You mention your intense, close connections are with your immediate family. Do you think your method would still work for you if you didn't like your family and were single? Unfortunately, that happens to many lonely males.

Your comment was an interesting read, though. I never before got into the mind of someone who prefers the "feral pack" over individual, more intense connections, and your description worked well with that.

Best of luck to you and also to your daughters and wife.

I can't really say other than I can say that I am not close with my sister and never have been. I am similarly not close with my own parents who now live in a different country though we are close with my wife's parents. So when I say "immediate family", what I mean personally is my wife and daughters. What would it have been like to have the closeness with my own parents that I have with my daughters? I'm not sure other than reflecting back on those days that it would have seemed weird to me. Perhaps that is a missed opportunity.

Even with my family though I have to actively work to listen first for empathy and problem solve only when asked :-)

> Of all the things I mentioned above, the one that bothers me the most is custom scroll behaviour on websites.

While I don't necessarily agree with the entire premise of the article - in particular, a well-designed range date picker is superior to two separate browser-native date pickers - I completely agree that custom scroll behavior needs to disappear.

This one is really nice. Imports in the middle of a file are very ugly but sometimes necessary. This fixes it in a nicer way.

However, it kind of goes against the principle that “explicit is better than implicit.”

And why should they, individually?

It's a tragedy of the commons.

I would expect it to supercharge them at first and become commoditized later on.

It is just like how a digital calculator affected the role of the human calculator, or how an automaton that can code would affect the job of a human programmer.

I understand you don't mean this in bad faith and are just trying to protect the internet from slop.

I just want to say that there is a human behind all of these articles. My intent is not to "spam," but to share what I think are the best practices for better privacy and security. I hope I am helping some people, at least.

41 or more of your 61 submissions since 4 months were self promotion.

Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The article stank of slop from the first paragraph. You are not distributing high-quality information here.

No, come on. Have you really tested all VPNs in 2026 and picked the best one? You're posting 100% AI-slop articles and the internet is already overflowing with this content.

It's obvious from most of those comparison type articles on the Internet that the author never actually used the product, and just threw something together based on other articles and sales copy. I don't know where you can find real life comparisons based on testing any more.

Derek Sivers is of the opinion that a fake persona is better than not sharing any details [1]:

> Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions.

1: https://sive.rs/anon

Noisy signals about tech literate people is still a signal. If only few experts are planting fake data about themselves, companies can cordon you off and spend more resources in deanonymizing you. By muddying the water, you are planting a target on yourself if many others aren't doing it.

Depends on the details IMO.

I always have my birthday, age, etc slightly off if possible for instance. I don’t claim to be 130 or something ridiculous. It’s all believable, near-accurate but not too near stuff for me.

Even comments on forums. I lie (in ways that don’t matter/deceive the people being talked to). I lie about my age, my family makeup, etc. when the info is relevant but doesn’t need to be specific. Example: if I’m 40, I’ll say I’m 43 (or in my mid-40’s or some other general statement) if being in that age range is what matters. If being 40 is what matters, well…I likely don’t need to comment badly enough to give that away.

Actually, noise is the opposite of signal. Data harvesting companies hate noise because strong signals are profitable. It's why Google successfully pushed for people to use their real identities online initially through Google Plus and why they also displayed such an unprecedented backlash against the AdNauseum browser extension after it came out

Being named John Smith is such an underappreciated superpower.

Nah, Smith stands out because everybody knows it's common. Cooper is better. It's one of the 10 most common last names in the US, but it doesn't give off "super common, might be fake" vibes.

The fact that you shouldn't use your real info online is clear to many. That being said, is it better to leave the fields empty, call yourself "anon," or create an imaginary online persona with inaccurate data to throw OSINT investigators off?

This was a super interesting read, and it highlights exactly the strength of cryptocurrencies. They turn game theory in their favor, so egoistic players (I don't mean this in an offensive tone) contribute to making it stronger and safer for everyone else.

Thank you for sharing!

They kinda do - I'll admit honestly that the final game I played in the cryptocurrency space I played solely to profit. (It was a minor, uh, **coin that didn't have a lot of redeeming value to start with). Though it turns out the incentives remained somewhat aligned: I ended up providing the developer with some security bug fixes to make sure someone couldn't mess with the cash cow. :)

(To be clear: We were just optimizing mining; in the process of looking for ways to mine it faster, I found some security bugs and fixed them. We weren't exploiting the bugs, that crosses a line for me.)