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 #15 [karma: 129325]

This still happens in most European countries, kids go to school on their own, you see them all over the place on public transports, play with their friends somewhere back home and then are eventually back.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

Which was largely sponsored by Google, as they removed GCC from Android, and needed to have clang compile the Linux kernel.

For a long time only Android Linux kernel downstream supported it.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

Around 10-15 years ago you could get a completely stock Android from China with basically zero branding, fully unlocked and easily rootable, removable battery, expandable storage, dual DIMs, etc. at a great price. I have a few. Unfortunately many of those small honest OEMs appear to have disappeared, and the bigger ones left have turned scummy.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

No, it is forced upon me when SaaS vendors only support Next.js/React as official way to extend their product.

It is gotten weird after Vercel's take over development, with all the "use whatever", which is getting out of hand.

Also the whole functional spaghetti is bonkers.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

How much are you spending a day for the tokens to do that?

Ingest big project, comment on it gets expensive. I'm not sure how expensive.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

Most of this smart home stuff doesn't do much. Managing lights and entertainment just isn't that interesting. It doesn't cook or clean. Vacuum, maybe.

There's been generation after generation of lighting control. There was a 1950s/1960s thing of putting everything on relays with 24V control signals and panels full of rocker switches. There was x10 in the 1980s. There were "smart" light bulbs in the 2010s. It's just not all that useful.

I mentioned this a few years ago, after I came back from an "Internet of Things" meeting in Dogpatch, in San Francisco. The Samsung guy pitched a refrigerator with a tablet mounted in the door. It didn't really have any more functionality than a refrigerator plus a tablet, but cost more. I asked him why, and he told me because there's a fraction of the population that likes to show off their kitchens, and it would be marketed to them. There were a few other IoT things pitched, all forgettable.

What struck me at the time was that we were in a room that really needed intelligent control. It was an office/meeting space, about 5000 square feet, in an old industrial building. Openable windows looked out on the bay, and there was a manual system with a shaft with a chain fall and a rack and pinion system to open the windows. A similar mechanical setup controlled windows in an openable skylight. The room also had a modern HVAC system, ceiling fans, and lighting.

None of this was coordinated. What should have been happening was that, as people came in and the CO2 level went up, the bay side windows and skylight windows should have opened, to get the CO2 level down and cool the room a bit. As the sun set and the outside temperature dropped, the bay side windows should have mostly closed, the ceiling fans should have started in the upward direction, and the skylight windows should have stayed open, to prevent the room from cooling too much while keeping the CO2 level down. Lighting should have increased as darkness fell. As it got later, and people started to leave, the bay side windows could close completely and the fan RPMs could drop. When everybody left, as noticed by motion detectors, the system should have dimmed the lights and done a quick fresh air purge - skylights open, bay windows open, fans to max in the downward direction. Temperature would drop, but unless it went below 60F, no need to turn on heat on an empty room. Then everything seals up tight for the night. Very little energy consumption. Tomorrow is another day, and the room should continue to react to the people load.

But no. You rarely see that kind of control. Except in hotel function rooms. Hotels put in systems like that because they have big rooms with widely varying people load, and customers who complain if a conference room is stuffy or hot or cold. Hotels have significant HVAC costs, and it's worth it to have the HVAC systems adapt to room usage. Honeywell and Johnson Controls sell systems for this for commercial buildings. They have both inside and outside sensors, and can operate fans, dampers, and HVAC separately.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

Which gets even better by still using C.

Large majority of CVEs in the update are related to memory corruption, out of bounds and use after free.

Naturally the logic and wrong permissions ones would happen regardless of the language.

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 79816]

If you try too hard to prevent deaths, you wind up causing deaths.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

There's a discussion of "delayed bounds checking", but not "hoisted bounds checking", where bounds checking is done early. Consider

    let mut tab: [usize;100] = [0;100];
    ...
    for i in 0..101 {
        tab[i] = i;
    }
This must panic at i=100. Panic becomes inevitable at entry to the loop. Is the compiler entitled to generate a check that will panic at loop entry? The slides suggest that Rust does not hoist such checks, and, so, with nested loops, it has trouble getting checks out of the loop, which prevents vectorization.

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

It's interesting how all of the LLM tools seemed to default to React in 2024-2025, but this year I'm finding them much more likely to default to vanilla JS and HTML instead.

(Purely based on vibes, I do not have anything robust to back this up.)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

The decline of programming books removed a constraint on programming language complexity. At one point, the basic set of books for Java was six volumes. That's when language books broke down from sheer complexity. The combination of Google search and Stack Overflow allowed programming to become more complex than anyone could keep in their head. C++ bloated to the point that people who used to be C++ language lawyers couldn't keep up.

This follows a general trend. Areas which used to be bounded by the limits of the human mind stopped being bounded that way some time back. This first appeared in corporate structure. Through the 1970s or so, there was an upper limit on corporate complexity. Beyond some point, connectivity problems started to choke the organization. There were classic ways around this, mainly dividing companies into sub-companies with their own profit lines. "The Concept of the Corporation" by Peter Drucker describes how General Motors did that. GM was at the time a group of loosely connected car companies under one corporate roof.

A few companies figured out scaling early. Sears was famous for having developed the "Schedule System", which reduced fulfillment overhead from O(N * M) to O(N log M). This allowed Sears to run a giant ordering plant out of Chicago to serve the whole country. But many companies didn't scale well, and choked as they grew. Westinghouse is a classic example.

As computers came in, the scaling problems receded. Airlines got their reservation systems under control, and seat utilization went up. Logistics went from warehouses to fulfillment centers, with much shorter holding times in inventory. Chains no longer were limited in size - WalMart, McDonalds, and the big banks could expand to planetary scale. The giant corporate paper-pushing plants disappeared.

So did forced organizational simplicity. Companies had, at some level, to be simple. Otherwise they became unmanageable. As computerization proceeded, that constraint was relaxed.

Finance achieved previously unimaginable levels of complexity. Until the 1980s, most financial products were rather simple. Now, there's no limit, and the tail wags the dog. Futures markets are far bigger than the volume in the underlying commodity, and zero-sum activity dominates.

AI will accelerate this. There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage. This may not be productive but will be profitable for someone.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

The antecedent to The Running Man and The Hunger Games.

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 79816]

Should have had Pininfarina do the body. The best looking Ferraris are all Pininfarina.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

The classic phrase is "the heir and the spare".[1] That's why Prince Harry's bio was titled "Spare".

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

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 79816]

Could have just asked me. I've taken advantage of that in the bulk of my life.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

It's good to want things!

walterbell ranked #28 [karma: 97927]

Similarly, https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/24/los-gatos-netflix-headquar... (with trail photo)

> One place where you’d always find someone from Netflix: the Los Gatos Creek Trail, a paved walking path right behind the office. “We would take our one-on-one [meetings] by just walking out of the building, down to the river, up to the reservoir and back, chatting,” .. Among the people frequently seen on the trail.. was [Reed] Hastings himself. That walk-and-talk tradition is still alive: On a recent spring day, it took just a few minutes after arriving for two people to emerge from Netflix’s office complex to stroll alongside the water, deep in discussion.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

Accountants and software developers do not in fact share a fate. I know it doesn't feel that way when you're commenting on HN, but there are whole lucrative professions that do not care at all what happens in ours.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

What? Why do people do this? Let me sign in with my damn email address, like a normal person. Why do you have to assume I have a Google account?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

It's the same situation with Aya in Rust. It's sort of a "same language on the backend and the frontend" kind of deal, like with Javascript.

I agree though, I think it makes more sense just to write the C code. The hard part of eBPF isn't writing the code; it's getting it past the verifier.

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

If you are building an agent product like this data exfiltration should be the number one risk you are thinking about.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

Generalizing doesn't mean everybody or even most in the group. It means it's a common behavior in the group relative to other groups.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

Electricity. Eventually, it was everywhere, used by everybody, and a background to society. Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 76733]

I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power.

For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the time was both incredibly productive compared to what came before but it also required legions of humans to operate it. Ford didn't pay his workers more out of the goodness of his heart, but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them. In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option.

So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. But this is not a rhetorical question - I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184049]

> What are those blind Waymo users going to do when a car ends up stuck in a flooded roadway?

Same thing anyone should. Get help.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 76733]

I'll never understand it when people quote a primary source and then summarize it in a way that completely ignores the original quote.

Olah's quote (edit - originally misidentified this as Pope Leo's) makes a lot of sense to me. He is saying, accurately, that modern AI (i.e. primarily LLMs) is created as essentially a mashup of our own language, and they are still a bit of a black box (or at least a gray box) to even their creators.

I don't know how you get from that to "he's framing AI as some new and fascinating form of consciousness".

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190319]

People say this like it's a simple engineering problem.

No. By itself, a new hypersonic engine can't make 2-hour flights between Japan and the US a reality. We are not even close to being able to build an aircraft that can do that - we don't even have the materials for that. What seems "easier" (as in "less impossible") is a hypersonic glider design that enters a suborbital trajectory and does shuttle-like aerobraking while it glides to its destination, before reengaging propulsion prior to landing on an airstrip (because passenger planes need to be able to abort landings and do multiple attempts). Not sure how reverse thrust would work there - variable geometry rocket bells?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184049]

This attitude misses the realities of scale bottlenecks and sunk costs.

If we ignore climate externalities, it makes sense to build solar as fast as we can and also pump oil, preferably for export.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 99810]

99% of people have no idea what this means, but they do understand voting.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184049]

> No such mandates should take place at all

How do you propose doing age restrictions for social media?

These are broadly popular. (And the evidence supports them.) They are happening. So the question is how to do it best. The project for reversing the consensus isn’t worthless. But it’s a long-term project that will have to bear fruit after these restrictions go into effect, if ever.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]
zdw ranked #12 [karma: 149051]

Having been through an hiring cycle recently and prior to AI, the entire process has been pretty broken for a long time, but AI is definitely breaking it (and a whole lot of other things) in new and novel ways.

The only reliable and high quality signal is a positive referral, but those are gated by your personal network, which may not be well developed.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 126645]

> It always surprised me that this was not true in air and airplane wings were supposedly best when glossy.

I was an AE major and I don’t recall ever learning that airplane wings were best when perfectly smooth, even as a simplification in undergraduate courses. We were taught that drag is reduced by maintaining an attached laminar flow.

Airplane wings are glossy because they’re metal (or CFRP) and painted for durability and corrosion and UV resistance.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 126645]

Leveling up civilization and moving up the tech tree requires orders of magnitude more energy.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

That's the optimistic viewpoint. It assumes Something Will Be Done. It's unlikely that much will be done in the US over the next few years, because the government is deadlocked and not oriented towards solving problems.

The "AI" we have right now seems to be able to replace at least 20%-30% of white collar jobs. Maybe more as it improves. The layoffs are underway. Now and then I remember going to the Burger King in SF next to the cable car turntable at Market Street, and hearing some homeless people talking about the good old days when they were printers and Linotype operators. That was a good union job once. Now it's gone.

We know what Universal Basic Income looks like. It looks like this.[1] I used to take a bus past those housing projects. Warehousing useless people is not a good solution.

What country seems to be preparing to handle AI unemployment well? Is there any model to copy?

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

jedberg ranked #43 [karma: 78851]

This is already happening. Most companies are using AI screeners for hiring now. They reject qualified people all the time.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

When I've been an engineering manager my policy has always been that I can work on code but only if that code is not on the critical path to shipping something my team is responsible for.

That's because management is an interruption-driven position. You just can't guarantee you can get 2-4 hours of productive, uninterrupted time.

Which means you shouldn't take on engineering responsibilities which, if delayed, will hurt your team.

So I'd still build stuff but it would be internal tools, or exploratory prototypes, or stuff that was absolutely not linked to any deadlines.

As far as I can tell coding agents have changed this quite a bit: I know a lot of engineering managers who are getting back into code now because they can carve out 30 minutes, and 30 minutes is now enough time to get something useful done.

I still think most managers should stay off the critical path to production though, at most organizations.

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

> Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people.

I couldn't agree more. If you're using AI tools to produce worse software, faster, you should rethink how you are using them.

If we're not delivering better software with this stuff then what are we using it for?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

More surprising to me than the BPF VM itself is the optimizing compiler for it that lives in libpcap.

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

I'd be interested to know if this is about individual employee AI usage, or use of AI tokens in production features, or both - and assuming both, what the split is.

I can see how Uber could burn unbelievable amounts of tokens if they start running internal features that run a bunch of prompts against every completed ride, or every customer profile, for example.

Or maybe this is about employee usage, but they introduced some stupid "you get evaluated on how many tokens you used" thing a couple of months ago when that was trendy and are just beginning to notice how much that cost?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

What "cloud memory costs"? Most Rust code is an informally-specified version of the old Python reference-counting GC. That's how you're supposed to write it, with clone() everywhere, and then dropping down to optimize. You can do the same thing with Go in the other direction by writing an allocator.

People believe a lot of weird things about these languages.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107970]

SSDs are vulnerable to bit rot. I recommend multiple copies on spinning disk at a minimum. For photos of historical family significance, consider uploading to familysearch.org as part of a family tree; this system is maintained by the LDS Church (Mormons) with a billion dollar trust contributing to their technology apparatus. Their longevity is likely longer than personal systems. M-DISC sounds reasonable for the use case but there is some concern about media authenticity [1] [2]; ensure you keep extra drives in inventory and have a media verification schedule. LTO tape might be better if you can find a used tape drive at a reasonable price [3].

I maintain a Dropbox account, Apple Shared Albums, and a private Peertube instance for sharing this media. Instructions for care and feeding are part of my death package for the next custodian to continue operations. Remember you’ll have to hand this off to someone in the future for archive continuity.

I cannot speak to scanning, I outsourced this due to volume; CharterOak Digital out of Stonington, Connecticut is a vendor I can recommend, as well as ScanCafe [ScanDigital now] out of Carmel, Indiana; no affiliation with either. Do not destroy or dispose of the original media or artifacts post digitization if at all possible; keep those stored somewhere safe as physical backups of last resort. This is how the Internet Archive operates, and so I believe it to be a best practice.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239553

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/HardwareLoan/comments/eoeuax/lto_ta...

Additional potentially useful resources:

https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/publications/managing-...

https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/archi...

https://files.archivists.org/groups/museum/standards/4.%20Ar...

steveklabnik ranked #29 [karma: 97478]

There is no downvoting on posts, only flags.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190319]

A this point I believe the only laws being respected are the laws of physics, and even then, it's not by choice.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]
stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

The solution to the lack of jobs should be a strong social safety net, but Americans don't want this because socialism, so what can you do? You can't really halt progress, and taxing the rich (or corporations) is very unpalatable there, so everyone is kind of stuck.

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 79816]

Yes, when I implemented ImportC (a C compiler built in to the D compiler), I had to spend a lot of time finding ways to work with all the nutburger nonsense in the various .h files.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/druntime/src/import...

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/blob/master/druntime/src/__impo...

mooreds ranked #33 [karma: 91543]
pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110321]

The results are kind of weird, but it does have one advantage: either nobody bothers to DMCA them, or they ignore it, or both.

mooreds ranked #33 [karma: 91543]

Haha, tells you something about the NPM ecosystem that rather than sharing the year something was published (typical for HN) I should reference the exact date.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190319]

I liked the previous Pope better, but I can't say this one is wrong about this.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 421036]

I brought up nmap. You said you'd expect respected SOC2 auditors to reject it. I don't just think that's not true, I know it not to be true.

thunderbong ranked #18 [karma: 117044]

Very well said. And I'm in the same camp. I've very rarely had someone with whom I could interact, bounce off ideas, brainstorm regarding the nitty gritty of code. Most of the time, I've had to dig through books, online articles and create my own mental framework of how things work.

And this has held me up in good stead.

Now with AI, I've found a tool from which I can learn, show me the right way to do things, and explain in detail what has been done. I can ask questions, point out mistakes, go back and forth on different implementations and at the end of it, come out a better programmer.

As many commentators have mentioned, AI means different things to different people. For me, it has been empowering, enlightening, and humbling.

There have always been so many things to learn, but never enough time. Now, it doesn't quite feel that way.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107970]

The bond market will only accept this up to a point.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190319]

For a moment I thought they were referring to the Scottish Highlands, but I guess the name fell in disuse when the Roman Empire fell...

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

>and yet we all function well

Sure...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-rem...

>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.

Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190319]

Being for quantum computing, the answer is both yes and no. You need to collapse the wave function to pick one.

mooreds ranked #33 [karma: 91543]
bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]
bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]

>The person I paid for it (blog owner) was surprised that I found it. They thought that they had removed it from their blog and asked me how I got to it so it could be removed.

I would have been flattered someone liked it enough to pay for it rather than removing it.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]
tosh ranked #8 [karma: 176704]

afaiu DuckDB doesn't do delta of delta for timestamps

but it can do delta and bitpacking which is also kinda neat

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

I wondered if that was the Pope's way of throwing shade at Palantir and Peter Thiel.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 190319]

Terminal needs a proper font: take mine: https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font .

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

Already covered by JSDoc, closure, and Babel before Typescript came to be.

Java IDEs were taking advantage of them for web development workflows, before VSCode came to be.

Also VSCode main architect is one of the Eclipse original architects.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

Can't think for yourself reading DevBlogs and Github issues?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

Nah, a comment about a point of view, naturally doesn't land with AI bros.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]
simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

Show me same examples of a leaked system prompt that came out different ever time and I'll concede that system prompt leaks are likely junk.

My experience has been the opposite: the way you confirm a system prompts leaks leak is to try it several times and check that you get the same result, and I've seen that done many times over the past few years.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 129325]

Just like plenty of other programming languages.

I am also tired that language extensions in C to work around ISO defencies is considered an advantage when argued by C folks, while at the same time it is considered a language design fault when the same crowd points to other programming languages.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

>“What issue did you run into with the Rust rewrite? If there’s something specific I’ll fix”

Besides, he doesn't mean he'll fix. He means "I'll let our AI vibe code a fix". We'd rather talk to the AI directly at this point, what exact value he adds?

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

>Plenty of theoretical CS is study of things like algorithms, which looks more like math proofs than code

Even those are just going to be outsourced to AI by the "students"

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110321]

Windows Phone let you do this with Continuum ten years ago: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/14/conti...

Like the rest of the WP ecosystem, never really took off enough.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

Yeah, I don't know how they expect the people of Latin America to read this.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

Same for me, and I'm Greek. It just sounds like it's intended to offend (even though I know you can't offend machines (yet?)), and it just gives me a negative feeling.

TeMPOraL ranked #19 [karma: 114364]

(I'm not a Catholic though most people around me are.)

I have a similar perspective. Plus, I'll be frank: in the last few years, these occasional keynote publications from Vaticans are pretty much the most sane, deep, balanced and humane perspectives on AI anyone is writing. Reading this is a better use of one's time than reading the current batch of "tech thought leaders" articles or HBRs or Gartner magic square updates.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

They specifically said "one degree Fahrenheit", so the GP's question was "why does going from 30 F to 31 F take a different amount of energy than going from 20 F to 21 F?".

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110321]

All regular expressions are deterministic final automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_automaton (finally, a use for my CS course); the extent to which that counts as a virtual machine varies. Some of the regex syntaxes extend it in ways which don't fit in a DFA and do count as a VM; Perl-compatible RE used to be popular (e.g. in Exim).

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

They have a direct link to buy from AliExpress

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

>I would argue that there is zero guarantees that LLMs are backwards compatible and that the markdown you wrote now will work just as fine in 1,2,3 years

That this would be the case is even more guaranteed than some programming language being backwards compatible and the code we wrote working just as fine in 1,2,3, years.

Languages do get non-backwards compatible changes, dependencies break, stuff is deprecated, etc.

But the job of LLMs will remain to generate something from a prompt, and the markdown we wrote, as it's high level and not tied to language versions, APIs, and implementation details, will be just as good a prompt for that in 2050 as it is in 2026.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 110321]

Humans have definitely had some understanding of selective breeding for a long time, but only partial understanding of recessive genes and the risks of inbreeding (almost all societies have incest taboos, but that didn't stop the Habsburg lip).

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

I have the same trackball, and did end up having to change the switches after a year. They need changing again, I should stock up on them in the hopes of having something that works for a while.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91330]

That Apple serves as a "Veblen goods" lifestyle brand is well established. Your amusement is what's weird.

Of course people show off their iPhone. It's a big reason of owing one, it's also a big reason behind slight/major redesigns (people are able to show they have the latest model).

Perhaps you take "show off" literally, like someone going "hey, look, I have an expensive phone"?

It's way more subtle than that, only someone totally crash would do it that way. It's done the same way people buy expensive sneakers and clothes, or how people buy Teslas (or used to) and similar stuff. As a consumer identity that signals you afford a higher cost lifestyle.

TeMPOraL ranked #19 [karma: 114364]

> yet the trade off seems to be clear and a lot of people are just ignoring it.

There's plenty of focus on the negative side of the tradeoff. Less so on why we're making it anyway, or why it somehow works out even if "this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language".

And the answer to that can be condensed to a one-liner, which I quote after[0]:

  sizeof(docs) << sizeof(code)
--

[0] - https://drensin.medium.com/elephants-goldfish-and-the-new-go... - article may be a bit fluffy here and there, but that one line was a big insight for me.

simonw ranked #26 [karma: 106052]

I've chosen to define "agency" as pretty much "the thing that humans can do and agents can't". To me, agency is the thing where you independently decide what it is you want to get done in the world, based on your own inherent goals.

Being able to say "the one thing agents don't have is agency" is a really useful way to help people understand why people still matter.

Setting software agents loose on the world to make their own top-level decisions about what they're going to do is a great way to infuriate Rob Pike https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ or unfairly attack the reputation of Scott Shambaugh https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... or waste the time of your local police permit office and suppliers https://andonlabs.com/blog/ai-cafe-stockholm

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

WTF, Intel? This is reminding me of a very similar bug from 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14630183

Clearly Intel needs to do far more extensive regression-testing, with things like demoscene productions --- especially the extremely size-optimised ones that can exercise the edge-cases much better than the usual "compiler slop".

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

Drivers may be a fun thing to get working depending on the OS, but that's just a software problem

Android USB tethering uses the RNDIS standard, which I believe goes back to the Windows 95 era, so there's certainly no shortage of driver support.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127874]

“Unforeseen consequences” in the same way death of the target is when someone aims a loaded gun at their head and pulls the trigger.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184049]

> Imagine how people in less lucrative occupations feel

To be fair, SWEs are facing a unique concentration of employment and wage-growth headwinds at the median.

steveklabnik ranked #29 [karma: 97478]

jj allows your commits to stay in a conflicted state until you choose to resolve them. I wrote about this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47767292

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 184049]

To be fair, there is a lot of acquisition capital looking for plays to throw at a wall and see if it sticks. The set of start-ups explicitly built as features, not standalone products, has always legitimately been non-zero. And when you get concentrations of acquisition capital, like we have now among the AI majors, you’ll see preference for that—versus the traditional product mode-of start-up.

Building a proper product is still good advice. But if you think you can slip that and flip a feature into a quick sale, that’s a higher ROI.

bookofjoe ranked #25 [karma: 107022]
stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

Here are my stats (from DeepSeek directly, with a script I wrote). The prices are what equivalent Sonnet usage would have cost, the actual amount I paid was $10. On performance, DeepSeek V4 Pro is comparable to Sonnet for me.

     ./cost.py amount-2026-5.csv 0.3 3.75 15
    input_cache_hit_tokens: 472,971,520 tokens -> $141.8915
    input_cache_miss_tokens: 13,299,013 tokens -> $49.8713
    output_tokens: 3,334,962 tokens -> $50.0244
    cache hit rate: 97.27% (472,971,520/486,270,533)
    cache miss rate: 2.73% (13,299,013/486,270,533)
    total: $241.7872
All of this usage was with an OpenCode subagent exclusively.

stavros ranked #44 [karma: 77707]

But, if there exist poorer countries, why is there a five-day work week instead of a seven-day one? Why aren't we all just working 24/7?

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

Port it to 64-bit, obviously; the NT kernel has already been ported to a few non-x86 architectures.

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

9 orders of magnitude difference!

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162795]

> It kept on saying that the "burn rate" wasn't progressing and "we" should refocus our efforts somewhere else.

It sounds like a boss. How soon will it be?

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 89602]

The legalese is thick but this is a notable point I saw from a quick skim:

5.3.2 "Passcodes or other means of access may not be utilized to access information that is only stored remotely."