Hacker News: ywain

New comment by ywain in "Fastmail offers EU data region"

ywain — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:59:50 +0000

> look at the Rwanda: It is absolutely possible to have a genocide made by democracies,

Rwanda has never been a democracy. Habyarimana was "elected" with 99% of the votes ffs.

> and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships

It is trivially easy to verify that this is not true.

New comment by ywain in "The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)"

ywain — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:59:01 +0000

The detailed terms of the bet include this:

> A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.

I assume this would cover the HTTP->HTTPS redirect scenario.

New comment by ywain in "Fastmail offers EU data region"

ywain — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:16:54 +0000

What's your point? You'd rather have a democratically elected but corrupt leader than an appointed but honest one?

New comment by ywain in "Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities"

ywain — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:34:11 +0000

Normal rules do not apply because these companies are worth billions and powerful people don’t want them to fail. It’s neither specific to AI nor a new phenomenon.

New comment by ywain in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

ywain — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:22:37 +0000

Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.

I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.

New comment by ywain in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

ywain — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:35:16 +0000

Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.

New comment by ywain in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

ywain — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:07:11 +0000

Mostly by looking at packets TTL. It gets decreased by 1 by the hotspot’s NAT so if the value is something like 63 or 127 (instead of 64 or 128 which are the defaults for most platforms) then it’s almost certain the packet originated from a device behind the phone and not from the phone itself.

New comment by ywain in "Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws"

ywain — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 04:33:20 +0000

Is that what really happens though? EU countries usually don't immediately punish violations unless they're particularly egregious. You're more likely to get a warning and a grace period to meet the requirements. So the rational approach would be to not bother with consent banners, GDPR and whatnot until you attract the attention of the regulators, at which point you should definitely hire a legal team that can tell you what exactly you need to do to comply.

New comment by ywain in "Founder Mode"

ywain — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 19:25:03 +0000

Urban Dictionary might be a better place for recent internet slang: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked

New comment by ywain in "Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?"

ywain — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 07:18:34 +0000

I'm not the person you're replying to, but here's my take: even though the two look conceptually similar, Unix programs are just a lot simpler. All programs run on the same machine, they read their input, execute, produce output which is piped to the next program, and terminate. Want to change something? Change one of the programs (or your command line), run the command again, that's it.

Microservices are a lot more complicated. You'll need to manage images for each of the services, a fleet of servers on which the services will be deployed, an API for services to communicate together, etc. In many (most?) cases, a monolith architecture will be a lot simpler and work just fine. Once you reach the scale at which you'd actually benefit from a microservice architecture (most companies won't ever reach this scale), you can start hiring devops and other specialists to deal with the additional complexity.

What actually gets hate, I think, is not microservices themselves, but the fact that microservices are often used in contexts where they are completely unnecessary, purely because of big tech cargo culting.

New comment by ywain in "Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'"

ywain — Tue, 07 May 2024 05:46:44 +0000

This was a very enjoyable read. Thanks for sharing.

New comment by ywain in "Show HN: Rotary Phone Project"

ywain — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 18:44:40 +0000

Very cool and fun project! Thanks for sharing.

New comment by ywain in "Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard"

ywain — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 01:04:16 +0000

The Q5 Pro is a 96% layout, but Keychron also has quite a few 100% layouts: https://www.keychron.com/collections/all-keyboards?sort_by=m...

New comment by ywain in "What it was like working for Gitlab"

ywain — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:19:07 +0000

Stripe does use Ruby, but not Rails.

New comment by ywain in "The Apple Vision Pro"

ywain — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 21:36:20 +0000

Apple's ad business is fairly limited in scope (I think they only sell ads in the App Store and the News app) so user data is not as valuable for them as it is for Google and Facebook.

They definitely do make some money off Apple Pay transactions via interchange, but it's probably something like 0.1 to 0.3%.

New comment by ywain in "Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes"

ywain — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 08:55:18 +0000

Presumably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Sherpa

New comment by ywain in "Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10?"

ywain — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:03:19 +0000

There are definitely some parkings where you can only pay with a smartphone. The worst is when they force you to download a shitty app. Super fun when the parking does not have good reception and you have to download an unnecessarily large app over 3G.

I've also been to random parking lots in the middle of nowhere with a cardboard sign saying "Venmo $5/hour at X".

New comment by ywain in "How do I become a graphics programmer?"

ywain — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 08:22:33 +0000

I'm not sure I understand how your analogy is relevant to the discussion, but you should know that the current consensus is that the pyramids were build by paid laborers, not slaves. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt#Great...

New comment by ywain in "We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO"

ywain — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 08:30:32 +0000

But HAL didn't act "on a whim"! The reason it killed the crew is not because it went rogue, but rather because it was following its instructions to keep the true purpose of the mission secret. If the crew is dead, it can't find out the truth.

In light of the current debate around AI safety, I think "unintended consequences" is a much more plausible risk then "spontaneously develops free will and decides humans are unnecessary".

New comment by ywain in "Rails 7.1 Released"

ywain — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 04:57:12 +0000

I'm working on a fairly recent Rails 7 code base. We initially started using Stimulus, but are now considering switching to React for a few reasons:

- if you're looking to hire frontend engineers, the candidate pool for React is a few orders or magnitude bigger

- it's getting harder and harder to find vanilla JS packages that you can wrap in Stimulus controllers for common tasks, compared to finding React packages

- Stimulus doesn't really offer a way to write unit tests for your controllers. With React, you can use jest and react-test-renderer like normal.

Additionally, the recent Turbo TypeScript debacle did not instill confidence in the long term stewardship of the Hotwire ecosystem.

We're still on the fence about it. Stimulus does feel like a very Railsy way to write frontend code, which is definitely a plus for small teams of people who're already familiar with Rails.