Hacker News Reader

neuralkoion Is Curiosity Good for Us?

> What Freud, like everyone else, cannot promise or even suggest is that our curiosity is always good for us, or on the side of our happiness or our health. The curiosity that the psychoanalytic method facilitates is always of ambiguous moral and emotional value.

I would argue something that helps you know yourself can only be a net positive, otherwise you're just being pushed around by forces you haven't even pinned down and put a name to. You're the cannon fodder of manipulative forces.

neuralkoion Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2026)

I wonder how many people are willing to work for free out there.

neuralkoion What do you do now as a software engineer?

Type "Yes" and press enter.

neuralkoion I'm addicted to buying domains for my vibe-coded apps that get 0 visitors

I bet they're real good domain names too.

neuralkoion Everyday Tiktokers Are Making $6k a Month Posting Stealth Ads

https://archive.ph/kBMCZ

neuralkoion The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities

According to George Carlin, "that's the whole meaning of life, trying to find a place for your stuff".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

neuralkoion Ask HN: What is the most career altering course or book you have gone through?

Not a book or course per say, but based on a book:

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" by Venkat [0]

Other contenders:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari [1]

Haseeb qureshi's articles on Negotiating [2]

These along with er... mind-altering substances, helped me see that reality as we live it (careers, status, institutions, ect) is like software: built/programmed by humans and can be changed by shifting your perspective.

[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGhTQ4iruLc&list=PLfc2WtGuVP...

[2] https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...

neuralkoion iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

You think that's ridiculous, try sharing a video on WhatsApp that's longer than a minute. See how "easy" that process is, especially if you walk away from your phone while it's "processing" or "preparing" the video.

neuralkoion Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

https://www.fieldsofcolor.org

I started a 501c3 nonprofit last year to showcase / highlight relatively unknown but talented artists in other countries in Atlanta, Georgia and we finally completed a visa application to bring one of them to the US.

As an engineer it's been difficult but really fun learning to help promote visual arts, but AI helped speed up a ton of stuff I wouldn't have really know about (like setting up a kanboard to work alongside artists).

neuralkoion This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

I didn't expect to see Twitch working so soon!

Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leveraged to speed up development, but I am indeed happier I might be able to ditch FF and begin using their browser soon.

neuralkoion Unusual Suspects

You might enjoy Telestrations. It's like telephone but: A person starts with a prompt, another draws it, another interprets the drawing into a prompt, another draws it, etc.

neuralkoion Take 10 Seconds to Read This Ezra Pound Poem. Think About It All Day

In a Station of the Metro By Ezra Pound

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
    Petals on a wet, black bough.

neuralkoion Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells in mice

This article talks about a finding related to SETD7. This has implications for new treatments.

neuralkoion Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

Programmers see the LLM as a coder. Others (i.e. business people) see it as a natural-language compiler. Ultimately LLMs will be good enough that there wont be a difference, but programmers will lament the loss of control.

neuralkoion UploadPrep – make photos and files meet government upload requirements

I was only a bit disappointed this tool didn't let me upload my blood type and DNA information. I guess my passport, photograph, and other biometric and intimately personal information will have to do.

neuralkoion Reddit Will Be Added to the S&P 500

It's been a journey seeing the enshittification over the past decade. I didn't know some of the ways they went about it were even possible.

neuralkoion uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account.

I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

neuralkoion As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

I've seen websites put up some draconian measures to try and get a grip on the scraping. So much for the sub-second loading experience when you have Cloudflare, Google, Anubis, and all these other captcha services trying to see if you're a human. It's made the web browsing experience so much worse.

Some of the proposals to address this include charging bots for access to web resources, but they will also have repercussions for regular users. I don't see how you solve this cleanly.

neuralkoion Everything you do is being recorded

Nobody really knows who runs the site. One concern I have after reading this thread is that they start pulling a 1984 at some point.

neuralkoion Is it all just vapourware?

AI is good at building "disposable" software. I think this category will grow specially for regular joes.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and anyone trying to build software without significant guardrails and insights into the process will have to give up control of their codebase.

Ray Myers does a good job of exploring this topic in a recent Software Should Work talk, trying to answer: "Is code for people or AI?" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZgglPK8Rg0

neuralkoion Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's

They have to memorize 25,000 streets. The test is no joke. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur61kzXjvN8

neuralkoion Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

The paper claims LUCA doesn't count as life because it still depended on its environment to metabolize.

It's kind of interesting that there's parasites that arguably don't meet this definition either. Looking it up: Chlamydia can't reproduce independently; relies on its host's metabolism. Microsporidia can't make ATP on its own. Are these "life"?

neuralkoion This Month in Ladybird: July 2026

Great stuff by them! As soon as beta drops, I'm ditching FF.

neuralkoion Why is my Claude agent being so mean to its subagent?

xcancel has a whole freaking captcha now.

neuralkoion Coursera Bets $100M That Chairman Andrew Ng Can Do What Coursera Can't

Coursera was co-founded by Andrew Ng.

Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

> In December 2024, Greg Hart, who served 23 years as Technical Advisor to Jeff Bezos at Amazon was hired as Coursera's new CEO and ended the opportunity to audit courses for free, putting all of the previously free university courses under a paywall starting at USD49 per month.

neuralkoion Ask HN: How many AI agents do you actively use?

What kind of stuff are you doing with these agents?

neuralkoion Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?

We are so full of ourselves we called ourselves Homo sapiens, wise man, but wise we don't seem to be.

I recently faced this feeling of overconfidence in knowledge trying to think about how seasons work or why rainbows have a curved or arcing shape.

You might think seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth, but why? Exercise left for the reader.

neuralkoion Ask HN: Any New Computer Ideas?

Check out Alan Kay's perspective on this [0]. This talk is excellent and will cue you in on how to go about thinking about the fact that the way we program and view and understand computers, with the exception of recent advances in neural networks/LLMs, has followed largely unchanged for the past 65 or so years.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY

neuralkoion Introducing selfie for sign-in: a new way to access your Google Account

Every time Google comes out with a new "feature" like this, it reminds me to resume my de-Googling journey with reinforced vigor. Drive and Photos are low-hanging fruit. GMail and YouTube will be more difficult.

neuralkoion Silent Replacement of Trusted macOS App Executables

I would use "Defense in Depth" as an argument to addressing this issue.