News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

annjose

Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN on Saturday October 31, 2026 @09:22PM (#50321890)
Whoa, what a breath of fresh air! Just watching videos without worrying about clickbait.

And those filters and sorting options - imagine what the internet could have been without enshittification.

Re:Laya the open source version of Jev on Saturday September 19, 2026 @09:40AM (#49766524)
And on Vercel AI gateway
I agree with you - there’s usually some adjustment for sampling bias, and this study says it is matching Census targets. But I had to go three levels down to see that info before I derive any meaning from the number.

My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters.

I agree it’s very possible subscriptions would become more common if targeted ads were restricted. Personally I’d rather pay money for a good product/service than 'being the product' for a bad product that monetizes my data.
Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes:

- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?

Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].

> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).

[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...

[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...

Re:NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook on Thursday July 16, 2026 @01:58PM (#48937934)
Apparently it is Language Model, as mentioned in the announcement of NotebookLM in 2023 [0].

> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.

It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.

[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/notebook...

"they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads."

- would they be able to make as much as they do now? I think it would be significantly less.

From Meta's official Financial Report for 2025 [0]:

Total Revenue: $200,966 Million

-Advertising: $196,175 million (97.6%)

-Other rev: $ 4,791 Million ( 2.4%)

[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

Unlike most articles that butcher an analogy so badly that you wish they could have just described the concept plainly, this one uses the analogy really well. It carries it from start to finish without overstretching it.

This line captures the essence of the article and is going to stick with me forever:

> SaaS is the bread, not the bread machine.

And yes, SaaS companies that understand that they sell convenience and accountability will be the ones that survive this AI rush. New ones could emerge too.

Re:TypeScript 7 on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @02:42PM (#48835736)
The Jevon's Paradox. And it is not a paradox :-)
Re:Half-Baked Product on Friday July 03, 2026 @11:49AM (#48776446)
Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol.

I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.

Re:Pieces: Social Network for People on Friday July 03, 2026 @12:13AM (#48770630)
Good work! I am hopeful for a social network that is not craving to increase engagement and going viral. I posted a sample but and created a profile.

But when I went to the Docs tab in my profile, it says...

Doc Not Found The doc "how-to-use-pieces" could not be found

Re:Claude Sonnet 5 on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @10:12AM (#48747156)
Not sure of any out-of-the-box tool. But Anthropic has a token count API which gives a near estimate of the input tokens for messages [1].

So this API can be used in a UserPromptSubmit hook [2] in the harness, get the token count for any model, calculate the cost and compare.

[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/token-...

[2] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks

Thanks for the note. While building the context bundle, there is a tool that detect gaps in the timeline. So when you ask 'kitchen renovation', and there are emails from 2019 and 2023, the tool flags these gaps and the LLM is made aware of it. So Memento asks which of these clusters you want to track as a project.

Later while generating the wiki, LLM handles conflicts and facts that evolved over time because it has the timestamp of the messages. So it shows that in the narrative.

Wwat we haven't implemented yet is to update the wiki when new emails arrive. That is the next one in our backlog.

Thanks for the feedback. What are the things you liked the most? Any other features you would like to see?
Good point! We will add it to README. The default msgvault setup instruction would work - see at https://www.msgvault.io/setup.

Note: Anytime you want to remove memento tables from msgvault db, you can do `./memento reset`

Co-author here. Happy to take any questions.

We built Memento for two reasons - we were frustrated by the search in Gmail, and we wanted to organize email locally in a privacy-friendly way. But the outcome was much more than that - we learned how to build agents from scratch, optimize agentic search, and discovered many beautiful memories we didn’t know were hidden in our email.

We would love to know what you think of this project. All feedback is welcome.

Re:Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive on Thursday June 11, 2026 @11:20PM (#48499522)
> (I have way too many open tabs!)

Phew! I thought I was the only one.

Re: on Friday June 05, 2026 @11:56AM (#48414305)
Same here. I didn't get a captcha. Good article. And looks like human-written. Refreshing.
Re:When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident on Monday June 01, 2026 @09:43AM (#48356783)
> Who is accountable for AI agents?

Obviously the person who built and deployed the agent (the claw in this case).

If we treat this as a hard question, we risk treating AI systems as people rather than tools. This is exactly what Armin warned about in his "clanker" post last week.

There are a few examples here:

https://github.com/DrCatHicks/learning-opportunities/blob/ma...

As I understand, this skill is intended to understand AI-generated code and potentially reduce skill atrophy. So it asks the agent to pause after important milestones (eg: created a file, changed db schema etc ) and ask the user questions about how they would do it.

Are they also held accountable for the code they ship? Are they added to the on-call rotation?
> today's best runnable-offline model is roughly 6–8 months behind today's frontier.

But it doesn't matter because frontier models were extremely good 8 months ago and we were doing real work with them. Now we have more capable open-source agents like pi and OpenCode which work well with these models.

More importantly, offline models is the best choice for privacy, on-device inference and no token/cost anxiety.

Re:A.I. is creating engineers who can't think without it on Monday April 27, 2026 @04:26AM (#47919049)
I don't understand why people crave to assign a new role for themselves (team lead, manager). AI is a tool that augments your skill and you use it carefully. It doesn't require a change in your role. A farmer with a tractor is a farmer, not a lead. An accountant with spreadsheets is an accountant. A software engineer using a coding agent is a software engineer who has a powerful tool in their toolbox.
Re:I created my first AI-assisted pull request on Monday March 23, 2026 @11:49PM (#47498410)
I love the description of the PR. This type of honest statement is the right thing to do - be transparent, be respectful of the time of the reviewer.

> This PR adds support for embedded Ruby (ERB) which is commonly used in Ruby on Rails projects. Note that I used heavy assistance from Claude Code and tried to ensure it didn't generate slop to the best of my abilities. All tests are passing and I also visually verified the end result which looks solid to me.

> Here's a screenshot that was generated by building the Chroma CLI with the ERB lexer and running it against the test data file with chroma --lexer=erb --style=monokai --html lexers/testdata/erb.actual

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