Hacker News Reader

jiscarioton Apple Pass Designer

They bought Siri, and 5 years later it was still only serviceable at setting an alarm or timer. Yet due to their hardware and market presence, they've still probably got the best chance of "winning" personal AI.

jiscarioton Hacking SimCity 2000 saved games

I really enjoyed "Hacking" Bard's Tale II Character as a kid. "Rex the Dino swings at a Barbarian 8 times for 900 points, killing them."

Using the sector editor to mess with things, did seem to often turn the characters in to Dopplegangers for some reason.

jiscarioton LinkedIn Larpmaxxing

One of my IRL acquaintances is calling themselves a "thought leader" on Linked In and I've never seem them the same since.

jiscarioton Did Meta's Big Settlement Actually Help It?

Minnesota attorney Keith Ellison was suing car manufacturers (Kia and Hyundai) because lots of "young people" were stealing them. Instead of, you know, just making crimes auto-theft, crime again.

jiscarioton Where did all the public bathrooms go?

And people with means, move from common to private spaces. Others will not have the same choice and things become more stratified, because a subset of society decided to cede public spaces.

jiscarioton DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813

Wonder if we'll ever see optimizations for pelican riding a bicycle svg, make it in to model training runs.

jiscarioton Karpathy’s Pelican

At some point, I'd think labs would start "teaching the test" and start adding bike riding pelican's in the fine-tuning.

jiscarioton Siri AI

In the US, every time I file my taxes, I wonder what % of people don't meet the cognitive barrier to successfully file. I suspect a large portion of people offload tax filing to a service or accountant for numerous reasons, which is basically a personal assistant.

jiscarioton Solving the “Zork” Mystery

I spent countless hours as a kid trying to figure out the games secrets. Only, 20-years later, did I read that you were supposed to be collecting specific items and putting them in the trophy case to "win".

jiscarioton I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

Not FANG, but I work at a company that operates some infrastructure at scale. What I've seen is after we've rotated through a number of different tools, in different pilot groups, eventually converging on tool X (a custom, internal wrapper around opencode).

Now every "working session" like meeting, at the team or dept level, has been around how to use tool X. Tricks using tool X. Problems using tool X. I can't help feeling if we had spent the same amount of time building up core knowledge/contempencies around say, design patterns, networking, specs, we'd be in a better place for building.

Instead we are going to have a few thousand people who know a tool really well.

jiscarioton Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

Still, they didn’t give up because that wallet contained 5 BTC; this may not sound much, but it has a value of almost $400,000.

They are really underestimating their audiance here.

jiscarioton I changed my personality in six weeks

Additionally, the author seems to be placing value judgments on agreeableness and neroticism. That's fine they if want to change their personality, but I would be very hesitant to argue that turning up the agreeableness and down the self-awareness dials, are a net benefit to society.

jiscarioton Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

I've read this one before, but this time it really hit home in how unlike most of the modern AI-emoji-filled-cringy-heading-20-page blog slop, it is. Very refreshing.

jiscarioton The best things and stuff of 2025

I like when people explore deep interests and share them. Especially, someone who has been doing it for 15 years, consistently. A pre-AI window of humanity. This stuff is more important now, than it ever was.

Thank you for sharing with us how you are happy that you have a wife and kids.

jiscarioton AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

I agree - there is a baseline amount of effort that should be expected. I was once dealing with a co-worker who was treating me like an llm. I had to encourage him that our job isn't about knowing things, but figuring things out. There's also that slack DM's don't scale like documentation does.

jiscarioton Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case

Will this help other services like Netflix, Spotify? Or am I misreading things.

My understanding, at least several years ago, that Netflix was paying as much to Apple in subscription fees, as they did for their AWS hosting.

I also noticed when upgrading my Spotify account, I couldn't do that through the iphone app itself - I assumed this was because it would break TOS, or they didn't want to pay a massive chunck of the monthly subscription cost to Apple.

jiscarioton Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet

Just think about what they could accomplish if they had more engineers than lawyers.

jiscarioton Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.

All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.

jiscarioton We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that

Using the author's loose criteria, one could say a criminal record is a social credit system.

These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.

jiscarioton AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

The emergent trait of AI laceing every other sentence/comment with emojis is a pretty good signal for when you want to ignore AI slop. I almost wish it was codified in to the models.

jiscarioton Flipper Zero dark web firmware bypasses rolling code security

Where I live, the ability for the "Kia Boys" to easily steal cars, really boosts their effectiveness at robbing people at gunpoint. Sprees of 20 people being robbed by the same group. It's not poor kids who lack school transporation options, doing their best to get by.

jiscarioton “No tax on tips” is an industry plant

Agreed 100%. I will enjoy the creative financial engineering that likely comes with this policy, as we attempt to classify more and more things as gratuity, to escape the reach of the IRS.

jiscarioton Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death

I'd love to find a way to encourage more dragonfly's to come hang out in my yard (middle of forest). I think of them as little organic mosquito-eating drones.

jiscarioton How the BIC Cristal ballpoint pen became ubiquitous

The skilcraft US government pen, was spec'd to write 5k in -40F to 160F and is also manufactured by the blind. I've got a box of them spread out anywhere I need a pen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0...

jiscarioton How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything.

I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.

jiscarioton IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

Target basically decided to stop "over-delivering" on DEI. e.g. stuff like $2 billion to black-owned businesses, increase black workforce by 20%, etc. Even with the rollbacks, they are probably doing on average more DEI for the sector, than a Costco, Amazon.

They definitely messed up the messaging, though, in that they positioned themselves to be somehow boycotted by both left and right.

Costco is 20x the business as Target for numerous reasons, I kind of doubt any of it has to do with DEI.

jiscarioton Bored of It

> "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."

Is this a SV thing? Conversations about IT with anyone other than co-workers are a once-a-year thing for me. It is actually refreshing, because a lot of the stuff I work on esoteric/niche it's not coming up a lot in conversation.

jiscarioton The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

The fact that the elephant in the room, the Jones Act, is never mentioned in the parent article, is pretty telling.

jiscarioton The State of Vim

Google translate says vim = 'I came' in portuguese, so I guess that explains Brazil.

jiscarioton The Anti-Social Century

There is a lot in this piece, but one of the things mentioned was public spaces.

While it likely doesn't play a huge role, it can't be ignored that the last ten or so years in the US, public spaces have generally deteriorated due to the lack of enforcement of quality-of-life laws, and general absence of social norms. If your government decides to allow tent cities (everything that comes with that) in your local park, people of means will take their kids to SkyZone. When public transportation becomes unsafe, people of means will opt to rideshare. It points to a failure in leadership of many large US cities. Hopefully that changes.