Hacker News Reader

a_imhoon Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account

Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?

a_imhoon GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

If I recall correctly there was a proposed proof to the abc conjecture by Mochizuki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture#Claimed_proofs which was rejected due to being rather inpenetrable to humans. Shouldn't this be an ideal target for LLMs?

a_imhoon Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

I have seen this or similar metrics cited as a reason for forcing customers into apps, but imo it is misguided in a measure-becomes-the target way.

a_imhoon The State of AI Coding Report 2025

My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

As a dev I very much subscribe to this line of thought, but I also have to admit most of the business class people would disagree.

a_imhoon New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.

a_imhoon Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions

I would argue that sortition is Democracy. From a purely technical point of view to be anti-sortition is to be anti-democracy, which is fine I guess but begs a lot of questions.

From a practical point of view the selection process is a bit of a red herring though. The current controls break down because the feedback loop is simply way too long to meaningfully affect the process.

While I personally subscribe to the idea that sortition is a superior way of electing representatives I don't see people considering it seriously. However what everyone can understand is using the same process but with sampling with a higher frequency.

a_imhoon A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up

Several gömböcs in action https://youtube.com/watch?v=xSdi51HSkIE

a_imhoon How to negotiate your salary package

Counterpoint, reorgs do happen. Even if someone is doing a fine job, they can find themselves in a completely new team working in a completely new domain just because bodies needed to be buried.

a_imhoon Why common climate messaging backfires

Nail on the head for me, people react to the hypocrisy. Virtual is a prime example. Can't take seriously when a a business advertises how environmentally conscious they are on one hand, but forcing people to commute via RTO on the other.

a_imhoon The Myth of Developer Obsolescence

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD103...

a_imhoon Getting AI to write good SQL

I've not fully bought the hype yet but actually think LLMs democratizing technical solutions would be a fantastic opportunity for both established players and newcomers. The more LLMs improve, the less of a moat technology is in itself.

a_imhoon Breaking Up with On-Call

IANAL, but my understanding is that in Europe on-call can fall under working time, depending on the exact nature of the requirements. In fact, I'm very interested whether anyone has firsthand experience arguing developer on-call falls under such category. E.g. being 8 minutes away from a work machine and network access is not too dissimilar to a firefighter being 8 minutes away from the fire station.

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/en/european-industrial-relat...

a_imhoon A Comment on Mozilla's Policy Changes

At this point I find it very hard to chalk it up to mere incompetence.

a_imhoon Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

I'm a Cloudflare customer, even their own dashboard does not work with linux+slightly older firefox. I mean one click and it is ooops, please report the error to dev null

a_imhoon Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube?

Not sure how obscure you are willing to go, but a quick look on private trackers do list the movie.

a_imhoon Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous free tier?

Piggybacking on the thread a little, anyone has experience to share using Pages or Workers at scale? Perhaps I bought too much into the JAMstack hype, but it seems like a much more convenient approach compared to the k8s rube goldberg machines every other shop is utilizing (assuming they work and scale as advertised on the tin). Wondering what are some drawbacks or even show stoppers.

a_imhoon Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

The math is indeed off in the tweet, as fruitarian should be 2.5x worse instead of 1.5.

I don't think the 5g/kcal is expensive according to the chart, it is a good average for omnivores, consider the biker being fueled by cheeseburgers on the other end of the spectrum. If you have a more efficient EV (smaller car, even scooter for commute), put in whole family instead of riding alone in a car, or have more efficient means to charge the EV like surplus renewables you can't store/use at home the difference is getting quite staggering. One could argue the manufacturing of the EV emits more co2 than manufacturing a bike and we should control for miles drive/rode during their lifecycle but if both are available using the EV is most probably the environmentally friendlier option. That said, I won't give up my bike either because I enjoy the exercise, but it is a lot less green than one would imagine without looking at the numbers.

a_imhoon Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

There are some variables to consider, but even using grid energy mix most EVs -including cars- have a smaller co2 emission per mile than bikes, due to agriculture having quite a big eco footprint.

https://archive.ph/YgEe8

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

a_imhoon Stay Gold, America

Everything is more expensive in the USA is quite an exaggeration. Being able to afford (better) consumer goods/services/experiences is quite nice in itself not to mention the quality of opportunities present. I don't see many people emigrating from rich countries either.

a_imhoon The Zombocom Problem

Classic hindsight/survivorship bias for me.

Bezo’s approach is sublime. It holds two seemingly irreconcilable insights in tension and transcends either lesser alternative:

Come on.

a_imhoon Collection of Dark Patterns and Unethical Design

Appsell - intentionally crippling or outright banning the browser client to force users installing your app in hope of better conversion or simply boosting vanity metrics.

Long logout - complete logout needs extra steps after clicking logout e.g. removing/forgetting the account. Often times the action is not even accessible from the logout screen either. On a shared machine it even leaks pii. Linkedin, Gmail, Facebook

a_imhoon Chat Control: Incompatible with Fundamental Rights (2022)

Don't think they need to legalese around exemptions, they can just do as they wish - as the Pfizer-gate shows they are not wrong so far.

a_imhoon Designing a website without 404s

On a not too outdated and fairly vanilla and permissive ubuntu/FF+ublock setup I can see the page load then everything clears. Not even reader mode fixes it. Probably unrelated, but the very basics not working makes me want to dismiss design suggestions right off the bat.

a_imhoon Sending emails to my three-year-old

Ok, so why not write them regular mails? Much more personal imo, you can preserve your handwriting as well, dont rely on an email provider, not handing over personal data either etc. Only flipside I see it is a bit harder to include digital data e.g. videos, but easier to add analog/physical.

a_imhoon People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one

There are plenty of alternative solutions compared to outright banning cars. Nothing beats telecommute for speed, safety and emissions for example, but even EVs can mitigate air pollution in cities. They also comfortably beat human powered transportation as soon as someone looks into the carbon footprint of agriculture. Efficiency can differ by orders of magnitude.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

a_imhoon How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

Hard disagree, bruteforcing work for rewards is waaay sub optimal in the vast majority of cases. Most people are better off interviewing, job hopping and always-be-leaving and/or social engineering their careers. Note, I'm talking about competent people who can hold a job. Any unit of effort put in over not-getting-fired is almost 100% wasted (financial) reward wise.

a_imhoon Protecting Secrets from Computers (2023)

Biometrics?

a_imhoon Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)

Perhaps even more relevant nowadays

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...

a_imhoon Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

Hence the virtual card. I can just discard it after a few purchases. Isn't this enough?

a_imhoon Passwordless: a different kind of hell?

Order pizza, pay with virtual card. Payment provider needs 3FA+Captcha, one of the factors is email which is another 2FA challenge. Disclosing the card details once logged in prompts for another 2FA, finally VISA also challenges you with a recent payment question. Insanity.