Hacker News: petcat

New comment by petcat in "Want your images back? That'll be $5"

petcat — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:22:34 +0000

Aren't they only required to delete the data on request? They don't have to actually provide it back to you

New comment by petcat in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

petcat — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:38:15 +0000

> unwritten agreement

New comment by petcat in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

petcat — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:35:11 +0000

> everyone knew was a bad idea

It was a good idea if it was also timed during the popular uprisings. But the 20,000+ die-hard citizens that would have effected regime change were slaughtered months ago. So now it's just a scared populace hunkering in place while USA warships and jets dominate their country.

And the Iranians fire off the occasional drone swarm on UAE.

New comment by petcat in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

petcat — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:30:56 +0000

USA almost certainly spies on Israel (and everyone else) far deeper than anyone spies on them.

New comment by petcat in "Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans"

petcat — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:02:48 +0000

The EU fines are not enough to get the US tech companies to change, or even leave completely. But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself. So this arm of the government really only exists to preserve itself.

I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?

New comment by petcat in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

petcat — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:43:35 +0000

> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU.

I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.

There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?

It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?

New comment by petcat in "Vibe Coding Is Not Engineering"

petcat — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:29:47 +0000

The bridge architects and engineers are not the ones hammering in the nails.

New comment by petcat in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

petcat — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:16:38 +0000

USA has had 3 different presidents from opposing parties just in the last 15 years. Putin hasn't allowed a challenger in nearly 30 years and he actively bans them, imprisons them, or kills them. It's a big difference.

> I'm not sure what difference there is between them.

Good hyperbole

New comment by petcat in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

petcat — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:27:11 +0000

What are the "footguns" with unlogged tables in Postgres?

New comment by petcat in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

petcat — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:15:26 +0000

Woof. That sounds very complicated. If you need that kind of write concurrency, use an unlogged table in postgres [0]. Then you don't have to invent a whole sharded thing yourself.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html...

New comment by petcat in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

petcat — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:57:24 +0000

sqlite is great for the contacts app on your phone, but that's it.

Hipp even said that it is not a replacement for a real multi-user, concurrent RDMS. Its primary competitor is "fsync".

New comment by petcat in "Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit"

petcat — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:20:12 +0000

> Abanca is using agent orchestration to handle sensitive customer information at a huge scale (2 million customers in their app).

Maybe my perspective is skewed on what "huge scale" means, but 2 million users? That's like a few hundred megabytes of data? Or a couple GBs if there's a lot of per-user data?

New comment by petcat in "The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time"

petcat — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:48:10 +0000

I think civic workers are generally aware of how much waste exists in their departments, but what is the motivation to change it? Any attempt at "efficiency" could very well backfire and mean the end of their own job.

New comment by petcat in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

petcat — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:52:30 +0000

What if they have a backlog of inventory that they can't sell at "market rate"? Are the taxpayers just supposed to take a loss because of this brilliant tax assessment scheme?

New comment by petcat in "US's big bet on quantum computing may not be legal"

petcat — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:49:01 +0000

Then why are they also investing $1 billion in the same company as the taxpayers?

New comment by petcat in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

petcat — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:40:44 +0000

What happens after the city buys it?

Also, most municipalities do not have the funds on hand to buy up people's houses just to call their bluff on taxes.

New comment by petcat in "We replaced Zendesk"

petcat — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:59:32 +0000

For real. Does stuff like Zen desk even have any moat at all? It's an easy framework crud app with a million features that you don't need.

Just get an AI bot to make one for you

New comment by petcat in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

petcat — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:21:10 +0000

> but the Indigenous probably are

None of this matters in this context. The indiginous people literally do not matter. It's bad, but it's just how it is when white Europeans start fighting over land in North America. We have 3 centuries of evidence.

New comment by petcat in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

petcat — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:04:23 +0000

> there is no legal mechanism by which Canadian provinces can unilaterally secede

Legal? Who's laws? Albertans can just declare that they don't respect Ottawa's authority, right?

Guns and bullets are the only "legal" currency. It's not paperwork.

New comment by petcat in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

petcat — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:48:41 +0000

Texas has entertained the idea of seceding for 150 years. And they would be a G7 country if they did. But they would have to fight a war to do it. USA already went through this once.

The only thing really stopping Alberta from leaving is whether or not BC, Ontario, and Quebec are willing to fight a war to stop it.

And that gets a lot more complicated if the US also wants Alberta to go independent....