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.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

The US spent trillions of dollars and many lives during their last escapade into the sandbox, and still went home having lost. What evidence leads you to believe a coalition of countries can stamp out autonomous, independent, ideology driven, potentially perpetual attacks? The potential attack surface is enormous, and attackers need to win only once versus needing a constant, successful defense against them. “What is your threat model?”

Iran is already demonstrating how to exhaust a supply of $4M patriot missiles with $50k drones. Broadly speaking, chaos is cheap when asymmetrical power is available and successful and soft, undefended targets are numerous and readily available. The cost to defend everything at once is untenable, and in some cases, it is almost impossible to defend the target at all (artillery against an LNG loading facility, for example).

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

It's been popular for at least 20 years, as far as I know.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177173]

Idk why you’re getting downvoted, the U.S. is looking for a quick win if it can have it. One of the destructive streaks in the Iranian regime (and among its proxies) is their glorification of martyrdom over pragmatism. It’s cost them historically and it’s costing them now.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167081]

Why would apologizing for plagiarism and fabrication preclude you from facing sanctions for plagiarism and fabrication?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177173]

> If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it

We have less of a problem with crazies voting for crazies than non-crazies not voting. Because if the crazies can find compromise with someone approximately as crazy as them while the non-crazies are either too lazy to turn out or unable to get out of stitches because the less-crazy candidate disagrees with them on two issues, the crazies win.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177173]

“Edwards also stressed that his colleague Kyle Orland, the site’s senior gaming editor who co-bylined the retracted story, had ‘no role in this error.’”

Has Orland issued a real apology? He bylined a piece containing fraudulent quotes.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

They are a reflection of the electorate. If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it. If you get what you voted for, don’t be sad about it, it’s what you voted for. Regime change will come with time, but it’s going to suck for a while because of this governance failure mode.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177173]

> "Pacific time" is going to be so confusing

It’s already ambiguous. Just use a city and let your calendar do the rest. New York, Phoenix and San Francisco time are unambiguous in a way trying to name time zones is not.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113412]

At least for me, the effect is real, and is driven not by media consumption but ergonomics of use. But at the same time, I'd say you're not missing that much. I always preferred large screens because of productivity gains[2], but even as screens kept getting larger, the set of things that "I feel I’m better off opening a laptop" for remained the same for me.

That is, until I switched to a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) half a year ago, and - I kid you not - I haven't used my personal laptop since that day.

FWIW, I still have a proper desktop PC; In the past decade+, I've been using a PC at home, and a "sidearm" on the go / away from home: always a 2-in-1 Windows laptop with top specs[0]. Being always with me, this laptop often replaced use of PC at home too, because of convenience & portability.

So by amount of productive use, for past 10+ years it was sidearm >> PC >> smartphone. But getting a foldable flipped it around. Having twice the screen size of a regular (large) phone is a big productivity win[1], but it's folding that makes the actual qualitative difference. Folded, the device becomes a regular smartphone - i.e. something that fits in my pocket, meaning it's always on me, in my hands, or less than 1 second away. Contrast that with tablets, whose form factor makes them basically just shitty laptops (same logistic as ultraportable, but toy OS of a phone).

I didn't expect this. I didn't even feel this change - I only noticed two months later that my laptop has been sitting unused on my desk, covered by a pile of stuff. Doing "laptop tasks" on a mobile device is still annoying (no keyboard, toy OS), but combining tablet-sized screen with portability of a phone makes them less annoying than logistics overhead of a laptop - and at least in my case, this eliminated the entire[3] space between "smartphone" and "PC".

--

[0] - Think Microsoft Surface, except I could get better specs at half the price if I bought an off-lease but pristine Dell or Lenovo.

[1] - It's not immediately obvious to people, but as things are today, a foldable phone isn't any better at media consumption than regular one, because almost all cinema, TV, videogames, etc. are all produced for widescreen - meanwhile, the inner screen of my Fold is approximately square, so e.g. for most TV, half or more of it is black at all times. However, all that extra space allows to effectively use multiple (3+) apps on screen, not to mention makes spreadsheets actually usable.

[2] - Bigger screen = less scrolling and tapping in menus, but also with text size scaled to minimum, my previous phone (S22) had a big enough screen that running two apps in split-screen became useful on a regular basis.

[3] - Well, almost. There are some tasks I really like physical keyboard and larger screen for - but for those, I just plug the phone into the screen via USB-C, and volia, it turns into a regular desktop. A shitty one, but good enough for occasional use.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90318]

"Apologized on Blue Sky" is absolutely no reason to keep them. The author did the absolutely worst things a journalist can do (short of actual corruption) and is unfit for the job:

- He didn't care for his story,

- he didn't care to verify his story,

- he published bullshit made up stuff,

- and put words in a real person's mouth

- and he didn't even care to write the thing himself

Why keep him and pay him? What mentality all the above show? What respect, both self respect and respect for the job?

If they wanted stories from an LLM, they can pay for a subscription to one directly.

Hope this sends a message to journalist hacks who offload their writing or research to an LLM.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

This sounds like a push piece from a throwaway account waiting for the comment suggesting a crypto recovery firm.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

I'm puzzled by this conversation, because Amazon did get on the agent bandwagon with Alexa Plus (I have it, it's buggier than regular Alexa and it's all making me throw my Echos away since they can't even play Spotify reliably).

Also, my Alexa does advertise stuff to me when I talk to it. It's not Budweiser, but it'll try to upsell me on Amazon services all the time.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

I know half the point of OpenClaw is to let it run wild on your personal data so it can do anything, but, if you're looking for a secure but still capable AI agent/assistant, I built one I really like:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

Everything is sandboxed and plugins have fine-grained permissions, so you can tweak the security/usability tradeoff to your liking. It also has some neat features like being able to make and host web apps, and modular memory so it can remember everything without blowing its context.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 88598]

FusionAuth | Senior Java Engineer, Technical Support Engineer, Account Executive , Solutions Engineer | Varies between REMOTE (in USA, also in Europe but only for the account exec/solutions engineer positions) and ONSITE in Denver, CO, USA, details in each job desc | Salary ranges listed on job req, but for the Senior Java Engineer it is 140k-180k

At FusionAuth, our mission is to make authentication and authorization simple and secure for every developer building web and mobile applications. We want devs to stop worrying about auth and focus on building something awesome. We also recently acquired a fine-grained authorization company ( https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-acquires-permify ) and are going to be building in that area as well.

There are a lot of companies in the auth space, but we feel like we have something special:

* a unique deployment model (self-host on-prem or in your cloud or run in our cloud)

* A well designed API first approach; one customer compared our APIs to petrichor

* a mature product (the code base is nine+ years old and we've found and fixed a lot of the sharp edges around core login use cases; but don't worry, there are plenty more features to add)

* our CTO is the founder and still writes code

* a full featured free-as-in-beer version which makes the sales cycle easier; prospects often come in having prototyped an integration already

Our core software is commercial. We open source much of our supporting infrastructure. Technologies and standards that you will work with: modern Java, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, OAuth, SAML, OIDC.

Learn more, including about benefits and salaries, and apply here: https://fusionauth.io/careers/ ( Click/tap the 'View open positions' orange button. )

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

What the hell? I thought the videos went to the phone directly, they're all getting uploaded to Meta? I don't know why I let my guard down against that company for one second.

EDIT: Wait, is this when you use the "ask Meta" feature? I do expect that to send all the clips to a server for an LLM to process, it's not done on-device. It's not clear to me whether it's that or just all videos/photos you record with the glasses.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80497]

More like - try not to be someone the government deems a terrorist

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

Why did you have to shut down? What would you have done differently? What would the future roadmap look like if you had been able to continue to build?

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88171]

It's worth noting that in China, where the whole country is on a single timezone (which is roughly solar time in the eastern part, but far from it in the western part), places in the west simply have a different notion of time.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82283]

> another reason is that generally driving conditions are worse in the morning than they are in the evening

Wait, why? Where? I've never heard this. Which driving conditions are you talking about? Rain? Snow?

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 71855]

Haaa! I also paused reading at “as a kid.”

I bought the 1st Gen iPad for my daughter while I was in the States for work (2010). Not a phone, big enough, and can be Internet-connected with a SIM. Lots of Games, and later my feeling of having bought something amazing was that my daughter learnt to speak brilliant English with Peppa Pig, way before her formal school started.

Palo Alto Stanford Shopping (USA) › FedEx to a Relative in Maine (USA) traveling to Manipur (India) › he trimmed a local SIM to fit the Nano-SIM tray › Happy Daughter on her 2nd Birthday.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77829]

Oh, this is really interesting to me. This is what I worked on at Amazon Alexa (and have patents on).

An interesting fact I learned at the time: The median delay between human speakers during a conversation is 0ms (zero). In other words, in many cases, the listener starts speaking before the speaker is done. You've probably experienced this, and you talk about how you "finish each other's sentences".

It's because your brain is predicting what they will say while they speak, and processing an answer at the same time. It's also why when they say what you didn't expect, you say, "what?" and then answer half a second later, when your brain corrects.

Fact 2: Humans expect a delay on their voice assistants, for two reasons. One reason is because they know it's a computer that has to think. And secondly, cell phones. Cell phones have a built in delay that breaks human to human speech, and your brain thinks of a voice assistant like a cell phone.

Fact 3: Almost no response from Alexa is under 500ms. Even the ones that are served locally, like "what time is it".

Semantic end-of-turn is the key here. It's something we were working on years ago, but didn't have the compute power to do it. So at least back then, end-of-turn was just 300ms of silence.

This is pretty awesome. It's been a few years since I worked on Alexa (and everything I wrote has been talked about publicly). But I do wonder if they've made progress on semantic detection of end-of-turn.

Edit: Oh yeah, you are totally right about geography too. That was a huge unlock for Alexa. Getting the processing closer to the user.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80497]

"Most employers" definitely don't allow flexible working hours. You have to be in specific sectors – basically just "modern" tech companies – to have that privilege. And that is a very tiny slice of the working population.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]
rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125813]

Holy crap, 32MB of SRAM on the chip for AI.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82283]

Don you carry a cell phone? Do you walk into rooms where other people have smartphones with Siri or Google Assistant? Those are literally no different from Alexa.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82283]

They definitely do. But in my experience they "accumulate".

Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows.

So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have migrated their data across three MacBooks over ten years are encountering problems left and right.

I reinstalled Sequoia fresh last year because some mystery process would slowly consume 50GB of disk space over the course of every two weeks, no disk utility could locate any file responsible, but restarting reset it. But with the fresh reinstall, everything started working fine again. It's annoying. Then I upgraded to Tahoe and zero problems. But I'm sure they'll gradually start appearing over the next year or two.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

As does Smalltalk and Erlang, and to make things more interesting, all three mean something not exactly the same.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91217]

It sounds like you think govulncheck can analyze your code and detect vulnerabilities that you wrote in your code. That's not what it does. It analyzes the libraries that you use and determines if you are using them in a vulnerable way. For a free tool, govulncheck is somewhat nicer than average in its class because it does call flow analysis and won't claim you're vulnerable just because you used a module, you have to actually have a call that could go over the vulnerable code, but "somewhat nicer than average" is as far as I would take it. But many languages have similar tools, and when you say "static analyzer" this isn't what I have in mind. For that I'd cite golangci-lint, which is a collection of community-built analysis tools, and it's nice to be able to pick them all up in one fell swoop, but they're nothing like Coverity or any real static analysis tool.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80497]

I'm happy for the existence of the e line mainly because it forces them to bump up the specs on the base iPhone. 17 is so good now that there's very little reason to get the 17 Pro.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90318]

>Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.*

Nonsens. The iPad is basically a 11 to 13 (Pro) monitor+computer with an amazing touch screen. Adding the official keyboard folio, or any bluetooth keyboard/mourse is trivial, and it makes for an excellent on-the-go machine. Not different to the 12-inch MacBook (circa 2015) and the older fan favorite 12-inch PowerBook G4 (circa 2003), and I know several devs who swore by them. Linus used and loved one of the latter (with PPC Linux on in his case).

The only issue is the lack of OS level support for some stuff, not the form factor.

Admins, devs working mostly on the Cloud, photographers, and writers already use it for "getting work done", I've seen execs too.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105298]

I'd argue that people can put words together to make new meanings or coin new words when they have to. The real magic of language is not "we have words for everything" but we have grammar.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159905]

"Today, Motorola also introduced Moto Analytics, an enterprise‑grade analytics platform designed to give IT administrators real‑time visibility into device performance across their fleet."

So they put in a back door for business users?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

I made a secure one:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

Everything runs in containers (I run it on a server along with everything else), plugins have a permission system so eg the AI can read emails but not delete or send, etc.

I really like it, I run it as my main agent and it has been extremely helpful.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127438]

> If you had a 386DX then I believe you had the math copro? The 386SX did not have an FPU and needed the additional 387SX.

The 386DX/386SX distinction was the external databus (32-bit on the DX, 16-bit on the SX)

DX was “Double word eXternal", SX was “Single word eXternal”. Neither had an FPU builtin, and there were corresponding 387DX and 387SX coprocessors.

Then Intel used the same naming split (despite the abbreviations not applying) for high-end vs low-end of the 486 where the DX had a builtin FPU and the SX required a “487SX coprocessor” to get an FPU (which IIRC was internally just a 486DX processor which went into a separate “coprocessor slot” which just bypassed the “main” processor when populated.)

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79044]

Germany didn't have patent laws in the 1800s. Their economy rapidly industrialized and boomed.

I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things better if they couldn't patent it?

Note that Tesla open sources its patents.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

Ideally Apple would finally do their Surface/2-1 with iPads, but Apple being Apple, rather sell an overpowered tablet, and a Mac laptop to go alongside with it

Some places even do a bundle "discount".

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127438]

> Cops can't move vehicles that they don't own because of liability. The only way for them to move a vehicle without liability is to use a tow truck.

While the precise boundaries of liability depend on the laws of the particular jurisdiction (they aren't consistent across the whole US) police generally can take reasonable action to move vehicles obstructing the road in an emergency without liability for any damages incurred, whether or not they use a tow truck to do it.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82283]

People take tons of photos and videos on their phones. Download 40 GB of music and podcasts on Spotify. Keep 50 GB of videos in their messages. All at once.

iPads usually aren't used as much for these things. They're used for browsing, streaming, gaming, reading... mostly things that don't take up nearly as much space.

It's not spite, just matching device capabilities to user needs without unnecessary upgrades that will lead to a higher price point.

I use tons of storage on my phone. Not much on my iPad. Pretty much just downloading TV shows before a flight, but 128 GB gives you plenty of hours of that.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127438]

> There is a legally protected right of publicity.

There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected.

There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

Cooling growth and expectations are allowing folks to have improved quality of life at an earlier age, which seems like an objective win versus grinding during the best years of your life for an unknown positive EV. Of course, China having built enough housing for everyone and related infrastructure during their boom years enabled this.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417152]

Where did you hear that? The IRGC is the creation of the revolutionary clerical movement. It exists specifically to prevent outcomes like Egypt, where a powerful national armed service operates as a check on political Islam.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177173]

As an outsider, why is this a credible institution over the jury and judge?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107015]

It’s only illegal if they don’t get away with it. Most get away with it in corporate America. If bad actors are going to push the bounds of the legal framework, good actors should as well when the rules don’t matter. Rule of “Fuck you make me.” To improve odds of success, one could operate from a position of being judgement proof, organizing corporate and legal entities accordingly from a charging perspective. Laws are not objective, it’s all interpretative dance. Know how to dance for the performance you choose to participate in.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125813]

The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.

The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.

The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239352]

> Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB

That's one way to drive sales for higher priced SSDs in Apple products. I'm pretty sure that that sort of move shows up as a real blip on Apple's books.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239352]

Unlike oil companies who would of course never do such a thing.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127438]

> It's not hard to imagine a small capable model that can boot strap itself into running on consumer hardware and stolen cloud resources being problematic on the net spreading its gremlin like behavior wherever it could.

If you understand what a model is and how you need separate traditional software to run it and turn is output from tokens into text and then (often in a separate piece of software) from text into interactions with the user or other i/o functionalities of the bost computer, it becomes harder to imagine a scenario where that is a problem primarily with an open model and not with the traditional software making up an open agentic framework (an OpenClaw successor is the threat here, not a Llama successor.)

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89486]

Rough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99787]

How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator?

I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them.

I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105298]

I worked at a startup where it was a running gag that we had an "all hands" every two weeks and somebody put their hands up and said that they couldn't find documents in the places we kept them and suggested the answer was adding a new place to store files -- somehow we never got insight into a group about this.

There are two sensible answers to this problem:

(1) Treat it as a wetware problem, that is, if people are well organized in a team they are going to figure out what their business process is and stick with it regardless of what tools you use.

(2) Treat it as a technology problem. The obvious thing here is some kind of system which can not only search over a large number of "documents" (e.g. a message on Slack is a tiny document) but understand the relationships between the documents.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 88598]

I don't know. It is in my area (according to some gardener friends).

https://support.getchipdrop.com/article/35-is-chipdrop-activ... is one of the FAQs.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177173]

What are the tangle consequences of losing status? Medical tests before travel? New visa requirements?

(Separately, if America’s states were each countries, who would and wouldn’t be losing status?)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]

Because fanbois don't want to wait another year for M5?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239352]

Speed cameras are a source of income, they are not for enforcement or safety.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103679]
pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

Additionally, the HPC folks are looking into Chapel, which also has a mixed mode approach to memory management, similar to Swift with memory ownership, than either C++ as it has always been, or looking into Rust.

Turns out a little bit of ergonomics actually matter.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

Constructors and destructors can have function level try-catch blocks.

Yes the syntax could have been much better.

As proven by ongoing work done by Khalil Estell, in some embedded scenarios exceptions aren't that great only due to quality of implementation, someone added the support and call it done, no effort at all to improve it.

Even Ada's Ravenscar profile does allow for exceptions in high integrity computing scenarios, in embedded systems.

Well I for one, if that would mean less "C programming with C++ compiler" that still plagues the security history to this day, great they can keep using C for that.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105298]

It's not the future — it's the past!

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125813]

It’s protectionism. These lab positions are basically like residencies. They are government paid research spots that enable people to do government funded work in furtherance of their PhD. Why should American taxpayers basically be paying for foreign nationals to complete their PhDs?

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106769]

A significant portion of the WW2 scientists were refugees from _before_ the US joined the war but after persecution had started. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/scientist-refugees-and-manhatt...

(later notable entry: Andy Grove, Intel CEO, was born Andreas Grov:

"By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them")

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125813]

Yeah, Epstein (like a lot of people) was obsessed with Trump, who was the President at the time. But what’s the smoking gun? It seems like if there was one that would be your lede.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239352]

The Mondrian estate... don't get me started on that one.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90318]

>Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

To what?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

I made something to help me with this exact process:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/

I usually forget what steps I've taken, but using the recorder above, I can dictate short clips of the steps. An LLM assistant I've built takes the clips and adds them to my Joplin, which then gets published:

https://notes.stavros.io/

It's been extremely helpful for keeping logs.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90318]

>If this translates to longer device retention (if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care. $200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit

Would it? Most people, including in the developing countries, like changing phones. It's one of the small consumerist joys they get, plus they show the Joneses that they can keep up.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90318]

No one who doesn't waste their time doesn't.

But what if they find willing stupid audiences?

After all people read Buzzfeed and other such crap, or all the older pre-AI human made self-help, outrage, gossip slop.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239352]

A Velomobile is not a socially acceptable vehicle, it is very fast compared to a normal bike but still limited to bike infrastructure and other cyclists absolutely hate them. Yes, they solve the leg suck problem and if all of the cars would be gone and you could use the roads then that would be a great solution.

I lived right next door to the guys that developed it and in the Groningen country side you could see them zoom by with some regularity. But where I live now I think I've seen exactly one in five years and that was after it had bowled into a mom on a cargo bike... the stigma roughly identical to driving a Canta on the bike path.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239352]

They are magical! A radio powered by the transmitter, it's an incredible thing, really. The trick is that the diode is a very low forward drop one, typically Germanium, which has only 0.2V forward drop. But for more magic, you can also use a razor blade or a little bit of lead and then seek for naturally occurring diodes on the surface of the material. These can be even more sensitive than the Germanium ones.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76027]

If it's been trying to get passed for years and hasn't yet, I think it's fair to say the EU very much doesn't want.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.

I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.

That Burning Memo was really a downer.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106769]

> Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code

Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple.

Ironically one of the things that the Quake engine relies on is clever culling. Like Doom, the level is stored in a pre-computed binary space partition tree so that the engine can uniquely determine from what volume you're in what the set of possibly visible quads is (if my memory is correct, oddly the engine uses quads rather than triangles) AND how to draw them in reverse order using painter's algorithm, because the software renderer doesn't have a z-buffer.

https://www.fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/quakeSourceRendit...

The BSP partitioning used to take several minutes to run back in the day.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Carmack used a few, clever, high-impact techniques to achieve effects, which were also "imperfect but good enough".

If you're not Carmack, don't over-optimize until you've run a profiler.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172649]

ty, I made a pull request: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/pull/111

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106769]

This does remind me of the brief period after the TikTok annexation where people moved to Xiaohongshu (RedNote) .. for about three days.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106769]

All the agentic AI projects remind me of "draw the rest of the owl": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl - there's a lot of steps missing.

Unlike many people, I'm on the trailing edge of this. Company is conservative about AI (still concerned about the three different aspects of IP risk) and we've found it not very good at embedded firmware. I'm also in the set of people who've been negatively polarized by the hype. I might be willing to give it another go, but what I don't see from the impressive Show HN projects (e.g. the WINE clone from last week) is .. how do you get those results?

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126529]

Yeah, and as you well put it, it isn't even some snowflake feature only possible in C.

The myth that it was a gift from Gods doing stuff nothing else can make it, persists.

And even on the languages that don't, it isn't if as a tiny Assembly thunk is the end of the world to write, but apparently at a sign of a plain mov people run to the hills nowadays.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79044]

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: 75589]

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: 77829]

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: 127438]

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.)

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125813]

It would be an afrocentric trope because it’s Europeans that have the most neanderthal genes.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99018]

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: 82283]

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: 82283]

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: 89486]

> 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.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89486]

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

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82283]

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: 103679]
doener ranked #42 [karma: 80387]

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: 88171]

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: 88171]

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