I checked Sectigo (1) and Digicert (2), same thing: The reduction of public SSL/TLS certificate validity to 200 days (199-day renewals) starting March 15, 2026.
Is there still a way to buy full size SSL certificate?
That sub used to be the absolute best place to get the latest in LLM developments. The worst thing that happened to the sub was karpathy making it popular with a tweet. Since then it's been overrun by a whole bunch of drama, toxic behaviour and useless bots, and the quality content has cratered.
There was a mod crisis and new mods came in, with really weird stuff (integrations with discord and such), lots of bots became active with useless posts and "engagement" bait, the chinese labs are all fighting eachother on who's better every time there's a release, claude-induced-manias on "papers" this and "zenodo" that (everyone is a researcher now, everyone is inventing a subquadratic attention, led by claude hallucinated stuff), they have an obsession with "local only", leading to removing any discussion about SotA (which is entirely counter productive) and so on.
I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites.
Connecting... Waiting... It was slow, both because of dial-up kbit/s and ping to websites, and every page felt like you were literally sending a request to another part of the planet. It felt like that was actually happening, and it was very different from what we experience now.
But most importantly, there were zero funds/VC in that Internet. Only very niche websites, zero online services, even email was difficult to obtain and felt like a real privilege. Only the fact of being connected made everyone feel not a stranger.
I kind of miss that Internet, but I'm grateful that once I was part of it.
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article
on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
The problem of viable news business models persists, and micro-payments have been proposed, but I have yet to see a viable implementation. Also, I think paying per news story isn't the right level of granularity. Articles that are less popular also need to be written, and the people that wrote them need food, too.
"I'm also curious because I remember that the first time I used the Internet (not internet, as it is nowadays), I had to buy a paper book with categorized links to websites."
I was looking at one of these books the other day called "The Internet Yellow Pages"
In the early 90s McGraw Hill published a book with this title
I found a version published by Que (Pearson Education) from 2007 (I suspect there may even be later editions)
That's 14 years into the public www
This was right before the iPhone
I never used these books. The best resources I remember were lists of sites published via FTP
Some of the nostalgia is still easily accessible via textfiles.com
I still use the internet in much the same way I did when I was first connected through a university. UNIX-like OS, no graphics, 100% command line
The main difference between then and now for me is the hardware and bandwidth
Everything is so much faster
IME, generally any slowness today is due (directly or indirectly) to the commercialisation ("monetisation") of _traffic_, e.g., ads, tracking, or having to use Tor to avoid all the nonsense
Originally the idea of commercial use of the internet was to sell products and services (excluding "advertising services"), not to sell and "monetise" _traffic_
Internet subscriber bandwidth is now used by companies for free to perform data collection, surveillance, telemetry, mostly undetected by the subscriber
For example, the majority of "Big Tech" revenues do not come from selling products and (non-advertising) services but from performing data collection, surveillance and "ad services". Even popular subscription software that predated the web, e.g., MS Windows, is engaged in data collection, surveillance and ads/tracking as a "business". Apple, once a traditional hardware company, is engaged in this activity as well
1. I have been doing some information retrieval experiments and the speed can be mind-blowing
What I've seen, the difference between spam detected or not is https://www before the domain name.
Here is an example of successful passing of all checks:
> Published
This comment passes all checks and would be published.
Score: 5/5 | Not spam | On-topic: Yes | No dogwhistles detected (confidence: 100%)
Can confirm. We hit this exact issue running tirreno www.tirreno.com (open-source fraud detection) on Windows ARM — libraries were auto-selecting AVX2 through emulation and batch scoring was measurably slower than just forcing SSE2. The 256-bit ops get split under the emulation layer and the overhead adds up fast in tight loops.
Pinned SSE2 for those builds. Counterintuitive but throughput went up.
On a separate note, if this is a real product, you might need to pay particular attention to data processing agreements etc., as the current T&Cs and Privacy Policy are actually missing how you process the input data, what you use, how long/where you store it, etc.
> All comments are processed and completely forgotten.
This is secure in terms of privacy but not safe in terms of operations, because if it gets even a little scale, your demo will soon enough be used to fine-tune spam comments for free.
Most likely basically because the cut off for atdt being any use to most users was mid 1990s. I still like the fact that it is still being used millions of times per day by cell phones.
DNS and SSH were/are things 'techie' people know. I can assure you most people had no idea what their IP was or what a DNS was. Being the "hey my computer is acting kinda slow can you look at it" guy. It felt like they actively sought out to not know. Honestly cellphones and tablets have basically ended my endless side job of 'hey can you look at my computer'. Because they hid all of that techno junk that is interesting to me but to most people isnt.
What I'm saying is that being a 'power user' is not a static thing, it's relative. It changes and evolves (or downgrades) over time.
But most importantly, and what the author missed, is that it works both ways. I know how to connect to a BBS, but I was literally paralysed by the fact that there is no LAN game in Counter-Strike 2. Where is LAN?! Why do I need a Steam account for every player to play with friends sitting in the same room? Why would I even need external servers for this?
idk, it's a modern world and I don't belong to it, so perhaps we should accept the slow death of 90s or 00s 'power users', and the rise of new 'power users' of the 20s, who won't even know what floppy disk icon on the Save button means.
I suppose it depends on what you think a power user is. Personally, I think it's someone who is interested in solving their own problems and thinking critically or outside the box. Someone who understands not only how to do something, but also why you do it that way.
In a Bash terminal, if something goes wrong, it's probably my fault and there's a clear path forward to troubleshooting and fixing it. That feels way more palatable than a bloated website that throws an "Oops, something went wrong" error. For us, that's hitting a wall, but for people who aren't living in a Linux terminal, needing to open one at all is hitting a wall.
LAN gameplay disappeared because it was the power user way. Steam is a complex centralized proprietary software stack that abstracts all the hard parts of online gaming away so anyone can do it. You can't just intuit the existence of Steam using knowledge of computer and networking fundamentals. That's a knowledge gap, not a lack of skill.
LAN gameplay disappeared because users changed. How many people that play LAN games regularly do you actually know?
I mean I'd like to keep playing and organizing LAN games but most of us who playedv togather as teenagers are too busy with real life. And youngsters have probably better ways of spending time with friends.
That is totally fair. I never really looked at it that way before. I just see it as another blob of skills to add to my growing list of useless knowledge. :)
tirreno guy here, we develop an open-source fraud prevention / security platform (1).
Sometimes there is no clear explanation for fake account registration. Perhaps they were registered to be actively used in the future, as most fraud prevention techniques target new account registration and therefore old, aged accounts won't raise suspicion.
Slightly off-topic, but there are relatively new `services` that offer native brand mentions in reddit comments. Perhaps this will soon be available for HN as well, and warming up accounts might be needed for this purpose.
They have a roadmap of where they want to be, I think that’s normal. As long as they don’t pull a fast one on the oss community then I think if this catch on and it’s worth it then even if they sell the community can fork if the new owners are not so welcoming.
Actually, you don't need to install something to not do something. In the first instance, it works better when you just don't have social media.
However, the ability to resist social media looks to me like a part of natural selection, and this is not something that you'd be able to improve with any software. This is a 'hardware' problem.
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