Hacker News Reader

AAAAaccountAAAAon IANA's email about why example.com changed

Maybe it could be further optimized, if it did return a plaintext answer, if the user agent is curl or similar.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights

Nonsense. At $20 you'll be very hard-pressed to get even a cheap dynohub alone, and that's before the wheelbuild and the light. And bikepackers aren't going to be satisfied with ultra-low-end wheels, anyway.

AAAAaccountAAAAon NetBSD 11.0

Some higher-end 486 boards[1] were made with PCI slots, so retrofitting them with an USB controller shouldn't be difficult? You'll still need a boot floppy to actually boot from an USB drive, I think?

1. https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-pvi-486sp3

AAAAaccountAAAAon Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification

Even EU institutions use cookie banners. Also, if it was just malicious compliance, there would have been years of time to fix the regulations so that such shenaigans would not fly.

I think the problem is that GDPR focuses on consent more than would be prudent. Regulation is usually introduced when some actions are not appropriate even when there was consent. For example, one is not allowed to sell spoiled food, no matter how clear warnings they gave to the customers.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Dumber Mini: A Nokia-Style Phone with WhatsApp and Maps

https://dumbermini.com/pages/faqs

> We will also regularly publish security updates for as long as AOSP 14 is supported by Google.

That won't be for very long. We are at AOSP 17 now. It is sad that they design new phones with so old software.

AAAAaccountAAAAon EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

I am getting somewhat confused about this. That website seems to be equating (semi-?)-reasonable measures with monstrosities such as banning or effectively banning e2ee.

AAAAaccountAAAAon The Commodore Callback 8020 smart flip phone

I don't think there are any particularly reputable brands of featurephones anymore. Nokia/HMD certainly isn't one: they have obnoxious bugs, they drop calls, and lack basic modern-day compatibility features like emoji in text messages (they display only an "unknown character" box) and group MMS.

However, it does not necessarily mean there is demand for a quality featurephone: it might be that the demand is so low that it does not make sense to manufacture one.

AAAAaccountAAAAon France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech

If that really is the case, why not stay on Windows?

AAAAaccountAAAAon Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

The new "Terminal" app might eventually evolve into something like that.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Keep Android Open

Why would F-Droid be any or more less "absolved of responsibility" than Play Store?

AAAAaccountAAAAon The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest crime

He's not a hacktivist at all, just a common extortionist.

AAAAaccountAAAAon The 2025 Matrix Holiday Special

At least a while ago Element X broke bridging in a pretty annoying way, since all chats with more than 2 members were classified as groups, even if they were marked as DMs.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health

I think it's the conventional unemployment benefit system that should show measurable benefits, not other way around. All the tracking, surveillance, reporting and interviewing costs money, and should not be done for the sake of it.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Show HN: A 2-row, 16-key keyboard designed for smartphones

Looks nice. Reminds me of MessagEase[1] and clones, such as ThumbKey[2]. I use the latter for my mobile text input needs. However, that method is sometimes prone to typos, since one key may have up to 9 different characters assigned to it, and it is easy to swipe slightly wrong way. QWERTYmini could be better in that aspect, since there are only 2 characters per key.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase

2. https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

AAAAaccountAAAAon School cell phone bans and student achievement

I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ULOptq2vk&pp=0gcJCR4Bo7VqN5t...

They seem to plan to rewrite the desktop client next.

AAAAaccountAAAAon What we talk about when we talk about sideloading

If that "disaster" was so "inevitable", it would have happened ages ago.

It's not like it was somehow possible to accidentally sideload apps. You have to first find the correct option from the system settings to enable sideloading, and then approve the specific app source you want to install from.

It is not like how things are/were on Windows. Back in the turn of the millennium, it was easier to catch malware than it was to install useful apps. For former, you only needed to double-click on an email attachment, for the latter, you needed to actively to go look for the website of the app developer, and download it from there.

Android already was pretty much at the sweet spot between security and freedom, what it came to sideloading. What Google should have done was to crack down on the scam apps in Play Store. However, they are not going to do that, since it would cut their profits.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Keep Android Open

What those "people-who-don't-understand-the-risks" will do then, with more money left? I think they will give their money to all sorts of political populists, who will cause danger not only to themselves, but everyone.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Typst 0.14

One of my biggest grievances with typst is that it still does not natively support locale-aware decimal separator formatting[1], and thus requires various kludges to present decimal numbers properly in non-English languages. Not that LaTeX is any better in that, though.

I think this should be solved quicker, because if it requires some sort of changes to syntax, we will have problems if the "legacy" syntax becomes entrenched, so this sort of decisions are better to be made sooner than later.

However, most my experiences with typst have been highly positive. It is much, much faster than LaTeX, and way easier. I am looking forward to see it to become more common.

1) https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093

AAAAaccountAAAAon Xubuntu.org Might Be Compromised

Has a single website security incident ever brought an end to any software project, proprietary or otherwise?

AAAAaccountAAAAon Xubuntu.org Might Be Compromised

It is an official flavor[1], that is, maintained as a community effort, but endorsed by Ubuntu. The related packages are hosted in Ubuntu's universe repository[2]. There is indeed a risk of reputation damage.

1. https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors

2. https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xubuntu-desktop

AAAAaccountAAAAon Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

Even if Typst was going to replace TeX everywhere right now, about half a century would still be a respectable lifespan for a software project.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely

I did use it some time ago, but I remember the user experience being somewhat confusing, since there are multiple similarly named tools around, which don't seem to be interoperable. Still, a cool concept.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

In addition to the issue of microchips being inherently difficult to tamper with, smartcards have various hardware and software based anti-tampering measures, that are designed to destroy the chip, if someone attempts to extract the keys from the chip. That kind of security measures are never totally impermeable, but defeating them requires advanced equipment and skilled labour, and the R&D costs of the cracking devices need to be offset, too.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Germany must stand firmly against client-side scanning in Chat Control [pdf]

I primarily meant that I haven't really encountered the belief that it was somehow EU specific

AAAAaccountAAAAon Germany must stand firmly against client-side scanning in Chat Control [pdf]

I don't think those issues are necessarily interconnected. If I have understood it correctly, many Germans view both hateful propaganda and surveillance as tools of dictators.

Surveillance of private communications obviously has a chilling effect on free speech as well, but freedom from surveillance does not imply a freedom to openly spread hate speech in public.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Germany must stand firmly against client-side scanning in Chat Control [pdf]

It's definitely not an EU only thing. China, Russia and such have been doing this for years. There have been attempts to introduce it in US (EARN IT Act) as well, and the current regime there might very well end up doing that. Australia has also been pretty authoritarian what it comes to this kind of things.

AAAAaccountAAAAon Can you use GDPR to circumvent BlueSky's adult content blocks?

All this word salad and smooth talk about the "middle ground" just worries me even more. We have been living in such an unusual period of peace, prosperity and freedom that the pampered, wealthy segment of the Western people is considering children seeing porn as a some sort of catastrophe, warranting extreme countermeasures. However, meanwhile in the actual reality, people are still being killed on the basis of sexual orientation.

I would support reasonable measures to block children from accessing pornographic content, but making people upload government IDs or biometric data does not belong to the realm of what is reasonable.

AAAAaccountAAAAon F-Droid and Google’s developer registration decree

That was literally before the first production Android phone become available. Does not seem to be a particularly common occurance. Though due to the current world situation, supply chain attacks might admittedly become more common.