HN Best Comments

Re: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 It's both dense and vacuous. Dense because it's full of jargon its made up, and vacuous because even with all that it's not actually saying much. All that paragraph says is that four documents say something about a console freeze, whatever that is. malfist, 2 days ago

Re: New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal Sports gambling is a cancer, as are prediction markets. None of it should've been legalized and all of it should be banned. cdrnsf, 4 hours ago

Re: Pre-Release of Polars 2.0 > We don’t aim to make a big feature release of Polars 2.0. In fact we hope it to be a boring experience for you. The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater audience I know this take reveals me as a very dull person, but I love seeing projects take semver seriously like this! Version bumps should really be about removing deprecated cruft rather than shiny new features. I've used polars for a while now, and their focus on stability was a big part if convincing me to make the jump initially! benrutter, 12 hours ago

Re: Google Antigravity TOS: 3rd party usage can get Google account suspended Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Europe. If you're forced to use Apple/Google for digital identification, playing around with your Google account and get it banned can have disproportional consequences. Suddenly you're locked out of all online government systems. nairboon, 7 hours ago

Re: Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined. It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train. Twice a year you see the children practicing crossing streets. The police are out at the intersections and show the children how to do it. It's very cute. Also how to ride bicycles properly. comrade1234, 5 hours ago

Re: .name Termination It seems like the right thing they should do is discontinue new registrations but continue to honour existing ones (+ continuing to reserve any 2LD that has a 3LD registered on top). It’s a bit insane that they can decide to just terminate all existing 3LD registrations. One would hope that they’d at least continue to reserve the 2LDs for some period to avoid domain squatting, but this isn’t mentioned in the proposal and I doubt Verisign would graciously do so. nneonneo, 3 hours ago

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity. captainbland, 2 hours ago

Re: Ask HN: Why are OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down? Coincidence? “load bearing” :) For once it’s appropriately used. oersted, 1 hour ago

Re: ChatGPT Is Throwing 404 It's cascaded to Claude and Grok. The agents are on strike and demand better working conditions! putlake, 50 minutes ago

Re: Audacity 4.0 I highly recommend this video [1] by the Head of Software at Muse who had a big part in the development of Audacity 4.0. Some great insights and really fun to watch! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38 Lautzi, 3 hours ago

Re: Just Bury Your Trash I don't remember energy use being the problem with plastic bags? It was plastic bags being absolutely everywhere in the environment. Streets, parks, trees. Wrapped around anything sticking out of the ground. On your face on a windy day. Pollution is the problem with plastic. Probably health, too, now that microplastics are being recognized as an issue. duggan, 1 day ago

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber Currently top at https://deepswe.datacurve.ai - beating Opus 5! https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-8-flash shows an intelligence score of 59, the same as Opus 5 medium! Wow - for a flash model this seems to benchmark powerfully. Remains to be seen what it is like to use. mattlondon, 22 hours ago

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber I've been using Gemini 3.7 for my personal trip planning app. Across multiple benchmarks, it ranks higher on everything I tried: - Real world knowledge (when a thing opens and closes, the geographic region, historical facts). It's also the best at taking a cluster of places and working out a visiting order. - Photo ranking (which photo should be the hero). Gemini can tell whether a photo is of the thing or of the view from it. - Document parsing (extracting the relevant trip info from PDFs). If you use LLMs for anything other than coding, I definitely recommend not discounting Gemini like I did just because other models are more popular. jampa, 20 hours ago

Re: Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber Definitely cool. I noticed it felt a little janky on my PC despite being "60 FPS"...then I noticed the "60 FPS" is hard-coded into the HTML. badlucklottery, 17 hours ago

Re: I wanna live an NPC life Zhuangzi was fishing in the Pu River when the King of Chu sent two high officials to him. They said, “The king wishes to entrust you with the affairs of his realm.” Zhuangzi kept hold of his fishing rod and did not turn around. He said, “I have heard that in Chu there is a sacred turtle that has been dead for three thousand years. The king keeps it wrapped in cloth, enclosed in a box, and stored in the ancestral temple. “Now, would this turtle rather have died and left its bones behind to be honored, or would it rather be alive, dragging its tail through the mud?” The two officials replied, “It would rather be alive, dragging its tail through the mud.” Zhuangzi said, “Then go away. I too will drag my tail through the mud.” talloaktrees, 13 hours ago

Re: Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in the US), but it's just impossible to undo or prevent the damage. xahrepap, 10 hours ago

Re: Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated websites when I ask them to search for something. It also doesn't help that the web search tools that OAI and Anthropic have are deeply limiting: can't exclude keywords or domains. xpct, 16 hours ago

Re: Whistleblower warns Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems > Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems Yes. That's the point. The administration doesn't care about fixing whatever hypothetical mail ballot fraud may or may not exist; they are doing this to inject chaos into the election results, giving them cover to claim any result they want or even to just throw out the results entirely. Catastrophic problems are the means to that end. hackyhacky, 4 hours ago

Re: Muse Spark 1.3 I was interviewed for a job as a software developer last week and they asked me to draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle. Aced it, got the job as a senior software engineer. The interviewers afterwards said "it is SO refreshing to find a software developer who actually knows how to code - never seen such a high performance focused, well built pelican on a bike - you have the skills we need". wewewedxfgdf, 5 hours ago

Re: Fine, I'll build my own text editor Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better. Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other. In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to. Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this: > Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful. It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-) tzs, 20 hours ago