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.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

These are the two uses cases we use it for: call parents, call grandparents, call friends. We bought units for their friends. No smartphones.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”

https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2016/user-clip-too-much...

Trump says US is 'winning so much' in longest ever State of the Union - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQUGjRtq-M - February 25th, 2026

Hence the joke, "I am tired of winning." as the situation continues to rapidly degrade through policy choices. So much winning, it's too much.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76488]

I don't understand the "he conned us" stance. He was literally saying all these things before getting elected. He wasn't being coy about it, we all knew it would be terrible, and here we are. What was the con exactly?

If there's one thing you can't accuse Trump of, it's ever masking how utterly nonsensical he is.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79142]

I remember the older driving games. They'd progressively "build" the road as you progressed on it. Curves in the road were drawn as straight line segments.

Which wasn't a problem, but it clearly showed how the programmers improvised to make it perform.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

The (now possibly vibe-coded) email clients hiding link destinations and the real senders' addresses as well as making it very hard to see the actual message content including all headers don't help either. Scammers might get the visible body content very convincing, but one look at the Received: and From: headers is still a reliable way to discern.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

Anything that uses the phrase "diverse perspectives" is not worth reading.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179135]

Expensive eggs are a political choice. Canada has eggs [1]. Mexico, too [2]. Meanwhile we have Tyson notching record profits [3] while facing zero antitrust scrutiny.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-r...

[2] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/

[3] https://farmaction.us/farm-action-calls-for-an-investigation...

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

It runs on two servers. Data replicated to a new box (or two) outside the US, DNS switched, easy peasy. Non US controlled tld if needed.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76488]

I don't understand how we're still using fossil fuels. I thought the only thing that would save us from the scourge is if renewables were cheaper, but even with solar being cheaper than everything else, we're still deploying fossil fuels.

Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76488]

Of course there is! You want an AI agent to be able to do some things, but not others. OpenClaw currently gets access to both those sets. There's no reason to.

I've made my own AI agent (https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot) and it has access to just that one WhatsApp conversation (from me). It doesn't get to read messages coming from any other phone numbers, and can't send messages to arbitrary phone numbers. It is restricted to the set of actions I want it to be able to perform, and no more.

It has access to read my calendar, but not write. It has access to read my GitHub issues, but not my repositories. Each tool has per-function permissions that I can revoke.

"Give it access to everything, even if it doesn't need it" is not the only security model.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

You may find this related article interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32960140

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]
userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

Looking at the state of things, it sure doesn't seem that way.

Literally nothing has degraded

Trying to gaslight others into thinking everything is just fine is not working anymore.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75669]

> they made an offhand comment contrasting its abilities with Git's, referencing Git's approach/design wrt how it "stores diffs" between revisions of a file. I was bowled over.

It seems like you have taken offense to the phrase "stores diffs", but I'm not sure why. I understand how commit snapshots and packfiles work, and the way delta compression works in packfiles might lead me to calling it "storing diffs" in a colloquial setting.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

All the companies I've worked at implicitly assume that you're supposed to use your working hours for more than just coding, including learning what you need for the task at hand, although if you're looking at very beginner material that might raise some suspicion.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90546]

The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90546]

>Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art.

"Needed to advance the state of the art" and actually deployed to do so are two different things. More likely either AI will learn to advance the state of the art itself, or the state of the art wont be advancing much anymore...

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107138]

All such private applications work better with a regular database.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127637]

A case for currying:

In languages in which every function is unary but there is a convenience syntax for writing "multiargument" functions that produces curried functions, so that the type functions of type "a -> b -> c" can be written as if their type was "a b -> c", but which also have tuples such that "multiargument" functions could equally conveniently be written as having type "(a, b) -> c", and where the syntax for calling each type of function is equally straightforward in situations that don't require "partial application" (where the curried form has a natural added utility), people overwhelming use the syntax that produces curried functions.

People only predominantly use uncurried multiargument functions in languages which make writing and/or calling curried functions significant syntactic overhead.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160334]

> The reason casino dice have such sharp edges is to get the to stop rolling faster with fewer tumbling. The more a die tumbles the more likely it will present any issues with it.

No, casino dice are flat-sided cubes because corner curvature could bias the result. Corner curvature is hard to measure. Cubical dice are easy to check for flatness and dimensions. Gambling regulators have specs for dice: 19mm, flat sides, translucent, balanced, with appropriate tolerances. Casinos usually use dice with serial numbers and logos. Casino dice come in a pack of 5 with all dice in the pack bearing the same serial, to detect substitutions.

Here's a manufacturer of casino dice, with their specs.[1]

[1] https://tcsjohnhuxley.com/product/certified-perfects-dice/

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90097]

> Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get?

Claude is pretty amazing, but it still goes down rabbit holes and makes obvious mistakes. Combining that with "oops I just bought a non-refundable flight to the wrong city" seems... unfun.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417580]

The damage this will do to the reputation of the SOC2 Security Attestation is incalculable.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

This is coping, with tools like Boomi, n8n, Langflow, and similar, there are plenty of automated tasks that can already be configured and that's it.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

This administration also impaired FEMA’s ability to provide disaster response to those impacted by this event.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

I left that page open in Firefox on macOS (no ad blockers) and after five minutes the network devtools panel showed me it had hit 200MB transferred, 250MB total from over 2,300 requests.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

"misconfigured" as in no adblocker? ;-)

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88542]

Better to have known unknowns, than unknown unknowns.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78269]

Some may want to come in here leaving snarky comments about how they shouldn't vote for an administration that doesn't believe in climate change. But I will give a concrete example:

This administration fired thousands of Forrest Service and BLM employees at the start of the administration last year. Those workers were the ones that were responsible for the maintenance of these lands and for the fire lookout programs.

Maybe they couldn't have prevented this fire, but it's pretty clear these fires are much worse today because of those firings last year.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160334]

I think this article was on HN a few days ago.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

Paper tigers preach and bully because words are cheap, winners build. Americans who have only known unearned prosperity through historical inertia are in for a painful century.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

The first company to deliver a truly secure Claw is going to make millions of dollars.

I have no idea how anyone is going to do that.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

Thanks for that, I didn't know about that API - which it turns out has open CORS headers so you can call it from JavaScript.

I now have my dream DNS lookup web tool! https://tools.simonwillison.net/dns#d=news.ycombinator.com&t...

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160334]

There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1]

In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those.

[1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179135]

> Which is potentially powered by ChatGPT

It’s not. It’s distributed through ChatGPT and Claude. But Sparky is Walmart’s kit.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 81528]

Funny to see how creatively tech marketing teams are spinning their push for a permanent underclass in America.

No employment contracts. No benefits. No protections. Unpredictable wages. But hey, it's great because in this new model people have "flexibility" and "freedom".

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125995]

“Operation Epic Fury might turn Iran into a luxury resort destination” is a compelling argument only to the small subset of people who are against luxury resorts on principle.

That’s not to say that there aren’t more compelling arguments against attacking Iran.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179135]

> Google has become the developer-focused company

They’re the advertiser-focused company. Bluetooth and NFC aren’t being exposed for developers first.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

The rewrite from Xamarin.Forms into MAUI, has given a bad taste to many in the community, and kudos to Avalonia to make it happen on GNU/Linux.

By the way on macOS MAUI uses Catalyst as backend, not native macOS APIs.

Also it is kind of interesting that Miguel de Icaza, nowadays completely switched into Swift ecosystem, and is the responsible for making game development on iPad with Godot a reality. Or porting old .NET ideas of his into Swift.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78269]

People are doing this now. It's basically what skills.sh and its ilk are for -- to teach AIs how to do new things.

For example, my company makes a new framework, and we have a skill we can point an agent at. Using that skill, it can one-shot fairly complicated code using our framework.

The skill itself is pretty much just the documentation and some code examples.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

> Tasks and the new app are currently available in select places in the U.S., excluding California, New York City, Seattle and Colorado.

Anyone know why that is?

(Claude thinks it's because those places have gig worker protection laws such that "classifying Dashers as independent contractors for non-delivery work is most legally risky")

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78269]

I too am here all the time and have never heard of it. But it looks interesting.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417580]

I would take the counterargument more seriously if anyone could name just one police department that administers IQ tests to applicants.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

Again, unless you have existing Windows 8/10 applications that were written against WinRT, UAP or UWP[0], that make use of WinUI 2.0, forget about touching anything related to WinUI 3.0 or WinAppSDK, stay away from the marketing.

Exception being the few APIs that have been introduced in Win32 that instead of COM, actually depend on WinRT like the new MIDI 2.0 or Windows ML.

Keep using Win32, MFC (yes it is in a better state than WinUI 3.0 with C++), WinForms, WPF, if using Microsoft only tooling.

Otherwise, Qt, VCL, Firemonkey, Avalonia, Uno, ImGUI,....

They were even forced to revamp WPF status at BUILD 2024, given how bad WinUI 3.0 was back then, and it isn't if it got any better, apparently it is in the process of being open sourced, to see if the community can take over the mess a $4 trillion valued company cannot fix.

Really, stay away from WinUI, unless you're a Microsoft employee on the Windows team without any other option.

[0] - Can explain by the nth time the differences, if one feels like it.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 89216]
simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

This thing is really short. https://github.com/bramcohen/manyana/blob/main/manyana.py is 473 lines of dependency-free Python (that file only imports difflib, itertools and inspect) and of that ~240 lines are implementation and the rest are tests.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106734]

In the end Iranians who want freedom need to form a different regime but when a group is under attack it rallies around the flag so it is a setback not an opportunity for dissidents.

jrockway ranked #49 [karma: 73246]

I think the choice of breed has meaning. The border collie is the smartest breed of dog, and its origin is in herding sheep. Calling your coworkers sheep isn't particularly nice. Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble. That's why the person you're replying to objects.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125995]

Crippling web apps is a user-positive behavior. It just so happens that user’s incentives and apple’s incentives are aligned.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

The project doesn't just use 2-bit - that was one of the formats they tried, but when that didn't give good tool calls they switched to 4-bit.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

The advocates of ChromeOS Platform keep pushing their agenda.

Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106734]

I am amused that this in the classic 1955 Asimov story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)

the protagonist is interviewed as a one-man "focus group" in lieu of a national election and one of the questions he is asked is "What do you think about the price of eggs?" and he said roughly "I have no idea, my wife does the shopping."

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107138]

Winforms is great until you try to make windows dynamically sized, or deal with DPI nicely. In every other regard it's still fine, and for accessibility actually _better_ than many subsequent frameworks. And produces nice small fast executables.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107138]

So .. the plan is Big Afghanistan, to install a puppet regime at massive expense which evaporates the moment the US ground troops leave?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76488]

One issue is that the human was less accurate than the LLM. The other is that the author probably didn't pay $1,500 for this, they probably paid $20 on a subscription.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

Depends on the target audience.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

Doesn't seem to work on iPhone. I suggest having a button to toggle between mine marking mode and regular mode - I used that on my own little vibe-coded minesweeper clone here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/minesweeper

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

Those aren't a standard library for the language itself - they're not showing up in browsers, for example.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240774]

> "Pen is mightier than sword"

You completely misunderstood that. Take into account that you see the swords failing all around you whilst one nation effectively messed up the rest of the world through propaganda and maybe you'll begin to understand the true meaning of that sentence.

Information, used well or abused well, is more powerful than any other weapon of war.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240774]

Cuba's biggest problem is its neighbor that through continuous embargo and immigration blockades helps cement the regime's position.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240774]

Oh, good one! I had never heard of it but yes, that would work.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

Good decision, as proven multiple times, it is the product not the programming language, that makes the customers.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127376]

Mostly because the C++/WinRT tooling is non existent, after killing the C++/CX Visual Studio XAML integration, C++ Builder like, thus most C++ teams reach out to React Native instead, as Microsoft's QML.

Same happened to the XBox dashboard.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75669]

I literally don't understand this comment at all. What point are you trying to make?

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99180]

It's not murder if they're guilty. Those planes come with doors for a reason.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417580]

You must be new to this. The median line of code in a security tool is materially less secure than the median line of code overall in the industry.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

I ingest, process, and archive the HN firehose. I know others do as well. Regardless of how one feels, once you put something on the Internet, any hope of control of that info is gone forever. Act accordingly. They are kind enough to make changes within some forum integrity tolerances, even though those changes are likely to help very little from an opsec perspective.

Edit: my use case is building a graph for archiving every link ever posted on HN (posts and comments), if that’s relevant. The contents of HN comments have little value to me for my workflow, nor do I profile users.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

Hah, that's completely fair. When I say "two things can be true at the same time" it's usually in a combative tone when I think someone is making a weak argument.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 100883]

Does that argument also apply to https://www.freeciv.org/ and https://openxcom.org/ and similar projects?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79142]

In the 1960s, Kosmos made the best electronics sets available. If you went through the kits, you received a complete undergraduate course in electronics (less the calculus).

https://generalatomic.com/teil1/index.html

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240774]

I you want to point at evil and dangerous regimes I have a list and Iran wouldn't even be in the top 3...

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417580]

You should just mail hn@ycombinator.com about this stuff.

Or: write a short blog post about it, and post that, on your (different) domain.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104281]
paxys ranked #41 [karma: 81528]

> See our bounty page to judge if you might be a good fit. Bounties pay you while judging that fit.

Literally the line above that

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107336]

> This is the first time in modern days we remove support for a URL scheme and we do this without bumping the SONAME. We do not consider this an incompatibility primarily because no one will notice. It is only a break if it actually breaks something.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160334]

"Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak."

Mass production of engineered structural lumber.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCYn3xQ0yS8

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 81528]

Title says "helps" but the summary says "it doesn’t effectively treat anxiety, depression, or PTSD". Big difference between the two IMO.

Plenty of people use cannabis to alleviate symptoms. I don't think they expect to be cured entirely. Getting a good night's sleep or being without chronic pain for a few hours is often enough.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125995]

How many kids do you have? How comfortable is the downtown core for families with 2-3 kids?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160334]

Classic mistakes in language design that have to be fixed later.

- "We don't need any attributes", like "const" or "mut". This eventually gets retrofitted, as it was to C, but by then there is too much code without attributes in use. Defaulting to the less restrictive option gives trouble for decades.

- "We don't need a Boolean type". Just use integers. This tends to give trouble if the language has either implicit conversion or type inference. Also, people write "|" instead of "||", and it almost works. C and Python both retrofitted "bool". When the retrofit comes, you find that programs have "True", "true", and "TRUE", all user-defined.

Then there's the whole area around Null, Nil, nil, and Option. Does NULL == NULL? It doesn't in SQL.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160334]

The U.S. Navy still has their main training facility near Chicago. And they still have weird training ships. USS Trayer is probably the strangest.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQCh1mLTIGk

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76488]

While I support this for the humour factor, it does make it much easier for a shoulder surfer to count characters, for whatever that's worth.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76488]

Imagine if we had a parallel information network that could coordinate the charging times of all these things in real-time.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417580]

Wow, sudo is a lot older than I thought it was.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90097]

The Bobiverse novels start this way. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_E._Taylor)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179135]

> Iran hasn't attacked Turkmenistan yet

The fact that we have to pick out a single neighbour they haven’t attacked sort of lands the point.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111145]

I think the article downplays the element that the attack probably achieved its goal which was not to actually hit something at Diego Garcia, but to show that thing 2500 miles from Iran are potentially targetable by Iran. That starts conversations like the one here and in other fora about whether or not Iran would limit themselves to military targets (Russia doesn't as an example) and if not how could Europe and its East Asian allies protect literally everything with their finite supply of defensive units.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111145]

I've been hearing similar things from a lot of different directions. The underlying issue about "you cannot replace time" is one that is good to internalize early. A number of people I know who "missed" their kids growing up because they were working hard to make lots of money. You can't go buy "time with my kids when they were growing up."

Agentic coding very much feels like a "video game" in the sense of you pull the lever and open the loot box and sometimes it's an epic +10 agility sword and sometimes its just grey vendor trash. Whether or not it generates "good" or even "usable" code fades to the background as the thrill of "I just asked for a UI to orchestrate micro services and BLAMMO there it was!" moves to the fore.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75669]

Yeah, the default Android volume control had (has?) the same problem. I remember when I got an early Pixel model that I thought there wasn't a low enough volume - this issue was filed in 2015 and is still marked as open: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37035441

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 81528]

Good, now do the same for public transit.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187401]

Still, most people interact with AI via a messenger-like app, not a terminal-like one.