Hacker News: nightpool

New comment by nightpool in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

nightpool — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:57:32 +0000

The history of the Honor Code system might be instructive: https://universityarchives.princeton.edu/2015/01/i-pledge-my...

Exames were previously proctored, and it led to a "us vs them" mentality that meant students banded together to

The Honor Code system, and removing proctors was a way to route around that—it made all of the students responsible for catching cheaters and turned the "Students vs Faculty" mentality into a "Honor vs Cheaters" mentality among the students.

Unfortunately, it seems like the "Students vs Faculty" mentality has seen too much of a resurgence due to outside factors, and the Honor Code is no longer a match for the current climate. That's what the article is about

New comment by nightpool in "Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined"

nightpool — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:02:32 +0000

coppsilgold is the one who made a hard-line, clear-cut dichotomy when they said "it's easy to do harm [but] it's all but impossible to do any good". bglazer referenced several interventions that are known to increase IQ which challenge this dichotomy. Saying that it is difficult to separate "doing good" and "stop doing harm" is agreeing with the point that coppsilgold created a distinction without a difference.

New comment by nightpool in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

nightpool — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:16:19 +0000

> And every other suggestion also doesn't work if the attacker can just replace the shell.

New comment by nightpool in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

nightpool — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:30:05 +0000

No, debt isn't "parts of your software that could have been written better". Any part of your software can always be written better. Debt is the cost you have to pay monthly to keep your application working—it's the parts of your codebase that make it harder to work on new features.

New comment by nightpool in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

nightpool — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:11:57 +0000

The article mentions that they use Private Access Tokens on iOS, so I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that they're "not adopting" them from

New comment by nightpool in "What makes a good smartphone camera?"

nightpool — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:45:40 +0000

Ooh, this looks really good. I use OpenCamera on Android but it's pretty limited... I wonder if there's anything like Lumina there.

New comment by nightpool in "Google tools for customizing searches"

nightpool — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:17:42 +0000

Is the AROUND(n) one real? I've never seen it before, and trying "climate AROUND(3) policy" as mentioned in the article just gives me results where "Around 3" is in the body:

European Central Bank Climate, Nature and Monetary Policy 1 day ago — ECB research has found that four years after a drought or flood, regional output remains depressed by around 3 percentage points on average

(compared to e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=climate+policy+ecb) which has the same result but does not show the "around 3 percentage points" snippet

New comment by nightpool in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

nightpool — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:53:33 +0000

Plenty of devs choose to sell on other platforms or directly and do fine. Steam doesn't have a monopoly on games the way Apple and Google do

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:23:11 +0000

Git adheres to the protocol which would allow you to pull from any upstream (that exists). Tangled does not change that.

New comment by nightpool in "At Protocol: Building the Social Internet"

nightpool — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:21:57 +0000

> Sync is pull-based. Applications are responsible for staying in sync with all member PDSes. PDSes assist by sending lightweight write notifications to prompt pulls when new data is written.

It looks like this basically just reinvents ActivityPub (local servers can pull or push to remote servers). So it defeats all of the "benefits" you get from Bluesky's firehose-based approach anyway, except for the fact that Bluesky assumes you're going to be using their AppView and they will always have access to your private data.

New comment by nightpool in "At Protocol: Building the Social Internet"

nightpool — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:19:35 +0000

It would fail the merkle tree validation

New comment by nightpool in "At Protocol: Building the Social Internet"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:31:00 +0000

The ability to make information private fundamentally conflicts with how ATProto is designed. All records have to be sent to all Relays and AppView nodes on the network to provide a "global view" of the network. So there's no way to keep records private without locking out some user's servers from viewing them, and since AppViews are centralized indexing services, they won't function without being able to see the entire network.

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:23:22 +0000

That sounds more like you want better decentralization, like IPFS or BitTorrent, not necessarily federation between different forge instances. I'm not familiar with any existing federated system that would be resilient to government censorship. Certainly Mastodon and Bluesky aren't.

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:25:48 +0000

How does tangled solve that? Repository contents are still hosted by the forges themselves.

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:25:17 +0000

How does that fix "when one node goes offline you may not have any upstream to pull from"? You'd still have your own local copy—just like git—but you wouldn't be able to access any sense of "upstream"

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:34:05 +0000

The OP says that tangled only supports event federation. How does it help with discoverability?

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:29:48 +0000

Not sure I understand, you're talking about mirroring git repo data between multiple different nodes? That seems unrelated to what's proposed in the OP--maybe you're seeing something I'm not?

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:21:16 +0000

In this case the PDS is only storing social data though, right? The forge would still store the repository data itself.

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:16:49 +0000

This is an indexing problem, not a federation problem. Personally, if I want to find software, I use Google, Rubygems, or NPM. Github is a distant third option. But this project is about data interchange between forges. It doesn't solve the indexing / discoverability problem.

Having a better code search crawler that can grab data from independent git repos would be really cool. But being able to submit a PR from server 1 to server 2 is pretty unrelated to that.

New comment by nightpool in "We need a federation of forges"

nightpool — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:16:48 +0000

I'm a huge supporter of federation, but I've never understood the use-case for a "federation of forges". What data are the forges exchanging? Why should the forge for Blender have any connection to the forge for Ubuntu?

Most of the value I get from Github is having a single login that I can take from project to project. Independent forges can get the same value simply by supporting social login, without needing the complexity of a "forge federation" system.