News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

asah

Re:Made-of-meat, a listserv for agentic eng practitioners on Sunday November 01, 2026 @06:07PM (#50330843)
MoM has grown to techleads from 500 companies and I think we're ready to grow. It's supportive and vendor friendly, but also super high quality with every message reviewed. We have "meatups" every ~2 weeks to show live demos. The direct signup link: https://swg.fyi/mom?ref=hn
Re:iPhone Duo Teardown on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:52PM (#50246933)
good point! counterpoints:

1. fold is godsend for commute/travel/restaurant/club/etc. tablet is nonstart. 2. one device = one device to learn/optimize.

also, there's something deeply elegant about starting with the outer screen for quick stuff, then unfolding when it's gonna be a minute...

I'm in nyc, and it's delightful to use slab-mode standing up, then sitting down and unfolding, like it's a Harry Potter moving newspaper...

Also, showing off my photos on the fold is a joy.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/wLoc3Baur7oVqLi68

Re:iPhone Duo Teardown on Sunday October 25, 2026 @10:42PM (#50238457)
??? everyone I know who's gone fold hasn't gone back.

yes, battery & camera are a generation back and water/dustproof is even worse.

but productivity and fun are off the charts: slab phones feel pathetic once you've got a fold. Communication apps show you the list of conversations as well as the current one - or the current one and the details/multimedia. Google Maps shows the map and the listing details/reviews. Games and multimedia are delightful. Photos are full sized, and you can see what you're shooting in detail - if you shoot with a digital camera, remote shooting is amazing because there's enough space to show detailed focus.

-1: if the fix breaks customers in other ways, they're screwed as well. Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
Criticize the argument, not the speaker.
Re:Orkut.com on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:33PM (#50007975)
also:

- early social media really struggled to scale the social graph algorithms. Facebook made real technical innovations.

- early social media had serious problems with trust/safety and really nasty content. Many complex problems from deeply adversarial userbase.

Together, Orkut got bogged down and couldn't compete for resources with ads/search/maps/etc.

Re:Margaret Hamilton has died on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @08:55PM (#50000747)
wow, that's a lot of hate and presumption.
Re:Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @02:05PM (#49981952)
law of diminishing returns? i.e. any reasonable frontier lab will have enough user logs...
yabut... airliners require constant maintenance and periodic rebuilds.
In nearly all cases, I recommend people use TIMESTAMPTZ with UTC timezone (i.e. convert on the way in). If possible, operate your apps with UTC until it hits a user's eyes, i.e. internally define your "day" to start in ~Greenwich UK.

This saves a __lot__ of headaches, of which timestamp vs timestamptz is the tip of the iceberg.

this is not limited to democracy - every form of government does this to varying degree, and in fact democracy tends to be (perhaps marginally) better than say autocracy.

as is often said with a sigh, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other."

to me, democracy is really about giving the masses enough feeling of agency, because the alternatives are either revolution and/or disengagement / low productivity / low creativity, and both are "bad for business" i.e. cannot compete with democracies.

China will be an interesting test of this theory. Notably, in China they have a terrific education system and the government is able to attract/retain smart ambitious people.

Another test will be the power of governments to thwart revolutions using digital and kinetic assymmetry. The masses have individual hackers and pea shooters and the government has digital armies and autonomous drone swarms. In turn, since revolution is off the table, governments don't need the overhead of democracy. In the US, we see this with the rise of Executive Orders for example.

Re:GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @03:57PM (#49821640)
actually, human latency is quite slow and distracted drivers often have 1sec+ latency.

it works because 99% of the time you don't need fast latency because you can accurately predict things.

that's why a standard recommendation is to drive 2+ seconds (time not distance) behind the car in front of you. also why experienced drivers instinctively move their hands/feet into position during tricky moments when they need to cut the latency.

fun exercise, try taking your foot off the gas and hitting the break - slower than you think!!

The argument goes:

Iran has repeatedly called for "death to America," "death to Israel" and so on.

Israel's leaders do not generally call for the destruction of other countries.

Re:Don't Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:51PM (#49649326)
+1000 did _exactly_ this right down to the ziploc. Also a bag for audio, HDMI, old apple cables, and "random" cables. These days, I store the ziplocs in a pelican-type case and that goes in a stack with cases for power cords, camera gear, SBC gear,etc - and the stacks all go on furniture dollies, so I can roll them out.
Re:OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally on Monday August 31, 2026 @04:15AM (#49506992)
nah they have AI bots for checking security, performance, etc so it's all fine!
Re:Creepy Crawlies on Sunday August 30, 2026 @02:41PM (#49501530)
Just slow unauthenticated traffic to non-essential stuff...
Backups!!!
Re:The Amazon Tax on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @05:34PM (#49353014)
Google has entered the chat, and also eBay and every aggregator site on the web.
AI is revolutionizing millions of white collar tasks - billions and billions of $$$$ labor requiring years of training, and making those workers wildly more productive. And its impact on robotics hasn't even started.

US is also taking leadership in space, which has deep military implications, telecomm and (maybe?) natural resources.

Lastly, it's a big mistake to write-off the US labor force and consumers, who react very quickly to change.

Re:Voyager 1 FDS Computer Emulator on Saturday August 08, 2026 @11:47AM (#49222929)
it would be amazing to include a few example programs!
Re:I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux on Thursday August 06, 2026 @03:02AM (#49193443)
the right answer is to deliver a usable SECOND device which happens to be linux based, and which has serves a purpose. Then over time, apps get ported.

realistically, this device would need to tiny to justify the extra weight, device-to-keep-charged, etc.

one idea: make it wifi-only and tether from your primary mobile device. This skips all the carrier nonsense, to focus entirely on the core use case(s).

I live in the one of the densest parts of lower Manhattan, and often explain that when I take a walk around the neighborhood, I pass 100,000+ people.

This map pretty much proves it!

no - see Jevon's Paradox
Re:Decoy Font on Thursday July 16, 2026 @03:09PM (#48938874)
waddaya know, it worked (on google Gemini/veo)

https://share.gemini.google/1yNVV19wUn46

only if other investors "catch" it...
But what color is that bike shed ??? /s
Re:Long Island's Decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @10:49PM (#48741742)
...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island.

Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC.

To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance.

Meanwhile, even the country's leading experts have no politically viable strategy for disposing of the waste, including the risk of derailments, terrorism, etc.

This isn't the world I want, but it's reality. IRL, people would rather die slowly from CO2 than live with the fear of 3MI/Chernobyl/Fukushima regardless of how rare they are (and they're not).

I'm optimistic that modern reactor designs and reprocessing technologies can overcome these issues, but I can understand why voters go full NIMBY.

Re:Looking Ahead to Postgres 19 on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @11:20AM (#48733994)
two techniques I use with pg:

1. "materialize" the view as a full table, then index that. Any reasonable pipeline/ETL tool can provide incremental updates between tables. Obviously, anything materialized requires considerations around storage, replication, backup/restore, I/O, etc.

2. use a regular VIEW and index (precisely) the underlying expressions mentioned in the view, i.e. so when the view is used, then the indexes get used.

Both require rewriting SQL, though I've used VIEWs to make the change transparent.

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