Hacker News Reader

pitchedon Show HN: Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met

> cannot do precise things like coding software since humans will never be able to use natural language to specify their requirements.

To your point, this example. The issue expressed here is with humans, not AI. We are still pretty terrible at writing specs. TBF, the AIs are too but that wasn’t being voted on.

pitchedon Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

FTA, this is a fault-tolerant server where all hardware is redundant and can be hot swapped while running. The servers you’re thinking about are redundant at the software level so rebooting one server won’t cause the service to go down.

What is remarkable is that apparently that VOS thing has never crashed. I wonder if they also do software redundancy under the hood to keep uptime going during reboots. If the CPU is hotswappable, it must have something.

pitchedon Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

A kid can follow a basic “todo list” tutorial and open a port on your home router then get friends to chat on that. In that case, how is the government enforcing a ban? We’re expecting some agency to do constant port scans on all its citizens to look for anything allowing writes?

The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.

pitchedon Ember-1

The issue I find with this is that the frontier models still outperform the small finetuned model on its specific task. So much so that the ROI on doing fine tunes is likely negative. I would love to hear some specific example where it did provide value though, if any has any. That would be helpful to start being able to find similar cases.

pitchedon Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

70 years after the peak of assembly, that value probably comes more from supply than demand.

pitchedon Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

Keeping the comparison to compilers, people in the 60s refusing the transition weren’t crushed, their skills were devalued. The open models work well enough at coding to keep up without buying OpenAI or Anthropic products.

pitchedon Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

Rust is used a lot. Elixir/Phoenix comes up often. You’re looking for something statically typed with string guarantees and as FP as possible to make unit testing easier.

pitchedon Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

AI is not as big of a productivity boost as compilers were but it is not zero. Back then, SQL was created and marketed as something “managers could use”, another parallel to the current cycle. This whole hype cycle is something we’ve seen before and IMO, we should know better how to handle it this time around. It’s a bit disappointing to hear the same arguments every time.

pitchedon AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

We’re sharing a world with cultures that do not respect or enforce patents. The internet has helped us stay competitive by making information a lot cheaper to share. AI is the same thing but more potent. It will help us stay competitive even longer.

There were some hidden downsides to the internet and they are worse with AI. Upsides are better, and downsides are worse. Still largely the same deal we already accepted though. “Information wants to be free” never said information wasn’t harmful.

pitchedon StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter

The original creators of Mario Kart are still involved in the latest entries (a 34-year run!) Thats not common outside Nintendo.

pitchedon Wk. 6 of Vibecoding an MMO

The “nearby” list of players takes up half the screen on mobile (Safari) and I can’t see my player or really anything going on.

I really like the Vampire Survivors vibe though and what I think might have been other players running around under my UI was really neat.

pitchedon California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law

I’m sure there will be a package available on day 1 that will tell all sites you’re 30+ and should be allowed in. Probably even just a Firefox add-on, not a full OS package.

pitchedon Relm4 makes developing beautiful cross-platform applications idiomatic

You have to head to the documentation to see an example. It is still Rust, which is a bit of an acquired taste so keeping that beauty off the main page makes sense.

pitchedon Relm4 makes developing beautiful cross-platform applications idiomatic

This is Gnome/GTK, not cross-platform like I would have expected. A Linux-first approach. I’m happy that this is the world we’re in now but expect it still to be royal pain to get a build running on Windows. Huge congrats to everyone involved if not!

pitchedon Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

I’ve found this too but I think audiobooks still have a place, they just can’t something you rely on being able to perfectly understand. A second book on the same topic or something in a topic loosely related but interesting. Or fiction to help stay awake on long road trips.

pitchedon Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

Where do you publish?

pitchedon Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

I want more things like that old hand made hero to exist in the world, but, from an interview with Casey himself, it doesn’t pay well enough to justify. Someone with the chops to put that together is in a position to be doing something much better incentivized.

pitchedon Moonshot AI wants 30% of what US clouds earn from Kimi K3

Implied in the article that this is more due to shear size than a change in business model but I hope this isn’t a first crack in the dam. Would hate to lose all the great work being done in the open over there.

pitchedon Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

The linked study does show that correlation. But I personally believe it’s more of a second-order effect.

Vegetarianism selects for openness and analytical/reflective thinking but the extra step to veganism selects for absolutism/purity and rigid category-based thinking. Reflective thinking and openness are definitely correlated to IQ so I believe the result in the article.

The point here is to know your audience. The people on this site are perfectly primed to respond well to a vegetarian/environmental point of view.

pitchedon Octopus intelligence may be related to never-before-seen mutation

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28926931/

> Compared with meat-eaters, vegetarians were more likely to have a higher educational level, whereas vegans had a lower education level

I think it’s good to question these things but the people who go full black/white on everything is where that whole movement died. Saying something strong like “eating any meat” will generally not win over hackers. But “we won’t bring cows to Mars” might work better.

pitchedon I'm becoming AI-blind

I think, they don’t care about truth at all, just whether the reviewer rates it highly. Otherwise, it would be deleted after that round of training. It values test-taking ability over critical thinking.

My two favourite words for this are “conditioned” and “catechized” where the latter is a bit more on the nose but way more obscure.

pitchedon I'm becoming AI-blind

> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components.

The best I’ve heard of this is peeling the onion. The first pass is always very high-level and you have to make it go deeper. That can be done manually with follow-on prompts but I like using subagents, each with a different angle on the problem.

pitchedon The Wonders of the Male Human Pelvis

Sophie Woods moved herself 2000km in 28 days and the scope of that battle is something I’m having trouble with. That’s 70 km/day for a month. There are no land animals I know of that can hit that.

pitchedon Our Reality Is Shifting and It's Just the Start

A few years ago, when this all started, we had major breakthroughs fairly often that would throw out all the existing tooling. Now, most of the breakthroughs have to do with improvements to the tools instead. All the gains I see personally have to do with agent upgrades, system prompt tuning, skill tuning, context optimization, etc. Didn’t the last Anthropic release come with some system prompt updates too? Plateauing of the LLMs themselves has long since been the case but that means they’re stable enough to build on which isn’t bad.

pitchedon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

It sounds like you understood. I find the disconnect between the summary above and the quote below really funny. Almost as funny as explaining the joke here!

pitchedon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

I think taxes predates that by a lot and probably had more to do with feeding management.

Money and trade as we know it today was invented by the Romans because soldiers were raiding their own villages for supplies. Paying soldiers with coins then demanding them back from villagers got them to start trading. That’s where incentives started.

pitchedon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

This link says very explicitly that it did show people were discouraged from working, making the experiment obviously a failure.

> Among all the people, only two key groups were found to be discouraged from working by the Mincome project – new mothers and teenaged boys, who, instead of entering the workforce at an early age, decided to study until grade 12, increasing the proportion of students who graduate high school.

pitchedon The lost civic life of movie rental stores

Being upset about immigration like this comes across as someone living somewhere successful but is not competitive with the new immigrants. Not saying psyops and civil forfeiture aren’t a thing, just that watching conspiracy youtube is less helpful than skilling up. This is a reminder to myself, not an accusation.

pitchedon The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)

Before LLMs, empire building was a very large incentive to hire. Teams tended to become larger than they needed to be so the boss feels good about their life choices.

LLMs do not fix this problem, they make it worse. Instead of the team being oversized, they’re now way oversized. It is still in everyone’s best interest to look busy anyways and LLMs do help a lot with that.

pitchedon The lost civic life of movie rental stores

This comes across as an unhinged boomer rant but is probably more right than wrong.

I have seen fast food chains in the US offering $30/h and that is a life-changing amount of money for a lot of the world. Immigration, as in an individual’s choice to immigrate or not, and the effect they might have, is a supply and demand question.