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.
This is the new fake news, now everything that doesn't go well is AI generated.
It starts by not looking into Windows through UNIX developer glasses.
The only issue currently plaguing Windows development is the mess with WinUI and WinAppSDK since Project Reunion, however they are relatively easy to ignore.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this: NewPipe is an Android app, and consuming YouTube on a mobile browser is a much worse experience.
Thiel lost the plot long ago, just like his PayPal buddy did. The money went to their heads.
300 years into the future some historian will publish a book: "The downfall of the USA traced back to the PayPal Mafia".
"Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Palantir ties"?
I still think Macs outnumber IBM mainframe and POWER machines by a couple orders of magnitude.
https://x.com/a16z/status/2018418113952555445
For my whole life in technology, there was this thing called the Mythical Man Month: nine women cannot have a baby in a month. If you're Google, you can't just put a thousand software engineers on a product and wipe out a startup because you can only... build that product with seven or eight people. Once they've figured it out, they've got that lead.
That's not true with AI. If you have data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve almost any problem. It is magic. You can throw money at the problem. We've never had that in tech.This is also why the Teletype layout has parentheses on 8 and 9 unlike modem keyboards that have them on 9 and 0 (a layout popularised by the IBM Selectric). The original Apple IIs had this same layout, with a “bell” on top of the G.
This is easy, no need for AI, just join any public servant IT organisation, regardless of the country. :)
Brainstorming a bit, you could get into that via hazardous or deferred pointers, but yeah I guess it falls down into specialized GC kind of solution.
> He explicitly writes that he did not do drugs or alcohol.
What are you talking about? He specifically mentions drinking beer and doing ayahuasca in the past.
Same here, I was more of a big iron UNIX guy on those days, the Linux server we had at the office was for hosting MP3 files and as Quake server for the occasional LAN parties.
Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.
> I've sometimes dreamed of a web where every resource is tied to a hash, which can be rehosted by third parties, making archival transparent.
I wrote a short paper on that 25 years ago, but it went nowhere. I still think it is a great idea!
I have seen enough compiler (and even hardware) bugs to know that you do need to dig deeper to find out why something isn't working the way you thought it should. Of course I suspect there are many others who run into those bugs, then massage the code somehow and "fix" it that way.
the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.)
I'm not sure if I'm reading satire or they are having some fun trolling.
Possibly because a lot of “AI-company scraping” isn't traditional scraping (e.g., to build a dataset of the state at a particular point in time), its referencing the current content of the page as grounding for the response to a user request.
This cognitive debt bit from the linked article by Margaret-Anne Storey at https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ is fantastic:
> But by weeks 7 or 8, one team hit a wall. They could no longer make even simple changes without breaking something unexpected. When I met with them, the team initially blamed technical debt: messy code, poor architecture, hurried implementations. But as we dug deeper, the real problem emerged: no one on the team could explain why certain design decisions had been made or how different parts of the system were supposed to work together. The code might have been messy, but the bigger issue was that the theory of the system, their shared understanding, had fragmented or disappeared entirely. They had accumulated cognitive debt faster than technical debt, and it paralyzed them.
I don’t have Airpods, but I turned on my stereo the other day after listening to music through the speakers in my monitor and it was quite a difference.
Pretty sure the reason they're sold out in 10 seconds is because of other bots.
Before you run into the limitations of the Arduino platform you will likely have decided to make this your career. You can get very far with very little in that world and Arduino's are incredibly powerful for their size and cost and there are many pin compatible options available if you want to scale up within the platform. Once you hit the wall on that you will have to change the toolchain but by then you will be building extremely complex stuff.
You have to evolve to compete. Look what happened to MIPS, the classic "pure RISC". (I know about RISC-V, but at this point it's become just another cheap core for those who don't want to pay for ARM licenses.)
The relevant bit:
" Shortly before beginning the GNU Project, I heard about the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.) This was a compiler designed to handle multiple languages, including C and Pascal, and to support multiple target machines. I wrote to its author asking if GNU could use it.
He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not. I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multilanguage, multiplatform compiler."
And not only was the university 'free' and the compiler not, neither was 'Minix', which was put out there through Prentice Hall in a series of books that you had to pay a fairly ridiculous amount of money for if you were a student there.
So the VU had the two main components of the free software world in their hand and botched them both because of simple greed.
I love it how RMS has both these quotes in the same text:
"Please don't fall into the practice of calling the whole system “Linux,” since that means attributing our work to someone else. Please give us equal mention."
"This makes it difficult to write free drivers so that Linux and XFree86 can support new hardware."
And there are only a few lines between those quotes.
Their self-reported benchmarks have them out-performing pinecone by 7x in queries-per-second: https://zvec.org/en/docs/benchmarks/
I'd love to see those results independently verified, and I'd also love a good explanation of how they're getting such great performance.
"All but unnoticed last month, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a resolution calling for Congress to keep budget deficits at no more than 3% of gross domestic product."
It went unnoticed for good reason. This Congress cannot bind a future Congress except through (a) rules, which the majority can change and (b) Constitutional amendments.
Second, voting for deficit-busting legislation every moment it comes up in one's politial career isn't undone by before go-nowhere messaging resolutions.
>"More men die with prostate cancer than because of it" - an old adage that still holds true in the 21st century
See also: call elevator to your floor buttons
I'm more interested in the fact that disclaimer at the top makes me think the entire article is written by AI as a summary of a bunch of reddit posts and tweets and discord topics?
Is that what the top says?
This Deep Think one was so good that I did get suspicious that maybe it was at least rendering the SVG to an image and then "looking" at the image and tweaking it over a few iterations.
But the reasoning trace doesn't hint at that and looks legit to me: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7e317ebb5cf8e75b2fcec4d0694a8...
I also asked Deep Think what tools it has access to and it has Python and Bash but no internet access, and as far as I can tell that environment doesn't have any libraries or tools installed that can render an SVG to an image format that it could view.
What addresses(es) would you send Bitcoin to in order to burn it?
No? The point of the article, and of the preceding comments, echoing a pretty common tenet of evidence-based medicine, is that frequent full-body MRIs are a bad idea for the patient.
>Why not just benchmark the models yourself?
Because their incentives are to churn stupid articles fast to get more views, and to be on major AI companies and potential advertisers' good graces. That, and their integrity and passion for what they do is minimal, plus they're paid peanuts.
Doesn't help that most brain-rotted readers are hardly calling them out for it, if they even notice it.
I think they meant that, now that LLMs are invented, people have suddenly started to lie on the Internet.
Every comment section here can be summed up as "LLM bad" these days.
> they'd rather vibe code themselves than trust an unproven engineering firm
You could cut the statement short here, and it would still be a reasonable position to take these days.
LLMs are still complex, sharp tools - despite their simple appearance and proteststions of both biggest fans and haters alike, the dominating factor for effectiveness of an LLM tool on a problem is still whether or not you're holding it wrong.
AI browsers will be the scrapers, shipping content back to the mothership for processing and storage as users co browse with the agentic browser.
You never could trust the internet. The difference is that now the problem is so widespread that it's finally spurring us into action, and hopefully a good "web of trust" or similar solution will emerge.
This will be about as impactful as printing out the best web articles you encounter and building a shed to shelve them in binders.
> What if the models have just gotten really good?
Kagi Assistant remains my main way of interacting with AI. One of its benefits is you're encouraged to try different models.
The heterogeneity in competence, particular per unit in time, is growing rapidly. If I'm extrapolating image-creation capabilities from Claude, I'm going to underestimate what Gemini can do without fuckery. Likewise, if I'm using Grok all day, Gemini and Claude will seem unbelievably competent when it comes to deep research.
> it was not really open content anyway
Practically no quality journalism is.
> we need something like wikipedia for news
Wikipedia editors aren’t flying into war zones.
Do you know what C# has and Rust doesn't? A binary distribution package for libraries with a defined ABI.
I've always been skeptical of the celebrity engineering managers/software entrepreneurs like Graham, DHH, Atwood, Spolsky [1], etc. Just because you made and marketed one or even two successful products doesn't mean you have any useful generalizable advice.
Today people who made something with AI think they have something profound to say about their experience but they don't.
All the projects I do now have a significant amount of input from AI assistants but I am going to post "Show HN: my heart rate variability biofeedback webapp" and not add "... that i vibe coded" because the latter one codes me as yet another NPC.
(e.g. if I am more successful as AI-assisted developer than some people it is not because I know anything about AI-assisted development which is interesting or generalizable, but it is because of the toolbox I've been using in a lifetime of software development!)
[1] Carmack is a true genius who is the exception that proves the rule
>videos that had some viewership base, there may be a consideration
Those would be the worst of the lot regarding how valuable they are historically for example. Engaging BS content...
I love how people in the thread are like "if I'm going to ask my group of friends to switch to this, I need to know it's not written by security-issue-generator machines", meanwhile at Discord LLMs go brrr:
https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-...
And then you have the "Alas, the sheer fact that LLM slop-code has touched it at all is bound to be a black stain on its record" comments.
Please name 50 other companies it's not.
It's good that they were responsive in the disclosure, but it's still a mark of sloppiness that this was done in the first place, and I'd like to know so I can avoid them.
I think it depends on the codebase. There are some reflection calls that you can make that can cause dead code elimination to fail, thought I believe it's less easy to run into than it was a few years ago. One common dependency, at least in my line of work, is the Kubernetes API and it manages to both be gigantic and trigger this edge case (last I looked), so yeah, the binaries end up pretty big.
Another thing that people run into is big binaries = slow container startup times. This time is mostly spent in gzip. If you use Zstandard layers instead of gzip layers, startup time is improved. gzip decompression is actually very slow, and the OCI spec no longer mandates it.
Recommended link to the Blu-ray collection for archival purposes?
Citizens can choose to prioritize quality of life over maximizing housing stock to increase the domestic population. “We’re all full up.” It is their country after all, it is their choice. Those who want in are not stakeholders nor have a vote.
I dunno if my Uni dodged the bullet because it was one step down in status or if it was the shitty airport.
> I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
Twenty years ago?
You know what else I don't see? Google Reader, because Google killed it!
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
It comes down to trust. There are ways to protect your own integrity and equanimity in a low-trust environment but most people will suffer in that kind of situation.
Before agile you could “kick the can down the road” for six months before the senior people realize what they wouldn’t hear from the new guy on the project: nobody knows how to make a production build! Until then though life can be cozy on a day to day basis. In agile on the other hand, you have nerve-wracking meetings every day but somehow it never gets out that the engineering manager has no idea how long it takes to build the product or that the code violates all the rules [1] laid down by that engineering manager despite that engineering manager asserting that “we do code reviews”
[1] reasonable if not inspired
Given how worried everyone is about the AI slopocalypse where the internet is drowned in LLM-generated junk content maybe it's time for a resurgence of human curated directories like this one.
Tests have dependencies. Crawling all of those dependencies to check for malicious code could require inspecting millions of lines of code, if you could even obtain the code.
It's also beginning to sound like needing to solve the halting problem.
taped and transcribed by Jeff Fox
Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.
Except that's sort of... exactly what they do.
The food industry has pretty much invented the whole process of making "addictive" products and then "test[ing] out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive". Of course, we usually call it making products that taste good, and running taste panels with the public for product development (making a new tasty thing), quality control (ensuring the tasty thing stays tasty), and market research (discovering even tastier things to make in the future). Each part of it employs all kinds of specialists (and yes, those too - nutrition psychology is a thing).
The process is the same. The difference between "optimized for taste" and "addictive" isn't exactly clear-cut, at least not until someone starts adding heroin to the product (and of the two, it's not the software industry that's been routinely accused of it just for being too good at this job).
Not defending social media here in any way. Cause and effect is known these days, and in digital everything is faster and more pronounced. And ironically, I don't even agree with GP either! I think that individuals have much less agency than GP would like it, and at the same time, that social media is not some uniquely evil and uniquely strong way to abuse people, but closer to new superstimulus we're only starting to develop social immunity to.
> Both of these are based on userspace stack switching, sometimes called “fibers”, “stackful coroutines”, or “green threads”.
There are M-Disks. These are CD/DVD/BluRay disks which use a drive with a higher power laser and work by ablating a metal layer, rather than a photosensitive dye as in the lower-powered disks. Regular drives will read both kinds.
For a small amount of data (crypto keys?), consider deep laser engraving on stainless steel. That's very durable. Or even engrave text into stainless steel with a small CNC mill.
You can engrave QR codes, bar codes, etc. But there's a lot to be said for engraving plain text.
Oh, that's why the DOJ didn't want to release these. Ok! :)
> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people
But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.
> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.
But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.
There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it.
Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich making.
Start with the Nala Sandwich Bot.[1] This is a single robot arm emulating a human making sandwiches. Humans have to do all the prep, and all the cleaning. It's slow, maybe one sandwich per minute. If they have any commercial installations, they're not showing them. This is cool, but ineffective.
Next is a Raptor/JLS robotic sandwich assembly line.[2] This is a dozen robots and many conveyors assembling sandwiches. It's reasonably fast, at 100 sandwiches per minute. This system could be reconfigured to make a variety of sandwich-format food products, but it would take a fair amount of downtime and adjustment. Not new robots, just different tooling. Everything is stainless steel or food grade plastic, so it can be routinely hosed down with hot soapy water. This is modern automation. Quite practical and in wide use.
Finally, there's the Weber automated sandwich line.[3] Now this is classic single-purpose automation, like 1950s Detroit engine lines. There are barely any robots at all; it's all special purpose hardware. You get 600 or more sandwiches per minute. Not only is everything stainless or food-grade plastic, it has a built-in self cleaning system so it can clean itself. Staff is minimal. But changing to a product with a slightly different form factor requires major modifications and skills not normally present in the plant. Only useful if you have a market for several hundred identical sandwiches per minute.
These three examples show why automation hasn't taken over. To get the most economical production, you need extreme product standardization. Sometimes you can get this. There are food plants which turn out Oreos or Twinkies in vast quantities at low cost with consistent quality. But if you want product variations, productivity goes way, way down.
[1] https://nalarobotics.com/sandwich.html
That's 70% of the population living in ghettos and the economy collapsing through lack of people with disposable income with extra steps.
I really like https://handy.computer for this.
How many would those people be?
We forget that it's what the majority does that sets the tone and conditions of a field. Especially if one is an employee and not self-employed
This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis.
This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.
“Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012” [1].
I imagine that apostrophes in legal writing are trouble, much like commas. It's too easy to shift or even drop one them by mistake, which can alter the the meaning of the whose sentence/section in unfortunate ways.
>That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
There is meaningful new information in this post.
>I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Case in point from Emacs/Vim and the Borland IDEs to Claude, plus all kinds of handy utils from mc and htop to mutt.
>They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely
That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.
> Do we hold gun manufacturers responsible for the deaths from their guns?
In a lot of the world, yes, and in America we would as well if it weren’t for the modern take on the Second Amendment. AI has no similar legal purchase.
> something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done
Not in sophistication. For examples:
The Pantheon - https://www.pantheonroma.com/en/pantheon-history/ There are no domes in Mayan architecture.
The aquaducts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct The romans mastered the arch. The Mayans never used them.
Roman iron and steel - the Mayans used copper and gold.
Roman ships had keels - Mayan ships did not. Cannot sail upwind without keels.
Romans used the wheel - Mayans did not.
Romans used papyrus for writing, and would send letters around the empire - the Mayans wrote on bark.
And so on.
How’s that working in Germany, the UK, Italy, etc? The only way that actually works is for left wing parties to adopt restrictive immigration policies, like Denmark did: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo
I hope this doesn't come across as being cynical in my old(er) age, but instead I just hope it's a reflection of reality
Lot's of organizations in the tech and business space start out with "high falutin", lofty goals. Things about making the world a better place, "don't be evil", "benefitting all of humanity", etc. etc. They are all, without fail, complete and total bullshit, or at least they will always end up as complete and total bullshit. And the reason for this is not that the people involved are inherently bad people, it's just that humans react strongly to incentives, and the incentives, at least in our capitalist society, ensure that profit motive will always be paramount. Again, I don't think this is cynical, it's just realistic.
I think it really went in to high gear in the 90s that, especially in tech, that companies put out this idea that they would bring all these amazing benefits to the world and that employees and customers were part of a grand, noble purpose. And to be clear, companies have brought amazing tech to the world, but only insofar as in can fulfill the profit motive. In earlier times, I think people and society had a healthier relationship with how they viewed companies - your job was how you made money, but not where you tried to fulfill your soul - that was what civic organizations, religion, and charities were for.
So my point is that I think it's much better for society to inherently view all companies and profit-driven enterprises with suspicion, again not because people involved are inherently bad, but because that is simply the nature of capitalism.
You've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.
It matters more for non-profits, because your mission statement in your IRS filings is part of how the IRS evaluates if you should keep your non-profit status or not.
I'm on the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation and the board has to pay close attention to our official mission statement when we're making decisions about things the foundation should do.
I've seen videos where people will put in removable drywall panels that can just be lifted out for access.
There are a lot of downsides though. You lose airsealing, if you don't have an airtight building envelope on the outside of the drywall. You lose fire resistance. You often lose aesthetics, although I've seen this done extremely tastefully. You lose childproofing, and run the risk of a kid electrocuting themselves or destroying your plumbing or dropping stuff in the wall. You impose constraints on what can go on the walls and where your furniture can go.
Given that drywall is pretty easy to cut and replace, most people figure it's just not worth the costs for something you do infrequently.
The Issues on the crabby-rathbun are a fun read: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/crabby-rathbun/issues
Most of the issues (now Closed) are crypto scammers attempting to prompt engineer it into falling for a crypto scam, which is extremely cyberpunk.
What, you've never seen industrial strength sandwich production?
> This is no longer about money, it's about power
This is more Altman-speak. Before it was about how AI was going to end the world. That started backfiring, so now we're talking about political power. That power, however, ultimately flows from the wealth AI generates.
It's about the money. They're for-profit corporations.
Looking at the front page now and I cannot see it. Do you have a link?
(pause)
Ah, now on the second page ...
Thanks for letting me know.
Try Dissolution by Nick Binge. Same weird vibes.
Read a good biography of Disraeli. Can't help looking his arc being "couldn't make up his mind about the corn laws" but maybe a good politician can't make up his mind when the public can't.
I am still laughing my ass off that The Economist gets flagged today as a left leaning publication when it was founded to advocate for free trade and still does... And of course they are politically homeless in the UK these days!
Commerzbank bank is Germany's second largest bank.
Related:
Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958399 - February 2026 (1020 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963089 (subthread)
Not exactly the same thing, but I know of at least two professors that would try to list their cats as co-authors:
If The Princess Bride is to be believed, MCP stands for the "Mutton Context Protocol".
> The key is that robot arms are not labor-replacing, but labor-shifting. Robots decrease hourly labor while increasing labor demand for programmers, maintenance technicians, and skilled trades for installation.
If anyone things that the demand for the latter would match the demand for the replaced former, they really have no idea why robots are used in the first place...