HN Leaders

What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

It is quite common when being around WG21 stuff, just as info.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106902]

The GPL talks about "the preferred form for modification of the software", and I'm starting to think that anything which involves any kind of LLM agent should be including all the text that the user gave to it as well. Prompts, etc.

Of course, even then it's not reproducible and requires proprietary software!

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76189]

When you grow up you should want universal healthcare...

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76189]

No, the number is made up, I'm saying that there's a point where the advice makes sense. Whether or not that's actually the case now is then a matter of statistics.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

The right way to start is with LispWorks or Allegro Common Lisp, exactly the surviving Common Lisp IDEs, instead of building your own IDE out of Emacs and SLIME.

However I do agree with the AI part.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106902]

Also, despite the CPU being 1000x slower, redraws were extremely fast. If they weren't quite fast enough, then the combo of deterministic keyboard nav and a reliable type ahead buffer meant the user could queue up a burst of actions from muscle memory.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172986]

And yet: current state of the art models are also great at navigating and trying language ecosystems that aren't as mainstream. So if you're curious it's now great to explore topics, languages, concepts that — even if not mainstream — were so far a bit out of reach.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

Yes, used it on MS-DOS 3.3, until getting hold of Works for MS-DOS.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

Is that because you don't believe we should use AI, or because you do not agree with “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

Priorities on what tickets to work on, and Apple being proudly underresourced.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

No, the President does not have “full naming rights” over entities defined and named in statute law. The President is bound to faithfully execute that law, but to change it (even if that change is merely to the name of a department or title of an officer specified within it) requires a bill to that effect to be passed by a majority of each house of Congress, which the President may then sign into law, effecting the change.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

It would be a brilliant move if it wasn't castrated with 8 GB, even my netbook from 2009 got upgraded to 16 GB during its lifetime, which ended in 2024.

A netbook from 2009, already had the capability to get RAM sticks up to 16 GB in total, go figure!

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

> I don't like paltry sums like this. $300 is a significant financial impact to someone who's barely making ends meet, and absolutely nothing at all to a billionaire.

One thing about daycares is that you will essentially never find "someone who's barely making ends meet" and "a billionaire" with kids at the same daycare, so a surcharge for out-of-normal-expectations service does not need to be designed to address both cases.

(In fact, you'll probably not find a billionaire with kids at any daycare, their hired childcare workers won't be shared with other people, and will probably be adequately compensated up front in a way which anticipates a fair degree of schedule variability.)

OTOH, with red light cameras, you also don't need to scale the fine to work with both, because the entire purpose is to bind the lower classes while exempting the upper from any substantial burden. (The least cynical explanation is that it is to discourage behavior which might incur liability grossly exceeding the mandatory level of insurance company by those least able to cover the cost of that liability, thereby avoiding uncompensated harms, but the realistic explanation is...not so generous.)

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99079]

It's a common problem to get excited about networks, build a large one, and then by stuck with an unapproachable hairball. If you want to explore network structure, consider using tools like quadrilateral simmelian backones which can provide an opinionated look at what matters in the network.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88219]

programs that have no good Linux equivalent

There is WINE.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160099]

But it's not bad enough yet to have a New Coke type consumer rejection.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

All corruption (and other dishonest ways of making profit or advantage) is graft, to attempt sell something under false pretenses is to grift [0].

Grifting is often among the techniques used to effectuate graft.

IMO, the upthread post reads better with “graft” which is a abstract noun, matching the use upthread, where “grift” is usually a verb (I've also seen it used as a concrete now for a particular operation in which the agent is perceived to be grifting.)

[0] Most dictionaries I think will still say this is specific to small-scale swindling, but I think that's a lagging indicator; IME, usage has drifted to be more generalized, with large scale operations often referred to as grifting.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75619]

The title does not all accurately describe the article IMO. Zuckerberg is not "finished" with Alexander Wang, whatever that was supposed to mean.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417262]

Best bit:

Put in an unreasonable amount of effort

> Earlier I made an analogy to being an explorer; here's another I like even more. Think of yourself as a wildlife photographer. Obviously you need to be in the right place (you won't get a great picture of anything from your couch) and you need to be skilled at your craft. But once you've met those preconditions, the way to get the best picture is to just spend an unreasonable amount of time waiting for exactly the right circumstances to arise.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77953]

> Same with ⌃ being a pinky not retained when ⇪ replaced it

Any time I get a new computer, one of the very first things that I do is remap Caps Lock to Ctrl for exactly this reason. I literally never use Caps Lock, but my pinky hits it all the time.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74005]

The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024. There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82425]

I mean, the very first paragraph of TFA is describing who is under that impression. Literally the first sentence:

> My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are full of screenshots from the recent Forbes article on Cursor claiming that Anthropic's $200/month Claude Code Max plan can consume $5,000 in compute.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

> With the files API, apps could actually replicate the microsoft word experience of drafting a file and saving it to your desktop and praying that your hard drive doesn't fail,

Even withou the files API, with local storage, web apps can (and some—mostly extremely casual games that are free—do!) duplicate that experience with the extra risk of your data being lost because your disk became too full or some other event causing the local storage to be cleared.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

> Unfortunately for Anthropic, the Constitution does not require the government to purchase goods or services from a company that has made a public declaration that it will not allow its AI models (specifically Claude) to be used for mass domestic surveillance or to power fully autonomous weapons, if such a declaration goes against the government's contract requirements.

Obviously, if the contract requirements themselves are lawful, the government has the power to purchase only those goods and services that meet the requirements, and to not purchase those that do not.

But that's irrelevant, because the "supply chain risk" designation is not needed if the government is merely trying to assure that the good and services in a contract meet the requirement of the contract, it is a separate legal provision with separate purposes that would be superfluous for the purpose described.

If the government is using the "supply chain risk" designation as a backdoor way to rewrite all previously-entered, still-in-force defense contracts to retroactively add new requirements incompatible with the use of Anthropic software given their limitations on the service Anthropic is willing to provide, that also is not what the "supply chain risk" designation exists for, and, even if were to seem facially within the statutory purpose of the authority, would raise 5th Amendment takings issues.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

> There are plenty of example, even recently, of billionaires losing their fortunes

Billionaires aren't on the same level of wealth as hectobillionaires, just like decamillionaires aren't on the same level of wealth as billionaires.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99079]

Thousands, perhaps millions of people use Anki with no manipulation or social component, just internal drive. Maybe start your research there.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127548]

Yes, Amazon Retail being the sole significant customer of AWS, I guess?

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 80800]

> The tech industry often talks about “the cloud” as though it were something abstract and untouchable. But the cloud runs on data centers, those data centers have an address, and that address can be hit by a drone.

Nominating this as the best opening line I have read in a while.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79087]

I read that it is statistically more dangerous to fly on a private jet than a commercial one.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91281]

From a 2026 perspective I couldn't possibly have had as a teenager in the 1990s, it kind of feels like a well-polished, extended SCP story.

As I can in 2026 gorge myself on "mysterious things doing mysterious tasks mysteriously", now an entire sub-genre of its own, I'm pretty sure the impact if I read it for the first time today would be somewhat muted by comparison.

I am also reminded of the J. J. Abrams "mystery box storytelling" technique. Rendevous with Rama was perhaps one of my first encounters with the technique, so I have fond memories of it. But in 2026 I find myself tired of the "woo woo there's a mystery and we're not going to tell you what it is" because in the end, all mystery boxes are fundamentally the same, and I've seen enough of the mystery box. It has its place in history but if a random person who has never read sci-fi of this era wanted a recommendation to start with, this would be way, way down on my list, unless you explicitly want to read things significant to the genre.

But as I've tried to make clear by my repeated references to the present time, that's my 2026 review. For the time it was a fine book.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239591]

Rendezvous with Rama is one of the most evocative books I've read by Clarke. I often think back of it in visuals and then have to remind myself I read a book, I have not seen a movie.

This does not improve.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239591]

And here we are throwing all that brilliance away with Async abominations. Software can be so simple and elegant.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239591]

They could have called it morewrong.com or morallywrong for all the right mathematical reasons instead. Their eugenics agenda is really more than a little bit tiresome at this point.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Tags do nothing, email the mods if desired. Bottom bar has deets (“contact”).

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76189]

This is interesting (and I've seen it mentioned in some editors), but how do I use it? It would be great if it had bubblewrap support, so I don't have to use Docker.

Do you know if there's a cli or something that would make this easier? The GitHub org seems to be more focused on the spec.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90360]

The parts that are not hearsay from anonymous sources, which basically means any paranoid story that the FBI still has to document, or blackmailers and grifters with plenty of holes and inconsistencies to their stories, are about about elites partying with 17 and above year olds who where otherwise active already in related "work". Still shady, but hardly what's being reported in the sensationalist coverage, which ranges from abductions and rings to acid baths for murdered victims.

https://www.mtracey.net/p/we-need-to-talk-about-virginia

https://www.mtracey.net/p/epstein-survivors-refusing-questio...

https://www.mtracey.net/p/i-found-the-real-epstein-coverup

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I am mainly a code monkey but I have done enough to know that Product Hunt is not a marketing plan and was never a marketing plan unless your product is something that will get you a #1 day on Product Hunt.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 80800]

Is there a legal distinction between training, post-training, fine tuning and filling up a context window?

In all of these cases an AI model is taking a copyrighted source, reading it, jumbling the bytes and storing it in its memory as vectors.

Later a query reads these vectors and outputs them in a form which may or may not be similar to the original.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I only use the source code repositories and have had little trouble in the last few months except for that time there was a network partition.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 80800]

Plenty of enterprise server hardware (racks, servers, RAM, disks) does have an active secondhand market after 3-5 years of use, but I think GPUs are too specialized for it to be viable. I doubt anyone has the setup to run a H200 in their home rig.

I also don't think companies are going to have mandatory replacement cycles for GPU hardware the same way they do for everything else, because:

1. It is an order or magnitude (or more) more expensive.

2. It isn't clear whether Moore's law will apply to the AI GPU space the same way it has for everything else.

Unless Nvidia can launch a new chip every 2-3 years with massively improved performance-per-watt at a lower price no one is going to rush to recycle the old one.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76189]

Yeah except you didn't actually find a vulnerability, you just searched for a pattern, found it, and thought "vulnerability" because you aren't a security researcher and don't realize that context is important.

You should educate yourself more before you go around slandering people.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186634]

2010 is also good. The movie is also competent, but it could never fill the shoes 2001 left.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167308]

The user you're responding too lists a "blood test viewer" [0], which looks to be a tool that turns his blood test PDFs into structured and analyzed data. You're saying that unless he continuously revises/upgrades the code, it's still "abandonware" even if it meets his needs for the near future?

[0] https://github.com/skorokithakis/dracula

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99079]

providing cheap energy

From what, turf? Back in the 1980s Ireland was importing coal from Poland because domestic mines weren't efficient. You're full of it.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

> The issue has drawn attention to the dire state of the health system in the southern Italian region, which paradoxically has an unemployment rate of about 20% yet struggles to attract medical staff. Working conditions there are notoriously harsh, largely because the remaining doctors and nurses shoulder an enormous workload.

Indentured servitude.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Something to consider for installations like this is a way to accept J1772 and NACS EV charging cables, allowing for charging at low or no cost from these level 2 chargers. Great write up by the author.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 97204]

> running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware

What async tasks could a local LLM accomplish on Intel 11th gen CPU with 32GB RAM?

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76189]

Maybe, although it's actually giving me OCD, I think. It's really hard to tune out because of the irregular ticking. I implemented a regular mode to combat this, defeating the purpose somewhat.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103841]
crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82425]

You might wish that were true, but there are very strong arguments it's not. Training on copyleft licensed code is not a license violation. Any more than a person reading it is. In copyright terms, it's such an extreme transformative use that copyright no longer applies. It's fair use.

But agreed that we're waiting for a court case to confirm that. Although really, the main questions for any court cases are not going to be around the principle of fair use itself or whether training is transformative enough (it obviously is), but rather on the specifics:

1) Was any copyrighted material acquired legally (not applicable here), and

2) Is the LLM always providing a unique expression (e.g. not regurgitating books or libraries verbatim)

And in this particular case, they confirmed that the new implementation is 98.7% unique.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

There is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177915]

Do parking tickets result in “a formal finding of guilt, and consequences tied to a driver’s record”?

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 80800]

How many times will the same report be regurgitated and reposted? There is nothing added here that the original source didn't cover already (https://www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-...). Read that instead of the derivative blogspam.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82304]

The phrasing "HR isn't there to protect you, it's there to protect the company" applies more here.

My experience is also that HR is very reasonable and cooperative with harassment claims. But the thing is that when you have a legit harassment claim, the law is there to protect you. You could make things very expensive for the company in court, and so protecting the company does mean protecting you and treating you respectfully and cooperatively.

If HR investigates and finds you don't have a legit case and that in fact you may have been the instigator, then protecting the company probably means getting rid of you. Your judgment and account of the facts is questionable in that case, and you're a liability from the other side.

I don't know exactly what happened in this case, but in the harassment case I've had to handle as a manager, the (male) employee said that the (female) victim had initiated everything and had this weird fascination with him, while the paper trail that everybody could see clearly showed that he was both the instigator and the one behaving improperly. Projection is strong in cases like these. So it's entirely possible we're not getting the full story from this anonymous blog post.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100367]

That's not at all incompatible with Bluesky having a funded company with a CEO.

The term they use for this is "credible exit" - designing the entire protocol such that if the company itself misbehaves the affected users can leave to a separate instance without losing their relationships or data.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 80800]

The only value driving most things you see online is the value of money. Which is not the kind of values they are referring to.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 97204]

> The devices will not carry the band support needed for these [non-EU] markets.

Would they have zero radio coverage, or sub-optimal coverage?

Could be a feature for those wanting a Wi-Fi only mobile Linux device.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100367]

The thing I most want to use this (or some other WASM Linux engine) for is running a coding agent against a virtual operating system directly in my browser.

Claude Code / Codex CLI / etc are all great because they know how to drive Bash and other Linux tools.

The browser is probably the best sandbox we have. Being able to run an agent loop against a WebAssembly Linux would be a very cool trick.

I had a play with v86 a few months ago but didn't quite get to the point where I hooked up the agent to it - here's my WIP: https://tools.simonwillison.net/v86 - it has a text input you can use to send commands to the Linux machine, which is pretty much what you'd need to wire in an agent too.

In that demo try running "cat test.lua" and then "lua test.lua".

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186634]

BASIC for 8-bit computers was an interesting language. It was limited in many aspects, but taught a whole generation about how computers actually worked. Apart from non-native data types (strings and floats), it was quite close to the machine - GOTO and GOSUB map very neatly to (in 6502) JMP and JSR.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Fantastic news, the longer the price is held up, the longer oil price levels tilts the economics towards electrification.

As Iran Crisis Upends Oil and Gas, Clean Energy Gets Complicated - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-02/middle-ea... | https://archive.today/fIND6 - March 2nd, 2026

> The European Union has already seen the benefit of pivoting to renewables after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though it also sought alternative sources of gas which are now under threat. Between 2019 and 2024, EU countries installed enough wind and solar capacity to avoid burning 92 billion cubic meters of gas and 55 million tons of hard coal in 2024, according to Agora Energiewende.

> “We’ve had tangible results,” said Frauke Thies, the think tank’s Europe director. “It was thanks to renewables that Europe wasn’t hit harder by the last energy crisis.”

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82425]

That's a heck of a "back of the envelope".

You're going to have to give us your calculations there.

Because a gigantic amount of life improvement is also attributable to using fossil fuels for energy. So how exactly are you weighing up the two sides? Not to mention, it's hard to see how we ever would have been able to create the modern forms of renewable energy in the first place without fossil fuels as an intermediate technological phase.

And it's not even clear how you'd attribute political violence to fossil fuels. You don't need fossil fuels for massive warfare. And if you remove one primary resource from the equation, then another resource now becomes primary, and people will be fighting over that. In the days of the Roman Empire, grain was the strategic resource.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 143474]

Insert here the New Yorker cartoon about the shabby business executive around a campfire with a bunch of kids crowing "Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 80800]

Do you think having women's only bathrooms is discrimination as well?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I think Mr. Foxx might have beat you to that one.

I kinda imagine the situations in MMO where people work to take down a big boss and wonder if you could capture the feel of it without people getting so invested in the game.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100367]

> CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system can apparently only batch-process 10,000 entry summary lines at a time, and there are over 1.6 billion entry summary lines that need updating. Importers frequently lumped their IEEPA duties together with other duties on the same line, meaning CBP personnel would have to manually untangle the amounts. Processing each individual refund takes about 5 minutes, which across 53 million entries works out to over 4.4 million hours.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239591]

Digital necrophilia. The living ones are the ones that are going to have to make the objections here.

This is revolting at so many levels.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Email the Cloudflare folks and see what they might have on offer. Might say no, might offer something with reasonable limits. Asking is free. Even if they can’t offer it for free, they might have some comment on how to optimize to keep costs minimal for serving these bits from CDN infra.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100367]

Right. The alternative is that we reward Dan for his 14 years of volunteer maintenance of a project... by banning him from working on anything similar under a different license for the rest of his life.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Related:

Microsoft adds higher-priced Office tier with Copilot as it tries to juice sales with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/microsoft-office-365-e7-copi... - March 9th, 2026

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

Yeah I've been thinking about a web site to shame people out of giving gift cards. On one hand there's the whole arguments that gift cards should be eliminated because they are a conduit for fraud, but also the one that they take away from the recipient as much as they give.

There was the time my sister-in-law gave my son a Burger King gift card just after Burger King went out of business in our town which was the beginning of a series of misadventures which could best be situated in the Buddhist framework that desire leads to suffering. Or the time she gave my son 3 $10 AMZN gift cards and I think I still have one with 84 cents of value on it. Just say no.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89583]

So it's an Osprey with a jet in the back?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

They can't win against Zuck, have to go after someone they can try to win against.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177915]

> An LNG terminal would make us more beholden to foreign powers

This is a weird way to justify using LNG brought in through Britain.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Original title "Wall Street Killed the Wildcatters: $100+ Oil Now Means Bigger Buybacks With Fewer Jobs and Babies Than Ever Before" compressed to fit within title limits.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

Defending against authoritarianism is never pointless.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I remember dealing with this BS back in 2017. It was clear to me that containers were, more than anything else, a system for turning 15MB of I/O into 15GB of I/O.

So wow and new shiny though so if you told people that they would just plug their ears with their fingers.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77953]

I'm curious what advantages this has over adding durability to an existing language, like DBOS does:

https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-demo-apps/blob/main/python/...

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

Workstations are more than just music, and there are still a few folks that still believe Apple will some day release a new Mac Pro that fits their hardware needs, without having to go either Windows or Linux.

https://cottonbureau.com/p/TR4KZV/shirt/mac-pro-believe#/300...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103841]

You are correct: my bad! Edited per your comment. Thank you.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74005]

There's a spicy argument to be made that "Rewrite it in Rust" is actually an environmentalist approach.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107094]

As Iran war shakes energy system, some see powerful argument for renewable energy - https://apnews.com/article/iran-war-warming-climate-change-i... - March 9th, 2026

The U.S.-Iran war is the biggest oil supply disruption in history - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/09/the-us-iran-war-is-the-bigge... - March 9th, 2026

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103841]
pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106902]

Until recently (and probably with some pressure from VW) everything else was supposed to be phased out in Europe within a decade: https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/1...

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I can just imagine all the other IPv6 security holes that have gone unnoticed because nobody is using IPv6.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77953]

This is fascinating to me. I am allergic to pork (or I would say intolerant, when I eat it I get a headache and/or stomach ache). But I did try a piece of wild boar once, and was fine after that. I will have to look into this!

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82425]

Thank you! So much more helpful.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 159919]

And there was a real cliff in recording time, not a marginal difference: a normal VHS tape could record a typical TV show, a normal Betamax tape could not. The utility function is a step function here.

(Both got more recording times through Long Play techniques a.k.a. quality degradation and through actually longer magnetic tape in the cassette, but at least in the beginning it was clear-cut).

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77953]

The last thing this world needs is my handwriting spreading beyond my local community!

But I would have loved to use this to capture my kid's kindergarten handwriting. Maybe I still have a sample around here...

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

There are 30,000 different x-platform GUI frameworks and they all share one attribute: (1) they look embarrassingly bad compared to Electron or Native apps and they mostly (2) are terrible to program for.

I feel like I never wasting my time when I learn how to do things with the web platform because it turns out the app I made for desktop and tablet works on my VR headset. Sure if you are going to pay me 2x the market rate and it is a sure thing you might interest me in learning Swift and how to write iOS apps but I am not going to do it for a personal project or even a moneymaking project where I am taking some financial risk no way. The price of learning how to write apps for Android is that I have to also learn how to write apps for iOS and write apps for Windows and write apps for MacOS and decide what's the least-bad widget set for Linux and learn to program for it to.

Every time I do a shoot-out of Electron alternatives Electron wins and it is not even close -- the only real competitor is a plain ordinary web application with or without PWA features.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82425]

> Number of times reading the documentation saved time and clarified why: never.

OK, so let's use an example... if you need to e.g. make a quick plot with Matplotlib. You just... what? Block off a couple weeks and read the source code start to finish? Or maybe reduce it to just a couple days, if you're trying to locate and understand the code just for the one type of plot you're trying to create? And the several function calls you need to set it up and display it in the end?

Instead of looking at the docs and figuring out how to do it in 5 or 10 min?

Because I am genuinely baffled here.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89583]

> The company and the Justice Department reached a surprise settlement on Monday, following a week of testimony during an antitrust trial that threatened to potentially separate the world’s largest live entertainment company.

Someone greased a few palms.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106902]

Sure, but then the taxpayer has to pay for it anyway. https://news.tvbs.com.tw/english/2690584

"TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) announced on Tuesday (Nov. 19 2024) plans to subsidize Taiwan Power Company (台灣電力公司) with NT$100 billion to address rising international fuel costs and stabilize prices"

=> over $3bn USD! This is not a small amount of money.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186634]

It might be a good time to move PyCon US to Canada again.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103841]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I dunno, previous generation Hakka tires were a revolution that has since been duplicated by other brands. Studless snows are really good, retractable studs can only add so much.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91281]

That would be a hypothesis, not a fact.

I'm not closed to it. You can check my comment history for frequent references to next-generation AIs that aren't architected like LLMs. But they're going to have to produce an AI of some sort that is better than the current ones, not hypothesize that it may be possible. We've got about 50 years of hypothesis about how wonderful such techniques may be and, by the new standards of 2026, precious few demonstrations of it.

Quoting from the article:

"Within five years, deep learning had consumed machine learning almost entirely. Not because the methods it displaced had stopped working, but because the money, the talent, and the prestige had moved elsewhere."

That one jumped right out at me because there's a slight-of-hand there. A more correct quote would be "Not because the methods it displaced had stopped working as well as they ever have, ..." Without that phrase, the implication that other techniques were doing just as well as our transformer-based LLMs is slipped in there, but it's manifestly false when brought up to conscious examination. Of course they haven't, unless they're in the form of some probably-beyond-top-secret AI in some government lab somewhere. Decades have been poured into them and they have not produced high-quality AIs.

Anyone who wants to produce that next-gen leap had probably better have some clear eyes about what the competition is.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105745]

I think the worst thing about the golden age of symbolic AI was that there was never a systematic approach to reasoning about uncertainty.

The MYCIN system was rather good at medical diagnostics and like other systems of the time had an ad-hoc procedure to deal with uncertainty which is essential in medical diagnosis.

The problem is that is not enough to say "predicate A has a 80% of being true" but rather if you have predicate A and B you have to consider the probability of all four of (AB, (not A) B, A (not B), (not A) (not B)) and if it is N predicates you have to consider joint probabilities over 2^N possible situations and that's a lot.

For any particular situation the values are correlated and you don't really need to consider all those contingencies but a general-purpose reasoning system with logic has to be able to handle the worst case. It seems that deep learning systems take shortcuts that work much of the time but may well hit the wall on how accurate they can be because of that.

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

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126804]

Sovereignty, the days of peaceful geopoltics are behind us.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89583]

Somehow that’s an often missed aspect of this. Yeah, ditching coal has a wide array of nice side effects. It has killed many, many more than the world’s nuclear accidents.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 88784]

I think this is true.

The closest analogy for AI, IMO, is not intellisense or auto-complete. It is cloud (there's a case to be made for compilers too; I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader).

Cloud, like AI:

* transformed hard things that took a lot of time and expertise into simpler things (do you remember setting up database replication?)

* came with a lot of hype but ultimately provided a lot of value (do you remember grid computing?)

* had plenty of skeptics (see this reddit thread which has some examples[0])

* was adopted at various speeds depending on the person and company

* caused security concerns[1]

In the end, people found a place for cloud. It is still growing, but not everything will run on cloud.

The same is true of AI. People will find a place for it. It won't do everything. But just as many sysadmins were forced to adapt to cloud, many developers will be forced to adapt to AI.

0: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/59ty7u/which_companies...

1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10848...