News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

keerthiko

I see it's capped to 500 articles, because the first two zip codes i tried were the middle of manhattan and the middle of sf, and i was curious just how many wikipedia articles these two epicenters have.
Re:Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans on Thursday October 22, 2026 @05:13PM (#50201126)
Ah, the irony that all the models produced a shared opinion while pretending they came up with it from analysis, which from their statements is implicitly some kind of a "human flaw" is not lost on me.
Re:OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @02:34PM (#50185502)
isn't the largest portion of openAI's reach to (overwhelming cloud provider leader AWS) enterprise customers via amazon bedrock?
bsky is primarily seeded with a culturally anti-AI, human-centric artist (illustrators, gamedevs, hobby coders, writers) core — these are the first folks who wanted to leave twitter/X but continue to share their art. Rick's og dogpiled post is now deleted so I don't know the exact drama, but I'd bet good money that he was either introducing AI features to paint.net, or trying to ship some vibecoded stuff no one asked for that is obviously vibecoded, and advertising them to the core hater-group as something they would be excited about.

I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.

Re:What shall I teach my son? on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:17PM (#50174898)
The single most useful thing I am glad my parents encouraged in my upbringing that is not ubiquitous among my peers, is a set of three things:

1. a willingness to inspect, interact and "mess with" (for lack of a better term) the world around me — intellectually, mechanically, and socially

2. an awareness that there will be consequences, and that I should take responsibility for them.

3. critically, the idea that "taking responsibility is a good (or at least not bad) thing"

In my case, this was light wrist slaps with a proud chuckle for me messing with the home electricity panel, stealing the refrigerator's power cord to replace my PC's broken one, getting in trouble at school for asking my teachers hard questions, taking some career/financial risks right out of college, and generally bending rules to find novel solutions to common problems, even if i got in mild trouble from time to time.

In many of my peers, including my older brother, they know they must take responsibility for consequences of their interfacing with the world — but that's something scary to them. So their conclusion is to inspect (but unobtrusively), interact (but only as instructed), and never mess with the world. This manifests (where I'm looking from) as limited curiosity, few novel ideas for how things could or should be (even at a small/local/domestic scale), and low initiative to try to alter their circumstances unless forced by said circumstances or authority or long debates to convince them of high certainty of upside.

Our society is cooked in the coming generations if everyone is raised to only operate within the rules they're given, and terrified of taking responsibility for anything they do — the rate of change in the world is going to accelerate so much faster than benevolent authority figures (like parents) can give them sensible long-standing rules to live within, and abusive/manipulative authority figures (billionaire CEOs, possibly superintelligent AIs or even just advanced LLMs) are going to take so much more advantage of them than they already do.

Re:An ad-free Android TV on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:01AM (#50161198)
You are looking for a very large monitor. They are very expensive. TVs are large monitors subsidized by their adware.
Re:Starcraft: Ashfall on Monday October 19, 2026 @08:29PM (#50159837)
this may be a long shot, but you aren't <EZMONE>ggEZnore on the SC2 teams ladder, are you?
Re:Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare on Monday October 19, 2026 @01:55AM (#50148856)
it's an MCP, so you could theoretically hook it up to a private/local model/agent.

but it's an MCP, so that also means it'll be more token-verbose than an API, which means your local agent hardware is going to chug a bit.

i have reached the point of just using LLMs to build my own API servers and tooling like search, and teach the LLM how to use those APIs, rather than MCPs.

Re:The game industry is broken – can we fix it? on Sunday October 18, 2026 @03:10AM (#50138666)
games are closer to art than products or services. the economic system around art has long been broken, imo mostly because of one reason - art generally is difficult to place a monetary value on in isolation: either based on cost to produce (+ value of skills needed), or based on value to end user. in the case of games, the disparity is extremely large. a game can cost upwards of $1m to build, and is worth approx $5 to a gamer. thus the economic model becomes "hit-based". this means large risk upfront, and a lot of "winner take all" in survival. yet like all art, there will be a steady supply of those willing to take abuse to practice the art. this leads to a lot of abusive industry practices.

the main differences afaik from movies & music industry are

- larger percentage of highly technically skilled workers who could make more money in another industry with their skillset

- it's a younger industry and thus has slightly less entrenched "this is just how things are done" cultural energy, allowing such articles to exist, fewer nepo-babies in control positions, etc

but as it has grown and every other entertainment industry has been getting their fingers in the pie, it has increasingly been adopting those toxic practices that have long existed in art under capitalism

Re:Barcodes are about to go extinct on Saturday October 03, 2026 @03:46AM (#49942204)
At a fundamental level, if the website isn't the product, the product has been public-facing and/or created post-2025, and it's not coming from a multi-million funded tech business, I wouldn't dock points for a slopped website — let the team focus on maintaining and using skills related to the actual product, while still having a working website. Even if the visual and textual tone may be off-putting, a decent-looking slopped website is better than no website, I prefer being able to discover and interact with them at all than not.

Just don't bury the core concept of your product in marketing-slop on your website (this site is certainly pushing that limit for me).

Re:GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven on Friday August 28, 2026 @06:17PM (#49484923)
yep, the curb cut effect is a well-researched and documented phenomenon [0] across ADA development in all aspects of the world.

accessibility work isn't just about making things possible for folks with disabilities, it's about making things better for everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect

i'd say it is a valid flex if from 16k users, their total volume of support tickets is so low that they can read and respond to them before they're done with their morning coffee -- a flex about how solid and well-targeted their service is that it doesn't draw more support requests!
Re:Claude Code Is Steganographically Marking Requests on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @12:35PM (#48749537)
> The other users could be perfectly happy about it

this could be true about a miracle drug that is untested too. still, human rights laws dictate that humans be allowed to opt in to such trials. so you must at least shift your argument to "users opted in to all of anthropic's bullshit, explicit or otherwise, when they opt to install and run claude code."

Re:MiMo Code Is Now Released and Open-Source on Thursday June 11, 2026 @05:21PM (#48496586)
Anthropic was making moderate revenue from their API tokens, but everything changed when they started bundling crazy amounts of usage credits at $20/$100/$200 claude max subscriptions relative to the API token rate, but only as long as you use their coding harness — despite claude code, back when this started at least, being an inferior coding harness compared to many open source ones.

CC is technically a free product (you can use it with any model). It's got very few popular "opinions" on how a coding harness should work, but it's by far the most popular one (including at competing LLM manufactories like OpenAI and Meta and Google). Why? If it was just that their models are 5% better, most workplaces would optimize on token (aka cost) efficiency.

Anthropic has been winning the usage of their harness, their tokens, while earning significant revenue, by significantly subsiding their token consumption.

This has earned them many things:

- prime data on how software development — simultaneously the leading beneficiary industry from LLM use, and also the most flush with cash to spend — has been using LLMs

- bringing that industry to standardize around their harness concepts. They are essentially establishing themselves as the W3C of LLM interfacing, except as a private organization.

- all dat data

Re:India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world on Friday June 05, 2026 @09:47PM (#48420572)
> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.

I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png

> The original adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” doesn’t necessarily rule out the converse.

I believe the logical term "converse" means swapping the conclusion and the condition in a logical statement, ie converse(if A then B) = if B then A

So here the converse would be "if you're the product, you're not paying". Which doesn't exactly make sense to me as a claim to make here. Did you just mean to reinforce your first sentence? In which case, I think you mean "the inverse", not the converse. However, I have only used the word converse in a "formal logic" scope (proofs) so I'm not sure if it has a more flexible meaning in informal language use.

You're better off creating a 3D model and then taking image-grabs of it facing different directions/doing different poses from an isometric perspective to get your isometric sprites, with the genAI tools of today without a skilled 2D artist at hand.

If you aren't ready to rig and adjust model poses in a 3D tool, you might be better off generating each movable model part as a separate mesh and just arranging them in space before doing the above.

Re:AI didn't delete your database, you did on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @01:06PM (#48025345)
There can be more than one person or entity to be held accountable, depending on the details of impact

If I install a powerful/dangerous app, and I come under harm, I have some accountability — most of it if it's due to user error (eg: I install termux and `rm -rf /`).

If it's malware, and Google/Apple approved said app to their store which is where I got it from, when their whole value proposition for walled-garden storefronts is protecting users, then they have significant accountability.

If the app requests more permissions than necessary for stated goals, and/or intentionally harms users via misrepresentation or misdirection (malware), the app publisher should also be held accountable (by the storefront, legally, etc).

I'm also unclear what angle you are arguing: are you stating that because tools have gotten so complicated that the end user may not understand how it all works, no one should be considered responsible or held accountable? Or that the tool (currently a non-entity) itself should be held accountable somehow? Or that no one other than the distributor of the tool should be accountable?*

Re:AI didn't delete your database, you did on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @12:03PM (#48024368)
I think you are misinterpreting gp as saying

"LLMs are a tool [like every other tool]" to mean "LLMs have similar properties to other tools" — when I believe they meant "LLMs are a tool. other tools are also tools," where the operative implication of "tool" is not about scope of capabilities or how deterministic its output is (these aren't defining properties of the concept of "tool"), but the relationship between 'tool' and 'operator':

- a tool is activated with operator intent (at some point in the call-chain)

- the operator is accountable for the outcomes of activating the tool, intended or otherwise

The capabilities and the abilities of a tool to call sub-tools is only relevant insofar as expressing how much larger the scope of damage and surface area of accountability is with a new generation of tools. This is not that different than past technological leaps.

When a US bomber dropped a nuke in Hiroshima, the accountability goes up the chain to the war-time president giving the authorization to the military and air force to execute the mission — the scope of accountability of a single decision was way larger than supreme commanders had in prior wars. If the US government decides to deploy an LLM to decide who receives and who is denied healthcare coverage, social security payments, voting rights, or anything else, the head of internal affairs to authorize the use of that tool should be held accountable, non-determinism of the tool be damned.

there are many[0] many[1] data points like this. even if individual ones seem like outliers, when there's this many outliers, it's like there's at least two distinct lines depicting consequences, one material and one not.

those who probably have exhausted all the various escape hatches built into the "vehicular manslaughter & mutilation forgiveness program" worldwide by the automobile industry, may get a year or so in prison — usually extreme repeat offenders, high profile deaths, homicide cases, or drivers who were already criminals just having the charge thrown in.

most people who "slipped up" are just fined and forgotten, at the cost of global pedestrian safety.

[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1856923/do-s...

[1]: https://gothamist.com/news/95-of-nyc-drivers-avoid-criminal-...

Re:Native Instant Space Switching on macOS on Thursday April 09, 2026 @11:03PM (#47713118)
I'm not a big space-switcher on OSX, mostly because each of my applications come with spaces (browser, IDE, etc), but unskippable UI animations are an instant roadblock.

Looks like HN hug of death killed your comments section though:

> An error occurred: API rate limit already exceeded for installation ID 65180581.

Claude Code is fairly notoriously token inefficient as far as coding agent/harnesses go (i come from aider pre-CC). It's only viable because the Max subscriptions give you approximately unlimited token budget, which resets in a few hours even if you hit the limit. But this also only works because cloud models have massive token windows (1M tokens on opus right now) which is a bit difficult to make happen locally with the VRAM needed.

And if you somehow managed to open up a big enough VRAM playground, the open weights models are not quite as good at wrangling such large context windows (even opus is hardly capable) without basically getting confused about what they were doing before they finish parsing it.

Re:Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:26PM (#47630193)
> Being rich != being famous.

> decided that simply being rich wasn't enough, they wanted to be famous

While these are true, the real detail is that these people were never satisfied with being rich -- they wanted to be powerful. And influence is what makes one powerful. Being rich goes a certain distance: once you have f you money, the only thing worth buying to gain more power is fame.

They also truly believe they have all the right ideas, and the validation that comes from being platformed for a financial success (often right-place-right-time type luck, but sometimes combined with genuine skill or insight in a relevant field) hardens them to all criticism.

I'd be sad if "quarterly numbers" is a reason for a privately held company with 40% controlling stake still held by Sweeney to lay off 1K folks.

As an indie dev, I generally like the guy's stance on shifting the PC gaming industry's support and financial incentive structures, so I'd be a bit surprised if he just did mass layoffs like Embracer and co.

That said, the article implies things that aren't necessarily canon: "cut jobs as Fortnite engagement falls" doesn't mean "cutting people because Fortnite is flagging". It's much more likely because the Epic Game Store struggles to push enough volume to recover the cost of developer acquisition on the platform.

Re:Apple Business on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @04:56PM (#47509142)
Definitely avoid unless you are distributing a consumer application through the dominant app stores (App Store and Google Play) ~globally, in which case you may not be able to avoid (or avoiding will be just as much work).

Google and Apple require it for lots of mobile apps targeting certain consumer segments because some countries (eg: Brazil, IIRC? don't quote me on that) have chosen to use D&B as a qualified unique identifier of business legitimacy and it requires exposing personal information of your company's leadership to them.

> “ Estimate: You are entitled to a written price estimate for the repairs you have authorized before the work is performed, only if you deal face-to-face with the facility and the work is expected to cost more than $100. Once you receive an estimate, the facility may not charge you more than 10% above the estimated costs without your prior approval.

I don't see how "estimates" given over the phone by the LLM and "estimate" as mentioned in this quote refers to the same thing, for the legal purpose of this statement. This would be strictly before repairs have been authorized, and it's obviously not a written estimate. If the client requests a written estimate, it would have to come at a later time after the human mechanic reviews related costs (like specialty parts availability/ship times), or the client bringing the machine in for physical inspection by the mechanic.

From my understanding of the article, it doesn't sound like the LLM is built to fully circumvent a customer phone call by the owner/mechanic before approving a job request unmanned: It's simply to not let go of a client lead because there was no one available to answer the phone, without needing to hire a full-time phone receptionist.

It seems highly unlikely a customer is towing their vehicle in without talking to the mechanic directly first, who now has some context and the ability to sift nonsense requests from realistic ones from the logs before calling or writing to the customer on their own time with all the expert nuance necessary.

Re:Shall I implement it? No on Thursday March 12, 2026 @06:39PM (#47358248)
It can terminate the current plan where it's at until given a new prompt, or move to the next item on its todo list /shrug
Re:Good software knows when to stop on Thursday March 05, 2026 @01:00PM (#47264955)
"I may play your game if you trim away a core appeal factor for the people who already play your game by splitting the active player base" is not that convincing a feature request to a gamedev.

Many live service games that are punishing for new players are still thriving like LoL and DOTA2. Much that punish-factor can be resolved by good matchmaking, putting new players mostly with each other.

Does anyone know where I can read more about which devices will be supported? GrapheneOS website devices FAQ doesn't list any Motorola devices, and the press release doesn't have much either.
This is the exact same logic as opting to not go through the hassle of registering to and casting your vote in your national elections (unless that physically isn't an option where you live) -- yes, your government isn't going to make a decision one way or another based on your vote alone. But will you affect the sociopolitical trends by whatever fraction of societal opinion you represent?

It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.

That said, I agree with the work it takes to navigate cookie banners being excessive (hence dark pattern), which is why my default browser config = ublock + consent-o-matic [1]

[1]: https://consentomatic.au.dk/

Older »