News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

akamaka

Re:MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:21PM (#50277186)
Whenever I had to use a laptop with a touch screen for work, I immediately turned it off. I have no idea what my use case would be as a coder, and it doesn’t seem like Apple has come up with anything new to give me a reason to try it again.
This entire thread is filled with people saying Wikipedia is doomed due to whatever minor problem personally bothers them, in this case apparently coverage of recent events quoting news organizations.

Nobody is actually showing us why the problem they choose to highlight is significant enough to torpedo Wikipedia altogether (or even that is a more important problem than all the others mentioned).

Also, nobody here is starting a long argument to waste people’s time. They’re simply saying “your one paragraph proclamation is completely unconvincing”.

Re:Margaret Hamilton has died on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @09:16PM (#50000870)
It becomes engineering when the software is flying to the moon and back.
Re:Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's on Sunday August 09, 2026 @11:25PM (#49238874)
You don’t need to be a full blown acoholic to be affected, it’s simply a correlation of more alcohol consumption to faster decline of the brain. Having a job that requires you to be sober more hours of the week might bump you into a lower risk category.
Re:Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's on Sunday August 09, 2026 @07:43PM (#49237469)
I wonder if alcohol consumption plays a role here, since it is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s. A taxi driver who works 60 hours a week will have very little time left over for drinking, whereas pilots have relatively short work hours where they actually need to be sober.
It’s unfortunate that the writing style wasn’t up to par, but I want to point out that I read the entire article and it doesn’t contain any criticisms of Redis. From the sounds of it, Redis worked perfectly and achieved what they wanted, which was beyond the capabilities of a simple MySQL implementation of the system.

In the end, they found a way to make it all work on MySQL, which solved some of the inherent complexity of using multiple databases side by side (but again this isn’t a criticism of Redis, the same problem would exist for any pair of databases).

I found Shopify’s post very easy to read, and learned about some features of MySQL. On the other hand, I didn’t get any value from reading your comment. You seem to have a bunch of opinions about how things should be done, but haven’t given any details about how you came to these conclusions.
I feel the opposite way. Seeing movies in IMAX is the only reason I still go to the cinema, and it’s maybe the best $20 I spend each year.
Re:The Strongest El Niño Ever on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @12:31PM (#49099633)
Yes, progress on renewable energy has virtually ruled out the extreme climate change scenarios that seemed possible 20 years ago (4-10°C warming).
Re:The Strongest El Niño Ever on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @12:29PM (#49099610)
That’s a true statement about most human endeavours through all of history, so I’m not sure what your point is.
Re:The Strongest El Niño Ever on Sunday July 26, 2026 @08:02PM (#49063643)
I’ve had the same discussion with many people, and when I tell them how much work is done on cleaning up carbon emissions, the reply is always “well… it’s not enough”. And of course, they don’t have a sense of what is “enough”.

They don’t really understand it in a factual, measurable way, but just are interesting in what the overall story is, and what it says about humanity failing.

All of three of these companies are huge $10+ billion corporations who are capable of doing good and bad simultaneously. If you’re happy painting them as black or white, that your choice, but some people are interested in the specific facts of each case.

All I did was quote a fact without any additional comments, and you are the one being dismissive and handwaving it away.

The $634 million judgement you’re referring to was only for Masimo’s patents, and the other claims they made about trade secret theft were dismissed.
The jury ruled against Apple only on the issue of patents, and the claims of trade secret theft were dismissed. There doesn’t seem to be evidence that the Masimo employees who went to work for Apple brought any confidential information along with them.
Re:Megawatts by Microwave on Sunday July 05, 2026 @11:15AM (#48794902)
Thank you, I found your summary helpful because the article doesn’t start with any explanation about what it will cover.
Re:5k Restaurant Menus, Years 1880-1920 on Sunday June 28, 2026 @02:03PM (#48709801)
It crashed my browser twice on mobile, so I just gave up.
It’s not hypothetical at all. The FCC is currently being used for political attacks: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/28/media/abc-fcc-disney-licenses...

And folks who are under attack happen to also be the biggest copyrighter holders, so this would open up a new avenue of attack.

My iPhone 13 performs better since the Liquid Glass update. Animations seem to have been optimized and are much smoother. I also replaced the battery last year, so it might be worth checking if you are getting degraded performance due to a old battery.
The article quotes the creator saying he used AI
It says in the article that the creator used OpenAI Codex, presumably because the spectrogram image wouldn’t have enough resolution by itself.
Re:Canada's first sovereign wealth fund on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:46PM (#47941881)
I have no idea what you’re talking about at this point. Do you have any interest in understanding why CPPIB invests the way they do and doesn’t seek the highest returns?
Re:Canada's first sovereign wealth fund on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @10:17AM (#47934998)
During the Great Depression, the stock market stayed below 50% of its peak value for about 20 years. Imagine that the $600 billion turns into $300 billion overnight. It will only last 5-10 years without inflows, but the GDP has also dropped by 40% and inflows have plummeted.
Re:Canada's first sovereign wealth fund on Monday April 27, 2026 @10:43PM (#47929949)
$780 billion divided by 6 million current recipients is a little over $100,000, which is hardly comparable to your wealth retiree example.
Re:Canada's first sovereign wealth fund on Monday April 27, 2026 @06:01PM (#47927973)
> Future payments in the short term are covered by inflows.

That wouldn’t work in a major depression when there is high unemployment and inflows drop.

Re:Canada's first sovereign wealth fund on Monday April 27, 2026 @06:00PM (#47927961)
Yes, if a retirement fund had put all their money into a stock index in 1926, it wouldn’t have been able to pay out pensions throughout the 1930s and 1940s and would have been bankrupt before the market eventually recovered.

Going full index is a great strategy for an individual person aged 20-50, but not a strategy for a pension fund which needs to continuously pay out.

Re:Android now stops you sharing your location in photos on Monday April 13, 2026 @10:18AM (#47752359)
I just tested this and the default setting is to include location, but once turned off it stays off (unlike the iPhone share sheet where you need to turn it off each time).
What’s the point of saying one stat is better than another, when all of them are meaningful in a different way? When renewables reach big numbers of TWh, someone will say “total generation is misleading if doesn’t line up with demand; what matters is capacity for power when we actually need it”.
I did the same math. The closest guess I have is that it is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $32150 (which divided by four is $8037).
Nope, I just spent 15 minutes reading the original paper and can’t make any sense of what he is calculating.

International dollars are normalized to USD, so there’s no conversion necessary. The figure he quotes of 63 min per dollar converts to $8343/year. However, his original paper states that he created this measure by inverting income, so the number 8343 is his starting point.

The closest guess I have is that is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $32150 (which divided by four is $8037).

If that is the case, what he is really doing is comparing poverty line definitions between countries.

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