Hacker News Reader

hotwired, suck, boing boing, CNET, digg, slashdot, segfault, geocities, flickr...

felixgalloon GPT-6 Astra covertly underperforms on safety research

actually SawStop does brick itself, destroying the brake cartridge and blade to save your hand.

felixgalloon Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?

Fable can go deeper than Opus in my experience. Opus is incredible for relatively now-simple things like coding, but Fable has delivered improved results for me in data analysis on relatively obscure topics. That said one gets much more Opus for a subscription than one does Fable, so obviously benchmark your own cases and come up with your own cost benefit analysis.

felixgalloon Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines

Microsoft's talent pool is deeper and equally smart. The problem is in the leadership, which grew fat and lazy and permitted a continuously terrible corporate culture and unfocused plan, and in the design. Microsoft's historical game plan is to copy and leverage its scale, but you can't copy and leverage scale in design or in management.

felixgalloon Meta censored the No Kings Instagram account during a nationwide campaign

the 'team red is being silenced' nonsense was, and is, a transparently synthetic attempt to promote right-wing discourse no matter how ridiculous it was. You may remember that Elon "free speech absolutist" Musk was the champion of this meme, claiming that Twitter was suppressing right wing views, and that every single one of his and Matt Taibbi's claims turned out to have been false or overblown.

felixgalloon Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude

because orders of magnitude cheaper models are also orders of magnitude less capable

felixgalloon A 28-Year-Old DOGE Operative Gutted USAID. HR Had No Record of Him Working There

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts....

this seems to have a lot of pretty concrete data. Which do you disagree with in particular?

felixgalloon In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

Unlike your hypothetical, mine is actual.

felixgalloon In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

Suppose there was a pre-pardoned, unaccountable, masked band of brownshirts in Temu youtuber military wannabe gear, stalking the streets with impunity, terrorizing people who aren't white, holding down American citizens and emptying guns into their backs. Suppose they have been given access to every database that the US has at its disposal, as well as sweeping powers to demand data from anyone they choose.

Suppose Flock's license agreement additionally said that they could give data to anyone they wanted to, as it does.

Suppose the leader of these brownshirts frequently talks about his opponents, protestors, etc., as enemies of the state and domestic terrorists.

How great do you feel about this nonexistent mystery technology of yours now?

felixgalloon In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

There is one independent national study ( https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/independent-study-vehicle-t... ) which indicates vehicle thefts fell 11% following a flock installation.

However, the vast majority of vehicle thefts self-resolve ( 85% of passenger vehicle thefts are recovered, a third within one day ). Flock's apparent impact was that vehicles came back on average 1/4 day sooner; it did not appear to impact the rate at which they were recovered, so your instinct would be incorrect.

Additionally, vehicle theft has been steadily decreasing year-over-year since COVID, and it's possible/likely that the effects seen in the study were continuations of that trend rather than anything attributable to flock. The paper even says as much -- that the effect began in the months preceding flock installation.

Intuitively, you'd think that flock cameras would help a lot. I would think so too! But at least in my small-to-mid-sized city, they don't noticeably help at all with any kind of crime.

https://ij.org/how-flock-is-trying-to-take-credit-for-the-po...

felixgalloon In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

You can imagine that, but at least in my city, no, crime was going down before Flock, and continued its trajectory; Flock did not cause that. Same for, e.g., SF.

felixgalloon In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real

I ran an in depth study of Flock for my city. It's been deployed here for several years. What I found is that there is no statistically significant correlation between Flock being installed and any reduction in any kind of crime. I suspect my city is not unique in this regard.

Flock rode a post-COVID wave of general crime reduction and claimed responsibility for it, but it appears that the only meaningfully effective use of Flock is for stalking, terrorizing immigrants, assembling opposition dossiers, and parallel construction.

felixgalloon The Goose Programming Language

If you think you'll be able to divine that if and only if the documentation is entirely written by a human, then I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you: no language has ever evolved strictly according to the initial plan of their authors. Nor has any author's strongly held belief about the future ever panned out the way they thought. Nor has the documentation ever held the immutable future of the language, even when fully human generated (which essentially zero languages have, even before AI).

The way to find out if a language is suitable for your needs is not to demand, in an entitled way, that the author perform an act for you. It is to (a) ask the author politely; or, failing that, (b) to examine it yourself (or ask Fable to evaluate it, using tokens you paid for).

This particular language, further, is Apache 2.0 licensed. If it's not working for you, fix it. Jesus.

felixgalloon The Goose Programming Language

With respect, what on earth are you talking about? The documentation is clear about what the language does. You can download it and test it out if you like, and verify if yourself if the documentation matches the feature descriptions. What the human collaborator wants is immaterial. You get the code.

The author has written that post about why the language came about. He doesn't owe you that, but he did it anyway. He doesn't owe you anything more. You can use it or not. Advising him to throw away all the documentation and rewrite it again by hand from scratch so that adastra22 can deign to examine it further is ridiculous.

If you have a question about whether or not this further iterations will fit your specific (and so far undescribed) particular use case, the correct avenue for that is to ask the author politely. Or Fable; Fable could probably tell you without having to bother the author. But holy cow, the entitlement.

felixgalloon The Goose Programming Language

We as a society have to cut this low effort commenting out. The documentation is perfectly comprehensible. What action would you take differently if a given feature were implemented by Claude, or a human?

felixgalloon Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed

Sam, I'll grant you, is probably among the top 10 most dangerous, but Dario? The only thing he's done to piss people off is to predict, correctly, that releasing too-powerful models too-quickly would cause havoc and chaos. This prediction actively hurts his company! It actively harms his chances of a huge exit! It actively raises the probability that Anthropic and OpenAI get nationalized and treated in the same way as, for instance, the nuclear program!

By comparison, do you think the Chinese models are going to be trained in such a manner that you enjoy the society that results? What makes you think that?

felixgalloon I Did This Without Your Knowledge

You apparently didn't watch Pluribus or read this. Pluribus is about the experience of essentially the last autonomous person on Earth. This is about the experience of the Singularity and the questions it raises.

felixgalloon Jared Kushner Hacked Phone Reveals Secret Negotiations, Millions in Transactions

Jack Smith, Barack Obama, and four teenagers from tiktok for supreme court additions.

felixgalloon Jared Kushner Hacked Phone Reveals Secret Negotiations, Millions in Transactions

Literally everyone from ICE to Kushner will be pardoned.

felixgalloon Footage of the Flock search that a judge ruled was uncosntitutional

she 'admits to a 2 night stay in california', and that's part of your reasoning for probable cause? I feel like you shouldn't be a police officer, either.

felixgalloon AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware

it has to be the website to start with; if the website is hosting malware, then it's the website's problem. Soon after that's implemented, the adtech companies will begin competing to solve the website's problem by promising clean, malware free ads, and will begin aggressively vetting ads. The monetization model will be preserved and the incentives will be properly aligned.

There is no universe in which 'gosh it's just too hard' is the correct answer.

felixgalloon Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved

No, it describes that Cloudflare was unable to identify that they have or haven't. The lack of evidence is not proof of absence.

felixgalloon AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary

The speed of light and the state of the internet doesn't permit many games to be effectively streamed; even great systems like Nvidia's, optimized to within an inch of their lives, feel laggy and weird for a large chunk of users.

It is more likely that we will see a cambrian explosion of games that obviates the need for big company games in the first place. Big gaming companies are big because they need lots of developers, producers, artists, QA, and management and executive suites to manage those. You can even today get code, assets and QA for a tiny fraction of the price you have to pay humans, and that will apparently only get 'worse' for humans over time. It's going to be a very intriguing next few decades.

felixgalloon Felix Rieseberg Homepage

I think the only controversial thing about this cute little homemade website is that he frames Electron as being a rebellion against the chaos of modern software, which, well.

felixgalloon AWS Lambda Web Functions

Probably because their solution is technically superior from a safety perspective?

felixgalloon CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades

You don't have to assume they're stupid, it's just that they're entirely surrounded by a bubble of increasingly protofascist craziness framed as reasonable opinion. Turn on Fox News sometime, or open Twitter.

felixgalloon Talorys – A self-hosted personal AI agent on Cloudflare's free tier

That’s great! Where do I download cloudflare?

felixgalloon In "Musk," Alex Gibney Punctures Elon's Self-Mythology

you can appreciate the work of spacex while also recognizing that Musk is one of history's greatest douchebags and civilization's worst enemies.