Hacker News: efreak

New comment by efreak in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

efreak — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:33:42 +0000

I'm reminded of the bot @needadebitcard on Twitter 10(?) years ago, that reposted pictures of people's cards that they posted on Twitter for the public to see.

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

efreak — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:33:50 +0000

You forgot to mention that the Java applet doesn't have antialiasing, so the entire menu looks like crap.

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

efreak — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:20:29 +0000

Not testing your software in the way your users use it is the disrespect. Not everyone has a modern device. Not everyone has 12gb RAM. Not everyone has 100mbps or even 10mbps. Not everyone has "unlimited" Internet.

If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load on the free Metro Wi-Fi, I'll go back to my search and pick a different page. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load on gigabit on a PC, I'll remember it and never click on links to it again.

If you don't respect my devices, then your work doesn't deserve my respect.

(Don't get me started on people calling themselves software _engineers_)

New comment by efreak in "Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it"

efreak — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:20:15 +0000

A light bulb doesn't require a processor to turn on and off when power is applied, so the only reason to add one is for extra functionality. A TV requires a (relatively) powerful processor just for decoding the signal.

New comment by efreak in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

efreak — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:34:25 +0000

Fairemail is great. Better than Thunderbird and any other mail client around. Every so often I see a new mail client pop up for Android advertising that it does X better than any other client; I look at it and it's either built on top of either aosp or some other oss email client (or a rewrite of same) with X feature bolted on, often with numerous features missing. If you want a full email client, go with fairemail.

Reminder to take a look at what nontrivial OSS software you use every day that you've never paid for, and consider a donation (I recommend GitHub sponsorship as a method that currently charges no fees to either the donor or the recipient)

New comment by efreak in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

efreak — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:22:52 +0000

3 is a result of Gmail's imap implementation, and can be squarely blamed on Google. They did this intentionally. Instead of mapping the your tags as imap labels, they mapped them as a folder structure.

While it certainly shouldn't be necessary, I do feel like it should be possible to work around this in a mail client, however; don't emails these days all have unique ids? If not, storing a hash of the message content+headers/timestamps for every message should be enough to keep a local index of what each message is tagged as (given the implementation where each message shows up in multiple places). I can somewhat understand Thunderbird not wanting to make compatibility shims for specific vendors poor implementations.

New comment by efreak in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

efreak — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:38:40 +0000

One of the things I like about Steam is that your email address, username, display name and id slug (/id/*) aren't required to be the same. All public identifiers should be changeable (regardless of whether or not making the change is a publicly available option).

New comment by efreak in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

efreak — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:30:18 +0000

Office 97 not only has everything most people need (wordpad has all features most people need; most users have no need for Excel or other office tools) it also starts up faster and uses less resources. The only question is do you actually need any of the massive quantity of features in modern office, or is word processing today still fairly simple for you. And maybe if you don't like MDI and want your multiple windows instead (the thing I miss most about old office is having 15 documents open in a single window when writing essays in school, without cluttering up alt-tab or the taskbar. That and the toolbar button that initiates the active screensaver). If you want to use your cloud storage (you really don't need it most likely) you'll have to use a sync tool instead of having it directly. Turn off macros for security and make sure it can actually run (no idea when office stopped using 16 bit components), and I recommend firewalling it as well, but office doesn't really need to be up to date.

New comment by efreak in "Last.fm is now independent"

efreak — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:48:13 +0000

Spotify was advised of payola scheme in federal court in the US, unfortunately last month the judge ruled that the TOS prevention of lawsuits against Spotify is legal.

New comment by efreak in "Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions"

efreak — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:13:27 +0000

That depends entirely on where you host it. My PC has more downtime than GitHub does. It's only up enough to push to it ~75% of the time (I do use it as a ssh remote fwiw, but most projects get pushed to a VM that only starts on login, and my PC itself isn't always running).

If you're working on an oss project (ie distributing source anyways), probably better a good idea to mirror to GitHub as a backup anyways, let Microsoft pay for backup+bandwidth for you.

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

efreak — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:46:12 +0000

If you're smart about the style/display format, this can be done with a frame that only has the necessary markup (ie just the contents of the cart, with links, think a sidebar/pop-up shopping cart embedded in the middle of the page). You can avoid the flash with css page transitions, too. It's not as nice as scripted setup, but if you're on a decent connection (latency) it's about even with other forms of progressive enhancement since you're not loading an entire UI framework. I'm not sure how well this would work for accessibility though, plain old frames aren't used much anymore.

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

efreak — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:48:40 +0000

Might be bugged or you might have some setting that doesn't allow websites to use it. Try https://googlechrome.github.io/samples/battery-status/

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

efreak — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:41:10 +0000

That's what frames are for. Only reload the frame with the important data in it (total cost, list of products in cart) and point the category links in the page to open in the same frame as the shopping cart. You can even style the frame contents with the main page's stylesheet so it only needs to load a `$41.29` total if that's all that's changed.

New comment by efreak in "DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved"

efreak — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:14:19 +0000

I had dnssec enabled from 2018 until 1984 hosting messed it up in 2023 and I had to remove/disable keys from the registrar (oddly no information about this on their website or elsewhere, the issue apparently only exists in emails. Apparently they had an issue with BIND upgrade and it made up new keys...). I thought about reenabling it, but very few people other than me access my server, it has a static IP, and Firefox still doesn't validate dnssec anyways.

New comment by efreak in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

efreak — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:05:12 +0000

An expert in any subject matter should not be allowed to provide misleading statements, regardless of whether they're speaking in an official/paid capacity. It doesn't matter if it's considered legal advice or not, the fact that you've got a license and know better should be enough.

New comment by efreak in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

efreak — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:00:12 +0000

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This is the entire text of the first amendment. Congress did not make the CCPA. The first amendment is irrelevant. Technically the first amendment also does not prevent Congress from saying you're not allowed to remember or see things, either, though likely there's other laws about this and/or an assumption that Congress will not make laws against thought crime and reality.

New comment by efreak in "Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable"

efreak — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:23:40 +0000

Determining who is at fault involves extreme annoyance and inconvenience for those who had fingers pointed at them, regardless of whether or not they were actually involved. If you involve yourself willingly, you're inviting that on yourself.

New comment by efreak in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

efreak — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:49:24 +0000

I have multiple drives that started out as their own os. Each of them has a Dropbox folder in the standard location. Each of them has a different set of files in them (I deduped at one point), with some overlap of different versions. I no longer use Dropbox, so none of these are synced anywhere.

They don't need to be in my case, I'm only using them now because of existing shortcuts and VM shares and programs configured to source information from them. That doesn't mean I don't want them backed up.

Same for OneDrive: Microsoft configured my account for OneDrive when I set it up. Then I immediately uninstalled it (I don't want it). But I didn't notice that my desktop and documents folders live there. I hate it. But by the time I noticed it, it was already being used as a location for multiple programs that would need to be reconfigured, and it was easier to get used to it than to fix it. Several things I've forgotten about would likely break in ways I wouldn't notice for weeks/months. Multiple self-hosted servers for connecting to my android devices would need to reindex (Plex, voidtools everything, several remote systems that mount via sftp and connected programs would decide all my files were brand new and had never been seen before)

New comment by efreak in "Installing every* Firefox extension"

efreak — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:20:09 +0000

Bayden SlickRun is still around, I use it daily for launching most of my programs (the only annoyance is the `hide` magicword gets interpreted as `hibernate` occasionally due to my typing `hi` and hitting enter). Unlike many other launchers, SlickRun uses minimal resources and can be configured to show useful information if you leave it on-screen (these days I have it set to auto-hide, as I have enough memory to not worry about it). Typing three keys to get auto complete and hitting enter is faster than searching the run menu (regardless of what implementation you use). I was very annoyed when I installed windows 10 and had to change my hotkey. (Much like I'm now annoyed at Windows 11 for hijacking the printscreen key I use for ShareX)

New comment by efreak in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

efreak — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:48:03 +0000

Or you could forget the borderless screen and add a bezel so I can hold my phone without touching the screen. Then you've got enough room to curve the corners and have square screen corners.