Hacker News Reader

RunningDroidon The One Question I Can't Stand at Restaurants ("What's your phone number?")

Fastrac gas stations have been doing it too, apparently they're telling the employees they'll close the store if they don't get enough numbers.

RunningDroidon Show HN: 2026 Midterms Tracker blends polls and Kalshi/Poymarket odds

s/Poymarket/Polymarket/

RunningDroidon Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

That's way the non-smart walk-in coolers work; every 12 hours they turn off the fans and heat the cooling element for about 15 minutes to melt any ice that's built up on it.

Ice anywhere else is treated as a separate problem and turning the cooler off to fix it is not typically an available option.

RunningDroidon The Surprising Reasons China Is Skeptical of A.I. Safety Calls

Paywall skip: https://archive.ph/PPrPh

RunningDroidon What Happens if the A.I. Bubble Bursts

https://archive.ph/ZqBF0

RunningDroidon Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock

There's a non-zero chance the "floor" is just plywood laid across some of the beams and the holes are from people missing the beam in areas there's no plywood

RunningDroidon List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games

On the topic of copyright expiration, "It's a Wonderful Life" would have been lost if the current copyright regime had been in place when it was produced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life

RunningDroidon The US techlash is real

https://archive.ph/lh1ZO

RunningDroidon Ntfy – open-source Push to Mobile

I've been looking for exactly this to run on my Librem 5, Thanks!

RunningDroidon A Teen Reporter Searched for His Community in the Epstein Files. Adults Freaked

Archive link: https://archive.ph/O66GM

RunningDroidon Veritasium – why he still gets views [video]

To clarify: this is about Veritasium, not by Veritasium.

RunningDroidon USAID Cuts Killed People. That's the Truth

https://archive.ph/rmhJl

RunningDroidon Amodei told lawmakers that open-source AI is moving down a "dangerous path"

The statement is from 2023 but the post is from June 28th.

Xcancel link: https://xcancel.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695

RunningDroidon Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi

You might like xdg-ninja‡ then, it tells you what program put which item in your $HOME and how to move it to ~/.config or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

‡: https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

RunningDroidon Company Will Add Phone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to ALPRs

It should be, but the last time the US got new privacy regulation it was because an employee at a VHS rental store embarrassed a member of Congress by telling people what movies he'd rented.

RunningDroidon Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India

Hint: The birth rate of a population is inversely correlated with wealth.

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

RunningDroidon Oura says it gets government demands for user data

Many times GadgetBridge* can be used instead of the official app

*https://codeberg.org/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge

RunningDroidon Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

> They literally call it an "AI revolution."

People proclaiming an "AI revolution" seem to have inspired at least one song:

https://genius.com/Worldview-ai-revolution-lyrics

RunningDroidon Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

> I don't have any reason to believe that similar projects won't work for the new version.

Sc-controller theoretically works, somebody with the hardware has to test though:

https://github.com/C0rn3j/sc-controller/issues/98

RunningDroidon Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license

You may be able to use SC-Controller: https://github.com/C0rn3j/sc-controller

Note: the Windows support is a WIP and the devs don't have the new Steam Controller

RunningDroidon Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

I've heard Turkey's age verification law jumps straight to "no internet access without ID"

RunningDroidon whohas – Command-line utility for cross-distro, cross-repository package search

> Probably nowadays this gets done in Node, parsing the package search websites. Preferably, this would be done via an API though.

Repology provides an API but it's unstable: https://repology.org/api/v1

RunningDroidon Electrostatics and High Voltage Links

If you view the page on the Internet Archive all the links point to archived copies, you may have to step back in time to get something nicer than a 404 though

https://web.archive.org/web/20260424095139/http://amasci.com...

RunningDroidon WebUSB Extension for Firefox

Firefox on Android doesn't support Native Messaging‡, so no, this extension won't work

‡: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

RunningDroidon Bluetooth tracker in a postcard and mailed to a warship exposed its location

The $10 Chinese ones can pretend to be an AirTag or Tile:

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/no-privacy-cloning-the-airta...

https://hackaday.com/2025/03/03/hijacking-airtag-infrastruct...

RunningDroidon EPA Moves to Ease Coal Ash Regulations for Power Plants

Archive link: https://archive.ph/MUD19

Archive.org doesn't bypass the login-wall

RunningDroidon Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons

There's been some progress on killing Citizens United:

https://transparentelection.org/

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/08/07/transparent-elect...

RunningDroidon The difficulty of making sure your website is broken

> Vanadium, Chrome and Firefox (all for Android) all accept all the revoked certificates... But revoked.badssl.com is considered revoked

Firefox Beta (150.0b7) is accepting all of the revoked certs on my device

RunningDroidon Am I German or Autistic?

Do you have German heritage or live in an area that had a large number of German immigrants at one point?

RunningDroidon Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO

> * Stadia SDK: developer.stadia.com (offline)

Stadia is completely shutdown and Archive.org has no captures of that subdomain so any content there is likely lost.