Hacker News: rjmunro

New comment by rjmunro in "New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure"

rjmunro — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:14:43 +0000

According to Gemini, index funds in total own about 20% of the value on the Nasdaq 100 index. So if you list a new company in Nasdaq, typically they have to buy 20% of it. But only about 5% of SpaceX will floated, which means there won't be enough shares to go round.

They are doing a bunch of changes to rules to try and make this not completely break, but even if it doesn't, it feels like index funds are going to have to buy a lot of the SpaceX float, which is going to make it look like a successful IPO even if hardly any real investors buy it.

New comment by rjmunro in "New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure"

rjmunro — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:53:42 +0000

I'd like to be able to invest in an "index minus certain companies which I choose" fund so that people can exclude companies that they don't like for whatever reason.

New comment by rjmunro in "Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for AV companies"

rjmunro — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:55:34 +0000

Some people would tell me that they do, but only for training their internal self-driving AI.

I'm not sure about the privacy implications. You say "all its cars" but you actually mean "all its customers cars". The relationship between Uber and the cars/drivers is fairly different.

New comment by rjmunro in "Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies"

rjmunro — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:53:21 +0000

Sometimes AV is supposed to mean Anti Virus or Alternative Vote and that's really confusing because it really means Audio Visual. Anything else, no.

I saw the title and thought it can't be AV, they must mean AI and made a typo.

New comment by rjmunro in "A Roblox cheat and one AI tool brought down Vercel's platform"

rjmunro — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:53:48 +0000

It might be the opposite - they logged into their work gmail account on their home machine to check their email.

New comment by rjmunro in "Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero"

rjmunro — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:22:46 +0000

In which country?

New comment by rjmunro in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

rjmunro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:40:07 +0000

I think thats a really wrong definition of spam. Spam is untargeted junk from people you don't know, who are probably hiding there real identity using fake email headers etc. If it's a legit company with legit unsubscribe options, it's not spam.

It worries me a lot that people clicking "mark as spam" on messages from legit companies because they subscribed to the newsletter will mean that my messages with important information (order confirmations, e-tickets etc.) will get blocked.

New comment by rjmunro in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

rjmunro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:35:27 +0000

I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway. They often use fraudulent tricks to try to get the email through filters, such as fake from addresses.

Spam is not email from legitimate companies with valid contact details that have an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them. That's legitimate marketing emails. You might argue they also shouldn't exist, but they are a different category.

I get plenty of the second from mailchimp (it's what they do), almost none of the first. Marking the second kind as spam, rather than clicking the unsubscribe link is dangerous because it teaches your anti-spam filter to reject messages from legitimate companies. You might find that if they need to contact you for a genuine reason e.g. a reciept for a future transaction, the message is blocked.

New comment by rjmunro in "Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs"

rjmunro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:12:17 +0000

Can you rephrase that? I don't think I've read it correctly. It sounds like you are saying it would normally cost $50k on a 5090 and they can do equivalent work paying $1k. That's sounds like a $49k profit margin, but you say they will go broke.

New comment by rjmunro in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

rjmunro — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:09:52 +0000

Legally how does it work if I upload a file to Google Docs and then share it with my contacts? Is Google then a data brokerage for my files?

New comment by rjmunro in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

rjmunro — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:07:17 +0000

The problem with this is where do you draw the line? If I film you with my iPhone (e.g. you walk past in the background of my video), Apple should delete my video from my phone and iCloud account based only on your instructions?

Apple hold the data in iCloud, Apple (or a phone network) may be leasing me the phone. That sounds pretty similar to the Flock situation.

I guess the difference is that flock might be sharing the data from a customers camera with other customers. Then they are definitely controlling it.

I think the bigger problem with Flock is the fact that their cyber security is so laughably bad that non-customers can easily access the data.

New comment by rjmunro in "Show HN: Git bayesect – Bayesian Git bisection for non-deterministic bugs"

rjmunro — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:02:22 +0000

I think if you make your test script compile and then run the tests up to N times, failing on first fail, then when you run bayesect, it just "sees" a test that is "N times more" deterministic, so will behave appropriately.

I'm not sure how to choose an optimal value of N. My first hunch is make it so that it takes at least as long to run all the tests as it takes to setup (checkout, compile link etc.), but it may make sense to go a lot more than that. I'd have to do some thinking about the maths.

New comment by rjmunro in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

rjmunro — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:03:47 +0000

I read something about the Challenger disaster being predicted by an engineer and they wrote a memo about the risk because they were worried about it, but it didn't get through. I wondered if this was the only memo ever about risks to the space shuttle, or if it was one of hundreds and it just got the actual cause by luck.

Does anyone know any more about this?

New comment by rjmunro in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

rjmunro — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:58:53 +0000

I thought I'd look this up. If you've had 9 successful attempts, assuming nothing has changed between them and no other prior knowledge about success probability, then Laplace’s Rule of Succession says the probability of the next mission being a success is about 83.3%, i.e. there is a 1 in 6 chance of failing next time.

New comment by rjmunro in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

rjmunro — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:04:56 +0000

Most of axios' functionality has effectively been promoted to a language feature as `fetch`, but the problem is people don't bother to migrate. I've migrated our direct usage of it but it's still pulled in transitively in several parts of our codebase.

Even left-pad is still getting 1.6 million weekly downloads.

New comment by rjmunro in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

rjmunro — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:29:46 +0000

> Likewise, every response I get is JSON.

fetch responses have a .json() method. It's literally the first example in MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/U...

It's literally easier than not using JSON because I have to think about if I want `repsponse.text()` or `response.body()`.

New comment by rjmunro in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

rjmunro — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:53:13 +0000

> If I buy a can of soup and find glass in it, I have a valid claim against the manufacturer.

What does that mean?

New comment by rjmunro in "The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification into Linux"

rjmunro — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:11:08 +0000

I'm probably missing something, but I don't think this is as bad or as useless as the article implies. E.g. as a parent I can set up my kids PCs with their age so stuff like app stores know to only serve them age appropriate things to download. It's the minimum to comply with the laws. It doesn't stop anyone owns a machine, but it does provide a useful option to set if you want it.

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification into Linux

rjmunro — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:51:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sambent.com/the-engineer-who-tried-to-put-age-verification-into-linux-5/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503493

Points: 15

# Comments: 13

New comment by rjmunro in "MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security"

rjmunro — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:44:07 +0000

What does that mean?

What are they actually doing for the MoD? Are they reading MoD data out and processing it elsewhere?