Hacker News: toyg

New comment by toyg in "Nordwand Mono – A monospace font for coders and adventurers"

toyg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 14:39:21 +0000

I think it's an investment in ergonomics, like a good chair or a good table. If your job involves staring at text 8 hours a day, $50 for a good font that relaxes your eyes and your brain is pennies well-spent.

This goes double for any contractor who can just write it down as business expense.

New comment by toyg in "UK Defence Startups Are Being Denied Banking Services Under ESG Rules"

toyg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:11:46 +0000

Sure, but there was also Baader-Meinhof, Munich '72, plenty of robberies and car theft (which are comparably pretty rare now)...

My point is that no decade is particularly "good" or "bad" even in peacetime - shit happens all the time. And of course, only 80 years ago most of Europe was in rubbles.

New comment by toyg in "AfD Leak: What 421,179 Hacked Emails Show about the German Far Right"

toyg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:58:29 +0000

It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.

The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.

To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.

New comment by toyg in "UK Defence Startups Are Being Denied Banking Services Under ESG Rules"

toyg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:46:36 +0000

We live in times. There is always something: just in Europe, in the 50s and 60s we had the Cold War (and on the other side of the Iron Curtain, outright invasions); in the 70s we had terrorism and economic shocks; in the '80s we had Libya, Lebanon, heroin, AIDS, Chernobyl; in the '90s we had genocide in Yugoslavia, big market crashes and sovereign debt crisis, the war in Kuwait; in the '00s we had 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq; you can go on and on...

The reality is that, as long as we don't start firing nukes, we'll all be alright in the end.

New comment by toyg in "UK Defence Startups Are Being Denied Banking Services Under ESG Rules"

toyg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:37:00 +0000

I've anecdotally heard that, as a reaction to that kind of issue, they've shifted all the way towards the other end of the spectrum. But who knows if it's actually true at all levels.

New comment by toyg in "UK Defence Startups Are Being Denied Banking Services Under ESG Rules"

toyg — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 10:35:13 +0000

The problem is that it's not a binary choice, and the current situation in Israel is making it extremely difficult for regular institutions to work with defence businesses without avoiding damaging associations in public perception.

New comment by toyg in "Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall"

toyg — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:39:32 +0000

Yes - the value that the world places on European art is disproportionately high, which makes it so much more worthwhile to target than the rest.

New comment by toyg in "Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall"

toyg — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 06:42:14 +0000

Formally-protected cultural heritage is disproportionately located in Europe compared to other continents, if anything because we effectively invented the practice. Italian, French, Greek, Egyptian museums store more artefacts than they can expose at any given time - we're talking 2x-3x.

New comment by toyg in "Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall"

toyg — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 06:36:22 +0000

Not everywhere. In some countries there is no bargaining system, and criminals will just fess up because they want to unburden, or because they might as well get famous on their way down.

But it is true that most national states will have a dialogue with organised crime, and privilege the pursuit of this or that interest over blind punishment. Greater good and all that.

New comment by toyg in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

toyg — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:56:44 +0000

Local AI will be made illegal under the guise of security, and then they'll just purge anything "revolutionary" from services. The endgame currently getting pushed by the big players is pretty obvious.

New comment by toyg in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

toyg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:30:24 +0000

We cannot really go there without opening a big can of politics, but I would be wary to consider this or that change fundamentally inevitable. Marx thought he could see the future, but most of his predictions did not come to pass. Humans are messy.

New comment by toyg in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

toyg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:58:51 +0000

> could be smaller to compensate.

New builds are already much smaller than previous generations' housing, to increase margins for developers. Smaller than that, we'll basically be like rats.

New comment by toyg in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

toyg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:36:19 +0000

Even in Italy, though, peak generation was in 2008.

Germany saw a massive drop too. The only big European country that keeps growing their electricity production is France.

New comment by toyg in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

toyg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:21:23 +0000

I've never had a problem with just getting a schematic, in my world that's typical of eBay (lots and lots of Apple boxes...).

The dark pattern on listing prices is real though. As it is the lower level of quality control - the same sellers will put the same product on both Amazon and Chinese stores, but the latter will get production batches that are lower quality (coil whine, etc).

New comment by toyg in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

toyg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:12:30 +0000

This came with a price, though. Japanese workers were squeezed extremely hard, entire generations of kids barely had any relationship with their fathers. A lot of those practices were then exported to other countries under the guise of toyotism.

New comment by toyg in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

toyg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:05:00 +0000

> vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.

In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.

New comment by toyg in "Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data"

toyg — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:45:25 +0000

That's not what happens in Italy, at least - the documents are scanned and uploaded to a police portal in less than 24h. I expect that's roughly the same elsewhere. (I honestly did not know until today, I just knew the police would come every night to collect copies - good to see some modernization...)

New comment by toyg in "Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data"

toyg — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:22:14 +0000

I know, and it's really the trade-off whenever this sort of system is centralized: you can better secure the leafs, but the central repository becomes an even juicier target.

This said, the police already has a database with these info, and it likely is somehow already on the network, so adding an api (if done properly) would not dramatically alter the exposure profile.

New comment by toyg in "Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data"

toyg — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:15:29 +0000

I know, and that's really the thing: nobody cares, not the government and certainly not the hotels.

New comment by toyg in "Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data"

toyg — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:12:45 +0000

The whole point is that the hotel would not even get a copy, the machine would just send hashes around and the hotel would only get an anonymous transaction ID to store. It would probably be even more secure than what you have today at the airport.

If you think photocopies kept in some folder accessible to anyone working in the hotel, with a promise to delete it at some point, is "secure" in any way, I don't know what to tell you.