HN user
lobste.rs invite wanted. Contact me at tmwnn@caramail.com
I read at night in bed. I love how, with ebooks (first Overdrive, now Libby), when I hear about an interesting book, I can within 30 seconds search for it across multiple libraries, borrow it, and send it to my Kindle.
A visa is no guarantee of entry into the US (or other countries) in the first place, let alone something guaranteed to never, ever be revoked.
A country can allow, or disallow, entry by an alien at any time. A country can revoke permission for an alien to stay in that country at any time. The only entity it is responsible for answering to is its own laws and procedures (which the country may change at its discretion), and not the wishes/demands/pleas of said alien.
Sorry, the "I claim that the ___ social issue exists, therefore we must willfully ignore the completely unrelated breaking of the law that provably occurs" card expired in 2024.
Well, yes.
That they should not be in the US, does not override the need for the government to obey the law. But that also does not mean that the fundamental incoherence of a news article ignoring the issue of illegal aliens having access to government aid–of inherently assuming that "of course they should, bigot"—should be ignored.
The day is coming when some *BIG* problem is solved by AI just because someone jokingly asks about it.
At least you recognize this. The average Redditor is not capable of such self-examination.
Highly relevant comment <https://np.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1jh9c90/why_do_...>:
Imagine you had a frozen [large language] model that is a 1:1 copy of the average person, let’s say, an average Redditor. Literally nobody would use that model because it can’t do anything. It can’t code, can’t do math, isn’t particularly creative at writing stories. It generalizes when it’s wrong and has biases that not even fine-tuning with facts can eliminate. And it hallucinates like crazy often stating opinions as facts, or thinking it is correct when it isn't.
The only things it can do are basic tasks nobody needs a model for, because everyone can already do them. If you are lucky you get one that is pretty good in a singular narrow task. But that's the best it can get.
and somehow this model won't shut up and tell everyone how smart and special it is also it claims consciousness. ridiculous.
Captain Kirk defeated multiple evil computers this way
I haven't read the op-ed, but I wonder if it talks about the French Leclerc case?
TIL that when Greece tested four tanks in 2000 before a big arms purchase, the US M1A1 Abrams and British Challenger 2E tanks had trouble with their satellite navigation systems. A French intelligence agency used GPS jammers to help the French Leclerc tank in the competition. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6bhr14/til_th...>
Highly relevant:
Great Moments in PCMR History: A chess game published in 1982 includes a computer opponent but only uses 672 bytes of RAM. 1K ZX Chess has been described as "wizardry", "history's greatest game programming feat", and "the greatest program ever written". By comparison, this headline uses 298 bytes. <https://np.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3s9riy/great_m...>
I hope my brain is also different. I also have never spent hours scrolling through short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, Facebok, etc. I never ever walk outside with my phone in my hand, instead enjoying the view.
I do enjoy watching YouTube videos at home, on the living-room flatscreen, on a variety of topics, but I select them manually, one at a time, from the vast selection The Algorithm(TM) offers me, plus my own searches.
Or as SCP calls them, cognitohazards.
Also relevant: <https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...>
My understanding is that those who work with the mentally handicapped use bright lights and other stimuli to soothe and control them. It is also my understanding that the autistic are stimulated by vibrant colors (coughcoughMy Little Ponycoughcough).
Who is to say that the rest of us are not also vulnerable to such controlling stimuli?
/r/space discussion <https://np.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1usdigz/china_success...>
China is now the second country, and third entity after SpaceX and Blue Origin, to recover a booster after launching a payload to orbit. While its predecessors use landing legs, the Chinese rocket uses a wire net to catch the booster.
Neither Blue Origin nor China has yet reused a booster. SpaceX has a fleet of boosters, including one that as of 9 July 2026 has been reused 36 times. <https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/spacex-launches-...>
As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>.
I spent a day or so traveling through Germany with my parents a few weeks ago as part of a (much longer) trip and a common refrain during that day was, "So much for German efficiency."
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
Germans are, rather, *rule followers*.
But even as an Englishman, it was very different to home. I remember the supermarket was shut all Sunday and was only open until 12 on the Saturday, and it shut early in the week too (at like 5pm or 6pm or something?) so by the time I'd got the train back home from work it was already closed. I had to get up early every Saturday just to make sure I could get the shopping done.
If it were the Anglosphere that had very restrictive laws about store hours/days of operation, and Germany/Austria with pretty much unlimited hours, this would be the #1 topic brought up in any online discussion whatsoever about the US/UK/etc. But because of DACH's smaller cultural visibility, it isn't brought up nearly so often in actuality.
The full manual cover photo at the top of the page shows that it was published by Optimized Systems Software for Atari.
I think most Atari users interested in C or C-like programming would have, instead of a C interpreter like Tiny-C, used a) Deep Blue C <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_C>, or b) Action! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language)>. Both are compilers with complete library support to Atari hardware features; as I understand it, they are superior to any high-level language available for Commodore 64, and comparable to the various BASIC compilers for Apple II such as Microsoft's TASC.
I think 0 people will say “I may be suffering but at least my countryman is doing fine.”
Again, that Michigan autoworker can move to Tennessee, or wherever else jobs relocate to. Millions of Americans (including, but not just, autoworkers) do. And even if the autoworker does not move, at least he will benefit from the taxes his countrymen who do take those jobs pay. Ontario (or Mexico) is a different story.
Whet I didn’t like about your comment is that you deny the global (national in this case) benefit — also received by most of the dislocated — for the short term benefit of the few.
I believe that free trade, between countries of comparable development, is overall a net benefit. That is not the same thing as saying that tariffs, even between such countries, are not at times an appropriate tool for geopolitical, economic, and fiscal purposes.
But if you look at the US alone, you see that process happening as well (e.g. aircraft and auto mfg moving to the non-unionized south).
A Michigan auto worker may not be thrilled by jobs moving to Tennessee, but a) at least his countrymen will work those jobs, and b) he can move to Tennessee. His job moving to Ontario does not have these virtues, and no amount of repeating
It’s economically superior to integrate these three countries and beneficial overall
is going to change this.
Krugman implies that the US-Canada (not Mexico) integration of the auto industry came from NAFTA. Not so; The Auto Pact <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Auto_Pact> preceded NAFTA by 30 years.
Krugman avoids answering the interviewer's question about whether Michiganites support having so much of the automobile supply chain outsourced to Canada, because he knows that the answer is "No". He instead says that the US has more auto jobs because of the cross-border integration than otherwise. The decline of the US auto industry began very soon after the start of the auto pact. I don't mean to say that the latter caused the former, but it would certainly be possible to make a case for such.
Trump's view is that Canada needs the US a lot more than the other way around. He's right. Every Canadian province except one trades more with the US than the rest of Canada, and every Canadian province is (far, far) more dependent on international trade than 48 of 50 US states. <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/goldfarbdanielle_we-make-thin...> At the end of the day, there is no way to get around the verity of another Krugman observation, that Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>
With the above in mind, consider the Trudeau government's bold talk in early 2025 about "dollar for dollar" tariffs <https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2025/mar/12/dollar-f...>. How that would devastate an economy 8% the size of the US's was, of course, unsaid, because vibes are all it takes to fight Trump fascism, amirite fellow Canadians? Of course Trudeau's replacement Carney is not stupid like Trudeau, so abandoned that policy during the campaign <https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-...>. But still.
in Europe there is still widespread cynicism and vitrol against anything Elon Musk especially Starlink.
European Tesla sales are rising yoy again. <https://www.statesman.com/business/article/tesla-sales-q2-20...>
Isn’t this a similar argument to how Africa adopted mobile phones significantly faster than other regions?
You didn't read the article:
Africa’s internet infrastructure is not fit for purpose. During a communications boom in the early 2000s, the continent eschewed fixed-line internet for cheaper mobile broadband; today more than 400m Africans, the bulk of the continent’s users, gain access to the internet this way.
But the technology has not kept pace with the rapid increase in data demand from streaming and AI-powered applications.
and then models learned that they can back track and error correct
You mean "Human developers learned ...", yes? Or was there really an all AI-driven, self-improving aspect to this?
If you don't want to believe me that Apple's drives worked and Tandy's didn't, consider why VisiCalc launched on the Apple II in 1979 despite Bricklin and Frankston intending to do so on the Model I,[1] because of the latter's far greater market share.
[1] Not only that, Dan Fylstra (founder of VisiCalc publisher Personal Software) was among the first people in the world to own the Commodore PET and the Model I, having reviewed both for BYTE
I mean, in 1978 Tandy used standard drives and a disk controller IC, and still managed to sell a whole 16K TRS-80 system with disk drive for the same price
The Tandy products were utter garbage.
Controller = Unreliable. Expansion Interface required for the controller = So unreliable that a robust third-party alternative market developed, including Steve Ciarcia's version. TRSDOS = So unreliable that Tandy has the dubious distinction of being the 8-bit system with the most third-party operating systems.
Reliability greatly improved from the Model III onward, but by then it was too late: Tandy had a) destroyed its reputation (the "Trash-80" nickname did not come out of nowhere) and b) surrendered its colossal market lead to the tiny startup founded by two California college dropouts.
that was something like 5x as fast.
... which is still significantly slower than the Disk II.
The 1978 Disk II is about 30 times faster than the unaccelerated 1982 Commodore 1540/1541, as well as more reliable,[1] cooler-running,[2] and just more elegantly designed. The same comparison holds for the 4040 and other pre-1541 Commodore drives, albeit with the speed disadvantage vis-a-vis Apple being less.[3]
[1] The 1541's drive head often goes out alignment despite both it and Disk II using similar "ratatatat" methods to return to the first track. Also, the first couple of years of 1541 production were notorious for failures in general.
[2] As the 1541 is a standalone 6502-based computer with an integrated power supply, overheating is constantly an issue.
[3] Yes, the 1541 is slower than earlier Commodore drives, because of the move from parallel to serial IEEE-488 and a hardware bug (that both necessitated and allows for Fast Load and its counterparts)
Commodore disk drives (4040 and so on) actually use a very similar approach. There's no FDC controller chip and the 6502 is hooked to the drive (literally the same SA-390 as Apple used) via simple hardware.
I disagree that the approaches are similar. The 4040 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_4040> is a monstrosity; even the later single-drive models, such as the 1541, are massive. Apple's 1978 floppy drive + Disk II card takes up less space than 1985's 1571 drive (and still significantly faster).
The only significant difference is that the 6502 (actually two of them) is in a separate enclosure from the Pet , communicating via IEEE-488.
Many things are possible when another 6502 is used just for the drives! That Commodore takes this approach is, as I said, no credit to its army of engineers versus one Berkeley dropout.
Since Commodore manufactured the 6502 presumably it was ok to use them liberally.
I acknowledge that, had Apple been the owner of MOS and manufactured 6502s, it might also have been tempted to take the easy way out designwise and built Commodore-style drives, or implement the Disk II with a 6502 on it. But I'd like to think that Woz would have done the "right" thing regardless of available resources.
As zellyn said, Disk II is pure genius writ large.
It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world—was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direct 1977 competitors, there were abundant human and engineering resources to come up with a fast, inexpensive, and reliable floppy drive and controller; Chuck Peddle at Commodore was certainly no average engineer. And yet, Commodore was still unable to do this in 1984.
Whether one believes in the reality of the existence of the "10X developer", it's hard not to see what Woz did between 1976 and 1978—Integer BASIC, Apple II color graphics, and Disk II—as proof that such a being can exist, even if (as I have written elsewhere) that brilliance straddled the line between optimized and overoptimized. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685888>
Yes, but only because of a MacOS update.
My UnRAID server has been up for more than a month, and would be much longer were it not for a system update there, too. The uptime of the VMs on the server are also affected by this.