News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ergl

> The people willing to spend their precious time on them are probably the ones whose opinions matter the least.

Yeah, the people who disagree with you are never worth listening to. (/s)

Re:Revolut down as users report app not working on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @09:31AM (#50166133)
> But the two ATMs problem would be solved by securing a lock on the database before proceeding with the transaction?

You can also let an overdraft occur. Now the user ows the bank some money and you can charge them interest for their debt.

Re:September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @05:26AM (#49906427)
> Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT?

You tell me:

> Scroll to follow one closed strait into fuel pumps, harvests, bond markets and my own country’s winter heating

Or:

> France: a run on the pumps. [...] drivers fleeing record prices elsewhere emptied its tanks faster than trucks could refill them. [...] A price cap meant as a cushion, in a system with no slack, turned a price shock into empty pumps.

A cursory check on Pangram returns 100% AI written just from the first 4 paragraphs.

Re:September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @05:06AM (#49906270)
Once again the top submission of HN is an LLM-generated article. I know we're not supposed to speculate on people reading past the title, but I incur you to read 3 paragraphs and tell me with a straight face that you did not eyeroll at every short, empty phrase stated with enormous confidence.
Re:What even is an OS now? on Saturday September 26, 2026 @07:34AM (#49855554)
> the only real software is blessed by our sacred priesthood of PLT experts.

Incredible how anti-intellectualism keeps taking over the software engineering profession.

All data labeling is training, but not all training is data labeling. In this sense, the headline is correct, I don’t get the nitpicking.
> they fired contractors for using AI to label data

Is your objection to the word “train” in headline? Otherwise, you’re just restating the headline while calling it clickbait (which, btw, it’s not, perhaps you meant to say it is misleading, which is a different thing.)

Re:Winning the Visa Lottery on Monday September 21, 2026 @03:48AM (#49784278)
The paper is about temporary workers, specifically for seasonal jobs. They’re not buying houses or renting long-term. In fact some of these jobs include on-site accommodation for workers.
Re:Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @12:25PM (#49714941)
> I'd love to see someone try to run one that can meet 100% of the world's demand for remote works.

I, too, have infinite contempt for my fellow working class members.

> Is anthropomorphizing a real problem?

The paper argues that pretending that the so-called thinking traces represent real reasoning can lead users into trusting wrong answers, if the thinking traces appear convincing enough. Researchers might inspect these traces to try to determine the “intent” of a model, as well.

For an example of the latter, when OpenAI spoke about the hacking of HuggingFace at Black Hat, they repeatedly showed the thinking traces of their model as “proof” of what the model was “thinking” as it performed the attack, calling out “surprise” moments, etc.

Now, it’s possible that the employees presenting didn’t truly believe that the thinking traces would give them useful clues, and presented them only for a “wow” factor, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility that even the people working at frontier companies can fall for this tendency to anthropomorphize LLMs.

On my knees begging that the developers of AI detectors use them on their own writing and that at least pretended to mask the obvious LLM cliches in their blog posts.
Re:The Short Leash AI Coding Method for Beating Fable on Friday July 03, 2026 @03:26AM (#48771976)
You're right, understanding things is so 2025.
Re:The room the economy can't see on Saturday June 20, 2026 @04:41AM (#48607486)
The market has been creeping into more and more facets of our lives, with delirious results: social networks are the market mediating family and friendship, dating apps are the market mediating meeting strangers, etc. I wouldn't expect that the answer to these problems would be letting the market mediate even more aspects of our lives.
Re:John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @06:28AM (#48553115)
A link to a tweet with two empty sentences, in turn replying to a LLM spam account, somehow shoots to #3 on the HN frontpage. This website is truly dead.
Re:There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing on Saturday June 13, 2026 @10:05AM (#48517480)
A summary of HN comments, posted on HN to generate even more comments. Very meta.
> These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved.

Good one!

Re:Ted Nyman – High Performance Git on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @08:32AM (#47933649)
I'm sorry if I have offended you.

You probably have a great deal of understanding and knowledge about Git, and this book might be a good resource.

I'm not asking you to do anything differently, and yet I think it's important to realize that people have a deep aversion to text that appears to be LLM generated.

By "shame", I meant that just from a skim of the contents of this book, it can be hard to distinguish it from any other LLM generated text by any other author who has no idea what they're talking about.

That makes people (like me) inclined to discount what it has to say, potentially losing out on good technical content.

Re:Ted Nyman – High Performance Git on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @07:57AM (#47933251)
> The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.

Personally I have an extremely hard time reading text like this and it makes me lose trust in the author. Publishing potentially useful Git knowledge this way is a shame.

Re:Ted Nyman – High Performance Git on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @06:51AM (#47932696)
The author works at OpenAI, so it's no surprise that they've stopped noticing how grating this kind of structure is to read.
Re:Ted Nyman – High Performance Git on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @05:09AM (#47932079)
Surprise, surprise, another piece of LLM-generated slop on the front page of HN.

From chapter 1:

> When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop asking questions the history could answer. They batch work to avoid sync cost. They keep messy branches alive longer, postpone cleanup, and treat the repository like something slightly dangerous.

From https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html

> Once machines start producing code at machine cadence, the model from this book does not break. What changes is the pace: more branches, more commits, more automation, and more surrounding metadata. The traffic gets louder, and the features that keep Git legible under pressure move from "nice to have" to "essential."

> These stop looking like side optimizations. They are what keep machine-scale Git traffic usable.

I feel I have a much more adversarial relationship with articles, comments and blogs online. I've been seeing old colleagues or acquaintances that I used to admire start to publish clearly AI generated blogs and I've noticed that my respect for them has taken a nosedive.

The online world feels much less useful now and I've been trying to read more physical books and to generally spend less time online (unfortunately one can't escape slop, as I've already seen clearly generated illustrations and photographs in billboards and subway adverts).

> those of us in the space are aligned with America irrespective of who's in the White House

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department"

Do you have any more platitudes to add so I can fill my dismissive HN comment bingo card?
The real travesty here is that a hospital has a CEO.
I'd be curious to know why you decided to bet on weather patterns in the first place. Seems like a very roundabout way to lose money.
Re:Lenovo's New ThinkPads Score 10/10 for Repairability on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @03:12AM (#47244582)
From the bottom of the linked article:

> Full disclosure: iFixit has an ongoing business relationship with Lenovo, and we are hopelessly biased in favor of repairable products.

I hope OP took more effort in making Viva understand the problem than the obvious zero effort it took writing this post, given it is completely AI generated.
Re:In Tehran on Thursday February 05, 2026 @02:53AM (#46896923)
I would suggest reading into the history of South Korea after the war. Nothing suggests to me that it was a good outcome. As a small sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising

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