Hacker News: spaqin

New comment by spaqin in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

spaqin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 04:44:11 +0000

The problem isn't in preloading, it's in how much data needs to be sent while quite probably most of the data could be either fetched on startup in an efficient format and rendered natively, or is completely unnecessary in the first place (telemetry, ads).

New comment by spaqin in "Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md"

spaqin — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:08:02 +0000

Scrapers won't be stopped by needing an account; in the recent discussion [0] about this, someone mentioned that there's even a JSON API you can use - by appending .json to any post! It's to drive engagement... for the advertisers. They gotta keep the valuation up after the IPO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015533

New comment by spaqin in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

spaqin — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 02:29:39 +0000

Man, all of these little steps Google is taking to take the control away from the users, not to take over the world or anything else, but to force on you more accurate advertisements. What are we even doing?

New comment by spaqin in "Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera"

spaqin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:20:15 +0000

Calling our friends, maybe? No idea; I've tried desktop Linux on phones years prior and besides maybe being a potential portable cyber security rig it was only a cool oddity.

New comment by spaqin in "How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots"

spaqin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:26:36 +0000

It's all "security" and all until your banking app has a bug that breaks exporting bank statements and the only way to get it out is to take screenshots - which are blocked as well. Oh, and you need to submit it by today.

At least on rooted Android devices you can bypass that.

New comment by spaqin in "Phones should have a 'guest lock' feature"

spaqin — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:32:46 +0000

App pinning is a thing on Android already, although I don't know how well it's supported in all the devices.

New comment by spaqin in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

spaqin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:42:06 +0000

I'll grab onto the very first thing you've said as it seems to be a basis for the rest - taxation isn't fun, but low taxes don't guarantee anything. Look at Hong Kong - one of the lowest tax rates in the world, but it doesn't really mean the citizens have more free income. The government still needs money to function, and the main source is land sales instead. The landlords have taken over instead and insane rent for smallest places is now the actual tax. And then it's reflected further in the price of the food or products, where rent is the biggest business expense.

The money just goes into private hands instead. Is that really the better option here? Innovation isn't necessary if you have a de facto monopoly - and frankly, Facebook is a good example; nothing it has done in 10 years was actually an improvement to the service or humanity.

It would be alright to socialize the good parts and get rid of the bad ones.

New comment by spaqin in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

spaqin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:50:12 +0000

I never found a competent metaphor for LLMs taking over. Any tool brought up before still required skill and thought, and deep knowledge of its intricacies.

New comment by spaqin in "Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo"

spaqin — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:10:31 +0000

Why can't we be just... done? Why is software development a never ending treadmill? App does what it's supposed to, the developer earns something (or doesn't), and they can I dunno, abandon it if it wasn't successful enough and the API breaks, without any guilt? Do something else with their life?

New comment by spaqin in "Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model"

spaqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:00:54 +0000

That's a bit amusing - not that I have the hardware to run it, but officially it's not available in Hong Kong. Not that getting it would be much of a problem with a help of a VPN either, but I'll assume mainland China is also restricted. Certainly not a competition for Chinese open weight models... in China.

New comment by spaqin in "The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)"

spaqin — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:34:41 +0000

That's the main reason why most embedded devices and Android phone hackers (or more recently, ROM developers) are from Russia, Brazil or India. It's more of trying to squeeze more performance from a cheaper option... and having the time to do it. Once you're happy enough (not even perfectly!) with your product and you don't have the time to try to improve it yourself, you just won't.

The hacker culture in the West is more related to creating a thing, and doing everything yourself from scratch on bare metal components - often for the fun and challenge, rather than necessity.

New comment by spaqin in "Learning to fly FPV drones with AI flight coach"

spaqin — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:41:44 +0000

Ehhh there's a lot of knowledge on the websites, freely available, for anyone who wants to read. Sometimes it might seem conflicting though. But there's a community who's used to responding to the same questions over and over again. Asking an LLM is no different and there's no extra value; I'd say you're even losing the community aspect of it. The only somewhat fun part is getting it to make a virtual map of your place - decent starting point. I wrote a similar guide/blog post - although it seems it's not caught in by Google for whatever reason so you can't find it easily...

New comment by spaqin in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

spaqin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:11:34 +0000

Sure; it was one of many posts in xda for a cheapo mid-level Chinese device. I haven't gone through it too deeply to understand and optimize further, works fine as-is to me.

https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-16-official-lineageos-23-for-mi-...

New comment by spaqin in "Online Friends Are Real Friends"

spaqin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:38:16 +0000

I'd say that sending your photo to a someone online is even weirder. If you're friends based on hobbies, interests, then their appearance (assuming decent hygiene ofc) shouldn't matter that much. From numerous times I've met online friends, I might've seen their photo few times at most?

New comment by spaqin in "I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux"

spaqin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:28:39 +0000

My LineageOS setup used to do that; until I found that someone found a script that would adjust the memory allocation and OOM killer to more sensible values. I just have that run on boot. No side effects.

Unfortunately, that's not an option for most people, the only choice is to complain - but not like there's any other option on the market that behaves better. Or there's some other drawback, or different UI to learn...

New comment by spaqin in "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"

spaqin — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:31:05 +0000

I'm pretty sure that just a year or two ago, software engineers were saying that coding was only a small part of the job; the rest is meetings, dealing with requirements, design, testing, maintenance. So, how can we expect a 10x boost in a productivity from improving a small part of the job - especially now if we have to clean up any mistakes the LLM makes?

New comment by spaqin in "Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification"

spaqin — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:31:45 +0000

We had a world without the endless scroll just a decade ago. You don't need a totalitarian surveillance state to regain control over that, nor do you need perfect enforcement - just like illegal betting sites are a problem, but a marginal one.

New comment by spaqin in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

spaqin — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:05:59 +0000

No one's really stopping you from owning nothing and being happy.

New comment by spaqin in "Android May Soon Restrict On-Device ADB"

spaqin — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:26:31 +0000

In this case, the OS security restrictions should be questioned in the first place as excessive if a "backdoor" is necessary for normal function.

New comment by spaqin in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

spaqin — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:11:03 +0000

Even if I have my Yubikey passkey that's with my house keys, it's annoying to go grab it and connect every time I need to access something. Enabling it on GitHub was a mistake...