News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

aorth

Re:Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy? on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:42AM (#50335567)
My preference is not connecting the TV to the network at all, and using an Apple TV via HDMI.
Three Body Problem :)
Re:A farewell to Arc browser on Thursday October 22, 2026 @01:24PM (#50198372)
I have seen the Arc posts here and on r/browsers over the years so I am loosely familiar with it, but what is Dia? The post doesn't say and doesn't even link to it. Venture capital funded, closed source, and AI... doesn't sound good.

Posting from Ladybird BTW (compiled from git today), which is starting to take shape!

Re:JPEG XL vs. AVIF for web use-cases on Saturday October 17, 2026 @02:38AM (#50128546)
Impressive. How can we use AVIF from Java? I have a Java application that relies on ImageMagick, which seems to use libheif for AVIF rather than libavif (avifenc).
The subtitle doesn't make sense:

> Investigators also sought permission to use an invasive surveillance tool called a cell-site simulators against journalist Georgia Fort and a Minnesota state Senate candidate.

"a cell-site simulators"?

Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies on Monday October 12, 2026 @01:48AM (#50051835)
Thanks. I tried this on Firefox for Android and each time I close the browser and load the page my fingerprint ID is different. So it seems to work. Have you had any sites break with this extension installed?
Re:F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom on Thursday September 24, 2026 @12:59PM (#49833543)
I have 23 currently. It's surprising how fast it happened... I don't have any problems, but I don't pay much attention to it and apps seem to update automatically sometimes and after a manual refresh other times.
Re:Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series on Thursday September 24, 2026 @11:57AM (#49832549)
Up voting based on the title alone, though I'm not expecting much.

If we could have a similar experience to Intel-based ThinkPad Carbon X1 or T series with performance, graphics, Wi-Fi, battery life, suspend/resume, external displays, etc, that would be awesome!

Apple hardware is awesome but I want to run Linux.

Re:F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom on Thursday September 24, 2026 @11:54AM (#49832486)
Cool! Unfortunately I switched to Obtanium a year or so ago. I get all my apps from GitHub releases straight from the developers now.
Re:Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says on Saturday September 05, 2026 @11:22AM (#49577426)
The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...
Re:Fastpotify on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @04:23AM (#49519425)
After discovering music I like on YouTube or whatever, I buy albums on Bandcamp and Qobuz if possible, and Amazon as a last resort. Then I host them on my personal Navidrome server to enjoy without involving any big tech.
This is nice to see. I've been a long-time contributor to OpenStreetMap and a long-time user of applications in the ecosystem. I recently tried the CoMaps fork of Organic Maps and was surprised by a few quality of life improvements. For example, the one named in the article about being able to receive periodic map updates outside of the monthly application update cycle. Another subtle example is the color scheme in CoMaps being slightly more pleasant.
Re:New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @02:59PM (#49438893)
My personal laptop is a 2018 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Gen 6. It's eight years old now. Still running Linux pretty well, but I really need to figure out what to do for a replacement sooner than later...
So far all the comments discuss whether this is due to LLM slop, plagiarism avoidance, or translation issues. I want to know how these passed the peer review process.
Re:99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots on Saturday August 08, 2026 @03:33AM (#49219659)
This will resonate with anyone who operates a public-facing website and doesn't work at a big tech company. In the past few years I have also been down this exact same road. I'm desperately trying to avoid resorting to Cloudflare, but I'm running out of time and patience to keep tweaking nginx and firewall rules every few weeks.

I had initial success with https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away as a more powerful and more reasonable self-hosted alternative to Cloudflare than Anubis, but it seems to have gone unmaintained. There is also https://github.com/dgl/haphash if you run HAProxy, though I have not tried it.

On that note, does anyone know what happened to Ted Unangst aka tedu? He was a prolific OpenBSD developer and blogger, and he had developed one of his own simple solutions https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/anticrawl, but all his web properties seem to have gone away recently...?

Re:A GTK4 SSH-askpass in Zig on Saturday August 01, 2026 @10:28AM (#49134760)
Any reason you don't use `pinentry-gnome3` from the `pinentry` package? Your wrapper is clever but doesn't work with gpg-agent.
Re:Morten Linderud resigning from Arch Linux development team on Saturday August 01, 2026 @10:19AM (#49134696)
Oh this is hard to read. Foxboron was a massively positive force for Arch Linux and the Linux ecosystem in general! I discovered his ssh-tpm-agent https://github.com/Foxboron/ssh-tpm-agent a few months ago and it is really nice!
Re:Mitchellh starts a new company: Superlogical on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:57PM (#49105985)
I've never heard of that Superset. I've used the Apache business analytics one though: https://github.com/apache/superset. Unfortunate name collision...
Re:Mitchellh starts a new company: Superlogical on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @11:54PM (#49105966)
I came to say something similar. On mobile it looks really nice and matches the highlights elsewhere. Cool subtle visual effect.
Re:How to Block Some of the Bots on Sunday July 26, 2026 @09:14PM (#49064087)
Sadly, go-away https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away doesn't seem to be maintained anymore.
This is really cool. We have them in Kenya too. https://www.colobusconservation.org/how-to-build-a-colobridg...
Re:The World's 2,400 Castles on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @12:23AM (#49001872)
I think it's cool. Having lived in Jordan for a while I see there are some missing castles there. I will look into adding them in Wikidata.
Re:Firefox 153.0 Beta on Monday July 20, 2026 @01:02PM (#48981541)
Awesome! JPEG-XL support is here. I enabled it via the new "Firefox Labs" section in the settings, then tested on https://jpegxl.info/resources/jpeg-xl-test-page.html without a restart.
Re:An Update on the scraper situation on Saturday July 11, 2026 @03:29AM (#48869647)
The excessive scraping and ignoring robots.txt only breaks the informal social contract established over the past decades of the open internet.

The real problem is the companies offering money to developers if they include unrelated SDKs in their calculator or flashlight (for example) applications. Those SDKs add functionality to incorporate those devices into a network that can be used for scraping. The traffic is little, but is distributed over millions of residential devices all over the world, making it difficult to categorize or block. That should be illegal, and that's what Google et al can be expected to be policing on their app stores.

Reminds me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Re:Response to AI slop is from Robin Williams on Sunday June 28, 2026 @06:40AM (#48706154)
In season 1 episode 2 of The Audacity JoAnne tells Duncan that "information is not insight" and that's a similar argument to this.
Re:Underarm Bowling Incident of 1981 on Saturday June 27, 2026 @02:03PM (#48700344)
I was reminded of this hilarious skit about English sports. https://youtu.be/E_6d3JBBo4s
In web Outlook I *very" often begin typing as some element is loading a popover and end up hitting some key that archives the message and leaves me scrambling to click Undo. I guess it's usually some contact comes into focus of my mouse and starts trying to load the org chart or whatever. Ughhhhhh.
Re:GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17 on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @01:53AM (#48566286)
Ah interesting. They use the "FUTO source first" license. https://github.com/futo-org/android-keyboard/blob/master/LIC...

Open source with limitations on commercial use.

What are "guardrails" in an LLM? Is it part of the system prompt, like a long list of "if the user asks about xxxx, xxxx, or xxxx, tell them xxxx"?

On a related note, I don't use LLMs at all, but I tried to use DeepSeek last week to help me fix a webpack dependency issue in an Angular project. After two queries or so I got logged out and banned. Is that "guardrails"?

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