Hacker News Reader

chickensongon Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline

Thank you!

chickensongon City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2

Cities Skylines' soul cashed out and was too busy buying sports cars and partying to deliver CS2. Transport Fever 3 looking good though.

chickensongon City building games have a Soul Problem pt.2

All about that traffic management!

chickensongon We're working on a new RuneScape MMO

IDK if those equate to an MMO resurgence. WoW Forever is just milking an old cow, and Runeterra is vaporware, as is RS4. MMO talk is cheap. Shipping something original and not half-baked trash is rare.

I do think Riot is in a good position to develop an MMO though, and maybe GW3 will deliver something as well, but the genre is on life support IMHO.

chickensongon Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code

We're all pretty thrilled to be done with Opus 5.

chickensongon Make Tmux the OS

It's not about the output, it's about using the tool. Imagine if you get a splinter every time you reach for your jig.

chickensongon Make Tmux the OS

Promote alternatives to expensive and adversarial operating systems that limit your options.

Even if someone isn't inclined to be computer literate, a shared understanding that the interface can be tailored to your preferences and that many flavors of interface exist, would lead to improvements IMHO. This is already normalized in the Linux world, but that world is very small.

chickensongon Make Tmux the OS

If he spent half the time it took to write that blog post on config, the problem might be solved.

chickensongon Go Concurrency Distilled

  Hello, Mike.
  Hello, Joe.
  System working?
  Seems to be.
  Okay. Fine.
  Okay.

chickensongon Plan mode is dead

SDD is good. It's a lot faster and cheaper to have an agent polish a spec, than refactor code. The implementation can then be verified against the spec artifact, and any drift can feed back into process improvements for future specs.

chickensongon Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

Not sure about your thesis. Still excited here, no dread. Linux works pretty well compared to the old days. Open source is stronger than ever.

> So lately, it's hard for anyone to know what their preferences really are.

Sway + keybinds for each workspace. Everything in it's place, every time, by pressing 3 keys. Foot terminal opens in sub-ms. MicroVM framework sandboxes workloads. The UX isn't that different from my older setups TBH, only the underlying tech. I'm open to trying new things, but I don't know how you can beat preconfigured workspace keybinds. Would love to hear any ideas though.

> and have no peers out there who are having fun

Having lots of fun lately! This LLM stuff is bananas! Not only can you ask your agent to do stuff in plain language, but it's non-deterministic so it's like RNG gambling except you can build a Rube Goldberg machine to increase your odds! Regardless, I'd still be having fun without LLMs. We have amazing languages and incredible hardware these days.

> the granularity of build it yourself systems is not great

NixOS takes some of the pain away. You can experiment easily and safely, and you have a single declarative source that captures everything. Admittedly this isn't mainstream, but you're talking about nvim frameworks so... yeah.

Anyway, chin up friend! There are some of us more stoked than ever on the current state of computing. There's so much exciting change happening it's amazing. I'm grumpy about lots of things, but computers are better than ever IMHO.

chickensongon Claude Opus 5.5

That's not what my comment is about. The parent said you're free to ignore the complaints, and I pointed out that when the volume is high, that's hard to do.

We all know that clanker language is often ridiculously bad. Got it.

Maybe policing every word and sentence and lodging your complaint along with all the other similar complaints is the right move. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. But meanwhile we're degrading the overall discourse on the topic at hand.

I'm not saying which is right, I'm saying there's a cost to constantly expressing one's annoyance on a well-worn subject. If you click a thread about X to read complaints about Y, we're doing great I guess.

chickensongon Show HN: Drop – A rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor support

A VM that doesn't contain your keys.

chickensongon Show HN: Drop – A rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor support

Not sure what the platforms are using, but this was recently released: https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate

chickensongon Claude Opus 5.5

It gets hard to ignore the annoyance when the volume degrades the signal. At some point the people who wish to engage with the substance just nope out when they see a sea of banality, and that's all you're left with.

chickensongon Claude Opus 5.5

It's not a weird phrase to some, just as many folks have used terms like load-bearing for a long time. People are defending it because it reads fine to them, just as some are attacking it because it's not their preferred language, it causes them confusion, or they're just triggered and seething.

LLMs have made people so sensitive to language that I fear we're going to throw the baby out with the bath water. The models obviously need work, but they're also a great opportunity to expand our own vocabulary and grammar. It would be a shame if we deny some of the finer points of language in favor of Grug-speak to appease the lowest common denominator.

chickensongon AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator

https://chatgpt.com/ is a good starting point. Enable voice control and ask the robot to draw a pelican riding a bicycle. Much wow, very revolutionary. More to come.

chickensongon AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator

> What's wrong with that?

Nothing at all. You'll know when you've outgrown it.

> what the general workflow is now that people are converging to?

Graph-based workflows where agents pick up work as it becomes available, structured output, while you manage the work queue and outcomes. Maybe? IDK really, it's all moving quite fast.

chickensongon Let's make quality the norm again

In a world of shrinkflation and enshittification, I just wanted to give a shout out to Feetures socks[0] which I love. It's a family-owned business and all they make is socks. They're anatomically designed, so if you can't handle sorting L/R these aren't for you. Not only are they a high-quality sock, they have a lifetime guarantee as well.

No affiliation, just a satisfied customer.

[0] https://feetures.com/

chickensongon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

The site looks nice, but I don't see an API option which makes it a non-starter for me. Having seen similar sites come and go over the years, I must assume that at some point my curated data will disappear. Or am I missing something?

No doubt the average person isn't going to be looking to integrate with your system via API, so maybe you're fine with it. Anyway, just some feedback from the fringe I suppose. Good luck with your project!

chickensongon Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

I've experimented quite a bit with giving agents python vs sed + awk. They make mistakes with both, a lot. The only thing that has stood out is that agents reach for python too quickly if it's available, and that awk causes the least problems, while sed might take several attempts to get results, similar to python.

chickensongon OpenAI Agents API

A lot of what a custom harness does isn't necessarily interacting with a model, it's the framework around it. Part of harness engineering is figuring out what can be done deterministically to avoid calling an LLM. A generational jump doesn't obsolete those areas, it just means you get the right answer (maybe) faster and easier when you do call the model.

There's a difference between their harness and your harness. The latter can be tuned to your preferences, while the former cannot. A custom harness can do everything that a packaged harness cannot. Good luck getting Claude Code to coordinate with multiple model providers or deeply integrate with your environment.

The point you're making is to be a consumer, which admittedly, is probably best for most people, but it's not going to satisfy the hacker. Normies aren't building custom harnesses, so your argument is DOA for the target demographic.

Also, vendor lock-in. No thanks.

chickensongon Programming is Art

There is one thing that upsets many people though...

if err != nil { return nil, err }

chickensongon An Alien Mind

We're not going to suddenly have new robots or operating systems. Those things take time. Just because there's massive change afoot, doesn't mean it's widely adopted or applied at lower-level products. ChatGPT is a product, and software, and a breakthrough. You can have a freeform conversation with your computer about anything, in human language, and ask it to do or make stuff and it will at least try, sometimes with surprising results. That wasn't possible until recently. The robots and products are coming, rest assured.

chickensongon Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?

If you can express something deterministically with code, it's better to do that rather than have an agent do it, because it's faster, cheaper, and deterministic. E.g. you regularly copy file A to file B. You can ask the agent to do it, or you can write a script and have the agent call the script via skill. That's the beginning of a harness.

Eventually you arrive at building custom software that does a lot in the traditional way, but delegates certain tasks to the model where it makes sense or it's non-trivial/impossible to express via code.

chickensongon Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%

Thank you!

chickensongon Xanadu was waiting for agents

Check out IPLD (the model that powers IPFS), which translates hash-linked DAGs and handles merkle DAGs (git) natively. There's been several attempts to build Xanadu'ish things on various types of networks, web2, web3, p2p, etc, but it just doesn't seem to be what the majority wants. Maybe someday...

chickensongon Tuxedo No. 2 – Cocktail recipes

You've missed the point. I enjoy cocktails, and I even think the linked page here is nice, both in cocktail selection and page design, but I don't think it particularly belongs on HN.

Here's an example recipe page that does feel appropriate to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48408854

I'm not trying to win any wars here, I only provided a possible explanation to someone's question. Culture evolves and that's fine, or maybe the ratio of technical vs non-technical content is actually stable on HN? I really don't know, but to me it feels like the the volume of random content and low-grade comments is increasing. Personally, I don't think that represents the spirit of HN, but my comment was downvoted so either I'm wrong, the culture has shifted, or the mainstream is already the majority here.

I'm a fan of the Caipirinha however, so thanks for the Tschunk recipe.

chickensongon Tuxedo No. 2 – Cocktail recipes

I feel the same, but it's an unavoidable cycle IMHO. Any subculture that becomes popular gets diluted by more average people, and the content becomes more basic and banal. You can flag and downvote, but eventually there are enough people who treat a platform like HN as a general discussion board, without regard for cultural alignment. It seems that stuff like politics and random recipes are on the rise, but it's not against the rules, so maybe it really is just a general discussion board that's evolving into the mainstream.

chickensongon Atomic Clocks

777-FILM "Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!"