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.
Billions of dollars of marketing have been spent to enable them to believe that, in order to justify the trillions of investment. Why would you invest a trillion dollars in a machine that occasionally randomly gave wrong answers?
Only because with Google open sourcing Kubernetes, it was a decision on still be able to play the game, or be left completely out, helping with OCI was a survival decision.
As proven later when Kubernetes became container runtime agnostic.
I've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind", inspired by that Jobs quote.
- some bicycle purists consider electric bicycles to be "cheating"
- you get less exercise from an electric bicycle
- they can get you places really effectively!
- if you don't know how to ride a bicycle an electric bicycle is going to quickly lead you to an accident
In multiplayer Beat Saber I think about pacing: if I want to slice harder to get the last 5% of points depending on how close the game is. No sense wearing myself out to beat somebody by 345k points instead of 335k or rather get beat by 28k instead of 37k.
I hear people report the opposite.
The sloppier a web app is, the more CSS frameworks are fighting for control of every pixel, and simply deleting 500,000 files to clear out your node_modules brings Windows to its knees.
On the other hand, anything you can fit in a small AVR-8 isn't very big.
Whatever you do, your mileage may vary.
You are so eager to reply that you haven't even read the whole comment.
> So normal people have stores with other people that they can talk to when they have problems, or just drag their computer into the store.
Which of those online stores have a physical address for the normal people to do as per my comment?
Linux forums have enough complaints about those fairly prominent Linux-only vendors, even though they are suppose to control the whole stack.
And they also fall into each having their own <favourite distro>, the other part of the comment that you missed as well.
Normal people aren't using SteamDecks for their daily computing activities.
I use Linux in various forms since 1995, and yet I am tired from trying out such alternatives, the only things that makes me consider it again is breaking the dependency on US tech, and even that isn't really happening, given how much from Linux contributions are on the pockets from US Big Tech.
Right - it's not that I don't value "the act of creating & understanding the software" - that's the part I care about and enjoy the most.
The thing I don't value is typing out all of that code myself.
Not really, the major one has been Leopard, which made Snow Leopard famous for being a bug fix release.
Apple always has teams quite small sometimes split across multiple projects, but like in the games industry, folks endure it because it is Apple on the CV.
However the whole redo the UI from scratch in one year, with such resource constrained teams could only lead to something like this.
coding agents are fantastic for learning more about computers
they can not only generate code but also explain code, concepts, architecture and show you stuff
great learning tool
AI is the first path out of enshittification the industry has had in a while.
See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/ebay-...
It will be funny to see the rapid about face.
"We don't make anything" and "there are no large British companies" are memes that help people feel better about perceived decline. It's not really representative.
https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100/constit... ; you can easily sort by market cap. GW are on page 4. Perhaps remarkably close to the two supermarket chains, Sainsburys and M&S, but those are much lower margin.
The top has "proper" global manufacturing companies: Astrazeneca, Unilever, Glaxo-SmithKline, BAE, Rolls-Royce. Along with the resource extraction companies, and Britain's major services export industry: banking.
(oddity: there are two Coca-cola companies on the FTSE, CCEP and CCH, which presumably exists for some weird tax reason)
Then you get into the question: what counts as a "British company"? There are plenty of overseas-owned UK success stories that are still significant UK employers and bringing money into the UK, such as ARM. Conversely, does a company which is listed on the FTSE but has most of its operations all over the world like RTZ count as "British"? Successful British startups quite often exit and vanish from discourse, while continuing to operate.
To my mind the important questions are "does this bring in valuable forex?" and "does this result in substantial UK employment?" Those don't necessarily have to be in the same company. The big employer list looks different: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1218430/largest-uk-based...
HSBC still up there (over 200k UK staff!), but there's a lot of food service (Compass), retail (Kingfisher you will know as B&Q) and so on.
I've not even got into the videogame industry (very good export industry, and seemingly responsible for the success of Warhammer). If you insist on making physical objects your perspective is going to be unnecessarily narrow.
I haven't searched much, but failed to find anything related to bounds checking, or enabling hardned runtimes for C++, which I consider a must-have in any modern project.
Also probably something similar for C, like using SDS (https://github.com/antirez/sds) instead of standard library calls.
Other than that, great work.
This sounds a bit like the "Asking vs. Guessing culture" discussion on the front page yesterday. With the "Guesser" being GP who's front-loading extra investigation, debugging and maintenance work so the project maintainers don't have to do it, and with the "Asker" being the client from your example, pasting the submission to ChatGPT and forwarding its response.
I am full in line with the sentiment expressed on the post, and can't wait for the whole must use AI bubble to implode.
Also the whole I am more productive vibe, well management will happilly reduce team size, it has always been do more with less, and now the robots are here.
Each day one step closer to have software development reach the factory level.
Yes some will be left around to maintain the robots, or do the little things they aren't still yet able to perform (until they do), and a couple of managers.
All the rest, I guess there are other domains where robots haven't yet taken over.
I for one am happier to be closer to retirement, than hunting for junior jobs straight out of a degree, it is going to get though out there.
> Kessler syndrome means you don't need to hit all 10k yourself
Kessler is useless for LEO constellations. The timeframes of the cascades exceed the useful lives and dwelling times at those altitudes.
I am not aware of a military solution to prompting a cascade over even a limited area. Instead, you’d use repeated high-atmosphere nuclear detonations to fry birds in a region.
Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee.
(Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)
Confluence search does this, for our intranet. As a result it's barely usable.
Indexing is a nice compact CS problem; not completely simple for huge datasets like the entire internet, but well-formed. Ranking is the thing that makes a search engine valuable. Especially when faced with people trying to game it with SEO.
Sure, because why not!
Cool idea.
I never used it, coding since 1986.
>In 2023, ssh added keystroke timing obfuscation. The idea is that the speed at which you type different letters betrays some information about which letters you’re typing. So ssh sends lots of “chaff” packets along with your keystrokes to make it hard for an attacker to determine when you’re actually entering keys.
Why not just add random "jitter" to the keystroke packets, but keeping just the 1 actual packet?
For me it's increasingly the work. I spend more time in Claude Code going back and forth with the agent than I do in my text editor hacking on the code by hand. Those transcripts ARE the work I've been doing. I want to save them in the same way that I archive my notes and issues and other ephemera around my projects.
My latest attempt at this is https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts which produces output like the is: https://gisthost.github.io/?c75bf4d827ea4ee3c325625d24c6cd86...
> And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
I mean, that description works almost as well for MacGyver as for The Doctor, so I am not sure it is the most un-American hero possible.
Problem is, security people don't want you to MITM connections, because it's insecure (mostly to business interests). Hence stuff like certificate pinning, HSTS, DoH...
Also LLM tools. Programmable Search Engine API was a way to give third-party LLM frontends the ability to give LLMs a web search tool. Notably, this was a common practice long before any of the major LLM providers added search capabilities to their frontents.
Why do you think that payment processors are obligated to intercept VAT? They're not.
That is surely the target for Apple platforms, whatever happens outside is more a nice to have kind of thing.
As proven by the track record of all languages that want to be simple, created as kind of anti-trends, they always tend to evolve into complexity as their userbase grows, as it turns out other programming language didn't got complex just for fun.
Then since they were initially created as kind of anti-complexity movement, the added on features always have warts due to not wanting to break compatibility, and are only half way there.
C23 versus PL/I, ALGOL variants, Scheme R7RS (full report) vs Lisp evolution, Java 26 vs Modula-3/Eiffel, Go 1.26 versus everyone, ...
It's a desperate attempt at staying relevant, even if most of those companies don't realize it yet. Because of its general-purpose nature, AI subsumes products. Most software products that try to "implement AI in every corner" would, from the user's POV, be more useful if they became tools for ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.
People's goals are rarely limited to just one software product, and products are basically defined as a bag of tools glued with UI, that work together but don't interoperate much with anything else. That boundary drawn around a bunch of software utilities, is given a name and a fancy logo, and sold or used to charge people rent. That's software products. But LLMs want to flip that around - they're good at gluing things, so embedding one within a product is just a waste of model capabilities, and actually makes the product boundary more apparent and annoying.
Or in short: consider Copilot in Microsoft Word, vs. "Generate Word Document" plugin/tool for a general LLM interface (whether Gemini webapp or Claude Code or something like TypingMind). The former is just an LLM locked in a box, barely able to output some text without refusing or claiming it can't do it. The latter is a general-purpose tool that can search the web for you, scrap some sites and run data analysis on results (writing its own code for this), talk results over with you, cross-reference with other sources, and then generate you a pretty Word document with formatting and images.
This is, btw., a real example. I used a Word document generator with TypingMind and GPT-4 via API, and it was more usable over a year ago than Copilot is even now. Partly because Copilot is just broken, but mostly because the LLM can do lots of things other than writing text in Word.
Point being, AI is eroding the notion of software product as something you sell/rent, which threatens just about the entire software industry :).
Then you are also fairly certain that it doesn't include latest version of bash, rather sh, and are aware of what the difference means.
I feel this has causality reversed. I'd say they are good at analogies because they have to compress well, which they do by encoding relationships in stupidly high-dimensional space.
Analogies then could sort of fall out naturally out of this. It might really still be just the simple (yet profound) "King - Man + Woman = Queen" style vector math.
This isn't an AI issue. Marketing departments have been like this forever, or at least since the infamous Canter & Siegel 'Green Card' email.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
We are close to a 1983 kind of crash, it has never been easier to produce games, the amount of shovelware is non stopping, additionally with emulators and existing working hardware there are plenty of games to play since Pong.
Graphics isn't everything, gameplay is.
As such there are more games to play than most of us care about in our lifetimes still, and not everyone suffers from FOMO, thus it is unsustainable to keep producing games that require hours of investment in double digits, new hardware all the time, 60 euros on average, with a userbase that is generaly speaking stable (e.g. there is no exponential growth of new customers).
Unfortunely MBAs don't get this, and the curve has to always go up, except it usually doesn't.
I used it, and agree 100% with the author.
Hence why in 2026, I still hang around programming stacks, like Java and .NET, where XML tooling is great, instead of having to fight with YAML format errors, Norway error, or JSON without basic stuff like comments.
I was surprised in college that the math for electronics circuits, mass-spring-damper systems, stress of materials, etc., was all the same.
an ordinary part that mapped into 8KB at location >6000->7FFF (the ROM) and another part, that normally held Graphics Programming Language bytecode, mapped into a completely separate “Graphics ROM” address space from >6000->F7FF (the “GROM”).
This reminds me of the NES, which has separate PRG and CHR address spaces, the latter being exclusively for the PPU to display its graphics.
What are the “borrow checker logs” in this context?
Sounds like you’d just need to obfuscate the link targets (to avoid filtering) and publish links on major AI crawler targets, yeah?
Safety driver is supposedly in a chase car.
I wonder if GPUs are so dense that SEUs are even more common than in CPUs or RAM.
We could try to find this loading using static analysis, but remember that I’m not comfortable reverse engineering this firmware, and I want to demonstrate a more dynamic approach.
Perhaps this is a "two types of people" situation, but I would absolutely not do that; once you dump the flash you can analyse and inspect it carefully at your leisure as it is otherwise inert, but messing around with the device itself presents a very real risk of accidentally bricking it.
I didn't need Carney's speech to mark that, Jan 6 2025 was the date.
Genuinely sounds like the kind of challenge that could be solved with a swarm of Codex coding agents. I'm surprised they aren't treating this as an ideal use-case to show off their stack!
I mean, it reports FOUR HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS in losses due to Apple Mail.app search not working. Give them credit for... something.
Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.
I don't like FIPS and think people should avoid FIPS-compliance projects but FIPS doesn't require you to implement Dual EC.
Related:
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699 - January 2026 (488 comments)
The aspect ratio of that vessel should give you pause though, that was not a pleasureboat but an open ocean vessel.
I own shares of Costco and am a member and I’m not concerned.
I bought one, to try out some ideas, then it sat on the shelf for about a year, then suddenly there were five and so on.
Thank you, I will do that. Never heard of it before!
Should watch "Zero Hour" (1957). "Airplane" is nearly a shot-for-shot remake, except it's done for laughs rather than a thriller.
"I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!"
I am thinking about stance while sitting lately. I am breathing and speaking more from my belly and that starts with posture which is neither slouched forward or back.
Why not follow them with xcancel or other pull through cache? If you’re not there for discourse, you just need to retrieve the published content.
Tammany Hall, the building, still stands. Sort of.[1] It hasn't been used for political purposes since the 1970s. It's been through several owners. The entire interior out to the walls was demolished a few years ago, and rebuilt as office space.
Slack was supposed to lease the space, but that fell through. There's now a Petco store on the ground floor. There was a liquor store for a while. Big comedown.
Brex got out of the SMB segment in 2022 and required some sort of "professional funding" for clients (e.g. VC money or sizable angel funding). There was a lot of reporting on it at the time: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/19/what-was-really-behind-bre...
Indeed. It's the immediate assumption that since you're asking me, it must be important to you - otherwise you wouldn't be asking in the first place.
I want to be the kind of person that helps others where it matters, and here you are, asking, thus proving it matters. Refusing becomes really uncomfortable, so I'd rather go out of my way to make it possible for me to agree, or failing that, to help your underlying need as much as I can.
I realize now this is a form of typical mind fallacy - I wouldn't ask you for something if it wasn't really fucking important or I had any other option available, therefore I naturally assume that your act of asking already proves the request is very important to you.
I guess I just learned I'm a Guesser :).
There is rapidly declining demand for combustion vehicles in China, so if you’re going to make them, might as well make them in the US for now.
China floods the world with gasoline cars it can't sell at home - https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-floods-world-wi... - December 2nd, 2025
GM's China Nightmare: Sales Crash from 641K to 20K - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GECdDIfpBuM - May 31st, 2025
> GM is facing a catastrophic collapse in China, with sales plummeting from 641,000 units in 2017 to just 20,000 in 2024. Once-popular brands like Chevrolet are now virtually dead in the market, as Chinese EV makers dominate. GM's rapid decline underscores the challenges foreign automakers face in China's fast-evolving auto landscape.
I really wish MS had stuck with the Windows 8/Phone direction - bright square blocks that didn't waste space, which felt like it was a full refutation of the transparent everything of Vista that was still there to some extent in 7.
Looking at macOS 26, it's hard not to compare it visually to Vista given the transparency emphasis. Hopefully in a few years an Alan Dye-free Apple will move in a different direction.
It's a small, simple and cheap piece of hardware with no moving parts. A "wooden round".
Sold for $5.15B.
Brex last raised $300M in Oct 2021 at a $12.3B valuation.
I just want to say this isn't just amazing -- it's my new favorite map of NYC.
It's genuinely astonishing how much clearer this is than a traditional satellite map -- how it has just the right amount of complexity. I'm looking at areas I've spent a lot of time in, and getting an even better conceptual understanding of the physical layout than I've ever been able to get from satellite (technically airplane) images. This hits the perfect "sweet spot" of detail with clear "cartoon" coloring.
I see a lot of criticism here that this isn't "pixel art", so maybe there's some better term to use. I don't know what to call this precise style -- it's almost pixel art without the pixels? -- but I love it. Serious congratulations.
Thought not well grounded in objective evidence has a place, both on matters that are not subject to empirical inquiry and in preliminary speculation about matters that are.
But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.
They're not?
Commuter train crashes into crane in Murcia, marking Spain's fourth train crash in five days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725317 - January 2026
In 2023, ssh added keystroke timing obfuscation. The idea is that the speed at which you type different letters betrays some information about which letters you’re typing. So ssh sends lots of “chaff” packets along with your keystrokes to make it hard for an attacker to determine when you’re actually entering keys.
Now that's solving the problem the wrong way. If you really want that, send all typed characters at 50ms intervals, to bound the timing resolution.
In practice I've never felt this was an issue. But I can see how with extremely low bandwidth devices it might be, for instance LoRa over a 40 km link into some embedded device.
New account, sub 400 karma, less than 30 days old iirc.
I much prefer OpenCode these days, give it a try.
Matt Levine (Dec 2025), https://archive.is/S3MPq
> Your business model might end up being sort of a … startup incubator or private equity firm; you’d spend your time starting or acquiring companies on which the robot could work its magic. Your business model would be “general business, but with AI”.. Either it will sell AI at high margins to lots of businesses, or it will sell AI at lower margins to lucrative businesses that it owns.
I'll pay attention to where the puck is because that is something I can observe, where it is going to be is anybody's guess. Lots of original ideas are coming out of Chinese AI research but there is also lots of junk. I think in the longer term they will have the advantage but right now that simply isn't the case.
Your 'cope' accusation has no place here, I have no dog in the race and do not need to cope with anything.
I find it disturbing.
One thing you notice if you have ADSL is that some services are built as if slower connections matter and others are not. Like Google's voice and audio chat services work poorly but most of the others work well. Uploading images to Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Nextdoor is reliable, but for Tumblr you have to try it twice. I don't what they are doing wrong but they are doing something wrong and not finding out what they're doing wrong because they're not testing and they're not listening to users.
Nobody consulted me about their decision not to run fiber by my house. If some committee decides to make ssh bloated they are, together with the others, conspiring to steal my livelihood and I think it would be fair for me to sue them for the $50k it would take to run that fiber myself.
It's OK if you work for Google where there is limitless dark fiber but what about people in African countries?
It's the typical corporate attitude where latency never matters: Adobe thinks it is totally normal that it takes 1-5s for a keystroke to appear when you are typing into Dreamweaver.
The excerpt you don’t understand is saying that if it has been Google rather than Anthropic, the blast radius of the no-explanation account nuking would have been much greater.
It’s written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people), but the reference is unmistakable.
Agreed, I found this rather incoherent and seeming to depend on knowing a lot more about author's project/background.
> The US can always print more money to fund its institutions, but other countries have to save theirs.
That only works if there are takers for US bonds otherwise all this will do is devalue the USD.
That basically matches, in broad outline, what I see from AI use in an enterprise environment; absent a radical change, I think the near term impact of AI on software development is going to be too increase velocity while shifting workload to less (but not zero) code writing and more code reviewing and knowing when you need to prompt-and-review vs. hand-code.
Enshittification arrives as it always does.
>My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems
Solve enough problems relying on AI writing the code as a black box, and over time your grasp of coding will worsen, and you wont be undestanding what the AI should be doing or what it is doing wrong - not even at the architectural level, except in broad strokes.
One ends like the clueless manager type who hasn't touched a computer in 30 years. At which point there will be little reason for the actual job owners to retain their services.
Computer programming on the whole relying on the canned experience of the AI data set, producing more AI churn as ratio of the available training code over time, and plateuing both itself and AI, with the dubious future of reaching Singularity its only hope out of this.
This podcast is about the NYC market, but a good deep dive into why this is not a simple proposition.
Looks like it's starting. Kudos for some courage and will on the EU's part.
Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026
Macron says €300 billion in European savings flown to the US every year will be invested in Europe from now on. All 27 EU states agreed to establish the S&I Union, a step toward the full Capital Market Union - https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qjtvtl/macron_says... - January 22nd, 2026
Savings and investments union - https://finance.ec.europa.eu/regulation-and-supervision/savi... - December 4th, 2025
You really, really do. It's quite something.
While converting it is not economical, class c office space (which is least desirable) demand is probably gone in this market due to lackluster demand for office space; the value of the building will get zeroed out by the market, at which point it can trade hands, be demo'd, and new residential can go up in its place.
You can think of class c office space, broadly speaking, as oil wells that have very little life left, and get bought up by folks who intend to extract the cashflow until they dump the externality on the public government and taxpayers (like abandoned shopping malls).
A recent example in St Louis is the AT&T office tower [1] [2].
[1] One of St. Louis’ tallest office towers, empty for years, sells for less than 2% of its peak price - https://www.costar.com/article/642008108/one-of-st-louis-tal... - April 10th, 2024 ("Goldman Group buys 44-story former AT&T office tower for $3.6 Million")
[2] St. Louis office vacancy hits all-time high [21.2%] as major companies downsize their footprints - https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2026/01/15/office-v... - January 16th, 2026
(conversions when the economics pencil out, haircuts for investors when they don't and more investment is needed to wholesale replace a structure)
US office vacancy rates chart supposedly pulled from Moody's: https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1p8mhmq/us_office_v...
There's a lot of complaints about externalities, especially when a power cut stopped all the vehicles in a city recently.
Poland still has majority coal power production! It's one of last places you can possibly blame renewables for pricing.
"The speed of speed!"
If you want to try out the voice cloning yourself you can do that an this Hugging Face demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS - switch to the "Voice Clone" tab, paste in some example text and use the microphone option to record yourself reading that text - then paste in other text and have it generate a version of that read using your voice.
I shared a recording of audio I generated with that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/qwen3-tts/
Looks like there is an opportunity to convert a lot of that into residential space.
I do sports photography for one of the most active organizations in my community, I pass out a lot of business cards [1] and will probably get more work
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3mcy6m4eos22k
I like to say "my code is 200% vibe-coded; the tricky bit is figuring out which 100% to keep".
Decisions matter, both technical and product ones. LLMs don't make as good technical or product decisions as I would, and the way I work with them tries to maximize my strengths and the LLM's strengths. I don't know if I succeed, but it's better than "make me an app like X" as a prompt.
... biofilms are like the bacterial wall turned inside out
Kinda funny, I think there was a conference on this stuff a few months ago as I've seen a lot of stuff about HRV go by in my RSS reader lately.
I have a github project
https://github.com/paulhoule/VulpesVision
that does an HRV visualization on a web site if you (i) use Chrome and (ii) have a modern BTLE HR monitor (I got two Polar H10s) You can bring it up with
npm install
npm run dev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_waves
by the simple method of eyeballing the instantaneous HR chart and breathing out when the chart goes down and breathing out when it goes in, being careful to manage your air supply (not breathe too deeply) so you don't top or bottom out.
Elite HRV is a pretty good commercial app but their "HRV biofeedback" isn't anywhere near as good as mine as it tells you to do "resonant breathing" by sweeping through the frequency range where the Mayer wave happens -- why do that when you can just sync it directly... in fact I can do the same feat eyeballing the heart rate in Elite HRV.
I'm working on a 2-player version of this game because I think it will make a demo that punches well above its weight.
They're advisors with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
> they would consider him a loser
What about Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes?
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
Categories missing:
- Operating systems, for various kinds of workloads
- Programming language toolchains
- Hardware vendors