News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

gleenn

Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:32PM (#50319881)
Do you have web activity turned off or use a separate old style Youtube account? Mine is also bad but I think it's because of those for me.
Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @07:27PM (#50267337)
And the fact that they skipped 9 and will likely skip iPhone 19 as well
Re:No More Icons in Every Menu by Default on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @07:23PM (#50189039)
The amount of times I absolutely cringe from super lux UI which clearly a lot of time and energy went into prettifying at the absolute expense of usability and affordances. I love Apple TV but flip to any screen with multiple buttons and not being able to tell which button is selected. Or the Russian Roulette of Youtube trying to select any of the overlayed buttons on the actual video frame. I would 1000% trade shiny for more usablility in 99% of apps.
3blue1brown has the absolute most educational and entertaining videos. Always fascinated by his animations which are custom programmed by him. I also appreciate the diversity of topics covered from deep math to software to science.
Re:Living off-grid: Hundred Rabbits on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:02AM (#50001720)
I remember a talk from them at Strange Loop, fascinating life living on a boat and trying to keep software running despite power and connectivity.
Re:Solving for faster SHA-1 collision detection on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:05PM (#49913582)
They stated they had trouble.
Re:OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites on Saturday September 26, 2026 @02:30PM (#49859192)
Because it furthers the idea of a rogue agent and places responsibility and blame where it belongs, on the people running the company.
Re:Solving for faster SHA-1 collision detection on Thursday September 24, 2026 @12:25AM (#49826237)
This seems extremely cool, but man does it also sound complicated. The write up was thorough but the algorithm seems so complicated that the author can't even write good tests for it is concerning. I would be very concerned their algorithm might accidentally skip something important accidentally given they are dealing with dynamically combining large binary expressions. You can make it fast, but if you can't prove it and it's security related that probably needs to be proved out more, even if SHA1 is already compromised.
Re:GPT-6 Sol and Luna on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @09:02PM (#49810359)
Last I heard, caches had like a 5 minute TTL... doesn't that mean if you get up and make a coffee (hand pour over of course), that you are back at full price?
Re:Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine on Saturday September 12, 2026 @01:48PM (#49675024)
IMHO, I think Apple is poised extremely well. They didn't blow billions of dollars chasing models that are becoming commoditized. So many interesting models can now be run locally. All the big AI players have to pay even more to run those models when Apple will happily sell you the hardware, and you pay for the electricity. There will always be a place for some many-billion parameter model but as time progresses I think fast local models that keep data on site will always be a valuable, and Apple will happily sell you something to run them.
Not sure if you're joking. How do you write an OS without these tools that might be compromised? It's the same problem.
Works until AI compromises a bunch of OSes. And wouldn't there be difficulty comparing binaries built from significantly different environments? It sounds like some progress has been made in general for fixed identical builds, but isn't that also still a hard problem? I don't know enough low level C-level stuff about binary generation.
Re:I Feel about AI on Sunday September 06, 2026 @11:48AM (#49587669)
I don't even think AI has to have physical presence to do significant harm. How many worldwide systems depend on computers. Think of all the planning and deployment and management systems like food shipping; water, gas, and electricity management; safety systems for planes and boats and traffic lights. Imagine the chaos if all the banks got reset to zero a la Fight Club where they blow up all the credit union datacenters. They probably wouldn't even have to blow them up, just zero them out. You wouldn't have to take out everything, just disrupt everything long enough to freak people out and disable communications and we would be in so much trouble. AI is finding 20 year old bugs in the Linux kernel... and people are now pumping out AI slop absolutely riddled with bugs. Also, AI could just take over communications: send everyone maliciously bad messages so coordination becomes impossible to believe. Imagine what would happen if you just disabled text messaging for a week or worse sent everyone evacuation messages and sent everyone somewhere else.
Google stopped putting so much money into SOTA models. All the hype has migrated. I was also frankly turned off when I got a popup from Gemein said I would either have to pay or have my conversations used for training. This may have always been true for other providers but when I declined, Gemini stopped remembering my conversations and that definitely made me move out.
Everyone is leasing datacenter space from some of Grok, Google, and Amazon aren't they? If it's hardware or DC level disruption I'm not too surprised it can affect multiple providers.
Re:Haiku R1/beta6 has been released on Sunday August 30, 2026 @02:34PM (#49501458)
Fedora got a syllable dangling
Yes, she did intervention.
My friend who is a Radiologist said all the older, more seasoned Radiologists don't have any hair that grows on their hands anymore. She said she was glad to get out because even if they provide lead bibs, the doctors doing emergency radiology type treatments were still exposed long term.
Re:Everything I own, owned on Sunday August 23, 2026 @11:28PM (#49414915)
Some people's time is actually worth or even just valued more than others to be bothered doing maintenance tasks such as there. I have a life to live outside preserving every last minute of functionality out of a monitor, I'll buy a new one eventually regardless.
Re:Pixel Watch 5 on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @07:49PM (#49280091)
They have some heart-rate and some health tracking an as others have mentioned, so many of the more fringe features are way less useful than a watch that lasts anywhere from a week to a month on a charge versus a daybor two with the ultra
I end up biting a lot of pills to get around that dose. I definitely always felt groggy until I dialed down the dose to just right, and it works perfectly: I fall asleep far quicker and more assuredly, and I don't feel to groggy. I can't believe they sell pills as large as they do, what other medication varies in dosage as much?
Bonus security on iPhone - if you long-press on any app, you can click "Require Face ID" and it will make thieves need your face again to open bank or sensitive apps. I did this for all my financial apps amd also email so they can't reset passwords. It isna minor inconvenience but would hopefully prevent an unlocked phone from being stolen and having bank accounts emptied.
Re:Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @01:48AM (#49164718)
I'm sorry but if you need a transpiler to get it to run in a browser, character replacability and runtime semantics don't matter. Typescript doesn't run in the browser, it's obviously a different language.
Re:Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library on Monday August 03, 2026 @06:15PM (#49162171)
Isn't that like saying the Internet is only written in English if you strip out all the non-English. All C-style languages are fully cross compatible if you only use semicolons.

I can't write Typescript into a browser without cross-compilation and "stripping out types" involves parsing and manipulating code. That's a different language.

Re:Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:49PM (#49159877)
Clojurescript not ClojureJs, and Typescript doesn't run in the browser, it has the exact same issues/limitations: it must be compiled to JavaScript first.
It's not, although rules vary by state. Medical professionals can prescribe it even though it's a Schedule III drug. I get ads for these presumably legitimate therapy services online all the time on major social networks.
Distilling isn't necessarily easy, there is a huge cottage industry of services middle-manning ChatGPT and Claude to collect huge amounts of data. It is still vastly cheaper than training yourself, but it is certainly not easy or feasible for most organizations. And I'm sure a flock of lawyers would show up if someone in America was found doing it.
Re:ECC and DDR5 on Monday July 20, 2026 @10:23AM (#48979299)
That particular quote did stand out to me. I think the counter claim is that if everyone uses software everywhere for everything, there is a very real societal cost for damaged data and if it's hard to detect then there is no way to prevent or measure harm. I think the "invisible hand" free market is showing some serious strain in modern times. People stopped using leaded-gas because it was causing measurable decreases in IQ for generations. I don't care how much you want to save a few dollars if it harms a lot of people and is difficult to measure. Everything else seems like a race to the bottom price so pushing the market in this manner doesn't bother me in the least. If you are running a server with others' data at stake, it seems like an obvious benefit for society on the whole to address the problem rather than serve some cheap datacenter operators.
One of the Mars landers famously failed due to unit conversion errors from metric to standard.
If someone quits their job, do all their opinions suddenly become suspect? You're kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't. Either you work for the company and you are biased one way, or you quit and now your bias is now suddenly the other way. I've joined and quit many jobs and my opinion may or may not have changed due to my change in status but it is clearly and ad hominem attack.

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