Hacker News: yoavm

New comment by yoavm in "Why China got rich and India didn't"

yoavm — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:24:05 +0000

Thanks, I very much agree with your points. I do however think it sounds very different to say "democracy has some prerequisites" and "democracy is not necessarily the best form of government for a nation. One can still think it's the best form (that we know of?) for all nations, albeit the path there isn't a one-step path.

New comment by yoavm in "Why China got rich and India didn't"

yoavm — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:10:48 +0000

Can you elaborate? What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?

And is it still relevant to call the view that democracy _is_ the best form of government a "US-centric" idea, considering that the current US seems to not be concerned about (and sometimes even embrace) non-democratic powers, in-land and around the world? If anything, it sounds to me like over the past few years it became a US-centric idea that it's totally fine to not have democracy.

New comment by yoavm in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

yoavm — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:10:37 +0000

The essence of the this story is still true: many non-Americans are choosing non-US tech/products/services whenever they're faced with an alternative. Living in Sweden I see it around me all the time, and this is something no one even thought about two years ago.

New comment by yoavm in "EU browser choice rules send millions more users Firefox's way"

yoavm — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:20:01 +0000

Sorry, I should have made it clear: my comment is about the general population. It is about why Firefox is losing market share. Not about IT people, privacy-conscious people or alike. It is about why the average Joe stopped isn't using Firefox.

New comment by yoavm in "EU browser choice rules send millions more users Firefox's way"

yoavm — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:30:12 +0000

This is nice in theory, but literally never have I heard a friend saying "I tried using Firefox, but it was too slow / too power hungry / had bad sandboxing / wasn't configurable enough". Not once. What I did hear, tens of times, is "I just use X, it came preinstalled with my phone/laptop. Why should I switch?"

New comment by yoavm in "EU browser choice rules send millions more users Firefox's way"

yoavm — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:44:47 +0000

People often think that Firefox is losing because it doesn't do this one thing they want it to do, and if only Mozilla listened to them they'd see Firefox skyrocketing. Seems like the truth is that Firefox is losing because users don't have a choice.

New comment by yoavm in "Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers"

yoavm — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:52:56 +0000

How does things like this work in terms of bookkeeping? How do they label the expense? Can a company send huge amounts of money to an unknown crypto account without needing to explain anything to the tax authorities?

New comment by yoavm in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

yoavm — Sat, 09 May 2026 07:58:32 +0000

Works fine from Sweden. But worry not, you're not missing anything. It's another American .gov joke website.

New comment by yoavm in "Cloudflare's AI Platform: an inference layer designed for agents"

yoavm — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:07:19 +0000

Workers AI had a free tier since it launched, I think? See the pricing page I linked to above.

New comment by yoavm in "Cloudflare's AI Platform: an inference layer designed for agents"

yoavm — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:03:50 +0000

Workers AI pricing is this: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/platform/pricin...

New comment by yoavm in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

yoavm — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:25:17 +0000

Alternative view: GPT2 was indeed a risk to society, but we just keep raising the bar and "accepting" the risks.

New comment by yoavm in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

yoavm — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:24:04 +0000

I guess YouTube doesn't really have any competition, i.e it's not like you're going to switch to the competitor video platform and search there. Your only option is to watch through multiple other videos before finding the one you want, which is great for them.

New comment by yoavm in "Show HN: sllm – Split a GPU node with other developers, unlimited tokens"

yoavm — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:48:21 +0000

> Prices start at $5/mo for smaller models.

Is there actually any $5/mo offering? It seems like the cheapest models start at $10.

New comment by yoavm in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

yoavm — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:44:53 +0000

Can you elaborate? Why? I think many of us were hoping we could switch to it if/when Android becomes intolerable.

New comment by yoavm in "Home Assistant waters my plants"

yoavm — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:19:43 +0000

For me the best solution was to use smart switches (mainly dimmers) and dumb lightbulbs. People can use the switches like any other if they want, but I can still have my automations and remote control.

New comment by yoavm in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

yoavm — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:29:34 +0000

Is it really that surprising? He worked very hard at insulting gay, democrats, Trump supporters, Europeans, Jews, trans... you name it. He also contributed to turning the all political disagreements personal by endlessly making ad hominem attacks. You can't attack the whole world personally and then wonder why they're happy to see you losing power.

New comment by yoavm in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"

yoavm — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:55:39 +0000

Nope, but you might want to check your sources if that's what you've been told.

New comment by yoavm in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

yoavm — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:40:36 +0000

Thank you for saying this. Power users love to complain about how GNOME took away many settings and options, and just made some hard decisions. I left GNOME many years ago since I miss these options, but I'm going to refer to your comment the next time people complain about the direction they took: there clearly is an audience of people that simply don't care about customizing every bit of their desktop environment, and GNOME is targeting exactly them. It's an audience we must cater to if we want Linux on the desktop to be successful.

New comment by yoavm in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

yoavm — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:05:21 +0000

Iran tends to lie about these things while Israel usually says the truth, at least after running an investigation. It's pretty simple: one is a dictatorship without free media, and the other one isn't. It's easy to lie when you can tell the newspapers what to write, and it's much harder when they're doing their job. You want an example? Khamenei. Iran says he's safe and wasn't hurt. Israel says he's dead. Let's see.

New comment by yoavm in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

yoavm — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:29:58 +0000

"A 2020 Online Survey by Gamaan found that 8.8% Iranians identifying as Atheist and a large fraction (22.2%) identifying as not following an organized religion and only 40% self identified as Muslims."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_Iran