<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: smakt</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=smakt</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 03:19:40 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=smakt" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "So where are all the AI apps?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This happens every time non-technical users get their hands on technical tools.<p>Just go look at some HyperCard compilation CD: all stacks were horrible, ugly and buggy, but if the author massaged them the right way, they kind of worked, held by spit and prayers. "How to sit people at my wedding" type of garbage. The only good quality HC stacks were the demo ones that came with the program, made by professional developers and graphic designers working at Apple. In the decade HC was a product, maybe 15 high quality stacks emerged.<p>Same with the horrible mess that "users" manage to cobble together if you give them access to Office(TM) macros. Users don't seem to know about Normal Forms when they begin to create tables in Access. The horror.<p>An education in Computer Science is necessary when systems have to interact reliably. One-off "I vibe coded a dashboard for my smart watch" are in the same category as Visual Basic with the server paths hardcoded all over, breaking on empty directories and if two PCs happen to run the same macro, then half of the files in some shared directory get wiped for good. You are welcome.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:22:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47515471</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47515471</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47515471</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Amazing that the peanut gallery of HN dipshits is short-stroking over a full-on LLM-slop shitsite writeup about nothing.<p>Truly, when anything in Slashdot News (delete delete) "HaCk3R Newz" has more than about 300 comments, I know it will be a merry-go-round of imbeciles regurgitating nonsense. A moronic choir of nobodies singing the same note. This one didn't disappoint.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:30:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476104</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476104</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476104</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Heh, I had not seen that one in a while.<p>This site is designed so that the wannabees are incentivized to lie and show off to get some of the sweet VC the whales are sitting on. The ease of lying at volume is down to zero, and here be nerds trying to solve a human problem with technology. Maybe show first that you can solve spam or bot networks.<p>Somehow lighthearted solution: employ Unix graybeard volunteers to weed out the garbage. I'd like to see HN showoff slop like "Distributed Kubernetes Package Manager using Blackwell-Hermann CRTDs in 500 lines of Go" get past Linus or Stallman.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 01:24:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303720</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303720</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47303720</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Trump Bans Anthropic from All US Federal Agencies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Since Reagan, americans have become world leaders at electing retards into Office.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:46:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47187700</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47187700</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47187700</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Reading across books with Claude Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Nothing here has been peer reviewed<p>Oh but everything here is peer reviewed all right: it's sheep-reviewed. All sheep singing the same note. Where's the explosion of groundbreaking, uber-creative, world-shattering, reliable software from MagicDust LLMs that turn you into a 10x engineer? If anything, it generates a lot of noise. Tell you what: being 10x more productive with a statistical engine that will only bring out the most normal of normal solutions is the dream of the incompetent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:58:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663771</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663771</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663771</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Reading across books with Claude Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And I need a name for shills that handwave the whole magic thinking in a blog post and conclude with "oh my claude code pointed out correlations between atlas shrugged and steve jobs" I'm so much smarter and ready for the future that's coming.<p>You are damn right I didn't try it out. I try things published in journals, vetted by peers, with clear explanations and instructions. On the other hand, when the tone is "It's All Magic Sprinkle(TM)" my pseudoscience alarm goes off.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 21:30:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662293</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662293</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662293</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Reading across books with Claude Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One has to be the special kind of stupid that is blinded by efficiency promises from the LLM Church to think the article is any worth.<p>It's the usual jargon soup. Publish a vetted paper with repeatable steps instead of a hyped-up, garbage, supposed 100x productivity bomb.<p>And his best result is mechanical findings from where the LLM got the highest correlations between its vectors: Bravo; there's always going to be a top item in any ordered list, but it doesn't make it automatically interesting. Reading literature is about witnessing the journey the characters take. Reading technical material is about memorizing enough of it. In both cases the material has to go through a brain. I find it idiotic to assign any value to outputs like "Oh King Lear's X is highly correlated to Antigone's Y"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:12:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46660385</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46660385</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46660385</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Why Microsoft Store Discontinued Support for Office Apps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>am I missing something<p>Maybe you are missing the fact that when indians get a foothold in any organisation they start bringing in their own and blocking everyone else. No, I don't like indians or any other culture where corruption at every level is needed to get ahead. I don't see competent western people like, I don't know, Linus or Guido try to cloudify Linux or Python, try to bring it all down for personal gain, try to direct everyone to rent-a-program software once they have captive customers. There is a level of integrity in competent people that I don't see in cultures where the only way to get ahead is to be a nephew of the local califa, bow to ridiculous honor-culture, mafia-like code of silence, and promote stupidity and backwardness over logic and soundness. I'm saying what every other indian who has escaped their hellholes says about their own culture of absolute corruption at every level. Besides, I don't give a fuck about karma on this site. Besides, microsoft is a husk; anyone paying them is either captive or dumb.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 11:48:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497694</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area<p>I agree to that but I don't follow. Are you a resident of a EU country? If yes, any bank operating in that country is obligated to let you open an account with them. Notice I say "resident", wich is a lower bar than "national". Banks operating in the boondocks and banks operating in the most expensive high street of the capital city, all must give you an account if you ask, so I don't follow unless they make you do banking in person only at one office, which I don't think is the case.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Dec 2025 11:58:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262454</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262454</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262454</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>good luck getting transactions done without one<p>you mean like I do all the time with my high-tech plastic code card? At any time of day or night, workday or weekend? I must be lucky because I have been doing it for decades.<p>Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:16:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260262</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260262</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260262</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication<p>Not impressed by the pseudotechnical bullshit. The law provides several ways to authenticate. I tell my bank that I don't have a smartphone and they have to send me (at 0 extra cost) a code card: a piece of plastic with numbers on it that no one is ever going to hack. I routinely transfer tens of thousands of Eur between my accounts at real banks within the EU without a problem with my plastic card. When I have used up all the numbers on it they send me another one. I don't know in which EU you live in either.<p>>Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks<p>They are collectively known as "neobanks" for a reason. The official name is "e-money institution". Those are financial casinos, not real banks, operating with non-full banking licenses, peddling all the tech-bro bullshit: trading on memecoins, pulling out of countries when the regulations that real banks have to follow irks them, with a horrible track record of IT security: customer data leaks in the millions, horrible track record of staff abuse, unpaid hours, null customer support: exclusively in-app, where your customer support is "other customers that answer to your in-app post"; the staff shows up once in every 200 messages to write a one-liner and go into hiding again. I do not do business with bullshit "lean" business that operate at cost. Look at their wikipedia pages sometime.<p>>In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver<p>Simply not true, not gonna argue this one.<p>>Shops can refuse cash<p>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it. There are exceptions like you cannot buy a car with a truckload of coins, or give a 5000 Euro note to a taxi cab but those fall under "unreasonable" and it's a very high bar. Also, there is a long tradition of countries delaying implementing EU directives for many years, and then getting it wrong several times. The EU is very lenient, but accepting cash everywhere is EU policy. The fact that some wise-ass members drag their feet for decades is not news and doesn't prove your point. If you push back at the dentist, for example, they will send you an invoice with a surcharge, and you can pay that invoice with cash at your bank.<p>>If you want to use the Tesla supercharger<p>Lol no I don't finance retarded imbeciles - incidentally, all the other charging networks allow you to pay right there without subscription, smartphone or app. It's called "drop-in" payment, and it is there because the law says it must be an option.<p>>In Northern Europe...<p>No, you confuse the EU policy of allowing cash in transactions with money-laundering directives. Those prevent you from buying a house in cash, but you can buy anything, say, under 10000 Eur or equivalent NOK/SEK</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:10:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260238</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260238</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260238</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>None of those require smartphones if you live in a free country (1) (2).<p>(1) Unbanked population in Uganda or india don't have options. Funnily, it's become the same with everyone, banked or unbanked, in the USA. The USA a third world dictatorship now, so expect that and more. Please vote for the orange buffoon a third time! He will most surely try to get on a third term.<p>(2) No bank in the EU requires a smartphone; it's banned by law (you know, law that protects people, the type you lost). "Banks" that are app-only are not banks but financial casinos. No bus driver in the EU can refuse small coins. In some countries they cannot refuse that you get on the bus without paying. No shop in the EU can refuse cash. No EV charging requires any app; you can pay right at the charging station with a credit card. Uber is not a universal right but a trinket. Same with tinder/food delivery and all the impoverishing tech for the disowned.<p>Enjoy the USA.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:33:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256255</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256255</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256255</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Open-source Zig book"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Haha the fucking garbage. Before AI, before the internet, this overexaggerated, hokey prose was written by scummy humans and it came exclusively in porn magazines along with the x-ray specs and sea-monkey fishtanks.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 10:19:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952330</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952330</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952330</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Computing Across America (1983-1985)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I found this guy also when the modems ruled the Earth. I was so blown away, like "when did this future happen?". Mind you, he had a lot of backing from some university (or corporate) if I remember correctly. It was another America, with Steve Wozniak pranking FBI agents and buying real Treasury-issued rolls of legal tender and giving it away at parties and many other shenanigans. Wozniak or this guy would have been shot in today's America. Those were wonderful years, with Hypercard roaring (yes, most stacks were amateurish and bad, I know). The technology was saner and funnier. I remember recording AIFF clips on my Mac and using ResEdit to replace the explosions and sound effects in games with my own recordings and I hardly knew BASIC; classic Macs were amazing. Have not had that much fun in a long time. Computers came with real manuals. Today computers come with a booklet in bible paper in 45 languages that says "Dear user, don't eat this phone".<p>There was something in the air. When I was in elementary school someone thought it would be a good idea to show 11 year olds nothing else that David Lynch's Dune. We had a projection room bigger than many present-day theaters. Like 2500 kids there watching Dune, uncut. I was properly blown away. Started me on a lifetime of loving SciFi. Computer labs at school where I could sneak off hours didn't help either...<p>Recently downloaded The Computer Chronicles. I want to go back to that world.<p>Last I read about him he was trying to make an autopilot for a sailboat. Motorized winches, radar, etc, all homemade. Sailboats and hard: a log in the middle of nowhere makes a hole in your fibreglass bathtub and you go down quickly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Nov 2025 15:05:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945628</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945628</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945628</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Seeing how much effort this takes<p>It takes effort even for the fanboys, but they are not going to tell you the hoops they jump through even in the Apple Soma Bubble (delete delete "Ecosystem"). You are expected to have the latest semi-broken iOS to even call your latest gen airpods airpods instead of generic bt audio devices lol. Let alone trying to make anything Apple work in Android.<p>I see the reason to liberate this corporate BT bullshit as a matter of principle, but I don't see the point of Apple fanboys today. In the 90s Apple was light years ahead of wintel, but today they are worse and more expensive than high end brands (etymotic for example) who don't engage in the silly marketing blending of brand and personal self worth the fanboys seem to ingest as if their life depends on it. They strike me as impoverished third worlders who think their internet cred will go up by buying Apple gear. Apple used to really mean "It Just Works", but not anymore by any stretch. On the other hand, the peace of mind of solving a problem for good and forgetting about it, like -radical idea- headphone jacks (removed because "courage"), using a stable environment on a computer you own with an environment you can recreate instead of the Apple merry-go-round, using your own infrastructure and ideas instead of hoping the Apple "Magic" will work when you really need to restore a backup. And when the Apple Machine(TM) eats your superior Apple creations, you simply were holding it wrong, man! Makes me wonder what the rest of the engineering world is thinking... for example, when are HiFi manufacturers going to ditch slimy, unseemly, dusty speaker cables for superior bluetooth sound quality? Why o why are Canon/Sony/Leica/etc still going with environmentally unfriendly, inefficient, heavy and dumb 35 mm image sensors? Don't they know about the miraculous-camera-assembly in iPhones? All 50 MP crammed not in 35 mm but in half the size, now that's sweet!<p>The idiocies keep coming, like "nano-textured" glass in Apple monitors that simply rehash the professional displays that for years have had accurate color reproduction, superior brightness, and -god forbid- matte screens. I think I must have a long-lost engineering prototype of a monitor with a superior, believed lost forever "nano-textured" glass. It's called matte screen, and it came in the superior display ratio called 16:10 once used by the dinosaurs instead of the retarded craze of everything you can dream of as long as it's 16:9 lol.<p>Apple fanboys: your identity brand has long since eroded, but by all means keep those credit cards warm, you need to finance the next Tim Cook yatch :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:05:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944819</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944819</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944819</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is bullshit. How can anyone pretend the radiation reflecting from it is significant? How wide are these things? 20 meters?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:45:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509317</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509317</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509317</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smakt in "California passes law to reduce volume of commercials on streaming services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Heh. The USA, getting there one law at a time. Have they banned stealing yet? Oh wait, never mind.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:31:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509138</link><dc:creator>smakt</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509138</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509138</guid></item></channel></rss>