<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: coldfloor</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=coldfloor</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:07:56 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=coldfloor" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is clickbait. The way they put "ads" in quotes every time shows they know what they're doing. I've seen some other comments here complaining about ads in Maps (which I've never used and can't speak to), but this article is specifically calling out the long-existing practice of Settings showing a little badge on new devices that says "You're entitled to some free months of Arcade/TV" or whatever. That's not an ad, or an "ad."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:22:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49802822</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49802822</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49802822</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "Hacking AI customer service agents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If fake screenshots, repetitious turbo-verbosity that turns every paragraph into a brain-breaking dadaist poem, and superfluous jargon-dropping doesn't convince you, what will?!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:37:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700801</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700801</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700801</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "Firefox's AI Switch Is Off. Telemetry Isn't"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because it's useful in aiding in development. "Telemetry" is not "spying" or "collecting personal information" or whatever else uninformed people like this blog author try to dramatize it as. Telemetry is anonymous crash reports, how many users are using vertical vs horizontal tabs, how many people engaged the AI killswitch, etc. If it's NOT anonymized/bucketized usage date, then it's NOT telemetry. People need to stop conflating the two.<p>Ironically, it's the people who disable all telemetry out of ignorance and paranoia that end up crying every time a developer deprecates their favorite feature or they have an issue with a new release. If you don't vote you don't get to complain. Mozilla's PM's in particular have repeatedly published and cited telemetry data in their decision making, and have referenced crash reports in proactively filed bugs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:38:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544089</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544089</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544089</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Was the linked article written by a confused AI?<p>There's no such thing as Airglow Browser. The entire article describes in great detail something that doesn't exist. Then it provides a link to "download the binary at airglow.dev."<p>airglow.dev is nothing but a link to a vibe coded Chrome extension that uses Claude to write user scripts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:53:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002368</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002368</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002368</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!<p>I think the post both directly and indirectly answers its own question when it states that the app does two things:<p>>It reports tracking data associated with your Google Account back to the developers.
>It shows you advertisements (which they call “inspirations”) for other trips organised by the same agency.<p>It's a lot easier to be user-hostile with an app than a website, and a lot harder for the average user to detect or block the bad behavior. Just about everyone at this point knows how to install a content blocker, open dev tools, and block stuff with their browser. The number of people with the ability, time, and energy to circumvent cert-pinning and inspect an app's traffic like this guy did is significantly smaller.<p>There's a reason why every company is constantly shoving apps down our throats and telling us all the cool young people are mobile-first.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:10:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883135</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883135</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48883135</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "How We're Keeping Reddit Real and Safe in the AI Era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no way they expect any Reddit user to believe they're "keeping it real."  The site is completely overrun by bots, and they continue to take actions protecting those accounts while punishing real users. The weird reverse block function, curated histories, limiting RSS, breaking old.reddit. All of this helps bots hide their activity.<p>Meanwhile, real users are shadowbanned all over the place, often just for the crime of being new to the site or not self-censoring. If you use the report function linked at the end of the article, the AI-generated content you're reporting will frequently pass their poorly engineered automated sniff-test, and instead the reporter ends up with their own account flagged for "abuse" or "bullying."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:32:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804335</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804335</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804335</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "Ask HN: What do SRE do at your company?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was an SRE at Yahoo until around the end of 2024. Not sure if things have changed - last I heard my former team had been laid off - but when I was there it was pretty easy. We had three tiers in the org, with increasing specificity and expertise: Operations Center -> SRE -> Product Engineers.<p>The OC collectively monitored everything across the company. Each alert that paged had an associated runbook. If they couldn't clear the alert with the runbook, they'd escalate to the SRE responsible for the alerting server/component. Our job was essentially to fix anything that broke that OC couldn't solve. For my domain this often just came down to basic Linux troubleshooting, but sometimes would actually involve specific knowledge about our component. For others (e.g. networking) I imagine the ratio of domain-specific-knowledge problems was higher.<p>If we determined something was fundamentally broken, like someone pushed an update and now the service won't start, we'd escalate that to PE. PE did a lot of what I think falls under SRE purview at other places: Managing deployments, building out infrastructure, etc. At Yahoo we were really just "tier 2 ops."<p>We'd also be paged for outages if our service went down or another team was blaming our service for their outage. The job here was essentially the same thing, just with more pressure and people yelling at you; or arguing and trying to prove your stuff was working, please find someone else to blame. If we were involved in an outage, we'd also have to join the "post mortem" (I'll never be able to say that without air quotes) and help with RCA/take on remediation tasks.<p>Secondarily, we created the monitoring/alerts that went to OC and wrote and maintained their runbooks. In our downtime we were also supposed to do simple automation/scripting to help us or OC with redundant tasks. Sometimes I think I made useful stuff, but often this felt like self-imposed busy work, because we always - especially under Marissa's stack ranking regime - had to demonstrate that we were doing more than just our job. I swear one quarter between us and OC we ended up with like 10 redundant Slack bots because everyone was rushing to make something to pad their review with.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:13:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712266</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712266</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48712266</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by coldfloor in "Google workspace threatening to block Firefox access"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not defending it, but given that they use the word "secure" three times in two sentences, I'm wondering if it's shown to browsers that don't support DBSC. Google has been really pushing/overselling this as a magical solution to cookie theft.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:09:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600689</link><dc:creator>coldfloor</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600689</guid></item></channel></rss>