News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Zanfa

Wasn’t one of Amazon’s biggest advantages over brick and mortar stores the fact that you could effectively avoid sales tax for a lot of the purchases?
Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:36AM (#50300822)
It’s been years since anything Tether minted was plausibly 100% backed by real assets. Both times they’ve been forced to show the books, they only had fractional backing. And they’ve minted tens of billions of tokens since.
Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @09:02AM (#50258545)
In theory sure, but in practice an engineer who can steer managers and product owners can have a massive impact on the outcome.
Re:Does Ruby on Rails still make sense? on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:01AM (#50180212)
Unless you're actually CPU-bound, there's never been a better time to use it. A lot of the benefits of Rails apply as much to LLMs as humans.

It's battle-tested, there are millions of lines of existing code using common patterns and libraries. It's still the gold standard for testability, with RSpec and factory_bot you'll have the nicest test setup with concise, human-friendly specs (especially if you're in the camp of verifying LLM work). Solid queue, cache, Active Storage with Turbo Frames give you all the benefits of single-page interactivity without the JS slop. Code size is a fraction of an equivalent JS setup, which is always nice for LLMs, went from close to 80k lines of JS to ~10k of Rails just recently on an internal project.

Historically, the main complaint was always "it's hard to hire for Rails" or "I don't know Ruby". But looking at the last 10 years of JS, I'm not sure the vast majority of JS slingers knew anything about Javascript either. And since everybody's vibing now anyway, why venture to the minefield that is the JS ecosystem.

Not just Finland. Apparently, it’s some russian dude who doesn’t like certain neighboring countries.
Re:Source code of the Estonian online voting system on Sunday October 18, 2026 @02:29AM (#50138425)
> It's not possible to steal numerous paper-based elections in a row

Why not? Estonia had paper ballot voting for the entire soviet occupation of about half a century, didn't have any effect on the amount of rigging though. Same with Russia today, they use paper ballots, but results still don't matter.

Paper vs electronic voting is just a small component in election fairness and there are upsides and downsides to both.

Claude is already emailing me from the CEOs email address. All the load-bearing seams and everything.
Who cares? Russia's been targeting Ukrainian vessels and shipping infrastructure since 2022, as we've established above. Just because Ukraine has chosen to respond in kind (or at a larger scale more recently) is irrelevant, the responsibility lies squarely with Russia. You should probably consume less Russian propaganda.
First, this thread is about refuting GPs claim about how this is in response to Ukraine attacking Russian vessels first, which is obviously bullshit.

Second, EU and US were not signatories to any deal between Russia and Ukraine, so any sanction relief was never on the table as part of the grain deal. Russia may have asked for it, but it was not offered or implied it in any way by anybody. And yes, this is typically how deals work everywhere.

Third, any ship that Ukraine sinks is 100% on Russia because they’re the reason any ships need to be sunk in the first place. Again, Russia could stop the war today and no further violence would be necessary.

Completely irrelevant as well as ridiculous. Russia is 100% responsible for any ships being sunk in the Black Sea. Making silly demands when things don’t work out the way they hoped does not shift the blame in any way whatsoever.

Russia can stop the war (and thus sanctions) whenever they choose to. Ukraine does not have that option.

Re:Things to know if you get cancer in 2026 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @04:36AM (#50100912)
Some notes from my father's experience over 10 years:

1) Doctors are human and make mistakes or overlook things all the time, so you yourself are ultimately responsible for double checking every result and lab test, following up with questions and getting second opinions when something doesn't add up or make sense. It can be as silly as a radiologist looking for changes between 2 identical images vs comparing with the previous scan.

2) Rare presentations happen. Just because some symptoms are a low probability occurrence, they still happen to somebody, so don't let anything be dismissed due to odds without further analysis or imaging.

3) Palliative care can have a major impact on the quality of life when there's nothing else to do. Nurses were more helpful for figuring out what to ask for than doctors.

Russia withdrew from that deal in July 2023
Russia has been targeting Ukrainian ships and shipping infrastructure since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Re:Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome) on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @06:48AM (#50085530)
I’ve used AdGuard for years across Macs and iPhones and it works great.
US wouldn't need to join the war for Ukraine to prevail. Not trying to force them to unconditionally surrender would be a good start.
Re:Yandex bot traffic down 99% after data center attack on Monday October 12, 2026 @02:24AM (#50052085)
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.

[0] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-covid-19-conspiracy-theoris...

I just finished ripping out one of these “dark factory” setups. Removed about 70k lines of code and 750k words of generated documentation. For what is effectively a 5-screen app.
Re:Eye of Sauron: Long-Range Hidden Spy Camera Detection on Saturday October 10, 2026 @04:04AM (#50030766)
Dan Gelbart's lecture on sensors[0] explains another fascinating method in detail using RF as well as the optical scanning method mentioned in the original video. The full lecture is worth a watch, but the timestamp is where the RF method explanation starts.

[0] https://youtu.be/0MtRxX0crjU?t=1815

> I don't understand why a label wouldn't like this model...

It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? They’d make less money and they have a lot of leverage over Spotify to force it to accept pretty much whatever terms that benefits the big labels at the expense of indies.

Re:AI Makes Me Sad on Friday October 02, 2026 @03:04PM (#49937250)
What makes me sad about AI is how it revealed how superficial everything is. It's not like I believed everybody were devoted to their jobs or took pride in it before, but most of my coworkers put in at least some minimal amount of effort.

Now everything is hollow. It's impossible to discern actual effort and polish from a polished turd without expending a lot more effort than it used to. Nobody cares to understand the problem so they're unable to consider solutions, other than what Claude spits out based on a single sentence prompt and zero context. You could put in the effort and do it better than before, much faster as well, but the result looks plausible either way, so nobody bothers and everything slowly enshittifies.

It's like uncanny valley of software, but somehow the majority of the people are unable to discern real from fake.

Re:Mozilla shutting down Solo AI website creator on Friday October 02, 2026 @12:25PM (#49935369)
Mozilla is already Google's charity project. They squandered Firefox's marketshare and there's really no reason for Google to pay them as much as they do at the moment, other than to pretend there's competition in browser engines and it's not just Chrome + Safari.

An absolute failure of Mozilla's leadership.

Re:I said no and Apple said yes on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @06:48AM (#49799189)
> This has changed recently

I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...

It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.

Google's search AI clearly trades accuracy for speed and it shows. It frequently draws the exact opposite conclusions from the sources it references.
Behold the View.java[0] at 34k lines of human code. IIRC it’s slimmed down a bit these days and used to be more.

[0] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

Re:Wax Motor on Friday September 18, 2026 @05:29AM (#49751971)
Yes. Most (even cheap-ish) greenhouse kits come with them, at least the ones I've seen around here.
Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @03:19AM (#49723093)
> What's always conveniently left out of lists like this is the greater context in which it occurred. Any state will go to great lengths to protect themselves and ensure their survival.

Putin isn’t worried about Russia’s survival or livelihoods. The country would’ve been an even richer Norway with all the natural resources and opportunity to trade with both mature European and emerging Asian countries. Instead they can’t even go a decade without invading any neighboring countries or a week of not threatening nuclear annihilation. It’s a national inferiority complex.

Re:Dyson CameraJet electric toothbrush on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @12:37AM (#49531769)
When I first unboxed a new V15, I thought I got a cheap knockoff instead of the real thing. That’s how cheap Dyson plastics look and feel.
Doesn't this usually just mean saying "I take full responsibility" and then firing a bunch of unrelated people?
I wish. Never used to really see any until recently. Looks like a brake light malfunction if you're not expecting it.
Re:Generic Methods in Go 1.27 on Thursday August 20, 2026 @01:55PM (#49377926)
But you can do equally horrible inheritance-y things with embedded structs.

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