Hacker News: smeggysmeg

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Working on Products People Hate"

smeggysmeg — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:48:04 +0000

The most successful businesses are often the most harmful forces in society. There's a lesson there.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "[dead]"

smeggysmeg — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:12:06 +0000

Operates illegal business. Claims to be a victim of company protecting itself from the customer's illegal business.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos"

smeggysmeg — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:30:41 +0000

It can fail 100 times and it won't count, and the one time this surveillance legislation passes it will become law. Thanks EU, nice show of democracy.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

smeggysmeg — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:07:09 +0000

* enable developer options

* confirm that you are not tricked

* restart phone and re-authenticate

* wait one day

* confirm with biometrics that you know what you are doing

* decide if you only want unrestricted installs for 1 week or forever

* confirm that you accept the risks

* enjoy the few apps that still have developers motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this

New comment by smeggysmeg in "US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement"

smeggysmeg — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:45:04 +0000

Rational market theory is dead. Markets are not rational and do not respond to situations in rational fashions like you suggest. People operate on hype, fear, and insider trading.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting"

smeggysmeg — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:22:56 +0000

Yes, I want to see real, serious punishment for corporate crimes, on par with the life disruption experienced by people who see a jail sentence. It's almost always brutal - major income disruption, job loss, etc. If it's a small fine, which it always seems to be for corporations, then there is no incentive for following the law. I'm also in favor of corporate death sentences for large-scale egregious violations - liquidate assets and jail executives.

By corporatizing social harms, basically nobody is ever held accountable - except for the little guy.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Got tired of bad PDF WebApp so we made a Free, Open-Sourced, Private Alternative"

smeggysmeg — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 07:26:28 +0000

I desperately wish Stirling wasn't a webapp. Having to setup and launch a web server and browser to edit a PDF on my computer seems insane. We skipped the "foss, local app" stage, where Adobe dominates, and jumped straight to the web service model.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable"

smeggysmeg — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 21:55:21 +0000

I've seen this tarpit recommended for this purpose. it creates endless nests of directories and endless garbage content, as the site is being crawled. The bot can spend hours on it.

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

New comment by smeggysmeg in "TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday"

smeggysmeg — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 15:20:40 +0000

ActivityPub is exactly that. Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, etc.

What you're asking for exists.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them"

smeggysmeg — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 21:34:51 +0000

Eliminate the 'light truck' exception to CAFE. Same standards should apply to truck bodies, retroactively to when CAFE began.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Big Layoff at Duolingo"

smeggysmeg — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 05:00:14 +0000

It sounds like they're telling us their product has no value. If AI can reliably perform language translation, then why would anyone bother learning a language? Checkmate, Duolingo.

New comment by smeggysmeg in "Leaving Google Fi"

smeggysmeg — Mon, 20 May 2019 03:16:32 +0000

I'm a long-time Google Fi customer and moderate another community about Google Fi. Some of the criticism about Google not being as customer focused is valid, but the two biggest problems with Google Fi are:

* The dependence on rigid processes. Customer support reps are cogs in a machine with no ability to override automated actions or to circumvent when processes go awry.

* Google does absolutely zero of the inventory or shipping. It's contracted out to Ingram Micro. Anyone in the IT world who has dealt with them knows they screw up a lot. Not terribly, but unless you have a direct line to them, you're hosed.

Combine these two factors and then add some typical call center metrics focus and nobody is empowered or interested in going to bat for you when the process falls apart.