Hacker News Reader

LAC-Techon I made my phone slow on purpose

You could break into a sprint when rage baited.

LAC-Techon Chuwi Minibook X

I managed to get myself to the point where I could do two slow, deep, controlled pushups in one session.

Hence I have genuinely never even noticed, cared, or paid attention to how much a laptop weighs.

LAC-Techon Chuwi Minibook X

The differenxe between a "heavy" and "light" laptop is about 250 grams, or the weight of a single apple.

If you can hike all day there is no way you are weak enough for this to even register.

LAC-Techon New Beam Spring Keyboards

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but is the loudness of your keyboard really a big deal in office environments?

Like I get if where you work is as quiet as a library, but in most places people are on voice calls, talking to each other over your head, etc. Any one complaining about clicky keys in that kind of environment can get stuffed as far as I am concerned.

LAC-Techon New Beam Spring Keyboards

I'm a bit of a clicky switch enthusiast. I use gateron melodics, which have a click leaf, meaning the click sound directly corresponds to actuation, unlike most modern clickies.

So I am very curious about beam springs. I doubt I would ever use one every day (I am pretty set on split ortholinears that sit low on the desk with short keycaps) but would love to try one.

LAC-Techon The dangerous delusion of modern warfare

They are compromised by Israel enough to not come out strongly against it, but not enough that I think they would have gone ahead with it - you need Epstein level blackmail for that.

LAC-Techon The dangerous delusion of modern warfare

I put this down to incompetence too. I know this is HN which mostly stakes it's claim on one side of the "culture war", but that is not where I am coming from - incompetence is incompetence, and we see that through the 2024 administration. (And I would argue - probably without much support here - a lot more incompetent than the 2016 administration which was unique in not actually starting new wars).

LAC-Techon Domain expertise has always been the real moat

The standard take, including my own from last year, is that these tools amplify senior developers because senior developers have judgment.

My take is much less charitable. I think a lot of senior devs are lonely and enjoy talking to chatbots all day. Saying it amplifies their productivity is a justification.

LAC-Techon Openrsync: An implementation of rsync, by the OpenBSD team

A few comments here suggest rsync is undergoing some "churn" which tbh is highly undesirable for a command line utility. Might switch over.

As an aside I really love the stuff openBSD puts out. If they ever succeed in making a modern journalling filesystem I will probably switch over.

LAC-Techon We should be more tired than the model

People are still letting LLMs generatr code for them?

Clankers are for reading code, not for writing it.

LAC-Techon A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025)

At the risk of making a fool of myself in-front of the rest of the class, I will come out and admit I don't know what the article is talking about.

> Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF.

I understand that Typst is a markup language that can output a pdf file (big Typst fan btw).

I understand Pandoc is a thing that transforms documents of one kind to documents of another, ie markdown to html.

But the author wants to "typeset markdown-formatted article to PDF". Which makes me wonder what this has to do with typst at all.

LAC-Techon Ferrari Luce

Everyone hating on it probably needs to reconsider.

Why?

IDGAF if Dubai Housewives like it. My world doesn't revolve around what they think.

LAC-Techon Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore

Yes, but it censors different political things. Which is why I do exactly what you describe.

LAC-Techon The Eternal Sloptember

I review every diff the clanker makes.

After a few hours of this I still look at the codebase and think "wtf is this?".

I think writing the code is a very important part of understanding it. LLM driven development is like doing maintenance programming from day one.

LAC-Techon Time to talk about my writerdeck

I've wanted to do this for general productivty; if I could find a good LLM to give me links I could forgo even a TUI web browser. perfect dev machine.

The default linux TTY is pretty barebones though. No unicode, and lots of TUI apps expect 256 colours. KMSCON looks like an interesting solution.

LAC-Techon .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types

Wow 2016 would have loved this news.

LAC-Techon Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

As someone who is very left curious/sympathetic recently (though no doubt that only goes one way)... is there not a massive contradiction in how you describe your beliefs?

I believe in a better future where we abolish wage-labor and tear down unjust hierarchies, I don't believe in the legitimacy of things like copyright or borders

Open Borders to me is the most hyper capitalist thing in the world. It's all clearly designed to drive down the price of labour, continuously and without end. All the window dressing about everyone holding hands and enjoying different foods is a lipstick on the pig of the profit motive.

LAC-Techon Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

Based. I always thought there must have been red-blooded leftists who enjoyed the photos of the politicians cowering on the floor as much as I did. Even if the "wrong people" made them do it.

LAC-Techon Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

I think you have a monolithic view of the US Right.

2016 Trump Admin is heavily populist, and his administration contains a lot of genuine political outsiders. People are very dis-satisfied, and genuinely excited about these "deplorables" shaking the establishment.

2024 Trump Admin is the establishment. Nearly textbook neocon, it's only innovation is its sophmoric conduct. To paraphrase Nietzsche... "if you drain the swamp too long, does not the swamp drain into you also?". Of course that assumes a draining attempt was made... regardless, it's populated almost entirely by those who were "never trumpers" during the first admin - including the Vice-President.

As for the man himself...I do not seem him as a deep or long term thinker. He's cleary attached himself to any vehicle which brings him to power. The idea that he planned and master-minded some "insurrection" in 2021 that was supposed to install him as a dictator, and his current Swamp Creature administration is somehow a continuation of that, just lacks credibility. It was a populist outburst of supporters of the first populist admin.Disillusioned protestors occupying a building is not a viable way to topple regimes (indeed it failed to do so in Hong Kong a few years earlier). These things do not work without institutional and military support, and the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.

A final note - the famous picture of the Jan 6 guy with the painted face and viking horns? He is now staunchly against Trump. Remember Trump is an egotist and an opportunist, not an ideologue. He wouldn't know what to do with a coup if he tripped over it.

LAC-Techon Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

I was a fan of his at one point. I did enjoy him talking about the English Civil war and Glorious Revolution, the US War of Independence, etc etc. He introduced me to the "Whig View of History". And his substack post about the ludicrousness notion that the occupation of the US Capitol my a mob in 2021 was a serious attempt at a revolution/coup was a welcome antidote to the hysteria at the time.

But the thing with Yarvin is - he's widely read, but if you dig deeper into any one thing, his reading is shallow.

And like most extremists I have read (from communists to anarcho capitalists), he is pretty good at diagnosing problems but awful at proposing solutions.

LAC-Techon Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist.

I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within.

But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.

LAC-Techon Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations

We desperately need some cultural norms and taboos to develop around AI usage.

LAC-Techon Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

The US literally had a communist agent at Yalta who co-founded the UN.

To dismiss this whole period as just a "Red Scare" is kind of ridiculous considering how much actual communist infiltration there was.

We won't even talk about FDR's diplomat travelling to the USSR and giving Stalin a kiss in the 30s...

LAC-Techon Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

Yes it's odd how this supposed "non-communist" first planned to flee to the Maoist Mainland when his security clearance was revoked, not the ROC in Taiwan, considering he had far more connections with the nationalists.

LAC-Techon Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

There were a large number of actual, convicted communist spies at high levels in the 1940s and 50s. Soviet penetration was massive. The Manhattan Project, State Department, Intelligence Agencies... this was around the time the US had an arms embargo against the Republic of China while the USSR supplied the Chinese Communists with weapons captured from the Japanese in Manchuria.

This revisionism that it was all just paranoid weirdo (McCarthy) harassing innocent people is a very common trope, but an a-historical one.

LAC-Techon Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

I don't claim to be an expert on this case.

But I can tell when things are being omitted or glossed over.

LAC-Techon Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier

Trying to buy Qwen credits and get an API key is a challenge all in itself. So many site redirects.

LAC-Techon Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

I feel like this article is leaving some important bits out for the sake of a narrative.

From Wikipedia

By the early 1940s, U.S. Army Intelligence was already aware of allegations that Qian was a communist

This predates the red scare - at the time the US was in bed with "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

While at Caltech, Qian had secretly attended meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons, and Frank Malina that were organized by the Russian-born Jewish chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party.[43] Weinbaum's trial commenced on August 30 and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him.[44] Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.[45] Qian was taken into custody on September 6, 1950, for questioning [7] and for two weeks was detained at Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to Theodore von Kármán's autobiography, when Qian refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum, the FBI decided to launch an investigation on Qian.[46]

This seems incredibly pertinent to the story as well.

LAC-Techon The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

"flash" or "fast" AI models are worse than useless at coding for me. they make my codebase much worse. It's a maintenance burden.

Gemini Pro on the other hand can be quite a pleasant experience.

LAC-Techon I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

Talking about my own personal workflow. No company has dictated one tl me yet lol.