HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

CharlesW

44,011 karma · joined June 28, 2010

Email: cwiltgen@gmail.com Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wiltgen.net Mastodon/ActivityPub: @CharlesW@hachyderm.io
submissionscomments
CharlesW··on DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro
FWIW, I haven’t experienced any of that using V4 Flash via DeepSeek in omp. What’s your coding harness and inference provider?
CharlesW··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
"Commercial displays" are "dumb mode" TVs. Alternatively, you can get an Apple TV and keep the TV off networks or in network jail.
CharlesW··on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
Yes, a custom output style would be a more idiomatic (and likely more effective) way to implement this.
CharlesW··on Connecting the machines
I'm hoping someone can explain why this is interesting.

I get that Herdr wants investors to give them money to own developers' coding sessions, but the value proposition ("Walk away and they keep working. Come back from any machine and they're where you left them.") seems like a miss since it's so easy to do that without them.

I'm surely missing something.

CharlesW··on The Untold Pre-History of 9/11
The 9/11 Commission¹ (see page 7) found that the existing FAA/NORAD protocols were "unsuited in every respect" to hijacked airliners being used as weapons.

Additionally, "the NEADS air defenders had nine minutes' notice on the first hijacked plane, no advance notice on the second, no advance notice on the third, and no advance notice on the fourth."²

More recommended reading: "9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes", https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/09/norad200609

¹ https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.pdf

² https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.htm

CharlesW··on The car industry A/B tested selling a car with and without CarPlay
The nice thing about phone projection (Android Auto, CarPlay) is that the tech remains in your phone, in contrast to Android Automotive OS.
CharlesW··on Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one
It's not unusual for Mac users to create custom shortcuts for things like this using built-in and 3rd-party tools like Shortcuts, Automator/AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, Hammerspoon, etc.

For copying the path of a file specifically, in Finder you can hold Option and then pick Edit → Copy as Pathname.

CharlesW··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
I believe you mean Cloudflare OS: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572
CharlesW··on The revolt of the reader
Your love shines through! I'll work on turning down my "assume the worst" knob, thank you.
CharlesW··on Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%
As I type this, my main is Claude Code and my secondary is omp. Both of these seem to do a pretty good job of choosing an appropriate model for subagent tasks, especially if I ask and/or save it as a guideline in project memory.
CharlesW··on The revolt of the reader
By "quid pro quo" I wasn't suggesting that Pangram's PR people's podcast placement was pay-for-play, just that they traded access for your positioning of their tech and their exec in your content marketing efforts.

That's pretty normal, but the point is that a blog post which is 35% Pangram promotion may not actually be less annoying than the use of AI to help write blog posts.

CharlesW··on The revolt of the reader
> Indeed, Pangram has become important to so many of us that I was thrilled when Pangram Labs co-founder and CEO Max Spero joined us recently on Oxide and Friends.

Is obvious AI-assisted writing better or worse than an obvious PR quid pro quo and/or cross-promotion?

CharlesW··on LG TVs aren't the only ones spying on you [video]
You can buy "commercial displays" with very good screens, but you'll pay more.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/products/Flat-Panel-Displays/...

CharlesW··on Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%
Very standard in all coding harnesses/models I've worked with, with the bonus that everything listed in the "What doesn't work in Portal by Spotify" section still works. I've been watching Opus spin off work to Fable and Sonnet as appropriate all day.
CharlesW··on Getting Started with AT Protocol
Do you know of something better than the first link in TFA?
CharlesW··on Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com
Apple's been a rock-solid email host for me. imapsync (https://imapsync.lamiral.info/) made the migration very easy. https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
CharlesW··on Wikimedia Workers Overwhelmingly Win Union with 93% Yes Vote
Archive: https://archive.ph/zXD5S
CharlesW··on 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres
> As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims.

But have they disproportionately amplified them? I follow some energy experts, and the consensus for AI-focused mega-datacenters seems to be "no". Some interesting reports:

• Artificial Intelligence: Generative AI's Environmental and Human Effects - https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107172

• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission): "…approximately half of this [$5.1 billion] cost will be borne by customers…" - https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/commissioner-clements-...

• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas: Processing Power: The Effect of Data Centers on Wholesale Electricity Markets - https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/papers/...

CharlesW··on Show HN: FnScribe – Open-source, offline dictation for macOS
Or the excellent Ghost Pepper*, or many, many other options.

*https://matthartman.github.io/ghost-pepper/

CharlesW··on Algorithmic rent-pricing litigation expands under new state and local laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing#:~:text=Rent%20al...
CharlesW··on Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/dreams
CharlesW··on How Dactyl Works
Is there anything here that professional product builders might be interested in, or is this just another entry in the AI app builder category?

It's cognitive whiplash to be sent to a blog post that will be interesting to some HN readers, and from there jump to a front page that says, "This not for you, and if we're successful will make make you irrelevant".

CharlesW··on Nebula Sans
I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.
CharlesW··on How much of HN is AI?
> Obviously those could be cherry picked…

The "could" isn't required here, since Pangram calls many of the evals "collaborations", and some received direct support. Results that don't favor Pangram as being among the least-worst of a questionable product category* surely wouldn't be featured.

* https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...

CharlesW··on How much of HN is AI?
All HN users can be part of the solution. Help mods by emailing them at hn@ycombinator.com. I recently pointed out a suspicious pattern, and the mods were able to use that to track and ban a collection of accounts.
CharlesW··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
It depends on the number of channels. The Xring O3 appears to have 4×24-bit channels, so 113.8 GB/s. The iPhone 17 Pro's memory bandwidth is ~76.8 GB/s. Seems fine?
CharlesW··on Using an old Android phone as a music player
PowerAmp and Symfonium for Android are excellent. If you don't mind the occasional pain of beta software, I intend to fill this gap on iOS with Poppy. https://www.reddit.com/r/PoppyApp/comments/1tiyki0/about_pop...
CharlesW··on CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
From Pen Computing Magazine #22, June 1998: "Why Did Apple Kill Newton?", by David MacNeill: https://www.pencomputing.com/Newton/AppleKillsNewton%28PCM22...
CharlesW··on Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md
That works perfectly, as does adding '@AGENTS.md' to your CLAUDE.md.

Both techniques have worked (and been officially documented by Anthropic) for as long as I can remember.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/memory#agents-md

CharlesW··on A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux
Fun fact: The working group initially chose 'PING' as the name, for "PING is not GIF".
← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →