Hacker News Reader

Joerion When did Google get so weird?

If you’re logged in you get wildly different results from someone else’s. I have turned off history on my google account to make it give me a “neutral” search result, but it still seems to take a lot of info like my location, language and device type into account.

Joerion Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

I wonder if they actually broke a law. The CFAA requires knowledge and intent to be present for criminal liability for hacking, and if we have to believe OpenAI they had no knowledge and did not intend.

At a minimum I would expect an FBI investigation, but given that the US government is right now a failed state I’m assuming no such investigation will happen.

Cybercrime legislation in other countries might not require intent, and then I would hope to see some prosecutions. OpenAI has clearly been negligent, and this negligence is causing harm in the world. Someone should be fined or jailed for this.

Joerion Plan mode is dead

We got Opus 5.5 just a few days ago so haven’t had time to learn its ways, and Fable was/is too expensive for many people including myself. Insiders have months to learn the ins and outs of new models.

It would be nice if with new model releases claude code also gave a bit of a model 101 that tells you evolving ways of prompting it that the insiders have picked up. I know there’s the prompting guide in the claude docs, but this is often very broad and most people don’t know about it.

Joerion Goodbye Google

Even aside from how aligned the plan is with us, what about how aligned we are with the plan?

I’m always intrigued by the duality and conflict of “I have free will and must choose to act the right way” and “God has a plan so everything will be alright”.

Either free will allows us to deviate from the plan, or the plan will always be carried out and free will doesn’t really matter in the end. Arguing for God’s plan as the thing that will save us is eerily similar to nihilism, because they’re really arguing none of our actions truly matter.

Joerion Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

There are companies where the CEO reports to the board, and there are companies where the board exists to keep up appearances. We’re finding out in real time Automattic is the second kind.

This should discourage investors, since an unbridled CEO is bad for them in the long term. But it won’t, because nobody thinks long term anymore.

Joerion Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

My experience with opus 5 is that its results are lower quality in dutch, but that its dutch is more readable than its english.

Joerion Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove

The web’s ad markets bake in a loss of privacy by design, and so every website that wants to participate in those ad markets has to dupe as many users as possible into handing away their privacy. Couple that with declining web ad revenues because of the move to mobile apps, and you get a web filled with malicious compliance cookie banners.

Had google offered a privacy-preserving ad model (basing the ads off the content of the page instead of who the user is) things would be very different.

Joerion Gemini 3.7 Flash

Why would they? Unless they have lots of unused tpu real estate that they could host it on “for free” they would be bumping more profitable workloads off of machines to give away that capacity to people with zero long term loyalty. There is no business reason for google to subsidize these models.

OpenAI has too much money. They’re spending their money in stupid ways.

Joerion Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

For running it in yolo mode I set it up in a devcontainer. It takes a bit of figuring out, but once set up the permission prompts go away and claude has no access to anything I haven’t explicitly added to the devcontainer (unless it hacks its way out).

Joerion Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

At one point I ran graphical linux on a 20 mb ram laptop although admittedly that was very tight.

I also remember running nt4 with photoshop, word, and my IDE (borland delphi) all at the same time and comfortably in 128 mb of ram.

Joerion The Valley of Webhooks

There’s also the Linked Data Event Streams (LDES) standard, which is a way of hosting a log as a set of linked http documents, fetched via polling and link navigation. Is there really anything more needed than a webhook for the notification and an LDES for the log?

https://semiceu.github.io/LinkedDataEventStreams/releases/1....

Joerion Progressive Web Components

It’s on the page: https://elenajs.com/#why-should-i-use-elena

You can create anything and everything. Web components are about extending html to make it do more, progressive web components are about rendering that on the server and progressively enhancing with interactivity in the browser. Elena solves the major pain points in doing that. Components built this way can be used in any framework.

Joerion Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac

Without fundamental model architecture improvements the practicality largely depends on how Apple increases memory bandwidth.

Memory bandwidths (* = rumored):

  M1:       68 GB/s
  M2:       100 GB/s
  M2 pro:   200 GB/s
  M2 max:   400 GB/s
  M2 ultra: 800 GB/s
  M5:       153 GB/s
  M5 pro:   307 GB/s
  M5 max:   460 GB/s
  M6:       200 GB/s*
  M7:       240 GB/s*
  
  Nvidia 4090 1008 GB/s
  Nvidia H100 3.35 TB/s

Basically what we're looking at by the M7 generation is a tier shift, where the base M7 can do what the M2 pro did, and every tier moves up accordingly, with the M7 ultra becoming competitive with nvidia dedicated consumer hardware.

Joerion Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

New cheap android phones are just as slow as old cheap android phones. The bottom of the market has been stuck in performance limbo for years, and modern web dev frameworks are ill designed to meet them where they are at.

Joerion They’re made out of weights

Internal to what? The brain is not a monolithic thing, it is different parts communicating and interconnecting. When the connection between the halves is cut, the person objectively becomes two people, but still experiences and presents themselves as one. Observing ourselves is just one part of the brain responding to another, or theorizing on past behavior. There is probably no actual introspection going on inside of the human brain, only the perception of one.

Joerion The dead economy theory

Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

Before a covid hiring spree twitter had around 4000 headcount, now they’re around 3000. Basically musk stopped moderating and fired the moderators. What he did demonstrate is that the market didn’t care about moderation, because active user counts increased instead of decreasing.

Joerion Can we have the day off?

Nationalization doesn’t work because every country’s citizens except those of USA and China still get nothing. Basic income doesn’t work because most countries lack leverage to tax the AI companies. International frameworks to do such things don’t work because Trump just marginalized all international bodies that might host such a framework.

If AI is really about to automate away a lot of labor, I have yet to hear even a hint of a plan to deal with the fallout of that which doesn’t involve consigning much of humanity to the dustbin of history.

Joerion Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

So what if they’re the biggest? They haven’t taken any meaningful steps to stop these attacks. The primary culprit for the sorry state of the npm ecosystem is npm inc, or actually their corporate overlord microsoft. They could be doing a lot more than they are.

I’m sort of reminded of how back in the day windows was swiss cheese and people kept saying “it is because they’re the biggest”, and then microsoft started caring about windows security and it improved enormously. When will microsoft start caring about npm security?

Joerion Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit

Blaming the victim is too easy. NPM is unsafe at any speed. You cannot use it in any but the most trivial capacities without opening yourself up to supply chain attacks.

Why is npm the only package ecosystem that has so many problems? What are the other package system owners doing better? Let’s start there, instead of blaming the victims.

Joerion DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

It’s not just AU: https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/05/apples-most-powerful-mac-stud...

They’ve dropped all the mac studio configs higher than 96 gb, as well as the base mac mini. They’re also rumored to be considering taking the Neo base config off the market.

This seems to be how they’re dealing with supply constraints for fab capacity and RAM.

Joerion Agents need control flow, not more prompts

You could have a skill that is the combination of a minimal markdown file and a set of orchestration scripts that do the deterministic work. The agent does not have to “run everything”, it just needs to know how to launch the right script.

Joerion OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund 'AI Literacy' in Schools

It’s such a lazy way of integrating AI as well, as if they asked AI to do it.

Why has no one tackled the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer? We know what AI-enhanced education should be, and we finally have the tech to build it.

Joerion The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

The deeper I wade through Microsoft’s Azure documentation the more I feel the reality of this. There’s so much of it that it basically is unreadable in real terms, most employees will never get the time allocated, and when you do try to exhaustively read up on a specific area you find that the documentation is incomplete and wrong in subtle but important ways. I’m sure Microsoft spends a lot of resources on that documentation, but it seems somewhat of a hopeless mission.

Joerion Tariffs Raised Consumers' Prices, but the Refunds Go Only to Businesses

Actually, a sizable chunk of the refunds will go to companies like Cantor Fitzgerald, the company of the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick (or his sons, which is the same thing), that bought the tariff refund rights last year for 20% of the refund value. While Lutnick was ostensibly pro-tariff, his company was betting against the tariffs being legal, and now will collect refunds paid by the American taxpayer.

So in reality, the tax payer is on the hook twice: once for paying the tariffs through increased prices, and once for the debt created by the people disbursing refunds to themselves.

Joerion An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

This sounds like one of those problems where the solution is not a UX tweak but an architecture change. Perhaps prompt cache should be made long term resumable by storing it to disk before discarding from memory?

Joerion France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk

The EU chips act is subsidizing new fab construction in Europe.

Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.

But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.

Joerion How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?

The name that still takes the cake is Github Advanced Security for Azure DevOps.

Joerion Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

NPM should have a curation mechanism, via staff review or crowdsourcing, where versions of popular packages are promoted to a stable set, like linux distros do. I would only use curated versions if they had such a thing.

Joerion The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

I think a blog post on jsdoc would be a better fit, with a link out from one of the main tutorial pages. Reach out to me over mail and we can work something out.

Joerion The three pillars of JavaScript bloat

I’ve been exploring this for years, even made a tutorial website about building sites and apps without dependencies (plainvanillaweb.com). What I’ve learned is that many of the things the frameworks, libraries and build tools do can be replaced by browser built-ins and vanilla patterns, but also that making things that way is at present an obscure domain of knowledge.

I think this is because the whole web dev knowledge ecosystem of youtubers and tutorial platforms is oriented around big frameworks and big tooling. People think it is much harder than it actually is to build without frameworks or build tools, or that the resulting web app will perform much worse than it actually will. A typical react codebase ported to a fully vanilla codebase ends up just as modular and around 1.5x the number of lines of code, and is tiny in total footprint due to the lack of dependencies so typically performs well.

To be clear though: I’m not arguing the dependencies are bad or don’t have any benefits at all or that vanilla coding is a superior way. Coding this way takes longer and the resulting codebase has more lines of code, and web components are “uglier” than framework components. What I’m saying is that most web developers are trapped in a mindset that these dependencies must be used when in reality they are optional and not always the best choice.