Hacker News: hellcow

New comment by hellcow in "GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard"

hellcow — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:51:39 +0000

Google can shuttle network requests to any of their other apps (or play services, if that's running) via IPC, even with the network permission disabled in Gboard.

So if you're using Graphene for privacy from Google specifically, it's not safe to install things like Gboard even with the network permission disabled. Even if they don't use IPC in this way today, there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.

New comment by hellcow in ".name Termination"

hellcow — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:51:14 +0000

Seems like you could use an escrow to defeat this and sell domain names safely and easily.

New comment by hellcow in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

hellcow — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:19:40 +0000

Yes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.

New comment by hellcow in "[dead]"

hellcow — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:22:31 +0000

What alternatives do people recommend that are secure and easy to use for nontechnical people with auto-backup?

New comment by hellcow in "Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root"

hellcow — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 03:01:58 +0000

vimium is my solution to the web.

New comment by hellcow in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

hellcow — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:36:02 +0000

There's raylib and sdl2 eggs available. Those are a great place to start.

New comment by hellcow in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

hellcow — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:20:59 +0000

The eggs are great. For instance I can be up and running building an SDL2 game or make a webserver quickly.

It has good emacs support with geiser-chicken.

Because it compiles down to C the FFI provides a lot of nice ergonomics beyond what I get with Chez Scheme.

Error messages are actually useful with a stacktrace. Can't overstate this.

It supports optional type definitions which reduces the number of tests I need.

The docs are adequate, though I frequently add "MIT scheme" to my search queries. I wasn't able to get chicken-doc setup in NixOS, and the docs website has gone down on me a bunch lately. I wish Chicken had complete documentation available including its eggs in an offline format, like a PDF.

New comment by hellcow in "Fastmail offers EU data region"

hellcow — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:45:49 +0000

Fastmail is an Australian company.

New comment by hellcow in "Framework discloses data breach via Metabase 0-day"

hellcow — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:38:57 +0000

There's no reason Framework needed to be storing this much PII about me all this time including my address, IP addresses and phone number.

I just requested a full delete courtesy of GDPR and CCPA and encourage others to do the same.

New comment by hellcow in "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"

hellcow — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:16:59 +0000

There's a Pink Floyd song about just such a thing, Fletcher Memorial Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDDzR2zSgsM

New comment by hellcow in "For most US drivers, EVs offer emissions benefits and cost savings"

hellcow — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:58:46 +0000

Electric cars face a lot of depreciation, so you can get a really good deal on a used one. Plenty of supply, low cost, and cheap to keep running.

New comment by hellcow in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

hellcow — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:07:29 +0000

Did we read the same article?

> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

This seems like a staggeringly reasonable take.

New comment by hellcow in "How I use HTMX with Go"

hellcow — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:15:55 +0000

There's security consequences to allowing inline JS, which hyperscript requires.

New comment by hellcow in "A Erlang style pure Scheme Webserver and further"

hellcow — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 07:49:55 +0000

It's sad to see the pre-LLM history of this project dating back years completely nuked in favor of this.

New comment by hellcow in "Organic Maps"

hellcow — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:15:49 +0000

They tried to put ads into Organic Maps, and they only backed down because CoMaps sprung up in response.

Others in the thread highlighted other issues, like Organic Maps' proprietary license for some parts of the repo: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_....

New comment by hellcow in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

hellcow — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:31:52 +0000

I'm hoping for a renewed focus on writing software that runs well on constrained machines and helps people get many more years of useful life out of their existing computers.

New comment by hellcow in "Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see"

hellcow — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:29:17 +0000

GrapheneOS lets you restrict the internet access of any app on install.

But yes, agreed it should be everywhere.

New comment by hellcow in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

hellcow — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:36:47 +0000

Apple still pushes ads to you. I can't recall how many times I saw ads in the App Store, and how many times they tried to push me into subscribing to whatever nonsense their executives' KPIs demanded (Apple Arcade+? News+? Music+?). No matter how many times I told Apple "No," they just kept pushing it. And now ads are coming to Apple Maps as well.

GrapheneOS has zero ads in the OS and main services.

New comment by hellcow in "Commodore Releases Flip Phone"

hellcow — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:08:20 +0000

Sheesh. $500 is a hard pass from me. Too bad because I was psyched to try this.

New comment by hellcow in "Chuwi Minibook X"

hellcow — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:18:19 +0000

Sure, I _could_ carry more weight, but I'm not sure why I'd _want_ to. Why should I sacrifice for example an extra pair of socks or a shirt, when I don't need to? Having a bigger screen or a faster PC doesn't matter more to me in light of that space and weight trade-off. I use a code editor from 1992, a programming language from 1989, and a tiling window manager with no frills. An N100 is more than enough.