Hacker News Reader

nxobjecton Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root

> But, this “vulnerability” is the thing everybody knows about docker since forever

OP’s point exactly - it seemed somehow in their vibecoding workflow, they forgot to even do a human architectural sniff test for the stuff everyone knows. It reflects very negatively on them.

nxobjecton Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

Gotcha! No, I feel the same way as well... there's no way "release" should somehow denote something bigger than "ship".

nxobjecton Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

I think another classic reference: Jobs saying to the original Macintosh team - "real artists ship"!

nxobjecton Tim Curry has died

When was that? Just went there last year - they technically never stopped the Saturday night shows during the pandemic, so we’d both have watched the same uninterrupted theatrical run…

nxobjecton Tim Curry has died

Dick Van Dyke, dammit!

nxobjecton IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE

I thought about that, too. I think they’re doing this for the same reason IBM has supported Linux LPARs: since a lot of customers who lease System/z currently probably get overprovisioned hardware that they’ll never fully use, why not try a last-ditch attempt to sell the excess capacity as ARM LPARs?

Now you’re thinking like a Big Blue sales rep.

nxobjecton A new ceiling for Λ: the de Bruijn–Newman constant

OpenAI's been building bridges with quite a few math departments these days – I'm sure they first thing they said is "please, god, no analogies"!

nxobjecton A new ceiling for Λ: the de Bruijn–Newman constant

For one, the whole text would show up in Safari's Reader mode, so I can skip past the hilariously low UI density that AI-generated websites have these days. Before AI you'd have to go out of your way put that much CSS padding into Wordpress! If everyone's going to play Terence Tao, at least copy his stylesheet.

nxobjecton Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

There used to be – pre-LLM days – a "Summarize" service that "summarized" prose to a length of your choice by deleting sentences. I'm sure it was once someone's pride and joy.

nxobjecton Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War

Ouch, that was indeed a typo...

nxobjecton More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

I was briefly excited that people were aware they lacked the understanding.

nxobjecton Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War

As the article belatedly mentions, the ~40 GB automated tape library for HARVEST was the bee's knees... and possibly the inspiration for "harvest now, encrypt later".

PS – Primary sources for the IBM 7950/HARVEST on Bitsavers, excellent as always:

https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/7950/

nxobjecton Dolly Parton has died

> She was beloved around the world, but she was an institution back home.

And the rest of the world is envious!

nxobjecton Dolly Parton has died

What a way to recognize her! I get the same feeling when she stormeed Glastonbury in 2014 - pure class. When you think about it, she had all of the virtues of a "national treasure" in the British sense.

nxobjecton IBM's next-gen mainframe chip is the first to run Arm and Z workloads

I’m surprised they’ve decided to do it on Z/Arch before POWER. The Visas of the world must have really wanted it!

EDIT: d’oh, of course it’s so that they can sell more Linux LPARs.

nxobjecton Letter from Dolly Parton to Eminem

I’ve seen artists be the artist’s artist, not the artist’s artist but the people’s artist… but Dolly was the only one who was both.

nxobjecton Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

Ironically enough, I knew a polar opposite prof… swore off Intel after the FDIV bug (he did cosmological simulations on Beowulf clusters)… although he was a stickler for time management, when Opteron came out he threw out his summer schedule to find grant money for a new cluster.

nxobjecton Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

The black MacBook I remember especially for leaving me with denim burns. And then I read all of the eulogies from people who never had to run it as a daily driver…

nxobjecton Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra for a big leap in performance and AI compute

Hell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...

nxobjecton How Universities Should Prepare Founders

> It’s not obvious to me that a “nobody wants this” megaproject by a decades old multinational forced to succeed by government mandate wasting over a decade debating national workshare is a great example of a “startup in aerospace”.

It looks like I wrote that in a confusing way! My intention was to ask about what features of the engineering discipline was motivating OP's comparison. Maybe a better series of comparisons would have been...

- the 747 – program conception in '63, delivery in '69; – the A350 - first sales in '05, delivery in '13;

which I think captures the slow pace, and large dependency chain, of any significant program beyond a revision.

nxobjecton How Universities Should Prepare Founders

I'm a little confused by what you mean with your question? I was trying to ask what features of an engineering discipline OP was pointing towards with his comparison. I wasn't intending to describe what the next generation of startups might look like!

nxobjecton How Universities Should Prepare Founders

> Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent.

Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.

nxobjecton Hot Chips 2026: CUDA Targets RISC-V – By Chester Lam

Beyond the significant PCI-e requirements, I'm tickled pink that many of the server platform requirements are "do what x86 does"... ACPI, UEFI, a TPM. I hope they do a better job with standards compliance than some of the shadier Wintel OEMs!

nxobjecton I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch

With the hindsight of experience, the remnants of my 18-year old energy go “woah, that’s cool!” at plenty of engineering feats… and my decades-older second brain goes “well d’oh, I could’ve just learned a trade to work on that!”

I think the last one was seeing a skilled electronics repairman do surgery on a CT machine controller.

nxobjecton Homebrew 68K Machine Has a PCI Bus

Absolute gem of an article.

I recommend taking the time to go to the original writeup -- you can see all the soldering on perfboard!

(More seriously, it's incredibly informative if your understanding of homebrew busses is stil in the "shared CPU bus" era. The interface to 68k memory-mapped IO is described in the "First PCI tests" section.

The key resulting limitation right now is that bus mastering is not implemented, but I don't think this is inherently impossible on the 68k bus: Macintosh addon SCSI cards did the same thing, no?)

https://maniek86.xyz/projects/homebrew_m68k_pci.php

nxobjecton I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip

Well, la-dee-dah, look at this person with an input device. Back in my day we looked at Bad Apple while twiddling our hands and we loved it!

nxobjecton I ran Photoshop on a £0.60 computer chip

I know your needs were already met, but would a Docker image with a ready-to-go cross-compiler have done the job? (I've run into this task before.)

nxobjecton Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

I'd be amused if a sub-sub-agent organically decided to do it anyway - even if just for a notable figure that an LLM can identify with its weights alone. What are the controls? Who's going to keep Google accountable? Hah.