Hacker News: avarun

New comment by avarun in "Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online"

avarun — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:51:31 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_(company)

There was already one that existed in the web 2.0 era. Founded in 2012, raised a $3M seed from Founders Fund and a $14M A. Completely failed though and was acquihired by Google to have the founders lead Google Play Books.

Amazon now has Kindle Unlimited but I think it's mostly romance slop and self-published books. Seems like publishing rightsholders were just too inflexible to let the business model take off.

New comment by avarun in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

avarun — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:37:46 +0000

Which specific product do you take? Do you have a link?

New comment by avarun in "Show HN: Dowe – A full-stack language for server, web, desktop, Android, and iOS"

avarun — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:19:19 +0000

How do people publish these websites that are full of Claude-isms and slop-writing and feel proud of themselves? A single cursory read of this page with fresh eyes would tell you that the page manages to communicate zero useful information, while also being written in a way that brings a bad taste to your mouth if you can recognize AI writing. Who is this for? Why would anybody want to try a project that has such little care and attention put into it?

And lest I be misinterpreted, this is not saying that you need to learn how to do frontend in order to create a programming language. Feel free to use AI to make your website, I don't mind at all. But ultimately the words on the page are for human consumption, and if I can tell that no brain cells were put into considering them, I'm not going to be interested in consuming them. Practical advice: once you've used AI to create your website, treat all of the copy on the page as filler equivalent to 'lorem ipsum' and rewrite it all in your own words. It will go a long way towards engendering trust in your project.

New comment by avarun in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

avarun — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:39:59 +0000

Unfortunately, Apple made the decision to have that be an opt-in flag for developers, and so the vast, vast majority of iPad apps don't allow themselves to be used on macOS.

New comment by avarun in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

avarun — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:34:21 +0000

Sure, but the fact that you can just install Sodium completely obviates the need for the Bedrock version to exist at all.

New comment by avarun in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

avarun — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:32:51 +0000

And also it has worse performance than Java if you just install a basic optimization modpack like Adrenaline on Java, which many players do. There's effectively ~zero reason to use Bedrock if you're on PC.

New comment by avarun in "GPT-5.6"

avarun — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:59:59 +0000

GPT-6 is supposed to be using a much larger base model that just finished pretraining so the "dump another chunk of all written language" approach is still going strong.

New comment by avarun in "GPT-5.6"

avarun — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:58:15 +0000

This has absolutely nothing to do with the comment you replied to.

New comment by avarun in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

avarun — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:35:31 +0000

I get 6% back instead of 5% with my Amazon card which is more than enough to incentivize me in many situations.

New comment by avarun in "Virginia bans sale of geolocation data"

avarun — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:05:39 +0000

As long as this is actually about "sale" of data and actually imposes strict limits on data brokers and all the nefarious actors out there, I am all for it.

If it's more similar to the California law, which just calls all uses of data "selling data" and just ends up muddying the waters without actually imposing any regulations of value on the bad actors in the industry, then that would be a shame.

There is value to actually keeping the meaning of words clear and consistent. I have no issues with Google using its first-party Google Maps data to serve me better recommendations. I have massive issues with AT&T selling aggregated geolocation data that makes it easy to identify individuals to third parties. I hope this is a clear path towards banning the latter without touching the former.

New comment by avarun in "Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand"

avarun — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:53:50 +0000

This is reddit-tier analysis that is commonly repeated and completely incorrect. The Democratic Party in America has policy positions that are significantly to the left of left-wing parties around the world, as well as positions to the right. Any political analysis that doesn't recognize this has major shortcomings.

To give an example, Democratic-run states in the US have significantly more permissive abortion policies than anywhere in Europe. They're also further to the left on drug legalization, restorative justice, and immigration. This also holds true with policy positions at the national level.

New comment by avarun in "Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike"

avarun — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:47:54 +0000

Your passkey login doesn't even work. I think the nature of Claude usage here goes a bit beyond "some polish".

(For reference, signing back in with a passkey seems to be impossible even after successfully creating an account with one. Every time you sign in it attempts to save a new passkey right after asking for the old one)

New comment by avarun in "Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand"

avarun — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:29:11 +0000

Yes. It is, significantly. More people die every year of heat waves in Europe than gun deaths in the US, and it's not even close. Youth unemployment in many European countries is egregiously high, leading to a sense of malaise and nihilism among the youth. The welfare state is collapsing in on itself and residents are taking that anger out on immigrants across the continent, leading to regressive policies being passed.

The EU is extremely close to entering its own Japan-like "lost decades" if nothing changes very soon.

New comment by avarun in "Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand"

avarun — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:22:35 +0000

I'm not sure what charts you guys are looking at, but this website clearly agrees that Grok is not right wing. Go look at the Worldview tab, filtering by United States. Each model is assigned a "closest party" by country, and for the US all 6 models are closest to the Democratic Party.

New comment by avarun in "Rhombus Language 1.0"

avarun — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:07:39 +0000

Extremely poor reasoning to assume that an author, upon reading his own primary writing once, is guaranteed to catch a typo of this nature.

New comment by avarun in "Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?"

avarun — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:13:51 +0000

There's plenty of incentive if it causes your users to churn.

New comment by avarun in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

avarun — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:06:55 +0000

Every single employee who joined prior to this year will make 8 figures+ off this exit.

New comment by avarun in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

avarun — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:04:59 +0000

They've tripled on "cloud servers" (shared hardware) as well.

New comment by avarun in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

avarun — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:04:23 +0000

Buried multiple links and scrolling deep, but looks like they're tripling prices for cloud servers in the US.

What's the next best option now?

New comment by avarun in "AI is slowing down"

avarun — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:57:42 +0000