HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Jskewel

220 karma · joined August 9, 2026

submissionscomments
Jskewel··on Google cleared 300 hectares of Finnish forest
Yes I regret typing it, I just get frustrated.
Jskewel··on Google cleared 300 hectares of Finnish forest
Just a note that forestry in Finland is managed, this means it is planted and harvested on a rotating basis. There seems to have been a huge messup here without securing the proper permits first. But any reporting you read describing it as an environmental problem will be nonsense as the trees would have been harvested at some point anyway.

However I understand that data-centres have become a political issue, and therefore my facts will be meaningless to a half of readers.

Jskewel··on DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests
Is there any way to test this without an API key?

I am curious if my large website is in their search results. My company charges $1 per page crawled of our website, and the only traffic that worms through our firewall is using hacked residential ISPs. I really need to know who to send the (large!) bill to.

Jskewel··on I Became a Citizen of Japan
Can't believe I just learned this, thanks!
Jskewel··on Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome)
I will switch to Safari immediately once they expand the number of languages supported by auto-translate. The current selection is very limited, and almost clownish for 2026.
Jskewel··on Web Search API
The big USA ones do, and it would be madness for them to do otherwise.

But that's meaningless because 99% of AI crawlers are "bad bots" which ignore robots.txt and use domestic IPs to circumvent blocks.

Jskewel··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
Saying the Chinese and US governments are the same is so absurd it doesn't warrant a reply.
Jskewel··on America.gov
Where are you seeing those claims?
Jskewel··on Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
I think we're fighting against the modern world here. My 4S did and still does take the last great iPhone photos, before the processing pipeline ruined it for me, with over-sharpening, smeared noise-reduction and color flattening.

Thankfully we have access to raw DNGs in phones after the 4S, so we can create our own image processing pipeline.

But for "out of the camera" JPGs, the 4S is still supreme.

Jskewel··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
Adsense has been a nightmare for us.

They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:

azurestaticapps.net

azurewebsites.net

herokuapp.com

ondigitalocean.app

digitaloceanspaces.com

netlify.app

Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.

Jskewel··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
Impossible. The majority of websites firewall automated crawler traffic (because of the rise of the bots), only making exceptions for the largest search engines. There is no possibility of starting a new crawler.
Jskewel··on iPhone Duo
4%-6% of iPhone sales, but not of profits.
Jskewel··on Bing Wallpaper showing Ad for Harry Potter and Fantastic beasts box set
Satya Nadella said he was going to make Windows less cr*p. Having a wallpaper advert is clownish and grotesque, so did he lie?
Jskewel··on Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
We have the absurd situation where human-made websites are by default blocking AI training bots (see Cloudflare etc), but AI is creating websites solely to be fed to AI training bots.

So within a few years, most of the ingested website content will be AI.

Is it inevitable that AI companies are going to have start paying to access human content?

Jskewel··on EVE Online moves to Python 3
I didn't realise using <> made me old-school, time for a find-and-replace in my PHP codebase!
Jskewel··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Not nearly fast enough on 32GB, would like to be wrong though.
Jskewel··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
The M6 is useless for AI. Is there any model which is actually useful and fast on 32GB?
Jskewel··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
PPWR is an EU catastrophe.

Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries.

Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.

The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented. I can assure you it is difficult to ignore a law that comes with a €200000 fine for non-compliance.

Jskewel··on Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
"there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end"

OK doomer

Jskewel··on Casio F-B100W-1A
It's almost unbelievable that a step-tracker can have 2 years battery.
Jskewel··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
With Cloudflare you can set a rule to block traffic that identifies as Googlebot but is not a "verified bot", ie is not from the proper IP range.
Jskewel··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
I'm happy to unblock China from accessing my website, once China does something about the millions of daily hack attempts originating from that country.
Jskewel··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
For those suggesting fail2ban as a solution, that's dinosaur software from the palaeolithic. If you have a website of any size then the number of bots will overwhelm the block list in days with their millions of unique IPs.
Jskewel··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
Cloudflare analytics is great, but you need to filter by edge status code 200 to see the actual real traffic that was allowed through their firewall.