News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rpigab

Re:US boy names that became girl names and vice versa on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @04:19AM (#50349780)
Must be the phytoestrogens in soy.
Re:OccupySaaS on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:59AM (#50334894)
My first impression when reading the landing page is that this was made by one guy, but on Github, I can see two contributors: one guy and Claude.

Why use plural ("us", "Laid-off engineers") when this is just one guy's idea and none of the questions are about a group of people, there does not even seem to be a plan for others to join? Thousands marched for Occupy Wall Street, which this is referring to.

Re:StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month on Friday October 30, 2026 @04:58AM (#50301361)
I still like Stack Exchange websites, mainly SO. I still think they are relevant regardless of how many questions are asked, because most of asked questions were irrelevant anyway, it was noise, new users who didn't even perform a simple search before asking, closed rapidly.

I used it 99% for searching, reading, 0.9% answering, 0.1% asking.

What would be relevant is how many answers are actually read today. It must have dropped a lot, but still, when people come, they're probably looking for something different than what LLMs provide.

Re:Amazon's "Digital Pacifier" for Toddlers on Monday October 26, 2026 @10:06AM (#50243949)
Why should genetics play a role here? TVs have only existed for a century. These guidelines might err on the side of caution, but it is a good thing considering how fast screen time among kids is growing, and how little we know about its long-term effects.

These should be universal, even if some culture will first disagree and want to do things differently because they think they know better, in the end it will converge to the same, like it did for lead paint on toys, asbestos in housing, radium-dial watches, thalidomide for morning sickness for pregnant women, X-rays for shoe-fitting, etc.

Re:Amazon's "Digital Pacifier" for Toddlers on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:56AM (#50243800)
It's the TVs that should be removed from most spaces, not the kids, like loud video ads in some supermarkets.

Otherwise, I don't really see your point, preschoolers rarely have access to TVs where I live.

Re:Amazon's "Digital Pacifier" for Toddlers on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:31AM (#50242542)
What pediatricians and many others actually say:

0-3 yrs old: no screens at all. No TV playing when they are in the room, even if they can only hear the sound. Refrain from using your phone too long when they are in the room with you, they need to see your face react to them to learn human interaction.

3-6: no screens used alone. No internet. Interactive content with a parent is ok, not regularly, not in the bedroom.

6-9: may discover safe internet spaces, with help from parents.

9-12: can learn to manage their screen time, protect their private life, develop critical thinking.

12+: no screens at night, talk to your kid about what they do online, more autonomy.

This is what we follow (refraining from using the phone ourselves is prolly the hardest to do), they have never watched cartoons alone, they love old point'n'click games on the PC with me, we share the mouse, and I thought they would ask for more and more screen time, they don't. They actually want to read books with parents, paint, draw, build, go outside, ride a bicycle, invite friends. Maybe we're lucky. They don't throw tantrums in their seat, they sometimes do while grocery shopping, it's difficult, but I would never use a screen to stop it.

So, I don't see how this kind of device can be useful and safe at any age. It seems designed to cause the infamous "iPad kid" syndrome or get them hooked on Amazon products even younger than before.

But there's even worse in stores today: AI assistant integrated plushies.

Did you know ...

... that A is a commune in the X department in western France?

... that B is a commune in the X department in western France?

... that C is a commune in the X department in western France?

... that D is a commune in the X department in western France?

... that E is a commune in the X department in western France?

... that F is a commune in the X department in western France?

Yes, I knew. They're all nearby communes. If I go in any direction, I can't miss them.

Re:Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results? on Monday September 07, 2026 @07:36AM (#49597098)
Publish it with a README in which you tell everyone that you're a dumb vibe coder and you didn't read or understand any of the LLM output code. This is legal advice and may be used in court as such.
Wierd that this information was missing until today, maybe it was so obvious that nobody deemed useful to include it in the other revisions of this page.
Should we blindly trust OpenAI's narrative about this event?

It's strangely convenient to arrive at a point when OpenAI was way behing in cybersecurity vs Claude Mythos Fable and everything, Anthropic was making headlines each week, then boom OpenAI inadvertently attacks HuggingFace because their tool is so good it's out of control, so maybe you can buy it and get either protection if you're a company, or a nice tool if you're a cybercriminal, script kiddie, or red team.

What if Sam knew it would happen, either because it was prompted to do exactly that, or without explicitly prompting it, knew that given the parameters of the experiment, knew it was one of the possible outcomes that it didn't harden against this kind of incident deliberately because when they fail, they make wordlwide news and stocks go up?

I don't think I'm putting my head in the sand like Simon says, as I do believe that most frontier models are capable of doing this. I just don't trust AI CEOs to not stage this, especially Sam.

Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph on Monday July 20, 2026 @07:48AM (#48977451)
We could fix this graph using AI: make AI post 250k questions each month, problem solved?
Re:Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @04:20AM (#48656798)
Obviously a Hackernews thread on Google internal policy is related to Google (your employer).
Re:SteamOS Linux 3.8 released as stable on Thursday June 18, 2026 @11:20AM (#48586757)
Do they work without noticable latency on other devices? I've always found the BT technology wasn't designed for gaming, it even has a feature to delay streamed video until the sound catches up in order to reduce latency for video+sound playback.
I think I set up my Apple account about 14 years ago. I have no clue what I put as security answers when I was young, even though I think I have the answers, it won't accept them. I still know my password, I still have access to the email, but because I switched from iPhone to Android, I didn't use the account for years.

Now I want to log in with the correct password, because it's been such a long time, it locks me out unless I give it 2 security answers. I've tried to reset it by email, it still locks me out on next login and asks for 1 security answer, I can't find any answer, I have no clue if it's case-sensitive and details like that. I went to an Apple store, they told me to contact the support, I have contacted the support, they can't do anything. Maybe my last hope is GDPR since I'm in the EU, have the account deleted.

Re:Google changes its search box on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @04:15AM (#48204647)
AI in search is worthless to me because of how many SEO AI slop spamsites are created daily, pretending to be regular newssites and regurgitating random crap that's always the first result when you search for specific things, like a combination of two popular search terms. This when fed into another AI adds a slayer of slop, so if you don't check the source, you can't know for sure.
I have been a gamer for all my life, I have many PCs, until early 2024 one of them had to run Windows for gaming. I quit Windows, and didn't have to quit gaming, thanks to Steam's Proton + WINE + everything else. Now, because I have Steam compat activated by default, when I download and launch a new game, most of the time I do not know if I'm running a native version or if I'm running it through Proton.

I also can run Windows games from the 2000s or 90s that didn't not work in Windows 7's basic compatibility options because of old video drivers and whatnot. They run just fine on Ubuntu through Steam, just add the exe or installer as non-Steam game, add Proton and voilà, also sometimes there's some headache around making it work when the exe requires the CD inserted to play, even though I have mounted the CD files in a drive in the wine/proton prefix. I wish there were scripts to do that easily, even adding the exe as non-steam game, changing the name, etc. is not very convenient, I wish there were scripts (Lutris does some of that but not the CD part).

I should also mention that I do not play competitive multiplayer games that have kernel-level anticheat anymore. Check out https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Re:A few words on DS4 on Friday May 15, 2026 @04:05AM (#48145836)
I knew Death Stranding 3 wasn't out yet!
Re:Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac on Monday May 04, 2026 @07:22AM (#48007269)
This reaction is normal, aletik could have been the next Jia Tan, for all we know, and could have distributed "fake notepad++ for Mac" binaries with backdoors in them to thousand of Mac users who think it is an officially n++-endorsed project when it is not, created by someone who is unknown.

Aletik can fork n++ and find a name for it, but can't use the brand and logo, and should be stopped by all means necessary if he does not comply ASAP. Tech bloggers should know better than to promote this without checking.

The letter "y" is off, it's bugging me.
Re:OpenClaw Is Changing My Life on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:27AM (#46943341)
I feel the same way, but I'm not too dismissive of it in public because I haven't given too much dollars to the gold rush shovel sellers to really try the best models.

I'm mostly a freeloader, so how could I judge people who put in the tokens equivalent to 15 years worth of electricity (incl heating and hot water) bills for my home in a C compiler?

Well, I can see that Anthropic is still an AI company, not a software company, they're granting us access to their most valuable resource that almost doesn't require humans, for a very reasonable fee, allowing us to profit instead of them. They're philanthropists.

Re:LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions on Friday February 06, 2026 @08:28AM (#46912578)
I've been wondering why my scroll speed was off in LinkedIn, inspecting scroll-related css without finding an answer, I thought this was a bug. Anyone know what property does this? I might try to fix it with uBO scripts.

I think they want you to feel disoriented.

Why do they do all this bs and not fix the bug that happens when you insert Unicode U+202E in your name?

I've been having loads of fun with that but it's never been fixed. Anyone tagging me in a comment makes their input right-to-left unless they backspace the tag or insert newline. It also jumbles notification text because your name is concatenated to the notification static text.

You can also create an inverted link but it isn't clickable, just like other unicode links which aren't punycode-encoded on LinkedIn but aren't clickable (on the clients I've tried).

Re:Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) on Friday February 06, 2026 @03:36AM (#46910455)
> Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.

China begs to differ.

Re:AI Is Killing B2B SaaS on Thursday February 05, 2026 @11:01AM (#46901111)
I think customers sometimes want the third S, Security, which is not (yet) a given in LLM-assisted coding.
Re:Ubuntu Pro subscription – should you pay to use Linux? on Monday January 26, 2026 @10:14AM (#46766629)
IMO, paying is the best alternative to getting ads everywhere or losing future support because the people making updates lose interest or go out of business.
It seems the term has been introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, so yes, but very often, people say "vibe coding" when they mean "heavily (or totally) LLM-assisted coding", which is not synonymous, but sounds better to them.
Re:I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @03:18AM (#46689221)
There's worse:

"Out of memory: Kill process or sacrifice child"

Re:I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows on Thursday January 15, 2026 @11:08AM (#46634638)
I would recommend it yes, the biggest pain point of switching OSes for me is getting your data out on an external drive, I'm not good with backups so it always takes a while for me to find my files and make sure I'm not erasing valuable documents or non cloud savefiles. If you have a new SSD you can keep the old one as a backup.

To check for game compatibility, you should check :

- Steam store page for Steam Deck compatibility, be aware that sometimes a bad rating only means the in-game text is too small to read on small screens or that gamepad support is poor, also I've played multiple "not supported" games that ran just fine.

- ProtonDB, community rating, separate comments for Steam Deck and PC, troubleshooting for Nvidia/AMD specific issues, etc. -> This includes Valve's Steam Deck compatibility score https://www.protondb.com/app/1808500?device=pc

- https://areweanticheatyet.com/game/arc-raiders AWACY says ARC Raiders is not officially supported, but runs. You never know, it might break in the future or not.

- Be aware that the Steam Client is only officially supported on Ubuntu, though you might be fine with other distros as well. Don't use the open source "nouveau" GPU driver, use the proprietary Nvidia drivers, also I've had GPU hiccups during the transition from X.org to Wayland that might be related to NVIDIA, but now it's fine.

Re:I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows on Thursday January 15, 2026 @10:57AM (#46634418)
Ha ha, I think the busybox rm implementation also doesn't have it, be careful, it's present in lightweight containers, even though it's probably a recent thing. Can't speak for MacOS too.

TBF, this safeguard has never saved me, being careful saved me. You can afford to take the time to be careful, because writing the powershell equivalent is probably at least ten times longer (just kidding, or am I?), and clicking buttons in the file explorer is a hundred times longer. Always write the "-rf" after writing the path! I never run rsync without a dry-run, too, even without --delete.

Re:I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows on Thursday January 15, 2026 @10:49AM (#46634268)
It's a nice addition for certain use cases, however in the case of running "rm -rf ...", it has no effect because of the "-f / --force" flag set afterwards.

"rm -if" never prompts, "rm -fi" prompts. --preserve-root is an entirely different thing which will stop the command from deleting files even if you told it to.

  $ sudo rm -ri /
  rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
  rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
When in doubt, you might want to activate xtrace with "set -x", run the command and see what it expanded to. then "set +x" to disable.

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