HN Leaders

What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126497]

Some people also don't use protective gear when going downhill biking, it is a matter of feeling lucky.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79033]

There are several in my neighborhood, and I enjoy patronizing them. The only difficulty is the same books sit in them for months at a time. What might work is having a backing store of books, and rotate them through the library once a month or so.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75588]

It took exactly 24 hours, to the minute, from the time I received the "we're generating an export" file until I got the download link, so guessing they're either batching it or deliberately sending after 24 hours because it adds friction to the account deletion process.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77701]

The way I write code with AI is that I start with a project.md file, where I describe what I want done. I then ask it to make a plan.md file from that project.md to describe the changes it will make (or what it will create if Greenfield).

I then iterate on that plan.md with the AI until it's what I want. I then ask it to make a detailed todo list from the plan.md and attach it to the end of plan.md.

Once I'm fully satisfied, I tell it to execute the todo list at the end of the plan.md, and don't do anything else, don't ask me any questions, and work until it's complete.

I then commit the project.md and plan.md along with the code.

So my back and forth on getting the plan.md correct isn't in the logs, but that is much like intermediate commits before a merge/squash. The plan.md is basically the artifact an AI or another engineer can use to figure out what happened and repeat the process.

The main reason I do this is so that when the models get a lot better in a year, I can go back and ask them to modify plan.md based on project.md and the existing code, on the assumption it might find it's own mistakes.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417152]

A starting point would be excluding Show HNs with generated READMEs, or that lack human-written explanations.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127428]

Actually, all you need is an interface that lets you manipulate the token sequence instead of the text sequence along with a map of the special tokens for the model (most [all?] models have special tokens with defined meanings used in training and inference that are not mapped from character sequences, and native harnesses [the backend APIs of hosted models that only provide a text interface and not a token-level one] leverage them to structure input to the model after tokenization of the various pieces that come to the harnesses API from whatever frontend is in use.)

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99017]

I bet you'd reach an even bigger market if you made this for Twitter, which is awash in this BS.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82270]

I was going to say that I was surprised that enough "normal" users had heard about the Pentagon news story that it would make a difference.

Then I remembered that the app store rankings [1] seem to be based on activity from just the past day or so.

And so a lot of "plugged-in" users switching to Claude all at once then would be enough to briefly send Claude to #1, since the migration would be sizeable in comparison to the normal daily download baseline.

But we can also expect that this would probably be just a blip for a couple of days, as it's unlikely to make much difference in the baseline ratio for the general population.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82270]

Obviously that's a ton more work, and not something most people have any desire to do. They just want to upgrade their phone and have all their data and apps migrate seamlessly.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89472]

> Who ever enables that for users best will get the users.

And if it's anything like Uber, that'll be when the enshittification really kicks into gear.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125761]

I can’t believe people are being so flippant describing this story (“sex life”) when there’s a high probability that the differential is because neanderthal males were raping homo sapiens females. Neanderthals had much higher muscle mass and were much stronger than homo sapiens.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89472]

I think the engineers working on "AI datacenters… in spaaaaaace!" largely realize it's never really gonna happen.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82270]

There are plenty of politicians who get into politics precisely because they love interacting with everyone.

It doesn't take the pleasure out of it, it doesn't make it transactional. It just gives them incredible job fulfillment, at least in that part of it.

Bill Clinton was famous for this. It was incredibly frustrating to his staff because he was constantly late for his next event, because he always wanted to keep talking to the people he'd just met. They'd have to build in buffer time to plan around it, because otherwise it wound up disrupting his schedule and logistics too much.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103663]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239318]

> The more useful case ime is turning cyclists with reduced mobility into regular cyclists.

That's exactly my use case. I've got a bad leg and this thing made all the difference for longer rides.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126497]

On the PC, my introduction to systems programming and Borland ecosystem, after some months of GW-BASIC, was Turbo BASIC.

Already a great experience with a structured compiled BASIC in 1991, and what made me look into other Borland languages.

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/borland_turbo_basi...

Nowadays it lives on as PowerBASIC.

I don't get the downplay of Delphi or C++ Builder, other that they aren't cool.

doener ranked #42 [karma: 80074]

I actually miss the days when the US administration in charge at least tried to appear not to be corrupt and malicious.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

If you started learning from the "bottom-up", you wouldn't think it's intimidating. Fortunately, it's never too late to start learning.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Cold War era definitely resulted in a lot of comms infrastructure being hardened against attack.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

It still works if the file doesn't fit in RAM

No it doesn't. If you have a file that's 2^36 bytes and your address space is only 2^32, it won't work.

On a related digression, I've seen so many cases of programs that could've handled infinitely long input in constant space instead implemented as some form of "read the whole input into memory", which unnecessarily puts a limit on the input length.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239318]

He's in full damage control mode. How to shaft your competitors and try to look good at the same time.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125761]

What do you want the government to do when your parents decide to abandon civilization and then live out without plumbing in the Oregon wilderness and then your dad abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?

My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.

The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239318]

I'd press it twice, but I would much more like an 'undo' button for the last decade until we've figured out how we are going to deal with mass unemployment and mental issues as a result of people no longer seeing (1) a future and (2) their sense of self worth as related to having a career erased, and finally how to ensure that the least scrupulous actors are not going to be the ones that hold the keys to these very powerful devices.

Note that voting in the poll is not voting for the poll.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159903]

I'm dreading having to buy a new rugged Android phone. I have one where all the stuff I don't want is turned off. F-Droid, Firefox, FairEmail, DuckDuckGo, no Google account. Getting a new phone into that configuration may not be possible. The major brands are more and more locked down, and the minor brands can't be trusted.

I have a Cat phone now. The actual manufacturer, Bullett, went bankrupt. Can't get the small rubber parts needed to maintain the waterproofing.

Suggestions?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89472]

Kalshi's pulling a "he's not out of power, he's dead" technicality, apparently. https://bsky.app/profile/slukemorgan.bsky.social/post/3mfyzr...

> "we design the rules to prevent people from profiting from death"

Read the fine print!

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177110]

For consumer ChatGPT accounts, go to their privacy portal [1] and, first, delete your GPTs, and then, second, delete your account.

[1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

XML has been "spooky old technology" for over a decade now. It's heyday was something like 2002.

Nobody dares advertise the XML capabilities of their product (which back then everybody did), nobody considers it either hot new thing (like back then) or mature - just obsolete enterprise shit.

It's about as popular now as J2EE, except to people that think "10 years ago" means 1999.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

If anything, memory ain't getting cheaper, disks aren't either, and as for graphics cards, forget it.

People wont be competing with even a current 2026 SOTA from their home LLM nowhere soon. Even actual SOTA LLM providers are not competing either - they're losing money on energy and costs, hopping to make it up on market capture and win the IPO races.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75588]

Only for very narrow definitions of "we".

I think it's pretty obvious when betting on events that are inherently just decisions by one or a few people (e.g. when will Trump launch an attack on Iran, when will a company launch a new product, will some company acquire another one, etc.) that they will attract insider trading and corruption by their very nature - all that's necessary is to have information about the decision maker. This is fundamentally different than events that are subject to forces that no single individual controls - e.g. who will win an election, where will a crypto price be in a year, movie box office results, etc.

I think betting on "single decision maker" events is just a "sucker is born every minute"-type bet.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99782]

MCP makes sense when you're not running a full container-based Unix environment for your agent to run Bash commands inside of.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167049]

I literally discovered Ghostty yesterday when googling "best terminal macos" and surfaced a ~year-old reddit thread recommending it [0]. Just needed something other than Terminal so I could Cmd-Tab between distinct command-line work (e.g. claude code and ipython tabs). Was nice to find something that just worked

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1loiw2z/comment/n0...

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82267]

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.

The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.

It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion.

Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.

- Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while).

- The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

- In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era.

>Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

That's how companies fail.

It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103663]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107012]

“Prices take the elevator up and the stairs down.” Sellers will make peace eventually that their prices are unreasonable, with those who must sell leading the downward price trajectory and setting comparables.

There is a price any property will sell at. Price discovery continues. To sell, lower your price until you have a firm offer.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125761]

> The non-Iranian part is key. Millions of muslims around the world viewed the Iranian theocracy as the only power in the world fighting for Islam

Yup. My Bangladeshi relatives who have no stake in Iran are upset. I suspect the lady who cuts my daughter’s hair—who was an accountant back in Iran and celebrated when Jimmy Carter died—is over the moon.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99782]

My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.

I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.

I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106752]

There's several buildings in Edinburgh that have designation "military base" (mostly Territorial Army) and are within a few hundred yards of a school or nursery. Probably the same in many cities.

It's up to the people with bombs not to bomb schools.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125761]

> CNN has geolocated video from the scene to the Shajaba Tayyiba School, which sits about 200 feet (61 meters) from an Iranian military base.

Who the fuck builds a military base 200 feet from a school?

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80485]

I have tried every possible setting but SSH ends up breaking more often than not. As opposed to iTerm which just works.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89472]

They’d ignore it like they did with copyright law.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239318]

Oh, that's very neat, I can imagine that some future front-end to a SDR will have no antenna at all, just a bunch of solid state.

The abstract of the paper:

"""Coupling a Rydberg vapour medium to both microwave and optical fields enables the benefits of all-optical detection, such as minimal disturbance of the measured field and resilience to very strong signals, since no conventional antenna is required. However, peak sensitivity typically relies on adding a microwave local oscillator, which compromises the all-optical nature of the measurement. Here we introduce an alternative, optical-bias detection, that maintains fully optical operation while achieving high sensitivity. To address laser phase noise, which is critical in this approach, we perform a simultaneous measurement of the noise using a nonlinear process and correct it in real time via data processing. This yields a 35 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio compared with the basic method. We demonstrate a sensitivity of 176 nV / cm / sqrt(f Hz) , reliable operation up to 3.5 mV/cm at 13.9 GHz, and quadrature-amplitude modulated data transmission, underlining the ability to detect microwave field quadratures while preserving the unique advantages of all-optical detection."""

Emph. mine, at about -36 dBm that's not super sensitive yet though, but that formula suggests that at lower frequencies it should be a lot more sensitive.

The paper is at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63951-9

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186366]

Maybe the briefing didn’t specify if the Spanish speaker was or wasn’t supposed to speak Spanish.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126497]

This is compiler specific and cannot be generalised as C++.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126497]

The current WinUI, WinAppSDK, Windows 11 teams should have a weekend retreat going down that article.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 86763]

prolog in another skin is called erlang you know.

doener ranked #42 [karma: 80074]

Sorry, I did not notice that this article is from 2024.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103663]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

What's the conspiracy theory here? That Samsung don't allow unlocking the bootloader?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

Wait, Trump didn't kill any US citizen? Have we been watching the same news?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

Seriously, it's a great time to be a hacker.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

Thanks, I'm glad you like them!

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

I've never seen the word "delve" show up with such frequency in the pre-AI era, but now it's an overwhelmingly large signal of LLM-generated text, so I'm not sure where that came from. Ditto for vomiting emojis everywhere.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro.

It's clear that no one at Apple (or any other big tech company these days) has ever watched old demoscene productions, then contemplated their performance against the available computing power of their current products and the experience thereof, and thought "something is very wrong".

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106752]

However there's one overriding concern which has got American to this point: "anti woke". That is, reinstating the load bearing racism and sexism.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Not sure we need another term for this, as "utilities" has been the accepted term for various one-off programs that do miscellaneous things, and of which power-users will tend to have a rather large collection of.

However, the term reminded me of a memorable interaction I had many decades ago with an old woman who wanted to write a program in x86 Asm to manage various aspects of the plants in her garden. (She did succeed at doing so.)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159903]

Can you still install F-Droid?

Can you still run without a Google account?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417152]

Please don't. We'll spend $500,000 tracking down what happened.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75588]

In the past I've felt like some of the anti-Altman rhetoric on HN was overkill. It some cases it felt like piling on, and while there was definitely some shady stuff in the past, it seemed like folks were too quick to paste the "evil" banner on anything they disagreed with.

I was wrong, and I no longer think that. I now lump him in with the rest of the narcissistic sociopaths I see with so much power in the country. I'm honestly really curious what past Altman champions like paulg think of him now. I just don't see how this is the slightest bit defensible.

The "We Will Not Be Divided" pledge at https://notdivided.org/ (and discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47188473 ) has 96 OpenAI signatories. Time for these people to show if their signatures actually meant something or were just meaningless theater. It's not like these people would have much of trouble getting jobs given they're AI experts with resumes to back it up. Signing that pledge and then staying at OpenAI after this would just look like rank hypocrisy to me.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91216]

Yeah, I'd definitely like to be able to edit my context a lot more. And once you consider that you start seeing things in your head like "select this big chunk of context and ask the model to simply that part", or do things like fix the model trying to ingest too many tokens because it dumped a whole file in that it didn't realize was going to be as large as it was. There's about a half-dozen things like that that are immediately obviously useful.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91216]

Yet the humans of the time, a small number of the smartest ones, did it, and on much less training data than we throw at LLMs today.

If LLMs have shown us anything it is that AGI or super-human AI isn't on some line, where you either reach it or don't. It's a much higher dimensional concept. LLMs are still, at their core, language models, the term is no lie. Humans have language models in their brains, too. We even know what happens if they end up disconnected from the rest of the brain because there are some unfortunate people who have experienced that for various reasons. There's a few things that can happen, the most interesting of which is when they emit grammatically-correct sentences with no meaning in them. Like, "My green carpet is eating on the corner."

If we consider LLMs as a hypertrophied langauge model, they are blatently, grotesquely superhuman on that dimension. LLMs are way better at not just emitting grammatically-correct content but content with facts in them, related to other facts.

On the other hand, a human language model doesn't require the entire freaking Internet to be poured through it, multiple times (!), in order to start functioning. It works on multiple orders of magnitude less input.

The "is this AGI" argument is going to continue swirling in circles for the forseeable future because "is this AGI" is not on a line. In some dimensions, current LLMs are astonishingly superhuman. Find me a polyglot who is truly fluent in 20 languages and I'll show you someone who isn't also conversant with PhD-level topics in a dozen fields. And yet at the same time, they are clearly sub-human in that we do hugely more with our input data then they do, and they have certain characteristic holes in their cognition that are stubbornly refusing to go away, and I don't expect they will.

I expect there to be some sort of AI breakthrough at some point that will allow them to both fix some of those cognitive holes, and also, train with vastly less data. No idea what it is, no idea when it will be, but really, is the proposition "LLMs will not be the final manifestation of AI capability for all time" really all that bizarre a claim? I will go out on a limb and say I suspect it's either only one more step the size of "Attention is All You Need", or at most two. It's just hard to know when they'll occur.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91216]

You can also get to computable numbers through a similar argument, substituting something Turing-complete for algebra. You definitely do get to learn some interesting things about numbers from computable numbers. The differences between the computables and the full reals are much more subtle than the differences between the rationals and the reals.

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 71845]

I got a gift of a box of 3.5 Floppies about 10+ years ago. Dug up recently, and given each to my daughter and her neighbor friends, “Here is the SAVE icon. Keep it with you.”

I also remembered and completed the meme with a magnet stuck to the fridge.

https://xcancel.com/brajeshwar/status/2024862389850734912

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77701]

Interesting, I'm running Sequoia and have never seen that.

However, I'm running Sequoa developer beta. In my system settings under Beta updates, I have "Sequoia developer beta" selected.

At this point it's basically just getting the Sequoa security patches a few days early. But I guess it also suppresses this message?

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77701]

If you're worried about privacy and security, why did you choose Inngest, which sends all your private data to Inngest? If you want truly private durable execution, you should check out DBOS.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77701]

If you want a true lesson on design, check out Ask Tog, starting here:

https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/

Tog was the original design engineer for the Mac, and arguably one of the first true HCI engineers.

Then read the rest of his website. He goes into where Windows tried to copy Mac and got it horribly wrong.

One of my favorite examples is menu placement. The reason the Mac menus are at the top is because the edges of the screen provide an infinite click target in one direction. So you just go to the top to find what you want. With Windows, the menu was at the top of each Window, making a tiny click target. Then when you maximized the window, the menu was at the top, but with a few pixels of unclickable border. So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.

If you're making a UI, you should read all of Tog's writings.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111122]

I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste of resources." And the counter argument was that different people would find the ways that work best for them, and having a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a probably a way that worked for more people.

The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127428]

> Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (I and II), Afghanistan, etc. were not technically wars in the sense that there was any form of formal declaration by congress.

(1) A declaration of war is not necessary for a war to legally exist, except in the context of specific US laws that might rely on a declared state of war,

(2) Congress constitutional power to declare war is not dependent on the use of special words; every (conditional or unconditional) “authorization for the use of military force” (including the broad but time limited authorization in the War Powers Act) and similar is an application of the Constitutional power to declare war.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75588]

> except for all of the laws that allow you to do these things.

It's even worse than that, because this administration has made it clear they will push as hard as possible to have the law mean whatever they says it means. The quoted agreement literally says "...in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control" - "Department policy" is obviously whatever Trump says it is ("unitary executive theory" and all that), and there are numerous cases where they have taken existing law and are stretching it to mean whatever they want. And when it comes to AI, any after-the-fact legal challenges are pretty moot when someone has already been killed or, you know, the planet gets destroyed because the AI system decide to go WarGames on us.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

>so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud

LOL

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77701]

Anthropic isn't preventing them from managing their key technologies. If my software license says 1000 users, and I build into the software that you can only connect with 1000 users, is your argument that the government can no longer manager their tech?

That my software should allow license violations if the government thinks it is necessary?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

Nobody has to worry about atrophy. That's the good thing about it: Things only atrophy when you don't need them any more.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105260]

He did not learn to find — on the keyboard and tapped out —- instead, bravo!

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

Sam Altman "donated" a bunch of money to US government officials.

US government officials said "we're thinking of ruining Anthropic if they don't play ball".

Sam Altman publicly said "oh no, don't do that, that's terrible, they're right to not play ball".

Sam Altman signed a deal to play ball after he said that, and it turned out he had been working on this deal even before the US government officials said the thing about ruining Anthropic.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79033]

Any user interface designer should take a good look at the controls on a commercial airliner. An awful lot of effort goes into making an intuitive, effective user interface. I have disagreements with it, but there's no denying it's very well done.

Designing a programming language is mostly about usability. I'll be giving a talk about that in April at Yale. It's a fun topic!

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125761]

Who decides what’s moral in a democracy? You?

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Once the windows become actually circles, or maybe some point along that path, they'll go back to square corners and congratulate themselves on how much better and innovative they are. It's just a stupid trend to keep rounding things more and more... I hope.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80485]

Too much willingness to disobey unlawful orders from the "woke left" I assume

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76011]

I can never see the point, though. Performance isn't anywhere near Opus, and even that gets confused following instructions or making tool calls in demanding scenarios. Open weights models are just light years behind.

I really, really want open weights models to be great, but I've been disappointed with them. I don't even run them locally, I try them from providers, but they're never as good as even the current Sonnet.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80485]

Easy to celebrate from a few thousand miles away.

I'm not saying the Ayatollah wasn't a vile criminal, but it's always innocents on the ground who face the brunt of war.

I hope the citizens of Iran can have a peaceful transition and chart a better path for their country, but every single one of America's previous forced regime changes in the region (and across the world) has shown otherwise.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 183069]
paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80485]

> MinIO as an S3-compatible object store is already feature-complete. It’s finished software.

I don't see how these two lines can be written together.

The goal is either to remain S3-compatible or to freeze the current interface of the service forever.

As it stands this fork's compatibility with S3, and with the official MinIO itself, will break as soon as one of them pushes an API update. Which works fine for existing users, maybe, but over time as the projects drift further apart no new ones will be able to onboard.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106752]

This was has killed a lot of innocent people. Khamenei was not one of the innocent.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159903]

Is the posting a description of a real system, or just imagination? Is there a link to something that makes this real?

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75588]

A "simple word choice"?? This isn't just about the single word "impose", read the whole post:

> Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment. The emphasized language is the delta between what OpenAI agreed and what Anthropic wanted.

> OpenAI acceded to demands that the US Government can do whatever it wants that is legal. Anthropic wanted to impose its own morals into the use of its products.

So first off, regarding that first paragraph, didn't any of these idiots watch WarGames, or heck, Terminator? This is not just "oh, why are you quoting Hollywood hyperbole" - a hallmark of today's AI is we can't really control it except for some "pretty please we really really mean it be nice" in the system prompt, and even experts in the field have shown how that can fail miserably: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Second, yes, I am relieved Anthropic wanted to "impose" their morals because, if anything, the current administration has been loud and clear that the law basically means whatever they says it does and will absolutely push it to absurd limits, so I now value "legal limits" as absolutely meaningless - what is needed are hard, non-bullshit statements about red lines, and Anthropic stood by the those, and Altman showed what a weasel he is and acceded to their demands.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107012]

You can either leave or stay. If you want to leave, start interviewing. It sounds like you want to stay, so optimize for that. Reduce unnecessary spend, increase savings, and ride it until it ends, either for them or you. Keep the job until you cannot. You can then look for another gig. You can only control what you control, don’t worry about that when you cannot. Optimize within what you can control.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82270]

It seems value-neutral to me. It's descriptive. Particularly for anyone who understands that different groups of people will legitimately disagree on many moral questions.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.

The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159903]

We have unaligned AIs now. They're called corporations.

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” - Milton Friedman, 1970.[1] That article, in the New York Times, established "greed is good, greed works" as a legitimate business principle.

Most of the problems people are worried about with AIs are already real problems with corporations.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106752]

Don't overlook the media consolidation under Bari Weiss.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

In this context they're not the whores, they're the johns. Trump / the PAC would be the whores, but what else is new?

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

>Nothing persuaded me that he had anything interesting to add - neither rationally, nor aesthetically - about a topic which has been covered by philosophers throughout the millennia.

That sounds more like an emotionally charge reaction than some calm assessment on the merits of the book for what it stands.

Especially when the idea here is that he presents his idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth" - not some claim that he solves the problem of truth "which has been covered by philosophers throughout the millennia", and which could very well be inherently unsolvable anyway.

A writer (even more so, an artist with a unique viewpoints) can add lots of very interesting observations and new ways of seeing the concept of truth or our approaches to it, even when they do it "in the small", without taking on or pretending to tackling the philosophical / ontological core issue.

It's even more useful if an author says some things that rub you off the wrong way, or challenge your core tenets. Else, I guess one cal always just resort to some echo bubble friendly comfort reading.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90287]

Means writing code (doing) vs writing documentation / plans / project architecture documents and so on.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77701]

It’s DoD. It’s still not officially changed. But if you insist on using the nickname it should be DoW.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99017]

I consider any claims this fundamentally unreliable because there's too much propaganda value in lying, especially during the opening phases of a war. I also don't consider Khamenei that significant; he's an important theocratic figure obviously but doesn't have the same kind of weight or charisma that his predecessor had.

steveklabnik ranked #29 [karma: 97108]

> I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect.

You can write a lisp in 145 lines of Python: https://norvig.com/lispy.html

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127428]

No, fighting a war requires only engaging in international armed conflict.

Declaring a war requires Congress, and fighting a war other than in response to an invasion may be illegal under US law if Congress has not exercised its power to declare war, but that doesn't prevent wars from happening it just makes it illegal (though the only actual remedy is impeachment) for the President to wage war without authorization. And, in any case, that’s largely moot because Congress has exercised that power in an open ended (in terms of when and against whom) but limited (in authorized duration of any particular action without subsequent authorization) manner via the War Powers Act, giving every President since Nixon a blank check to start wars with full legal authority and then allow Congress an opportunity to vote to pull support from forces already in combat and hope the enemy already engaged is willing to treat the war as over as the only after-the-fact constraint.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82270]

> Six months later, an architectural change required modifying those features. No one on the team could explain why certain components existed or how they interacted. The engineer who built them stared at her own code like a stranger’s.

Genuine question: so what?

First of all, team members leave all the time, and you're stuck staring at code nobody instantly understands.

Second of all, LLM's are a godsend in help you understand how existing code works. Just give it the files and ask it to explain to you what the components do and how they interact. It'll give you a high-level summary and then you can interactively dig in, far faster than has ever been possible before.

Heck, I often don't remember anything about code I wrote six months ago. It might as well have been written by someone else. And that's not an original observation either -- I remember hearing the same thing from other developers decades ago, as justification for writing better code comments.

Modern codebases are often far too large for any one person or even an entire team to fully comprehend at once. The team has cycled through generations of team members, with nobody who can remember the original rationales for design decisions.

LLM's are helping comprehension more than ever. I don't understand why people aren't talking about this more.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103663]
paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80485]

I assume it is mostly or entirely written by AI, so that tracks.