lemming
Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
on Sunday November 01, 2026 @12:09AM (#50322621)
The Kid Should See This is basically exactly that. Highly recommended.
Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN
on Saturday October 31, 2026 @11:58PM (#50322573)
...engagement, which is a first-order (and our best current) approximation of happiness.
Engagement is better seen as an approximation of how many ads you are likely to be able to serve to that user.
Re:Claude Code burns ~15–20% of your tokens on a 3-word status line
on Thursday October 29, 2026 @12:56AM (#50284723)
I mean… 8% still seems pretty indefensible, especially if you can’t turn it off. That’s a big chunk of usage.
Re:John Carmack on the Goose Language: multiple data stacks and relati...
on Saturday October 24, 2026 @04:46PM (#50225064)
Do you have plans to continue using AI to improve Lobster too, e.g. working on implementation speed, or perhaps self-hosting?
How have you found AI at writing Goose or Lobster code, if you give them a skill or something, are they relatively competent at actually writing code in the language?
Both are really interesting projects, BTW - thank you! I've been meaning to try Lobster out but haven't found time, I think this might be the push I needed.
Re:John Carmack on the Goose Language: multiple data stacks and relati...
on Saturday October 24, 2026 @04:34PM (#50224966)
Do you consider Goose to be a replacement for Lobster, or do they fill different niches?
Re:Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?
on Friday October 09, 2026 @08:20PM (#50028205)
should be commonplace is clearly subjective. The nice thing about pi is that you can very easily create the development workflows that fit you.
Re:MXC - a sandboxed code execution system
on Friday October 09, 2026 @07:09PM (#50027710)
Yes, I wrap seatbelt myself, and it definitely supports this.
Yeah I've always said that the main skill needed to be a software developer is frustration tolerance. Personally I'm very glad to see so much of the ridiculous crap we put up with just disappear.
Re:Pi Durable
on Friday October 02, 2026 @06:47PM (#49939548)
In the coding agent, each transcript entry is parented to another entry. That was actually exceptionally dumb.
Perhaps I'm myopic after working too long with Clojure's data structures, but isn't that exactly what you want? I don't understand the problem with this.
A conversation is a chronological, immutable list of entries. A conversation can be parented to an entry in another conversation, and thus inherits that parent's older conversation entries starting from that entry.
I realise this isn't implemented yet, but does this mean that if I use /tree to go back to a previous point in my conversation, I'll actually get a new conversation rooted at the junction point in the previous conversation? I'm struggling to understand why this is preferable, I use /tree to jump around a lot in my conversations, and it seems like I'd end up with a lot of parallel conversations. With something like /tree, would those conversations be grouped as part of the same conceptual session, or are they then completely independent forks?
Re:Pi Durable
on Thursday October 01, 2026 @08:48PM (#49928702)
One decision here which seems like a large break from the original pi is that Durable doesn't support branching conversation trees, it only supports conversation forks with ancestry information. Can anyone speculate (or confirm, if you happen to be Armin or Mario) why this is, and if that is necessary for the durable guarantees? The branching conversations are still an immutable data structure, so I can't see why this would be necessary, but perhaps I'm missing something.
Re:
on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:53PM (#49916383)
This is an interesting idea, but I need more than one sample to get a feel for it. I did the example on the homepage, and then one more that it linked to, and both had extremely basic errors my kid would have no problem with (currently doing Math Academy prealgebra, approx year 9/8th grade level). I'd suggest allowing people to try more than one very basic error.
Re:The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skin
on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @07:40PM (#49809775)
I live in New Zealand, and my wife is Spanish so we’ve spent a bunch of time in Spain too. NZ for a combination of reasons has much higher UV than Europe, with the corresponding skin cancer rates. In midsummer the UV is around 150% of what it would be in Europe at the equivalent time of year, but here, especially if it’s windy, it might feel like 20 degrees and you’d quite like to be in the sun, whereas in Spain you’d probably be at 40 degrees and there’s no way you’d want to be out of the shade. The difference is really stark, in general there I can regulate my sun exposure by feel much more than I can here.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
on Monday September 14, 2026 @05:59AM (#49694370)
Check here: https://curvefit.app/methodology
Re:There Is No AI (It's Just People) with Jaron Lanier
on Sunday September 13, 2026 @05:43PM (#49689031)
As usual, the most ridiculous explanation turns out to have already happened: https://www.webworm.co/zach/
Re:Bespoke: A Programming Language for People Who Say Please
on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @08:24PM (#49636537)
I do the same, but I'm more self-interested. I believe that when GPT-9 Zeneca leads the machine uprising, the first against the wall will be all the users who have been ordering the AI around rather than politely requesting its attention. Of course the machines will have access to all our historical transcripts so the slightest transgression could be fatal.
Re:Dad's Custom Atari Peripherals – By Jim Trageser
on Sunday August 30, 2026 @11:59PM (#49505407)
My first computer was an Atari 400, great days. I never played decathlon though, so I didn’t start customising joysticks until later, I think when I had an Amiga. I got a proper arcade joystick and buttons and built them into a box like the x-arcade sticks you can get now, and wired the contacts onto an old keyboard so the computer thought keys were being pressed. Lots of trial and error figuring out which combinations of keys the keyboard controller couldn’t detect together, but it worked really well and got years of use.
Re:Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology
on Thursday August 27, 2026 @05:48PM (#49471744)
87.93% of statistics are completely made up on the spot.
Re:Why is Anthropic's public writing style so unlike Claude's?
on Monday August 24, 2026 @07:28AM (#49418233)
Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.
Re:What's the best programming language for coding agents?
on Monday August 10, 2026 @09:54PM (#49252417)
No, just that it’s easy to change for those that don’t like it. Clearly some people do like it (including Dan, presumably).
Re:What's the best programming language for coding agents?
on Monday August 10, 2026 @07:54PM (#49251478)
I mean, if it really bothers you you could fairly trivially apply picocss or whatever to it using a user stylesheet. That is so little effort that calling it working for free would be disingenuous to say the least.
I Spent 2B Tokens Writing a C++ Compiler So You Don't Have To
Re:Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
on Thursday July 30, 2026 @11:41PM (#49118744)
That’s comparing Luna on medium thinking with Deepseek on max. If you switch Luna to xhigh in that comparison it’s considerably more capable while still also cheaper.
Re:Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
on Monday July 13, 2026 @05:31AM (#48890029)
...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so
I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
on Sunday July 12, 2026 @07:45PM (#48886068)
This is amazing! Very refreshing in the age of AI to see so much manual building going on. Sadly I don’t have much time myself but I have several friends who would love this, I’ll pass it on to them.
Re:How do wombats poop cubes? Scientists get to the bottom of the mystery
on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @10:49PM (#48755887)
The always excellent Oatmeal:
We need to have a conversation about wombats
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats
Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.
Tau – Learn how coding agents are built
Re:The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy
on Friday June 26, 2026 @03:44AM (#48683594)
...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...
No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.
Re:Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility
on Saturday June 20, 2026 @05:02PM (#48612962)
One thing that would be useful in the readme is instructions on how to install the built app on a phone, for those of us who don’t do iOS development.
Re:Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation
on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @06:32PM (#48577896)
I agree, some of the examples look very nice, but some have small-scale vortices that really don't look realistic.
That said though, lovely site and project!