News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

acid__

In short, another AI-generated slop project.

I've seen this exact UI style a dozen times now and it's always accompanied with tell-tale overly verbose, overly dramatic text.

Re:GitHub Merge Queue Silently Reverted Code on Thursday April 23, 2026 @06:43PM (#47883188)
Tip: identify PRs with this problem by looking for discrepancies between the metadata (files/lines affected) for PRs via GitHub API and associated commits in the time window.

This was a pain to clean up!

Re:Shall I implement it? No on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:31PM (#47359675)
It seems to be particularly bad in Windows/WSL
Re:Claude Sonnet 4.6 on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @05:59PM (#47054656)
The 8% and 50% numbers are pretty concerning, but I’d add that was for the “computer use environment” which still seems to be an emerging use case. The coding environment is at a much more reassuring 0.0% (with extended thinking).

Edit: whoops, somehow missed the first half of your comment, yes you are explicitly talking about computer use

Re:Gemini 3 Deep Think on Thursday February 12, 2026 @03:27PM (#46994635)
> Most (probably >99.9%) players can't do that at the first attempt

Eh, both myself and my partner did this. To be fair, we weren’t going in completely blind, and my partner hit a Legendary joker, but I think you might be slightly overstating the difficulty. I’m still impressed that Gemini did it.

Re:Cognitive and Mental Health Correlates of Short-Form Video Use on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @04:55PM (#45985824)
I didn’t even click the link, just read the top two comments and closed the page before realizing what I had done.
Re:Lightstep is shutting down March 1, 2026 on Thursday November 06, 2025 @02:44PM (#45839422)
After being acquired by ServiceNow in 2021 for $510M and being rebranded to ServiceNow Cloud Observability, Lightstep is now being sunsetted with minimal fanfare.
I can, I’ve written a billing system before (unfortunately). There’s a lot of annoying math/edge cases and systems to sync between.

While I never implemented a restriction like this, it would have prevented a lot of weird bugs/customer support issues and kept the underlying code much simpler.

(Annoying math = time zones, prorations, discounts, billing cycle anchors, etc. see the “falsehoods programmers believe about X” series)

(Systems to sync between = internal DBs, billing APIs, payment processors, etc.)

Re:Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data on Friday April 05, 2024 @03:13PM (#39945977)
Top multimodal models have about 200-1000 tokens per image, so the math works out.
My experience from working in the security space is that all the tech is pretty un-sexy (with very good sales pitches), and none of it will save you from a nation-state attacker.
Be sure to check out the mentioned catalog. [1]

The NSA's capabilities back in 2008 were pretty astonishing: "RAGEMASTER" A $30 device that taps a VGA cable and transmits the contents of your screen to the NSA van sitting outside! Crazy stuff. Makes you wonder what they've built in the last 15 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog

What gives you confidence that this is a bot account and not a frequent reader of HN that is passionate about growing the number of unique topics discussed here? And what’s up with the strong, inflammatory language?
Re:The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @03:23PM (#39458991)
Wow, only 256 tokens per frame? I guess a picture isn’t worth a thousand words, just ~192.
Re:Hey, Computer, Make Me a Font on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @12:46PM (#37767900)
Designing fonts for languages that use Chinese characters is often challenging due to the sheer number of glyphs.

This approach to generating fonts is very interesting… feels like it could unlock the creation of heavily stylized fonts that just wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.

Re:iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @04:34PM (#37487821)
Prediction: There will soon be a lot more VR “content” available with the proliferation of VR-capable recording devices.

This could be a big push towards making the metaverse more compelling.

Hrm, true, no one’s ever gotten fluent in a language just by reading a textbook.
Surely if any IC would be in the know, it would be an L9.
Re:I don’t want to be an internet person on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @07:19PM (#33902364)
Oof, that’s a little too relatable. I’ve spent the better part of a decade recovering from that. It has very much colored who I am today but I do my best to not allow it to define me.
Re:The World Is Run by People No Smarter Than You on Friday November 11, 2022 @01:34PM (#33564767)
Once upon a time, all of that would have been managed on just pen and paper, calculated by humans instead of machines!
Re:WebKit Quirks.cpp on Friday October 14, 2022 @04:50PM (#33208661)
Huh, how big does your website have to be in order for your bugs to be patched this way?
Re:So You Want to Compete with Steam (2018) on Thursday September 22, 2022 @11:49AM (#32940611)
It’s true, but new characters are very “expensive”, even in the free currency. I have an embarrassing number of hours in league (4 digits) and do not have all the characters unlocked. Compare to Dota where I had every character unlocked at hour zero.
I’m glad to see a shift in sentiments from Germany about nuclear power [0]. There have been warnings about energy dependence on Russia for years [1], maybe not long enough to spin up more nuclear plants but certainly enough time to make good progress on them.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/world/europe/germany-exte...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/09/25/trump-accuse...

Re:Cut the cutesy errors on Thursday August 04, 2022 @11:06AM (#32343891)
No need to qualify your statement, as a native speaker myself I can confirm your assessment is 100% on point.
Re:Someone is impersonating us in a recruiting scam on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @02:30PM (#32086868)
That’s funny, there’s actually been an intentional shift among “email thought leaders” towards shorter, plain-text emails because they can come across as more personal in today’s world of high-powered CRMs.
It’s not always easy to migrate identities, especially if your identity has built up reputation or trust in a community.
Re:LaMDA is not sentient on Monday June 13, 2022 @01:31PM (#31728690)
They’re pretty clear that this is not the case. However, that doesn’t stop our imaginations going wild as per the GP’s point. It’s impressive how good these bots are compared to the state of the art 10 years ago.

https://help.replika.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001070971-Is-t...

Re:LaMDA is not sentient on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:44PM (#31728017)
This is already a real issue with many existing public chatbots.

Take r/replika for example, they’re constantly getting posts from users who think their chatbot partner is real. It’s the first question in their FAQ.

The mods keep needing to post reminders. [0] Even in this post, there are many commenters (if you scroll down) who don’t believe the mods.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/r5t0wk/so_you_thin...

I’m not at all qualified here, but it sounds like autorotation might not be involved in crashes because when autorotation works, there is no crash :P

Older »