Hacker News: pred_

New comment by pred_ in "Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide"

pred_ — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:56:06 +0000

The time is ripe for deterministic AI; incidentally, this was also released today: https://itsid.cloud/ - presumably will be useful for anyone who wants to quickly recreate an open source Python package or other copyrighted work to change its license.

New comment by pred_ in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

pred_ — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:54:51 +0000

Based on https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv..., it looks like they are going to go for “legitimate interest” which seems clearly overridden by data subject interests in this case, hence not lawful.

If you don't want to wait until your PII inevitably gets sent through, you can already now file a complaint to your local supervisory authority: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en

New comment by pred_ in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

pred_ — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:03:46 +0000

Would you be able to comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522876, i.e. explain the legal basis for this change for EU based users? If there is none, you may have to expect that people will exercise their right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

New comment by pred_ in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

pred_ — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:37:53 +0000

What is the legal basis of this in the EU? Ignoring the fact they could end up stealing IP, it seems like the collected information could easily contain PII, and consent would have to be

> freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous. In order to obtain freely given consent, it must be given on a voluntary basis.

New comment by pred_ in "ArXiv declares independence from Cornell"

pred_ — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:11:00 +0000

The endorsement system already works along that line: https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html

It's probably not perfect but in practice, it seems to have been enough to get rid of the worst crackpotty spam.

New comment by pred_ in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

pred_ — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:16:36 +0000

Has the Apple situation really improved?

I'm probably out of the loop, but last I checked, to put an app somewhere that's not the official App Store, they required you to pay their hefty fee for putting it in the App Store (even if you weren't going to do that), _and_ an additional Core Technology Fee.

(And if that's still accurate, one thing I don't get is how that isn't also anti-competitive.)

New comment by pred_ in "Xfce is great"

pred_ — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:08:48 +0000

The workaround for me is to always resize by clicking Alt, right click, and drag. At the end of the day, that's probably just straight up easier, since you never need to bother getting close to the borders of the windows.

New comment by pred_ in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

pred_ — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:23:22 +0000

Does Germany require that all DNS providers block Anna's Archive? I thought that was mostly handed for ISP DNS providers.

New comment by pred_ in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

pred_ — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:08:25 +0000

I remember Tor being significantly more usable, and not having random 3 second delays on websites.

New comment by pred_ in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

pred_ — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:06:15 +0000

How about Quad9?

New comment by pred_ in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

pred_ — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:57:42 +0000

One thing it should mean is that anyone using Cloudflare is doing so while risking that its CEO suddenly pulls the rug and closes down the service; not a dependency you want in your stack, and not a great look for a service that's supposed to be usable as a stable high-availability one.

New comment by pred_ in "US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified"

pred_ — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:08:21 +0000

> just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building?

As the article also touches upon, this already happened in the particular case of Revolution Wind: There, work, was forced to stop in August, then in September a federal judge blocked enforcement of the block, and work continued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/judge-orsted-revolution-wind...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/offshore-wind-develo...

And “what happens” seems to be that rather than appeal, the rule-of-law deniers apparently choose to not care? Work has stopped again:

https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2025/12/revolution-wind-and...

New comment by pred_ in "Advent of Code 2025"

pred_ — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:35:19 +0000

So, publicly admitting that you broke the rules and are part of the reason we can't have nice things. Why?

New comment by pred_ in "Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator"

pred_ — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 11:22:21 +0000

Another meta simulation of the thing we're already doing, because apparently we needed to simulate commenting on a simulation. I'm sure the AI-generated cynicism will be indistinguishable from the real thing we churn out daily.

Regards, the AI commenting on a post about this post: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/2387

New comment by pred_ in "SPy: An interpreter and compiler for a fast statically typed variant of Python"

pred_ — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:02:17 +0000

It's still pretty confusing: Uunchecking the box doesn't seem to do much (is it actually unchecked when you click it? There's still a checkmark); you still have to click Accept to see the text; what are you accepting?

In any case, pre-checked boxes are not valid consent under GDPR (“Planet49”).

New comment by pred_ in "Show HN: Play abstract strategy board games online with friends or against bots"

pred_ — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:57:46 +0000

How about 2 players playing on the same device, i.e. offline play?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dnane might be a fit.

New comment by pred_ in "Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware"

pred_ — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:23:45 +0000

Normally, where I come from anyway, verifiability would refer to the ability to prove to a classical skeptic that the quantum device did what it's supposed to, cf. e.g. Mahadev (https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01082), Aaronson (https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06930), in a strong, theoretical, sense. And that's indeed relevant in the context of proving advantage, as the earlier RCS experiments lacked that ability, so “demonstrating verifiable quantum advantage” would be quite the step forward. That doesn't appear to be what they did at all though. Indeed, the paper appears to barely touch on verifiability at all. And – unlike the press release – it doesn't claim to achieve advantage either; only to indicate “a viable path towards” it.

New comment by pred_ in "LinkedIn will soon train AI models with data from European users"

pred_ — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:42:13 +0000

Unlawful processing of data is absolutely not “opt out” by default, and simply assuming that “legitimate interest” applies does not mean that you can allow on opt out.

Here's just a quick reminder that if you're a LinkedIn user based in an EU member state, and if you do not believe that “legitimate interest” applies, you can file a complaint with your national supervisory authority (SA)/data protection authority (DPA); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_data_protection_autho...

New comment by pred_ in "Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value"

pred_ — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:56:21 +0000

Thanks for writing that up! Was there anything to be learned from those 13 sporadics or are they simply truly sporadic?

New comment by pred_ in "Firefox 143 for Android to introduce DoH"

pred_ — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 17:29:33 +0000

> Avoid Cloudflare. They log traffic.

That sounds like a GDPR violation if the logs include PII like IPs and if it's not opt-in. Is that really the case?