HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

anticrymactic

278 karma · joined September 16, 2022

submissionscomments
anticrymactic··on Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
The audio option will be blocked if you use it too much.

If you can reliably use it, you are not at the "deepest" bot detection level.

anticrymactic··on Audacity 4.0
> Wow. @Meta settled for $18B, also agreeing to implement significant protections for teens. They'll of course choose the weakest / least effective implementation possible but even so - governments are beginning to force change. > >2 years ago, it looked hopeless. Big moment.

That Tweet shows that he is pro "protecting minors from social media", and "governments should do that protecting"

anticrymactic··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
> Video games of yore were actual games you could buy and play with friends.

While this is _true_, it's hardly a good-faith interpretation. The original Mario Bros was around $40 on release. Mostly sold as a bundle with the NES itself around $100.

That's $350 in today's money. Oddly around the same as the switch 1 on release ($299) + BOTW ($60)

Compare the "value" of NES + Mario Bros with Switch 1 + Breath of the Wild.

Yes Nintendo can take one of those away from you, that's despicable, but the "product" has shrunk in no way.

anticrymactic··on Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
In that case you can use the simple Mozilla API (all code in pwsh)

  irm https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json

Will output a table of latests Firefox versions. (LATEST_FIREFOX_VERSION is the one we care about. Save it in $v), then simply:

  iwr "https://download-origin.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/$v/win64-EME-free/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%20$v.exe" -OutFile Firefox.exe

  start Firefox.exe
So simple. So elegant. So thankful that Mozilla uses their millions of funding for maintenance of a subset of their packages on winget.
anticrymactic··on You might want to build your WebApp in Canvas instead of HTML
> maintaining a separate, hidden outline of DOM elements mirroring what’s on screen.

Is there any analysis on the efficacy of this approach? This is always my first thought in these discussions. Performance of WASM with native text IO. Being fully "hidden" one could just use semantic elements, skipping most layout div's, maybe in turn reaping untold accessibility benefits?

Being such a simple idea I cannot believe that it wasn't tried and abandoned before.

anticrymactic··on Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did
> I guess it still will be the best browser to download Firefox

```cmd winget install Mozilla.Firefox ``` Should always work out-of-the-box now.

anticrymactic··on Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
My bank sets the default to "Standard (1-3 Days). Many forget to click the checkbox. I have also heard: "I only do instant when I need it" implying some implicit cost/limit they fear. This is probably still worth it for Banks. As not _all_ transfers are now the dreadful super expensive instant variety.
anticrymactic··on Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
While researching Wero initially, I was confused too that no APK is offered. Maybe we can change that.grbn
anticrymactic··on Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
> How would you even pronounce wero as a native English speaker?

Thankfully, only about 2% of the EU population speaks English natively.

[0] https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/ebsm/api/public/deliverable/dow... Page 10

anticrymactic··on Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
Wero is such a valuable asset for Europe and couldn't have come at a better time.

It's built on the excellent SEPA system, which standardized bank transfers and "Lastschrift" in Europe. SEPA itself got a huge upgrade last year with mandatory instant transfers that cannot cost more than standard transfers between European checking accounts.

Both of those allowed Wero to happen as a final abstract top layer, meaning: the UX of sending money to an email address with the security and convenience of bank transfers. And everything is built collaboratively on top of European banking infrastructure.

No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.

And before some says: "Well, now the government controls everything!": They already did, since... Ever. Now its one less entity with that access and one that can be (hopefully) controlled and changed by a majority.

anticrymactic··on The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party
At face value: yes of course.

The relevance of this story does not come from a obvious "wrong" in the support of political value X. Infact Mullvad is clearly politically active, supporting "individual-privacy" in legislation processes multiple times. This is expected. The 'problem' is build from multiple assumptions.

1. Owner, Co-Owner, director, etc. Have direct immediate unchecked control over "the product" 2. The actual content of far-X Politics in inheritly unpopular. Else it wouldn't be "Far" from anything. This is also why propaganda and populism are necessary. 3. Far-X politics DEPENDS on direct control (information and excercise) because of (2.)

Therefore --> Owner Opinions become Company opinions. And owner(company) supports ideological politics that are fundamentally opposed to product and broader HN views.

anticrymactic··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
In my experience: Everything™ works, except Google pay unfortunately.
anticrymactic··on Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it
> Crypto where the OS (or a website) can ask the card: "Is the holder of that card over X years old y/n?" and the card would just answer with a binary yes no question without exposing any other data while still checking the government signature.

This is the same as "What's the card holders age" by simply binary searching for it. A better way would be:

1. Have the card define the countries age access levels. (Example in Germany: >=16 [Beer/Wine], >=18 everything else)

2. The app can only ask: "Is [BEER] allowed for the card holder y/n?

This makes it immediately cross-legislative and protects the exposed data from meta analysis.

Edit: This would allow for self exclusion too. Make it possible for individuals to give up access to gambling/alcohol/tabacco/porn nationally.

anticrymactic··on Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?
Like nixOS?
anticrymactic··on Age Verification as Mass Surveillance Infrastructure
While this would solve the technical problem at hand. It lacks any safeguard against a very simple workaround of sharing your certificate or even posting for everyone to use.

Fullly anonymous + untraceable attestation --> unlimited certificate sharing

anticrymactic··on Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth
Unsurprisingly this is also today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260404.html

anticrymactic··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
How so?

Since when is slop-producing ad-machine social media the only access to speech, press and association?

anticrymactic··on 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
> Why is that problematic? They don't have your private keys and their "level of access" is equivalent to any other certificate authority that your browser trusts.

Let's Encrypt could stop issuing certificates to you, if the administration decided that necessary. This would at least disrupt whatever you were serving. Not that I think this is likely, only possible.

I think LE clealy demonstrated the need for a accessible free ACME authority. But it is high time for more alternatives (EU and China at least). FWIW: Everything around public infrastructure should be run decentralized not-for-profit using national resources. Things like DNS Registrars are silly if you think about it. They just buy it from TLD holders anyway.

anticrymactic··on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
> Just like C++ never killed C, despite being perfect replacement for it

I think c++ didn't replace C because it is a bad language. It did not offer any improvements on the core advantages of C.

Rust however does. It's not perfect, but it has a substantially larger chance of "replacing" C, if that ever happens.

anticrymactic··on “Boobs check” – Technique to verify if sites behind CDN are hosted in Iran
Let's encrypt supports ACME. Here are hundreds of ways to obtain a certificate:

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/client-options/#other-client-op...

anticrymactic··on Why xor eax, eax?
> so that they don't have to do const $=document.getElementById,

``` const window.$ = (q)=>document.querySelector(q); ``` Emulates the behavior much better. This is already set on modern version of browsers[1]

[1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_co...

anticrymactic··on Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders
> Actually, for Robotics hardware is a solved problem.

I understand the sentiment but this couldn't be further from the truth. There are no robotic hand models that get close to the fidelity of humans (or even other primates).

The technology just doesn't exist yet, motors are a terrible muscle replacement. Even completely without software, a puppeteered hand model would be revolutionary.

anticrymactic··on Space Elevator
PayPal and Apple pay take a significant cut of the transaction. CC is a lot less and bank is mostly free of TX fees. Most users don't know/don't care, so given the option, they will likely take it and funnel their donations to conglomerates.
anticrymactic··on Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
You can use ReVanced on Android to block the ads in the YouTube app
anticrymactic··on Always Invite Anna
> Be careful. It is trivial for others to take advantage of such selfless kindness.

What harm does is do? Altruistic kindness is not affected by the response. That's the point. Being "exploited" for kindness is not possible, it's not a currency.

> Ingratitude is common, as is sociopathy.

Source? If anything, most anecdotes point to the opposite, gratitude and kindness is extremely common.

anticrymactic··on Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s
> Which is why they’re so bad at maths for instance.

I don't think LLMs currently are intelligent. But please show a GPT-5 chat where it gets any math problem wrong, that most "intelligent" people would get right.

anticrymactic··on I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory
Or they could just tell you. Imagine talking to someone over and over again. They would tell u to get on with wherever you promised them.
anticrymactic··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Most banking app work, either directly or with a settings change to allow Google Play Service emulation. [1]

[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#banking-apps

anticrymactic··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
> Average users benefit greatly from their pocket appliance not being a full fledged computer.

In what way? Seriously, what benefit is there? (And don't say security...)

anticrymactic··on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels
A lot of discussion is about the security of these devices (resistance to false open states). But most of the time the safety (false closed states) has even higher stakes associated to it. Having to wait because some api server is slow is annoying but can quickly become life threatening in a different context. Fail-Safe vs Fail-Secure is (imo) often overlooked and probably just as important as the actual implemented security.
Page 1 of 3Next →