News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Unai

Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @09:08PM (#50283206)
People used to add "reddit" at the end of their search queries, and now I'm sure many of those people just ask a bot. But reddit is still there (even if in the form of a grotesque mutation of itself) because people like to talk to each other.

So yeah, AI surely didn't help, and I concede that the SO case is even worse given its nature (and how good of a substitute AI is), but if it wasn't a pool of acid I could see it existing as a place for people who want human help and opinions. So I don't think it's fair to say the drop is "100% because of AI", as you put it.

Then again, it's been a pool of acid since forever and it kept going for a long time like that, so maybe you are both right. AI did kill it, but because it was hostile.

Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @10:02AM (#49993040)
That was indeed surprisingly readable and very in-depth at the same time. Thanks for sharing!
Re:The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art on Monday September 21, 2026 @11:55AM (#49788916)
Well, seems like we're getting there in terms of refresh rate, if not there already, so still easier and cheaper than making new CRTs.
Re:The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art on Monday September 21, 2026 @05:11AM (#49784921)
*presets
Re:The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art on Sunday September 20, 2026 @08:48PM (#49781734)
Seems obvious that it would be incredibly expensive to do for something very few would buy.

Let's say you manage to build a product you could sell as a niche expensive thing and not as a super duper expensive rich-people-only thing; you would still be competing against people buying an old CRT for 20 bucks or just using shaders for free (which gets you 99% there on an HDR 4k TV and takes 0% space in your house).

Another advantage of shaders is that you can make them look exactly how you want, down to particular CRT models, screen curvatures, analog signal aberrations, etc. And almost everything you could want comes already included on RetroArch by default, with lots of presents if you don't want to mess with that stuff yourself. Hard to compete with that. A CRT TV comes with only one look. But again, working with the TV you already own instead of occupying a cubic meter of your house is probably the biggest advantage.

I play retro games almost exclusively and I would never get a CRT myself, not even if it was free.

Re:Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @01:16PM (#49452597)
Thankfully, people with ridiculous opinions ridicule themselves. Like pretending the web is just documents, as if we were living three decades ago. Or pretending that "latest and greatest features" is the only reason to keep a browser updated. Or pretending that new features are somehow bad or not useful. Or defending poor Apple for wanting people to spend a grand on new hardware to update be able to update their browser.
Re:Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @05:22AM (#49446102)
A non-evergreen browser in 2026 should be publicly ridiculed any time its name is brought up.
Re:98% Isn't Much on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @09:18AM (#48817376)
I blame it in big part on the WebDX community group, their absolutely useless "Baseline" guidelines, and on them allowing Apple to be part of that group and make decisions on what features are "ready" to use whilst being behind the only non-evergreen browser in 2026.

The "baseline" means nothing. The percentage in caniuse means nothing. The only number that matters is the number of Safari users stuck using a no longer supported Apple device that access your website. Of course Apple makes sure to hide usage stats of older devices.

Everyone complains about only having three browser engines out there, but I'll be happy to go down to two if that means freeing the world from Safari.

I think you can add add-ons for additional trackers, even private ones I think, but I've always just used the ones that qBittorrent comes with and I can find almost everything I look for.
Re:Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @07:48PM (#48377813)
If you're gonna go off-topic, I wanna join.

How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.

We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.

I commented somewhere else already, but you can search directly from qBittorrent. Search by title, then filter by "Remux" or sort by size. Keep in mind tho that a blu-ray release must exist in the first place, and that some 4k blu-rays are just not very good to begin with (upscaling and what not).
I might be misremembering, but wasn't YIFY/YTS known for their awful quality ultra compressed releases? I thought they closed down many years ago tho, so no idea if they are the same people or if they still focus on low-quality releases.
You can turn it on in `View -> Search engine`. Then a new tab will appear next to the main transfers one. You can (have to?) add search plugins, which is done from the same search tab (look for a button in the bottom right). And I think to remember you need to have Python installed for the search tab to work, but qBittorrent should prompt you automatically for it.

I might be misremembering something, so ask again if something I said didn't work or wasn't where I said.

Free extra tip: did you know qBittorrent has support for themes? I got a pretty clean dark theme one, but no way I can remember the name or where I found it.

I love qBittorrent.

I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.
Not sure how you want me to respond to that. Are you getting that from a feel of yours or some statistical analysis of familiarity with polymarket in Spain? I don't think it matters much anyway, I bet most human beings don't know what polymarket is. But still, you think it warrants a conspiracy? To what end? None of this makes much sense to me.
There are bets everyday, so no matter when the ban is announced, you can always attach a conspiracy to it.
Re:Vivaldi 8.0 on Thursday May 21, 2026 @06:09AM (#48220250)
I really doubt that's as general of an occurrence as you make it up to be. There's a particular government process I can only do on Edge (no other browser works, chromium or not). For a certain login process in a different branch of government I can use Vivaldi or Firefox, but not Edge. I don't think you can single out a browser for this kind of thing.
Re:Gemini Omni on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @07:54AM (#48206268)
Interestingly, the video on the announcement also starts with some papers and a toy car on a wooden table exploding like those jenga pieces.
Re:Google changes its search box on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @06:21AM (#48205533)
> Websites may go back to being simply labors of love.

If I'm gonna lose my job, at least give me that in return

Re:Halt and Catch Fire on Saturday May 16, 2026 @08:56PM (#48165171)
Lee Pace is just bigger than life, and Mackenzie Davis is electric in every scene, but my favourite on the show was Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance. Although I guess that could be said of all the main (and not so main) characters in the show.

If anyone else loved these actors watching HACF, I would recommend watching The Fall (Pace), Fargo S3 (McNairy) and Station Eleven (Davis).

Re:A HN post with negative points – how? on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @08:37AM (#48107393)
That's correct AFAIK, submissions can't be downvoted.

If anyone's interested, here's a list of undocumented HN features/rules (although I don't know how up to date it is): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Re:Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @07:30AM (#48106749)
Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.
Re:People Hate AI Art on Friday May 08, 2026 @10:48PM (#48071305)
This community is mostly based around sharing ideas, not feelings.
> You prefer dark interfaces — your operating system told us.

oOoOohh my settings worked as intended, spooky!

I can highly recommend Gamesir controllers. I haven't tried all of course, they make a lot of different ones, but generally it's a great brand for very high quality controllers at crap-controller price. Better bang for the buck than 8BitDo (who focus more on style than functionality).

I've no relationship with the brand btw, I'm just a happy customer.

I got a big "reject all" button just next to the "accept all" one, on mobile.
At least that was cut from the game. I remember that episode from The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files spin-off series, where they stopped the (inside job) hijacking of a commercial airplane from crashing into the twin towers, which aired just a few months before the attack.

I only watched it a few years later, and I had to double check the airing date.

When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory.

It was a completely random series of notes.

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