phowat (u/phowat) - Readit News

phowat commented on An informational website about why I went to prison prison.josh.mn/... · Posted by u/andsoitis

71bw · 3 months ago

Depends on what he did with them. Likely nothing, considering he's speaking about it so freely on a public website.

Wonder what the implications of just taking the CC numbers 20 years ago would have been?

phowat · 3 months ago

Yeah, I never actually used or shared/sold any of it since it was mostly a game for me. But nowadays I understand it is a very bad idea even just to store this kind of stuff.

phowat commented on An informational website about why I went to prison prison.josh.mn/... · Posted by u/andsoitis

typpilol · 3 months ago

What's the point of risking your freedom to give away stuff for free pirated stuff? I understand uploading to the pirate bay but streaming is a different beast entirely.

I'm not going to lie, I've used some streaming sites. But I can't understand the people behind them.

Who's giving away 100s of TB of video decode and bandwidth for free. And why?

phowat · 3 months ago

I don't know how old OP is but I did a lot of dumb stuff on the internet 25+ years ago when I was a teenager. Including writing viruses and stealing credit card information. I'm glad things were a lot different back then.

phowat commented on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own hugotunius.se/2025/08/31/... · Posted by u/K0nserv

kristov · 4 months ago

I think the conversation needs to change from "can't run software of our choice" to "can't participate in society without an apple or google account". I have been living with a de-googled android phone for a number of years, and it is getting harder and harder, while at the same time operating without certain "apps" is becoming more difficult.

For example, by bank (abn amro) still allows online banking on desktop via a physical auth device, but they are actively pushing for login only via their app. I called their support line for a lost card, and had to go through to second level support because I didn't have the app. If they get their way, eventually an apple or google account will be mandatory to have a bank account with them.

My kid goes to a school that outsourced all communication via an app. They have a web version, but it's barely usable. The app doesn't run without certain google libs installed. Again, to participate in school communication about my kid effectively requires an apple or google account.

I feel like the conversation we should be having is that we are sleepwalking into a world where to participate in society you must have an account with either apple or google. If you decide you don't want a relationship with either of those companies you will be extremely disadvantaged.

phowat · 4 months ago

Frankly I think it's a lost cause and sadly doesn't make sense to waste energy on it anymore. I eventually abandoned my de-googled phone exactly because I couldn't use my bank with it.

phowat commented on Plain – a web framework for building products with Python plainframework.com/... · Posted by u/brylie

phowat · 9 months ago

I really don't understand why every time a big project is forked People are so upset. IMO, one of the great things about open source software is that a fork is possible. Maybe it will go nowhere, maybe some good ideas will be fed back to Django, maybe it will become the new standard. Most of the time , we will end up with better software overall.

phowat commented on Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening seven39.com... · Posted by u/mklyons

m_mueller · 10 months ago

are you a frontend engineer? cause I'd hope the time checking happens on the server ;-)

phowat · 10 months ago

What about using vpns to connect through different timezones ?

phowat commented on Who killed the rave? ft.com/content/2138e940-0... · Posted by u/this_weekend

anigbrowl · a year ago

It's not really surprising, but the article seems to conflate raves with nightclubs, with numerous remarks about the cost of being out at a club all night and paying for things like expensive bottle service.

Raves are not clubs, and historically have never done that well in club environments. People who are really into staying up all night dancing to techno music aren't buying expensive alcoholic drinks, they're buying cheap water to stay hydrated. Many (though by no means all) take drugs, but generally that means one dose of a drug like MDMA at the beginning of the evening. Psychedelic drugs like LSD are also associated with the rave scene but are less compatible with a nightclub environment (bars, security, overgrown disco lights). People are more likely to consume psychedelics at an outdoor party or a warehouse space.

In my view what has killed raves was the declining availability of cheap accessible commercial spaces, police/administrative hostility to informal economic activity, and overcommercialization, which has tended to select for the shittiest music/DJs.

phowat · a year ago

100% agree. The article does not seem to be written by someonene who is particularly interested in this subject. The fact that it starts talking about what is IMO the most overrated scene ever, Berlin, says a lot.

phowat commented on Meta's Hack (HHVM) language appears to be no longer maintained github.com/facebook/hhvm/... · Posted by u/nkcmr

lallysingh · a year ago

Huh, no discussion nearly an hour after posting. Either a time zone thing or a conspicuous silence.

Or nobody cares about Hack anymore?

phowat · a year ago

I don't think this was used much outside of meta anyway.

phowat commented on Comma.ai: Refactoring for Growth blog.comma.ai/refactoring... · Posted by u/ppsreejith

shon · a year ago

> Everything sounds like it's just a bunch of hackers

It is! This is run by George Hotz, aka geohot, aka the kid who cracked the iPhone SIM lock at 17yo, released the 1-click jailbreak for iOS before he was 20, and then went ahead and cracked the PS3 shortly after and released Sony’s private key (used to sign all PS3 software) for all the world to see.

He’s a beast. Now he’s doing Tinygrad and Comma. You won’t be seeing Corpo-speak from this guy or his team lol.

Cool to see him doing well and doing it his own way.

phowat · a year ago

Exactly! And I would expect hacker news of all places to understand that.

phowat commented on Ask HN: Do you already see the impact of LLMs on the job prospects for dev's? · Posted by u/thesumofall

williamdclt · a year ago

My own experience is that it _might_ speed up juniors (and even that, I'm not convinced about). But juniors make up a tiny part of the overall throughput, I am easily 10x faster to do anything than they are. So a 10-20% productivity boost for juniors is pretty much negligible for the company.

For myself, everytime I try to use chatgpt it completely fails to be helpful, for the same reason that stackoverflow also fails: the problems I have as a senior are too specific or too complex. Every single time, querying an LLM ends up being a waste of time.

phowat · a year ago

Also when you wear multiple hats. Recently I had to setup an OpenResty including writing some fairly complex Lua scripts, both which I had never touched before, and it was much faster with the help of an llm.

phowat commented on The Ruin of Mumbai asteriskmag.com/issues/05... · Posted by u/torts

phowat · 2 years ago

I 100% clicked the link expecting an article about how the open source PBX software Asterisk was being used in some nefarious way.