Every trade has a counterparty who missed out on those capital gains because they did not have their thumb on regulatory levers.

New comment by mdavidn in "“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill"

mdavidn — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:15:28 +0000

The very first sentence of the linked article contradicts your alternative theory. These leaders performed similarly to their peers before ascending to leadership.

New comment by mdavidn in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

mdavidn — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:10:34 +0000

Infants don't breathe before birth either. A beating heart would provide umbilical circulation for a few fleeting minutes.

New comment by mdavidn in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

mdavidn — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 02:36:23 +0000

Most companies will use the AWS SDK client's default retry policy.

New comment by mdavidn in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

mdavidn — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:50:20 +0000

Banking is full of examples of eventually consistent systems. ACH, credit card transactions, blockchain...