Hacker News: Elfener

New comment by Elfener in "AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs"

Elfener — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:43:47 +0000

> You can install third party stores and apps on iOS without a waiting period (in places with decent consumer rights)

Doesn't apple still "verify" (and can decide not to allow) those supposedly 3rd party applications?

New comment by Elfener in "Making big downloads resumable in Firefox"

Elfener — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:51:37 +0000

I think firefox's search is just cursed. The option that you want to only enable for a single search ("Whole Words") remains enabled, while the option that you want to permanently enable ("Match Diacritics") just turns itself off after every search. (Yes, I know for the latter, you can set findbar.matchdiacritics =1)

New comment by Elfener in "Making big downloads resumable in Firefox"

Elfener — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:45:17 +0000

There's some shady stuff about JDownloader, afaik mainly that building it from source requires some java binaries that don't have their source available anywhere.

New comment by Elfener in "Why should I have to pay more for buses if I don't use a smartphone?"

Elfener — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:04:18 +0000

I find it weird that you have to pay every time you get on a bus in the UK it seems?

Are there no passes? e.g. in Budapest I have a monthly public transport pass and I just board the vehicle when it arrives without having to validate or purchase a ticket every time.

New comment by Elfener in "Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees"

Elfener — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:47:24 +0000

That is much better, but you're still paying visa/mastercard some percentage fee for a service which should be provided by e.g. the central bank.

New comment by Elfener in "F-Droid 2.0"

Elfener — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:34:55 +0000

Yes, but the ability to install any software isn't. goggle can still decide to allow only "official" apps in """3rd party""" stores.

New comment by Elfener in "Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers"

Elfener — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:00:50 +0000

> But imagine for a second they did do that. You get the API, all the info is there.

> Why do you need AI then?

(from this HN comment, worth a read in full: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679585)

New comment by Elfener in "Disruption with Some GitHub Services"

Elfener — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:06:36 +0000

Ah so that's why I got a random "github-merge-queue Bot removed this pull request from the merge queue due to no response for status checks"

New comment by Elfener in "I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases"

Elfener — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:29:17 +0000

> skipping the expensive phone network and re-routing calls over the cheap internet instead.

I find this such a bad idea, if I want to use the cheap internet for a call I would use an internet based voice call system directly, rather than messing around with telephone numbers and I guess potentially accidentally doing an expensive phone call (same with RCS/SMS vs. just using an internet-based chat directly).

New comment by Elfener in "old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login"

Elfener — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:15:44 +0000

It seems to be random, I tried it a few times during the last few weeks due to people talking about it, and sometimes it lets me use old.reddit.com, while other times it redirects to the login page.

New comment by Elfener in "World Train Map – 1247 train routes around the world"

Elfener — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:37:57 +0000

https://openrailwaymap.app/ (the vector tiles version) is much better, I don't know why people keep recommending the older, raster tiles version.

New comment by Elfener in "On non-rooted Android 17, ADB uninstall of system apps fails"

Elfener — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:09:07 +0000

GrapheneOS or other custom ROMs don't solve the actual problem that you can't just buy a smartphone and install any operating system like you can with an actual computer, despite technically being one.

Also, GrapheneOS supports device attestation (the non-google kind at least), which is still ridiculous as such systems have no benefit to people, only to technofeudalist corporations.

New comment by Elfener in "EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation"

Elfener — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:20:50 +0000

And it's not just desktop _linux_ that's not allowed, but any desktop operating system, since this only works with "smartphones" not general-purpose computers.

(and of course even if they were to support computers, an age/id verification system either won't work at all or only work to be abused by those in power)

New comment by Elfener in "Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant"

Elfener — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:49:07 +0000

I've read that in the case of Paks a retrofit doesn't make sense because the entire thing is so old and needs to be rebuilt anyway.

However, hopefully, they change the plans for (stalled project) Paks 2, because that would've used the same cooling system as the first one.

New comment by Elfener in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

Elfener — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:44:40 +0000

That second quote is truly a sentence of all time. It is not possible to use this [computer payment system] on a computer...

New comment by Elfener in "VLC for Unity now supported on Linux"

Elfener — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:40:26 +0000

This is a very big oversight in that EU law.

Allowing third-party "app stores" is completely useless when all apps must be approved by the operating system company.

It's also being abused by google (technically, will be, very soon), I guess they saw that since the legal framework for this kind of thing has now been written, they can do it too.

New comment by Elfener in "The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)"

Elfener — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:12:51 +0000

The same thing happened to me in school (during a test...), except I tried to type & on a hungarian keyboard, which is of course also altgr+c.

New comment by Elfener in "AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs"

Elfener — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:09:01 +0000

I would be fine with this if it meant CPUs became slightly cheaper, but we know that's not going to happen.

And there's been talk that now the so-called "AI companies" will start using more CPUs as well, due to "personal agentic agents", so I hope that people won't be priced out of CPUs too...

New comment by Elfener in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

Elfener — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:02:40 +0000

Very weird that this is coming from Google, given that they made their phone platform specifically to not let you install your own operating system. And now, they're making it illegal to install custom apps too: https://keepandroidopen.org/

New comment by Elfener in "A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones"

Elfener — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:59:03 +0000

They're literally doing the opposite, right now you can't install a custom operating system, but in the near future you won't be able to install custom apps either: https://keepandroidopen.org/