Hacker News: wang_li

New comment by wang_li in "M7.6 Earthquake in Panama"

wang_li — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:40:03 +0000

Wonder if there could ever be enough damage resulting in the lake draining because the locks failed?

New comment by wang_li in "Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser"

wang_li — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:22:59 +0000

There are people who code well, people who have idea but can’t code well, and people with no ideas and no coding ability who want to be part of the Skilled Developer Club.

New comment by wang_li in "Tell HN: Apple not letting removal of AI models on macOS 27 is outrageous"

wang_li — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:58:52 +0000

A fresh install of Tahoe is 15 GB. 30 GB of models is not reasonable when they are selling machines with 256 GB of non-upgradeable internal storage.

New comment by wang_li in "Altman: The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of AI"

wang_li — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:33:37 +0000

Didn't they ban cool glowing radium dials because it caused cancer? You can adopt new technologies with regulations or even ban them entirely if the downside is too high or the benefit is too low. I'm unconvinced that the benefits of AI outweigh douchery of Sam and Dario.

New comment by wang_li in "Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel"

wang_li — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:17:37 +0000

>And not only that, remember the hn crowd is not at all representative of the average.

We should keep our hopes up, someday we may get there.

New comment by wang_li in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

wang_li — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:49:18 +0000

It's a nightmare because one prosecutor may think that building out infrastructure for a technology that really might not be worth the cost is a perfectly valid research expense and a different one may not. Similar to how one person might think that the social safety net is for someone who lost the ability to provide for themselves through no fault of their own, and another might think that the social safety net is for anyone who doesn't want to work. These things need to be written down clearly expressing the intent so that society can understand and make choices appropriately. Like, if the tax code said you can have a 401k account and put a reasonable amount in it per year, then some people might think they can dump $400,000 tax free per year into their 401k while another thinks $16,500 is a reasonable amount.

New comment by wang_li in "Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant"

wang_li — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:27:01 +0000

These are criteria that any police officer can use, a dog sniff outside your vehicle, a big bag of pills labeled "methamphetamine" sitting on your dashboard, an outstanding warrant when they run your id after a lawful stop. If they abuse them you have the right to argue for dismissal of evidence in court and if appropriate you can sue for damages and collect lots of cash from whatever level of government was the abusive one. Tort liability is a thing.

Sure, they can lie about probable cause, but they would then have that evidence thrown out in any case that derived from the search. Similarly, I can kick in your door and search your house and your only recourse is violence or the legal system. The whole question here is not whether a search is possible, but whether there is any legal consequences of it.

New comment by wang_li in "Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant"

wang_li — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:05:45 +0000

They cannot enter a home without probable cause or a warrant. And outside of an actual port of entry, say at a random checkpoint they set up, they can only check IDs and look into cars the same as regular police. To perform an actual search of a vehicle in those circumstances still requires a warrant. From your first link at the cbp.gov website:

>Border Patrol checkpoints do not give Border Patrol Agents carte blanche to automatically search persons and their vehicles, other than in the manner described above. To conduct a legal search under the Fourth Amendment, the agents must develop particularly probable cause to conduct a lawful search. Probable cause can be developed from agent observations, records checks, non-intrusive canine sniffs, and other established means. Motorist's may consent to a search but are not required to do so.

New comment by wang_li in "NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates"

wang_li — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:59:18 +0000

A nand gate takes 2 transistors. So 554,000 transistors if this were manufactured in a physical device.

By way of comparison, the Intel i386 had 275,000 transistors.

New comment by wang_li in "Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC"

wang_li — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:20:48 +0000

CAP theorem suggests it is not solvable.

New comment by wang_li in "Two-tier encryption in the UK"

wang_li — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:41:02 +0000

> Border agents in America can search your phone or laptop without a warrant or sufficient suspicion at the border.

That is something that can happen at nearly every international border crossing. Before posting I tried to find a list of countries that require a warrant to search your stuff and the only place that came up was Hong Kong. New Zealand requires some suspicion, but that's effectively the same as they can simply state "they were acting suspiciously to my eye."

>Oh, and flock cameras and ICE aren't exactly a sign that America is this beacon of freedom that it likes to portray.

The US never said that you won't be observed in public nor that you can enter, remain, and travel freely around the country forever without permission.

New comment by wang_li in "I don't like passkeys"

wang_li — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:44:51 +0000

I don't want to have the security sensitivity of my devices be escalated by the fact that I access a very important service with that device. Currently I have separate passwords and a 2FA on my investing and bank accounts. I don't want to have to treat my cheap travel laptop as a SCIF because it is synced with my cloud services and has passwordless access to my entire financial life.

New comment by wang_li in "I don't like passkeys"

wang_li — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:37:52 +0000

>Apple has a vision where you have an iPhone and a mac at home and a mac at work and a vision pro and an Apple TV and all of that and your passcodes "just work".

I have many of those and I fucking don't want them to "just work". My iPad is not my iPhone. My Mac Mini is not my iPhone. Yet my iPad at home pops up the speech-to-text voicemail notifications from phone calls that I chose not to answer while I am miles away at work. It's so fucking annoying that you can't specifically turn that off.

New comment by wang_li in "Can we stop with the uptime percentages?"

wang_li — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:10:07 +0000

Services can have a 50% uptime (or a 50% downtime if you prefer) as long as it's the time when I need it to be up (or don't need it.)

Which is to say that the significance of downtime depends on the user. Talking about nines only makes sense internally when you are evaluating your infrastructure and operations. It doesn't tell you squat about impact to your customer.

New comment by wang_li in "Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster"

wang_li — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:40:11 +0000

The new Derek Smart.

New comment by wang_li in "Measuring the sloppiness of code"

wang_li — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:36:16 +0000

Code and software and applications are an intermediate stage. The final stage is an AI/LLM that just does the thing that is needed without any code being written, there are no applications or programs, just an AI that does everything.

New comment by wang_li in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

wang_li — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:55:16 +0000

>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,

My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.

New comment by wang_li in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

wang_li — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:34:31 +0000

I'm waiting for a software release for my iPhone 16 Pro Max that will let me plug in a dock that has an attached SSD, keyboard, mouse, and display, and an option to pop up on my phone to reboot into MacOS.

Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.

New comment by wang_li in "Apple Watch Series 12"

wang_li — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:56:44 +0000

And a crime in plenty of states. It shouldn't be, but it is.

New comment by wang_li in "Apple Watch Series 12"

wang_li — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:56:01 +0000

Apple needs to move the health data storage, at least optionally, to the home pod/apple tv. My phone is my main interface, but it's not the only interface. And many of the devices that interface with the health app are not mobile. My blood pressure monitor, my bathroom scale. Test results from my doctor. And so on. These should be synced/stored on either my home device and exposed through an app on my phone/desktop/laptop.