Hacker News Reader

xkcd-suckson Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google

Cool, but when will Google let anyone find public website content effectively?

xkcd-suckson We should be more ambitious with the software we build

OTOH managers also like to retain people because headcount in one's org is a power/status thing, capacity headroom is good for absorbing unexpected work, and most important they don't actually benefit from cutting costs. At most, managers like it when other managers' employees exit

xkcd-suckson The compiler was supposed to end programming too

    In [1]: def f(x: int) -> float:
       ...:     return f"the input was {x}"
    In [2]: f(b'deadbeef')
    Out[2]: "the input was b'deadbeef'"

xkcd-suckson AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware

Which is surprising that these organizations have trust; like our employers probably wouldn't be comfortable shipping all their code to / embedding agents from cybersecurity firms in Russia

xkcd-suckson Using AI to reverse engineer hardware

Because with enough time "the market" reverse engineers everything that has mainstream adoption, but only you are going to reverse engineer something that only you care about

xkcd-suckson ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)

"Revenge" is such a dystopian way to describe "making time for oneself"

xkcd-suckson Docker Agent

What do you prefer to Cursor and why? Just asking because I don't really experiment w/ AI harnesses much outside of work, where cursor has a lot of traction, and I'm too burned out to explore much these days

xkcd-suckson Will AI kill us all

By analogy, humans actively want to kill all mice and cockroaches but haven't made much progress there - Either the goal isn't possible or the value isn't worth the cost

xkcd-suckson GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

> Not sure what kind of usage can justify $200/month of either openai or anthropic, i'm not even talking about $500

It's easy to hit those numbers in a day in an modern-enterprise context synthesizing from incoherent information in jira, slack, layers of codebases etc. Modern enterprise meaning a firm that has been serving a few strategic customers w/ "move fast and break things" since day 1

xkcd-suckson People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes

Cytisine ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytisine ) doesn't get much attention.

It's extremely effective at reducing nicotine cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

Moreover, European pharmacy formulations are available "OTC" from Amazon in the USA because its not a recognized drug there

xkcd-suckson Smartphone LED detects hidden cameras with AI

Ideally yes but in practice thermal cameras measure radiance not temperature and different materials are more or less radiant; putting a camera behind a wall blocks the signal or at least diffuses it; the resolution+SnR are not great at consumer price point; and background objects can be surprisingly warm. For example a tree at night can be about the same temperature as a wireless camera attached to that tree. So in the best case it can work to see power-inefficient devices out in the open, but isn't useful under many real world conditions

xkcd-suckson The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services

> From the manufacturer's perspective, the life time value (LTV) of us as a customer was basically just one fan + the free marketing of folks like myself writing this kind of post.

Given there's zero barrier to substitution + the TAM for fans and lightbulbs is huge as sibling comment mentioned, there's no reason for the LTV to meaningfully exceed 1 puchase and the value of that free marketing could be higher than the EV of purchase N+1

E.g., if my name-brand turd wears out unreasonably, I don't replace it with the same name-brand turd; instead I replace it with an ephemeral Chinese brand turd which is just as likely to have similar build quality and features.

xkcd-suckson AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

"AI dementia"? NB psychotic delusions are an optional feature of dementia

xkcd-suckson A handful of cities have replaced Flock with Axon

> One reason why journalists, activists, and residents have been able to learn so much about what police use Flock for is that the company has built auditing tools that the public can access through records requests. ... It is not clear if the same granularity of data can be learned about Axon systems, although it does allow agencies to generate audit reports.

> Axon’s documentation for its ALPR product, a “shared data” option “extends the query to partner-agency detections once a sharing relationship is active.”

Axon develops a data marketplace to streamline so-called lawful sharing of data, or acquires it via Flock and rebrands the network name. Audit capabilities are removed to streamline operational efficiency and reduce political risk. The public is no better off than before.

xkcd-suckson Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed

It's absolutely nuts that there's so much volume of low effort cryptocurrency transfers that replacing clipboard contents with a different wallet address on people not blocking ads on a specific ad network nets anything at all

xkcd-suckson Mozilla: The state of open source AI

Would that require a watershed event to clearly establish the importance/risk of privacy though? For example, right now it seems like most big software companies w/ strong security process are comfortable uploading entire codebases to Israeli cybersecurity firms for vulnerability scanning compliance purposes

xkcd-suckson Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries

There's a pretty good 2008 Mexican scifi film "sleep dealer" that covers this topic more or less

xkcd-suckson What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice

Sure, "authenticity" evaporates under close inspection but it's still a good proxy for quality

xkcd-suckson Tailwind and slop apps

Brand differentiation, not art

xkcd-suckson Full Reverse Engineering of the TI-84 Plus Operating System

> Confidence is flagged: .....

> The big picture

> The structural reverse-engineering is comprehensive (every subsystem mapped, both cross-page mechanisms resolved ...

> Confidence summary / open items

Probably an LLM wrote the docs.

> (the GhidraMCP plugin reconnects for interactive work)

Probably LLM+Ghidra for the actual RevEng. Ultimately does it matter if the end product is works though

xkcd-suckson Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

Ha, I agree most of his books evoke having been written during stimulant binges; rich and detailed world building in the beginnings transition to incoherent plot driven action at the endings

xkcd-suckson Domain expertise has always been the real moat

Domain expertise combined with a QA mindset could replace SWE, but consistent QA mindset is rare

xkcd-suckson It Will Never Be the Year of the Linux Desktop

Lower lift to add accessibility tree as a new feature to Linux desktop environments, vs de-enshittifying MS and MacOS desktops?

xkcd-suckson Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference

There is some real world value to selecting for people whose learning is more resilient under pressure

xkcd-suckson The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

All of Silksong did this really well - Killing the bosses is the point of the game; each boss fight starts out frustrating and becomes quite fun, but at the point where the fight becomes pure fun you kill them and can never repeat that fight again. With the exception of its wonderful final boss fight, but still

xkcd-suckson Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)

Honest question, what isn't compatible? Where I work we've simply replaced node with bun across a lot of overcomplicated + crappy projects, and on my work+personal computers I alias bun/bunx to node/npx with seemingly no issues at all

xkcd-suckson The end of responsive images

A picture is worth a thousand words; this article about pictures contains no pictures and too many words. Probably AI slop

xkcd-suckson Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

A lot of discussion about self-checkout fraud, but these tags are only for shoppers' convenience and don't control pricing - One tag goes in front of that SKU on display so you can see the price. At checkout, a barcode or plain old paper tag / printed barcode on the item itself gets scanned and that's where the price is looked up.

xkcd-suckson Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?

Oh FFS claude code is the only reason I have a pro claude subscription. I don't even use my personal subscription all that much after spending all day with claude/bedrock at work. I will absolutely cancel my pro subscription and continue to use local / Codex if claude code stops working.

I realize this duplicates a lot of sentiment already in this thread but anyone here with pull at Anthropic please understand it will undo a lot of the goodwill that made Claude so successful in the first place.

xkcd-suckson F-35 is built for the wrong war

> Think of a violin made by a master craftsman: beautiful, precise, capable of extraordinary performance, but impossible to produce quickly or cheaply. It takes time, rare expertise, and materials that cannot be sourced at scale. You would not equip an entire orchestra with instruments like that.

Kinda lost me at the first sentence with this metaphor; you can and do equip an orchestra with instruments of similar caliber to the violins. Woodwinds are expensive. Bigger strings are expensive. Percussion is expensive. Maybe brass is cheap idk but there aren't many of them in an orchestra. In fact the plurality of instruments in most orchestras is violins.