Hacker News: freedomben

New comment by freedomben in "Bitwarden Dual License Model"

freedomben — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:58:00 +0000

That's my concern as well. I have no problem with the current license change if they continue to publish all the code as they claim. My concern is that this is usually step 1 in a boil-the-frog strategy to eventually split and break off enterprise features. I'll give them some trust until they give me a reason not to (I think they've earned it), but the concern remains.

Google Docs and Drive now support Markdown files natively

freedomben — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:41:10 +0000

Article URL: https://9to5google.com/2026/10/05/google-docs-drive-markdown-support/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49993532

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by freedomben in "Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1"

freedomben — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:36:57 +0000

Is Haskell in this case just binding a local HTTP port that users then hit with the browser? Or is it like a Tauri/Electron type of thing?

New comment by freedomben in "Cloudflare OHTTP gateway"

freedomben — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:52:50 +0000

> Customers will be able to enable our new OHTTP Gateway as a paid add-on to their zone and start receiving OHTTP traffic with just a few clicks.

I love to see privacy improvement in tech. However I do wonder at this. Cloudflare is obviously a business and can't do everything for free, but charging extra for websites to add privacy Seems like a poor incentive if the goal is to improve privacy generally

New comment by freedomben in "Apple Pass Designer"

freedomben — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:46:43 +0000

My guess is, you're right, it's to force your use of their app. for data harvesting reasons?

New comment by freedomben in "Apple Pass Designer"

freedomben — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:02:30 +0000

I don't go to many events, but the last one I went to was a concert, and the tickets required the app and could not be screenshotted or PDFed because there was some motion thing on the QR code to ensure that it wasn't a screenshot. It really pissed me off, but there's not much I can do about it other than boycott the show.

Someday, I'd like to try capturing an animated gif or short MP4 or something of the motion, and see if that works, but the pragmatic part of me overwhelmed the hacker side of me. I would hate to lose my money on the ticket and not be able to see the show because I tried to hack the process

New comment by freedomben in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:52:58 +0000

I think you're both right, it depends a lot more on the specific situation. For example if Corporation A finds a loophole that allows them to dump toxic waste in the river, let's be pissed at both sides. If Corporation B reacts to incentives in the tax code to build an AI data center, you can be mad at data centers if you believe they poison the earth and waste resources, but you should also be mad at the government who created those incentives in the first place.

New comment by freedomben in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:50:23 +0000

That sounds like a nightmare for the business owner, and a huge boon for the legal industry (aka lawyers). Uncertainty/ambiguity in law is poisonous for someone trying to operate in the law, and that goes for everyone from big corp to individuals just trying to function in society.

New comment by freedomben in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:45:21 +0000

Is Googlebook OS going to be "open source" like Chrome OS was (through Chromium)? Or is this also a forced transition from open -> closed? (that would make me far madder than simply forcing a migration).

New comment by freedomben in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:38:03 +0000

> My pet theory with this move from Chromebooks to Googlebooks is simply that Chromebooks have a major stink on their entire brand reputation

I think you're right. Many of the students I've talked to have an immediate reaction of "slow, limited" when asked about a Chromebook. The early years of under-powered hardware and limited storage/memory really did them a disservice when it comes to brand

New comment by freedomben in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:33:47 +0000

How do you propose they offer the contracted services like MDM, GSuite (email, Drive, etc) without storing any of the data?

New comment by freedomben in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:32:28 +0000

Correct, "can't". Are you suggesting they secretly violate the contract and use the data anyway?

New comment by freedomben in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

freedomben — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:30:40 +0000

I'm on the school board for our school, and they last a few years if we're lucky. There are some that survive up to maybe 7, but they accrete so much damage by then. While I think it would have been ideal for G to keep it 10 years, I think in practice it won't matter for many people. Most students are awfully hard on those things after all.

New comment by freedomben in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

freedomben — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:39:06 +0000

This is the impression I get as well. Plus, people concerned that property values will be negatively affected, that their taxes may go up to subsidize the data center, etc

New comment by freedomben in "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos"

freedomben — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 12:39:06 +0000

I'm not overly impressed with those videos. They simply move too quickly for someone who isn't already familiar with the subject. There simply isn't enough time to read what's on each slide. Perhaps this could be fixed trivially with a prompt, but just going on the example videos, I'm not sure this is all that useful.

Now that said, it is wild that in just a few years we've got AI making videos like this!

New comment by freedomben in "Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech"

freedomben — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:55:47 +0000

I've been making audiobooks out of text files that I have lying around, and kokoro TTS has been phenomenal

New comment by freedomben in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

freedomben — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:16:00 +0000

make sure to enema yourself with a verification bag to continue

New comment by freedomben in "The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern"

freedomben — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:37:43 +0000

Indeed, and also now with agents everywhere the docs can be updated and checked more regularly. If it's in the wiki, you can clone it locally and put an AGENTS.md line informing of where the docs are, but it's still a separate repo to deal with. Credit where due, it was a revolution (even a godsend) in it's time, but at this point I agree a /docs is better.

New comment by freedomben in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

freedomben — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:24:05 +0000

Alaska was like this. Taking your trash to the transfer station or dump was expensive, so people throw it all over the place, trashing the highways and vacant land, or they use burn barrels and cause massive pollution torching plastic and other things. It's pretty horrifying to see such beautiful areas littered up :-(

New comment by freedomben in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

freedomben — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:21:01 +0000

sadly, it is often true though. I learned early on that "free" usually meant "trash I don't want to deal with disposing of". There are of course people who don't do that (like myself) but that "price" is unfortunately a real signal to pay attention to