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.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90194]

Japan apparently likes to attract a couple of nukes every 60-70 years

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105141]

I think it’s not unusual that reader-writer locks, even if well implemented, get in places where there are so many readers stacked up that writers never get to get a turn or 1 writer winds up holding up N readers which is not so scalable as you increase N.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

The big problem, and I say this as someone that appreciates some of the Microsoft technologies, is that it is always first and foremost about Office, and nothing else.

Forgotten are Windows, XBox, DirectX, VC++, C#, F#, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, Azure, Teams, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics,....

Ah but some of those are FOSS, they are, pity that most money and project steering only flows from one place.

Repeat the same listing exercise for every US big tech company and their influence on the computing industry at large, and possible geopolitcs, that is how we end up with HarmonyOS NEXT with ArkTS.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

> I led the national security business at Palantir

> group of individuals who deeply value privacy

.. do you see the problem here?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

> There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation

The threat isn't HAL, but ICE. Not AI as some sort of unique evil, but as a force multiplier for extremely human - indeed, popular - forms of evil. I'm sure someone will import the Chinese idea of the ethnicity-identifying security camera, for example.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

They thought it would work, and it did?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

Halfway between Waze and Waymo, I guess.

It's interesting to see the ""legacy"" car makers finally deciding to go for this. ADAS now being mandatory pushes everyone towards gradually enhancing it until the point of true (no human monitoring) self driving arrives.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113340]

Right. But we're at stage 2 now.

Stage 1, the SOTA LLMs of current top vendors, started with general feel-good alignment and ideology that's compatible with progressive western sensibilities (so quite neutral, even if not completely), and gradually adjusted to address issues that could generate bad press and hurt revenue.

Now that these are established, anything new - such as, but not limited to, those "national" LLM projects popping up around the world - need to differentiate themselves from the incumbents - and that implies more bias and ideology, since you can hardly have less bias and ideology than what Stage 1 LLMs have.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

The single most valuable part of science is keeping the gates: not adding things to the corpus of scientific knowledge unless they can be properly substantiated.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

Quite interesting, and arxiv seems to have some issues handling \texttt{find}.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

Yes, but it's a difficult equilibrium to reach. It's easy to ticket 100% of littering if not many people are doing it.

There is another side to this, which is that the police need to not hassle people who are not committing crime. Which is why you'd struggle to adopt this anywhere in America.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

I only know a tiny corner of the language, but for things like this I really wish they'd cite the original Japanese. Precisely because the haiku is a constrained form, it is also an opportunity for ambiguity, double-meaning, and cases where a word may be translated with the same semantics but different connotations.

By comparison, the gold standard for dealing with non-English poetry in English: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...

You have (1) the original Greek, (2) word-by-word lookup, (3) translation notes, and (4) multiple translations.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

I've never seen this with any other tech adoption. Normally companies are very reluctant to spend money on dev tools or components. Maybe reluctantly some of the Jetbrains suite. But in this case people are being ordered to use an expensive tool! e.g. in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148256

Similar to the tendency of other companies to cram in useless AI buttons for no other reason than to pump the stock. Like I have one in outlook, with two disclaimers "I can help—but I don’t currently have access to your whole inbox, only to the specific email thread you had open", and "AI answers may be incorrect". Or the Notepad one, complete with CVE.

It has much more the feeling of a management reorganization fad, like edicts of the form "we're all going to be agile now! Please submit your sprint planning for the next six months by Friday".

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90194]

It doesn't work precisely because people are using claude.

If it worked, there'd be no people using it.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90194]

>These files are harder for humans to read now. There's no getting around that. Compact notation is fast to parse programmatically but slower to scan with your eyes.

That's not a problem. You can have the full version for you, and "compress" programmatically the claude-bound version before claude reads it.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90194]

>I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines

There was a great article from like 20 years ago - it quoted Jobs too on that. I remember Forbes or something like that, maybe this "“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” — The New York Times (Jan 21, 2012)" (cant open it now)

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

Why should it?

"We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." -- Guy Steele

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159763]

Stripe is reportedly proposing to buy PayPal.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/paypal-stock-stripe-acquisit...

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159763]

A vibrator, not a rotating motor.

Interesting idea, but not all that useful. I was expecting a pancake motor, since those are mostly flat plates. Printed circuit pancake motors, where the windings are printed circuit traces, do exist. The 3D printer setup they have ought to be able to make most of the parts for such a motor.

Good bearings will be tough. Their structural material is PLA, which is not a good bearing material. Nylon might work, but at some point you need to smooth out the bearing surfaces. That may be why they chose to make a vibrator, with flexures rather than bearings.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

Another example how those company trainings about ethics are only HR compliancy and nothing else.

It isn't about the right answers, rather the expected answers.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77608]

I don’t blame anthropic here. The government literally threatened their existence publicly. They either agreed or their business would be nationalized.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159763]

> Now, suppose you order it from Amazon.

You do not order electronic parts from Amazon. You order them from Digi-Key or Mouser. They're organized to ship efficiently from a huge inventory of small parts, and they buy directly from manufacturers, so the supply chain is solid. If you order a Panasonic resistor, you will get a Panasonic resistor, not some random floor sweepings. (This does not apply to DigiKey's "marketplace", which is third party resellers. DigiKey does claim to monitor their resellers, and DigiKey, not the reseller, handles customer complaints.)

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88091]

Later models of the Optophone allowed speeds of up to 60 words per minute, though only some subjects are able to achieve this rate

Looking at the speeds with which people can communicate with Morse, I suspect that the skill of effectively turning your brain into a UART is something that improves with much practice.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

You aren't paid to write lines of code, you are paid to build, ship and maintain products and services, usually in a complex corporate setting with ambiguous and ever-changing requirements. Code is a very small part of the overall picture.

Why do you think in most technical organizations the higest ranking and highest paid engineers generally write the least amount of code (often none)?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239053]

Because it would first require one to acknowledge that they are no longer ahead. In some cultures this sort of thing is extremely difficult.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75514]

Previous discussion from 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966753

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 82199]

> I waited in line for at least 30 minutes just to make it to the lobby... Scanning was already slow, you had to wait to be approved. But once you passed the turnstile, there was another line for the elevators.

I'm baffled. I've worked in multiple buildings with turnstiles. There's never been a line. They take about a second to scan. Is this just some horrible broken implementation?

I get why they're used. They protect randos from walking in and stealing stuff. It's not about "feeling" secure. When you have someone make off with 10 laptops, it's actual security. And that's before you start worrying about more serious threats that come from plugging in USB keys...

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 82199]

> sued Amazon for prohibiting vendors that sold on its website from offering discounts outside of Amazon... to make sure that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price...

First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years.

Second, manufacturers get around it in a clever way. They always list their items on their own site at the same price as at Amazon... but then magically almost always seem to have a 20% or 25%-off sitewide coupon available, whether it's for first-time customers, or "spinning the wheel" that pops up, etc.

So I don't know how much this is really raising actual prices in the end.

Otherwise, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because pricing contracts are common on both ends. Manufacturers frequently only sell to retailers who promise they won't charge less than the MSRP, and large retailers similarly often require "most-favored-nation" pricing, so they can always claim they have the lowest prices. If you want to end these practices, then it's only fair to have a law prohibiting it across the board, rather than singling out Amazon.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239053]

That's the wealthy outlook: solve climate change and that pesky employment issue with those oh so annoying plebs in one smooth go.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 82199]

That jumped out at me too... I'm not sure if they have different hyphenation properties set though, or if the greedy justified version just doesn't wind up hyphenating anywhere in this particular case?

Unfortunately there's no live HTML demo to inspect, just the images.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75514]

Supply chain risk is a very specific designation, meaning not only would Anthropic lose Pentagon contracts, but no other company with Pentagon contracts would be allowed to use them either. It would have the effect of being a near industry-wide blackballing of Anthropic given all the major companies that have contracts with the DoD.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

You don't need collusion, just the VC money drying up. Economic reality will set the base price.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

The fact that California is pushing this gives me some hope.

Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103475]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159763]

The concept of measuring how much ink appears as the text passes a vertical slot came back again in the 1950s. MICR codes, the numbers that appear on checks, are read that way. [1] Or at least were in the original implementation. The ink was magnetized and the paper went past a one-track magnetic tape head. The waveform for each symbol is unique. The recognizer is more like a bar code reader than an OCR system.

There are only 14 characters in that font - the digits 0-9 and four special field identification symbols. The 1970s "futuristic" text fonts which look like MICR symbols are purely decorative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...

walterbell ranked #30 [karma: 97067]

> run on your own gear

Where does that fall within the range of Mac Studio, Nvidia 4090, H100?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113340]

Important thing to remember is that "new opportunities", whatever they are, are neither for you nor your children to partake - they're for the people just entering the workforce. Those whose careers suddenly disappear, as well as their families and children, are too busy dealing with consequences of being suddenly thrown down a rung or three on the socioeconomic ladder.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113340]

Common failure mode I've observed is people building a stateful harness for the LLM and then forgetting to tell the LLM about it. Leads to funny/disturbing results whenever the two "desync" in some way.

Example: a plan/act division, with the harness keeping state of which mode is active, and while in "plan mode", removing/disabling tools that can write data. Cue a mishandled timeout or an UI bug that prevents switching to "act mode", and suddenly the agent is spinning for 10 minutes questioning the nature of their reality, as the basic tools it needs to write code inexplicably ceased to exist, then opting for empirical experimentation and eventually figuring out a way to reimplement "search/replace" using shell calls or Python or whatever alternative wasn't properly sandboxed by the harness writers...

Part of this is just bugs in code, but what irks me is watching the LLM getting gaslighted or plain confused by rules of reality changing underneath it, all because the harness state wasn't made observable to the agent, or someone couldn't be arsed to have their error messages and security policies provide feedback to the LLM and not just the user.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

The federal government regulates interstate commerce. Apple and Google fit that definition. This is really no constitutional ambiguity here. Congress is 100% capable of acting if they wanted to.

walterbell ranked #30 [karma: 97067]

> I need to have the robotic arms

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/08/14/apple-moving-forw...

  [Apple is] working on a device that uses a robot arm to move around a display.. [that] can spin around and tilt thanks to various actuators.. device to be introduced by 2026 or 2027.. price tag of $1,000.. "several hundred people" working just on that device

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113340]

I call that "hidden inflation", and if I were to guess, the ongoing degradation of services across the board, in every aspect, can easily account for actual inflation figures being half of what it feels they should be.

It's the tiny things. Like, you visit a beauty salon or restaurant today, and compare it to the same or equivalent place 5 years ago. PDF menus instead of paper. Apps for booking instead of support staff. Leaflets where there used to be magazines to browse. No complimentary coffee. Kitchenware that used to be pristine and high-quality, is now the cheapest offering for commercial wholesaler. There's less light, worse decor, no music (or louder music, to boost turnover), worse sound-proofing, etc.

Sure, the prices are the same, or maybe little higher. But the overall quality of service - not just direct service, but whole experience and ambiance - took a nosedive, so you pay a little more, for much less.

You start looking for it, and the slow decay of everything becomes apparent even on the scale of months.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

I'm not saying it is totally untrue, but this is the same generic, hedged statement that every business and political leader has been repeating for a couple years now. Unless there's anything new or noteworthy added (and looking at the article there isn't) what is really worth discussing?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89155]

And would Israeli polling about Palestinians justify their deaths, too?

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

You think you'll get better long-term support from an experiment that a single engineer did in his spare time?

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99600]

At this point the AI labs would pretty much have to form an illegal price fixing cartel in order to jack the prices up, they've been competing to drive down prices for so long.

They'd have to get the Chinese AI labs to go along with that price fixing too.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113340]

OTOH the controlling way modern software behaves is an US artifact, so the differences are not necessarily clear-cut like this.

I grew up and live in Europe. I support the general idea of "regulation to make everyone safer" being an acceptable choice. At the same time, I vehemently oppose third-party interests reaching into my computing device and dictating what I can vs. cannot do with it.

But as you say, "global platforms with global impact and reach" - and so I can't set up my phone to conditionally read out text and voice messages aloud, because somewhere on the other side of the world, someone might get scammed into installing malware, therefore let's lock everything down and add remote attestation on top.

Unfortunately, the problem is political, not technological, and this here is but one facet of it. Ultimately, what SaaS does is give away all leverage: as users, it doesn't matter if we fully own the endpoints, or have a user-friendly vendor: any SaaS can ultimately decide not to serve a client that doesn't give the service a user-proof beachhead.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.

minimaxir ranked #47 [karma: 73720]

Are the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts or new accounts?

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125700]

Even if you hate the orange guy, there's something to be said for his approach of using threats to achieve results instead of carrots like tax breaks.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176835]

> or (c) the government won't use it

And coerce other defence contractors into not using it.

minimaxir ranked #47 [karma: 73720]

Apple has been taking about Apple Silicon's AI capabilities for the past few years, particularly around Apple Intelligence.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105141]

Whether or not people have a "right" to feel comfortable when you make them feel uncomfortable they vote for populists. See: the Netherlands.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176835]

> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement

I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]

Takeaways:

* CoreWeave Inc. is looking to raise about $8.5 billion from banks to help finance a buildout of cloud computing capacity for Meta Platforms Inc.

* The proposed loan would be backed by a contract Meta signed to pay CoreWeave up to $14.2 billion for its services, and a separate agreement valued at more than $5 billion.

* The loan is expected to close in March and would be supported by Meta's blue-chip profile, which is expected to result in an investment-grade rating and lower borrowing costs for CoreWeave.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98902]

You're right, but the consequences of different security failure are different, no?

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98902]

The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125700]

I love this comment:

"Btw, we rolled this out over 3 weeks ago and I think you're the first person to ask about it on HN. There was one earlier question by email. I think that qualifies as a splash-free dive."

I had no idea and I'm an HN addict!

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 82199]

> Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom.

So... no food and safety regulations, because life is not safe, and people should have the freedom to poison food with cheaper, lethal ingredients because their freedom matters more?

You're right that things can't be made more safe without taking away the freedom to harm people. Which is why even the most freedom-loving countries on earth strike a balance. They actually have tons and tons of safety regulations that save tons and tons of lives, even you from your point of view that means not "treating people as adults". You have to wear a seatbelt, even if you feel like you're not being treated like an adult. Because it's also not just your own life you're putting at risk, but your passengers' as well.

You're taking the most extreme libertarian stance possible. Thank goodness that's an extremely minority view, and that the vast, vast majority of voters do actually think safety is important.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417084]

OK. You seem pretty confident. Let's make it easy on you. Name a single police department in the United States from which you can present evidence from the past 10 years that they have an IQ or general cognitive cap on applicants.

Should be straightforward, since the root of this thread confidently asserts that police generally disqualify applicants based on high IQ.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

While great option, LispWorks and Allegro Common Lisp should not be overlooked, too many focus on SBCL + Emacs and then complain about Lisp tooling.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98902]

Axon interfered heavily with that process and -- after the legislative workgroup had well concluded and just a couple of hours before the Senate committee was to vote on it -- managed to neuter one of the key protections in the bill.

This is why I'm increasingly jaded with 'get involved with your local legislative process!' proponents. If you don't have the ability to lobby around the clock and make campaign or in-kind political donations (and know how to communicate your willingness to do that), then you're at a massive disadvantage. As well, the process itself is highly corruptible, eg altering the text of a bill just before a scheduled vote.

As a general matter, I'm increasingly disgusted with the prevalence of tactics like holding votes in the dead of night or in closed sessions. Politicians engage in a lot of tricks to evade scrutiny from their constituents, relying on the fact that once a piece of legislation is passed people might be angry but the politician can often get away with saying 'there was no other choice, we have to work within the process' or some similar empty truism.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185997]

I have to say I worry a bit when I see these circular bets designed to pump up share cost without fundamentally increasing underlying company value. I get subprime vibes every time this happens and it’s happening a lot with extremely large dollar numbers.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98902]

Yes, I was hoping for a system where Claude was informed it was communicating with an unusually intelligent dog whose ability to communicate was limited by dog anatomy, and that the AI would not to hold the dog's interest with its output.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176835]

And to be clear, there is a difference between America not being obligated to save lives and tearing away treatment once you’ve started providing it. DOGE did the latter, and some of the cases are horrific, experimental devices being left implanted in study participants.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185997]

South America as well, in particular with regard to the US. Too many coups and sponsorship of military dictatorships will do that.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172241]

nb: there is a SBCL release at end of every month: https://www.sbcl.org/all-news.html

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127316]

Wasn't it always an expectation, not a commitment?

If they didn't appropriately account for risk that the expectation would not pan out, well, that's on them.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

Unfortunately some things never change in war crimes, see Stalingrad.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

> OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280 billion

For context, that is more than the annual revenue of all but 3 tech companies in the world (Nvidia, Apple, Google), and about the same as Microsoft.

OpenAI meanwhile is projected to make $20 billion in 2026. So a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions.

Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

Tesla stock up 15% on the news, probably.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

Even if the cost of software is truly going down (which is debatable), what makes you think the savings will be passed down to you?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417084]

This is going to happen in a lot of places that aren't large enough to make news: people dumping Flock over bad publicity, and simply installing ALPR cameras from vendors smart enough not to get themselves embroiled in politics.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

That businesses will eventually care about quality.

As proven by offshoring, it is a race to the bottom, as long as software kind of works.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

Maybe because for us tea leaves fall under herbs, as general purpose description.

However the right wording is Chá, and it needs to be explicitly mentioned of what.

Chá preto - black tea

Chá de ervas - herbs tea

And so on.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]

Harder for activist investors to get into a private company than a public one imho. Keeps out those who would squeeze the business and bail, and potentially kick out the founders. With sufficient cashflow (which Stripe most certainly has), you can buy out existing investors without going public.

(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417084]

We don't care if people with $100MM make a bad bet on a tech company.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77608]

You can. It would just cost you so much in legal to not be worth it.

The reason it's worth it for these companies is because the number of zeroes involved. The legal costs are a rounding error for them.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105141]

There is the ideal of school and then there is school.

I was very 'school-shaped' if by school you mean I could sit quietly and read books and solve problems. More school-shaped than the other kids.

If by school you mean that bullies don't find you interesting, that nobody threatens to kill you, then I was not 'school-shaped' at all.

I was really excited to go to school on day one, within a year it tuned very bad and I wish, retrospectively, I'd had the courage to stay home.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105141]

Which introduces variables such as: "believes in righteous anger"

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105141]

When I am finding tasks hard to complete I fall back to paper lists. These are privileged relative to all the things that live on a screen and compete with all the things I need to deal with to get the tasks done that... also live on a screen.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]

The society you exist in, and are enabled to generate income from, is paid for via taxation.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126356]

This is why legislation matters, capitalism cannot sort out such misbehaviors when the public keeps giving money to the same bad actors.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239053]

Funny. We had a security guard that had memorized all the faces of the employees. If he knew you he'd buzz you through. If he didn't know you you'd have to be vouched for by someone that he did know or by showing your credentials. By day #3 he'd know you, and he also somehow knew when you were no longer with the company.

There never was a line and there were 1400 people in those buildings.

I never realized how incredibly that guy's contribution was but this story made it perfectly clear.

Also, I don't actually buy the story as related here. It would seem to me that within minutes of that queue building up the turnstiles + card system would be disabled because something clearly was not working.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105141]

Well... It is more that a traditional oil refinery has a BTX section

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(chemistry)

which produces an excess of chemicals in the process of improving the octane of gasoline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_reforming

and that is where you get monomers like styrene and Terephthalic acid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene

is another important petrochemical feedstock which can be made from natural gas or other forms of petroleum.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]

Related:

Exercise may relieve depression as effectively as antidepressants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541672 - January 2026

Exercise twice as effective as anti-depressants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39396047 - February 2024

Running from the Pain (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27306725 - May 2021

Running from the Pain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573009 - March 2018

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125700]

The court system is designed to optimize throughput at the expense of latency, against the background of a system where authority is vested in a relatively small number of presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed constitutional officers. About 350,000 civil cases and 65,000 criminal cases are filed every year, spread out across less than 700 district court judges.

To maximize throughput, proceedings are structured like batch processing systems. You submit work, it waits in the queue until the system gets to it, some intermediate decision is rendered, and then you submit some more work. For constitutional reasons, criminal cases cut in line, which can further increase the latency of civil cases. That means that, in a four-year case, the lawyers don't actually work on the case for four years straight. They do batches of work a couple of months at a time, and then work on other cases while waiting for the output.

Moreover, court case are, to a degree, inherently serial. Motions to dismiss--briefs that argue a case must be dismissed because its legally defective--must be filed before you start deposing witnesses or exchanging documents. You generally need to do depositions of witnesses after you've reviewed all the relevant documents. And all the fact gathering must be done before you file summary judgment motions--briefs that argue a case can be decided on the factual record without a trial.[1]

Part of the inherent delay is that the legal system is already an "exception path" in the ordinary course of business. A lot of time is spent waiting for people outside your organization who don't work for you. For example, when you're deposing a witness, they have work responsibilities, vacation plans, etc., and everyone has to work around that.

It's possible to structure cases where everything can be done in a year. That's what happens at the International Trade Commission, for example. Arbitration proceedings can also be structured like that.

[1] This also means that legal teams aren't very big. Massive corporate cases with billions of dollars on the line are handled with core teams of a dozen or so lawyers--with maybe another dozen or two parachuting in to help with specific phases like trial. Technology was squeezed out a lot of the parallelizable work. The days of 20 junior attorneys sitting in rooms reviewing boxes of paper documents are gone.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 88570]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 106623]

This is not relevant to LFP and sodium ion chemistries, which most of the industry is moving towards.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80126]

If they are ex-Stripe they are likely holding shares, and so yes they would personally profit from going public.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239053]

At scale, payment processors are amongst the most difficult things you could do because every two bit crook out there is going to try to scam you somehow.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185997]

It will be fun to watch the companies trying to migrate their COBOL systems...

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106661]

This is basically describing the Cayman Islands. Or, to lesser extents, UAE or Malta (e.g. https://taxjustice.net/2026/02/24/malta-the-eus-secret-tax-s...).

The problem with this warm Galt Gulch idea is that someone has to do the actual work, and if the top level government is just a corrupt sinecure designed to shield the corporation from actually paying taxes, then nothing works properly. Comfortable island living is also surprisingly expensive, you have to import everything.