Hacker News: afarah1

New comment by afarah1 in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

afarah1 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:44:29 +0000

In Brazil you already can't access some government services without a smartphone, such as paying for municipal parking in various cities. So if you own a car but not a smartphone, you get a fine. Sadly the least of the country's problems.

New comment by afarah1 in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

afarah1 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:10:43 +0000

Ah, so the minutes long wait hearing answering machine bs is a universal experience. I thought it was a local thing and limited to ISPs, utilities, and financials... When I can choose between competing companies, having a direct line to a human for customer support is at the top of my list. I'm happy with either chat or phone, I just don't want to go through a bot first.

New comment by afarah1 in "Open Camera is a FOSS camera app for Android"

afarah1 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:27:14 +0000

I've used it for several years now, it's a great app. Not perfect, there is noticeable lag to capture high resolution images, and lacks shutter speed control. Still, beats other FOSS alternatives in my experience.

New comment by afarah1 in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

afarah1 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:19:12 +0000

And for most it would be a valid point. Nozick makes the best case for this.

New comment by afarah1 in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

afarah1 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:58:32 +0000

>every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board

Is there strong evidence for that? The first study that pops up if I search this suggests otherwise, that it could increase consumption of sugar-substitutes and overall caloric intake. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.019

>we need guardrails to defend against

There is no "we". You say that I and others need it, and you want to impose your opinion by taxing us.

New comment by afarah1 in "How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code"

afarah1 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:44:32 +0000

Reminds me of this 2023 post "re-implementing LangChain in 100 lines of code": https://blog.scottlogic.com/2023/05/04/langchain-mini.html

We did just that back then and it worked great, we used it in many projects after that.

New comment by afarah1 in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

afarah1 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:46:05 +0000

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

New comment by afarah1 in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

afarah1 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:20:51 +0000

A comment with an article citing published medical literature on risks associated with this type of vaccine was flagged and hidden. Why? I don't know the author nor am I a medical doctor to understand the topic at depth, so it's a genuine question. Was it misleading? If so, how? That's what the comment was asking, actually, if there were counter-points to the text, which was favorable to live vaccines (e.g. shingles) but critical of those developed with other methods. Is there no merit to that? I genuinely don't know, and since it seems impossible to discuss the topic, it's hard to say.

New comment by afarah1 in "On privacy and control"

afarah1 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:03:15 +0000

FYI: NetGuard is an open source rootless firewall for vanilla Android which also allows per-app network access control, for those unable or unwilling to go with other OSs. Works by leveraging Android VPN to block instead of tunneling packets.

New comment by afarah1 in "EU to build no-fee payments service like Visa/Mastercard and Apple/Google Pay"

afarah1 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 11:25:02 +0000

With the hability to see and track every payment?

New comment by afarah1 in "Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves"

afarah1 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:35:55 +0000

In Brazil there is a similar problem, but it's not as widely discussed. Here, police investigations revealed that a website sold access for less than $4 to the nation-wide surveillance system, which included live feed of public safety cameras and person search by tax identifier. It was also shown that criminal organizations used it to locate their targets. Access was through the open internet, with leaked credentials, the federal government's system requires no VPN for access.

Source (Portuguese): https://mpmt.mp.br/portalcao/news/1217/164630/pf-expoe-invas...

New comment by afarah1 in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

afarah1 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:27:47 +0000

How do you hook it up and how do you control it remotely?

New comment by afarah1 in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

afarah1 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:00:16 +0000

That's not a good answer, unless you just want cable. YouTube, Netflix, etc won't work. Buying hardware is paying extra which is already a deterrent, but anyway just shifts the problem to that piece of hardware - is the stick vetted to not do any harm? Other solutions are often impractical or overly complex for non-technical people. I haven't seen any good answers to date. I guess your TV just shouldn't spy on everything you watch? Seems like a reasonable expectation.

New comment by afarah1 in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

afarah1 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:00:48 +0000

Of course they have a choice. Just don't do it. All you said are predictions of what may or may not happen in the future. The opposite could be true - the audience at large may get sick of AI tools being pushed on them and prefer the browser that doesn't. No one knows. But even if you are right, supporting an hypothetical API that extensions and websites may or may not use and pushing opt-out AI tooling in the browser itself are very different things.

New comment by afarah1 in "Uber is turning data about trips and takeout into insights for marketers"

afarah1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:01:49 +0000

Interesting read, thanks. The related article shows that even more robust anonymization techniques may still be insufficient (in the case of the taxi rides, spatial-temporal analysis could still lead to de-anonymization). More reason to reduce data collection. Unfortunately the trend is the opposite for governments all around the world.

New comment by afarah1 in "The disguised return of EU Chat Control"

afarah1 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:58:18 +0000

This seems to be more about political power and government overreach than money. The narrative seems to be focused solely on concentration of the later, lately.

New comment by afarah1 in "Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle"

afarah1 — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:42:47 +0000

Any setups without Claude Code? I use CoPilot agent heavily on VSCode, from time to time I have independent grunt work that could be parallelized to two or three agents, but I haven't seen a decent setup for that with CoPilot or some other VSCode extension that I could use my CoPilot subscription with.

New comment by afarah1 in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"

afarah1 — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:26:00 +0000

Android also has limited photos access nowadays.

New comment by afarah1 in "What makes Claude Code so damn good"

afarah1 — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 13:39:07 +0000

But is it a game changer vs CoPilot in Agent mode with Claude 4 Sonnet?

Because it's twice the price and doesn't even have a trial.

I feel like if it were a game changer, like Cursor once was vs Ask mode with GPT, it would be worth it, but CoPilot has come a long way and the only up-to-date comparisons I've read point to it being marginally better or the same, but twice the price.

New comment by afarah1 in "Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription"

afarah1 — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 12:49:55 +0000

Poor comparison, none of these are attached to the manufacturer, you can and usually do get these services from other companies of your choice. You don't need VW-Gas(TM) from VW-Station(TM) in your tank for the car to run.