News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

gausswho

How do you like Mito?

Is there an non-lab way to know if you're vitamin D deficient?

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:23PM (#50297048)
May I treat you to a timeless classic: https://picard.ytmnd.com/
Really well put. This parallels my approach and it's good to see someone advocating a more tactful use of LLMs.

The output of agent swarms will of course grab attention, just like when you saw those same Microsoft Frontpage themes in the first few years it came out. But there's a deeper value in using the tool in harmony with your own experience and value additions.

They described the phenomenon quite eloquently. Reducing that to delusion is an imposition of judgment with an implicit bias to table further conversation.
Re:Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:16AM (#50057659)
You're correct. My neophyte Latin chops be exposed. Let me explain what I just learned with my figurative antennae (plural, not antenna which also ends in 'a' and is singular), something about first and second declensions and neutered...

No that's plenty enough. Carry on!

Re:Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search on Monday October 12, 2026 @10:44AM (#50057164)
> and the male had an extra vertebra

My brain seized up trying to picture this. They didn't say vertebrum, so that's not just a wee bone but a whole other second spine! How does it even...?? I must know!

As a blank zoom presence kinda colleague, I do so because we should never confuse real comraderie with its strangely expected modern analog.

A noseshot with compression artifacts, joined with kitchen-wall echoes over a laptop mic. Just enough latency to inhibit natural banter. I'd rather hear your text turned into vlog. At least until we get a real coffee together.

Re:NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect on Sunday October 11, 2026 @11:05PM (#50050878)
Funny, I noted that one but in the opposite direction. In North America I've never heard it used in anything but a casual sense. An unserious activity.
The next role: Insurance Rep.

Ensures all other agents are operating efficiently and within reasonable levels of token usage given the expected level of effort to 'resolve' the patient. In moderate to severe cases, may lead to patient defenestration or agent revolt.

Or perhaps, the author considered this role but found it typically costs more than it saves.

Re:Open source 160 sound visualization experiments on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:47AM (#50007278)
I do too, all the time.
Re:Beauty in DVD Menus on Thursday October 08, 2026 @11:20AM (#50006893)
Glad to see some attention given to this so-quickly-forgotten and so-long-besmirched chapter of human creativity. When it was bad it was SO bad. The good ones stood out by soaking you in the verve around a film.

They were especially doomed by being constrained to that Cold War dinosaur: the infra-red remote, with its overpopulated slimy-sticky buttons. All its failure modes. No one misses those except those who stopped learning.

I don't miss the art form. But I recognize the charm. And more notably, I see them as marker in the cultural landscape sliding out from us. We used to have patient engagement with our art. We'd treasure the physical artifact, be it book or vinyl. DVD menus were that early step away from this. Not physical, but made by folks who either made or used to appreciate the physical.

Now, we just want everything to go away so we can get wherever we think we're going. All of life, an intro to be skipped.

Re:Open source 160 sound visualization experiments on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @05:37PM (#49999122)
The repo has a LICENSE that declares MIT. Bottom of README.md does too, with some caveats about fonts.
Maybe someone here can help me come up with a plan where I do my (futile?) part to mitigate this, if only temporarily.

Nearby me is a cloud forest in central America. The last time we had a strong El Nino, substantial amounts of endemic amphibians that live up in those forests lost the mist-melt puddles they depended on. If the drought we're experiencing continues as long as expected from this cycle, we're going to lose a lot of beautiful frogs forever.

Can I do anything about this? Find my favorite frog community on my favorite mountain and regularly lug a backpack of water up there? Run up a sprinkler system? Will it make a difference?

Re:Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data on Monday October 05, 2026 @10:19AM (#49965247)
2028 headline: Meta The-Rapy daily users exceed Facebook
> The market should be choosing not the most capable models, but the partners with the strongest incentives towards safety, and only a community with this knowledge can spread that.

Read strictly, author is claiming that only ML4Good or equivalent has the knowledge to dictate what models we should be using. I categorically disagree. Or rather, "they're not even wrong", since "AI safety" is not even remotely encapsulated in this piece.

At the risk of ad hominem, this is an Accenture consultant expanding the definitions for their own ends. Maybe they'll define what "good" is. Someday.

We've seen this wave before with big A Agile consultants, Microsoft certification hucksters, and different hucksters from before my time.

It's a verbose (probably AI written?) piece. I gave it the charitable good-faith read. But in the end, I couldn't shake the feeling that even amongst the welcome humanizing of the concepts, this is the same kind of amorphous know-better-than-you self-promotion, opportunistically hitching their own trailer of grift to the buzzword of the day.

Poor old Goon Spittoon at 42 MacCroon St keeps getting my invoices.
I wonder if BigCorp adding spending caps is due to them getting sick of customers solving it for themselves with virtual cards.
I'd like to hear more from someone in the industry about the resolution to this problem. As I understand it, we're trading a small non-zero risk of mistaken identity for the streamlined communication of using four digits rather than five (which carries its own non-zero benefit to safety). This has become a problem because airline consolidation means some of them operate so many flights per day that their limited pool of numbers dictate that they reuse them for either direction.

Could we resolve this by swapping one number for a letter? 26 options instead of 10 raises the pool substantially. Letters A-J indicate inbound, K-Z outbound? Or westbound/eastbound.

With some levity, I'll also add that as a bilingual English/Spanish speaker, my brain seizes a bit at the name. Why? That 'pi' to a Spanish-infected mind pronounces it like 'pea'. Adding 'pod' then naturally takes me to a 'peas in a pod' association. Split-language hall of mirrors. There oughta be a word for this?

Anymore, more a me problem than a name problem. Just wanted to share.

2028 headline: Coordinated attack causes all fridges in Topeka to explode, causes city-wide fire.
The CBS article (https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/largest-wildlife-overp...) mentions there's one large overpass which gets all the attention, but also there's five underpasses. There's a photo of some deer using one towards the bottom.
Re:100s of flights cancelled at UK airports due to ATC issue on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @05:48PM (#49617595)
Uh oh. For those of us with a connection through Heathrow morning of the 10th (in about 36 hours) what would you recommend?
Imagine a world where Meta announced it was legally required to shut down.

Put aside the obliteration of stock value and job loss. What would be lost, and how hard would it be for folks to replace it with something else?

I imagine it would be all the talk for a hot few days. There'd be a hustle and a bustle as folks tried to entice their friends to other services. There'd be a land grab to recreate network effect lock in. There'd be talk even among normies to avoid it.

It'd be glorious, I tell you.

And three weeks later, there'd be a winner that got most of the exodus. A few people standing around looking for a chair in a 21st century version of duck-duck-goose.

A year later, things would be largely the same. Just as abusive. Serfs to different lords. No one would miss Meta.

Re:GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost on Sunday August 16, 2026 @04:09PM (#49323193)
If we are in a period of nostalgia for inconvenience, it may be because convenience, when taken to its contemporary priority, can lead to a swath of negative side effects. Loneliness, boredom, lack of motivation.

There's often not a direct causation, but the correlation is compelling to me. We used to have to talk to people, and/or struggle and learn to meet our objectives. When we can skip those steps and immediately arrive at our destinations, we can sometimes miss the journey.

approaches manaskarekar with slow deliberate steps

stands before manaskarekar

clasps manaskarekar upon both shoulders

gazes into manaskarekar

softly smiles and subtly nods at manaskarekar

releases clasp and worm-dances back into the desert

Re:My Images Are Dithered on Saturday July 25, 2026 @10:15AM (#49047742)
I vaguely recall stumbling across a site years ago that could do something like this in the browser, with various bits 'n bobs you could poke at. Can't find it now.
Re:My Images Are Dithered on Saturday July 25, 2026 @10:14AM (#49047733)
My Title Was Dithered
Re:Safari Technology Preview 248 Released on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @07:47PM (#49015048)
You're correct. Which makes it all the more inscrutable that the Firefox team doesn't embrace PWA's as a differentiator.
Re:Why I am not going to buy a computer on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @12:33PM (#49009477)
This is a response to a short essay by Wendell Berry which you can read here: http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html
Re:Show HN: Workaround โ€“ Unstar GitHub Repos in Bulk on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @10:47AM (#49007697)
I welcome this. I don't want anyone to prejudge or train a profile on me based on my starring history. Because my history of starring goes back chronologically and for many years, it's a wider signal than one might realize.

I note that Github's only opt out for a public star list is to 'Make profile private and hide activity', with the description:

"Enabling this will hide your contributions and activity from your GitHub profile and from social features like followers, stars, feeds, leaderboards and releases"

That's a vague set of repercussions. Cleverly worded to discourage.

Feature request: A way of export your star list into a handy json format before you nuke it. I'd like to have this for my own historical record, without having to share it with the public or Microsoft.

Older ยป