Hacker News Reader

pickledishon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

100%, back when it was Ox Alpha I had a little fun trying to guess what it might be by looking at the reasoning and I consistently laughed at how excited it got

pickledishon Bazel's UX is really, really, really bad

hehe this was therapeutic to read. and doesn't even begin to talk about starlark, bazel's almost-but-not-quite version of python that doesn't support all manner of features you would hope for, including REGEX

pickledishon Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked

(not sure why you were downvoted, you are correct)

pickledishon Anthropic appears to be A/B testing reduced effort levels in Claude Code

You are very much not alone, and I don't think we're all getting dumber -- I kept using opus 4.5 all through the nonsense that was 4.7, 4.8, and 5, and kept having a good time :)

I think we just need to decouple "doing better on benchmarks" and "actually more useful to me", since they've clearly diverged

pickledishon Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM

Word, that one also includes an example which is great, shows really clearly what the issue is for those who might be less familiar

pickledishon Router by Ramp

router.com! Cool domain though that must have been expensive :P

pickledishon Qwen 3.8 27B

The "a3b" refers to its active parameters -- unlike 27b it is a mixture of experts model, so it runs much faster, about as fast as a 3b model, but needs as much memory as a 35b model! So good for unified memory systems like macs :)

pickledishon LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences

Haha indeed; maybe they just meant "won't replace"

pickledishon Private equity bought America's essential services

clicks

> When a fire truck fails to deploy in a burning building and four people die, the cause isn’t just mechanical failure. It’s a business model.

leaves

pickledishon Magnifica Humanitas

This is also the message I got from "the wind rises"! Though from talking with other people that takeaway doesn't seem universal -- which IMO is one of the ways to tell it's a great film :)

pickledishon The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood

Don't know why you were downvoted -- I scoffed at that part too. The least we in tech can do is have some self-awareness

pickledishon The happiest I've ever been

Ah -- IME people usually start a sentence with "in the nicest possible way" when they're couching something mean is all. Often it's even sarcastic, and the meanness isn't even meant to be couched, so I wasn't sure how to read it

pickledishon The happiest I've ever been

Agreed! I'm not sure why the GP comment has a somewhat negative attitude about it, I think it's great for people to realize this and talk about it, every year a whole new year's worth of young adults turn up not knowing it! Insert XKCD lucky 10,000 comic here

pickledishon BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive

They're talking about this I'm pretty sure!

https://www.telotrucks.com/

pickledishon Brexit Hit to UK Economy Double Official Estimate, Study Finds

Hah yeah, I'd never really thought about it, but newspaper headlines must be a late-game boss for non-native speakers, they are super convoluted

pickledishon Ground stop at JFK due to staffing

Sadly I don't think it works this way, at least IIUC -- the state can't withhold taxes from the federal government, because those taxes (from biweekly paychecks anyway) don't go through the states -- they go directly to the federal government. Some states are trying to pass laws to still make headway in this area, for reasons like you suggest, for example NY:

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/10/state-lawmaker...

(it's a really interesting situation since I think I read somewhere that the reason federal income taxes are directly remitted to the federal government today, is specifically to disallow this kind of state retaliation)

pickledishon Getting syntax highlighting wrong

Aside from the rest of the (interesting!) nuanced discussion going on the comments here -- I really like his idea towards the bottom of combining the colors for numbers and strings into one.

They're both constants, so yeah, they should be!

pickledishon Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

Agreed!

And, maybe I'm missing something, but to me it seems obvious that flat top part of the S curve is going to be somewhere below human ability... because, as you say, of the training data. How on earth could we train an LLM to be smarter than us, when 100% of the material we use to teach it how to think, is human-style thinking?

Maybe if we do a good job, only a little bit below human ability -- and what an accomplishment that would still be!

But still -- that's a far cry from the ideas espoused in articles like this, where AI is just one or two years away from overtaking us.

pickledishon Agent Client Protocol (ACP)

Yeah agreed!

As you suggest, I've had a moderately successful time trying to get AI to write its own Sublime Text plugins so our favorite editor doesn't get left behind, so might be cool to try with this too?

https://github.com/pickledish/llm-completion

pickledishon Framework Laptop 16

If you haven't seen it, this "Linux Touchpad like Macbook" project is related, the last/best effort I've seen in this direction. Here's a random update from a few years ago:

https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_update_december...

pickledishon ChatGPT Saved My Life (no, seriously, I'm writing this from the ER)

Thank you for writing this and sharing it here!

I know there are a lot of conversations going on about the dangerous elements of LLMs, but it’s nice to read a story like this alongside them — it’s a reminder of the remarkable potential of this new technology.

Could you have found out somehow else about the severity of the problem? Maybe, sure! But the fact that you had this LLM to ask, and it so easily understood whatever info you gave it, asked clarifying follow-up questions, and gave you info/directions in the way you needed to hear them — it’s such a new way of interacting with computers, almost like an API but made for humans to use, and cases like this is where that value shines most clearly IMO.

pickledishon Start a computer club in the place that you live (2023)

This whole site makes me happy. Thanks for sharing it :)

pickledishon America stopped caring how poor kids do in school

(sadly, I also tried this, but this snapshot seems to also include the paywall)

pickledishon America stopped caring how poor kids do in school

I'd like to read this, but it seems to be behind a paywall?

(There is a reasonable amount of the article before the paywall, and since the other comments here don't mention it, I am wondering whether they just thought the article was very short and then ended abruptly, lol)

pickledishon The Origins of Wokeness

(regardless of the merit of your criticism, this comment was at least very funny to me, so thank you for that)

pickledishon Ask HN: What is a common PR review time at your company?

Jesus. Sorry to hear it dude, FWIW I’d love to have someone like that on my team. Hope your current place is better!

pickledishon Show HN: Cardstock- Free TCG Proxy Manager for Magic, Yugioh, & Pokemon

Wow, they look great, the upscaling seems to have gone really well!

pickledishon Show HN: Cardstock- Free TCG Proxy Manager for Magic, Yugioh, & Pokemon

This looks pretty cool, and is definitely useful! Do you have any examples of what the printed out cards look like? Perhaps in comparison to real cards