Hacker News Reader

simianparroton BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal

As a European (but from Norway, so not entirely beholden to the unelected EU overlords) how in the _world_ do you get to the mindset that the _USA_ are traitorous!? How does this happen? Is it spending so much time online on social media in bubbles where you get convinced of drivel like this?

simianparroton iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

Been working with web related tech since the early 00’s. Safari has just never been a problem except for invasive ads, like back in the Flash days.

simianparroton iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

The world hasn’t ended but it arguably got worse with most of those features. Good enough reason to not implement them.

simianparroton BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal

"But Tesla bad so BYD is a necessary evil" seems to be a common sentiment.

simianparroton Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

Yeah I agree with all of this. Having seen the final episode now, while not as bad as Game of Thrones, it's very reminiscent. It's like they never had any idea how they'd wrap it up and just wrote something that checks the boxes to wrap up a series without much thought.

I was going to write a lot more but I just want to not think about this anymore, I'm so disappointed. It seems like the best we can wish for from Netflix shows is that they get cancelled before they turn into whatever this became...

simianparroton I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

50% expenditure saving sounds good, but how many more hours per month are you now spending making it all work?

simianparroton Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings

Yeah this season started off decent but by the penultimate episode it’s nosedived off a cliff…

simianparroton Claude in Chrome

Can we please stop and ask ourselves "is this a good idea?"?

Giving everyone the ability to bot, even literally grandma, with an "agent" that might hallucinate and fill your cc details into the wrong page. What could go wrong?

And before someone replies with the tiresome "well we might as well do it before someone else does", think about that argument for _two_ seconds. Should you push someone off a bridge just because someone else might do it if you don't?

simianparroton Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal

"Can"? Sure. "Does"? Now that's debatable. Still waiting for the latest scandal to wrap up. Any day now. Surely it was the last. Surely the limp response hasn't led to more. _Surely_ arresting people for talking about it on social media hasn't led to more of it going on.

simianparroton Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

They can’t even prosecute grooming gangs, the pretence it’s about “the children” rings completely hollow.

The UK is a failing nation run by pedophile apologist imbeciles. This is just desperate flailing to hold onto power by any means.

simianparroton Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial

They didn’t learn better. They lost their aspirations and decided to give up as a nation.

simianparroton Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon

Don’t use Firefox. It’s practically no longer a maintained browser engine because Mozilla has other priorities. Not a problem in Safari or Chromium.

simianparroton Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

Instead of "LLM's will put developers out of jobs" the boring reality is going to be "LLM's are a useful tool with limited use".

simianparroton Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?

You have to be joking

simianparroton Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

Yes well that wasn't the point. I was fed up with the direction and quality (or lack thereof) of Apple laptops at the time. I wasn't going to chance it on an Air , which at the time wasn't relevant to my use either due to its specs.

simianparroton Work disincentives hit the near-poor hardest (2022)

DOGE tried, and despite it’s best efforts still couldn’t do more than make a dent

simianparroton Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

Thank god. Microsoft has shown they don't care about their users as anything other than eyeballs to shove bullshit to for _years_ and Gabe called them out on it back with Windows 8, and Valve has been working on this since.

Steam Deck is fantastic to use. Good riddance to Windows.

simianparroton OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

Any data after that is contaminated with vast amount of AI slop. Is anyone training on anything newer..?

simianparroton Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

That was one of the reasons I even considered getting a new MB Air yes; I certainly wouldn't if they'd still have those.

simianparroton Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

What’s interesting is that I recently got a MB Air after being away from Mac since ~2019. The touchbar on the keyboard and awful keyboard quality drove me away.

Now I return from having spent the intervening years with an Ubuntu laptop and Windows 10 desktop as my daily drivers at home and Windows 11 at work for the last year.

MacOS is so much better than any of the alternatives. Maybe the bar really is just too low but that’s my experience.

The grass is not greener on the other side.

simianparroton Don't push AI down our throats

You don’t need it for development. Neither locally nor on the mainframe. Money saved.

simianparroton Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out

“That’s a great point about your finances. But did you know this company offers credit to someone in your position for only this low interest? I can apply on your behalf if you just sign this statement”

simianparroton Show HN: Explore what the browser exposes about you

Seems like the fingerprint ID is unique on each refresh in Safari, so fingerprint protection working as intended I presume?

simianparroton A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z

Keep this in mind if you _ever_ feel tempted to take A16Z seriously. Absolute charlatans and clowns.

simianparroton We're losing our voice to LLMs

Why the f- would I train software to do my thinking and reasoning for me!?

simianparroton Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free'

Emulating real life isn't going to be as exciting as you think it is. That awesome moment in Half Life is scripted to make it immersive like that, but most of the game isn't and that's what makes it special. If all the enemies behaved realistically all the time, the game wouldn't be fun, I can guarantee you that.

simianparroton Bring bathroom doors back to hotels

Tell that to my asshole. I’ve tried training it to be silent on the shitter for near 40 years but it fails more often than not.

simianparroton Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

Datacenter GPU's have a lifespan of 1-3 years depending on use. So yes they exist, but not for long, unless they go entirely unused. But then they also deprecate in efficiency compared to new hardware extremely fast as well, so their shelf life is severely limited either way.

simianparroton Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

... just because OpenAI call their product "ChatGPT" doesn't mean the term "chat" should now mean "interacting with an LLM".

simianparroton Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world

Have you looked into the amazing things people do with procedural generation with only a tiny bit (kilobytes, often) of source code? My intuition is that this is vaguely analogous.

Here's an example from 2003, where the entire source code, from music to visuals, fits in 64 kb: https://youtu.be/HtJvSvQnep0

Here's a good gallery of such demos: https://64k-scene.github.io