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.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

Arguing with leftists all the time is the sure sign that you're a leftist.

(seriously, this is a significant asymmetry between the two that has been there for at least a century. There isn't one lockstep leftism, there's thousands of micro factions arguing about most things)

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 69406]

Reality isn't constrained by quality bars.

danso ranked #7 [karma: 164689]

FWIW eliminating the de minimis exemption had already been proposed by President Biden late last year:

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

doener ranked #50 [karma: 67580]

"This guy cracked the tariff formula: @orthonormalist

It’s simply the nation’s trade deficit with us divided by the nation’s exports to us.

Yes. Really.

Vietnam: Exports 136.6, Imports 13.1 Deficit = 123.5

123.5/136.6 = 90%"

https://x.com/Geiger_Capital/status/1907568233239949431

anigbrowl ranked #25 [karma: 94016]

Have you considered the possibility that they know perfectly well what they're doing and they're just lying about it? Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has been CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald for over 2 decades. The treasury secretary has a similarly stellar resume. There is no way these people don't understand the difference between expressing a trade deficit as a ratio and actual tariffs laid by other countries.

Trump personally may or may not understand it (I think he does) but his political superpower is his willingness to stand up in public and say complete bullshit knowing that it's bullshit, knowing that some people are fools who will uncritically believe the bullshit, and other people are cynics who who will nod along with the bullshit either to make money out of the rubes or because they think it serves a strategic purpose.

You can waste years wondering which side of Hanlon's razor someone is on, but it's important to remember that obsessing over such dilemmas can lead to paralysis. Just like there are a lot of street hustles and cons that depend on confusing/misleading the mark before tricking or mugging them out of their money, there are a lot of political gambits that depend on inducing analysis-paralysis in opponents. Manufacturing dilemmas is also a key element in military strategy.

My advice is to stop worrying about whether these people are such fools that you owe them some sort of empathy and an effort to save them from themselves, or you will end up like Charlie Brown having the football pulled way by Lucy yet again. It is OK to cut them off and treat them as bad actors, for the same reason you should often round off quantitative values instead of obsessing over precision.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 402400]

Voter ID helps Democrats in 2025, it doesn't hurt them.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 150493]

(2010)

This refers to the era of COBOL, or maybe Hypertalk, not LLMs.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 114489]

I guess a few brownie points for making the case for compiled managed languages in games, nice work.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 150493]

Did the "de minimus" exemption on small packages from China go away, and are all those now going to have to go through customs clearance?

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 157834]

The real number is “the alternative model forecast, which adjusts for imports and exports of gold” at “-1.4 percent.”

That is down more than a percentage point from the last forecast and seriously implies that our stable genius’s policies are putting the country into a recession. (The headline number can’t reflect the updated model until the end of April, I think, due to the recent Fed meeting freezing the model.)

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 114489]

Looking forward to the retaliatory tariffs, which seems to be only language this administration understands.

I guess it will eventually be the year of FOSS software, I am only waiting for the administration going back to export restrictions in software as well.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 75087]

> just about to end its fight with inflation

Inflation will decline only when the deficit declines.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82281]

that some new deals have been struck.

I believe that was the plan all along. He's just doing it aggressively with tariffs.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 75087]

I enjoy debating politics in the way that others enjoy playing chess or a friendly game of bowling. But when the other party gets wrapped around the axle, I don't debate with them anymore. Unfortunately, most seem to be in the latter camp.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

2008 was a long time ago, and it was notable at the time because it was already contrary to the overall trend of partisan polarization, which had been consistently escalating since the end of the long period of overlapping realignments that started in the 1930s and settled out in the 1990s. (Political polarization had been high in much of that realignment period, but because the major parties weren't coherently aligned around the high-salience issues that divided the public, that polarization was not strongly partisan.)

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

It's not uncommon for people who decide they have "discovered" the "real political spectrum" by simply adding a new axis to the traditional left-right spectrum to coincidentally idealize one pole on that new axis, viewing all variation on the left-right axis as indicative of distraction from what is important.

Asserting that people varying on the left-right spectrum also cluster around the anti-ideal pole of the idealized axis while everyone closer to the ideal pole clusters around the left-right center is not as common, but reflects the same cognitive bias, though it is particularly amusing when that axis independent thought (ideal) vs. groupthink (anti-ideal), such that freethinkers are asserted to by ideological uniform even outside of the shared commit to "free" thought, while sheepish adherents of groupthink are more ideologically diverse.

(And, yes, that graph is deadly serious -- as well as, IMO, hilariously wrong [0] -- and fairly central to the theme of the post.)

It's even more funny that this "free thinker" is decrying tribalist groupthink, asserting (as already discussed) that free thought exists only in an extremely narrow band in the center of the left-right axis, and talking about how they can't talk politics with anyone outside their group and are "desperate for like-minded folk". The lack of self-awareness is...palpable.

It's even more funny that all the ideas he embraces and purports to have trouble finding people he agrees with are the standard doctrines of the rationalist/EA/longermist faction that is so popular in the tech/AI space (and the conceit of being uniquely free thinking is also common to the faction.)

[0] Actual free thinkers are, IME, distributed widely -- not necessarily evenly, but certainly not clustered in one spot -- across both the left-right axis and a number of other political axes [1][2], such as the authoritarian-libertarian axis, so both the distribution shown and the assertion that the "real" political spectrum is two dimensional with only freethought vs. groupthink added to the classic left-right axis are incorrect.

[1] For a number of reasons, including both differences in life experiences and thus perceived probabilities on various factual propositions, but also on fundamental values which life experiences may impact, but not in a deductive manner, because you can't reason to "ought" from "is".

[2] Free thinkers do differ from groupthinkers in that their positions in the multidimensional space of political values are likely not to fall into the clusters of established tribes, but to have some views typical of one tribe while other others fall out of that tribes typical space (and possibly even into the space of an opposing tribe.) But there are enough different tribes

ChuckMcM ranked #21 [karma: 109082]

Heh, I've got a T440 [T420i, see edit] I'm running FreeBSD on. Definitely tank status. It is even one of the 'rare' HD ones.

EDIT: I just turned it over to check and its a T420i Type 4177-X07 pretty much solid as a rock. I also discovered it would run with 16GB of RAM so there's that.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 150493]

To have an informed view on any given issue, one needs to:

1. understand economics, game theory, philosophy, sales, business, military strategy, geopolitics, sociology, history, and more

2. be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic

3. detect and ignore their own bias

1) is a lot of work. Just finding out what's going on is hard. Partly because news-gathering organizations are far more thinly staffed than they used to be. There aren't enough reporters out there digging, which is hard work. There are too many pundits and influencers blithering. Read the output of some news outlet, cross out "opinion" items and stories based on press releases or press conferences, and there's not much left. The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Reuters still have people who dig for facts. Beyond that, reporters are thin on the ground. If you can only read one thing, read the Economist for a year. Each week they cover some country in detail, and over a year, most of the world gets a close look. (Although at the moment, their China coverage is weak, because their reporters were kicked out of China for doing too much digging.)

Background is necessary. Many pundits seem to lack much of a sense of history. Currently, understanding the runups to WWI and WWII is very useful. Understand what Putin is talking about when he references Catherine the Great and Peter the Great. Geography matters. Look at Ukraine in Google Earth and see that most of the current fighting is over flat farmland and small towns, much like Iowa. Look at Taiwan and realize how narrow and exposed an island it is. There's no room to retreat after an invasion, unlike Ukraine.

As for empathy, there's a huge split in America between the areas above and below 700 people per square mile. Above 1,500 per square mile, almost always blue. Below 400 per square mile, almost always red.[1] This effect dwarfs race, religion, ideology, or income level. It's very striking and not well recognized in public discourse. There's a minimum viable population density below which small towns stop working as self-supporting entities. (On the ground, this shows up as empty storefronts on Main Street and a closed high school.)

On bias, there are many people in the US whose lot has been slowly getting worse for decades now. That's the underlying source of most US political problems.

[1] https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-pol...

simonw ranked #48 [karma: 68839]

H1B is a dual-intent visa, which means holders are allowed to pursue permanent residency (upgrading them to an immigrant by the US legal definition) by applying for a green card.

Most people use the term "immigrant" for people who have chosen to live in another country without considering the "non-immigrant" status of their visa.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 75087]

You're hired to make money for the company.

walterbell ranked #28 [karma: 88522]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

What happens if and when ICE starts rounding visa holders up to deport? No snark intended, this is a genuine question based on all available evidence. I don’t endorse such action at all, but we are existing in exceptional times and the discussion is important. “If you stay, what are you getting yourself into?” is a serious question to ask and to manage the risk around.

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 123125]

This is the most important investment in our economic future in a generation.

I remember discussing with a Juniper guy back in 2008 or so about how Huawei would just rip off their designs. Back then it was conventional wisdom that China could just copy, not build. Now, Huawei can make state of the art routers with home grown chips. Turns out all the Reaganites got sucked into just handing China our economy. It’s not sustainable. I don’t want my kids having to learn Chinese and become immigrants (as if China would even allow that) because we shipped the last shreds of our economy over there.

simonw ranked #48 [karma: 68839]

Worked for me in Mobile Safari in iOS on my iPhone.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 88484]
nostrademons ranked #36 [karma: 79433]

Yeah. I was made a manager in Feb 2022 with 5 directs and 9 headcount to fill. Hired 5, and then by June 2022 all remaining headcount was cut. In January 2023 we had our first-ever layoffs in the company's 25-year history.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

They claim that they are "reciprocal" tariffs, and their chart shows them at exactly half the tariffs they claim are imposed by the target or 10%, whichever is higher. But it is suspicious that the column on their infographic showing the foreign tariffs has fine print indicating that includes other non-tariff things that you can't easily calculated as a neat rate the way tariffs are. And, some people running the numbers have determined that the quoted foreign "tariff" amounts are consistently the US trade deficit in goods with the target country divided by that country's exports to the US, with a minimum of 10%.

So, despite being labelled "tariffs", the actual basis for calculating the "reciprocal tariffs" has nothing to do with tariffs.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 157834]

> the US going insane and Americans nodding along

The current crop of policies are basically only supported by uneducated white men who voted for Trump [1]. (And even then, only 44 to 40 percent. Though uneducated white women give them a run for their money.)

[1] https://law.marquette.edu/poll/

ColinWright ranked #13 [karma: 130296]

Do people really believe that these are reciprocal tariffs?

Do people really believe the figures quoted here?

Do people really believe that other countries are already applying draconian tariffs on US goods?

Seriously?

crazygringo ranked #42 [karma: 74061]

Yeah, just because a channel is public broadcast doesn't mean some of the content it shows hasn't been commercially produced, and a license purchased for that country's geographical area only.

anigbrowl ranked #25 [karma: 94016]

Fuck modern taste. I have a bedroom where the walls and bedding are deep blue and it's accented with neutral colors. There's another room which is a rich shade of purple. Doing without bold use of color isn't tasteful, it's just boring.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 69406]

That particular display that they use is around $40, and then there's a $3 ESP32.

I bought one because I think the software and the ecosystem is worth the price, but it's not terribly hard to make one of these for much less than $150.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110266]

> Does the AI system perform actions under its own identity? If it does, it’s an agent, and the audit logs will name the agent itself. And if it doesn’t – like most copilots or in-product assistants – it’s not.

God please no, let's not normalize this idea.

1. That's not really a good definition of an agent;

2. The only agents I care about are agents acting under my identity, for me, in my interest. You know, like browsers were supposed to - that's where the name for "User-Agent" header comes from. But in short - whether I'm accessing your service directly or using an agent (AI or otherwise) to do it for me, is none of your business. Letting service providers differentiate based on that was a cardinal mistake of the early Web.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

L'etatt, c'est M'att.

mooreds ranked #38 [karma: 77968]

If you are interested in learning more about the organization, here's an article about Jerome Hardaway, the founder: https://github.com/readme/stories/jerome-hardaway

And here's their GitHub org: https://github.com/Vets-Who-Code

Jerome also was kind enough to write a post for my Letters To a New Developer blog a few years ago: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/09/21/youre-gonna-be...

simonw ranked #48 [karma: 68839]

Is ChatGPT with its Code Interpreter tool an agent?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

Ohio’s First Peanut Roundabout: SR 61, SR 656 & Wilson Road Roundabout - https://www.burgessniple.com/our-work/ohios-first-peanut-rou...

mooreds ranked #38 [karma: 77968]

FusionAuth | Senior Java Software Engineer, Senior Security Engineer | Denver, CO, USA ONSITE | Salaries listed on job req, but for the Java engineer it is 140k-180k

Our mission is to make authentication and authorization simple and secure for every developer building web and mobile applications. We want devs to stop worrying about auth and focus on building something awesome.

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

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

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

* a relatively mature product (the code base is over eight years old and we've found and fixed a lot of the sharp edges around core login use cases; however there are plenty more features to add)

* founder-led; the CEO is an engineer who still writes code

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

If you are passionate about technology and want to join a company moving the industry forward, FusionAuth might be a great fit for you. As mentioned, our core software is commercial with a "free as in beer" version. We also open source much of our supporting infrastructure.

We are profitable but raised a round in 2023 to accelerate our growth (more on that here: https://fusionauth.io/blog/fusionauth-funding ).

Technologies and standards that we use or implement: Modern Java, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Docker, Kubernetes, OAuth, SAML, OIDC.

Learn more, including about benefits and salaries, and apply here: https://fusionauth.io/careers/

Click/tap the 'View open positions' orange button.

crazygringo ranked #42 [karma: 74061]

Exactly. My work-provided chat app and email automatically contains the whole company's contacts. And the messages show up on people's work devices.

If I wanted to use a personal chat or personal email, I'd need to know their personal details, or copy-paste their work info, it would confuse which accounts they reply to... it would make no sense at all.

I keep my work convos and personal convos separate not just because it's company policy, but it's 100x easier for me.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 157834]

The idea that there is no opportunity in these policies is peak Silicon Valley head-in-the-sandedness.

Yes, they’re destructive to the country. But they still also create massive loopholes and thus opportunities for profit.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82281]

Good, another way to fight the loss of ownership and right-to-repair.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 88484]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110266]

But think of the economy!

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

Trump supporters are unswayable. The same rule about negative stimulus applies. Nothing you can say makes a difference, but if they start losing money eventually they might change behavior. Or they radicalize further.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 80545]

It may also have been part of his reason for doing so. Panic/desperation.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

> our findings suggest that compared with enforcement by police officers, appropriately located automated technologies, such as speeding cameras, could help reduce selective enforcement of traffic violations

This seems to presume that automated enforcement replaces, rather than enabling departments to even more precisely focus, the selective human enforcement of traffic laws. Given the role of selective traffic enforcement as a conscious tool in generating contacts to look for non-traffic issues, rather than a product of mere implicit bias, I find it extremely unlikely that this would happen with any real-world police department.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 80545]

https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/black-drivers-are-less...

> The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race.

Very clever methodology on this one: they used Daylight Savings to rule out other variables.

> Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.

> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables — the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

Upvoting posts has a moderation-like effect (opposed to that of downvoting).

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 114489]

Great, maybe Inferno as follow up?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

Can always vacation somewhere you can pickup gear and bring it back with you. Not customs advice.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

Same with trading your time for stock options (that you hope are eventually negotiable shares); trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.

walterbell ranked #28 [karma: 88522]

Does anyone remember which US gov entity funded Signal and Open Whisper Systems?

Signal chairman is ex-CEO of Wikipedia.

Signal CEO estimated annual costs at $50MM.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 88484]
PaulHoule ranked #32 [karma: 87154]

I have an "Enhanced Driver's License" from the state of NY and it is (1) a RealID and (2) gets me into Canada by land.

jedberg ranked #41 [karma: 74905]

Step 1: Get a regular corporate job that allows you to work OSS some of the time

Step 2: Work on OSS while doing your day job.

If you're lucky you'll find a company that actually uses said OSS!

jedberg ranked #41 [karma: 74905]

Welcome Tom! Wishing you good luck from this former Reddit mod -- I know how hard the job can be!

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 157834]

My guess is the idea that folks are waiting for a redesigned Model Y will be blown apart by April figures showing that this is brand destruction, not demand deferral.

We also haven’t seen anyone ban or put a special tariff on Teslas, or take the nuclear option, ban cameras-only self-driving cars. (The idea that Musk stepping away will politically neutralise him is nuts.)

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 150493]

Maybe only on surfaces. Lighting has become very colorful.

Look at modern Asian cities. Beijing is rather grey in daytime, but at night, there's colored lighting. Shenzhen, where LEDs are made, has reached insane levels of lighting effects at night. Not only do most of the skyscrapers have animated lighting effects, the effects are coordinated across the whole downtown area. Then there are frequent drone shows.

American cars are now coming stock with lighting effects previously seen on lowriders.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 150493]

Does it help if you buy a blue checkmark?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 402400]

A lot of HN mechanism makes more sense if you can accept the idea that the goal is to promote good threads, and not, as so many people believe, to promote one set of opinions over another. Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.

A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing in one thread or another.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 87630]

I don't converse about politics at all, because conversation is not generally amenable to anything other than some vague virtue signaling in all but the very best of circumstances. For instance, a basic rule of conversation is that unless you have a very good reason, once a conversation wanders away from a topic, you don't drag it back to the same topic. That's great for idly chatting and catching up with friends, and it's a rule for a good reason, but it's quite far from what any sort of thought or an interaction that might actually change my mind on some topic requires.

While I don't disagree that people are quite tribal, I would observe that determining that people are tribal based on conversations can be a bit misleading, because the conversational form is extremely biased towards expressing things that will be indistinguishable from "tribalism", since all you have time to do is basically to put a marker down on the broadest possible summary of your position before the conversation baton must move on. That is, even a hypothetical Vulcan who has gathered all the data, pondered the question deeply, and come to the only logical conclusion, is going to sound tribal in a conversation, because that's all a conversation can convey.[1] Sufficient information conveyance to actually demonstrate the deep pondering and examination of all the evidence is ipso facto a lecture, or at best, a Socratic dialog or an interview, neither of which is a conversation in this sense.

For better and worse (and rather a lot of each), this medium we're working in right now at least affords itself to complete thoughts. It has its own well-known pathologies, like the interminable flame wars descending off to the right endlessly as two people won't let something go, and many others, but at least it's possible to discuss serious matters in a format similar to this, based on writing in text that can be as long as it needs to be without anyone needing to interrupt to maintain basic social niceties. There's a reason the serious intellectual discourse has been happening in books and articles for centuries if not millennia now.

Note how conversationally gauche it would be for me to monopolize a conversation long enough to simply read this post, and by the standards of intellectual discourse this is a rather simple point.

[1]: In fact, most people will read the Vulcan as exceedingly tribal, because no amount of reciting snap counterarguments against the Vulcan's position will cause him/her to so much as budge an inch or even concede that "perhaps reasonable people could think that" or any other such concession. The snap counteragument was encountered a long time ago, and analyzed in the light of all the other data, and they have long ago come to their conclusions on it. If they can be moved, it will take a lot more. This is difficult to distinguish from a maximized tribalist in any reasonable period of time in a conversation.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 170637]

This should not have been flagged.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 170637]

We don't know now what to curate for the future. We should preserve as much of everything we can - we don't know what will be important in 50, or 500 years.

Case in point: retrocomputing is my hobby. I buy, restore, preserve, and use old computers. Most of them are home computers, because business computers go directly from the office to the recycling facility or the landfill. Unless someone deliberately preserved, say, a Burroughs B-25 desktop, or the similar from Data General, they are gone.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110266]

> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth.

I don't consider this to be a be-all, end-all of design, but I appreciate that designs following this approach can be stunningly beautiful. That said, this is not the problem. The problem is, what happens these days, someone films your room with that "gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background" and... color grades the shit out of color, making it near pitch-black on non-HDR TVs (and most computer screens) and merely grey with tiny amounts of trace color on HDR TVs.

This is the problem - or at least its TV aspect. That Napoleon example was spot on - most movies these days look like the right half, whereas anything remotely approaching realism would make it look like the left half. And TFA correctly notices the same washing out of colors is happening to products and spaces in general (which means double trouble when that's filmed and then color-graded some more).

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 402400]

Notably, I think LetsEncrypt has been MPIC for some time now.

jgrahamc ranked #27 [karma: 91792]

I was part of that, but many others helped that be a reality include the CEO.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

Elon’s close association with the Trump Administration has not been the best thing in the world for the Trump brand; I can see the market seeing the end, or at least weakening, of that association as a positive move for Tesla.

uptown ranked #39 [karma: 76498]

An answer to my wishes ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398696 thank you!

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 80545]

Sometimes you're right, sometimes they are. Sometimes, as the Rick & Morty quote goes, "Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

Original title "As Life Happens, “Locked-in” Homeowners Pay Off Below-4% Mortgages: Share Drops to 54%, Lowest since Q4 2020" compressed to fit within title limits.

walterbell ranked #28 [karma: 88522]

TikTok hired former TLA officers (2022), https://www.scrippsnews.com/science-and-tech/social-media/ti...

  The U.S. intelligence community sees China as its top threat. But Americans who have left intelligence agencies are getting jobs at TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.. the lines between business and government get blurred in China, in part because of Beijing's national intelligence law, which compels citizens and businesses to share information with state intelligence-gathering efforts.. America's freedoms give China an advantage.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

Maybe not “the Greeks” broadly, but Spartans specifically are equated with austerity to the extent that “spartan” is adopted as an adjective meaning “showing indifference to comfort and luxury”.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

Congrats Tom! Thank you for your service.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 75087]

Not about steam locomotives. Disappointed.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

> Now, China, Iran and North Korea are backing Russia without engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine;

Not true of North Korea, which is engaging in direct confrontation in Ukraine.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

Are there any products that can act as a locator beacon, in perhaps a pager form factor? They listen for a signal from a powerful base station at frequencies low enough to deeply penetrate RF opaque material, and upon command, could key up and transmit at max power while using Time of Flight to triangulate (from a network of base stations)? 900mhz comes to mind, but perhaps there are alternate, more optimal frequency bands for this.

It's a local version of https://www.findmespot.com/

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 121342]

War is bad. It is correct to respond to aggression initiating war with defensive war.

Trade wars are like regular wars, in that respect.

PaulHoule ranked #32 [karma: 87154]

For more than 10 years I used Skype on a tablet as my ‘mobile’ phone which worked great for many purposes although some services would not send texts to a VoIP number.

When I heard Skype was ending I decided to get an iPhone from a real carrier (my impression is that MVNO service sucks, I used to have Tracfones that didn’t work reliably either in Upstate or NYC.). At the AT&T store the salesperson had never transferred a phone number over from Skype but looked up in a manual about how to do it. She said it was the easiest number porting she’d ever done.

So if you want to port your Skype number, just do it!

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 80545]

As with "I coded a Twitter clone in a weekend", this tends to be a lot harder than you might imagine.

crazygringo ranked #42 [karma: 74061]

It's not "losing" color.

At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.

But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.

Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.

I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.

crazygringo ranked #42 [karma: 74061]

I don't think HN is the right place for such broad, open-ended health questions that don't have anything to do with tech or hacking at all.

There's so much information available across the internet on this, both expert and in forums.

danso ranked #7 [karma: 164689]

I know that "DogeDesigner" is a Elon-stan account, but I hadn't compared Optimus's 2022 introduction vs its 2025 demo, and seeing it side-by-side is very...uh...underwhelming? And that's just walking — I assume if Optimius were able to attempt autonomous servicing of various factory tasks, we'd be seeing that footage in full.

[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1907331216623141305

minimaxir ranked #46 [karma: 69769]

The real takeaway is $80 MSRP games, and I’m surprised it was Nintendo that crossed that particular Rubicon.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 170637]

A durability test would be an interesting future article. I need to dig up my old backups and check how readable they are now.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 162232]

Incredible run, all the best going forward!

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

There are people who will learn from this lesson, and people who love the bullying and could not care less. Regardless, friendly US trade counterparties are making rational decoupling decisions to prevent further weaponization of trade against them, which is just good policy. If it impairs the US economic outlook, well, better choices could've been made. But this is what the unsophisticated voted for, so let them have it.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #44 [karma: 71953]

Please introduce me to the fantasy world where everything else can survive without deadlines and schedules.

As an engineer, I don't like deadlines either given how unpredictable large scale software development can be, but the fact of the matter is that most software is in service to a business, and businesses need to run on schedules. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be working in a software business, you should be working in a research think tank or academia.

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 123125]

Does it matter? Both candidates promised to deport gang members. You think it’s possible to do what Harris promises to do by giving each one a jury trial?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

This is important sentiment data because, in a forward looking macro where workers are scarce, employers are desperate to hold on to workers by any means necessary. If workers recognize their job is just a job and emotional investment can't be used to retain and lower churn, labor costs will rise.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 80545]

> Despite affirming Abrego-Garcia's link to MS-13, and authorizing his deportation, an immigration judge determined he should be removed somewhere other than El Salvador due to potential safety concerns.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

The real evil option is C: 2+"22" = 0, 4+"4" = undefined behavior and probably the value of some other variable.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 94779]

There still remains substantial value destruction ahead of us.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

> "In terms of income, I’d try to set up some little online business that gets you about $5k/m"

Ah yes, simple easy life advice that every citizen can follow.

The rest of this .. some is pretty good, especially about not just focusing on computers but on people, but even now I think the "don't go to university" is hugely controversial because a lot of employers do look at qualifications.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

Plus points for using strace. It's one of those debugging tools everyone know about for emergencies that can't be solved at a higher level, and a great convenience of using Linux. The Windows ETW system is much harder to use, and I'm not sure if it's even possible at all under OSX security.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 98375]

It happens remarkably often even in big construction projects, when requirements shift for political reasons or when something unexpected is discovered about the ground it's being built on.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 87630]

To be a "good" web crawler, you have to go beyond "not bad coding". If you just write the natural "fetch page, fetch next page, retry if it fails" loop, notably, missing any sort of wait between fetches, so that you fetch as quickly as possible, you are already a pest. You don't even need multiple threads or machines to be a pest; a single machine on a home connection fetching pages as quickly as it can be already be a pest to a website with heavy backend computation or DB demands. Do an equally naive "run on a couple dozen threads" upgrade to your code and you expand the blast radius of your pestilence out to even more web sites.

Being a truly good web crawler takes a lot of work, and being a polite web crawler takes yet more different work.

And then, of course, you add the bad coding practices on top of it, ignoring robots.txt or using robots.txt as a list of URLs to scrape (which can be either deliberate or accidental), hammering the same pages over and over, preferentially "retrying" the very pages that are timing out because you found the page that locks the DB for 30 seconds in a hard query that even the website owners themselves didn't know was possible until you showed them by taking down the rest of their site in the process... it just goes downhill from there. Being "not bad" is already not good enough and there's plenty of "bad" out there.

PaulHoule ranked #32 [karma: 87154]

"Nerds vs Jocks" is a trope that bugs me to no end because my experience in school and afterwards is that jocks are better than average. I never got bullied by a jock, in fact, when people tried to ambush me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time anybody tried to ambush me at my dorm.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 80545]

> His entire cabinet is made up of people who have trashed him, his own VP called him literally the next Hitler.

You don’t think it helps his ego to bring these folks to heel? To make Marco Rubio preside over the destruction of a foreign policy system he personally values?

> Except with Trump's base, where it has climbed from -10 to +50.

The same folks suddenly hate Canada. They swing, wildly. The core principle is “what is Trump saying today” - what he said yesterday is unimportant.

If Trump turns on Musk, so will they.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 88484]