News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kryogen1c

Re:I know why Mathematicians weep on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:19AM (#50104059)
> Think about a world where non-mathematicians leapfrog the field after a few AI prompts. It would be a world with more knowledge. But it might be a world with less understanding.

This seems like a good summary of the article, and I think the answer here is obvious.

So what?

News flash folks: we do not have the knowledge to survive on our own. If a solar flare deletes the electric grid, the first thing that happens is 8 billion people die in the next year.

We survive on abstractions others have built, and we have a global dependency web.

AI abstracting knowledge is neither new or dangerous; if it is dangerous, this certainly isnt the argument to prove it.

Re:Ask HN: What do you think about Fractional CFOs on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @11:24PM (#49987733)
> Get an employee who's dedicated to your mission

I dont know about startup culture or silicon Valley, but i do know a fractional cfo who is more motivated and dedicated than most full time associates.

I'm not convinced fractionalness is a bad thing; i would think it adds tight feedback loop for performance that executives sorely lack.

> just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist.

yes and no. in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid. its not definitive, but it is strongly dispositive.

> no there aren't

the article you linked is contradicting you, but regardless the claim isnt falsifiable:

"If Huanan Market was the source, why were “only” one- to two-thirds of early cases linked [...] why would one expect all cases [...] to be confined to one market?"

the article's thesis is that there are multiple cases not linked to Huanan market, but thats expected because of asymptomatic transmission. That argument could be used in favor of either side, so its not particularly meaningful.

> infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it

as I just mentioned, the article you linked makes this very claim. you cant have it both ways.

> The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover.

Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.

> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest

thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.

> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.

It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.

> unusual coincidence

A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.

I think you mean all systems by design do not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly. Thats actually not a thing.
> That's not responsive to OP or coherent

The claim was Ds are more procedural than Rs. Asking what process the Ds followed to attempt to run, and then back out of running, biden (who again, was very obviously and publicly mentally incompetent) is clearly a rebuttal to a presented point.

> democrats are more a process oriented party

Oh? Thats why Biden tried to run in 2024? Because democrats procedurally try to elect obviously incapable presidents?

Re:OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @11:04AM (#49728163)
> Who actually wants this?

I mean, not to be rude to this and all sibling commenters, but obviously everyone? I feel like this comment has no basis in reality.

People want things cheaper and they tolerate ads. Those two things put together means everything gets ads and gets cheaper? YouTube exists for free and costs billions to run. Companies A/B test ad tiers and paid non-ad tiers, and the results are always the same.

> too much faith in the professionalism

I dont know that its a matter of professionalism. Everyone in the world has known that AI can generate video and audio that is imperceptibly fake, for years. And thats to say nothing of man-made forgeries in the years prior.

I have a hard time seeing people on the front line throwing down arms and running away because of an unsourced twitter clip.

> What do you think the chain of command looks like in the third world?

I have no idea, but Im certain that twitter recordings do not put frontline forces in disarray.

> use Telegram for basic operations

an encrypted private communication channel is very different than public social media

Can't read the Twitter link, but that sounds made up.

Where in the battlefield decision making process are they listening to social media recordings to make combat decisions?

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs on Saturday September 05, 2026 @07:20PM (#49581699)
Windows supports dhcp failover, where multiple dhcp servers can exist on the same subnet.
Re:Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread on Saturday September 05, 2026 @09:50AM (#49576504)
I assume youre being sarcastic, but ive heard serious thinkers, like sam Harris, sincerely make this argument.

America is truly lost when people wish their politicians were lying to them more.

Re:When Fruit Is Scarce, These Monkeys Hunt Animals on Monday August 31, 2026 @10:03AM (#49509958)
Yup. Lots of stories of old timers dying of a heart attack in the pen and only finding glasses and watches left.
Re:When Fruit Is Scarce, These Monkeys Hunt Animals on Sunday August 30, 2026 @01:51PM (#49501021)
Its probably true of most animals. I raised a couple of pigs and we intentionally never fed them any meat, even though they'd probably eat it, because we didnt want them to get a taste for it
Been here 8 years, always wondered how comments died. I assumed it was algorithmic. TIL
> Of course, but that's not what happened here

They dropped rods and had to scram, unclear what part of that you think is not relying on a safety feature. Why do you think they scrammed?

>this is largely the design operating correctly and prioritizing radiological containment.

Is that largely what is was, or entirely what it was? Im not sure what your point is.

> there are maintenance and procedural questions about why the rod was dropped.

I agree, that's why I said it.

> People will likely get fired over this.

I dont know why youre telling me this, you're the one that called this a nonevent

Re:A SAT Attack on Tarski's High School Algebra Problem on Sunday August 16, 2026 @01:45PM (#49322069)
Man I wish I understood anything you said, or anything in tfa. Math has to have my personal gold medal for highest desire to learn coupled with total unwillingness to.
>generally a non event

depends on what your priors are. Is a dropped rod a fukashima or chernoble international emergency? No.

However, depending on the design characteristics of the core, dropping rods lowers the heat distribution proximal to the dropped rod(s), but may result in higher peaks distal to the rods as physics characteristics attempt to maintain the average, which may exceed design limits.

Furthermore, rods aren't supposed to drop. How that came to pass is a matter that requires honest investigation - manufacturing/quality control, maintenance practices, personnel error? Much to learn to ensure safety.

Saying "we just had to rely on a critical reactor safety feature and scrammed, this is a nonevent" doesnt quite hit the mark.

Rabbits are a good input calorie to output meat ratio, and their excrement makes good cold compost. They breed and litter relatively easily. Theyre also easy to house.
> Fun fact: a pallet of books is called a "gaylord,"

A Gaylord is a type of box that fits on a pallet. There are multiple ways to palletize products, like shrink wrapping or metal banding

epsteins case tells you how much the US political class cares about SA and CSA happening in the US.
Re:Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor on Sunday July 19, 2026 @08:16AM (#48967472)
The middle east is not one time zone

https://whichtimezone.com/me/middle-east-map/

Did you read what you linked? It's not a study of the effects of cpr, it's a list of facts about cardiac arrest that occurs outside a hospital. It explicitly says cpr is life saving:

>Survival chances decrease by 10% for every minute that immediate CPR and use of an AED is delayed.

Re:I Built the Only 2026 WWII Jeep on Thursday July 09, 2026 @12:29PM (#48848531)
>in some cases they were pushing aircraft of the deck of carriers into the sea so they didn’t have to pay

You may be shocked to learn that practices such as this exist in the modern US military as well.

Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room on Saturday July 04, 2026 @08:48AM (#48785038)
>that's 0.2% CO2, it that CO2 is the result of respiration, it means that about 0.2% O2 was consumed,

I dont know anything about human respiration, but I know a little about chemistry and theres no reason to assume this is true. Basic stoichiometry.

According to a random article on the internet[1], nominal co2 production is 80% of oxygen consumption.

Your point appears broadly correct, just wanted to point out some faulty reasoning that could lead to incorrect results in the future.

[1] https://societymechanicalventilation.org/wp-content/uploads/...

Re:Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @05:27PM (#48739449)
> For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient

This had never ocurred to me. Starting to develop a picture in my head that looks a lot like train-served dropshipping. Continuous vs demand signals like top-up and running out? The space savings seem extreme.

Guess I have to do a train play through :-/

Re:I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI on Sunday June 28, 2026 @01:28PM (#48709497)
On the flip side of this problem, novel best practices lag the medical standard of care, other human failures like corruption and competing priorities notwithstanding.

For example, we had to advocate for certain practices during the birth of our first child that became routine during our second several years later.

So, neither side is guaranteed correct, doctor or citizen researcher (which did not include LLMs in my case, for the record). The truest answer is also the most useless one, applicable to all fields: it depends.

The real question is: if you embrace being a layman, whom do you trust more: LLMs/the internet or experts, like doctors? I think the answer is pretty clearly experts.

Is this after cleanup? There's almost zero wreckage and if it was at takeoff it shouldn't have enough speed or descent angle to atomize.
This still confuses me. It's clear they wanted to 10x licensing costs and /10 customers which assumably raises margins, but i still dont see it working out.

My international enterprise and all our business partners moved every broadcom product we have to a competitor. On top of that, they were very aggressive and combative with their sales+cease and desist threats.

They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will listen to me.

Older »