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haaron Gone (Almost) Phishin'

Thank you for writing this up (and getting it put into a video). I sent this blog post to my parents and my mum has decided to forward it on to all of her friends after watching.

Seems easily digestible and approachable for a specific target audience.

haaron Should QA exist?

No, they're lactose intollerant - or do you mean kittens?

haaron Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?

Pretty much anything computer graphics related seems to follow the sage advice that "a close approximation is better than an accurate simulation", if that's the kind of thing you're looking for?

haaron Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

https://ardent.pet/

My Family recently (in the last couple of years) started to breed Ragdoll cats in the U.K.

In an attempt to support what's involved in this I built Ardent for them. It covers a bunch of the day-to-day concerns (weighing and health tracking), Lineage and Inbreeding prevention, and Owner Pack generation for handovers to new Owners.

haaron VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot

LazyVim is about as easy as it gets in the Vim space for a fully-fledged (but customizable) editor.

https://www.lazyvim.org/installation

Then run `LazyExtras` and you get a prompt that shows things like:

  Recommended Languages: (2)
    ○ lang.docker    mason.nvim  nvim-lspconfig  nvim-treesitter  none-ls.nvim  nvim-lint
    ○ lang.toml    nvim-lspconfig

Hit x against a couple and you're off to the races.

[lang.docker and lang.toml are examples of things you're selecting, the list after is what is being installed and configured for that thing]

For things like integrating a debugger, or to run your tests directly inline from the editor might require more customisation though.

haaron 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions

Do you just mean external vs internal processing/thinking?

haaron Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

https://ardent.pet/

I doubt it'll be of interest to folks here - but my Family recently (in the last couple of years) started to breed ragdoll cats in the U.K.

This has been my personal project to understand where I personally find LLMs useful as coding assistants, and where I don't. One easy to spot example is, front-end + copy. Another area I've enjoyed it is talking through how I'd design and build functionality and features ahead of time.

It's been very interesting, and is helpful to folks I care about, even if no-one else ends up using it!

haaron Why do companies lie about uptime?

Why do companies lie about their uptime?

I'm not trying to call out Sentry.io specifically here, I'm just using them as the example because it happened today. In fact, in general I'm a happy customer of theirs.

I'm trying to understand the motivations behind companies that aren't open about their uptime (or other issues, such as data breaches etc).

Why is it not encouraged/rewarded (or perceived as such) to be up front and open about these things? It seems that amongst the HN crowd it has been valued, and folks are appreciative and supportive of these things (vocally and with their wallets) - so why is it not more common practice?

haaron Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

I clicked the image thinking I was seeing the message you were getting (geoblocked in the UK), then realised I'd clicked an imgur link :facepalm:

(Note: Zero negative sentiment towards imgur here)

haaron AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally

I think even if the AI response at the top of the search result is good, I question what it means for the "open web".

If all your content is consumed and presented via a third party - how does that change the nature of "content publishing".

It's the summarisation of Wikipedia and the like on steroids.

haaron Mark Zuckerberg Shakes Up Meta's A.I. Efforts, Again

Which are those 7 companies?

haaron Prime Number Grid

Setting it to 1, 7, 100 looks like a ticker tape of constellations (like Stargate Chevrons) :D

haaron Review of Anti-Aging Drugs

I think for myself, regardless of what the downsides are - the likely alternative was death, which is still an option.

haaron My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

Apologies if I was unclear.

The more I've used it, the more I've disliked how poor the results it's produced, and the more I've realised I would have been better served by doing it myself and following a methodical path for things that I didn't have experience with.

It's easier to step through a problem as I'm learning and making small changes than an LLM going "It's done, and production ready!" where it just straight up doesn't work for 101 different tiny reasons.

haaron My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

I've had little success with Agentic coding, and what success I have had has been paired with hours of frustration, where I'd have been better off doing it myself for anything but the most basic tasks.

Even then, when you start to build up complexity within a codebase - the results have often been worse than "I'll start generating it all from scratch again, and include this as an addition to the initial longtail specification prompt as well", and even then... it's been a crapshoot.

I _want_ to like it. The times where it initially "just worked" felt magical and inspired me with the possibilities. That's what prompted me to get more engaged and use it more. The reality of doing so is just frustrating and wishing things _actually worked_ anywhere close to expectations.

haaron Apple will charge 27% commission for alternative payment systems in Netherlands

Apple review your apps before approving them onto the App Store.

You can opt to not follow their rules, and they can opt to not approve your app.

haaron Facebook Renames to Meta

Click to watch the keynote... "You must log in to continue."

haaron German pensioner given hefty fine for WW2 tank in house

He was prompted to sell the tank to a museum, or collector - what distinguishes him from a "collector"?

haaron Show HN: Fakeflix – Netflix open source clone

A _tiny_ side note:

You'd be better served using an example.com email address for test accounts over a test.com account, with the former being a reserved domain name and the latter being a real one.

https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved

haaron Hydrogen fuel cell cars (2020)

I think generally your comments would be more well received if you provide links backing up your statements. Currently your posts just seem to be going through criticisms and simply stating "No, reverse of above statement".

This doesn't lead to a discussion, or informative comment threads.

You can ask for the same in return from those you're interacting with, but considering you're a brand new account seemingly created to provide a counterpoint; it felt worth calling out (with your declining Karma).

haaron Terms and Conditions Game

I tried that and it seemed broken for me, for some reason clicking agree in the text above marked it as passed :confused:

haaron A brief history of people losing their minds in Antarctica

Two schools of thought?

- Those that really try hard to make sure the computer cannot crash.

- Those that see the computer crashing as an inevitability, and want to ensure the appropriate behaviours are in place when it does happen.

haaron Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Just as a off-hand personal comment -

If those are the Bose NC700, mine decided after a year to stop charging, and instead smell like melting plastic with smoke coming out of them.

That in itself wouldn't be an _absolute_ terrible thing, except their customer support was _abysmal_.

First of all they suggested I hard-reset the headphones, much to my surprise. When I emphasised that I wouldn't be plugging them in again and repeated the point about smelling melting plastic and smoke coming out, they then asked for pictures before initiating a replacement order process they'd suggested.

I explained that there isn't any visual indicators on the headphones such as melting plastic as I'd noticed it immediately, but they insisted I send them photographs anyway.

On sending them photos as asked (and clarified) they've since gone radio silent for 3 weeks, and ignored any more attempts to get in touch with them.

So yeah... I won't be touching Bose products at all in future.

haaron Asdf – An Extendable Version Manager

I introduced ASDF at the company I currently work at and it spread like wildfire to every team.

Having a single version manager that manages the versions for numerous tools across different teams has been invaluable.

haaron South Korea now has 11M 5G subscribers

I am unable to get a decent wired internet connection in the middle of a city center in the U.K. (13Mbps peak via ADSL).

I’ve recently switched to using a 5G connection for home internet and whilst it’s very early days - a slight sacrifice in latency (ADSL isn’t great there either), and a daily modem restart, is a welcome price to pay for 250Mbps down/50Mbps up (at the same price point).

haaron TerarkDB, ByteDance's RocksDB replacement

Wasn't the driver for nvim specifically disagreements with the direction/priorities/steer of the project? Is progress in a different direction necessarily a bad thing, especially if that effort couldn't be directly applied to the original anyway?

Please someone feel free to correct me, but if I recall correctly a lot of the improvements in Vim 8 were a result of the popularity of functionality in NeoVim?

haaron Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11M Concurrent Users (2019)

The closest I've found is the Spotify open-source project "Backstage", which uses Discord for communication (https://github.com/backstage/backstage) - I have no idea about the rest of Spotify, mind.

haaron Webpack 5

I've been using ASDF (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) for a while now to manage each of the language (and sometimes build tool) versions for a folder/repo in a consistent manner. I'd definitely recommend taking a look at it.

haaron How many pieces can a puzzle have?

Somewhat related, but I thoroughly enjoy my infinite galaxy jigsaw puzzle:

https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/shop/product.php?code=346

Edit: To clarify it relates to the title, rather than the content of the article. :D

haaron Pure Skill Minesweeper

I somehow managed to break it https://share.getcloudapp.com/6quexyvk

Clicking on any of the remaining spaces results in:

    Uncaught Error: what
      at LogicGrid.updateKnowledge (logic-grid.js:431)
      at LogicGrid.resolveCell (logic-grid.js:175)
      at LogicGrid.reveal (logic-grid.js:96)
      at HTMLElement.reveal (grid.js:111)
      at HTMLElement.<anonymous> (grid.js:61)