HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

thenaturalist

1,424 karma · joined May 20, 2016

submissionscomments
thenaturalist··on Running Claude Code dangerously (safely)
This would be lovely and much appreciated!

Devcontainers look perfect but also like a bit of a burden to entry with regards to setup.

thenaturalist··on OpenAI could reportedly run out of cash by mid-2027
https://old.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1qf6z4v/anthropic_3...
thenaturalist··on Show HN: Streaming gigabyte medical images from S3 without downloading them
Pretty bold half claim while not backing it up with a single data point. :D
thenaturalist··on East Germany balloon escape
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]

> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.

People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.

Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.

thenaturalist··on Apple Creator Studio
I'm sorry to break it to you, but they certainly won't.

It's in the announcement and look at what Microslop and Google have done to their versions.

thenaturalist··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
This is so simple.

This makes me angry.

thenaturalist··on Donut Lab’s all-solid-state battery delivers 400 Wh/kg of energy density
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is objectively true.

Saying this as a German, where the economy is the worst it’s been in decades and our federal government acts incapable at changing this so far.

Anyone who’s been to China, Israel or the US will be familiar with the pragmatism and, more importantly speed things happen in these places.

I do like Europes rules on civil liberty and privacy protections, but let’s not pretend the bureaucracy is on a unique scale across the board.

thenaturalist··on It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
If there is ever a leaked insider story of how whatever Tahoe is supposed to be got cooked up and released that would be my read of the year.
thenaturalist··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Yeah as someone being born in the early 90s to Eastern European parents who experienced generational joy when Causescu and his wife were shot dead, the globalization that followed hasn’t exactly delivered for people - mostly so in the West.

Yes, millions of people in the poorest nations have been raised out of absent poverty since, but beyond that, wealth has flowed to the top 1% any country you look at (check median wealth ownership in the US, basically plummeted for the average Joe since the mid 80s), the environment has gone to shit and the generational promise that the children will have it better than their parents has gone over board with asset prices ballooning.

I‘m right there with you, the societal promise of meritocracy and the middle class was broken in the early 90s and so far there is no replacement in sight.

thenaturalist··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
> Venezuela doesn't exactly come across as a sophisticated nation.

Yeah this is just flawed.

thenaturalist··on Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it.

If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.

thenaturalist··on Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?
BetterOffline [0] by Ed Zitron [1] dissecting AI hype and boosters. By a long shot.

The information density and clarity are outstanding.

0: https://www.betteroffline.com/

1: https://www.wheresyoured.at/

thenaturalist··on We removed 80% of our agent's tools
> We assumed it would get lost in complex schemas, make bad joins, or hallucinate table names. So we built guardrails.

An actual sentence written by a "Chief of Software"...

How are people getting hired at such prestigious engineering companies putting out such sentences?

Sorry if this sounds snarky, but I'm blown away.

This is seemingly a team wasting god knows how many man hours and $$$ on tool spend assuming things top down instead of collecting data and benchmarking bottom up.

Crazy on so many levels.

thenaturalist··on Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?
For data engineering the two best by far I know of:

1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore: https://bicortex.com/

2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/

thenaturalist··on Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE
But if they do, prohibiting SQL injection, a critical last mile vulnerability, seems trivial?
thenaturalist··on Inside PostHog: SSRF, ClickHouse SQL Escape and Default Postgres Creds to RCE
Wow, chapeau to the author.

What an elegant, interesting read.

What I don't quite understand: Why is the Clickhouse bug not given more scrutiny?

Like that escape bug was what made the RCE possible and certainly a core DB company like ClickHouse should be held accountable for such an oversight?

thenaturalist··on Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac
Jup.

Honestly was stumped that there was no more explicit mention of this in the Anthropoc docs after reading this post couple days back.

Sandbox mode seems like a fake sense of security.

Short of containerizing Claude, there seems to be no other truly safe option.

thenaturalist··on Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC
Laughs in German...

Honestly the main part about nuclear energy is dependence.

In Germany we saw how well that played out in 2022 when Russian gas stopped flowing.

There is a shit ton of innovation around battery technologies, extending the grid and behind the meter micro-grids.

A more diversified, autonomous (as in, wind, solar) energy supply beats Nuclear in terms of national security and long term viability any day.

thenaturalist··on Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC
And what have they said about the millenia-spanning effects of the waste?

About reactor malfunctions and fallout?

Yes, I know the chances are slim and you know as well as I do they're not 0.

thenaturalist··on Is it a bubble?
They are talking to each other already.

Whether for betterment remains to be seen.

2 Opus 4 talking directly to each other: https://www.iflscience.com/the-spiritual-bliss-attractor-som...

"Learning" passing between derivatives of the same base models: https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/

thenaturalist··on Is it a bubble?
No, but there are huuuuuge incentives by people publishing such statements.
thenaturalist··on Is it a bubble?
„Just XYZ more billion, bro, and then we’re gonna have AGI! For real bro, pleaseeee!“
thenaturalist··on Is it a bubble?
Also equating artificial intelligence with LLMs.

I get that laymen and the media do it, but imo this looks really bad for an investor.

thenaturalist··on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
Coincidentally, in macOS and iOS design and functionality - especially since Tahoe and 26 - it rather feels like the slop has taken over.

quality sacrificed for speed, resulting in mediocre, buggy software.

The classic AI business manager formula.

thenaturalist··on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
Yes.

Thank you for your attention on this matte.r

thenaturalist··on Super fast aggregations in PostgreSQL 19
DuckDB and other specialized DBs benefit from much more optimized math, data structures and data storage/ memory lookups I'd assume.

But a 5x increase simply by optimizing the planner is nothing to be ashamed of.

thenaturalist··on How AI is transforming work at Anthropic
Most believable stats out there.

/s

thenaturalist··on Nvidia CFO admits the $100B OpenAI megadeal 'still' isn't signed
> ... but Nvidia’s latest 10-Q offers clues.

> The filing states plainly that “there is no assurance that any investment will be completed on expected terms, if at all,” referring not only to the OpenAI arrangement but also to Nvidia’s planned $10 billion investment in Anthropic and its $5 billion commitment to Intel.

"We are definitely not Enron"...

thenaturalist··on How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA
This reads like a sleek way to weasel oneself out of responsibility.

So what you're effectively implying is that the court of public (in Israel instances very clearly biased) opinion rules the site?

So guidelines for thee (Israel supporters) but not for me (Israel haters and Antisemites).

A famous poem from Martin Niemöller, who actually lived through facism comes to mind:

    First they came for the Communists
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a Communist

    Then they came for the Socialists
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a Socialist

    Then they came for the trade unionists
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a trade unionist

    Then they came for the Jews
    And I did not speak out
    Because I was not a Jew

    Then they came for me
    And there was no one left
    To speak out for me
thenaturalist··on How a French judge was digitally cut off by the USA
It would be really, really great when the open Israel hate and borderline Antisemitism displayed in many threads related to these topics could be moderated to the same tune.

It's the same hate that has killed Jewish Americans in the past year.

Many of these replies are very low on facts, very high on emotionally loaded subjective opinions.

It's a challenging task as BBC and so many more Western media outlets had to retract and amend their own faulty reporting over the last few months, but if we're talking about the spirit of the site, everyone should be held accountable equally.

Example at the top of this thread:

> Why is the president of the United States protecting a blood soaked war criminal?

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46006941&goto=item%3Fi...

← PreviousPage 2 of 16Next →