Hacker News: psittacus

New comment by psittacus in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

psittacus — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:02:27 +0000

Not that it answers your question, but the move happened in 2020 to "hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible".

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

New comment by psittacus in "Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking"

psittacus — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:27:53 +0000

Pop-ups [1] in Niagara launcher do this. However, it comes with other unconventional UI decisions which might or might not be to your liking.

[1]: https://help.niagaralauncher.app/article/115-pop-ups

New comment by psittacus in "Show HN: DoNotNotify – Log and intelligently block notifications on Android"

psittacus — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:02:08 +0000

It took me a moment to find, but Alertly claims to do something similar while being open-source. Last commit was made two years ago though.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.example.notificationalerter

https://github.com/lightningcpu/Alertly

New comment by psittacus in "Kagi Hub Belgrade"

psittacus — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:36:59 +0000

Just in case you need sources: Kagi is using [1] Yandex and paying them as of June 2025. This is a long-standing position, which was also voiced [2] in November 2024.

Regarding Yandex. The founder sold [3] the assets (seemingly including the index and Yandex trademark) to VK (Mail.ru) in 2022. VK are known supporters of the war [4]. The founder subsequently renamed [5] his original company to Nebius Group and pivoted towards compute for AI.

[1]: Kagi Community AMA by the founder. Timestamped link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbmMUGSFldQ

[2] Kagi forums, a response by the founder. https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex#2020s

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/26/22951307/us-sanctions-rus...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebius_Group

New comment by psittacus in "Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support"

psittacus — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 06:13:14 +0000

Take a look at Open-Xchange, it's not developed by Thunderbird folks but otherwise fits the bill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange

mailbox.org is based on it.

New comment by psittacus in "Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie"

psittacus — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 15:29:22 +0000

I was browsing through the issues of extrepo and found deb-get, seems pretty useful too:

> deb-get makes it easy to install and update .debs published in 3rd party apt repositories or made available via direct download on websites or GitHub release pages.

https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get/

In particular, the list of software is a bit longer than extrepo (e.g. includes zoom):

https://github.com/wimpysworld/deb-get/blob/main/01-main/REA...

New comment by psittacus in "Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels"

psittacus — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 13:36:28 +0000

Keep in mind that using Beeper for Instagram breaks their ToS and often gets your account suspended or banned. This happens with both cloud and local bridges.

https://www.reddit.com/r/beeper/search/?q=instagram+suspende...

New comment by psittacus in "Is Gravity Just Entropy Rising? Long-Shot Idea Gets Another Look"

psittacus — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:33:18 +0000

Isn't this something we already know from the mass–energy equivalence? In the same way that a nuclear reaction that produces heat must cost the object mass (and therefore gravitational pull)

New comment by psittacus in "Which year: guess which year each photo was taken"

psittacus — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:50:40 +0000

There's a similar game, but for guessing both the year and the location

https://timeguessr.com/

Discussed on HN a couple of years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203511

edit: found another game like OP in the linked thread https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html

New comment by psittacus in "Philip K. Dick: Stanisław Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)"

psittacus — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 11:42:48 +0000

There's also a great documentary on Stanislaw Lem. It's in Polish, but with English subtitles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw

Lem himself talks about the movie a bit there too, around the 24th minute. He didn't seem fond of Tarkowsky's religiousness and the impact it had on the movie.

Timestamped link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQq4aKldaw&t=1434

My impression was similar — the movie seems to be a free retelling and doesn't reflect the book well.

New comment by psittacus in "Apple ordered by EU antitrust regulators to open up to rivals"

psittacus — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:38:20 +0000

Can you say the same thing about iCloud, AppStore?

New comment by psittacus in "Home Manager: Dotfiles Management"

psittacus — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:42:13 +0000

It should have the same constraints as nix itself — i.e. easiest on linux, slightly more complicated on macos.

Bug isolation is probably the best next step for you. Is it during nix installation? Is it a particular package that thows an error?

There's some community at #hm:rycee.net, perhaps they can help you debug it live.

New comment by psittacus in "Synapse Pro, a new enterprise Matrix server from Element"

psittacus — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:18:59 +0000

Promising efficiency, "new functionality written in Rust".

But also:

> Available under a commercial license, Synapse Pro will alhelp fund and accelerate the continued open source development of Synapse for the benefit of all of Matrix.

https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/113627636666252355

> Synapse Pro is for nation-scale deployments, not community use.

https://mastodon.matrix.org/@element/113628266288510356

Not sure how to feel about it just yet.

Synapse Pro, a new enterprise Matrix server from Element

psittacus — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:17:05 +0000

Article URL: https://element.io/blog/synapse-pro-slashes-costs-for-running-nation-scale-matrix-deployments/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42375470

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by psittacus in "Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)"

psittacus — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 05:27:10 +0000

Depending on the domain, a language workbench might be a good fit.

https://spoofax.dev/

https://www.rascal-mpl.org/

New comment by psittacus in "Inspecting North Korea's Digital Map App: Licensing and API Insights"

psittacus — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:57:46 +0000

There is some information here and in references, but it's sparse on how he entered the university.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Alek_Sigley

New comment by psittacus in "Emails I Received, the Collection"

psittacus — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 11:13:50 +0000

Certainly, the problem is bigger than just computers. I was trying to say that if you don't understand how computers work your chances of getting confused are higher since they are ubiquitous and often the interactions with them are so poorly designed that it's easy to get confused.

New comment by psittacus in "Emails I Received, the Collection"

psittacus — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 22:33:43 +0000

Not to cast any shade on Daniel, but perhaps as a warning of sorts?

Actually reading through the emails was only sporadically fun — a lot of them are from people who seem like they need urgent help and obviously aren't getting it.

His "summary" is "somehow they help me remember that the world we live in is super complicated" and while true, it was more of testament how confused a lot of people are, how lost. And how privileged people who understand computers are, being able to avoid this confusion.

New comment by psittacus in "Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android"

psittacus — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 15:53:54 +0000

Besides being allegedly hard to shut down without breaking iPhones, there's also this statement given to Ars Technica:

> Migicovsky had a few different answers. The broadest one, regarding the tech behind the app, is that reverse-engineering for interoperability is legal—a fair use exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's restrictions against circumventing encryption or other protections. The app also goes out of its way to avoid trademarks like iMessage, referring instead to "blue bubbles" and the like, and the rest might be considered nominative fair use.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/beeper-mini-on-andro...

New comment by psittacus in "EU confirms six (mostly US) tech giants are subject to Digital Markets Act"

psittacus — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:42:53 +0000

Seemingly no iMessage, unfortunately.

I guess Apple won that argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37401632

edit: the article actually mentions iMessage explicitly:

> And the newspaper reported the Commission was still deliberating over the inclusion of Bing and iMessage.

> In the event, the EU looks to be taking a cautious approach to this early pushback — since, as noted above, both Bing and iMessage are not on the initial list of 22 core platform services. Instead, the Commission has agreed to take a closer look at Apple and Microsoft’s arguments that these services should be excluded.