Hacker News Reader

I love this answer and your fondness for "assisted" betting. Do you blog?

"Who wants bigger phones?"

Everyone who buys larger phones instead of the iPhone Mini. The market decided that.

htkon Our position on open-weights models

"To summarize my and Anthropic’s position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category." Translation: If it's so strong that it threatens my business, ban it.

"We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, " Translation: Let's kneecap competitors.

"stopping industrial-scale distillation" They stole the work of every book author, and now are trying to say their AI's output should be protected from competitors.

htkon Apple Neural Engine: Architecture, Programming, and Performance

The idea is that it uses a lot less power than the GPU.

htkon What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis

No, the symptom is being treated, not the underlying issue. And that's ok, but treating the underlying issue, when possible, is better, as the problem ceases to exist.

htkon Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs

The M1 Max from 2021 has better memory bandwidth. The M3 Max can be specced to 128GB.

Nothing new here, apart from being able to use CUDA on a less power hungry system.

htkon Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

Flagged. Article is as AI heavy as the commits that people are complaining about.

htkon iPhones with iOS 26 are freezing FaceTime calls when they detect nudity (2025)

What might be the impact on battery life?

htkon KV cache is becoming the memory hierarchy of inference

Hard to read article. The writing is curiously more robotic and repetitive than those written by AI.

htkon Three men are facing charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests

The article is about Canada.

htkon macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore

Keep an Intel Mac around?

htkon A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

Popups were dealt in a way that could be useful here, they're only permitted when the user directly generates the interaction that creates the popup (not scripted). The back button could use the same algorithm back in history, only go back to screens that the user directly navigated.

htkon AirPods Max 2

Thanks to the kind soul who upvoted this horrendously typed reply. Unfortunately I can't edit it anymore.

htkon AirPods Max 2

Absolutely! I have both the AirPods Max and the Bose QC Ultra and even though my whole ecosystem is Apple, the QC Ultra is a lot more comfortable reliable on day to day usage. Comfort is due to weight, and reliability is the batter is predictably on the QC Ultra, but on the Max I never know if the battery went all down because I can't turn it off.

htkon BitNet: Inference framework for 1-bit LLMs

So Microsoft is actually using 2 bits instead of 1.58. In this case they could represent -1, 0, 1, 2. As inhibitory synapses account for 20%-30%, this could map well to how biological brains are structured.

Does that make sense?

htkon macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses

"In 2015, Dye became the head of Apple's user interface design team"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dye

htkon NetNewsWire Turns 23

This is THE reader of RSS feeds if you're in the Apple ecosystem.

It's so good to still find new feeds to subscribe to now and then.

My latest is the newsletter from Retro Game Corps. Pure nostalgia fun right on my NetNewsWire apps.

htkon iOS 26 Shows Unusually Slow Adoption Months After Release

Liquid Glass is less performant, and the interactions are less reliable due to the bouncing and wobbling. Also all the transparency makes it harder to read.

A bad "upgrade", but thankfully the designer who fathered this is gone from Apple.

htkon We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

Unbelievable story in the best of ways. Three amazing people lucky to have each other in their lives.

htkon I program on the subway

If you took the time to read the first paragraph instead of typing this snarky comment, you'd know he's working on his personal projects.

htkon Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

Every now and then we talk here about Mozilla needing more money to keep Firefox alive, meanwhile they spend money with other priorities in mind.

This is an old article but has some good examples:

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

htkon Surface Tension of Software

Please elaborate. I thought the article was interesting and would love a contrasting take.

Edit: thank you for the answers, I don't know how I missed that em dash clue.

htkon The Disappearance of an Anti-AI Activist

Meanwhile, on another news website: "Cops still searching for ‘volatile’ activist whose death threats shut down OpenAI office The ChatGPT maker’s HQ was locked down after a former member of the protest group Stop AI allegedly threatened murder."[1]

[1]: https://sfstandard.com/2025/12/02/openai-protester-shut-down...

htkon Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

I remember when crypto ruined the market for GPUs, and now AI is ruining the market for DRAM. Darn you, fads.

htkon IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

Great article, thank you for writing and sharing it!

htkon People are using iPad OS features on their iPhones

I'm on the same boat. Several links on HN are not opening.

htkon Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

Absolutely, I flagged this post for this very reason. Far left or right websites are no place to get a reliable account of things.

htkon Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

Thank you for the info. A lot of superficial noise in the discussions here.

htkon Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year

Most of us wouldn't mind if the limitation was that you can't opt IN more than 3 times/year, but of course Microsoft dark patterned it to limit the opt outs.