Anthropic's new flagship model claims a leap forward, but the comment section is not convinced it's more than a price cut.
What the article says
- Anthropic launched Fable and Mythos, its most capable models yet for coding, research and long unattended work sessions.
- The company says cache reads got much cheaper, which cuts real world costs noticeably for heavy agent workloads.
- Safety filters got looser too, so the model should stop blocking harmless requests like hardening a server.
- Partner quotes describe the model finding a crash that stumped engineers for years and mapping a new part of Venus using old satellite data.
- New anti copying protections lock down how much of the model's internal reasoning outside tools can see or reuse.
What HN is saying
- Several commenters pulled up independent benchmark sites and argued the gains over the previous flagship are tiny once you strip out one science test, and that real world cost sometimes went up, not down.
- A recurring complaint is usage caps. People on the priciest subscription tier say they burn through their weekly allowance in a couple of days.
- Writing style split people. Some like that it sounds less like typical AI prose, others still find responses too dense and hard to skim.
- A few power users are frustrated by safety filters blocking mundane tasks like server security work, and by the model rewriting entire files for small edits.
- One long thread debates whether AI progress has genuinely stalled, with several engineers saying gains now come mostly from tooling, not the underlying model.
Google Play is threatening to pull a beloved flashcard app over a donation link technicality.
What the article says
- AnkiDroid, a free flashcard app used by millions for studying, faces removal from Google Play on September 11 unless this gets resolved.
- The fight is over its donation link to Open Source Collective, the nonprofit that holds its funds.
- Google says donations must go to a fully tax exempt group. Open Source Collective has a different, related tax status, and Google is treating that as disqualifying.
- The developers say they already sent Google an official IRS letter proving the nonprofit status, but keep getting the same boilerplate rejection back.
- They're asking people to share the post rather than flood Google support directly.
What HN is saying
- A lot of the thread is people carefully parsing Google's actual policy wording, since tax exempt and tax deductible turn out to mean different things and it's not clear which one Google actually means.
- Many say this is classic Google: an automated review process, no human to appeal to, and apps get pulled with little warning. Several say Apple, despite its fees, is easier to deal with because a real person answers support tickets.
- One commenter recalls Google did the same thing to WireGuard back in 2019.
- A side argument breaks out over whether this justifies more government regulation of app stores, with pushback that being big doesn't mean a company should be regulated like a utility.
- Longtime users show up just to say thanks and vow to donate, and one mentions using F-Droid to sidestep the Play Store entirely.
A weekend AI coding project made a faster Spotify client, and it's splitting Hacker News down the middle.
What the article says
- It's a free Rust app that plays Spotify locally or controls playback on another speaker or TV, like the official Connect feature.
- You can browse your library, search the catalog, and edit your own playlists.
- The standout feature turns it into a tiny Winamp style mini player, complete with classic skins and a visualizer.
- It's open source, but the author says the code and docs were largely written by an AI in about five days.
What HN is saying
- Plenty of people pile on Spotify itself, calling its official app slow, buggy, and worse since it moved from a native client to a web based one.
- The sharpest fight is over the AI generated code. Some worry that means nobody actually understands or vetted it, others say the author uses it daily and fixes bugs fast, so it doesn't matter.
- A few commenters single out the site's writing as obviously AI generated and say that overly polished, vague marketing copy makes them trust the project less.
- A side thread turns into people swapping ways to quit streaming entirely, from self hosted music servers to just buying albums on Bandcamp.
A blogger begs you not to ditch Firefox, and the comments turn into the most honest Firefox therapy session on the internet.
What the article says
- A blogger argues people are dumping Firefox over small annoyances while ignoring the bigger picture.
- The trigger was a writer who switched to Vivaldi because Firefox joined X, even though Vivaldi is on X too.
- The piece calls Firefox the last real alternative to Chrome's engine, since Safari only survives because Apple forces it on iPhones.
- The author says Firefox is chasing new users by any means necessary, including X, and thinks it deserves support rather than pile ons.
What HN is saying
- Most commenters agree Firefox matters for keeping the web from becoming one Chrome monoculture, even while listing real complaints.
- Frequent gripes include heavy memory and CPU use, Mozilla's ad tech ventures, confusing settings, and an AI heavy new tab page nobody asked for.
- One person pushes back hard, saying much of the hate comes from web developers who quietly optimize only for Chrome and blame the browser instead.
- A former Mozilla employee jokes that staff read every thread like this, which gets upvoted as proof the complaints actually land somewhere.
- Several people mention switching to Firefox based browsers like Zen for a smoother experience without fully leaving the ecosystem.
A hobbyist trained a tiny model for under a dollar that beats big LLMs at abstract reasoning.
What the article says
- The author built a small transformer from scratch, training it in under two hours on a single home GPU.
- It scored well on ARC, a brutal abstraction test, beating plenty of big language models even though it isn't one itself.
- The whole run cost less than a dollar, remarkable for research that usually needs huge compute budgets.
- His trick is letting the model study the test questions, never the answers, before grading. He calls this transductive learning, a decades old technique, not cheating.
- He thinks teaching models to learn from very little data is AI's biggest unsolved problem, and this is his cheap attempt to chip at it.
What HN is saying
- The author showed up and personally answered nearly every question in the thread.
- Most of the debate centered on whether training on the test questions, without their hidden answers, counts as cheating. He and others argue it's a recognized method, not a shortcut.
- One skeptic pushed back that the score could be overfit, since it's measured on a public set rather than a truly private holdout.
- Another commenter compared the approach to how a student skims an entire exam before tackling any single question.
- A side thread admired an unrelated line on his personal site, where he describes diagnosing his own medical emergency after doctors initially missed it.