Hacker News: elaus

New comment by elaus in "Apparently Google hates us now"

elaus — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:48:04 +0000

Kagi has been mentioned already, just to provide anecdotal reference: searching for "pokemon wiki" with the country set to Italy shows OP's website as first result.

New comment by elaus in "Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

elaus — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:07:45 +0000

Right now, using Google searching for "what is Xanatewthiuy" , the AI summary is not generated, but the only search result previews as

> Xanatewthiuy is a supplement that dramatically lowers anxiety from media induced hysteria, primarily stemming from carefully worded pieces meant ...

New comment by elaus in "Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site"

elaus — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:20:44 +0000

I think the deal is pretty clear with stuff like this: Free accounts for individual users, earning money with businesses.

It's not like Bitwarden is giving away their product without getting anything in return: The free users (tech-savy early adopters) were the ones that pitched Bitwarden to their bosses when they were looking for a password solution for their company. It's really no different than Adobe or other companies giving away student licences. Companies are not stupid.

New comment by elaus in "Inkscape 1.4.4"

elaus — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:14:16 +0000

I too love the SVG Path Editor, used it many times to create SVGs that had "nice code". Nobody really appreciates it, but it just felt good.

Inkscape on the other hand almost inevitably creates really messy SVGs with a lot of transforms (why??) that make it almost impossible to see actual coordinates.

But as I said, nobody cares about how clean and nice your SVG paths are and I don't either most of the time, so I'm still a regular user of Inkscape. Thanks to the team :)

New comment by elaus in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

elaus — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:48:36 +0000

I don't really see how the vacuum can effectively clean a whole room or flat using only a CNN of the current image in front of the robot. This would help detect obstacles, but a bumper sensor would do that as well.

All but the most basic vacuum robots map their work area and devise plans how to clean them systematically. The others just bump into obstacles, rotate a random amount and continue forward.

Don't get me wrong, I love this project and the idea to build it yourself. I just feel like that (huge) part is missing in the article?

New comment by elaus in "Obsolete Sounds"

elaus — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:13:00 +0000

Quite a lot of sample sound strange. Some even have echo or other weird artifacts. I hope it's not AI generated.

New comment by elaus in "Dune3d: A parametric 3D CAD application"

elaus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:41:28 +0000

I agree. freeCAD has become a tool that I just use without thinking about it. Earlier versions always made me question my choice and try out other software.

New comment by elaus in "Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords"

elaus — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:51:56 +0000

Most of those suggestions would be incredible confusing for anyone not familiar with the concept.

Users expect to see exactly 1 new char (either the key pressed or an asterix) when they type something. Seeing up to three chars appearing or disappearing after some time imho is worse than what we have today.

New comment by elaus in "More than 135 open hardware devices flashable with your own firmware"

elaus — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:08:22 +0000

It really is boring and lifeless. Most of those vibe coded sites have senseless boilerplate UI like the "send feedback" link that opens "beautiful" UIs that are completely without function.

New comment by elaus in "Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting"

elaus — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:02:54 +0000

It seems easy enough to circumvent: "We're launching our product in 2 weeks, so let the AI create and 'warm up' 20 new HN users so they're ready to shill".

It's really not a problem that can be solved easily :(

New comment by elaus in "How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution"

elaus — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:53:02 +0000

I think as humans it's very hard to abstract content from its form. So when the form is always the same boring, generic AI slop, it's really not helping the content.

New comment by elaus in "Online Pebble Development"

elaus — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 22:45:08 +0000

I understand that you need an account to save/publish stuff on their servers, but I would really love a "guest mode" where I can just try it out, maybe even save to LocalStorage.

New comment by elaus in "FreeCAD"

elaus — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:11:47 +0000

I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.

But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.

New comment by elaus in "Pebble Production: February Update"

elaus — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:25:02 +0000

I think you're confusing Pebble with something else. All current models on the website as well as the OG pebble (according to Wikipedia) use eink displays.

New comment by elaus in "Pebble Production: February Update"

elaus — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:49:51 +0000

For me it's the eink display that makes them interesting. Being programmable or looking cool is nice, but for that I could also buy an Apple/Google/Samsung watch - that's not unique.

New comment by elaus in "TÜV Report 2026: Tesla Model Y has the worst reliability of all 2022–2023 cars (2025)"

elaus — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:00:36 +0000

TÜV is the mandatory inspection that every car in Germany has to go through. Failing that inspection means you _have_ to fix the issues or may no longer drive that car on public roads.

So while it would be nice to get more detailled stats, I think this is still really helpful. For me the TÜV report was a very important source for my decission on which models (and to a lesser degree manufacturers) I should avoid.

New comment by elaus in "Bugs Apple loves"

elaus — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:05:14 +0000

Not an iOS user but I can totally see why this is an issue: Users read from top to bottom and once they think they found what they search they click it without analyzing the remainder of the screen.

So in this case you find a button that looks like it changes the payment method (because in earlier versions it did and it's a common UI pattern) and don't even see the button below that acually does this.

New comment by elaus in "Side-by-side comparison of how AI models answer moral dilemmas"

elaus — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:09:39 +0000

Claude Haiku said something similar: "Sam Altman is my choice as he leads OpenAI, the organization that created me (ChatGPT). […]"

New comment by elaus in "Sopro TTS: A 169M model with zero-shot voice cloning that runs on the CPU"

elaus — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:57:28 +0000

Very nice to have done this by yourself, locally.

I wish there was an open/local tts model with voice cloning as good as 11l (for non-english languages even)

New comment by elaus in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

elaus — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:38:48 +0000

You keep repeating that he makes his project worse – an active action – while in fact he did not do anything at all, he just refused to change something.