Hacker News Reader

blahajon Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site

Were you aware of the risk you were getting yourself into when you built heheStreams? Did you take any precautions and how did you sleep at night?

blahajon Show HN: Anonymous Age Verification

> and those 5.6 million probably aren't accessing sites that require age verification.

Why would you presume that?

> Not every solution needs to work for 100% of people.

A solution that censors large amounts of speech and culture from millions of people is clearly either insufficient or, if it is deemed sufficient, authoritarian.

blahajon Upcoming coordinated security fix for all Matrix server implementations

You might want to look into Unified Push. Although you need to use a Unified Push server that supports the differing Matrix endpoints because for some reason the Matrix devs decided to do their own thing. I wouldn't call using Unfied push with Matrix reliable, just like nothing with Matrix is ever truly reliable, but it works much better than native notifications for me.

blahajon Where's Firefox Going Next?

Android?

blahajon The $25k car is going extinct?

A fancy old house is more fancy than a new fancy house.

blahajon Automatic Beyond Belief

Here is a Technology Connections YouTube video about the toaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

blahajon How to post when no one is reading

Would you mind sharing your site?

blahajon Gender characteristics of service robots can influence customer decisions

> Service robots depicted in the study were the same except for the use of gray or pink colors to portray male or female genders, respectively. After receiving a menu recommendation, participants then rated the robot’s persuasiveness.

So they found out that different colors have an effect on how persuasive people perceive robots to be? And then they just claim that this is due to genders they associate to the colors? Their metric of a self reported sense of power also seems dubious to me.

This looks like junk science to me.

blahajon Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

The internet is much bigger, more diverse and complex today. You need a lot of storage to get any meaningful impact. Caching the http of Wikipedia won't get you much. You need to cache lots of YouTube videos. Or you just get them from the data center you peer with over the fat link you built.

With bandwidth usage the diversity of the data retrived over the internet has also gone up. You can't just cache the few most popular websites and save most bandwidth. But bandwidth capacity has scaled a lot so you probably also do not need to.

blahajon Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

> You could have some hash check to prevent hijacking. The old method would be naive today.

But how do you know that the cached site is up to date? How does the ISP know that? What about dynamic content? What about consistency between different requests that are part of the same page load?

> Sure but they are some switches away.

My point is that this does not matter much. Usually, at least in non sparsely populated parts of the world with modern infrastructure, these switches are close and there is lots of bandwidth capacity.

I just don't think it makes sense for ISPs to save bandwidth on these links by building their own local data centers when they peer with a CDN data center anyway.

blahajon Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth. Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited.

Also I am very happy that it is not a thing and that ISPs cannot do that. When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly as the server delivers it and not some other page that my ISP thinks is how the website should look.

Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway. I don't get the site from the other side of the world but from the closest CDN server that does caching. The important difference is that the CDN server is authorized by the website to cache the page and the webmaster has control over what it does.

blahajon Why Flatpak apps use so much disk space on Linux

Just a guess, but Windows executables probably depend on a bunch of Windows APIs that are guaranteed to be there, while Linux systems are much more modular and do not have a common, let alone stable ABI interface in the userspace. You can probably get small graphically capable binaries if you depend on QT and just assume it to be present, but Flatpak precisely does not do that and bundles all the dependencies to be independent from shared dependencies of the OS outside of its control. The article also mentions that AppImages can be smaller probably because they assume some common dependencies to be present.

And of course there are also tons of huge Windows software that come with all sorts of their own dependencies.

Edit: I think I somewhat misread your comment and progval is more spot on. On Linux you usually install software with a package manager that resolves dependencies and only installs the unsatisfied dependencies resulting in small install size for many cases while on Windows that is not really a thing and installers just package all the dependencies they cannot expect to be present and the portable version just does the same.

blahajon "AI-first" is the new Return To Office

You could do a GDPR request for the data they have on you. I would be curious what they save. Keep us updated if you want to.

blahajon Someone at YouTube needs glasses

> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.

Doesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?

blahajon No as a Service

I don't think things have to be impressive to be shown. A funny little idea is all you need, no matter how simple the code. Actually I find exactly that quite neat.

blahajon No as a Service

So it is just purposefully made to be less useful? Is that part of the joke?

The rate limit still pretty surely isn't applied per IP.

blahajon No as a Service

> Rate Limit: 10 requests per minute per IP

I understand that one wants some rate limiting so that others don't just use this as a backend for their own service causing every single request for their service to also create an API request. But this is as simple and resource unintensive as it gets for an HTTP server. 10 requests per minute is just silly.

Also could it be that the limit isn't enforced against the origin IP address but against the whole Cloudflare reverse proxy?

blahajon First hormone-free male birth control pill enters human trials

Wikipedia gives a 2% pregnancy rate for condoms within one year with perfect use which is much worse than 0.3%.

We only have the numbers for the lab environment with I assume perfect use for this new drug, so we can only compare perfect use.

blahajon First hormone-free male birth control pill enters human trials

With the female contraceptive pill 0.3% of women get pregnant within a year if taken perfectly (which is rarely the case, but the figure here is also from lab conditions). This drug leads to 1% pregnancies in 4 weaks, which is much worse.

That said this is still great news especially as the condom is also much less safe then the female contraceptive pill.

blahajon First hormone-free male birth control pill enters human trials

> In male mice, the drug caused infertility and was 99% effective in preventing pregnancies within four weeks of use.

I don't know if they mean 99% reduction compared to normal or 99% of mice did not cause a pregnancy. Either way this does not mean that every intercourse has a 1% chance of causing a pregnancy. Also you are assuming an unconditional probability. It could very well be a conditional probability. It might completely work for 99% that do not cause any pregnancies at all and not work for 1% that cause pregnancies as without the drug.

Anyway I am looking forward to getting the perl index for humans from clinical trials.

Edit: fixed wrong wording

blahajon BearSSL

https://www.bearssl.org/naming.html

> I just happen to be quite fond of bears

blahajon Is AI Making Us Lazy?

I predict it will be like the calculator: make some smarter and some dumber. There are people who use calculators as a tool to do the manual unintelligent work they already understand, so they can instead do more challenging math or other mentally challenging tasks that require math – and there are those who use a calculator so they do not need to understand basic arithmetic.

blahajon OpenSSH 10.0/10.0p1 (2025-04-09)

> This release removes support for the weak DSA signature algorithm, completing the deprecation process that began in 2015 (when DSA was disabled by default) and repeatedly warned over the last 12 months.

This is gonna break things. For good.

blahajon Hiding elements that require JavaScript without JavaScript

We should simply not support websites that download huge arbitrary programs from a huge number of arbitrary third party domains just to retrieve bit by bit what is in the end a static website and reimplement all kinds of standardized browser features in a non standard way that makes a huge number of assumptions and only targets a subset of people with specific browsers with specific settings using specific input devices in a specific way and just break that functionality for everyone else making the open web very closed by enforcing clients behave and be used in a certain pre approved way, breaking accessibility and crippling all kinds of browser features often with disregard and often with intention.

It's my device and I should get to decide what code I run in it, what software I use, how that software displays content to me and how I interact with it.

blahajon Let's Ban Billboards

What exactly is authoritarian and from the top down about the majority of people deciding that they do not want a minority of rich people and especially companies to place huge ads everywhere in public places where everyone is forced to see them?

The majority deciding to ban the minority with enough money from taking over public spaces and forcing the majority to see their ads seems very bottom up to me.

blahajon How 1000 Volvos Ended Up in North Korea (2017)

I wonder how they maintain these cars. Of course back then cars were much simpler to repair, but surely during the 50 years since they needed some non trivial replacement parts.