Hacker News Reader

aehardingon Apple passwords deserve an app

You can make an iOS shortcut to make it appear as an "app" (launches keychain manager). I did this for some elderly folk, works great.

aehardingon Are you ok?

Go outside and everything is covered in fucking cars.

aehardingon Tech entrepreneurship and shifting sentiment

Relevant song (rät)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqyXvMrQDk8

aehardingon Is artificial light poisoning the planet?

> there are no street lights in the entire city.

Yikes. Street lighting is one of the most important safety improvements, especially for people walking, as most pedestrian deaths due to drivers occur at night.

https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/provencountermeasures/lighting.c...

Of course, if we weren't so dependent on cars to do literally everything this wouldn't be the case, and we could safely get rid of a lot of street lighting.

aehardingon Ask HN: What's the current best domain host?

I’m being bitten by this right now. Registered a domain in personal account, want to move to a different cloudflare account and I can’t since that’s completely unsupported. The recommendation is to transfer out to external registrar, wait 60 days, transfer back in.

Can’t even change the name servers, since that’s not configurable with cloudflare.

And I can’t move the domain out of cloudflare so I can change nameservers for 60 days because I just registered the domain…

Support very unhelpful, situation sucks.

aehardingon Ask HN: Alternatives to AWS SES that are quick to get up and running

That's weird. Every time I've applied to get out of sandbox it's taken <24 hours, including very recently.

aehardingon Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS

Browserstack. Free for FOSS

aehardingon Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS

Wow, it's actually happening! Providing the notifications API behind "add to home screen" is exactly what I've been hoping for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33816700

aehardingon What 2023 will bring for PeerTube

Nice seeing this on the top of HN, lucky timing, I was just browsing code/blogposts etc last night and ended up donating €30. I've been toying with the software and I've been pretty impressed.

I'd like to see an invite-based signup option like Mastodon, but other than that, it's a nice roadmap!

Edit: Created an idea post: https://ideas.joinpeertube.org/posts/139/invite-links-to-cre...

aehardingon Missing radioactive capsule found in WA outback after frantic search

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...

aehardingon Money creation in the modern economy (2014) [pdf]

2021 thread, 2014 report.

aehardingon Ask HN: What's on your home server?

Most recently, hosting Mastodon has been great (single user).

aehardingon Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

Can be found at @paulg@mas.to

aehardingon Mandatory helmet laws make cyclists less safe

It's a lot more productive to support a free helmet program in your city, if you really want more people to wear helmets.

aehardingon Consider Disabling Browser Push Notifications on Family and Friends Devices

Some APIs need to be locked behind “add to home screen” starting with the notifications api.

aehardingon Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad

Amazon prime isn’t even two days anymore in Madison. It’s more like four or five days. I don’t understand what people value in prime anymore.

aehardingon Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app

Nice. I wish there was some web API to record geolocation in the background over time. I understand the privacy implications, but if it was an API only available to installed PWAs, and with an indicator similar to native apps when recording geolocation in the background, I feel like that would be acceptable.

aehardingon State of CSS

So excited for colors outside of sRGB! I make good use of display-p3, currently only supported in Safari, on https://ppg.report.

aehardingon We used to get excited about technology. What happened?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqyXvMrQDk8

aehardingon Ask HN: What not-profit-seeking project are you tinkering with this week?

https://ppg.report

Flying my paramotor is one of the things I love to do in my free time, and this project (weather report for paramotor pilots) is the result of that!

Also open source https://github.com/aeharding/ppg.report

aehardingon Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

I just really hope the onboarding experience is improved. Right now it's very convoluted and messaging is extremely difficult, in some places impossible.

For example, in SFSafariViewController there is no “add to home screen” button in the share menu, but in actual safari there is. Despite them both being web view experiences controlled entirely by Apple.

(And you can’t detect SFSafariViewController vs Safari as a web app, so good luck onboarding users for your PWA.)

aehardingon iPhones and action discoverability

The share button also has actions that vary unnecessarily.

For example, in SFSafariViewController there is no “add to home screen” button, but in actual safari there is. Despite them both being web view experiences controlled entirely by Apple.

(And you can’t detect SFSafariViewController vs Safari as a web app, so good luck onboarding users for your PWA.)

aehardingon Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support current content blockers

Yeah you can get over that in a few months. It is annoying though during the process. I switched a year ago.

aehardingon Mozilla claims Apple, Google and Microsoft force users to use default browsers

Ugh, Apple is guilty of this too in spotlight search. Actually worse, because it randomly changes after maybe 500ms, randomly, after typing a character, sometimes.

  N    -> OneNote.app
       -> Then (maybe) quickly changes to Notes
  No   -> Notes.app
       -> Then (maybe) changes to OneNote
  Not  -> OneNote.app
  Note -> Notes.app

etc

aehardingon Manifest V3, webRequest, and ad blockers

> the move from a persistent background.js script to a sevice-worker will just make a number of use-cases impossible or very hacky

Yep.

Chrome is even crippling some of their own APIs, like chrome.tabCapture (not available in service workers, and in mv3 will be "foreground only")

AKA, if you want to use chrome.tabCapture in mv3, you have to run it in a tab. And because that tab can be closed at any time, you need to serialize megabytes of data to the chrome.storage api every few seconds.

aehardingon The rush to mine lithium could dry up the high Andes

We already have electric powered busses, and they don’t have dirty and heavy batteries. It’s called a trolley bus.

aehardingon NTSB Calls for Alcohol Detection Systems in All New Vehicles

Yup. This drunk driving detection is just a symptom of the larger problem: car dependency.

You don’t need alcohol detection in cars if everyone can just walk or bus safely to their neighborhood bar or friends. Virtually nobody wants to drive drunk, but it’s basically encouraged by the way we design our cities.

aehardingon NTSB Calls for Alcohol Detection Systems in All New Vehicles

Because in this country the options are

1. Buy a car because it’s required in order to literally feed yourself, or

2. Live in one of the highly desirable, expensive pre-war neighborhoods that remain walkable

Many Americans can’t just “give up cars” even if they wanted to. Car dependency is literally codified in out zoning and street building (MUTCD)

Maybe if car dependency wasn’t such a requirement in order to live, maybe if everyone could easily walk to the bar, we wouldn’t need alcohol detection in cars.

aehardingon Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3

It's extremely frustrating how Google is ignoring this issue. So much for developer relations.

aehardingon Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years

Craigslist has an awesome UI. But I really wish they'd switch out their clunky JS-based gallery component for pure CSS scroll snapping!