HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cocoafleck

41 karma · joined February 26, 2021

submissionscomments
cocoafleck··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.

Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... is a source I would recommend checking out if you are curious.

cocoafleck··on About the browser choice screen in the EU
I was tempted not to respond, but honestly this comment makes me slightly angry. As someone who is young, and works on software this comment does not seem very worldly to me. Have you seen the US government, Japan, and other places struggling to still switch away from antiquated technologies? Yes, they are partially incompetent, but also there is a certain level of justifiable trust in the system working in its current form.

> Grandpa also needs to do his banking online, his taxes, needs to manage his online identity, car registration, medical things.

No, they don't. They can use paper, phone, and fax still (at least in the USA). One of my grandparent's did this until very recently (when they sadly passed away) for most things. I was at one point told by the same grandparent that the "the familiar 'red yellow green blue'" you so describe they suspected was a virus and they don't understand how it appeared on their computer. Another grandparent struggled with the concept of folders (as in file explorers), and when they first received their a phone would shut it down and then was confused on why it wouldn't receive phone calls. These people were successful and educated (they had gone to college and used their degrees in their professional life). They just don't care about technology and when Apple makes a choice for them on the default browser they are happy.

cocoafleck··on Lenovo profits sink 75% as PC demand continues nosedive
I don't see any ads outside of the app store on Android (and obviously the web browser). Microsoft puts them in the start menu which seems very different to me (I would be very angry if Android put them in the launcher). I do customise my set up a great deal so I am curious to know if your experience matches mine.
cocoafleck··on A search engine for your personal network of high-quality websites
Well, I don't know what to say other than that:

a) I want to import my bookmarks

b) I can't enter any of the domains I care about as I mostly have obscure tastes

due to the above two issues I was unable to actually see how the product felt.

cocoafleck··on Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak
Slack still has .deb files you just need to scroll down and find the small button for it. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/downloads/linux search for "Download .DEB app". Last I checked they also have an Ubuntu only dependency that has a Debian equivalent but they don't list it so it won't install unless you modify the dependency list. I used the following script to do so, but I haven't updated in a while.

    #!/bin/sh
    if [ "$#" -eq 1 ]; then\
      tmp_dir="$(mktemp -d)"
      dpkg-deb -R "$1" "${tmp_dir}" && sed -i 's/libappindicator3-1/libayatana-appindicator3-1/g' "${tmp_dir}/DEBIAN/control" && dpkg-deb -b "${tmp_dir}" slack-fixed.deb
    else
      echo "Read it"
    fi
cocoafleck··on Repurposing an old Android phone as a web server
T-Mobile has open ports on IPv6 (at least as of a few months ago). I was curious, and tried hosting a web site from my phone, and it worked flawlessly (assuming you are willing to abandon IPv4).
cocoafleck··on Alexandria Search
I was trying to learn more about the ranking algorithm that Alexandria uses, and I was a bit confused by the documentation on Github for it. Would I be correct in that it uses "Harmonic Centrality" (http://vigna.di.unimi.it/ftp/papers/AxiomsForCentrality.pdf) at least for part of the algorithm?
cocoafleck··on Yandex Provides Update on Impact of Current Developments
Google also censors, however, they censor different topics. They mostly filter content related to piracy, suicide, and misinformation sources.
cocoafleck··on Less secure apps and your Google Account
As a note: Google requires two-factor authentication to be enabled to use this feature.
cocoafleck··on U.S. Senate Panel Approves Antitrust Bill That Would Allow Sideloading
Amy Klobuchar if I understand this page correctly (although there are 11 other cosponsors it says if you click the all information button on the page) https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/299...
cocoafleck··on A New Search Engine That Doesn’t Rank Sites Based on Their Authority
Qwant also uses Bing.
cocoafleck··on PLOS2021: ISO-C became unusable for operating systems
I'm very curious to learn more about this as I thought it was easily possible to opt out of the overly aggressive defaults of GCC, Clang, and the like.
cocoafleck··on Americans Have No Idea What the Supply Chain Is
Minimum wage is closer, environmental standards are somewhat similar, and laws can be passed on a federal level. It is just as easy for workers to change states as businesses while internationally it is easier for businesses to change locations than workers.
cocoafleck··on Cloudflare's inaccessible browser contradicts the company's mission
I have never seen captchas from another CDN that I can recall. I believe that is partially responsible for people's opinions.
cocoafleck··on Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation
I felt a bit queasy reading that.
cocoafleck··on Online ID / age verification: the death of online search
I agree, but keep in mind that children grow up in a society, and make friends in school. You are influencing their relationships by restricting their internet access.
cocoafleck··on Where did my 256 GB go? Mobile storage Analysis [pdf]
I don't know what the paper used, but I like DiskUsage from F-Droid.
cocoafleck··on List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots
I did a quick study on an Epson Ecotank printer 3 or 4 years ago, and I found "random" colored pixels that were added (for example a single cyan dot in a large circle of pure cyan changed to a pure magenta dot... like that is a natural mistake if it occurs multiple times on a single page with different colors, and different positions), fuzzed black lines (not really fuzz, but holding data in the "noise"), and a few horizontal lines shifted by a few pixels every once in a while. So I believe that most of the other changes are real.

Edit: If you want to check your printer then: print something to a piece of really white paper, scan it, and then use a diff tool like in Gimp after resizing it to easily spot the differences. If you are using off white paper you can scan it also before you print on it, and attempt to remove the paper's natural color variations before "diff"ing it with the digital version.

cocoafleck··on Brave Search beta
You don't seem to support the !ddg, and !duckduckgo bangs. See https://search.brave.com/search?q=!ddg+test nor do you support bangs in the middle of queries such as https://search.brave.com/search?q=example+!rust+example
cocoafleck··on The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-interferes-with-its-... I'm sure that the title tells you that the article has an opinion (not unbiased), but I think it is a useful source.
cocoafleck··on Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’
I believe that people (usually) choose to communicate with faces, but just as people can lie with words they can lie with faces.
cocoafleck··on Google can't pass its own page speed test
Well clearly we can't remove analytics, and if we changed analytics to a different (faster) provider someone would have a cow... We could lower our image sizes, but let's be honest that would result in the dreaded JPGing. Our Javascript is a hand crafted wonder that we just rebuilt for the 6th time in the past decade in a new modern better framework so clearly that cannot be the problem. Therefore I'm leaning towards adding a CDN to lower the first byte time, or yelling at our DNS provider to speed up their side. /s
cocoafleck··on Let’s Talk About Hot Tub Streams
I think it makes them feel appreciated when others are thanked as they now feel that they are part of the group (who is being thanked). Their individual donation doesn't need much praise if any. I agree with one of the other posters that it is related to loneliness. I could be mistaken obviously.
cocoafleck··on The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences
I realize many people don't care about credit cards spying on them, but I do value cryptocurrencies offering alternatives. From what I understand the Apple Credit Card was somewhat of a similar attempt (Goldman Sachs isn't allowed to sell the information). I'm not saying that the benefits outweigh the costs, but it does seem that they allow for more than money laundering, and speculation.
cocoafleck··on Credit Card Ads Targeted by Age, Violating Facebook’s Anti-Discrimination Policy
While technically what you say appears to be true, Facebook's actions still violate the spirit of avoiding that type of advertising in my opinion. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/28/facebook-...
cocoafleck··on The last generation of typewriter repairmen (2010)
Maybe I misunderstand your intentions, but PS/2 to USB converters are fairly standard devices from what I understand that are cheap, and available. No need for reverse engineering :)
cocoafleck··on Show HN: Shepherd.com – Discover books in a new way, like wandering a bookstore
My gut tells me that that patent falls afoul of the "with a computer" problem (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/supreme-court-sm...). Replace computer with human and they sound ridiculous.
cocoafleck··on WinGet is terrible, I want AppGet back
That is mostly due to the company (Docker) not doing it the usual way. Normally they should have a build server, and then have a few line install. First is to add their repository, second is to install the software. From then on you just use your normal distributions update system. (Such as for example https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=hardware....) The real issue is that many companies choose to not do it the right way, and instead come up with weird new installation ways. When they do the same on Windows it just works because there is only one Windows, but there are multiple Linux distributions. As Windows begins to support Arm, and Apple moves to Arm (meaning more targets to support), I suspect that currently Linux specific issues will become more universal.
cocoafleck··on Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.
If you specifically mean files you can try https://www.sharedrop.io to share files in the browser (I'm not affiliated in any way, just an occasional user.)
cocoafleck··on End to End Encrypted, Private Search
Startpage is similar to what you are describing. (Supposedly private, and backed by Google search.)
Page 1 of 2Next →