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arantius

arantius on Hacker News

Re:An ad-free Android TV on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:40PM (#50172373)
I use wolphin. Biggest thing for me is the seeking. I press < or > and it seeks, now. Default Android Jellyfin client seeking is really unpleasant. Some other smaller niceties, too.
Re:America.gov – Whatever you need from government, start here on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:22PM (#49913838)
This is just language being language. Humans are lazy, and over-abbreviate and over-shorten. "United States of America" is long. There are a few ways to shorten that, and they're all used.
Re:Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the fil... on Sunday September 27, 2026 @10:25AM (#49866904)
No one will ever see this (probably) but I remembered this comment, and just had this experience:

I've been learning the eBay developer APIs. Recently (i.e. within the past few hours) I looked up the "Browse API" specifically. My first or second try failed so I typed just [ebay brows] and didn't find it! But when I finished [ebay browse] that document (within ebay.com and titled "Browse API | eBay Develo...") did show up!

I can't reproduce now so I can only guess but it's possible this was a timing thing. I was typing several things, and changing/re-typing "as soon as" I did or did not see what I wanted to show up. But there was definitely a moment where I'd expect "that page I just had open an hour ago" to be at the top, but instead search suggestions (ugh, search in the address bar ...) were all that was showing.

Re:Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the fil... on Saturday September 19, 2026 @01:14PM (#49768335)
For things I access often, the Firefox address bar does function like a near-perfect search for me. Some things I type [ab cd] and the page with the words _starting_ ab and cd pops right up.

A while back I looked up a manual for an old Singer sewing machine, which turned out to be the model 15. So I typed [sin 15] in the address bar and -- yep, first result! A week ago I looked into the game Metroid Dread. Typed [met dre] and two relevant pages from my history came up, immediately.

I don't know what you mean by "100% unique match" but, this feature works for me, and in fact I regularly use it and find it very worthwhile.

Re:Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory on Saturday August 15, 2026 @08:42AM (#49310101)
> ... fast/audible switching between notes in a chord ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpeggio

Many of my favorite chiptunes use this technique.

Re:Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere on Thursday July 23, 2026 @12:54PM (#49024698)
I guess they've never heard of select-and-drag? Which isn't universal, but is common. And should be universal. I use it frequently. So many one-time-password forms break it in various ways, like wanting the value to go into six separate input boxes (why is this so common!?).
Re:LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs on Monday March 30, 2026 @08:47PM (#47581493)
This is a fantastic claim. I've been making web pages since the '90s and using web browsers just as long, and I can't think of a single instance of this. Perhaps it existed and I never knew about it? Can you provide some evidence for where and when this was the case?
Re:Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers in 1993 on Saturday February 28, 2026 @01:52PM (#47198861)
I've thought a little bit about this, and I agree that always on is a big part of the problem. I think if I were the time lord, I'd aim for crippling wireless computer networking. I think I want everything we have computing and internet wise, if it's not available wirelessly, and thus always.
Re:Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @08:04AM (#46974458)
I can't answer for Americans for a whole, but I live in the USA and I pay with credit card by default. My personal reasons:

* Cards are convenient. No need to go get cash, no change at each transaction to manage carrying around. * Cards give a discount in the form of "cash back". (As mentioned elsewhere, this really just inflates the cost of everything for everyone, but I might as well claw it back.) * I don't actually go "into debt". I pay off my card (automatically!) every month, and incur no interest charges. I use it like a slightly deferred debit card with benefits.

The last bullet being significant to your point: I don't "spend money on [a] loan".

Re:Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:42PM (#46740561)
What prevents it is that the web in 2026 is very different than it was when OG pagerank became popular (because it was good). Back then, many pages linked to many other pages. Now a significant amount of content (newer content, which is often what people want) is either only in video form, or in a walled garden with no links, neither in or out of the walls. Or locked up in an app, not out on the general/indexable/linkable web. (Yes, of course, a lot of the original web is still there. But it's now a minority at best.)

Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.

IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.

Re:Ford kills the All-Electric F-150 on Wednesday December 17, 2025 @04:53PM (#46306085)
For one piece of anecdata:

I drive a hybrid with a weird size/shape 12V battery. (It uses the traction battery for starting, so only needs a smaller 12V for e.g. accessories and simple bootstrapping of electronics.) Though I normally do my own maintenance at this scale, when it went bad I went to the dealer because they both had the right battery and didn't charge much more than parts. Plus drove me home after dropoff, and drove me back there when it was done (a few hours later? fuzzy memory), at no extra cost.

They're not all awful?

Re:Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to de-enshittify the... on Friday November 14, 2025 @01:25PM (#45930005)
IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.
Re:Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to de-enshittify the... on Friday November 14, 2025 @01:23PM (#45929980)
For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.

Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.

Re:The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia on Thursday November 13, 2025 @11:35AM (#45916943)
A penny is less than 3% copper (since 1982).
Re:Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail on Tuesday July 22, 2025 @02:45PM (#44651375)
Receiving mail correctly at the address on the label isn't a problem with the post office.
Re:A new, 200% faster DeepSeek R1-0528 variant appears from German lab on Monday July 07, 2025 @10:17AM (#44490619)
This is an appropriate usage of the word "variant", and applies to anything that can have several varieties.
Re:Iconography of the PuTTY Tools on Friday March 14, 2025 @07:45PM (#43368521)
Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but

https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+vs+spy&udm=2

An image search will show you plenty copies of the inspiration for this hat.

Re:What Happened to the N in Restaurateur? on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @11:16AM (#43173787)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=restaura...

Similar in Google trends, but

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

Much smaller difference, when limited to the USA.

Re:Researchers have identified a total of 6 vulnerabilities in rsync on Friday January 17, 2025 @05:32PM (#42743975)
For a concrete example: https://www.gentoo.org/support/rsync-mirrors/

Gentoo's package manager most typically updates over rsync.

Re:Cuttle – a MTG like game using a standard 52 card deck on Monday January 13, 2025 @08:54PM (#42692506)
I discovered this back in 2015 (by the version history) and put together a "one sheet" (two sided) version of the rules. The side with the card effects is especially useful.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rRIiRebARNIadQaMZgimKYvW...

Re:ELKS: Linux for 16-bit Intel Processors on Monday January 06, 2025 @04:50PM (#42616346)
With so little context in your question I'll reply with

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project

I remember using this in the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). A linux distro designed to be a router, and to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.

Re:WireGuard: Beyond the most basic configuration on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @01:21PM (#42248362)
Because this misunderstanding and limitation is so common, BitTorrent has workarounds in place.

See https://superuser.com/a/1548724

Re:Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @12:47PM (#41710910)
> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.

FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.

Re:Coq will be renamed into 'The Rocq Prover' on Wednesday August 07, 2024 @04:01PM (#41184795)
I'm honestly guessing here because I'm not an insider and I don't naturally understand what's going on with this made up word, but I think it's:

1. Name is "coq" which is pronounced like "cock". Tee hee hee I'm so funny I made you say a bad word. (Opinions can differ, but this word being bad isn't a terribly rare opinion IMO.)

2. Obviously, that means Q (at the end of a word!? *) is pronounced like a hard K.

3. Enough people don't like being "forced" to say that word, pick a new name, new name is "rocq". I was confused like you for a while until I figured out the above. If q->k, then this is pronounced "rock".

4. New name learner: Why in the world would you pronounce a Q (at the end of a word) as a K? (and/or) How am I supposed to pronounce that name? I've never seen a word like that before.

5. Oh, tee hee, because of an immature joke from the old name. (Have to explain the old name and make the innuendo, to make the new name make any sense. And the new name makes so little sense, it would be very natural to ask how it came about.)

* https://scrabblewordfinder.org/words-ending-in/q Which never happens -- have you heard of any of these words before? I haven't. (Besides I guess "tranq" which is really an abbreviation.)

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