Hacker News: yyyfb

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

yyyfb — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:54:00 +0000

I'd be mindful that having a NATO partner be able to spy is maybe better than having Huawei spy if you have to choose, but yes, I think it's a risk that EU countries should be aware of and probably are more aware of than with social networks.

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

yyyfb — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:50:15 +0000

No. Unlike a newspaper, they host videos and photos of a third of (?) the US population, have detailed reader data on who reads what when, who is friends with whom, location history, etc.

This data treasure trove may be stored in US, but it isn't protected from Chinese govt access. It is the same for data by American companies, which US Patriot act lets the US govt access.

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

yyyfb — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:44:11 +0000

Not necessarily. China pursues many objectives when it comes to its national security, such as intimidation and coercion of dissidents or opponents of its regime living abroad. Assuming China's equivalent of the Patriot act lets it treat TikTok user data as an open book, there is a lot for them to learn from it.

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

yyyfb — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:41:04 +0000

EU countries are asleep at the wheel on matters of national security and sovereignty. Spotify is not a matter of national security. TikTok, and social networking in general, has been one for some time now. Misinformation, conspiracy theories, actual conspiracies to overthrow govt, etc have all found renewed vigor thanks to social networks.

US on the other hand now has its social media controlled by oligarchs, not much better maybe.

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

yyyfb — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:34:44 +0000

Parent talks about Meta, you mention Microsoft. They are not in the same business. Meta is in the social networking domain, which the communist party in China has treated for years as a matter of national security. The "color revolutions" and the "Arab Spring" gave them good reason to believe that online social networks were a driver of societal change too powerful not to control. And they control it very very tightly.

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

yyyfb — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 12:27:13 +0000

As an EU resident your govt likely exerts far more control over media (both domestic and foreign owned) than the US

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

yyyfb — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:14:29 +0000

TikTok's problem isn't with what they say openly, it's with the amount of invisible control exerted by a foreign government.

New comment by yyyfb in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

yyyfb — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 16:11:28 +0000

Compare with China though. There is absolutely no way that a company like Bytedance would be allowed to operate inside China while under American control.

New comment by yyyfb in "How NAT Traversal Works (2020)"

yyyfb — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:10:43 +0000

The fact that this emerged instead of IPv6 is a true testament to the power of "good enough hackery"

New comment by yyyfb in "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang (2022)"

yyyfb — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 10:14:50 +0000

I feel that the future for Python people who want type safety will eventually be TypeScript on nodejs. Go was intended as an alternative to C++. It seems that in reaction to the ungodly complexity of C++, the creators wanted to avoid adding language features as hard as possible. If the user could work around it with a little extra verbosity, it'd be ok. I feel they removed too much and maybe not the right things.

New comment by yyyfb in "Biological Miracle – Wood Frog"

yyyfb — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 13:26:50 +0000

Couldn't it just be algorithmic? Go uphill in the summer, then downhill until you hit water, you'll probably end in the same pond?

New comment by yyyfb in "Starship's Sixth Flight Test"

yyyfb — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:08:10 +0000

Musk in 2022: "Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic"

In 2024:

New comment by yyyfb in "Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone"

yyyfb — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 18:30:12 +0000

If the continental US can do it (and it looks like it might soon, with California voting for it) I'm not sure I buy that argument. Heck if China can survive on one timezone...

New comment by yyyfb in "Gettiers in software engineering (2019)"

yyyfb — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 14:18:59 +0000

Reminds me of "how did this ever work in the first place" bugs. Something that used to work stops working, you look into it, and it seems that the thing looked broken to begin with, but by some lucky miracle something was making it work.

New comment by yyyfb in "Don't defer Close() on writable files (2017)"

yyyfb — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 14:13:08 +0000

Boggles my mind that after more than 60 years of computer science, we still design tools (programming languages) where the simplest tasks are full of gotchas and footguns. This is a great example.

New comment by yyyfb in "Nearly half of Nvidia's revenue comes from four mystery whales each buying $3B+"

yyyfb — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 18:28:51 +0000

What if having the resources to develop hardware are not the point? This is a physical business, and supply chain is the bottleneck at some point. Right now it seems that all the money in the world can't build fabs fast enough to manufacture alternatives to Nvidia's chips. As long as they maintain dominance over the supply chain, having developed equivalent technology might not matter. Someone correct me if this is wrong, I'm mostly speculating.

New comment by yyyfb in "Susan Wojcicki has died"

yyyfb — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 17:54:20 +0000

Let me put it this way. I don't think you and I are fundamentally disagreeing: money matters, to the extent that it allows to buy statistically better health outcomes and quality time with family. I don't personally think it matters more than that.

New comment by yyyfb in "Susan Wojcicki has died"

yyyfb — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:47:20 +0000

Also for background playback on mobile

New comment by yyyfb in "Susan Wojcicki has died"

yyyfb — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 13:34:29 +0000

It's not about them opposing each other, it's about priorities.

New comment by yyyfb in "Defcon stiffs badge HW vendor, drags FW author offstage during talk"

yyyfb — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 13:30:03 +0000

I'm pretty sure it would've stayed a defcon thing