Nvidia Nemotron is also an open training source model, though a portion of its dataset remains proprietary.
Quoting lambda's comment:
> Note that the Nemotron models are generally stronger than Olmo and K2 Think V2 (according to Artificial Analysis benchmarks), and there is a lot of overlap in their datasets (lots of datasets are based on the same sources with different filtering, Olmo and K2 Think V2 both have used some Nemotron datasets).
> But yeah, Nemotron is a modern and fairly capable LLM, even the 122b is more capable than Deepseek R1 (a 671b model) on most benchmarks, and there's also the recently released 550b Ultra now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492439","time":1782079849,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SwellJoe","id":48623204,"kids":[48623308],"parent":48622778,"text":"I like the idea, and it has become more pressing that everyone outside the US think about tech sovereignty because the US has become an unsafe place to keep your data, but the impression I get from Apertus is that it moves at the speed of a committee. I have no expectation they'll deliver a competitive model. At least, not competitive with current models. Maybe competitive with models a year ago (though they haven't even done that yet, right?).","time":1782080521,"type":"comment"},{"by":"JSR_FDED","id":48624920,"parent":48622778,"text":"From a sovereign AI perspective, how does this compare to Mistral?","time":1782095342,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throwaw12","id":48623004,"kids":[48623102],"parent":48622778,"text":"Looks like their instruct models are Llama3.1 fine tune from last year. Is there any progress on new models?
My last hope for soverign AI is from Chinese open models","time":1782078993,"type":"comment"},{"by":"pferde","id":48623188,"kids":[48623633],"parent":48622778,"text":"For a model that claims to focus on many languages, it's quite unreliable when it comes to simple questions like "how to say X in language Y" or "how to conjugate verb X in language Y". It keeps hallucinating words that do not exist, and when corrected, it only hallucinates a new lie.","time":1782080408,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mrshu","id":48623524,"parent":48622778,"text":"By far the most impactful product of the Apretus project are the people. To quote a memorable line from Dominique Paul (https://www.thisiscrispin.com/):
> What most people miss IMO is that this is not a team who is doing this for the fourth time like virtually any other LLM provider and who could learn from its own past experiences. I bet if the team would do another model training they could get way better results at one fourth of the costs.","time":1782083172,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zitterbewegung","id":48624540,"parent":48622778,"text":"Sort of interesting license not sure if anyone will do it long term.
The training data and the Apertus LLM may contain or generate information that directly or indirectly refers to an identifiable individual (Personal Data). You process Personal Data as independent controller in accordance with applicable data protection law. SNAI will regularly provide a file with hash values for download which you can apply as an output filter to your use of our Apertus LLM. The file reflects data protection deletion requests which have been addressed to SNAI as the developer of the Apertus LLM. It allows you to remove Personal Data contained in the model output. We strongly advise downloading and applying this output filter from SNAI every six months following the release of the model.","time":1782091828,"type":"comment"},{"by":"reconnecting","id":48623579,"parent":48622778,"text":"A chat interface where you can try Apertus:
https://chat.publicai.co","time":1782083629,"type":"comment"},{"by":"trvz","id":48622936,"kids":[48622955,48623199],"parent":48622778,"text":"The previous version of this model has been pretty bad, but claimed to adhere to copyright laws. However, based on my testing, that's not true either. So in my view this is completely useless.","time":1782078564,"type":"comment"},{"by":"yreg","id":48622887,"parent":48622778,"text":"previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108401","time":1782078233,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dTal","id":48623415,"kids":[48623719,48624402,48624112,48623610,48624087,48624159,48623808,48623710,48623762,48623455,48623454,48624224,48623511],"parent":48622778,"text":"It's good that there is a movement for open LLMs, but it's not where the battleground is right now. The battleground is local vs service LLMs, and we are losing that battle badly despite all the software being here now and viable, entirely because UX sucks.
How many normal people do you know who use "ChatGPT"? A lot, probably.
How many even know what "Gemma" is, let alone have downloaded llama.cpp, a GGUF file from Hugginface, and run "llama-server" from a text console with all the correct command arguments? How many are thinking about this use case when speccing out their next computer? Where is the breathless marketing copy boasting x tok/s?
We are sleepwalking into slavery.","time":1782082416,"type":"comment"},{"by":"neom","id":48623927,"parent":48622778,"text":"I'm curious to know what stuff like this means for cohere? Their whole value prop is Sovereign AI. It seems they spent a lot of money developing models but own none of their own infra, what is the point of a country spending a lot of money on coheres solutions when stuff like this is becoming increasingly available and usable? Feels like I must be missing something here??","time":1782086804,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jawns","id":48623654,"parent":48622778,"text":"I am curious about how opt-outs and PII removal work.
Who confirms those requests are legit?","time":1782084236,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dangoodmanUT","id":48623977,"parent":48622778,"text":"How are they going to be competitive with top models at 70B size?","time":1782087387,"type":"comment"},{"by":"holistio","id":48624076,"parent":48622778,"text":"Knowledge cutoff is March 2024. Incredible.","time":1782088144,"type":"comment"},{"by":"atemerev","id":48623016,"kids":[48623321],"parent":48622778,"text":"I use it extensively. It is not ready for agentic use, but as a generic driving model for RAG use cases, it is pretty competent. You can build useful software with it.","time":1782079050,"type":"comment"},{"by":"_pdp_","id":48623140,"parent":48622778,"text":"I want to believe.","time":1782079982,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nisten","id":48624154,"kids":[48624457],"parent":48622778,"text":"As an opesource AI researcher with a lot of models and datasets on huggingface I am very appreciative of these types of project but we are ignoring the elephant in the room here ( or lack of )
the swiss have no gpus","time":1782088756,"type":"comment"},{"by":"markab21","id":48623970,"parent":48622778,"text":"I'm mildly surprised that more people aren't using Nemo models for this reason. We've moved most of our processing to a combination of Nemo Ultra and Super, with some support for multi-model-specific tasks on Omni. The setup is working REALLY well for us, and I'm comfortable with the more measured pace of improvements. We work with many long-context problems, and the ecosystem is great.
There were a number of use cases where we needed to use Gemini (audio modality), and Ultra has been a VERY cost-effective alternative once we got through the nuances.","time":1782087338,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Ainaguade","dead":true,"id":48623876,"parent":48622778,"text":"[dead]","time":1782086218,"type":"comment"},{"by":"focusgroup0","dead":true,"id":48623993,"parent":48622778,"text":"[dead]","time":1782087530,"type":"comment"},{"by":"david_shi","id":48624345,"kids":[48624370],"parent":48622778,"text":"These models don't seem very competitive, who's their target audience?","time":1782090369,"type":"comment"},{"by":"maxloh","id":48623213,"kids":[48623408,48623292],"parent":48622778,"text":"Great to see more fully open LLMs.
I think a problem with open-weight models is that while you can improve them, you are not going to create the next generation of LLMs by fine-tuning. We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs. For example, Anthropic recently started requiring identity verification for Claude [0], same for OpenAI [1].
If one day China's distillation labs stop releasing their LLMs as open-weight, I doubt American labs will continue to release free LLM weights without that competition.
That's where fully open pipelines shine: they enable the community to create the next generation of SOTA LLMs. That is the only way LLMs truly become sovereign.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618455
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618606","time":1782080627,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"advisedwang","descendants":112,"id":48622867,"kids":[48623671,48623332,48623889,48623778,48623280,48624853,48623475,48623519,48624711,48623968,48623263,48624013,48623523,48623727,48624323,48624078,48623839,48623684,48623918,48623792,48623416],"score":250,"time":1782078053,"title":"Did my old job only exist because of fraud?","type":"story","url":"https://david.newgas.net/did-my-old-job-only-exist-because-of-fraud/","comments":[{"by":"etothepii","id":48623671,"kids":[48624256,48623912,48623791,48624636,48623895,48624472,48624530,48624303,48623973],"parent":48622867,"text":"As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank.
Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.
One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.
I once asked a more senior colleague how this made any sense. His answer stuck with me:
"You can’t stop people from doing their jobs. If someone thinks their job is to deliver X, they’ll find a way to deliver X. Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside."","time":1782084423,"type":"comment"},{"by":"comrade1234","id":48623332,"kids":[48623822,48624349,48623490],"parent":48622867,"text":"I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use up the budget of the client. Although this is normal in the private sector I told him from the beginning that you can't do this on a government project.
The project was $1M+ which was enough for prison time. He had gone into our billing software and edited my entries - it wasn't as if he was submitting the fraudulent totals only - he was changing what I was entering.
I gathered as much documentation as I cloud and went to a law firm. They told me I had two options - report it to the Government Accounting Office or report it to the head of the project, an academic.
So I simultaneously resigned and reported it to the professor. I covered my butt. I'm pretty sure the professor hid the fraudulent billing but I didn't look into afterwards because basically that was what I was hoping he'd do so I wouldn't have to go to court and defend that my reported hours weren't really mine.
The full project was eventually awarded to another academic group.","time":1782081637,"type":"comment"},{"by":"siskiyou","id":48623889,"kids":[48624063],"parent":48622867,"text":"I worked for Advanced Network and Services, which operated the NSFNET and was later acquired by America Online. Then one day the company was acquired by WorldCom. A few years later the CEO was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a ~$10 billion fraud. As a systems administrator I knew nothing about any of that, but I could tell that the new management included a lot of players and empire builders. That's the signal that told me to quit a few months after the acquisition. Employees were invited to invest their retirement savings in a mutual fund that contained only WorldCom stock. Many of them lost everything. Pay attention to those signals.","time":1782086411,"type":"comment"},{"by":"scrubs","id":48623778,"kids":[48624137],"parent":48622867,"text":"I was briefly employed by a robotics company in the US ... robotics is too nice: glorified if/then/else is better.
The owner was the son of an old school magnate out of PA.
Among other things his line has always stuck with me: "A whale that surfaces is soon harpooned."
The company never made money. I think the whole thing was run as a loss on purpose for tax purposes. I became tired of the head manager/engineer combo (big fish in this tiny, tiny world) and left.
Even they knew this company was never really trying to do anything serious. Strange indeed","time":1782085334,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Zhenya","id":48623280,"kids":[48623344,48623532],"parent":48622867,"text":"Why does any of this actually matter? Why were you shaken?
You weren’t committing fraud. You did real work. Now you’re in the US with a family and a career.
Happy Father’s Day.","time":1782081226,"type":"comment"},{"by":"peteforde","id":48624853,"parent":48622867,"text":"First, you'll probably never know and this is one of those ouroboros questions that can drive you a little crazy if you let it. I urge you to not let it, because the only actual answer is that if you did work you were proud of and met the mother of your children, it quite literally doesn't matter. We should all be so lucky!
Second, very few things in life are so cut and dry. Legal cases are by nature simplified abstractions that attempt to render a three dimensional situation that unfolded over a long time in a few pages of a graphic novel.
Third, this sort of thing is so incredibly common. Often the only difference between fraud and IPO is whether it worked or not. That's not cynicism, just pragmatism.
If you ever read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - and you should - you'll quickly decide that the real fraud is late capitalism writ large.","time":1782094788,"type":"comment"},{"by":"exac","id":48623475,"kids":[48624228,48623506],"parent":48622867,"text":"Fraud aside, I think a more common thought among developers is
> Did my old job only exist because the Product Owners didn't realize we didn't have product-market fit?","time":1782082830,"type":"comment"},{"by":"uberex","id":48623519,"kids":[48623858],"parent":48622867,"text":"If we can see far, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of tyrants.","time":1782083137,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bhickey","id":48624711,"parent":48622867,"text":"Well that's a blast from the past. When I lived in London I hung out with some of the geniedb team (hey Alaric).","time":1782093482,"type":"comment"},{"by":"big85","id":48623968,"parent":48622867,"text":"I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.","time":1782087332,"type":"comment"},{"by":"db48x","id":48623263,"parent":48622867,"text":"Love that second footnote.","time":1782081077,"type":"comment"},{"by":"suzzer99","id":48624013,"parent":48622867,"text":"I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA).
It became pretty obvious to me from the get-go that nothing was being built, and the startup was just siphoning money off the parent company. I'm not sure if there was any fraud going on beyond a bunch of people collecting a paycheck.
I think the boss was skimming off of the captive H1Bs, and there was a guy in NYC who never did anything as far as I could tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of kickback going on there.
My first day, I went out for sushi with the top devs, who proceeded to tell one horror story after another about the boss. Awesome way to start a job. I lasted 3 months.","time":1782087665,"type":"comment"},{"by":"iparaskev","id":48623523,"parent":48622867,"text":"I think it doesn't really matter if the fund manager was committing a fraud. The author had fun, met their spouse and just enjoyed life with the information they had at that point.","time":1782083167,"type":"comment"},{"by":"rwmj","id":48623727,"parent":48622867,"text":"At the end of the day he wrote some software which sounds legitimate and useful. What management did without his knowledge isn't really his problem.
At the other end of this extreme is if you have a good job in a bad industry, like gambling or boiler room frauds. You should feel responsible even if your job is just maintaining the servers.","time":1782084903,"type":"comment"},{"by":"phendrenad2","id":48624323,"parent":48622867,"text":"In these cases I'm always curious who the investors were. I have the bad feeling it was you and me via our 401ks somehow.","time":1782090102,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jackbucks","id":48624078,"parent":48622867,"text":"YES","time":1782088176,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throwaway98797","id":48623839,"kids":[48623911],"parent":48622867,"text":"sometimes fraud leads to positive outcomes.
imagine a world where SBF didn’t defraud the crypto world.
in that world anthropic may have not existed.","time":1782085892,"type":"comment"},{"by":"actionfromafar","id":48623684,"parent":48622867,"text":"No Genie finally out of the bottle joke?","time":1782084504,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48623918,"parent":48622867,"time":1782086757,"type":"comment"},{"by":"focusgroup0","dead":true,"id":48623792,"parent":48622867,"text":"[dead]","time":1782085460,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Apreche","id":48623416,"kids":[48623566,48623862,48623835,48624364,48623453],"parent":48622867,"text":"One of the many reasons to never actually care about the work you are doing if it is a for-profit endeavor, and you are not the owner. You are there to collect a paycheck so you can survive. If you want a job that you should care about then work in public service, at a non-profit, or for yourself.","time":1782082417,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"E-Reverance","descendants":17,"id":48622626,"kids":[48623546,48623317,48624887,48624619,48624446,48623435,48623397,48623171],"score":125,"time":1782076232,"title":"Everything is logarithms","type":"story","url":"https://alexkritchevsky.com/2026/05/25/everything-is-logarithms.html","comments":[{"by":"helterskelter","id":48623546,"kids":[48623592,48623646],"parent":48622626,"text":"Logs are awesome. I started a math textbook from the 1920's a while ago, and all the calculations relied on tabulated logs, where you would convert the number to a log in a table to reduce the operation's degree, then convert back to the ordinary representation. This would reduce operations like finding cubed roots to division, would could be converted to log-log to be further reduced to subtraction before you would restore to ordinary notation. It feels like you're using a magic wormhole or something when you're doing this stuff by hand, it's really neat.","time":1782083404,"type":"comment"},{"by":"badlibrarian","id":48623317,"kids":[48624440,48624819,48623428],"parent":48622626,"text":"This essay needs a type system. Every time it says “log” it should say: log of what, into what?
It’s like audio where people say "dB" as if it answers the next question. Relative to what, measured how, and weighted for whom?
Author should brush up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_theory","time":1782081548,"type":"comment"},{"by":"kfse","id":48624887,"parent":48622626,"text":"All this would be way more interesting if it actually helped to demonstrate a novel mathematical fact. Right now it's more like notational play.","time":1782095032,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aesthesia","id":48624619,"parent":48622626,"text":"I think what's going on with the complex logarithm is basically the same as the logarithm that outputs the set of all possible bases for a vector space. The complex logarithm produces a Z-torsor, and the basis logarithm produces a GL(V)-torsor. There's probably some way to represent a choice of branch cut as a part of the choice of the base of the complex logarithm, and similarly the choice of a specific basis as part of the choice of base of the vector space base logarithm.","time":1782092579,"type":"comment"},{"by":"saulpw","id":48624446,"parent":48622626,"text":"This sentiment (not necessarily the content) is what I'm striving to communicate with Mag World[0] (website and podcast so far).
[0] magworld.pw","time":1782091128,"type":"comment"},{"by":"amelius","id":48623435,"kids":[48623642],"parent":48622626,"text":"Does this answer the question of why we see hyperoperations until exponentiation in physics, but not higher?","time":1782082528,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jongjong","id":48623397,"parent":48622626,"text":"That's a lot of ways to think about logarithms.
Logarithms are laughably simple once you've fully internalized the meaning of the log function; it simply answers the question:
"To what power must I raise the base to get the argument?"
This is why the output tapers out as you increase the argument; because even if you increase the argument exponentially, you only need a fixed increment in the power to reach that number... So if you increase the argument only by a fixed amount (linearly) instead of exponentially, then it makes sense that the output will grow sub-linearly.
I remember when I was doing algebra with logs many years ago at school, I was applying rules to remove the log from one side of the equation.
Then when I got to uni, I had to revise the rules but it was kind of silly of me because those rules can be trivially derived if you just think about what the log function means. Turns out I had been solving equations with logs throughout school without understanding what they even meant... It's only at university that I actually bothered to learn them.
Actually TBH. I didn't even fully understand powers for some time even though I was doing calculus with them at school. I only fully understood powers once I properly internalized the concept of k-ary trees as a proxy.
It's one thing to be able to apply something, another to understand it. And I think to innovate with something, as a tool, it's not enough to be able to apply it. You must understand it.","time":1782082205,"type":"comment"},{"by":"yaccb3","id":48623171,"parent":48622626,"text":"Look, the whole thing actually makes sense and the core idea is pretty cool because it's true that a lot of stuff in math looks identical. But in my opinion this is way too much of a macro-level overgeneralization and you risk throwing everything into the same pot, which ends up diluting the actual point of things.I mean, if you take a hammer and a meat mallet, at the end of the day they're both chunks of metal used to hit stuff, but if you bunch them together without making any distinction, you lose track of why you use one to drive nails into a wall and the other to prep cutlets.Saying everything is just one big logarithm is a nice mental exercise, but I feel like it flattens out the differences too much and makes you lose the practical utility of the individual math tools, which are meant to solve completely different problems.","time":1782080307,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"arexxbifs","descendants":5,"id":48624114,"kids":[48624835,48624872,48624487,48624442,48624561],"score":19,"time":1782088473,"title":"1983 Northern Telecom Commodore Phone","type":"story","url":"https://www.oldtelephoneroom.ca/1983-northern-telecom-commodore-phone/","comments":[{"by":"userbinator","id":48624835,"kids":[48624922],"parent":48624114,"text":"Telco regulations were also why modems used an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler instead of being directly connected.
As an aside, the em-dash density of this article is one of the highest I've ever seen.","time":1782094610,"type":"comment"},{"by":"wolvoleo","id":48624872,"parent":48624114,"text":"We had similar idiotic regulations in Holland. Most people rented their phone though they did have a plug (albeit a special one we called the pigs nose).
But in the 80s nobody gave a crap anymore and we just connected whatever we wanted. Aftermarket and technically illegal phones were sold everywhere.","time":1782094885,"type":"comment"},{"by":"classichasclass","id":48624487,"parent":48624114,"text":"Commodore made all kinds of wacky stuff back in the day before they concentrated entirely on computers and peripherals. I have a Commodore AM radio and a couple of Commodore wristwatches, chickenhead logos and all, not to mention the calculators and typewriters which were their original bread and butter.","time":1782091444,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48624442,"parent":48624114,"time":1782091093,"type":"comment"},{"by":"_-_-__-_-_-","id":48624561,"parent":48624114,"text":"This website is so nerdy and so cool!","time":1782092036,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"pizlonator","descendants":0,"id":48606096,"score":19,"time":1781926159,"title":"Memory Safe Inline Assembly","type":"story","url":"https://fil-c.org/inlineasm","comments":[]},{"by":"amarble","descendants":24,"id":48622518,"kids":[48624965,48624096,48624700,48624490,48624249,48623937,48624038,48624564,48624897,48624958,48624812,48624604],"score":63,"time":1782075361,"title":"There is minimal downside to switching to open models","type":"story","url":"https://www.marble.onl/posts/cancel_claude.html","comments":[{"by":"pkulak","id":48624965,"parent":48622518,"text":"Sure. But OpenAI is the same price. Why would I pay $18/month for z.ai when OpenAI is $20/month?","time":1782095754,"type":"comment"},{"by":"julianlam","id":48624096,"kids":[48624496,48624789,48624836,48624428,48624885,48624482],"parent":48622518,"text":"I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.
Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.","time":1782088294,"type":"comment"},{"by":"linzhangrun","id":48624700,"parent":48622518,"text":"Open source models are still not good enough for now, but with the current speed of one new SOTA every two months, by this time next year we will definitely have cheap open source models at least as good as Fable :)","time":1782093408,"type":"comment"},{"by":"radhitya","id":48624490,"parent":48622518,"text":"Have you read about Opencode Go? They are great provider for open model, like GLM 5.2, Deepseek v4 Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code. You should give it shot to them :-)","time":1782091450,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mdale","id":48624249,"kids":[48624816,48624660],"parent":48622518,"text":"I think the frontier will command premium for sometime just as slight better software developers were 10x's vs their peers as their architecture & development strategies and code approach compounded quickly. One less error per block of work compounds quickly.
Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development","time":1782089567,"type":"comment"},{"by":"DANmode","id":48623937,"kids":[48623952],"parent":48622518,"text":"But, what model are you using?
and what hardware are you using?","time":1782086941,"type":"comment"},{"by":"PcChip","id":48624038,"parent":48622518,"text":"Is it just me or is half the article missing?
I enjoyed the first part though","time":1782087829,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aussieguy1234","id":48624564,"parent":48622518,"text":">There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk1. First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted
For a while during this era, I used to port my laptops windows installation into a virtual machine that can run on Linux. It took a bit of hacking away but I could usually do it in a day or two. Then its all Linux with the windows vm being used for the microsoft stuff.","time":1782092069,"type":"comment"},{"by":"causality0","id":48624897,"kids":[48624918],"parent":48622518,"text":"I know open models have gotten quite good in many tasks such as coding or composition, but are there any that can access the internet and retrieve data like ChatGPT, Claude, etc can?
I do have to admit I have recently begun wishing I could pay five dollars a month for a "just answer the fucking question" plan that would give me results without the guardrails and without the constant simpering and ego-stroking. I keep finding myself going a quick evaluation of "is it faster for me to skim search results myself or to construct an elaborate narrative to make an AI give me a real answer".","time":1782095098,"type":"comment"},{"by":"cws_ai_buddy","dead":true,"id":48624958,"parent":48622518,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782095701,"type":"comment"},{"by":"c_chenfeng","dead":true,"id":48624812,"parent":48622518,"text":"[dead]","time":1782094446,"type":"comment"},{"by":"codelong888","dead":true,"id":48624604,"parent":48622518,"text":"[dead]","time":1782092463,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"ethanhawksley","descendants":46,"id":48621517,"kids":[48622373,48622286,48624415,48624667,48622473,48622250,48621896,48623771,48623451,48624090,48621820,48622050],"score":171,"time":1782067907,"title":"JSON-LD explained for personal websites","type":"story","url":"https://hawksley.dev/blog/json-ld-explained-for-personal-websites/","comments":[{"by":"JdeBP","id":48622373,"kids":[48622976,48622647],"parent":48621517,"text":"> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking.
This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor.
As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Breadcrumbs' and getting a pretty display name instead of the domain name, don't address the fact that Google de-prioritizes all of that, pretty tweaks or no, nowadays.
This is a lot of effort for stuff that people visiting my actual site directly will never see, and which people using Google will not find above the fold of its own massively LLM-ized version of stuff.","time":1782074138,"type":"comment"},{"by":"klodolph","id":48622286,"kids":[48624643,48622715],"parent":48621517,"text":"I would encourage people who have the pragmatic bent to read about JSON-LD from the Google documentation for web sites;
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...
You’ll also notice that a lot of the information is relevant to only a small subset of sites. Rotten Tomatoes can publish the critic rating for movies using JSON-LD, but that’s not relevant for me (even if I write a review for a movie).
JSON-LD is nice because it’s easy and it is actually used by search engines. Yes, it can duplicate information in the web page itself, but I think the dream of perfectly annotating information so it only appears exactly once in your document is, well, a dream of spherical cows and massless ropes. It takes human effort to make a webpage and I am ok with a little duplication in the final product. My <h1> duplicates information in <title> anyway.","time":1782073498,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bryanhogan","id":48624415,"kids":[48624427],"parent":48621517,"text":"Some additional information, what you actually want to implement for every website is Structured Data, using the Schema.org vocabulary.
JSON-LD is one of the ways to do this. There's also RDFa and Microdata.
I used this article and can recommend it when I first learned about it: https://neilpatel.com/blog/get-started-using-schema/
You can try exploring what data to add with this tool: https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/
The full list can be found on the schema.org site: https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html","time":1782090887,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hi_hi","id":48624667,"parent":48621517,"text":"In the old days (a few weeks ago) you could read google’s SEO recommendations and guidelines.\nThis was great for debunking many a recommendation from clueless SEO agencies trying to force requirements on dev teams.
Is there any similar recommendations available for their new, LLM, world?","time":1782093145,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gomoboo","id":48622473,"kids":[48622866],"parent":48621517,"text":"Do these attributes actually help with search engine visibility or do they just make it easier for search engines to keep users from leaving the search page? Honest question here.","time":1782075012,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tommica","id":48622250,"parent":48621517,"text":"Super useful article, wish that had existed in my seo days.
I had misunderstood the type field, because to me I was often just linking to a webpage, even if it is for a saas, the marketing page is still a webpage.","time":1782073248,"type":"comment"},{"by":"lenkite","id":48621896,"kids":[48622359,48622040,48622094,48622472],"parent":48621517,"text":"We have semantic HTML, but for some weird reason we need to yet again re-express the semantic meaning of our website in bespoke weird JSON in a script tag that the browser won't process.","time":1782070630,"type":"comment"},{"by":"deftio","id":48623771,"parent":48621517,"text":"It seems useful but then we have to manage similar metadata in multiple places, so hygiene around consistency becomes important","time":1782085287,"type":"comment"},{"by":"prima-facie","id":48623451,"parent":48621517,"text":"Imagine if we had managed to deliver on the original promises of the Semantic Web, instead of having these locked-in platforms. How incredibly useful all that linked and structured data would've been to humans and LLMs at the same time.
https://www.w3.org/2001/sw/","time":1782082617,"type":"comment"},{"by":"arthurlockman","id":48624090,"parent":48621517,"text":"If only there was some kind of markup language for websites where different tags could have different meanings. If only.","time":1782088230,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mananaysiempre","id":48621820,"kids":[48621976,48622112],"parent":48621517,"text":"A bit disappointing that (IIUC) for the common parsers you have to say everything twice, in HTML and in the accompanying JSON-LD form even though RDFa exists for the exact purpose of letting you point at the values already present in your markup. (Admittedly RDFa is perhaps too flexible for its own good when you just want to mark up some stuff, but if you’re writing a full parser anyway dealing with a bit of excessive cleverness in the format should not be too bad.)","time":1782070118,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48622050,"parent":48621517,"time":1782071784,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"thisislife2","descendants":27,"id":48622731,"kids":[48623202,48624786,48623917,48623100,48624573,48623974,48623130,48624473,48623143,48623028,48623096],"score":79,"time":1782076993,"title":"PowerFox Browser","type":"story","url":"https://powerfox.jazzzny.me/","comments":[{"by":"pndy","id":48623202,"kids":[48624439],"parent":48622731,"text":"There was a similar project called TenFourFox that was halted in 2022:
https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfo...
Some 12 years ago I had to order a new motherboard and at that time all I had at hand was some old eMac. I'm not sure if it had 512MB or 1GB of ram installed by previous owner but browsing the Internet was tiresome. Still, both that chunky white boy and TenFourFox managed to help me and I've purchased that mobo.","time":1782080518,"type":"comment"},{"by":"born-jre","id":48624786,"parent":48622731,"text":"Bashed of comments here I checked https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ which is this bashed on looks great when you want lightweight browser to run on old laptops or whatever. Look like still some work being done looking at the repo (not a abandonware) I opened 20+ random tabs and ram usage still round gig, very nice I use old laptops to show some dashboards and stock ticker updates etc and I am fine with opening some trusted site or own designed dashboard in this thing even if underlying engine might not be secure ( worse case I mean I don’t know security/patches of underlying engine but it opened all random stuff I opened )","time":1782094138,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ishanr","id":48623917,"kids":[48624954,48624036],"parent":48622731,"text":"Seeing that aqua scrollbar fills me with such joy. This is when tech was joyful and fun. I think what happened to the scrollbar is such a reflection of our industry as a whole. A microcosm.","time":1782086725,"type":"comment"},{"by":"userbinator","id":48623100,"kids":[48623366,48623221],"parent":48622731,"text":"One thing that seems to be common amongst many of these Firefox forks is they're very difficult to find which official version they're equivalent in functionality to. This one is no exception.","time":1782079633,"type":"comment"},{"by":"HerbManic","id":48624573,"parent":48622731,"text":"I absolutely love that folks keep these old systems going with stuff like this.
But, I do wonder what the browsing experience is like. It was rough using Firefox back on Mac's in the mid 2000's and the internet has only gotten significantly more data heavy since.
Anything less than a G5 would be difficult to deal with.","time":1782092129,"type":"comment"},{"by":"CursedSilicon","id":48623974,"kids":[48624777],"parent":48622731,"text":"Wonderful timing. I just set up an old Mac Pro with Snow Leopard and Vista [1] for retro software compatibility testing.
I might download and give this a shot
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiZR3UFaWuU","time":1782087351,"type":"comment"},{"by":"seabrookmx","id":48623130,"parent":48622731,"text":"I used TenFourFox to extend the usefulness of my PowerMac G5 for many years, though I last used it about a decade ago. I'd imagine running the modern web on a machine that slow would be painful.
The G5 was actually the last Mac I owned until buying a Neo just for giggles.","time":1782079902,"type":"comment"},{"by":"system7rocks","id":48624473,"parent":48622731,"text":"So grateful for all of the dedicated coders and hackers in this space to keep our old Macs relevant and useable.
PowerFox has tweaks especially for Leopard and Snow Leopard and Mac-quality of life features. You can also try Basilisk, which is the upstream version without those tweaks.
Momiji is another variant targeting Mac OS Mavericks and other targets with ESR Firefox fixes. Works pretty well!
Finally, there is work being done to revive Safari for Mavericks and work to bring Netsurf to MacOS 9.","time":1782091355,"type":"comment"},{"by":"treve","id":48623143,"parent":48622731,"text":"I've been meaning to dust off my black plastic intel macbook and see if it's still usable as a workstation. Go back to Snow Leopard","time":1782080010,"type":"comment"},{"by":"walrus01","id":48623028,"kids":[48623241,48623603],"parent":48622731,"text":"This is probably off topic to the browser itself, but a mac of that age due to its limited capabilities is probably best used as a thin client to a modern desktop environment (like a full screen VNC-over-SSH session to a x session and desktop environment running on a linux server) and will be overall a better experience. The screen, keyboard and mouse may be totally fine to use as a thin client.","time":1782079165,"type":"comment"},{"by":"franze","id":48623096,"kids":[48623988],"parent":48622731,"text":"Nice, on the other hand if you are interested into a no / anti security browser that runs js as node.js on every page ...\nhttps://github.com/franzenzenhofer/nightmare","time":1782079602,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"reasonableklout","descendants":32,"id":48623721,"kids":[48624383,48624940,48624915,48624524,48624555,48624681,48624563,48624597,48624311,48624334,48624297],"score":47,"time":1782084847,"title":"Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models","type":"story","url":"https://mcipetition.com/","comments":[{"by":"foltik","id":48624383,"kids":[48624476,48624437,48624400],"parent":48623721,"text":"It’s a bit hard to feel sympathetic here. Those signing this petition actively enable and profit from one of the most pervasive surveillance networks ever built.
Funny how much easier it is to tolerate something when it only affects other people.","time":1782090662,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nbardy","id":48624940,"parent":48623721,"text":"Signing this sounds like a good way to get fired. Executive in corporations gets to make the decisions. Employment is at will, if you don’t like it you get to leave otherwise you’re not fulfilling your contract","time":1782095548,"type":"comment"},{"by":"cmoski","id":48624915,"parent":48623721,"text":"Surely anyone working at Meta sold their soul long ago. Do yourself a favour and quit.","time":1782095299,"type":"comment"},{"by":"btbuildem","id":48624524,"kids":[48624606],"parent":48623721,"text":"Petition? What do you think this is, a democracy?
All* corporations are dictatorships, and you're disposable machinery in one.
Irony is off the charts here, given what you helped build.
*not Mondragon, but like, pretty much all.","time":1782091659,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mattoxic","id":48624555,"kids":[48624799],"parent":48623721,"text":"Sure if you've signed this you've have added your name to a list, while someone in HR has added your name to another.","time":1782091991,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tdeck","id":48624681,"parent":48623721,"text":"People who are focusing on whether we should have sympathy for Meta employees here are missing the point.
Meta employees have some of the strongest bargaining power in our industry. This particular imposition is undesirable to almost everyone. There is no upside in it for employees.
Therefore, if Meta employees can be forced to accept it, everyone will be. And you'd better believe that there will be a flood of companies happy to set this up for your employer at your workplace.
That's why, as someone who wouldn't consider working at Meta for ethical reasons, I'm hoping this pushback succeeds. A win for Meta here throws the floodgates wide open. A loss helps put the brakes on a bit.
Furthermore, collective action that starts like this (and keeps pressure up) is much more effective than a bunch of individuals quitting their jobs. That's why employers would much prefer the latter when they're up to no good.","time":1782093254,"type":"comment"},{"by":"phyzome","id":48624563,"kids":[48624730,48624793],"parent":48623721,"text":"Try unionizing rather than just asking nicely.","time":1782092059,"type":"comment"},{"by":"4fffs","id":48624597,"parent":48623721,"text":"The only right course of action for Meta Mates is to eventually be hired by other firms who then squeeze everything out of them. Repent your sins and all that.
Soz but zero sympathy if you chose to work there.","time":1782092421,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dvt","id":48624311,"parent":48623721,"text":"> Indexing by search engines is fully suppressed by robots.txt
Ah yes, the companies that have ignored robots.txt to scrape your website for 20+ years will now not totally, most definitely not ignore (wink wink) polite requests to not use your data for AI training. Also, haven't Meta employees been complicit in getting teenagers addicted to social media and violations of PII until they got caught?
Respect goes out to mathematicians and their Leiden Declaration, which is an actual level-headed approach given the complexities of AI training and usage.","time":1782089968,"type":"comment"},{"by":"supertroop","id":48624334,"kids":[48624742],"parent":48623721,"text":"If I was Mark my answer would be “or what?” These people already work at a vile company. Which means they sold out already. If what mark does to other people doesn’t bother them they probably won’t have the backbone to leave if he says pound sand. “Oh it’s ok if you do it to other people just not me.” Get bent.","time":1782090202,"type":"comment"},{"by":"irishcoffee","id":48624297,"kids":[48624359],"parent":48623721,"text":"Oh man, a petition. Now stage a walk out, maybe a protest. They’re all equally effective.","time":1782089852,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"bathory","descendants":521,"id":48618455,"kids":[48621207,48622980,48618606,48622516,48618482,48618843,48618747,48622462,48618699,48622422,48624110,48621109,48622371,48623477,48618738,48621678,48621799,48618982,48622402,48618694,48621964,48618895,48619426,48622532,48621988,48621588,48618779,48622192,48622066,48621600,48622840,48622632,48623414,48621272,48621526,48622349,48623487,48621684,48623214,48621579,48624172,48619001,48622335,48621395,48622802,48621332,48618822,48624209,48622059,48622640,48621475,48622579,48621698,48618961,48622273,48618777,48623071,48622086,48621577,48623034,48624827,48622733,48622633,48622808,48621614,48622838,48621036,48622775,48621830,48618546,48622161,48622844,48618746,48621261,48621609,48621159,48624362,48620534,48622594,48619520,48624118,48619058,48623068,48621925,48622563,48622526,48622276,48618753,48621969,48618781,48622221,48622818,48620226,48622734,48622638,48622614,48618918,48622182,48618824,48622095,48622044,48621597,48622619,48618931,48618863,48618818,48621539,48622691,48622324,48622216,48622414,48619234,48622537,48622305,48618841,48621970,48624445,48618634,48623298,48622540,48621213,48619292,48618669,48622650,48624485],"score":592,"text":"https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_...","time":1782045853,"title":"Identity verification on Claude","type":"story","url":"https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude","comments":[{"by":"data-ottawa","id":48621207,"kids":[48623135,48624684,48622445,48622034,48623430,48622338,48622694,48623019,48622418,48621586,48623005,48624664,48623302,48622554,48624219,48622769,48624502,48622340,48622839,48622951,48622455,48622663,48621778,48622134,48621250],"parent":48618455,"text":"The US is really shooting itself in the foot here.
The restrictions on LLM models like Fable has created a viable international LLM market where it was difficult to justify investment two weeks ago.
As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to. That's no longer up for debate or question. Each month that I pay Anthropic is now a depreciating value -- I'm paying for models I'll never be able to access, while other models are able to catch up.
Adding US based identity verification through Persona is also incredibly off-putting. I think it's sufficient to kill my use of Claude altogether.
So the question I have to live with is what do I do instead.
I installed Mistral Vibe last week and I've been experimenting with offloading work to it. I won't pretend that Mistral-medium is close to state of the art. It isn't. It still writes incorrect tool calls.
From the last week about 50% of my LLM tasks actually reduced to "take this work and write about it" and Mistral excels there -- it definitely beats Opus at writing. Mistral nails it, and when it doesn't its so fast to iterate.
There's another say 30% of tasks that's writing queries against a data warehouse. I updated my semantic layer MCPs and Vibe uses them, but it struggles with ambiguity here. It's not a replacement, it's maybe where Opus was a year ago.
The rest of my work involves writing code. That's going to be harder to replace for now. My next step is exploring OpenRouter and other models. I can't decide if I was ever actually happy with Opus's work on this front though -- the understanding tradeoffs when you trust LLMs with decisions stack non-linearly and negatively. I did like Fable on these tasks, I won't lie, I will miss it, but not by any choice of my own.","time":1782065833,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Aurornis","id":48622980,"kids":[48624854,48624319,48623959,48623746],"parent":48618455,"text":"This page has been up since April: https://web.archive.org/web/20260415064244/https://support.c...
I see a lot of comments linking this to Fable or implying that the existence of this page is triggering them to cancel.
You should know that this help page and their ID process are not new. This page has been up for many months. It gets discussed from time to time, including in past HN posts.","time":1782078851,"type":"comment"},{"by":"JimDabell","id":48618606,"kids":[48622365,48622817,48618995,48618674,48619893,48622810,48618705,48618734,48622202,48618664,48618687,48618965,48618905,48622591],"parent":48618455,"text":"OpenAI also has this kind of check. What is especially bad is that if you fail the verification process, they won’t let you retry – you are permanently locked out from the top models. They aren’t clear about this upfront during the process, so make sure the lighting is good when you scan your ID!
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10910291-api-organizatio...","time":1782046937,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tgsovlerkhgsel","id":48622516,"kids":[48622645],"parent":48618455,"text":"Most importantly, they state "We [Antrhopic] are not using your identity data to train our models" but "Persona [...] can use your data [...] to improve their ability to prevent fraud." -- in other words, Persona can (and will) use your data to train their models.","time":1782075344,"type":"comment"},{"by":"xmstan","id":48618482,"kids":[48621310,48618570,48618845,48624685,48618668,48621177,48622457,48619172,48619021,48619020,48618954,48619188,48618860],"parent":48618455,"text":"Funny how no-one talks about AI neutrality like we used to discuss net neutrality. We literally now enter a space where not only you will have to prove your identity with a gov issued ID, but they will silently block you if they deem you try to use it in a way that they don't like.
It is literally similar to a situation where your ISP would investigate all sites you visit and limit your bandwidth if they don't like the the ones you enter...","time":1782046150,"type":"comment"},{"by":"truthbe","id":48618843,"kids":[48624225,48618897],"parent":48618455,"text":"Cancel and Refund link if anyone is searching
https://claude.ai/settings/billing?action=cancel-refund","time":1782048776,"type":"comment"},{"by":"consumer451","id":48618747,"kids":[48619236,48621408],"parent":48618455,"text":"Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633 - 67 days ago, 100 comments
As mentioned in that thread, Persona as the provider is a bit surprising and problematic.
Discord dropped them after user backlash.","time":1782048041,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sinker","id":48622462,"kids":[48622895,48622541,48622764],"parent":48618455,"text":"Cancelled. Anthropic can get bent if it wants to market itself as the ethical AI choice and at the same time lies in bed with those openly pushing for a surveillance state.","time":1782074910,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Rooster61","id":48618699,"kids":[48618880,48619069,48624704,48623018],"parent":48618455,"text":"I really don't like that headlines have been surfacing about the US government putting pressure on Anthropic, and now a short time later they are requiring ID's (albeit for certain use cases, but that's a slippery slope).
I may very well stop using Claude due to this.
Also, who is providing the verification service? We don't want another Discord situation.
EDIT: Just saw it's Persona. Definitely dropping Claude now.","time":1782047641,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dsign","id":48622422,"kids":[48622617],"parent":48618455,"text":"> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.
That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.","time":1782074624,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Havoc","id":48624110,"kids":[48624233],"parent":48618455,"text":">Verification data stays between you, Persona
The company that already had a data breach incident & has ties to palantir. Also used by OpenAI to ensure you can't escape it.
Now we just need to tie this in with Sam's eyeball scanning tech for maximum dystopia vibes","time":1782088378,"type":"comment"},{"by":"827a","id":48621109,"kids":[48621610,48621204,48622603,48621484,48621803,48624310,48621712],"parent":48618455,"text":"Its a very well known fact that all of our geopolitical adversaries have sophisticated fake American ID markets. This doesn't stop any of the most dangerous adversaries from getting access to systems protected by this technology. DeepSeek is going to go buy 20,000 fake IDs for their fake distillation accounts and keep on keeping on. This just hurts normal people, Americans and non-Americans, who might struggle to authenticate or be disallowed because of their place of birth. Pointless CYA, and beneath a research group whose intention is to invent the machine god.","time":1782065228,"type":"comment"},{"by":"p0w3n3d","id":48622371,"kids":[48622873],"parent":48618455,"text":"
A phone or a computer with a camera: you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone, or your webcam\n\n A blood probe might be required as usb dongle to test your blood sample. We're working on stool sampling mechanism as well.\n\n Your house might be monitored with one or more armed drones to prevent any tampering with your WiFi and cable connectionhttps://x.com/trq212/status/2068793885535694858","time":1782082843,"type":"comment"},{"by":"I_am_tiberius","id":48618738,"parent":48618455,"text":"I just hope there's huge protest. I hope people just cancel the subscription. I fear people will just accept the terms. The result will be a kill switch for the US government and a clean distinction between national and foreign users so spying will become legal. Surely Anthropic hasn't allowed the NSA connect so far, - openai clearly did (see their board members).","time":1782047949,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zaptheimpaler","id":48621678,"kids":[48622888,48622486],"parent":48618455,"text":"AI is weapons now. Need a gun license to buy and operate pistols (Opus), assault rifles (Fable) will be highly limited, even higher tiers of weapons will only be accessible by corporate and state-level actors - we might not even know they exist or what they're capable of. Democratization of AI is dead. Gen pop is completely asleep to all of this so its going to get locked down in the name of safety before anyone even wakes up.","time":1782068984,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dwa3592","id":48621799,"kids":[48623618],"parent":48618455,"text":"I downgraded from Max to Pro about a month ago. Time to downgrade from Pro to No.","time":1782069958,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aqua_coder","id":48618982,"kids":[48619038],"parent":48618455,"text":"This might seem unrelated but on one of my free accounts. I tried to make Claude do some historical fact checking on the inter-war period of the USSR. The point isn't if it is true or not, but it felt like it would help quite a lot to see what the sources Claude finds says about the both sides of the picture and I was curious at some point.
Funnily enough, a day after this my account got banned under the pretext that I was a child using Claude and that I would need to verify my account. The age verifier said that it doesn't store my photos or anything. It gets cheeky though and indirectly it says it doesn't store what I upload but sends it to third parties that do store and sell it. \nIts like saying I won't steal your money, but I will give it to the thief right over there for free.\nNow the flagging might be entirely coincidental, but I just exported my chats and just never went on with the intention to re verify my account (since it is a free one basically and there is no incentive for me to do so).\nWeirdly enough, I started to see my past chat history that I exported to check and see if there is any correlation between how I talked and if there might have been some instances in which the system might attribute said message as what a young person would say. Though from the looks of it, it didn't give any of that sort of vibe.","time":1782049750,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dvduval","id":48622402,"kids":[48622646,48622500],"parent":48618455,"text":"So when the FBI comes to Claude, it will be that much easier now to track down exactly how they have been using the LLM. Maybe a political candidate for the opposing party has something embarrassing there for example.","time":1782074413,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Artoooooor","id":48618694,"kids":[48621523],"parent":48618455,"text":"Every time I consider renting a service from Anthropic, they drop such bomb. Full capability with pre-agreed price per token and no ID verification. That's what I demand.","time":1782047615,"type":"comment"},{"by":"chickensong","id":48621964,"kids":[48622281],"parent":48618455,"text":"Oh good, uploading your ID and selfie to the much-hated Persona. What could possibly go wrong?","time":1782071086,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Overpower0416","id":48618895,"kids":[48618988],"parent":48618455,"text":"Yeah, not happening. Gonna hope for the open models getting better and staying with what I've got for now.","time":1782049206,"type":"comment"},{"by":"rzk","id":48619426,"parent":48618455,"text":"> How are we verifying?
> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner
See this related thread regarding Persona:
OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140632 - Feb 2026 (206 comments)","time":1782053237,"type":"comment"},{"by":"neosat","id":48622532,"kids":[48622616],"parent":48618455,"text":"Anthropic is really on a tricky path here. When you have had runaway success due to a hit it is easy to believe that it is the natural way of things. However, that happened due to unique convergence of tech paradigm shift, the competitive landscape, and how they were positioned to capture that value through claude code.
They somehow conflate their value with 'safety'. While it's an admirable internal quality for the company to have, their treatment of their user base (developers, users) has been bordering on indifference and their stance bordering on arrogance.
As competition heats up, there is a very real chance of them shooting themselves in the foot with friction such as this (to be fair not completely in their control but also they had their share of responsibility that led to this)","time":1782075460,"type":"comment"},{"by":"redbell","id":48621988,"parent":48618455,"text":"> We are rolling out identity verification for a few use cases, and you might see a verification prompt when accessing certain capabilities, as part of our routine platform integrity checks, or other safety and compliance measures.
I'd like to know what capabilities/features/plans that need ID verification as it is unclear for me right now. Also, this would become a true barrier in the future if they apply this for every account regardless of the features being used.
> We selected Persona Identities as our verification partner based on the strength of their technology, privacy controls, and security safeguards
Since I read I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245), I, somehow, start feeling very uncomfortable with ID verification as it appears there are actually many players processing my personal data, not just Persona.","time":1782071268,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nightshift1","id":48621588,"parent":48618455,"text":"When i tried to upgrade from 5x to 20x a few months ago, they froze my account until i sent them a full 3d scan of my face and a photo of my id. The only way i could deny was to cancel my account. So this is nothing new for them.","time":1782068409,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jacomoRodriguez","id":48618779,"kids":[48618868,48618806],"parent":48618455,"text":"Just canceled my subscription.\nI don't want my id data end up with persona and/or the us gov.","time":1782048295,"type":"comment"},{"by":"g42gregory","id":48622192,"kids":[48622510,48622576,48622544],"parent":48618455,"text":"I am not sure what is the purpose of this. If you are paying with a credit card, they already have your fully verified identity through the bank's KYC, fully protecting Anthropic legally.
Corporate accounts, in the US, will have full personal identification through the corresponding company's HR.","time":1782072750,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dofm","id":48622066,"kids":[48622213],"parent":48618455,"text":"Ohhh Emm Gee, the HN singularity has arrived.
chuckling in slightly mischievous British
Jeez, Persona though. Couldn't they have got Fable to write them something of their own?","time":1782071891,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gravity2060","id":48621600,"kids":[48621670],"parent":48618455,"text":"One of my frustrations with this is for those of us who allow our under-18 year old children access to our account. If we want our kids to code with ai-assist, my read of the “ban-if-under-18” means I risk my indispensable pro account by giving my kids claude code on their laptops now. Is this a correct reading?","time":1782068471,"type":"comment"},{"by":"giancarlostoro","id":48622840,"parent":48618455,"text":"I am reminded of the time Discords support desk was compromised where hackers had access to the data of anyone who ever had to give their support channels their ID. Are we sure we trust this third party to not be compromised? Is Anthropic allowing non-US citizens access to this data? Are they in countries where they could be bribed over access to this data much like in Discords case?
I would not share my ID without understanding all of this.","time":1782077833,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sebiw","id":48622632,"parent":48618455,"text":"MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128GB RAM + oMLX|LM Studio|Llama.cpp|etc. + Opencode|etc. + Models from DeepSeek|Qwen|Google. There are alternatives to centralized, cloud-based LLMs!","time":1782076297,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throwatdem12311","id":48623414,"parent":48618455,"text":"Anthropic: we don’t want to be used for mass surveillance
Also Anthropic:","time":1782082411,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throwaw12","id":48621272,"parent":48618455,"text":"I hope EU bans US models and adopts Chinese models, since US models seems to be a clear threat to EU sovereignty, while Chinese models can be deployed anywhere","time":1782066229,"type":"comment"},{"by":"othmanosx","id":48621526,"kids":[48622310],"parent":48618455,"text":"Just run the /insights command on your Claude and see what it gives you, you'd be shocked what it knows about you just talking to it.","time":1782067960,"type":"comment"},{"by":"_bobm","id":48622349,"parent":48618455,"text":"I find it funny that some comments are arguing why "the innocent users have to fall victims, becoming/ being collateral damage" to this american governmental whim and thus being deprived of access to these models.
But hold on, collateral to what? Is this "our own personal jesus" access that we cannot live without or what?
People don't and cannot learn how to code or what? We don't know how to think?
I am calling their bluff. Fill your own gddam datacenters with "meaning".
Panta rei.","time":1782073928,"type":"comment"},{"by":"_heimdall","id":48623487,"parent":48618455,"text":"> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes
I'm always curious about these stipulations. Its not like Anthropic would have a choice here what the legal demands are, but I don't see a commitment to make all requests as public as they legally can.
If the government were to say export controls mean you must share every identity verification attempt with us, it may be a long drawn out battle if Anthropic wanted to deny that's a legal order.","time":1782082957,"type":"comment"},{"by":"padjo","id":48621684,"kids":[48621810],"parent":48618455,"text":"Not a chance i'll be handing my id over to Persons. So what are the alternatives for AI coding these days?","time":1782069012,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Aeolun","id":48623214,"parent":48618455,"text":"Oh, yes, they’ll only have my passport and selfie. I’m sure they couldn’t do anything with those.
Seriously, those are probably the most sensitive documents in existence.
How is it always the same company doing the verification too?","time":1782080630,"type":"comment"},{"by":"AnotherGoodName","id":48621579,"parent":48618455,"text":"From that thread.
>The OP post is misinformation. The policy page has been unchanged since April 16 (including the words Updated this week) and has to do with verifying if you're an adult if they suspect the account is used by an under 18, which we all already know Anthropic is doing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260416010409/https://support.c...
So this isn't new right?","time":1782068341,"type":"comment"},{"by":"claudecheers","id":48624172,"parent":48618455,"text":"Currently going through all my claude web chats and building conversation logs and downloading all my files as well as using the export function. Getting throttled pretty hard now. I have a max20 plan and will be canceling it at the end of my billing cycle. What disappointing news! I was all in until this identity verification requirement. I guess I will have to try out deepseek now.","time":1782088930,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Amir6","id":48619001,"kids":[48619076],"parent":48618455,"text":"I’ve been waiting for days for an appeal decision on a suspension that I have zero clue on why it happened! I’m trying very hard not to hate Anthropic right now!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861","time":1782049858,"type":"comment"},{"by":"octagons","id":48622335,"parent":48618455,"text":"I’ve only seen vague suggestions of what is actually being gated through this verification. Is there a more definitive explanation of what will require the verification?
Either way, the moment I encounter this, I’ll be canceling. It’s a complete deal breaker.","time":1782073866,"type":"comment"},{"by":"labrador","id":48621395,"kids":[48622738],"parent":48618455,"text":"ID verification might be a path to allow restricted access to Fable (doesn't mention nationality yet), but I concluded I don't need Fable, which excels more at technical work, because I do therapy/recovery/lifecoach work which Opus is good at. I'm retired and need personal "executive function" type assistance.","time":1782067057,"type":"comment"},{"by":"fizlebit","id":48622802,"parent":48618455,"text":"How is it going to work for corporate customers. What if one us employee writes claude output into a ticket, can that be read by a non us citizen employee? What about paraphrased?","time":1782077513,"type":"comment"},{"by":"maxprimes","id":48621332,"parent":48618455,"text":"Yeah that'll be a pass for me.","time":1782066587,"type":"comment"},{"by":"RaSoJo","id":48618822,"kids":[48618963],"parent":48618455,"text":"Is there any info on what these "certain capabilities" are?","time":1782048652,"type":"comment"},{"by":"neilv","id":48624209,"parent":48618455,"text":"I want Anthropic to be the good guys.
I think Anthropic should explain why they're doing this particular partnership.","time":1782089229,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dom96","id":48622059,"kids":[48622074,48622174],"parent":48618455,"text":"I don't mind this, what I do mind is that there is still no way to verify my identity without giving private information to third parties. Why aren't governments building zero knowledge proof-based solutions to this?","time":1782071871,"type":"comment"},{"by":"phreack","id":48622640,"parent":48618455,"text":"Makes one ponder how there really is no moat. If this rolls out as implied, it is immediately easy to switch providers, and I will.","time":1782076339,"type":"comment"},{"by":"photios","id":48621475,"parent":48618455,"text":"I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D","time":1782067606,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jasonvorhe","id":48622579,"parent":48618455,"text":"Not gonna happen. I'll just just more of the Chinese models then. Digital I'd is a clear no from me.","time":1782075840,"type":"comment"},{"by":"rzerowan","id":48621698,"parent":48618455,"text":"How does this play aout in the current realm of ID verifiation laws sweeping across most of the EU and US. As usual is using 'protect the children' : UK,AuS, FR for social media and Operating Systems while also pushing 'national security' : this current iteration.\nEnd result seems to be total end of online anonymity while the data slurpers and data brokers continue plying their trade uninterrupted.","time":1782069062,"type":"comment"},{"by":"fidotron","id":48618961,"parent":48618455,"text":"One dimension of this which isn't discussed enough is this opens the road to inference providers silently discriminating against different users who will remain oblivious to what's going on. i.e. if you "fail" ID verification it's actually good that they tell you as opposed to serving you a malicious model instead.","time":1782049654,"type":"comment"},{"by":"g42gregory","id":48622273,"kids":[48622454,48622301],"parent":48618455,"text":"Here is what I think it the game is:
1. Force KYC is US LLM providers, gleefully supported by the US LLM providers.
2. Next -> now Chinese LLM providers must use KYC in the "free market" Western world.
3. But we can's allow KYC information to go to China, can we?
4. Now Western customers can not access Chinese LLM
5. Prices go up 10x to $2,000+/month. Anthropic/OpenAI are happy.","time":1782073410,"type":"comment"},{"by":"comboy","id":48618777,"kids":[48619070,48621528,48622129],"parent":48618455,"text":"They all have everyone ID's through payments already..","time":1782048287,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nedt","id":48623071,"parent":48618455,"text":"At the very least I would expect them to support eID for everyone who can and doesn't want their 3rd party. Also much better than take a video of plastic card.","time":1782079451,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bnj","id":48622086,"kids":[48622103],"parent":48618455,"text":"> We are not collecting more than we need
Why does anthropic need more than a credit card for paying subscribers?","time":1782072007,"type":"comment"},{"by":"oceanwaves","id":48621577,"parent":48618455,"text":"I wonder how this will work for third-party providers' enterprise customers. E.g. Vertex, Bedrock","time":1782068332,"type":"comment"},{"by":"userbinator","id":48623034,"parent":48618455,"text":"I wonder how good AI now is at generating plausible-looking identity documents, photos, and videos of a virtual identity...","time":1782079215,"type":"comment"},{"by":"epsteingpt","id":48624827,"parent":48618455,"text":"all the paid spies in the comments being like... 'f this is bad for the U.S., the U.S. is doing something terrible'","time":1782094558,"type":"comment"},{"by":"noiv","id":48622733,"parent":48618455,"text":"Interestingly Persona offers an attribution process (“verified” or “not verified”) and no data is held. Why does Anthropic want a selfie?","time":1782077025,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hmate9","id":48622633,"parent":48618455,"text":"Not defending this, and it's far from ideal, but also credit card details were already pretty much confirming identities already.","time":1782076310,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aucisson_masque","id":48622808,"parent":48618455,"text":"Alright, I'm off Claude.
That's how you kill people's will to use your product, there are so many competitors.
How could they do that ?","time":1782077573,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dpkirchner","id":48621614,"kids":[48622684],"parent":48618455,"text":"I wonder if they've deployed Mythos' pen testing against Persona?","time":1782068532,"type":"comment"},{"by":"maccard","id":48622838,"parent":48618455,"text":"So apparently the UK and Europe are sleepwalking into an identity collection en masse by the state and yet…","time":1782077831,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dang","id":48621036,"parent":48618455,"text":"(Submitted URL was https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ubm53n/official_... - we changed that to what looks like the original source, but put the Reddit link in the toptext for context.)","time":1782064851,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sph","id":48622775,"parent":48618455,"text":"How does it work in business settings? Is your employer going to send your ID information to Claude?","time":1782077355,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dwa3592","id":48621830,"parent":48618455,"text":"Are they paying Persona identities in Haiku credits? Is that why they chose them? It was only 4 months ago that company was dropped by discord.","time":1782070197,"type":"comment"},{"by":"usernamed7","id":48618546,"kids":[48618636,48618638,48618567],"parent":48618455,"text":"Let us hope this only accelerates the proliferation of local models","time":1782046551,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zeafoamrun","id":48622161,"parent":48618455,"text":"Maybe the double taxation is worth it if I can get access to frontier models. Just wish the US had a lite subscription.","time":1782072473,"type":"comment"},{"by":"yuzuquat","id":48622844,"parent":48618455,"text":"I'm curious how multiple accounts come into play here. Does anyone know?","time":1782077886,"type":"comment"},{"by":"macic","id":48618746,"kids":[48622155],"parent":48618455,"text":"Very disappointing that they went with Persona, the company whose CEO regularly argues with people on Twitter and lies about their arguments.","time":1782048024,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zwaps","id":48621261,"parent":48618455,"text":"Oh no that’s terrible. They even say the data is used by the external company to train and use however.
Shit now i have to cancel my account","time":1782066171,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tamimio","id":48621609,"parent":48618455,"text":"I don’t know since when it became acceptable and normalized to provide government ID to some corporate, and your data are under the mercy of a random employee, manager, revised policy, or predator investors? No, never. I only provide my government ID to the government that I voted for, or I can hold it accountable if anything goes wrong.","time":1782068509,"type":"comment"},{"by":"cute_boi","id":48621159,"parent":48618455,"text":"> We are not collecting more than we need. We ask for the minimum information required to verify your identity.
You say this today, but your claude app is full of hidden telemetries and fingerprint identification. How can we trust you?","time":1782065503,"type":"comment"},{"by":"micromacrofoot","id":48624362,"parent":48618455,"text":"No I will not","time":1782090516,"type":"comment"},{"by":"general1465","id":48620534,"parent":48618455,"text":"This further confirms that self hosted LLM are the future. Today it is ID verification, tomorrow it will be only for US citizens and day after tomorrow only for US citizens who can get "Secret" clearance.","time":1782061466,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SXX","id":48622594,"parent":48618455,"text":"Come on guys, just give your ID, passport data and photo (since it scans NFC) to Persona. After all Peter Thiel is the most trustworthy supplier of tech in US used to kill people using drones with AI including face recognition.
Nothing bad will ever happen, Anthropic gives you pinky promise. You are not woke terrorist arent you?","time":1782075969,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gcanyon","id":48619520,"kids":[48621340],"parent":48618455,"text":"If this is what it takes to get access to Fable I'll be sad, but go along with it. Fable was (at least in my testing) remarkably good.","time":1782053944,"type":"comment"},{"by":"yieldcrv","id":48624118,"parent":48618455,"text":"I bet z.ai doesn’t even respond to US subpoenas","time":1782088515,"type":"comment"},{"by":"spprashant","id":48619058,"parent":48618455,"text":"Yes the era of the no-fly list is coming to AI.","time":1782050342,"type":"comment"},{"by":"lofaszvanitt","id":48623068,"parent":48618455,"text":"Ridiculous theatre.","time":1782079423,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mounz","id":48621925,"parent":48618455,"text":"This make me think that we will have Fable back tomorrow and gpt 5.6 or 6 announcement not long after","time":1782070826,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Alien1Being","id":48622563,"parent":48618455,"text":"This is a big win for LLMs from China and to a much lesser extent from Europe.
I expect Europe to meekly follow the example of their American overlords,the way they generally do.","time":1782075705,"type":"comment"},{"by":"llm_nerd","id":48622526,"parent":48618455,"text":"While this seems related to recent events, this page has been there for months. They have used it when they think an account is underage.
We talked about this previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633","time":1782075430,"type":"comment"},{"by":"kingkongjaffa","id":48622276,"parent":48618455,"text":"Since the end is near does anyone have a claude data export flow/tool they have used?
I have claude projects, skills, etc. I'd want copies of before deleting my account.","time":1782073438,"type":"comment"},{"by":"rvz","id":48618753,"parent":48618455,"text":"No surprise. Anthropic was going to do this anyway just like OpenAI did.
Never been a better time to use local models.","time":1782048110,"type":"comment"},{"by":"skywhopper","id":48621969,"kids":[48622148],"parent":48618455,"text":"It will never stop amusing me that an expired ID is invalid for verification. How does that negate my identity? Particularly my age.","time":1782071105,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48618781,"parent":48618455,"time":1782048306,"type":"comment"},{"by":"monksy","id":48622221,"parent":48618455,"text":"Hard no on this. I'll stick with the Chinese models. They don't behave this poorly.","time":1782072970,"type":"comment"},{"by":"13415","id":48622818,"parent":48618455,"text":"I'm glad I don't use Claude.","time":1782077685,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jauntywundrkind","id":48620226,"parent":48618455,"text":"So like 36 days after most people signed up for an account to try Fable. Bother.","time":1782059134,"type":"comment"},{"by":"AtNightWeCode","id":48622734,"parent":48618455,"text":"Why use Persona? Most countries have real services for identifying users. Same services that are used when you pay online or do your taxes. At the end it does not really matter I guess. American cloud services are compromised and can no longer be trusted.","time":1782077028,"type":"comment"},{"by":"fithisux","id":48622638,"parent":48618455,"text":"The coding capabilities they offer, are their own.
This is the bottom line. Even if they trained on public data.
We knew that from the start.","time":1782076325,"type":"comment"},{"by":"kylehotchkiss","id":48622614,"parent":48618455,"text":"On the bright side maybe less people will use AI as a therapist if every thought they dump into it is now associated to their ID and home address","time":1782076114,"type":"comment"},{"by":"fortran77","id":48618918,"kids":[48619003],"parent":48618455,"text":"Where are these "certain capabilities" documentes?","time":1782049399,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aftbit","id":48622182,"parent":48618455,"text":"How long can they retain my identity information? I didn't see an answer to that in the post - did I just miss it, or are they being purposefully obtuse?","time":1782072639,"type":"comment"},{"by":"shevy-java","id":48618824,"parent":48618455,"text":"YOU have become their product. This so conveniently ties into age-sniffing as well.","time":1782048662,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nailer","id":48622095,"parent":48618455,"text":"> you may be asked to take a live selfie with your phone
They've been generating these with AI since 2023 (and likely earlier, but that's the first time I heard it being used in the wild).
Photo ID is a real person (your hotel maid took photos) iPhone headroll is generated to match the real photo ID with AI.","time":1782072080,"type":"comment"},{"by":"phendrenad2","id":48622044,"parent":48618455,"text":"This is an old page that pre-dates the Fable situation. Seems people only discovered it recently though.
Edit: oh, just saw the previous discussion on HN from 2 mo ago","time":1782071711,"type":"comment"},{"by":"surume","id":48621597,"parent":48618455,"text":"Please God let a model or company as capable as Claude/Anthropic come along soon that doesnt require ID so that we don’t all end up as uncreative mind slaves.","time":1782068443,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SilverElfin","id":48622619,"parent":48618455,"text":"> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it.
What a disgusting gaslighting corporate speak. Anthropic really has blown all trust in these last two weeks.
AI is all about information and therefore about speech. If you need to identify yourself to access information or ask questions, it undermines freedom. Anthropic is on the wrong side of history.","time":1782076178,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jjice","id":48618931,"parent":48618455,"text":"I mean, this feels exactly what had to happen after their announcement with Fable being restricted by the US government since the requirement is that they need to know you're a US citizen. You can argue this is Anthropic's fault due to their Mythos/Fable fear mongering, but at the end of the day this is a requirement by the US government to use this (and likely future models).
I expect to see this repeatedly with new powerful models from all providers.
Best I can do is root for local models (already was), but I'll keep my Anthropic subscription for their "lesser" models without an ID (for now).","time":1782049452,"type":"comment"},{"by":"holoduke","id":48618863,"parent":48618455,"text":"For certain capabilities one can use uncensored models which can be found on huggingface. It's perfect for asking on how to create atomic bombs, meth labs, assassination plans, brute force hack scripts and more. You only need one or two h200 cards.","time":1782048925,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48618818,"parent":48618455,"time":1782048631,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ur-whale","id":48621539,"parent":48618455,"text":"One more item to tack on to the already very long list of "why you should run AI models on your own hardware".","time":1782068055,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ares623","id":48622691,"kids":[48622721],"parent":48618455,"text":"Once again I just can't help but laugh at how my fellow engineers coddle AI.
"Hey, maybe social media shouldn't be made available to children. Let's add some age checks maybe?" "Reee noo that's invasion of privacy it's a slippery slope"
"Hey, my totally really, totally dangerous model, is too dangerous for adults. Let's add some checks maybe?" "Oh yes that sounds perfectly reasonable"","time":1782076735,"type":"comment"},{"by":"petre","id":48622324,"parent":48618455,"text":"Persona? Photo id? Heh, good luck, I'm not touching it with a 10ft pole.","time":1782073790,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jbverschoor","id":48622216,"parent":48618455,"text":"> How your data is protected
It's not","time":1782072910,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jchw","id":48622414,"parent":48618455,"text":"lol, absolutely not.","time":1782074549,"type":"comment"},{"by":"greatgib","id":48619234,"parent":48618455,"text":"So convenient so that the day that you go to visit USA or Trump has a grief against you, we can immediately identify your accounts and inspect all your life!","time":1782051755,"type":"comment"},{"by":"BoredPositron","id":48622537,"parent":48618455,"text":"It's annoying but ok in general to verify age of your users. The problem for me is mainly how and what vendor they use. They picked the worst possibilities.","time":1782075498,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jimmydoe","id":48622305,"parent":48618455,"text":"ffs do it and give me fable.","time":1782073648,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Razengan","id":48618841,"kids":[48622274],"parent":48618455,"text":"Fuck.. How did y'all in the Land of the Free let it get this way","time":1782048775,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dev1ycan","id":48621970,"parent":48618455,"text":"Good luck getting me to use software that requires me to upload an id","time":1782071107,"type":"comment"},{"by":"kersplody","dead":true,"id":48624445,"parent":48618455,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782091124,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jingpostmedia","id":48618634,"kids":[48618838],"parent":48618455,"text":"Worth noting that China implemented mandatory real-name verification for generative AI services back in 2023. The practical effect wasn't just about preventing misuse -- it created a two-tier system where verified users get full capabilities while others get heavily restricted outputs. What's interesting is how quickly the market adapted: local open-source models partly flourished because they sidestep these requirements. Western providers are now walking a similar path, but without the digital identity infrastructure China already had in place.","time":1782047177,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hottrends","dead":true,"id":48623298,"parent":48618455,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782081355,"type":"comment"},{"by":"randomuser558","dead":true,"id":48622540,"parent":48618455,"text":"[dead]","time":1782075520,"type":"comment"},{"by":"antimony51","dead":true,"id":48621213,"parent":48618455,"text":"[dead]","time":1782065852,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throw-the-towel","dead":true,"id":48619292,"kids":[48619670,48619788],"parent":48618455,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782052189,"type":"comment"},{"by":"badgersnake","id":48618669,"kids":[48618697,48618686,48620717,48618889],"parent":48618455,"text":"How does a company verify its age?","time":1782047462,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nickandbro","id":48622650,"kids":[48622751,48622760],"parent":48618455,"text":"I understand how this can be incredibly frustrating to non-US users or people who would like to remain anonymous. But from an enforcement perspective makes sense. If someone is able to leverage a jail break to break into a classified system, the government needs to easily be able to track down who that person is.","time":1782076382,"type":"comment"},{"by":"winterec","id":48624485,"parent":48618455,"text":"My email address in Claude contains my full name. I pay it with a bank card and the bank already verified my full identity.
Realistically this is a "who cares" for me. It represents very little if any incremental privacy loss.
The only question left is which countries will have access or if it will be USA only.","time":1782091432,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"dannyobrien","descendants":6,"id":48589687,"kids":[48589896,48624346,48624304,48589731,48624499],"score":31,"time":1781808303,"title":"I Play Video Games with Spinal Muscular Atrophy","type":"story","url":"https://www.openassistivetech.org/how-i-actually-play-video-games-with-sma-the-tools-i-use-every-day/","comments":[{"by":"Boom890","id":48589896,"parent":48589687,"text":"Glad he gets to do so.","time":1781809242,"type":"comment"},{"by":"senectus1","id":48624346,"parent":48589687,"text":"this sort of digital accessibility fascinates me. I'd love to get into working in that field.","time":1782090373,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dbg31415","dead":true,"id":48624304,"parent":48589687,"text":"[dead]","time":1782089882,"type":"comment"},{"by":"blinkbat","id":48589731,"kids":[48624414],"parent":48589687,"text":"King shit.","time":1781808493,"type":"comment"},{"by":"kQq9oHeAz6wLLS","id":48624499,"kids":[48624552],"parent":48589687,"text":"I didn't know any video games had Spinal Muscular Atrophy","time":1782091540,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"mosiuerbarso","descendants":260,"id":48617990,"kids":[48618604,48619662,48622325,48619384,48621888,48618498,48618574,48618866,48619450,48618670,48622078,48621735,48618433,48620154,48618124,48618465,48622849,48624372,48620642,48622744,48620868,48624375,48622383,48623433,48624161,48619970,48618401,48619098,48619022,48619294,48624048,48618543,48624396,48619082,48619676,48619280],"score":439,"time":1782041881,"title":"Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)","type":"story","url":"https://www.beyondallreason.info","comments":[{"by":"aetherspawn","id":48618604,"kids":[48619639,48618830,48619148,48621852,48618693,48618726,48620353,48619661,48621534,48618925,48622705,48621425,48622771,48622577,48620799,48622175,48621707,48623120,48620241,48619690,48619742,48620420,48621255],"parent":48617990,"text":"Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units.
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.","time":1782046914,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tobinfekkes","id":48619662,"kids":[48619932,48622183,48620785,48620001,48619801,48619842],"parent":48617990,"text":"This is amazing to see TA on HN.
I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day.
So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time.
Games aren't the same anymore.
I still have the original game and expansion packs. Highly recommend playing it.","time":1782054888,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bar2","id":48622325,"parent":48617990,"text":"Best RTS ever made, in my subjective opinion, but incredibly toxic player base despite active moderation.
I think it's a numbers issue with 16 players in a standard game, and if you play five games in a session, with all chat enabled, you're going to run into a small handful of truly nasty people, which is souring of the experience and why I put the game down in the end.
I know the standard advice is to ignore it but it's just not fun to be constantly exposed to aggressive and unhappy people.","time":1782073790,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mboerwink","id":48619384,"kids":[48621266,48622122],"parent":48617990,"text":"I play Zero-K (a related open source game) a few times a month. I really enjoy their 'cold take' blog series discussing game mechanics and the history of TA derivatives. https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes","time":1782052899,"type":"comment"},{"by":"InsomniacL","id":48621888,"kids":[48623795,48622212,48623485],"parent":48617990,"text":"BAR is amazing but there's a hurdle for new players.
If you download it, don't join the first lobby you see.
My advice is to watch some videos on youtube, play some games solo, then look for new player lobbies or create your own and set restrictions on it.
It only takes one player on the enemy team who regularly plays the game and you'll get stream rolled.
Or you'll join a game of regular players, can't hold your lane and everyone will get frustrated when their base is blown up from your lane not holding.","time":1782070576,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SockThief","id":48618498,"kids":[48620182,48618547,48618639,48620943],"parent":48617990,"text":"The game is very mature and well thought RTS. The user experience and performance is beyond anything on the market now. It beats all well known AAA studios attempts at it by far.
It's still actively developed and very free to play.
Here's a cast of 40 vs 40 players by a former Star Craft 2 pro player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1a5dkjUq3o","time":1782046280,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bob1029","id":48618574,"kids":[48620414,48619657,48618930],"parent":48617990,"text":"If you are into playing with others, you might find a more stable community with FAF.
https://www.faforever.com/","time":1782046739,"type":"comment"},{"by":"abc42","id":48618866,"kids":[48619361,48619492],"parent":48617990,"text":"I know this is kind of silly, but even though TA's game mechanics are obviously great, I really liked its ambience and story. The sort of a melancholic vibe of a slow-moving neverending war.
BAR in contrast is a bit of a PvP clickfest, which I don't enjoy. I wonder if there's a game mode or another Spring mod that would give me a more authentic feel? Single-player or perhaps PvE.","time":1782048955,"type":"comment"},{"by":"queuep","id":48619450,"parent":48617990,"text":"Interesting, tried this game just 2 weeks ago and beat one of the pve modes with a friend just yesterday.
Joined some 8v8 for noobs and some were very friendly but they also wanted to kick me for not knowing the game. After all they let me stay but I stuck to pve or vs bots with friends now","time":1782053398,"type":"comment"},{"by":"plopz","id":48618670,"kids":[48619248,48618739,48620389],"parent":48617990,"text":"Theres been some drama with this game where a few of the core admins have claimed ownership and sold out to a publisher. They are taking the free open source game and selling it on steam with a free demo. In addition to the toxic community, its made the whole thing a bit radioactive. Curious to see how it all plays out.","time":1782047466,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Lucasoato","id":48622078,"parent":48617990,"text":"This game is so great, particularly the depth behind the different roles you can play. You could be in the frontline and fight for every cm, or be behind, following your carefully crafted recipes to build an exponential economy that will eventually sustain your team late game.
The learning curve could be a problem though, sometimes a game ends really quickly because a player is slightly less experienced than the others and it’s over.","time":1782071983,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dang","id":48621735,"parent":48617990,"text":"Related. Others?
Beyond All Reason – open-source RTS game built on top of the Recoil RTS Engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42826983 - Jan 2025 (4 comments)
Beyond All Reason – An Open Source RTS Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431216 - May 2024 (2 comments)
Beyond All Reason – Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39012392 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Beyond All Reason: Open-source RTS reimagining Total Annihilation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201265 - Aug 2021 (101 comments)","time":1782069423,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Waterluvian","id":48618433,"kids":[48619118,48618749],"parent":48617990,"text":"There’s a very “we’re selling business software” feel to this webpage, which makes me wonder what it would be like for business software to be marketed like a video game.","time":1782045688,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mholm","id":48620154,"kids":[48623017,48622060],"parent":48617990,"text":"As someone who loved Supreme Commander, I really wanted to like BAR, but I found it felt like death by a thousand cuts. I last played more than a year ago, so things might be different, but the QoL felt really lacking.","time":1782058553,"type":"comment"},{"by":"pohl","id":48618124,"kids":[48619698],"parent":48617990,"text":"Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.","time":1782042907,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gbuk2013","id":48618465,"kids":[48618551],"parent":48617990,"text":"I used to play the original TA a lot and BAR is very well done. Much harder than the original though - I had no trouble with TA campaigns but I have not even made it halfway with BAR before hitting skill wall. Not a teen anymore so it’s hard to motivate myself to try and push through. :)","time":1782045936,"type":"comment"},{"by":"killerstorm","id":48622849,"parent":48617990,"text":"I tried playing SC2 for a few years but controlling units was too difficult: the only thing I could do is to send entire army to fight.
No such problem with BAR, at least in early game: quite feasible to control each unit even if you don't have fast reflexes. That's pretty much unique in RTS.
Late game is more chaotic, but it's fun in its own way...","time":1782077931,"type":"comment"},{"by":"italiansolider","id":48624372,"parent":48617990,"text":"Looks like supreme commander.","time":1782090594,"type":"comment"},{"by":"corysama","id":48620642,"parent":48617990,"text":"“Making of BAR” documentary
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5F36yViPz7w","time":1782062056,"type":"comment"},{"by":"pelorat","id":48622744,"parent":48617990,"text":"It's a decent game, but not a good 1v1 game. Fun to watch the massive 100+ player brawls though.","time":1782077089,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Thundernerd","id":48620868,"parent":48617990,"text":"Is it PVP only or can I play this against bots as well?
I would like to play it but the comments about the community make it so that I never want to touch PVP with a 10ft pole.","time":1782063476,"type":"comment"},{"by":"italiansolider","id":48624375,"parent":48617990,"text":"looks like supreme commander","time":1782090608,"type":"comment"},{"by":"CrzyLngPwd","id":48622383,"kids":[48622821],"parent":48617990,"text":"What is singel player vs computer/bot experience?
I'd love to wile away some time on a single player, short adventure/mission, game from time to time. I have enjoyed lots of fun times with game like cmomand and conquer in the past so something like that wouldf be amazing.
Is this game it?","time":1782074240,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jonplackett","id":48623433,"kids":[48623535],"parent":48617990,"text":"No MacOS support (cry emoji)","time":1782082498,"type":"comment"},{"by":"halyconWays","id":48624161,"parent":48617990,"text":"Long thread but I highly recommend this game. It scratched the itch I had for TA. Well, for everything but that amazing soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxAdOQtAFEs&list=RDBxAdOQtAF...","time":1782088792,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48619970,"parent":48617990,"time":1782057264,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zeafoamrun","id":48618401,"kids":[48619263,48620043,48619135,48618544,48619230,48618554],"parent":48617990,"text":"This looks really slick and also very detailed. Is it free as in beer or free as in freedom?","time":1782045452,"type":"comment"},{"by":"inigyou","id":48619098,"kids":[48619250,48619162,48619709],"parent":48617990,"text":"The game itself notwithstanding, is this website marketingslop? I don't think it's AI but it's definitely not written by the developers.","time":1782050656,"type":"comment"},{"by":"amitayk","id":48619022,"parent":48617990,"text":"Been playing BAR for couple of years now. Do not sign up if you have a minor addiction problem to fun things.","time":1782050002,"type":"comment"},{"by":"goels","id":48619294,"parent":48617990,"text":"Looks great","time":1782052224,"type":"comment"},{"by":"s1artibartfast","id":48624048,"parent":48617990,"text":"One thing people might find interesting about bar is how popular spectating matches is. It's not uncommon for the top 16 player lobbies to have twice that many players in game spectating and commenting on plays. It's currently a small community so it has a recurring cast of characters and people know each other across months or years of playing together.
You have the Divas and the workhorses, the air or sea specialists, and the goofballs and communists","time":1782087911,"type":"comment"},{"by":"encom","id":48618543,"kids":[48618800],"parent":48617990,"text":">All development updates, tech support, finding friends and all player and developer communication takes place on Discord.
[ eye rolling emoji ]","time":1782046544,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tsouth2","dead":true,"id":48624396,"parent":48617990,"text":"[dead]","time":1782090758,"type":"comment"},{"by":"swordlucky666","dead":true,"id":48619082,"parent":48617990,"text":"[dead]","time":1782050525,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mciair_alpha","dead":true,"id":48619676,"parent":48617990,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782054956,"type":"comment"},{"by":"joseph_council","id":48619280,"kids":[48619618],"parent":48617990,"text":"Is that AI ?","time":1782052127,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"JumpCrisscross","descendants":51,"id":48622987,"kids":[48623195,48623330,48623782,48623270,48624669,48623438,48623271,48623382,48623300,48623648],"score":37,"time":1782078874,"title":"Rent collections are down in New York","type":"story","url":"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/21/rent-collections-are-down-in-new-york-and-no-ones-sure-why-00966982","comments":[{"by":"alexjplant","id":48623195,"kids":[48623913,48623805,48623625,48623507],"parent":48622987,"text":"> “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.","time":1782080450,"type":"comment"},{"by":"delichon","id":48623330,"kids":[48623476],"parent":48622987,"text":"> We have to consider what the unintended consequences are of public policies or practices where there are no immediate consequences for someone who falls behind on rent
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.","time":1782081634,"type":"comment"},{"by":"toofy","id":48623782,"kids":[48624072],"parent":48622987,"text":"i occasionally come across some of the forums and online groups of landlords and the things they have to deal with, particularly in cities with strong protections for the tenants and its interesting to watch the perspectives.
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.","time":1782085378,"type":"comment"},{"by":"djeastm","id":48623270,"parent":48622987,"text":"It sounds like an ad-hoc rent strike. Not a great sign for an economy.","time":1782081138,"type":"comment"},{"by":"_DeadFred_","id":48624669,"parent":48622987,"text":"All slack has been removed from society. All pricing has been maximized. Every interaction capitalized. Every point of extraction extracted from.
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.","time":1782093152,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hagbard_c","id":48623438,"kids":[48623667,48623473],"parent":48622987,"text":"I'd say rent collections are down because those who play with the thought of 'rent striking' are more inclined to do so now that a 'democratic socialist' has been voted into power on a wave of 'rent freeze' and 'bad evil landlords versus oppressed renters' rhetoric. I'm pretty sure the Politico writers realise this as well but they seem hesitant to say so, probably because it is a bit too much on the nose. The woman standing to the right of Mamdani (left on the photo) is Cea Weaver, appointed by him to the post of "executive director of the Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants". She's quite a piece of work, a typical 'progressive' activist who has called for the seizure of private property and linked home ownership to white supremacy. With someone like that in the position she now holds it comes as no surprise that more people are thinking twice before signing that rent cheque.","time":1782082543,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sieabahlpark","dead":true,"id":48623271,"parent":48622987,"text":"[dead]","time":1782081138,"type":"comment"},{"by":"RagnarD","dead":true,"id":48623382,"kids":[48623423],"parent":48622987,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782082072,"type":"comment"},{"by":"JCTheDenthog","dead":true,"id":48623300,"kids":[48623706,48623563,48623331],"parent":48622987,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782081363,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gacgacgac","id":48623648,"parent":48622987,"text":"People can't afford to live and food comes before paying your landlord? Economy is fucked right now. Income inequality pushes any gains into the hands of the wealthy.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.","time":1782084161,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"Finbarr","descendants":0,"id":48624782,"score":5,"time":1782094098,"title":"Sakana Fugu","type":"story","url":"https://sakana.ai/fugu/","comments":[]},{"by":"pavel_lishin","descendants":2,"id":48622814,"kids":[48624627,48623224,48624707],"score":21,"time":1782077651,"title":"My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992","type":"story","url":"https://blog.plover.com/prog/fortran-i.html","comments":[{"deleted":true,"id":48624627,"parent":48622814,"time":1782092662,"type":"comment"},{"by":"PaulHoule","id":48623224,"parent":48622814,"text":"Before the Dragon Book some commercial compilers used heroic techniques that got superior performance along various axes.","time":1782080712,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jmclnx","id":48624707,"parent":48622814,"text":">In the middle 1970's, the IBM corporation did (and perhaps still does) most of their in-house programming in a computer language called FORTRAN.
Sorry, I doubt that. In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM and many other companies.
Now if you said the 60s or science based programming, I would agree with you about FORTRAN. But in-house usually means running the business, that is where COBOL rules.
Now, in-house is SAP ABAP, I think that took over at IBM in the mid to late 90s and early 00s. But IBM is moving to the next release of SAP and from what I heard from people there, ABAP is being phased out for something new that SAP came up with.","time":1782093461,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"dev-experiments","descendants":2,"id":48623434,"kids":[48624699,48624514],"score":25,"time":1782082523,"title":"Good results fine tuning a local LLM like Qwen 3:0.6B to categorize questions","type":"story","url":"https://www.teachmecoolstuff.com/viewarticle/fine-tuning-a-local-llm-to-categorize-questions","comments":[{"by":"nl","id":48624699,"parent":48623434,"text":"If you are going to go to the bother of fine tuning for trivial problems like subject classification then I think you'll find Scikit Learn with a SGDClassifier on 2-grams will do probably just as well and be under 1MB for the trained classifier.
You can train it in under a minute, and it will work perfectly well on embedded devices.
Small LLMs are good choices for text classification in two cases:
- If you next to provide in-context examples and classifier based on them.
- Your classification goes beyond simple subject-type classifiers. For example, multiple choice question answering is classification where small LLM will work but traditional ML methods won't/","time":1782093402,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jszymborski","id":48624514,"parent":48623434,"text":"I think the Qwen 0.6B is so cool. It is super fast and as illustrated here it has a clear niche, esp. when fine-tuned.
I'm also interested in it as a student for distillation.","time":1782091612,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"arthurofbabylon","descendants":2,"id":48568487,"kids":[48624332],"score":11,"time":1781693338,"title":"From Combinatorial Mess to Linear Elegance: Architecting a Conversion Engine","type":"story","url":"https://blog.minimal.app/conversion-engine/","comments":[{"by":"rho138","id":48624332,"kids":[48624436],"parent":48568487,"text":"Obligatory:\nhttps://xkcd.com/927/","time":1782090184,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"rafaepta","descendants":295,"id":48620090,"kids":[48620636,48621955,48620406,48624708,48620455,48620438,48620539,48620563,48622008,48620302,48620612,48620395,48623059,48620465,48620604,48621514,48623180,48620376,48621482,48623133,48621986,48621551,48623555,48620359,48620518,48621085,48621154,48622430,48620327,48620574,48623853,48620523,48621871,48620503,48621413,48620440,48620931,48621886,48620663,48621779,48621047,48620704,48620651,48620479,48621557,48621661,48621842,48622964,48621078,48620361,48620349,48620664,48620515,48620756,48620459,48624408,48621968,48620732,48621500,48621623,48620597,48622120,48620557,48620501,48620598,48620631,48620798,48620934,48622831,48621288,48620998,48622852,48622507,48621833,48621809,48621535,48621473,48620757,48620431,48620839,48622035,48620944,48620543,48621942,48620552],"score":429,"time":1782058103,"title":"Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)","type":"story","url":"https://sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction","comments":[{"by":"lg5689","id":48620636,"kids":[48621485,48622391,48621765,48623926,48621755,48622006,48622460,48621945],"parent":48620090,"text":"I believe that "single source of truth" is a principle that should always be followed. If there's duplicated code where it'd be a bug if they diverge, then you should refactor. It creates a long-distance coupling in your code that may be invisible to future developers until a bug emerges.
But with that in mind, I mostly agree with the article: if it's not a violation of "single source of truth", then abstractions are just a convenience. If it starts being inconvenient, then it's not doing its job and there's no reason to use it. It's a serious code smell if a function needs several flags for custom behavior; that means it's probably the wrong abstraction or violating the single responsibility principle. If there is a legit need for lots of customization, an often-good way to handle is to take a function/functor as an argument for the customization. E.g., rather than `solve(f:double -> double, max_iters = 99, x_abs_tol = 1e-15, x_rel_tol = 1e-15, ...)` you can do `solve(f:double -> double, stopping_criteria: StoppingCriteriaClass)`","time":1782062033,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Waterluvian","id":48621955,"kids":[48622147,48622773,48622089],"parent":48620090,"text":"I think about this on occasion. Most recently I ran into an issue during a personal project: 2d sprites for RTS units were packed on spritesheets in a consistent manner: 5 sprites for 8 directions (you mirror 3). Packed in order of: stand, move, attack, die. So I made a loader that understands how to take action + direction and offer an array of sprites to play through.
But then I came across more cases: sprites with no directionality (an explosion), and corpse sprites (which were only 4 directions, 2 mirrors, and most except the first four were shared by both orcs and humans).
I agonized for a little bit on what the hell the common abstraction is for all this. In the end, I factored out some of the loading code, and made a UnitLoader, CorpseLoader, EffectLoader and moved on. Now, there's probably a better abstraction in there because all 3 loaders have to reason about the same things a little bit. But I will discover that abstraction later on and it's easier to just de-duplicate the code then, rather than try to identify the abstraction now and make some complicated EverythingLoader that handles all those cases.","time":1782071021,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bhouston","id":48620406,"kids":[48620644,48621349,48624649,48624213,48620542],"parent":48620090,"text":"I used to struggle with abstractions back in my OOP days but since moving pretty much to a purely functional approach I find that code duplication is rare. Just have a function and call it in two parts. The main abstraction issue is then data structures but with TypeScript interfaces being duck typing essentially I run into few problems there as well.
So code duplication because of abstraction issues is rare. Code duplication because of siloed developers is so much more common.","time":1782060586,"type":"comment"},{"by":"skreem","id":48624708,"parent":48620090,"text":"Nice to see Sandi mentioned! If anyone liked her philosophy / writing style I highly recommend you check out her books
I read “Practical Object-Oriented Design (POODR)” ages ago at this point, but it reshaped how I approached OOP
Granted… OOP as a default paradigm has fallen out of favor (at least for me), but it’s still everywhere & won’t be going away. She gives a great framework for making it sane","time":1782093466,"type":"comment"},{"by":"strongpigeon","id":48620455,"parent":48620090,"text":"Echoing the article, anyone who has experienced both will agree: it’s far easier to work with an under engineered code base than an over engineered one.","time":1782060914,"type":"comment"},{"by":"znkr","id":48620438,"kids":[48622158,48621901],"parent":48620090,"text":"+1 The worst code I had to maintain was code that tried to follow DRY (without the trying to understand what the original intention of that principle was). The only way out of that mess was widespread code duplication.","time":1782060828,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Rendello","id":48620539,"kids":[48620741],"parent":48620090,"text":"Two talks come to mind here: Mike Acton's Data-Oriented Design and C++ [1] and \nBrian Cantrill's The Complexity of Simplicity [2].
Mike's talk argues that code solutions need not be modelled on the real world, and that different data creates different problems, which need different solutions. I can't do the talk justice, but it's had a big impact on me.
Brian's talk is about abstraction generally, and how it's difficult to find the "right" abstraction.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cum5uN2634o","time":1782061481,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ultim8k","id":48620563,"kids":[48624261,48623934],"parent":48620090,"text":"Nobody wants to listen. Nobody. In 90% of the companies there are some so called senior devs that get ecstatic when they create a new abstraction.
Overengineering, abstractions and premature optimisation are the 3 worst plagues of engineering.
At the same time I’m happy they exist because it means we’ll always have a job.","time":1782061692,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aftbit","id":48622008,"kids":[48622037,48622901,48622243],"parent":48620090,"text":"Similarly, I've seen some developers who seem to think that any inline string or numeric constant is evil. In one PR, I saw:
HTTPS_SCHEME = 'https'\n DOMAIN = 'www.example.com'\n \n url = HTTPS_SCHEME + '://' + DOMAIN\nPart of being a good engineer is finding the right balance.
I know engineers who would gladly duplicate code all over the code base to avoid creating a new abstraction.
I know engineers who create polymorphic abstractions for a single caller with a very obvious set of parameters.
So much of wisdom is in finding balance and not being dogmatic about rules.","time":1782061890,"type":"comment"},{"by":"agentifysh","id":48620395,"kids":[48620416,48621617,48622306],"parent":48620090,"text":"i recall very early in my career i did exactly this. i took what worked duplicated it—my reasoning being that it was far safer to reuse what has been battle tested and leave refactoring at a later stage
it wasn't received well and senior developer told me that 'good developers know exactly what patterns to use all the time before writing any piece of code and that he will clean up my mess'
long story short his refactoring caused what was otherwise a stable system into a complete mess and it reminded me of Nassim Taleb's book","time":1782060480,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ketozhang","id":48623059,"parent":48620090,"text":"I like to think most seniors know to not blindly follow DRY. However, I can tell many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of needing to maintain multiple duplicated sources of code.
To help with that, I think the simple model of two callers depending on a common code needs to be scrutinized. If the common code needs to change because only one of the caller needs it, then it doesn’t belong in the common.
The wrong goal for DRY is attempting to do it with encapsulation. Encapsulation shifts the refactoring work from\nthe caller to the common code. However this is not what you want because there’s a lot more consequence in updating the common code than the caller.
You can avoid encapsulation and still be DRY by having multiple thin abstractions that the caller needs to be aware about is better. In OOP you are taught SRP and IoC for this. In procedural programming, this just comes naturally as code calling series of helper functions.","time":1782079359,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dofm","id":48620465,"kids":[48621302,48620596,48620530,48620769,48620687,48620871,48623531,48620668,48620836,48620513,48621518,48620581,48621451,48621650,48621529,48621004,48620965,48620783,48621017],"parent":48620090,"text":"No it's not. This has always been a needlessly iconoclastic rather than sensible suggestion.
At the very least it is not once you're working at the wrong kind of scale.
Once you have an awkward number of customers (more than five and less than a hundred), maintaining duplicated code that should have been abstracted and modularised will only seem cheap if you don't mind that you burn through even junior employees at a pace.
And in the LLM era the wrong kind of scale appears in different ways; code generated and duplicated without proper abstraction and then maintained by an LLM that cannot be trusted to do the same modification each time it encounters a pattern or to have enough of an overview to slowly rescue duplicated code through good abstractions.
I would go as far as to say that any abstraction you can maintain (that is in active maintenance, I mean) is better than code duplication once you are past a de minimis threshold.","time":1782060983,"type":"comment"},{"by":"fjfaase","id":48620604,"parent":48620090,"text":"I once used code duplication to implement a fourth type of dialog that looked somewhat similar to the others, that were sharing a lot of code, because I felt that although it looked much the same as the others, there was some fundamental difference. Took me about a day to implement. When some other engineer saw this, he spend the next three weeks trying to integrate all of them with some shared class. His work was not completely worthless, because he did find some small bug during all his efforts to avoid any possible code duplication. I already had predicted that it would take a lot effort, but I did not object, because I hoped that he would learn something from it and the next time think twice before always trying to avoid code duplication.","time":1782061849,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dang","id":48621514,"parent":48620090,"text":"I dislike duplicate code as much as anyone, but agree with the OP that bad abstractions can be worse. They add confusion and complexity which compounds over time, since people are forced to build on top of them in ways that (by definition) don't suit the underlying domain and ultimately become self-referential. This leads to contortions, workarounds and even more bad abstractions which ought not to be there—they're reactions to the code not fitting the problem, or as Fred Brooks called it, accidental complexity. You end up in an evolutionary dead end where the system is hard to extend because it's too hard to understand.
I've learned to tolerate a small amount of duplicate code for this reason. If the duplication remains small, it's not that harmful, and if it starts to grow, one has a better shot at finding a good abstraction for it. Bad abstraction is premature abstraction.
One thing I'm not sure this thread has mentioned yet is how LLMs alter the cost-benefit curve of this. They are much better at managing duplication than humans are, and much better at noticing inconsistencies - the sort of small bugs which duplication traditionally leads to. I don't know if this is enough to count as a different kind of good abstraction; I doubt it. It reminds me of a petroleum economist I once knew who had 200 duplicate spreadsheets analyzing different projects and who hired a junior analyst to keep them all consistent. An LLM would be like the junior analyst.","time":1782067878,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ninkendo","id":48623180,"parent":48620090,"text":"To me it’s distracting to think about duplicating vs creating an abstraction, because the answer is always “it depends”, which is not really an answer.
To me, the question is: can you look at this abstraction and understand why it exists, without knowing who’s calling it? If so, it’s probably fine.
If an abstraction only makes sense because of the particular weird details of these 3 callers that have to pass mutually exclusive arguments to it to get their desired behavior, it’s probably wrong. An abstraction needs “a place to live” in your architecture. It needs to be self-evident in justifying its existence.
If you find yourself repeating code, but de-duping it would create these sort of weird non-self-justifying abstractions, your architecture is probably a bad fit for the problem you’re trying to solve. Maybe that’s because the problem changed since the software started (which is a bit of a pickle: do you re-architect, or do you continue writing weird inscrutable code?) or maybe it’s because you just picked the wrong abstraction in the first place. But you should recognize it: duplicating vs wrong-abstraction is about choosing the lesser evil. If the abstraction was a natural fit for the problem, you wouldn’t need to answer this question in the first place.","time":1782080365,"type":"comment"},{"by":"platz","id":48620376,"parent":48620090,"text":"2016 (up to 2018 or so) may have been the peak of such varied activity in the developer ecosystem, including articles like this, whether it was discussion, ideation, OSS variety, language development.
There has been growth since but it's been concentrated into fewer channels and somewhat industrialized.","time":1782060324,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dang","id":48621482,"parent":48620090,"text":"Related. Others?
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927149 - May 2023 (69 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095503 - May 2021 (17 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739596 - July 2020 (240 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714 - July 2018 (207 comments)
Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061453 - July 2016 (96 comments)
The Wrong Abstraction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11032296 - Feb 2016 (119 comments)","time":1782067638,"type":"comment"},{"by":"corysama","id":48623133,"parent":48620090,"text":"I always liked the advice "Abstract for replacement. Not for reuse."
If you have code that is reusable, you'll want it to have a nice interface. But, you don't need an abstraction on top of a nice interface. Just use it.
For abstraction, what you need to focus on is "What is most likely to change in the future?" You want to put in abstractions that will make those changes low-cost.
Ex: At work there was a small debate about which C++ JSON parser to use with no stand-out winner for our framework's needs. So, we picked one and I put a thin layer over it for everyone to use. We have since then swapped out the parser and swapped it back over the years of a hundred devs using it in our framework and no one noticed the swaps.","time":1782079918,"type":"comment"},{"by":"stevefolta","id":48621986,"parent":48620090,"text":""If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some." -- Alan Perlis","time":1782071250,"type":"comment"},{"by":"stcg","id":48621551,"kids":[48621928,48621608],"parent":48620090,"text":"This is like saying "A slow leak is cheaper than a burst pipe"
Yes, okay. But with both you will have a bad time cleaning up.
There is a third option: good abstractions.
I did see this pattern described in the blog in practice a lot (and fell victim to it myself) and I think that in general this comes down to inexperienced programmers. Object oriented programming makes it worse.
Teaching these programmers that they should not abstract is not the solution. It is blocking their growth.
Teach them how to make better interfaces instead.","time":1782068178,"type":"comment"},{"by":"codr7","id":48623555,"parent":48620090,"text":"I certainly learned this the hard way.
When I started writing code 40 years ago, I used to over estimate my understanding and abstraction skills a lot. As a result I created overly complicated and difficult to maintain/evolve solutions.
Turns out I need to see more examples of patterns before making good choices, which means becoming comfortable with seeing and tracking duplication over time.","time":1782083448,"type":"comment"},{"by":"christophilus","id":48620359,"kids":[48620444,48620892],"parent":48620090,"text":"Yes. I’m dealing with a graphql, urql, Next, Prisma stack at the moment. Something that would be a handful of lines of code in a different stack ends up being hundreds in this one.
The Node ecosystem is full of wrong abstractions.","time":1782060191,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jbvlkt","id":48620518,"parent":48620090,"text":"It depends if duplication is accidental or real. I.e. if two taxes are using the same formula, it is accidental. If you use the same physic formula on multipla places, it is real duplication.","time":1782061348,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Verdex","id":48621085,"parent":48620090,"text":"Cheaper is skipping a step.
Code duplication and 'wrong' abstractions both count themselves amongst the other foibles of programming. But they don't directly produce a cost which can be cheap or expensive.
They produce some other high dimensional intermediate value which can then produce highly variable cost dependent on the domain, goals, and scenario.
As ever, it depends.
The depends is quantifiable, but it doesn't fit in a blog post. Think more along the lines of war and peace.","time":1782065067,"type":"comment"},{"by":"time4tea","id":48621154,"parent":48620090,"text":"You dont know immediately if something that superficially seems the same actually is.
Copy and paste once is fine, twice, not so much.
Often I've seen two totally different things exist in one bit of code, no overlap!
Premature generification is bad, and leads the developer to believe that two things are the same, making it harder to see they are not.
Also, can make it much harder to see that a different abstraction would give a cleaner outcome....","time":1782065474,"type":"comment"},{"by":"infinitebit","id":48622430,"parent":48620090,"text":"I feel this deeply. Although abstraction isn’t a one way door, “deduplicating” logic tends to be much easier than breaking big functions back down, and so these days I tend to leave a comment with the date wondering if it is too similar to some other code. then if i come across it again months later and it still is, then maybe it is safe to make it DRY.
I think DRY is the first heuristic for “good code” that most junior devs actually grasp, and so they become very dogmatic about it for a while","time":1782074668,"type":"comment"},{"by":"antonymoose","id":48620327,"parent":48620090,"text":"Twice a coincidence, thrice a pattern.","time":1782059932,"type":"comment"},{"by":"MrGando","id":48620574,"kids":[48620752],"parent":48620090,"text":"I once had to work with a system that was refactored and abstracted away heavily to use Redux. It didn't work then, the implementation had way too many abstractions, doing any change meant you had to touch dozens of files. It was insanity. Left me with a bitter taste regarding the redux pattern for ever (probably not the pattern's fault).","time":1782061739,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throwatdem12311","id":48623853,"parent":48620090,"text":"My company paid to have her do one her day long workshop at HQ. Don’t know how much they paid but it was worth every penny. Changed my life.","time":1782086018,"type":"comment"},{"by":"originalcopy","id":48620523,"kids":[48620693],"parent":48620090,"text":"While I see the point, I think I more often encounter the opposite. Duplication, but not exactly duplication. \nThen the "sunk cost fallacy" is not an issue but there is huge maintenance cost and no-one feels like refactoring it. I'd rather refactor bad abstraction than 10x duplication.","time":1782061363,"type":"comment"},{"by":"davnicwil","id":48621871,"parent":48620090,"text":"One way I like to think about is that often abstraction is an automation for a task that doesn't need automating.
You hardly ever change the thing and if you do, changing it in two or three places 'manually' is really not a big deal.
Now changing something fairly often, that affects logic in 50+ places? Then it makes sense to automate with an abstraction so it all flows through the same lines of code.
I know I've personally spent way more time over the years debugging bad abstractions than changing things in a few places.","time":1782070488,"type":"comment"},{"by":"northisup","id":48620503,"kids":[48620541],"parent":48620090,"text":"Duplication is fine, triplication and above is the issue.","time":1782061226,"type":"comment"},{"by":"andix","id":48621413,"parent":48620090,"text":"I always try to design in a way, that using abstractions/shared logic is optional.
I've worked in too many projects, where every new feature needs to be built on top of existing abstractions, that often lead to severe restrictions if something slightly different is required. I always try to create reusable units/components, that can either be used as intended or replaced by something that behaves slightly different if needed.
Components are not necessarily frontend components, this extends also to backend logic.","time":1782067124,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bazoom42","id":48620440,"parent":48620090,"text":"Depends. If the abstraction is just a level of indirection, then it is usually pretty simple to eliminate - just hit “inline function” in the refactoring tool a few times.
On the other hand it is pretty difficult and error prone to consolidate duplicated code which have drifted apart over time.
If in doubt, chose the approach which is simplest and least risk to revert if you discover in the future you made the wrong choice.
I do agree a bad abstraction can cause huge problems. But it’s usually not the kind of abstractions introduced to eliminate code duplication, but the kind of top-down “architecture astronaut” abstractions, where a model is chosen which does not fit the complexity of the problem.","time":1782060837,"type":"comment"},{"by":"omoikane","id":48620931,"parent":48620090,"text":"> Programmer A sees duplication.
This step should also be parameterized by how many times the duplication has occurred. Refactoring preemptively may lead to poor abstractions, but not refactoring after seeing the exact same thing tens of times would also be weird. See also:
https://wiki.c2.com/?DuplicationRefactoringThreshold
https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreeStrikesAndYouRefactor","time":1782063966,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hakunin","id":48621886,"parent":48620090,"text":"I think what this advice is really getting to, is that you should prefer everything generally build-time/hardcoded/static rather than runtime/dynamic. Wrote about this in 2013 (calling it a CMS trap[1], back then seemed pertinent).
[1]: https://max.engineer/cms-trap","time":1782070575,"type":"comment"},{"by":"luckystarr","id":48620663,"parent":48620090,"text":"How I see this:
Refactoring code to reduce the number of lines is _compression_, akin to RLE coding.
Refactoring the code to lift conceptually coherent parts is _abstraction_.
Less compression, more abstraction. Then you're fine.","time":1782062163,"type":"comment"},{"by":"fpoling","id":48621779,"kids":[48621808],"parent":48620090,"text":"With LLMs the cost of duplication is much lower both to write and maintain. So abstractions needs much higher justification.","time":1782069760,"type":"comment"},{"by":"LunicLynx","id":48621047,"parent":48620090,"text":"The generic repository "pattern" is the prime example of this. There might be CRUD operations shared between repositories, but they should not be that base of every repository.\nI've seen this so many times, because in the beginning the CRUD stuff is what you code over and over again and then suddenly business logic emerges and everything breaks down, but the repository prevails because sunk cost fallacy ...","time":1782064927,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gb2d_hn","id":48620704,"parent":48620090,"text":"Interface over inheritance is the paradigm I try and stick to. I'd rather maintain orthogonal code than code with overuse of inheritance because of over adherence to DRY.","time":1782062440,"type":"comment"},{"by":"joshmoody24","id":48620651,"parent":48620090,"text":"I've seen the pendulum swing between duplication and abstraction a few times in my career, and I'm currently on team "it's usually not that hard to find a good abstraction up front."
IMO it's easier to inline a bad abstraction than it is to consolidate a bunch of subtly different things that should have been abstracted from the beginning.
But I expect people's opinions on this differ wildly based on their personal experiences. Just my anecdotal take.","time":1782062117,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bob1029","id":48620479,"parent":48620090,"text":"If you work backward from the schema these sorts of things tend to evaporate before they can become a problem.
Some of the biggest rabbit holes come from naming conventions not aligning across the business and technology silos. If everyone agrees that Customer has exactly 34 attributes, then it is possible to move to the next step of sharing libraries of types across the team. Getting your POCOs/DTOs 1:1 across the board is when the duplication really starts to melt away.","time":1782061098,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bogrollben","id":48621557,"parent":48620090,"text":"One thing I don't see talked about often is the fact that not all duplication is equal. Duplicated html/xml/markup does not equal template-based boiler plate, which does not equal almost everything else. I'm far more forgiving of duplicate html/markup because that code is so cheap.","time":1782068202,"type":"comment"},{"by":"felooboolooomba","id":48621661,"parent":48620090,"text":"The bad thing with abstractions is when you start it too early in your code base for things. It's also a bad thing when you start it too late, although not as bad. If you start it way, way, way too late it's very, very, very bad.
Of course, the worst abstractions are the ones you don't need at all.","time":1782068865,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zadikian","id":48621842,"kids":[48621889],"parent":48620090,"text":"I always felt like I abstract and modularize things way less eagerly than other programmers. Was pleasantly surprised to find that LLMs do it mostly my way by default, then again they're also bad at abstracting when it's actually needed.","time":1782070261,"type":"comment"},{"by":"he0001","id":48622964,"parent":48620090,"text":"If you can’t fit into the same abstraction, is it really a “duplication” or is it just a slightly, but incomparable, function?","time":1782078771,"type":"comment"},{"by":"DmitryOlshansky","id":48621078,"parent":48620090,"text":"I would argue that _premature_ abstraction is worse than _some_ duplication of code.
Also I’ve seen the kind of codebase that seems to be LZW packed due to the sheer desire to DRY everything out. Not pleasant thing, by the time you goto 10 layers deep on some “helper” function you forgot why you in there.","time":1782065050,"type":"comment"},{"by":"KHRZ","id":48620361,"kids":[48620392,48620737,48620424],"parent":48620090,"text":"This is the biggest lesson I got from LMMs. I have a 1 million LOC vibe coded project that I can only imagine would fit in a few hundred thousand lines. But it's still holding up, I expected some kind of development collapse long before this point.","time":1782060233,"type":"comment"},{"by":"anon-3988","id":48620349,"kids":[48620413,48620393],"parent":48620090,"text":"The problem with coming up with a rule that works for everyone is that everyone have a different idea of what makes a good abstraction.
Do you want to iterate using for loop or using .iter().step(2).map()?
I would rather have consistency than a mixed bag of levels of abstractions.","time":1782060120,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tetha","id":48620664,"parent":48620090,"text":"I watched a talk by her about this, and this post is missing half of the equation, which is really important:
Having a wrong abstraction means you end up with a class/function/module with a huge amount of configurations through boolean/enum parameters. It's not even clear that all combinations of configurations is even valid. This situation may be simplified by duplicating, and then eliminating code, thus creating more streamlined code for each use case. This may require fixing similar or cross-cutting bugs in multiple places (eg: JSON serialization is stupid, need to hack a workaround), but keeps the business logic changes simple. Maybe a bit more numerous, but the code is able to raise all the scenarios to consider.
Having no abstraction means you may have to change business logic consistently in multiple places, or you have to fix exactly the same misconception (aka a bug) in multiple cases. e.g. tax rate management in a multi-national context. This is also terrible, because you may fix an important problem in one place and forget other places with the same issue. Now you missed 12 potential bugs by fixing one. This can however allow you to discover a true abstraction. Maybe these 12 places should call just one place?
But for code evolving across a team understanding this tension, a bit of duplication while waiting for confirmation that these pieces of code break together and change together is better than just shoving the same 3 if-statements into a function to avoid "line duplication". Concept duplication is more important.","time":1782062166,"type":"comment"},{"by":"williadc","id":48620515,"parent":48620090,"text":"The "99 Bottles of OOP" book mentioned at the bottom was an excellent introduction to refactoring. I highly recommend it if you struggle with finding the right data models for the problems you work on.","time":1782061310,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ozgrakkurt","id":48620756,"parent":48620090,"text":"The discussion around this topic would be nicer if the title had "can be" instead of "is".
Otherwise what is better is better and we don't know what we don't know","time":1782062778,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jstimpfle","id":48620459,"kids":[48620517],"parent":48620090,"text":"Code duplication is the wrong abstraction too -- unless it's not really code duplication but code that only happens to be similar for some really "unstable" reason.","time":1782060942,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gaigalas","id":48624408,"parent":48620090,"text":"I like the mantra: "prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction".
Combined with another interesting idea "whatever I dislike is wrong", it makes me _always be right_, which is awesome. I can never lose a discussion about abstraction with this powerful combo.","time":1782090855,"type":"comment"},{"by":"_pdp_","id":48621968,"parent":48620090,"text":"The biggest mistakes young engineers make is working out a problem from bottom up... i.e. building frameworks and libraries, rather than exploring the problem space which is more chaotic.
You cannot find the edges of the system with structure you don't understand because once the abstraction are set in place solutions often have the same shape as the frameworks which leads to ultimately really bad systems.
The best way is often not the obvious way. Once you reach the edges then you can think how to program the abstraction but that is many versions down the line from the original.","time":1782071099,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dmos62","id":48620732,"parent":48620090,"text":"If it's duplication, it's the same abstraction by definition. The fundamental unit of programming is intent, not code.","time":1782062644,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jeffypoo","id":48621500,"parent":48620090,"text":"I've always told engineers to duplicate until the abstraction is punching them in the face.","time":1782067751,"type":"comment"},{"by":"alkhimey","id":48621623,"kids":[48621781,48622072],"parent":48620090,"text":"The disadvantages of duplication are greatly reduced in the world of AI. From my experience it can easily detect the duplicates and refactor code safely. On the other hand, code without abstractions is easier to read and easier for AI.
With AI, we really need to rethink the clean code principles.","time":1782068596,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aappleby","id":48620597,"parent":48620090,"text":"The smallest amount of simple code that solves the problem wins. Everything else is irrelevant.","time":1782061826,"type":"comment"},{"by":"andai","id":48622120,"parent":48620090,"text":"See also: Muratori, Semantic Compression ("Compression-Oriented Programming")
https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015
Previously discussed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17090319
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36455794
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183091","time":1782072223,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ChrisArchitect","id":48620557,"parent":48620090,"text":"(2016)
Some previous discussions:
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927149
2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095503
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739596
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17578714
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11032296","time":1782061648,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sebastianconcpt","id":48620501,"parent":48620090,"text":"Oh the self-contradiction here...
Generalizing this in the abstract is a wrong abstraction.","time":1782061225,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hedora","id":48620598,"parent":48620090,"text":"I’ve seen code bases that evolved like that. The problem is almost always outside the abstraction that has a pile of conditionals.
Usually, some moron decided to copy paste things a few levels up and then the top half of the system metastasized into two parallel universes of broken garbage.
For instance, one might decide to perform auth later in the flow so unauthorized handlers can run and set a “this requires auth” bit that defaults to false, and the other flow could add a forged auth header before the auth step.
Now, the auth handler needs a “allow forged header” flag and a “already authenticated” flag.
I’ve seen that grow to a half dozen cases until massive production dataloss occurred. A buggy client tried to delete something local to their account without specifying a userid as a parameter (this codebase was garbage!) and deleted the something for all users instead.
I can’t remember how the dataloss was “fixed”, but it definitely wasn’t “all requests go through a simple auth check, and all handlers declare/implement their auth requirements in the same way”.
Getting a design approved to require a user id be specified exactly once for account-level operations was fantasy land for that team. (Most hires with any sort of engineering talent bounced in under a year.)
Anyway the “abstractions are hard so copy paste” approach did provide job security for the lifers on that product. I can’t imagine them holding a job elsewhere, but they were completely immune to layoffs (hostage style).
This is a pretty valid approach if you’re an agent hired to perform industrial sabotage, or if you keep replacing keyboards after you knaw through the corner.","time":1782061826,"type":"comment"},{"by":"TexanFeller","id":48620631,"kids":[48620684],"parent":48620090,"text":"> Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction
Very true in some sense, but I continue to encourage DRY-bias because I've literally never seen teams duplicate code responsibly and later dedupe it when it's the right time. 95% of the time this sentiment is quoted to justify shipping quick slop and stable reusable bits are never extracted into a shared lib later.","time":1782062008,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mcculley","id":48620798,"parent":48620090,"text":"Yes, if your programming language/environment is weak.","time":1782063078,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mohamedkoubaa","id":48620934,"parent":48620090,"text":"Duplication is often a small price to pay for isolation","time":1782063984,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hyperpallium2","id":48622831,"parent":48620090,"text":"prefer semantic abstraction even when it creates duplication","time":1782077781,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nullbio","id":48621288,"parent":48620090,"text":"Code duplication is terrible in the age of LLMs, unless you want to maximize on drift.","time":1782066293,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ilvez","id":48620998,"parent":48620090,"text":"Just three words: rule of three.","time":1782064516,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jongjong","id":48622852,"parent":48620090,"text":"Also, I prefer having all the code inside a single 5000-lines file than split up into many small files representing incorrect abstractions.
The urge to split the code up since they beginning is generally a bad idea; it forces early abstraction; more likely to be wrong.","time":1782077956,"type":"comment"},{"by":"threethirtytwo","id":48622507,"parent":48620090,"text":"Duplication and the wrong abstraction are looking more and more to be implimentation details handled by AI. A possible future may be a place where none of this matters.","time":1782075298,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48621833,"parent":48620090,"time":1782070207,"type":"comment"},{"by":"lazide","id":48621809,"parent":48620090,"text":"Yes, but counterpoint - code duplication is also the wrong abstraction.
Pro tip - which is the least bad abstraction? Answer: it depends!","time":1782070040,"type":"comment"},{"by":"vcryan","id":48621535,"parent":48620090,"text":"The sweet spot is really duplicating the wrong abstraction: I see you Claude!","time":1782068032,"type":"comment"},{"by":"johnwheeler","id":48621473,"parent":48620090,"text":"These are not mutually exclusive.","time":1782067598,"type":"comment"},{"by":"slopinthebag","id":48620757,"parent":48620090,"text":"I prefer the go mantra: a little copying is better than a little dependency.
Abstraction is a vague term when used here. Is a shared function an “abstraction”? It’s more like implementation hiding, maybe some data hiding. But you definitely have a dependency on it now.
Acronyms like DRY are for beginners. Once you get good you know when to break the “rules” (and when not to).","time":1782062783,"type":"comment"},{"by":"atmanactive","id":48620431,"parent":48620090,"text":"No it's not.","time":1782060785,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aplomb1026","dead":true,"id":48620839,"parent":48620090,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782063318,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gilleswr","dead":true,"id":48622035,"parent":48620090,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782071630,"type":"comment"},{"by":"meerita","dead":true,"id":48620944,"parent":48620090,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782064054,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48620543,"parent":48620090,"time":1782061524,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SameerVers3","dead":true,"id":48621942,"parent":48620090,"text":"[dead]","time":1782070942,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Ozzie-D","dead":true,"id":48620552,"parent":48620090,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782061590,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"toomuchtodo","descendants":94,"id":48579013,"kids":[48623373,48624895,48623489,48623672,48623285,48623793,48624709,48624624,48624770,48623673,48623887,48624376,48623948,48579648,48623573],"score":169,"time":1781743012,"title":"HPV jabs cut risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30 to almost zero","type":"story","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/17/hpv-jabs-reduce-risk-dying-cervical-cancer-before-30-zero-study-finds","comments":[{"by":"alistairSH","id":48623373,"kids":[48624108,48623395],"parent":48579013,"text":"Reducing deaths is great, but shouldn’t they also mention the reduction in treatment (which is usually surgical or chemo, both of which are massively expensive, traumatic, and life altering in negative ways).","time":1782082018,"type":"comment"},{"by":"wolvoleo","id":48624895,"parent":48579013,"text":"I wasn't allowed to have it from the official health service because I'm already 50 even though I've not been very active in earlier years. But I paid for it myself (600€ for the 3 shots, quite expensive). I'm glad I did, when reading stuff like this.
They don't usually give it to older people because the more you have been exposed to the virus the less effective the vaccine is. But it protects against 9 variants and I think it is very unlikely I've encountered them all.","time":1782095078,"type":"comment"},{"by":"AngryData","id":48623489,"kids":[48624927,48623501,48623957,48623520],"parent":48579013,"text":"Glad to see it, except it is still a sensationalist headline IMO because HPV deaths, and specifically below 30 years old, is already extremely low.","time":1782082962,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Supermancho","id":48623672,"kids":[48623700,48623978],"parent":48579013,"text":"Why is a this news headline using the slang "jabs"?","time":1782084428,"type":"comment"},{"by":"eek2121","id":48623285,"kids":[48623346,48623436,48623467],"parent":48579013,"text":"Just a note: the article focuses on the ladies, but men should absolutely get it as well because it cuts risk for other types of cancers. I was looking for a better link, however this is the only one I found (I had an older one saved, however I can't find it):
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/24/health/hpv-men-vaccine-cancer...","time":1782081277,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nikolay","id":48623793,"kids":[48624064,48624330,48624432,48624155,48623924,48624674],"parent":48579013,"text":"My oldest daughter almost died from the first Gardasil, so you may not die from cervical cancer, but die from something else. I am not against vaccines; my kids are all fully vaccinated on a spaced-out schedule and not taking more than one shot in at least 2 months, and so am I, but the HPV vaccine was not mandatory, so, given the experience and the similar genetics, we didn't do it for the other two kids. Yeah, there's a risk of cancer, which might be curable 5-10-15 years from now, but the risk of side effects is here now... for some. So, it's not always a win-win, and we've got no interest from health authorities in assessing the risk for my other two kids, so they also seem very risk-averse and want us to assume all the negatives.","time":1782085483,"type":"comment"},{"by":"yamillove","id":48624709,"parent":48579013,"text":"They forgot the “This article is made possible with funding from Pharma Inc”.","time":1782093473,"type":"comment"},{"by":"polnurfer","id":48624624,"parent":48579013,"text":"Just keep it in your pants, Billy C","time":1782092639,"type":"comment"},{"by":"economistbob","id":48624770,"parent":48579013,"text":"Death risk was already low in many places.
Over a period of 30 years, approximately 400 women died of the disease under age 25 in the USA. [1] So many women's deaths were reported to VAERS in relationship to the HPV vaccination that it exceeded the death rate of the disease itself in the United States after approval. In the safety systems setup in 1986 in exchange for immunity for the vaccine manufacturers, the death rate from the HPV vaccine itself exceeds the death rates of cervical cancer, and that says nothing about the tens of thousands of other adverse events.
Dr. Harper was responsible for the phase 2 and phase 3 safety and effectiveness studies and made a speech and said she was making it so she could "clear her conscience so she could sleep at night" On October 2, 2009 in Reston Virginia at the 4th International Conference on Vaccination.
She specifically said that the vaccination was unlikely to have any effect upon the rate of cervical cancer in the United States. If it would not reduce in the United States, why would it reduce it elsewhere? Most reportage since that time frame relates to total cancer cancers and treats the injections as risk free.
The approved vaccination received approval for 4 strains out of more than 40 known.
And while studies are retracted related to fertility -- the hard data from fertility services providers is not. Gravidity (the number of times one is pregnant) is about halved for the HPV vaccinated vs the unvaccinated.
There have also been large scale studies indicating the same, but when politics retracts something, many believe that one should ignore that document. The raw gravidity counts on the other hand, are a observable fact. The vaccinated patients were even older, which makes it even worse, because those are older women who have had more time to be pregnant. [2]
Gravidity is a fact. So is cutting it by half via HPV correlation Read link two. Look at those gravidity numbers for older vaccinated women and younger unvaccinated women. HPV vaccination may not be caused by eugenics but it is certainly correlated with it.
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2827212
2. https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(23)00478-8/full...","time":1782094034,"type":"comment"},{"by":"arjie","id":48623673,"kids":[48624921,48623726,48624151,48623757,48624073,48623824],"parent":48579013,"text":"Every time HPV comes up, someone says “guys should get the vaccine too” but I’ve never managed to succeed. Even after last time someone mentioned it I tried and I got the absolutely worst result where they recorded me as being given it but then said it wasn’t meant for men my age. Had to get it removed from the record by the One Medical people I saw next.
And when I saw them, they said it wouldn’t be covered under insurance and would be like $1.2k. I intended to just get it on my next visit to India but ended up not traveling.
I don’t get it. Is this like those Internet memes “don’t mess with the postal police” and stuff or is it a real thing? Any guy in their late 30s in the US who managed to get it?","time":1782084431,"type":"comment"},{"by":"moralestapia","id":48623887,"kids":[48624913,48624054,48624479,48624404,48624390],"parent":48579013,"text":"What's the rate for the unvaccinated group? So a comparison can be made vs. the vaccinated one.
The fact that they leave this out is a bit weird, sloppy journalism I guess.","time":1782086337,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SanjayMehta","dead":true,"id":48624376,"parent":48579013,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782090610,"type":"comment"},{"by":"TZubiri","dead":true,"id":48623948,"kids":[48624166,48624088],"parent":48579013,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782087033,"type":"comment"},{"by":"apothegm","id":48579648,"kids":[48623136,48624924,48623182,48623305,48623098],"parent":48579013,"text":"From what risk level without them? How many people actually die of cervical cancer before age 30??
I mean, vaccinations and cancer prevention are both great, but this headline is ridiculous.","time":1781747977,"type":"comment"},{"by":"kelipso","id":48623573,"kids":[48623883,48623875],"parent":48579013,"text":"I remember this vaccine being part of political discourse, so I everyone should be extremely skeptical of any news about it.","time":1782083580,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"brandur","descendants":52,"id":48620342,"kids":[48621636,48621252,48623897,48622408,48621311,48622789,48621169,48622017,48621900,48620915,48622345,48621987,48623226,48621540,48621929,48623998,48621376,48621849,48622931,48620827,48624615,48622505,48622087,48623358],"score":134,"time":1782060081,"title":"The minimum viable unit of saleable software","type":"story","url":"https://brandur.org/minimum-viable-unit","comments":[{"by":"zingar","id":48621636,"kids":[48623370,48623945],"parent":48620342,"text":"I have multiple side projects that I would never have contemplated building before but whose utility now exceeds the much lower cost to build.
I got a few weeks in to each and then stalled on all of them because the effort and motivation required to extend beyond the crazed early days _is_ still more than the utility I get.
In a professional context, paying someone for software to do something outside my core domain is still the practical option compared to the motivation and effort needed to maintain another dependency.","time":1782068689,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ahamilton454","id":48621252,"kids":[48621748],"parent":48620342,"text":"I like that you point out that the cost to build software is still not 0. And in my expirence it’s further from 0 than I would expect. I often find myself thinking I can rebuild a project (or usually improve upon an existing one) in just a few days. And yet when it comes down to making anything well, it still takes time and iteration.
It’s a bit funny because I felt this way before coding agents as well, like you could clone something in just a few weeks. But in practice my expectations are rarely accurate.","time":1782066119,"type":"comment"},{"by":"andai","id":48623897,"parent":48620342,"text":"> Are you crazy?! Anything you ship can be instantly displaced by an internal package built by an LLM!
That's funny, the first thing every LLM I use generally does is install a bunch of third party packages...","time":1782086499,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bze12","id":48622408,"parent":48620342,"text":"“Build vs buy” assumes that there are only two parties. If it’s easier to build internally, then it’s easier for a 3rd party competitor to enter the market and bid the price down. I think the "zone of viability" is real, it just narrows and shifts downward.
The author hints at this in a footnote:\n> It does, however, pencil out to use a different product instead. In this particular case, it’s easy: use Linear instead of Jira.","time":1782074479,"type":"comment"},{"by":"monkeydust","id":48621311,"kids":[48622130,48621927],"parent":48620342,"text":"I wouldn't underestimate the community effect of software. There are plenty of features that get shipped because a small but important minority requested them, only to benefit the long tail of users who never knew to ask for such a feature but now find it indispensable. If everyone is building their own isolated solutions, how does this positive externality manifest itself?","time":1782066456,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ChrisMarshallNY","id":48622789,"kids":[48622811],"parent":48620342,"text":"> the internet’s most wretched hive of engagement farmers and master solicitors of fake information and fictional anecdotes, LinkedIn
Great quote!","time":1782077429,"type":"comment"},{"by":"deftio","id":48621169,"parent":48620342,"text":"Truly agree with the framing of buy vs build.
Also, some software businesses use a ton of aggregated or hard to get data which needs to be synthesized and that doesn't go away even if the llm driven coding is cheap.","time":1782065582,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jwitchel","id":48622017,"kids":[48623394],"parent":48620342,"text":"I recently asked Claude to duplicate Google Docs. It practically threw up. I tried to have it write a plan, decompose it, deobfuscate it.
It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly.
It knew.
One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality.
With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face.
You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there.
These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.","time":1782071540,"type":"comment"},{"by":"drchaim","id":48621900,"parent":48620342,"text":"Brandur of course knows more than me, and his framing sounds correct. I would be worried about whether the TAM of Go + Postgres is enough for business sustainability, but that says probably more about my fears than the reality in this huge market called “internet”","time":1782070653,"type":"comment"},{"by":"applfanboysbgon","id":48620915,"kids":[48621069,48621308,48621041,48621028,48622204,48621837,48621251],"parent":48620342,"text":"Be careful with making decisions about your livelihood based on a rational calculus. As you correctly point out, there is a threshold for which a programmer or company should not even blink at the cost of software. It's often the case that if the software they're buying saves one single hour of productivity, it's value-positive... and yet they won't buy it. Individual devs are notorious for refusing to pay a cent out of their own wallet, turning up their noses at anything that isn't offered open source and completely free. Enterprises manage to saddle what should be a no-brainer trivial expense into dozens of hours of bureaucracy that cost two orders of magnitude more than the expense the bureaucracy is for.
Your customers are more irrational than you are, and your appeal to them will likely need to resonate with them on an emotional level rather than logical one. I would argue that marketing is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, by far.","time":1782063897,"type":"comment"},{"by":"CrzyLngPwd","id":48622345,"kids":[48623121],"parent":48620342,"text":"I am forced to use jira soon as I was using BB issues and that is expiring soon.
So I'll build something simple for us, that integrates with our systems and how we like to do things.
It won't cost us much since our meagre requirements are nothing comparted to a full fledged Jira replacement.
Without LLMs it would have taken maybe a couple of days effort and perhaps an hour a month to fix any bugs we miss or add an extra overlooked feature.
With LLMs ... we shall see.
We won't set out to solve all of the world's issue tracking problems, so that will save a lot of time.
KISS is the goal.","time":1782073915,"type":"comment"},{"by":"stevenjgarner","id":48621987,"parent":48620342,"text":"I think this is a well thought out understanding of your specific snapshot in time. However these are indeed exponential times. It may be more realistic to do your calculus on time shifting assumptions, especially given how clear you are about the development time and life cycle of the product.","time":1782071256,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ThePhysicist","id":48623226,"parent":48620342,"text":"Corporations will be quite happy with really simple features if they're packaged right. I'm selling software that mostly does things that a good programmer could whip up in a couple of days or weeks, but what cost me most of the development time wasn't the features but all the FUD around them e.g. SSO, multitenancy, audit logs, corporate design support, ... Most enterprise software could be replaced with simple scripts and command line tools if they had this enterprise layer. I'd wager tons of SaaS is just simple open-source software and libraries behind a management layer.","time":1782080728,"type":"comment"},{"by":"imhoguy","id":48621540,"kids":[48621674],"parent":48620342,"text":"Not a SalesForce dev, but there is a bit of oversimplification what CRM SaaS is today.
Almost everything integrates with SF today and most often understanding, replicating and maintaining these integration pathways may need more than 1.5 engineers. You then bring 3 engineers (to cover absences) and buy enough tokens.
And we haven't even scratched other parts: disaster recovery, security, legal (CCPA/GDPR), etc","time":1782068078,"type":"comment"},{"by":"holistio","id":48621929,"parent":48620342,"text":"1.) your site looks gorgeous\n2.) so does the Bulgarian scene from the top, added it to my list\n3.) excellent thinking, I'm wishing you good luck","time":1782070849,"type":"comment"},{"by":"globalnode","id":48623998,"parent":48620342,"text":"Not everyone is a 200k engineer. Even kids with some hacker skills or university students with time > salary, who have access to LLM's, will start making cheaper alternatives and get into business that way for themselves.","time":1782087557,"type":"comment"},{"by":"piterrro","id":48621376,"kids":[48622470],"parent":48620342,"text":"Good luck on your new endeavour! Selling to devs is hard, did you consider building in public? That would def help get traction imo.\nYour point about considering API design and overall architecture would definitely differentiate among the all AI slop out there","time":1782066893,"type":"comment"},{"by":"chasing","id":48621849,"kids":[48624779],"parent":48620342,"text":"I find that younger software engineers sometimes take the attitude of: Why would I pay for that when I could easily just do it on my own? As they grow and gain more responsibilities that flips to: Why would I build and maintain something on my own when I could pay someone else a few bucks to do it? At least I feel I went through this change as I grew professionally...
So many things I am completely capable of doing on my own I simply don’t want to. I have better things to do. More valuable things.
Yes, build versus buy. The eternal question!","time":1782070335,"type":"comment"},{"by":"carlosjobim","id":48622931,"parent":48620342,"text":"In business you should focus more on how much you can make than on how much you can save.
If you are lucky to have talented staff on your payroll, they should put their hard work into things which increase business revenue and profit, not things which reduce expenses. Unless there's an expense which is outrageous.
If that engineer in the article example can build a Salesforce clone, then he can instead build more valuable software which the business can sell for a profit. It could be a Salesforce clone even.","time":1782078534,"type":"comment"},{"by":"cwmoore","id":48620827,"parent":48620342,"text":"“buy vs. build. . . the calculus changed”","time":1782063222,"type":"comment"},{"by":"defytonofficial","dead":true,"id":48624615,"parent":48620342,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782092521,"type":"comment"},{"by":"randomuser558","dead":true,"id":48622505,"parent":48620342,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782075294,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gilleswr","dead":true,"id":48622087,"parent":48620342,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782072026,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bschmidt900","dead":true,"id":48623358,"parent":48620342,"text":"[dead]","time":1782081891,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"mateenah","descendants":58,"id":48622590,"kids":[48623577,48623069,48623056,48623829,48623010,48623825,48622872,48623266,48623730,48622961,48623626,48624861,48622878,48623192,48623674,48623255,48623126,48623082,48623896,48623144,48623218,48623122,48622990,48623186,48624616,48623046,48624170],"score":77,"time":1782075937,"title":"Show HN: Recall – fully-local project memory for Claude Code","type":"story","url":"https://github.com/raiyanyahya/recall","comments":[{"by":"mikeocool","id":48623577,"kids":[48624686,48623759,48623944,48624111,48623820,48623908,48623996],"parent":48622590,"text":"I apparently use Claude differently the most people who talk about using Claude on the internet.
I’ll typically have a bunch of short sessions over the course of a day. Anytime I start a task that isn’t going to very directly benefit from the existing context I start fresh.
I don’t find a lot of benefit in explaining the project overall to Claude — I’ve deleted a lot of that explanation from my Claude.md because it didn’t seem to impact much.
I typically start a task by pointing it to 1-2 files and giving it some explanation of what I want done, and it \nfigures it out.
Basically never hit context window limits or compactions, and can’t remember the last time I hit a 5 hour or a weekly limit.","time":1782083613,"type":"comment"},{"by":"serial_dev","id":48623069,"kids":[48624866,48623235,48623594,48623612],"parent":48622590,"text":"I might be missing out on something but I never had to explain my project. Just give it a task, or if you really want to, type it quickly, then you are good to go.
I can’t imagine this being worth optimizing. The issue is never that Claude can’t figure out what the projects is about…
Am I missing something or does this project not solve a problem most regular people have?","time":1782079446,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SubiculumCode","id":48623056,"kids":[48623145],"parent":48622590,"text":"Sometimes its good to start fresh. LLMs need large context restart's sometimes so they can better identify holes that they become blind to.","time":1782079332,"type":"comment"},{"by":"anigbrowl","id":48623829,"parent":48622590,"text":"I use Deepseek and just as it to generate a state.md file with a summary of the project every time I've reached a goal or milestone. I then take a few minutes to edit this and add in or take out details. Between token pricing and generous cache discounts This has proved very efficient so far, I reset every few hours of work and bypass the muddle of having too many priorities or over-extrapolation from un-nuanced instructions I gave at an earlier stage.
I do think that this project is interesting in several ways - prioritizing privacy, minimizing spend, and using objective semantic markers to sift and consolidate the key takeaways from long sessions. I'd like to try it on my cline project history. But while it would make a great recording of project history, I wonder if a lot of it doesn't end up detailing blind alleys the project went down and had to back out of.
Generally when this happens I feel that it's due to vague specification on my part, or avoiding architectural decisions I didn't want to deal with and implicitly inviting the model to implement a lowest-common-denominator solution.","time":1782085783,"type":"comment"},{"by":"comrade1234","id":48623010,"kids":[48623044],"parent":48622590,"text":"IntelliJ handles this for you. Basically it sends half your project to Claude even if you're asking some question about Star Wars.","time":1782079028,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aubreykilian","id":48623825,"kids":[48624320],"parent":48622590,"text":"I have a documentation vault in my repo, organised using Obsidian (bases, wikilinks, frontmatter, etc), and accessible using obsidian-cli (and related Claude skills, thanks kepano). I started the repo agreeing with Claude the structure and front matter of documents and how to edit and read, all stored in a markdown file in the vault, and a specific instruction in the CLAUDE.md file on when and how to access it. Any updates require consistency sweeps. Any decisions made and agreed during implementation of new features get added to the vault.\nIt's been amazing how I just don't need to explain the project anymore. An empty context and a few sentences on what I'd like to spec next and the LLM finds what it needs in the vault.","time":1782085761,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tt_dev","id":48622872,"parent":48622590,"text":"How does this beat a Session specific README?","time":1782078106,"type":"comment"},{"by":"intothemild","id":48623266,"kids":[48623409],"parent":48622590,"text":"I think the majority here have stated the same... That CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md effectively do this. Either that or the readme.
The only tip I can give is that your skill that builds or wraps up work. You should have it update those files if anything has changed.
Claude/Agents files shouldn't be bloated, but should imho act as a basic amount of context on the project so your agent and skills can pick up and go, with even the most basic initial prompt.","time":1782081095,"type":"comment"},{"by":"rabbitlord","id":48623730,"parent":48622590,"text":"With all due respect, this github repo looks really like an AI-generated project.","time":1782084952,"type":"comment"},{"by":"reckless","id":48622961,"kids":[48622984],"parent":48622590,"text":"Doesn't Claude have memories like Codex?","time":1782078747,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gman83","id":48623626,"parent":48622590,"text":"How's it different to https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter ?","time":1782084022,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SwellJoe","id":48624861,"parent":48622590,"text":"Another day another "memory" system for a tool that cannot ever have memory. LLMs have context, and the more you fill that context with unrelated junk, the worse they perform.","time":1782094837,"type":"comment"},{"by":"giancarlostoro","id":48622878,"kids":[48623184,48623023,48622930],"parent":48622590,"text":"I never have to because I use a ticketing system the model goes through in addition to a CLAUDE.md file with a summary, including vision, goals, non-goals etc","time":1782078117,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gste","id":48623192,"parent":48622590,"text":"CLAUDE.md is already a good system for context window management for all the same reasons that version control management of code is good.
And keeping a local copy of everything you ever told Claude in your context window is bad for the same reasons keeping a local copy of your code called My_Code_v3_final.zip is bad.","time":1782080427,"type":"comment"},{"by":"coherentpony","id":48623674,"parent":48622590,"text":"My employer is counting token usage, so explaining my project between tokens isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I am clearly a more productive engineer because of it \\end{sarcasm}","time":1782084438,"type":"comment"},{"by":"cadamsdotcom","id":48623255,"parent":48622590,"text":"Exciting to see hooks used for automation.
But if I may, the need to manually update the context is a huge hurdle.
Automation like this is limited unless no human has to remember it. So perhaps you can save context during the PreCompact and Stop hooks.","time":1782081030,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dools","id":48623126,"parent":48622590,"text":"If I need context for a session then that is output from a previous session, otherwise I find any “memory” functionality cumbersome.
I saw /graphify recently which cuts down on exploration cost and seems more appealing (although I haven’t tried it yet)","time":1782079843,"type":"comment"},{"by":"alansaber","id":48623082,"parent":48622590,"text":"Nothing wrong with a toy project.","time":1782079505,"type":"comment"},{"by":"folays","id":48623896,"parent":48622590,"text":"I was tired of seeing "--resume"^W loose so much context.\n[edit: not --resume, I meant a new session using project memory]
I had the idea of an oracle/apprentice.\nThe idea was that the new session would learn from the old session, like a tutor.
I asked Claude to code a program, so that the old session would launch in loop, being the "oracle", and the new session would use it to connect to the oracle, to ask it questions.
So when I'm doing that, I'm seeing the two Claude sessions discussing between them. It's fun seeing the "apprentice" asking follow-ups questions.
The mechanism (on a Linux machine) is relatively simple : I asked Claude to code a Go tool, to use an abstract socket (\\0claude-handoff-<projectname>), and specified that whichever is the first to successfully listen (no EADDRINUSE) becomes the "listen()er/accept()er" and that the second becomes the "connect()er".
So that establishing the socket in whichever order is independent of which of them is the oracle/listener.
I've put the mechanism in a global Claude rules. In the oracle when I'm a 98% usage of the 1M context, I just have to type "handoff <projectname> oracle", and to start a new session with "handoff <projectname> client".
And the "oracle" will loop on the tool (with a subagent, waiting indefinitely), the tool exits with a question on output, and re-call (with a subagent "handoff <projectname> answer") to give back the answer (which automatically waits for the next question).
And since the oracle is doing the call to the handoff tool in a subagent, when you see it answering, you can also type something along the lines of "hey please also precise to the apprentice <some specific information>".
The "transmission of knowledge which matters" is so much efficient, that ~2% of remaining context (20k tokens) is enough to transmis WAY MORE USEFUL information that any memory saving which would miss important informations.
It's not unexpected. It's like real-life. You may have an human put all informations that you want in some documentation, nothing can replace a phone line from the new human to the previous human for specific follow-up questions.
Tho one of the mattering rule specificity is to precise that the oracle should always include in this response the level of confidence in the answer, like if it is certainty/guess/hypothesis.
It's fun seeing the two Claudes discussing like two colleagues. I guess you could also ask Claude to code the tool to instead connect on a localhost IRC server.
I think that if you want this tool, you just have to c/c my text into a new Claude session and to tell it "I want this too, please code it, please also setup the global rule".","time":1782086491,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zihotki","id":48623144,"kids":[48623205],"parent":48622590,"text":"Are there any benchmarks/evals to back the claims? Or how do you know that it helps reducing waste?","time":1782080033,"type":"comment"},{"by":"drivebyhooting","id":48623218,"kids":[48623279],"parent":48622590,"text":"Why would you want a simple summarizer instead of frontier AI doing the summarization for you?","time":1782080662,"type":"comment"},{"by":"hbarka","id":48623122,"parent":48622590,"text":"Willing to try this but the author missed that Claude also has memory.md","time":1782079812,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dimitrios1","id":48622990,"parent":48622590,"text":"The question I find myself asking very often these days: Is this better than asking claude to do the same things the plugin/repo does?","time":1782078907,"type":"comment"},{"by":"johnwheeler","id":48623186,"parent":48622590,"text":"How is this different than just using a resume?","time":1782080395,"type":"comment"},{"by":"defytonofficial","dead":true,"id":48624616,"parent":48622590,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782092527,"type":"comment"},{"dead":true,"deleted":true,"id":48623046,"parent":48622590,"time":1782079295,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SadErn","dead":true,"id":48624170,"parent":48622590,"text":"[dead]","time":1782088917,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"worik","descendants":55,"id":48622788,"kids":[48624002,48622962,48622952,48622921,48623452,48622986,48622897,48623172,48624468,48624285,48623859],"score":115,"time":1782077425,"title":"FDA advisors unanimously vote to approve Moderna's mRNA after agency drama","type":"story","url":"https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/fda-advisors-unanimously-vote-to-approve-modernas-mrna-after-agency-drama/","comments":[{"by":"JSR_FDED","id":48624002,"kids":[48624944,48624272,48624450,48624326],"parent":48622788,"text":"How much death and suffering does this guy have on his conscience?
I’m so curious how someone goes from being a professor to a science denier? I simply can’t imagine that journey.","time":1782087593,"type":"comment"},{"by":"comrade1234","id":48622962,"kids":[48623015,48624039],"parent":48622788,"text":"Is this the one that's a flu/Covid combo? I live in Europe and have been looking forward to it - especially since the flu part covers way more variants than traditionally - no longer a need to depend on flawed predictions as to what variants will be predominant. Also no longer a need for two sore arms.","time":1782078754,"type":"comment"},{"by":"epistasis","id":48622952,"kids":[48624302,48623510,48623118,48623616,48623716],"parent":48622788,"text":"The subversion of scientific expertise to replace it with podcasters and political sycophants is one of the biggest disasters of the current years.
The very concept of merit has been destroyed and replaced with judgement calls on celebrity (necessary for leadership role) and subservience to the political whims of the last 15 minutes (and you had better switch in the next 15 minutes or you're out).","time":1782078678,"type":"comment"},{"by":"amanaplanacanal","id":48622921,"kids":[48624024],"parent":48622788,"text":"Sounds like at least one step toward putting science back in charge.","time":1782078432,"type":"comment"},{"by":"consensus1","id":48623452,"parent":48622788,"text":"> Prasad was also behind the rejection of a closely watched gene therapy for Huntington’s disease made by UniQure
This guy is a disaster. But really it's not just him. It's the entire organizational structure that puts him, or any other one person, in the position that they have the power to do this. There is simply no one qualified.
We need to have expert scientists to set up trials and review the design of the trials and conduct the analysis of the data. This is something that is generally objective and not able to be done without skills and experience. But then you have to make a decision based on those results. And the decision is some sort of risk reward trade off. While science can quantify what that tradeoff is, which path to take is fundamentally outside of the scope of science.
Trade offs are not objective determinations at all because they are based on subjective preferences. And therefore it makes no sense to force it into a one size fits all approval or denial by some centralized body. The only rational approach to such a trade off is to allow each individual to choose for themselves. The only person's opinion on whether the risk justifies the reward for the experimental Huntington's disease treatment is the patient's. The best we can do with science is to use it for its intended purpose to produce good data for him to make his choice.","time":1782082622,"type":"comment"},{"by":"arjie","id":48622986,"parent":48622788,"text":"This would be a much more useful headline if it said "vote to approve Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine".","time":1782078872,"type":"comment"},{"by":"andy99","id":48622897,"parent":48622788,"text":"For context, it’s a seasonal flu vaccine, the title is a bit unclear.","time":1782078297,"type":"comment"},{"by":"2OEH8eoCRo0","id":48623172,"parent":48622788,"text":"Is this good because flu vaccines are an educated guess as to what will be circulating because it takes so long to culture them all and this will shorten the manufacturing time so the educated guess can take place later in the process (and be more accurate)?","time":1782080308,"type":"comment"},{"by":"willmadden","id":48624468,"parent":48622788,"text":"Flu vaccines aren't immunizing vaccines. They protect against specific strains, and half the time they immunize against a strain that doesn't become widespread and do very little or nothing to protect you. They have side effects which vary widely in severity depending on the specific vaccine.
This article has no data about why mRNA flu vaccines will improve these outcomes, and has no data about the risk/benefit ratio or how it was calculated. It doesn't even cite the "studies" it mentions. It's a remarkably bad article written for low information readers by a low information author.
Hard pass until I see some hard data.","time":1782091295,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ConanRus","dead":true,"id":48624285,"parent":48622788,"text":"[dead]","time":1782089787,"type":"comment"},{"by":"chmorgan_","id":48623859,"parent":48622788,"text":"If Prasad thought this needed more research then it needed more research. He and the people he works with have written dozens, maybe hundreds now, of reports that expose studies that lack the rigor for definitive results, have misleading endpoints, have imbalanced arms etc. I get that anything that would slow vaccines down has somehow become political and lots of people would gladly accept the pharmaceutical companies word on things. This is a blindness due to political leanings and not evidence based. If Prasad says it needs more and better data I'd put money on it needing it.","time":1782086052,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"MrBuddyCasino","descendants":36,"id":48618536,"kids":[48624609,48618878,48624572,48619696,48624150,48624300,48624637,48624357,48619823,48624757,48624336,48619898],"score":56,"text":"https://xcancel.com/MattZirwas/status/2068365802491834541","time":1782046508,"title":"I was wrong about the Midjourney ultra-sound scanner","type":"story","url":"https://twitter.com/MattZirwas/status/2068365802491834541","comments":[{"by":"madrox","id":48624609,"kids":[48624732,48624736],"parent":48618536,"text":"I wonder how much of the knee-jerk cynicism comes down to it being Midjourney doing this in a way where it feels like "practicing medicine without a license."
The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.
It is very easy to be cynical about change...especially in areas we are knowledgable...because all we see are the challenges.
And there will be lots of challenges with this. For my part, I'm not wild about what Midjourney might be allowed to do with this data. However, dealing with those problems seems better to me than leaving things as they are. This X post is a great example of "yes, and" instead of "no."","time":1782092485,"type":"comment"},{"by":"techblueberry","id":48618878,"kids":[48624350],"parent":48618536,"text":"2 things:
1. We should absolutely pursuing these kind of ideas but given then nature of technological progress and our history with “democratization” things are likely to get worse before we get better. Matt is hedging a lot here reflecting this.
2. Maybe all this stuff is as promising as the various threads suggest but it’s bizzare that this is all being argued in culture war terms (you vs the gatekeepers) and not like shared human flourishing terms. Again maybe it’s working, but it’s also being marketed to a certain kind of persons fears, not as the future of human understanding.","time":1782049088,"type":"comment"},{"by":"the__alchemist","id":48624572,"kids":[48624642],"parent":48618536,"text":"> But the only way to find out was to have invasive, risky procedures to biopsy or remove what was found.
> And overall, the side effects from all the risky, invasive procedures to track down the over 90% of stuff that was harmless equal or outweigh the benefit from removing the less than 10% of stuff that wasn't harmless.
I accept this (well-used) perspective from a practical, current perspective, but not for abstract diagnostics generally. From the Bayes' theorem, and same logic you use in Kalman filters: More knowledge, if you have data on the confidence, always helps. It only causes these negative outcomes due to acting poorly with the data (e.g. due to emotions and liability concerns, I suspect here)","time":1782092129,"type":"comment"},{"by":"FinnLobsien","id":48619696,"kids":[48622649,48622666],"parent":48618536,"text":"There’s one thing that I find interesting about this. I can’t judge whether this is a good product, whether it’ll work, and what it’ll add to the medical establishment, or whether more data is always more useful.
In general, I think we should applaud this though.
Any genuine attempt to create novel medical technologies is probably a good thing (assuming they’re non-invasive and non-painful).
Unless it’s a Theranos situation, I think it’s a great thing to attempt, even if it fails. So many things we rely on today are the result of a successful attempt, but the failures were just as necessary for the eventual success.
That ambition is very positive to me.","time":1782055141,"type":"comment"},{"by":"winrid","id":48624150,"kids":[48624275],"parent":48618536,"text":"This is AI right?","time":1782088717,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jti107","id":48624300,"parent":48618536,"text":"one thing it can be used for is ultra precise body fat estimation and localization. depending on your genetics you might be skinny fat but have alot of internal visceral fat that is very damaging to your health.
the state of the art is dexa scans but they can be off by 5+% and more error on the distribution of the fat","time":1782089873,"type":"comment"},{"by":"democracy","id":48624637,"kids":[48624666],"parent":48618536,"text":"Midjourney seems useless these days, not even sure why would anyone use.","time":1782092802,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jmward01","id":48624357,"kids":[48624665],"parent":48618536,"text":"I'm not a doctor but (Isn't there always a but after someone saying they aren't a doctor?) it seems to me we need three things to bring in a true revolution:
- imaging that can get down to the cellular level easily and often.
- the ability to process that imaging data to find issues effectively.
- the ability to act on that data in a minimally invasive way.
This is a step in the right direction for one and two and the third has had progress too by others. We aren't there yet, but I can see a future where individual cells are treated and at that point all sorts of things are possible.","time":1782090495,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48619823,"parent":48618536,"time":1782056118,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48624757,"parent":48618536,"time":1782093884,"type":"comment"},{"by":"noobermin","id":48624336,"kids":[48624754],"parent":48618536,"text":"Given the incentives (an ai booster account who is also prompting chat to write his posts) does this even belong on HN? I feel like our standards have dropped so much in the last two years.","time":1782090212,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aaron695","dead":true,"id":48619898,"parent":48618536,"text":"[dead]","time":1782056733,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"ObviouslyFlamer","descendants":15,"id":48567028,"kids":[48571199,48623866,48571257,48623634,48624041],"score":63,"time":1781681609,"title":"Minecraft: Java Edition 26.2, the first version with Vulkan 1.2","type":"story","url":"https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-java-edition-26-2","comments":[{"by":"HelloUsername","id":48571199,"parent":48567028,"text":"Ooh nice! Would've expected a bigger blog post announcement about it though? Like couple months back: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/another-step-towards... (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068948)","time":1781707211,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jchw","id":48623866,"kids":[48624955,48624562],"parent":48567028,"text":"I find this choice interesting. Vulkan is a sensible choice given the game is multiplatform (and of course they mention MoltenVK right in the announcement.) Despite that, I still find it interesting that a Microsoft subsidiary would make this choice given that Vulkan is a direct competitor to Direct3D and that Microsoft seemed to only begrudgingly continue to support OpenGL and wgl. (Am I hallucinating, or was there not a period of time where the graphics drivers shipped from Windows Update simply omitted OpenGL support, leaving you with only the terrible OpenGL 1.4 software renderer?)","time":1782086121,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ramon156","id":48571257,"kids":[48573698,48623503,48573379],"parent":48567028,"text":"> Under Vulkan, we will prefer your dedicated graphics card over any integrated graphics, which is a change from OpenGL
Did OpenGL not do this?","time":1781707466,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SugarReflex","id":48623634,"kids":[48624455,48623789],"parent":48567028,"text":"Is it safe to say that this positively affected me?\nFor the very first time I installed Linux Mint on my old gaming with a 1080 TI and installed Minecraft/Steam. Minecraft ran beautifully and it is Java Edition 26.2. \nI've had a harder hit and miss time with games on Steam.","time":1782084047,"type":"comment"},{"by":"bellowsgulch","id":48624041,"kids":[48624068],"parent":48567028,"text":"I thought Minecraft has been using bgfx for a while now.","time":1782087855,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"kaushikmahorker","id":48620504,"score":1,"time":1782061228,"title":"Wildcard (YC W25) is hiring an applied ML engineer","type":"job","url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wildcard/jobs/SEmo4di-founding-applied-ml-engineer","comments":[]},{"by":"olievans","descendants":13,"id":48609054,"kids":[48624766,48624800,48624253,48624177,48613468,48613634,48612396,48609193,48614623,48623881],"score":52,"time":1781961508,"title":"Show HN: Criterion Closet as a website – pull any of 1,247 films off the shelf","type":"story","url":"https://the-criterion-closet.vercel.app","comments":[{"by":"mcint","id":48624766,"parent":48609054,"text":"Nice to be reminded of the collection, and another way to present it.
I want to view the boxes, especially after filtering, grouped near eye level and seeing the faces not just the spines.
Nice to see VR (potential for XR), cool use!","time":1782093982,"type":"comment"},{"by":"davidhariri","id":48624800,"parent":48609054,"text":"Awesome! I recently replaced Netflix for Criterion so this is quite welcome!","time":1782094310,"type":"comment"},{"by":"dnlzro","id":48624253,"parent":48609054,"text":"I’m going to use the heck out of this!
Just one suggestion: Could you add another sort order for the list view based on the number of “closet picks”? It would be cool to see which films are most popular among Criterion Closet guests.","time":1782089573,"type":"comment"},{"by":"aarmenante","id":48624177,"parent":48609054,"text":"you need to add a feature where You can put your self in there with a webcam and record a interview","time":1782088967,"type":"comment"},{"by":"apresmoi","id":48613468,"parent":48609054,"text":"Really nice. You could use polycss.com and render the library and form all together!","time":1781993561,"type":"comment"},{"by":"VarunMenon","id":48613634,"parent":48609054,"text":"really nice! Criterion should have this as a view on their website!","time":1781994996,"type":"comment"},{"by":"starkparker","id":48612396,"kids":[48612512],"parent":48609054,"text":"Missing quite a few compilations,","time":1781985071,"type":"comment"},{"by":"julia-kafarska","id":48609193,"kids":[48609211],"parent":48609054,"text":"Are those movies public domain?","time":1781963078,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sarmadc","id":48614623,"parent":48609054,"text":"This is so cool!","time":1782003374,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jbaber","id":48623881,"parent":48609054,"text":"Very, very nice!","time":1782086304,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"tosh","descendants":55,"id":48619831,"kids":[48621746,48620229,48623969,48619997,48622534,48622517,48621891,48620099,48622389,48623816,48622435,48619922,48622351,48621262,48620325,48623758,48622863,48619948,48620385,48619979,48622820,48620567,48620387,48621070,48620556],"score":166,"time":1782056193,"title":"(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)","type":"story","url":"https://norvig.com/lispy.html","comments":[{"by":"dang","id":48621746,"kids":[48622841,48621991],"parent":48619831,"text":"Is it classics day or something? (Fine with us!)
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(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443949 - Feb 2022 (9 comments)
(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30327437 - Feb 2022 (3 comments)
(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036431 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
How to Write a Lisp Interpreter In Python (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20590439 - Aug 2019 (29 comments)
How to Write a Lisp Interpreter in Python (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12777852 - Oct 2016 (28 comments)
How to Write a Lisp Interpreter in Python (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7825054 - May 2014 (41 comments)
(How to Write a ((Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1746916 - Oct 2010 (10 comments)
(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745322 - Sept 2010 (39 comments)","time":1782069492,"type":"comment"},{"by":"chombier","id":48620229,"kids":[48621686],"parent":48619831,"text":"If you ever wondered how to write a programming language, this is probably the best resource to get started (and then of course Crafting Interpreters).
See also part 2 https://norvig.com/lispy2.html","time":1782059146,"type":"comment"},{"by":"jll29","id":48623969,"parent":48619831,"text":"Strangely, Peter's 1987 Ph.D. thesis cites itself (reference 90), but with the year being off by one (1986).
Writing a LISP in Python is only for educational use, or to have a boostrap LISP that you can write a better (faster) LISP in.","time":1782087337,"type":"comment"},{"by":"zahlman","id":48619997,"kids":[48620373],"parent":48619831,"text":"(how-to in-python (write (interpreter lisp)))","time":1782057431,"type":"comment"},{"by":"leonardool","id":48622534,"parent":48619831,"text":"I've been working on a similar (ish) project for a while: Ribbit (https://github.com/udem-dlteam/ribbit). Supports a full R4RS REPL (with tail-calls) in the same sizes as Lispy (8Kb for JavaScript and 6.5Kb for x86)!","time":1782075475,"type":"comment"},{"by":"userbinator","id":48622517,"kids":[48622780,48622615],"parent":48619831,"text":"And in the other direction, here's a Python interpreter written in Lisp: https://github.com/metawilm/cl-python","time":1782075348,"type":"comment"},{"by":"timonoko","id":48621891,"parent":48619831,"text":"My Lisp from 1975 was actually used in real world and highly lucrative. Gemini could read the source code, but it told that my code was piece of shit and cannot be implemented in 64-bit world without drastic changes, so it made an example. But that version was just too advanced and too complex as a study subject. There are already enuff good Lisps in the world, methinks.
https://github.com/timonoko/nokolisp","time":1782070589,"type":"comment"},{"by":"azhenley","id":48620099,"kids":[48620404],"parent":48619831,"text":"Writing a Lisp is one of my favorite projects. I try to do it every year or two, taking a different approach each time.","time":1782058155,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48622389,"parent":48619831,"time":1782074276,"type":"comment"},{"by":"wmedrano","id":48623816,"parent":48619831,"text":"I made a rusty version of this. No linked lists, but that's not important in the grand Scheme of things.
https://wmedrano.dev/post/2025/11/15/lisp-1","time":1782085681,"type":"comment"},{"by":"adamddev1","id":48622435,"parent":48619831,"text":"Interestingly enough, linguists also use Lisp-like parentheses or brackets to annotate sentence structures. Trees and brackets are isomorphic, as both phrase structure grammarians and the original SICP lectures pointed out.
The brackets in the title sentence would look a lot different though. ;-)","time":1782074679,"type":"comment"},{"by":"tosh","id":48619922,"kids":[48620087],"parent":48619831,"text":"I can't recommend highly enough to implement a simple lisp (or a forth).
Illuminating experience and it will also help you see (among many other things) the parentheses in a different light.","time":1782056924,"type":"comment"},{"by":"sashank_1509","id":48622351,"parent":48619831,"text":"Depressing to think that AI will be doing most of this in the future. Sharing it freely in the internet, basically ensures AI can copy it well.","time":1782073965,"type":"comment"},{"by":"timonoko","id":48621262,"parent":48619831,"text":"I actually perfected the Norvig Lisp at one time. It has compiler to python and just everything. Those very few here that can actually read code, understand why this project soon exploded into biggest piece of odorous excrement.
https://github.com/timonoko/nokolis.py","time":1782066175,"type":"comment"},{"by":"librasteve","id":48620325,"parent":48619831,"text":"or you could just use Raku and its “surprisingly good lisp impression”:
https://www.codesections.com/blog/raku-lisp-impression/","time":1782059920,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mathnode","id":48623758,"parent":48619831,"text":";;;; Not sorry
)","time":1782085228,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ljcoco","id":48622863,"parent":48619831,"text":"article to follow between all the ai noises these days","time":1782078029,"type":"comment"},{"by":"urcite_ty_kokos","id":48619948,"parent":48619831,"text":"Appreciated the title xD","time":1782057086,"type":"comment"},{"by":"joshuamorton","id":48620385,"parent":48619831,"text":"There are edge cases where this fails, but `def parse(s): return json.loads('['+re.sub('([")])\\s*(["(])','\\g<1>,\\g<2>',re.sub('[^()\\s]+','"\\g<0>"',s)).replace('(','[').replace(')',']')+']')` is a surprisingly robust lisp parser.","time":1782060407,"type":"comment"},{"by":"e12e","id":48619979,"parent":48619831,"text":"(2010)?","time":1782057321,"type":"comment"},{"by":"unfirehose","dead":true,"id":48622820,"parent":48619831,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782077722,"type":"comment"},{"deleted":true,"id":48620567,"parent":48619831,"time":1782061704,"type":"comment"},{"by":"timonoko","dead":true,"id":48620387,"kids":[48620602,48621007,48620493,48620918,48620617,48620478],"parent":48619831,"text":"[flagged]","time":1782060413,"type":"comment"},{"by":"timonoko","id":48621070,"kids":[48621097],"parent":48619831,"text":"?","time":1782065013,"type":"comment"},{"by":"RedCinnabar","id":48620556,"kids":[48620607,48620702,48620579],"parent":48619831,"text":"Man these kind of resources have aged really bad in the age of AI.","time":1782061622,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"modinfo","descendants":31,"id":48594090,"kids":[48624932,48621715,48621080,48622121,48621692,48624441,48622777,48624388,48621978,48621620],"score":62,"time":1781835016,"title":"An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy","type":"story","url":"https://github.com/w84death/floppinux","comments":[{"by":"buttocks","id":48624932,"parent":48594090,"text":"I wonder why the 486 DX is supported but not the SX. How is the math coprocessing unit necessary for kernel and basic system tools?","time":1782095414,"type":"comment"},{"by":"muppetman","id":48621715,"kids":[48622386,48622523,48622415],"parent":48594090,"text":"I wonder why it needs 20MB minimum. Back in the day linux 2.0.33 would boot happily into a GUI and everything on an 8MB machine.
Or maybe I misremember... I know my machine at the time got upgraded to 24MB so maybe it was that machine I was running.
Anyway it's neat this can still be done.","time":1782069185,"type":"comment"},{"by":"littlecranky67","id":48621080,"kids":[48622428,48623540,48621846,48621200,48621256],"parent":48594090,"text":"I remember around 2002 running my home router without any hdd on fli4l - a single floppy linux router distribution. I slept in the same room as the router was, hence I wanted a solution without a noisy hdd from that era.","time":1782065052,"type":"comment"},{"by":"Crunchified","id":48622121,"parent":48594090,"text":"I always had a muLinux disk handy in my computer toolbox. Most of its shell commands came from a simple script ingeniously written by the distro's author. It's been around since the mid-90s, I'd guess.
https://micheleandreoli.org/public/Software/mulinux/mu/html/...","time":1782072229,"type":"comment"},{"by":"EvanAnderson","id":48621692,"parent":48594090,"text":"I guess I made a floppy-based "distribution" of Linux back in the late 90s without even realizing it.
I built it to do network-based disk imaging of fleets of Windows 9X PCs in a K12 school district. I used udpcast[0] to receive the image of a FAT32 volume (as a raw dd of the source drive gzip'd) and would stream it in realtime (decompressing and writing) to the hard disk drive on the clients.
I would run the udpcast sender on a "gold master" PC and stream its drive out to as many clients as I wanted (over 10Base-T Ethernet at the time, but later over faster networks). Since the sending PC's CPU was typically the bottleneck the receiving PCs never had problems falling behind receiving and writing the stream.
The most time consuming part of this "generation" of the tool was writing all zeros to the free space on the "gold master" computer to minimize transferring "slack" space (since I was just using dd and not a filesystem-aware tool). I'd mount up the drive in a Linux distro and dd from /dev/zero to a dummy file on the volume until it was full, then delete the dummy file. (One of Jeff's axioms of computing in play: Never underestimate the power of stupid technology.)
I updated the "distribution" in the early 2000's to support NTFS using the various ntfsprogs tools (ntfsclone, ntfsresize) to support imaging Windows XP machines. It was vastly more efficient than the dd method because it only transferred the used blocks of the filesystem.
Since you could make bootable CDs (and later DVDs) using floppy diskette images as the "boot media" I updated the "distribution" again to support mounting a local optical disk and streaming the image off a bzip2'd ntfsclone image. I even added some silly multi-disk "spanning" capability for images >4.7GB. (It was very janky and involved recombining the image chunks in a temporary partition on the local drive, then imaging the machine from that local copy. The I/O contention of reading / writing from the same drive made that very, very slow.)
Finally, when PXE-capable NICs were more common, I would PXE boot the "distribution" (because PXE easily supported booting floppy disk images) and modified it to pull from HTTP, local optical drive, or udpcast.
I gave up when AHCI became common because I couldn't keep up with making the "modern" Linux kernels work with the various models of PCs I was using. I moved over to a Windows PE-based tool in about 2006 - 2007.
[0] http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/","time":1782069044,"type":"comment"},{"by":"h4kunamata","id":48624441,"parent":48594090,"text":"2000 Coyote Linux keeping a whole university network going while running from a floppy disk joined the chat.
The idea is cool but anything nowadays has USB ports, there is no suck solution to run from those devices.","time":1782091092,"type":"comment"},{"by":"st_goliath","id":48622777,"parent":48594090,"text":"This project has a website that was previously posted on HN[1], I (unsuccessfully) tried to boot it on an actual 486 machine[2], as the site boasts about supporting that.
The version of the SYSLINUX bootloader that it uses had a bug in the fallback path if E820 memory information is not available from the BIOS, and the BIOS on my machine indeed does not support it, or E801 for that matter[3].
I have not gotten around to further testing and fixing the actual issue in SYSLINUX yet (also one of the RAM sticks has sadly developed a parity issue, so I'm stuck at 16M for now). However, I did manage to dig up a newer 486 machine[4][5]. From some testing just this weekend, the BIOS on that one does support INT 15h, AX=E820. I'll have to dig up more memory, but I'm looking forward to another round of trying to get this to boot on the actual hardware, once again :-)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866544
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873814
[3] https://imgur.com/a/GCG9jO7
[4] https://imgur.com/a/am486dx4-retrotank-VUOTahf
[5] https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/zida-4dps","time":1782077371,"type":"comment"},{"by":"nycerrrrrrrrrr","id":48624388,"parent":48594090,"text":"See also https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/, http://www.tinycorelinux.net/","time":1782090708,"type":"comment"},{"by":"delduca","id":48621978,"parent":48594090,"text":"I used to use brazilfw on my server, it was only a single floppy","time":1782071199,"type":"comment"},{"by":"znpy","id":48621620,"kids":[48624832,48621638],"parent":48594090,"text":"“Floppydistros” were a thing back in the day.
When i was 12 or 13 in the very early 2000s i tried to download something called “coyote linux” (from sourceforge iirc) and boot it on an internet cafe pc because i really wanted to try this linux thing.
But i was very nooby and of course it mostly didn’t go anywhere. I have vague memories of maybe getting it to boot, getting a shell and then not know what to do with it.
Fun times :)","time":1782068581,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"paytonjjones","descendants":38,"id":48618488,"kids":[48623101,48621074,48623857,48621457,48624846,48621776,48623294,48621875,48622851],"score":67,"time":1782046188,"title":"Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch","type":"story","url":"https://github.com/paytonjjones/bsharp","comments":[{"by":"frafart","id":48623101,"kids":[48624075,48624567],"parent":48618488,"text":"It can be dormant in adults. I discovered it when I was 16 after meeting a pianist who had it and “taught me” how to do it. I kept getting faster and more accurate as I practiced solfeggio in music school in my 20s.
Crazy thing is it changes with age. At around 30 I started regressing. These days I identify the tones but shifted by one semitone.","time":1782079634,"type":"comment"},{"by":"KomoD","id":48621074,"kids":[48624045,48623788],"parent":48618488,"text":"> Young children can acquire absolute (perfect) pitch — but adults cannot. The window closes around age 6.
I found some papers suggesting it is possible for adults, but more difficult.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31686378/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388931575_Learning_...","time":1782065033,"type":"comment"},{"by":"throwawayk7h","id":48623857,"parent":48618488,"text":"What I dislike about this method is that it seems to be focussed on A=440 Hz, which is arbitrary. I assume that if the learner drifts later in life by under a semitone, then things will seem like they're between keys.","time":1782086043,"type":"comment"},{"by":"gcanyon","id":48621457,"kids":[48624483,48624329,48622923,48622253,48624735,48623238],"parent":48618488,"text":"I've seen articles that say that absolute perfect pitch is a curse, not a gift, because it wanders with age, and then everything is "out of key".","time":1782067454,"type":"comment"},{"by":"SeanLuke","id":48624846,"parent":48618488,"text":"I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote.
Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouln't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch.
For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the F# and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to C. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch.
This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing.
When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I couldn't sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over.
Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C.
It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but it looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object and you say, that's blue. But it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too, because your ego has been wrapped up tightly with perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.","time":1782094712,"type":"comment"},{"by":"mystifyingpoi","id":48621776,"kids":[48624101,48621932],"parent":48618488,"text":"What are the next steps after, let's say, a child is able to indentify all "colors"? They can distinguish F/A and F/C, then what? Should this app/method be combined with regular piano/other lessons, so the child knows what's even happening?","time":1782069724,"type":"comment"},{"by":"delis-thumbs-7e","id":48623294,"kids":[48623739,48624120,48623698,48623304,48624104],"parent":48618488,"text":"Don’t teach you kids perfect pitch. Introduce them to the wide variety of music from punk to jazz to classical and let them play with sounds. If they get into it, ask if they want a teacher in instrument of their liking.
Perfect pitch != musicality && perfect pitch != music genious or whatever people think it is. Relative pitch, good understanding pf harmony and good rhythm is much more essential.","time":1782081340,"type":"comment"},{"by":"RickJWagner","id":48621875,"kids":[48622989,48623613],"parent":48618488,"text":"As a banjo player, I have heard perfect pitch defined this way:
“Perfect Pitch: When you throw a banjo into a trash bin and it lands on an accordion.”","time":1782070501,"type":"comment"},{"by":"ljcoco","id":48622851,"parent":48618488,"text":"not sure this can be taught","time":1782077952,"type":"comment"}]},{"by":"yathern","descendants":9,"id":48612432,"kids":[48624144,48624174],"score":14,"text":"The overall idea is to chart out the thousands of Mini PCs by benchmark and reveal the Pareto Front so you can get the most Compute per Dollar. Definitely a labor of love as I have a number of Mini PCs for my "homelab" (TrueNAS, piHole, Plex, basic stuff). It uses Gemini to extract specs from listings (since they're not often strongly categorized).
Quick blog post here: https://luke.zip/posts/pareto-pcs/","time":1781985354,"title":"Show HN: MiniPCs.zip – Charting the Pareto frontier of Mini PCs","type":"story","url":"https://minipcs.zip","comments":[{"by":"walrus01","id":48624144,"kids":[48624293],"parent":48612432,"text":"The same N150 CPU mini PC with 12GB RAM I bought on Amazon a year ago seems to have considerably increased in price, as a result of the RAM price surge... Even though what's soldered onto its motherboard is probably the cheapest possible ddr4-2666 or similar.","time":1782088678,"type":"comment"},{"by":"yodon","id":48624174,"kids":[48624223,48624238],"parent":48612432,"text":"It would help if you actually explained what the color means.
What is yellow? What is green? What is blue? Are they relative to their CPU column? Relative to the pricing row? Absolute?","time":1782088937,"type":"comment"}]}]}