News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

shawkinaw

I am so tired of these self-serving theatrics. These bosses take advantage of the fact that most people don’t remotely understand how “AI” actually works, building up this aura of omnipotence and inevitability, the net effect of which is to pump their company valuations that much more. They want people to think they’ve built Skynet, because that sounds super valuable - much more valuable than the (admittedly useful) mindless human mimics that they’ve actually built.
Re:The "mechanical miracle" that ruined Mark Twain's life on Monday August 10, 2026 @09:28PM (#49252229)
> promising the impossible — the 19th century version of Steve Job’s reality distortion field.

Seriously, that’s your best example of that lately? Not, I don’t know, Tesla FSD? Theranos? Bernie Madoff?

Let me add to that: how about “no uncontrolled left turns onto busy streets” mode? Google Maps does this to me all the time and it’s infuriating, it’s up to me to avoid it.
Yeah I wish I hadn’t, this will not help me get to sleep at night
Mine was just over $1 billion. I thought the email was a phish at first and almost trashed it, but it seemed otherwise very real, so I logged in to AWS just to check. Then I almost had a heart attack when I looked at my billing estimate. Eventually I saw a banner on the support page, but my question is why wasn’t there a banner on the page SAYING I OWE A BILLION DOLLARS?!
Re:Incident CVE-2026-LGTM on Friday June 26, 2026 @12:46PM (#48688788)
I really enjoyed the line “The incident was resolved when the attacker’s autonomous agent read a file it shouldn’t have, which is also how the incident started.”
Re:Homebrew 6.0.0 on Thursday June 11, 2026 @02:23PM (#48494390)
Could really use a good rollback mechanism, is there one in the works perchance? I have broken my home server multiple times with bad InfluxDB and Grafana updates, and rollback was a huge pain. I’ve now disabled cleanup so old versions of packages are kept, but there must be a better way.
Re:Layoffs at Block on Thursday February 26, 2026 @09:11PM (#47175463)
Exactly this. Seriously, look at a 10 year graph of SQ/XYZ. How a board of directors puts up with this is beyond me, seems like a massive governance failure.
I do love the random stream of pics at the end.
Re:Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26 on Friday October 10, 2025 @07:44PM (#45545065)
I appear to be in the minority here, but I really like Liquid Glass on iPhone, Apple Watch, and especially Apple TV. But I do hate it on the Mac, the window borders are so thick and rounded, I really can’t stand it.
Reading about the Azores high, Hadley cells, etc. on Wikipedia is incredibly illuminating. Hadley cells and related phenomena combined with the Coriolis effect explain a bunch of weather phenomena: trade winds and westerlies, the jet stream, hurricane formation, global rainfall patterns.
Re:Why Not Matrix (2024) on Monday July 28, 2025 @06:45PM (#44716646)
Yeah, I tried to read the post and was immediately put off by the lack of capitalization. Then I came to the comments and had to fight the urge to ask “why not capitals”
Re:How virtualisation came to Apple Silicon Macs on Thursday January 11, 2024 @06:01PM (#38960751)
Meta, but I’m glad to see Eclectic Light getting some love on HN lately, it’s such a great resource for really in-depth articles on macOS internals (and art!)
Yeah. I mean, the headline is just straight up false:

> Whisper Aero unveils ultra-quiet electric leaf blower, powered by aerospace tech

Looks a lot like the app World Clock Pro I’ve used for a while: https://worldclock.pro/mobile/
What a bad headline. “Raises emission standards” sounds like a good thing, i.e. making the standard more strict, but actually the article is about Texas raising emission limits.
The goal was to stop Congress from certifying the vote. That’s not a protest, that’s sedition, plain and simple.
No, the tactic used in non-democratic societies is to take power by force, which is what was attempted on January 6.
Re:Bye Bye Semantic Versioning, Say Hello to GitDate on Saturday June 11, 2022 @10:52AM (#31704850)
Hard to take seriously when the cons list doesn’t even have “versions no longer indicate breaking changes”.
Re:Google 'colluded' with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy on Saturday October 23, 2021 @10:50AM (#28969052)
> It contends that there was collusion between Apple and Facebook to protect their abuses of dominance in the marketplace

s/Apple/Google/

Re:Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere (1997) on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @01:34PM (#28855026)
Besides Reader View as mentioned by others, you can increase the zoom of the page (accessible in the “aA” button to the left of the URL.) This particular site renders pretty well at 200% on my phone in portrait. The zoom is site-specific so it won’t screw up any other sites. It’s generally a good way to make desktop sites legible.
From watching the documentary linked in another comment, a big part of the JWST’s potential is its deep-infrared sensitivity, which in turn requires very cold temperatures and exquisite shielding, and why it will be literally 1 million miles from Earth. I don’t think you can fake that with computation.
If it’s on, apps still have to ask. Global opt-in is what it used to be.
Boy do I hate blog posts with no link to the page for the actual project. I’m tapping “Murex” in the banner, that should take me to the homepage so I can see what the heck it is!
Re:Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:50PM (#26345534)
You can have ads without tracking. Print, radio, TV all do this.
Re:Google outage – resolved on Monday December 14, 2020 @09:54AM (#25418206)
Let me be clear, I agree it should not be normal to SSH into a prod box. Our logs are centrally aggregated. But it’s one thing to say it’s not normal, but quite another to say engineers shouldn't have access, because I totally disagree with that.

Older »