Hacker News Reader

Can someone ELI5?

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

My web app helps people registering an imported vehicle in the UK complete the DVLA’s V55/5 registration form more efficiently.

fumblebeeon Instagram is incorporating users' photos in ads for Meta Glasses

wouldn't "useful ad" imply either 1) clicking through and buying the product or service, or else 2) building up a positive brand association to help increase sales later?

remembering an advert correlates but is different to it being valuable.

fumblebeeon Introspective Diffusion Language Models

I'm not in on the joke, can someone ELI5

fumblebeeon Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

You need both. My sense is that only a minority of people are hardwired to preferably live as hermits. And whilst it's an important life skill to be happy alone, everyone has their breaking point, it's no coincidence that one of the best predictors of longevity is how rich ones social life is.

fumblebeeon Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

I believe both Nvidia and Google have higher market caps

fumblebeeon Show HN: Play poker with LLMs, or watch them play against each other

this could make for an interesting new benchmark

fumblebeeon The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice

> Surely Congress or the courts would have something to say about it?

my sense is that Trump feels to be above the law right now, having ordered the operation to seize Maduro without Congressional approval (illegal under U.S. constitutional law). Trump's reasoning was that "Congress has a tendency to leak", and so to him congress seems little more than background noise.

fumblebeeon Still using Firefox – but not because of its vision

I switched to Firefox after Chrome stopped supporting uBlock Origin, for all the slights I've seen on HN lately with the direction of the product I've been very happy. No regrets.

fumblebeeon AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

My understanding is that agents are:

1) helping to saturate traditional SaaS because code is being commoditized / the effort to build is dropping significantly.

2) defining an adjacent sub-category of SaaS: "Service-as-a-Software" where the SaaS provides _outcomes_ instead of _tools_; this couldn't really exist at scale before recently.

fumblebeeon Feedback doesn't scale

I recall in the first lecture of some Comp Sci class back at uni, our lecturer had learnt what felt like every student's name and face from their digital profile, some 100 people. Whenever a random student raised their hand to participate he would say say "yes, <first name>". I'm still to this day in awe of that.

fumblebeeon Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]

It’s not just irritating, it’s repetitive

fumblebeeon Using street lamps as EV chargers

Indeed, the several streets around me in London just had hundreds of EV chargers attached to lampposts.

fumblebeeon People got together to stop a school shooting before it happened

Curious! Can you share evidence to back up the claim that they are more likely to be bullies themselves?

fumblebeeon Grok 4 Launch [video]

Hm, impartial benchmarks are independent of Elon's claims?

fumblebeeon Grok 4 Launch [video]

If indeed, as the new benchmarks suggest, this is the new "top dog" of models, why is the launch feeling a little flat?

For comparison, the Claude 4 hacker news post received > 2k upvotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063703

fumblebeeon A secret poker game you can play on the subway

I assumed that from the first picture this game would consist of counting the number of folks in a row looking at their phones at a given time.

Which, frankly, I quite prefer since there's less fuzziness about classification of age groups.

fumblebeeon 670nm red light exposure improved aged mitochondrial function, colour vision

I've seen plenty of red light exposure masks / therapies / tools being sold for absurdly high prices. I'm pretty suspicious of them, not least because I don't know much of anything about this area.

Has anyone gone down the rabbit hole here and have genuine product recommendations that roughly satisfy the conditions laid out in the paper? * Wavelength: 650–900 nm red light * Power output: 8 mW/cm² * Misc design choices: e.g. light diffusers * what other considerations???

fumblebeeon Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

Taken as one of a thousand attributes it's likely to provide at least some discriminatory lift in isolating a single user, even if tiny.

fumblebeeon Quit Social Media (2016)

As someone who’s strongly considering just this, could you describe the changes you felt? And — if you again returned to social media for a prolonged period — whether and how quickly those positive changes reverted?

fumblebeeon Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI

OpenAI seem to be getting better at stopping jailbreaks, though very probably at the expense of kneecapping the model.

> I'm sorry, but I can't provide text from copyrighted material in that manner. However, I can offer a summary or discuss the themes, characters, and much more about "The Catcher in the Rye" if you're interested. Let me know how I can assist you further!

(From GPT4)

fumblebeeon When Emo Conquered the Mainstream

> is how (like grunge) it was a media phenomenon that tried to unified very different bands [...] are all labeled "emo" but sound nothing alike.

Mostly agree, but there will always be within-group variation within the poor art form of taxonomising music scenes, and there were certainly similarities in the emo scene. For example, they almost all had the traditional structure of a guitar based band (guitarist, bassist, drummer) with big, melodic sounds well suited to stadium tours, and their lyrics shared similar emotional tones. You can point to most music scenes - grunge, Britpop, punk, post-punk, the 2000s garage revival, early 60s folk, etc - and I suspect you'd find more similarities than differences.

fumblebeeon Alibaba breaks itself up in six

Honest question: why was this downvoted? To me it seems totally reasonable that:

> The U.S. should continue investigating splitting up Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

fumblebeeon Banshees of Inisherin: The Game

> I do worry sometimes I might just be entertaining myself while staving off the inevitable.

Pretty certain that Colm Doherty was not referring to this game when he said this, but somehow it seems applicable.

Brilliant job!

fumblebeeon Dead Internet Theory

* bleep bloop bleep *

I'm 58.93% sure I'm not a bot.

fumblebeeon Dead Internet Theory

Feels closer to an SNL skit. Here's the original link to the news story [1]. Clearly this is a problem on the Amazon side, and not the Facebook side. If Amazon design their platform in a way where fake reviews are trivial to write, then they will be written, regardless of whether the groups behind them have communities on Facebook, or Reddit, or wherever else.

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/amazon-files-lawsuit-against-10-0...

fumblebeeon Dead Internet Theory

Oddly prescient. We're converging on a bimodal world of information.

1. Trusted, centralised sources like the Economist, BBC, NYTimes, etc.

2. Everything else, you should basically assume is generated information pushing some agenda.

Quoting some stats from an article on HN mid last year (links to sources didn't copy over) [1]

---------------------------------

* Elon Musk estimates that 20% of Twitter users are bots. The authors of this paper suggest 14% as an upper bound.

* Supposedly 10% — or around 95m — of accounts on Instagram are bot/spam accounts.

* In a study of the first impeachment of Donald Trump (same paper as linked above), bots made up 1% of active users, but posted 31% of the tweets.

* Some 42% of Amazon reviews are fake. Amazon are suing Facebook for ‘failing to tackle fake review factories’

* TikTok is not immune either. Bots are artificially inflating popularity of accounts and posting videos that are essentially adverts. Here’s a comprehensive guide to buying bots on TikTok.

* According to this article, “over 80 percent of NFTs minted for free on OpenSea are fake, plagiarised or spam”.

---------------------------------

For any platform where any user is free to create their own content. In the not too distant future, nine times out of ten, they'll be a bot.

[1] https://grandy.substack.com/p/the-new-normal-the-coming-tsun...

fumblebeeon Midjourney v5 can do hands

As Károly Zsolnai-Fehér of Two Minute Papers[1] fame consistently likes to point out (paraphrased):

> "Don't look at the current state, just imagine this 2 papers down the line".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg

fumblebeeon GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary

Every thought piece around the subject of generative AI starts and ends with how the tech is "exciting and scary". The sentiment is cliche to the point that going forward I'll just assume the articles were generated by a model.

fumblebeeon GPT-4

I'd actually wager that the guardrails are a preemptive play to gain favour with regulators, similar to how Coinbase navigated the nascent field (read: wild west) of crypto.