Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
discord is shit, poorly designed software, with all the most obnoxious poor security decisions (like requiring phone calls), with poor political decisions on top as well as spying. probably one of the worst pieces of software to ever exist. all it has is momentum. it's like pop music where a million people make bands and one wins the fame lottery.

it's primarily a windows program and they can't even make a proper windows gui but embed a website, so clicking on anything is like a link instead of focusing into it. for instance if you middle click someone's name it opens it in a browser. fuck off. pressing alt+f4 closes discord instead of sending it to the tray (despite being a tray program). it's always updating something and then it just says "logging in" instead of saying what it's doing. it gets stuck indefinitely if you log in on a slow connection or you unplug lan while it's logging in or doing whatever it's doing at any given moment. absolutely the most frustrating crap to use. it has a billion options for stupid "hardcore" gamers (i am, too, but i don't need it) with special needs while not being a basic quality application that conforms to any UI standard.

they openly spy on you, not even trying to hide it.

instead of real software, it's a stupid fucking social media "community", so you can't just use it as a MECHANISM NOT POLICY program, instead every time you do something like log into a different account you have to check whether this is morally correct or will somehow harm their "community". like say i want to work on my blockchain, who are dumb enough to use discord as their main communication platform. i obviously then would want one account for that, then another - completely separate (but perhaps with the same phone number to make it logistically easier which SHOULDNT EVEN BE A THING, this is the internet) - account for playing games (often during work), i can't just log into these simultaneously, i have to go check what their policy is on that. literally, my first thought is that like typical incompetent american software devs, they will think i'm trying to scam people or some other kind of "abuse". and of course, they appear to have conceded to partially implement this "feature" (by undoing their nonsense about forensically attempting to forbid this)

Comment · 1 year ago
> "Videos of people having sex" is deliberately misleading

it literally isn't. porn is mostly people having normal sex or just nude images of a woman. the existence of fringe fetish stuff doesn't affect that in any practical way. but your confusion seems to be thinking this discussion was about feminism or something when it's really just a decrepit boomer who is against sex being even legal lying through his teeth to justify completely pointless and harmful legislation (see 2 posts up)

Comment · 1 year ago
lets just skip straight to the logical conclusion, buddy. no amount of "web" or "discord" regulation stops porn consumption. the statistic of "minors viewing porn" wouldn't be affected even slightly, even if all of the regulation in question here were passed to the fullest extent. this is because people can just download and run whatever software they want, and communicate with any party they want. what you want is for people to not have control over their computers/communications made from them. people talk about a middle ground, but there is none, because you will always just notice that the "minors viewing porn" statistic is not affected by your latest law, until you have absolute control over civilian communications. this is completely against what anyone in the open source community let alone democracy, stand for.
Comment · 2 years ago
regulation fixes nothing and just makes everything worse in the big picture

> no recording in public

this is the only one that sounds like good common sense but isn't even regulation it's just law any sort of legal system would enforce.

all these "safety" things means ai offerings are all useless like google after 2003 when anything you query like "list of fad diet" is transformed into instead of an answer to that "problematic" question, an answer to "NVM LOL HERE IS A LIST OF HEALTHY DIETS"

> can't train on copyright material

that's so dumb. this world has no interesting copyright content coming out for 2 decades, it's literally all sellouts. losing to AI (which will happen regardless of whether the training material contains any copyright content) is exactly what they deserve. don't forget that these are also people who sue random civilians for "damages" that only exit in their head. sellout culture no longer even applies to musicians and book authors, it's also the majority of software too, with people just creating software for part of their resume, or some crowdsource shit, or a blog. any software anyone makes in a corporation is just to host an ad or be a dev tool for people who just host an ad

Comment · 2 years ago
> Please wait while your request is being verified...

Speaking of snakeoil

Comment · 2 years ago
Password policies are a joke since you use 5 websites and they will have 5 policies.

1. Bank etc will not allow special characters, because that's a "hacking attempt". So Firefox's password generator, for example, won't work. The user works around this by typing in suckmyDICK123!! and his password still never gets hacked because there usually isn't enough bruteforce throughput even with 1000 proxies or you'll just get your account locked forever once someone attempts to log into it 5 times and those 1000 IPs only get between 0.5-3 tries each with today's snakeoil appliances on the network. There's also the fact that most people already know that "bots will try your passwords at superhuman rate" by now. Then there's also the fact that not even one of these password policies stops users from choosing bad passwords. This is simply a case of "responsible" people trying and wasting tons of times to solve reality. These people who claim to know better than you have not even thought this out and have definitely not thought about much at all.

2. For everything that isn't your one or two sensitive things, like the bank, you want to use the same password. For example the 80 games you played for one minute that obnoxiously require making an account (for the bullshit non-game aspects of the game such as in game trading items). Most have custom GUIs too and you can't paste into them. You could use a password manager for these but why bother. You just use the same pass for all of them.

Comment · 2 years ago
Wow SMS 2FA forced bullshit that suddenly got astroturfed right on the day of the Snoweden revelations is actually indeed bullshit. When will they have opt out of this or is this just the end of the web? 20 years ago I did not need or want anything more than a password (obviously cryptographic key auth would be better but not if it's brought to you by X.509). And of course all the HNers who eat this shit up and defend it like little dogs are suddenly on the other side. Email verification is fucking dumb too, and of course now every email forces phone SMS shit.
Comment · 2 years ago
they also aren't very hot and wont work in northern cities, but people will install them there anyway. "boiler" - is that jargon for multiple kinds of heating units or actually just boilers?
Comment · 2 years ago
another thing i just remembered like this is how the start menu will fade in in windows XP, and submenus. but after you open one submenu and then decide to open another beside it, it admits that the animation is just a gimmick and doesnt do it again.
Comment · 2 years ago
> Health advocates praised the Environmental Protection Agency

which ones? which ones didn't? just 2 days ago i heard PFAS is still in the rumor stage.

> Water providers are entering a new era with significant additional health standards that the EPA says will make tap water safer

i thought you already said it's safe?

i have plenty of health issues caused by just about everything, everything has 10 billion perfumes for no reason, and new kinds of experimental plastics in every single possible thing you can buy, that smell terrible and unsurprisingly make you feel awful, just walking in a city and coming in fills my face with irritants and can ruin my day. this is a small difference in comparison. i doubt the PFAS thing is any more than a typical fad and way for gov to make money as usual. nobody actually cares about this stuff, they just pretend.

Comment · 2 years ago
you don't expect it to work that way, you discover it. once you discovered it, sometimes you have two files that start with e and you press e to get to the one you want, but it got you to the one before it, so you press e again to go to the next one, which is faster than reaching for the down arrow. being able to select files with finesse is important in windows.

windows 9x was probably the last time any user interface tried to be this efficient, now it's just click the arrow and it will make sure to slide the next photo in very slowly in case you forgot that you're waiting for the next photo to appear

Comment · 2 years ago
how was this not just an exercise of checking the law or amending it for fraud / false advertising with a result like, "a service has to state the actual cost up front and not require the person to calculate a bunch of stuff in his head with 5 equations for 10 competitors before he can even compare them". you can't say "$30/mo" and then put a star once you click 3 pages deep saying "(for the first 3 months)", because that makes it practically impossible for the buyer to compare prices, gating it behind some stupid fucking address entry form that breaks 80% of the time. it's simple fraud and nothing else. you write: "price: $30/mo and then $70/mo after the first 3 months"

and i bet FCC spent 100 million dollars making this

and can you even access these food labels before entering your address? (and why is it not mandated that they provide a list of zones and prices per zone?)

a number like "total latency" is just complete nonsense, as its not a real metric that can fit in one number, and the kind of number marketers love to abuse.

and nothing about what kind of modem the ISP is compatible with. is it cable, adsl, fiber?

wifi extender and battery backup? because someone in FCC needed to work his full shift so he added those during his time? i'm not going to compare isps based on what random bullshit they bundle in, i only care about the actual service. anything more than 3 variables is too much. modem rental is important since they fucked up the chance of having open standards so hard that most people practically have to rent a modem. i guess FCC can't be blamed, they aren't techies or whatever.

Comment · 2 years ago
these kinds of stories are such a joke, why can i not just give someone my public key and that should be enough to communicate with him forever? how is that not user friendly? because he can lose the key? you just give it again. you just use some decentralized protocol with a DHT or something and the only step the user ever has to do is get the public key of the person he wants to add. net result is far better off than nonsense like email, dns, and x509. and i had this exact same rant 15-20 years ago too, it's amazing how everyone is still chasing the same carrot.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton