Hacker News Reader

mellosoulson Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone

I'm thinking mostly of eg terraced streets in villages and towns. Similar to cities in that there tends to be a single space for parking on the street but multiple car owners per house on average.

Different to cities in that there isn't remotely the public transport infrastructure to support getting rid of cars, or the private facility to support electric overnight charging for the longer distance car-commuting etc that isn't generally needed if you live in cities.

Things are improving with technological advance but - again - not everybody can afford those advances and the latest models.

It's a completely different lifestyle living in those sorts of places in some respects.

mellosoulson Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone

I'm having trouble envisioning that.

Yeah that seems to be the general problem here. Electric car champions and city dwellers living in a bubble.

mellosoulson Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone

Except for the many many people who don't have off street parking.

mellosoulson Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone

Probably a much better idea first to have a decent public transport and electric car support network throughout the country first.

We don't all live in the city.

mellosoulson The 37signals Manager Playbook

You'd rather the banal corporate beige in every other handbook? At least this reads like someone means it.

No, I'd rather straight talk clear of idealism about being a corporate cog. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

mellosoulson The 37signals Manager Playbook

The bar for remaining on the team at the 1-year mark isn’t just passable performance, it’s hell yeah! You’re excited to have them on the team in their current state, and you can’t wait to see what they do next.

Who writes this cringe-worthy crap? Or is it an American cultural thing?

This is just ultimately a commercial company churning out digital widgets so I hope they are paying "Hell Yeah!" money...

mellosoulson A digestion of the proof of Sendov's conjecture

Software Engineering feels a little less impacted?

I don't think so - software engineering has already been completely up-ended; we are showing mathematicians what is next for them.

Sure though wrt your point about mystique there is a difference in psychological importance and cultural meaning - maths at the highest level is far more intellectually challenging and even "glamorous" and represents one of the peaks of human achievement. Ironically though if we allow the invention of AI belongs to our (software engineering) field, this is the first time we've matched those peaks.

I agree with you on not missing manual coding, which in some way surprises me - but it's been a long time since I had the passion of my youth for it.

mellosoulson Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election

Not optimistic.

Boris actually seemed to be a charismatic leader in the same class as Blair and Thatcher but seems to have been rather morally flawed which ended up bringing about his downfall.

The other leaders have been uninspriring second raters - Andy Burnham himself is a Gordon Brown B-side fully compromised by PFI but perhaps he's grown via his mayorship.

Seems now to have some of the common touch of Boris which is positive.

Britain itself is quite a grey and timid place, challenged by both fear and awe of it's great history and the complex consequences of its impact on the world.

It's neither the diverse heaven the left would tell you, staggering unfairly under the weight of brexit foisted on an unwitting populace by the big bad press barons, or the front line of the fight against Islam and a liberal-triggered decline into a violent dystopia that our more swivel-eyed compatriots on the right would have you believe.

However there are some insights to be gained by listening to all those voices about it's current state and potential - but the ensuing noise represents the confusion and disagreement that is holding us back from moving into the light with purpose.

mellosoulson US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers

What could go wrong with preferring people who have ingrained disconnect between the objects on screen and real living humans.

mellosoulson Grok Bot

Grokbot is another derivative of open source originals like Open Claw

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

mellosoulson Show HN: Git-knife – edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet

Hmmm, this seems to be making easy something you normally should not do.

mellosoulson $580M undersea cable rerouted to avoid the grave of Dobby the House Elf

This is a rehash of the Guardian article (submitted here yesterday with no traction), which should the the link:

Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/10/harry-po...

mellosoulson 50k Boat Names

Snap!

mellosoulson 50k Boat Names

Disappointed to see no mention of Boaty McBoatface.

Can't be that often boat naming becomes headlines.

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

mellosoulson Real-time MCP interceptor that blocks .env reads and dangerous commands agents

The claimed public GitHub 404s

https://github.com/edgarfloresguerra2011-a11y/marketnow

I think this is supposed to be a ShowHN.

It's a little confusing but it looks like another skills directory that is claiming to be audited and trustable.

The attempt to back that up in the About Us is laudable but needs work to both hone the message and bring the proof centrally.

The UI at the moment isn't really distinguishable from all the other AI-designed projects.

mellosoulson Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

Yep, now the probability of alien civilisations is completely unknown, but half the completely unknown it was before.

mellosoulson “Gravity is worth asking about”

The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.

mellosoulson Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

even an AI assist that makes coding twice as fast would, in theory, improve developers’ overall productivity by less than 15 percent. The other 85 percent of their time remains untouched

I stopped reading after this. AI has massively impacted most aspects of my non-coding work including the mentioned planning, understanding legacy code bases, setting up environments, etc etc.

Either this article is written by people with skill issues or - given the platform - its a biased and protectionist take that will fall quickly under the march of reality.

mellosoulson Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

Firstly: good luck!

I've been wondering what the alternatives to things like Github Copilot Cloud and Codex Cloud might be, especially ones that might be flexible wrt models, and this seems at least to have some of those behaviours.

If that perception is correct, please would you explain what it offers against those sorts of services (those in particular) and how the pricing compares - eg. their base levels are $20 a month, yours starts at a higher level - I can see there seems to be more brought in from the local IDE world (and similar), which seems very useful compared to the standard "prompt against repo, repeat" of the normal cloud agents but it would be useful to understand the targets and intents.

mellosoulson Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

They're asking us to engage and try it, that's what ShowHN is.

mellosoulson Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

The name screams for attention, so of course it's on topic. I made no appeal to authority, just maturity.

mellosoulson Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

Yes, see also gimp, thefuck and other equally depressing juvenile names. I'm aware of precedence.

It's partly frustrating because the laziness of the naming presumably doesn't actually reflect the effort that has gone into the project.

mellosoulson Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

Going by the childish naming of the project, it doesn't inspire confidence in the professionalism of the author going forward, and neither will it help with getting it installed on corporate networks.

I'm all for vulgar wit but this isn't that (yes I'm aware of the -tty convention) & just reinforces the cliche of tech skills inversely proportional to social ones

mellosoulson Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation

1. Your examples are very different; we know in both cases the qualifier. I clicked on the link fully expecting to read an article about people.

2. Mice are obviously a useful first test subject or they wouldn't be used; they are also different enough from humans for studies to have no guarantee of results transitioning either smoothly or at all to us.

So yes, let's be more responsible with our link titles if the original articles "forget" to include the limitations.

mellosoulson Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation

(in mice)

Needs to be as mandatory a suffix here as year, video, etc

mellosoulson qm – Multiplayer agent harness for work

In a tangential earlier release, Gary Tan's own gstack:

https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

Use Garry Tan's exact Claude Code setup: 23 opinionated tools that serve as CEO, Designer, Eng Manager, Release Manager, Doc Engineer, and QA

mellosoulson The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)

Not to denigrate the moment (AI ingress into theory which this is a part of) or the result here, but these headlines are perhaps overstating the importance - some of the theories and conjectures are available for AI-assisted exploration because they are quite niche and not very important.

Maxwell's name being invoked here for instance implies a hundred year old foundational problem like Fermat, but it's just a recent conjecture that was inspired by reflections from the great man on his work.

mellosoulson Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench

This is nice, but would be really useful measured against human performance, and yes - I understand that is likely a difficult challenge.

Many people though are going to read the headline figures and think it means - say - Opus 5 is only a quarter the strength of a human coder.

mellosoulson UK's iconic Jodrell Bank telescope faces axe in science cuts

Can't see this happening in the new localist PMs back yard.

mellosoulson MouthPad: A Tongue-Controlled Touchpad

As much as I'd like to support this, $1400 places it squarely in the "disability tax" bracket that accompanies products targeting this market.