Hacker News: flaburgan

New comment by flaburgan in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

flaburgan — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:03:24 +0000

It still is risky, as who knows what tools NSA & cie really have. Even if it feels safe now, it can be stored by them, and what will (quantum?) computers be able to do in a decade? And how will the US gov look like at that time?

Open-source software could be excluded from Colorado age verification bill

flaburgan — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:12:43 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/carlrichell/status/2031125624711164182

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317060

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by flaburgan in "How will OpenAI compete?"

flaburgan — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:32:01 +0000

I am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search

New comment by flaburgan in "Keep Android Open"

flaburgan — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:58:36 +0000

Ubuntu Touch is not dead though, I use it happily on my primary device for 8 years. It's working like a charm. And waydroid allows you to run APKs, even if some bank apps may not work.

New comment by flaburgan in "Keep Android Open"

flaburgan — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:48:27 +0000

Could anyone provide me some clarifications?

If I understood correctly, to "protect" users, Google wants to control what is installed on Android phones. I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app, which in turn means: - That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps - That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc. Obviously this is awful and would mean the end of F-droid and Aurora store etc. However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something? Why do people link this app verification thing with a possible closing of AOSP?

Also, Mozilla was already saying it 10years ago with Firefox OS but... The web is the platform. 90% of the apps out there could be websites. We have all technologies needed for this including offline with service workers. And it works on every damn platform, even the most obscure OS has a web browser. Don't want to be locked to an ecosystem? Just target the web!

New comment by flaburgan in "Keep Android Open"

flaburgan — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:34:23 +0000

>The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.

I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don't see why they would not remove the verification and that's an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.

New comment by flaburgan in "Keep Android Open"

flaburgan — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:23:37 +0000

How do you install the bank app if google does not allow you to install APKs manually / with a 3rd party store? You have to go with Google Play. Which requires a Google account. So I can't do it. That's the whole point of this thread: it would not be possible to use Android without a Google account.

New comment by flaburgan in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

flaburgan — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:09:28 +0000

Sure, but at some point the idea is to train an LLM on these downloaded files no? I mean what is the point of getting them if you don't use them. So sure, this won't be interpreted during the crawling but it will become part of the knowledge of the LLM

New comment by flaburgan in "Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version"

flaburgan — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:26:30 +0000

It looks cool, but to have to navigate from one side of the screen to the opposite one is quite suboptimal

New comment by flaburgan in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

flaburgan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:56:41 +0000

I had the same story but 15 years ago. I was so happy with XP, but Vista was terrible, so I put Ubuntu on my laptop. When 7 came, it became my OS on my desktop. But then it was 8 time. Couldn't bare it. Now it's Linux everywhere, including my sister, parents, grand parents, girlfriend, brother. Linux Mint is perfect for non technical people BTW. I heard good things about Zorin OS as well.

New comment by flaburgan in "Web development is fun again"

flaburgan — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 21:17:43 +0000

Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced.

New comment by flaburgan in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

flaburgan — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:40:57 +0000

I use it as my primary phone for 2 years, first with the Flame, then with a Z3C. For me Firefox OS was the finale move of Mozilla, either it successes and Mozilla becomes a major actor again or it fails and they slowly die. And thebmy decided to kill it right when it was becoming stable enough.

New comment by flaburgan in "Migrating Dillo from GitHub"

flaburgan — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 22:47:08 +0000

You can pin those you want in the left menu

New comment by flaburgan in "Signal knows who you're talking to (2023)"

flaburgan — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:15:39 +0000

I'm sorry but I don't think this guy did his homework correctly. You don't need a phone number anymore to use Signal. You still need one to register, but not to communicate with anyone. You can simply share your username for that. So you can just buy a prepaid card with cash, register, and then throw it away, and it will never be linked to your real identity. Signal is not perfect, but it's still the best we have.

New comment by flaburgan in "I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla"

flaburgan — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:22:23 +0000

Wrong. They are actually doing it, with NLNet and NGI (Next Generation Internet) but they chose to funs Servo not Firefox.

New comment by flaburgan in "Bitchat for Gaza – messaging without internet"

flaburgan — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:00:21 +0000

Source code is MIT: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat-android

I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.

New comment by flaburgan in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

flaburgan — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:05:40 +0000

I am working on https://disco2very.org a NextJS AGPL game to discover the CO2 footprint of... many things. It is using the open data from the French environmental agency ADEME. Tell me what you think!

New comment by flaburgan in "Signal Secure Backups"

flaburgan — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 21:58:04 +0000

They have it between two Android phones next to each other for years, but probably not Android to iOS

New comment by flaburgan in "I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me"

flaburgan — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:12:17 +0000

The scenario you are describing (discovering a problem to fix, being able to fix it, but then not sharing the fix with other people) is the exact reason why GPL has been invented: to force people to share their work, so that we can all have better software, together. Maybe the software you are using wouldn't have been that good if other people weren't forced to share their improvements. Your small effort is going to help others, and their small efforts are going to help you even more. This mindset of sharing should be natural but, as you just proved, people are lazy and so the license has to force them.

New comment by flaburgan in "Delta Chat is a decentralized and secure messenger app"

flaburgan — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 10:55:27 +0000

Signal is not a company but a non profit, and their service is not proprietary but fully open source including the server side. That being said, it is centralized and so less resilient, it can be taken down more easily. So you have to pick between more secure (Signal) or more resilient because decentralized (DeltaChat). Theoretically Matrix has both, but at the moment it is not as secure as Signal, and its UX is clearly worst. And to that you have to add the complexity of decentralization for normal people: which server to pick, how can I know if someone I know has an account... Here the comparison with email should help but still it is not as easy as entering a phone number and immediately you have all your contacts available.