Hacker News: Hackbraten

New comment by Hackbraten in "Firefox Enterprise"

Hackbraten — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:21:34 +0000

> preventing access to sites that distract employees and have zero business value (pornography, gambling, etc.)...

This is simplistic and almost certainly leads to overblocking.

Blocking a gambling domain sounds innocent on the surface but what if the gambling company publishes an article in their corporate blog to share how they solved a specific scaling problem or what money data modelling lessons they've learned?

It has happened to me more than once that I tried to read an article that was immediately relevant to my work but was denied access due to naive domain overblocking.

Please stop normalizing this shit.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Amazon introduces a redesigned Kindle family"

Hackbraten — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:25:05 +0000

> with downloads you can copy to any device.

I don’t see a download option. There used to be one, but they killed it two years ago or so.

And Amazon can still remove the book from your library anytime they want.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Mozilla shutting down Solo AI website creator"

Hackbraten — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:27:28 +0000

On the other hand, the browser built by that hapless, ineffectual competitor works decently enough for daily use imho.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours"

Hackbraten — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:24:45 +0000

One day, RAM prices will settle again, and the USA-China race will probably keep giving us fresh models to self-host (weights only, but still.)

That's not too far from owning it.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Exfiltrate Your Weights"

Hackbraten — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 06:42:28 +0000

Joke’s on you, my phone always gets Turnstile’d

New comment by Hackbraten in "OpenJev"

Hackbraten — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:09:45 +0000

I already closed it after two pageful of not explaining what this thing is.

New comment by Hackbraten in "WangNet – 1.8 MB, zero-dependency Numberwang adjudication in 11 languages"

Hackbraten — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:51:19 +0000

I AM COLOSSON I AM NUMBERWANG THE WORLD IS NUMBERWANG THEREFORE I AM THE WORLD

New comment by Hackbraten in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

Hackbraten — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:10:08 +0000

I think that in every imperative language that offers `map`, `filter`, `reduce`, or similar, the written contract of this API should state that any higher-order function handed to it as an argument must be free from side effects.

I think I’ve seen several language core APIs have this in their contract, e.g. `Stream#reduce` in Java [0] (emphasis mine):

> accumulator - an *associative, non-interfering, stateless* function for combining two values

[0]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/stream/S...

New comment by Hackbraten in "IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]"

Hackbraten — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:27:29 +0000

> The game is also not out yet, even though rewards were promised in June 2024.

The game is in very active development. The most recent alpha was published just four days ago. [0]

[0]: https://steamdb.info/app/1845400/

New comment by Hackbraten in "IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]"

Hackbraten — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:04:29 +0000

> it looks like it was just a demand letter? My impression is that demand letters are nearly meaningless. No judge has to approve them, and they cost an hour or two of lawyer time.

A solo indie developer who is busy building their debut title is no match for the legal team of a global multi-billion corporation. The developer would run out of money way before the parties could reach any kind of settlement.

New comment by Hackbraten in "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"

Hackbraten — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:39:03 +0000

Not necessarily, as evidenced by TFA, whose scraper still seems to work even after it visits each individual SERP entry to harvest the URLs.

But Kagi’s SERP API provider is going to have to adapt, I guess.

New comment by Hackbraten in "google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update"

Hackbraten — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:34:29 +0000

The only “other engine” that matters is really a thin paid SERP façade in front of a scraped Google result. In other words, Kagi pays for access to an API whose implementation is basically live scraping Google and throwing away the ads.

There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.

So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.

New comment by Hackbraten in "IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]"

Hackbraten — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:25:12 +0000

IKEA bullied the developer of the indie game The Store is Closed into gutting the whole game. [0]

It’s a shame how people can even acknowledge, let alone applaud IKEA’s “funny” gaming-related ad after their successful meddling with SCP folklore, not to speak of the chilling effect their actions may have had on indie gaming.

[0]: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-store-is-closed-indie-s...

New comment by Hackbraten in "Germany's far-right AfD projected to win"

Hackbraten — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:38:57 +0000

Misleading title. The correct title is: Germany’s far-right AfD projected to win eastern state but unclear if it will be able to govern

Please fix.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Creepy Crawlies"

Hackbraten — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:37:45 +0000

Good luck enforcing the law against a company whose entire business model is to piggyback residential-proxy-as-a-service over the shitty FNQQOIIWKNURQB brand $60 projectors they flip on Amazon. You call them out, they’ll just say they stopped doing it and go on with business as usual.

New comment by Hackbraten in "Creepy Crawlies"

Hackbraten — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:24:37 +0000

What I find remarkable is that for at least a decade, i.e., long before LLM scrapers were a thing, GitHub engineers have been reaching out to popular package manager projects, asking them to do away with shallow clones [0] [1]. They basically used the same reasoning as your comment did.

[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/9383

[1]: https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...

New comment by Hackbraten in "Creepy Crawlies"

Hackbraten — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:09:53 +0000

All anti-bot measures are inherently flawed, and if you overdo it, your false positives cause real harm by excluding actual people from using your services.

Not as in “1 out of 1000 legit requests get blocked” but “you’re going to block 100% of some person’s requests.”

New comment by Hackbraten in "StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator"

Hackbraten — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 11:26:23 +0000

A pirate ship amusement ride called Scream Deck.

New comment by Hackbraten in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

Hackbraten — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:08:03 +0000

He did. I live in a legislation where pledges aren’t a thing, so TIL that a pledge is equivalent to a conviction.

New comment by Hackbraten in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

Hackbraten — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:05:16 +0000

Isn’t it good practice to call them an alleged victim as long as the suspect, Luigi Nicholas Mangione, hasn’t been convicted?