News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

orangea

Re:The Lithium Hypothesis of Obesity on Saturday October 31, 2026 @07:17PM (#50321190)
> "There's no diet or exercise reason why altitude would make you thinner."

I beg to differ.

Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build on Sunday October 25, 2026 @12:47AM (#50228419)
Consider using "reader view" / "reading mode"
Re:Furifont, a Japanese font that shows furigana on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:02PM (#50134005)
I'm seeing Chinese versions of kanji on this website; the HTML might need a language annotation or something. https://i.postimg.cc/NGTvHP4x/Screenshot-2026-10-17-at-12-00...
Re:A third way of using Linux on Monday October 05, 2026 @05:57PM (#49971433)
I don't see any suspicious JS on the page, so I suspect it's a styling issue triggering some inefficiency in Firefox. There are animations and text-shadows.
Re:Tree Calculus on Saturday September 12, 2026 @11:20PM (#49679659)
has tree calculus been used to prove something interesting about something that is not tree calculus?
Re:Be Using Rootless Containers on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:58PM (#49638235)
The kinds of things that you list that an attacker could do with root access don't sound like things that an actual attacker would want if they are infiltrating random people's personal computers for their own gain. Modifying the kernel or arbitrary programs is so far beyond what typical malware tries to do that I think it seems kind of silly to consider those things when evaluating the security of an operating system designed for personal computers.
Re:Be Using Rootless Containers on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:50PM (#49638179)
I think you're just illustrating my point. Those concerns don't apply to personal computers and they don't stop an intruder from doing anything they might practically want to do for gain. Like installing ransomware, participating in a botnet, exfiltrating personal files/browser cookies/etc (all accessible as non-root!), ...
Re:Be Using Rootless Containers on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:36PM (#49638095)
Why would an adversary being able to execute code as root on a personal computer be a bigger threat than their being able to execute code as non-root? Surely just about any of the stuff that a malicious hacker might want to do to someone's personal computer can be done without root... right?
Re:AirPods 5 on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @07:32PM (#49636126)
From what I've seen it seems to be a very common opinion that the pro 3 is worse than the pro 1 and 2. Hopefully the new tip design is just a temporary indiscretion like the touch bar.
Re:Any Nix package, live in the browser on Sunday September 06, 2026 @03:00PM (#49589675)
I think it could be made much faster by emulating Linux system calls instead of running a real kernel, and translating x86 binaries to wasm before running (using something like cheerpx).
Re:Any Nix package, live in the browser on Sunday September 06, 2026 @02:57PM (#49589652)
> The first time you run a binary, it is translated from x86_64 to WebAssembly and that takes time.

If the binary is running under a real x64 linux kernel running in qemu, wouldn't that imply that the binary is never translated to wasm?

what is "PCC"?
It's because it's effectively impossible to make a markdown authoring app that meets everyone's needs, and people tend to be picky about what they want in a writing environment. People have strong preferences about WYSIWYG, flavor of markdown (pandoc/quarto/GFM/etc), theming support, some want notes to be able to link to each other, etc. As an example, I require math notation support for basically everything I write which automatically rules out 90% of markdown editors for me.
Re:Combinatorial Games in Lean on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @02:30PM (#48925119)
It probably has more to do with the fact that formalizing chess in such a way wouldn't be particularly interesting. Chess is mostly studied because of its historical significance, and if you change the rules then the game no longer is as connected to its historical significance.
Re:Anyone here with an "in" with eBay? on Thursday July 09, 2026 @01:17AM (#48841278)
I mean... is it not obvious that in a he said she said scenario like this they have to simply side with the buyer? I struggle to understand your mentality, assuming that you have no way to prove (to Amazon or to a court or whatever) that their negative feedback was fraudulent.
Re:Let's discuss sandbox isolation on Friday February 27, 2026 @08:39PM (#47188877)
The first half of the article says "namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp aren't 'security boundaries' because if the kernel had a bug it could be used to escape from a sandbox". Then in the second half it says "use gvisor and do all this other stuff to avoid these problems." This presentation feels kind of dishonest to me because the article avoids acknowledging the obvious question: "well what if gvisor has a bug then?" I mean, sure, another layer of sandboxing that is simpler than the other layers probably increases security, but let's not pretend like these are fundamentally different approaches.
Re:Mean People Fail (2014) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @03:03PM (#46890867)
If the successful people you meet in real life are nice and you see lots of meanness on the internet, it probably just means that anonymity causes meanness.
Re:Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI" on Thursday January 22, 2026 @03:57PM (#46725044)
> We already know many useful things to do; there are already 10,000 startups (9789 out of YC alone, 4423 of which are coding-related) doing various ostensibly useful things.

I don't think you meant "ostensibly".

Re:Exe.dev/ on Friday December 26, 2025 @08:08PM (#46398156)
See also, for comparison: https://www.val.town/
Learning homological algebra is a long way away from learning about varieties and ideals in any sensible order in which to learn material. You have to do a lot of work in between in order for homological algebra to seem motivated. Sounds like you ought to try an introduction to algebraic topology.
Re:Thoughts on Omarchy: Slick Distro, Complicated Ethics on Monday October 13, 2025 @10:05PM (#45575492)
Why not read the source and decide for yourself? Here's a blog post linked in the article, as a start: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Re:Thoughts on Omarchy: Slick Distro, Complicated Ethics on Monday October 13, 2025 @07:30PM (#45574464)
> Well, dhh considers torrents outdated (I’m not kidding, check the tweet), so it’s only officially being offered as a single download from a Cloudflare server. Which sounds cool until you’re on a weak-ass connection in constant danger of dropping halfway through the download.

That has nothing to do with bittorrent vs http; use a download manager instead of a browser.

Re:Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon in Practice (2022) on Thursday October 02, 2025 @01:38PM (#45452837)
Asahi is useless to me, and I would assume many others, without USB-C display support.
Re:Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City on Friday August 22, 2025 @04:17PM (#44989308)
Don't you think that the vast majority of dangerous human drivers would be perfectly capable of changing their behavior during a driving test? Even without any malicious intent most people would be more careful during a test.
Re:Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) on Thursday July 24, 2025 @07:17PM (#44677502)
> targeted specifically high ticket items (jewelry, luxury)

My immediate instinct upon reading this is "of course those businesses wouldn't be interested". They are selling a brand and image first, and if it looked like they wanted people to download some new app and put in their bank details to make a purchase instead of swiping a credit card it would cheapen the brand. Luxury stores are all about a streamlined experience and the appearance that money is no issue.

Re:Rediscovering Quaternions on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @03:06PM (#43187620)
At least this is a topic that the average HN reader is likely to be able to understand and which is closely related to software. Several years ago there was a period where there were periodic posts about things like homotopy type theory and research-level algebraic geometry which inevitably spark only inane misunderstandings and uninformed speculation in the comments. I can only attribute it to some kind of fetish for the frontiers of pure math.
Re:We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour on Sunday November 17, 2024 @02:05AM (#42162475)
When something costs $1/year, the primary barrier isn't being able to afford it, but having a valid payment method. Depending on the requirements, it can be an issue if you don't have a credit card, don't have a bank account, etc. And not having those things is slightly correlated with poverty. In addition, it makes it harder for children to sign up (not necessarily a bad thing, just saying).
- Doesn't allow installing multiple versions of packages at the same time

- In practice, requires being installed to /usr/local

- Hard to uninstall in practice, leaves files scattered behind

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