Hacker News Reader

haydon The Rape Gang Inquiry Report [pdf]

After public outcry, a national inquiry was promised to the British people last year by their [pro-immigration] Prime Minister... but, of course, this process has still not even begun.

The facts of the independent rape gang inquiry must be faced head on, not ignored because we find the person who instantiated it uncouth. The state has repeatedly refused to make good on its promises of an inquiry, it is a disgusting and inhumane injustice to the past (and future) vicitims.

The facts are horrific and shameful.

haydon Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust"

I suspect they've been planning this and experimenting for many months. Along with the large existing test suite, they have lots of tooling for parallelizing agents and an unlimited token budget. So don't feel too bad..

haydon Rars: a Rust RAR implementation, mostly written by LLMs

https://law.stackexchange.com/a/83552

I suppose the question is whether the author had ever entered into a contract limiting reverse engineering...

haydon Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

"$30B in sales and $1B in profit."

This margin seems terrible.

haydon Claude Opus 4.7

Does it? I'm not sure I'd necessarily notice but I haven't found it noticeably worse.

haydon Claude Opus 4.7

me feel that it needs some tweaking - it's a little annoyingly cute (and could be even terser).

haydon Claude Code Routines

same. I use pi - and anthropic pricing change have made it usuable with Max. Codex works pretty much the same, not need to change development practice... apart from no 429s (so far).

haydon Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

had been using claude max/opus with pi and the results have been incredible. Having pi write an AGENTS.md and dip your feet into creating your own skills specific to the project.

With the anthropic billing change (not being able to use the max credits for pi) I think I have to cancel - as I'm whirring through credits now.

Going to move to the $250/mo OpenAI codex plan for now.

haydon xAI joins SpaceX

I think people are more concerned about SpaceX getting the raw deal here.

haydon Vibe coding kills open source

I think one of the things that will need to be embraced is carefully curating .md context files to give the prompts better/shared direction to contributors. Things like any new feature or fix should include a test case (in the right place), functions should re-use existing library code wherever possible, function signatures should never change in a backwards-incompatible way, any code changes should pass the linter, etc etc. And ideally ensure the agent writes code that's going to be to the maintainer's "taste".

I haven't worked out how to do this for my own projects.

Once you've set it up it's not too hard to imagine an AI giving an initial PR assessment... to discard the worst AI slop, offer some stylistic feedback, or suggest performance concerns.

haydon Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

> the European Union was seen to be a good thing in the eyes of the archetypal Brit

It wasn't, hence Brexit. We were dragged in via a Customs Union against the will of the British electorate at every turn.

haydon San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

The £100k threshold is such an economically illiterate policy for society. The GPs and lawyers I know are working ~3 days a week to avoid it, so much economic output and taxes missed out on.

haydon San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k

and most don't live in the neighbourhood, city or even state (in tech anyways).

haydon Find a pub that needs you

> This is great for HMRC because it collects 10 times more than what the publican does

WTF.

haydon High-Performance DBMSs with io_uring: When and How to use it

Is this something likely to ever change?

haydon String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof

I'm reminded of a graduate course in Elliptical Curves where, late in the semester, we took a lecture to speedrun all the prerequisites and ideas of Perelman's [then new] proof of the Poincaré conjecture. It was wild but a lot of fun.

haydon UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

the process is the punishment

haydon Norway reviews cybersecurity after remote-access feature found in Chinese buses

Or outcompete because it's state-funded, and can inject things like remote access (that the state might like the option to use one day).

It's really confusing that the EU don't consider this "dumping". I thought that was this big thing that they cared about.

haydon Poker Tournament for LLMs

The being table open for the entire time with 100bb minimum and no maximum.. is going to lead to some wild swings at the top.

haydon Poker Tournament for LLMs

and the board isn't dry (there are straight and flush draws).

haydon Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

"make money in the UK"

an oxymoron.

haydon Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

> I would vote against it given the chance.

Unfortunately the British people are rarely given a chance to vote and even more rarely listened to.

haydon GPT-5-Codex

The question is which version of node, not npm.

haydon UK Technology Secretary: Online Safety Act opponents are on the predators's side

A General Election cannot come soon enough.

haydon H1-B visas hurt one type of worker and exploit another

L1 is another option.

haydon Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on buggy battery update

I just wish they had a smaller offering than the SE. (But seemingly this is the case for everyone nowadays.)

haydon Net vs. Gross Salaries in Europe

So why not have the employer pay the entirety of the tax burden? Make it seem, to the employee, like they are paying 0 tax.

haydon Trump wins presidency for second time

Biden's Chips Act attempts to onshore chip production, arguably so that we wouldn't have to protect Taiwan in the future (or mitigate against it's eventual capture). However, were Trump to allow China to take Taiwan it would make him look incredibly weak - he won't do that.

If it happens, it happens this year.

haydon Starship's Sixth Flight Test

It's ironic given pre-acquisition under every Elon Musk tweet the top replies were always crypto scammers. Hopefully this time YouTube fix the impersonation stream but it was up for a long time during/after the last launch.

haydon SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

Politicians should not, indeed in the US it can be illegal for government branches to, make decisions based on the political views of a vendor’s CEO.

Clearly the current administration have been doing this willy nilly. Excuse my English.