avarun

Joined 10 years ago

Karma
510
Submissions
270
Member since
Jul 11
Varun Arora, varun [at] varun [dot] codes

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/varunarora; my proof: https://keybase.io/varunarora/sigs/wKOHSwQ2CrIeEblomNw37xlU4pIRclWlhWkPfSoEEE4 ]

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 20 hours ago
He works there
Comment · 20 days ago
Grok has been at the frontier since 4.6
Comment · 20 days ago
The Quest literally outsold the Xbox despite being a brand new "gaming console". Very difficult to call this a failure if you understand technology.
Comment · 20 days ago
I mean, Meta themselves put Wonder at much lower on the benchmarks they've released than Wonder Full. So this is not very surprising from base Wonder.
Comment · 1 month ago
Exact same. I was a huge user of SvelteKit from 2022 to early 2025. But ever since LLMs got good enough I went back to React, because the ecosystem size matters a lot more once the coding experience is automated away. And early models were much much better at React than they were at Svelte – I suspect that difference may be gone now but is there a good reason to switch back to Svelte?
Comment · 1 month ago
This is more of a forward than a future. Futures are standardized and regulated. Forwards are not.
Comment · 1 month ago
They rolled this out in March this year in the US (and December last year in India).

I've successfully renamed an old account with an email address I no longer liked. It works quite well on everything 1st party, but does have the potential of causing issues with OAuth on poorly-coded websites that key on email instead of user ID (ie. most of them). You do get to keep your old email address though, so it still ends up working fine in practice.

Comment · 2 months ago
This is exactly what RLVR is, and the reason that models have improved so much at verifiable domains like coding and math while not so much on unverifiable ones like writing and UI design.
Comment · 2 months ago
Why did they skip version 3?
Comment · 2 months ago
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.

Comment · 2 months ago
Which specific product do you take? Do you have a link?
Comment · 3 months ago
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.

Comment · 3 months ago
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.
Comment · 3 months ago
Sure, but the fact that you can just install Sodium completely obviates the need for the Bedrock version to exist at all.
Comment · 3 months ago
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.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton