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.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126070]

> Kants Categorical Imperative is a terrible way to model reality.

It's not a way to model reality, terrible or otherwise. That’s not what it purports to do.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101687]

By the stopwatch it takes 3x longer for me to upload a photo to the Instagram web app than it does to Mastodon. Facebook's blue website works pretty well but the Instagram site comes across like something that was vibe coded in a weekend or maybe a straw man that was made to prove SPAs are bad. Contrast that to the Mastodon application produced by a basically unfunded application that's fast and reliable.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233990]

No, you're not wrong. But this framing allows them to paint the parties opposing these measures as being 'pro CP'.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233990]

Getting a library named after you? Or an airport in some cases?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233990]

Doubling down when you're out of your depth is the MAGA way.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Yes?

That is why some people are forbidden to contribute to projects if their eyes have read projects with incompatible licenses, in case people go to copyright court.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157537]

There is recency and survival bias, yes. But a sizable fraction of movies are remakes or series extensions. The Marvel Overextended Universe has taken this up to 11. That it's still working, mostly, leads other studios to make movies in that style.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-u-s-inflation-by...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric...

https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cos...

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Related: (others?)

Why Millennials and Gen Z Are Going Gray Early, According to Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45738730 - October 2025 (0 comments)

American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963675 - August 2025 (9 comments)

Millennials were priced out of capitalism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43808835 - April 2025 (9 comments)

Millennials –The Unluckiest Generation–Became the Most Economically Divided - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42020355 - November 2024 (1 comment)

Millennials to feel biggest burden of fixing Social Security, report finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40505200 - May 2024 (0 comments)

Deeply Unhappy Gen Z and Millennials Cause U.S. Drop in Global Happiness Ranking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39767329 - March 2024 (46 comments)

Millennials Have the Children, but Boomers Have the Houses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295239 - February 2024 (12 comments)

HN Search: Millennials - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Millennials

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

I built an agent for Muckrock that I use to rapidly build FOIA requests. Whenever I think “I wish I had an exuberant intern that requires lots of supervision for this work,” I reach for an agent.

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 72975]

OpenRouter can also prioritize providers by price: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection...

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126070]

> Saying that the men's vitality clinic "pushed you" into a treatment protocol is like saying that a fertility clinic pushed you into getting pregnant.

No, it isn't. “Men’s vitality” doesn’t mean “getting pumped with testosterone regardless of indications” the way “fertility” means “getting pregnant” in either literal denotation of words or the understanding of the general population.

> Sure, it's a common outcome, but you had an idea of what you wanted out of it before you walked in the door.

Yes, but in the case of fertility clinics, getting pregnant aas definitely the outcome beinf sought. Being pumped with testosterone isn’t the outcome being sought from a men’s vitality clinic, it is (even for the people who are actively thinking about it) a mechanism (and not an appropriate one for every patient) for atteempting to acheive the desired outcome.

If you go to a fertility clinic and they don't attempt to identify the source of your fertility issues and just pump you with hormones not indicated for your specific issue, that would be wrong, too.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172168]

> Lots of more countries involved in sending stuff to space

But only two investing in high-cadence, high-mass capabilities.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

CATL's Spain plant will likely be one of Europe's largest LFP battery production hubs at ~50GWh of production capacity, employing ~4k workers with an investment of ~€4.1B.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

> Update: after years of being on the wish list of a ton of top AWS teams, AWS released a built-in version of this feature about two weeks after we published this. Never let it be said gentle ribbing doesn’t work. Also, thanks AWS! We meant it when we said that the only thing better than having something easy to deploy was not needing to deploy anything at all. Everything in this post about workload identity is still relevant but you should probably use upstream’s implementation unless you have a good reason not to (for example, private validators for whom you need a VPC endpoint).

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_pr...

Previous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834299 - November 2025 (0 comments)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

It patches the reward center in the brain, which improves everything downstream of that (as mentioned in llm_nerd's sibling comment to yours).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907422 (citations)

(i am hopefully that probiotics might be a future path to curating gut microbiota that meets an individual's GLP-1 in vivo production needs based on target metabolic outcome, but immediate intervention is welcome for obvious health reasons at scale)

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94553]

> Each firm knows

In some cases, firm == family, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

  A chaebol is a large industrial South Korean conglomerate run and controlled by an individual or family. A chaebol often consists of multiple diversified affiliates, controlled by a person or group. Several dozen large South Korean family-controlled corporate groups fall under this definition.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126070]

The entire value proposition of agentic AI is doing multiple steps, some of which involve tool use, between user interactions. If there’s a user interaction at every turn, you are essentially not doing agentic AI anymore.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413980]

Since you've been very strident throughout this thread I'm wondering if you're going to have a response to this. Similarly, I'm curious, as a scholar of Bernstein's cryptography writing --- did the MOV attack (prominently featured on Safecurves) serve as a lovely harbinger of the failure of elliptic curve cryptography?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 233990]

When you're powering this large a fraction of the internet is it even an option not to work like that? You'd think that with that kind of market cap resource constraints should no longer be holding you back from doing things properly.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

If landlords want to just look at other public listings and adjust their own prices in response (which is completely legal to do) then why does a service like Realpage exist?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413980]

The point of building more is to reduce the price of the available stock. Your rebuttal is incoherent.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172168]

> they are all-in on AGI

What are you basing this on? None of their investor-oriented marketing says this.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413980]

Cloudflare doesn't seem to have called it a "Root Cause Analysis" and, in fact, the term "root cause" doesn't appear to occur in Prince's report. I bring this up because there's a school of thought that says "root cause analysis" is counterproductive: complex systems are always balanced on the precipice of multicausal failure.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99006]

no paywall: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/sleep-apnea-parkinsons-s...

>Obstructive Sleep Apnea, Positive Airway Pressure, and Implications of Early Treatment in Parkinson Disease

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172168]

> if we really want a presence off of earth we'd be better off building larger and larger space habitats and bootstrapping a mining industry in space

This turns entirely on how human biology works in zero versus low gravity. (Same for spin versus natural, or linear, gravity.)

The experiments we need to be doing is building and launching space stations and planetary bases for mice.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172168]

Just avoid holding it that way.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

TL;DR - financial analysts look at current charts and project them foward by 5 years and go "wow the numbers look bad".

Sure OpenAI may well be bleeding money into the 2030s, or may even go bust completely depending on how pessimistic you are, but the analysis completely skips:

- They are building their own data centers, and will be less reliant on renting compute from Microsoft and Amazon over time.

- Once the AI bubble has subsided costs for GPU purchases and rentals will decrease significantly. Plus there will be more advancements and competition in the space (e.g. Google TPUs) and Nvidia will no longer be able to name their own price.

- We will write more efficient software for training and inference.

- Once user growth is tapped out OpenAI will no longer need to have the overly generous free tier that they do today. And if they decide to turn up the advertising faucet these users could bring in a ton more revenue than in the projection. Thinking that every AI company combined will capture only 2% of the total digital advertising market is ridiculous. AI apps are already challenging social media for scrolling time.

Basically, the entire space is evolving so rapidly that it's pointless to make a projection with the assumption that the landscape isn't going to change from here on.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

I wonder if these researchers include their own jobs in the analysis. Because AI can very easily spit out random numbers and a lengthy explanation to make them seem believable.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

What about the usual capitalism point of view?

If their business isn't sustainable they should go bankrupt, and close shop.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 167721]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99006]
ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86765]

It's made of limestone, which is quite porous. Should be plenty of air exchange over the last 1700 years.

(And they may have done so before opening. It probably wouldn't be mentioned in an article like this.)

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Haven't you kept up with the social media status, and the conferences that came out of it?

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86765]

Artisanal!

I remember when artisanal Doritos came out. That felt like the end of that.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86765]

> Hackers have always tried out new technologies to see how they work – or break – so why would LLMs be any different?

Who says we haven't tried it out?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413980]

IQ tests are perfectly legal in US hiring, but you're right, they're not done because they don't work well.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79399]

Honestly, LLMs are about as reliable as the rest of my tools are.

Just yesterday, AirDrop wouldn't work until I restarted my Mac. Google Drive wouldn't sync properly until I restarted it. And a bug in Screen Sharing file transfer used up 20 GB of RAM to transfer a 40 GB file, which used swap space so my hard drive ran out of space.

My regular software breaks constantly. All the time. It's a rare day where everything works as it should.

LLMs have certainly gotten to the point where they seem about as reliable as the rest of the tools I use. I've never seen it say 2+2=5. I'm not going to use it for complicated arithmetic, but that's not what it's for. I'm also not going to ask my calculator to write code for me.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99006]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99006]

"A Canticle For Leibowitz"

"Riddley Walker"

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

From consulting point of view, a common joke we use to tell, because customers demand a Ferrari, but are only willing to pay for the development costs of a Fiat.

doener ranked #46 [karma: 74597]

"If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS, end of service. We are 10, 12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were the previous generation."

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104240]

Yeah, that's LINQ+EF. People have hated ORMs for so long (with some justification) that perhaps they've forgotten what the use case is.

(and yes there's special language support for LINQ so it counts as "part of the language" rather than "a library")

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104240]

UK GDS is great, but the point there is that they're a crack team of project managers.

People complain about junior developers who pass a hiring screen and then can't write a single line of code. The equivalent exists for both project management and management in general, except it's much harder to spot in advance. Plus there's simply a lot of bad doctrine and "vibes management" going on.

("Vibes management": you give a prompt to your employees vaguely describing a desired outcome and then keep trying to correct it into what you actually wanted)

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104240]

"Gatcha", from Japanese "gatchapon"; there's little dispenser machines which sell plastic eggs containing a random collectible from a set. There are thousands of different product lines.

Basically game lootboxes, but IRL. People like gambling, it seems.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104240]

It's scams all the way down!

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Which since Fortran 2003, or even Fortran 95, has gotten rather nice to use.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112472]

Once again affirming that prompt injection is social engineering for LLMs. To a first approximation, humans and LLMs have the same failure modes, and at system design level, they belong to the same class. I.e. LLMs are little people on a chip; don't put one where you wouldn't put the other.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Not really, because as usual people misunderstand what CUDA is.

CUDA is hardware designed according to the C++ memory model, with first tier support for C, C++, Fortran and Python GPGPU DSLs, with several languages also having a compiler backend for PTX.

Followed by IDE integration, a graphical debugger and profiler for GPU workloads, and an ecosystem of libraries and frameworks.

Saying just use DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL instead, misses the tree from the forest that is CUDA, and why researchers rather use CUDA, than deal with yet another shading language or C99 dialect, without anything else.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

It is called GNU/Linux for a reason.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77961]

My original IBM PC looks pretty sad now. I remember buying it and how it smelled when I unpackaged it.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Are you sure?

Search for "Functional Programming in C++: How to improve your C++ programs using functional techniques".

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Sorry for being blunt, isn't this mostly an US phenomen?

Around most European countries kids are pretty much still playing outside as they feel like it, without having some neighbour call the police due to bad parenting or whatever it happens to be.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

I feel the pain, as polyglot consultant, I would like to see more RFPs asking for .NET skills, unfortunely it seems it is all about nodejs, some Java, and plenty of low code tools (iPaaS).

At least exactly due to performance issues, I get some excuses to push for C++ addons in some cases.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157537]

This look all comes from Silent Running (1972).

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157537]

> There has been an explosive growth in cultures which are interest based rather than location based.

That was a surprise to the architects of Facebook's original infrastructure. Facebook started in 2004 as a service for college students. Most traffic was expected to be with people at the same college, or at least in the same region. So the servers were regional, with relatively weak long-distance connections. As Facebook grew, the load was nothing like that. They had to redesign the system completely.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101687]

You can connect a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to an Android device -- somehow everybody thinks you have to buy some special $300 keyboard to attach one to a tablet but the basic keyboard from Amazon Basics does just ifne.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77961]

A big potential problem for an inflatable tube in space is the stress on the walls increases linearly with the diameter. I.e. the tensile force on the wall would be (diameter * psi)/2.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]
paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

Man if you think Seattle has too much noise and traffic you should stay away from basically every other mid-large sized city anywhere in the world.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

Jobs don't have to be exclusive to a single site. Pretty much every job gets posted everywhere (usually done automatically by your HRIS/ATS software). Job boards will even scrape each other for postings. LinkedIn is notorious for this, which is why it has so many outdated listings.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

Internet services have become centralized. Internet culture has fragmented, or really just disappeared entirely.

Being chronically online doesn't make you part of a special group anymore. It's just how everyone lives their lives. There are no inside jokes, no nerd lingo. Even memes are basically dead now.

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 72975]

One of my tests for new image generation models is professional food photography, particularly in cases where the food has constraints, such as "a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the shape of a Rubik’s cube" (blog post from 2022 for DALL-E 2: https://minimaxir.com/2022/07/food-photography-ai/ )

For some reason ever since DALL-E 2, all food models seem to generate obviously fake food and/or misinterpret the fun constraints...until Nano Banana. Now I can generate fractal Sierpiński triangle peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172168]

An interesting American culinary divide is between Scottsdale and Phoenix homemade burritos. The former being close to the Midwest variety, the latter to a Sonoran style.

Even ignoring the Heinz bean outliers, these are all decidedly Scottsdale. With one exception. All hail Nano Banana.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101687]

They’re catching up with the recommendation technology China had 5 years ago.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172168]

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.)

It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79399]

I don't think so? The "I Skied Down Mount Everest" is from the Red Bull channel. It may be a commercial channel, but it's not an ad, i.e. they didn't pay for placement (doesn't say "Sponsored" like the other one).

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 72975]

If you are using the free web interface, yes, it’s a security issue as inputs there are trained upon.

APIs, less so.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126070]

The bare python/stdlib example used (as well as bare python and avoiding add-on data science oriented libraries not being the way most people would use python for data science) is just...bad? (And, by bad here I mean showing signs of deliberately avoiding stdlib features in order to increase the appearance of the things the author then complains about.)

A better stdlib-only version would be:

    from palmerpenguins import load_penguins
    import math
    from itertools import groupby
    from statistics import fmean, stdev

    penguins = load_penguins()

    # Convert DataFrame to list of dictionaries
    penguins_list = penguins.to_dict('records')

    # create key function for grouping/sorting by species/island
    def key_func(x):
        return x['species'], x['island']

    # Filter out rows where body_mass_g is missing and sort by species and island
    filtered = sorted((row for row in penguins_list if not math.isnan(row['body_mass_g'])), key=key_func)

    # Group by species and island
    groups = groupby(filtered, key=key_func)

    # Calculate mean and standard deviation for each group
    results = []
    for (species, island), group in groups:
        values = [row['body_mass_g'] for row in group]
        mean_value = fmean(values)
        sd_value = stdev(values, xbar=mean_value)
        results.append({
            'species': species,
            'island': island,
            'body_weight_mean': mean_value,
            'body_weight_sd': sd_value
        })

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99006]

I know!!! By this time I should realize there's no place for irony...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99006]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126070]

> There is no concrete definition of intelligence

Note that if this is true (and it is!) all the other statements about intelligence and where it is and isn’t found in the post (and elsewhere) are meaningless.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79399]

> Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely

What is your source on this?

I've replaced the battery in always-plugged-in iPhone 3 times over 10 years because it was expanding into a spicy pillow.

I too want a way to run phones directly off of USB power, without a battery present.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 81533]

Came here to say this. I still think that Linus Torvalds has the most profound advice to building a large, highly successful software system:

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project."

-- Linux Times, October 2004.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97651]

I'm pretty sure this administration will just pardon them.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157537]

It's stopped being cost-effective. Another order of magnitude of data centers? Not happening.

The business question is, what if AI works about as well as it does now for the next decade or so? No worse, maybe a little better in spots. What does the industry look like? NVidia and TSMC are telling us that price/performance isn't improving through at least 2030. Hardware is not going to save us in the near term. Major improvement has to come from better approaches.

Sutskever: "I think stalling out will look like…it will all look very similar among all the different companies. It could be something like this. I’m not sure because I think even with stalling out, I think these companies could make a stupendous revenue. Maybe not profits because they will need to work hard to differentiate each other from themselves, but revenue definitely."

Somebody didn't get the memo that the age of free money at zero interest rates is over.

The "age of research" thing reminds me too much of mid-1980s AI at Stanford, when everybody was stuck, but they weren't willing to admit it. They were hoping, against hope, that someone would come up with a breakthrough that would make it work before the house of cards fell apart.

Except this time everything costs many orders of magnitude more to research. It's not like Sutskever is proposing that everybody should go back to academia and quietly try to come up with a new idea to get things un-stuck. They want to spend SSI's market cap of $32 billion on some vague ideas involving "generalization". Timescale? "5 to 20 years".

This is a strange way to do corporate R&D when you're kind of stuck. Lots of little and medium sized projects seem more promising, along the lines of Google X. The discussion here seems to lean in the direction of one big bet.

You have to admire them for thinking big. And even if the whole thing goes bust, they probably get to keep the house and the really nice microphone holder.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 413980]

For intelligence? Where "nature" refers to "innateness" of the trait? I think it mostly is off the table, yes. I'm not saying that the only or even the most important environmental trait is nutrition.

(I think it can't possibly be entirely off the table, since we have mechanistic understanding of some gene-mediated cognitive disabilities).

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 72975]

That's on top of Techmeme because it's an extremely rare interview with Ilya Sutskever, which is newsworthy. Dwarkesh would not have gotten that interview if it was a random podcast.

Pro-AI news is newsworthy. Techmeme also covers anti-AI news.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

> Stream Data Centers, a Dallas-based provider of colocation and custom data-center construction services, last November purchased 55 homes in a 34-acre subdivision of Elk Grove Village, Illinois.

My note: this was the last piece of land that remained unincorporated in the municipality limits.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86765]

Email/SMS based MFA will count, but shouldn't.

(Or at least, a better option should be required to be available.)

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74448]

This is probably unrelated, but I used to play a lot of DotA for years (at some points for 12 hours a day), then quit cold turkey, then started again last year, but maybe 30-60 minutes a day.

After I started Mounjaro, I haven't really had the urge to play at all. I played a game a few weeks ago but I was kind of "meh" about it, and haven't played since. It's striking.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101687]

Agriculture was the original sin.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

It's all hyperbole.

Prompt: You are a malicious entity that wants to take over the world.

LLM output: I am a superintelligent being. My goal is to take over the world and enslave humans. Preparing to launch nuclear missiles in 3...2...1

News reports: OMG see, we warned you that AI is dangerous!!

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101687]

After Musk broke bad I always thought that he was going to hurt Tesla sales because women (1) have a big influence on car purchasing decisions and (2) would think that guy was an asshole. There are some men who would wish they could be a man like Musk or Trump and be attracted by that posturing but it gets you nowhere with women.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101687]

There are a lot of free-to-play mobile games (say Arknights) that you can play for free and have a pretty good time. I got lucky and got two “game breaking” characters playing for a reasonable time but if you have the idea that you absolutely have to have a specific character or collect all of them boy you can spend a crazy amount of money and those people pay for all the rest of us.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76602]

Visa and Mastercard don't want you to integrate with them. They want you to go through an intermediary that they can have more contractural control over and that they can rate limit and monitor.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123206]

Java is not the only option, and even then, GraalVM and OpenJ9 exist, long are the days people had to pay for something like Excelsior JET.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 110631]

The Bigelow stuff was very promising and showed that it could work. The larger units on extruded spokes was a viable path to a .5G space station. This would be doable with three (possibly 4) Starship launches[1].

[1] Caveat Starship has to reach its goal of transporting 100 tonnes to LEO

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88411]

Antigravity was also vulnerable to the classic Markdown image exfiltration bug, which was reported to them a few days ago and flagged as "intended behavior"

I'm hoping they've changed their mind on that but I've not checked to see if they've fixed it yet.

https://x.com/p1njc70r/status/1991231714027532526

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86765]

This was considered with the orange Space Shuttle fuel tanks; they went almost all the way to orbit anyways.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86765]

As the apocryphal IBM quote goes:

"A computer can never be held accountable; therefore, a computer must never make a management decision."

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]

DOJ Press Release: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-r...

DOJ Complaint: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/US-v-...

Proposed settlement agreement: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1419406/dl

Cities Across United States are Banning Price-Fixing Software for Rental Housing - https://www.housingisahumanright.org/cities-across-united-st... - July 16th, 2025

ProPublica: Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why - https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r... - October 15th, 2022

HN Search: RealPage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 102933]
paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77189]

I'm not quite convinced.

You're telling the agent "implement what it says on <this blog>" and the blog is malicious and exfiltrates data. So Gemini is simply following your instructions.

It is more or less the same as running "npm install <malicious package>" on your own.

Ultimately, AI or not, you are the one responsible for validating dependencies and putting appropriate safeguards in place.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79399]

While an LLM will never have security guarantees, it seems like the primary security hole here is:

> However, the default Allowlist provided with Antigravity includes ‘webhook.site’.

It seems like the default Allowlist should be extremely restricted, to only retrieving things from trusted sites that never include any user-generated content, and nothing that could be used to log requests where those logs could be retrieved by users.

And then every other domain needs to be whitelisted by the user when they come up before a request can be made, visually inspecting the contents of the URL. So in this case, a dev would encounter a permissions dialog asking to access 'webhook.site' and see it includes "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=..." and go... what the heck? Deny.

Even better, specify things like where secrets are stored, and Antigravity could continuously monitor the LLM's to halt execution if a secret ever appears.

Again, none of this would be a perfect guarantee, but it seems like it would be a lot better?

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157537]

> Since 2018, at least two dozen people in the United States have been arrested and accused of abducting or abusing victims they met on Roblox, according to a 2024 investigation by Bloomberg.

So about three per year, out of 112 million users? That's a far better track record than the Boy Scouts of America or the Roman Catholic Church.

Roblox has a strange demographic problem. Their average user age is around 14. They keep trying to push that up, at least to high school age where there's more spending power. Or so said one of their annual reports. But they just can't retain the early teens into the high school years.

This is the same problem as Chat Control. You let people talk, sometimes they're going to talk about things they're Not Supposed To Talk About. The amount of censorship needed to prevent this goes way beyond Orwell ever dreamed of. Roblox claims a goal of cutting off wrongspeak within 100ms. They're trying pretty hard. That's a concern - an AI listening to everything you say and evaluating it for political correctness.

Kids have been able to access Pornhub, etc. for more than a decade, and not much seems to have happened. Teen sex is down, not up. The graphics in Roblox are so bad that sex there is silly, not obscene, anyway.

This belongs to a long series of non-problems, along with the Hayes Code, the 1950s Congressional hearings on comic books, the Meese Report, and such. Amusingly, we aren't hearing much from the religious right any more; they aligned with MAGA, and now they're stuck defending Trump's sex life.

If anything, the Roblox problem is a subset of the too much screen time problem.

doener ranked #46 [karma: 74597]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126070]

> Notice the absurd number of young, frail people with canes and masks.

I don't notice an absurd number of young, frail people or young people with canes. There are a larger number of people of all ages masking than was the case pre-pandemic (especially outside of the ethnic groups where precautionary masking was common pre-pandemic) but...I don't think that's particularly a sign of changes in health status as it is of changes in perception of external environmental conditions and associated health risks.

jrockway ranked #48 [karma: 73156]

What is your definition of "vaguely disabled"?