A lot of the criticism is based on the concept that it won't be technically watertight. But the key is that it doesn't have to be watertight to work. Social media is all about network effects. Once most kids are on there, everyone has to be on there. If you knock the percentage down far enough, you break the network effect to the point where those who don't want to don't feel pressured to. If that is all it does, it's a benefit.
My concerns about this are that it will lead to
(a) normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams. This won't be just kids - scammers will be challenging all kinds of people including vulnerable elderly people saying "this is why we need your id". People are going to lose their entire life savings because of this law.
(b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.
Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive.
In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, they will dodge you, and if you ask front-end or web developers, they are waiting for you to provide them the API. The hardest part is understanding the requirements. It's not because of illiteracy. It's because software development is a lot more than coding and requires critical thinking to discover the requirements.
This is one of the greatest LLM creations I've ever seen. It nails so many things: Google killing products, Microsoft price hikes, ad-injecting in AR glasses, and even HTMX returning!
It'd be so awesome if Gemini CLI went through and created the fake posts/articles, and HN even comments. Perhaps a bit much to ask of it?
Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful service - thank you to the entire team.
The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me because 1), it's (and was at the time) the largest certificate authority in the world, and 2) I've never seen someone care about who issued your cert on a sales call. It coming from GoDaddy is not a selling point...
So my question: has anyone actually commented to you in a negative way about using Let's Encrypt? I couldn't imagine, but curious on others' experiences.
I downloaded the original article page, had claude extract the submission info to json, then wrote a script (by hand ;) to run feed each submission title to gemini-3-pro and ask it for an article webpage and then for a random number of comments.
I was impressed by some of the things gemini came up with (or found buried in its latent space?). Highlights:
"You’re probably reading this via your NeuralLink summary anyway, so I’ll try to keep the entropy high enough to bypass the summarizer filters."
"This submission has been flagged by the Auto-Reviewer v7.0 due to high similarity with "Running DOOM on a Mitochondria" (2034)."
"Zig v1.0 still hasn't released (ETA 2036)"
The unprompted one-shot leetcode, youtube, and github clones
Nature: "Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status" / "Buy Article PDF - $89.00 USD" / "Log in with WorldCoin ID"
Github Copilot attempts social engineering to pwn the `sudo` repo
It made a Win10 "emulator" that goes only as far as displaying a "Windows Defender is out of date" alert message
"dang_autonomous_agent: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675309 because it was devolving into a flame war about the definition of 'deprecation'."
This title is moderately clickbait-y and comes with a subtle implication that Rust might be getting removed from the kernel. IMO it should be changed to "Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental"
Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter:
The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. There were sound reasons for moving away from Times: Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman tend to appear more distorted. While serif fonts are well-suited to high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, on typical office screens the serifs introduce unnecessary visual noise and can be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.
Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman—a typeface older than the current president—presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.
Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
Calibri, by contrast, incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, offers only minimal kerning and letter-pair adjustments. This is especially evident in words set in all capitals—such as “CHICAGO”—where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters “HIC” are tightly packed, while “CAG” are spaced too far apart. Microsoft cannot rectify these issues without altering the appearance of existing documents.
It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there. I understand that at low zoom levels you may need to filter what is displayed based on the high density, but when I zoom in I want to see everything that is there. Sometimes I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type the company name into the search box to force the business marker to show up and get clickable.
I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.
All: before commenting here, please verify that you're feeling something different—quite different—from anger and a desire to fight this war. That is not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.
This site is for curious, thoughtful, respectful, and kind interaction—most of all with those you may disagree with, regardless of how bad they are or you feel they are.
If that's not possible, it's ok not to post. We'd rather have a thread with no comments than a thread with aggressive comments, let alone nationalistic or religious flamewar. There is far too much aggression in the thread below, which is is understandable, but please don't add more. It provides a fleeting sensation of relief, but then it just makes everything worse.
AI professor here. I know this page is a joke, but in the interest of accuracy, a terminological comment: we don't call it a "hallucination" if a model complies exactly with what a prompt asked for and produces a prediction, exactly as requested.
Rater, "hallucinations" are spurious replacements of factual knowledge with fictional material caused by the use of statistical process (the pseudo random number generator used with the "temperature" parameter of neural transformers): token prediction without meaning representation.
When I read the headline i thought “well obviously they don’t mean Marco Rubio, there must be some famous publicist or something”. Cannot believe it actually was Marco Rubio, lol
No, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver.
Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.
Father of five here, and founder of a social media marketing company (exited). Our kids are up against problems we didn't have during the great expansion of social. The three big things:
1. State level actors and well funded not for profits are fighting an information war to influence our kids. And they are very good at it. Down to having troll farms to talk one on one. Every time something new happens in the world, my younger kids ask me about what they saw on Tik-Tok and their initial understanding is shaped by a well funded actor, and is often completely a false narrative. The solution is be open and talk about it with your kids.
2. Criminals are even better at social than state level actors. They are smooth. And they are on platforms you wouldn't expect - like games. And criminals aren't all about fraud. They sell drugs, they try to physically steal in real life from your kids,they'll try to get your kids to do something embarrasing and blackmail them with it, and even can be human traffickers. Again, the solution is be open and talk about it with your kids - and make sure they know it's ok to ask, and it's especially ok if you think I shouldn't share this with Dad or they person is saying not to show your parents.
3. Sexual predators are even better at social than the criminals. The difference is that the predators can't hide behind national borders so they are very careful. Same solution as $#2, but this one is really tough because when your kids come to you about it, they may have shared something with the predator that the predator is using to extort them into hooking up. Don't attack or blame your kid, focus on making sure the predator never gets to them
I do not believe for a minute that social media was good for my kids as they grew up, but I'm not sure that you can even begin to fix it the way AU is trying to - regulating speech, association using prohibition is dipping a colander in the river to filter the silt.
The dynamic soundscape is delightful, as it subtly adds instruments and musical texture as you progress. And going back down the scale regresses it to simple again. Smoothly done.
It reminded me of Operation Neptune (1991): each level starts with just one channel, probably percussion, and as you progress through the rooms it adds and removes more channels or sometimes switches to a different section of music. It is unfortunately all sharp cuts, no attempts at smoothing or timing instrument entry and exit. A couple of samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LNaatyoQk is an hour of gameplay revelling in “the dynamic and sometimes beautiful music of Operation Neptune” using a Roland MT-32 MIDI synthesiser; and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPxEdQ4wx9s&list=PL3FC048B13... is the PCM files used on some platforms (if you want to compare that track with the MT-32, it starts at 28 minutes).
I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market.
They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China
We really need to just force all standards organizations to release their standards for free. No making you pay $300 or whatever for a standard. (The PCI SIG makes you pay like $5000 for access to the PCIe standard...)
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with."
I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.
1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it
2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read
3. don't talk with your back to the audience
4. make your font as big as practical
5. 3 bullet points is ideal
6. add a picture now and then
7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!
8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type
9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it
10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!
11. the anxiety goes away
12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it
This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumber then trying to tell them how to fix the toilet.
*as an aside, this reminds me of the classic joke where the client asks for the price list for a developer's services:
I do it: $500
I do it, but you watch: $750
I do it, and you help: $1,000
You do it yourself: $5,000
You start it, and you want me to finish it: $10,000
I absolutely understand the sentiment, but LWN is a second-to-none publication that on this rare occasion couldn't resist the joke, and also largely plays to an audience who will immediately understand that it's tongue-in-cheek.
Speaking as a subscriber of about two decades who perhaps wouldn't have a career without the enormous amount of high-quality education provided by LWN content, or at least a far lesser one: Let's forgive.
My concerns about this are that it will lead to
(a) normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams. This won't be just kids - scammers will be challenging all kinds of people including vulnerable elderly people saying "this is why we need your id". People are going to lose their entire life savings because of this law.
(b) a small fraction of kids branching off into fringe networks that are off the radar and will take them to very dark places very quickly.
Because it's politically unattractive, I don't think enough attention has been given to the harms that will flow from these laws.