Hacker News Reader

peraon Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

Maybe if I can find an unused one, still not sure tbh... Or I might go for an alternative SBC from AliExpress and compromise on CPU

peraon Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

I was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.

peraon No right to relicense this project

Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI researcher who was found dead in his flat just before testifying against his employer, published an excellent article somehow related to this topic:

When does generative AI qualify for fair use?

https://suchir.net/fair_use.html

Balaji's argument is very strong and I feel we will see it tested in court as soon as LLM license-washing starts getting more popular.

peraon Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

It turns out the biggest threat to AI safety is capitalism, who would have thought

peraon Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge

This was on the news yesterday:

> The meeting between Hegseth and Amodei was confirmed by a defense official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/hegseth-to-meet-with-anthropi...

peraon OpenAI CEO reduces childhood to a power bill

Not just childhood: Altman is reducing human beings to his own commercial products. This way of thinking won't end well.

I think it is getting more clear why two years ago the board ousted him, and also the reasoning behind those who left OpenAI.

peraon Epstein took a photo of his 2015 dinner with Zuckerberg and Musk

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA012056...

peraon Ask HN: Why LLM providers sell access instead of consulting services?

But those margins are for traditional businesses with human workers, if these claims of 100x productivity increase are real Anthropic should very easily be able to outcompete Accenture no?

peraon Data centers in space makes no sense

New GPU dense racks are going up to 300kW, but I believe the normal at moment for hyperscalers is somewhere around ~150kW, can someone confirm?

The energy demand of these DCs is monstrous, I seriously can't imagine something similar being deployed in orbit...

peraon When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

> I agree that "from scratch" is a misrepresentation.

I believe in the UK the term for this is actually fraudulent misrepresentation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation#English_law

And in this context it seems to go against The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2008/1277/made

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/13/section/226

peraon Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water

That's very interesting, thanks! I had no idea that legionella risk was a thing for data centers. This article mentions that to avoid the risk most data centers treat the water with disinfectants which are sometimes toxic:

https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/making-the-energy-efficienc...

peraon AI Usage Policy

Last year I had to deal with a contractor who sincerely believed that a very popular library had some issue because it was erroring when parsing a chatgpt generated json... I'm still shocked, this is seriously scary

peraon Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees

I guess it was a Fairphone 2 from 2015? They are still selling screens, cases and camera modules but not the rest of the parts unfortunately:

https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...

peraon First Lady Melania Trump Inspires America's Children to Be Curious, Use AI

Full title is too long for HN: "First Lady Melania Trump Inspires America’s Children to be Curious, Use AI to Achieve their Career Ambitions"

peraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

"Borrow" is an interesting choice of word, see for example this:

    /// The quirks mode of the document.
    #[inline]
    pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
        self.quirks_mode
    }

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

And then this:

    /// The quirks mode of the document.
    pub fn quirks_mode(&self) -> QuirksMode {
        self.stylist.quirks_mode()
    }

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...

It seems ChatGPT is still copying segments of code almost verbatim, although sometimes it does weird things, compare these for example:

https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/3e5bc78b075645...

https://github.com/servo/stylo/blob/71737ad5c8b29c143a6c992a...

peraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

Just for context, this was the original claim by Cursor's CEO on Twitter:

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

> It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

https://xcancel.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552#m

peraon Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

Has anyone tried to rewrite some popular open source project with IA? I imagine modern LLMs can be very effective at license-washing/plagiarizing dependencies, it could be an interesting new benchmark too

peraon The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)

I think you are confusing The Dark Project, which is the first game of the Thief series from 1998, with some mod or maybe The Dark Mod? :)

peraon US attack on Venezuela raises fears of future Greenland takeover

CNN interviewed Stephen Miller last night:

Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509694

Here is a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tidejP41CBk

peraon Matlab Killed Home Perpetual License

The Home License for personal, non-commercial use, moved to an annual subscription model:

https://uk.mathworks.com/pricing-licensing.html?prodcode=HOM...

I am very sad because I was awaiting for my Learn & Development budget at work to renew to get a license to use the Antenna Toolbox :_(

peraon Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin

Thanks for mentioning this project, I have been looking for a good reverb plugin for Linux for a while now and this sounds great.

peraon US attack on Venezuela raises fears of future Greenland takeover

Here is a link for those like me who have not read Article 5 before, with additional comments:

https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/coll...

peraon Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?

Given that Big Tech is training AI on copyrighted material downloaded from shadow library torrents it's safe to assume that they don't care about licenses at all.

Plus the US government is pro Big Tech and they will protect them at all cost.

peraon GitHub is returning Gateway Time-outs

It's intermittent for me now, some requests go through if I refresh enough times, but no incident according to the status page still...

peraon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

I didn't mean it as VR being useless - I'm sure it can be useful for some applications or fun for gaming - my point was that you shouldn't fear getting left behind just for not having an Apple Vision Pro app or a land in the Metaverse :)

Another way to see this: Hammers can be useful, the Internet can be useful, but this doesn't mean that as a hammer manufacturer you should make your next hammer an IoT product ASAP or you will be left behind.

peraon Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

Many thing are "here to stay", should Mozilla also implement a "share with TikTok" functionality into their browser?

> or get left behind.

Last time I heard this phrase it was about VR, and before that it was NFTs. I wished the tech community wasn't so susceptible to FOMO sentiments.

peraon Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach

Meanwhile MI6 offers an onion service for secure communications:

mi6govukbfxe5pzxqw3otzd2t4nhi7v6x4dljwba3jmsczozcolx2vqd.onion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYB129pGq0k

peraon US threatens EU digital services market access

https://xcancel.com/ustraderep/status/2000990028835508258

peraon Ask HN: Any experience using LLMs to license-wash FOSS projects?

Thanks for those links, I read a couple of the cited comments on those cases and still cannot find any mentions of restrictions for engineers who at some point in the past had access to the code.

Nordstrom Consulting v. M&S Technologies, which is possibly the most relevant case, describes a process for developing under a clean room environment and from what I understand it seems to focus on isolation of engineering teams and resources (except when required for interoperability). I did not find mentions of assessing the cohort of engineers for prior access to the copyrighted material but if I have missed that please let me know.

I also wanted to say that I am not asking this because I am thinking to start an unethical license laundering business, I am only trying to understand the meaning of making LLMs legally equivalent to human workers.

peraon Ask HN: Any experience using LLMs to license-wash FOSS projects?

Could you share a source for this definition? As far as I know it means no having access to the code only during the implementation of the new project