Hacker News: promano

New comment by promano in "AlpineBSD"

promano — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:06:19 +0000

Sure, but they would still be required to open the source code of the last version they distributed before that roll back, which could then be forked.

New comment by promano in "Llama.cpp on a jailbroken PS5: run any GGUF model natively on the console"

promano — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:51:26 +0000

Yes, turn the PS5 into an AI machine right when people want to buy it for GTA6. Why not?

New comment by promano in "StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter"

promano — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:43:41 +0000

Starcraft III would be as far from a new IP as you could go while still making an RTS. Except for a Warcraft IV, I guess.

New comment by promano in "An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation"

promano — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:23:21 +0000

They also don't care which URL was accessed when the goal is scraping as much text as possible for AI training.

New comment by promano in "Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs"

promano — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:09:17 +0000

I'd bet the kind of people who care about the RAM usage of their media player haven't used Windows Media Player in a decade and disable as much telemetry as they can.

New comment by promano in "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time"

promano — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:25:11 +0000

And even if you don't have seasonal products, you still need an end date to mark when you stop selling a product; otherwise you have to do something hacky like defining " = NULL means we stopped selling the product after " and inserting an extra record.

I think the end date should be nullable though, but valid_to is NOT NULL in the starting example... later in the article, when showing the "new way" using date ranges, it inserts a row with an open-ended range, which is more what I'd expect.

New comment by promano in "Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass"

promano — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:57:28 +0000

Google's whole business is built on top management abandoning its moral compass. Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote that "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers". Then they got into advertising anyway.

New comment by promano in "Stop Killing Games"

promano — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:26:38 +0000

Maybe we need a separate campaign, "Kill Games": any games whose existence requires players being "shaken down" should not be allowed to exist.

New comment by promano in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

promano — Sun, 17 May 2026 10:37:46 +0000

A token is approximately word generated by a LLM; a few dozen tokens gets you a line of code... so measuring token burn rate is the same as counting lines of code. All it took was a change of name, and we're back to the most primitive metric we ever got for measuring programmer productivity.

I don't think I can take anything from management in tech seriously again after tokenmaxxing.

New comment by promano in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

promano — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:27:46 +0000

We had a way of measuring velocity, but who cares about estimating stories when we could be spinning up more agents? Burn a bunch of tokens and those stories will be DONE before you could even find your planning poker cards!

New comment by promano in "Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?"

promano — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:28:58 +0000

Correlation is not causation and all that, but anime was better without Crunchyroll.

New comment by promano in "Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads"

promano — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 20:05:37 +0000

They obfuscate it more than just pressing "Yes". You get a big warning saying Microsoft Defender has protected you, and the only clear option is "Don't run"

https://cdn.advancedinstaller.com/img/prevent-smartscreen-fr...

In order to run, you have to click on "More info", and then a second "Run anyway" button appears.

There's way more than 5% of the Windows userbase that gets confused and can't get past this warning.

New comment by promano in "Review of Mullvad VPN"

promano — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:18:49 +0000

There was an audit of the VPN servers earlier this year:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/fourth-infrastructure-audit-comp...

New comment by promano in "Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust"

promano — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:40:13 +0000

The Business Source License is not an open source license. Open source does mean "free to use without encumbrance" - see points 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition at https://opensource.org/osd