HN Best Comments

Re: Claude Opus 5.5 “Pacing the frontier” sounds smarmy and weird, like the phrase was generated by Claude itself mukmuk, 6 hours ago

Re: Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school > It found the U.S. “failed in its obligation to do everything feasible to verify” that the school was a military objective and that the failure “went beyond mere negligence.” The report said the United States “directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.” Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat. The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted. The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence. legitster, 3 hours ago

Re: Claude Opus 5.5 Finally that price drop

   Prices per 1M tokens     Claude Opus 5.5    Claude Opus 5
   Cache reads              $0.20              $0.50
   Input tokens             $4                 $5
   Output tokens            $20                $25
   Cache writes             $5                 $6.25

Opus 5 is the model with highest spend on openrouter (https://openrouter.ai/rankings#task-spend) and it seems plausible that Opus 5 is/was the highest spend model in the world, and certainly Anthropic's biggest moneymaker. If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor GodelNumbering, 5 hours ago

Re: GPT-6 Sol and Luna GPT-6 Luna being half the price of GPT-5.6 Luna is a really big deal. Here's GPT-6 Luna pelicans: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... And GPT-6 Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... Scroll to the bottom for the GPT-6 Sol max one: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... For comparison, here are the pelicans I got for GPT-6 Astra: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - I still like the Astra Max one best. Here's a comparison grid showing all of the GPT-6 and GPT-5.6 pelicans at all effort levels: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6.h... The grid is actually really interesting, because it shows that the 5.6 family default to brighter colors than the 6 family. simonw, 2 hours ago

Re: Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure. But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster! From this article > repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful. From a recent post by John Gruber: > Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1] Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience? [1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa... AnonC, 5 hours ago

Re: I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB > About 20 Markdown files described browser use, connectors, payments, credentials, data handling, generated files, voice, goals, and scheduling. This the state of software engineering in 2026. Edit: clarified engineering to software engineering, which is more correct tolugenius, 4 hours ago

Re: Claude Opus 5.5 > Claude Opus 5.5 is our first release since we called for pacing the frontier. Interesting how the very first line is used to remind the reader of their call to pace the frontier just last week, and everything else after that line is to demonstrate with very specific numbers how they absolutely are not pacing. sailingparrot, 49 minutes ago

Re: AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing. One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1]) I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing. "I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee" "we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers" Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China. [1] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY NalNezumi, 4 hours ago

Re: Attention is all you have Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do. We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data. Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach. nostrademons, 20 hours ago

Re: I said no and Apple said yes Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware. Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad… It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying. Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates tomp, 4 hours ago

Re: I don't want to read what you didn't write It's funny, i push back on pull requests because there is too much description now - a 20 line change has pages and pages of generated description, rationalisation for why it is safe, defense of each design decision, analysis of risks and side effects. People are indignant, you're rejecting my change because there is too much documentation? And my response is, I don't have time to read it and you put me in the position where I can't afford not to - because approving the PR implies I did and accepted it. The investment to read all that for the value of a code change that I'm one prompt away from doing myself if I cared is just not high enough. So it's rejected. zmmmmm, 14 hours ago

Re: I said no and Apple said yes Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you. vitro, 4 hours ago

Re: Attention is all you have The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search. We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory. It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead. I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades? A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog. econ, 19 hours ago

Re: AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up A good chunk of what my company has been doing with AI falls into either burning down our known tech-debt and "easy wins" that no one ever had the bandwidth to approach... And improving / automating our processes. The former is having a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services. Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent blocker of all our releases, are doing more in-depth reviews and catching issues earlier in our release process. They have become unblocked to the point they are actively chasing down work that starts to slip. We have cleaned up and tuned both our security alerts and operations logs and improved our tenant isolation in our service in a way that makes customer and formal audits SIGNIFICANTLY easier. We're setting ourselves up for faster human development of the hard-things. Our development environment and infrastructure are faster, cleaner, more auditable processes, and cheaper overall to operate. These fixes mostly don't show up in our product change logs, and definitely don't fall into "new features". It would largely be invisible to the outside world, but our costs are going down (though to be fair, not offsetting the spend on AI to date), internal productivity has improved, operational incidents are down, and customer satisfaction is up. TrueDuality, 13 hours ago

Re: Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac I want the disk space taken from the models back. I will never touch this garbage and would rather use the disk space I purchased to be used for my purposes, not the industry's pointless fad bubble endeavors. VCFundedGenYer, 13 hours ago

Re: Xiaomi MiMo v2.6 Anyone else more excited about Chinese models than American models these days? Big thing for me is affordability. lwansbrough, 5 hours ago

Re: I don't want to read what you didn't write As I have been saying for years: Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out. hatthew, 4 hours ago

Re: AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up Here's my constant question: Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever. Why have we not seen an improvements in products? While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu. Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something? torben-friis, 5 hours ago

Re: US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut It happens. There use to be a joke during the first big DC build out phase that went like if you're ever going into the wilderness take a 1ft length of fiber optic cable with you. If you get lost bury it and a back hoe operator will appear and sever it within an hour. You can get a ride back with them. chasd00, 4 hours ago

Re: Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August The Office of Weights and Measures exists because, long before any of us were born, in 1836, companies were up to shady shit and consumers were paying for inconsistent products. I.E. Being scammed. AI companies should be subject to the OWM like any other company that sells a product that varies in weight. Perhaps when a sane administration is re-elected; one that can read history books and comprehend why our regulations exist in the first place. Or have even a semblance of respect for its citizenry. jesse_dot_id, 5 hours ago