News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

thinkthatover

Re:Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? on Monday September 14, 2026 @05:56PM (#49704734)
also known as an olla pot!
Re:iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 on Monday September 14, 2026 @03:27PM (#49702564)
I think it's different for mini owners. I upgraded my battery in march of this year and its already at 89%, I blame ios26 frankly.
Re:Genuine Creativity Is Your New Moat (2026) on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:50PM (#49649990)
pedantic but who DOESNT remember 2004's Troy? Brad Pitt, Orlando bloom, Brian Cox, Eric Bana, my lord.
Re:GPT-6 Astra on Friday September 04, 2026 @04:32PM (#49569884)
per capita seems the wrong metric given the difference in population sizes and America's wealth. They have roughly 4x the people and have added 10x new power capacity in the last 10 years, not to mention lapping us in renewable and long distance transmission lines added.
Medicaid and medicare make up 50% of the "abuse" (primarily overpayment), which again points towards companies milking the system, not individuals https://washingtonstand.com/article/gao-finds-15-major-feder...
I'm curious, what have firsthand experience have you seen of solutions implemented by The Ocean Cleanup?

There will always be misallocation of resources in the private and public sector, I think the main point of this article is "trusting the experts in complex situations", which in my opinion is valid and needs to be said more emphatically in the current political climate.

“There was this spirit at the time that a few well-meaning young people with a lot of passion would find solutions, but for complex problems like this one, the teenage geniuses and their billionaire backers aren’t going to save us, and they’re going to take us on a wild and expensive ride along the way,” Helm says.

yeah agree "will you have spent more of your life procrastinating using screens than quiet reflection in a sacred space"
Re:Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking on Friday August 14, 2026 @06:29PM (#49305407)
Disagree, and in a way it feels like we are dealing with inverse issues: the security "skill" is well defined and will be also engaged with by an agent. Communication companies are further incentivized as any failure is at best reputational harm. Meanwhile SaaS companies are not strictly required to have good UX for their human end users, largely because those users will likely work around the issue. also network effect vs low costs of switching for for comms
Re:Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? on Saturday July 18, 2026 @08:42AM (#48957646)
imo: sub-conscious messaging to get you used to looking at a loading screen for a large portion of your workday
not since X.AI got folded in
Re:15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test on Sunday June 21, 2026 @11:00AM (#48619527)
My friend was diagnosed with lyme disease in his mid-20s after years of symptoms similar to your own (brain fog, extreme fatigue, etc.). The hard thing is that even lyme disease itself is a constellation of illnesses, he had to work with mulitple specialists for years to confirm what the issue was and get the proper treatment.

In his case, he is mostly back to normal, albeit gluten intolerant, which will cause his symptoms to redevelop, namely spinal inflammation.

Its hard not to engender helplessness when hearing or dealing with types of issues, but I wish you perserverance in your search for answers, and grace when dealing with your problems.

Re:U.S. Science Is in Chaos on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @08:32AM (#48569506)
I agree that pure science should not be cut and prioritized. The more frustrating thing about the type of sociological research you critique is that it feels like that data already exists somewhere - between health insurance companies, google, social media, etc. We know that we can de-anonymize data to get very specific actionable data for advertising. American scientists should have a Mega API from Palantir to ask their questions as well, and it ultimately won't cost as much.

Side tangent, I wonder how much China does these kinds of sociological studies, and the differences in infra/how they conduct the research. Lord knows we're not the only ones getting fat over here.

Re:European sunscreens are safer than American (2024) on Friday June 12, 2026 @12:43PM (#48506349)
More likely if the FDA was properly funded these things could get reviewed more often and this wouldn't be an issue. Not updating allowed ingredients in over 20 years doesn't point towards a lack of flexibility, its debilitation.
god whenever I hear/see "genuinely" I get so triggered
Re:Dopamine Fracking on Monday June 08, 2026 @10:45AM (#48446111)
just because everyone seems to keep asking this on different threads - hacker news is definitely social media, with a few extra steps. Its where i come to get my dopamine hit at least
If only! Many people have limited options for investing based on their employer's allowed plans that match 401k contributions
Re:India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world on Friday June 05, 2026 @04:54PM (#48418142)
why not just eliminate the $170K payroll cap? that gets us most (certainly not all) of the way there.
Re:The Dead Economy Theory on Friday May 29, 2026 @11:03PM (#48332073)
this is Amodei's position in a nutshell for AI development. We have to go as fast as possible because China. It's not the only frame though. If AI models and warfare (cyber, biological) becomes easily accessible and dangerous enough, there is a strong incentive for the world's leaders to cooperate towards something akin to nuclear non-proliferation.

In fact, there's strong incentives now to slow down AI progress for multiple reasons: de-escalate tension over Taiwan and lessen China's desire to build their own advanced fabs, protect peoples livelihoods by smoothing the AI transition. Except the incentives to bring AI companies public (and maintain some twisted shred of American Hegemony) are greater.

funnily enough - "letter of the law" interpretations can be so general that many left US leaning people believe it is abused by the right for systemic corruption: https://youtu.be/l7To2evwGKs?si=i93YDCuqCl5PMPlY
I really don't like this framing - it's hard to short a market at the best of times, let alone when governments have a vested interest in tech being too big to fail to compete in the global economic arms race - see Intel's stock in the past few months.

I agree with you both - undoubtedly there are still massive gains to be made with the frontier models we have today with tooling and iteration, yet I do not believe there's sufficient evidence to claim we are rolling towards AG/SI on an exponential curve, without some additional breakthroughs given the jagged edges and data used to train models being fundamentally linear

Re:GPT-5.5 on Thursday April 23, 2026 @08:23PM (#47883996)
Who's Sam again? oh that person whose house was molotov'd last week? Or the person who had an expose written in the new yorker calling him a sociopath? I forget.
Re:GPT-5.5 on Thursday April 23, 2026 @08:12PM (#47883911)
what size models are you using? this sounds like a good idea
truly a k-shaped economy we live in
Re:Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator on Sunday March 22, 2026 @11:25AM (#47478492)
what makes you think AWS would look at any of the bugs filed by people using local emulators
now now, Canada is only allowing 50K of these cars to be imported per year. This is a middle power extending a hand to a superpower in the new multipolar world, nothing more. Also BYD subsidies (and sales) in China have been dropped in the past year.

Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.

agreed but the current administration is pretty adept at using the slimmest margin for justification and benefiting from the fact that the legal process playing out over years is extremely detrimental to everyone but the government
If they can't provide it to us for national security purposes, certainly they could to the appropriate congressional subcommittee
Re:America's Semiconductor Boom is Real [video] on Friday October 17, 2025 @09:07AM (#45616335)
good point, but to push back a bit, I think geopolitical factors such as Taiwan's Silicon Shield and the related AI arms race are as much responsible as free market principles for semiconductor improvements recently.