Hacker News Reader

zaptheimpaleron Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

They didn’t sell it no strings attached, they sold it with explicit restrictions in their contract with DoW and the DoW agreed to that contract. Their mistake was assuming they operate in a country where rule of law is respected, clearly not the case anymore given the 1000s of violations in the last year.

zaptheimpaleron Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

This is all just completely wrong. Anthropic explicitly stated in their usage use of their products is not permitted in mass-surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weapons, in the contract that DoW signed. Anthropic then asked DoW if these clauses were being adhered to after the US’ unlawful kidnapping of Maduro. DoW is now attempting to break the contract that they signed and threatening them because how dare a company tell the psycho dictators what to do.

zaptheimpaleron Inputlag.science – Repository of knowledge about input lag in gaming

Very cool! Yeah I love borderless fullscreen mode, its very convenient.

zaptheimpaleron Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

When we ask for regulation and oversight from the government, generally we mean regulation and oversight designed to help consumers or citizens and align the interests of institutions with that of the citizens. Yes the US trying to force Anthropic to let them use Claude in mass-surveillance and auto-kill robots is technically regulation, no its not good regulation. It seems to be designed to hurt the average citizen not help them. The oversight that might help here is say the courts or congress stepping in and facilitating a public discussion and legal review on the kind of surveillance the DOW intends to carry out. Is that so hard to understand without being spelled out?

zaptheimpaleron IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report

The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.

zaptheimpaleron Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI

I'm skeptical any public company is really going to have the strength to develop junior talent no matter how many experts say its important or what the long term consequences are. ShitCo A will slash headcount and see their stock go up 50%, investors & VCs at ShitCo B will ask why aren't we doing this and will soon follow. The same thing played out with all kinds of manufacturing industry jobs.

The track record in all industries for companies having well thought out plans to develop talent is pretty bad in the age of money. More likely they just fire the juniors, slowly lose seniors and pray for AGI to take over all coding. Maybe it does and they win, maybe it doesn't and they start panic hiring after 5 years.

zaptheimpaleron Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January

I didn't know about the long history of racism involving Elon's companies. But it seems Tesla had a problem discriminating against black workers since at least 2015:

"including slurs, nooses, swastikas, and threats found on equipment, in bathrooms, elevators, and even on new vehicles. The EEOC also charged Tesla with retaliating against employees who complained"

and has come up repeatedly since then, involving many workers and in different locations and newer factories. They still have a few lawsuits open against them from workers, shareholders, federal & state agencies.

zaptheimpaleron People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much

Look at the massive and growing wealth & power inequality today, an age of aristocrats, then look at these AI fucks bragging about how AI will eliminate all white collar jobs. Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. You can already see LLMs are making programmers much more productive but it's actually causing lower salaries and job losses - so who's capturing the value of that increased productivity? Not workers..

Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past).

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ul...

zaptheimpaleron Inputlag.science – Repository of knowledge about input lag in gaming

Windows solution to this is exclusive fullscreen, which bypasses the compositor.

You can try Gamescope [1] from Valve, that's what Steam Deck uses - i think its a compositor designed to minimize latency but support the few things games need. Some compositors like KDE Plasma KWin support a direct scanout mode which is the same idea as windows' exclusive fullscreen. You might need to look for support for something similar in niri.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope

zaptheimpaleron I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

I think we should stop making excuses for shitty practices. I can understand why they might do it, i can also see there are much better ways to deal with this situation.

zaptheimpaleron I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

Maybe the law should be changed then. The companies that have this level of disregard for security in 2026 are not going to change without either a good samaritan or a data breach.

zaptheimpaleron I fixed Windows native development

I don't think the article "reeks of LLM style" at all. It's actually very obviously written by a human in my eyes, there are several phrases that LLMs would not write. I see this accusation leveled at basically any piece of writing that is long and not very casual now, it just doesn't make any sense.

zaptheimpaleron Mystery donor gives Japanese city $3.6M in gold bars to fix water system

Here is some of what happened during COVID, according to Patrick McKenzie (patio11) [1] :

----

I want to both be polite about the fact and be honest about it. We, the United States of America, through our elected representatives and through civil servants who represent our interests, committed monstrous crimes in 2021, which are against the laws, traditions, and constitution of the United States of America, including aggressively redlining the provision of life-saving medical care in a way which was designed to cause racially discriminatory outcomes with the provision of medical care.

Just throwing that out there as a statement. With that caveat, one of the things that we spent tens of millions of dollars on was that we want your consultancy to write a website which will enforce residency restrictions. A residency restriction is essentially, when we are under a supply constraint, there must be some method to decide which people get it, and some people don’t. We have, in our infinite wisdom as the government, decided that equity, equity, equity is one primary thing that we are focusing on. A thing that we think would be contrary to equity is allowing anyone who shows up at the clinic to receive the life-saving medication.

The thing that we are specifically worried about is relatively well-resourced people from advantaged demographics will use their superior access to transportation and information to travel to clinics which have the vaccine available and take that instead of that vaccine being used by someone in the local community who we intend the vaccine to go to. Therefore, to get an appointment to go to the vaccine, you will need to go to the county’s website, which is delivered by Accenture or similar, and prove to the website that you reside within one of the zip codes that we have allocated for those vaccine doses. Only then will you get the ticket, virtual or otherwise, which allows you to go to the pharmacy and get the vaccine. We spent tens of millions of dollars on that, targeting essentially a four-month window where we were acutely supply constrained. But we did not turn off residency restrictions on the websites after that four month window because we physically had no way to do that because that was not in the bid documents in some cases. ...

----

Just one of the many ways that rigid institutions that behave more like stupid robots than things capable of dynamic decision-making cause immense harm. This is not a rant against equity btw, only against insanity.

[1] https://alethios.substack.com/p/patrick-mckenzie-vaccinateca

zaptheimpaleron Mystery donor gives Japanese city $3.6M in gold bars to fix water system

They likely wouldn’t even accept the money because it’s in gold bars, and they wouldn’t be able to prove its source.

zaptheimpaleron We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

The people doing the arresting have no ID and wear masks, arrest people without any evidence, throw them in detention centers and then deny them their legal right to a bond hearing and instead detain them indefinitely. Even someone like you should understand, police are not the judges, they can arrest someone but detaining them for a long period of time requires ascertaining their legal status and offering a chance for bond. The judges also overwhelmingly ruled the same thing, while ICE is directly disobeying their legal orders. If they were law enforcement, they would be following the law not breaking it.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-succe...

zaptheimpaleron We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

They're happy to fund the military, they have a list of words [1][2] that they use to flag grant applications, including "female", "bias", "political" and others. Cuts seem to be directed at biomedicine, health and social studies.

[1] https://grant-witness.us/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...

zaptheimpaleron We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

Yes, Canada has already seen a large uptick in researchers and doctors coming in from the US and other countries have too. It's good for everybody for research to be more decentralized so that it can better withstand shocks in single countries.

zaptheimpaleron I fixed Windows native development

Humans invented writing, not LLMs. They are copying us not the other way around. You can’t jump on 1 sentence that vaguely sounds like an LLM and say it’s written by AI. It’s so silly. I understand the aversion to AI slop but this is not that.

zaptheimpaleron Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

HN has taken a very sharp turn over the past 2-3 years. Putting aside politics, they are reflexively cynical, misinformed and confident in their ignorance even about technology. Missing the boat on AI as well for years as its evolved from cool chatbot that hallucinates to can write serious code with few errors and solve unsolved research problems with some assistance.

zaptheimpaleron Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

I said thousands of victims, not thousands of babies or murders. That much is confirmed even by the FBI.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1407001/dl?inline#:~:text=...

Some of these claims don't have bulletproof video evidence and DNA, and i suspect you would call those fake too even if they did but they are not unbelievable when considered in the context of everything that's been shown. I can't do that for you.

Anyways, if that's not enough for you to even spend some time reading the news, then I don't know what is. Enjoy being stupid and smug.

zaptheimpaleron Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

https://x.com/jakeshieldsajj/status/2022425434626183307?s=61

this is one example mentioning babies. There are hundreds of other pictures and emails re young girls. If you bother to look into this, you will see. you would rather feel superior nitpicking a minor detail while missing the fucking point. Good job. Heres another crumb, a tiny sliver of evidence:

https://hyperallergic.com/epstein-files-detail-gruesome-alle...

zaptheimpaleron Rust implementation of Mistral's Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime runs in your browser

I don't know anything about these models, but I've been trying Nvidia's Parakeet and it works great. For a model like this that's 9GB for the full model, do you have to keep it loaded into GPU memory at all times for it to really work realtime? Or what's the delay like to load all the weights each time you want to use it?

zaptheimpaleron When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

Its great to be clueless, thats how you learn! Just dont flex and demean other people like "Coming from someone who worked at FAANG, this is sub par post." if you're clueless. Again everything you've said does not really apply here or is impractical.

zaptheimpaleron When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

Actually I host everything on a linux PC/server, but a different box runs PFSense and a local DNS resolver so I was talking about setting up a split-brain DNS there. So I don't have to manually edit the hosts file on every machine and keep it up to date with IP changes. Personally I really like docker compose, its made running the little homeserver very easy.

zaptheimpaleron When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

Clueless lol. This is not about any of that. I run Plex on my local network at plex.domain.com. Plex sends logs to the internet with its local domain in the string. Leak. There is no easy way to solve this without deeply inspecting each packet a service sends outside your network, and even that doesn't work when services use SSL certificates and certificate pinning preventing MITMs.

zaptheimpaleron When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

I don't know much about email, but how would some random service send an email from my domain if I've never given it any auth tokens?

zaptheimpaleron When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

Oh god this sucks, i've been setting up lots of services on my NAS pointing to my own domains recently. Can't even name the domains on my own damn server with an expectation of privacy now.

zaptheimpaleron AI is killing B2B SaaS

This is an incredibly broad statement that just isn’t true in a million cases. Last co we migrated all of our observability from Datadog to Grafana/AMP because it’s much much cheaper. The vendor can charge some premium over the cost to build/maintain but not infinity. SaaS is going to have to get dramatically cheaper to compete with the lower cost of building your own.

zaptheimpaleron The Codex App

Is there any actual problem you have with the application? If not, who cares? Is this the 10 year old Electron is slow and bad meme being trotted out again?

zaptheimpaleron LNAI – Define AI coding tool configs once, sync to Claude, Cursor, Codex, etc.

I’ve been using chezmoi to manage dot files, that should be enough to handle AI config too. It’s easier to just have one tool do all of that.