charles_f

My TV isn't even connected to power

Over-engineering is solving the wrong problem

Is it though? Engineering is providing the cheapest solution that corresponds to what your customer asked. As it goes: anyone can build a bridge with infinite budget, only an engineer can do it for cheap.

A system that's un-necessarily complex for what it does is over built, and under engineered.

I think it's important beyond semantics, because sometimes you have to propose designs that wouldn't be in books, yet they're the cheap and fit with all requirements, and are thus well engineered.

Now the difficulty is to figure the requirements that are not being expressed. "Allowing an occasional resurfacing" and "don't explode when there's icing" are obvious ones; the hard one for our job are "allow for adding another lane" or "allow support for trains as well"... because you know these might come.

Can you not set spending limits in AWS?

I have to call MINI at some point and demand they fix this garbage

That would never occur to me. Whenever something produced by a large company breaks, I pretty much assume there's no signal possible back to whomever is responsible for the breakage, and that whatever is broken now is broken forever.

To the author's point, they're A-gile, but forgot that the first step in the process was customer feedback

Also, corporate bullshit such as this should be stigmatized.

Quite especially when the process seems to have been triggered by the head of state of that host nation

Fixing the link: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2025-04/ed...

I'm somewhat knowledgable on privacy topics, pasting my answer to another comment:

The EDPB has explicitly ruled on that, when it comes to age verification^1, you should delete: "Trust models are crucial to prevent data breaches in age assurance contexts [...] once the user's age is verified, no record of the personal data used for the age assurance process is kept".

^1: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2025-04/ed..., number 36.

The EDPB has explicitly ruled on that, when it comes to age verification^1, you should delete: "Trust models are crucial to prevent data breaches in age assurance contexts [...] once the user's age is verified, no record of the personal data used for the age assurance process is kept".

^1: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/documents/2025-04/ed..., number 36.

Why wouldn't they?

They most likely weren't allowed to keep it past the verification per GDPR art.5. Once the passport has been verified for whatever purpose they needed it ("age verified to be > 18yo on 2026-06-12" or "identity verified to be XXXX YYYY"), there is no legitimate use for the passport photo and details anymore, and they should delete it.

Zero password protection on document storage systems > No encryption for sensitive identity verification data > Public URL access with no authentication requirements > No access logging or monitoring systems in place

Pretty much the bingo of secure storage, even CTF demos make it less obvious. Storing a document that they have no business keeping in the first place, with no security whatsoever.

Yeah, I almost closed my tab and burnt my browser realizing that.

It funny to see the community here expects the human body to be treated like a deterministic function

In a community largely made of people whose job it is to produce such functions, I'd say it's to be expected

"Oh but they didn't read the fine prints so that's on them".

What a great argument.

To people, "buy" when in the context of a movie largely means owning the freaking thing.

we're past "the button said 'buy'" discussions.

That's normalization of deviance. It's fine if you're fine with that scam, don't come onto people who aren't.

Have you ever bought a ticket to a concert ?

This comparison makes no sense. When you buy a ticket to a concert you fully expect to be allowed access to said concert. If it gets cancelled because this or that studio owns some random right you fully expect to be refunded.

I was already renting stuff when video tapes were a thing

Good for you. These guys also propose rental with a rent button, and a purchase button for what you'd expect be purchasing the movie. Do you still not see what the issue is and why the debate on what word means is anything but sterile?

Or are you just happy being outraged and will go back to your daily life afterwards ?

Wow, this is gratuitous and extremely belittling. I hope you feel good smelling your own farts.

Ah, you mean picking pst as the permanent timezone?

the effort to write a post

This post was pretty obviously written by llm. You can assume the llm also picked the hosting platform.

That law, voted years ago, has overwhelming public support (including mine). Source: an actual source^1

^1: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2019PREM0103-001748#:~:text=...

drop the battery and use either PoE or just AC

I sent many an email from jacques.chirac@elysee.fr, the veneer of the terminal helping, my friends were quite impressed by how good a hacker I was. Good olde days when many DKIM/SPF weren't a thing yet and SMTP servers weren't even authenticated.

I work on the receiving end of media processing nowadays, and the overlap of variety in formats, codecs, and configurations is frustrating. No two encoders work the same way, and they often "innovate" in fun and varied ways that almost feel like renewed attempts to make decoders crash.

In my case, I asked it to migrate my static site from using Eleventy to Hugo

This blog is on medium so I guess the migration went sideways!

Joke aside, nice series of tutorials, don't let the haters get to you. I think with the current token panic it might get handy soon

Hi Eric!

Sounds like an interesting topic!

Why do good companies go bad

I find interesting the systemic explanation of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith in "The Dictator's Handbook"^1: In any publicly traded company, if the executives (or the board) are not ready to do whatever it takes to maximize profit, they will be replaced by people who are. It becomes a selection process creating tyrants. If you're lucky (as employee, customer, or human living on the same planet), whatever it takes might be aligned with employees and customers' interest. When times are bad, whatever it takes has no limits, it becomes a question of survival or progression for business leaders.

I'm curious to see how much that maps with what you identified in your new book! Patagonia is private and under the control of a few benevolent dictators ; Costco and Nordisk are a bit more surprising, I'm keen to know more.

^1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook

Posted many times before: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

My favourite issue being about GDPR compliance https://github.com/philipl/pifs/issues/56

It's announced as a revolution but when you look at those benchmarks it surely looks like an iteration.

I love mountain biking, and part of it is the effort it requires to get to the high trails, fitness to do multiple laps, and the quiet of being in the forest.

But for the past 5-10y eMTBs became a thing and progressively became more affordable. And now you've got 200lbs gorillas zooming past you, digging into the trails with their heavy rigs, and a large number of people who'd never have paid for the effort of getting there without their ebikes.

Fracking that dopamine like there's no tomorrow.

Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand

That's true, but they care deeply about the consequences of that:

about how AI “writes bad code,” “introduces bugs,” “creates technical debt,” or something along those lines.

So whomever your strawman is, they got a point.

Note that I'm "anti-ai", I use it a fair bit and even received the trendy email asking me to watch out how much I spend in it cause it's expensive. I'm also not delusioned into believing the "it's 10x faster" and "code doesn't matter anymore" marketing. If the thing fails it's my name on the git blame and my number they call at night so I'll review that code thank you very much.

I feel like past the wow effect it's pretty easy to see the seams and the limits, even on "frontier" (god do I hate that term) models, and nothing replaces human skill for now if you're working on something with any significance.

Dang sums it all, I dont perceive hn as being pro or against AI, it's a mix, but if you're polarized, whatever "side you're on" you'll feel the other side is over represented.

But, have you thought of the shareholders?

I remember a moment at the very onset when chatgpt was just opened to the public. A manager sent us a congratulations text chatGPT had prepared for his kid's graduation from high school. He said that he was not much of a writer and that was miles better than he could have said. We had a discussion about the moral side of that (though moral might not be the word), pointing out that bad words that come from a genuine place and required effort from you are better than great words that are manufactured by a robot. He didn't see the issue.

I think this just depends on a system of values, "to each their own". I don't see the point of having a bot write comments for me on HN, or blog posts for me, or answers on GitHub. I feel great for articulating my thoughts in a way that (narcisticaly) I can enjoy re-reading myself. Some people don't value that, and for whatever motivation don't mind delegating their voice to a bot.

And then there are the "people" who just try to build accounts with lots of internet points that they might be able to resell for a few bucks. Those can die.

“If you don’t learn how to use AI, you’re going to be left behind.”

I don't subscribe to that even to begin with. Learning "how to use AI" in a a dev workflow takes less than a month, just by practice. Assuming "how to use AI" refers to using agents, rather than just a more advanced auto complete, once you've made the couple of mistakes you can make a couple of times (mainly, leave the coding agent to do something too big for too long), you're caught up. Maybe it take a little more time to get the habits into your workflow.

Leveraging a LLM for coding is orders of magnitude simpler than the code it's writing, and the skills you need to review said code.