Hacker News: lowdude

New comment by lowdude in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

lowdude — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:10:45 +0000

I would have assumed that some assistant goes through the inbox and only a (random or filtered) subsample of those mails actually gets read by Tim Cook.

New comment by lowdude in "Session is shutting down in 90 days"

lowdude — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:39:24 +0000

That is probably the reason they added the /s at the end

New comment by lowdude in "How to turn anything into a router"

lowdude — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:16:07 +0000

I have actually been curious about this: How good can a WiFi mesh get latency-wise, given the right equipment, and how close would a consumer router setup be to that, do you happen to know?

New comment by lowdude in "15 Years of Forking"

lowdude — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:23:55 +0000

I came across Waterfox a number of times over the years, but I think it will be difficult to get a similar amount of reach for your search engine. In particular, on the home page of Waterfox, there is nothing even hinting at the existence of the search service. Maybe this is intentional, as it is in public beta for now, but I think it would help to at least note its existence there, or near the `donate` section (as a means of support, rather than direct donation). Also make sure that this directly exists as one of the search engine options for Waterfox, if it isn't already, every click involved in the setup will make it easier for people to try out.

But charging $5 / $10 for basically what StartPage does (to the best of my understanding) is going to be a tough pitch either way. Out of interest, what would the pricing for the Google API look like, if you had no other costs involved?

New comment by lowdude in "Apple Business"

lowdude — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:13:07 +0000

The nice thing about many of the native apps compared to their Google pendants is the absence of ads, with the glaring exception of the app store, which looks like a dumpster-fire. It is so disheartening to see the trend of shoving ads everywhere continue with Apple as well. I guess the profits are just too tempting to stick with idealistic UX decisions, if there was any of that left in the first place.

New comment by lowdude in "Apple Business"

lowdude — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:07:15 +0000

Yes, and it works with a user agent switcher extension for Firefox, which is always the cherry on top.

New comment by lowdude in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

lowdude — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:16:25 +0000

That was my first thought as well, and I am one of those people. I strongly dislike being called, especially unexpectedly, and much prefer a quick text message to maybe meet up in person, if the opportunity presents itself (e.g. if one of us happens to be in the town of the other one)

Apple adds support for partial security patch updates

lowdude — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:53:21 +0000

Article URL: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102657

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501887

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lowdude in "My Homelab Setup"

lowdude — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:36:31 +0000

I cannot say much about the quality, but I am also testing around with it at the moment. As for the identity control, you may be able to achieve this with a few extra steps, if you set up bucket policies for the credentials. For this, it would be a bit cleaner to move the storage box to a project of its own.

I still have to check if this actually works in practice, but I am hopeful. I based it off their documentation here: https://docs.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/faq/s3-crede...

New comment by lowdude in "iPhone 17e"

lowdude — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:36:00 +0000

I would not go as far as calling the iPhone Minis "egregiously huge", keep in mind that screen size is not a great measure for phone sizes across different generations. You could easily fit a 4+ inch display into the form factor of the 4S with modern technology, the bezels on those phones were huge. Unless my math is off, the housing of the 4S has a diagonal of just over 5 inches.

New comment by lowdude in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

lowdude — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:53:48 +0000

I believe it comes down to intrinsic interest, that he would not consider this something boring he needs to work through, but rather something fun and intriguing to spend his time on.

Disregarding the unusual age in this case, I believe that most people could be significantly better at mathematics than they are, if only they found it interesting enough.

New comment by lowdude in "WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026"

lowdude — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:59:36 +0000

Unless people notice that they just built lots of useless datacenters and push back towards a mainframe + terminal setup, because ah sorry, modern software just runs much better that way, and you can save money on our inexpensive laptop with subscription model

New comment by lowdude in "GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple"

lowdude — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:46:25 +0000

There is a difference between security and privacy or freedom of use. Locking down the device to only allow a subset of apps that Google has some control over (by requiring developers to register) is a measure that can increase security, even though it obviously takes some control away from the end-user.

The fact that the play store is not exactly known for exceptionally high standards w.r.t. malware, or that there are lots of valid concerns that come along with a company controlling who is allowed to supply apps for the device is a different topic.

New comment by lowdude in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

lowdude — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:27:35 +0000

Interesting that you mention this, as I also switched to Fastmail recently and got more spam than before, but after marking it as spam for some time it now died down I think. This may also be a symptom of changing providers, where the previous provider knew the kind of spam I tended to get from past years, while Fastmail needed some time to get up to speed.

Fingers crossed that the experience will be the same for you.

New comment by lowdude in "End of an era for me: no more self-hosted git"

lowdude — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:04:43 +0000

There was a comment in a different thread that suggested they may respect the robots.txt for the most part, but may ignore wildcards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975726

Maybe this is worth trying out first, if you are currently having issues.