Hacker News Reader

blahgeekon An Update on Orion for Linux and Windows

> Kagi can still benefit from this, though, by serving as the default search engine in exchange for funding the development

This is not gonna work because Kagi is not free to use

blahgeekon Pi 1.0

https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/

They explicitly said no MCP and no fullscreen TUI, which makes it minimal and attracts many people.

blahgeekon OpenAI's Sam Altman says it would be 'ill-advised' to go public in 2026

Right but I think it’s due to the shortage of chips (and data centers), instead of shortage of money

blahgeekon Fuck it, make it anyway

There are two types of coding in my life: work and hobby.

Before ~3 years ago, they are more or less similar to me: it's mostly pure creation and sparks joy and makes me fulfilled. I love working and it pays well, and my hobby improves my work skill. It's like living in the dream.

Now? I can "make it anyway" like the author suggested indeed, but only for my hobby. I don't think I can keep coding the old way during work without getting myself fired.

I guess there's no much to complain. Lots of people work only for a living. It's a rare privilege to love one's work. I should be grateful that I can choose to keep my hobby.

blahgeekon Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

I would assume that it’s like the Chrome browser does not allow you downloading Firefox using it, surely that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?

blahgeekon Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

I’m a noob about laws but isn’t this abusing its dominant market position and violates some antitrust law?

blahgeekon macOS Container Machines

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

blahgeekon SoulsOnly.tff – A font for humans not AI and keyboard firmware to type in it

Reminds me of an anti-crawl mechanism I encountered some time ago in a financial data provider's website: for all numbers in the table, a special font is used where 0~9 are randomly rendered as different chars (e.g. '0' is rendered as 5, '1' is rendered as 8, etc.). The backend server returns the "encoded" chars, and is then correctly "decoded" by the font. The font changes after each reload. So humans always see the correct numbers, but when some crawler uses the HTML source, the numbers are incorrect.

blahgeekon Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?

> Prioritise running as many type-checkers as possible on your test suite. Run at least one on your source code.

There are two types of tests: those that test against the public API, and those that test internal codes with various mocks and fakes. I think the vast majority of unit tests is the latter one, in which case the suggestion does not really make sense.

blahgeekon When “idle” isn't idle: how a Linux kernel optimization became a QUIC bug

The more precise title should be: How we copied code from Linux kernel without fully understand it and missed its follow-up fixes, now it bites us

blahgeekon Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

Reminds me of Cython vs CPython

blahgeekon MacBook Neo

Yeah that’s totally reasonable. I’m just curious about how do they make a thicker and heavier laptop with less capabilities… do they intentionally make the case thicker or something?

blahgeekon MacBook Neo

I completely understand that as a cheap one, it has to be worse than macbook air in some aspect to make the product line work. However I'm genuinely curious why it's thicker and no lighter than the Macbook Air, while at the same time has shorter battery life, less ports, no keyboard light, and a smaller chip? Do they put dead weight inside it or something?

blahgeekon The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran

Same. And I don’t understand why you are being down ranked. The HN guideline specifically stated that political news are not welcome, yet, this is the post with most comments in the front page. I didn’t come to HN for this

blahgeekon Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts

Apple is and always has been a hardware company. I would like to use the Linux ecosystem, however there’s simply no laptop other than Mac that is light and powerful and runs 15 hours in battery.

blahgeekon New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

It may be related to the fact that some non-native English speakers (including myself) would sometimes use AI based tools to revise or translate their writings before posting online

blahgeekon macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool (2025)

Although macOS do provide many little known useful tools (besides this, there’s also dtrace, pf, etc), I still run a Linux VM in my MacBook for daily work. Thing is, the effort I spend on learning these tools is almost wasteful unless I’m doing iOS or macOS development. Skills about Linux tools however, is something people considered valuable because of its wider application. I think apple is missing opportunities by not doing more about macOS Server platform.

blahgeekon MuMu Player (NetEase) silently runs 17 reconnaissance commands every 30 minutes

I would always refer to Hanlon's razor on things like this: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I'm not trying to finding excuses for them, just saying that most likely there's no deep conspiracy theory involving government level surveillance here, they are just stupid. On average, Chinese software engineers are less educated and have no sense about privacy or how to implement privacy related features properly.

blahgeekon DNS-Persist-01: A New Model for DNS-Based Challenge Validation

Given the name of DNS-01, you would think it would be called DNS-02...

blahgeekon Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs

If human is at, say, 80%, it’s still a win to use AI agents to replace human workers, right? Similar to how we agree to use self driving cars as long as it has less incidents rate, instead of absolute safety

blahgeekon Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app

> Apple could take just 7% cut and still make 20% profits.

We can say this to any company, "$X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits", but it doesn't really make any sense. Making profits is what makes a company a company instead of a non-profit organization.

blahgeekon Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only

Fun fact - back in 2009, iPhone 3GS sold in China does not have WiFi feature. If that's possible, I can totally see a new iPhone model with restricted satellite feature selling in Iran and China.

blahgeekon Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only

I guess by "Everybody I know who grew up in China" you mean those elites who speaks English and have already bypassed restrictions to talk to you online or travels to other countries. There's some selection bias here.

blahgeekon iPhone Pocket

I think it's a common term used to loosely describe the geographical region. It's used by many other companies like Microsoft [1] and Google [2]

[1] https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/locations/gcr.htm...

[2] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-apac/collections/gre...

blahgeekon Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

> especially when you are on Linux AND on macOS. I can’t run FreeBSD jails or ZFS on macOS, can I? Definitely not with one file and one command.

On macOS, docker actually launches a Linux VM to run containers. If this counts, then yes, you can run FreeBSD jails or zfs on macOS, by running a FreeBSD VM.

blahgeekon Why is Zig so cool?

This. Is Zig an interesting language? Yes sure. But “a totally new way to write programs”? No, I don’t see a single feature that is not found in any other programming languages.

blahgeekon Cloudflare tells U.S. govt that foreign site blocking efforts are trade barriers

There are actually two part of mechanisms in China to wall its garden.

The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.

The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.

blahgeekon Apple reports fourth quarter results

Speaking from a developing country with a large population of less educated people, I think you would be surprised to find out that a majority of the people in the world simply don't do "research work". Successfully booking a flight ticket from a straightforward app on their phone is already at their limit (BTW, ~80% of people in the world have never taken a plane). For most other "research" requirement like planning a trip, they would just search on tiktok to see what those influencers have to say (or nowadays, ask the AI)

blahgeekon Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down

> could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app

Wow, in a world dominated by gigabytes of electron application, people thinks 10 MB is the optimal size for a simple utility TUI app.

As a reference, (from archlinux repo), vim’s install package is 2.3MB, curl is 1.2MB, lua (the complete language interpreter) is 362KB

blahgeekon ./watch

> taking inspiration from command-line interfaces

IMO the take away from command-line interfaces is compact, precise and minimal design. In a transitional shell prompt like #~$, each character has its meaning. Merely copying these symbols to a watch face is the exact opposite spirit of command like interfaces.