Hacker News Reader

zetanoron Every Fucking Website (2020)

The EU said "you have to ask for permission before forcefully sodomizing your users", and webdevs thought "let's ask for permission" rather than "let's not forcefully sodomize our users". Of course, the law could have said "don't forcefully sodomize users", but it seems the west is still under the impression that some people will do the right thing, just because, sometimes. (maybe 20 years ago they would have, just because, sometimes, but they won't now)

zetanoron uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

I'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.

zetanoron Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

Sweet, can I mint these as NFTs? I don't know how to multiply 43252003274489856000 by 50 USD but I think it could make me a lot of money, and I like money.

zetanoron I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me

Talking about this like there's an "attack" feels very melodramatic. It seems to me like the non-constructive messages are either shitposts or just curious probes (testing whether certain codepoints make it through, testing whether bad no-no words make it through, testing how various things will render, testing whether the input is sanitized...). There's links to God knows what and some walls of inflammatory language, but I'm not noticing anything that could even remotely cause any harm.

zetanoron Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones

Setting R² to various large values like 50, 500 and 5000 then moving the slider around seems to give a decent and simple visual representation of what's happening.

zetanoron Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

The conceptual level breaks down in places where an open shop is illegal or disincentivized, which I suspect is the case in California where the Wikimedia Foundation is based. Europe usually has open shops, not closed shops, for example.

zetanoron Situational Awareness Down 67% in July in AI Stock Rout

Can you provide a comparable or superior analysis by someone else?

zetanoron Android may soon restrict on-device ADB

Google pushes a new feature to Android where phones wake up at 2:22 AM every night to play a blood-curdling scream at maximum volume, regardless of settings. An issue is created and gets assigned, into which Google employees regularly butt in to explain the feature exists to keep users safe from night break-ins. Nothing changes. People have to start modifying their lives around this problem—most have to shut off their phones during the night, many had to buy a separate alarm clock—and masses of disappointed customers eventually make their way to the bug tracker to voice their concern. The issue gets locked as "too heated".

Apple has had this feature for three years on iOS. What else should they have done?

zetanoron Advertise in ChatGPT

I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.

The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.

Thank you, POWERADE®.

zetanoron Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files

WirePlumber switched its config from Lua to a JSON variant not so long ago.

zetanoron Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

Extend, embrace

zetanoron Good Tools Are Invisible

Many small reasons; changing workflows, very strange default settings (may have been fixed a few years ago?), snaggy desktop integration, because it's a pain to use at work on Windows, etc.

zetanoron 45% of Enthusiasts 'Seriously Considering' Leaving Sony for PC

You can fix a lot of problems if you have the necessary power. Unfortunately, this is not going to lead to a civilizational revolution.

zetanoron 45% of Enthusiasts 'Seriously Considering' Leaving Sony for PC

Some people like disc cases and the actual disk itself, but the main gripes I've seen with digital only games on consoles were: 1) without a disc you can't give/trade/sell the game, 2) without a disc the game can be taken away from you, 3) if you can't make an offline backup copy of the game and transfer it from console to console, most/every copy of a game will eventually disappear.

Steam has issues, and you certainly can't (legally) trade or sell your library, but nearly no single player games on the platform have DRM. Thus, you can have as many off-Steam backups as you want (which can't be remotely deleted/disabled), and you could certainly "give" the game to a friend (but don't copy that floppy), or otherwise preserve it for posterity.

zetanoron Good Tools Are Invisible

I rarely use vi{,m} these days but I sometimes still instinctively type motions or :commands into other terminal editors (which naturally blurts them out into the text buffer). When using something like Sublime or VSCode, I'm always hunting through menus, documentation and search engines to do something simple like ":%!sort -u". Kate is a bit unwieldy—far from invisible—but I've found it to be the most frictionless editor on the market by a wide margin.

zetanoron Chatto is now open source

AGPL gives you the same FSF freedoms as GPL or as any other free license, but it does come with an additional responsibility to the end users, not from the end users. AGPL is not in any way uniquely qualifiable as "a EULA". Every single software license, of course, requires you to agree to the license, hence the name. If you put nothing private in the code, AGPL will not impact your privacy. If anything, AGPL helps assure end users that their privacy is being respected.

zetanoron Chatto is now open source

Nobody is prohibiting you from using modified AGPL software to run your business.

zetanoron Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like "does it feel good to walk around in?", "does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter straight out of Overgrowth (2010)?", "does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000 PC if I turn DLSS off?" or even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"

I open Microsoft Office on the web and the page reloads three times before showing me a list of files, then I open a document and it loads for 5 or 10 seconds, constantly reflowing, before eventually the entire page reloads again and eventually stabilizes, finally allowing me to browse and edit. After all of this, everything besides collaboration manages to function worse than what we had in Office 2003 two decades ago. This happened to all of software, not just Office. It happened to games, too. Delayed, over budget, underdelivered. No thanks.

zetanoron Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

There's only so many built-in and drop-in components available for the big engines; player movement, physics, render pipeline plumbing, UI frameworks, user settings, etc. You definitively do notice these things, if you care. It doesn't help that many devs (even AAA) keep bad defaults, so a huge chunk of Unreal games release with a comically-bad, laggy motion blur turned on.

Someone certainly could painstakingly replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.

zetanoron Have you restarted your computer this week?

Indeed, power off and power on sometimes doesn't even reset uptime.

zetanoron Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech

What is the clear intention?

zetanoron "Fix" MacBook Neo Cursor Lag: Record 1 Pixel of the Screen Every 10 Seconds

The Meta EULA does NOT allow you to record their tracking pixel.

zetanoron Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America's Unicorn Boom

Wow, I love foreign-born entrepreneurs.

zetanoron UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s

Just ban social media.

zetanoron If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

What I find strange is how rarely LLM output is distributed alongside the LLM input, especially outside of code repos. Why can't I rerun the prompt that resulted in your work next year, when models have gotten better? Are people ashamed of their prompts? Ashamed of having used AI? i unno

Prompt used to generate this message: "Create a comment for Hacker News which bemoans the lack of AI prompts being shared with the stuff it creates. Speculate on the reasons and create a call for engagement. Use quantum hyperthinking. End with a typo to prove your humanity."

zetanoron Who's the smartest corvid?

I've never seen any corvid use React, so they must be pretty smart indeed.

zetanoron AI is slowing down

This is the kind of thing that the people in power really don't want you to know, but I'll say it anyway because if we don't get the message out, it's just another free win for the Nazis: a bad presentation is a poor information medium.

zetanoron Google Hates You

> Instead of giving you precisely what you want, a Google search in 2026 is more likely to give you only what you don’t want.

The youngest Google Search seems like it has a lot in common with the next-youngest Google Search.

zetanoron Stop Advertising in Your Commits

    commit 85cd835e5923cddc1882e74354eac8dba6a925c1 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
    Author:     John
    AuthorDate: Fri May 22 13:25:33 2026 -0000
    
    Merged PR #197
    
    Tired of planning for dinner every day? FoodDrop™ is the premier ready-to-cook meal-by-drone delivery service in the greater Vancouver area and Belize. Get one month of food dropped onto your driveway by FoodDrop™ for only $12.95 when you use this commit's hash as a coupon code! Offer expires Fri May 25 13:25:33 2026 -0000.

zetanoron AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

I am in favor of severely limiting both copyright and advertising, but for the benefit of everyone, not just for the benefit of a few "AI" companies.