1dom (u/1dom) - Readit News

1dom commented on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification" · Posted by u/nextdns

pogue · 5 days ago

In the replies to the reddit thread, I'm seeing a lot of people they tell me they moved to Control D. Some people had complaints about latency of the service and other factors, as it seems Control D doesn't have very extensive worldwide coverage.

But, it definitely seems to be the superior option. It's $40 a year more for the full plan, which is unfortunate, but if they offer more options, better customer support and etc it is probably worth it. NextDNS is $20 and standard Control D is the same price. NextDNS does work, but there is seemingly no support whatsoever.

I came across a Stacksocial coupon that offers $40/yr for the standard plan, so I'm tempted between the two options. The standard option doesn't offer changing location via DNS. That may not be important if you're already using a DNS, but it would be nice to have.

I bought a RPi5 with the intention of turning it into a PiHole but never got around to it, and I don't believe you can use your PiHole's DNS outside of your LAN (for example, if you use it on your mobile device and leave your local wifi, it can't connect to it's local IP).

1dom · 5 days ago

Thanks!

This was a few years ago for me. It also aligned with my personal pendulum swinging back from cloud to on prem.

I switched to local pihole. I didn't really like it though, it felt a bit too toy-like. I then switched to adguard home, and I still use it. I've found it faster, easier and just generally more mature feeling than pihole.

Regarding using it away from local area network, I use tailscale (via selfhosting headscale) and then have adguard home joined on that, with the tailscale IP for adguard set as the DNS server for all my tailscale client devices. The only downside with this I personally face is it can be a little hit-and-miss changing networks on some older versions of Android.

1dom commented on Show HN: NextDNS Adds "Bypass Age Verification" · Posted by u/nextdns

huhkerrf · 7 days ago

I'm really surprised to see this pop up considering how the NextDNS team seems to have disappeared otherwise. Out of date offerings like you mentioned, coupled with 0 customer support when things break (and things break a lot). New features like this are fine only if the base service works. I can guess that this feature also is going to break soon, and I don't have high hopes for it getting fixed.

I moved over to ControlD about a year ago and I've been very happy. Nothing has broken, and they seem to be active about their service.

1dom · 6 days ago

Same here, I left NextDNS because I didn't trust it anymore. I started using it personally in homelab and just found it to be randomly a bit sluggish at times. Saw other similar reports. Tried to get support and failed. I saw it trying to sell itself as business capable DNS, and considered if it would fit in at work. Then I got an e-mail giving 7 days for me to disable and move all my logs out of the EU region. I was working at a large fintech firm at the time, and if a vendor had given us 1 week to rearchitect and figure out a new logging solution for DNS, we would have dropped them immediately due to the massive compliance issues they would have created.

The messaging around the change was very much "FYI we're deleting everything in 7 days in that region whether you're good or not, feel free to do what you want", e.g. creating problems with no interest in helping with solutions to those problems. This would all be fine for a free-tier service, but I was a paying customer. Even as a paying customer though, I paid virtually nothing.

Overall, NextDNS felt like it had the worst possible combination startup, passion project and beer money project features: I paid for it for a couple of years and got fed up because the amount talk about it gave the impression to me there was a fair and growing customer base but NextDNS were missing either the capability or focus to grow the service at the time. I'm conscious they'll be reading this - it was 2 years ago this happened, so maybe things have changed.

1dom commented on Simulator of the life of a 30-year-old in the UK nicksimulator.com/... · Posted by u/kostyal

mike-cardwell · 7 days ago

I live in the East Midlands in the UK. You can grab a reasonable first house here for less than £150k quite easily. So you'll need a 5% deposit, £7,500 for one of those. One person on an average salary for the area would be able to afford a mortgage for a house like this on their own. But Nick has a girlfriend, who can hopefully work, so should be able to afford it easily.

But half of people earn less than the mean salar though. So what about those on minimum wage? Well, one person with a full time minimum wage job should be able to get a mortgage for close to £100k, so wouldn't be able to afford a £150k house on their own. They could scrape by and get a house close to £100k though. There are plenty of these. Again, two people on minimum wage should have no problem.

I recognise that people have all sorts of different circumstances, so this is not meant to minimise the difficulty of affording property, but I'm just not recognising this claim from the outset that you need a £100k deposit or high paid job to get on the property ladder. It's hard, but it's doable for most.

And on top of this, Lifetime ISAS are a thing, so you only need to save up 80% of your deposit, the govt will pay the rest. And shared ownership is a thing, making it even easier.

1dom · 7 days ago

Start pressing buttons and you'll see even more weird claims that most sane Brits won't recognise. This is a weird website that probably shouldn't be given much time.

1dom commented on Simulator of the life of a 30-year-old in the UK nicksimulator.com/... · Posted by u/kostyal

jamesalvarez · 7 days ago

This could actually be good but instead it just comes across as a coded xenophobic rant. Wasted opportunity!

1dom · 7 days ago

Great way of putting it.

This looks like ragebait.

First 2 things I saw:

- the idea that £100k deposit is needed to buy a house

- some weird stuff about nationwide initiatives and hypothesised awkward conversations with people who might be Muslims.

Maybe I got unlucky?

1dom commented on Why LLMs can't really build software zed.dev/blog/why-llms-can... · Posted by u/srid

noduerme · 10 days ago

Good programmers working hand in glove with good companies do much more than this. We question the business logic itself and suggest non-technical, operational solutions to user issues before we take a hammer to the code.

Also, as someone else said, consider the root causes of an issue, whether those are in code logic or business ops or some intersection between the two.

When I save twenty hours of a client's money and my own time, by telling them that a new software feature they want would be unnecessary if they changed the order of questions their employees ask on the phone, I've done my job well.

By the same token, if I'm bored and find weird stuff in the database indicating employees tried to perform the same action twice or something, that is something that can be solved with more backstops and/or a better UI.

Coding business logic is not a one-way street. Understanding the root causes and context of issues in the code itself is very hard and requires you to have a mental model of both domains. Going further and actually requesting changes to the business logic which would help clean up the code requires a flexible employer, but also an ability to think on a higher order than simply doing some CRUD tasks.

The fact that I wouldn't trust any LLM to touch any of my code in those real world cases makes me think that most people who are touting them are not, in fact, writing code at the same level or doing the same job I do. Or understand it very well.

1dom · 10 days ago

I think this is a fair and valuable comment. Only part I think could be more nuanced is:

> The fact that I wouldn't trust any LLM to touch any of my code in those real world cases makes me think that most people who are touting them are not, in fact, writing code at the same level or doing the same job I do. Or understand it very well.

I agree with this specifically for agentic LLM use. However, I've personally increased my code speed and quality with LLMs for sure using purely local models as a really fancy auto complete for 1 or 2 lines at a time.

The rest of your comment is good, bit the last paragraph to me reads like someone inexperienced with LLMs looking to find excuses to justify not being productive with them, when others clearly are. Sorry.

1dom commented on Nearly 1 in 3 Starlink satellites detected within the SKA-Low frequency band astrobites.org/2025/08/12... · Posted by u/aragilar

rickdeckard · 11 days ago

> I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".

I fully agree, and that's IMO the core-issue here: This strong-arm approach of just forcing the problem to be solved in your favor by scaling as fast as possible and then pleading how uneconomic it would be for you to change course, insisting that the other side should be pragmatic about this.

I don't remember this was a working strategy in the past (imagine a car-company just accelerating sales of a faulty car to scale THEIR issue and avoid having to do a recall), but nowadays it could even be turned into a geopolitical topic...

1dom · 11 days ago

I instinctively want to agree with you here and bemoan the state and directions of the world. But if I really think about it, it's been happening my entire life. I'm mid 30's now. I assume someone older than me would have had the same experience of it happening their entire life.

You're right though, it's crappy and merits a lot of geopolitical reflection. But I suspect it goes back millenia and is a manifestation of basic evolutionary biology with the business world, rather than anything that can be solved/fixed.

And we've gone full circle about the balance of working for/against humanity in the name of progress.

1dom commented on How I code with AI on a budget/free wuu73.org/blog/aiguide1.h... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

bayarearefugee · 14 days ago

I understand the point people are trying to make with this argument, but we are so far into a nearly universal scam economy where corporations see small (relative to their costs of business) fines as just part of normal expenses that I also think anyone who really believes the AI companies aren't using their data to train models, even if it is against their terms, is wildly naive.

1dom · 11 days ago

> is wildly naive.

I do know the way of the world, I just disagree with it and would like it to be different, so I make a point of taking opportunities to try and do that. It's possible to understand the world whilst also not accepting it, and encouraging it to be better.

You can call me naive, I will call you defeatist:)

1dom commented on Nearly 1 in 3 Starlink satellites detected within the SKA-Low frequency band astrobites.org/2025/08/12... · Posted by u/aragilar

jillesvangurp · 11 days ago

> the required SNR

Require by who and on what authority?

My point here was not to contest that but make the point that the cat is out of the bag and that it is indeed impacting SKA-Low EoR science and the people involved with that have to deal with that.

Getting the cat a little bit back in the bag via policy and other means is maybe worth trying (good luck) but I don't give it a very high chance of success.

1dom · 11 days ago

This makes me want to say "is nothing sacred?!" I get your point from a pragmatic: this is the world we live in, work with it, not against it.

I think you need to scope this approach when suggesting it though, since it's effectively "a policy has been broken by a company, but we can't undo it, so lets just accept it and let them get on with it" which doesn't seem like it'll lead to a better world.

I do agree with your point that the people who suffer from the policy breach have to be pragmatic in their handling. But ultimately, let's not let pragmatism and stoicism lead to businesses spectacularly breaking policies in hopes of being told "well the cats out the bag now, the victims can deal with it, you might has well continue".

1dom commented on How I code with AI on a budget/free wuu73.org/blog/aiguide1.h... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

can16358p · 15 days ago

Many folks, especially if they are into getting things free, don't really care much about privacy narrative.

So yes, it is free.

1dom · 14 days ago

> So yes, it is free.

This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important to spell this out: this sort of stuff is only free if you consider what you're producing/exchanging for it to have 0 value.

If you consider what you're producing as valuable, you're giving it away to companies with an incentive to extract as much value from your thing as possible, with little regard towards your preferences.

If an idiot is convinced to trade his house for some magic beans, would you still be saying "the beans were free"?

1dom commented on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/08/... · Posted by u/blenderob

hopelite · 15 days ago

Your question is “what is the deal with Amazfit?”

There is an implied question there, but you may want to get a bit more specific. The deal seems to be that you get a really good fitness watch for a fraction of the cost of Android and Apple offerings, if your statement and my first review of their website is accurate.

1dom · 14 days ago

> The deal seems to be that you get a really good fitness watch for a fraction of the cost of Android and Apple offerings

Fair point, I elaborated a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854032

You're right in your assessment. My "what's the deal" was more asking "how did such a small unknown-to-me company do this with similar or better results to the worlds largest hardware/software companies (Apple/Google) in 2015/2016?" It sounds like they did it with even more specific and low level hardware and software, which makes it even more impressive.

Like I said, my bip did GPS, bluetooth notifications, hardrate tracking and most of the other things an iWatch did, but it had 20x the battery life and cost 1/5 of the price. I find this an unbelievable achievement that I don't understand, and it's rarely talked about.