Hacker News: tptacek

New comment by tptacek in "Flock license plate reader wrongly linked a San Diego man to a violent crime"

tptacek — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:51:52 +0000

People are writing as if an ALPR directed these cops to arrest someone. No, it didn't. They asked it where they could find a red Alfa. It accurately told them. It's not the tool's fault it didn't occur to SDPD that there could in San Diego be in fact 2 red Alfas.

New comment by tptacek in "Fooling Go's X.509 Certificate Verification"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:59:07 +0000

I feel like basically all the X509 threads on HN should basically be locked until after you write your first comment on them.

New comment by tptacek in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:43:27 +0000

"In collusion with the rest of the government" makes that statement meaningless.

New comment by tptacek in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:42:39 +0000

What I like about Python types is that they accommodate both styles of programming. I happen to be completely sold on at least some baseline level of type safety (I don't need my type system to be a complete modeling toolkit for everything in my problem domain, just enough for basic sanity), but if you're an old-school Python type, you and I can work on the same codebase without types ruining your life.

New comment by tptacek in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:59:22 +0000

Lack of typing is my biggest problem with Python, Ruby, and ES6 Javascript; I have to write everything twice, once to do the stuff I want, and once to double check that it's actually doing stuff, because a single typo blow the program up despite it parsing fine.

Python typing is easy to dip in and out of. It handles None nicely; not as nicely as a true Optional, but enough for daily driving. The annotations are readable and simple. What more could I ask for, without asking for an entirely different language? Python typing catches a lot of bugs I'd otherwise have to tediously unit-test for.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it feels like it relies a lot on importing stuff from the swamp of the Python stdlib.

New comment by tptacek in "Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:15:05 +0000

This story doesn't mean anything. SBF has been "seeking" a pardon for over a year now. There's no due process consideration for obtaining a pardon; "applying" for one doesn't get you anything more than asking for one on Twitter would --- given the current administration, asking on Twitter might get you further! I don't think SBF's case is slipping the administration's mind.

New comment by tptacek in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:10:44 +0000

Risk in the cohorts we're talking about have tripled or even quadrupled. Obesity has not; prevalence is up 10-20%.

New comment by tptacek in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:07:24 +0000

Stored apples are not causing cancer.

New comment by tptacek in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:56:34 +0000

No? One has nothing to do with the other.

I think those of us who work in compiled languages are just snooty about them.

I'm a compiled language snoot, and happen to be working over the past couple days in typed Python for the first time. It's kind of nice. I like it. It's a huge improvement for me over ordinary Python/Ruby/Javascript; it materially improves the experience of working in the language.

New comment by tptacek in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:36:38 +0000

Right, standing seems like a series of technicalities until you realize it's fundamentally what keeps judges from becoming philosopher-kings that control the entire rest of the government: judges only exercise power in actual cases and controversies between formally-identified parties.

New comment by tptacek in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:35:20 +0000

This is not an interesting rebuttal, sorry.

New comment by tptacek in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:56:57 +0000

Nobody has volunteered to do any work for you at all and no matter how many words you spend saying otherwise that will not change.

New comment by tptacek in "A CGo-free port of SQLite/SQLite3"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:40:46 +0000

I don't care, I just wrote to clarify the project, in the Go community, isn't called "sqlite". That wouldn't make sense; there are multiple (pin-compatible) sqlite interfaces for Go.

New comment by tptacek in "A CGo-free port of SQLite/SQLite3"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:17:39 +0000

The biggest reason you'd want a cgo-free sqlite is if you're cross-compiling; for instance, from your macOS dev laptop to an x64 dev server.

New comment by tptacek in "A CGo-free port of SQLite/SQLite3"

tptacek — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:16:36 +0000

It's cznic/sqlite in Go-land; this is just a quirk of HN titling.

New comment by tptacek in "Flock license plate reader wrongly linked a San Diego man to a violent crime"

tptacek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:07:19 +0000

It didn't lead SDPD to any person at all. It led them to a red Alfa Romeo with tinted windows.

Flock doesn't do facial recognition. It's a real-time search engine for cars on video feeds.

New comment by tptacek in "The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy"

tptacek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:06:18 +0000

Right, I get that, but the article is heavily weighted towards examples of Elon Musk and the Republicans colluding to shape specifically the feed on Twitter. I agree that it's bad that's happened (in the sense of Twitter is now a much less credible platform as a result), but, again, if you're talking about destabilizing entire democracies you have to account for the fact that Musk has direct influence only over a social network very few people pay attention to.

New comment by tptacek in "The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy"

tptacek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:37:56 +0000

Any story about threats by the Internet to democracy that revolve around Twitter has to account for the fact that only a minute portion of the electorate ever looks at Twitter.

New comment by tptacek in "Flock license plate reader wrongly linked a San Diego man to a violent crime"

tptacek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:27:41 +0000

This doesn't seem like a Flock story so much as SDPD making an arrest purely on a nexus to "red Alfa Romeo with tinted windows". From what I understand of the story, the Flock camera did in fact tag a red Alfa Romeo (there's a still frame in the article). It wasn't the right one, but ALPR cameras aren't psychic; they tell you features, make/model, and plate, not "criminal culpability".

New comment by tptacek in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

tptacek — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:22:06 +0000

No, it is not.