Hacker News: naniwaduni

New comment by naniwaduni in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

naniwaduni — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:19:47 +0000

> This is not an approach any other app on any platform has historically used, and it doesn't seem sustainable if every app you install has to modify your hosts file to use a hack like this to detect whether it should handle files or not.

How many apps are you installing that it becomes "unsustainable"? Host file entries are extremely cheap, and it's not like the app needs more than one. Of all the arguments against this, sustainability is a comically weak one. If anything, it's using less contested resources than the "hitting random ports on localhost" approach...

New comment by naniwaduni in "Just 'English with Hanzi'"

naniwaduni — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:59:22 +0000

The latter sounds absurd, nearly as ridiculous as the English it was translated from.

New comment by naniwaduni in "GitHub's Historic Uptime"

naniwaduni — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:33:29 +0000

Nobody cares about every part of GitHub working correctly. I mean, ok, their SREs are supposed to, but tabling the question of whether that's true: if tomorrow they announced a distributed no-op service with 100% downtime, you should not have the intuition that the overall availability of the platform is now worse.

New comment by naniwaduni in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

naniwaduni — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:59:02 +0000

The legal system does nothing to fix the harm done by murder to the person who's now dead, either.

New comment by naniwaduni in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

naniwaduni — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:33:37 +0000

The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?

New comment by naniwaduni in "Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks"

naniwaduni — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:02:20 +0000

Arbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so many epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a warning against overgeneralization than an insight with any significant predictive power in its own right.

New comment by naniwaduni in "Keep Android Open"

naniwaduni — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:27:25 +0000

Nearly all the security value of 1fa is that it keeps your users from picking the own passwords.

New comment by naniwaduni in "The Day the Telnet Died"

naniwaduni — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:16:52 +0000

From ChangeLog:

    * telnetd/utility.c (getterminaltype): Change the
      name `user_name' to `uname', as the former shadows a precious
     and global variable name.

New comment by naniwaduni in "Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'"

naniwaduni — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:58:04 +0000

> and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.

It's this one. If you're in a position to refund a "cost accident", then clearly you don't have to enforce cost controls in real time, and the problem becomes much easier to achieve at billing cycle granularity; the user setting a cost limit is generally doesn't care if you're a bit late to best-effort throttle them.

New comment by naniwaduni in "An Update on Heroku"

naniwaduni — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:37:38 +0000

To be clear, you just answered "Do you care to show prices?" with No.

New comment by naniwaduni in "An Update on Heroku"

naniwaduni — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:31:51 +0000

Oh, they're very clear, just not explicit.

New comment by naniwaduni in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

naniwaduni — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:52:03 +0000

It's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.

New comment by naniwaduni in "The world of Japanese snack bars"

naniwaduni — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:05:29 +0000

There is value in maintaining the fiction that words mean things.

New comment by naniwaduni in "Always bet on text (2014)"

naniwaduni — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:53:41 +0000

It may amuse you to learn that tar headers are designed as straight up text tables with fixed-width columns, marred only by the fact that modern implementations pad with 0s instead of spaces. The numbers are encoded as octal digits!

New comment by naniwaduni in "Always bet on text (2014)"

naniwaduni — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:48:44 +0000

The human cost becomes negligible once the tooling is already integrated. You don't get to call it negligible until after the integration has been done.

New comment by naniwaduni in "Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years"

naniwaduni — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 17:10:13 +0000

Adjective order in English is basically that most essential qualities of the object go closest to the head. There are lists out there that try to break this down into categories of adjective ("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which sorts of properties are more or less essential are not trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to make it out to be.

New comment by naniwaduni in "Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years"

naniwaduni — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 03:40:57 +0000

It was almost never quite Hepburn either, usually shi/chi/tsu/fu/ji with no di/du, but often alongside wo/he/ha (in roughly that order of likelihood, not always consistently), macrons almost never, っち is cch. Ironically, I have to imagine there's more "bastardized Nihonsiki" out there than "bastardized Kunreisiki", because the differences between the two are exactly the ones that matter when typing them out, and of course everyone in the j/e scenes is by far most often inputting wa-puro ro-maji (and of course that's ji, not zi, because which one is on the home row?).

In short, the usual infelicities of Japanese romanization as practiced in the wild on keyboards people actually have, and there is a method to the madness but it's not what any of the standards reflect.

New comment by naniwaduni in "Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years"

naniwaduni — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:46:24 +0000

You are very, very likely to find people who prefer "sushi wo tabemasu", because standards are great.

New comment by naniwaduni in "The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude"

naniwaduni — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:39:00 +0000

The terms of the licenses have legal bearing. The definitions of open source are a historical accident that mostly traces back to "well GPLv2 already exists".

New comment by naniwaduni in "Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025"

naniwaduni — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 23:59:27 +0000

The headline status doesn't have to be "worst of all systems". Pick a key indicator, and as long as it doesn't look like it's all green regardless of whether you're up or down, users will imagine that "green headline, red subsystems" means whatever they're observing, even if that makes the status display utterly uninterpretable from an outside perspective.