Hacker News Reader

Comment by bearzdev | Hacker News Reader

I can't bear the contradictions.

- "No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets" - inline js. - inline stylesheets. - uses favicon which can be used for tracking. - not self hosted. - requires an account to sign up - "TOS" > "Bear may disclose personally identifiable information under special circumstances, such as to comply with subpoenas or when your actions violate the Terms of Service." - can't be bothered to indent the html. - payment system could require real identity.

View on HN

I suspect what he means is "this is a safe space" in contrast to the open/hostile internet "out there", i.e. there is no nefarious intent. As you point out, this is really mostly virtue signalling (and probably well-meant). The fact that actually there is JS, there are trackable signals, your PII can and will be disclosed etc is sorta beside the point of sites like this.

How do you expect them to not comply with subpoenas? Or collect payment without a real identity.

As far as I understand bitcoin is mostly useless for actual payment these days.

Bitcoin works fine for payments, just hope you didn’t put your life savings into it at the top of the bubble.

If an organization or person is selling a product focused on privacy and there is a TOS that focuses on the org or person avoiding liability but lacks documentation or links to resources to help users to lower their liability and increase privacy, its a red flag to me.

Their servers are located in the Netherlands. Its good that they list that. It would be better to hoist information into something that is less policy/legal oriented and perhaps provide an overview of the laws of that region.

Other things that should be listed is how is the data stored, transferred, how is it protected, are there any steps to anonymize the data, hash the data, or provide a way to bring your on key for data encryption.

Is there any telemetry gathered or stored by the server? Is the code in the github project the same that is deployed in production or is there a private repo that augments the code?

Fyi, HN uses a limited version of markdown which doesn’t recognize standard markdown list syntax. If you want to make a bullet list, you have to put blank lines between each bullet point, like this:

——

- "No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets"

- inline js.

- inline stylesheets.

- uses favicon which can be used for tracking.

- not self hosted.

- requires an account to sign up

- "TOS" > "Bear may disclose personally identifiable information under special circumstances, such as to comply with subpoenas or when your actions violate the Terms of Service."

- can't be bothered to indent the html.

- payment system could require real identity

Thanks for taking the time to provide this.

Please don’t say HN uses any form of Markdown. It’s its own thing entirely with absolutely no foundation in Markdown—the only points of any similarity between Markdown and HN comment formatting predate both by multiple decades. HN’s formatting gives you paragraph breaks (by blank lines), linkification (with no delimiter, unlike stock Markdown which requires angle brackets, to the surprise of many), monospaced blocks (by two space indentation), italics (with asterisk delimiter), backslash escaping for asterisks, and that’s all. Every element of this, or a very slight variant, has been common in lightweight markdown languages since before Markdown, and all but the backslash escaping and hyperlinks (which hadn’t been invented yet!) have been in conventional use in communication since well before the web (and match some typewriter conventions from before the invention of computers).

Markdown is not the only game in town. Yes, for now it’s the dominant lightweight markup language (more’s the pity—it’s a right mess, thoroughly unsound and inconsistent in a great many ways), but a lot of stuff exists beyond its horizons; it’s only an instance of LMLs, not the whole class.

Thanks for the history lesson, TIL :).

The favicon is actually a URL-encoded SVG with an emoji. It’s an open source Django app and can be self hosted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com