News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

nmeofthestate

Re:The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978) on Friday October 23, 2026 @02:08PM (#50213089)
You misunderstood my comment - I meant that if instructing a programmer to program something is "natural language programming" (what AI agentic coding is), then they had "natural language programming" in 1978. I wasn't saying they had AI in 1978.
Re:The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978) on Friday October 23, 2026 @04:38AM (#50206068)
It's the same as "natural language bricklaying" where you make walls appear by speaking instructions to a brickie whom you're paying.
Re:The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978) on Friday October 23, 2026 @04:35AM (#50206033)
If AI is natural language programming then they already had it in 1978, because AI is in fact "asking a programmer to write code for you". And you can even ask them to do it at different levels of abstraction!
Re:What Is Gridifcation on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:05AM (#50196416)
Pfft - this doesn't make a general point about quantisation - he completely altered the drum part. He didn't just shift things by minute amounts to hit the "exact" timing while maintaining the swing. Of course if you remove swing then it's completely changed - it could also be quantized while maintaining swing.
Just seems weird for anyone to focus on trying to crack private keys starting with absurd 8-bit values that "nobody would use for a private key", let alone bother to do it at all, given the search space.
I wonder how someone stumbled upon this - maybe leaked by someone inside eMudhra?

Since there's nothing to indicate that the private key was all zeroes and one non-zero lsbyte, and presumably nobody would try to brute-force a private key.

If it's government funded from general taxation I don't see how that changes.
You currently need a license if you watch live broadcasts on UK TV channels (whatever technology is doing the live streaming), or use the BBC's on demand service iPlayer. You can watch other on demand services such as Netflix, on demand services provided by non-BBC UK TV channels, YouTube, without a license.
No you're right. The idea that UK legislators, of all people, would push through ridiculous unenforceable legislation is simply not plausible.
I'm so happy to be able to not watch any UK terrestrial television, and avoid having to pay a license fee as a result. It's total shite - when you don't watch it and occasionally witness it in other folk's houses, you really see the decline. Just complete garbage.

I'll be so annoyed if they go ahead with this change and I can no longer avoid funding it.

Sour is the word they were going for I think. Wine isn't bitter IME.
Re:English: A vs. An on Sunday September 20, 2026 @05:59AM (#49774282)
A related quirk is English people saying "an hotel" (pronounced an otel). It's a subset, and specifically more popular with English speakers as opposed to non-English British. Also, someone else claimed the English don't say "an historic" - incorrect. Again it's not universal.
Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @11:04AM (#49713644)
No I agree with that, but if it's "activists" I would expect them to claim credit otherwise it's all pointless. The same doesn't follow for Russian fuckery, IMO.
Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:54AM (#49711803)
Russia spends a huge amount on manipulating western citizens via the internet, let's not play dumb about that. You may not think that it has any effect, but apparently Russian intelligence does.
Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:52AM (#49711776)
>Might be related to today's yearly 'Prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands:

Russia may have heard about that annual event as well, of course.

Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:48AM (#49711732)
We should see some claim of responsibility if it was indeed anyone other than the usual suspects.
Re:Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:45AM (#49711699)
Explosive-equipped drone attack on airport - Russia! Numerous arson attacks on businesses supplying Ukraine - Russia! Country invaded, cities destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed, raped, tortured - Russia.
Re:I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @07:56AM (#49711180)
Mountainous jungle terrain?
Re:Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results? on Monday September 07, 2026 @03:39AM (#49595165)
You should just ask AI, since you used AI to make the encoder and write your HN post.
Re:Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude on Friday August 28, 2026 @10:05AM (#49478682)
ChatGPT 5.6-Sol via CoPilot is absolutely fine in my experience - no weird LLM-ese.
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked: Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
Contemptible cookie dialog.
Some Conservative activists were campaigning for the joke candidate in the constituency. Although none of the parties officially endorsed him obviously, they have all been gushing about him on social media.

I'm not sure the traditional parties standing aside in favour of a joke candidate, even if none of them stood a chance in this constituency individually, paid off. It probably just pissed off Farage voters hence his increased vote count with a reduced turnout.

The whole thing was cringeworthy, insulting to the voters, and just played into Farage's hands.

Re:The Water Footprint of AI on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:08AM (#49256317)
0.16% (high estimate) of global water usage by the way.
> It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it.

Got a bit confused by this, because nowhere in the article are the words "Renderer" or "GPU". Regardless - all processes that comprise the app are the app, not just the parent process.

When I run it locally and check in procexp it has 8 webview subprocesses and all together it's using similar if not higher levels of memory than claimed in the article. Private Bytes is over a GB in total. I expect the webview processes are sharing memory for DLLs though.

>It’s rare to see political attitudes change this fast

On the contrary - these mass political crazes are like flash-floods these days.

Weird 'discussion'. Almost entirely single messages with no threads, all with the same anti-Anthropic/AI position.
Re:AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence on Sunday July 12, 2026 @04:17PM (#48884338)
This would be better as a drunken rant in a pub, where you could at least get to roll your eyes at your friends while George wasn't looking.
Thank you for posting a positive comment among all the dreary teary-eyed quivering bottom-lipped sadsacks.
Re:Show HN: Capacitor Alarm Clock on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @08:26AM (#48569429)
Oh no. I quite liked this until you said it was art that Represented something.

Older »