Hacker News: nothrabannosir

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

nothrabannosir — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:00:22 +0000

pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI

I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.

https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

nothrabannosir — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:46:43 +0000

There’s discussions in a (thankfully banned) sub thread pulling this into question so I just wanted to add sources:

> The short-form video-hosting service TikTok was under a de jure nationwide ban in the United States from January 19, 2025, until January 22, 2026, due to the US government's concerns over potential user data collection and influence operations by the government of the People's Republic of China. However, the ban was not enforced. The ban took effect after ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, refused to sell the service before the deadline of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA). Prior to the ban, individual states, cities, universities, and government-affiliated devices had restricted TikTok.

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

and:

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

Amy Howe, Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, SCOTUSblog (Jan. 17, 2025, 12:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/01/supreme-court-upholds-tik...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

The executive branch explicitly defied an act of Congress which was upheld by the Supreme Court. First Biden for one day, then Trump II as he took office and continued not to enforce the ban.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

nothrabannosir — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:19:35 +0000

Notable exception: the TikTok ban.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

nothrabannosir — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:32:27 +0000

I’m guessing the app works but their prod servers don’t? If they can point the app during review at a “self hosted” GitHub Enterprise server on a test domain with AAAA that would pass the requirement as stated by gp , without requiring GitHub.com actually support ipv6.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

nothrabannosir — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:27:19 +0000

> The Big Mac Index is a price index published since 1986 by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and providing a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. It "seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible."[1] The index compares the relative price worldwide to purchase the Big Mac, the flagship hamburger sold at McDonald's restaurants.

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

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness"

nothrabannosir — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:30:33 +0000

If you are over thirty and still this strong, then you have my respect and envy. I’m not even forty and even I would say a >7h economy flight (middle seat particularly) can take about two days to recover from.

How much money would you pay for two extra days of life? In the end, time itself is also “fleeting”, if you want to put it that way. But I sure as heck would fork over the money if I had it.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

nothrabannosir — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:06:17 +0000

My focus is on the educational and entertainment value, not really the progress or utility of the code I write. I originally started this as extended L&Ls for friends & fam who were just starting out programming, so they could see how I work through things.

My take away from that perspective is: be honest. IMO the best moments are me just failing. It's probably more fun and more instructive to see me struggle than to see me breeze through things.

And it better be entertaining because I work on stuff absolutely nobody cares about anyway. XD Right now I'm writing a microformats2 -> RSS converter in JQ...

Today was my first time on Twitch, which is way more social. Random people drop in and start talking to you. Very cool. Very different from youtube live, where it's only the people who already know you, IME.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

nothrabannosir — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:50:07 +0000

I’ve started streaming programming on Twitch and YouTube live.

Used to do it for friends only, but been publishing publicly since recently and it’s fun.

“Senior dev, junior attitude”

https://youtube.com/@harlybarluy

https://twitch.tv/harlybarluy

Spent 3h today adding a “system” filter to jq only to find out there are like seventeen PRs for this going back ten years. T_T I live but I don’t learn.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

nothrabannosir — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:08:07 +0000

Someone brought up Socrates upthread:

> People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word.

If the conclusion now becomes “actually, Socrates was correct but it wasn’t that bad”, then why bring up Socrates in the first place?

New comment by nothrabannosir in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

nothrabannosir — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:49:56 +0000

What do people mean exactly when they bring up “Socrates saying things about writing”? Phaedrus?

> “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; [275a] and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Sounds to me like he was spot on.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

nothrabannosir — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:14:09 +0000

Your last point, I think, is why so many sibling commenters are balking at GP :)

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

nothrabannosir — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:48:02 +0000

Exactly. So in the words of the comment you replied to: why are we wasting energy on worrying about Claude code impersonating humans? We have that solution you proposed.

That’s what I mean by “you agree with the person to whom you replied”

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

nothrabannosir — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:17:47 +0000

You can prove the commits were signed by a key you once verified. It is your trust in those people which allows you to extend that to “no LLM” usage, but that’s reframing the conversation as one of trust, not human / machine. Which is (charitably) GPs point: stop framing this as machine vs human — assume (“accept”) that all text can be produced by machines and go from there: what now? That’s where your proposal is one solution: strict web of trust. It has pros and cons (barrier to entry for legitimate first timers), but it’s a valid proposal.

All that to say “you’re not disagreeing with the person you’re replying to” lol xD

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"

nothrabannosir — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:13:46 +0000

> … took advantage of a community…

It would be helpful for everyone if that community would pause before contributing to code bases with licenses which allow for that. MIT, BSD, Apache, …

It would be helpful for them because they’ll know what they’re getting into. For us because we won’t have to see this tragedy unfold time and time again. And for all open source users because more efforts will be directed towards programs with licenses that protect end users. GPL, AGPL, …

It will be a little worse for companies seeking free labor. A price I’m willing to pay.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes"

nothrabannosir — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 05:17:04 +0000

I mean that whatever signal you think you get from the sentence structure was not introduced by (potentially) automated translation. The sentence structure is precisely the same in the original Dutch.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes"

nothrabannosir — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:58:28 +0000

It is a faithful translation of the original Dutch. Dutch is structurally very similar to English so this type of nuance carries over pretty much intact.

Dutch: “Dat was niet enkel onzorgvuldig, het was fout.”

English: “That was not just careless—it was wrong.”

I’d say the only difference is the em dash.

Whether you consider it proof of AI is up to y’all.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "SBCL Fibers – Lightweight Cooperative Threads"

nothrabannosir — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 04:59:43 +0000

I strongly recommend having a look at the mailing list to get some context:

https://sourceforge.net/p/sbcl/mailman/sbcl-devel/thread/CAF...

and

https://sourceforge.net/p/sbcl/mailman/sbcl-devel/thread/CAC...

This will certainly speak to some people taking part in some of the more controversial discussions taking place on HN recently, to put it mildly.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Levels of Agentic Engineering"

nothrabannosir — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:10:44 +0000

I would ignore any HN content written by a ghost writer or editor. I guess I would flag compiler output but I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing?

I’m on the internet for human beings. I already read a newspaper for editors and books for ghostwriters.

Not for long though, HN is dying. Just hanging around here waiting for the next thing , I guess…

New comment by nothrabannosir in "Rebasing in Magit"

nothrabannosir — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:29:21 +0000

In a conversation about magit, this is comparing jumping off a sidewalk to powered flight.

New comment by nothrabannosir in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

nothrabannosir — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:49:17 +0000

(tangent of the decade : prefixing your debug printfs with NOCOMMIT helps catching them before commit :) sample precommit hook and GitHub ci action I wrote is at https://github.com/nobssoftware/nocommit but it’s just a grep)