<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: repiret</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=repiret</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:12:26 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=repiret" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Assuming you mean in the United Stares, can you cite a specific law or court case to support your position?<p>It occurs to me that the existence of paparazzi seems to be evidence against your position.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 03:04:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569963</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569963</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569963</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Claude Code runs Git reset –hard origin/main against project repo every 10 mins"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or just `strace`.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:31:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569437</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569437</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569437</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This isn't the first time this month I've read about someone suffering consequences of mistaken identity after their facial recognition said they look like someone who committed a crime.  I'm sure this is starting to happen at an alarming rate.<p>The fundamental problem is that among the 350 million people living in the United States, there are a lot of pairs of people who look pretty darn similar.  It used to be impractical to ask a question like "who in the US looks like the person in this security footage", and so as a matter of practicality, once you found someone who looks like the suspect, you probably also have other evidence, even if it's pretty weak, linking them to the crime.<p>But with AI, you can ask "who in the US looks like this person", and so we need to re-calibrate what it means if all you know is that someone looks like a suspect.  I am of the opinion that "looks like someone," in the absence of any other evidence, is reasonable suspicion, but not probable cause, that you are the person you look like.  Reasonable suspicion is enough for the police to stop you on the street and ask for your ID, but not enough to arrest you.  There are other data points that alone might not even be reasonable suspicion, but could be combined with "looks like someone" to make probable cause, such as "was near the place at the time the crime happened".<p>AI isn't really the problem, even whether or not the AI's determination that two people look alike is valid or reviewed by a human isn't the problem.  The problem is assuming that because two people look alike they must be the same person, even if you have no other evidence of them being the same person.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:46:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568690</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568690</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568690</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Castlevania and Bloodstained developer Shutaro Ida dies aged 52"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If, like me, you were wondering how a 52 year old could have been a developer on a game you remember playing on an NES in the late 80s or early 90s: It looks like Īda's Castlevania involvement started around 2003, working in increasingly senior roles on Castlevania games released since then.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:39:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039305</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039305</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47039305</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My insurance agent has recommended that once a year or so I carefully walk through the house with a video recorder, opening every cabinet and drawer and tool box and so on.  It's easier than constructing a detailed inventory, but gives you the raw data you need to construct one in the unlikely even that you need it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 04:43:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921371</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921371</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921371</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is what I do too, but be warned about “fire proof” - a fire that results in the total loss of your house will create enough heat for enough time that fireproof gun safes and smaller fireproof lockboxes will be destroyed, or even if not, their contents will get hot enough to combust anyway.<p>A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.<p>It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:37:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918476</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918476</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918476</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As someone who recently replaced a few windows in my house, I can say in no uncertain terms that spending $1200 for a lamp and paying to feed it 0.58kW is cheaper than hiring a contractor to add another window.  And it works all day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:39:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881890</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881890</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881890</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "X offices raided in France"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is really useful for those of us who are really only familiar with the US system.  Let me restate a few things to make sure I understand, and follow with some questions:<p>1. The "procureur" and "juge d'instruction" are chosen from the same pool of judges, with the former appointed by the government executive, and the latter nominated by the judges themselves.<p>2. Does the executive choose one "procureur" to serve a particular region for a particular span of time, or do they choose a "procureur" every time there's some sort of criminal activity they think needs investigation?<p>3. How is the pool of judges themselves chosen?  In the US, for example, federal judges are chosen by the president and confirmed by the senate, and serve for life.  While state court judges are typically elected for a specified term.<p>4. Supposing we both live in France and I break into your house and steal from you.  What happens next?  For the sake of telling a story, suppose that you have a security camera from which I could be recognized, but not so clearly that anybody can be certain it's me until someone searches my garage and finds your stolen things.  Walk me through the process of who does what?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:03:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878667</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878667</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878667</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm reminded of the monologue from Terminator 2:<p>> Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him... it would always be there. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him or get drunk and hit him, or say it couldn't spend time with him because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.<p>The AI doctor will always have enough time for you, and always be at the top of their game with you.  It becomes useful when it works better than an overworked midlevel, not when it competes with the best doctor on their best day.  If we're not there already, we're darn close.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Jan 2026 20:50:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46816398</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46816398</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46816398</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>100ns intervals.  My favorite part of that story is how long after Windows 95 was released before anybody discovered the bug.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:22:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751006</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751006</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751006</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Memory layout in Zig with formulas"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> CPUs fetch data from memory in fixed-size blocks of so-many bytes, and performance degrades when data is misaligned.<p>A memory bus supports memory transactions of various sizes, with the largest size supported being a function of how many data lines there are.  The following two statements are true of every memory bus with which I'm familiar, and I probably every bus in popular use:  (1) only power-of-two sizes are supported; (2) only aligned transactions are supported.<p>Arm, x86, and RISC-V are relatively unique among the multitude of CPU architectures in that if they are asked to make an unaligned memory transaction, they will compose that transaction from multiple aligned transactions.  Or maybe service it in cache and it never has to hit a memory bus.<p>Most CPU architectures, including PPC, MIPS, Sparc, and ColdFire/68k, will raise an exception when asked to perform a misaligned memory transaction.<p>The tradition of aligning data originated when in popular CPU architectures, if you couldn't assume that data was aligned, you would need to use many CPU instructions to simulate misalinged access in software.  It continued in compilers for Arm and x86 because even though those CPUs could make multiple bus transactions in response to a single mis-aligned memory read, that takes time and so it was much slower.<p>I don't know for sure, but I would expect that on modern x86 and high performance Arm, the performance penalty is quite small, if there's any at all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:04:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750908</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750908</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750908</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Chromium Has Merged JpegXL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can use too few bits of color depth to get lossyness in PNG.  More generally, I can't find myself very sympathetic to "I don't want a format that can do X and Y, because I might accidentally select X when I want Y in my software".  You might accidentally choose JPG when you want PNG too.  Or accidentally resample the image.  Or delete your files.<p>If you want a robust lossless workflow, PNG isn't the answer.  Automating the fiddly parts and validating that the automation does what you want is the answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:20:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605292</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605292</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605292</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use MoneyDance, which does automatic bank sync, is double-entry (although you can make single-entry transactions if you try hard enough), and is a program rather than a web service.  It’s got some rough edges, but it meets my needs well enough. I haven’t looked into how hard it would be to read its data files if I wanted to migrate away.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:11:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468216</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468216</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468216</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Monotype font licencing shake-down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Allegations of copyright infringement where the person making the allegation hasn't done due diligence need to be illegal and subject to civil penalty.  The penalties for actual copyright infringement can be so severe that we cannot allow all the copyright wolf-crying that happens.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 06:03:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976346</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976346</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976346</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The inflated medical bills are not malice from the medical provider, they're incentivized by the insurance system.  Providers are required to have a standard price list for all their billing codes; hospitals are required to publish it even, although compliance with publishing is sketchy.<p>Their contracts with insurers says they can't bill the insurer more than what's on the standard price list, but the insurer won't pay more than the contracted amount for each billing code.  As a result, the standard way to make a price list is to periodically review what insurance has paid on all the billing codes you've used lately, and if there's any billing code for which insurance has fully paid, increase the price.<p>This is exacerbated by the fact that a single encounter might be encoded into multiple billing codes.  One billing code for an aspirin, one for the nursing time to administer it, for example.  Suppose insurance A pays reasonably for the nursing time but in exchange pays a pittance for the aspirin, but insurance B pays enough for the aspirin to cover the nursing time to administer it, but doesn't pay the nursing time billing code, but insurance C pays for an omnibus code for "spent a couple hours in the ER", but doesn't pay for nursing time or aspirin separately at all.  A provider can agree to all three contracts, because they each give them enough money to profitably provide the service, but that requires that their price list has a high price for the aspirin, an high price for the nursing time, and a high price for the omnibus billing code.<p>A cash payer gets the same bill an insurance company would - high prices on all three items.  But insurance companies never pay that.  In the old days, you would just have a totally separate cash pay price list, but medicare rules don't allow that anymore, and limit the magnitude of cash discounts.<p>Fix the insurance system, and the bogus hospital bills that the hospital doesn't actually expect people to pay go away.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 06:12:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743230</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743230</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743230</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Passwordless boot with a TPM means the software can control what secrets it gives out.  Yeah, if you boot to a desktop operating system and auto-login as an admin user, that doesn't leave things very secure, but that's not the only scenario.<p>Consider a server.  It can have an encrypted hard drive, boot with the TPM without a password, and run its services.  In order to steal data from it, you need to either convince software running on the server to give you that data, or you need to do some sort of advanced hardware attack, like trying to read the contents of DRAM while the computer is running.<p>There are other use cases too, like kiosks, booting to a guest login, corporate owned laptops issued to employees, allowing low-entropy (but rate limited) authentication after booting, to name a few.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2025 02:38:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612833</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612833</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612833</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree that biometrics are in the same ballpark as low-entropy passwords, which means their security relies on avoiding offline attacks.  My ATM card is protected by a 4-digit pin.  That's perfectly secure, because the ATM network won't let you enter a wrong pin more than a single-digit number of times before locking the account.<p>Windows Hello allows you to log in with a 6-digit pin.  That's perfectly secure, because the TPM lets them design a system where you can't do an offline attack on the pin.  Too many wrong entries and you'll need to use your password.<p>I doubt there's more than two dozen bits of entropy provided by finger print readers or facial recognition authentication, but you can make an acceptably secure login experience with it because, again, the TPM lets you prevent offline attacks.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2025 02:20:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612759</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612759</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612759</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But most people don't want to enter a password, and if you make people enter a password too much, they'll choose terrible passwords and put them on a sticky note.  Windows Hello can only be done securely with a TPM.  A server that I want to turn back on all by itself after a power outage can only be done securely with a TPM.<p>I want a TPM in my computer so I can have the security and convenience.  Yes, it's another point of failure.  But I need backups in case the hard drive fails anyway.  And besides, the OS can be designed so I can enter a password if I need to use the drive without the TPM.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 04:57:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601593</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601593</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601593</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree with all of the articles points except for the first one: TPM and Secure Boot do not reduce user choice or promote state or corporate surveillance.  If you want to be able to prevent root kits you need secure boot, and if you want to store secrets that don't need a user password to unlock and can't be stolen by taking apart the computer, you need a TPM; or you need substantially similar alternatives.<p>I would say that specifically with Secure Boot, Microsoft actually promoted user choice:  A Windows Logo compliant PC needs to have Microsoft's root of trust installed by default.  Microsoft could have stopped there, but they didn't.  A Windows Logo compliant PC _also_ needs a way for users to install their own root of trust.  Microsoft didn't need to add that requirement.  Sure, there are large corporate and government buyers that would insist on that, but they could convince (without loss of generality) Dell to offer it to them.  Instead, Microsoft said all PCs need it, and as a result, anybody who wants to take advantage of secure boot can do so if they go through the bother of installing their own root of trust and signing their boot image.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 01:51:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45600632</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45600632</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45600632</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by repiret in "Notes on Managing ADHD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is a large adult population with undiagnosed and untreated ADHD.  A generation ago that population was even higher.  A bunch of them are pilots.<p>So then the question is, if in a professional pilot and I think I might have ADHD, do I follow up on that hunch?  Of course not, because a diagnosis would cost me my career.<p>There’s good research to show that stimulants reduce the rate of car crashes in people with ADHD.  I have no doubt that if we encouraged pilots to seek ADHD treatment, it would improve safety.<p>IMO the diagnoses that should exclude someone from flying are those that could cause them to become suddenly incapacitated.  For everything else, we can just test whether someone can safely fly an airplane, which we already regularly do for pilots.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2025 03:27:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089184</link><dc:creator>repiret</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089184</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089184</guid></item></channel></rss>