Hacker News Reader

SergeAxon Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps

Yellowstone rangers taught us that building an effective anti-bear trash container is impossible because the top 10% of bears are smarter than the bottom 10% of tourists.

SergeAxon Astral to Join OpenAI

Not including direct downloads via the native installers, Homebrew, Winget, or Docker, mind you.

SergeAxon ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did

My prediction is that when Chinese factory-cities adapt to tremendous demand, we will see a new digital Renaissance with teraflops of compute in toasters and kettles. And we will laugh at laptops with 8 GB of RAM so hard.

Your compute is someone else's sand.

SergeAxon Effort to prevent government officials from engaging in prediction markets

I think every sane person today should abstain from insider trading markets (stop calling them "prediction markets", BTW). If you are not an insider, you are a sucker - someone who will definitely lose out to insiders' gains.

SergeAxon Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

On the interview for my current job, they asked me what I would do if I needed to download the entire Wikipedia. They expected me to design a scalable system with a separate crawler, parser, download queue, exponential backoff, and stuff. I said that I would just download a tarball. To their credit, they quickly accepted the answer as correct.

SergeAxon Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

This is because in Japanese, the verb (or the main predicate) almost always comes at the very end of the sentence. Half of the time, you have a chance to get the whole phrase wrong.

The same, but rarer, may happen in German when a long, complex sentence ends with "nicht", flipping the whole meaning.

SergeAxon How will OpenAI compete?

There's no stickiness per se. The thing is, all modern LLMs are good enough to answer everyday questions most people ask. Moreover, I really think most people using LLMs for more specific tasks (e.g., coding) will not be able to distinguish top LLMs in a blind test.

SergeAxon Never buy a .online domain

The culprit here is the TLD operator. Why on Earth would they suspend a domain because of some private web browsing blocklist? FWIW, the client may not even bother with the web browsing; there are hundreds of other things we use DNS for.

Alas, the .tech domain is quite popular.

SergeAxon Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran

You were getting it wrong all this time. The #1 use case for crypto is buying illegal stuff. Mostly drugs, but also weapons and child pornography.

SergeAxon How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

Papers I read on arxiv mostly say that persona prompting changes tone of voice and attitude, but not the quality of the answer, at least statistically.

For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05858

SergeAxon Gemini 3.1 Pro

All perceptions are very personal and anecdotal. Here's mine: I tried to rebuild a website from Hugo to Astro. Gemini 3.0 was mediocre and in the end just failed and was unable to complete the task. Sonnet did almost well. I had to flush the context once most of the job was finished, for atomic git commits and deployment scripts.

SergeAxon Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

The subscription model works for AI companies exactly the same way it does for gyms and coworking spaces: underutilization. Obviously, using subscription limits in third-party tools negates that.

SergeAxon Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

I am almost sure that those two acts refer to human beings reading and listening, not to algorithms. Or at least a decent corporate lawyer will convincingly turn things that way.

SergeAxon Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

Google is notorious for creating bad products, and right now, Gravity is the worst ML-assisted code editor on the market, IMO.

Also, I personally experienced a mishap when Google ML-chat was unable to sync chats between the web and mobile clients. To my embarrassment, it turned out that I was using Gemini on the mobile and AI Studio on the web. How Google managed to create two similar products - I don't know, but it was obviously a tremendous misallocation of resources.

SergeAxon xAI joins SpaceX

http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/chinavoices/2025-10/23/content_...

In your opinion, how credible is this story?

SergeAxon xAI joins SpaceX

If we (as in "civilization") were able to produce that many solar panels, we should cover all the deserts with them. It will also shift the local climate balance towards a more habitable ecosystem, enabling first vegetation and then slowly growing the rest of the food chain.

SergeAxon Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB

Telegram Messenger works fine at 2G (bar photos/videos, obviously). I was surprised by it. This is an upside of "building your own crypto" or the MTProto protocol, in their case.

SergeAxon Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

> without burning 10 years of cash flow

AAPL has approximately $35 billion of cash equivalents on hand. What other use may they have for this trove? Buy back more stocks?

SergeAxon Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

This is a continuation of LaLiga vs Cloudflare in Spain. Spaniards are just blocking the whole CF IP ranges during the broadcast of important sports games, shutting down half the internet altogether. Italians are trying another way.

I can't ad hoc the best solution for all, but asking for help from Elon Musk and JD Vance, two prominent borderline fascist figures of our time, is disturbing.

SergeAxon Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

This article is much better than hundred of similar articles "AI will change software engineering" because it have links to actual products created with said "AI". I can't say they are impressive, but definitely so for laypeople.

SergeAxon Vietnam bans unskippable ads

Can you remember the last 3 times when ads showed you products that solved your problem? I cannot.

The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.

And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.

SergeAxon Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged

My point is not that Russia can win the war with Europe, it definitely can not. My point is that Europe can't even start the war with Russia. It is economically and politically unsustainable for the EU locomotives: Germany, France, Netherland. It will be devastating for the entire EU political canvas when Russia's marionettes Hungary and Slovakia, backed by right-wing EU and US actors will start peddling pro-Russian (masked as anti-war) rhetoric at scale 10x from now.

My point is that the EU has a unique opportunity to outsource that war to Ukraine, but seems like blowing that opportunity.

Update: I hope you are right about RS-26/Oreshnik, but you can't spread hope on your sandwich, as an old Russian proverb goes.

SergeAxon Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged

The EU currently has about 450 Typhoons, 230 Rafales, and 140 Gripens. It also has about 160 F-35s; let's assume that the orange clown will not shut them down remotely. They also have some older Tornadoes, Mirages, and F-16 and F/A-18. All those aircraft are fighters, not strategic bombers. Their impact is limited; their range is about 700km.

The EU doesn't have a plan for how to fight without the US. Today's airstrikes should be carefully planned: planes, pilots, munitions, targets, engagement trajectories, and return trajectories. They will need time to figure out those plans. In their shoes, I would have started drafting those plans four years ago, but they still didn't.

The EU will not attack nuclear siloes, for fear of nuclear retaliation. Even if they try, most of those siloes are much farther than 700 km from Russia's borders. Those siloes were built by the USSR, and the USSR knew better.

The EU will use Storm Shadows/SCALPs/Tauruses. There aren't many of those in arsenals. Trying to use smart planning bombs with sub-100 km range will only make casualties 10-20 fold.

The EU strikes may reach Baltic and Black Sea naval bases, some energy infrastructure (port Primorsk being the first), and some airfields. They will not get the North Sea and Pacific bases, airfields near Murmansk, Saratov, and Irkutsk, which are used now to attack Ukraine.

Russia has integrated air defence, anв the shit is real, it is fight-proven, it works day and night for the last 3 years. Ask Ukrainians.

EU strikes will not be very effective and will not last. I estimate it in 1500-2000 sorties, and about half of those will reach the targets. The EU will lose about 100 planes and 50 pilots. Russia will receive a blow, but will not be devastated.

Russia will retaliate with new conventional MRBM strikes on the military and double-use airfields, and also factories of Gripen, Rafale, Airbus, etc. With those strikes, the EU will lose another 200 planes and most of its capacity to produce and repair them. Russia will also strike one large natural gas storage, one LPG from the Gulf comes into. Russian diversants will deliver several hits to the EU energy system, probably to large distribution hubs.

The EU stocks will drop to 70%-50% of their current value. The euro will fall by 20%-30% against global currencies. Electricity, gas, and heat prices will rise 2-3 times; gasoline and diesel prices will increase 1.5-2 times.

Your move.

SergeAxon Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged

Unfortunately, you lose.

SergeAxon Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged

Let's play war game. Here's a life-like scenario:

- Russian ship damages another cable - EU deploys military ships and planes on Baltic/North sea - Russia deploys military ships and planes of their own - EU tries to stop and seize another RU shadow fleet vessel - EU vessel denies EU demands - EU attack a vessel, trying to immobilize it - RU ships and planes attacks EU ships and planes - casualties from both sides - RU drops 10-15 MRBMs with conventional (non-nuclear) warheads onto key EU naval bases - orange clown in the White House says "this is not our war"

Your move.

SergeAxon Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

For quite some time, I have been convinced that all forms of advertising are net negative for society. It seems that affiliate marketing (pay for results, not exposure) is not much better.

SergeAxon CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them? (2021)

This is precisely the same dilemma as self-driving cars. Who will be held accountable if something goes wrong? Who will be dragged into court by shareholders?

SergeAxon Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time

Are you referring to the "Builder DI-1"[0] from the USSR? I had it in my childhood, too.

[0] https://postimg.cc/phNBBTtS

SergeAxon Unifi Travel Router

I will use ¾ next time)

SergeAxon I'm returning my Framework 16

My desktop PC has been constantly evolving for about 15 years now, literally the ship of Theseus. Currently, following the latest upgrade in September, it's an absolute powerhouse.

During the same time, I burned through four laptops (for travel purposes), all of which were mostly weak, with a maximum of 16 GB RAM, no real GPUs, and 14"-15" screens, expensive, and had poor resale value.

My next travel computer will be Framework 16.