HN Best Comments

Re: OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room These are not very smart spies: > A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address. simonw, 8 hours ago

Re: New Apple TV 4K I'm a little surprised at the price (especially when their newly-announced HomeView is the same price, and it has a screen!). I love this product: it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data. I have two older ones and was looking to get something that supported 4K but waited for this to come out. $300 might be a decent price if you use it for all of the things that it can do, but if all you're doing is launching streaming apps, $200 was already on the high end for that. $300 seems...a bit much. Anything I'm missing here? The silver lining is that this product is almost certainly still in the "pay money then forget about it for a decade" tier, which is nice. I'm also wondering if/how the "add up to four homepods" feature compares to "getting a soundbar". In the other thread for this someone noted that the HomePods only work with this box; so if you're running a game console that's no bueno. But apart from that, if $600 on an Apple TV + two HomePods mini delivers something comparable to a ~$500 soundbar, that's a decent value proposition. Brendinooo, 15 hours ago

Re: Firefox Enterprise Folks here don't understand how big of a market this is. Island just raised a $400 million Series F at $6.4 billion valuation: https://www.island.io/press/island-announces-400-million-ser... Mozilla is also very, very far behind in this race. But the potential is real. Enterprises have both the budget and the motivation to care about DLP (including preventing employees from copy/pasting sensitive data into AI chat apps), VPN-less access to private intranet apps (including to contractors on BYOD), preventing access to sites that distract employees and have zero business value (pornography, gambling, etc.)... If you care about an open web browser, you should care about it having a sustainable revenue model. Enterprise browsers are exactly that revenue model. The question is not whether this is a good idea; the question is whether Mozilla can catch up. solatic, 7 hours ago

Re: Gemini 4 Argon I just created a Google account, which was a hassle. I tried to find an app and found AI Studio, but I’m not sure what that is. Then I found Antigravity, which apparently is Google’s alternative to Codex, and I installed it. Then I tried to buy the small Gemini AI Ultra package, but it didn’t let me pay. It accepted neither my credit card nor my PayPal account. It’s crazy how bad the Google experience is nowadays. You don’t know what to use or where to find it, and the security measures seem totally overkill. Am I really the only one having these experiences? Is Google aware of that? I_am_tiberius, 8 hours ago

Re: Gemini 4 Argon I haven't tried it for coding yet, but I ran a couple of my recent curiosity driven queries from Claude (mostly used Fable and Opus 5.5) through it. This is a clear step change, I'm genuinely amazed. Its answers are to-the-point, logically structured, clearly written. Like a really well made mini essay on your question. It also really likes to build little simulations / models that you can tweak the parameters on. Amazing to explore how different assumptions affect economic scenarios, for example. It's also great at picking (sourced) illustrations. I'll be using this for everything that isn't coding from now on. svara, 4 hours ago

Re: Gemini 4 Argon I'm using this model via API. I am most excited about its ability to write the english language (or any language). My least favorite trend on twitter has been people posting 2D illustrations/3D renders as a proxy for model capability. Well-written prose is far less likely to go viral but far outstrips the importance rendering a fantasy world in one shot. I've been trying it out via the API and the model has been a delight so far. Clear in the head, not RL-fried, distinct writing style, and big model smell. That said, the em-dash is back w/ this model. That said, I would be so frustrated with Sundar Pichai if I was on the Google team. The botched rollout of this model seems to be entirely a matter of capacity, and Pichai has been more than happy to give it to anybody but his own team. postalcoder, 8 hours ago

Re: Gemini 4 Argon > The model launches today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (with cached input tokens at 95% off). Couldn't you just say what the price will be after the introductory period and when it'll take effect? Do they have some SKILL.md for these blog posts that requires the most important information to always be buried ten levels deep and hidden behind a login page? damsta, 8 hours ago

Re: OpenAI engineer arrested in bugging of executive conference room Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people. adamm255, 2 hours ago

Re: Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy For all intents and purposes Character.ai was acquired in August 2024, and this is just the mess leftover from their run around antitrust regulation. The company filing for chapter 11 today is shell that was left after Google "hi-quired" (the opposite of acqui-hired) the founding team. The shareholders got paid ($2.7B from Google), the founding team moved on, and what's left is the corporate structure and whoever Google did not want. It sucks for the people left over (but then again, it also sucks to be part of the team that's laid off in a merger). It's also a terrible practice that I hope the Justice department and the CFTC will put an end to soon. fra, 9 hours ago

Re: Firefox Enterprise Probably the most practical idea Firefox has had to maintain and possibly build up its market share in a long time. PaulHoule, 10 hours ago

Re: Redesigning source control at Anthropic Excuse me for throwing up this stupid idea, but if code changes per unit of time keep growing at this rate and are not slowing down with infinite merging demand, it seems that this repo will be in a constant state of continuous change and we constantly roll forward with automated code and obviously no direct human supervision, then why even have source control? Why not just let software be fluid and, like Heraclitus river, never step twice in the same repo. frangonf, 4 hours ago

Re: Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk. Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such. Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way). Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet). Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it. I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those. But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari. And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware. TheDong, 6 hours ago

Re: Firefox Enterprise This was needed. A lot of large businesses ban Firefox because they don't have these kind of controls. I can't test Firefox on my work computer because company policy prevents it being installed. And that kind of thing really hurts Firefox. nicoburns, 6 hours ago

Re: Apple HomeView > Secure Exclaves. The A18 chip inside HomeView contains Secure Exclaves that process the camera and microphone feeds in a secure compartment that cannot be accessed by the operating system or by Apple. This enables HomeView to recognize the face and voice of each user without exposing the audio and visual data used for recognition to the operating system. This is interesting! fmarasho, 4 hours ago

Re: Apple HomeView The weird thing about this product is that its biggest competitor is "an old ipad." I feel like most of their target customer base already has an old ipad that's better suited for what this does in every way. Old ipads: 1. Have a battery so you're not tied to a cord. Even old poor batteries are better than no battery. 2. Have apps! How does this not support apps?! 3. Have a huge range of 3rd party products and hacks and 3D models to wall mount it or stands for it 4. Are kitchen-safe (splatter proof, far fewer holes than this product, movable out of the way) 5. Also support siri and facetime and everything this device does AFAICT I'm guessing they realized this and made sure it's priced lower than the cheapest new iPad, but it will be interesting to see if the price difference can compete with the old iPads most of their customers have in drawers or already on walls. Maybe the purpose-built nature will be a reasonable enough differentiator, but I'm not sure it's focused enough for that. It's both a passive information station and for calls? It's for recipes which implies you put it in the kitchen, but it looks like a nightmare to clean with all those holes? It's also a very small screen when you have to read the recipe from a distance because it has no battery. I can't move my stove to it, and I definitely don't want it too near a stove or sink! The multiple users feature is a really neat trick, but I would kill to have this for all Apple devices. Let me hand my kid my phone and it automatically switches to kid mode! Please Apple don't lock multiple users to stationary devices like HomeView! schmichael, 3 hours ago

Re: 11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker Type systems are hard! Check out https://counterexamples.org/ I gave it a quick scan for Rust examples; there are 11 samples among the following pages:

  https://counterexamples.org/eventually-nothing.html
  https://counterexamples.org/mutable-matching.html
  https://counterexamples.org/selfishness.html
  https://counterexamples.org/scope-escape.html
  https://counterexamples.org/nearly-universal.html

The first thing I always look for is mutability (combined with some other tricky feature), e.g. "Now it's a Just(3):Maybe<Int>, now it's a Nothing:Maybe<Int>, now it's a Nothing:Maybe<String>." I wonder if TFA's example could be reproduced without mutability. mrkeen, 7 hours ago

Re: Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise As a Firefox user, I hope this works. As someone who works in IT, people are going to try and install Chrome at all costs and your ticket queues will be clogged with people saying a computer is broken or has no internet access if it doesn't have Chrome on it. DoctorOW, 4 hours ago

Re: Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe This is pretty interesting as the Danfoss vulnerability was suspected to be related to a similar situation that occurred across US military bases in late August 2026. https://signalandsilence.substack.com/p/i-think-someone-hack... Could this be the same group? Or someone inspired by reading that article? Or just entirely unrelated? bronco21016, 1 day ago

Re: Apple HomeView The overwhelming cynicism about this product I'm seeing here on HN tells me it's going to be a hit. postalcoder, 3 hours ago

Re: CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades This regime, as others like it, poses the constant question, “What are you going to do about it?” And the answer is, largely, nothing. It’s a shame, really. ergonaught, 4 hours ago