HN Best Comments

Re: Fox to buy Roku I may be lambasted for saying this, but I do not believe that Fox (or any large media company, really) should be permitted to purchase direct access to the TV hardware of roughly 30-50% of american households. nrmitchi, 15 hours ago

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer LinkedIn offers no way for $company to disavow users who claim to work for $company - they will appear on the official company page as long as it's in their profile. We've had fake recruiters that claim to work for us running basically the same scam. These are great fake profiles: LinkedIn Premium, tons of relevant posts, etc... but they don't work for us, and we get angry messages from people saying our recruiter tried to scam them. No, they're not our recruiter despite showing up on our company page on LinkedIn. No number of reports could get them taken down. I finally got it solved by buying drinks for a buddy of mine that works for LinkedIn, but not all startups have that connection! pants2, 9 hours ago

Re: Iroh 1.0 I am one of the iroh developers. A question that frequently comes up: when will iroh support webrtc, or BLE, or LoRa, or ... Iroh as of now supports only IPv4, IPv6 and relay transports out of the box. There is such a large variety of potentially interesting transports out there that we can't support all of them without turning the codebase into an unmaintainable maze of feature flags. But we have added the ability to implement custom transports. That way your transport implementation can live in a completely separate crate. Existing experimental custom transports include Tor, Nym and BLE. https://github.com/mcginty/iroh-ble-transport Here is how custom transports work under the hood: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/iroh-0-97-0-custom-transports... rklaehn, 10 hours ago

Re: Iroh 1.0 If you're new to Iroh, my mental model is roughly "Tailscale at the application layer instead of the network layer". If your question is, "why not just use Tailscale?", look at it from an app developer's perspective. If you want to release an app and have instances of your app be able to easily connect to each other, you could theoretically embeded Tailscale functionality into your app, but then the users of your app need Tailscale accounts, and your app is dependent on Tailscale. Iroh lets you embed this functionality directly, and provides public fallback relays. If your app gets too big for the public relays, using your own relays is the flip of a switch. apitman, 5 hours ago

Re: A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer > a recruiter at a small crypto startup [...] she described a broken proof-of-concept they needed a lead engineer for, and then sent me a public GitHub repo to review. Specifically, she asked me to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue.” > ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine. > npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just installing dependencies executes the backdoor. > The instruction to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue” was bait to get me to run npm install. Great catch. I've not been phished on LinkedIn before. Surprised it's getting this bad. wxw, 3 hours ago

Re: US battery manufacturing output continues to break records In numbers (cell production capacity, 2025):

    [1] USA         70 GWh
    [2] China     1755 GWh
    [3] Europe     252 GWh

That's excluding small battery production for electronics etc. [1] https://reasonstobecheerful.world/us-grid-battery-storage/ [2] https://english.news18a.com/news/english_224842.html [3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-swelling-wav... ricardobeat, 2 hours ago

Re: What happened to nerds? Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success. Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity. A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0] [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... azalemeth, 10 hours ago

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment So the AI boom is resulting in a) fewer jobs, b) massive increases in hardware, and c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?). When exactly are the upsides going to hit? ryandvm, 3 hours ago

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding? I have! I care about data privacy and LLMs being free. I'm using the Pi coding harness but containerized and sandboxed, to make sure it's running completely offline. On my Mac Studio with 128GB RAM (or MacBook with 36GB RAM) I'm using Qwen3.6 35b, with only 3b active parameters so that it runs really fast. I've done a complete redesign for my website's homepage and blog with Django + Wagtail. The latter is interesting, because Wagtail is a bit less well-known, so the agent, without giving it internet access, doesn't always know how to develop for Wagtail. I've used Qwen3.5 122b for when things get more complex. At 10b active parameters, it's significantly slower though. I've noticed a few things compared to large models like Claude. For starters, you really need to know what you're asking, and be precise; it doesn't do much thinking for you. Any assumptions left open, and it'll take the easiest route to reach the goal (e.g. CSS in HTML), often not the best in terms of architecture. It gets into loops quite often, and surprisingly often gets the edit tool call wrong, after which it will spend lots of thinking tokens and re-read files instead of retrying (despite the system prompt suggesting so). Comparing agentic Qwen3.6 35b to Claude Opus is like a junior with knowledge across the board, that you really need to guide, versus a senior that thinks with you on architecture. If Opus gives a 15x speedup, local and fully offline Qwen gives a 5x speedup. Which, given that it's completely free, is still mind-boggling to me :) Greenpants, 3 hours ago

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment This is just the reality of hardware costs now. RAM and Disk are scarce, prices have skyrocketed. I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds. binarymax, 6 hours ago

Re: Write for One Person I've spoken before a thousand several times saying with a straight face "Every audience is an audience of one." My first example, I was asked to give one more talk on how one needs to shuffle seven times. There were four people, and a blackboard smaller than my kitchen window. I went for it like I was in office hours, which I've always enjoyed more than teaching. A few weeks later a phone call "I liked your talk." "Thank you." "Could you come to Switzerland to give it again? We can only offer a week's full expenses..." Then I was asked to write a review of the off-broadway play "Proof" for the American Mathematical Society Notices. I didn't read it much, but I was told people do. I worked a very hard week on my review; my Swarthmore College classmate Ben Brantley's Broadway reviews were life or death for productions at the time, and I didn't want to embarrass myself. Ron Howard read my review, went to see "Proof" twice and loved it, and hired me to be the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind". That was a transformative experience. Every audience is indeed an audience of one. https://www.ams.org/notices/200009/rev-bayer.pdf Syzygies, 19 hours ago

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator For players who are new to the game, there should be a 1/4 chance you go to bed proud of an honest day's work with your hands, and wake up the next morning having strained a muscle you didn't even know you had, and you can't chop wood for the next couple weeks. neilv, 1 day ago

Re: Fox to buy Roku As a long-time[1] customer of Roku I am tentatively extremely pessimistic. I have always been unhappy with Roku's decision to get involved in streaming content at all, because it could potentially cut into their service-agnostic architecture. Bad enough in my mind that they had in-platform ads instead of just charging for hardware, but way worse when they are actively competing with streaming services. And now it looks like it has happened -- a large content provider wants to buy the company, and while I hope that they can at least notionally continue to be service-agnostic, the temptation to cheat to favor your own services will always be there an when cost cutting and belt tightening is on the table, that is surely what will happen. [1] My order for the "Netflix Player by Roku": "CustomerID# 1162 Thank you very much for your Roku order. Your order number is 2472, placed 5/20/2008 at 10:01AM." andrewla, 6 hours ago

Re: Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole? "If you win an argument" Let me stop you right there. I am not arguing with a machine. You sound like a crazy person, when you say you are winning an argument with Claude. Claude is not my friend, I don't need it to agree with me, I don't need it to like me (it cannot like or dislike me). I give it instructions or ask it to explain things. That is the sum total of my interaction with Claude. A machine cannot "argue" with me, it doesn't want anything nor does it have beliefs or experiences. SwellJoe, 21 hours ago

Re: Apple Foundation Models This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done. harrouet, 9 hours ago

Re: Don't trust large context windows I guess I am mostly enjoying learning the fundamentals of AI stuff, even though I disagree with the direction it is going. But I am struggling to put into words how alarming I find the comments on threads like this — all sorts of good-natured anecdotes about how XYZ works for them that are more like the suggestions in pet care or cookery threads on Facebook. (Or worse still, like any Facebook 3D printing group: anyone who prints but wants to understand what is actually going on will know what I mean, I think) Any shared sense of rigour is just completely torpedoed by the LLM world, particularly the cloud LLM world it seems, and we are reduced to cargo culting. Nobody is any more right or wrong than anyone else. Have you tried cleaning your context with dawn dish soap, letting it dry and then adding a layer of glue stick? -- ETA: I don't want to sound so mean about people who try to help, here or in facebook groups. I guess I just find these threads so different to threads on more or less any other topic, where someone's suggestion can be debated or refined by other commenters and then someone will explain a thing about how bash history selections work that will change your entire life. With these threads they devolve to "isn't it weird that threatening it works?" dofm, 1 day ago

Re: What happened to nerds? I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group. “What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”. keiferski, 8 hours ago

Re: Your ePub Is fine Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically. m348e912, 13 hours ago

Re: How to earn a billion dollars Disco Stu meme Paul is my favorite example of "brain gout." I learned what gout was as "a disease kings used to get by eating foods that were too rich." Paul's writing when he was closer to reality, in the early 2000's, was a lot more insightful, because he was closer to reality. But if you've spent 21 years never having a material concern, and increasingly interacting with other rich people (or young people who idolize them), it takes a toll on your grasp of things. It's a king eating rich foods for decades. Like his "wealth tax" piece, he's very proud of doing elementary maths that ignore a major part of the reality at the start (in that case, he was assuming that their money wasn't growing, just being taxed, which... my man). It's sad to see, and I hope anyone who gets financially successful takes the lesson to try as hard as possible to keep living like normal people do. Buy your own groceries. Cook your own meals. Keep close to the friends you made before you were rich. srpablo, 12 hours ago

Re: How to earn a billion dollars Someone told me it was impossible to become an avogadrillionaire (to have a net worth of one mole, or approximately 6.02 x 10^23 dollars.) Now there's this founder I know whose startup grew 93% last month. Let's be conservative and say she has 2 million dollars. Let's calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 301,100,000,000,000,000x. The log base 1.93 of 301,100,000,000,000,000 is 61.2091. That's about 5 years and 35 days. Is it really impossible to grow 93% month over month for 5 consecutive years? I can imagine some startups that can. There are two numbers that determine whether you can make one avogadrillion dollars. One is your growth rate, which doesn't matter at all. The other is the size of the available market. Simply identify a market that has on the order of 10^20 times the demand that is currently being met. Understand what your users want. Ask ChatGPT for advice. galenptacek, 18 hours ago