urbandw311er

I remember that my ZX Spectrum 48k came with a big orange book of BASIC programs to type in.

One of which was some sort of mystical “reflect on the runes” program that printed ancient symbols to contemplate. It had a written comment in the docs that it would self destruct after three attempts “to guard against frivolous use”. And, sure enough, if you typed it in without understanding it - there was the BASIC command that soft reset your computer on the third iteration! I can’t remember that command now - RANDOMIZE USR 0 perhaps? Happy days.

This was fascinating and a most enjoyable read - thank you for writing it all down!

Except that it’s an entire continent and loads of people do comply with it. You just sound ignorant.

Oh sorry - it’s actually quite boring it was called Radbench! I had this idea you could load workbench from a TSR RAM disk rather than endlessly swapping floppy disks whenever you wanted to run a command.

Oh sorry - it’s actually quite boring it was called Radbench! I had this idea you could load workbench from a TSR RAM disk rather than endlessly swapping floppy disks whenever you wanted to run a command.

Always fun to go and look up the very first software I sold in this archive.

How does this compare to [SOME COMPETING THING I WANT TO PROMOTE]?

Well that’s just snarky and not very nice. The guy has 30 years experience as a dev according to a sibling comment so it’s not as though it’s some vibe coded junk. Why do you believe a good dev can’t use AI to assist in writing great code?

I’m sorry - it was an attempt at a joke based around water pressure.

I can't help but like his altitude.

This doesn’t get called out enough. Although actually come to think of it, I think it could be against HN guidelines to accuse things of being Astroturfed!

Looks like the complainant blogged about it here:

https://evomap.ai/blog/hermes-agent-evolver-similarity-analy...

This is a horrible and yet not unexpected insight into the internals of Excel

Let’s wait and see how those three big IPOs go first…

Exactly the same problem manifests itself in Google Docs.

Hit RETURN. New paragraph. Begin considering what you will write. Prompt pops up: “Help me write.” Every time.

It’s incredibly distracting and turning it off is hard wired into disabling about 1000 other features.

Visual memory is really powerful and maps far more easily onto human brain’s experience of navigating the world. So it’s easier for many people to imagine and organise around a grid.

11.94 tokens/sec (from another answer above)

This is sometimes exposed in front end browser code and I had an actual (non technical) end user email our support team last month asking if it was something they should be concerned about! God knows how they found it, I suspect everyone is now an AI-enabled expert at these things…

Nrwl are right to be sceptical about Microsoft’s published download numbers for the compromised extension. Given that my machine downloaded it a full two hours after it was supposedly unpublished.

I wonder if this was the compromised nx console extension that bit me yesterday. The timing seems identical. See https://github.com/nrwl/nx-console/security/advisories/GHSA-...

This list is incomplete - at least one other package (nx-console VS code extension; 2.2M downloads) was compromised yesterday with this worm: if suitably qualified/connected people are reading this, it could be worth following that dependency chain too in case there are more. See here:

https://github.com/nrwl/nx-console/security/advisories/GHSA-...

PS: I posted on HN to try and alert people right after it was compromised but sadly got almost no upvotes :-(

Incidentally, this is one of the first times where an LLM was genuinely useful in helping me quarantine & identify the issue with a degree of certainty.

If you want further information on how the attack was obfuscated & executed, I posted in the nx-console Issues board [here](https://github.com/nrwl/nx-console/issues/3140) - (apols for the LLM-assisted post, as you would imagine I was in something of a hurry to report it)

Ouch: critical supply chain attack in one of the most popular VS Code Extensions (2.2M installs)

I was bitten by this today - the payload dropped a Python C2 backdoor and LaunchAgent. (fortunately, it failed to run due to failed dependencies...)

Incidentally, my local install was almost 2 hours after the maintainers claim they pulled it from the marketplace so the real-world exposure window appears to have been substantially longer than 11 minutes.

`2026-05-18 16:34:11.092 [info] Extracted extension to .../nrwl.angular-console-18.95.0`

This feels like an underrated comment. Anyone here got the technical chops to address it?

You speak into the microphone, it gets sent to one of OpenAI’s billion servers, and then a GPU pretends to talk to you via text-to-speech. Neato.

People (including this article) keep talking about OpenAI realtime like it’s a STT - LLM - TTS pipeline but I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the model works. My understanding is that it accepts (and outputs) actual raw audio waveforms. Which, for me, is the sheer joy and wonder of the thing.

There is perhaps _some_ truth to this, long term. But I think it’s way too early to remove all the QA.

I think it’s more feature bloat to be honest. And trying to deliver on massively over-juiced profit projections.

This is a really underrated comment. It’s a great question and speaks volumes as to what the hell so many modern tech cos are actually doing with all their resource. Didn’t Elon strip most of the team at Twitter away, after some awful false starts, it pretty much ran fine on about 80% less human resource?

Tan’s website made 169 server requests (Hacker News makes 7). It shipped 28 test files to production users. It loaded 78 JavaScript controllers Uncompressed 2MB PNGs that could’ve been 300KB. An empty 0-byte file sitting in production. A rich-text editor loaded on a read-only page.

I mean - none of this is great, but if these are the very worst examples they can find then it feels a bit like scraping the barrel.

Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!