News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

diffuse_l

Re:GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @02:19PM (#49897996)
I'm describing what I got from 20x Codex vs Claude 5x. Codex is just not worth the money, at least for me. What's flipped is the value you get for each of those
Re:GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @02:03PM (#49897704)
OpenAI 20x wasn't 20x even before that change. I got a lot more from Claude 5x than Codex 20x...
Re:Claude Fable 5 on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @05:51PM (#48468254)
Seems like weekly allowance got reset back to 0%, pretty usual when they deploy new models.
Re:Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @04:49PM (#48285770)
For short strings (probably most of them) - use a byte for the length (at the string/symbol definition site, alongside the offset) (adds 1 byte * symbols, use high bit if necessary to add bytes for longer strings). You need the offset into the table anyway. It isn't strictly better, but it isn't strictly worse, and it gives you the option to reuse sub-strings.
Re:Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves on Saturday May 23, 2026 @04:05AM (#48245773)
Nothing prevents you from using a shared pool of strings that don't have null terminator. It can even be more efficient, since you don't have the null byte to handle at string end. Depending on the maximum string length you want to support, it doesn't even have to take more space.
Complete assembly. Wouldn't call it trivial, but not super hard either. I wouldn't dream of doing this without the complete assembly, not worth the hassle. You run the risk of ruining something, but for me the reasoning was that worst case I'd still have a conputer I can attach to an external monitor. Replacement itself is mostly removing screws and cables carefully - followed the ifixit guide.
Had a similar issue - some of the display was garbled for more than a year. Had a replacement screen from aliexpress lying around that cost 126$ two and half years ago, got to do the replacement a few weeks ago, as the kid needed a laptop for school. Turns out the replacement screen resolution was not the same as the original, but it still works fine, took ~1 hour for the replacement.

So for me it did make sense to repair - it costs less than a new laptop, at least

Re:XML Is a Cheap DSL on Saturday March 14, 2026 @09:52AM (#47376682)
That's if you parse the into a DOM and work on that. If you use SAX parsing, it makes it much better regarding the memory footprint.

But of course, working with SAX parsing is yet another, very different, bag of snakes.

I still hope that json parsing had the same support for stream processing as XML (I know that there are existing solutions for that, but it's much less common than in the XML world)

Re:How many registers does an x86-64 CPU have? (2020) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @11:54AM (#47016053)
Some minor nitpicks, but hey, we're counting registers, it's already quite nitpicky :)

Add far as I van remember, you can't access the high/low 8 bits of si, di, sp. ip isn't accessible directly at all.

The ancestry of x86 can actually be traced back to 8 bit cpus - the high/low bits of registers are remenants of an even older arch - but I'm not sure about that from the top of my head.

I think most of the "weird" choices mentioned there boil down to limitations that seem absurd right now, but were real constraints - x87 stack can probably traced back to exposing minimal interface to the host processor - 1 register instead of 8 can save quite a few data line - although a multiplexer can probably solve this - so just a wild guess. MMX probably reused the register file of x87 to save die space.

The policy link[0] page still has a link to the bug bounty program[1] which still discuss monetary compensation.

[0] https://curl.se/dev/vuln-disclosure.html

[1] https://curl.se/docs/bugbounty.html

Too bad, but I managed to watch about 30 seconds of the video before getting motion sickness.

Seems like a really cool technology, though.

I wonder if anyone else got the same response, or it's just me.

Re:What an unprocessed photo looks like on Monday December 29, 2025 @01:47AM (#46418093)
Really enjoyed the article, thanks! A small nit - I think you have a small mistake in the value range at the start - 136000 should probably be 13600?
Re:The Number That Turned Sideways on Thursday December 18, 2025 @01:36AM (#46309550)
It was pretty clear towards the middle of the piece that an ai was involved writing this piece, which was unfortunate, since it distracted me so much from the subject that I couldn't complete reading it...
Re:We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner on Thursday November 13, 2025 @04:02PM (#45920484)
At least it's ACID compliant
Well, at least the first half was somewhat useful...
It mostly rehashes the point of using float instead of integer representation, and uses different headers (radical solution, why this matters, secret weapon, philosophy, the bottom line) for streching what could be said in a few sentences into a few pages.
I think the article could be better and get the point across with half the length and without the second half of it being full of ai generated list of advantages, or using that space to give some more technical information
Re:First Shape Found That Can't Pass Through Itself on Saturday October 25, 2025 @08:16AM (#45703306)
For some reason, it really bothers me that under one of the images there is a caption that says "the pink cube", but the cube is in a shade of blue...
Re:Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series? on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @11:51AM (#45028232)
It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive
I would expect no less from a company that acquired/merged with IronSource...
I'm pretty sure that the website will reside in cache in any case.
I'm wondering if the usage of an em-dash in the article (somewhere towards the middle) is self-aware trolling, or just the result of excessive ai use...

> includes both a human and a computer—and “surprisingly,

Re:When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @06:34AM (#44657626)
Flash was a security nightmare, with multiple vulnerabilities discovered regularly.

It was eventually killed because Apple decided it won't support it on the iPhone.

Re:Original Xbox Hacks: The A20 CPU Gate on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:07AM (#44591274)
Indeed, more than you ever wanted to know about the A20 line: https://aeb.win.tue.nl/linux/kbd/A20.html (from your article)

This is one hell of a rabbit hole...

Re:Repaste Your MacBook (But Don't) on Friday July 11, 2025 @01:42PM (#44535016)
I tried to repair a macbook air, and did manage to tear the microphone cable, because I didn't notice the connector :|

Like you said, you need to be careful, but you better be prepared to pay dearly (or manage without) for your mistakes...

Nitpick - Maps and Chrome were also acquisition. Also Android, for that matter
I'm pretty sure Ireland was home to a lot of global corporations EU headquarters way before brexit...
Assuming the statistical analysis was sound. It is not always so. See the replication crisis for example
Re:Growing Buffers to Avoid Copying Data on Friday April 04, 2025 @03:19PM (#43586614)
2^48 is 2^16*2^32 = 65536*4GB, not 256*4GB
It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible

Older »