Hacker News: yabones

New comment by yabones in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

yabones — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:00:32 +0000

This issue here isn't surveillance as per a signed warrant. I don't think anybody's really arguing against that.

The problem is mass data collection without suspicion, probable cause, or warrants whatsoever. That's a brand new thing, other than the places in the world unfortunate enough to have roving gangs of police going door to door and searching homes without warrants. This facilitates it on a scale that's never really been seen before in human history.

New comment by yabones in "ICE Appears to Be Buying Immigrants' Tax Identifiers from a Data Broker"

yabones — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:41:20 +0000

While there might be some benefit, most of them are snakeoil. Effectively they're just sending polite emails to "people search" websites to remove you from search results. The real, very harmful, data brokers are background check systems (LexisNexis), credit bureaus (Equifax), and insurance industry registries, which there is effectively no way to opt-out short of faking your death.

New comment by yabones in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

yabones — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:44:02 +0000

Obviously "physical access is full access", but it's shockingly easy to break into a Windows box if you have access to the unencrypted drive. I learned with I was a teenager how to use the recovery partition to mount the C: drive, then copy "cmd.exe" to "utilman.exe" or "sethc.exe" and get an instant root shell on the login page. Takes about 2-3 minutes, can be done in the time somebody leaves their laptop to go to the bathroom at Starbucks.

To me that's the main thing about disk encryption, it's to stop a nasty rootkit from being installed trivially as much as it is about stopping the guy at the pawn shop from getting your tax info. Whether you're on macos, linux, or windows, it's really quite easy to fully compromise a machine if you have hands on it.

New comment by yabones in "Car headlights don't have to be this blinding"

yabones — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:07:40 +0000

I do this on long drives, but always have to put it back to normal when it's time to park. It would be neat if cars would implement some sort of automatic switch between this configuration and the straight-back mode when reversing.

New comment by yabones in "BYD is bringing its 5-min 'Flash' electric car charging to Canada"

yabones — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:59:52 +0000

The situation out west is indeed rough. Saskatchewan still burning coal and Alberta... Being Alberta. It's not to say we can't fix it, those are both places where you can build plenty of solar and wind power for very cheap.

These problems are very political, but also very fixable. I think (well, hope) once it becomes clear that cheap Chinese EVs are here to stay the tide will begin to turn. In terms of total lifetime cost, you can either spend 200K CAD on a Silverado or 50K CAD on a Dolphin.

New comment by yabones in "BYD is bringing its 5-min 'Flash' electric car charging to Canada"

yabones — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:48:29 +0000

Seems like a good plan. Canada has the third largest hydroelectric power production in the world, and quite a bit of nuclear, so let's use it properly. People talk about transmission infrastructure like it's difficult, but we're the ones who made the ~5,000 KM HVDC system that feeds the northern US from James Bay! I don't see why we can't quickly electrify transportation, it's the kind of project Canada seems to be pretty good at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T...

New comment by yabones in "PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you"

yabones — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:56:35 +0000

I'm curious how this might help with our biggest downtime-causer with postgres, which is major version upgrades. Poolers do a great job for failover and load balancing, but we consistently need ~10-20 minutes of downtime once or twice a year to do upgrades. Logical replication between old->new versions could probably help, but it would still require flipping everything over to the new cluster without partial writes or anything silly. Anybody have experience with this?

New comment by yabones in "Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min"

yabones — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:28:31 +0000

The people who created this policy are almost certainly exempt from it.

New comment by yabones in "Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]"

yabones — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:13:11 +0000

The toyota hybrid transmission is genuinely brilliant. Probably one of the most important and broadly overlooked innovations in automobile technology this century.

https://eahart.com/prius/psd/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmxIsoV_Xo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyK3ZlUbtM

New comment by yabones in "CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on GitHub"

yabones — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:41:37 +0000

I bet the scanner went off quite a few times and the guy disabled it...

"I turned off the carbon monoxide detector because it kept beeping, now I can finally get some sleep"

New comment by yabones in "Claude for Legal"

yabones — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:11:51 +0000

Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you. There's no errors or omissions insurance, no legal accountability, no attorney-client privilege, and no bar association to handle disciplinary action.

I think we should be realistic here, this is a more advanced version of those "will kits" that spit out a PDF. The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff until something fundamentally changes.

And like, I would love if we didn't have to spend thousands of dollars to defend ourselves in a culture as litigious as ours. But I wouldn't put my life and well being on this thing.

New comment by yabones in "Extremely Low Frequencies"

yabones — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:16:52 +0000

It's crazy that they're using radio frequencies that are within the range of human hearing... Obviously sound and RF are different things, but it puts into perspective how a "high" sound is a very "low" frequency ;)

New comment by yabones in "I want to live like Costco people"

yabones — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:45:49 +0000

I get the allure, but it's not for me and my partner.

We live in a small apartment. We drive a small car. The pantry has a good amount of dry bulk & canned food, but we largely shop one week at a time.

Sure, we could "lock in" on two or three foods, buy weeks worth of them at a time, and save some money. But like most people we like a bit of verity. It's just not possible to buy such massive quantities of things with nowhere to store them.

What I want is an anti-costco. More like a bodega. Still curated, maybe a larger mark-up, but smaller quantities of everything. Half loaves of bread, small bags of frozen veg, enough sugar or flour to bake just a couple batches.

New comment by yabones in "Chevrolet Performance eCrate package (400v/200hp)"

yabones — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:49:27 +0000

It's so you can obliterate your tires by sending all 260 ft/lbs through first gear from a dead stop, or pull entire buildings up hills.

New comment by yabones in "Life During Class Wartime"

yabones — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:11:32 +0000

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had. It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged.

I think almost everybody would be better off if taxes were something like 1% of total assets rather than off the top of your income.

New comment by yabones in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

yabones — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:40:29 +0000

"move fast and break things" only sounds good when it's not breaking things in a serious and unfixable way. Maybe we shouldn't take hype mantras as instructive means to an end.

New comment by yabones in "Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?"

yabones — Tue, 05 May 2026 13:10:52 +0000

A very simple fix for that is to use the systemd log driver to send all the container logs to journald. Then you can set a size or time limit on journald.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/logging/drivers/journald/

I believe Podman can do something similar.

New comment by yabones in "AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on"

yabones — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:51:13 +0000

It could give you a rough idea, but it's far from precise. The delay added by a single router could throw you off by several KM.

It's much more effective to just go through satellite imagery and land title records.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.01+ms+at+speed+of+lig...

New comment by yabones in "CPanel and WHM Authentication Bypass – CVE-2026-41940"

yabones — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:29:15 +0000

Oooooh that's really bad. Wordpress on Cpanel sites is like the Dark Matter of the internet, it's everywhere and you don't see it until something bad happens. Libations for the sysadmins patching & cleaning up this mess.

New comment by yabones in "Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns"

yabones — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:16:23 +0000

It feels like people are more willing to give their agent a prompt than search the web for existing solutions.

I've noticed a crazy amount of clearly AI coded projects that do a small subset of an already existing and very trusted open source project. Comments usually point this out, and the OP never responds. I'm not sure what the end goal is, but the whole thing feels like a waste of time for everybody involved.