Hacker News Reader

kitdon Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

BBC News does have to report on itself from time to time. Here's it's "live" feed from November on the Parliamentary Committee investigation into the Trump speech edit incident:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cp34d5ly76lt

(edit: technically, it was Panorama. I'm not sure if that is part of the News remit or separate from it).

kitdon When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

Be careful. I'm pretty sure my wife is going to leave me for Claude any day now.

kitdon Over 80% of 16 to 24-year-olds would vote to rejoin the EU

IIRC, only education outranked age in predicting how likely you were to vote leave. In short, the younger and more intelligent you were, the more likely you were to vote remain.

Looks like today's youth continues that trend.

kitdon Stoolap/Node: A Native Node.js Driver That's Surprisingly Fast

Blog post written with an LLM

What makes you say that?

a project that went Go -> Rust -> Node?

The DB went from Go to Rust. The Node part is the Node DB driver

Does it not bind to your already built Rust tool?

It's in the 3rd paragraph.

I guess I'm a bit confused but don't want to read AI fuzz further

Personally, I'd learn to get used to it.

kitdon Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning

The long-term trend (ie since 2023) is for more ShowHN posts to be stuck at 1 point compared with normal posts, and for that gap to be growing. This implies that people find the ShowHNs to be less and less interesting.

kitdon I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Given that an estimated 70% of human communication is non-verbal, it's not so surprising though.

kitdon Oat – Ultra-lightweight, zero dependency, semantic HTML, CSS, JS UI library

The claim is "no classes for native elements". Ie you don't need classes just to create a button etc.

kitdon Oat – Ultra-lightweight, zero dependency, semantic HTML, CSS, JS UI library

Great work! PicoCSS feels a bit too minimalist at times. This looks like a better balance of lightweight and functional.

kitdon Understanding the Go Compiler: The Linker

TDD and the coding agent: a match made in heaven.

It is Valentine's Day after all.

kitdon Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives.

- See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

This is good advice IME. Get well acquainted (like REALLY well acquainted) with opposing viewpoints, such that you could argue them better than their proponents. See also "Argue Well by Losing" by Phil Haack [1].

Somewhat relatedly, the ancients viewed Rhetoric as the purest expression of intelligence. It required you to have deep knowledge of a topic, including all arguments in favour and against (implying deep empathy with the audience), and the ability to form coherent and meaningful argument. Modern political "debate" is ludicrous in comparison.

[1] https://haacked.com/archive/2013/10/21/argue-well-by-losing....

kitdon D Programming Language

https://xkcd.com/1053/

And if you've never heard of the lucky 10000, QED.

kitdon D Programming Language

Sure, but the point was that it being used for web backends was years after it was invented, an area in which it never ruled the roost. ML is where it has gained massive traction outside SW dev.

kitdon D Programming Language

It was popular as a teaching language when it started out, along side BASIC or Pascal. When the Web took off, it was one of a few that took off for scripting simple backends, along side PHP, JS and Ruby.

But the real explosion happened with ML.

kitdon D Programming Language

Weird post. How does one of today's 10,000 who have never heard of a subject learn about it?

kitdon D Programming Language

Python was first released in 1991. It rumbled along for about 20 years until exploding in popularity with ML and the rise of data science.

kitdon A Broken Heart

I would say just reusing widely-used emojis you have already downloaded would be less error prone

... assuming it all works ofc (though you could say that about serving svgs too)

kitdon The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

Note that for the most part, air travel into/out of the UK is international, so the constraints are stricter.

kitdon Treasures found on HS2 route

You really need a better source of information.

kitdon A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

I think this is where tools like OpenSpec [1] may help. The deterioration in quality is because the context is degrading, often due to incomplete or amibiguous requests from the coder. With a more disciplined way of creating and persisting locally the specs for the work, especially if the agent got involved in creating that too, you'll have a much better chance of keeping the agent focussed and aligned.

[1] - https://openspec.dev/

kitdon A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

with these tools, the guy who knows business can now code fairly well.

... until CC doesn't get it quite right and the guy who knows business doesn't know code.

kitdon New York Times games are hard: A computational perspective

I do Wordle, Pips, Strands, Connections & Sudoku. Of all of them, I find Connections definitely the hardest, even without the occasional US cultural references that I miss.

kitdon The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013)

> The pattern was first discovered in nature in the 1950s in the energy spectrum of the uranium nucleus, a behemoth with hundreds of moving parts that quivers and stretches in infinitely many ways, producing an endless sequence of energy levels. In 1972, the number theorist Hugh Montgomery observed it in the zeros of the Riemann zeta function(opens a new tab), a mathematical object closely related to the distribution of prime numbers. In 2000, Krbálek and Šeba reported it in the Cuernavaca bus system(opens a new tab). And in recent years it has shown up in spectral measurements of composite materials, such as sea ice and human bones, and in signal dynamics of the Erdös–Rényi model(opens a new tab), a simplified version of the Internet named for Paul Erdös and Alfréd Rényi.

Are they also cranks? Seems it at least warrants investigation.

kitdon France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

My fear as a Briton and European is that even when Trump departs, the distrust remains so long as the US continues to be so politically divided. The chance of Trump being replaced by someone similar or worse will make most European politicians (incl UK ones) throw their hands up in despair.

kitdon Small Kafka: Tansu and SQLite on a free t3.micro

My thoughts too.

> kafka compatible

Kafka is not a straightforward protocol and has a few odd niches. Not to mention that message formats have changed over the years. Even the base product has recently dropped support for some of the oldest API versions. And there are still plenty of clients out there using old versions of librdkafka (he says from experience).

So I'd be interested how (backward-)compatible they are.

kitdon Viking mice: Norse discovered Azores 700 years before Portuguese

The history books say the Azores were discovered by Portuguese explorers in 1427. But mouse DNA and lake sediment suggest that the mid-Atlantic archipelago was actually discovered as much as 700 years earlier, by Vikings.

kitdon Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

Really interested in your workflow using OpenSpec. How do you start off a project with it? And what does a typical code change look like?

kitdon Show HN: AWS-doctor – A terminal-based AWS health check and cost optimizer in Go

Using AWS may not be your decision. If you're stuck using it by company policy, OP's tool could make you a workplace hero.

kitdon Bare metal programming with RISC-V guide (2023)

Good fun, but the command for the linker step is missing. For those following along (like me):

1. Save the linker script as hello.ld

2. Run 'riscv64-linux-gnu-ld -T hello.ld --no-dynamic-linker -m elf64lriscv -static -nostdlib -s -o hello hello.o' to generate the binary.

You can now run objdump to view the elf.

kitdon The <Geolocation> HTML Element

> Jitsi is about audio / video where this would make more sense, not about geolocation.

It's still permission-based. And the article mentions that the same ux is being done for media objects.

kitdon UK Expands Online Safety Act to Mandate Preemptive Scanning

Can I get that one in the Post Office?