Hacker News Reader

Cider9986on America.gov goes crazy on "play Minecraft"

If you try to enter a SSN e.g. "219-09-9999" it blocks you with something called Rampart.

Cider9986on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal

Have we made any progress on a cracked version?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/8aiz67/how_...

Cider9986on Why copyright makes no sense

It's added automatically so they must have edited it. Also [2019] is customary.

Here's a similar discussion from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622042

Cider9986on Let's Ditch Google (Verb)

Brave search is the best alternative to Google. They have an independent index and good UI. Very rarely do I switch to another engine. Brave does well at surfacing forum threads and the AI summary has been surprisingly good for a while.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/

Cider9986on US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

What are you referring to? Cashless is terrible so that would be good but I don't know what you mean.

Cider9986on Google ending ChromeOS support two years early

I guess we will see by October 2030. They'd be getting a class action lawsuit for clear fake marketing.

https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime

It doesn't seem like they are ending support for updated software on these devices before 10 years, it will just be different software.

Cider9986on America.gov

The Whitehouse learned about vibecoding. See this and arcade.gov.

Also, what?? https://america.gov/privacy

At least realfood.gov was decent [1].

Shouldn't the government websites work on very slow internet connections?

Where's the source code for these websites? First of all, if they are vibe coded by government employees they have to be open source, and secondly, if they are vibe coded (even by a contractor), then they can't be copyrighted.

[1] https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/04/national-design-...

Edit: it says this one is made by the National design studio at the bottom.

Cider9986on 500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

I mean a lot of our lives, resemble 1984, but this is literally the UK, where 1984 was set. And then they are doing all of the 1984 activities with no shame whatsoever.

Hitler was elected democratically. Democracy is non-excuse for the complete destruction of civil liberties.

Cider9986on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

You may be out of date. I haven't heard anything recently. Are you thinking of this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880630

Cider9986on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

It takes a ton of work to run a forum. In the case of the two examples I linked, there's simply no alternative on Reddit, so it's not an option to use Reddit. Those communities are vastly more knowledgeable, organized, kind, fairly moderated, etc, compared to r/privacy.

I guess you get what you put into it in terms of community.

I used to be more interested in succulents. It's a shame mine have to stay under grow lights to not stretch out. It would be cool to have them scattered around...

I could see succulents benefiting from a Discourse forum, but Reddit likely does the job pretty well with photo sharing. The nice thing about Discourse is, I feel like threads are more permanent.

A forum I would want is a modern cooking forum for homecooks with a slight focus on science. Although I have not actually searched for one. It comes up on HN from time to time.

Cider9986on Behold the pawpaw

I can't say definitively about the taste because I've only had Pawpaws a few times [1]. They're like a slightly less ripe banana taste in a less satisfying mango texture and less sour. I'm not a huge fan of the flavor but they are good ecologically, are native, and it's just fun to be able to eat fruit growing on trees.

Has anyone else noticed how good fruit has gotten in the past years? Sumo Citruses are amazing, strawberries have gotten sweeter (it depends which ones but generally). They used to always be white in the middle but now they're often have more red.

I just had some insane blueberries where they were all perfectly sour, firm, and there was only one bad one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgZkMRfnomI

Cider9986on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

> Bring back forums.

Here's an active and good privacy forum: https://discuss.privacyguides.net

Here's an active and good private OS forum where privacy is discussed along with Android apps and the OS, ofc: https://discuss.grapheneos.org

Cider9986on Flock Wants the Most Detailed Map of Its Surveillance Cameras Taken Offline

Government officials should be highly transparent. Privacy for the people, transparency for the government.

Cider9986on I switched to Brave

>Brave Experimental Adblock rules for blocking twitch.tv ads

Those work now? That's impressive. I used to VPN to some east European country after I couldn't get adblock working.

Cider9986on I switched to Brave

Ironfox has been well received and will be added eventually, from what I skimmed.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/ironfox-a-new-mull-fork/...

Librewolf has community support as you can see here.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/librewolf-firefox-based-...

They don't do anti-recommendations on the pages but you can see the discussion for things on the forum.

Cider9986on I switched to Brave

Not FUD, just oudated. I wasn't around then but privacytools.io, now, is definitely not trustworthy.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/privacytools/

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/about/#history

Cider9986on I switched to Brave

Brave is the only Chromium browser recommended by Privacy Guides which is why I chose it. It has a good update schedule and I never have problems with ads.

Once I set it up, it's been just a clean, ad-free browser. Based on Little Snitch, which is free on Linux, like Brave Origin, Brave has a clean list of default connections.

While Firefox may be considering shipping Brave shields for ad block, wouldn't Brave be more opposing to Google's monopoly considering it blocks their business model? Firefox is funded by Google and has bad privacy by default. It connects to Google servers when you first set it up.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47697870

Cider9986on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5

> it was done with the new suno

https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/slimer48484/status/20977525692...

Cider9986on Prompting Claude Opus 5.5

This is the video (I think) in case anyone's wondering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU

Cider9986on Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

Can you buy one of these in XMR?

Cider9986on Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees

Yes, those as well. But I think only a few European banks have that.

Cider9986on If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622042

You can't steal something that's infinitely duplicatable. Also, AI training is fair use, not that I believe it should have to be.

Cider9986on If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

On the GrapheneOS forum, I enjoy answering the questions in a post of user who just set up their phone.

AI does not have as good knowledge of the OS as frequent forum contributors. I'm sure plenty of people get by with AI help for their questions and there's likely little questions that hasn't been already discussed, but I love to see new people using the OS and it doesn't take long to give them an exact answer. The Flarum software that the forum runs is very fast, as well.

Cider9986on Sousveillance

https://sunders.uber.space/

https://deflock.org/

I'm opposed to public security cameras. No expectation of privacy in public does not mean we should surveil everything in public.

Cider9986on Japan Suddenly Paused All Social Rules [video]

Dang, the title filter made the title more clickbait.

Cider9986on Tx.taxi: I forked mempool.space, but for (soon-to-be) every blockchain

Monero.forum.

Other places crypto is discussed that are not crypto spaces is discuss.privacyguides.net.

I will use it in the future when I look up transparent addresses to snoop lol.

You could post it on privacyguides but idk if they will let it through, I saw they said they get a lot of showcase submissions recently. No harm in trying though.

You could submit to get it listed on Monerica, fmhy.net.

You can submit a few times on HN (at least with Show HN, I think they're moderated more)but I wouldn't do more than 2-3. You might get auto-banned if you do that on a new account without other posts.

Unrelated, you might consider removing the Cloudflare analytics.

Cider9986on Tx.taxi: I forked mempool.space, but for (soon-to-be) every blockchain

Love to see Monero right up there.

Unfortunately crypto is not very popular on HN. Personally I do think crypto is mostly a scam except Monero but it still is better than banks.