Hacker News Reader

sidpatilon Please don't discontinue Gemini 2.5 Flash

Further, they may change the behavior of the existing model without providing clear notice. E.g. existing models start to behave worse shortly after new model releases, due to resource reallocation away from the older models toward the newly-released ones.

sidpatilon Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing by up to 13 years

This phenomenon is referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

sidpatilon "No, I swear I wrote this."

I'm pretty sure Coursera or edX was using this same approach a while back — they'd make you type in a paragraph of text, then they'd use the timing information as a fingerprint or signature, to authenticate you as the actual student.

sidpatilon New Texas Instruments 5532 chips are not the 5532s we’ve used for decades

In software, this is known as Hyrum's Law: https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

sidpatilon Time to talk about my writerdeck

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/

sidpatilon Hunting a 34 year old pointer bug in EtherSlip

> There's also the weirdness of tunneling protocols like PPPoE which only exist to tunnel Ethernet through non-Ethernet systems.

Isn't PPPoE the opposite — carrying a non-Ethernet protocol over Ethernet?

sidpatilon Rubens Menin's 150 Years "Old" Port Wine

Original title: 'Rubens Menin's "Very Very Old" Port wine'

sidpatilon Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

Someone here mentioned a whole ago that the labs deliberately haven't tried to train these characteristics out of their models, because leaving them in makes it easier to identify, and therefore exclude, LLM-generated text from their training corpus.

sidpatilon A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC

Why?

sidpatilon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Construction and home contracting follow building codes.

sidpatilon Bumblebee queens breathe underwater to survive drowning

Only if it's decomposing aerobically.

Anaerobic decomposition, like what you find in a septic tank, doesn't produce any heat.

sidpatilon I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

> I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.

You're not the one in control of their employment status and workplace reputation.

sidpatilon Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps

Is nuclear energy considered renewable?

sidpatilon How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

It looks like Slidev is designed for presentations about software development, judging from its feature set. Quarto is more general-purpose. (That's not to say Quarto can't support the same features, but currently it doesn't.)

I'm not affiliated with Slidev. I was just curious.

sidpatilon How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

It's not, to be fair.

> I use my own `.md` plan files rather than Claude Code’s built-in plan mode. The built-in plan mode sucks.

sidpatilon Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube

> smaller scale stories are replaced with moving the big plot forward

This is pretty common in TV shows, from what I've noticed. It takes a few seasons for a show to find its footing.

sidpatilon GitHub Agentic Workflows

Does this products directly compete with GitHub Models [1]?

[1] https://github.com/marketplace?type=models

sidpatilon Waiting for Postgres 19: Better planner hints with path generation strategies [video]

You might be interested in Substrait (https://substrait.io/).

sidpatilon AI will not replace software engineers (hopefully)

> It may be that like clothes, there's only so much need for software.

Clothing demand has increased greatly in the past decade due to fast fashion. Much of this clothing is designed to cost a few bucks, last a few wears, then get thrown out. It's an ecological disaster.

Maybe we'll see something similar happen with software — as production costs fall, trends will shift toward few-use throwaway software. I highly suspect this is already happening.

sidpatilon Progress on TypeScript 7 – December 2025

I'm unfamiliar with all the changes coming soon. What would you need to refactor?

sidpatilon Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back

You would need to rerun the LLM, but you wouldn't necessarily need to rebuild the codebase from scratch.

You can provide the existing spec, the new spec, and the existing codebase all as context, then have the LLM modify the codebase according to the updates to the spec.

sidpatilon Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

Perhaps not for much longer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45785987

sidpatilon Hackers leak Qantas data on 5M customers after ransom deadline passes

Japan Post is rolling out such a system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117779

sidpatilon Walmart says tariff costs are rising 'each week' and will continue

The Wal-Mart near me uses e-ink price tags for many (but not all) of their items.

sidpatilon Instant SQL for results as you type in DuckDB UI

What do you dislike about that style?

sidpatilon Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature

PRQL [1] is a pipeline-based query language that compiles to SQL.

[1] https://prql-lang.org/

sidpatilon Global coffee trade grinding to a halt, hit hard by brutal price hikes

Green beans are unroasted, yes. They can last for a long time in storage.

sidpatilon Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

You can try asking ChatGPT to rewrite the original script to include the improvements.