Hacker News: wang_li

New comment by wang_li in "A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime"

wang_li — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:33:36 +0000

Cancel your phone service and then no one can call you or interrupt you. Set it to Do Not Disturb. You got multiple choices.

New comment by wang_li in "A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime"

wang_li — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:51:42 +0000

You can trivially accomplish this under the current system. There is no need for a change that imposes your preferences on everyone.

New comment by wang_li in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

wang_li — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:09:30 +0000

As a person who drives on a daily basis, I want to know why we don't have AI controlled stop lights and overall traffic control.

New comment by wang_li in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

wang_li — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:53:39 +0000

I'm 55 and likely have been using computers longer than that poster has been alive. Regardless of the fact that I started young, by the time I was in college the PC revolution was in full swing and everyone had and worked with computers.

My mother, born in 1934, had no problem using computers. She didn't internalize how they work, but she learned the workflows she needed. How to launch applications and so on.

The situation described in that comment is just a broken app, it has nothing to do with the age or the understanding of the user.

New comment by wang_li in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

wang_li — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:45:21 +0000

Until 2025 Carmel-by-the-Sea in California had no street addresses. The houses have names or you just have to know who lives in which building. They also didn't have postal delivery, they all had to go to the town post office and pick up their mail.

New comment by wang_li in "Life is too short for a slow terminal"

wang_li — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:55:03 +0000

If what a person does during the day is mainly interacting with text then they need a tool for working well with text. Possibly this is an editor window inside an IDE. Possibly this is a shell in a terminal emulator. However, dismissing GUIs out of hand and asserting superiority of CLI is wrong. Far more disciplines need a GUI to get maximum utility from their computers than can get by with a CLI. Designers, architects, actual engineers, artists, lawyers, etc.

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

wang_li — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:53:08 +0000

A license is not a contract. It's a grant of permissions from an owner to a recipient that details what they can and cannot do. A license can be part of a transaction, but it does not constitute a contract. Especially in the case of free software where there is no exchange of considerations.

Regardless, contracts are not required for reliance interest to apply.

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

wang_li — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:58:10 +0000

If you induce someone to expend resources you can have liability even if those resources are not a payment to you. You can’t license your way out liability if you advertised, formally or informally, certain features and functionality that cause people to act on that advertisement. It’s called reliance interest. It’s an actual legal principle with case law supporting it.

New comment by wang_li in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

wang_li — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:23:04 +0000

Unless you are in a vacuum, a laser that can reach a useful distance can be observed due to atmospheric scattering.

New comment by wang_li in "I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab"

wang_li — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:19:55 +0000

They aren't a hard problem to solve. In the server market it's completely solved with a BMC. The problem being solved here is someone wants to make a product using some commodity product like a raspberry pi, perform video capture on a VGA/HMDI/DP port. This is not actually a problem end users have.

If you want to plug into a system that isn't server class, then they should be producing a video card that hooks into the USB bus, the always on rail of the power supply, the power switch pin of the power supply, and has an RJ45 jack. The contents of the card should be an off the shelf BMC chip.

But realistically if you want this kind of functionality, just buy server class systems that come with it.

New comment by wang_li in "Take Action: LAPD Removed Crime Location Data. Here's Why It Matters"

wang_li — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:42:05 +0000

No. You are trying to change the rules to a different game and then use those rules to invalidate a completely unrelated point. Having bad information doesn't make the fact that partial information is better than no information. It just means you were deceived by the information and your attempt at making decisions was sabotaged. If you are so wound up in "everything and everyone is against me" you have a mental disorder. If you are just picking and choosing who you define as adversarial based on which information disagrees with your priors you are just close-minded.

New comment by wang_li in "Take Action: LAPD Removed Crime Location Data. Here's Why It Matters"

wang_li — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:36:05 +0000

Having partial knowledge is good, even in your YOU'RE RACCIIISSTTTT!!!! example. Let's explain.

Consider you have to perform a task that in some way can interact with something in the environment. You have two choices of where to perform this task. In the first location there are 20 red things in the environment. In the second location there are 20 red things and 10 blue things. You know that 1 in 10 of the blue things have a negative interaction with your task. You know nothing about the red interactions with your task. You obviously choose the location with no blue things.

New comment by wang_li in "Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux"

wang_li — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:13:00 +0000

It’s deterministic. But as the user you don’t know enough to know what was determined.

New comment by wang_li in "HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C"

wang_li — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:06:38 +0000

‘dc’ has been a thing on Unix forever. It uses RPN, provides arbitrary precision arithmetic, and is programmable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dc_%28computer_program%29

New comment by wang_li in "NPM packages from Red Hat have been compromised"

wang_li — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:28:11 +0000

It's not the package manager, it's the repo and the cryptographic signatures that are trusted by the package manager and the users who choose to point their pacakge managers at those repos. The fundamental problem here is that people's risk assessment is treating a user named devioustiger12345 as having the same situation and story as Microsoft/Apple/Red Hat.

New comment by wang_li in "When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident"

wang_li — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:57:42 +0000

This is “the gun killed the victim, not the person who aimed it and pulled the trigger” argument and we shouldn’t even entertain it for one second. This was 100% done by a person.

New comment by wang_li in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

wang_li — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:15:34 +0000

>The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability.

That would only be true if a new owner purchased the business. In bankruptcy consigned goods become property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate and cannot be returned to the original owners. The original owners have a cause of action against the estate, but they are not guaranteed the return of the consigned goods or full recompense for the value of the goods. It largely depends on how corporate took over the franchise.

    Generally, if the consignee under such a consignment arrangement files for bankruptcy relief, the consigned goods are property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate. Accordingly, 11 U.S.C. §362(a)(3) prohibits the consignor from picking up the consigned goods after the filing of the bankruptcy. Additionally, if the consignor picks up the goods, (1) the consignor may be subject to a turnover action under 11 U.S.C §§542 or 543 for their return and/or (2) within 90 days prior to the bankruptcy filing, the consignor may be subject to a preference action under 11 U.S.C. §547(b) for their return.

From https://www.abi.org/abi-journal/navigating-the-consignment-r...

New comment by wang_li in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

wang_li — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:08:37 +0000

He kind of is. The right thing to do here is go straight to court. All this drama, grandstanding, conspiracist thinking, and stunts are bullshit. Sue. Get the judgment. Collect.

New comment by wang_li in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

wang_li — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:08:16 +0000

You're not my tech support person so I'm not going to get into it deeply, but I don't mean the phone option of "Calls on Other Devices" (which is off on my phone) or the Messages option of "Text Message Forwarding" (which only has my Macs listed.) I mean that whenever I get a voice mail on a call it shows up as an alert on my iPad and Messages receives copies of various text messages, I think via iCloud as this happens when my iPad is at home and I am miles away with my phone at the office.

New comment by wang_li in "Magnifica Humanitas"

wang_li — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:34:55 +0000

Speed limits, safety features, fuel efficiency for cars. Every government regulation is to moderate some human behavior and when that behavior is related to technology it is "taming" that technology.

We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.