<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: timv</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=timv</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:37:34 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=timv" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Imagine you were making purchasing decisions about which LLM-based coding tool to use.<p>If one of the possible vendors convinces you that that they have a next gen model that is so powerful it found 20+ year old bugs in a hardened operating system, that would undoubtedly have an influence on your decision even if you are only buying the current model.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:47:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712616</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712616</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712616</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Why Is SQLite Coded In C"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The argument here is that they're confident that the bounds check isn't needed, and would prefer the compiler not insert one.<p>The choices therefore are:<p>1. No bound check<p>2. Bounds check inserted, but that branch isn't covered by tests<p>3. Bounds check inserted, and that branch is covered by tests<p>I'm skeptical of the claim that if (3) is infeasible then the next best option is (1)<p>Because if it is indeed an impossible scenario, then the lack of coverage shouldn't matter.
If it's not an impossible scenario then you have an untested case with option (1) - you've overrun the bounds of an array, which may not be a <i>branch</i> in the code but is definitely a different behaviour than the one you tested.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2025 04:18:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588041</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588041</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588041</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This is also an unconventional drinking fountain.<p>Why do you say that?<p>At least in Australia, drinking fountains ("bubblers"!) are fairly non standardised. I don't recall seeing many with that rubber top, but the rotating release mechanism is pretty common. I'd say press buttons are more common but both are typical.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 01:24:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44187414</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44187414</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44187414</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "BYD to offer Tesla-like self-driving tech in all models for free"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In Australia the entry level "Dolphin essential" is A$30k which is between US$18.5k and US$21k, depending on the (fairly volatile) exchange rates.<p>Still not US$14k, but not quite the $25k it is in other markets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2025 06:02:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43022354</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43022354</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43022354</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Phones have a lot of that market covered, and the Switch Lite gets close enough for a lot of people who want something other than a phone.<p>I guess Nintendo don't see enough left over space to bother trying.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:31:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42733466</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42733466</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42733466</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even Linux users in 1999 (when you had to be pretty well informed to know that Linux even existed) were truly that uninformed.<p><a href="http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0" rel="nofollow">http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:28:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42733445</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42733445</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42733445</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The market penetration of the switch makes it harder for Sony to expand into the family/casual gaming space. That forces Sony to stick to the AAA lane (which is where their focus is) limiting their growth opportunities.<p>If the switch had been a failure, then a lot of households that currently have a switch (only) would have bought a different console and that would likely have been a PS5 (even if they held on to their previous generation console, and waited a couple of years until the PS5 price dropped below $500)<p>I have a PS4 and a Switch at home. The kids play the switch and occasionally play on the PS4. I can't justify buying a PS5 because there's only so much 
gaming time available, and family gaming is covered by the switch and my personal gaming is good enough on my PC. Take the switch out of the equation and that changes.<p>PS5 is winning the AAA console lane, no doubt. But Sony could have been making more money if they could also own a significant portion of the family console lane.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2025 01:08:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42732952</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42732952</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42732952</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Australia's 3G Shutdown – Why your 4G/5G Phone is now Blocked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's been more than a decade since I was involved with emergency services, but ~15 years ago there was a requirement (in Australia and elsewhere) that phones must be able to call emergency services from <i>any available network</i> even if the preferred carrier did not have service in that area. I assume that is still the case.<p>That requirement forces phones to have some degree of special handling for emergency calls. It may have required (or been interpreted to require) that a phone make emergency calls over 3G if VoLTE was unavailable. I can imagine someone deciding that means "lets just use 3G for all emergency calls" because who ever expected a case where 4G was available and 3G was not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Nov 2024 05:18:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104738</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104738</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42104738</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "An admittedly wandering defense of the SSO tax"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><i>Its presence implies that the company both is capable of and is overcharging the people coerced into the higher price tier.</i><p>"Overcharging" is a concept without a precise meaning. The SSO-capable version has a feature that cost money to build and support. That it is sold at a higher price (often alongside other enterprise features that cost money to build and support) is not proof that they are overcharging.<p>Any company that is tying to recoup the costs of building those features will charge the customers that use those features. The existence of a price differential between the 2 editions does not tell you whether they are overcharging.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:01:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306662</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Pixel Watch 3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not as widely available. My bank doesn't support registering my card with GarminPay.
Pretty much every bank supports Apple and Google.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:51:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241460</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241460</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241460</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "The juror who found herself guilty"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It would also be interesting to consider smaller groups for discussion. Break the jury into 2 groups of 6, or 3 groups of 4 people.<p>I wonder whether you could get the benefits of weighing the evidence collectively but reduce the influence that 1 or 2 dominant jurors might have.<p>If 2 or 3 independent groups reached the same conclusion, does that increase the chances of them being correct?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jan 2024 22:00:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39123147</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39123147</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39123147</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Timeline to remove DSA support in OpenSSH"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The main source code for DSA is here<p><a href="https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/ssh-dss.c" rel="nofollow">https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/ss...</a><p>You can see that the team did a big refactor of key handling about 14 months ago that required multiple rounds changes to the DSA code.<p>That's the sort of cost that legacy code brings - it's not about make changing to the DSA feature, it's about the cost of maintaining the DSA code when you  make changes across the codebase.<p>In the original mail, DJM mentions that they'd like to explore a post-quantum signature algorithm. Adding that to the codebase is likely to require some broad changes to key management, and that will be less work if there are fewer supported key types.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jan 2024 02:58:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38963106</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38963106</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38963106</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Engineer Used Water Pump to Get $1B Stuxnet Malware into Iranian Nuclear Plant"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It doesn't even have to be a totally "random" (unrelated) motorcycle accident.<p>If he panicked after the Stuxnet attack, as his family is reported to have said, then it's likely he has behaving erratically and was fearful for his life.<p>That could easily translate to circumstances where he rides a motorcycle in a particularly dangerous manner - e.g. fleeing from someone he thought was Iranian/Dutch/US/Israeli intelligence (even if they weren't).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jan 2024 01:30:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38962332</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38962332</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38962332</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Google illegally refusing to bargain with employee union, says NLRB"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The issue doesn't appear to be "pay" but conditions.<p>From the decision (linked 2 up)<p><i>At all material times, Respondents Cognizant and Google have codetermined the essential terms and conditions of employment of employees employed at the E. Parmer Lane facility and have been joint employers.</i><p>(2nd to last paragraph of "Findings of Fact > Jurisdiction")<p>The original article (the register) quotes a union member<p><i>Google and Cognizant have proceeded to make unilateral changes to our working conditions such as a forced return to office, removal of sick pay during a global pandemic, and the implementation of a 'Clean Room' policy that bars us from having our phones, paper, or pens in our office, without bargaining with our union.</i><p>The line of reasoning seems to be something like:<p>- There are decisions that Google is making that, if the workers were employees, would need to be negotiated with the union.<p>- Google is making those decisions with application to the contractors as well as their direct employees<p>- Consequently, for the purposes of union negotiation, Google is a joint employer (alongside Cognizant) of the contractors because it is making decisions that affect the workers and ought to be negotiated with a union.<p>If that is the argument, it seems fair to me.<p>If Google wants to make decisions about the employment conditions of contractors then it needs to accept that it is an "employer" of those workers. Alternatively it can decide not to make decisions about their conditions and leave all of that to Cognizant - but in that case it cannot enforce those policies on the workers until after Cognizant has negotiated with the union and reached an agreement about the the workers conditions. Google would have to make sure that every workplace policy that they wished to have applied to the contractors was handled as a contractual arrangement between Google and Cognizant, not an employment arrangement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jan 2024 02:38:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875059</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875059</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875059</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "With revenue declining, Mozilla CEO gets a 20% raise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The purpose of a system is what it does.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jan 2024 03:35:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850394</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850394</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850394</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "On a great interview question"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you have a reason to believe (c) is true in practice?<p>I strongly suspect many interviewers (myself included) would have a few "top issues" and significantly favour candidates who pointed them out.
But as the candidate you don't really know which issues will seem important to the interviewer.<p>It's not an irrelevant exercise though - code reviews are a real part of many roles and making sensible choices about what to comment on is a necessary skill.
But it is hard to avoid turning the interview into an exercise in "guess what's on the top of my list"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Apr 2023 12:32:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554396</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554396</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35554396</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "How to hire engineering talent without the BS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The ridiculousness isn't that Google has changed their hiring process to reflect their current state, it's that other companies are copying what Google does now with the hope that it will allow them to replicate the success that Google had 20 years ago.<p>If your premise is <i>"We look a lot like Google circa 2015, and I really like what they've done since then, how did they do it?"</i> then it might make sense to replicate their hiring.<p>But if you want to achieve what Google achieved between 1998 (founding) and 2004 (IPO) then asking what they do <i>now</i> (or have done over the last 10 years) isn't particularly relevant.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2023 03:14:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35051093</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35051093</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35051093</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "Of Course “changeme” Is Valid Base64 (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think that's true. The underscore is valid in RFC4648, but the exclamation point is not.<p>And the RFC explicitly says:<p><pre><code>    Implementations MUST reject the encoded data if it contains
   characters outside the base alphabet
</code></pre>
So, unless I've missed something in the RFC (and I admit I only skimmed it), <i>change_me!</i> isn't valid in either traditional or URL safe base64.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:40:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28362711</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28362711</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28362711</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "So you want to build a carbon capture company"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In which case it wouldn't be "still light" it would be "already light"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2021 09:46:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035649</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by timv in "So you want to build a carbon capture company"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>a location east where its still light.</i><p>You've got your directions backwards.<p>7pm in NYC is 4pm in SF, so you wanted to use solar power to provide evening energy then you generate in the West (SF) to power the East (NY).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 May 2021 08:52:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035385</link><dc:creator>timv</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035385</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27035385</guid></item></channel></rss>