Hacker News Reader

RunSeton The death of web development education

The ubiquitous "LLM slop is the car and thoughtful development is the horse" analogy makes me think of Steve Jobs's "Bicycle for the Mind".

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle...

RunSeton macOS 27 is so buggy

> how to do high performance GUIs on multiple operating systems.

By being a poorly-behaved process until you are caught red-handed.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

RunSeton Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards

".avif" format rears its ugly head.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webp-image-co...

RunSeton Returning from vacation? The government can search your phone without a warrant

Possible solution: An app that dumps / restores the phone to a remote site, all e2ee.

Wipe your phone and factory reset before you cross the border, then restore afterward.

RunSeton Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available

Slop born of plagiarism. People would rather read a pastiche of documentation than the actual documentation.

RunSeton Ask HN: What are you reading?

> I heard complaints that it's just a Tolkien clone

What a flattering complaint. Reminds me of this:

"Terry Brooks has often been disparaged for imitating Tolkien, particularly by those reviewers who find his books inferior to Tolkien's own. I can say only that I wish there were more imitators -- we need them -- and that all imitations of so great an original must necessarily be inferior. "

https://web.archive.org/web/20110823100353/https://www.theni...

RunSeton Lady Gaga, Lena Dunham and surrogacy: Why isn't it causing a scandal in the US?

> Another high-profile case is Ms. Rachel, one of the most influential YouTubers in the United States, who has a channel with 21 million followers, a Netflix series, books and a commercial brand. [..] She has spoken out for LGBTQ+ rights, against the war in Gaza and against ICE mass detentions, especially of children — positions uncommon in the U.S. With a son aged eight, at 43 she became a mother again in 2025 via surrogacy, citing medical problems that prevented her from carrying a pregnancy. She drew no criticism.

Given her "I care about ALL children" stance, it would have been more on-brand for her to adopt an unwanted child than to lease a human body her own genetic lineage.

RunSeton What makes software development engineering

I notice that software-related professions tend be named after traditionally male-dominated fields, such as "software engineer" or "software architect" or even the "rock star programmer".

Which is strange since the original "computers" were predominately women[0] and I find writing software has much in common with activities that were historically at least coed, such as creating recipes or sewing patterns.

Yet we never hear of "software chefs" or "software tailors". Given how little many titular heads of software companies understand their product, "software nanny" would also be applicable.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

RunSeton US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-calls-all-icc-memb...

RunSeton US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

Killing the survivors of a shipwreck[0] is a textbook example of a war crime[1] and would explain why the liar-in-chief is so sweaty about the ICC.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/28/...

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/cnns-elie-honig-points-out...

RunSeton OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns

"Drink responsibly."

RunSeton OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns

I would consider it more "bizarre" to assume that Sam Altman was telling the truth about anything.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240112010809/https://www.sfchr...

RunSeton OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbOckHiVXZc

RunSeton It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

Funny how the industry built around selling predictive language models as "AI" is both inevitable and too big to fail.

RunSeton Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

https://www.theverge.com/tech/975398/reddit-ai-rules-hub-mod...

I was banned by their new AI moderation system. Then I appealed it and got a message saying "Our slop banned you by mistake." (paraphrased)

Then I was banned again by their new AI moderation system.

Then I deleted my post history using Power Delete Suite and stopped using reddit.

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

Let their bots moderate bots.

RunSeton Pirating the Pirates

> the worst outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit

RunSeton Driver Ticketed for No Insurance Just Because Flock (YC 2017) Said She Didn't

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can_beat_the_rap,_but_you...

RunSeton I switched to Brave

> Firefox always felt slower to me

Since Google has proven willing to stoop to bad behavior to lend Chromium the impression of superior performance[0] I don't consider subjective performance to be a meaningful benchmark.

As metrics go, I am more concerned with "demonstrable respect for user-agency", a competition in which a browser from the world's largest advertising conglomerate is forbidden entry.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/why-google-took-year...

RunSeton Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

> It's also a matter of whether it would be worthwhile to reveal the existence of such a capability in a given case.

That would require many individuals to keep a juicy secret for a hypothetical future collective reward.

RunSeton Made by Mechanical Means

The euphemism treadmill never stops. Even now, the liar-in-chief is pushing "super-intelligence"

Purveyors of slop will go to any length to rationalize concealing the origins and nature of their wares.

RunSeton Jensen Huang says AI distillation is 'competition.'

He is selling shovels and piling manure so that he always comes out on top.

RunSeton Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

> I half expect the LLM would have mentioned that at some point, but the repository does not.

The repository does not even mention this software is LLM-generated.

I wonder when/if the collective realization will land that LLM's failure to retain provenance during training means the code it generates exists in an indeterminate state of public domain / IP trap.

RunSeton OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News

> A world where AI can solve diseases easily, and corporations can find ways to claim ownership over those novel solutions, is not one where we should be encouraging stronger IP laws.

How about a world where readers can't even find factual autobiographies because they are so outnumbered by machine-generated hallucinations?

Unlike "AI can solve diseases easily" what I wrote describes the actual present and not a hypothetical future.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/technology/ai-slop-books-...

RunSeton How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs

> At least the way I use it, I still feel like my experience, knowledge and taste is being utilized to make it better than if I were to vibe it.

> What has made me enjoy it less, is having to deal with colleagues' use of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_effect

RunSeton What even is an OS now?

> Why would you ever want to ask an AI to make an app for you to complete some task, if you can instead ask the AI to complete the task directly?

Given the current trends in predictive language models, once users are able to articulate their needs with clarity and precision, conventional software development may become obsolete.

RunSeton The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy

"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief..."

\- Alan Greenspan

https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2009/03/30/...

RunSeton Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

Tech oligarchs: "Nothing can stop the software we are making from escaping and destroying everything."

Clueful types: "Did you try air-gapping it?"

Tech oligarchs: "Be realistic."

RunSeton Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks

It's not "pushing policy" if the policy has a popular mandate.

Compare the respective numbers of Democratic and Republican presidents in your lifetime who attained the office while losing the popular vote.

RunSeton GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks

The last decade has taken the edge off Hanlon's razor.

RunSeton GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks

In violation of their own name-squatting policy, Github has refused to rename or remove an account that is squatting my legal name even after I sent them a scan of my ID proving that it is my legal name.

Unfortunately drawing attention to it would likely invoke the Streissand effect and be counter productive so I can only wait until the frabjous day that github goes dark at last.