Hacker News Reader

over_bridgeon We’re forgetting what darkness feels like

Not only outside but every rental I've lived in has had cheap curtains with crazy light bleed around the edges. It feels like the street light is in the room with me. Then every device I own seems to have a blue charging led. Even inside I can't find darkness.

Bring back the orange I say. Red has certain connotations but orange is friendly enough and doesn't keep you awake

over_bridgeon Munder Difflin – Agent harness to run an office of your clones

Am I the only one who doesn't want a virtual assistant? I just struggle to understand this goal we apparently are all aiming for

I want to be an active player in my own life. I want to do things even if there's some friction.

All I can imagine is that future from WallE where everything is so easy no one tries or does anything at all

over_bridgeon New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.

Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?

You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?

over_bridgeon People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more

I'm not American. It's hard to fire people. You have to recycle them into new positions. The author seems to be French so I imagine it's similar there

I do wish it were easier to fire people for poor performance though. Nothing kills morale like tolerating incompetence

If the unemployment benefits are strong then I have no problem with easier dismissal rules

over_bridgeon People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more

Many places I've worked didn't promote hard workers at all. Hard workers were hard to replace so they were kept where they were and even blocked from promotions at times. People floating about with few duties were easy to backfill so could move to new positions, including up.

This is mostly public sector and utilities

over_bridgeon Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

Jokes on him. I'm a peasant and I've been here for years

over_bridgeon I Fired My AI Assitant

I find lower intelligence/ status people especially like it. Many of the earliest adopters of AI at my company were the ones who weren't performing. They often felt unappreciated or ignored (for good reason) but AI started telling them they were right. It became their only ally and allowed them to spread their terribleness on a scale we couldn't have imagined. This was a government agency where firing wasn't a thing, only 'performance management'.

For me hearing that every idea is my best yet is my cue to touch grass

over_bridgeon I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

I mean that it's allowed more bad apps to be created. It hasn't lowered the quality of apps necessarily but the low barrier to entry means things can be created that don't need to exist

over_bridgeon I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

I've used AI for building a hobbyist note app myself. It's also a mixed bag but a lot of that comes down to how I've changed.

Before AI dev was expensive so I'd spend hours planning features. I filled 5 notebooks with UI sketches and data schemas and lists of names of what to call things. Building was more or less final as I only had 5-10 hrs a week max and wanted to move on.

Now I type directly into the Claude Code chat box and it writes it in front of me. I haven't planned a thing in months. As a result the app swings wildly around based on my whims and feelings. I can rewrite the whole thing based on something I thought of in the shower. Then days later I realize it isn't right and I rebuild it again. All of the rewrites have done a number on the code and I see dead patterns everywhere from stuff long since deleted.

In a professional app I'd have others to hold me accountable so it's not exactly the same but AI has made it very easy to make a lot of bad apps quickly. If you know exactly what you want though it can feel like magic.

I just hope it's still respecting the data loading and caching algorithms I designed so carefully cause I wouldn't know if it wasn't anymore.

over_bridgeon Who's afraid of Chinese models?

I feel like I'm crazy here but isn't China just sitting there doing nothing?

On one hand there's the relentless barage of American propaganda. I get that a militaristic society needs an enemy to fight against lest they turn on each other. I get that if you tell people a bad guy is coming for your jobs or your lives then you can maybe get your workers to accept worse conditions and living standards which increases profits. It's ghoulish but there's some logic.

On the other hand I can't see China doing anything except minding its own business. No tariffs. No bullying other nations. No wars started. No threatening allies. They don't let their people waste their lives on brain rot or gambling. They largely align with UN resolutions. They respect international institutions instead of always being the asterisk.

Has American propaganda just failed to work outside it's borders? It's not landing at all

over_bridgeon Who's afraid of Chinese models?

I don't trust any American company because they will switch into extraction mode eventually and squeeze every cent they can out of you.

Even if the founders didn't want that, eventually the upper ranks will fill with MBAs and the board with private equity and they will make it that way. Their bonuses are based on quarterly performance not customer experience

Long gone are the companies who served their communities for decades or centuries, providing a stable return to the owners, jobs for the workers and value to the customers.

I'd rather China have my data than America. China might do something with it one day but America built exploiting it into the business model (disclaimer that I'm not Uyghur or Taiwanese though)

over_bridgeon The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed

I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds

over_bridgeon Grok 4.5

Unless you also believe the neutral view is earth being half flat and half round

I like this analogy. You can't just average two ideas and call it a centrist position. Sometimes one position is right and the people supporting the losing idea should be ignored. Facts are how we decide. People are not logical creatures and will cling to ideas beyond all reason or common sense once they've incorporated it into their identity. There is a reason that right wing appeals to emotion aren't popular with LLMs

over_bridgeon Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say.

Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO.

NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received

over_bridgeon Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

Agreed with this. The majority would happily stop working but we never hear that message because a small percentage of nutters have tied their whole identity to their job and how hard they work. These people dominate headlines and shift the Overton window. Elon is the poster boy of this but there are plenty of others pushing extreme habits.

Most people I know just want to hit their escape number then they'll never be seen again.

I just regret the loss of the Renaissance values. They believed people should pursue many things to become broad and well adjusted. Nowadays it's just obsession about a single thing to the detriment of all other aspects of life. We've embraced one dimensional people and given them the world.

over_bridgeon SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company

over_bridgeon Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk

Can you imagine if the world ever actually achieved a state of utopia? Stupid people would burn it down within weeks just to have something to watch

over_bridgeon Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years

Cowards. I maintain my position that all political polls are either useless or actually detrimental to democracy though - how many didn't vote for Hillary because the polls said she'd win? How many more might have turned out if they hadn't seen that? Only the election matters and the rest is noise

over_bridgeon xAI joins SpaceX

Wait so now SpaceX is the company letting you undress people? Why mix gold and poop? SpaceX plus xAI.

over_bridgeon James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise

Seems like we've got a few of these imbalances now where you'd expect 50:50 but instead it's skewed to one side where nature had a different idea

Matter-antimatter ratio

Left vs right handed molecules

Now galaxy spin directions

Maybe there are others I missed too

over_bridgeon Please Stop Inviting AI Notetakers to Meetings

I really don't agree. People behave differently when they know they are being recorded. They are less likely to admit mistakes or ask dumb questions.

There's just this odd formal air about them and I get annoyed when certain people try to record everything. Sometimes people just need to be able to speak freely.

There's a time and place for recording stuff - technical walk throughs, bug reports, demos, meetings where attendees are employed by different companies etc. Having your standup recorded just encourages one sentence answers (and yes, that's a bad thing if you want people to actually tell you if they have a problem)

over_bridgeon Trump wins presidency for second time

PhD should never be considered a sign of intelligence. Anyone can get one if they pay enough and don't have any better prospects

over_bridgeon What is the ideal chapter length? (2023)

Skip Crossroads of Twilight. Read the summary on Wikipedia. It's a gimmick that covers the same day and events from lots of different perspectives. None of them are good. That book serves as a slap in the face for the author who made a course correction for book 11 and got it back on track. Then Sanderson naturally has a faster pace than Jordan and brings it home strong. 11-14 are great again for those who survive 7-10.

over_bridgeon Japan chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in QoS push

Because 'line go up' is the only globally shared value left in modern society

over_bridgeon Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?

> Humans need a world where being lazy causes their standard of living to deteriorate in a very noticable way, where working hard causes their standard of living to improve

The opposite of capitalism then? Right now, as soon your absolute asset gains equal your expenses, you can coast along doing nothing forever. You'll probably get richer too if you can live below that level. The whole goal of society is to retire and literally stop working hard (minus a few workaholic CEOs who will die alone at their desks).

over_bridgeon Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

Once you learn that online outrage doesn't actually impact your life that much, its easy to ignore. Gone are the days of public apologies and now we just sweep criticism under the rug and carry on.

over_bridgeon Microsoft Paint's new AI image generator builds on your brushstrokes

Jira now makes your requirements for you. They all seem perfectly logical and not connected to anything your actual customers need.

over_bridgeon The People Deliberately Killing Facebook

You joke but the drive to increase profits at any cost is having pretty insidious impacts on the world. Enshittification is everywhere now with companies being forced to degrade customer experience to appease shareholders. Nothing wrong with making a profit but making additional profit every single quarter is making the western world hostile to most people on average wages. It's too expensive to even live here with only a small percentage of people doing well under these circumstances.

over_bridgeon Nvidia CEO says future of coding as a career might already be dead, due to AI

I think we might be seeing the end of hyper specialisation. The need for pure coders will decrease in the same way pure scrum masters, business analysts or project managers did. The skills are still there and used but they are aspects of roles rather than the whole role.

That is my optimistic read on AI. Return of the generalists (note - don't read that as a 'jack of all trades' but rather someone who is very good at 2-5 things rather than an expert at 1-2). Have a broader base and know how to use AI tools to do the prescriptive parts.

over_bridgeon MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions

A profitable company that lacks DEI is still a success

A company that loses money but has plenty of DEI is a failure.

DEI is not the factor that determines success or failure.

It is a tool that you can use but it makes no sense as a goal or target in itself. If your customer base has some attributes that aren't reflected in the staff, maybe hiring some will help you relate. The idea that your company must match the 'diversity' of the general public (in one country) is all backward.