Hacker News: bluebarbet

New comment by bluebarbet in "Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)"

bluebarbet — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:42:56 +0000

In the 2020s, outside the office (and certainly outside middle-class America), ordinary people hardly even use computers let alone printers. I have not owned a printer in 15 years. So, yes, it is a massive inconvenience. Not to mention insecure: to make a paper document I would need to share the supposedly private file with third parties.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)"

bluebarbet — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:36:28 +0000

>I never said that the act of making a digital doc look like it was scanned is fraud.

Yes you did. Verbatim.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)"

bluebarbet — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:55:53 +0000

An interesting take that reveals differing moral bases.

As a preamble, I have zero moral qualms about technically committing fraud in order to access my own money (almost nobody would).

More important, I choose not to respect a law that upholds an insecure and broken system. A parallel with traffic regulations come to mind: as a cyclist I regularly break rules when I consider that they do not best serve my safety. All things being equal, I follow the law. But all things are not always equal and bad laws are there for the breaking.

The correct outcome here is that the law is tested and amended. That is the way to end the perverse situation of the precise example you raise, where anybody with technical skills can fake a document and then win in court.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)"

bluebarbet — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:34:30 +0000

It's not that you're wrong, but the fact that it would be fraud is farcical and needs to be challenged.

My bank demands that I perform this ridiculous hoop-jumping. Like others here, I use ImageMagick hocus pocus to defeat them with trivial ease (a couple of times they complained so I tweaked the algo a bit and they were happy). The whole situation is beyond absurd. It's security theater in place of security.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Dallas Fed: 30% of housing cost increase driven by unauthorized immigration [pdf]"

bluebarbet — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 22:20:32 +0000

Probably and it seems a good compromise to me. Under asylum law, "illegal" is technically wrong until the final judgement is rendered. And "undocumented" is IMO an obvious manipulation of language (you would not call a doctor practicing without a medical license "undocumented"). Pending a decision on legality, "unauthorized" seems both neutral and correct.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Can you see three trees?"

bluebarbet — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:14:55 +0000

An exaggeration. The numbers just function as a rule of thumb intended to inspire and motivate action.

New comment by bluebarbet in "How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart"

bluebarbet — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:16:51 +0000

This comment clearly does not meet HN benchmarks for civility and good faith.

New comment by bluebarbet in "McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)"

bluebarbet — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:14:15 +0000

By that standard, a Picasso painting is only good art because it's expensive.

New comment by bluebarbet in "McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)"

bluebarbet — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:02:10 +0000

That logic would make all cultural criticism verboten.

New comment by bluebarbet in "McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)"

bluebarbet — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:59:53 +0000

Exactly the thought I had. The typical (i.e. not-very-grand) English country house looks a bit like a McMansion with added ivy.

New comment by bluebarbet in "The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars"

bluebarbet — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:49:34 +0000

Very on-the-spectrum (PS: and proudly so) IIRC. That has to mitigate the sociopathies that typically accompany great wealth.

New comment by bluebarbet in "I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs"

bluebarbet — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:48:30 +0000

For which the other 475 get saddled with a bunch of extraneous downloads and invasive tracking.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Why I email complete strangers"

bluebarbet — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:14:40 +0000

This is my strategy with forum comments. Always try to end with a compliment. Takes the edge off any criticism and makes an angry reply much less likely.

New comment by bluebarbet in "A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)"

bluebarbet — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:17:18 +0000

>what you're calling ethics

I wasn't calling anything anything. I was just putting the obvious counter-argument on the table. You make a fair point.

New comment by bluebarbet in "A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)"

bluebarbet — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:41:19 +0000

To which the obvious rejoinder is that Maestri had no authority to put them there in the first place.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

bluebarbet — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:32:29 +0000

Cards on the table, after posting I had doubts about this and had to look it up! Executive summary: "digger" = hole, "bulldozer" = flattish, "steamroller" (or just "roller") = flat as a pancake.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

bluebarbet — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:35:33 +0000

Amazing. This is exactly what's needed. It's in the Ubuntu LTS repo too, though not installed by default.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

bluebarbet — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:28:50 +0000

Digging with a bulldozer sounds like hard work. You mean a digger.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Appreciating Exif"

bluebarbet — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:48:05 +0000

Incredibly frustrating but absolutely to be expected.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Leaving Mozilla"

bluebarbet — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:22:20 +0000

Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.