Hacker News Reader

news_hackeron Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

> They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning

Children ask some incredibly deep questions, I would not sell them short.

news_hackeron Stop the Apple Music app from launching

The MacMediaKeyForwarder works like a charm:

https://github.com/quentinlesceller/macmediakeyforwarder

LLMs are great at knowledge transfer, the real question is how well can they demonstrate intelligence with "unknown unknown" types of questions. This model has the benefit of being released after that issue became public knowledge, so it's hard to know how it would've performed pre-hoc.

news_hackeron Fixing HN comments with breadth-first navigation

That is indeed the current workaround, but IMO still unwieldy and inefficient. I find that the hotkeys alone allow you to fly around the comments and scan them way faster.

news_hackeron Fixing HN comments with breadth-first navigation

Appreciate the feedback! Agreed that on HN, even collapsing at L2 would be a significant improvement.

I'll keep brainstorming with the UX for the next version. I appreciate your perspective on how all the data disclosed on first load might be disorienting with unclear relationships. I'll play with either some sort of animation cue, colored or bordered visual indicators, or a default null selection as you've suggested.

news_hackeron Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

https://hn-comments.netlify.app/

I got tired of the lack of ergonomics around HN comments, and built my own navigator/viewer.

news_hackeron The highest quality codebase

the "best practice" suggestion would be to do this in a sandboxed container

news_hackeron Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

I've been using bkt (https://github.com/dimo414/bkt) for subprocess caching. It has some nice features, like providing a ttl for cache expiration. In-pipeline memoization looks nice, I'm not sure it supports that

news_hackeron Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

I will never use Gemini for this reason. The enshittification of Search is so treacherously disgraceful and user-hostile, that I have no faith that the same fate won't occur with Gemini as well.

news_hackeron Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20250725124140/https://pastebin....

news_hackeron Hidden interface controls that affect usability

Spot-on article. What's especially aggravating is the "skill-issue" meme that folks retort with when you make mention of this.

news_hackeron Engineered Addictions

Absolutely not. People are not asking for dark patterns to engineer their behavior to maximize retention. This is like locking a kid in a room full of candy, and then blaming them for gorging themselves.

news_hackeron Electronics Course (45 episodes, YouTube)

Wonder if they could use Google Takeout [1] to export all their YouTube data, and then try to search through the history data.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

news_hackeron Fighting for the open web [image]

do you have a link to the git guide?

news_hackeron Cookie Clicker saved my PhD

The irony of a cookie popup showing up on the author’s blog..

news_hackeron Practice typing by retyping entire novels

Anyone have a link for this?

news_hackeron Text to Diagram Tools

I would love an AI-enabled chat bot that transforms text -> diagrams. Diagram creation could still be a lot easier.

For example: "I want to show that the causes of burnout are the following 5 categories: 1) lack of purpose, 2) community breakdown, 3) ... " -> and then that gets turned into a diagram. Then an update like: "make lack of purpose more prominent" and it increases in size.

I would even settle for a transformer that converts natural language to one of the diagram syntax languages in the OP link.

news_hackeron Reality is just a game now

This. It's east to be fooled by the illusion of choice and customization.

Just see what happens to other markets in maturity, e.g. food: https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/10-companies-own-...

I still see the spirit of what the OP is saying, though. At least the AI will know if I like my Kraft Mac-n-cheese extra-creamy or dry.

news_hackeron Show HN: TaskTXT, plain text task-timing notepad

I think having a small "Dismiss" link or "X" button could feel a little less coercive. I do appreciate being able to click outside the modal to do this, but it wasn't immediately clear at first.

news_hackeron Ask HN: How do I develop focus?

Excellent! Tight feedback loops are everything. Feel free to take a look at my /milestones page or DM me if you have any questions. I'm always looking for accountability buddies too.

news_hackeron Ask HN: How do I develop focus?

Relatable. Try what I'm doing. Work your way backwards.

https://backwards.dev

Start with the final goal you're seeking (in my case it was a Pay Me checkout button) and then piece the rest of the fluff later.

A lot of the focus product is dealing with emotional barriers and your personal psychology. This shatters all this and paves a new path.

There's something sobering about starting at the end, instead of consistently getting side tracked at the beginning.

I put this up 2 days ago and some stranger has already sent me 12 cents :)

news_hackeron Deskreen: Turn any device into a secondary screen for your computer

Do you support screen flipping, e.g, when using the iPad as a teleprompter?

news_hackeron Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand

hijacking the cultural cache of the phrase "that's so meta" - deviously clever and annoying

news_hackeron Ask HN: Good books/courses to learn networking essentials for web developers?

I was also interested in this, instead of all the TCP/IP resources mentioned here. You may find the Interconnect section of this book helpful: https://pragprog.com/titles/mnee2/release-it-second-edition/

It covers:

- DNS

- Load Balancing

- Demand Control

- Network Routing

- Discovering Services

- Migratory Virtual IP Addresses

news_hackeron Immutability Changes Everything (2016)

Your link wasn't working for me, here's a different one: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3415014

news_hackeron Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

I think the answer is because it's called "business" - if you're not busy it's "bad for the economy"

news_hackeron Ask HN: What novel tools are you using to write web sites/apps?

I'm really enjoying working with MDX (JSX & markdown hybrid). https://mdxjs.com/

I was able to quickly put together a blog with some pretty nice features (e.g. margin notes): https://pratik.is/writing/essays/media-as-food

Writing content in markdown while adding interactivity with JSX is pretty nifty.

If you click "Raw" here you can see how the blog post is just markdown with some custom JSX elements littered in, e.g. <WrappedSidenote />: https://github.com/pringshia/pratik.is/blob/master/pages/wri...

news_hackeron Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code

I really wish it had Cmd+P support for searching for project files.

I find the project a really cool concept, but am genuinely curious what real value this is adding in it's current incarnation? Navigating the folder structure is kinda nice, but I don't see much else.

Am I missing something obvious?

news_hackeron Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

If 90% in the US are "upper caste", their lived reality isn't really "upper caste"... by virtue of being part of the 90%.

news_hackeron Mark Zuckerberg Asserts Control of Facebook, Pushing Aside Dissenters

Zuckerberg also has connections via Sheryl and her extensive repertoire. I doubt it's just him running the ship, he's mostly there for the hacker-kid personality cult.