Hacker News Reader

nsrivon Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay

The announcement pretty clearly lays out what she's done to earn it, acknowledging that while international law isn't perfect, the fact-finding process of its practice is important and sets a precedent for continued adherence to legal principles. Her devotion to that practice and influence on introducing sexual assault and propaganda as charges of incitement to genocide are significant contributions backed by legal victories she was instrumental in winning.

My opinion is that yes, while international law rarely leads to punitive justice as many would like to see it executed, bad actors attacking these legal institutions demonstrate their importance in the court of public opinion and legitimacy.

Hope that gave you some Gyan, Mr. Chawdhary. Please remember that it's a big world out there and human endeavor has many paths to take beyond just science or what one person can understand by skimming an announcement.

nsrivon CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

Not sure if you're joking but Clearview's primary customers are local or metro police departments.

nsrivon Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery

Love to the point of invention! This looks and feels great.

I'm an Elixir newbie and wondering if I should start with learning Ash or stick with Liveview until I know more. Any thoughts on what Ash solved for you over Phoenix Liveview?

nsrivon DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why

This is what I'm hopeful for, but haven't researched enough into whether there are hardware startups in this space as I believe the majors will chase the hype cycle. Optane being canned always felt like a poor, shortsighted decision to me.

nsrivon Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies

Highly recommend the book "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" by Norman Ohler, a podcast promo led me to get the book from the library and I really liked it!

nsrivon Affinity Studio now free

I think they're giving it away to take mindshare away from Adobe among younger creators. The rise of Capcut and similar mobile first software eventually leads to Adobe, Final Cut for video, and Davinci Resolve. This provides a ladder from Canva to Affinity under one banner at low to no cost.

nsrivon NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

Controlling culture, yes but wild pivot to mention that criminal alongside Karpathy.

nsrivon Electron-based apps cause system-wide lag on macOS 26 Tahoe

I think that's probably a recipe to hit the limits more often and end up being more frustrating, depending on your hardware.

nsrivon Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-ma...

nsrivon Anti-*: The Things We Do but Not All the Way

Completely tangential, but this is a gorgeous personal site.

nsrivon iFixit iPhone Air teardown

This isn't a full teardown/repair guide, more a first-look video.

nsrivon Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

ITT: HN goes mask off

nsrivon Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync

Pixel Call Screen has been a godsend for me since its debut, akin to using uBlock Origin for browsing.

nsrivon Robert Redford has died

"Lions for Lambs" is widely panned, but I think spoke to a particular subset of people interested in doing over talking. RIP to a great.

nsrivon Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah

Who do you think gets stopped to meet quotas?

nsrivon Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0

I think most chat apps do the same, above commenter just needs to learn to count.

nsrivon The MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge

Protractor app when?

nsrivon What is it like to be a bat?

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

nsrivon Judge Orders Google to Share Search Results to Help Resolve Monopoly

https://archive.is/Bh8JU

nsrivon An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

What you're describing, especially with the amount of water "given a detailed list of symptoms" is carrying, is essentially a compute-intensive flowchart with no concept of diagnostic parsimony.

nsrivon An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

I have a hunch that the whole "chat" interface is a brilliant but somewhat unintentional product design choice that has created this faux trust in LLM's to give back accurate information that others can get from drugs.com or Medline with a text search. This is a terrifying example, and please get her to test it out by second guessing the LLM and watching it flip flop.

nsrivon Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war

In the US it seems like every company eventually turns into a bank.

nsrivon De minimis exemption ends

Yeah, I haven't seen enough coverage of this. Just edicts and no process and Customs is still reeling and never found their feet from the first time tariffs were imposed. There isn't even a remit process or guidelines if a foreign postal service tried to send the payments.

nsrivon What happens when ambassadors are summoned by the host country?

Kushner's piece in the WSJ [1] makes the claim that the French government's recognition of Palestine and public statements "haranguing Israel" has uniquely exacerbated this and asserts October 7th is the genesis of this behavior, with no mention of the behavior that Israel is being "harangued" for, which your comment seems to downplay.

The letter is a clear attempt to bully an ally into US style speech suppression by using someone that has both official position and a personal Presidential imprimatur.

[1] https://archive.fo/wzVUR

nsrivon Telo MT1

Genuinely terrible, a 15 year old Civic handily gets 35mpg highway, a 2025 non-hybrid gets 47+.

nsrivon A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages

I agree with you, and think we are in the heady days where moat building hasn't quite begun. Regarding 1) and 3), most models have API access to facilitate quick switching and agentic AI middleware reaps the benefits of new models being better at some specific use-case than a competitor. In the not-so-distant future, I can see the walls coming up, with some version of white-listed user-agent access only. At the moment, model improvement hype and priority access are the product, but at some point capability and general access will be the product.

We are already seeing diminishing returns from compute and training costs going up, but as more and more AI is used in the wild and pollutes training data, having validated data becomes the moat.

nsrivon What's happening to reading?

Exactly this. On the less artistic side, I've seen so many critiques of popular self-help books for being anecdote heavy and people sharing (or even selling!) summaries of the key bullet points, and the whole point is to develop a resonance with the author to drive home the point. Otherwise it's now just a listicle.

nsrivon Proposed NOAA Budget Kills Program Designed to Prevent Satellite Collisions

Trying to save on a $55 million program by standing up a joint agency. I have truly heard it all now.

nsrivon Hidden interface controls that affect usability

Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away.

First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.

nsrivon Stop Hiding My Controls: Hidden Interface Controls Are Affecting Usability

I have had to explain it as such while teaching kids to use Zoom over the pandemic, and yeah one of the first things I got was "it's a drop up menu!"