News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

satnhak

Re:Start Doing Graph Theory on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:41AM (#50274477)
Looks like an excellent book, and the author is right that graph theory is a very useful and practical branch of mathematics. If only I could persuade my son to read it.
Re:GPT-6.1 Terra on Monday October 26, 2026 @06:51PM (#50252288)
the only things we've got to actually make a judgement on are vibes and token anxiety. vibes generally indicate that more expensive == better, but more expensive == more token anxiety. so you end up using the most expensive model x effort that keeps your anxiety in check. yeah, maybe terra is great at technical documents. i'm not going to use it because i'd need to spend a couple of days writing technical documents to work out if it was better than sol and then what if it isn't?

is opus 5.5 better than sol 6.1? hmm, i really can't tell. maybe claude is a bit more diligent and identifies more issues up front. but sol has this can do attitude and the codex harness just gets on and does it's job done.

Re:Brown student maps the hidden global labor powering AI on Monday October 26, 2026 @02:25PM (#50248563)
OK, so all of the evil capitalist western companies entirely pull out of the global south, taking their evil dehumanising "work" with them. Then what?

Maybe the lucky ones get to work as domestics or laborers in the Middle East? I'm sure that's much better than reading AI slop in your home country with their children living with them and their friends and family nearby.

From my limited experience of working with McKinsey people, I would describe it as a Fortune 500 C-Suite incubator. The hire smart people, they are very well connected and the goal is to rise the ranks and get a CEO position in a multinational. I was told by a very senior ex-McKinsey consultant that their main role is to get people promoted (regional CEO to central board for example). The projects are essentially a vehicle for an individual to move up. Their network is phenomenal. I wasn't very impressed with what i saw productivity wise, but they are polished and the point is not to impress the lower downs.

Accenture are mostly a bunch of low level talentless grunts. There are a lot of them. If you're hiring Accenture then you are in trouble in more ways than one.

Re:Show HN: Swurf – Swipe through the real web on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:05PM (#50216007)
it's a good idea, but can you tweak it so that page 1 isn't a flashing naked lady?
If the majority of German voters want "to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany", then is it not their democratic right to do so?
What annoys people about Singapore is that it's an incredibly right leaning society with single party rule and "outrageous" social policies like "get divorced, lose your home", "10 grams of meth and we'll hang you (and we mean it)". And yet it's incredibly successful, and the people there are happy.
Re:Abandoning Scientific Linux Was a Mistake on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @05:31AM (#49813569)
"Scientific Linux was never simply "RHEL with a different wallpaper." It gave the scientific community an institutionally independent implementation of the Enterprise Linux platform."
Re:HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents? on Thursday September 17, 2026 @12:44PM (#49743345)
Claude Code is an absolute dog. They hijack the scrollbar. Keybindings don't work properly on WSL. A jumble sale of slash commands that are almost all useless. Stupid flair like "Boondoggling...". I despise everything about it.

Compare this to the Codex CLI that is no fluff, minimal and just does it's job. Open AI models are in a totally different league to Anthropic (in the real world) so no loss really.

Re:Performance Improvements in .NET 11 on Thursday September 17, 2026 @12:27PM (#49743129)
I thought the exact opposite a few lines in, and that's a shame because I'm genuinely interested. But it was unreadable.
Re:Why getting your hands dirty is good for you on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:47AM (#49608997)
And no one has dirtier hands than the BBC
Re:Programming is Art on Monday September 07, 2026 @11:28AM (#49599490)
What I find ironic are the "creatives" who declare resolutely that AI cannot create art,... now here is this cool vibe-coded software I've made. It's like saying a chisel cannot create a sculpture. Yeah, OK, but without the chisel the sculpture wouldn't have been made. Who cares. It's a tool. What you do with it is up to you.
Re:Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem on Saturday September 05, 2026 @01:08PM (#49578494)
I used to attend Kevin's Number Theory seminars at Imperial College many years ago and he's both a first rate mathematician and a very nice person. His blog has got me interested in maths again. Considering how pro AI he is and that he's been working on this problem for such a long time I'm a bit disappointed that Anthropic didn't involve him directly in this work. However, I think it's important to remember that without all of the work Kevin and people like him have done, the machines wouldn't be able to do this.
Re:No AI Fridays on Sunday August 30, 2026 @11:03AM (#49499281)
No thanks
And we all sit on beanbags, sing kumbaya and write poems about our feelings.
Come to a country with universal healthcare (England) and realise that if you work then you're paying 5x the market price for the worst healthcare imaginable. MRI scan - we don't know, one month wait, maybe two. Operation - are you going to die tomorrow with out it? No, ok then that could be years.

You need to pay rock bottom wages to doctors to make it work, so guess what all the good doctors leave for private healthcare and you end up with the dregs from the third world.

React isn't immediate mode. The dependency array, amongst other things determine what redraws and what doesn't. Yes, you can make React look like it's running in immediate mode, fully redrawing on every frame. But if you do that then you're probably in the wrong line of work. Maybe try management.

This post is impressively bad. It's been AI generated and the AI doesn't even know what immediate mode is. Did you use Grok?

Sorry, I just don't understand the premise behind Rune. The whole neovim / emacs / blah blah cult is based around configuring the infinitely configurable ecosystem. It's not better, or more productive, it's a hobby. So if you try to package that you've missed the point.
I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.
Re:What to Learn to Be a Graphics Programmer on Thursday July 02, 2026 @07:41AM (#48759867)
Should also include be under 25 and have lots of time to dedicate to it. I've always been interested in the idea of graphics programming and a few years ago I started teaching myself vulkan. Not sure quite how long I spent in total, 6 months of free evenings, maybe a bit less. I'm close to having a rendering framework. But it's one of those things where the further you get with it the more you realise how little you know. You feel like you're sort of happy with how things work and then you discover, no that's not the right architecture. I guess it's basically the mathematics of applied lighting. That's what your doing. The rest of it is the plumbing. Oops, why do my spotlights shine straight through the cube? Oh, I need to calculate shadows. Spend a couple of weeks working out how to get that into the render pipeline. But it is a lot of "fun" if you're into that sort of thing.
Re:The minimum viable unit of saleable software on Monday June 22, 2026 @07:23AM (#48628700)
This is quite an interesting one to me because dotnet has a couple of job queues, with hangfire (hangfire.io) probably being the main one. I've used hangfire for years and it's OK, but it was lacking a few critical features for the current project I'm working on. I've tried extending hangfire before and it's quite unpleasant to work with, so I decided to go down the LLM build route https://github.com/hackf5/sheddueller. It took about a week to build the service that did everything I need. The code is good enough and it was definitely the right choice. The real benefit is that I can add any features that I need and make it work in harmony with the main project.
Fake news
Re:Lines of Code Got a Better Publicist on Thursday June 11, 2026 @11:51AM (#48492044)
I once worked in a company where there was an 80% code coverage requirement. Some enterprising contractor had a script that generated a single file with its own covering test suite the size of which could be tuned to achieve 80% over the whole codebase. Mostly the code was untested.
Re:European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low on Thursday June 11, 2026 @05:28AM (#48488140)
The problem is that if you look at Russia's actions they are mostly rational and predictable. And by Russian standards Putin is a moderate. The Western wet dream is to "Yugoslavia" Russia. Balkanize it, load it with debt and take all of its assets. They had their man in Yeltsin, but he was such an egregious drunk that even the CIA couldn't get him reelected. In many ways, if you look at things objectively, there may not be a Russia without Putin.

(and you show me a major country where they aren't poisoning political opponents, conducting significantly less relevant wars than the one in Ukraine, and all kinds of other things)

Re:European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @08:56AM (#48475606)
"Russia is good, actually" is a hard sell to anyone who has been indoctrinated by a lifetime of Western Russophobia. Is I think what you meant.
Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone.

Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.

Re:EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada on Thursday June 04, 2026 @12:27PM (#48400949)
The problem the UK has had is that although the British people voted to leave the EU, most MPs we're against it and there was a very concerted effort to not honour the electorate's wishes. Brexit happened in name and by default. It was the worst possible outcome, but probably predictable.
Re:EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada on Thursday June 04, 2026 @12:14PM (#48400761)
Actually, the EU has lots of (probably) intractible problems. For example the closest thing it has to a constitution is the TREATY OF LISBON (the constitution project having fallen apart), which begins HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...). Compare that with the US constitution that begins "We the People of the United States" and you start to understand how bad the situation for the EU is.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
Re:Mo RAM, Mo Problems on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @10:20AM (#47948859)
Thanks! Amazing website, so many useful articles. Wish I had a couple of free years to work through these books https://fabiensanglard.net/Computer_Graphics_Principles_and_...

Older »