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john01dav

Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Sunday November 01, 2026 @06:42PM (#50331125)
I got an old gigantic monstrosity of a DLP tv off facebook marketplace for free then plugged an old Intel NUC into it. It's not for everyone, but I think that it's great, partly because the facts that it was free and that it's stupidly big give me joy.

More practically, when I am not using that, I just watch tv shows and such on my desktop computer running NixOS with a nice and modern (1440p 170Hz high quality but not highest possible end IPS) monitor over displayport.

Other options include a projector, buying a very large computer monitor marketed panel, or using something that is modern enough to be fine, but not so new that it has malware in it (like a friend who was moving gave me a very heavy but also very nice plasma tv, with zero malware on it).

Basically, anything except something marketed as a consumer grade TV. The last time that I had to displeasure of dealing with that it was when my parents bought one and asked me to set it up, and the built-in Roku software refusde to even display from an HDMI or DP input unless it was logged in and connected to WiFi! Alas, I was not able to convince them to return it, but I did decline to have anything to do with it.

Re:Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots on Saturday October 31, 2026 @09:23PM (#50321895)
That post that I replied to requires identification of the bot too, even if running the bot at harmless rates, which will result in enough hard blocks of all bots to be a problem, thus creating a moat for those who do more work to get around said blocks in legal or illegal ways.
Re:Breaking the Open Web Won't Stop the Bad Bots on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:12PM (#50311338)
This model is the exact wrong direction for a healthy society. It will just make it harder to use information that's already available to the public, on a public website, and thus just create moats around training data.

Instead, I'd like to see a comprehensive copyright modernization bill that addresses training data, fair use, and copyrights of generated assets, in a fair and balanced way that minimizes moats and tries to address a reasonable compromise of each stakeholder's conflicting wants (being clever to satisfy as much as possible), and then ban websites from discriminating against traffic based on if it comes from a bot or a human. You can set rate limits, even at the network level, if you want as long as they apply to everyone, or charge per request as long as the price is the same for everyone, and so on. But, if I'm allowed to do it manually I should be allowed to do an identical task automatically.

Re:Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:04PM (#50250114)
> Well that can't be entirely true, the desktop experience on Windows 10 improved on Windows 8 by leaps and bounds.

In large part, windows 10's ui is more like that of windows 95 because it undid the changes away from the windows 95 paradigm that windows 8 did. Furthermore, those changes away from windows 95 in windows 8 were the exact kind of thing that might be called "mobile first".

What country is this?

Usually when I hear about health insurance being unreasonable, it's the united States. However, denying health insurance for a pre existing condition is illegal in the United States under the affordable care act, and I'm not aware of any exception to this that would explain your situation.

Re:How to Migrate from Gmail to Proton Mail on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @01:56AM (#50176607)
I would be a lot more interested in Proton Mail if it had a better way to do compatibility with Thunderbird (i.e., without a local SMTP daemon, and without fees to access this; I am aware of the technical trade-offs in why this solution may be chosen) and had working notifications on degoogled android. Lacking the latter is especially shocking for a privacy-focused company. You can even get working notifications with Gmail on degoogled android via an app like fair email.
Re:Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:59AM (#50161915)
Kia trucks and similiar classes of products (cheap, robust, no fancy features, intensely practical) are very common in some places (notably some parts of Asia) but are also extremely hard to find in the US, primarily due to regulatory reasons. BYD cars are also often cheaper than US options, but are also not available in the US.
Re:Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @01:38AM (#50161766)
Regulatory capture (occasionally outright banning a superior product, but usually just raising the cost of competition) as well as anti-competition wrapped up in acquisition culture severely impair this.
Re:Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please? (2026) on Monday October 19, 2026 @10:08PM (#50160510)
I have found that Dark Reader works much better than this.

(I use Firefox generally, but my employer forces Chrome for many work tasks, and is also very concerned about data security from 3rd party extensions, so Dark Reader is not readily accessible. I use Dark Reader with Firefox at home, and find that it much more frequently has a reasonable result. Another issue with teh Chrome flag is that it is inconvenient to toggle when encountering such a broken website, or when you want light mode.)

I think that T3 Code tries to do something like this, though I do not use it and have not used it, and I have heard good things about this.
Re:OpenCode Hacked: User credentials leaked on Saturday October 17, 2026 @07:32PM (#50136201)
Who else has a plan like OpenCode Go for subsidized access to cheap models? I've been using Qwen 3.7 Plus on it and having great results for $10 per month with my personal usage. I'm not aware of any other options with nearly that value, but I am interested in switching because OpenCode isn't so trustworthy, it seems. This is the second issue that I've seen.

The other issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655991

Re:OpenCode Hacked: User credentials leaked on Saturday October 17, 2026 @07:14PM (#50136056)
I thought that the many provider pay as you go product from OpenCode was Zen. Also, how does OpenCoe Go fit into this?
Re:I let an AI run my startup for a week on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @10:44PM (#50098513)
I agree with the points about wanting to have access to a full disconnect. Reading your message also concerns me about such things becoming socially unacceptable, analogously to what happened with cell phones making disconnection already less socially acceptable than it once was.

However, at the same time, when I am explicitly doing work, I may find it to be preferable to do so in a very physically comfortable environment, like a bed, so I see value in such workflows. However, from conversations about this preference with others, it isn't a common one it seems.

Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:06PM (#50009549)
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.

This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:

- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense) - How big is this effect? - How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done? - How will this affect competition with other countries? - What about outsourcing?

> What real solutions are there?

For starters, in the general case, try having a larger threshold to go in guns blazing, like trying to verify with the residents first, or just knocking on their door normally to address whatever it was instead of a full on raid. The trauma of being subjected to a SWAT raid is obvious, so they should recognize that and more properly balance it with the harm of not doing one, rather than simply doing it.

Looking at the article's specifics for this specific situation, some options are:

- don't violate the constitutional rights of the victims as a court ruled retroactively happened in this case

- ensure that all officers are professional, as the article says that only some were

- add them to the swatting house list

- have basic dignity, like facilitating the person covering up instead of cuffing them naked on the curb; police and prisons seem especially happy to engage in forced nudity in a general case -- it's part of a concerningly high fraction of police abuse news

Paternalism?

Overall, in the United States, I think that prescriptions are far too broadly required.

For example, I get extreme nausea for about 6-8 hours when I get a viral infection. It's truly miserable, and to the point that I must lay down and can't walk for even a few meters (standing up makes the nausea worse). But, the last few times I had this, I had to go completely without treatment (meaning, for me, ondansetron/zofran) because it takes a massive fraction of that time to see a doctor and it's quite difficult to haul myself to an urgent care when I can't walk, and the telehalth doctor that I saw via my insurance company agreed that ondansetron was indicated but his telehealth company didn't have that drug on the allowed prescriptions whitelist, so he refused to prescribe it. This is despite me knowing the exact needed dosage, the exact needed drug, and being reasonably sure that it wasn't a symptom of something more dangerous. Yet, the law says that this knowledge is irrelevant, and I need someone else's permission, resulting in me being in completely unnecessary misery for a day.

And, in that story, it's just a day, and has no lasting consequences. It gets much worse for other people in some cases.

And, could loosening of prescription paternalism result in people making mistakes? Of course. But, I'm allowed to go and buy power tools, to drive a car (licensing requird, but it's realistic to get this license, while the same isn't true for a medical license and even then self prescription is heavily discouraged), and many other dangerous and complex things.

I've found it to be extremely helpful for me to research options for what medicsm tools/treatments to use. Then, later, I had to convince a prescribor to agree with my assessment as to which thing I needed, which resulted in some friction, but once they did, I'm happy with the result. So, at a minimum, your preference will block some seemingly unambiguously helpful cases.
I could in principal see something that isn't clearly entirely derivative, like if a person takes their own original thought and uses generative AI to make it into a video instead of, for example, learning animation and animating it or finding (probably amateur) actors to film it with. This of course still has some derivative aspects that may be easier to avoid than in the non-generative-ai case, but it is also clearly distinct from a 100% generative AI case.

For example, ever since roughly the mid 2010s when I finished Star Trek: Enterprise, I've been thinking about someone using some sort of generative AI to complete this series, once its good enough to be entirely convincing.

> Yikes. Estimated cost of 15.2B USD for 1200MW of capacity. I am taking bets: How much will this project overrun its estimates? My guess: 25-50%. I don't get it. Why are these better than just building one big reactor with 1000MW+ of capacity?

It's my understanding that they want to be able to mass produce these kinds of smaller reactors, to drive the cost down over time.

So, the 1st one isn't competitive. But, hopefully, the 100th or 1,000th will be.

Re:Fuck Android Developer Verification Program on Thursday October 01, 2026 @02:28AM (#49918360)
Either because their vision of what they want to make needs a mobile form factor and can't be a website (possibly due to marketing causing users to reject mobile websites), or (and I suspect that this is the bigger driver) the pay from the stores (even after the ridiculous 30% cut + bureaucratic insanity) makes it worth it (possibly under the category of getting "a big pay check", but it sounds more like you mean employment).
Re:Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests on Sunday September 27, 2026 @08:13PM (#49872133)
If you're about to install an upstream binary with this and you're not reviewing this then it's purely (irrational) vibes to be concerned with the also unreviewed shell script from the same source.
Re:Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later on Sunday September 27, 2026 @05:30AM (#49864962)
Well, I wouldn't even expect to be able to have access to any platform to be taken seriously enough even if I had such a bill. For example, most professional licensing is at the state level, so it requires a state legislature vote. I've already spoken to both of the state representatives' offices for my area, and they give me a hard wall of they won't even talk to me about it in any detail unless I come back with a huge number of people demanding the same. And, I can't get that because of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs — very few people will both care enough to show up, and be on the side that is not the special interest with concentrated benefits (i.e., current license holders).
Re:Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later on Saturday September 26, 2026 @08:15PM (#49861923)
Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.

I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.

Re:PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock on Saturday September 26, 2026 @07:44PM (#49861729)
It not being on the app store doesn't meant that there can't be low friction updates. FFUpdater, for example, is plenty convenient.
Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Friday September 25, 2026 @04:12AM (#49841608)
> partly funded by central banks

What's the specific mechanism that you're referring to here?

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:10PM (#49834620)
As far as I know, such plug-in hybrids directly drive the car forward via the internal combustion engine, which is more efficient than using a (possibly smaller and simpler) engine to charge a battery which then moves the car via electric motors, which is what I understand the person that you're replying to to be describing, though I am not familiar with the specific Chinese cars in question, since those are not options available to me due to living in the United States.

Related, though not for plug-in hybrids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnUFH5GX_fI

Re:Toyota is finally taking its best-seller electric on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:08PM (#49834591)
> let’s make good-looking cars that everyone will want to drive!

This is a very unfortunate goal for Toyota specifically to have. I am extremely loyal to driving late 90s/early 2000s toyotas (I have owned at various points a 1997 corolla, a 1999 camry, and a 2000 tundra, and my daily driver today is such a car as well), due to them being extremely cost effective and also extremely reliable. A well-maintained, or even moderately maintained, late 90s/early 2000s Toyota car is, in my experience, almost as reliable as a new car that costs 4x+ the price, and it has the benefit of much less DRM, spyware, and other software bullshit, as well as being much easier to repair. I am also unaware of any modern car that is remotely like this, as well as unaware of any electric car that is remotely like this, except maybe Slate (though this is not available yet, so I am withholding judgement until I can see 3rd party reviews and maybe try one).

But, to summarize, I really like some of Toyota's old work for intensely practical reasons, and I think that this is a gap in the market of cars manufactured today (someone please tell me I am wrong by pointing to a good option on these criteria, preferably an EV!), and I couldn't give a rat's ass about the car being "good-looking", so it's unfortunate (though not surprising) that Toyota is deeming that their goal.

Re:Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing on Thursday September 17, 2026 @02:39PM (#49744782)
The problem with this is that paying is a massive friction point to joining that many people, wisley or not, are much more averse to than a free (if toxic) option.

Normally, this is manageable, but for product categories with a huge network effect (like social media) this is a death knell unless you have the users of that product category already used to paying (Adobe's network effect driven business model comes to mind), and even then the switching friction is greater since that usually means many people paying for two systems for quite a long time, if not indefinitely.

The native Signal android app delivers notifications just fine without Google play services on my degoogled android.
Re:So you want to use OpenRouter? on Friday September 11, 2026 @06:13AM (#49655991)
I've had opencode go + opencode work reliably, though I'm skeptical of how robust their data security claims are in practice because they suddenly blocked accessing Deepseek unless you were okay with the data going to China where true data privacy for something like that is illegal, which makes me wonder where it went before, which weakens my trust. It's also a lot less useful now that Deepseek is so much more expensive.

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