News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

bumbledraven

Re:Butlerian Jihad on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:06PM (#50127509)
Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution, both personally and as a species.

Indeed.

> I guess [the term “autoformalization”] came from a chatbot?

The term dates back at least to 2020, years before the release of ChatGPT.

https://research.google/pubs/a-promising-path-towards-autofo...

Did anyone consider keeping the current name but changing the pronunciation to “coke”?
Re:Ask HN: What're You Reading? on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @10:21PM (#49903614)
I tried multiple English translations of The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Robin Buss translation was the only one I enjoyed. (Unfortunately, there is no audiobook of this translation, but I had Codex create one for me.

If you're unconvinced, try comparing a few random passages to see which one you prefer, or just check the beginning of Chapter 1. You could also show a few translations of a passage to an LLM and ask it which one best conveys the nuance of the original French.

Re:Stockfish 19 on Thursday September 10, 2026 @01:56PM (#49647795)
Compared to chess, Magic: The Gathering ability transfers much better to real life. MtG has:

- dealing with imperfect information

- bluffing

- thinking ahead with an enormous number of possible moves (especially when you consider deck construction)

- tracking board state

- mentally implementing "triggers"

Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov (1997) and AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol (2016) marked the first defeats of a world champion by a machine in a chess or Go match. Coincidentally, both machines played an iconic move on Move 37 of Game 2:

• Deep Blue played Be4, declining a pawn capture to achieve a long-term positional advantage and fueling Kasparov’s suspicions of human intervention.

• AlphaGo played P10, a brilliant 5th-line shoulder hit that live commentators initially dismissed as a blunder or misclick.

https://franky07724-57962.medium.com/amazing-coincidence-in-...

Re:Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion on Friday July 31, 2026 @03:37PM (#49127658)
Does Tailscale offer a "security checkup" function? Best practices evolve over time, and it would be nice to know if I'm using the recommended configuration.
TFA links to https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/tailwind-is-smart-steering, which is about Tailwind, but makes multiple distinctions and points that could just as well apply to LLMs, e.g.:

> Builders value getting the work done as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are making something—likely something with parts beyond the frontend—and are often eager to see it through to completion. This means Builders may prize that initial execution over other long-term factors.

> Crafters are more likely to value long-term factors like ease of maintainability, legibility, and accessibility, and may not consider the project finished until those have also been accounted for.

> In my view, the more you optimize for building quickly, the more you optimize for homogeneity.

Re:The agent principal-agent problem on Friday May 08, 2026 @03:28PM (#48067606)
800-word response by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky, who was on the team that built Windows NT: https://nitter.net/marklucovsky/status/2052828852490285390#m.

It begins:

> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.

> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.

> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.

Conclusion:

> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.

> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.

Re:Google has a secret reference desk on Friday April 17, 2026 @01:42AM (#47802762)
This article has one neat Google search trick I hadn't known about: `AROUND(#)`. But I am skeptical of much of the rest of it.

Searching for `“can anyone recommend”` to get unfiltered recommendations is an interesting hack, but I feel it's not too reliable. At reddit, you could ask this, and an unknown percentage of responses could be shills or bots.

I'm also skeptical of how much the suggested `@reddit` differs from just `reddit`. The description says it's for social media handles, but reddit is a platform, not an individual user's handle. I suspect google looks for the user's intent to see results from a particular site or social media platform and uses that signal to influence the ranking, and I doubt '@' has much of an effect on that process.

> The results Google omits tend to be less trafficked and less search-optimized, which frequently means they’re more substantive and written for readers rather than algorithms

Really? I call BS. Every time I've looked at the omitted results they've been very similar to ones I've already seen.

I stopped reading after that.

Re:Man beats machine at Go (2023) on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:34PM (#47550988)
Details on the strategy employed by the human are at https://goattack.far.ai:

> We discovered simple adversarial strategies that beat superhuman Go AIs, and find that adding defenses helps but does not eliminate the problem. Our cyclic adversary beats the state-of-the-art KataGo AI more than 97% of the time at superhuman settings. This strategy is simple enough to be replicated by an amateur human player and transfers to other superhuman Go AIs.

Re:Man beats machine at Go (2023) on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:32PM (#47550975)
A design doc with a robust "alternatives considered" section.
Re:Y Combinator Files Brief Supporting Epic Games on Sunday August 24, 2025 @03:27PM (#45006935)
> the 30% Apple Tax … is not merely a cost of doing business, it is a profound and often insurmountable barrier to entry that stifles competition and innovation at its source.

This reads like AI slop.

Re:Optimizing our way through Metroid on Saturday August 23, 2025 @06:39PM (#44999692)
It would be neat if a fuzzer could help set a new tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) record.
> You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.

Isn’t that basically Caltech? They had a 3% acceptance rate in 2023, the lowest in the nation. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...

Do you have a citation for this? The most Gemini could say is: "While research has not identified a specific tsunami stone located at the Fukushima Daiichi site that was directly violated, the spirit of these ancient warnings was undeniably ignored." (https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...)

Older »