Hacker News Reader

apples_orangeson The Post-American Internet

But can't be bothered to avoid Palantir or Microsoft.. that would be TOO tough! Learn all those new buttons (once) and that confusion with ~ instead of C:\. Oh the difficulties! :D

apples_orangeson The Post-American Internet

Until China decides they don't want to sell to them that is.

apples_orangeson iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

FeatureToggles.swift

apples_orangeson 2025 Letter

It's not clear what the US plan even is. Move all manufacturing back home and compete with China ASAP?

apples_orangeson Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

Tired of this kind of talk. Everybody is looking for a scapegoat. For some it's China, for others the billionaires, yet others suspect it's all the Jews' fault, or the European Union, or wokeness, or Donald Trump or or or.. sigh, it's not new, it's just boring, and it rarely leads to any good things.

apples_orangeson Why Indian cinema is awash with AI

American cinema is awash with special effects since Jurassic park or so .. with a few good films in between :)

apples_orangeson Has Anyone Deployed AI in a Small Business and Seen Real Value?

Social media businesses for sure have seen benefits

apples_orangeson Tell HN: Wrapping up the year and resetting my goals

Reviewing the year is good practice

apples_orangeson Americans in 1998 tried to predict 2025

Well if it weren’t for Trump then it would have been Haley vs Harris and woman president election would have been correct.

apples_orangeson Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian

Hm but a set of letters takes how long to learn? A weekend?

apples_orangeson Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (1990)

you mean photo not screenshot.

I think all floppies are magical :)

apples_orangeson How I protect my Forgejo instance from AI web crawlers

HTTP 412 would be better I guess..

apples_orangeson Venezuela explained in 10 maps and charts

Good video on the oil: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgwny1BiCYk

apples_orangeson Venezuela explained in 10 maps and charts

War is bad .. yes very, of course, but look closer at life in Venezuela, it’s really gotten bad for people there.. millions left, just saying: regime change if it works might .. be good?

apples_orangeson Surface Tension of Software

Good type definitions are the foundation

apples_orangeson How I block all online ads

realistically though, most YouTube content is an ad for something ;)

apples_orangeson Why we can’t quit Excel

It's just so much easier to stay and keep paying Microsoft than switching. But why hasn't any startup found a way yet to disrupt it by giving the users something they actually love more, so they can start lobbying businesses to switch to it, I wonder.

apples_orangeson OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

Yes I agree (and personally avoid ads where I can with blocking or using paid subscriptions) but many or most people will still accept that deal.

apples_orangeson OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

I don't understand this view. I think most people would be happy to use the best models for free in exchange for seeing ads. That's basically what google and many others successfully do for decades.

apples_orangeson Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes

I neither like the taboo nor the opposite. Too much psychology talk in every day life, everyone is traumatised and has unresolved issues etc. That may be, but I wish we would handle it all more privately...

apples_orangeson Could Virtual Reality Help Doctors Learn Empathy?

I think a story, maybe a video clip of a person talking about their struggle will also do.

I understand some people are less sensitive to such things than others, but let's say you watch, for example, a YouTube video, even just a Short, of a WW2 veteran, talking how they stormed a hill and his best friend died. It's touching and you can relate with how it must have been and how this man might have felt or still feels.

apples_orangeson Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?

I think it’s just like Steve Jobs said: they have no taste. That never changed and it causes them to fail time and again with innovations

apples_orangeson After my dad died, we found the love letters

"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged.

Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with more normal human emotions.. or I live in regret myself and push it aside, ha.

apples_orangeson Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Why bother. When you publish something good, AI will fetch it in 0.01 seconds from you..

apples_orangeson Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws

Imagine the useful, user friendly, well designed features when business had a big incentive to push privacy

apples_orangeson Heretic: Automatic censorship removal for language models

Well I guess only on HN, this has been known and used for some time now. At least since 2024..

apples_orangeson Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit

there are llms which are modified to not reject anything at all, afaik this is possible with all llms. no need to convince.

(granted you have to have direct access to the llm, unlike claude where you just have the frontend, but the point stands. no need to convince whatsoever.)