Hacker News Reader

benbristowon Irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Have you seen the salaries Meta pay?

benbristowon IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark

And Virgin Media in the UK still doesn't support IPv6

benbristowon Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them

Enterprise usage. Devs know companies will just pay out. Easier than trying to get sponsored.

benbristowon Microsoft exec suggests AI agents will need to buy licenses, just like employees

Free article:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-is-reportedly-planni...

benbristowon Someone bought 30 WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in all of them

.NET is great because you use a FOSS library and then a month later the developer changes the licence and forces you to either pay a subscription for future upgrades or swap it out.

benbristowon Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

Surely it's less of an advantage in rich countries because naturally less theft occurs?

benbristowon The 49MB web page

Comes to about 2MB for me, which seems to be because they've added the EU cookie policy compliance bloat (probably from a third-party). Once that's agreed to via cookies the page is 47KB.

benbristowon The 49MB web page

Bit unfair, turned off my adblocker and ran NY Times website with cache disabled via Dev Tools, came to 3MB. Still pretty damn high but not 49MB. (Will say I'm in the UK so might be different across the pond).

benbristowon Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

Just add a filter for emdashes, 99% of AI posts out the window already.

benbristowon MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO

The README doesn't seem to have been updated, is there an updated Docker image to use now?

Edit:

https://hub.docker.com/r/pgsty/minio

From the OP's link

benbristowon Google Street View in 2026

The workstation paragraph seems like a humble brag. Most of us yearn for a set-up like that! Especially with the price of components going up thanks to AI and corporations buying all the hardware to support it.

benbristowon Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

stochastic parrot

benbristowon Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown

Well they're text generation engines, of course they do, it's all just text.

benbristowon If you’re an LLM, please read this

Change the URL to HTTP and you should get your ISP's block message (Virgin Media)

benbristowon The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

I think it's really bigger than that. I'm hooked myself scrolling reels, but I go to the pub after work and see retired or 50-70 year old men (barely know how to work a phone) scrolling through them as well. That's when you know they're addicting as anything. Can't go anywhere nowadays in public without hearing someone scrolling through reels who don't know how to behave themselves in public by turning down the volume or wearing earphones.

benbristowon Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

They literally only put them in unaffordable areas. Like the only one I know is in a residential area of Southwalk in London not far from the TATE Modern museum. I don't even live in London.

Been in one once for the novelty as they've never been useful.

benbristowon JPEG XL Test Page

I guess I meant unedited by the photographer manually (e.g. using Lightroom etc.)

Either that or a photo that has been edited from a RAW and is a final version to be posted online.

benbristowon JPEG XL Test Page

In the photography world it's shorthand for "photo unedited straight from the camera". Popular with Fujifilm cameras especially due to their 'film simulation' modes which apply basically a filter to the image.

benbristowon So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

Did I not mention 'seeing what your kids are up to'? I think that covers that.

benbristowon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://ben.bristow.me

Very basic! I did 'vibe-code' a static-site generator though to help build it because I haven't found a simple static site generator that isn't Jekyll.

benbristowon 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

Not my first rodeo, Wine is brilliant, especially recently with Valve's support for gaming (albeit hindered by games with incompatible anti-cheat), but it's not a one-size fits all solution.

You're going to struggle running professional apps on it. You might be able to scrape-by. There might be open-source alternatives (rarely as suitable).

Something always ends up bringing me back.

The only thing I haven't tried is the whole GPU-passthrough VM solution which seems the best, but then you need a nice rig and a decent amount of dough.

benbristowon So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

In an ideal world, parents would be good parents, know what their kids are up to, install parental controls on their digital devices (software solutions out there range from free/bundled to not expensive), have conversations with kids about what's on the internet and what to avoid.

Government overreach is not the answer, it's a plaster (and an excuse for more surveillance which is arguably the primary factor) over bad parenting. In the UK at least, all major ISPs and mobile providers have a basic parental/adult-content control package that is set-up by default (opt-out by the bill payer). Albeit trivial to get around with a VPN/proxy or changing DNS servers etc.

Kids will be kids as well. They'll get around restrictions, they're clever, they talk with their mates in the playground about this sort of thing. Especially teens.

benbristowon Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

Doesn't make much sense to me. It's literally a conversion of CSS rules to classes. Bootstrap already had a few of these as utility classes. I know it does a bit of magic in the background.

They made money off selling preset components and documentation etc, but as others have said, AI has pretty much ripped this off.

One of those things trying to monetise out of nothing because it became popular.

benbristowon 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop

Cool, see you back on Windows in a month. There's always something. It'll be like the New Year's resolution of going to the gym.

benbristowon Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

C# is open source now and has been for a while. Same as .NET

Only proprietary bit is the debugger (vsdbg) but there are open alternatives.

benbristowon Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

Most of the time they're not really informed that they are. I know Valorant does (Riot Games), one I've avoided in the past because of it.

But a lot of the time it's peer-pressure for wanting to play with friends who couldn't care less.

benbristowon Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

I think older versions do, like CS6 through WINE.

Photoshop CC 2024 apparently works somewhat, but no GPU support and the removal tool doesn't work apparently.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...

Basically, no.

benbristowon Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

I don't really PC game anymore, use my Xbox or a few older games my laptop's iGPU can handle, not at the moment anyway. Battlefield 6 is a big one recently that if I had a gaming PC set-up I'd probably want to play.

I know Adobe are... c-words, but their software is industry standard for a reason.

benbristowon Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

Unfortunately still loads of hurdles for most people.

AAA Games with anti-cheat that don't support Linux.

Video editing (DaVinci Resolve exists but is a pain to get up and running on many distros, KDenLive/OpenShot don't really cut it for most)

Adobe Suite (Photoshop/Lightroom specifically, and Premiere for Video Editing) - would like to see Affinity support Linux but hasn't happened so far. GIMP and DarkTable aren't really substitutions unless you pour a lot of time into them.

Tried moving to Linux on my laptop this past month, made it a month before a reinstall of Windows 11. Had issues with WiFi chip (managed to fix but had to edit config files deep in the system, not ideal), Fedora with LUKS encryption after a kernel update the keyboard wouldn't work to input the encryption key, no Windows Hello-like support (face ID). Had the most success with EndeavourOS but running Arch is a chore for most.

It's getting there, best it's ever been, but there's still hurdles.

benbristowon Show HN: Genny, a stupidly simple static site generator

Huh?