Hacker News: aidanbeck

New comment by aidanbeck in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

aidanbeck — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:06:25 +0000

The downside mentioned by the author's replacement in the article is the unfortunate explanation for why this is rare in practice.

> "but that’s a lot more work for us."

And it's not that any individual or team is lazy. Most teams have a constant barrage of priorities to balance and are paid by companies valuing efficiency over everything. That said, I think the article makes a great case for adjusting our prioritization. Going a bit slower won't kill anyone, in fact doing so will probably save some.

New comment by aidanbeck in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

aidanbeck — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:53:29 +0000

I was going to comment on the Terence Eden excerpt quoted by the author about the woman researching housing benefits on an old PSP browser, when I noticed that you (the OP) are Terence himself. It's strikingly powerful, and a reminder of the duty we have in building our infrastructure.

> Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures.

It is frightening to think of how many people are alienated from critical systems every day because of this bias reinforcing the idea that they do not exist.

New comment by aidanbeck in "A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking"

aidanbeck — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:51:47 +0000

Aside from the fingerprinting methods, the graphics processor string seems to be the most immediately personal data given up (other than location, which was incorrect for me). I could see sites tailoring ads around an assumed class, income, and level of digital literacy based on this data point alone.

New comment by aidanbeck in "Mouse Pointer as a Mere Mortal"

aidanbeck — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:04:42 +0000

The most intriguing case for hijacking is in Neal's "cursor camp" game linked by the author. In my own designing of applications, navigating a 2d space exceeding the boundaries of a window has a whole host of design problems. Clicking and dragging to offset your perspective is the best solution, but it is less intuitive and eliminates otherwise accessible click interactions.

Letting the view follow the pointer (therefore moving it relative to the device screen) would be remarkable for this genre of UI.