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.
Probably a different type of sugar too.
> used by Celtic tribes ... to intimidate their enemies
Hmmm. I need to get me one of those!
That's the reason why it will never be allowed to come to the US.
Narrow field of view LIDAR units have been moderately priced for years. Forward looking LIDAR is useful for anti-collision systems. It doesn't yield the situational awareness of full coverage needed for full autonomy, but it's good for putting on the brakes.
So, better face his rage then. If those are the options the choice is clear and easy.
> He thinks he knows better than the experts
It’s a kleptocracy. He doesn’t care. He just wants cheap money from the Fed as patronage.
Nothing? Trump is playing freeway chicken with Powell, he's driving a Pontiac Fiero and Powell is driving a bulldozer. The Supreme Court has already signaled that they're not on board fucking with the Fed. This will potentially cost Trump his next Fed nomination for awhile, because GOP Senators are putting a hold on his nominations until the legal stuff resolves.
Lately I've been interesting in biosignals, biofeedback and biosynchronization.
I've been really frustrated with the state of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) research and HRV apps, particularly those that claim to be "biofeedback" but are really just guided breathing exercises by people who seem to have the lights on and nobody home. [1]
I could have spent a lot of time reading the docs to understand the Web Bluetooth API and facing up to the stress that getting anything with Bluetooth working with a PC is super hit and miss so estimating the time I'd expect a high risk of spending hours rebooting my computer and otherwise futzing around to debug connection problems.
Although it's supposedly really easy to do this with the Web Bluetooth API I amazingly couldn't find any examples which made all the more apprehensive that there was some reason it doesn't work. [2]
As it was Junie coded me a simple webapp that pulled R-R intervals from my Polar H10 heart rate monitor in 20 minutes and it worked the first time. And in a few days, I've already got an HRV demo app that is superior to the commercial ones in numerous ways... And I understand how it works 100%.
I wouldn't call it vibe coding because I had my feet on the ground the whole time.
[1] for instance I am used to doing meditation practices with my eyes closed and not holding a 'freakin phone in my hand. why they expect me to look at a phone to pace my breathing when it could talk to be or beep at me is beyond me. for that matter why they try to estimate respiration by looking at my face when they could get if off the accelerometer if i put in on my chest when i am lying down is also beyond me.
[2] let's see, people don't think anything is meaningful if it doesn't involve an app, nobody's gotten a grant to do biofeedback research since 1979 so the last grad student to take a class on the subject is retiring right about now...
They chanted “lock her up” en masse as a campaign slogan. The desire to imprison is quite evident.
I missed that somehow. Upvoted.
You are expecting high quality and free, and unwilling to pay $50/month. Is this crazy? It’s certainly unrealistic.
Any equipment recommendations beyond what’s in this piece?
Agreed (mostly, but going into the Electoral College debate is a whole other rabbit hole, and regardless a majority voted for these people at least once, with full prior knowledge), and in a democracy we get the government we deserve.
But still, I saw a good clip from Bernie Sanders arguing that when people voted for Trump, they weren't really voting for giant tax breaks for billionaires, or making health care much more expensive, or kicking lots of people off food stamps (though I'd argue they should have realized these things were coming if they had paid attention). What they were voting for was a fundamental shake up of the system, and (for better or worse) Trump was the only one offering fundamental change, vs. the incremental anodyne "can't we all just get along" milquetoast plans from the Democrats (or at least the "elite" Democrats).
Also, for this imperial expansionism issue in particular, I'd argue that this really does feel like a 180 flip flop from Trump after all his "America First" and isolationist rhetoric. For a lot of other issues, for example the immigration crackdown or tariffs, I was truly baffled that some people were surprised how dumb or extreme his policies were, as he basically laid out that this was exactly what he was going to do in the campaign. But putting us in the path of more global conflict and territorial expansionism was actually the exact opposite of what he said he'd do. I'm not that surprised because he's such a transparent malignant narcissist, but again, at least on this issue he flip flopped.
Because it is, you are not. Checks and balances are at their limits (judicial branch), or non existent (Congress).
Did you genuinely select those examples in good faith?
If you're here to converse in good faith, what's your opinion of the examples I shared in this post over here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574276#46582192
Getting things I voted for that I didn’t even know about. https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-replaces-nrc-chair-as-...
Anyone could’ve picked up the mantle of fixing the NRC, which is an obviously broken agency. France transitioned the majority of its grid to nuclear back in the 80s. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, anyone could have picked up this low hanging fruit and fixed the problem. Nobody even tried.
It’s such an utter piece of crap.
Thanks for commenting, do you support S3 compatible targets? Backblaze B2, for example.
> advanced trigonometry
There's a ratio involving pi between the base lengths of the pyramid and its height. This is been interpreted by enthusiasts that the Egyptians knew about pi.
But, consider a measuring wheel, where you can mark off distances very accurately by counting revolutions of the wheel, say, 1 cubit in diameter (I know, I know, what's a cubit?). Then, if the height is laid out in cubits, the ratio of pi is there while being completely ignorant of it.
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
Lidar is incredibly low power and fast scanning, the retinal risk is probably much less than having to drive when the sun is near the horizon.
>Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building.
Nope. It was coding. Enjoying the process itself.
If I wanted to hand out specs and review code (which is what an AI jockey does), I'd be having fucking project managers as role models, not coders...
> For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it.
Talk about a good thing coming from bad intentions! Congratulations on shaking that demon.
Wait, can you provide the positive definition for "sandbox" you're relying on here?
Between anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.
Does Photos have features you use that Immich doesn't? I've switched to the latter fully and love it (though I have an Android).
Not your parent, but there are two ways:
1. If you use a custom deleter, then there's extra stuff to store that. this isn't common, and this API isn't available in Rust, so... not the best argument here.
2. There's ABI requirements that cause it to be passed in memory, see here for details: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58339165/why-can-a-t-be-...
> The sheer brazenness of calling legitimate congressional oversight 'circus-like publicity stunts' is on a whole new level
Is it? I feel like the mud slinging has been in vogue for a few decades.
The willful lawbreaking is new. But the rhetoric feels familiar.
> point do the MAGA folks realize that they are enabling a future Democrat in the White House to do the exact same thing
None of them do. (To be fair, administrations have been expanding the Presidenxy since WWII. We never had a Constitutional discussion of strategic nuclear command or a standing superpower’s army.)
My pet projects are shredding federal student loan records, tearing the turbines out of coal plants and ceasing enforcement on tariffs and duties on all imported food on day one.
Rounded corners are ironically symbolic of the dumbing-down that's affected the software industry. Instead of the sharp precision of 90-degree corners, we get vague curves that don't make sense anymore as though the corners have been worn away.
> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked
Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)
Sell shovels during a gold rush.
I think the absurdity is the whole point.
It‘s "remove". A common word, but many words are common and not on the list. Lesswrong also lists "prüf" (check), another common word.
> hardware you can buy with $2000
Including how much RAM?
Right. Meta wants big enough plants that an AP1000 or two would be the right size. They're known to work. There are four in operation, two in the US, and another dozen or so under construction.
Most of the small nuclear reactor startups hand-wave the failure modes and argue that they don't need the hulking big expensive containment building. NuScale claimed that. They wanted multiple reactors sharing the same cooling pool. If they ever had a leak, the whole set of reactors would be contaminated, even without a meltdown.
If we look at the big reactor accidents so far, there's Chernobyl, with no containment building. There's Fukushima, with too small a containment unable to contain the pressure. And there's Three Mile Island, where a large, strong containment building contained a meltdown. Three Mile Island was an expensive disaster, but not hazardous outside the plant. That's the failure mode you want.
We might be better off at developing better techniques for welding thick sections to make hulking big, strong containment vessels. There's been progress with robotic welding of thick sections.[1]
[1] https://www.agrrobotics.com/trends-s-industry-analysis/roadm...
The pain I’ve experienced running ComfyUI on windows is from (1) pytorch and the complexities of managing it through pip when python’s platform concept doesn't encompass CUDA versions, (2) dependency conflicts between custom nodes (some of which also involve #1 because they pin a specific pytorch version as a dependency), and (3) gratuitous breakage in ComfyUI updates.
None of which Linux makes any better.
> surprised there's so many nuclear power companies
This is actually American capitalism working at its finest.
Have you seen a video of a slime mold "solving" a maze? It reaches out in every direction with thin tendrils until it makes contact. (Then the game shifts.)
We have a sense, like a slime mold picking up on the "scent" of food, that there is energy. But there are lots of good hypotheses for how we get there. So we try them. Not exhaustively. But multiply. When someone demonstrates they've got it, the game will shift to consolidation and scaling.
Maybe because Pix is quite good?
Even more of a crypto scam than usual:
> Disclaimer: $RALPH is a memecoin created to celebrate the Ralph Wiggum Technique and AI development culture. The token was created and is operated by BagsApp—Geoffrey Huntley did not deploy the smart contract and has no control over it.
What a mess, starting to really miss Balmer.
Which goes to show how often this comes up, yet Steam hardware survey is now about 3%, a decade later.
Well, sure. There is a price to pay for alienating research and investment in a particular domain. A decade is a long time in tech.
Even in normal human-written code, it's not guaranteed to get the code completely correct in one-shot. That's why code review and QA still exists.
The issue here is more organizational with the engineers not getting the code up to standards before handing off, not the capabilities of the AI itself.
Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported.
I'd also note in advance there is a big difference in someone figuring out how to jailbreak Gemini or OpenAI, and then the companies responding swiftly to fix that, than what has been reported with Grok where it was basically wide open to create those images.
Or maybe they just don't like thieves or the parties that are currently in charge of these systems. There are as many reasons to like AI as there are to dislike it.
Of course veteran industry insiders who had equity as a significant part of their compensation would have no motive to cement the existing oligopoly, would they?
Very nice, did you run into any interesting challenges?
Unfortunately the rest of the world also gets the leader the US deserves.
> I never understood why the more strict rules of XML for HTML never took off.
Because of the vast quantity of legacy HTML content, largely.
> HTML 5 was an opportunity to make a clear cut between legacy HTML and the future of HTML.
WHATWG and its living standard that W3C took various versions of and made changes to and called it HTML 5, 5.1, etc., to pretend that they were still relevant in HTML, before finally giving up on that entirely, was a direct result of the failure of XHTML and the idea of a clear cut between legacy HTML and the future of HTML. It was a direct reaction against the “clear cut” approach based on experience, not an opportunity to repeat its mistakes. (Instead of a clear break, HTML incorporated the “more strict rules of XML” via the XML serialization for HTML; for the applications where that approach offers value, it is available and supported and has an object model 100% compatible with the more common form, and they are maintained together rather than competing.)
The 6502, for all its warts brought the best out in the programmers that used it.
Dell XPS 14 starts at $2,050, while the 16-inch model will demand $2,200 starting Jan. 6. If you think that’s high, that’s because Dell revised its price point from $1,650 and $1,850, respectively.
If my mailbox is breached, Instagram will be the least of my worries.
Couple of blogs about my KIM-1:
1. My 1976 KIM-1 https://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/my-1976-kim-1.html
2. Getting the KIM-1 to talk to my Mac https://blog.jgc.org/2025/02/getting-kim-1-to-talk-to-my-mac...
Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of HTML5 is that it specifies exactly what to do with tag soup. The rules are worth a glance at some time, just to see how rather absurdly complicated they are to do the job of picking up the pieces of who knows how many terabytes and petabytes of garbage HTML were generated before they were codified in an attempt to remain backwards compatible with the various browsers prior to that. And then you'll understand why I'm not going to even begin to attempt to answer your question about how browsers handle various tag combinations. Instead my point is only that, with HTML5, there is in fact a very concrete answer that is no longer up to the browsers trying to each individually spackle over the various and sundry gaps in the standards.
But honestly no answer to "what does the browser do with this sort of thing" fits into an HN comment anymore. I'm glad there's a standard, but there's a better branch of the multiverse where the specification of what to do with bad HTML was written from the beginning and is much, much simpler.
Am I missing something? The source they shared is a screenshot of a password reset email, which anyone can trigger if they have the email address of the account.
I think it goes back all the way to the founding days of Canada, essentially the Hudson Bay Company.
Note that C# 14 versus C# 1.0 isn't suffering from feature creap as well.
What has guided C++ are the 300+ volunteers that get to submit papers, travel around the world attending the meetings, and win the election rounds of what gets into the standard.
Unfortunately design by committee doesn't lead to a clear product roadmap.
Doesn't Amazon incur compliance problems then? If they become the actual "importer of record".
Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, and WPF also exist and are quite usable.
Apple also doesn't always uses their stuff as they are supposed to, Webviews are used in a few "native" apps, some macOS apps are actually iOS ones ported via Catalyst, which is the reason they feel strange, and many other stuff I could list.
Two measures, two weights.
Has February 6 been upgraded from NET?
This is a particularly-dumb conspiracy theory as far as these go. It’s like arguing Ford was founded to build tanks.
With doom scrolling for the comments. And cat pictures.
On build your own PC desktop with known parts, yeah.
On random laptop regular people buy at computer stores and needs to be reversed engineered by volunteers, it will be business as usual.
Without even touching this "cheese is not as good as you find in Europe", if you had deep-dish pizza you should know that's tourist pizza. I grew up with cracker-thin pizza from Fox's, cut into squares; the real Chicago pizza.
Would that be this item? [1] The product description and SKU match.
It's not clear who "FS" is. A reseller? A manufacturer? They seem to be in Singapore. There's no excuse for the external plastic sheath disintegrating. They must have formulated the plastic wrong. The terms specify a 30 day warranty.
Here's a catalog of real mil-spec fiber optic cables.[2] This is overkill for home applications; you put these in a fighter jet.
In between are Telecom Industry Association compliant fiber optic cables. That's what telcos use. There are US manufacturers with real plants and addresses.
What a bunch of BS. Once I buy a product I can resell it elsewhere. That's how ownership works. I do not need "permission" for this, beyond that guaranteed by the legal system, and exceptions such as export restrictions notwithstanding. There is a term for this that currently eludes me (first sale doctrine is a similar concept but not exactly.)
If I was a seller, I'd probably find this a good thing --- Amazon is effectively giving me more customers for free.
> a more likely outcome is Iran comes out the other end of this on Monday morning with 5000 dead
Agree. But what would you wager on that today versus a year ago?
Also it's "glyphosate", right? Not "glyphosates". It's not like some weird class of industrial chemicals; it's a specific herbicide, used since 1975, more commonly known as Roundup, notable because Monsanto owns patents on genetically-modified crops that are resistant to it.
The link to the product says "TPU outer jacket". That's thermoplastic polyurethane, which is well known for degrading via hydrolysis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane#Hydrolysis_and_bi...
...so it is a bit amusing to see "TPU Jacket Features Water, Abrasion Resistance" in the product description. PVC or PE would be far better and more common.
In 1996, Doris Kelley and her daughter, Katie Kelley-Mareau, filed a lawsuit against Clarence Lushbaugh, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Cecil Kelley.[12][13] The case alleged the misconduct of doctors, the hospital, and the administration of Los Alamos in removing organs from the deceased without consent from next-of-kin over a span of many years (1958–1980).[14][15] Kelley's autopsy was the first instance of this type of post-mortem analysis, but Lushbaugh and others performed many more in later years at Los Alamos.[13] During a deposition for the case, Lushbaugh, when asked who gave him the authority to take eight pounds (3.6 kilograms) of organs and tissue from Kelley's body, said, "God gave me permission." The class action suit was settled by the defendants for about $9.5 million in 2002 and an additional $800,000 in 2007. None of the defendants admitted any wrongdoing.
The unwillingess to ever admit wrongdoing in a legal or social context is a political disease.
Storage units are the way station to the thrift store / city dump.
I had a storage unit for a while until I realized that the monthly bill was more than the value of the contents.
Shrug-emoji. I copyedited this post. I get that people don't have a lot of my writing to go off of on HN, it's a real problem I have.
That’s where they got the idea.
> how have wolves shaped humans?
The bonds between humans and wolves go both ways. Humans love their dogs.
Memorialize accounts whenever possible to make them immutable.
> More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive.
There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much. It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".
There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication. Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1] The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.
[1] https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/im...
Bindless Vulkan is in some ways simpler than binding for each draw. But there are now more synchronization conditions.
That big table of descriptors is an unusual data object. It's normally mapped as writable from the CPU and readable from the GPU. The CPU side has to track which slots are in use. When the CPU is done with a texture slot, the GPU might not be done yet, so all deletes have to deferred until the end of the frame. This isn't inherently difficult but has to be designed in.
The usual curse of inefficient Vulkan is maxing out the main CPU thread long before the GPU is fully utilized. This is fixable. There can be multiple draw threads. Assets can be loaded into the GPU while drawing is in progress, using transfer queues and DMA. Except that for integrated memory GPUs, you don't have to copy from CPU to GPU at all. If you do all this, GPU utilization should reach 100% before CPU utilization does.
Except most of this stuff doesn't work on mobile or WebGPU yet. Portable code has way too many cases. Look at WGPU.
What you get by using Unity or Unreal Engine is that a big team already worked through all this overhead. Most of the open source renderers aren't there yet. Or weren't as of a year ago.
Related:
How A Decline In Churchgoing Led To A Rise In ‘Deaths Of Despair’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408406 - December 2025 (2 comments)
The question is which nation you'll have to depend on when you want a bug fixed. With OSS, the answer is "none".
I just use iMessages and Signal groups. I am willing to live without the features, what they offer for private groups is sufficient. Shared Apple iCloud albums for photos. Apple also has an Invites app for events management. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” —- da Vinci
I do donate monthly to Signal and pay for iCloud, so I suppose the answer is “I am willing to pay, but only these entities.”
I see an interesting parallel to how people think about captured encrypted data, and how long that encryption needs to be effective for until technology catches up and can decrypt (by which point, hopefully the decrypted data is worthless). If all of these documents are stored in durable archives, future methodologies may arrive to extract value or intelligence not originally available at the time of capture and disclosure.
Fairly common from what I've seen. You're supposed to ooh and aah at the number of options they give you and not ask question about what they're actually going to be worth. This is one of the bigger reasons HN tends to advise people to treat stock options like lottery tickets rather than any sort of money in the bank. You generally have no idea what they've done to your "options" between giving them to you and you finally getting to exercise them, especially with the ever-lengthening time it takes for companies to finally go public. On the plus side, this has also driven the creation of other ways of getting options out of a company prior to an IPO.
Education can be viewed as intellectual property theft. There have been periods in history when it was. "How to take an elevation from a plan" was a trade secret of medieval builders and only revealed to guild members. How a power loom works was export-controlled information in the 1800s, and people who knew how a loom works were not allowed to emigrate from England.
The problem is that LLMs are better than people at this stuff. They can read a huge quantity of publicly available information and organize it into a form where the LLM can do things with it. That's what education does, more slowly and at greater expense.
Engine control alone can be self-contained. The Ford EEC IV of the 1980s had its program permanently etched into the Intel 8061 CPU, and was designed to last 30 years. It did. I finally sold off my 40 year old Ford Bronco, which was still running on the original engine and CPU.
Yes. That should be done along hiking and biking trails under power lines. There's one in Silicon Valley along the bay shore line. The fluorescent tubes don't wear out; the filaments at the end are not in use. Just slip them inside polycarbonate tubes.
Drones consume something like 100W to stay in the air (ballpark, of course), so they'd probably never charge if they had to hover.
This is super cool imho. Check my mental model on this, but with a sufficient lookup table or index, you could cherry pick any file you wanted based on filename, SHA hash, etc from any publicly available container in OCI registries. Almost like a torrent swarm.
That seems entirely unviable to me. Have you met… people?
“Trust me, bro!” is something I wish my power company would do, but they installed a meter instead.
Far-UVC and Eye Safety: Findings from a 36-Month Study - https://uvmedico.com/news/far-uvc-and-eye-safety - January 16th, 2025
> Far-UVC is a type of ultraviolet light emitted at a 222 nm wavelength that effectively deactivates microorganisms. Unlike traditional UVC light at 254 nm, Far-UVC doesn’t penetrate the outer dead layer of skin or the outer layer of the cornea, making it safe for use around people while maintaining powerful germicidal properties.
> The 222 nm wavelength is unique in its ability to decontaminate without causing harm when used within regulatory limits. Unlike longer UV wavelengths, it interacts only with the outermost layers of the skin and eyes, which naturally renew themselves. This makes it ideal for continuous decontamination in occupied spaces, as confirmed by the 36-month clinical study showing no adverse effects even after daily exposure.
References:
https://www.faruvc.org/ (disclosure: this is published by the same author as this post)
Sugihara K, Kaidzu S, Sasaki M, Ichioka S, Sano I, Hara K, Tanito M. Ocular safety of 222-nm far-ultraviolet-c full-room germicidal irradiation: A 36-month clinical observation. Photochem Photobiol. 2024 Dec 10. https://doi.org/10.1111/php.14052 Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39659140. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/php.14052
Sugihara K, Kaidzu S, Sasaki M, Tanito M. Interventional human ocular safety experiments for 222-nm far-ultraviolet-C lamp irradiation. Photochem Photobiol. 2024 Aug 19. https://doi.org/10.1111/php.14016 Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39161063. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/php.14016
Buonanno M, Hashmi R, Petersen CE, Tang Z, Welch D, Shuryak I, Brenner DJ. Wavelength-dependent DNA damage induced by single wavelengths of UV-C radiation (215 to 255 nm) in a human cornea model. Sci Rep. 2025 Jan 2;15(1):252. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-84196-4 PMID: 39747969; PMCID: PMC11696903. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-84196-4
This is just a link to the Penguin book site.
Is there something I'm missing?