News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

AnonHP

Tangential question: seeing a wider negative sentiment against Gemini and Google’s AI capabilities here makes me wonder — would Apple have been better off (purely on capability and being among the best of the best) going with Anthropic or OpenAI instead of Google for its Apple Intelligence platform?

These models have been changing so rapidly that I often find myself using two or more on the same topic but seeing one do better than another in different topics. There doesn’t seem to be a clear all-round winner, IMO, that I can stick with permanently.

Re:Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results on Saturday September 12, 2026 @05:17AM (#49670543)
I find that I rarely do one search. It’s usually a search, followed by looking at the first few links and probably opening them in tabs, then refining the search terms to get better results. It’s an iterative process. So the 10 per day on average would be exceeded quite quickly.

I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.

Is Julia any good for general purpose (non-scientific) use? I guess it probably may not have as many libraries as Python. So what do the library and third party package coverage look like in comparison to languages like Python, Go, etc.?
Re:Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI on Sunday August 30, 2026 @12:12AM (#49495628)
A bit weird writing style, and I don’t know if this is Substack or the lack of proofreading.

It quotes a problematic statement and then after one or two paragraphs, it says this:

> But here is an important thing that many people forget:

> There is no better productivity hack than a great culture. No AI tools will provide bigger productivity gains.

> I’ve unfortunately seen and heard this sentence quite a few times, either directly or from an engineer or engineering leader who has reported that to me.

So the problematic sentence is the one that talks about a great culture being the biggest productivity hack? I had to scroll up again and see what it was referring to.

I like the graphical interface and the movement of the blocks. Brings back memories of defragmenting hard drives once a month and seeing noticeable performance improvements sometimes.

> Fragmentation and extent allocation were adding measurable variance, even on NVMe,

Why exactly would there be a measurable variance on NVMe? I understand there could be some impact on magnetic hard drives. This sounds like some sort of coincidence due to other factors and that this defragmentation won’t achieve much (except for wearing out your SSD even faster in certain cases).

My guess is that OpenAI now has a full blown Cursor equivalent in development (an expansion of Codex?) and will announce it in September. Otherwise it stands to lose those who are used to working with Cursor.
Re:Pixel Watch 5 on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @11:40PM (#49281542)
> two-finger-tap to feel the time discreetly

What is this “two-finger-tap to feel the time discreetly” and how does it work?

My experience is different. I like the chronological feeds and the lists I can create to group accounts.
I have a lurking account and follow some other accounts, but I’m not interested in “liking” or “reposting” any posts. I want to keep my usage and engagement as low as possible. The “For You” feed doesn’t work for this need because it relies on signals like liking content.

I agree that the Discover feed sucks (why does it show posts from people I’m following when there’s a dedicated tab for that?). But I’d rather have a better Discover feed than me having to do more work on the “For You” feed.

> Any call the agent makes to an external connector is reviewed by an LLM judge to prevent dangerous operations.

A few basic questions: how reliable is this judge since it’s based on an LLM? What additional measures can an admin or someone with more technical knowledge take to tighten this further if needed? Are the rules in or used by this judge visible to the users or an admin?

Re:Parody Hacker News (2013) on Thursday July 30, 2026 @01:34PM (#49113111)
Someone please create something similar about AI slop and comments about AI slop in an article. That will be more 2026 HN. /s (partially)
Re:Ente – Opening Our Books on Friday July 17, 2026 @01:13AM (#48943550)
GP here. You make some valid points, but I was talking about the pricing of the hosted service by Ente because Ente allows self hosting too. Of course, the investment to support self hosting and to provide the apps (for free to anyone, including the self hosting crowd) matter in pricing decisions. But it still seems quite high to me.
Re:Ente – Opening Our Books on Friday July 17, 2026 @01:07AM (#48943521)
GP here. The initial comment did not say that it was the gross margin. Only a follow up reply to my comment asking about the price reduction did. So I assumed it was net margin.
Re:Ente – Opening Our Books on Thursday July 16, 2026 @09:35AM (#48934362)
If your margins are about 70%, do you have any plans to reduce your prices? Compared to other photo storage platforms, your pricing seems a lot higher. End to end encryption seems to be the only USP when a person looks at your hosted offering.
Re:Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years on Thursday June 04, 2026 @04:34AM (#48395856)
I’ve always felt that SQL is somewhat easy to grasp for basic queries, but gets complex and difficult for even moderate to higher complexity use cases. My eyes glaze over when I read long stored procedures that someone else has written. Any recommended resources to go from beginner/beginner-intermediate to advanced?
I had a quick look and bolted out within half a minute. Trying to open an organization or repo throws an error. There’s a featured comparison section on the homepage, and tapping on the first one leads to a message saying free tier allows two things to be compared and a pro subscription allows more. Why put this as the first in this section then?

Seems like this is not fully baked yet and it pushes for pro subs a little too soon.

I disagree that it’s a waste of time or that only gullible people use it. A WAF (enabled to block malicious requests) is a cheaper and quicker solution to throw and still get some benefits.

I’ve seen that even in some large (non-FAANG or whatever) companies, budgets for security are always very tight or not available. Practically, it’s easier to kick the can down the road with a WAF.

For enterprise applications deployed for specific clients, if at all there are issues because of the WAF, they’d quickly bubble up through standard support mechanisms.

Re:Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma on Friday March 06, 2026 @10:12PM (#47284101)
How is it on older or budget hardware though? It’s been a long time since I tried KDE, and in between even worked with Xfce because Gnome was a bit more resource intensive. Is it still the case that in terms of hardware specs and demand of the hardware, KDE needs/uses more than Gnome? I guess Xfce will be in a different league capability wise and resource requirement wise.
Re:Zed new terms required to be 18 years old on Thursday March 05, 2026 @03:43AM (#47259216)
Re:Zed new terms required to be 18 years old on Thursday March 05, 2026 @03:42AM (#47259209)
Gram [1] is a fork of Zed with all these removed. It seems to depend on more involvement from others to keep it going though.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/GramEditor/gram

Re:Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @10:22PM (#47242629)
> On iOS there isn't always a choice to not build something native.

Tangentially, even native can be badly designed and developed, performance wise. Even Apple hasn’t been able to do a good job with the Reminders app (one of the several apps ported to Mac with the same level of negligence that Electron brings in). I use a lot of Reminders and lists in Reminders. It’s janky and poorly coded.

I skimmed through the article. I didn’t understand what role AI supposedly plays in this case for tracking aid deliveries. For tracking you need sensors and connectivity from the mode of delivery, location information, some analytics and databases. What does this AI do for tracking? I can understand a sales pitch that says AI decides where to provide aid, how much, when, etc. But tracking deliveries? It’s a head scratcher for me.
I think Meta employees don’t protest either for the genocides its platforms aided and supported or the other harms caused to kids in general. Maybe the pay is so good that one can convince oneself they’re on the good side. Maybe these companies attract a certain type of personality that doesn’t necessarily care much about others.
Re:Apple's Latest Attempt to Launch the New Siri Runs into Snags on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @10:05PM (#46984425)
> Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device.

Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.

Re:The Day the Telnet Died on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @09:26PM (#46969999)
So Telnet as a client is not dead though, right? A long time ago, I used to use the Telnet client to talk to SMTP servers (on port 25) and send spoofed emails to friends for fun.

With port blocking widening in scope, I’ve long believed that we would one day have every service and protocol listening on port 443. Since all other ports are being knocked off in the name of security, we’ll end up having one port that makes port based filtering useless.

I have one observation that doesn’t seem to be reported on this thread. The home page is very heavy, loading several MBs of images. It took half a minute to load completely for me on mobile.
That’s exactly what I thought too when I saw “$12 annually”. Then I read the “$15 when billed monthly” and realized this is a monthly price. OP, please correct this.
Re:Why I Joined OpenAI on Friday February 06, 2026 @10:47PM (#46921127)
I’m replying to your comment in the hopes of getting a response. In the blog post, you said:

> There's so many interesting things to work on, things I have done before and things I haven't.

What are the things you haven’t done before, if you could mention them?

I didn’t understand how a user that cannot unlock FileVault helps. Can you please elaborate on this setup? Thanks.
Re:State of the Windows: What is going on with Windows 11? on Monday January 26, 2026 @10:37PM (#46775220)
I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.

If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.

Older »