Hacker News Reader

nickvecon Men who stare at walls

Yep. You don’t have to have to have your eyes closed to meditate. You can keep them open to focus on the flame of a candle or something else… in this case, a wall!

nickvecon The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

"Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic."

I am not condoning violence, but claiming it is not a politically effective tactic is disingenuous. I get that columnists are trying to cover their asses, but still.

nickvecon DeepSeek v4

The Flash one is pretty impressive. Might be my favorite so far in the pelican-riding-a-bicycle series

nickvecon GPT-5.5

Interesting. I may have to give that a shot, thanks.

nickvecon GPT-5.5

I'm conflicted whether I should keep my Claude Max 5x subscription at this point and switch back to GPT/Codex... anyone else in a similar position? I'd rather not be paying for two AI providers and context switching between the two, though I'm having a hard time gauging if Claude Code is still the "cream of the crop" for SWE work. I haven't played around with Codex much.

nickvecon SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

Because VCs are braindead... I see your point.

nickvecon SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

I'm out of the loop - what moat does Cursor even have now, and why is it worth $60B?

nickvecon Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training

Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.

nickvecon Not buying another Kindle

Ah, that’s a very valid use case. I sadly don’t read as much as I’d like to (I only have a couple dozen books to my name, though I’m in my mid 20s.) I can see storage becoming an issue though if one owns hundreds, if not thousands, of books. Not a bad problem to have I suppose!

nickvecon Not buying another Kindle

Besides portability, what other benefits are there to using e-books? I vastly prefer having a physical copy of a book, mainly because I’d rather not look at a screen while reading (unless necessary.) Plus, I love lending out books to friends, and I feel like it’s a much bigger pain to do so virtually (unless they’re tech savvy!)

nickvecon Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall

I previously worked at Uber and there were constantly internal complaints that went unheard regarding the enshittification of the UI. Since Uber really hasn't had much innovation going on in the last few years, (imo) frontend teams are forced to justify their existence/employment by adding changes to the UI that look great on paper but in practice are not.

As for all the associated bugs, it's inexcusable and I'm still unsure how most of them even get by QA. Engineering culture there has gone downhill; I saw the majority of great engineers leave during my tenure after being fed up with the endless cronyism + promo-project culture.

nickvecon Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7

For all intents and purposes, aren't the "token change" and "cost change" metrics effectively the same thing?

nickvecon Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for FSD

As it turns out, having unfathomable amounts of wealth lets you get away with just about anything.

nickvecon Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug

Definitely one of my biggest pet peeves with articles / blog posts. There is so much fluff. Just get to the point!

nickvecon OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports

I suspect that Google is working on improving their models for coding behind the scenes. Hopefully they release something soon to compete with Codex and CC. To be candid, I use CC, but have not tried out Codex.

nickvecon The AI backlash is turning revolutionary (Fortune)

https://archive.ph/TrQpO

nickvecon Tax Wrapped 2025

As an aside, the creator of this site (Riley Walz) has some other awesome projects I’d recommend checking out https://walzr.com

nickvecon Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug

Yeah, extremely misleading title even if it is technically true semantically. The phrasing gives the impression that a bug was found in `lean-zip` as part of the proof boundary when it was part of the unverified archive-handling code.

nickvecon Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

You're right. Thanks for calling it out. Doesn't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way.

nickvecon Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings

How out of touch can you be to do something like this?

nickvecon Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

Some poor security guards are going to end up getting gunned down.

nickvecon Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

Just speculating, but I assume the motivation is in a similar vein to the Stop AI movement. https://www.stopai.info/

nickvecon Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack

Altman needs to sell off that house and move to an anonymized address. I don’t see these attacks letting up any time soon. Two targeted attacks in three days is nuts.

nickvecon AI Job Loss Tracker

Site doesn’t load for me, just hangs indefinitely.

nickvecon Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

Altman can both be mentally unwell and a grifter, they aren't mutually exclusive.

nickvecon Filing the corners off my MacBooks

> This was on my work computer.

Bold move to do this on your work Macbook. I'd be too worried of getting chased down with a bill when returning the laptop eventually.

nickvecon DOJ wants to scrap Watergate-era rule that makes presidential records public

Crazy that you can't even read an article anymore without having to cough up money and/or provide your personal data.

nickvecon Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

I would argue that "abundance and growing the pie for everyone" is even more unfathomable given how things are structured currently. The wealth gap will continue to widen until something gives.

nickvecon Former NASA Astronaut Charles Camarda on the Artemis II Heatshield Decision

Good point. Guess it depends on how privy the four astronauts are to the Camarda document, etc.

nickvecon Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman

https://archive.ph/aoXIY

@dang didn't see this post before posting the archive.ph link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722344 - feel free to delete/merge that thread with this one