Hacker News: robhlt

New comment by robhlt in "What we know so far about Spain train crash"

robhlt — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:40:25 +0000

Many train systems have a trip-stop on signals that will automatically activate the trains's emergency brake if one passes a red signal.

It cannot be bypassed, if an operator must go through a red they have to manually reset the e-brake on each car once it passes the signal.

New comment by robhlt in "Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists"

robhlt — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:36:01 +0000

Your Microsoft example is only equivalent if Microsoft was also scanning hotmail and MSN messenger for threats against the company.

New comment by robhlt in "FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses"

robhlt — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:27:02 +0000

The social security administration does have a central database of essentially everyone born in the US after 1986, when a law was passed that required you to provide the SSN of anyone you claimed as a dependent on your taxes. As a result essentially every child born in the US is issued an SSN along with their birth certificate.

New comment by robhlt in "Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO"

robhlt — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 03:49:29 +0000

This kind of thing has come up before with "murder for hire" advertisements [1]. The publishers were only found liable when the advertisement was very explicit. Seems like the bar is quite high and courts are currently unwilling to impose "undue burden" on publishers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_of_Fortune_(magazine)#...

New comment by robhlt in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

robhlt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:03:23 +0000

Just denying write access outside the build directory and denying network access would go a long way and won't break pretty much any well-behaved build systems.

Any C library that's also packaged by debian supports being built under these conditions because it's required for everything except non-free packages: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#main...

New comment by robhlt in "Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union"

robhlt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:47:01 +0000

I do disagree. They've funded macOS R&D for decades without charging developers anything. Why should iOS be any different?

New comment by robhlt in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

robhlt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:42:16 +0000

The OP article is also wrong on multiple counts. "Customer behavior" data like call recordings and email addresses/activity is specifically not included in Google's purchase. See page 18 of the court document they link, the "Google's Data Purchase Request" column on the right lists what is and isn't included.

New comment by robhlt in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

robhlt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:36:49 +0000

None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included".

The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included.

New comment by robhlt in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

robhlt — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:41:38 +0000

It's not really the same unless the human cleaner also wears a gopro to record and archive their entire cleaning session for later review (and potential sale to data brokers when the cleaning company wants more money).

New comment by robhlt in "Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers"

robhlt — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:15:13 +0000

This is still a thing on Android if your work account is a Google account and uses the Work profile feature. You can pause all apps in the Work profile on a schedule (or on demand), so it includes any work apps you might have in addition to email.

New comment by robhlt in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

robhlt — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:24:26 +0000

Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.

New comment by robhlt in "Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning"

robhlt — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 03:36:44 +0000

Air conditioners don't need to use fossil fuels. Solar power and AC work really well together because peak solar energy is exactly when you need AC the most.

No heat is created either, that would explicitly violate the first law of thermodynamics. An air conditioner powered by solar energy (or anything solar powered) ends up releasing the exact same amount of "excess" heat as the sunlight would have if it hadn't been absorbed by the panels.

New comment by robhlt in "Steam Machine launches today"

robhlt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:48:49 +0000

For HDMI CEC they've already published their user-space daemon: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/holo/linux-cec

New comment by robhlt in "Steam Machine launches today"

robhlt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:45:58 +0000

It's a bit niche, but Steam can download games from another PC running Steam on your local network. 2.5GbE on both PCs makes that a lot faster.

New comment by robhlt in "Rent collections are down in New York"

robhlt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:20:01 +0000

Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.

New comment by robhlt in "Starship's Twelfth Flight Test"

robhlt — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:17:25 +0000

That's not how it works. Probability of precipitation means exactly what it sounds like: the probability that precipitation will fall in a specific forecast area.

Here's the definition from the NWS: https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%2...

New comment by robhlt in "No more JetBrains products for me"

robhlt — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:44:10 +0000

My problems are mostly with the language servers. I've always found them to be slower, consume more resources, and provide worse results compared to the equivalent JetBrains IDE. I've tried Python, Rust, and Go within the last few months and found this is still the case. Go is the worst of them, on larger repos gopls will easily consume 3-4x more memory than GoLand with far worse responsiveness on completions.

New comment by robhlt in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

robhlt — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:17:22 +0000

Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.

New comment by robhlt in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

robhlt — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:52:39 +0000

Plaid's login flow also requires a 2FA code if your bank requires it. The same 2FA code that banks say to never provide to anyone else.

They're literally proxying the bank's login page just like a phishing site would, and I assume they're also selecting the "trust this computer" option so their access is more persistent. My bank does require re-2FA for larger transfers, but there's still a lot of damage I can do on a "trusted" computer without triggering another 2FA prompt.

New comment by robhlt in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

robhlt — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:16:43 +0000

Plaid requires your bank username and password, so they have full read-write access to your account. They can do anything you can do when logged in to the bank's website, and so can anyone else who gains access to Plaid's database.