Hacker News: tga_d

New comment by tga_d in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

tga_d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:48:37 +0000

Okay, but that again seems to just be a few selected data points, rather than an actual trend, backed by peer reviewed study? Japan, Australia, and Iceland all have CT units per capita that exceed the US (~ 112, 70, and 50 /MM respectively), and all of three have universal care, two are full on single payer.

New comment by tga_d in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

tga_d — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:09:52 +0000

> In general the countries with the highest levels of nationalization also have the most problems with shortages.

Do you have any citations for this? I've heard this rhetoric before, but every time I look into it, searching around for studies on google scholar or the web, I can only find studies and reports indicating that health outcomes trend better in countries with more universal coverage. There are think pieces with anecdata of course, but no actual peer reviewed publications I can find.

New comment by tga_d in "Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK"

tga_d — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:17:10 +0000

You seem to have misunderstood an is/ought distinction. You may hold the (fairly extreme, as far as copyright goes) position that surveillance footage should be subject to copyright, but it's well established that it's not. Who owns the camera is irrelevant. At least in the US; I'm not aware of any jurisdictions that hold otherwise. This is why Wikipedia articles on world events in the past few decades are full of stills from surveillance cameras: it's one of the few sources of imagery of an event that are unambiguously legal to include, because unlike a photo or intentionally made video of something specific, it's not a creative work. It's also pretty firmly established that human authorship is required for something to be subject to copyright, and having an idea that lead to some particular expression is itself not sufficient; see, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

(Not a lawyer, just a Wikipedia editor.)

New comment by tga_d in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

tga_d — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:47:16 +0000

> Heck, are we at the point where we shouldn't even do that and everything should be done in a vm container?

This is the premise of Qubes OS. It's gotten decently usable, I'd estimate about as good as Linux a decade ago. https://www.qubes-os.org/

New comment by tga_d in "StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time"

tga_d — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:11:22 +0000

Strava doesn't have complete coverage, especially on newer trails, but more importantly: doing the trace via Street Complete attaches it to an OSM note with an optional (but encouraged) photo. This additional context makes it a lot more useful for editors than an ordinary trace, which can just as easily be an actual trail, a desire path, or someone deciding to improvise a shortcut through some brush. Even if the note just contains the word "trail", that helps us (though more detail is greatly appreciated, of course).

New comment by tga_d in "We all depend on open source. We will defend it together"

tga_d — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:46:12 +0000

I don't see how that was implied? Just because someone is part of the "club" doesn't mean many other "members" can't be skeptical of their role.

In fact, it doesn't even seem difficult to simultaneously acknowledge and commend the valuable role they play, while also expressing concern over the influence they wield and how it might contrast with desires and goals of the wider community.

New comment by tga_d in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

tga_d — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:49:19 +0000

These are two separate incidents, please read the article. While the latest one is certainly arguable and I suspect most people would understand why someone would want to take it seriously (even if they themself would not), the earlier "Free Palestine" one seems absurd to label a threat, and I would be very curious how someone would justify it as such.

New comment by tga_d in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

tga_d — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:01:30 +0000

Setting aside the fact that there are multiple very old, very large religions that are nearly or actually vegan (e.g., Jainism), or that people raised vegan can't easily digest meat or animal products, why on earth do you feel that you or a hospital worker are qualified to determine the beliefs making up someone's identity, when you know absolutely nothing about them?

New comment by tga_d in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

tga_d — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:12:16 +0000

Most of the input devices that Apple sells on their website don't have multitouch, including 0 keyboards and only one of the mice. Many of the photos on the site for each of their non-iMac desktops include full setups that don't have a magic mouse or separate touch pad. The Mac mini and Mac Studio don't come with any input devices, and don't say anywhere that multitouch is recommended (closest is some language clearly marketing it as an up-sell on the Studio, "Take your creativity to the next level [with extra purchase]").

New comment by tga_d in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"

tga_d — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:56:58 +0000

I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.

[0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...

New comment by tga_d in "A website to destroy all websites"

tga_d — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:42:19 +0000

I'm going to have to bite at the bait here: your post is guilty of what it's critiquing, and to a larger degree than the post being replied to.

New comment by tga_d in "Geedge and MESA leak: Analyzing the great firewall’s largest document leak"

tga_d — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 23:30:40 +0000

I agree, I just don't think it makes someone a "failed excuse for a human being".

New comment by tga_d in "Geedge and MESA leak: Analyzing the great firewall’s largest document leak"

tga_d — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:12:20 +0000

There's a sort of mirror world of academic research happening, where on one side of the mirror, you have people building the tools to censor the internet (typically but not always in Asian venues), and on the other, the tools to circumvent that censorship (typically but not always in Western venues). I know far more people on the latter half of the equation, but have enough exposure to the other side of the mirror to know that most of them earnestly believe they're doing something good. They see massive megacorportaions pushing American interests as an unfair lever in a fight for national sovereignty, and what they do as simply leveling the playing field, and combating misinformation. While I would wholeheartedly agree that they are mistaken in their analysis (reifying systems for people, "The institution I'm supporting may sometimes do bad things, but what I do is supporting the good parts!") and should immediately stop, I wouldn't want to dehumanize them any more than I would someone who works for Palantir, or even Google, Amazon, etc.

New comment by tga_d in "Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah"

tga_d — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 23:09:51 +0000

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee

New comment by tga_d in "Pixel 10 Phones"

tga_d — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 02:00:03 +0000

There is a dedicated reproducible builds action that verifies that it does match (currently failing because of the aforementioned bug). I'm not sure why you're still litigating this when, again, you can not only just go look at it, you can very much do it yourself.

New comment by tga_d in "Pixel 10 Phones"

tga_d — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 01:18:07 +0000

Pick a decently up-to-date fork of Signal on GitHub and look at its Actions. You can also just do it yourself if you'd like, the process is effectively just doing a build in a docker container and comparing the result.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

New comment by tga_d in "Pixel 10 Phones"

tga_d — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:43:03 +0000

People reproducibly build Signal all the time. There's a bug right now that makes the play store version differ from the one you get by downloading off their website/build from source, but you can examine the differences to see they're minor.

New comment by tga_d in "Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting"

tga_d — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 14:46:10 +0000

Tracking pixels aren't for fingerprinting, they're just regular tracking. You can block them fairly easily (just block the 3rd party request to the known tracker). Fingerprinting is a lot more difficult to detect and prevent. Companies claiming they reserve the right to do it is a good reason to take precautions, but without insight into what is actually being done, that's hard to effectively do (without resorting to blocking all possible vectors, like Tor Browser).

New comment by tga_d in "I use zip bombs to protect my server"

tga_d — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 01:46:23 +0000

There was an incident a little while back where some Tor Project anti-censorship infrastructure was run on the same site as a blog post about zip bombs.[0] One of the zip files got crawled by Google, and added to their list of malicious domains, which broke some pretty important parts of Tor's Snowflake tool. Took a couple weeks to get it sorted out.[1]

[0] https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/ [1] https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/#safebrowsing

New comment by tga_d in "Deterministic simulation testing for async Rust"

tga_d — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:28:11 +0000

What's the advantage of integrating this at a library level instead of just compiling it and running in Shadow? https://github.com/shadow/shadow