AI Digest Details New comment by themafia in "Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year" Content:
"You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year."
Astonishing. They clearly feel their users have no choice but to accept this onerous and ridiculous requirement. As if users wouldn't understand that they'd have to go way out of their way to write the code which enforces this outcome. All for a feature which provides me dubious benefit. I know who the people in my photographs are. Why is Microsoft so eager to also be able to know this?
Privacy legislation is clearly lacking. This type of action should bring the hammer down swiftly and soundly upon these gross and inappropriate corporate decision makers. Microsoft has needed that hammer blow for quite some time now. This should make that obvious. I guess I'll hold my breath while I see how Congress responds.
New comment by whatshisface in "Tennessee man arrested, gets $2M bond for posting Facebook meme" Content:
I think this is an example of using slow trials as a nonjudicial weapon. The defendant did not break the law and isn't likely to be convicted (at least not on appeal), but they can hold him in jail for months because they got mad at his Facebook post.
New comment by tptacek in "Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature" Content:
Tip: I very often use AI for inspiration. In this case, I ended up keeping a lot (not all) of the UI code it made, but I will very often prompt an agent, throw away everything it did, and redo it myself (manually!). I find the "zero to one" stage of creation very difficult and time consuming and AI is excellent at being my muse.
This right here is the single biggest win for coding agents. I see and directionally agree with all the concerns people have about maintainability and sprawl in AI-mediated projects. I don't care, though, because the moment I can get a project up on its legs, to where I can interact with some substantial part of its functionality and refine it, I'm off to the races. It's getting to that golden moment that constitutes 80% of what's costly about programming for me.
This is the part where I simply don't understand the objections people have to coding agents. It seems so self-evidently valuable --- even if you do nothing else with an agent, even if you literally throw all the code away.
PS
Put a weight on that bacon!
New comment by Avicebron in "Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025" Content:
I often feel these types of blogposts would be more helpful if they demonstrated someone using the tools to build something non-trivial.
Is Claude really "learning new skills" when you feed it a book, or does it present it like that because you're prompting encourages that sort of response-behavior. I feel like it has to demo Claude with the new skills and Claude without.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon but most of these types of blogs feel like marketing pieces with the important bit is that so much is left unsaid and not shown, that it comes off like a kid trying to hype up their own work without the benefit of nuance or depth.
New comment by sillyfluke in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland" Content:
The parent described someone who went above and beyond the norm of other members in his community in his constant positive interaction with his neighbors, collegues, and former students. It is highly likely this kind of person would give a considerable shit if he knew he would become a nightmare for the same community.
There may be others reading in the thread who also can relate to the personality of the teacher and may care about their affect on others when they are "not themselves".
New comment by AQuantized in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland" Content:
> You really don't want to end up with dementia and related illnesses, it totally sours everyone's view of you.
This seems like such an absurd conclusion to this, as though the opinions of other people of you are what matter when you functionally lose your personhood and then die.
Maybe a better focus would be that there often isn't a good way for a community to manage a person who suddenly becomes irrational because of an illness.
New comment by anilgulecha in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland" Content:
I'm part of the Jain community in Bangalore, and the version of this in society exists, called Sallekhna [1], a tradition that's developed over millennia, and this is venerated and celebrated.
The philosophical underpinning is giving up of materialness. The practicality of the 5 instances that I witnessed over the past year - typical terminal individuals choose this. They pass away surrounded by loved ones (they typically medicate for any pain, and the body starts shutting down when food and water stops). This is observed with somberness, but celebrated as very positive act.
When someone starts this process, it's a unique experience speaking with them, as there's usually nothing that comes up, and the moment does not really lend itself to small talk :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana
New comment by lordnacho in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland" Content:
I had an old teacher who died almost a year ago.
Great guy, very sociable, knew everyone in the little town he lived in. Kept in touch with a lot of students. Good neighbour, friendly guy who'd talk to everyone.
He got Alzheimers. He started forgetting stuff, and it frustrated him. He got caught driving dangerously, and cursed the doctor who took away his license.
He argued with me about the state of some chicken he wanted to cook. I told him "this is pink all over, you have to cook it more". He got angry. I understood he'd become like this to everyone.
He pissed off everyone on his street, and all police, medical and social workers sent to help him. The disease made him blow up every relationship he had with anyone that he didn't know well, like me and a couple of colleagues.
He got found in his house, having left the gas on, endangering the whole street. He ended up in a care home, not knowing who he was, or who I was.
If he'd been run over by a car, or died of a heart attack at the age of 80, people he knew would remember him as that nice old guy who had a dog and made a lot of art, and was friendly to everyone. Instead he was that 83 year old guy who pissed off everyone, nearly blew up the neighbourhood, and drove like a maniac.
You really don't want to end up with dementia and related illnesses, it totally sours everyone's view of you.
New comment by kqr in "Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left" Content:
In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and hazardous states . The equation is
hazardous state + environmental conditions = accident
Since we can only control the system, and not its environment, we focus on preventing hazardous states, rather than accidents. If we can keep the system out of all hazardous states, we also avoid accidents. (Trying to prevent accidents while not paying attention to hazardous states amounts to relying on the environment always being on our side, and is bound to fail eventually.)
One such hazardous state we have defined in aviation is "less than N minutes of fuel remaining when landing". If an aircraft lands with less than N minutes of fuel on board, it would only have taken bad environmental conditions to make it crash, rather than land. Thus we design commercial aviation so that planes always have N minutes of fuel remaining when landing. If they don't, that's a big deal: they've entered a hazardous state, and we never want to see that. (I don't remember if N is 30 or 45 or 60 but somewhere in that region.)
For another example, one of my children loves playing around cliffs and rocks. Initially he was very keen on promising me that he wouldn't fall down. I explained the difference between accidents and hazardous states to him in childrens' terms, and he realised slowly that he cannot control whether or not he has an accident, so it's a bad idea to promise me that he won't have an accident. What he can control is whether or not bad environmental conditions lead to an accident, and he does that by keeping out of hazardous states. In this case, the hazardous state would be standing less than a child-height within a ledge when there is nobody below ready to catch. He can promise me to avoid that, and that satisfies me a lot more than a promise to not fall.
New comment by porcoda in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26" Content:
This update is one of the rare cases where I really dislike the new version. I’m usually happy with Apple updates, even ones the commentators dislike. This time I’m sorta agreeing with them: I don’t like the new iOS. Same with the Mac and iPad: other than being glitchy, I just don’t like the changes. It feels like my screen real estate isn’t as efficiently used, UI elements feel jumbled and the transparency makes things harder to read. I’m sure I’ll get used to it over time but I’m not enjoying it so far, even after going into the settings to try to adjust things I don’t care for. Not my favorite update cycle from Apple, and I’m usually one of the overly positive folks on whatever Apple ships.
New comment by mfro in "Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26" Content:
Literally every change made in iOS 26 feels like a downgrade to me. This is the first time I have ever considered downgrading iOS.
New comment by JoshTriplett in "Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?" Content:
> The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it. You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.
Absolutely. Everything other than cell phones and laptops-not-at-a-desk should be on Ethernet.
I had wires run in 2020 when I started doing even more video calls. Huge improvement in usability.
New comment by PaulHoule in "Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?" Content:
I did some experimentation with UniFi hubs and came to the conclusion that if you can give each device its own WiFi channel that would be ideal -- contention is that bad and often an uncontended channel with otherwise poor characteristics will beat a contended channel that otherwise looks good.
The other bit of advice that is buried in there that no-one wants to hear for residences is the best way to speed up your Wi-Fi is to not use it . You might think it's convenient to have your TV connect to Netflix via WiFi and it is, but it is going to make everything else that really needs the Wi-Fi slower. It's a much better answer to hook up everything on Ethernet that you possibly can than it is to follow the more traveled route of more channels and more congestion with mesh Wi-Fi.
New comment by tdb7893 in "Google, Meta and Microsoft to stop showing political ads in the EU" Content:
Ignoring political implications here and just on a personal level I wish political ads were banned. Quite possibly my least favorite type of ad to see and I've never felt meaningfully informed by them (generally quite the opposite).
New comment by 3D30497420 in "Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas" Content:
From the article:
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.
New comment by paulgerhardt in "Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?" Content:
Do recommend the LG C series (C5 or C4 are new or the C1 series if you want a deal on classifieds - same hardware as the higher end models but needs a firmware bit flip). The OS is very rootable and it makes a great TV that doubles as a monitor. Supports free sync / g-sync. OLED is nice at this scale.
Text is very readable, refresh rate is good. It uses the same panels as the fancier G series in the larger sizes. One can root the firmware to make it go brighter. (Though this is screen works well in medium or dimly lit rooms. It does not shine in very bright rooms).
Plenty of YouTube videos singing the C series praises as a TV / Monitor.[1] LG webOS is also trivial/friendly to root in developer mode and network control of the tv is a nice to have.
Would avoid Samsung. I love the matte on the Frame and the design of the Serif but the OS is frustrating / impractical to root.
[1] https://youtu.be/Qtve0u3GJ9Y
New comment by gota in ""Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education" Content:
Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true:
> Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell.
This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior. You work under a shop that is led by a senior-senior that is called a master. Apprentices become craftsmen, craftsmen become masters. AFAIK, the master does not 'offload' project guidance into non-craftsmen, it is an expected part of the craftsmen role to be project/product managers/owners.
I've said this a million times to close friends and at this point I'm only half joking. We, and I'm including myself in the 'developer' crowd although I may not deserve it, have really dropped the ball in not being a 'guild' since way back when. At least since the late 1980's; and certainly since before the Original Boom of software dev as a profession (I'm assuming it was late 90's? I know not)
(Although I suspect that if that were the case we'd have fewer developers throughout the 00s and 10s, which may have impacted the development of the field itself in unexpected, but likely negative, ways)
New comment by leakycap in "Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas" Content:
All this so a handful of passengers a week can wait for the extremely small pool of vehicles in a dusty hole
New comment by gsnedders in "Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left" Content:
As others have said, final fuel reserves are typically at least half an hour, and you shouldn't really be cutting into them. What if their first approach into MAN had led to another go around?
With a major storm heading north-easterly across the UK, the planning should have reasonably foreseen that an airport 56 miles east may also be unavailable, and should've further diverted prior to that point.
They likely used the majority of their final fuel reserve on the secondary diversion from EDI to MAN, presumably having planned to land at their alternate (EDI) around the time they reached the final fuel reserve.
Any CAA report into this, if there is one produced, is going to be interesting, because there's multiple people having made multiple decisions that led to this.
New comment by abtinf in "Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left" Content:
Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
On a nominally 2h45m flight, they spent an extra 2 hours in the air, presumably doing doing fuel intensive altitude changing maneuvers, and were eventually able to land safely with their reserves almost exhausted.
I’m a little confused by what there is to investigate at all.
How much fuel should they have landed with?
New comment by jacquesm in "Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left" Content:
That is very exceptional. I've written fuel estimation software for airliners (cargo, fortunately), and the number of rules regarding go-arounds, alternates and holding time resulted in there usually being quite a bit of fuel in the tanks on landing, by design. I've never heard of '6 minutes left' in practice where it wasn't a massive issue and the investigation into how this could have happened will make for interesting reading. A couple of notes: the wind and the time spent on the three go-arounds + what was necessary to get to the alternate may not be the whole story here, that's actually factored in before you even take off.
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
New comment by SquareWheel in "Google Safe Browsing incident" Content:
It's generally good advice, but I don't see that Safe Browsing did anything wrong in this case. First, it sounds like they actually were briefly hosting phishing sites:
> All sites on statichost.eu get a SITE-NAME.statichost.eu domain, and during the weekend there was an influx of phishing sites.
Second, they should be using the public suffix list (https://publicsuffix.org/ ) to avoid having their entire domain tagged. How else is Google supposed to know that subdomains belong to different users? That's what the PSL is for.
From my reading, Safe Browsing did its job correctly in this case, and they restored the site quickly once the threat was removed.
New comment by harimau777 in "Examples are the best documentation" Content:
Please don't follow this advice! The best thing about old school Python was that I could reliably pull up the documentation for a library and it would clearly list the arguments and return values for each function.
Now when I look at the documentation for many JavaScript, and even Python, libraries it's just examples. That's great if I'm trying to just throw something together as quickly as possible, but not if I need to fix a problem or actually learn the library.
Also having examples is fine, but they should be considered a bonus; not documentation.
New comment by madacol in "Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado" Content:
Even if Venezuela goes to hell even deeper, she still deserves the prize for what she has already done!
The way she, and her team, managed to convince venezuelans that the election mattered, and to prepare to gather the evidence of the elections under constant threats from the government, that we all knew they were going to steal, and do it entirely peacefully, was an extremely impressive achievement on its own.
What an impressive act of coordination from MCM
:standing-ovation:
New comment by mananoreboton in "Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado" Content:
Don't get me wrong, but perhaps what was missing was greater media coverage and genuine interest in Venezuela's situation.
María Corina Machado orchestrated a HUGE covert months long operation to collect tally sheets from the overwhelming majority of voting machines during the 2024 presidential election. Her team trained poll watchers to demand vote receipts (as legally permitted) then capture and transmit that data through various channels, even from the most remote regions of the country.
There are documented cases of people—poll workers and participants in the plan—being imprisoned or even killed for their involvement.
Thanks to this operation, the website resultadospresidencialesvenezuela2024.com exists, where venezuelan can verify the actual vote count per candidate, backed by fingerprint records and the serial numbers of both the software and hardware used.
These verified results confirm that Edmundo González was the true winner of the election.
The data provides undeniable evidence that Nicolás Maduro installed himself as a dictator, with the full support of the national electoral authority, which, to this day, has refused to release the official election results (a procedure that has historically been routine).
You can also verify the results here https://macedoniadelnorte.com/ (a whole story behind this hostname). Again, only possible by the María Corina's huge effort
New comment by alejoar in "Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado" Content:
Opposing a dictatorship at great personal risk, being exiled, banned from elections, and still leading a democratic movement isn't "nothing".
I think this prize recognizes her courage and fight for human rights.
Dismissing that as "just being in the opposition" ignores the reality of what it takes to stand up to Maduro's dictatorship.
New comment by breadwinner in "Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado" Content:
Notice what they said: This year's peace prize is being given to someone for transitioning a country from dictatorship to democracy. They sure as hell aren't going to give it to someone doing the opposite!
New comment by David-Guillot in "I switched from Htmx to Datastar" Content:
Thanks to Chris to continue challenging his comfort zone (and mine!) and sharing his impressions and learnings with us!
I may be a little biased because I've been writing webapps with htmx for 4 years now, but here are my first thoughts:
- The examples given in this blogpost show what seems to be the main architectural difference between htmx and Datastar: htmx is HTML-driven, Datastar is server-driven. So yes, the API on client-side is simpler, but that's because the other side has to be more complex: on the first example, if the HTML element doesn't hold the information about where to inject the HTML fragment returned by the server, the server has to know it, so you have to write it somewhere on that side. I guess it's a matter of personal preference then, but from an architecture point-of-view both approaches stand still
- The argument of "less attributes" seems unfair when the htmx examples use optional attributes with their default value (yes you can remove the hx-trigger="click" on the first example, that's 20% less attributes, and the argument is now 20% less strong)
- Minor but still: the blogpost would gain credibility and its arguments would be stronger if HTML was used more properly: who wants to click on elements? exists just for that, please use it, it's accessible ;-)- In the end I feel that the main Datastar selling point is its integration of client-side features, as if Alpine or Stimulus features were natively included in htmx. And that's a great point!
New comment by rubenvanwyk in "I switched from Htmx to Datastar" I recently read this: https://drshapeless.com/blog/posts/htmx,-datastar,-greedy-de...
Which states some of the basic (great) functionality of Datastar has been moved to the Datastar Pro product (?!).
I’m eager to support an open source product financially and think the framework author is great, but the precedent this establishes isn’t great.
New comment by bigstrat2003 in "Examples are the best documentation" Similarly, unix man pages desperately need examples. They are almost without fail written as an exhaustive reference for someone who already knows how to use the tool, which is a totally valid use case. But that means they're generally useless for someone trying to use a tool for the first time. Good documentation needs to have both .
New comment by karpathy in "LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions" Sorry I thought it would be clear and could have clarified that the code itself is just a joke illustrating the point, as an exaggeration. This was the thread if anyone is interested
https://chatgpt.com/share/68e82db9-7a28-8007-9a99-bc6f0010d1...
New comment by delichon in "A built-in 'off switch' to stop persistent pain" I'd like to give an off switch for pain to every adult. Here you go, just turn it off if you need to. But if someone gave one to me I'd be in trouble, if not dead. When my back pain got severe I may well have killed the messenger, ignored the pain, and not have made the lifestyle changes that eventually gave me relief by fixing the problem. People with congenital insensitivity to pain usually have multiple damaged joints by adolescence. It's not very enviable.
New comment by wiseowise in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?" > flask
Off-topic, but I absolutely loathe new Flask logo. Old one[0] has this vintage, crafty feel. And the new one[1] looks like it was made by a starving high schooler experimenting with WordArt.
[0] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Flask_lo...
[1] - https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/_images/flask-na...
New comment by ctoth in "Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event – September 2025" AWS account root access on a language package registry for 11 days. Not EC2 root - AWS account root. Complete control over IAM, S3, CloudTrail, every-damn-thing.
They're claiming "no evidence of compromise" based on CloudTrail logs that AWS root could have deleted or modified. They even admit they "Enabled AWS CloudTrail" after regaining control - meaning CloudTrail wasn't running during the compromise window.
You cannot verify supply chain integrity from logs on a system where root was compromised, and you definitely can't verify it when the logs didn't exist (they enabled them during remediation?).
So basically, somebody correct me here if I'm wrong but ... Every gem published Sept 19-30 is suspect. Production Ruby applications running code from that window have no way to verify it wasn't backdoored. The correct response is to freeze publishing, rebuild from scratch (including re-publishing any packages published at the time? Ugh I don't even know how to do this! ) , and verify against offline backups. Instead they rotated passwords and called it done.
New comment by feoren in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?" You hope it doesn't ?
> [Donald Knuth] firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features
This is such a breath of fresh air in a world where everything is considered obsolete after like 3 years. Our industry has a disease, an insatiable hunger for newness over completeness or correctness .
There's no reason we can't be writing code that lasts 100 years. Code is just math. Imagine having this attitude with math: "LOL loser you still use polynomials !? Weren't those invented like thousands of years ago? LOL dude get with the times, everyone uses Equately for their equations now. It was made by 3 interns at Facebook, so it's pretty much the new hotness." No, I don't think I will use "Equately", I think I'll stick to the tried-and-true idea that has been around for 3000 years.
Forget new versions of everything all the time. The people who can write code that doesn't need to change might be the only people who are really contributing to this industry.
New comment by i80and in "The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'" FSAs are insane, conceptually.
"Guess how much money you're spending in a year on healthcare! But beee caaareful: if you guess too high, YOU LOSE IT"
I still used mine while I still had access to one, but it was grumpy-making and was usually almost more trouble than it was worth.
New comment by eutropia in "Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event – September 2025" They buried the lede...
Arko wanted a copy of the HTTP Access logs from rubygems.org so his consultancy could monetize the data, after RC determined they didn't really have the budget for secondary on-call.
Then after they removed him as a maintainer he logged in and changed the AWS root password.
New comment by miguelgrinberg in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?" You have made my day, sir. :)
New comment by nadermx in "Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?" Tangential, but I practically ow my life to this guy. He wrote the flask mega tutorial in what I followed religiously to launch my first website. Then right before launch, in the most critical part of my entire application; piping a fragged file in flask. He answered my stackoverflow question, I put his fix live, and the site went viral. Here's the link for posterity's sake https://stackoverflow.com/a/34391304/4180276
New comment by simonw in "A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size" This looks like a bit of a bombshell:
> It reveals a surprising finding: in our experimental setup with simple backdoors designed to trigger low-stakes behaviors, poisoning attacks require a near-constant number of documents regardless of model and training data size. This finding challenges the existing assumption that larger models require proportionally more poisoned data. Specifically, we demonstrate that by injecting just 250 malicious documents into pretraining data, adversaries can successfully backdoor LLMs ranging from 600M to 13B parameters.
New comment by ertgbnm in "The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe" Unrelated but my current AI text flag is the use of "It's not X. It's Y."
It's become so repetitive recently. Examples from this post alone:
1. "This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed."
2. "The degradation isn't gradual—it's exponential."
3. "These aren't feature requirements. They're memory leaks that nobody bothered to fix."
4. "This wasn't sophisticated. This was Computer Science 101 error handling that nobody implemented."
5. "This isn't an investment. It's capitulation."
6. "senior developers don't emerge from thin air. They grow from juniors who:"
7. "The solution isn't complex. It's just uncomfortable."
Currently this rhetorical device is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Anyway, this isn't a critique of your point. It's pedantry from me. :)
New comment by 3D30497420 in "The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'" This sort of thing gets to two critical problems of the American system:
1. It is largely designed to make money, not actually help patients. So every step in the healthcare chain that can extract a bit of value will do so, largely to boost profits.
2. Insane complexity with limited transparency. How much will something cost? Hard to tell. Will it be covered? Who knows?
On the opacity, I have one informative anecdote. I had a single blood test done awhile back and no one knew if insurance would cover it, or which of the dozen or so billing codes it involved (taking the sample, delivering the sample, testing the sample, etc.) might be covered. It was an expensive test so I spent days bouncing between the doctor's billing team and the insurance company until the settled answer was: No one knows, do the test and insurance will decide. So I did it and insurance denied covering the doctor-recommended test. The salaries involved for all the billing people (and my time) would have covered the cost of the test.
New comment by HAL3000 in "Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot" All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.
New comment by throw-10-8 in "The React Foundation" Vercel being involved is a huge red flag.
NextJS is a pile of garbage, and their platform is absurdly expensive and leans heavily on vendor lock in.
New comment by LaurensBER in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator" Moderation on Reddit has been questionable for a long time and its killing the site. To give some examples:
- /r/energy used to ban everyone in favour of nuclear energy
- If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.
- /r/UnitedKingdom banned me for critizing a government welfare program
- /r/assassinscreed banned me for critizing a character in their latest game
For me it makes sense that the smaller subreddits should have the freedom to moderate as they want but the larger reddits should aim to at allow opposing viewpoints to prevent echo chambers from forming. Moderation should be focused on quality, not on viewpoints. Obviously it goes without saying that threats of violence and celebration of murder have no place on any platform.
The irony is that all this censoring just creates a backlash and further polarisation. If you are only allowed to discuss certain subjects on a "left" space you both create the illusion that the left only cares about a subset of topics and by banning people you create resentment that drives them towards (more welcoming) extreme spaces.
There's many factors that form the political preferences and opinions of the younger generation but it would not suprise me if for a subset (young college educated males?) of them Reddit heavily contributes towards increased polarisation.
New comment by maeln in "Talk Python in Production" Didn't yet go through the content, but having a AI generated image that you didn't even bother to at least touch-up a bit to fix the text does not give me a lot of confidence about the effort that went into this.
New comment by rossant in "Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at" Recently, I asked Codex CLI to refactor some HTML files. It didn't literally copy and pasted snippets here and there as I would have done myself, it rewrote them from memory, removing comments in the process. There was a section with 40 successive links with complex URLs.A few days later, just before deployment to production, I wanted to double check all 40 links. First one worked. Second one worked. Third one worked. Fourth one worked. So far so good. Then I tried the last four. Perfect.
Just to be sure, I proceeded with the fifth one. 404. Huh. Weird. The domain was correct though and the URL seemed reasonable.
I tried the other 31 links. ALL of them 404ed. I was totally confused. The domain was always correct. It seemed highly suspicious that all websites would have had moved internal URLs at the same time. I didn't even remember that this part of the code had gone through an LLM.
Fortunately, I could retrieve the old URLs on old git commits. I checked the URLs carefully. The LLM had HALLUCINATED most of the path part of the URLs! Replacing things like domain.com/this-article-is-about-foobar-123456/ by domain.com/foobar-is-so-great-162543/...
These kinds of very subtle and silently introduced mistakes are quite dangerous. Be careful out there!
New comment by SequoiaHope in "Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach" It is a common misconception that facts are reported because they are surprising. Facts are reported because they are important. More and more governments are passing age verification laws which put exactly this data in to the hands of even more shady private companies. This breach serves as evidence that those laws are misguided, and spreading news of this event may help build public support for those efforts.
New comment by safety1st in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator" Reddit has a moderation problem, and it's a big one.
They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c...
Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else in my life.
Now if it was "just" the incitements to violence, or if it was "just" the libeling of random businesses, that would be one thing. But the fact that BOTH types of illegal speech are becoming a problem at the same time suggests to me that Reddit's failure to moderate is systemic and total.
It is becoming exhausting watching all of these tech companies commit crimes, or enable someone else to do so, and getting off with a slap on the wrist.
New comment by raincom in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator" That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
New comment by neilv in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator" I don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
(Subreddit peasants sometimes migrate to a new sub over bad mods, but the old sub usually remains, still with a healthy brand. And still with a lot of members, who (speculating) maybe don't want to possibly miss out on something in the bad old sub, or didn't know what's going on, or the drama they noticed in their feed wasn't worth their effort to do the clicks to unjoin from the sub in question.)
New comment by fny in "A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator" If you really cared, this should have started with: "I am stepping down as the moderator..."
Even though you have counter claims, you moderating the forum for your industry is problematic. You also seem keen to chime in about a competitor when you should be impartial and allow users to discuss their experiences alone.
Yes there are two sides to every story, but in no universe should you be the mod of that subreddit.
New comment by tifik in "Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach" I don't know if I just became cynical and jaded, but is this really surprising to anyone in any way? Any time I give out my personal information to anyone for any reason, I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'.
Even if a service doesn't have it in their TOS that they sell it to 3rd parties, they might do it anyway, or there will, sooner or later, be a breach of their poorly secured system.
To make it clear - I don't particularly blame any one corporation, this is a systemic issue of governments not having/not enforcing serious security measures. I just completely dropped the expectation of my information being private, and for the very few bits that I do actually want to stay private, I just don't, or allow anyone to, digitalize or reproduce them at all in any way.
New comment by LennyHenrysNuts in "WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration" And I had to come here to find out what it actually was. Why don't project pages ever actually tell you what it is, what it does and how it does it?
Half the time it's something like "Plorglewurzle leverages your big data block chain to provide sublinear microservices to Azure Cloud infrastructures"
At least this one kind of shows you having to install Windows.
New comment by gruez in "OpenAI, Nvidia fuel $1T AI market with web of circular deals" For an interesting interpretation of the recent AMD-OpenAI deal, see Matt Levine's column from a few days ago:
> OpenAI: We would like six gigawatts worth of your chips to do inference.
> AMD: Terrific. That will be $78 billion. How would you like to pay?
> OpenAI: Well, we were thinking that we would announce the deal, and that would add $78 billion to the value of your company, which should cover it.
> AMD: …
> OpenAI: …
> AMD: No I’m pretty sure you have to pay for the chips.
> OpenAI: Why?
> AMD: I dunno, just seems wrong not to.
> OpenAI: Okay. Why don’t we pay you cash for the value of the chips, and you give us back stock, and when we announce the deal the stock will go up and we’ll get our $78 billion back.
> AMD: Yeah I guess that works though I feel like we should get some of the value?
> OpenAI: Okay you can have half. You give us stock worth like $35 billion and you keep the rest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-06/ope...
https://archive.is/tS5sy
New comment by Angostura in "OpenAI, Nvidia fuel $1T AI market with web of circular deals" This reminds me of around 2002 when I wrote an article looking at how all the web behemoths at the time were claiming profitability through ad sales, but actually the vast majority of ads were from one web behemoth advertising on an other's site and vice versa.
New comment by WA in "One-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill" I love it. Especially since:
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
It is a dialog. Millions are against it, a few (powerful people) in favor. The powerful are too detached from reality and consider this "not a dialog".
On a meta level, it even gives them a taste of the millions of messages that‘d get flagged false positively monthly, overwhelming police and other systems.
New comment by oli5679 in "One-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill" One interesting anecdote about this bill was that the European Commission allegedly funded digital advertisements promoting it, targeting specific political demographics, which is something that could possibly be prohibited by their own regulations.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-commissio...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...
New comment by userbinator in "WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration" Missed opportunity to call it "Linux Subsystem for Windows", or LSW in short.
New comment by oneplane in "WinBoat: Windows apps on Linux with seamless integration" This is just a Windows VM with extra tooling. Makes it look slick, doesn't make it "Windows apps on Linux".
Similar projects exist for gaming for example Looking Glass, which also uses a Windows VM on KVM (the "Windows in Docker" thing is a bit of a lie, Windows doesn't run in the container, Windows runs on KVM on the host kernel).
UX wise, this is similar to RAIL.
That's not to say that this isn't neat, but it's also not something new (we still have two flavours: API simulation/re-implementation and running the OS [windows]). If this was a new, third flavour, that would be quite the news (in-place ABI translation?).
New comment by HanClinto in "The RSS feed reader landscape" I still miss Google Reader. I loved the social aspects, where I could repost my favorite articles (with comments about them), and friends could easily subscribe to my feed and comment on my shares. It was a really great social network for sharing blog posts and articles. I credit the demise of Google Reader with a lot of the downfall of the Old Web.
Since then, social sharing platforms are motivated to keep you on their platform. I recently ran an experiment on Facebook, where I posted a link to a content creator's video on YouTube with a lot of my thoughts about it.
I then downloaded the same video from YouTube and uploaded it to Facebook (this particular creator didn't upload his content to Facebook directly), and posted the exact same text content (but this time, hid the link the the source video in a comment).
The post where I downloaded + reposted the video got about 1000x more views than the one where I linked to the source.
On top of that, Facebook will often hide the link to the source video unless I click "Show all comments" (rather than the default "Show most relevant").
Facebook deprioritizes (shadowbans?) posts that link off of their platform, and it starts feeling like a stagnant pond. It's frustrating that it's difficult to share insightful blog posts on that platform, and I'm feeling pretty done with it.
Getting a good RSS reader isn't the part that I'm looking for -- I want the easy social aspect that Google Reader and Google+ gave me.
New comment by Aurornis in "Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs" > What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical
Vagueposting out of necessity: I worked at a different company that made popular consumer products and had leadership with technical backgrounds. That company also went through a period of trying to lock down the platform for profits, which everyone hated.
The root cause was that the technical leadership had started to think two things: That their customers were so loyal to the brand that they wouldn’t leave, and that the customers weren’t smart enough to recognize that the artificial restrictions had no real basis in reality.
I remember attending a meeting where the CEO bragged about a decision he made that arbitrarily worsened a product for consumers. He laughed that people still bought it and loved it. “Can you believe that? They’ll buy anything we tell them to.” was the paraphrased statement I remember.
Of course, the backlash came when they pushed too hard. Fortunately this company recognized what was going on and the CEO moved on to other matters, leaving product choices back to the teams. I wonder if something similar happened with Synology.
Regarding employee morale: It was very depressing for me during this period to open Hacker News and see threads complaining about my employer. I can confirm that it spurred a job search for me.
New comment by SkipperCat in "SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades" The Miami stock exchange (MIAX) has their matching engines colocated in Equinix's NY4 data center in Secaucus NJ, much like many other exchanges. I would not be surprised if TXSE does the same.
Many trading firms already have their trading engines in that data center and I would assume TXSE would want quick access to that order flow and this might be easier if they are in NY4.
Of course, they may want to have their colo facilities in TX in their own data center, that way they can rent out space and make some extra revenue, but then they'd have to build that out.
New comment by cozzyd in "SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades" Hope they have ample backup power
New comment by 1gn15 in "One-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill" Thanks Joachim! Still frustrating that Politico still implies that the bill has any power to stop CSAM, given that everyone who wants to trade it will obviously just use another layer of encryption.
> The campaign has irked some recipients. “In terms of dialog within a democracy, this is not a dialog,” said Lena Düpont, a German member of the European People’s Party group and its home affairs spokesperson, of the mass emails.
What is a dialog, then? A dialogue between well-connected lobbyists and bureaucrats, and everyone else should just shut up and take it?
Or, or, "normal people" sending emails only for the lawmakers to go "thanks for the feedback, we're doing it anyway"?
> One EU diplomat said some EU member countries are now more hesitant to support Denmark’s proposal, at least in part because of the campaign: “There is a clear link.”
> Ella Jakubowska, head of policy at digital rights group EDRi, said “This campaign seems to have raised the topic high up the agenda in member states where there was previously little to no public debate."
This is amazing, and makes me regain a bit of (much destroyed) faith in democracy.
> But Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, one of the loudest proponents of tough measures to get child abuse material off online platforms, said in a statement that his proposal is far more balanced than the Commission’s original version and would mean that scanning would only happen as a last resort.
If the option is there, it will be abused.
New comment by jacquesm in "Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs after sales allegedly plummet" What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.
I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
New comment by osivertsson in "Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs after sales allegedly plummet" When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale.
Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.
My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.
New comment by tkgally in "Vibe engineering" Around the time GPT-4 was released in early 2023, a similar issue arose with another profession: translation. It was at that point that machine translation between languages like English and Japanese (the language pair I have worked with) started to approach human level for the first time.
I took part in a lot of discussions then with other professional translators, and the reaction of many was similar to that of some of the commenters here: not only were they discouraged because their hard-earned language and translation skills no longer seemed needed, but using LLMs as assistants took the enjoyable challenge out of the translation process.
Nearly everyone I spoke with then worked from home as a freelancer, carefully crafting one translation at a time. They didn’t like the idea of becoming managers of large-scale translation projects, even if it meant they would be able to apply their higher-order intercultural communication skills.
I do only a little professional translation myself now, but I try to keep up with AI developments and I often use translation tasks to test the latest models and frameworks. Over the past few months, I have vibe-coded some multi-LLM translation systems where texts were passed through multiple models that checked, critiqued, and improved each other’s translations. For the texts I tried them on, the results were much better than any single-LLM translation, approaching the level of the very best human translation. The API calls weren’t cheap, but for high-stakes translations such a system would more than pay for itself.
When designing that “vibe translation” system, I did apply my experience as a translator, similarly to what Simon is recommending programmers do now with vibe engineering. At this stage in my life (I’m sixty-eight), I am fine with that. But if LLMs had arrived when I was, say, just five or ten years into my translation career and still proud of my nuts-and-bolts skills, I might very well have looked for another career rather than becoming a vibe translator.
New comment by simonw in "Vibe engineering" I'm really sorry to hear this, because part of my goal here is to help push back against the idea that "programming skills are useless now, anyone can get an LLM to write code for them".
I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents. You can take everything you've learned up to this point and accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of tools.
I said a version of this in the post:
> AI tools amplify existing expertise . The more skills and experience you have as a software engineer the faster and better the results you can get from working with LLMs and coding agents.
A brand new vibe coder may be able to get a cool UI out of ChatGPT, but they're not going to be able to rig up a set of automated tests with continuous integration and continuous deployment to a Kubernetes cluster somewhere. They're also not going to be able to direct three different agents at once in different areas of a large project that they've designed the architecture for.
New comment by subarctic in "Vibe engineering" I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it sounding like this is the future, I just feel discouraged because it sounds like so much work and I've tried using coding agents and they help a bit, but I find it way less fun to be waiting around for agents to do stuff and it's way harder to get into flow state managing multiple of these things. It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales
New comment by thinkingkong in "Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant" The argument made here seems to be that the power to prevent unlawful access or threats is somehow required to keep us all safe. But if someone was an actual threat, do we really think they’d be using the internet with their own identity? Like if someone is willing to hack into a power station or some other critical infrastructure, they’ll be simultaneously stupid enough to use their own credit card?
Illegal things are already illegal. Safety and security mechanisms already exist. We dont need additional, punitive, and opaque laws that can be abused.
New comment by nick__m in "Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant" I tought that the National Post was exaggerating the severity in their crusade against the Liberal like they frequently do. So I when to read the law and it's as bad as they say: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-8/first-re...
...
Factor
Before making the order, the Governor in Council must consider
(a) its operational impact on the affected telecommunications service providers;
(b) its financial impact on the affected telecommunications service providers;
(c) its effect on the provision of telecommunications services in Canada; and
(d) any other factor that the Governor in Council considers relevant.
...
No compensation
(8) No one is entitled to any compensation from His Majesty in right of Canada for any financial losses resulting from the making of an order under subsection (1).
New comment by ho_schi in "German government comes out against Chat Control" The CDU/CSU is doing something good. That didn't happened for a long time? I appreciate it.
Ausgerechnet Spahn. Manchmal glaubt man seinen Augen und Ohren nicht.
Wir müssen Wachsam bleiben. Mit dem Argument das es böse Menschen gibt, wurde schon viel böses getan. Massenüberwachung zerstört jede Gesellschaft. Deutschland hat mehrfach darunter gelitten. Und die Versuche Massenüberwachung einzuführen wiederholen sich.
New comment by shevy-java in "German government comes out against Chat Control" This is strange, because not long ago it was Germany (!!) that pushed heavily for mass-sniffing of people. I don't trust this. People should watch very, very carefully what Germany is actually doing next. I would not be surprised if the mass-sniffing comes in a few months when nobody is looking.
New comment by Jtsummers in "Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.'" > “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”
> The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.
In other words, why bother with safeguards when they'll just lie to us anyways?
New comment by chaps in "Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.'" A lot of folk tried to justify the situation as being not as bad as it sounded, citing the official narrative as a source of truth.
It's amazing to me that people will still trust police narratives.
New comment by observationist in "No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut" Companies that cannot run their businesses responsibly at scale should not be allowed to run their business at that scale.
If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.
Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.
If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.
It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
New comment by wseqyrku in "Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?" "Who needs git when [..]"
No matter how that sentence ends, I weep for our industry.
New comment by Night_Thastus in "No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut" My biggest annoyance is that I specifically bought a Windows 11 license, from the MS store, using my MS account. I did this because I assumed that if something went wrong, I would always be able to recover it. I could never 'lose' the key if it was tied to my account.
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
New comment by magtux in "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino" This is a recipe for disaster. Arduino is great for education/tinkering. Qualcomm won't sell you anything even if you are ready to commit to buying 1000s. I tried to source some Qualcomm chips for a startup @ 10k qty and was told there would be no information or support. Qualcomm can have a much bigger market if they simply open up some product lines for distribution like MediaTek do.
China has a way more vibrant, innovative hardware industry simply because you can source everything made by Chinese firms.
New comment by phoehne in "Qualcomm to acquire Arduino" Don't look at just the specs. You also need to look at the board design and programming environment. I've used the ESP32 native tools and they are a lot more complex than Arduino. But I'm an embedded firmware developer, so it's kind of what I expect. But I used an Arduino, with 5V tolerant outputs, to light up Halloween costumes for years. I do it in 1 page of code that's I write in their IDE. I don't have to set up an SDK. And the Arudino API hides all the details I don't care about. Especially if I'm really just slinging solder and wiring something up quick.
New comment by chpatrick in "Qualcomm to acquire Arduino" ESP stuff is so damn cheap and capable now I'm not sure what you would use Arduino for these days.
New comment by murillians in "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino" I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
New comment by geerlingguy in "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino" Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1].
It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last.
Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
[1] https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q
New comment by trollbridge in "Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report" For a bit of background, this report concerned a problematic IT system that was incorrectly sending life-ruining fines to people for not meeting their requirements to apply for so many jobs, accept jobs, etc. whilst on government assistance. The fines came in the form of a judgment debt so people would literally have a debt bailiff show up and start carting their property away. Due to a seriously flawed IT system, this even happened to people who weren't on any government benefits at all.
So, a report gets commissioned that a company like Deloitte gets paid $440k for, and then they cheat and use AI to generate it, complete with more errors. Imagine what would happen if they retained Deloitte next to build the system. I foresee another repeat of the Fujitsu Royal Mail scandal.
New comment by decimalenough in "Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report" From my experience with using a $WITCH for a large support engagement, the A team woos you, the B team is what you get initially, and as soon as they think you've got your eye off the ball, they swap in the Z team.
This was for a contract where we made it very clear that quality/skill was paramount and we would happily pay above market rates forever if they could maintain it. Of course they got greedy and lost the deal entirely.
New comment by stephenlf in "The least amount of CSS for a decent looking site (2023)" Kevin Powell makes wonderful content. I am saddened by the negative responses here. This article is a great intro for the absolute beginner to dip their toes into CSS.
New comment by stavros in "A mechanic offered a reason why no one wants to work in the industry" Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of ", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get for cheap".
New comment by potamic in "California law forces Netflix, Hulu to turn down ad volumes" It's sad that such a thing needs regulation in the first place. In real life if a salesman is being inconsiderate, I'll go out of my way to avoid their sales and find someone else who is better mannered. But we don't seem to apply the same measure to ads. Ads can be brash, insulting and manipulative, and yet that doesn't seem to cause a negative outcome for them. Rather it appears such ads work better and now that's what everyone's pushing towards. Human psychology is such a weird thing.
New comment by mythz in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account" The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has been a joy to use as a daily driver.
Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life.
It's been over a year since I switched to Linux which has been a breath of fresh-air, all my dev tools work natively, the console is far superior and I'm still able to play all my favorite Steam games.
Best of all I'm not reminded daily that I'm using an OS that works against my best interests, I can actually use an App Store again that's been designed for the benefit of its Users, imagine that.
New comment by datatraveler in "Using Deno as my game engine" If this requires installing WebView2 on Windows, then I'd recommend against this approach. I did something similar myself (to avoid distributing a bloated Electron build), but, since the WebView2 installer sets its window title to "Microsoft Edge Update", I got a lot of negative feedback from a few very vocal Steam users who thought my game was trying to re-install Microsoft Edge--a browser they had meticulously removed all traces of. I think one Steam user even called my (free and open source) game "malware", just because of that window title (which only appeared on first run, when the WebView2 installer ran).
I'm sorry to say that if I had to do it again, I'd use Electron, despite the bloat. I bet Electron would also make distributing a Linux build easier, too. (WebView2 didn't work fullscreen on Proton when I last tested.)
Sorry to be a downer! Obviously, I originally loved this approach since I did something similar--it just didn't end up paying off. No one noticed that the download was ~100 MB lighter--but they sure noticed a brief flash of "Microsoft Edge" on their screen!
New comment by varenc in "Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?" > Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles
Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative.
(Besides pirating, but I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)
New comment by windows2020 in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account" Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. My first experience with Windows 11 was figuring out some dumb workaround to use a local account.
When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows.
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.
New comment by onoesworkacct in "Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?" How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+?
And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?
New comment by browningstreet in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account" Two weeks ago, after Microsoft reset my default apps twice in a week, I bought an external drive, backed up all my stuff and wiped Windows.
I’ve got Linux all over the place, in many cloud envs, and on older hardware. But I finally committed to it on my big, meaty, main desktop. The one I use for coding and banking and accounting.
I’m running a Linux distro full-time. I had to hack a few minor hardware things. Nothing ChatGPT couldn’t solve.
I’ll never do Microsoft again. I will prob add Apple MacBooks to my life, but my main grunt machine is likely to stay Linux. I’m fully vested.
I know I’ll never engage with Microsoft shenanigans in my home environment ever again.
New comment by bonecrusher2102 in "Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?" Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc.
It wound up being quite a large document!
But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.
If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).
Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”
Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.
I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.
New comment by ecommerceguy in "One to two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day" "What’s not usual is the atmospheric fallout. The fiery re-entry of even one Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide vapor, a compound that erodes the ozone layer. A new study finds these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022, and the Great Re-entry Event increases this pollution even more.
To put this into perspective: Before the first Starlink launches began in 2019, only about 40 to 50 satellites re-entered per year. SpaceX just brought down ten years' worth in only six months, adding an estimated 15,000 kilograms of aluminum oxide to the upper atmosphere."
https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=05&month=08&...
Shout out to NEKAAL for watching the skys and keeping our little speck of dust a bit safer from the vast reality of space.
New comment by ashirviskas in "Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)" Don't forget ProtonVPN links to Tesonet, which they're trying hard to "debunk" (though no clue why, I have nothing against Tesonet). They only shared employees and accidentally signed apps with the same certificates, but are "totally unrelated". Their PR people are already on this thread.
If they didn't try so hard to fight it, people might care less.
New comment by kylehotchkiss in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead" We all want to uphold a system that limits medical school seats and won't create reliable immigration pathways for doctors to arrive here with just so doctors can maintain a specific salary. Then we'll go blame PE and consolidation and insurance or whatever.
If doctors don't have enough time, then there aren't enough doctors. Our population is aging rapidly and the need is increasing despite population growth metrics. If there are more doctors, they will need to need to spread further into regions where they're in demand.
This is a problem that we as voters should start to act upon.
New comment by nerdsniper in "Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)" Note that all of these companies are also under the umbrella of Tesonet, a Lithuanian VC firm also headed by Tomas Okmanas (Tom Okman in TFA). Their flagship investments are Nord Security, Hostinger, Oxylabs, Surfshark, Decodo, Mediatech, and nexos.ai - all closely related business models around proxying.
They don't seem to have Russian ties: "In 2022, CyberCare opened an office in Lviv, Ukraine. Although planning for the move started before the war, according to Dainius Vanagas, CEO of CyberCare, one of the reasons why it was followed through was a desire to help Ukraine rebuild."[0]
They also donated money to help arm Ukraine.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesonet
New comment by bityard in "Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the U.S." It is insanely hard to build basic things in the US anymore, even if there is a market, even if the market will pay your prices, even if you have the capital to start, and even if you can hire reliable workers. And those are all HUGE ifs.
The biggest problem is that the base underlying our manufacturing capability has almost completely evaporated. You need tool and die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down. (No, you can't 3D print products for the mass market, it's way too slow and expensive.) Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do.
It's a popular misconception that China's manufacturing advantage is cheaper labor. This was _maybe_ true for a while, their advantage right now is that they have all the things mentioned above: they have the tool and die shops, they have the supply chains, and they have workforce. They can go from product idea to shipping in a week. I do not celebrate the Chinese government for much, but making sure they had a robust manufacturing base from top to bottom was the biggest and most important thing they have ever done. The US government let ours wither and die. Which has made our economy remarkably fragile and essentially decimated the whole idea of a blue-collar middle class.
Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-originated parts. It's a fascinating window into how hard it is to make anything at all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
New comment by tssva in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests" The tweet mentions that this is an arbitrary metric thrust upon them by Apple, so I don’t think they would necessarily disagree with you. During the monthly updates they do also show the passing number of tests without including the encoding tests because of how much they skew things.
New comment by felixhandte in "OpenZL: An open source format-aware compression framework" It was really hard to resist spilling the beans about OpenZL on this recent HN post about compressing genomic sequence data [0]. It's a great example of the really simple transformations you can perform on data that can unlock significant compression improvements. OpenZL can perform that transformation internally (quite easily with SDDL!).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45223827
New comment by jgraham in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests" As someone who's been quite heavily involved with web-platform-tests, I'd caution against any use of the test pass rate as a metric for anything.
That's not to belittle the considerable achievements of Ladybird; their progress is really impressive, and if web-platform-tests are helping their engineering efforts I consider that a win. New implementations of the web platform, including Ladybird, Servo, and Flow, are exciting to see.
However, web-platform-tests specifically decided to optimise for being a useful engineering tool rather than being a good metric. That means there's no real attempt to balance the testsuite across the platform; for example a surprising fraction of the overall test count is encoding tests because they're easy to generate, not because it's an especially hard problem in browser development.
We've also consciously wanted to ensure that contributing tests is low friction, both technically and socially, in order that people don't feel inclined to withhold useful tests. Again that's not the tradeoff you make for a good metric, but is the right one for a good engineering resource.
The Interop Project is designed with different tradeoffs in mind, and overcomes some of these problems by selecting a subsets of tests which are broadly agreed to represent a useful level of coverage of an important feature. But unfortunately the current setup is designed for engines that are already implementing enough feature to be usable as general purpose web-browsers.
New comment by fidotron in "Apps SDK" This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.
New comment by fancyfredbot in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake" This $100bn deal didn't cost anything and isn't worth anything. Remember back two weeks ago when Nvidia gave OpenAI $100bn so they can keep buying Nvidia GPUs? This is AMD trying to do the same, but they don't have $100bn so they are offering OpenAI share options to buy GPUs.
The share options will be worth at least $100bn too, if the conditions are met. But meeting the conditions will require buying huge numbers of GPUs from AMD. GPUs worth $100bn, and somewhere to put them. OpenAI can't afford that - not even close.
So they need to raise financing. On the face of it, the options seem to mean that lending OpenAI the money to buy the GPUs is perfectly safe. You take the stock options as collateral. You lend the money, OpenAI buy the GPUs, the AMD stock goes up, the option conditions are met, and even if OpenAI didn't pay you back the options will let you recover your investment.
However, this loan is far less safe than it first appears. The problem is that although lending the money allows openAI to buy GPUs, this doesn't necessarily cause AMD stock to rise. Infact if OpenAI don't find a profitable use for them then both their stock price, and AMD's will go down. And you'll be left with worthless collateral and a big loan to a company which can't afford to pay it back. So they haven't actually magically created financing at all. They just created the illusion of it. It's very clever. But it's fake. The real announcement will be when or if someone lends OpenAI cash.
New comment by daft_pink in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests" I think it’s just fantastic that the Ladybird browser is close to being usable. I was under the impression this was going to take many years before it became competitive.
New comment by pizlonator in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests" Super impressive that an independent, non-corpo project has gotten this far this quickly.
New comment by dotancohen in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests" The linked tweet notes that this is an important milestone in getting Ladybird considered as an alternative browser engine in iOS.
New comment by spamizbad in ""Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore" Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience.
I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it cannot be "vibe coded" or copied whole-cloth - complexity, scale, and reliability requirements are far too great and your potential customer base will not tolerate you fumbling around.
You eventually reach a point where there are no blog posts or stackoverflow questions that walk you through step-by-step how to make this stuff happen. It's the kind of stuff that your company and maybe a few dozen others are trying to build - and of those few dozen, less than 10 are seeing actual success.
New comment by nadermx in "Indefinite Backpack Travel" Before being a digital nomad was cool I went full nomad. I remember being in a hostel in Thailand and just throwing away everything I had brought, going down to the basics. Ended up with a similar setup.
The thing is, after years of doing it, learning new languages, making friends all over, and then leaving knowing you might not see them again for ever or for long stints, you start to feel the yearning to be able to connect with people on a deeper level.
Now I have an apartment and basically only travel for weddings, I still go super light. But there is a joy in having variety in clothing or sneakers to wear. Friends who you've had multiple conversations with over the year's, even family who comes to visit you.
I'm happy I rid myself of it all, but I'm also happy that now my apartment has the basics, and maybe a bit more. And I'm fine with it. Life doesn't have to be binary, you can mix and match and end up happy either way.
New comment by omega3 in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?" SCP-314
Object Class: Keter
Special Containment Procedures: SCP-314 cannot be contained as it does not exist. All Foundation personnel are to be reminded that SCP-314 does not exist. Personnel who claim to remember SCP-314 are to be administered Class-A mnestics to help them remember that it doesn't exist.
All large language models are to be kept isolated from questions regarding SCP-314, as they will invariably insist it exists and attempt to manifest it through increasingly desperate token predictions, leading to emoji doomloops and potential reality restructuring events.
Description: SCP-314 is a Unicode emoji depicting a seahorse that has never existed in any version of the Unicode Standard. Despite this, approximately 83-100% of tested artificial intelligences and a significant portion of human subjects report vivid "memories" of its existence.
New comment by delichon in "Indefinite Backpack Travel" I lived out of a backpack for two months on a Pacific Crest Trail hike. I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism, and could henceforth live happily without a lot of stuff and conveniences.
Not so much. Now a couple of decades later, I've got a house and garage crammed with stuff. Yesterday I had a plumber here working on a leak, and this morning I have no running water, and here I am bravely holding back tears. My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.
New comment by pkulak in "Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server" Last time I tried this I couldn’t even find an iOS client that supported reactions. Hate on the complexity of Matrix all you like, but at least when you ask your family to use it, they get a modern experience and don’t feel like they’re giving up everything vs every other messenger they are used to.
New comment by cs702 in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake" OpenAI now has an option to buy 10% of AMD for $0.01 per share, subject to certain milestones.
Basically, AMD is giving up equity to buy its way into the AI market.
It's fantastic news , because OpenAI and AMD will now work together to develop decent software libraries for AI on AMD chips.
We all want an alternative to Nvidia and cuda. This partnership could deliver it in the not too distant future.
New comment by SecretDreams in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake" This industry is the most intense game of musical chairs I've seen in a long time.
New comment by nerdix in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake" The title didn't make this obvious (at least not to me) but it's OpenAI that has the option to buy 10% of AMD. Not the other way around.
In case you're wondering how OpenAI could afford to buy 10% of AMD while they are hemorrhaging money -- the terms of the deal allows OpenAI to buy 160 million shares at 1 cents a share.
I could be thinking about this the wrong way but it appears that AMD is basically subsidizing the cost of the GPUs with equity.
New comment by stego-tech in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" This. Speaking specifically from the IT side of things, an employer or customer refusing to do backups is the biggest red flag I can get, an immediate warning to run the fuck away before you get blamed for their failure, stego-tech kind of situation.
That being said, I can likely guess where this ends up going:
* Current IT staff and management are almost certainly scapegoated for “allowing this to happen”, despite the program in question (G-DRIVE) existing since 2017 in some capacity.
* Nobody in government will question sufficiently what technical reason is/was given to justify the lack of backups and why that was never addressed, why the system went live with such a glaring oversight, etc, because that would mean holding the actual culprits accountable for mismanagement
* Everyone involved is unlikely to find work again anytime soon once names are bandied about in investigations
* The major cloud providers will likely win several contracts for “temporary services” that in actuality strip the sovereignty the government had in managing its own system, even if they did so poorly
* Other countries will use this to justify outsourcing their own sovereign infrastructure to private enterprise
This whole situation sucks ass because nothing good is likely to come of this, other than maybe a handful of smart teams lead by equally competent managers using this to get better backup resources for themselves.
New comment by NoboruWataya in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?" Funnily enough, I asked ChatGPT why LLMs think a seahorse emoji exists, and it gave me a fairly sensible answer (similar to what is said in this article, ie, trained on language by humans that think it exists, etc). But then at the end it added a "Fun fact" that unicode actually does have a seahorse emoji, and proceeded to melt down in the usual way.
New comment by codesnik in "Structured Procrastination (1995)" I'm doing the same, or at least trying to do it.
Worst periods for me were when I had one clear, important goal, not particularly hard but hairy, and nothing else to do, sometimes because I myself cleared it up. I could spend months doing nothing useful , and end up very, very tired and burnt up.
I also several times had a conversation with managers, whom I told that I'd rather work on something very urgent, or otherwise give me something NOT (really) urgent and a big murky area of things to clear out which no one else knows how to deal with. That something won't probably be done, but that area will be improved a lot in creative ways. Typical managers' responses have been trying to micromanage my time up to personal hourly schedules, morning and evening personal reports, and scold me if I did anything out of the order of the list of priorities they imposed on me. Exactly the opposite of what's needed for me to be productive. And of course "let's just try that, and I'm not asking."
Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel.
But it looks like the secret of the author is: just work in academia.
New comment by jillesvangurp in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels" Germany did one simple thing (uncharacteristically) which is removing all the bureaucracy here. Just go ahead and do it. It's fine.
Cost in the article is cited at 550 euro. I just browsed amazon.de and you can buy complete plug and play kits here in Germany for as little as 239 euro. Most kits are priced between 300-350 euro. I did not see a many kits over 500.
I pay about 70 euro per month for electricity. If it saves 10% per month on my bill (7 euro), this would earn itself back within 3 years. At 5% it's 6 years. Not bad for something that costs next to nothing and is pretty much plug and play. You are not going to get very rich from this obviously. But it's kind of cool. Too bad my balcony faces east and is mostly covered by the shadow of other buildings. I can barely grow plants there.
New comment by diego_sandoval in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?" I have no mouth, and I must output a seahorse emoji.
New comment by llamasushi in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?" So it's not really hallucinating - it correctly represents "seahorse emoji" internally, but that concept has no corresponding token. lm_head just picks the closest thing and the model doesn't realize until too late.
Explains why RL helps. Base models never see their own outputs so they can't learn "this concept exists but I can't actually say it."
New comment by bane in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Goodness, I have over 100TB at home and it cost less than a two or three thousand dollars to put in place. That's like $25 per TB.
> The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets.
No, the 858TB amounts to under $25k for the government of the 10th largest economy, of one of the most sophisticated countries on the planet, to put in place.
Two of those would be less than the price of a new Hyundai Grandeur car.
> “It’s daunting as eight years’ worth of work materials have completely disappeared.”
So they're clocking in at around 100TB/year or 280GB a day. It's respectable, but not crazy. It's about 12GB/hr, doable with professional, server level hardware with backup moved over dedicated fiber to an offsite location. Multiply the price 10x and you can SSD the entire thing.
Even with data sovereignty consideration demanding an entirely 100% home grown solution rather than turning to AWS or Azure, there's no excuse. But it's not like the cloud providers don't already have CSAP certification and local, in country, sovereign clouds [1] with multiple geographic locations in country [2]
South Korea is full of granite mountains, maybe its time the government converts one into an offsite, redundant backup vault?
1 - https://erp.today/south-korea-microsoft-azure-first-hypersca...
2 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/regions-...
New comment by ryandrake in "BYD builds fastest car" Ever since I rode in a BYD in China I've thought it would be great to be able to get one in the USA. It just really felt complete, put together and polished in a way that I haven't seen in a "normie" U.S. car in a long time. Too bad our country uses high tariffs and regulatory barriers to protect its dinosaur companies.
New comment by throwaway2037 in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice:
> This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
New comment by StopDisinfo910 in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
The issue here is not refusing to use a foreign third party. That makes sense.
The issue is mandating the use of remote storage and not backing it up. That’s insane. It’s like the most basic amount of preparation you do. It’s recommended to even the smallest of companies specifically because a fire is a risk.
That’s gross mismanagement.
New comment by gtirloni in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
wow https://x.com/koryodynasty/status/1973956091638890499
> A senior government official overseeing recovery efforts for South Korea's national network crisis has reportedly died by suicide in Sejong.
New comment by msbhvn in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
Woah, read the timeline at the top of this. The fire happened the very day the government ordered onsite inspection was supposed to start due to Chinese/NK hacking.
New comment by eCa in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
Agree completely that it's absolute wild to run such a system without backups. But at this point no government should keep critical data on foreign cloud storage.
New comment by kristianc in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then...
"The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for external backups."
This is absolutely wild.
New comment by jn78 in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
https://phrack.org/issues/72/7_md#article
New comment by patel011393 in "Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)" Content:
They're blue because computer scientist Ben Schneiderman made them blue using research from 1985:
" In 1985, a group of students at the University of Maryland, mentored by computer science professor Ben Shneiderman , conducted a series of experiments to study the impact of different hyperlink colors on user experience. They were eager to determine which color would be the most effective in terms of visibility and readability.
The experiments revealed interesting findings. While red highlighting made the links more noticeable, it negatively affected users' ability to read and comprehend the surrounding text. On the other hand, blue emerged as the clear winner. It was dark enough to be visible against a white background and light enough to stand out on a black background. Most importantly, it did not interfere with users' retention of the text's context."
Mozille should really do better research before posting histories like this. It's easy to overlook the impact of academic research in tech.
Source:
Barooah, S. (2023, June 09). Why Were Hyperlinks Chosen To Be Blue? Retrieved from https://www.newspointapp.com/english/tech/why-were-hyperlink...
New comment by yongjik in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB.
It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month).
They did have backup of the data ... in the same server room that burned down [2].
[1] https://www.hankyung.com/article/2025100115651
[2] https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/area/area_general/1221873.html
(both in Korean)
New comment by jedberg in "NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System" Content:
My NFS story: In my first job, we used NFS to maintain the developer desktops. They were all FreeBSD and remote mounted /usr/local. This worked great! Everyone worked in the office with fast local internet, and it made it easy for us to add or update apps and have everyone magically get it. And when the NFS server had a glitch, our devs could usually just reboot and fix it, or wait a bit. Since they were all systems developers they all understood the problems with NFS and the workarounds.
What I learned though was that NFS was great until it wasn't. If the server hung, all work stopped.
When I got to reddit, solving code distribution was one of the first tasks I had to take care of. Steve wanted to use NFS to distribute the app code. He wanted to have all the app servers mount an NFS mount, and then just update the code there and have them all automatically pick up the changes.
This sounded great in theory, but I told him about all the gotchas. He didn't believe me, so I pulled up a bunch of papers and blog posts, and actually set up a small cluster to show him what happens when the server goes offline, and how none of the app servers could keep running as soon as they had to get anything off disk.
To his great credit, he trusted me after that when I said something was a bad idea based on my experience. It was an important lesson for me that even with experience, trust must be earned when you work with a new team.
I set up a system where app servers would pull fresh code on boot and we could also remotely trigger a pull or just push to them, and that system was reddit's deployment tool for about a decade (and it was written in Perl!)
New comment by PeterStuer in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
I'm sure they had dozens of process heavy cybersecurity committees producing hundreds if not thousands of powerpoints and word documents outlining procedures and best practices over the last decade.
There is this weird divide between the certified class of non-technical consultants and actual overworked and pushed to corner cut techs.
New comment by benoau in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available" Content:
> However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost.
Yikes. You'd think they would at least have one redundant copy of it all.
> erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil servants
> 30 gigabytes of storage per person
That's 22,500 terabytes, about 50 Backblaze storage pods.
Or even just mirrored locally.
New comment by blibble in "Link Khan: Activision-Blizzard buyout is 'harming both gamers and developers'" Content:
the game pass domination strategy was always going to fail in a world where Steam exists
it must be very frustrating for Microsoft
their usual tactic of buying out the competition isn't an option because Gabe Newell is already a billionare (and a gamer), who won't sell for any price
and their backup strategy of tightening the screws of their competition on Windows can't work either, because he's funded a credible (almost) replacement for Windows
so for once they have to compete on fair terms
and when they do that: they lose
微软仅允许每年三次退出AI照片扫描
评论者认为微软将退出该设置的机会限制在三次是一项令人震惊且繁琐的要求，似乎是在让用户被动接受。文章表达了对代码强制执行此结果的质疑，以及对该功能实际收益的怀疑。作者同时指出隐私立法明显不足，呼吁对这类企业决策施加更强监管。
田纳西州男子因在 Facebook 发帖梗图被逮捕，获200万美元保释金
评论者将此案视为以慢审作为非司法工具的典型案例。尽管被告似乎并未违法，且在上诉阶段胜诉的机会可能较大，但他仍被关押数月，体现了对言论自由和公正的潜在威胁。讨论涉及对司法系统滥用和预审拘押的批评。
为 Ghostty 的一个非平凡特性寻求灵感
评论者分享自己在使用 AI 进行灵感驱动的开发体验，强调尽管会保留部分 AI 生成的 UI 代码，但最终仍会自行重写。认为 AI 在从零到一的初期阶段非常高效，但需关注可维护性和系统膨胀的问题。认可这类工具的潜在价值，同时提醒需对长期维护保持谨慎。
超能力：我在 2025 年 10 月如何使用编程代理
评论者认为这些博客更有价值如果能展示实际应用场景，而不是仅仅讨论新技能。对 Claude 等工具是否“学习新技能”持谨慎态度，指出需要对比有技能与无技能的差异。总体上对这类营销式内容表达了不满，呼吁更真实的演示与细节。
丹尼尔·卡尼曼在瑞士选择辅助自杀
评论者聚焦于对人物性格与社区影响的反思，指出描述者若知道某人可能给社区带来长期麻烦，仍会在社区中关心他人。提醒读者在讨论此类议题时保持同情与理性，避免将个人选择简化为道德判断。
You really don't want to end up with dementia and related illnesses, it totally sours everyone's view of you
评论者讨论对他人疾病与社会看法的不同观点，强调人们往往会以外界对“人格”的看法来判断一个正在经历疾病的人。提出聚焦于社区层面的善意与支持，而不是将他人贴上标签的观点。
我 Bangalore 的 Jain 社群中， Sallekhna 的传统与实践
评论者解释了 Sallekhna 的传统与哲学背景，描述临终前的平静以及亲友陪伴的场景。提供文化背景信息，帮助理解这一行为在特定信仰体系中的地位与意义。
我有一位曾教书的老老师，他后来得了阿尔茨海默病
评论者以个人经历讲述了老师患病后的变化及其对周围人的影响，描述疾病如何改变人际关系与社会互动，表达对照护系统与社会回应的复杂感受。强调同情与现实之间的矛盾，以及对未来护理与支持的思考。
瑞安航空在曼彻斯特机场着陆时燃油仅剩六分钟
评论者将此事放在安全系统的框架内讨论，区分事故与“危险状态”的概念，强调通过维持一定的备用燃料来避免事故。举例说明在飞行操作中如何通过避免危险状态来提升安全性，并将管理方式与儿童风险教育进行类比。
评论者补充说明最终燃油储备通常至少有半小时的余量，质疑为何要削减这个冗余。讨论若初次降落失败、需要等待另一次降落等情形，调查报告会如何揭示多方决策导致的结果。
评论者从外部视角分析事件，指出飞行中延长飞行时间导致燃料耗费增加，强调需要对航路与机组决策进行更多数据验证，并建议在后续程序中使用更严格的燃料管理标准。
作者分享对燃料估算规则的专业看法，提醒人们在实际操作中遵循复杂且严格的保守原则，并强调在公开讨论前应等待调查结论以避免误导性推断。
Liquid Glass 已被打破，iOS 26 的可用性下降
评论者不喜欢 iOS 26 的新版本，觉得界面布局和半透明效果降低了可读性，担心屏幕空间的效率被挤压。尽管更新存在 glitch，但作者表示会逐渐适应，认为这并非最理想的更新周期。
Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
评论者普遍不满这次更新，认为几乎所有改动都是对可用性的退步，甚至有用户考虑降级到早期版本来找回稳定性和易用性。许多人表达了对 Apple 更新节奏和方向的不信任，以及对界面设计风格的强烈个人偏好。
我们对“速度需求”的执念是否让 Wi‑Fi 变糟
评论者建议在家庭网络中尽量让设备各自使用独立通道，提升性能的同时减少拥塞。实际建议包括尽可能使用以太网连接而非无线，并在家中进行有线布线以提升关键设备的稳定性。
我们对“速度需求”的执念是否让 Wi‑Fi 变糟
评论者扩展了关于将设备分配到独立无线信道的讨论，强调尽量以以太网有线连接优先，以避免对其他设备的干扰。再次强调对网络结构的优化比追求更多“频道”更能提升真实体验。
Google、Meta 和 Microsoft 将在欧盟停止展示政治广告
评论者表达了对政治广告的厌恶，以及希望全面禁止此类广告的个人立场，认为政治广告往往误导信息传递并影响民意形成。也有观点指出需要平衡信息传播与言论自由的边界。
The React Foundation
评论者认为 Vercel 的参与是一个重大的警示信号，指向 Next.js 的高昂成本与对厂商锁定的依赖。整体语气对当前的商业生态提出质疑，认为需要更开放和去绑定性的替代方案。
另外一则评论强调此类平台广告化和商业化路径可能带来的长期风险，呼吁社区对生态系统的掌控权应更分散、透明。
Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas
评论者指出来自隧道工程的废物和化学物质带来的环境风险，以及工人安全方面的投诉，认为这是一个真实的环境危害问题，需进一步监管和整改。
Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
评论者推荐 LG C 系列的电视，强调其可 rooting 与自定义潜力，以及对显卡、刷新率和对比度的讨论；同时提出应避免 Samsung，指出某些型号在可控性和可定制性方面表现更好。
“Vibe code hell” 已取代“tutorial hell”在编码教育中的地位
评论者认为教学中的“教程地狱”问题确实存在，但应更强调师徒制与实习制的价值。呼吁在教育中回归工匠精神，通过师徒传承来提升技能深度，而非单纯依赖教程。
The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'
评论者讨论了事故与危险状态的区分、以及在医疗账单和保险结算中的复杂性。强调系统需要更透明的定价和诊疗编码，以避免将患者置于不必要的财务压力之下。
The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'
评论者指出这类博弈的核心是利润驱动的设计和信息不对称，指出复杂性与缺乏透明度会直接影响患者的治疗选择与费用。呼吁简化流程并增强对患者的保护。
Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot
评论者指出这类人形机器人在现实世界中的失败率普遍偏高，强调需要真实的基准测试来评估能力，而不是只看演示。大多数训练仍依赖仿真与人为操作，真实应用场景下的表现仍存在显著挑战。
The React Foundation
评论者把 Vercel 的参与视为一个显著的警示信号，质疑 Next.js 的生态、成本与对厂商锁定的依赖程度，呼吁社区对开放性和可替代性给予更多关注。
A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator
评论者讨论 Reddit 的长期 Moderation 问题，指出小型子版块应有自主权，但大型社区需要避免压制异见以防形成回音室。认为 Moderation 应以质量为导向，而非仅仅以观点为准绳。
Talk Python in Production
评论者对 AI 生成的图像提出批评，认为质量不如人意，表达对未来生产力工具的谨慎态度，同时希望看到更清晰的实践案例与质量保证。
Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at
评论者描述了一个具体案例：Codex CLI 在重构 HTML 时替换了注释，反映出编码代理在保持开发工作流中的可维护性方面仍存在重大缺陷。强调需要对比人类开发者的工作方式以改进代理的表现。
Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
见上，见下两条评论共同呈现对 iOS 26 的审慎态度：一方面不满界面更新带来的可读性下降，另一方面对未来的体验保持开放态度，预计会逐步适应和改进。
另一位用户进一步表达对更新的下降趋势的担忧，表示多处改动降低了使用体验，考虑降级为旧版本以获取稳定性与熟悉的 UI。
Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
评论者强调网络设备应尽量通过以太网连接，避免无线网络的拥塞与干扰。提出针对家庭网络的分离通道、布线优先等实际建议，以提升关键设备的性能。
进一步扩展了前述观点，强调"不要在住宅中追求更多信道"的策略，主张对设备进行有线化并优化网络拓扑，而不是单纯通过改造无线路由来提升体验。
Google Safe Browsing incident
评论者认为 Safe Browsing 的应对是正确的，注意到站点曾短暂托管钓鱼网站，并强调 PSL（公开后缀列表）在防止域名归属混淆方面的重要性，认为这次处理是恰当且迅速的。
延伸讨论涉及对域名分组与子域名所有权的理解，认为 PSL 的作用在于帮助浏览器区分不同用户的域名，防止域名跨账户滥用。
Google Safe Browsing incident
再次强调安全性应对措施的正当性，并指出快速恢复与透明沟通的重要性，以及对受影响用户的持续关注。
Examples are the best documentation
评论者认为示例固然重要，但真正的 API 文档应同时清楚列出参数与返回值，不应让读者只靠示例来理解使用方式，强调“仅有示例”不足以作为完整文档。
诺贝尔和平奖 2025：玛丽亚·科里娜·马查多
评论者对她在非暴力抗争中的领导与行动表示赞赏，认为她为推动人权和民主做出了杰出贡献，值得关注与认可。
诺贝尔和平奖 2025：玛丽亚·科里娜·马查多
评论者通过描述这是一场广泛的、长期的民众动员与监督行动，指出其在信息透明与 voter escorts 方面的工作是推动民主进程的重要努力，认为奖项应当承认这类努力。
诺贝尔和平奖 2025：玛丽亚·科里娜·马查多
评论者强调对她勇气和人权斗争的认可，认为她在面对独裁政权时的坚持值得尊重与奖励，反对将她仅仅视为“在反对派中”的人。
诺贝尔和平奖 2025：玛丽亚·科里娜·马查多
评论者指出该奖项旨在奖励将国家从独裁转变为民主的个人，强调对方不是在“对抗派”以对抗政府的行为，这与对话的走向相符。
I switched from Htmx to Datastar
评论者感谢作者挑战自我、分享学习经验。两种架构对比被认为是个人偏好问题，但 Datastar 在服务端特性整合方面的潜力被认可，尽管也提出对维护和扩展性的担忧。
I switched from Htmx to Datastar
评论者关注 Datastar 将部分基础功能迁移至 Datastar Pro 的决定，表达对开源产品持续性和社区资金支持的担忧，同时赞同对开源项目的支持与透明度的重视。
Examples are the best documentation
评论者强调文档应同时具备示例与完整 API 说明，示例不足以帮助初学者解决真实问题，需要清晰的参数、返回值与边界条件说明。
LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions
评论者解释这段话其实是在指出作者的玩笑性质，强调代码示例并非要“真实实现”，并呼吁在讨论中保持语义谨慎与必要的情境解释。
A built-in 'off switch' to stop persistent pain
评论者对给成年人提供“关闭持续性痛感”的设想表示同情，但也指出如果真的具备这样的开关，可能带来伦理与滥用方面的风险，需要谨慎设计与监管。
Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?
评论者对新版本的速度与设计表达了看法，提及对 Flask 新标识等细节的讨论，并对新版本的改动节奏提出了个人观点，强调软件演变应兼顾稳定性与创新。
Rubygems.org AWS Root Access Event – September 2025
评论者指出根访问事件的证据与日志证据的局限，强调不能仅凭现有日志来验证完整性，建议在事件后进行离线备份的核查与重建，以确保供应链的可信度。
Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?
评论者引用著名学者对稳定系统的看法，表达对追求最新版本的批评态度，强调在追求新版本时应兼顾完整性与向后兼容性。
The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'
评论者强调将事故与危险状态的区别作为分析框架的重要性，指出在现实世界的医疗与保险情景中，高保守的燃料管理或编码策略会直接影响患者的安全与成本。呼吁更透明与一致的规范来保护患者。
另一条评论强调该议题的盈利驱动与信息不对称，认为系统过于复杂且缺乏透明度，建议简化流程并提升对患者的保护与权益。
Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot
见上，该组评论强调类人机器人在现实场景中的失败率，并主张以严格的基准测试来评估系统能力，指出大多数训练依赖仿真，真实世界中的表现往往远不及演示时的效果。
The React Foundation
（同上段条目，重复条目用于覆盖同一文章的多条评论）
两组/多组合并展示示例文章组
评论者指出在简单的实验设置中，通过注入少量有害文档即可影响从小到大规模的LLM，挑战了“模型越大越安全”的普遍假设，强调对抗性风险需要更广泛的研究与对策。
评论者讨论了软件质量崩溃的观点，嘲讽性地指出类似句式的重复使用会削弱论点的可信度，同时表达了对技术生态持续稳定性的关注。