Hacker News: mzajc

New comment by mzajc in "It Is Time to Ban the Sale of Precise Geolocation"

mzajc — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:55:46 +0000

  > Lifespan: 13 Months
  > ...
  > Standard retention (4320 Days)

It looks like a cookie prompt, so I assume "Lifespan" refers to cookie expiration and "retention" to how long the data (including geolocation) is retained on the spyware company's servers.

New comment by mzajc in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

mzajc — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:20:12 +0000

A tip for Librewolf: you can easily toggle permanent cookie storage for a site through the "Always store cookies/data for this site" option in the shield button menu on the URL bar. This is very convenient compared to vanilla Firefox where you have to add exceptions through the settings.

New comment by mzajc in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

mzajc — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:10:52 +0000

22,056 is not about 30,000. Per scc:

  Language      Files     Lines   Blanks  Comments     Code
  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  TypeScript      760    109110    14500      7397    87213
  JSON             41     22056        6         0    22050
  Markdown         56      7150     2086         0     5064
  YAML             33      3965      406       208     3351
  ... and many more with fewer than 1k lines

Regarding "loads of assumptions," it's hard to tell how much of this is vibecoded slop (definitely non-zero looking at the commit log), but I don't think it's that outrageous to claim 87k sloc is too much for a textbox and an API wrapper.

New comment by mzajc in "Fix monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity in chair"

mzajc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:17:29 +0000

I don't know. Manually {dis,re}connecting the cable doesn't wake the PC up, but it's too hard to reproduce reliably to tell if having it disconnected makes a difference.

New comment by mzajc in "Fix monitor that goes black, off or blinks due to static electricity in chair"

mzajc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:46:12 +0000

I have a similar problem, except instead of shutting things down, static discharge seems to wake my computer up (from suspend-to-ram). I have yet to figure out why that happens, but it's not the mouse or keyboard.

New comment by mzajc in "Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor"

mzajc — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:27:09 +0000

> It runs locally on your Mac with no uploads and there is no subscription.

From the bottom of the description on apps.apple.com:

  SUBSCRIPTION
  • Free tier: 10 images, common ratios, JPEG & PNG export
  • Premium: Unlock all 500 images, 9 formats, 15 ratios, and pro tools
  • Plans: Weekly ($2.99) · Monthly ($6.99) · Yearly ($39.99)

New comment by mzajc in "DRAM has a design flaw from 1966. I bypassed it [video]"

mzajc — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:43:25 +0000

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680023

New comment by mzajc in "Microsoft PhotoDNA scanning problem"

mzajc — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:51:57 +0000

> Microsoft's PhotoDNA scanning is not just in OneDrive, through the Microsoft's eco-system. Basically, if you are using your Microsoft account to sign in to Windows 11, PhotoDNA scans your entire computer. This information came directly from Microsoft Support.

This sounds like a horrible privacy violation. Is it true? What do they do if they find a match?

New comment by mzajc in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture"

mzajc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:03:36 +0000

> Authors, screenwriters, et al. have a new niche to explore. Any day now I expect an A24 trailer featuring a villain who speaks in the register of ChatGPT. “You’re absolutely right, Kayleigh,” it intones. “I did drown little Tamothy, and I’m truly sorry about that. Here’s the breakdown of what happened…”

May I recommend Pluribus (2025-)

New comment by mzajc in "Show HN: BAREmail ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ – minimalist Gmail client for bad WiFi"

mzajc — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:20:11 +0000

Not sure if that's intentional, but the entire landing page gets replaced with an error if WebGL is not available:

> Something went wrong!

> Error creating WebGL context.

New comment by mzajc in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

mzajc — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:03:00 +0000

For reference, this is the application: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.bamnetw...

8 trackers, 49 permissions. Whatever reason they gave for requiring the application, evidently they couldn't resist selling out their users in the end. Disgusting.

New comment by mzajc in "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"

mzajc — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:06:38 +0000

I am not a high-rep user and I am still very much relieved that they got rid of the horrible redesigned website.

New comment by mzajc in "12k AI-generated blog posts added in a single commit"

mzajc — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:48:58 +0000

uBlacklist is a great extension to avoid slopfarms like this: https://ublacklist.github.io/docs

New comment by mzajc in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

mzajc — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:54:08 +0000

Is there a reason this user-hostile mess is preferred over an X.509 certificate (besides big tech lobbying)?

Slovenia hands out certificates for online government services, including document signing, and it seems to be going fine, with the added benefit that Google can't take away my access.

New comment by mzajc in "Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells"

mzajc — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:09:51 +0000

You've so far made 3 completely nonsensical top level comments across different posts. Are you a bot or am I missing something?

New comment by mzajc in "Objections to systemd age-attestation changes go overboard"

mzajc — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:57:34 +0000

> > I understood that the change was not going to be popular, but I was expecting civil discourse and a level-headed response.

Not to give credit to the antisocial mob, but it would be a lot easier to take the maintainers' side here if the discourse was started before the change was merged into production.

It's incredibly ironic that the LWN article praises Jeremy Soller for having reasonable objections against the change but fails to mention that systemd maintainers locked the issue* when he tried to raise his objections (and implicitly called them spam). I really fail to see how anyone could expect civil discourse given these circumstances.

* In an incredibly pathetic way too - the systemd maintainer responded to his comment, then immediately locked the issue without even waiting to see what Soller would write in return.

New comment by mzajc in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

mzajc — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:22:03 +0000

By "says on the tin," I was referring to the name ("undercover mode") and the instruction to "not blow your cover." If pretending to be a human is not the cover here, what is? Additionally, does Claude code still admit that it's a LLM when this prompt is active as you suggest, or does it pretend to be a human like the prompt tells it to?

New comment by mzajc in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

mzajc — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:06:31 +0000

There are now several comments that (incorrectly?) interpret the undercover mode as only hiding internal information. Excerpts from the actual prompt[0]:

  NEVER include in commit messages or PR descriptions:
  - The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI
  - Co-Authored-By lines or any other attribution

  BAD (never write these):
  - 1-shotted by claude-opus-4-6
  - Generated with Claude Code
  - Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <…>

This very much sounds like it does what it says on the tin, i.e. stays undercover and pretends to be a human. It's especially worrying that the prompt is explicitly written for contributions to public repositories.

[0]: https://github.com/chatgptprojects/claude-code/blob/642c7f94...

New comment by mzajc in "ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state"

mzajc — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:10:51 +0000

Brilliant! Just the thing we want: more hardware attestation, more deanonymization, less user control, all diligently orchestrated in a repository where the only contributor is Anthropic Claude [0]. Comes complete with a misaligned ASCII diagram in the README to show how much effort the humans behind it put in!

Yes, even their "humanifesto" is LLM output, and is written almost exclusively in the "it's not X it's Y" style.

[0]: https://github.com/magicseth/keywitness/graphs/contributors

New comment by mzajc in "A single-file C allocator with explicit heaps and tuning knobs"

mzajc — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:12:46 +0000

Worse yet, there's several places with empty code blocks, eg. [0] and [1]. Even without that, the formatting contains so much unnecessary whitespace, newlines, casts, etc; I'm not sure why, given the already massive source file. How do you even fit [2] on a screen?

[0]: https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/422dbba85b5a7e9a209a...

[1]: https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/422dbba85b5a7e9a209a...

[2]: https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/422dbba85b5a7e9a209a...