News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mnw21cam

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @03:23AM (#50349450)
Yes, it's the normal Debian kernel plus DKMS. It just works seamlessly.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @12:00PM (#50339829)
I'm writing this on a Debian machine that is using ZFS. It's Red Hat that has a problem with ZFS, not Debian.
Re:Tell HN: I'm going on strike this November on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:05AM (#50273790)
Generally when you are on strike you do not get paid.
A tenth is perhaps an exaggeration. It depends on how you count your lifespan.

A lead-acid battery mainly ages by cycle count. If you keep a decent quality battery charged up, and don't regularly discharge it too much, then there are claims they will last ten years. If you discharge them excessively each day, then you'll kill them really quickly.

A LiFePO4 battery has a quoted cycle count. But really what matters is simply elapsed time - the battery will last about ten years if it isn't abused, and you'll be hard-pressed to actually do that many cycles in that ten years. It ages mainly by elapsed time, not cycle count.

I used to argue that for an off-grid solar solution, you should get lead-acid batteries with capacity so that you are normally never discharging below 70%, and that this was still cheaper than getting LiFePO4 batteries with smaller capacity that you would discharge down to 20% each night. The lead-acid would then give you a larger reserve capacity for those instances where the weather is foul for a bit longer than normal and you don't get meaningful charging.

However, since then LiFePO4 batteries have continued to decrease in price, there are new Sodium batteries available now, and I haven't done the calculations again - the best option may have switched over, or it may be so close that it doesn't really matter which one you choose.

I have a completely unrelated problem with my rather old Asus Zenbook UX305C. The Intel graphics driver for Linux (specifically Debian) crashes the whole OS whenever it enters DPMS screen blanking. I'm able to tell the interface while logged in to never blank, but the login/unlock screen use a completely separate X server with separate settings, and I haven't been able to work out how to just completely disable DPMS. So while it can sleep and suspend, I can never lock the screen, and when I wake it from sleep/suspend I cannot leave the login screen long enough for it to go into screensaver, because that will crash the computer.

It's annoying. Back in the mists of time when the laptop was new, it all worked fine. It's the updated Intel drivers that are broken.

Re:Most advice is right for the person giving it on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @11:17AM (#50182488)
When I go hiking for a couple of weeks (with significant elevation gain each day), I eat like a pig. I mean, something like 5000 calories a day. I lose weight over that time. So it's possible to lose weight through exercise, however you really do have to spend a very significant chunk of each day doing it for it to work.

Not eating as much takes much less of your busy day.

Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:57PM (#50125295)
Is this page geo-locked? All I get is a page telling me that I'm unauthorised to view the page.
Re:Things to know if you get cancer in 2026 on Thursday October 15, 2026 @12:54PM (#50106535)
I work with monogenic diseases, where a single mutation (or a pair in the same gene for recessive conditions) does cause disease. There's a lot of them. Your statement isn't true for these.

You're talking about polygenic traits. That's a different ball game entirely.

Re:Things to know if you get cancer in 2026 on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:02PM (#50095208)
That's not universal. I work in genetics, and we did an investigation a few months back, by asking various AIs whether a particular mutation causes $DISEASE. Invariably they were very strongly biased towards saying yes, even for completely obviously benign variants. I think that's because the majority of the literature out there describing variants is describing pathogenic ones, because why would you write an article about a benign variant, so the only material it has ingested is articles describing variants as pathogenic. In reality, the average person has millions of variants, and almost all of them are completely benign, so there should be a very strong pre-supposition that a given variant is benign unless there is fairly strong evidence saying otherwise.
It's helped a lot by the fact that solar panels have become very cheap indeed, so the fact that we don't get as much sun as other places doesn't matter so much - it will still pay off, as long as you can actually use that energy effectively (which may require batteries or a decent export payment rate).
Astronomers definitely do like them because they're orange, and they can filter it out of their photos.
Re:Fingerprints Are the New Cookies on Monday October 12, 2026 @09:51AM (#50056484)
The typical wording is "We value your privacy". Which just means they think it's valuable and want a part of that pie thank you very much.
Re:Don't Put Tilde In Your Path on Sunday October 11, 2026 @04:15PM (#50047362)
Any fule no that a file name is just an array of bytes (excluding the null byte and the slash). You can create a file with a name that is an invalid UTF-8 encoding. It's fun to see how much software chokes on that!
Re:Don't Put Tilde In Your Path on Sunday October 11, 2026 @04:10PM (#50047314)
In every single directory you're ever going to have as cwd when running that software?
Re:Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @11:40AM (#49994397)
It's not the PNG encoding that causes the loss. The optimisers are literally creating a different image and then losslessly encoding it as PNG.

But it's also a valid point.

Re:The art of defusing a second world war bomb on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @07:30AM (#49991265)
Some explosives degrade by becoming more and more sensitive and dangerous, not less.
Re:The designer lamps in my house on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @04:10AM (#49989759)
Um, no. Have a look at the two pictures just under the title "Akari 75A". They are of the same room. On the right-hand picture, the ceiling lamp is round, but on the left-hand picture, the ceiling lamp is oval.

https://pliggle.homeip.net/tmp/squished_pictures.jpg

Clicking on the pictures does nothing - are you relying on Javascript to do these things for this page?

Re:The designer lamps in my house on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @10:06AM (#49978726)
The picture just below the title "Tizio Micro" looking down on the lamp with the lawn behind, part of the collage of five photos, has been squished horizontally or stretched vertically quite a lot. Many of the other photos on the page have also been stretched in one direction but not the other.
Re:The designer lamps in my house on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @06:01AM (#49976352)
Nice lamps, but what's with the photos very significantly stretched out of aspect ratio?
I get that it's only a game, but all of these gravity games (with a couple of rare exceptions) ignore the fact that the black holes (or planets/suns) should be moving as well.
> Only about 4% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans

Part of that might be because only 4.2% of the population of the world lives in a country that has both democrats and republicans.

Re:2DWillNeverDie on Friday September 25, 2026 @10:39AM (#49845299)
I was using a desktop browser.
Re:2DWillNeverDie on Friday September 25, 2026 @05:04AM (#49841947)
Is this page geo-locked? All I get is a "403 forbidden" when I try to access it from the UK.
Re:How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years? on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @05:40AM (#49813612)
All I get is a 403 forbidden when I try to access this page.
Re:I said no and Apple said yes on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @07:11AM (#49799381)
It's there for sure. However, it's not particularly relevant to the following two points:

1. The author should be able to do whatever he wants with his own device. That he owns.

2. The author should be able to decline consent for data-gathering activities and general AI stuff that he doesn't want.

Re:A faster way to calculate the day-of-the-week on Thursday August 20, 2026 @08:08AM (#49373494)
See the Doomsday algorithm, discussed elsewhere on this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule
Re:Supersonic Trebuchet [video] on Thursday August 20, 2026 @07:44AM (#49373290)
I don't believe that is true - rockets produce a very supersonic airflow from gas pressure.
Re:Supersonic Trebuchet [video] on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @10:40AM (#49362296)
Or if you have a limited supply of gunpowder but a way to make sufficient numbers of appropriately shaped projectiles, an air rifle would do the job and is much lighter and simpler than a trebuchet.
Re:Finger: Social network that never died on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @08:01AM (#49344416)
There was a fellow student at university who put the entire Hunting Of The Snark in their .plan file. It scrolled for a while.
Re:The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing on Thursday August 06, 2026 @06:07AM (#49194713)
Did the author forget to add pictures? They seem to be referred to in the text.

Older »