Hacker News Reader

sparklingon Launch HN: Speko (YC S26) – OpenRouter for Voice AI

Just canceled my WisprFlow subscription a few days ago to switch to a open source, free, local alternative. In my case handy.computer with the Cohere model.

sparklingon Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

The free DeepSeek depended on full data sharing straight to China.

sparklingon Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

>OpenRouter represent ~$100B in payment volume, whereas Stripe in total doing ~$2T.

That is a much higher % than i expected.

sparklingon Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

I call it "jargon slop". Half of my follow-up prompts nowadays when working with Opus were "TLDR please".

I switch to GPT 5.6 Sol please and its a much more pleasant pair programming like experience.

sparklingon DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813

deepseek-v4-flash feels so fast and snappy, i'm loving it. Happy to trade speed for the the 5% degraded benchmarking performance.

sparklingon Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot

Focsec.com IP database for offline use (datacenters, VPNs, proxies, bots) runs around $1k/month for internal-only use.

sparklingon Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model

Even if you had a 64GB machine: Are you willing to reserve 90% of your memory to run a LLM? With dirt cheap models like deepseek-v4-flash that will run "forever" on $10, the answer for me is clearly: no.

sparklingon Hetzner Experiments Platform: Inference API

Jup. I wonder if they will be able to provision enough capacity to keep up with demand. Choices in the EU inference space [1] are still quite limited overall, so any added capacity helps.

[1] https://eualternative.eu/categories/ai-api/

sparklingon Hetzner Experiments Platform: Inference API

Looks like Hetzner is getting into the Inference game, starting with 4 open models. They also seem to offer a managed OpenClaw box.

sparklingon Fastmail offers EU data region

To me, jurisdiction matters more than physical location. I'd rather be with a EU-operated service that stores data on a non-EU server, than a non-EU operator with a German/french datacenter.

sparklingon Sensitive Info Goes into 'No Reply' Emails Constantly. This Guy Sees It All

There was a CCC talk with a similar approach, where researches bought expired government domains and typo / bit flip domains. For example: bund.de is managed by the German Federal Government and they purchased bund.ee, the Estonian TLD, which is both a typo and bit flip and started watching email and DNS requests coming in.

German language only unfortunately https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-verlorene-domains-offene-turen-w...

sparklingon DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

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

Seems more like a overall industry problem, not limited to low cost carriers

sparklingon Taste Is All That's Left

What is left? The second-best architecture for any given technical problem is, in the majority of cases, still good enough.

sparklingon FFmpeg 9.0

Not a Lex Friedman fan, but I highly recommend the recent podcast he did with two leading engineers (and founder) from the ffmpeg project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nepKKz-MzFM

In a world full of endless AI slop, it is refreshing to see that there are still folks out there hand-rolling assembler code to squeeze out another 5% efficiency.

sparklingon Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

What does your usage look like?

sparklingon Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

Is it? OpenRouter shows DeepInfra being cheaper than DeepSeek directly

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-20260731#pr...

sparklingon Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

Can you elaborate on DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash, i assume?). What does your typical usage pattern look like and what is your weekly/monthly spend?

I gave it a try for a few days (pi + openrouter + deepseek-v4-flash via deepinfra) and ended up paying ~$18 for rather light usage. Yes it's still cheap, yes it's fast, but i feel i would still get a better deal with a Claude subscription plan.

sparklingon Don't be a meat proxy

I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.

sparklingon Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

>Europe due to its lack of European competitors, has no current similar protectionist incentives [...] The genie is out of the bottle in the West already.

I agree, but you are underestimating EU regulatory incompetence

sparklingon Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents

Amen. If i see a 5000 line README i am closing the tab.

sparklingon Cancelling Cursor

>bug reports sit on their "feedback forum" for months

This, plus in my experience, the forum is the only way to get things resolved.

Bug reports to the account managers / architects (Enterprise contract) is not forwarded to the appropriate channels and never get addressed.

sparklingon Only 8.9% of sites block AI crawlers, but 94.8% are never cited in AI answers

Blocking known bot identifiers via robots.txt does nothing by the way. Too many labs are running sneaky crawlers that do not respect robots.txt. You will need to take extreme measures: blocking basically all datacenter IP ranges, VPN IPs, aggressive rate limiting, etc.

Blocking LLM crawlers has become the number one use case for our IP database customers at https://focsec.com/

sparklingon 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

Even very basic browser fingerprinting will still identify you. The IP address is just one of many data points.

sparklingon 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

Jup, if you are using any mainstream VPN provider (the ones shilled on every tech YouTube channel) or anything that results in a datacenter IP, it is trivial to discover and block.

The detection tech has been around forever: https://focsec.com/

sparklingon 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling

Add to that that half of these companies are registered in obscure offshore locations where it is practically impossible to even find out who are the ultimate owners.

sparklingon Airbus Takes Flight from AWS

To be fair: all hosting providers deal with A LOT of abuse happening on their systems. Malware being hosted, people abusing trial periods ands free plans etc.

No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.

sparklingon Airbus Takes Flight from AWS

>Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.

[x] doubt

There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.

sparklingon ZCode: Claude Code from the Makers of GLM

Thank you, this is the type of hands-on experience report i was looking for.

sparklingon Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5

How has your experience been so far? Did you previously use Opus? Im curious how the overall "feel" of it is.

sparklingon Claude Sonnet 5

What is your motivation? Privacy and/or data protection?

I currently don't see a world where it makes sense to run a local model that will eats up 60% of my RAM, 20-30% of my disk space while providing worse quality output than a $20/month subscription.