Hacker News Reader

sterlindon Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM

it depends on your prompting. LLMs can generate beautiful code, or absolute slop.

sterlindon Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor

again, you can easily prove me wrong by finding a single professional font designer who uses FontForge as their daily driver.

sterlindon Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor

please find me a single professional font designer who uses FontForge. just one.

I use FontForge because I'm a pleb hobbyist without a Mac, but it's like comparing yachts and life rafts.

sterlindon Show HN: Lean4 Datalog DSL Based on Google Zanzibar for AI Projects

as a lean noob but a datalog novice, could you explain how it ties to lean? I thought of lean as a proof language rather than a programming language. don't you have to write out every step yourself? or.. hrm. is lean actually a pure functional language with dependent types, and the tactics are just functions? or are tactics like type-level functions, but lean can support regular functions too?

sterlindon New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

I think by "update" they mean "re-up," as in you need another depot injection every six months.

sterlindon New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

assume you have a population of IV drug users. as a society, would you prefer to spend nothing and see them develop HIV, or to spend some and control the HIV?

you don't have to care about the drug users at all. even if you treat them as pests rather than humans, we frequently vaccinate pests for public health measures. pathogens will spill over to populations you do care about, they'll create a drain on the healthcare system, they'll harbor other opportunistic infections. it's not sanitary.

this is completely leaving aside that some drug addicts can and do turn their life around, and that HIV is a horrible illness nobody should have to deal with, even if it's "their fault."

sterlindon A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

what happens if the defendant pleads not guilty? does the public defender not bother to show up to trial? do they not represent the defendant? what is this charade?

I found the verdict here: https://www.canlii.org/en/ns/nspc/doc/2024/2024nspc4/2024nsp... but no transcript is given. it has to be requested, it seems.

sterlindon A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

does Canada not have public defenders? I know they're overworked but, c'mon, surely they can do better than they did?

I want to see the transcripts.

sterlindon A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

there's no time machine, but at least the charges are removed from the poor man's record.

he should probably try to seek damages from the state for his wrongful conviction (and get his lawyer disbarred for grossly incompetent counsel!)

sterlindon Our position on open-weights models

wouldn't stop AI companies from continuing to develop using their current infrastructure.

the West could retaliate by halting shipments of photoresist and other materials to China.

meanwhile, Intel second-sources Nvidia and starts pumping out GPUs.

the economic fallout would be devastating as trade wars and export bans on both sides make Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs look like NAFTA.

sterlindon Our position on open-weights models

cryptography, too. remember when that was regulated? strong cryptography had to be carefully controlled as a munition, for national security!

sterlindon Our position on open-weights models

> The most compelling argument would be that by limiting the use of open-weight models in the US that it will reduce cases of accidents like the recent attack on Hugging Face.

an attack done by a closed-weight model (GPT-6) and defended against by an open-weight model (GLM-5.2) precisely because OAI positioned themselves as gatekeepers for cyber capabilities.

if anything, open-weight models shift the battle towards defenders because they can actually run them.

sterlindon Unitree As2-W

howc hard is it to jailbreak the device?

sterlindon A24 Is Copyright Striking Backrooms Artwork Older Than the Movie

it's called a "jury."

sterlindon Americans hate AI so much that politicians are losing their jobs over it

I don't think Americans hate AI, but many of us really hate how we're being treated like horses destined for the glue factory during the rise of the automobile.

sterlindon The creepiest 'sales demo' of all time

why are private community centers installing Flock cameras indoors?

sterlindon As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers

and migrants? I think liberal parties in European countries seem to be much more supportive of refugees than Democrats, current Republican rhetoric aside. also, police, and guns. meanwhile, even with the issue you singled out, most red states in the US have enacted near-total abortion bans. do any countries in Europe ban abortion outright? are the conservative parties pushing for it?

sterlindon Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection

they are already pulling the rug. Google took months to publish devicetrees for the Pixel 10. they've signaled (iirc) that they'll no longer make the Pixel line capable of running AOSP. the reason they even did at first was to make Pixel a reference implementation that vendors could use to port Android, but now they've announced a switch to an emulated device for that purpose.

sterlindon Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers

"A riot is the language of the unheard." ~ MLK Jr.

sterlindon Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers

Merriam Webster defines whistleblowing as:

> one who reveals something covert or who informs against another especially : an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or by other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency

Wikipedia further asserts:

> Whistleblowing is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed wrongful – whether it be illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical, or fraudulent

Arguably, nothing the NSA was doing was illegal. Was Snowden not a whistleblower?

sterlindon GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis

there are cheaper ways to do it. not like, consumer-cheap, but I'm setting up a rig for 80% cheaper than that.

I'm a tad worried about triggering a run on the particular hardware I'm buying though so I'll leave it vague here, but hit me up on Discord if you're curious.

sterlindon Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

what about just... becoming mediocre? engineers are already infamously lazy at reviewing PRs. how is Meta incentivizing these Data Labelers to give a shit and actually scrutinize the AI-generated code they're supposed to be reviewing? what's the reward structure? what prevents engineers from flagging minor nitpicks all day while they look at LinkedIn?

sterlindon GLM 5.2 Is Out

I'm amazed we didn't have the same moral panic when the web became popular. billions of people suddenly had access to knowledge about how to create dangerous viruses! sites like Wikipedia don't even check that you're a US citizen before letting you access pages on recombinant DNA and genetic engineering! the articles on sarin and VX nerve gas include syntheses!

sterlindon Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes

why would the First Amendment apply to foreign nationals working for a foreign corporation in a foreign country?

sterlindon Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

I think there's space in the middle between "incremental improvement" and "doomsday device." it's a major step up, sure, but so was GPT-5 over GPT-4.

sterlindon Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

they probably did. either they subsequently ignored the models' suggestions, or the model sycophantically gassed up their bad decisions, or the models are not very good at persuasion/spin/politics.

sterlindon Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

how did you feel about Hegseth's "double tap" strike?

sterlindon Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time

> The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers after WW2 with a veneer of legality, for imperialist superpowers to bully the small third countries who refuse to play ball, not for something superpowers to actually abide by themselves

I recommend you watch Judgment at Nuremberg - the 1961 film, not the 2025 one (I've seen both.) the Nuremberg Trials were very much to punish the architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust for their atrocities. you can choose to be cynical, but consider: which "losers" were "persecuted?"

- the Doctors' Trial sentenced the doctors who murdered thousands of disabled Germany's own citizens in the Aktion T4 program.

- the Judges' Trial sentenced the Judges who enforced the Aryan racial purity laws, ordered the castration of "mental defectives" and sent falsely-accused Jews to their deaths.

- the Pohl Trial which sentenced the SS officers who ran the concentration camps and death camps.

sure, the US doesn't have perfectly clean hands, and the victor usually won't prosecute its own the way they prosecute the enemy, but I strongly disagree that the Hague was just an attempt to "persecute the losers." they were prosecuted, not persecuted, and they weren't prosecuted for "losing," they were prosecuted for their atrocities.

just because the Hague is unfair (some men never faced justice, since they were on "our" side) doesn't mean it was unjust (those who were convicted deserved it.)

sterlindon Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

Smoking gun! You've hit the nail on the head, and the case is stronger than you think.

sterlindon Waymo Premier

I hope they succeed, for the sake of my mom who's legally blind and has dreamed about them for decades. but I'd be significantly more excited about self-driving if you could buy level-4 AVs that you can actually own.