News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

benjaminl

Re:How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine on Saturday September 19, 2026 @12:55AM (#49763432)
Tony Bruno, when referring to the partially assembled engine, was complaining about the lack of engine controllers, fluid management, and TVCs [1].

In addition, SpaceX isn’t cheating by not including TVCs. They purposely designed their rocket to need a minimum of them and fully take advantage of the space savings the lack of TVCs affords them.

[1] “So, there is no need to exaggerate this by showing a partially assembled engine without controllers, fluid management, or TVC systems, then comparing it to fully assembled engines that do.”

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1821679540973765026?s=20

For me the old web is when people still had homepages. When those went away, the old web died.
It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.
Re:Africans Are Turning to Starlink on Friday July 03, 2026 @11:14PM (#48782336)
The parent is correct. Look up have many antennas are on each Starlink sat. There are multiple dedicated antennas for customers and ground stations. There isn’t just one antenna or beam per satellite.

Also, lookup the number of ISLs in orbit. Starlink has been providing coverage for the middle of the ocean for years now. They have provided coverage to Pacific Islands that have lost their undersea cable connections.

Ctrl+V paste works for me on WSL. My secret is that I have given up on WSLg and use a standalone X Windows server. Specifically, the X410 X Server. This removes a whole lot of weird behavior including the ones described by the article.
Re:ARC-AGI-3 on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @07:56PM (#47524973)
This issue here is that people have different definitions of AGI. From the description. Getting 100% on this benchmark would be more than AGI and would qualify for ASI (Algorithmic Super Intelligence) not just AGI.
Re:10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips on Thursday March 05, 2026 @06:44PM (#47268814)
In just about every way. CPU caches are made from SRAM and live on the CPU itself. Main system RAM is made from DRAM and live on separate chips even if they are soldered into the same physical package (system in package or SiP). The RAM still isn't on the SoC.
Re:TPSV, an Alternative to TSV (and CSV) on Saturday April 26, 2025 @07:04PM (#43808051)
The spec says that the first row specifies the number of columns.
I don’t understand why people are surprised that they are earning money from affiliate links. They are very upfront about it. It is described in a page aptly titled “How does Honey make money?”[1]. On their partner page the first link is to “How Honey Works with Affiliates” [2], which describes their relationship with the affiliate networks.

The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?

[1] https://help.joinhoney.com/article/30-how-does-honey-make-mo...

[2] https://get.joinhoney.com/business/how-honey-works-with-affi...

The story is satire. But the satire is illustrating true problems and attitudes.
Re:Pytudes on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @11:22PM (#37244637)
Kinda hard to answer as that depends on your definition of new. But most likely yes, https://github.com/norvig/pytudes/commits/main
Re:Tailscale vs. Narrowlink on Friday August 11, 2023 @03:36PM (#37092967)
They should move to using QUIC which is the protocol backing HTTP/3. QUIC incorporates TLS1.3 and has an extension for UDP style unreliable datagrams (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9221/). It would be the perfect way to bring SSL/TSL/HTTPS VPNs onto a modern performant protocol while keeping the simplicity in of the https based VPN. It would still have the advantage of looking like https traffic, while have the performance characteristics of UDP based VPN protocol.
Re:GPT-4 Can't Reason on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @12:43PM (#37051809)
GPT-4 gave me a concise correct answer without disclaimers.

This may be due to using many custom instructions like the following in ChatGPT settings:

- No need to provide disclaimers about your knowledge cutoff

- No need to mention you are an AI language model

- Only discuss safety when it is not obvious and very important

- You should act as an expert in the relevant fields

I also buy the most expensive Apple phone and not put it in a case. My experience is quite different from your, perhaps unintentional straw man. Let’s take this assertion by assertion.

> I put my (slippery) iPhones in cases because if I don’t they stop working. Your phone might not care that its screen is cracked

I would be hugely bothered by a cracked screen or an otherwise non-operative screen. But Apple’s Pro level phones feature steel cases. This makes the phone very robust. I have yet to crack or otherwise damage my phone.

> have to pay several hundreds to put it back the way it was vs spending 20$ or less on a case and screen protector

Always get AppleCare Plus. It serves as my screen protector. If I ever did crack my screen service fee to fix a broken screen is $29.

> which takes 10 minutes vs having to pay 100x as much and wait a few days to get my phone back to swap displays

As per above the price difference between a case and AppleCare is minimal close to 0x as much.

And it doesn’t take days to have your screen replaced. Apple stores will do it in minutes within the space of a single service appointment.

iPhones are truly works of art and should be enjoyed without cheap plastic cases. Just make sure you have AppleCare Plus.

Re:Norway: Landlines will no longer be supported on Thursday December 01, 2022 @10:46AM (#33817797)
Analog telephones have terrible bandwidth. Just 300–3,300 Hz. This it technically called the voiceband, but it cuts off a good portion of female speech.

Also, all phone lines these days, wether POTS or VOIP are digitally trunked and switched.

Re:A court just gutted years of California's housing efforts on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @05:42PM (#33443296)
Normally that is the case, but California has been very active passing significant housing reform legislation in the past couple of years. Just this last legislative session over 20 housing bills were passed: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2022/10/calif...

The problem is that city counsels and judges are skirting laws by violating clear legislative intent.

Yeah, pitch is only one of the components of speech pattern differences between genders. Others include resonance, intonation, rhythm and more.

Ask a trans person and they will tell you that changing your perceived speech gender is much more than just the pitch.

Re:Sex Redefined (2015) on Thursday August 04, 2022 @10:37AM (#32343493)
The problem is that a certain segment of society is passing laws insisting that everyone neatly fit into 2 distinct buckets. Also, insisting that the bucket you were categorized in at birth is immutable. They are using the phrase “biological sex”, where as this paper shows, that concept is both ill defined and messy.
The linked article appears to be entirely copied from the University of California press release. https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/07/25/chemical-controllin..., which is a much better source of information.

Also, here is a link to the actual paper published in Biophysical Journal.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2022.05.035

Re:Fuchsia Workstation on Monday March 28, 2022 @01:38AM (#30827448)
Since the build page doesn’t provide much context, Fushsia has 3 different configurations bringup, core and workstation.

The workstation configuration is described as:

> workstation is a basis for a general purpose development environment, good for working on UI, media and many other high-level features. This is also the best environment for enthusiasts to play with and explore.

From https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/build/fx#key-pro...

Re:How SpaceX lands Starship (sort of) on Thursday May 13, 2021 @10:07PM (#27149847)
The YouTube show How to Make Everything. Did this. They started the tech tree from the very beginning by making simple hand stone tools and then building up tool by tool to more sophisticated technologies.

If all you have is a hand. Even getting the wood to make a handle for your axe is hard.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qRC_MAQZcVxpjtF...

Re:SSH and User-Mode IP WireGuard on Tuesday March 02, 2021 @06:18PM (#26322558)
With the coming ubiquity of QUIC, its seems natural to have a QUIC based analog to OpenVPN using packet based QUIC instead of OpenVPN’s UDP/TLS.

It also seems rather obvious to extend WireGuard to run over QUIC in addition to UDP. But the movement on that front has been very limited.

Re:A request for Pinboard old-timers on Friday February 19, 2021 @09:02PM (#26200757)
If Pinboard is being maintained, this is great news. I had thought it was abandoned and I have been looking for alternatives.

My biggest pain point is the lack of maintained iOS clients.

Re:Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe? on Thursday January 14, 2021 @01:48AM (#25773006)
Don’t forget the 10.25% sales tax. This puts the combined marginal tax rate at 59.85%. (24 + 9.3 + 7.65 + 7.65 + 1 + 10.25)
Re:Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @05:35PM (#25652176)
Windows on ARM supports 64bit ARM apps.

What you were possibly remembering was that Windows on ARM when it was first introduced only supported emulating x86 apps. Although x64 emulation is currently in preview.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...

Re:Peak Oil Is Suddenly Upon Us on Sunday December 06, 2020 @01:54PM (#25325636)
That US oil self sufficiency means that it will get out of the Middle East is a key part of Peter Zeihan’s Disunited Nations. His premise is that the US will disengage from the world no matter who won the election and that will have far reaching ramifications for the world.

A major reason of the ability for the US to do this is energy self sufficiency.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062913689/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm...

They are making these claim using the EEMBC benchmark. This must be an interesting benchmark as they claim the fastest chip on the EEMBC benchmark is a Cortex-A9, a 8 year old design.
Re:Why is Apple's M1 chip so fast? on Monday November 30, 2020 @02:57PM (#25258165)
Unlike what has been said on Twitter the answer to why the M1 is fast isn’t due to technical tricks, but due to Apple throwing a lot of hardware at the problem.

The M1 is really wide (8 wide decode) and has a lot of execution units. It has a huge 630 deep reorder buffer to keep them all filled, multiple large caches and a lot of memory bandwidth.

It is just a monster of a chip, well designed balanced and executed.

BTW this isn’t really new. Apple has been making incremental progress year by year on these processor for their A-series chips. Just nobody believed those Geekbench benchmarks showing that in short benchmarks your phone could be faster than your laptop. Well turns out that given the right cooling solution those benchmarks were accurate.

Anandtech has a wonderful deep dive into the processor architecture.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Edit: I didn’t mean to disparage Apple or the M1 by saying that Apple threw hardware at the problem. That Apple was able to keep power low with such a wide chip is extremely impressive and speaks to how finely tuned the chip is. I was trying to say that Apple got the results they did the hard way by advancing every aspect of the chip.

Re:It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google on Sunday November 29, 2020 @07:42PM (#25249590)
Towards the end of the post we find out why they want to block news links from Facebook and Google, they are setting up a competing platform.

“That’s why we’re building Forth, a news-first platform that pays journalists for their work and offers the audience concise updates with context -- from the reporters they trust. All revenue generated on Forth is shared with our news partners.

We only allow trusted and credible journalists (vetted by our editorial team) to publish to the platform. It's a one-stop shop for accurate information about what's happening right now.”

Re:Why do printers still suck? on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @09:44PM (#24986167)
My color laser provided significantly better color than any of the inkjet I have used. It provided nice even color. Whereas the inkjet color was often banded.

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