Hacker News: rplnt

New comment by rplnt in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

rplnt — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:55:08 +0000

It wasn't about keeping up. It was 100% about Google putting billions in advertising and abusing their dominance. Besides legit stuff like paying millions or more likely billions for billboards, spots in tv/radio/etc... there were monopoly "ads" on google.com, gmail,com, youtube.com homepages. And of course the classic of blocking features based on user agent alone, lying to people they need to use Chrome to access a product or a feature. They just needed to manipulate the masses and now almost everyone uses browser from an advertising company and they can keep pulling the rug.

New comment by rplnt in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

rplnt — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:48:33 +0000

Thanks Chrome for ruining web in yet another way. LRU is THE default for virtually every windowed and tabbed application, then Chrome comes and fucks it up. Now we have a video talking about a "fix", and likely not a single user in Vivaldi even using the default (because they would notice it's broken). Kinda hilarious.

New comment by rplnt in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

rplnt — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:18:50 +0000

Switching tabs doesn't work like you would expect in Opera for example. The order of tabs gets shuffled randomly. It's completely broken. I downgraded to a version where it had worked, stuck with that for a while. When I complained about it people usually say "just use it like chrome where you can't switch tabs properly anyway lol". It was reported with the precise version that broke it. Vivaldi team asked maybe twice on social media, but then it was just tumbleweeds. It's 100% reproducible with a clean install, on both windows and osx. I gave up and preach for people to just stay away from that browser.

New comment by rplnt in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

rplnt — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:31:52 +0000

Unfortunate that they can't fix tab switching they broke 2~3 years ago. It's fully broken, on every platform, one of the main interactions with the browser. Doubt there's actually "a team".

New comment by rplnt in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

rplnt — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:29:22 +0000

It's a cool idea, but major bugs are being introduced and then ignored. Virtually unusable and I would not recommend it.

New comment by rplnt in "I was insulted today – AI style"

rplnt — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:19:46 +0000

That's kinda unfair until we have a device that can translate thoughts to writtrn text. Both from time and energy perspective. Though my guess would be we'd only win the energy contest and many of us would fail at free-styling a whole page.

New comment by rplnt in "Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking"

rplnt — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:25:27 +0000

The chart would benefit from having weekends highlighted. Or have another chart averaged by a weekday.

New comment by rplnt in "List of individual trees"

rplnt — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:30:44 +0000

I would check here for examples: https://old.reddit.com/r/TreesSuckingOnThings/

New comment by rplnt in "List of individual trees"

rplnt — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:27:06 +0000

However obscure this page might be, I was there just a few days ago. Clicked on it from this article about a tree that was cut down, and it was apparently a big thing in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sycamore_Gap_tree

New comment by rplnt in "90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet"

rplnt — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:19:50 +0000

It's as if there are two different actors and only one is an ally that can be held responsible by the government people are actually protesting "to".

New comment by rplnt in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

rplnt — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 09:47:44 +0000

One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..?

Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).

New comment by rplnt in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

rplnt — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:55:36 +0000

Do you mean wire and tool manufacturers? Electrician is mostly a user. Or to avoid flawed analogies - should books on Windows, Office, ... be only limited to a small subset of Microsoft employees? I'd assume the book is for users, what does it matter if the author contributed to the project?

And that's still ignoring that evangelism is also a valuable contribution.

New comment by rplnt in "I canceled my book deal"

rplnt — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:23:42 +0000

So are you just verifying/factchecking everything it tells you? How is that a good learning experience? And if you don't, you are learning made up stuff, so not great either.

It's a good tool to learn stuff, I'm not trying to argue that, but one has to be fully aware of its shortcomings and put in extra work. With actual tutorials or books you have at least some level of trust.

New comment by rplnt in "iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan"

rplnt — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:17:01 +0000

Always had. From blocking features by UA to ads worth billions of dollars (only little of which they had to actually pay).

New comment by rplnt in "Go away Python"

rplnt — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:43:23 +0000

So does that also solve the many issues

I've never worked on a super big project, so when it comes to python dependancies the issue I always had is some C/C++ packages trying to build locally and fsiling. While this is mostly a problem on windows I've encountered it on mac as well. I assume uv doesn't have a way to solve this?

New comment by rplnt in "Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite"

rplnt — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:19:39 +0000

And the important lesson from that the k/v-like aspect of it. That the "schema" is horizontal (is that a thing?) and not column-based. But I actually only read it on their blog IIRC and never even got the full details - that there's still a third ID column. Thanks for the link.

New comment by rplnt in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

rplnt — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:10:28 +0000

> What did you do once you arrived in Budapest?

You will be perfectly fine staying in Budapest with just English; you can learn hello, please, and thank you to be polite. This goes for most bigger European cities, outside of France I guess.

New comment by rplnt in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

rplnt — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:54:15 +0000

If you travel to Budapest from Berlin you buy the ticket from DB and the crew changes as follows: German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian. None of the first three crews would speak Hungarian. Luckily all will be able to communicate in English.

(regular announcements oftentimes won't be in Hungarian until you are in Hungary, that depends on the train origin, but I would only expect local+English)

New comment by rplnt in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

rplnt — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:47:48 +0000

Honestly, it should be an obligation. DB should make it one for themselves. DB carries millions of people a year that do not speak the language. Important information like route changes should be available to them. English just happens to be the most likely language to be understood at least enough to ask staff/other passengers as to what is going on.

New comment by rplnt in "Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig"

rplnt — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 10:24:07 +0000

How many X servers named Pheonix are there? Surely it doesn't matter if there are frameworks and libraries of the same name in other areas. It's inevitable to have collisions like this.