Hacker News Reader

andersrson Volvo delivers 74-tonne electric truck

Germany is doing something with electrified truck lanes on the highway. The trucks get charged through a pantograph as they're travelling.

andersrson WHO: Loneliness global health priority with new Commission on Social Connection

It's like a gambling addiction. All the apps have been designed and tweaked with user engagement metrics to ensure they are as addictive as possible and if the app fails it will be forgotten as users engage more with another more addictive app. Essentially they are dopamine dispensers. Scroll, dopamine, scroll, dopamine. A bit like a slot machine don't you think?

andersrson Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

With AI devaluing human creativity and thought I wonder what is left to be proud of? One's body? It seems like humans will be valued more based on their looks than anything else. Apps like Tinder, Instagram, OnlyFans have already been pushing in this direction but AI will take it further and devalue the one valuable trait that the less attractive people could compete on. AI will also compete with porn but the tech for replacing physical human bodies is nowhere near as advanced. The winners will be attractive women and maybe plumbers. The losers will be everyone else but especially men.

andersrson It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

It's not very fashionable and it's kind of a poor person's car.

andersrson It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

Reading these stories makes me love my shitty old 16 year old Civic. It's modern enough to have cruise control, AC and a fairly decent engine. But not so modern that reliability is compromised in the name of fuel economy and it's also not a "rude-ass car" with dumb features nobody asked for. I could afford a better car of course but I don't drive much and I'm not inspired by these rude-ass features.

andersrson The .ing top-level domain

Are you the one person that believes Epstein killed himself?

andersrson The .ing top-level domain

Conspiracy theory here: if you go to a big player like GoDaddy they'll sell their queries and some party will see the domain you want and squat it unless you register right away. Just use the whois command in your terminal.

andersrson The costs of microservices (2020)

        Goldilocks went inside the Git Hut. First she inspected the git repo of the great, huge bear, and that was 2TB which was far too large and monolithic for her. And then she tasted the 281 repos of the middle bear, and they were far too small and numerous for her. And then she went to the 10 repos of the little, small wee bear, and checked out those repos. And they were neither too large nor too small and numerous, but just right; each had it's own reason to be and she liked it so well, that she sat down and cloned it all.

andersrson YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

I was going to invest in it until Cathie Woods showed up.

andersrson YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

The moralizing is a bit pointless since every big tech company is trying to monopolize and lock-in users as much as possible. It's just the old blitzscaling enshitification cycle. They have deep enough pockets to subsidize the cost until monopoly status is achieved. Pot meet kettle.

andersrson The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

Companies and governments will always undermine privacy either by incompetence or because it's good for business. In every case the only party that benefits from more privacy is really the end user. So what can we as users do about this? Is there an email service that can generate unique alias addresses? just.for.bloated.govt.dept.123@xyz.com would really help but I'm guessing the big companies like Google and Microsoft have no interest in privacy.

andersrson Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

Even if you didn't they'll likely have a relatives data.

andersrson Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

Thank you auntie Janice for leaking my genomic data. I'm sure the health insurance companies will love you.

andersrson Using Goatse to Stop App Theft

I've had the same with my word game. People will report a bug and then I find out they are on some ad-ridden copycat. For my app it's reached multiple levels. One of the app thieves has embeded another app thief. https://imgur.com/a/0qW0y1r

The most frustrating thing for me is fucking Google. Their search results are so bad these days I can't get my game to the top even though thousands play it every day and link to it on social media. I'm at the top of Bing, DDG, Kagi. These sites run links to each other and Google's dumb algo loves it. Usually they don't use iFrame but proxy the whole request. Since using CloudFlare as my CDN a few of the app thieves have been defeated.

andersrson Honda debuts its first-ever electric autonomous zero-turn riding lawn mower

Right but all you need is a joystick/app to steer it not a whole seat. Having a seat seems like an admission the robotic part doesn't work very well.

andersrson Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://qwertl.com - Like Wordle but with hints based off the qwerty keyboard layout.

andersrson Honda debuts its first-ever electric autonomous zero-turn riding lawn mower

But why does it even need a seat if it's a robot?

andersrson The anatomy of a smart bulb

It's probably because they're so small, integrated and installed in confined insulated spaces. My house is 5 years old and I've never had an LED light break. The hardware I have is split into the LEDs (bigger ones with a heat sink) and the AC/DC drivers which are installed above the ceiling insulation or in a wall cavity for wall lights. The old school gu10 bulbs are notorious for burning out as well I used to go through about 4 a year just in a kitchen rangehood.

andersrson John Riccitiello steps down as CEO of Unity

The enshitification business model is like a gold digging spouse. Someone gets into a relationship with and makes a baby then once the person is tied down everything changes.

andersrson USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

But we tried the port for each use case thing in the 90s and it sucks. VGA, Printer port, ps/2 for mouse etc. It's pretty easy for me to tell which usb cable works with my monitor dock because it's a really thick one.

andersrson AI offers improved civility for polarizing online conversations

[I know you feel that this technique is helpful and you want to save the world. That's double plus good of you.] [For me, I think that] all the padding makes the conversation diluted, watered down and boring. It's similar to 'The Gift Shop Sketch' [1]. [I feel] this is very disrespectful of my time. [In my opinion] it would be great to use another model to strip all the feely words, condense the meaning and generally un-fuckify all the AI waffle. [What are your thoughts about that?]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc

andersrson Booking.com makes a fortune – so why is it leaving its bills to hotels unpaid?

I just hate all the dark patterns that create feeling of scarcity.

andersrson DJI Mini 4 Pro

Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882467

Of course there is no smoking gun but you'd have to be dumb to believe it's not happening. Apple want to make phones in China and sell phones to China Wechat (China) is allowed a free pass on the app store.

andersrson Why don’t Americans eat mutton?

I'm in NZ and I've never had mutton. Lamb is common though.

andersrson Rethinking the Luddites

> sat back

I'd say it's more than sitting back. Complaining about the loss of manufacturing jobs or immigrants competing for jobs and housing is seen to be poor peoples' game. The middle class want to be (seen to be) wealthy and educated so they'll signal that these trends are nothing to worry about because it's only an issue for the plebs and they're definitely not a pleb with this opinion.

Every technology has it's equal and opposite force.

Smart phones result in dumber people with lower attention spans. Medicine has taken away most evolutionary selection pressure. Modern agriculture paired with car culture means a lot of us are unfit and overweight. Social media makes people less socially connected and promotes unrealistic beauty standards.

andersrson DJI Mini 4 Pro

I'm not sure if you're joking. Apple's business depends on them bending the rules for China.

andersrson DJI Mini 4 Pro

Of course! Only drone owners have working ears. Could it be that everyone notices but they just don't want to speak with some rude drone dude.

andersrson Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)

The intent might have been to prevent it turning on while in your pocket.

andersrson Cache headers could probably be more aggressive

The madness begun when SPAs (single page applications) became fashionable along with simple REST APIs. This made the client experience smoother but the network waterfall could get a bit long. For a shop you might have a workflow like [click product]->[get /product]->[get /product/reviews].

Then GraphQL came along to solve the N+1 issue as let you query everything in one network call... but only over HTTP POST so it broke caching on CDNs.

Then edge workers/lambda came to solve that issue. You can also bring your data closer to the edge with replicated databases.

Most newer stacks like Nextjs, Nuxt or SvelteKit behave like a traditional server side rendered page at first and then dynamically load content like an SPA once loaded which is the best of both worlds. They'll also be using HTTP/3 to force-feed a bunch of assets to the client before it even requests them.

Ideally you'd have your data distributed around the world with GraphQL servers close to your users and use SSR to render the initial page markup.

andersrson UK Parliament undermined the privacy, security, freedom of all internet users

Hate speech is just whatever they don't like such as opinions outside the Overton window. Even the law enforcement people are scared of being labeled hateful. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... The UK's BBC also knew about kiddy fiddler Jimmy Saville but they kept calm and carried on letting him fiddle.

Given that the terminology comes straight of Orwell's 1984 they're barely even trying to hide the blatant power grab with a few cliche excuses (children, terrorism).