Hacker News Reader

bertmanon Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines

Synopsis from the project's "instructor guide:

>This is not a computer science course, nor even an information science course—though naturally it could be used in such programs.

>Our aim is not to teach students the mechanics of how large language models work, nor even the best ways of using them in various technical capacities.

>We view this as a course in the humanities, because it is a course about what it means to be human in a world where LLMs are becoming ubiquitous, and it is a course about how to live and thrive in such a world.

bertmanon [dead]

Unlocked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/technology/sam-altman-elo...

bertmanon Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

>“Enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and users from bots and evolving forms of abuse and spam,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch

I really wish TechCrunch hadn't let the spokesperson off the hook so easily for that statement. How could using Google without JavaScript be "safer" in any shape or form?

bertmanon Euro-cloud provider Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

Netcup seem to use qemu[0], which is what Anexia will also use according to OP's article

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/VPS/comments/1ghz4fd/i_know_contabo...

bertmanon Video Games Can't Afford to Look This Good

Unlocked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics...

bertmanon Gazzetta, an RSS Reader for Mastodon

FYI: Mastodon offers RSS feeds for single accounts (e.g. https://mastodon.social/@primatologyxyz/with_replies.rss), but efforts to extend native RSS support seem to have gone stale (e.g. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21500).

However, there are RSS bridges like RSSHub (https://docs.rsshub.app/routes/social-media#mastodon) and OpenRSS (https://openrss.org/blog/mastodon-rss-feeds) that offer RSS feeds for the "Explore" and "Hashtag" sections for local instances.

bertmanon Microsoft accused of Malware-like Bing Wallpaper app

Better, more comprehensive article:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/26/bing_wallpaper_app/

bertmanon A battle is raging over the definition of open-source AI

https://archive.ph/PwmeR

bertmanon Hacker News Submit – Chrome Web Store

https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

No (MV2) extension needed

bertmanon Show HN: Hacker News Explorer – Chrome extension to personalize HN stories

Nice! Sample output for

  https://hackernewsexplorer.com/similar \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"story": {"id": "42018119", "title": "Show HN: Hacker News Explorer – 
  Chrome extension to personalize HN stories"}}' | jq .

is here: https://privatebin.net/?910a6ce9f7d7a9f6#5QcbtLQ5SqqoEaXkRwq...

bertmanon Honeybee: Calling via XMPP

>but I had somehow gotten the impression XMPP is a dying protocol. Any opinions on that?

Not at all. Have a look at https://snikket.org for example. This let's you set up your own XMPP server that "just works" in a couple of minutes, and then you can hand out invites to your friends and family, so that they can install the Snikket app (Android or iOS) and are automatically registered and in your contacts in a few taps, without them even needing to know what XMPP is.

The server is the well-known Prosody, dockerized, the Android app is a re-skinned Conversations, the iOS client is based on Siskin IM.

And just like that you have a working, private, self-hosted, end-to-end encrypted cross-platform messaging system that also support a/v calls out of the box.

It really is pretty cool.

bertmanon Show HN: Mailinator Generator – A Simple Chrome Extension for Temporary Emails

Looks good! A (plaintext, JSON, whatever) export functionality would be nice.

bertmanon Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS

I think we're seeing another big step on the path to the deprecation of ChromeOS.

Back in June this year, they were "embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS"[0]. Now they're enabling a Linux VM on Android, which is the inverse of what they did on ChromeOS under the ArcVM moniker, i.e. running Android in a VM[1].

[0]:https://chromeos.dev/en/posts/building-a-faster-smarter-chro...

[1]:https://9to5google.com/2019/05/24/chrome-os-android-apps-vm/

bertmanon Show HN: Bullshit Translator, OSS Chrome extension that cuts through the crap

Bookmarklet:

https://privatebin.net/?eacca724550d7516#5fBRbnxtMhgDp48jMcm...

bertmanon End-to-End Encrypted Cloud Storage in the Wild: A Broken Ecosystem

https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/new-...

https://support.google.com/a/answer/14326936

bertmanon [dead]

Since the OP article is LLM slop with no actual information:

The full paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08944393231220165

The "Discussion" part from the paper: https://privatebin.net/?c4c369f1b8f7c851#BNGSrxQLew2C5KpgUDK...

Summary of the "Discussion" part:

* English Wikipedia is heavily focused on American topics.

* Americanization is strongest in Europe and Latin America, with Italy being the most Americanized country.

* European countries vary in Americanization, with Western countries generally more Americanized than Eastern ones.

* South & West Asia, and Islamic clusters have lower Americanization values.

* Hebrew Wikipedia, representing Israel, shows high Americanization, reflecting its Western orientation.

* Developed countries have higher Americanization values than developing countries.

bertmanon Screenpipe: 24/7 local AI screen and mic recording

They store everything in an SQLite db :)

https://github.com/mediar-ai/screenpipe/blob/4f2391c6dfd8775...

bertmanon Microsoft hosts a security summit but no press, public allowed

The article is from August 28th, the conference was on Sept 10th (two days ago).

bertmanon Big Tech in China doubles AI spending despite US restrictions

https://archive.ph/ELI6A

bertmanon Kill the Newsletter: Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds

I'm not sure I understand what you (and others in this thread) are getting at.

Non-technical users can simply subscribe to the newsletter with their email address. If they don't understand what this project is about, they probably don't need and don't want it.

Users that prefer RSS over email use kill-the-newsletter for outlets that don't offer RSS.

bertmanon Google Chrome will let you send money to your favourite website

From the official spec (still WIP)[0]:

>For example, micropayments of a predetermined monetary value could be "streamed" to the site over time. Alternatively, the user could make one or many discreet "one-off" payment(s) of any arbitrary monetary amount, even while micropayments are simultaneously being streamed.

Also, Flattr[1] tried (and eventually failed) to establish something similar more than 10 years ago.

[0] https://webmonetization.org/specification/#goals

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

bertmanon Chrome: Use Apps, Not Tabs (08/2024 Update)

>I’m not completely sure what distinguishes a website that has an “Install” option from one that doesn’t,[...]

You're talking about PWAs, which require things like a manifest and service worker to make them "installable" by the end user. See e.g. here:

https://web.dev/explore/progressive-web-apps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app

bertmanon Misfire

This is a blog post about the W3C Technical Architecture Group's stance on third-party cookies.

bertmanon Google Is Keeping Cookies in Chrome After All

[Dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41038586 [<-- most comments]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41039606

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41039613

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040981

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41041763

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042963

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41043139

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41043500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41044765

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41045054

bertmanon Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel on Facebook, Millenials, and Predictions for 2030

Here's a whisper-generated transcript of the first episode for people that prefer text: https://nopaste.net/boom_transcript

bertmanon Google takes first major step: E2EE interoperability across all messaging apps

MIMI: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/

(More Instant Messaging Interoperability)

bertmanon Combine multiple RSS feeds into a single feed, as a service

I guess this moves complexity away from the client and enables a dead simple setup (maybe for non-technical friends and family?) with just a single big feed, like they already know from TikTok and the likes.

bertmanon Scan HTML faster with SIMD instructions: Chrome edition

Pretty cool and relevant! From the Chromium commit[0]:

>The CL improves jQuery Speedometer3 story by 2%.

[0]:https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/55...

bertmanon The Positive Hacker News RSS Feed

>Where would one modify this code to filter different sentiments?

Right here: https://github.com/garritfra/positive_hackernews/blob/main/m...

This project uses the sentiment analyzer provided by the NLTK toolkit [0]. The `SentimentIntensityAnalyzer` class assigns polarity scores to its text input, where a score >=0 denotes a "positive valence".

[0]:https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.sentiment.SentimentIntensityAn...

bertmanon Show HN: Tiny Chrome extension to disable images to reduce distractions

OP's extension simply uses the `chrome.contentSettings.images` API, which you've always been able to set manually in the standard browser settings. It never disappeared (chrome://settings/content/images).