News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

brandon272

Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:11PM (#50264234)
> So we see a 11% uplift already.

Am I crazy, or are a lot more people using the term "uplift" in place of "increase" within the last year? Google Trends (for whatever it's worth) shows a significant increase (uplift?) since mid-late 2025. [0]

[0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=uplift&date=today%205-y&...

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Monday October 26, 2026 @01:47PM (#50247890)
Support chatbots and other automated support mechanisms have been "regurgitating documentation and debug procedures" since the 90s, if not earlier.

If frontier AI deployed at frontier labs is not capable of "resetting 2FA, issuing refunds, handling payment glitches, etc." then the current and near-future capability of AI is being severely overstated.

Re:My old job feels distant now on Friday October 16, 2026 @08:51PM (#50126701)
"App store apps" seems like the last place I'd look to try and determine whether the software market is saturated. It's a niche, at best.
Re:New Apple TV 4K on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:40PM (#50078404)
In Canada this is nearly $500 with sales tax. A total non-starter for me, personally.
Re:The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27 on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @02:05AM (#50067427)
Snow Leopard was my favourite. Was also the version I first started out with as a Mac user, so there's probably a nostalgia component that influences that opinion.

What I do know is that in the uniform-looking icons we have in the current dock, I seem to find myself hunting for the right icon to click a lot more than I have in the past.

What connection does the 3% have to the ability to do a chargeback? The card company isn't absorbing the loss, they are just pushing it back on the merchant and collect it from them unless the merchant successfully disputes the chargeback.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37267299

(2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192749

(2013)

There have been discussions on HN about this topic across administrations. That is not to say that there aren’t differences in degree, but the government has long maintained that it has special rights to conduct searches at the border that would not be permitted elsewhere.

Re:You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @09:58AM (#49893396)
It’s a little odd how everyone is misreading this comment.

They are not saying that introverted and extroverted characteristics did not exist in people, they are saying that people did not run around proclaiming their introverted or extroverted status in the same way they do today and they didn’t use it to rationalize behaviour to the same extent.

Re:Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @01:09PM (#49804615)
I agree. Hopefully Anthropic has fixed Opus' ridiculous communication style so that people - like me - no longer have any kind of weird impulse to imitate it.
Re:Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @12:35PM (#49803997)
You were right to notice the complaints. One decision remains, and it is yours, genuinely.
For a lot of people involved in local LLM, ownership and control of their data matters to them a lot. It's what pulls a lot of people toward local models. Renting a 5090 off of some random infrastructure provider that is reselling some random dude's 5090 does not fit the bill.
Thanks, that makes sense. When you said they “barely, barely worked” for you I assumed that meant something different.
Out of curiosity, what do you find the SOTA models are simply incapable of when it comes to your Rust and Go projects?
Local models are undeniably capable of "helping with coding" today.
This. People have convinced themselves that the absolute frontier is what is needed, anything below it is an unacceptable compromise, and we seem to be speaking different languages when it comes to discussing model capability.

It's like watching a discussion about cars available to take on a 100km road trip. A new car gets released that is on par with a Toyota Corolla but it is dismissed as completely useless for a 100km trip because it doesn't have the seat massagers and air ride suspension that the new Escalades have.

The reality is that something like Sonnet 4.6 is still amazingly capable for so many programming tasks, especially if you already have some reasonable level of experience to steer it in the right direction.

And if you think Sonnet 4.6 is still worthwhile, then it seems undeniable that something like Qwen 3.8-27B is also worthwhile.

Re:I built the fastest PHP webserver in the world on Saturday September 19, 2026 @01:10PM (#49768306)
What do you mean LLM slop? OP says they built it themselves.
Re:I don't like passkeys on Saturday September 19, 2026 @12:53PM (#49768119)
It does when I log in. You click "Try another way" and then it brings up a menu of options you have for 2FA. For some reason they have designed the account recovery flow to be different.

So, if you are used to the "Try another way" flow on login, it can be confusing to see an entirely different "Try another way" flow on account recovery.

Re:I don't like passkeys on Friday September 18, 2026 @07:46PM (#49761794)
Thanks. Upon further investigation we could have hit “Try another way” on the account recovery process UI a few times to get to a workable account recovery method.

Would be nice if Google would lay your recovery options out for you (which I am used to it doing in regard to 2FA if you are doing a regular log in) instead of having to hammer the “Try another way” link repeatedly as it cycles through options.

Re:I don't like passkeys on Friday September 18, 2026 @11:03AM (#49755406)
Ran into the same issue with my dad the other day. Has a passkey set up on his Google account. Bear in mind that he doesn’t know what a passkey is, so Google obviously sent him through a pattern at one point to get him to create one.

He didn’t have access to it the other day and we needed access to his account. He didn’t remember his password, and we were unable to reset it because you need the passkey! No other options to authenticate for a reset were available.

Add in the fact that I was trying to help him with this by long distance call and you can imagine the frustration.

Laws are threats. The difference is that we empower the government to threaten us to maintain social order, we do not empower individuals to threaten each other.
> AI stealing their jobs isn't a "legitimate material harm"?

No, if you have to make several indirect causal leaps, to get from "shop owner uses ChatGPT instead of MS Word to generate a menu" to "somewhere a graphic designer loses their employment" it is not legitimate. And if that is how you interpret the world, virtually any harmful or even violent action can be rationalized in the name of stopping some probabilistic harm.

Sticking with your cow's milk analogy, serving the wrong milk to the wrong customer with a dairy allergy can cause immediate harm to their health. Generating an AI menu cannot be reasonably interpreted as causing direct harm to anyone.

> If people don't want to patronize businesses that use AI, there's nothing wrong with that.

I completely agree. But making a personal choice to not visit a business and undertaking a coordinated effort to organize a boycott against a business is in a different category altogether.

Re:Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @06:04PM (#49733675)
> In your original point you seemed to be painting everything with the same brush. There was no "90%" mentioned.

My apologies, I assumed that it was implied that I was speaking generally. I will try to be clearer going forward.

I stand by my 90% figure based on what I observe from the full corpus of daily "Show HN" submissions.

> And you sound extremely angry about it.

I can't even begin to imagine what part of my very plainly written comments are communicating "extreme anger" but I guess it's difficult to communicate tone online!

> I suspect that bird detector wouldn't be terribly difficult for a Claude subscriber. Yet you already agreed it's not in the shit category, right?

It depends on what you mean by "terribly difficult".

To provide some clarity on my view:

Just because something can be recreated easily does not automatically make it terrible or bad, but the fact that we can now generate software as easily as we generate a bowel movement (to borrow from my previous comment) means the bar for quality and attention has changed.

> Are you sure that the number of good projects hasn't increased? Or is it just the signal to noise ratio that troubles you?

Yes, signal-to-noise.

In that analogy, you SHOULD assume the person is an influencer.

In the case of this shop, we're talking about local retail. If you are a retail small business owner you have to assume that any customer can be an "influencer" and cause significant harm if they seek to trash your business online.

If the "business owner needs to own their actions", shouldn't the people who are seeking to take a coordinated effort to harm that business also "own their actions" and be able to say plainly what they are doing instead of misrepresenting it via "Stop being crazy, I'm not making threats, I'm just talking to my friends" gaslighting nonsense?

> If the shop's oat milk was really cow's milk, would it be "threatening their business" to tell other customers that?

To entertain this analogy, if a shop is misrepresenting their ingredients then it can make sense to spread the word, particularly if the shop owner refuses to rectify the issue, because there are health implications which represent a legitimate material harm to their customer base and the safety issue takes priority over the shop owner's bottom line.

An AI menu, assuming it offers a reasonable representation of what the shop offers, has no safety issue.

If I tell someone that I am going to take a coordinated effort to undermine their business and get customers to stop shopping there, potentially resulting in the demise of the business, the loss of their livelihood and ability to provide for themselves or their family, I cannot think of any reasonable person who would not categorize that as a threat. A threat by no means is limited to violence only.

I am really disturbed by language minimizes concrete actions taken to cause harm.

"I am not hurting your business I am just talking to my friends!"

"Nice business you've got here, shame if something happened to it"
I think that issuing an ultimatum where if the person does not do what you want, that you will be sharing your concerns with likeminded people online, with the underlying implication being that the business owner will end up experiencing some kind of negative outcome from that, is absolutely a threat.
Re:Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @03:57PM (#49732108)
The bird frame project has all the signatures of something developed with thought, care and effort put behind it, and the fact that it involves physical hardware is part of that. There's a reason it reached the front page.

My point was: that cannot be said about 90% of what gets posted in 2026 with a "Show HN" prefix because it is minimal-effort LLM-coded work that can be recreated easily by anyone with a Claude subscription, and we should not pretend that software developed in 2026 is the same as software developed in 2021. Everything has changed, including incentives to post, and that has changed the level of attention I can devote to that category of HN post.

Re:Ask HN: AI Panic, you buying it? on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @02:47PM (#49731254)
I think there are undeniable and novel risks with AI. But there are risks in everything. We could theorize all day about them. We all use tools every day that could be used for very ugly acts. An iPhone can be used to plan a terrorist attack. A 3D printer can be used to print weapons. We could sit here and fear monger all day. Time will be needed to understand, weigh and contextualize these risks.

What is a more immediate concern for me is the efforts of frontier labs to have government craft legislation that shields them from competition, cements them as monopolies, or assigns them the capability to be moral arbiters in our society.

Re:Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @12:53AM (#49722244)
Yes, a rare gem.

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