News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

anilakar

Re:I Dream of Quieter Computing on Monday August 24, 2026 @08:21AM (#49418704)
I owned a 17-inch Trinitron and very much preferred it over the early slow and small LCD panels. I did get a 15-inch Samsung VGA LCD panel for free later, but only kept it as a LAN party display as it folded completely flat for storage and transport.
Re:Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider on Monday August 24, 2026 @03:38AM (#49416371)
Google will present multipe bogus reasons, such as:

1) it is not automated

2) the user consented

3) subjecting oneself to automated processing is a hard requirement

while in reality

1) a human rubberstamping the decision does not make it non-automated

2) coerced or forced consent via ToS and a checkbox is not consent

3) automated processing is not a requirement, just a business decision.

Re:Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider on Monday August 24, 2026 @01:54AM (#49415667)
Google has a computer making decisions that affect humans, and then they then have humans defending the decisions a computer did. We live in a dystopia. I hope "Karen" sees the irony in the day job she is doing.

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.

—IBM, 1979

Re:I Dream of Quieter Computing on Sunday August 23, 2026 @05:10AM (#49407231)
We had CRT displays that could easily do 100 to 120 Hz. Then we regessed to LCD panels that could do 60 Hz and it somehow became the performance target.
Re:Hyperspace on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @01:38AM (#49253777)
For Windows users looking to save space, there's Compactor[1] that uses the NTFS built-in compression opportunistically for only those files that benefit from it. It is not a deduplicator but the basic idea is the same: take an underutilized OS feature and make it usable.

Pretty handy when your flight sim game takes 1.2 terabytes with most of that being sparse terrain mesh data and uncompressed textures. Compressing the whole directory would take over a day according to Microsoft and their infamous progress bar; Compactor gets it done in fifteen minutes.

[1] https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor

No ISO? No numpad? Also we're doing preorders for preorders now?
Re:Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @10:00AM (#49169133)
Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.
Re:HMD Touch 4G on Sunday July 19, 2026 @02:31PM (#48970574)
Considering how bad the Windows Phone ecosystem was, the smartphones were not much better...
Re:OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe on Thursday July 16, 2026 @09:59AM (#48934697)
> After two years your battery will be almost unusable

After two years increasingly complex web apps will have made your hardware obsolete. Batteries can be swapped, bad web development at scale cannot be fixed.

We did Tailscale-like SSH reverse tunnels at scale first in 2013 and the main issue has always been that there are no good libraries. Bash scripting around the OpenSSH binaries is pretty much the only way to go.

There's Paramiko, but Python is still a huge liability in memory-constrained systems.

Re:I'm a USB-C Maximalist on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @02:21AM (#48916931)
> C7 and its 2.5A max current

If 250 W (in the absolute worst case, a 100 V .jp grid) is not enough for travel purposes, I have no idea what will satisfy your requirements.

When I was in high school my German teacher taught us to tip by default by rounding up and paying with exact change. Is that still a thing when everyone is paying with card?
Re:Good Tools Are Invisible on Saturday July 11, 2026 @03:29AM (#48869648)
The best tool has just a single button that has already been pressed for you. The mechanical action is there just for satisfaction.
Re:Has_not_been_viewed_much on Monday July 06, 2026 @02:19AM (#48801240)
This feels like I am violating something that is sacred.

The last time I felt the same was when I accidentally found a Japanese Youtube channel that had tons of clips of konbini storefronts, a few seconds long each, most of them with zero views.

Re:Vulnerability Reports are not Special Anymore on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @05:24AM (#48657263)
CVE 10.0 if you happen to use one specific functionality in the library. Non-CVE if you do not, and because it's an old bug, you cannot just downgrade to get a non-red result from Trivy.
GPU driver packages are already a huge collection of workarounds for bad game engine coding.

An Nvidia employee once told me that one of the easiest ways to squeeze out a few extra frames on your old machine is to rename the game executable to hl2.exe.

Re:Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe on Monday June 15, 2026 @01:48AM (#48537080)
Only in EU because of the Accessibility Act[1]. Copywrong holders are allowed to disable screen readers elsewhere because that allows them to sell more audiobooks. You will apparently also lose many other features, among them Asian scripts and developer mode.

[1] https://www.kobo.com/kobo-writing-life/blog/our-commitment-t...

Nineties called and they want their shitty export grade computing back. Anyone still remember OpenBSD?
Look, we're always telling our bosses to stop micromanaging us. UB is just the compiler telling us to stop micromanaging it!
Turns out intelligence gathering is pretty boring routine work, not Bond-esque spy stuff or stakeouts in camo nets and face paint.
So... because of risk of retaliatory litigation I have to sit on vuln reports for one month while black hats are free to roam.
Re:Changing How We Develop Ladybird on Friday June 05, 2026 @05:08AM (#48409934)
If you grew up in a junkyard, getting adjusted to the social norms of a bazaar might feel like your way of life is being threatened.
> There are no other choices.

Fail safe noisily and implement a cooldown period.

Most online merchants redirect me to my bank's web page when I enter my Visa credit card number. In theory it should be possible to have a card number that by itself is useless and always requires an external confirmation?
Re:Everything in C is undefined behavior on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @03:00AM (#48204102)
Removing code paths that the programmer has explicitly laid out in the source code should be made a hard compile error unless the operation has been tagged with an attribute (anyone who wants to add the unsafe keyword to C? ).

Another commenter suggested using LLMs, but I disagree. Having clangd emit warning squiggles for unchecked operations (like signed addition) would be a good start.

Re:We are retiring our bug bounty program on Friday May 15, 2026 @11:10AM (#48149703)
Without AI, both writing and reading code are bottlenecks.

How many times have you reviewed your old code and been appalled at the terrible quality? You personally created slop; it's no different from GenAI output except that a human had to spend precious time crafting it. You likely were indeed bottlenecked by your ability to churn out code that you just had to get to work, for one reason or another.

The real issue is in the asymmetry when one party can use automation to create more code than another party can possibly manually verify.

Re:My graduation cap runs Rust on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @02:46AM (#48118599)
Those ATtiny85 boards that plug directly into a USB port are great if you need 1 to 5 GPIOs and/or a HID interface. At 2 dollars apiece or so it's worth having a few around.
Re:Remind HN: Today is Mother's Day, call your moms on Sunday May 10, 2026 @02:00PM (#48086258)
When my mom remarried, her new husband started to manipulate her and isolate her from other relatives, trying to turn everyone against each other. The last time I met her, I was basically talking to two copies of him.

I've already dealt with the fact that I will not get my mom back.

Re:The bottleneck was never the code on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @09:11AM (#48035835)
The author argues that writing code cannot be a bottleneck because work always fills up the allotted time. Developer teams should instead focus on doing less and writing better specifications.

The error in the reasoning is that while you can increase your resourcing to tenfold and gain nothing in return, the inverse is not necessarily true.

Re:Laws of UX on Thursday April 30, 2026 @01:16AM (#47958427)
That site itself violates at least "similarity", "proximity" and "common region" as everything is sorted in one alphabetical list.

Older »