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Windows
Each story opens in a window holding its article above its discussion; drag the bar between them to share the room differently. A window can be moved by its title bar, resized from any edge, snapped to a half or a corner by dragging it there, maximised, or minimised to the bar at the foot of the page. Use Window > New reader window to open an empty reader, or Story > Open in new reader window to open another reader for the current article. Docked readers keep their articles when you select another story from the sidebar. Minimized readers can be restored and reused for their site. A window's Previous and Next buttons read up and down the list in the same window.
A link in a comment or an article to another Hacker News or Lobsters thread opens that thread in a window too. A link to a single HN comment opens the comment above its replies.
While a story's window is in front, the Story and Discussion menus in the menu bar hold its commands: pinning, Previous and Next story, sorting, collapsing every thread, jumping to the first new comment. Each window also remembers where you were in its article and discussion, so a reload, or Back to a story that Next took you past, finds your place again. Closing a window forgets it.
The whole arrangement lives in the address, so a bookmark or a shared link brings it back, and Back undoes the last change. Moving between Hacker News, Lobsters, their lists, Pinned and Find changes only the list, and leaves the windows open.
The list
The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.
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View > Windowed and View > Classic select the browsing view and save your default in this browser. Window view reuses a reader for each feed. Classic view opens stories and applets as pages. Open as a page is a one-off action that does not change your saved default. Use the Windowed selector to return an article to a window. Direct page links always open as pages.
Applets
The Applets menu in the menu bar holds three tools, each a window of its own. Replies to me takes your Hacker News user name and lists the replies to your last thirty comments and stories, checking again every three minutes while it is open, and marking what is new since you last marked them read. Look up a user opens a profile on Hacker News or Lobsters, with their submissions and recent comments, as a commenter's name in any discussion does; the bar at the top of a profile looks up someone else in the same window, and Back returns to the one before. Who is hiring? filters the posts of HN's monthly hiring threads by the words you type.
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Find
Find takes any link and lists every time it was submitted to Hacker News and Lobsters, so you can read each discussion of it.
About
YAVCHN never sees your Hacker News or Lobsters login. The discussion is fetched from each site's public API; to vote or reply, follow the link above the discussion, or the arrow beside a comment, to the source's own site. Without a YAVCHN account, your data stays in this browser. When signed in, pins, collections, notes, blocked domains, and retained reading state are stored with your account and synchronized across devices. Hidden stories and layout stay in this browser. The privacy policy has the details.
Open source: github.com/paulmooreparks/yavchn. Built with PUDL.
No one has any plausible plan or halfway-decent plan for how to maintain control over an AI that has become super-humanly capable. Essentially all of the major AI labs are trying to create a super-humanly capable AI, and eventually one of them will probably succeed—which would be very bad (i.e., probably fatal) for humanity. So, clearly the AI labs must be shut down and in fact would have been shut down already if humanity were sufficiently competent. The AI labs must stay shut down until someone comes up with a good plan for controlling (or aligning) AIs, which will probably take at least 3 or 4 decades. We know that because people have been conducting the intellectual search for a plan for more than 2 decades as their full-time job, and those people report that the search is very difficult.
A satisfactory alternative might be to develop a method for determining whether a novel AI design can acquire a dangerous level of capabilities along with some way of ensuring that no lab or group goes ahead with an AI that can. This might be satisfactory if the determination can be made before giving the AI access to people or the internet. But I know of no competent researcher that has ever worked on or made any progress on this problem whereas at least the control problem has received a decent amount of attention from researchers and funding institutions.
The AIs that might prove fatal to humanity will be significantly different in design from the AIs that have been already widely deployed: for one thing, they will constantly learn (like a person does) as opposed to already-deployed AIs in which the vast majority of the AI's learning happens during a training phase that ends before any widespread deployment of the AI. Also, they will be much better than current AIs at working towards a long-term goal. I say this because I don't want to be misunderstood as believing that Google Gemini 2.5 or ChatGPT 5.0 might take over the world: I understand that those AIs are incapable of a such a thing. The worry is the AIs that are still on the drawing board or that will appear on a drawing board 5 or 10 years from now. There is no need to ban Gemini 2.5 and ChatGPT 5. Since some AI researchers pursue AI "progress" for ideological reasons and will tend to persist stubbornly even after AI research is banned, the best time to ban AI frontier research is now, so that these stubborn ideologues whose research will have been driven underground (because of the ban) but are capable of making a little more "progress" on AI will be unlikely to be able to make enough "progress" to end the world.
Again, as soon as anyone comes up with a solid plan for controlling (or aligning) an AI even if the AI turns out to be more capable than us, the ban on frontier AI research can be lifted as long as the majority of AI experts and AI researchers are in agreement that the plan is solid. No one can say how long this search for a solid plan will take, but IMHO it will probably take at least 3 or 4 decades.
More at
https://intelligence.org/the-problem/