News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

akoboldfrying

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:26AM (#50338123)
I think this is the important question. To everyone who is complaining while using Ubuntu for free: People whose software you use for free don't owe you anything.
Re:OccupySaaS on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:01AM (#50333320)
I agree. With that said, I don't have a problem with this motivation. With that said, it would however have been even better overall to have made this a credible threat used to keep the original developers in their original jobs. As it stands, it's basically Mutually Assured Destruction after one side already pushed the button.
Re:Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin on Sunday October 25, 2026 @04:19AM (#50229376)
This logic doesn't work here, because it relies on the premise that you alone potentially have an unreleased zero-day exploit, which is not the case.

If prompting an AI could exploit this for less than $500 in token spend, then you should immediately do so, since if you don't, in a few minutes' time someone else will.

Re:Docker Is Weird on Friday October 23, 2026 @03:02AM (#50205372)
They aren't at all the same thing, but at a high level they both reduce the amount of fragile/tedious setup-specific futzing you need to do to get a few basic services up.
Re:What Is Gridifcation on Thursday October 22, 2026 @04:38PM (#50200697)
> What modern production calls “correction,” and mistakes for care, is really a form of epistemic violence

I'm so tired of people reaching for the emotional impact of the word "violence" in contexts that are far removed from its actual meaning -- and this context is about the furthest removed I've seen to date.

> If we cannot hear and feel coordinated human time, we cannot learn the forms of felt life that make mutual recognition possible.

I actually laughed out loud.

Remember folks, "punching in" is Okay. Gridifying is Not Okay. Because ________, obviously.

Re:Chain of Thought for Humans on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:10AM (#50192167)
I often find it helpful to type comments (starting with a # character) directly in a shell session, to remind myself where I'm up to, what I need to do next, or what I've just done. Especially handy at the end of the day or when switching context to something else.
> Deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy aren't conservative values.

They're fiscally conservative values, as you likely already know. Social and fiscal conservatism are correlated, as you likely also already know.

In order for you to make this statement, you had to take a word ("conservative") that can be interpreted in one of two well-known ways ("social conservative", "fiscal conservative"), and pretend that when I used that word, I must have meant the way that doesn't make sense, instead of the way that obviously does.

> the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people.

It explicitly cares about people who identify as traditional Germans, who in their own eyes are "the normal people".

On the economic side, Gemini tells me that they favour deregulation, smaller government, and reducing bureaucracy for small and medium-sized enterprises (Mittelstand). They also want to increase family support payments to incentivise having children. These are all economic policies that make sense to conservative-minded "normal people".

I agree with this actually. All of these things were good for some and bad for some, and these groups overlapped. All were good for (most) humans-as-consumers, and bad for (some) humans-as-producers, and the IR was also bad for horses.
It's "worse for humans" in exactly the same way that first the Industrial Revolution and later computer programming made things "worse for humans", but the post you're referring to only notices that it's "worse" when they are the victim.
AI has already made mathematics better in the sense that it has greatly advanced what we know to be true (theorems).

The only way that it hasn't made mathematics better is in the sense of human mathematicians' career prospects -- and in this respect, it is identical to other forms of automation that the world, and especially computer programmers like us, have participated in in the past without complaint.

Re:I built a programming language that LLMs can't use on Sunday October 18, 2026 @06:52PM (#50146320)
Interesting. LLMs seem to now handle other kinds of state changes with ease, so I'm not sure why they would trip over this.

Do you mean stack-based source code languages like Forth or PostScript, or directly writing machine instructions for a stack-based ISA/VM like the JVM?

Re:What on Earth Is Dekton? on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:02PM (#50127484)
I can see how thinness is a benefit for induction heating, but how does it benefit a regular countertop?
Re:The Double Headed Stack Allocator on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:32AM (#50101283)
The system in TFA can only handle 2 "categories". Note that there could be many distinct types in each category; the important thing about categories is that everything in the same category should share an allocation/deallocation timeline. If this holds separately for each category, there will be no fragmentation.

For this 2-category case, the double-headed stack is strictly better than maintaining 2 separate half-size stacks, since it permits every sequence of allocations and deallocations that the latter permits, while there are sequences that it permits that the latter does not permit (namely, any sequence in which more than half the memory is temporarily needed by one of the categories, and the other category is temporarily not using it).

Re:Things to know if you get cancer in 2026 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:57AM (#50100656)
> You're banking on there being a significant shift in technology/knowledge that occurs right between the time you are diagnosed and the time you have left to treat it. Just as a Bayesian probability, it's extremely unlikely to be the case.

The probability that I think you're talking about here is not actually relevant, given that the trial is already underway. Basically, the "potential advance" event has already happened. (Similarly, the probability of getting shot by an arrow is not relevant once the arrow's already poking out of your body.)

Given the trial is already underway, the probability that matters is the fraction of treatment candidates at the phase you are considering that make it all the way through; for phase 3 trials, this is 58-65% [0], which is actually pretty good. Of course, rates for earlier phases are much worse because there's attrition at each phase.

0: https://patentpc.com/blog/clinical-trial-success-rates-how-m...

Re:Ask HN: What is the current trajectory of a senior engineer? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @08:16AM (#50086486)
I think the idea of "software architecture" may become irrelevant.

Architecture, in the sense of applying/enforcing organising principles like modularity and levels of abstraction, is something we currently do largely to manage complexity -- so that we can fit as much of the system into our limited brains as we can. For a large enough system, this is necessary in order to work on it efficiently. But if you can "keep the whole thing in your head" without using these "crutches", then there's actually no need for them. They become overhead that can be done away with. We do this already for sufficiently small things -- no one plans a software architecture for a "Hello world" script.

It's possible that future (maybe even current?) AIs will be able to "keep the whole codebase in their heads" just fine, in which case the need for architecture goes away.

Re:Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @07:16AM (#50085833)
No.
Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:51AM (#50084954)
I don't think that's likely to be a problem, really. If I explained the concept of an agent to you in a couple of sentences in Feb 2025, could you understand it, even though agents didn't exist yet? I think you could, and I think a modern frontier LLM probably can too.
Those searches look like a smoking gun, but the article points out they happened roughly a month after the murder, which I think genuinely does shrink (most of) them back down to simply looking really bad.

Though if, as the prosecution claim, she really did take out life insurance on him multiple times, for millions of dollars, and then remove him as a beneficiary -- that gun is pretty smoking.

Re:Grace Hopper Celebration Cancelled on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:21AM (#50084182)
Who does AnitaB.org actually support or advocate for?

Their "Our Mission" page refers only to the perfectly vague "our community", never once describing what that is. Nor does their landing page. Their "Our History" page says that the organisation started out to support women in the tech industry, but then describes several name changes, eventually dropping all use of the words "woman" or "women" and switching to the user of "individuals" without explanation or elaboration. It reads like a perfectly choreographed PR "product" designed to maximise deniability of... something. But what?

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @07:45PM (#50080531)
> I haven't tried it for coding yet
Re:11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @09:33AM (#50071502)
> This is not even the first soundness bug that appeared on HN frontpage.

This is not a counterargument to my claim that "#1 on HN" status implies that many people are surprised by this.

> It just means you don't pay attention to Rust development

Correct, I don't. I never said that I did.

Re:11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @09:26AM (#50071382)
From TFA:

> How on earth was this not found before this???

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/164250#issuecomment...

> Assigning P-high

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/164250#issuecomment...

In general I agree with fg137's assessment of soundness bugs as being inherently high-impact, i.e., serious:

> The Rust community is well aware that such bugs exist, will be found, and address them just like other high impact bugs.

Re:11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @08:26AM (#50070591)
Given that TFA is currently #1 on HN, I suspect I'm not the only person who is aware of Rust's borrow checker but not aware, until now, that it has a history of serious soundness bugs.
Re:11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @07:14AM (#50069862)
As an old C++ guy, my take is: Heh heh heh.

ETA: Downvoters, I salute you. Without your selfless courage, the forces of light humour would surely prevail.

Re:Auto Research: Integer multiplication below n log n on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:50AM (#50069163)
> There's literally no such thing as a hard wall where something is nlogn in time and can't get lower

I guess you're saying that this holds in "realistic" computational models? Sorting in the decision tree model is famously \Omega(n log n)-time.

Yes, but this threat analysis also holds for laptops and phones.

What do you use to access your bank account online? I use my laptop, or my phone.

Re:Fable Took My Job on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:32AM (#50054306)
Hobby woodworkers still build tables themselves, despite the existence of factories, assembly lines, IKEA.

Until the government forbids writing programs by hand, writing programs by hand will remain a satisfying hobby. The only thing that's changing is how much other people appreciate the skill and effort you put into a given program.

Re:Fable Took My Job on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:16AM (#50054158)
Although obviously I wouldn't like it happening to me, if the offshoring quality was as good as the original -- and I'm sure sometimes it was -- I can't find any valid objection to it. It is, after all, just a different bunch of people being paid to do some work. Why must it be "us" who get that work? Why can't it be "them"?

Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.

Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.

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