News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

smashers1114

Of course it has to be maintained. Things are maintained as they are sunset.
Presumably it makes sense to sunset PHP especially with how cheap code migrations are nowadays.
Re:Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @10:28AM (#50181640)
What topics are you still seeing this in?
Re:"I'm Not Going to Have Blood on My Hands" on Saturday October 17, 2026 @07:14PM (#50136055)
Its striking how fast gambling has been growing in the US. Up to $17B revenue (after payouts) in 2026, when it was $7.5B in 2022.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/29332/gross-gaming-revenue-fr...

Re:How to Formalize All of Mathematics on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:51PM (#50121815)
I agree with the sentiment of mixing up sources. However there are not really many textbooks that rise to the level of "ground truth". Plenty of times that books give wrong explanations as well.
I disagree somewhat. I think internally OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are probably all pretty close right now. Argon is competitive with Opus 5.5 and Astra. It might be third, but its competitive at least. Its becoming more apparent that different models are RL'd for different tasks.

Astra (or broadly openAI) are best for mathematics, 3D modeling, and vision. Opus 5.5 is best at like visual design (or just in general adding more taste and feel)

Now, it can depend on your definition of frontier class model. But Argon is a strong model. Google is not running a distant third. If OpenAI and Anthropic shut down they would have the strongest model on the market in like 2 months imo. Google does suck at shipping (maybe due to an unusual amount of dogfooding models internally?)

And we know all the labs have stronger internal models than their public releases.

Re:Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:04AM (#49864119)
I feel like the author was either trying to write to a pretty lay audience or didn't understand the broad applicability of quantum mechanics. There is no threshold either where things are "classical" or "quantum". The systems that may be satisfactorily described by classical mechanics are just those in which the Planck constant may have a value of zero. While in modeling a system using quantum mechanics, it has a finite value.

Computational chemistry is based on different approximation methods for evaluating the interactions of a molecule with another. These methods work well, and as you can imagine form a large portion of biochemistry. Saying "Biology may not be quantum.." in the title seems pretty misleading at best.

Most of the interview quotes are researchers talking about any sort of long term coherence used in a biological organism. The article mentions this in brief but I didn't see a link. For a real cool example of biology pushing quantum limits check out the magnetic field "vision" of birds [0].

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0711968106

Ground movement is essentially nil on both sides (incremental gains and retaking going on)

Both sides are able to perform drone attacks 100s of km beyond their border. Moscow is also enduring drone attacks.

Re:Where Rust actually is in Windows 11 on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @01:41AM (#49797193)
Pangram also shows 100% AI generated. Its very likely that the technical details have some correctness, but you could also just ask the LLM of your choice for an analysis of where Rust is and get similar quality. There doesn't appear to be any interesting technical moral or anything.

Also I am loving just how over the top clickbaity Claudeish is for an article like this. I just imagine it as a dramatic narrator announcing these section titles: 5. The one announced as accessibility, not as Rust: Narrator’s maths engine 9. The compiler that changed name

Re:Grok 4.7 on Monday September 21, 2026 @03:27PM (#49792117)
The fact that it might affect quality is something that is on my mind. In fact, I have mainly been using Astra after being primarily on Claude for several years exactly because of this annoyance. Ultimately, the model (at least for coding purposes) should just... not have this writing style.

I do think an infrastructure where another Claude retranslates the output would be better. Oftentimes I forget to put it in the actual prompt and when I receive back 8 paragraphs of Claudeish I ask for it then.

I would have to disagree that it gets as grating as Claudeish though. Its just direct and professional instead of ring-around-the-rosy clickbait.

Re:Grok 4.7 on Monday September 21, 2026 @01:25PM (#49790348)
FYI a quick fix for claudish is to ask for the response to be in ASD-STE100 (Simple Technical English). Then it is far more readable. But I would agree that this is an annoyance and shouldn't require user workaround to get something readable.
Re:The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced from the Facts on Saturday September 19, 2026 @01:04PM (#49768257)
That is a vindictive way to view the world. It'll be a race to the bottom if everyone gives up on facts and says whatever is politically expedite. I would urge you not to give into it, although I certainly understand the frustration.
Re:GPT-6 Astra on Thursday September 03, 2026 @04:10PM (#49556134)
I tried the kart racer game and instantly found that there is incredible auto-steering and you can fly by spamming spacebar.
A more physical way to think through this may be: imagine many many bits of rock all with their own semi random velocity. The overall system has an angular momentum that must be preserved. So as these bits of rock accrete you end up with orbits of large bodies that all must add up to the initial angular momentum of the system. Since every planet is a conglomeration of many bits it is extremely likely that all orbits are in the same rotational direction, though not guaranteed.
Maybe thinking of Titius-Bode laws? Or perhaps the notion of Musica universalis? These are not taken too seriously since they do not hold to close observation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis

When you think about the word apple and what it signifies, what do you experience?

So I have all sorts of associations with "apple" and spent a little time playing with it.

First in a raw physical sense I can imagine an apple in my head, spin it around, imagine its physics with near cylindrical symmetry etc. A red apple is what first pops into my head, although of course I know there are many apple variants and have opinions on their taste etc.

There are many cultural associations I have with apples from Newton to George Washington. The company Apple has its own set of ideas that I interact with when I hear the word.

In other words I can think of various associations I have to the word apple of various strengths. These associations and strengths are functions of my experience encountering the word and actual apples.

Is there a feeling of "appleness"?

I don't really know what this would mean. I would say no, unless it can perhaps be defined what appleness means and feels like. I don't really notice any strong set of emotions or feelings from this thought exercise.

Do you think that sense of meaning is equivalent to the numerical weights of an LLM?

Again I think I would need a definition of "sense of meaning". I don't seem to derive a singular pointlike meaning when contemplating a singular word. I never was contending that human and LLM cognition are exactly equivalent, but I could see these association strengths being represented in LLM weights. I would say then if an LLM has similar association strengths with "apple" then it "understands" apples as well as I do. Of course this is really hard to test, but frontier models could give you all sorts of apple facts and cultural associations and so on. It may slip up and hallucinate, and I'm sure that I also believe at least one false thing about apples.

So what is your brightline between LLM and human understanding in this example? I assume that your line of reasoning would argue that LLMs do not understand apples. Why don't LLMs understand the word "apple?

I mean brains get a lot of training data too in order to understand language. I don't think you provided a relevant difference.

Or rather, maybe I don't understand what you mean :)

Re:GPT-4 on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @02:32AM (#35164653)
Just tested it out and got the following:

=========

To find the value of foo applied to bar, we need to first determine the values of both foo and bar. Let's start with bar, the circumference of a circle with radius 1:

Circumference (C) = 2 * π * r where r is the radius.

In this case, r = 1, so:

bar = C = 2 * π * 1 = 2π

Now, let's move on to foo. Since foo is a function that calculates the sinus of its first argument, we need to find the sine of bar (2π):

foo(bar) = sin(2π)

The sine function is periodic with a period of 2π, which means that sin(2π) is equal to sin(0). The value of sin(0) is 0. Therefore:

foo(bar) = sin(2π) = 0

======= So I think it evaluated correctly here unless I have made a dumb mistake in reading your prompt myself.

Re:Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office? on Sunday February 05, 2023 @05:59PM (#34670707)
Not true of my friend and coworker group. You should think carefully of confounding factors before taking anecdotal data and extrapolating to something that applies to a much larger group.
Re:AI Could Defeat All of Us Combined on Friday June 10, 2022 @08:11PM (#31700728)
Sounds kinda like "The Last Question" by Asimov, but not quite. I might have thought about it partly because of the anecdote about it being hard to remember. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question#History