Hacker News: ataru

New comment by ataru in "Michigan 'digital age' bills pulled after privacy concerns raised"

ataru — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:24:35 +0000

It's illegal for us to steal from you, so we won't invite you inside.

New comment by ataru in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

ataru — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:06:15 +0000

The problem with anyone using my face to identify me is that it's hard for me to leave home without it.

New comment by ataru in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

ataru — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 14:11:33 +0000

I've noticed that the apple news ads target sensitive issues. The retirement one is a good example of that. I've seen ads that appear to already know my financial status and health conditions. I tried the option to reset my advertising identifier, it doesn't seem to make much impact.

New comment by ataru in "Ask HN: How many people got VPNs in response to laws like UK Online Safety Act?"

ataru — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 10:47:50 +0000

I did, I don't want the hassle of anything being blocked, and I don't want to upload identity details as they have the potential for misuse.

I notice that some tech companies claim they are "trusted" or have "trusted third parties", I don't trust them at all, I'm not sure why they think I do.

New comment by ataru in "The MacBook Air 2025 Is Now Cheaper Than a Random Mid-Range Windows Laptop"

ataru — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 12:12:17 +0000

This is a good moment to try to take Microsoft customers, as they're putting a lot of machines out of support.

New comment by ataru in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"

ataru — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 16:46:54 +0000

The interfaces look like they wanted to be graphical, as they have windows and drop down menus, and they wanted to have multi-tasking, as they implemented the overlay tools in Borland Sidekick. They wanted those things but they were limited to staying in text mode because widespread adoption of any real graphical interface was slow.

It seems a little humorous now that professionals were stuck for several years doing their day to day word processing, spreadsheets and databases in text mode, where getting different sized text or different fonts was almost impossible. This also wasn't just in the 80s, it was still somewhat true in the early 90s, not very long before the beginning of the internet as we know it.

Still, I wonder if things are really any better now, as we're all using software interfaces built on something else that's not really appropriate for the job. HTML.

New comment by ataru in "The UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass"

ataru — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 12:25:55 +0000

The world-wide-web is becoming more and more only-your-country-web.

New comment by ataru in "The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public"

ataru — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 07:59:55 +0000

I noticed that some of his choices contributed to his problem. I haven't been forced into accepting AI (so far) while I've been using duckduckgo for search, libreoffice, protonmail, and linux.

New comment by ataru in "I fought in Ukraine and here's why FPV drones kind of suck"

ataru — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:22:04 +0000

I've always wondered if the burning batteries and electronics in the drones have any significant environmental impact when compared to conventional weapons.

New comment by ataru in "Astronomers have discovered a mysterious object flashing signals from deep space"

ataru — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 20:14:24 +0000

Any self respecting alien would send the signal every 42 minutes.

New comment by ataru in "The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown"

ataru — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 17:02:30 +0000

I think it worked as defined, it hogged the POST requests?

New comment by ataru in "No Uptime Hosting (2006)"

ataru — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 14:22:14 +0000

I think I heard that moving from 99.99% unavailability to 99.999% unavailability costs ten times more.

New comment by ataru in "Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?"

ataru — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 20:35:52 +0000

Do we lack a captcha here?

New comment by ataru in "Doomscroller.xyz"

ataru — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 18:38:15 +0000

On the website there is a demo, when you spin the wheel, it scrolls a screen on the right. The demo may be blocked by an adblocker.

New comment by ataru in "Tell HN: Repurposing old iPads as home security cameras"

ataru — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 21:44:27 +0000

I tried a similar phone app years ago but it crashed almost every day, which made it impractical. I'm not sure why it should work now as phones aren't designed to run continuously for long periods without attention from a user.

New comment by ataru in "Function keys productivity trick"

ataru — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:36:33 +0000

I bind mine to virtual desktops, but I have the same applications on each desktop all time, so the workflow is quite similar.

New comment by ataru in "DOS demo/game development template"

ataru — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:48:59 +0000

That looks really cool. I'd need more help for the next steps - a game loop that runs the game at a consistent speed on different processors, and a sound library.

New comment by ataru in "GTK File Chooser Dialog gets a thumbnail view after 18 years"

ataru — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 14:57:58 +0000

I like gnome: it works, its easy to use, it looks pretty, it's free, and it doesn't feel like it's being run by a corporation that wants to control what I do. Sure there's some design things that aren't right, but I don't feel that it matters a lot, a certain other OS is popular while having a zillion design things that aren't right.

New comment by ataru in "Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?"

ataru — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 13:26:55 +0000

It is valuable, you can tell because companies like Google and Facebook have no intention to automatically forget old data, instead they are intent on keeping it forever. I expect they see data=money.

New comment by ataru in "Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?"

ataru — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 13:14:52 +0000

One thing to think is that new ways to use data will be created in the future.

Some companies (e.g. Google) by default will capture multi-gigabyte decades-long records of information about us. We might let them do it thinking that it is not much threat to us.

But new technologies can be invented, for example things like widespread use of facial recognition, or deepfakes, or AI, which could make the trove of data we gave away become more dangerous in the future.