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.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

“Almost every engineer will work on a product people hate.”

No. Forcing people to use a product they hate is privilege. It’s about power. Monopolists like Microsoft and Google can do it, companies that face market competition can’t.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127718]

Depends on which OS we are talking about.

I know a few where that doesn't hold, including some still being paid for in 2026.

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 134833]

Here's the one I use: https://issinfo.net/artemis

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 87291]

be bop be bop ! why yes, yes i am.

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 116243]

There are so many interesting things that can be done with an Android phone. Tomorrow, if the Google Play store decides not to publish this app, I can still install it via the APK file. I wonder how many of these apps will be usable after Google's new rules about sideloading.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113796]

Like a Borg cube - if there's one thing more scary than a cube full of drones, it's one that's mysteriously empty.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127718]

Sure, that is why I see translation and asset creation teams being let go, replaced by AI.

Or head count in dev teams, now doing even more with less.

Not to count all those gas stations, supermarket checkouts, or underground lines that are fully automated.

Still wondering when I will also be shown the door.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 87291]

couple that with the "the ray tracer challenge" book, and you can generate some pretty cool images :o)

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

We've been in low-key WW3 since 2022 or maybe even since 2014, it is just that like WW2 it did not arrive everywhere at once. But there are a lot of countries at war now and if the fall out from this entirely manufactured energy crisis is going to get just a tad worse then I expect more countries to join in shortly.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

Imagine the degree of fall out if say Estonia allowed Ukraine to use their country to set up a base and they started attacking russian infrastructure or Kaliningrad from there. I'm fairly sure russia would see that as Estonia having joined the war.

And for once I would agree with russia. So Iran has - in my opinion - a legitimate claim that if the USA uses other countries to launch their aircraft from that those countries have effectively joined the war.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160762]

SF should just name it "Chavez", as a convenience. Lots of people are named Chavez. No rush. Shorten the signs as they are routinely replaced.

Going back to "Army" would be silly, especially since the U.S. Army never had a presence on that side of town. It was all Navy near the bay. The Army was up at the Presidio.

SF has this silly thing of giving streets secondary names. Who knows where "Herb Cain Way" or "Isadora Duncan Lane" is?

Numbered streets have their own problems. In San Francisco, 4th St. and 16th St intersect near the UCSF hospital complex.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

UAE has always been one of the more repressive government on the planet.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

Low latency to certain markets.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

Iran has been on the other side in the Ukrainian war so they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to complain about. If anything they should count their blessings that Ukraine has so far left them alone, they could have definitely chosen not to do that and some of Iran's more vulnerable infrastructure is right where Ukraine has an advantage.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88751]

More like turn them both into a liquid.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

Holy fuck. Ok, this will change things considerably for some companies I'm working with that had moved their stuff to Azure. Thanks. More than I can express on here.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241193]

The no monoculture one is the big one for me. And I think 2008 is very generous.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107662]

That's the "digital escort" process mentioned in the very long OP. Understandably, the US government got mad when they found out that cheap Chinese tech support staff were being used for direct intervention on "secure" VMs.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88751]

Likewise, I read it as "Fake Rescue Packet"

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88751]

It would be far more interesting to look at what this was "compiled" from; it looks like the output of a state-machine generator.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126025]

Why go through all that trouble to reinvent SMTP? Outlook is trash, but the web is even worse.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107780]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160762]

That's been done as "The Store is Closed."[1]

IKEA threatened to sue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/sK5wPE-aQwc?autoplay=1&enablej...

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107780]

In these cases, report to Brian Krebs instead.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/

https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127741]

> Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed.

It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180291]

> options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants)

RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180291]

> on the guidance computer

Source for this running on the GN&C (guidance and nav) computer? Isn’t that built by the ESA?

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76762]

To clarify, the parent here didn't actually give the model a way to run the commands. The model just wrote the script/command and then, being unable to run anything, just mentally calculated what the result would probably be (and got it wrong).

Yes the answer was wrong, but so was the setup (the model should have had access to a command runner tool).

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417779]

Wait, the thing we're talking about is Apache 2.0?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104690]

I want more — of your writing. Where can I find it?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104690]

I nicknamed ESPN in the US EBetPN

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107662]

The specific lie discussed was the idea that granting options was not somehow an "expense" and could be excluded from the accounts.

(Google tells me this is a relevant summary of US GAAP https://carta.com/uk/en/learn/startups/equity-management/asc... )

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 134833]

I've found half a dozen sites to track the progress of Artemis II ... this is among the best.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82601]

> Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"? Never.

Companies lower prices all the time. It's the competitive market at work. They just don't tend to say why, because nobody cares about the reason, so it's not necessary.

E.g. snack prices are coming down, to pick one recent example: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/03/nx-s1-5697941/pepsi-prices-ch...

But it's human bias to notice when things get worse, but not when things get better.

jrockway ranked #49 [karma: 73250]

Sometimes I wonder if we just do these wars so that companies can raise prices and when the war ends, not lower them. Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"? Never. "But the free market will force someone to do this to gain marketshare." But Amazon is the only Amazon, so I doubt that will happen.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113796]

What is a difference? If the "elaborate harness" consists of mix of "classical" code and ML model invocations, at which point it's disqualified from consideration for "thinking machine"? Best we can tell, even our brains have parts that are "dumb", interfacing with the parts that we consider "where the magic happens".

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82448]

The strict definition of touch typing reminds me of how when I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that there’s a specific way of holding chopsticks. You gotta hold the top one like a pencil, and rest the bottom one between the crook of your fingers and your ring finger, and make sure they’re the same length and the bottom one isn’t moving and you’re just using it as a base to press against.

And then I became an adult and visited China and met actual Chinese immigrants and married a native chopstick holder. And half of them don’t hold chopsticks “the real way”. Somehow it all works out. As long as you can eat a peanut with them, you pass.

As an adult I learned that there’s also a whole lot of prescriptive bullshit that basically nobody pays attention to. The strict definition of touch typing seems like one of those. If you can type without looking at the keys, you can touch type.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

Well I guess you could say there is some amount of text that entertains you as much as a 10s Sora video. Judged in terms of time a fast reader might read 50 words in 10s and that is what, 100 tokens? If somebody wants to fudge that up by a factor of 10 (picture is worth a thousand words or something) you get where they are.

Now personally I am not entertained by motion-for-the-sake-of-motion Instagram reels, they actually make me queasy despite having a cast iron stomach and having taught myself to not get sick in VR. So if that's 10s of entertainment, leave me out. I don't care if Tom Cruise is whaling on Brad Pitt or the other way around for that matter, but boy do I want to see the body thetans burst ouf of Cruise's body when OTIII goes horribly wrong.

My reaction to the article was funny. I mean, I saw that 160x thing and thought it was bogus, and of course it is all AI generated and poorly formatted to boot but I did like the overall message. It does remind me of the early 2010s when a lot of sites with photo-based content (including mine) were going out of business because the revenue wasn't enough to pay the hosting costs and a few newcomers like Instagram were survivors and Google was obviously cleaning up with video on YouTube. From the viewpoint of business models for AI video I think there are two questions:

(i) how many times can you get people to watch the same video, i mean, no matter how expensive it is, if you get enough views/ad impressions/other revenue you are OK

(ii) how does it compete with some other way to generate the video?

The picture that the $20 subscription costs $65 to serve doesn't sound too crazy to me. I mean, there might be somebody who can get 3x the value out of a 10s Sora video than somebody else or they could get the cost down by a factor of 1/3.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82448]

Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treating them as an expense weren’t even really necessary, but it took a few years. It wasn’t obvious in 2002 that this is how it would play out.

And relevant to the title quote: maybe it should be amended to “good ideas do not need a lot of lies to gain public acceptance eventually”. The dynamic here is that a significant part of public opinion is simply “well, this is how things work now, and it seems to be working”, and any new and innovative idea by definition is not going to be how things work now. The lies are needed to spur action and disturb the equilibrium of today. But if you’re still telling lies a few years in, you’ve failed and it’s a bad idea to begin with.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

In my mind tractors are just plain dangerous. I can't say I have driven tractors that much but I've put them in ditches and have gotten closer to rollovers on tractors without a ROPS than I like. I've heard a lot of stories about people getting caught up in PTOs and it's famous that a young man was driving down a hill with a haywagon and had the transmission pop out of gear and couldn't get it back in and died when the tractor crashed at the bottom of the hill.

So I wouldn't expect it to be safe around an autonomous tractor and even with an operator I trust I always have an exit plan and know where I'm going to bail if I see the machine going the wrong way.

Overall agri-tech is challenging. Personally I am not so interested in more AI-generated Nobel Prize winners as I am in machines that can pick strawberries, change bedpans and do other things we need.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82601]

Oh, thanks. Those buttons seem designed to be as inconspicuous as possible.

This just looks like a pretty normal homepage. It was not obvious to me at all that the homepage was an actual dynamically rendered canvas, as opposed to just canvas-"themed".

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82601]

To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been menu bar icon behavior for decades where if there isn't enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a ton of menus).

And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable.

With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click.

tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160762]

Not to be confused with the Yggdrasil Linux distro.

(Sometimes being first doesn't help.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107780]

This was reversed upon judicial review. Checks and balances.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82601]

> even though I cannot recall running into a problem that would have prevented by its presence in the before-time

I very, very much did. I was using a Python package that used a lot of NumPy internally, and sometimes its return values would be Python integers, and sometimes they'd be NumPy integers.

The Python integers would get written to SQLite as SQLite integers. The NumPy integers would get written to SQLite as SQLite binary blobs. Preventing you from doing simple things like even comparing for equal values.

Setting to STRICT caused an error whenever my code tried to insert a binary blob into an integer column, so I knew where in the code I needed to explicitly convert the values to Python integers when necessary.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

I have found that talking with chatbots can help me organize my thoughts but I do not like what they do with my text. [1] I mean, I write pretty fast and only really need help when I am writing something I find hard to write. Usually I feel like it just isn't my voice and at best I will lift out a sentence or two.

[1] My experiences with human editors are mixed. I read some of the chapters I wrote for Wrox press back in the day and find something that couldn't have been my words but that I really liked. Years back though when I was doing content marketing I hired a copy editor and he injected more errors than he took out by far

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78402]

This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:

access to my home server

ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)

ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.

I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82601]

> Yes, but I also think that most people would interpret "Getting a full list of all the Chrome extensions you have installed" as a meaningful escape/violation of the browser's privacy sandbox.

I don't think so, because most people understand that extensions necessarily work inside of the sandbox. Accessing your filesystem is a meaningful escape. Accessing extensions means they have identification mechanisms unfortunately exposed inside the sandbox. No escape needed.

It's extremely unfortunate that the sandbox exposes this in some way.

Microsoft should be sued, but browsers should also figure out how to mitigate revealing installed extensions.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 82161]

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

> With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste.

Humanity does far more wasteful things than build some extra solar panels.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79330]

> the idea that some people do make better investment decisions than average.

Of course some do. After all, that's what makes an "average".

Some people are taller than average, too!

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101886]

"airs weekdays from 11–2pm PT"

This is one of those moments where I turn out to be entirely out-of-touch with the rest of humanity, because I cannot imagine being able to spend 3 hours every day watching some livestream news show!

Is this is the younger alternative to having Fox News playing on the TV all day?

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127718]

What would all these companies do without Microsoft shipping VS Code as open source, probably still stuck with vi and Emacs.

Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74108]

So it has converged to the same UI/UX as the Claude/Codex desktop apps. If that's the case, why use Cursor over those more canonical apps?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160762]

Everybody has a JSON extension, and they're all slightly different.

I just got hit badly by Dreamhost, which is still running MySQL 8.0. That version has a "JSON extension" which is almost totally useless. I designed something before discovering how different MySQL 8.4 and MySQL 8.0 are.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74108]

Essentially yes. It only has traction on X, but in the AI world that is all that is necessary. (its engagement metrics are poor for its size on all other platforms)

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90648]

>Counting is something that even humans need to learn how to do

No human who can program, solve advanced math problems, or can talk about advanced problem domains at expert level, however, would fail to count to 5.

This is not a mere "LLMs, like humans, also need to be taught this" but points to a fundamental mismatch about how humans and LLMs learn.

(And even if they merely needed to be taught, why would their huge corpus fail to cover that "teaching", but cover way more advanced topics in math solving and other domains?)

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

Speaking of falsifiable info:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/01/27/fac...

> Experts say the rising tally of polar bears reflects an increased ability to track bears – not an actual increase in the population. The graph is based on various estimates of the global population that include unscientific estimates, extrapolation and insufficient data sets, according to scientists.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79330]

The same goes for college.

I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard.

When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.

Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for you.

The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very productive!

Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged slide presentation.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104690]

The average person — that would be me — thinks "nah, I have no idea how to install an ad blocker or how one works, and I'm afraid I'll screw up my computer."

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90648]

>Assuming we knew enough about how a dog behaves (or less ambitiously, a more primitive organism) I would assume this could be described in a formal language. But why would Principia be needed for this?

It explains this directly before that phrase:

"Their language was dense and the work laborious, but they kept on proving a whole bunch of different truths in mathematics, and so far as anyone could tell at the time, there were no contradictions. It was imagined that at least in theory you could take this foundation and eventually expand it past mathematics: could you encode in pure logic how a dog behaves, or how humans think?"

>Math have been used to model natural phenomena a long time before Principia.

Which means little in this context. The question posed wasn't if you can use some math to describe some natural phenomenon.

The question posed was whether one could model the whole thing (e.g. how a dog behaves) in a formal language - not just take some isolated equations and apply it to this or that aspect of phenomenon (especially if it's a mere approximation). That they already knew, e.g. the equations for planetary motion.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180291]

> An passive investors are going to get hosed by this thanks to NASDAQ cooking the rules

I’m genuinely confused how a passive investor winds up tracking the NASDAQ 100 versus a broader index.

Also, if you’re picking and choosing your exposures, you aren’t passive.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180291]

> The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring

A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.

China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104690]
simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101886]

I ran these in LM Studio and got unrecognizable pelicans out of the 2B and 4B models and an outstanding pelican out of the 26b-a4b model - I think the best I've seen from a model that runs on my laptop.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/2/gemma-4/

The gemma-4-31b model is completely broken for me - it just spits out "---\n" no matter what prompt I feed it. I got a pelican out of it via the AI Studio API hosted model instead.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 82161]

Everyone is so confident in their reading of tea leaves

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180291]

> it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS

This is sort of like arguing cutlery is a military enterprise. Like yes, that’s where knives came from. But that’s disconnected enough from modern design, governance and other fundamental concerns as to be irrelevant. The internet—and less ambiguously, the World Wide Web—are more commercial than military.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180291]

> Because DOGE did not cut the budget of the space programs

DOGE absolutely tried to gut Artemis [1]. The popularity is part of what saved it. (Weirdly myopic metric for what is and isn’t popular? Since when did DOGE become arbiters of anything.)

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/g-s1-49451/artemis-moon-nasa-...

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 82161]

You can be inspired by the company and skeptical of its finances.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113796]

> Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for it

Livestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really should be using KSP for it - it's not hard to wire up with external telemetry, and with couple graphics mods, it looks way better than whatever expensive commercial professional grade simulator rendering they're using (which I suspect is part of a package that may be really, really great at simulations - and is intentionally not great at visuals of this kind, as it doesn't show anything that isn't directly representing some measurement).

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74108]

The benchmark comparisons to Gemma 3 27B on Hugging Face are interesting: The Gemma 4 E4B variant (https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-E4B-it) beats the old 27B in every benchmark at a fraction of parameters.

The E2B/E4B models also support voice input, which is rare.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101886]

Pretty solid Pelican: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ca081b679734bc0e5997a43d29fad...

I used the https://modelstudio.alibabacloud.com/ API to generate that one, which required signing up for an account and attaching PayPal billing - but it looks like OpenRouter are offering it for free right now so I could have used that: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-plus:free

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107780]
coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90648]

They always did that. Did they say anywhere they'd open all their models? They still have a business.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

I suspect this is a frequency thing. Early SpaceX broadcasts were pretty rough. NASA just doesn't do launch coverage with the same sort of cadence.

Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90648]

>where-as Alaska is contiguous with the United States, but requires crossing through parts of Canada to reach by land.

Contiguous means the 48 connected (contiguous) states. It never includes Alaska.

And even though definitionally/officially continental could include it (it's in the same continent), in common use "continental US" is not meant to include Alaska either.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107780]

Additional citation:

https://www.governance.fyi/i/192862936/who-pulled-the-ladder... ("Who Pulled the Ladder Away") from Marc Andreessen Is Right That AI Isn't Killing Entry-Level Jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613752 - April 2026

> The noncompete story is more galling. Legal experts describe the period from 1990 to roughly 2010 as the golden age of noncompete enforcement in America. What started as a tool for protecting senior executives’ trade secrets metastasized into a blanket restriction applied to hourly workers, sandwich shop employees, pet cremation technicians. An estimated 30 million Americans, nearly one in five workers, are bound by a noncompete agreement. These agreements directly suppress the mechanism through which the job ladder operates: they prevent employed workers from accepting better offers.

> The FTC, under the Biden administration, attempted a nationwide ban. The estimated effects were large and specific: $400 to $488 billion in increased wages over the next decade, $524 per worker per year in additional earnings, 8,500 new businesses annually, and 17,000 to 29,000 additional patents per year. The rule was struck down in federal court. The Trump administration formally vacated it in September 2025. The FTC has shifted to case-by-case enforcement, including a February 2026 consent order against a pet cremation company that had imposed blanket noncompetes on 1,780 employees, including hourly laborers and drivers. The bipartisan Workforce Mobility Act, reintroduced in June 2025 by Senators Murphy, Young, Cramer, and Kaine, would ban most noncompetes nationwide. It has been referred to committee. No further action has been taken. Over 150 bills have been introduced in more than 35 states, creating a patchwork that varies by jurisdiction. The patchwork is the opposite of the clear nationwide signal that would restore competitive dynamics.

> The graduate scrolling LinkedIn is not competing against chatbots. She is competing against four decades of eroded mobility, in a labor market where the companies that might hire her face less pressure to do so than at any point since the data began. We all spent two years worrying that AI will trap young workers in obsolete careers, if they every get a career in the first place. Meanwhile, noncompete agreements have been legally trapping workers in underpaying jobs for decades, and we barely noticed.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75857]

An iPad absolutely doesn't make kids "better at technology", if anything it makes them worse because it just wraps everything up in a braindead simple package for consumption.

Ironically, Gen Z was supposed to lead the way as "digital natives", but in many ways they are (speaking broadly) much less technically adapt than, say, Gen Xers, because Gen Xers had to struggle to figure stuff out because it hadn't been all wrapped up with a bow yet, and thus we got to understand the details of how thing worked at a deeper, more fundamental level.

I recall reading some articles about how many Gen Zers new to the workplace didn't even understand how file systems or directories worked, because things like iPads largely hide those details from the end user.

And to emphasize, I'm not dumping on Gen Z - they're, like everyone, just a product of the environment they grew up in. But I strongly disagree that getting access to an iPad makes anyone more technologically adept.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90648]

This is also how you get a romantic relationship and friendships: you stop being uptight about everything and treat the other as a stranger, and start being more relaxed with bounderies reserved for strangers.

A lost art today, where narcisism is "everybody else is toxic" and boundaries for everything is the norm.

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 73025]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

Whenever I get some breathless email about security from my organization I send a phishing report for it even if I think it is real. All the messages about mandatory password resets and the like just increase the surface area for phishing. There should be a policy like "we will never send you an email about the security of your account" See

https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/201...

a policy that's been talked about for more than 10 years and that the industry is almost catching up to.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107780]

While this works for some cohort of consumer, it doesn't work for organizations that need consistent cashflows to pay for consistent expenses, and so, those willing to subscribe on a recurring basis carry the economic burden of sustaining such operations.

steveklabnik ranked #30 [karma: 97157]

Just to be clear about it, we’re not “the stacked diffs company,” that is, we consider stacked diffs table stakes for good code review, not the entire point and focus of the product.

That said, we haven’t talked a ton publicly about what exactly we’re building yet, because we’re very focused on building it. But if you or anyone else is dealing with pain around source control management, I’d love to hear about it: steve@ersc.io

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

"Over 100,000 packages on Nixpkgs. Every CLI tool you can think of. Installed declaratively, cached across container restarts, no Docker rebuild."

Mrs. Holbrook, who gave me a D in high school English, would point out that there isn't a single sentence there. On the other hand, I've had times when I made most of my income by writing. What do you want, good grammar or good taste?

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 73025]

The “Hacker News - Complete Archive” on Hugging Face,[1] recently popped up here. “The data is stored as monthly Parquet files sorted by item ID, making it straightforward to query with DuckDB, load with the datasets library, or process with any tool that reads Parquet.”

Out of curiosity, I tinkered with it using Claude to see trends and patterns (I did find a few embarrassing things about me!).

1. https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

Like posted or "gets to the top page?"

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104690]

I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years in practice). I read Perrow's book several years after it was published. I was struck by how relevant his points of failure were to the practice of anesthesiology, the concept of the danger of tight coupling. I referred to this book over subsequent decades in my presentations on Grand Rounds, but to my knowledge none of the residents or other attendings ever read it.

Read a sample here: https://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tec...

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127718]

Another good reason not to use extensions, and leave whatever they do for utility apps.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

I just wish Apple would let devs cancel and refund subscriptions for people.

People get really peeved when we tell them that, believe it or not, we can't do it on our end.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

No, they employ those.

In Zuck's case especially, in order to use what we know about childhood development and education to get kids addicted early.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

The "The Attack: How it works" section explains how it works. It's not an API.

I am a little surprised something like CORS doesn't apply to it, though.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91727]

The existence of science does not obligate us to either receive a double-blind study of massive statistical significance on the exact question we're thinking about or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.

It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what screens do to children when that's all we have. You operate on that standard all the time. I know that, because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices you must make without a "data" to back you up on.

Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if there is any study out there that even remotely supports the idea that it's all just hunky-dory for kids to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and parents are just silly for being worried about what it may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time" but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I don't really like it either.)

"Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either. This is one of the cases where the politicians are just jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't following them.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113796]

If life keeps giving it them, they should instead invent a combustible lemon.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 82161]

I'm assuming less than the average ambulance ride in the USA

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

Both is fine.

Prosecute, and get rid of the loopholes that made it necessary to do so.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90414]

It’s a leavener when you get it wet, so swallowing enough will definitely feel like digestive upset from all the gas.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 87291]

why not just buy 2 sets ? problem solved ?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

I am impressed with the Steam Deck. Playing The Hundred Line on the deck brings back the glory days of the Playstation Vita. And it's the one device I have (including iPhone, iPad and Mac) for which AirPods are 100% a "just works" experience.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417779]

Software has gotten drastically more secure than it was in 2000. It's hard to comprehend how bad the security picture was in 2000. This very much, extremely includes Linux.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106916]

Yeah, 12 years ago or so I had trained an LSTM to make fake clinical reports based on clinical reports abstracts from pubmed. It was clear then that starting out in an empty state was a poor way to sample because the process that generates those documents doesn't start with 'pick the first letter' but it starts with the condition of a body which is revealed in the clinical encounter -- all of which is in the "state vector" of the real world so of course it should be in the state vector of the model.

The sponsor wasn't interested (people weren't interested enough in optimizing text generation then) so it never happened but it is nice to see that it works.

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Reply: we would have learned the initial state for all the training vectors and probably randomly generated initial states for generation