Hacker News Reader

mgbmtlon Elizabeth line: Central stations now boasting 4G phone coverage

I can do plenty of that while working ;-)

mgbmtlon Elizabeth line: Central stations now boasting 4G phone coverage

There was a time not long ago when subways had those free newspapers ("Metro" etc), and people would read them (and they would clutter the place).

What's wrong with people being on their phone though? I barely use my phone, but if I'm in a tunnel and there is nowhere to look, yeah, I'll read a book, online news or email. I rarely socialize on the subway and I have one of those glances that make people uncomfortable.

Anecdotally: I just came back from London. Big fan of the new Elizabeth line. The Piccadilly (and most lines) low ceilings are a bit soul crushing (I'm tall, but I suspect for most people too), although I really like the character of the old stations.

mgbmtlon The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier

At least that advert was less cynical than Hilton's huge billboard in Sofia with the slogan "Forget where you are" (in English, of course).

(circa 2002-2005)

mgbmtlon At Least 15% of Reddit Content Is Corporate Trolls Manipulating Public Opinion

The article is paywalled and cites a paper published on an Elsevier platform. Is this anything other than wild speculation? Seems like the kind of content that goes viral because it validates our gut instinct.

Not that I disagree with the made up number. I expect most social media to have a very high amount of manipulative content, especially the high-visibility content.

mgbmtlon Firefox Developer Edition and Beta: Try Out Mozilla's .deb Package

I did that as well, but it also means that the binaries can be modified by an exploit (running as a regular user). It's not a huge difference with the deb, but still, it's a small additional layer of security.

mgbmtlon Housing wealth is meaningless, destructive and fundamentally changing society

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America

24,709,000 km^2

mgbmtlon Firefox Is Going to Try and Ship with Wayland Enabled by Default

To be fair, for such a huge change to how we use Linux on the desktop, worst things could have happened.

mgbmtlon Hello, stranger – Talking to random people

A friend always has headphones, often not listening to anything, because she would get constantly harassed or hit on otherwise. She doesn't stand out, ordinary looking, but she suspects that's why.

But yeah, I interpret headphones as "leave me alone".

Although from the article in the Netherlands, I suspect another reason why people use kiosks, is that folks working service jobs might not speak the language fluently, or the person was a tourist. I'm not criticizing anyone, I think it's a nice feature of kiosks.

mgbmtlon A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

A long time ago, I remember a MySQL talk where they explained dual-license as "if you make money, then we make money", while keeping the product FOSS.

I think it's a reasonable simplification.

And if the company changes the licence, then a A/GPL fork can survive (c.f. Hashicorp, which could have probably avoided their issues with a better licence from the start, but at the time no one expected to be eclipsed by big cloud providers with infinite resources).

mgbmtlon Global CO2 Levels

If you want a depressing graph, check Canada's oil production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Canada#/... (the US has a similar curb, although I'm not an expert, just a slightly depressed Canadian, especially since the government will soon shift further right, expect production to increase in 2 years)

mgbmtlon New Study Says Maybe Helicopter Parenting Is Making Kids Depressed

If you can tolerate the crazy politics and French, I grew up and live in Montreal central-ish neighborhoods, and have a very independent teen in high school who takes public transport or bikes to go just about everywhere in the city.

It's not always efficient, but teens have time (saving a few minutes by using a car would make me waste a ton of time).

Personally I have a car, but I bike most of the time to go downtown because it's 15-20 mins away and there are those new bike paths that are clean in winter too (and much faster/fun than driving).

mgbmtlon Yugoslavia's Digital Twin – When a country's internet domain outlives the nation

Probably an accurate stat of today, but misses the point and context. I said "I think" that education helped people from Quebec to negotiate a better situation, rather than doing so by arms (up to the 1970s with the FLQ). I do think that squashing rebellions is a counter-productive way of solving conflicts, as Yugoslavia did (I also lived a few years in the Balkans, in a neighbouring country, and had a few good friends from ex-Yu with identity issues in the early 2000s).

I also think education can help people understand topics such as majority/minority rights, rights/history of first nations, systemic racism, etc. many of which the current provincial government still denies (not immune to populist). Despite all that, and despite this province's completely train-wreck succession of governments since the 80s, what is taught now in schools is still better than in the 80s. That might be of an empirical feeling. My high school still had priests raping kids until the mid-90s and racism was rampant. I have a teen in a public high school, what they learn now is pretty neat. All thanks to teachers, of course, and not to governments.

Texas and other states are now burning books (and I hope we don't get to that point). One could have a PhD in CS, but be a tech-bro ignorantly erring towards fascism. I don't call that education. I think how a society treats its minorities (whether cultural or things like accessibility) is the best measure of advancement. Quebec is no model on that either, but it's probably better than Texas. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/14/texas-most-b...

mgbmtlon Yugoslavia's Digital Twin – When a country's internet domain outlives the nation

In normal democracies, parties usually reach a balance that protects regional interests, and the interests of minorities in those regions. It's not easy, but when done in good faith, can be very effective at lowering support for violent rebellion.

(greetings from Quebec, which rebelled a few times, and isn't immune to populist politicians, but nonetheless somewhat stable. I think investing into education also helps a lot, which is the opposite of what Texas is doing)

mgbmtlon Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

Cool, thanks for the hints. I'll dig more in that direction :)

mgbmtlon Ask HN: Is anyone using cloud dev environments (e.g. Codespaces/Replit) at work?

Any suggestions for a small agency that handles sites with a lot of personal information?

I work in a small shop and things are messy. Similar to having hundreds of WordPress sites, but we managed to standardize the main set of plugins we use on all clients (this has its own git repo), and clients will have their custom theme and some custom plugins (in another repo).

Ideally we would have a tool that lets us spin up a dev site for any client, fetch the production database from the last backup, anonymize the data, connect an IDE and have git commit access.

mgbmtlon Scrollbars are becoming a problem

Sometimes when using Wayland on my laptop, I have to switch back to X11 just because Wayland has no way of controlling the contrast.

(I tried searching a few times, no luck..)

mgbmtlon The short life of New York City’s first skyscraper

Definitely in terms of "how is it possible that this building is not falling over". I remember first seeing 432 Park and immediately checking online to understand how it was physically possible to build. I'm still a bit skeptical. With increasingly frequent extreme climate events, I wonder how resilient the building will be.

mgbmtlon Canadians have a ‘right to be forgotten’ on Google, Federal Court rules

I think the problem is not so much the news article, but that it pops up front and centre when doing a trivial search. Also, considering the low levels of alphabetization, most people won't even bother reading the article, just the (often clickbait) snippet. I'm not blaming the newspaper, I'm saying search results should be held to higher standards.

mgbmtlon Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

I often stumble on clients who use Edge without knowing it, and then using Bing because they don't know how to change it, but I can imagine some might not be able to change any browser settings (although, imo, Google is pretty much as bad as Bing lately).

mgbmtlon Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

Seems to be Vercel / Next.js (I'm not affiliated, only did an IP lookup because I was curious)

mgbmtlon I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

As I said, most would probably say the government does not do enough. My point was just that the comment could be seen as erring towards conspiracy theories, because it's quite common to hear "the government is against you". Maybe it was not op's intent.

mgbmtlon I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

I understand the feeling. It could definitely be said for browsers (from Netscape to IE, to Firefox and now what might feel like a giant kludge). It could be said for cars (more expensive to own, complicated to fix, only to be stuck in traffic).

I don't think it's a conspiracy though. Certain things do reach saturation, or end of the S-curve, and sometimes society moves on to something else. I now use my old bike mostly instead of my expensive car, sometimes freezing my ass in winter, and I'm getting old and have kids. I could be bitter, but I'm actually quite happy that I can safely cycle in my city now.

(I know, I'm offtopic, though I do wish the downvote brigade would provide more useful feedback)

mgbmtlon I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser

I didn't flag/mod the comment, but I think it errs towards conspiracy theories.

I'm not American, and I understand the American government does evil things sometimes, but it also does a lot of good things for its citizens. It builds roads, keeps the skies clear, funds education, health systems, sues tech giants when they go too far, tries to manage the speculation/money markets, etc. To say "undeniably often working against the best interests of its citizens" is very hyperbolic. Most would probably argue that the government does not do enough, even conservatives (ex: controlling abortion or bathrooms, not that I agree).

The news are also not there to demoralize you, not as a primary objective. Anxiety and negative news do sell ads. I find public radio such as NPR do a wonderful job of balancing point of views, giving the facts, and provide some hope by explaining the underlying issues and possible solutions. Where I live, public radio is the only non-ragebait media that constantly puts pressures on whatever government is in power, and explains various points of views (while admittedly being more centrist editorially, angering both hard-left and hard-right).

I totally agree however with doing whatever it is you are good at, and that's a way to work towards improving the world.

mgbmtlon OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era

Same here, but sometimes I have to resist playing a second game :)

I appreciate the simplicity of the game, but also the small details that make it fun. And that a typical game rarely lasts more than 20-30 minutes.

mgbmtlon Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

Smaller countries (by economy or by population) tend to have protectionist rules, otherwise they simply get absorbed by their (bigger) neighbouring countries. Historically, those protections weren't that much of an issue, but as bigger countries continue optimizing their systems at huge scale, smaller countries can't keep up (offer the same price/quality).

For example in the US, when TikTok became too popular, politicians quickly reacted to avoid having a major social network that was backed by a foreign country. Legitimately in the name of consumer protection, of course, but clearly also other interests. Funny how the US very selectively protects its consumers.

It's not great for the consumer (less competition/freedom), but ultimately it's about protecting local expertise to avoid being fully dependant on another region (obviously, sometimes this gets abused). Losing local expertise increases the brain-drain, since any skilled person will know that they won't get many good job options locally.

I live in Quebec/Canada, which has many rules in the name of consumer protection, but usually it's really about protecting local businesses without going against free trade agreements. I'm not a fan of isolationism, but winner-take-all types of scenarios, where no one can compete against foreign semi-monopolies hurt us in the long term. It's hard to find a good balance. An interesting take, in Quebec and in the EU, is seeing many laws that only apply above a certain scale.

mgbmtlon TPM provides zero practical security

Depends on the implementation? For many services, I register my Yubikey, but also the Android fingerprint authentication (as well as TOTP as another fallback).

So for example, if I login to Gitlab on my phone, I can use my fingerprint (lockscreen auth). It's more convenient than using the TOTP app.

Similarly, I could register a TPM from my desktop that could be the same as using the fingerprint auth? It would only work from that desktop, but it's the same logic as my phone, and in a sense, that's a nice benefit.

mgbmtlon Meta throttles 404media investigation on drug ads, continues to advertise drugs

Can you quote an exaggeration or something sensationalist from the article?

The article has details and examples of their own experience (and it's titled "my feed", not "instagram in general"), they interviewed researchers/experts on the topic, reached out to Meta for comment, waited to see what happened after doing so, etc.

mgbmtlon AI real-time human full-body photo generator

In Canada, CP drawings are illegal (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_Ca...)

mgbmtlon A group of Motherboard folks just spun up their own new independent outlet

Congrats! I'm a fan and subscribed.

Tech nitpick: I was a bit annoyed though that the green buttons to subscribe are then replaced by green buttons to "gift to a friend" or subscribe to newsletter. It's easy to add to uBlock, but it would be nice to not have annoyances that distract from reading. I really like the long form of articles.

mgbmtlon Short session expiration does not help security

Except if the cookie is copied elsewhere, then that cookie/session needs to be expired?

(but yes, expiring locally reduces the window for copying that cookie)