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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.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

> AI generated or not, I concur. I rally want to know what Universities will look like in 10 years time. What will be taught there that cannot be taught by an AI (whatever form or interface it has).

Computer-assisted instruction been amazing unsuccessful. Why is that?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Quite strange indeed, given that was one of the main points on their security conference a few months ago.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

"As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." Terry Gou, former CEO of Foxconn. He wanted to use far more robots at Foxconn, but that was a decade ago and the technology didn't work well enough yet. It's a lot closer now, and the robot headcount in China is way up.

That's the real issue. To corporations, employees are a headache. The fewer employees, the better.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Now this is interesting, because moving away from foreign cloud vendors hardly helps if everything else stays the same.

Maybe some Jolla sponsoring as well?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

Putting info into a spreadsheet is a higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking. There are many concrete representations like that. LLMs don't use them much. This is a lack.

Can you point a LLM at a body of code, and tell it "give me a concise UML chart of what this does"? I'm not advocating humans writing UML, but some representation like that may be useful to AIs. Except that they don't really do graphs very well. We may need a specification language intended to be read and written by AIs, readable by humans but seldom written by them. Going directly from natural language specifications to code causes the LLM blithering problem to generate too much code.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91268]

Most people who say this didn't/can't happen to them, are the worst cases...

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79671]

Well, James, forgive me for being so inquisitive; but during the past few weeks, I’ve wondered whether you might be having some second thoughts about the mission.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

How good a position can you get from GPS today in receive only mode?

You can download and store Open Street Map for individual states. Map data doesn't have to come in over the air. That's not the problem. It's enhancing GPS with cell phone tower data that's the problem. That requires a cell connection.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

> "new enrollments for next year are down close to 20%."

Does this mean that MIT admitted fewer people, or that there are fewer applicants? The article does not seem to say.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Now they can, 30 years ago not really.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Looks into the CVE, ah an heap memory corruption, business as usual.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78777]

Not only that, but to legally be a charity, you have to spend at least 5% of your assets every year. So not only do they have to stay ahead of their own growth, they have to spend down 5% of quite a lot!

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 83080]

It may be good but also can be very problematic.

Organizations don't really shrink well. When times are good, they hire a lot of people that are marginally necessary. Over the good times, these roles become well-integrated into how the organization does business; whether or not they were necessary at first, people start depending on that person for a task, their approvals become part of a critical workflow, they develop special institutional knowledge without which the institution won't function, etc. When the organization needs to shrink, the marginally-necessary roles all get laid off. Except now you have all these unfilled dependencies. Other remaining employees depend upon the now-gone employees to do their jobs. Communication processes break. People get demoralized as they realize the organization is broken anyway, and quiet-quit or start looking out for their own self-interest.

You run into Gall's Law in action: "A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work: you have to start over with a working simple system."

Lots and lots of things are going to break as fertility declines and the population shrinks. Education is going to be one of the first ones hit because it explicitly deals with young people, but likely this will go right up to capitalism and the state.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420272]

It's beyond contest that the g factor is real in part because it's a statistical inevitability in any series of related tests, be they for intelligence or product/market fit in automobiles. It's an exploratory statistic, a hint at underlying causality; it is not a dispositive revelation about the structure of human thought.

Sure: there's a battery of general cognitive tests, and if you smush data sets together a dominant factor will emerge. And?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Never, a couple of years ago Apple gave up on the server market, that is why having Swift on Linux is so relevant for app developers.

Now they gave up on the workstation market that really enjoys their slots for all myriad of cards.

Having a thunderbolt cable salad is only for those that miss external extensions from 8 and 16 bit home computer days.

Which is clearly what Apple is nowadays focused, if you look back at the vertical integrations before the PC clones market took off.

So now if you really need a workstation, it is either Windows, or one of those systems sold with Red-Hat Enterprise/Ubuntu from IBM, Dell , HP.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127871]

> Winter wheat is the dominant variety in the U.S. and is (and is projected to be further) down due to drought.

Both drought and the fertilizer shortage (which, as the article notes, was too late to effect planting decisions but DID impact the costs, and thereby decisions on the applied quantities, of nutrients for the winter wheat crop this year) are impacting winter wheat yields.

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92180]

Two hours ago you posted "I don’t believe claims made without evidence", lol.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48135626

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160464]

Third world is historically outside the American (first world) and Soviet bloc (second world).

I don‘t think it‘s terribly relevant today, but why beat around the bush? Let‘s call it how we mean it:

Poor.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99672]

Right and there's no wars in Ukraine or Iran, they're 'special military operations' or 'excursions.'

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 82184]

I bet the majority of people reading this really think Claude cracked the encryption.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99672]

Why not just build affordable housing instead of luxury condos, you're creating a weird false equivalence.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99672]

You're missing GP's point. The objection is not to the inclusion of swift bricks in new houses but the belief that it is sufficient to stabilize/restore the population, because relatively few new houses are being constructed.

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92180]

> I don't really understand the point of the embargo.

Making sure Florida's Cuban-American community keeps voting Republican.

The end result is going to be them being another China-dependent colony. https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/as-the-us-starves-it-of...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183362]

Solid compromise is Kagi's research assistant. Aggressively cites, unlike Claude. Concise, unlike Grok.

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92180]

> because stopping Trump will get them voted out

Hey, you misspelled "murdered".

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77542]

I agree with you, I immediately understood what they are, but what's the problem with more clarification? I've upvoted you.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 105158]

I believe it's an evolution of the technique used in GPT-Image-1 (or whatever they called that), which was derived from their work on making GPT-4o an "omni" model that can directly output images and audio in addition to text.

The 2024 GPT-4o launch post https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/ hints about how that works:

"With GPT‑4o, we trained a single new model end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning that all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network."

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

> a million different versions of which will get them bad press: “Apple told me to go and pick up my dead child’s cancer medication!”

This is a very tricky one.

>> Know that my son has a test on Thursday and hasn’t opened the revision material since Monday. A gentle nudge, not a surveillance report

This feels like a surveillance report to me. The extent to which adults should surveil their children's devices is hotly disputed. There's one faction which thinks total surveillance should be mandatory (as a solution to the age verification problem or otherwise), and others which believe that children can and should have privacy (are you absolutely sure you should be monitoring your seventeen year old's conversation with their girlfriend?).

Not to mention that it's tracking a family member's interaction with a third party. We can pre-emptively assume the school knows and approves about this one, at least.

> Track our medication schedule and ping people (or me, if someone misses a window) without turning into a clinical monitoring tool.

This feels like the sort of thing where you have weeks of meetings trying to work out whether HIPAA applies or not. It would definitely be valuable. It's also a problem if it's wrong, even if that's entirely down to user error. So people make do with the adhoc version of general purpose calendar entries.

(not to mention the period tracker use case: you want to be careful with technologies which provide an evidence trail that the government have announced they want to use against you)

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 105158]

"due largely to the heavy new 8% tax on our endowment returns, a burden for MIT and only a few other peer schools"

I went digging. Turns out that's a 2025 "Big Beautiful Bill" thing, which raised that from 1.4% to 8% but only for colleges where the endowment exceeds $2,000,000 per student. Which meant MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard.

https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2025/05/14/ways-and-means-vot... boasts that this "Holds woke, elite universities that operate more like major corporations and other tax-exempt entities accountable".

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92180]

Stop freaking out at thought experiments.

I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids?

What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183362]

> have to imagine he's behind this

Is Musk probably throwing fuel on the fire? Yes, probably. (Though we have no proof of this.)

Is Musk causing this? No. This is mainly Altman’s doing. The hyperbole. The lying. The leverage. The pomp. Even Zuckerberg and Bezos haven’t painted a target on themselves like he has. (To the point that I’m borderline sympathetic.)

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77542]

I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k.

Thank you MtGox.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183362]

The speech makes a lot of arguments. It argues against the endowment tax, which seems politically deaf. But it also cites research-funding cuts (both legal and illegal).

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92157]

Funny, I was just sort of spec'ing this out to myself yesterday.

I'd consider building the system out as an MCP server rather than trying to bundle the agent with it. I had an AI build something out that is just a tasklist that works the way I think about tasks, which I've been using both personally and professionally. It's an MCP server only, which I can expose on the internet with OAuth. It has been surprisingly fun to use, because the AI can spontaneously interact with the information in ways I didn't program in. I have a recurring task with an AI to give me a dump of my current top tasks once a day to my phone.

Professionally, I'm working between a lot of different teams with their own Jira boards and I needed something to use myself to organize and prioritize tasks that can't be prioritized within one place in Jira. With the Atlassian MCP server hooked up to the same agent as my code it is fairly trivial to attach a Jira bug to a task and then prompt the AI to do whatever to the bug attached to this task. I put an explicit field for it in to the task definition but you don't even really need that, just putting the bug in the description is all that was really necessary.

The point I am trying to make here is, you don't even really have to "design" a product at this point. You just need to expose things to the AI so that when the user makes some vague statement about what they want to do it can convert that into concrete calls. The AI and the user will do things with it that you didn't even think of, and users can just add things by saying things in the descriptions of various tasks. I've mentioned how even if AI were to freeze today for the next 10 years we'd still be learning how to use AI and getting more out of it... this is I think a still under-explored application space.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77542]

Korea is hardly the developing world, but they're from not-US, basically, which might as well be the developing world as far as the conversation is concerned.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90874]

Thank you! I grabbed the first link I found, but the GitHub repo is definitely superior.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90874]

> And then they dump it in your lap as being helpful

I've been guilty of this and gotten pushback from my manager: "this feels like homework, cut these options down to 100 words each, max".

Curation and refinement are even more important when you can have genAI generate reams of text.

Seeking outside signals is even more important, like talking to customers, looking at real usage data, and more. It's too easy to trust believe what Claude tells you, even if you say "please argue against this idea", which you always should.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

You certainly can sue: "The ruling comes after Meta sued Italy’s national telecommunications regulatory agency (AGCOM) in Italian court in 2023"; that's the normal process for disputing regulatory rulings. Doesn't mean you'll win though.

I'm very much in two minds about this because "news" is not a morally neutral category in itself, such as with similar laws benefiting News Corp in Australia, but it's clear that Meta/FB is a much worse unrestrained actor.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160464]

Hey, someone submitted my old article. On my birthday!

Oh, people hate it… and even someone I definitely look up to.

You‘re absolutely right, though, I don‘t remember it being that bad, and probably I just read over it when resurrecting the article, because I‘m so familiar with every word.

I‘ll slap some <hr> tags on it when I‘m back home from my holiday.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78777]

Do they not have mice and rats there? This looks like a place those creatures would nest long before a bird got to it.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189179]

The author highlights an interesting point. There are a couple variables in action:

A- The difficulty to publish the tool

B- The difficulty to create the tool

C- The usefulness of the tool to others

D- The social reward for publishing the tool

E- The negative incentive of adding a dependency

Difficulty to find a canned solution goes up with A (because someone needs to create it) and B (someone needs to figure out how to publish it), but, the more useful it is to the community (C), the easier it gets to find it, because people will tell you.

If A and B are substantially different, if A is much higher than B, people will tend to write their own and forget about it. If B is lower, there will be fewer solutions to your problem. If A and B are low, and the social reward (C) for A is higher than the price of depending on something else (E), you'll have a leftpad situation. A lot of NPM is made of packages with high C and D and low E.

In the case of Emacs Lisp, A used to be high, but now is low, B (once you climb the learning curve) is low, C, D, and E aren't high either way. This can lead to a scenario where you build the tool before you even look if there is a tool that does it (unlike it is with VSCode, and with Eclipse before it - both have a high B).

I see a thesis someone younger than me will want to bring out to this world.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108327]

For years my favorite hackathon kit has been a tablet + cheap bluetooth mouse + cheap bluetooth keyboard. It could be an iPad or an Amazon Fire tablet so long as it can run an RDP client and I can log into my home computer or a big cloud machine.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77542]

Also, if the game is single-player, you don't care: Simply let the players enjoy the game how they want to enjoy it.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92157]

A do nothing C program (int main() { return; }):

    $ time ./a.out

    real    0m0.002s
    user    0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.002s
A do-nothing Go program:

    $ time ./tmp

    real    0m0.002s
    user    0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.003s
I don't believe Go has any optimizations to not start its runtime if it isn't necessary, but when I added spawning a goroutine that immediately blocks on a channel read that will never come the numbers didn't change. That doesn't really time the runtime. Probably the program terminated before the goroutine was scheduled to run anything. It just makes it so there definitely wasn't an early exit because the compiler or the runtime "realized" it didn't need to start the runtime.

I'm sure the Go program is somewhat slower to start and end than C, and that we're running into the limits of how quickly processes can be spawned and other timing overhead which is obscuring the difference. However for practical purposes, "it starts up in less than the overhead for starting a process in the shell" is the same speed for most purposes.

Not even a "do nothing" Python program, no Python program at all:

    $ time python3 -c 1

    real    0m0.012s
    user    0m0.008s
    sys     0m0.004s
If you had a Go program that was slow to start up, it was your program, not Go. By contrast, Python, and the dynamic scripting languages in general, can be quite slow to start up, just in the reading and compiling of the code. (Even .pyc files, IIRC, take processing, just less processing than Python source code... it's still nowhere near "memory map it in and go" as it is for statically-compiled languages.)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106339]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

Option 3: Elon takes over the Federal government, causes some major security incidents, and cuts off USAID stranding a number of Federal employees and cutting off short term food support for hundreds of thousands of people depending on it.

Option 4: Elon takes over a social network and tries to Orbanize the West with it.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

> where we identify public servants with strong technical aptitude across government, bring them into dedicated product teams

> The team’s approach was straightforward. Build working software fast. Put it in front of real users early. Collect feedback. Fix things quickly. Release updates every two weeks.

> That’s a 95% cost reduction. Both systems instead of one. Delivered faster. With 643 users already on the platform

This is a proven solution. These parts, the non-AI management ones, are proven to work in all sorts of places. Gov.uk is another example.

However, there's one massive problem with this: it doesn't involve the free market and it doesn't make any money for corporations to feed back to politicians in campaign donation kickbacks. It even involves respecting civil servants - maybe even paying them market wages! These parts are so heretical that most governments would choose the solution that 10X more expensive and also doesn't work, every single time.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

The secret ingredient is money. Money makes everything possible. Money can materialize energy and water from nowhere.

(well, it can't, but it allows you to buy them off poor people, who don't matter)

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 176230]

ty, I accidentally submitted the url with anchor

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

I think mature sysadmins accept there's a certain .. bushido to their security-critical role. It is after all their job to respond to security threats, including by revoking credentials, and to recognize that they might fall on the wrong side of that some day.

But things are different both in small companies, and non-US environments where minimum notice periods or redundancy consultations are a thing. You may put people on "gardening leave" where they're still paid but not actually working. Or it may be the case that the sysadmin is the one person who knows and controls a lot of stuff, and the employer has ended up relying on them for a smooth handover. Password and role management for the "root" of things is a real problem.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Coding on 8 and 16 bit home computers still required some skills that most vibe coders certainly lack.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

No, it's just a cash replacement, the trust lies in expecting people to make the payment in the first place rather than just steal unattended goods.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

It takes up more space and costs more (connectors are surprisingly expensive), as well as adding an electrical overhead, while most (yes, not all) customers don't take advantage of it.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109978]

Meanwhile in Korea:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-offi...

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employee...

SK Hynix is making an absurd amount of money from the RAM shortage, and the employees are not unreasonably demanding their cut from it.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Basically complete disregard for the history of programming languages and learnt lessons.

Go fits well close to Oberon released in 1987, or Limbo in 1995, when exceptions and generics were still esoteric features.

Instead they had to reach out to Phil Wadler to help them, as he did previously with Java almost a decade earlier, panic/recover is clunky way to do exceptions, instead of doing enumerations like Pascal in 1976, it needs a a iota/const code pattern, hardcoded urls for source repos, if err all over the place like last century programming, many errors are plain strings, ah and nil interfaces what a great gotcha.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Same here, some of your southern neighbours also have unions on IT, as a union in general covers specific industries, regardless of what job each person does in the building.

As a tip for others as well, even without an union it helps to be aware of the country labour laws even if superficially.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91268]

It's the same, on steroids.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160464]

No article with that title. Flagged.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

"AI safety", as defined here, has most of the problem that "fact checking" for social media had. Many of the same problems the "woke" concern about "microagressions" had. Most of the techniques used in advertising. Much of what passes for political discourse today has the same problems. It's somewhat convincing bullshit.

Should AIs be held to a higher standard than X/Twitter? Than Reddit? Than Fox News? What censorship is appropriate? And, yes, alignment is censorship.

Then there's the big problem of chatbots telling you what you seem to want to hear. This is an old problem. "Happy Talk", from South Pacific", is the entertainment version. "Wartime" by Paul Fussell, is the serious version.

As the article points out, a small percentage of the population is very vulnerable to certain types of misinformation. It may be the same fraction of the population that's vulnerable to cults. But maybe not. Cults have a group self-reinforcing mechanism and an agenda. Chatbots have neither. Worth studying.

The point here is that restrictions on chatbots strong enough to protect the vulnerable would close off most political and social discourse.

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

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126512]

Do you think there was ethnic favoritism going on?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128867]

Or VC++ if ever, which has the best modules support, but it is still trailing behind in C++23.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

Bell System historical video on this.[1] This is the popular version, but it's not bad. The more technical version [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS5X5BkIKpM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8BqomKTKE

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89566]

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here

You underestimate the number of HN users who are reading this site in their terminal. ;-)

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420272]

Lots of products have the same fraud/chargeback dynamics are are similar disfavored by payment processors.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127871]

> Have you happened to purchase anything in the past 12 months, and looked at the Fed's inflation numbers?

The Fed doesn't issue inflation numbers. The usually cited headline inflation numbers (CPI) are from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ones used by the Fed as an input to monetary policy decisions (PCE) are issued by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106339]

>Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/40-percent-st...

https://archive.ph/RPegw

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420272]

Audiobookshelf is a web app! Like, if you had a good TUI music player, I don't think you'd be rebutting my thesis here. I don't doubt anybody's ability to build TUIs.

The point of the post is the emacsification of the native macOS (and Windows, I assume) environment. Totally reasonable not to care that it's occurring, that's not really responsive to the post, is it?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420272]

You haven't done the math here. Multiply the numbers out. This is what I'm talking about. How are you supposed to engage with these topics if you're literally recoiling from 7th grade arithmetic? Congratulations, taken on your own terms, you just found 3.6% worth of savings from practitioner costs.

My local grocery store wouldn't even bother issuing a coupon for that small a discount.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 105158]

"There is no independent audit, no time series, no disclosed methodology, so we have no idea whether the real figure is higher, whether it is growing, or how it compares across the other frontier models, none of which publish equivalent data."

Tip for writers: aggressively filter out the "no X, no Y, no Z" pattern from your writing. Whether or not you used AI to help you write it's such a red flag now that you should be actively avoiding it in anything you publish.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89566]

"Cheating" was pointless, because everyone else in the room was struggling just as hard as you were.

That reminds me of what an instructor (one of the best ones I've had) said a long time ago in response to one of my classmates asking if the exam could be open-book: "I could make it so, but it's not going to get any easier." The same instructor also responded to another question with "it doesn't mean I won't change the length of the exam."

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126512]

Being a high trust society isn’t the same thing as being a fully egalitarian society.

Getting to “high trust for the majority” is the 0 to 1 of civilizational development. Most societies never get there—they’re low trust for everyone.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

Participants were 529 (289 men, 234 women, and 6 identified as other) undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).

Sigh. A sample of convenience. Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.

If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83596]

This is not obvious at all.

Loyalty is a fundamental moral principle. Loyalty to a friend carries a lot of moral weight. Humans are a social animal, and loyalty to a friend can easily outweigh loyalty to some abstract institution. Like, my friend will still have my back five years from now. The university I went to won't do shit for me.

Like, if you're talking about loyalty to a friend who wants you to cover up an unjustified murder they committed, then I think most people will say the value of telling the cops about the murder outweighs the loyalty to your friend.

But for cheating on some test where probably 30% of the other students are cheating anyways? I think the vast majority of people will say that loyalty to your friend is the more important moral principle here. We all make mistakes in life, and the whole idea of loyalty and love to a friend is that we support them even though they make mistakes. As long as the mistakes are common mistakes like cheating on a test or cheating on a boyfriend, as opposed to things like felony crimes.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

When you lose access to your projects, does Anthropic acquire the intellectual property? It's a real issue when it's in a machine learning system, not passive storage like Github.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91268]

>As far as I know, java has 7 GC implementations, none of which are perfect, all of which have drawbacks

Compared to Python's, all of them are beyond perfect. And 99.9% of the time you don't even need to use anything but the default.

steveklabnik ranked #30 [karma: 97441]

The startup I'm at (ersc.io) is working in this space (version control more than the IDE side of things), because, in my opinion, there just plain isn't any.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91268]

>responding to incoming emails / voicetexts.

You need an AI for that?

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126512]

The idea that America had “goodwill” in other countries before Trump is laughable. Where? Latin America? Africa? In the Muslim world? We bombed the hell out of all those places long before Trump. This most recent Iran war has generated less outrage in the Muslim world than the war against Iraq 20 years ago.

American foreign policy since the 1950s, fixated on fighting communism and then terrorism, has meddled with so many foreign countries that it’s silly to talk about “goodwill” towards America. That is not to say goodwill matters. Clearly the U.S. has done great without it.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91268]

Manliness is the confounding factor.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106339]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

That's what happens when the storage tanks fill up. Nobody can buy it because they have to accept delivery and put it somewhere.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

Yes.

"Medicare Advantage" = HMO. All the usual HMO problems.

The best Medigap plan is Plan F, which is no longer available to new subscribers. "Discontinuation of Medicare Plan F was a strategic decision aimed at promoting responsible healthcare spending and ensuring the financial sustainability of the Medicare program." It covers just about everything Medicare doesn't pay, including the various deductibles Medicare has. If Medicare covered Medicare's part, the Plan F provider has to pay their part. They don't get to question it. I don't even see hospital bills, just statements that it's been paid for.

Plan G is one step down from that.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83596]

It might be more likely that it cannibalizes used Macbook Air sales.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77542]

We weren't talking about whether the registry was better or worse, we were talking about how similar the two OSes were.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92157]

I run Steam on Ubuntu with a "GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER" (according to lspci), and while it generally works it has some weird issues with gaming in Linux. Some games end up with what feels like ~200ms latency for no apparent reason, and frame rates on some things like Just Cause 3, which I ought to be horribly overspec'd for (a 2015 game) run comfortably, but just barely, which really isn't right. And Persona 5 gets about 2 frames per second in Linux. My Steam Deck pushes it at 60 at 720p with no problem, and I think was pushing out 1080 at one point quite playably, and I think I benchmarked my PC at ~6 times more powerful than my Steam Deck.

Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106339]

In fact he's the opposite of frightening.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

It's a win, but the Salt Lake City Tribune is mostly Utah news.

Who doesn't have a paywall now? Fox News. This is a problem.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

Yes. Apollo had a lot of WWII military people. The dud leaders in the US military were mostly identified early in the war and kicked out. Gen. George C. Marshall established a "plucking board" in 1941 to remove bad officers.[1] "In the first six months of its existence the panel removed 195 captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. Ultimately 500 colonels were forced into retirement."

That set the tone for the rest of the war. Bad leaders were routinely demoted or retired by a formal process for identifying losers. Not for policy reasons. For not being good at combat leadership. For most of the 1950s, at least, the US military continued that tradition. Much of the staff of Apollo came from that environment.

[1] https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/gen-george-c-mar...

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

There's been real progress. Wine's memory allocator had an architecture with three nested locks. "Realloc" held a futex lock on the memory allocator while recopying the buffer. Multiple threads doing allocation could go into futex congestion, with many threads looping on the futex. This made Vec::push in Rust insanely inefficient. Some of my programs dropped from 60FPS to about 0.5 FPS.

Fixed in Wine 11.0. Thanks to the Wine team.

Not sure if this was related to NTSYNC, but Wine's locking infrastructure definitely got an overhaul.

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 83080]

That's probably why they are two of the most powerful men currently in existence.

When there is something genuinely acknowledged as being valuable - and a $900B company certainly qualifies - people are going to fight over it. Only natural, because in most cases the way to get power is to fight for things that will make you powerful. Just look at the history of Facebook or Twitter or Google Chauffeur/Waymo or Cisco or the U.S. presidency.

When you get wealth and power without fighting, it's usually because you managed to identify something that would eventually make you powerful without anyone else realizing that it's important, until you become too big to overthrow. This is the story of the Google founders or E-bay or Github or...I can't really think of others, it's a pretty rare path to success. Either that, or seem non-threatening and mild-mannered enough that nobody attacks you and then be the last one standing after all the combative types have destroyed each other, like how Sundar got to be CEO of Alphabet or Bran Stark won the Seven Kingdoms.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108327]

... and you reward them for it?

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108327]

Ouch! We get told at least 10x what a genius this guy is before we even are told what he did.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106339]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162220]

Many sites are talking about this, but here's the actual video.

Related announcement from CEO on X: https://x.com/adcock_brett

It's a humanoid robot taking bags and boxes from an incoming chute and facing them label-side down. About an hour and a half in so far. No commentary.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91268]

>a man who I praised fulsomely in a blog post 20 years ago, for his coverage of the genocide in Darfur

But apparently don't care for him when the genocide hits closer to home.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127871]

A national public payment processor in the US would not be more immune to political pressure from religious moralist groups than a duopoly of private processors.

For evidence see, well, all the other institutions of the US federal government.

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 83080]

> Muneeb Akhter asked Sohaib Akhter for the plaintext password of an individual who submitted a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Public Portal, which was maintained by the Akhters’ employer. Sohaib Akhter conducted a database query on the EEOC database and then provided the password to Muneeb Akhter.

WTF?

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 83080]

Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits.

My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled though, even though the official Google developer workstation was Goobuntu, Google-flavored Ubuntu. This reflected the overall developer population of the time.

I think Cider actually was invented a little earlier than the article describes. I have vague memories of some engineers experimenting with web-based IDEs that would integrated directly with Critique (the code-review software) as early as 2013-2014. Its use was not widespread when I left in 2014; there was still the impression that it wasn't powerful enough for daily driving.

When I came back in 2020, emacs/vim use was much lower, again probably reflecting differences in the general population of developers. Many more of the developers had been trained in the post-2010 developer ecosystem of VSCode, IntelliJ, etc, and this was reflected in tool usage at Google too. I'd say IntelliJ was the dominant IDE, with Cider a close second and Cider-V just starting to take market share. You still had to pry emacs and vim from a grizzled old veteran's hands.

By 2022 I'd transferred to an Android team, and Android Studio with Blaze was the dominant IDE, even as general IntelliJ usage in the company was falling. Cider just didn't have the same Android-specific support. Company-wide Cider-V was growing the fastest, taking market share from both IntelliJ and Cider-V.

By 2024 Cider-V was dominant and there started to be a concerted push to standardize on it, particularly since new AI agent tools were coming out and they couldn't be supported on all editors that Googlers wanted to use.

As of my departure in 2026, the company-wide push was to standardize on Antigravity [1], which, as I understand it, won a turf war within the developer tools org and got blessed as the "official" Google AI coding agent. This also has the effect of concentrating developer time dogfooding Google's external AI coding offering, which hopefully should improve its quality. There's still significant Cider-V usage, but it's dropping, and execs are pushing Antigravity hard.

[1] https://antigravity.google/

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78777]

Looks interesting, curious what your moat here is. What prevents Supabase/Neon from doing this? Actually don't they already do this? How does this differ from the branching Neon and Supabase already offer?

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189179]

I honestly thought it’d be wind that would make a dent in generation before solar, but I guess I was wrong.