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WA

9,458 karma · joined November 20, 2009

I run a bootstrapped B2C webapp/app. Mostly a lurker on HN.
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WA··on HN Slop: AI startup ideas generated from Hacker News
I recently found a vibe-coded app that generates courses on the fly from YouTube, including automatically generated quizzes. I forgot the URL, but the result was beyond awful. Questions were something like: "what was the title of the youtube video?" and other utterly stupid things.

Not saying that it isn't possible, but stuff like this does need the human touch.

WA··on Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri
They could secretly make Siri slightly better in intervals. People have a low opinion of Siri anyways. No way they compare Siri to Gemini. For them, Siri might just stop sucking completely at some point and then the comparison is between the Siri of the last several weeks and the old Siri.
WA··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
I just started on an old-school forum software. Go + Sqlite. Good old server-side HTML templating.

Why? I don’t like Discourse and Flarum that much. I want an even simpler solution with fewer bells and whistles.

But I guess the market is dead anyways for forums. I might replace my phpBB instance that has been running for 15 years.

WA··on Show HN: Lego Island Playable in the Browser
Nintendo and Lego are on the same level when it comes to sue people for trademark violations. There are several cease-and-desist orders against YouTubers for calling no-name bricks legos.
WA··on Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp
lol I'm from Germany and most people I know use WhatsApp, especially for groups, events, activities. Almost nobody uses Signal and even less use Threema. The place after WhatsApp is Telegram.
WA··on Guess I'm a rationalist now
If there is no free will, thoughts about free will are predetermined and so is punishment. The punishers don’t have agency either. You seem to say that punishers do have free will, but criminals don’t?
WA··on Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis
That was it, thanks!
WA··on Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis
> And it also sounds like the opening chapter of a story about what happens when an AI finds a nice little unpatched exploit in human cognition and uses that to its advantage.

I vaguely remember an article arguing that companies are basically a form of AI, because in a way, there are processes and systems and the whole thing is more than the sum of the humans working in it or something.

Now replace "AI" with "company" in this sentence of yours and we are already there. The exploits being the gigantic slot machine of social media, notifications, short-form content and endless scrolling.

WA··on WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History
Maybe it's a subtle way to punish non-native apps that recreate UI elements, but do not use SwiftUI. The user gets used to the native way of UI elements and everything else will look odd after a while, forcing developers to ditch everything that isn't truly native.
WA··on Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26
I looked for April 1st as a date. Next thought: the "news" is about an LLM writing these articles and messed something up.

But thanks for clarifying!

WA··on OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats
And then the rest of the world got tired of Apple not proposing this supposedly superior piece of engineering as a new standard... because of licensing shenanigans.
WA··on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70
It’s the other way around: a few decades ago people retired only a few years earlier, had 5-10 years of retirement and then died.

Now people live way longer, but the retirement age never got adjusted properly to the new reality. So 15-20 years of retirement is the new normal.

In addition, way fewer young payers for the now old.

WA··on Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?
To piggyback on this discussion, what do you all think about option 3:

Work for companies (as a consultant?) to help them implement LLMs/AI into their traditional processes?

WA··on Claude 4
So what's the result? I don't have a local LLM. Are the "dot papers" insane or the "thinking in actual reasoning tokens" insane?
WA··on Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
I'll give it a try, thanks.

Edit: Do you use reasoning models that introduce way more tokens into the context at all or prefer simpler models?

WA··on Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
I played around with your suggestion for a day or two now. While I'm intrigued, there are some real-world issues with this approach:

- The same spec is processed by the same LLM differently when implementing from scratch. This can maybe mitigated somewhat by adjusting the temperature slider. But generally speaking, the same spec won't give the same result unless you are very specific.

- Same if you use different LLMs. The same spec can give entirely different results for different LLMs.

- This can probably mitigated somewhat by getting more specific in the spec, but at some point, it is so specific as being the code itself. Unless of course you don't care that much about the details. But if you don't, you get a slightly different app every time you implement from scratch.

- Gemini 2.5 pro has "reasoning" capabilities and introduces a lot of "thinking" tokens into the context. Let's say you start with a single line spec and iterate from there. Gemini will give you a more detailed spec based on its thinking process. But if you then take the new thinking-process spec as a new starting point for the next iteration of the spec, you get even more thinking. In short, the spec gets automatically expanded by the way of "thinking" with reasoning models.

- Produced code can have small bugs, but they are not really worth to put in the spec, because they are an implementation detail.

I'll keep experimenting with it, but I don't think this is the holy grail of AI assisted coding.

WA··on Can you trust that permission pop-up on macOS?
Thanks for posting. I’ve had this vividly in my mind for years, but didn’t remember the source. Makes so much sense.
WA··on The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
VB got me into programming as a teen in the 90s. I even managed to create several small games without having much of a clue. Good times.
WA··on Someone at YouTube needs glasses
The worst thing about YouTube in 2025 is auto-translation. Whoever is behind this doesn’t seem to understand that many people outside the US actually understand two languages rather well.

In my case: German and English. I don’t want either to be translated to the other, but no chance. If you switch languages in the UI, you will get the garbage translated titles.

WA··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
Really good game. I liked that you can't guess your way to success, but must solve it logically. I found the terminology ok after reading it.
WA··on Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?
Ironically, 3 billion is proof that these tools do not work as expected and won’t replace coders in the near future.

Otherwise, why spend 3 billion if you could have it cooked up by an AI coding agent for (almost) free?

WA··on Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety
Yes but "hundreds" is the selector that applies for all three of my examples, whereas "thousands" merely applies to two ;)
WA··on Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety
Ah come on. While you have a point, it’s been bread and games, public executions, and sad classical music in D minor for hundreds of years.
WA··on What to Do
> It's just like the low-achieving over-confident folks of Dunning-Kruger: they don't really care about the truth, they're satisfied just believing they're an expert. The real experts take a far different tac, one of humility and intense, honest work.

Do you also love these kinds of people?

WA··on AI will change the world but not in the way you think
You can do this in Cursor already. Write a README or a SPEC file and the LLM will try to "complete your thoughts", except that it's off often enough. I find this hugely distracting, as if someone always interrupts your train of thought with random stuff.
WA··on Gemini 2.5
Reasoning != coming up with something novel.
WA··on I use Cursor daily - here's how I avoid the garbage parts
If you stopped using agent mode, why use Cursor at all and not a simple plugin for VSCode? Or is there something else that Cursor can do, but a VSCode plugin can't?
WA··on US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s
I think the parent poster has a point. It's a good idea to pause for a moment and think about this critically: Why would Putin attack the EU? Just because he can? What's the gain?

> destabilisation operations

This might actually start to become more of a self-inflicted wound. The uprise of right-wing parties is already happening in the EU. Mostly voted for by people with less education and less wealth. If we spend more money on defense and less on social security, right-wing parties might get even more traction, which causes further destabilization.

> sabotage

Yes and it sucks. There's actually not much you can do about it, because of how international waters are treated legally. But you think rearming the EU will prevent sabotage in the future? I have my doubts.

The current narrative seems to be "Ukraine is almost an EU member state and if we do not defend Ukraine, the EU will be next". Another view of the situation could be: "Ukraine is a special case and Putin would be very dumb to invade the EU".

WA··on US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s
Thing is, you can democratically vote for anti-democratic people/parties. Just because the process is democractic, doesn't mean that the end result will be democractic. We have the same discussion here in Germany with the right-wing party AfD.
WA··on Copilot for Everything: Training your AI replacement one keystroke at a time
Your output is the map, the map of your experiences. If you make a map of the map (by training a model on your output / the map), this is two abstractions away from the human being experiencing the world with all the errors and uncertainties encoded in both maps.
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