Hacker News Reader

Autism diagnosis has targeted screening questionnaires. So what kind of general purpose screening do you mean?

You need:

- table of contents

- automatic chapter and section numbering

- cross references and automatic tracking of figures, tables etc.

- different styles besides blockquotes such as info sections, warnings, tips

Imho, cross-referencing chapters, pages, figures, tables and the lack thereof in Markdown is the first and most important thing to check how you would like this to be solved.

WAon Agent design is still hard

Not the LLMs. The APIs got more capabilities such as tool/function calling, explicit caching etc.

WAon Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

I'm 100% on the same page as you. I just wanna point out that apparently, the enforcement of said regulation just failed. There are way too many businesses that don't give you a single "reject all" button and get away with their dark patterns. A regulation that can't be enforced consistently is not desirable and failed to some degree.

WAon Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

I assume it's because a business has different ideas about what to collect from their users and users are more or less willing to share some data with some specific businesses. Hence, every business needs their own consent rules. The fact that this is achieved with a cookie banner for 99,9% of all businesses is a side-effect. Could there be a better solution? Probably. But the law and the incentives aligned to cookie banner hell.

WAon Where do the children play?

I agree on the needed flexibility part.

> the best system btw is montesori

I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002

tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.

WAon Where do the children play?

Your scenario paints an overly negative picture. Neither do the majority of the kids move between schools every year, nor do they switch up classes within a school every year. They usually stay with the same class 2-3 years and only switch for individual courses for a couple of hours per week.

You can criticize the way how kids are separated into different levels by 5th grade, but this has nothing to do with being able to find friends.

Furthermore, your argument doesn't make much sense, because the school system is like this way before smartphones even existed and kids were able to find friends back then. It's not like the school system forces them into escapism. Just that smartphones are simply addictive.

WAon Where do the children play?

The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions.

You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?

WAon Open-source Zig book

So, a new JS linter written in Zig, when?

WAon End of Japanese community

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel

Especially coupled with this non-apology.

WAon OpenAI signs $38B cloud computing deal with Amazon

Correct and the reason is that borrowing stock for shorting isn't free. You gotta pay interest on that. Or if you go the option route, your options lose value because of time.

WAon How I use every Claude Code feature

After CC used that skill and it is now in the context, how do you get rid of it later when you don’t need the skill anymore and don’t want to have your context stuffed with useless skill descriptions?

WAon OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

Under Medical Device Regulation in the EU, the main purpose of the software needs to be medical for it to become a medical device. In ChatGPT's case, this is not the primary use case.

Same with fitness trackers. They aren't medical devices, because that's not their purpose, but some users might use them to track medical conditions.

WAon Tags to make HTML work like you expect

Try Apple Numbers, where even function names are translated and you can’t copy & paste without an error if your locale is, say, German.

WAon The Swift SDK for Android

I wrote this in another thread: I'm confident that with Liquid Glass, even more companies aren't interested anymore in the Apple UI look and rather want their own UI language, because Liquid Glass is just that bad.

WAon What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?

I thought that all non-native apps will feel even more out of place with Liquid Glass and developers go back to writing more native apps. After experiencing iOS 26, I’m pretty confident that people will actually actively try to get away from the default iOS UI language and will use more cross-platform tech that makes it easier to implement their own designs. Liquid Glass is just annoyingly bad.

WAon Element: setHTML() method

Neither does

    .innerHTML = "<script>...</script>"

WAon Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

One script I use quite often:

    function unix() {
      if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
        echo "Arg: $(date -r "$1")"
      fi
      echo "Now: $(date) - $(date +%s)"
    }

Prints the current date as UNIX timestamp. If you provide a UNIX timestamp as arg, it prints the arg as human readable date.

WAon ChatGPT Atlas

> Why isn’t this a bigger problem for people?

Same reason why Chrome and Gmail won. People don't care. Even most people on HN don't care if the tool is slightly better than the competition.

WAon LLMs can get "brain rot"

Don‘t forget the terabytes of torrented ebooks.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

https://www.classaction.org/news/1.5b-anthropic-settlement-e...

WAon Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making

The bad sci-fi story is that the Oligarch will get away with it, will die of old age peacefully while having scammed millions of people along the way and the average person foots the bill. No happy ending.

WAon Just talk to it – A way of agentic engineering

I get what you're saying. "they're" and "their" is also a classic that many non-natives seem to get right, but native speakers have trouble with.

But OP isn't native either. He's Austrian.

WAon Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?

Another theory: you have some spec in your mind, write down most of it and expect the LLM to implement it according to the spec. The result will be objectively a deviation from the spec.

Some developers will either retrospectively change the spec in their head or are basically fine with the slight deviation. Other developers will be disappointed, because the LLM didn't deliver on the spec they clearly hold in their head.

It's a bit like a psychological false memory effect where you misremember and/or some people are more flexibel in their expectations and accept "close enough" while others won't accept this.

At least, I noticed both behaviors in myself.

WAon Fastmail desktop app

I use Mail on macOS, but occasionally the Fastmail web app in a browser. Here are a bunch of things I use the web app for besides configuration stuff:

- Block sender (whole domain)

- Report phishing

- Mark as spam

Because that stuff should be done on the server, not on the client and if you mark stuff as spam in Mail, it's on the client afaik.

WAon Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland

> You could express your wishes about how you would like to be treated in advance, while you are still clear in the head.

You can't express in advance that you want to have assisted suicide.

Your former self might express wishes, but what if your later self doesn't feel like this anymore? In a way, we can all get the same feeling when doing another round of "lose weight this year" new year's resolutions just to realize a couple weeks later that the former self wasn't that trustworthy to begin with (or was it the other way around, the future self can't be trusted?)

Point is: you can wish for whatever you want, but dementia is probably a tough case and it shifts your priorities, making everything before obsolete and I'm not sure that people beginning to suffer from dementia ever find the right point in time to end life early.

WAon Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland

Yeah but if you are in that state, you probably don’t give a shit and everybody else seems to be the problem. So how do you solve this? When dementia isn’t too far progressed, your life seems to be still worthwhile to live and once the dementia gets worse, it’s too late to realize this.

WAon I'm turning 41, but I don't feel like celebrating

Exactly and what he writes about Germany is wrong:

> Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet

No you can criticize all you want. You just can’t insult them. Free speech is different in Germany than in the US. Insulting people isn’t covered by free speech.

Whether or not that is a good thing is up for debate, but Durov’s statement is plain wrong.

WAon Reasoning LLMs are wandering solution explorers

> Based on the findings, we advocate for new metrics and tools that evaluate not just final outputs but the structure of the reasoning process itself.

Maybe the problem is to call them reasoning in the first place. All they do is expand the user prompt into way bigger prompts that seem to perform better. Instead of reasoning, we should call this prompt smoothing or context smoothing so that it’s clear that this is not actual reasoning, just optimizing the prompt and expanding the context.

WAon The React Foundation

Hono is a server-side framework like Express. So same way like you handle application state in most server-side multi-page web apps: You just fetch whatever you need from the DB per request.

"State management" really isn't that much of an issue on the server. Only on clients, when you need to map state changes to DOM updates.

WAon The React Foundation

You lost me at React SSR. That is part of the complexity bs. React is a lib for mapping state to the DOM. There's no DOM on the server. So React on the server is 95% useless for that purpose and hence, overengineered to create a bit of HTML and send it down the wire.

I like the simplicity of Hono and use their html helper to write good old HTML that is send to the client.