Hacker News: natch

New comment by natch in "Starlink Mini as a failover"

natch — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:48:54 +0000

I have never noticed an issue but now that we’re talking about it I realize It’s never occurred to me to run a speed test during a heavy downpour. Which might tell you something positive by itself. Next time I will do so but it might be a while; my rain season has ended.

New comment by natch in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

natch — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:45:24 +0000

Perhaps they discovered that they had been misled about him.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he’s not flawed. Just that people learn things and change their minds.

But you’re also right about people giving up morals for financial gain. Just an odd example to use.

New comment by natch in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

natch — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:40:24 +0000

You entirely missed the point. Please don’t disengage from those bars you perceive to be tainted in some way.

New comment by natch in "Starlink Mini as a failover"

natch — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:57:14 +0000

I’ve never had an issue with Starlink when it’s cloudy, or rainy for that matter. They even advertise this. Mini is different this way?

New comment by natch in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

natch — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:08:49 +0000

Bettering humanity is a pretty good two word summary of what should be the meaning of life and everyone’s goal. Please don’t disengage.

New comment by natch in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

natch — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:03:53 +0000

Not true in general on HN about one side only; it happens to all sides imho. But if you wanted to measure, you would have to normalize by the total number of occurrences on each side, and there is a lot of passive aggressive wording so the measurement would be easy to do badly.

To the extent that discussion of discussion is considered boring, perhaps this will get shut down too, but I think it was important to counter your claim.

New comment by natch in "E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May"

natch — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:31:24 +0000

It’s possible to want something without wanting to live in a system where there is a nanny to enforce that thing. Other means of enforcement exist, such as free markets.

New comment by natch in "E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May"

natch — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:24:00 +0000

This is in the US. It’s a free country. Things are legal by default (that’s a good thing) until the system notices them and makes a law.

Having seen how things work where freedom is not the default, I much prefer freedom.

New comment by natch in "Unity Asset Store de-listing assets originating from China"

natch — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:47:42 +0000

I can construct some educated guesses in my imagination, but does anyone know the backstory of why?

New comment by natch in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

natch — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:31:19 +0000

Sensor damage

https://youtube.com/shorts/oeHtfMFdzIY?si=hpLBgqom_kHVPuhL

New comment by natch in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

natch — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:31:37 +0000

Fascinating. If you're not aware of Jesse Schell's book on game design, even if your work is unrelated to games, I highly recommend taking a look. Would love to hear more about your work / product.

New comment by natch in "Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB"

natch — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 01:11:15 +0000

Fortunately 1. For slow speeds, it’s not like you have to live with that slowness every day. The impact is limited to the remaining few days of the month where you ran up against the 100GB, so the either-or in your statement looks worse than it is; and 2. Starlink makes it dead easy to switch from plan to plan right in the app so you can go right back to a lower plan when the higher one is not needed. With the caveat that they do change what plans are available sometimes as we’re seeing here.

New comment by natch in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

natch — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:48:17 +0000

E2E encrypted is nothing if key escrow is happening.

Why did they change their wording from:

Nobody can read your data, not even Apple

to:

Apple cannot read your data.

You know why.

New comment by natch in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

natch — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:45:00 +0000

They transitioned from “nobody can read your data, not even Apple” to “Apple cannot read your data.” Think about what that change means. And even that is not always true.

They also were deceptive about iCloud encryption where they claimed that nobody but you can read your iCloud data. But then it came out after all their fanfare that if you do iCloud backups Apple CAN read your data. But they aren’t in a hurry to retract the lie they promoted.

Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name, email, phone number, and content of the local users, guess what. Since they messaged you, now not only their name and information, but also your name and private information and message content is shared with that country’s government as well. By Apple. Do they tell you? No. Even if your own country respects privacy. Does Apple have a help article explaining this? No.

New comment by natch in "Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time"

natch — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 02:08:31 +0000

I did my first programming with those wooden blocks.

I would build structures deliberately designed to gradually self destruct through a long sequence of actions. A cylinder rolls down a ramp and displaces a support that tips a tower that hits a lever that tips another ramp… endless fun.

New comment by natch in "Tell HN: Merry Christmas"

natch — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 10:30:07 +0000

Try four leading spaces?

    Test, is this monospaced?
    012345678901234567890123456789

New comment by natch in "Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash"

natch — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:04:19 +0000

My household alone has had two fender benders in the past six weeks, one of which will not be reported (and, maybe not relevant, both the fault of other drivers). Zooming out in time they are less common but most are unreported. The big question would be whether the 40,000 number includes unreported incidents.

New comment by natch in "Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash"

natch — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 05:57:53 +0000

Yes, I will try to find better ways to engage. Thanks for your moderating hand here.

New comment by natch in "Tesla reports another Robotaxi crash"

natch — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:14:48 +0000

Most minor fender benders are not reported by the involved people, whereas even the most minor ones often caused by other humans must be assiduously reported by any company doing such a rollout.

A responsible journalist with half a clue would mention that, and tell us how that distorts the numbers. If we correct for this distortion, it’s clear that the truth would come out in Tesla’s favor here.

Instead the writer embraces the distortion, trying to make Tesla look bad, and one is left to wonder if they are intentionally pushing a biased narrative.

New comment by natch in "Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres"

natch — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:38:01 +0000

If your system (pseudo-) random number generator (RNG) is compromised to derive a portion of its entropy from things that are knowable by knowing the time when the function ran, then the search space for cracking keys created around the same time can be shrunken considerably.

This doesn’t even rely on your system’s built-in RNG being low quality. It could be audited and known to avoid such issues but you could have a compromised compiler or OS that injects a doctored RNG.