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Comment by SergeAx | Hacker News Reader

But why do you need an app where webpage is more than enough?

Because it cost like $10 and 5 minutes, could be set up by non-web-plumbers, and was pretty out of the box.

Aside: this is one of the biggest lessons of my adult life. Just because I could make something doesn't mean I should make something. Learning to value your time is a very underdeveloped skill.

But...but.. something.. something Stallman...vendor lock-in...closed-platforms bad...something.

If it is a sarcasm, then please mind that original comment author got really humped by this app's vendor when it stopped working. Maybe Stallman got something right after all?

It didn't stop working. It just doesn't get updated anymore.

In Stallman thinking though, he doesn't have the freedom to fix or update it himself.

(I don't think Stallman's ideas are necessarily right for everybody, but I'm glad he's doing his thing right out in his end of the bell curve to counteract the opposite end of the software philosophy craziness...)

Under Stallmans model the developer works for free, and I guess they need a second job to pay the rent. Ah but GPL doesn’t mean free as in beer? Oh yes for practical purposes it does mean exactly that. Outlier business models excepted of course!

Actually no. Under Stallman's model it is perfectly okay to demand and earn payment for your work, but results still would be free, quote, as in "free speech", not "free beer", unquote. Did you see bounty offers in open source repos' issues?

I really don't understand, is sounds too ignorant and almost arrogant.

Web browser doesn't need to be set up, it is already included with iPad (or any Android device, or any laptop or desktop, or your smart TV, smart fridge or smart watch).

You need to configure your app during first launch pointing it to your data source, and maybe entering login and password. It is exactly the same amount of hussle compared to opening web site and make it default homepage of your browser.

I don't even want to talk about money, it's totally irrelevant, $10 or $0.

The hard/technical part isn't launching the browser. It's about building a continuously updating status page for that browser to display.

One more thing, if I want a webpage, I will just write plugin for this: https://github.com/netdata/netdata

It is meant as system monitor but it can chew up preatty much anything. And it is fast and lean. Really fast.

Have you found any tools for writing custom dashboard in netdata?

The docs are really light and custom dashboards seems to involve hacking the default HTML and pulling out all the components (javascript/divs) you need. I thought about writing my own, but have too many projects already.

Set up netdata, check which plugin serves the type of chart you want, find shortest of that type, make a copy and hack it untill it works. I was doing it a while back so I cant remember the details but it wasnt something special to do... Ignore the docs, existing plugins are all the documentation you need.

Note well that it will silently send lots of information about your machine and browsing/usage to Google:

https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/7366

They added a tiny mention in the installer when I complained, but they still don’t mention how to opt out. The opt out doesn’t disable the spyware in the webpage, either.

I have a patched version (sneak/netdata) on dockerhub, if you like. The issue is that it’s just not that great of a system monitor. Looking at, say, a “last 24h” chart is difficult. It’s a good and pretty replacement for top/htop/iptraf/iotop, but that’s pretty much it. You still need a graphite or prometheus or mrtg/rrdtool ultimately for serious understanding beyond “what happened in the last few minutes”.

There are 17 lines of text output to verify the installation choices, of them 5 are devoted to opting out of the anonymous telemetry. The wording seems clear.

  NOTE:
  Anonymous usage stats will be collected and sent to Google Analytics.
  To opt-out, pass --disable-telemetry option to the installer or export
  the enviornment variable DO_NOT_TRACK to a non-zero or non-empty value
  (e.g: export DO_NOT_TRACK=1).

Ahh, nice to see they updated it. Too bad they're still not actually getting consent.

This message appears before a y/n confirmation prompt - i.e. explicit user consent.

The y/n is for install. It’s saying “do you want to install with telemetry, xor not install at all.”

That’s like those EULAs on websites that say “by continuing to use our site, you agree never to sue us, to surrender your first born to us, and to never speak ill of us for any reason, et c.”

That’s simply not affirmative consent. Imagine if you tried that in life! “Anyone who stays in this room after 5pm is consenting to be groped! Proceed at your own risk.”

That’s not how any of this works. Stating your intentions to assume and potentially violate consent is not obtaining consent.

I took another look, it's not a y/n prompt as I wrote before. It lists all the settings and asks for confirmation. Each of the other settings requires a trip to the docs to find out how to change before re-running. The telemetry is given special prominence with instructions about how to change before the prompt.

Also worth mentioning: they are lying when they say it’s anonymous. It includes your IP address, which is a globally unique identifier. I believe it also transmits an installation ID, which persists on the machine.

It is absolutely not anonymous.

I doubt that my IP address is a globally unique identifier. I can think of 15-20 devices that are sharing it now. Advertising networks jump through a lot of hoops to tie those devices together in a small cluster of user profiles.

How does the installation ID identify a person?

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