Hacker News: jchook

New comment by jchook in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

jchook — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 05:13:45 +0000

And it's Howard Lutnick... the guy who lived next door to Epstein and magically wasn't at work on 9/11.

New comment by jchook in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

jchook — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:39:28 +0000

The entire arc reads as a marketing stunt rather than a legitimate national security threat. Maybe Anthropic asked the US for this action to be taken.

edit: > Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (lol)

Fable was out for 3 days, not really long enough for us to properly evaluate it, but the "Sorry we had to remove Fable. Read more. (because it's too powerful btw)" is loudly shown every chance they get for weeks. It creates a halo.

Reminiscent of the 1999 Apple G4 commercial where they displayed it next to military tanks. "For the first time in history, a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the U.S. government."

New comment by jchook in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

jchook — Tue, 19 May 2026 01:33:04 +0000

The US fundamentally wants the oil to flow globally.

Its secondary blockade of the Strait seems to be driven by optics and PR rather than strategic value.

New comment by jchook in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

jchook — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:48:00 +0000

Recently published https://hngram.com/

It’s an n-gram viewer for Hacker News comment data.

Still working on daily data updates, etc but it’s live!

New comment by jchook in "Show HN: Hallucinopedia"

jchook — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:54:28 +0000

My first three stumbles were:

- https://halupedia.com/07-hitlerwasrighthitlerwasrighthitlerw...

- https://halupedia.com/0-0-fuck-ai

- https://halupedia.com/67

New comment by jchook in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

jchook — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:46:38 +0000

Is the conjecture not trivially sound at an intuition level? It's surprising that this proof was difficult.

New comment by jchook in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

jchook — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 04:25:23 +0000

I would rename "the dark forest" to "the interesting horizon"

New comment by jchook in "Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies"

jchook — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:29:12 +0000

> To see Sid use his motivation and resources to solve his own problem is the core message (IMHO) of the hacker community.

Hacking is about exploration beyond the known, and iterating towards a clear understanding.

New comment by jchook in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

jchook — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:29:13 +0000

Like the evergreen comic, "How would you like this wrapped?" by John Janik

For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children.

https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg

New comment by jchook in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

jchook — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:59:04 +0000

Fool me once...

New comment by jchook in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

jchook — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 02:26:24 +0000

https://zulip.com/

New comment by jchook in "Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)"

jchook — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:48:51 +0000

A lot of vim users use comma as the leader key so this is probably natural for a lot of folks.

Also seems convenient to be able to type , to autocomplete over your custom commands, in case you forgot the name you assigned them.

New comment by jchook in "Kitty – GPU based terminal emulator"

jchook — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:43:19 +0000

Incredible popular software lore here. Calibre and Kitty are two of my favorite pieces of software in the world.

New comment by jchook in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

jchook — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 07:32:19 +0000

Obligatory reference to Simple Made Easy https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I watch this talk about once per year to remind myself to eschew complexity.

New comment by jchook in "Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?"

jchook — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 07:44:11 +0000

Is that true? I thought wg-quick etc were just convenience functions and that it's relatively trivial to use iproute2 to configure a VPN link

New comment by jchook in "Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?"

jchook — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 05:06:59 +0000

Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.

New comment by jchook in "Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp"

jchook — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 06:39:46 +0000

Critical portions of the server are not FOSS. Also the core software forces you to join their servers.

Also we have no proof that they are running the server software published on GitHub. This concern is exacerbated by the fact they didn't publish server code updates for many months.

New comment by jchook in "Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp"

jchook — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 06:58:45 +0000

Oops I meant Revolt, the Rust-based alternative to Discord. Updated. Thanks. https://github.com/revoltchat

New comment by jchook in "Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp"

jchook — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 06:47:33 +0000

Signal has a central, proprietary server. It's between impractical and impossible to run your own Signal server like you can with Matrix, Revolt, or Delta Chat for example. BlueSky has a similar approach (compare to Mastodon).

Also Signal requires a phone number to sign-in. It's not exactly private. AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.

The WhatsApp co-founder gave Signal $105M in 2018. Signal costs ~$50M/year to run. It's also funded by wealthy donors such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter, BlueSky, Square). BTW Jack is now pushing Signal to integrate Bitcoin.

When evaluating the "ethics" of a chat platform, we should factor-in the metadata, soft power, and eventual leverage that centralized (controlled by a few) platforms like BlueSky and Signal afford to wealthy folks who are bankrolling it.

New comment by jchook in "Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp"

jchook — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 06:13:15 +0000

It's illegal to encrypt CB radio signals in the US and many other countries.