News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

bz_bz_bz

Re:The Agent SDK on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @03:55PM (#50279954)
You're wrong.
Re:US Man Given Prison Sentence for Bot-Farming Music Streams on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:14PM (#50013754)
Literally the next full paragraph after your quote:

“Royalty payments are made proportionately to musicians and songwriters from a pool of funds. As a result, streaming fraud diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming.”

Re:San Francisco Onion Futures Company on Saturday September 19, 2026 @11:48AM (#49767531)
None of the products you’ve chosen have a substantial futures market, which is why the person you responded to chose corn to make their point.
Re:Backprop Alternative: Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding on Monday September 14, 2026 @06:13PM (#49704922)
Their image classification benchmarks include both: https://pub.sakana.ai/pc-alm/assets/figures/benchmark_accura...
Save you a click:

"The rancher is selling calves for record sums, but is not better off because he has higher costs. The feedlot company is selling for all-time high prices, but it also has to pay them in the first place. The packers are losing money because there is a limit to what they can charge. Restaurants and supermarkets also can only increase prices by so much."

Seed was in Aug ‘25 and website simply says the project will no longer be maintained: https://www.tensorzero.com/
Re:Ryanair dark UX patterns summer 2026 refresher on Friday June 12, 2026 @08:36AM (#48503343)
I would argue that 4 and 6 are not dark patterns but necessary CYA given they cover two of their most common complaints.
The person you’re replying to is very explicitly not expecting them to honor the International Convention…
Clearly a parody account...
Re:Apple Accelerates US Manufacturing on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @02:22AM (#47148453)
The topography of Houston is that everywhere is a few hundred meters from a flood zone. You are exactly right; the area did not even come closer to flooding during Harvey and is a good 30ft higher than the flood zone OP is referencing.
Re:The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @01:05PM (#46874635)
If they opted for a pat down for 6 years, then faster treatment clearly wasn’t the goal. Metal detector + swabbing is not faster than the scanner either.
Blame Simon Willison ;)

“A common complaint today from AI coding skeptics is that LLMs are fine for toy projects but can’t be used for anything large and serious.

I think within 3 years that will be comprehensively proven incorrect, to the point that it won’t even be controversial anymore.

I picked a web browser here because so much of the work building a browser involves writing code that has to conform to an enormous and daunting selection of both formal tests and informal websites-in-the-wild.

Coding agents are really good at tasks where you can define a concrete goal and then set them to work iterating in that direction.

A web browser is the most ambitious project I can think of that leans into those capabilities.”

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-202...

“The browser and this project were co-developed and very symbiotic, only because the browser was a very useful objective for us to measure and iterate the progress of the harness. The goal was to iterate on and research the multi-agent harness—the browser was just the research example or objective.”

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/fastrender/

Investors? No. Customers? They were paid the cash value of their crypto holdings at the time of bankruptcy. Thanks to a massive bull run in crypto between bankruptcy and payout, customers were able to be paid back in “full” even with the fraud. However, when BTC is sitting at $60k and your missing BTC is being paid back at $17k, you’re not exactly going to be feeling giddy.
The EV options sell better in Europe because they completely stopped selling the ICE Macan due to EU cybersecurity regs. In North America (the only market that hasn't seen a decrease in sales), they did a 180 and promised to keep selling the ICE SUVs into 2030 because EV adoption has massively disappointed. The new K1 is now going to be sold with a combustion engine first instead of as a fully-electric.
Did it work? I'm not sure the financial or car community would agree. They already walked back their BEV strategy:

"Due to market conditions, the new SUV series above the Cayenne, which was previously planned to be fully electric, will initially be offered exclusively as combustion engine and plug-in hybrid at market launch. In addition, current models such as the Panamera and the Cayenne will be available with combustion engines and plug-in hybrids well into the 2030s."

https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/company/porsche-realign...

Given that they walked back many of their BEV goals in mid-to-late 2025, some may find this surprising. The K1 was supposed to be all electric vehicle when it was announced, and they are now going to release it as a gas & PHEV first instead.
Re:What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025 on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @11:16AM (#46603017)
Their total household usage was actually ~17.3 MWh depending on what data source you're using for their usage.

Given 6 MWh of exports with only 3.2 MWh of total solar production, they are cycling their powerwall to get paid for the fact that their off-peak rate is half the price of their peak export tariff rate which is inflating the number you're looking at.

Re:Aligning Games and Sets in Determining Tennis Matches on Monday January 12, 2026 @05:39PM (#46595203)
I grew up playing tennis competitively and can't remember a single time someone complained about this. I think only academics consider it a "fairness problem."

Do the authors of this paper also want to rewrite the rules of every American sport that has a "best-of" playoff system (e.g. MLB, NBA, NHL, etc.)?

Re:Vortex: An extensible, state of the art columnar file format on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @08:14PM (#45987567)
That’s like comparing words with characters.

Vortex is, roughly, how you save data to files and Iceberg is the database-like manager of those files. You’ll soon be able to run Iceberg using Vortex because they are complementary, not competing, technologies.

Re:iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @11:03AM (#45888875)
An Apple Thneed
What social media platforms do you use where Europeans are too dignified to point out the consequences of America’s hypercapitalism?
Does being born and raised in Houston make you an expert on homelessness? It's interesting you are so quick to rebuke the article with sweeping generalizations and zero data. Could it be because it does not appeal to your preconceived notions?

Houston was one of the first major cities to transfer chronically homeless individuals from encampments to one-bedroom apartments with almost zero friction (no intermediate shelters, no drug testing, no requirement to find a job). This was a highly successful program under Turner that had little to do with sprawl or police brutality.

I once dined at a Michelin starred restaurant that ended the meal with a surprise for us that made me feel that they must have had listening devices in the establishment (it was based on a comment made when no server was around). In the moment, I was very impressed (and figured maybe it was a common thing in eastern bloc countries lol), but I could definitely see how others would find it creepy.

Edit: removed Bear comment as I misread the article.

Re:We just hit $1M ARR in 4 years. With zero funding on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @02:08AM (#44506764)
I like to think a portion of your success came from having such great OMSCS SDP group project partners ;)

Congrats on what you’ve accomplished. Always fun to read the updates.

Re:How renewables are saving Texans billions on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @01:00PM (#44379508)
There’s no power market in America with a cap at $900. Just yesterday, power in New York reached $3k and PJM had spikes to almost $4k.

The cap was raised to $9k to try and incentivize generation because the forward reserve margin was dwindling. ERCOT was the only electric market in the US that was actually growing and old thermal plants were retiring because they couldn’t economically compete with new renewables. Bill Hogan @ Harvard was commissioned to help solve this problem and his team created a new scarcity pricing mechanism along with higher price caps based on the value of lost load. These caps were set by the PUCT and ERCOT had no say in them.

Why are you so focused on caps and not on learning the difference between gas and power markets? You keep trying to simplify very complex systems and issues with a half baked understanding of some basic talking points and minimal understanding of how the markets actually operate.

Re:How renewables are saving Texans billions on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @04:18AM (#44374843)
> I would take any gas price to ensure that I have the last available drop of gas.

This is true of any ISO in the country during extreme conditions and you wouldn’t want it to not be.

Re:How renewables are saving Texans billions on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @03:51AM (#44374670)
You keep editing your responses heavily, so it's hard for me to respond correctly. I assume the changes to your post mean that you have found this article: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/05/texas-ercot-electric...

I'm not sure how you decided what I'm "focused" on. Read the first two sentences of my previous post again.

Re:How renewables are saving Texans billions on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:45AM (#44374272)
You haven't explained what any of that has to do with gas trading profits. HSC didn't go to $400/MMBtu because of ERCOT.
Re:How renewables are saving Texans billions on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @02:11AM (#44374094)
I never said ERCOT did not have failures. I'm in the industry and have been massively critical of ERCOT for caving to politics rather than following market rules when they arbitrarily decided to keep the market at the cap. PUCT actually had final say on repricing those hours and chose not to.

ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.

However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.

Older »