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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.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 100421]

We're all "media trained" now from a young age to behave like people being filmed or photographed "should" behave.

And if you don't quite fit the look, the camera AI selfie mode can tighten up your face for you.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 100421]

> I'd like to point out a B&W tv is probably way cheaper and robust that and the 4K OLED one

Where would you even find such a thing other than as a curated, carefully expensively maintained antique? Sure you can buy them second hand on Ebay, but the shipping costs of CRT TVs are pretty big. Everyone has a "flatscreen" TV because that's the default cheapest solution.

Shipping and handling costs are a big factor in the death of large, heavy traditional items.

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 88009]

>Unfortunately you need years to notice such long-term differences, unless someone tells you.

Hardly rich, but that "veneer wood furniture and doors" are much better than "laminated chipwood" is common knowledge. But back in the day, poor and rich alike wouldn't look twice at either, but opt for solid wood furniture.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

Possible counterexample: Larry Ellison, although he's at least an order of magnitude richer than Trump.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 152542]

Powered blinds and curtains are common, but powered home windows are very rare. Even though home control systems which managed windows would be great for heating and cooling. Interesting that they're not as common as electric auto windows.

(Linear induction motors were invented for curtains. Really. Kirsch Electrac)

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> There are other ways to do that. School is an investment

For most people, yes. For our elites, I think one of the great losses over the past generations has been this financialisation of education. Measuring ROI solely in monetary terms, thereby sacrificing the civic and cultural parts for that which is easily measured and marketed.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

As expected, they don't touch the issue of how shaders work in PlayStation (LibGNM, LibGNMX) and Switch (NVN).

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]
JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> would allergy sufferers be marvelling at the removal of all the dust and pollen? This would be like the outdoors becoming a giant anti-static dust remover

How do solar flares render pollen groundborne?

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

Default judgement against Anthropic. And sanctions on the Latham attorney who signed this.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

The fact that DOGE went through as deeply as they did and found, to a rounding error, zero fraud, is sort of remarkable from my priors around government efficiency.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 152542]

That may be reading too much into this behavior. Watch this video of metronomes self-synchronizing.[1] That's a pervasive phenomenon. Anything with similar oscillation frequency and coupling will do this. (Including polling systems with fixed retry intervals.)

Are you sure that's not just this effect?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxw4zbULMs

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> There are no other viable (across a number of dimensions) alternative

There is: you pay to skip ads.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

UPE, also known as biophoton emission, is a spontaneous release of extremely low-intensity light that is invisible to the human eye and falls within the spectral range of 200–1,000 nm

Part of that is in the infrared spectrum, and the other end in UV (including A, B, and C). Isn't this just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation that everything with a non-zero absolute temperature emits? Dead beings would obviously cool down and reduce the amount of radiation they emit.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

Those statistical properties are inherent in how the human brain works.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> Now there are family office concierge services

These are between multi-family offices and scams targeting new money. (The intersection between the best hospitality folks you can privately hire and the best money managers is roughly zero. Consolidating those functions makes no sense unless someone cannot afford them.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

I’m also struggling to see how one’s risk of drowning isn’t obviously related to fitness. (The nexus between weight and car crash mortality isn’t exactly buried science, either [1].)

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11829292/

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

…dare I ask what the 88 means?

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

Chinese also like to use the digit 8 as it's a lucky number in their culture.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

With a federal law or regulatory rule (FTC). Failing that, more aggressive spam filtering.

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 123682]

“Antinatalism” is arguably distinct phenomena in individualist societies like the U.S. versus collectivist societies like Asia. The latter were heavily propagandized in the 20th century to believe that lowering birth rates was key to societal progress. It’s not a moral stance against children.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 152542]

> it's that crypto makes them much worse by ignoring hard-earned lessons in traditional finance.

Indeed. A friend of mine manages a retail bank branch for a major US bank. She gets a few cases a week where someone appears to be a scam victim or is being coerced in some way. They want to make an unusually big cash withdrawal for their account history, or do an unusual money transfer, or something involving gift cards. She's seen all the standard scams by now, and is experienced in explaining what's going on to the victims. Often she can talk them down, or help them. Sometimes even get previously scammed money back.

A surprisingly large part of retail finance work is dealing with fraud and fixing problems. The routine transactions have been automated for years, after all. Crypto land lacks this.

Here's a bank's guide to current scams.[1]

[1] https://www.firstcitizens.com/personal/insights/security/top...

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 75706]

Couldn't one's crypto pile be divided into multiple wallets, each with different passwords?

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> What business and role can the UN have to get into open source solutions?

The UN has a nine figure IT budget for starters.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 152542]

There are at least 18 humanoid robots far enough along to have YouTube videos.[1] That's from February 2024. As far as I can tell, none have an order page where you jut enter a credit card number and get the product. It's all "pre-order", "contact sales", or just plain vagueness.

There are a lot of "really great, real soon now" humanoid robot startups.[2][3] As far as I can tell, nobody has yet deployed one in a production environment.

On the mechanical engineering side, it's likely that a drone company will have the first big low-cost product. Drone companies have people who understand sensors, balance, navigation, reliability, and weight/cost/strength tradeoffs.

[1] https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-...

[2] https://personainc.ai/

[3] https://gotokepler.com/

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

There are various attempts to phase checks out, and switch to FedNow and RTP instant payment rails. Unfortunately, there is no legislation requiring a deadline to phase out paper instruments such as checks. Call your Congressional rep. The infra already exists, anyone dragging their feet has limited incentive to hurry up.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

The subset could just be an older version of the spec, e.g. HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1.

(My opinion as another one who has been slowly working on my own browser engine.)

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen

Would note that this is a very modern phenomenon, with Nixon having considered pushing for abolishing the electoral college in the 70s.

Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 157276]

If you run the node.js server version it can handle images properly, as separate files. That also gives you the practical ability to use many large images and videos.

Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 157276]

No, not PDF, only HTML. There are community companion programs like SuperMemo Assistant, that enhance SM, but it‘s all fiddly.

I paid for two SM versions and went back to Anki. It‘s very idiodyncratic, the user interface is atrocious (in the latest version it finally, finally added thumbs up/down icons for grading the answer —- before that you had to remember whether 1 is good and 5 is bad or vice versa).

SM is fascinating (including task management, sleep cycle tracker etc.), but it‘s held back by its technological choices (only support for Edge or IE, and Edge only in the newest version), and for incremental reading you‘ll be mostly ingesting Wikipedia articles, because PDF isn‘t supported.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

I’d expect Google would love such legislation as it effectively raises the bar on new-entrant competition.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 160346]

> If 2% of the population is strongly in favor of something and 98% of the population is weakly opposed and you put it up for a vote, it fails

Sure. More common: 2% is strongly in favour and 98% don’t care.

> What does being rushed have to do with it?

You described to what “ the constituents in any given district are paying more attention.” That’s a function of focus and time.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

The best version of Battle Chess was on the Amiga, though. :)

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 152542]

> The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems.

At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things. All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of. The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)

Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 157276]
dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 122366]

> I think people are still fooling themselves about the relevance of 3GL languages in an AI dominated future.

I think, as happens in the AI summer before each AI winter, people are fooling themselves about both the shape and proximity of the “AI dominated future”.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

These data centers should just be built in Illinois, which has the largest population of existing commercial nuclear generators today. New generation will be wind, solar, and batteries to backfill current nuclear generator if allocated to data centers.

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=IL

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 70413]

A point of note is that the text embeddings model used here is paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 (https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/paraphrase-mult...), which is about 4 years old. In the NLP world, that's effectively ancient, particularly as the robustness of even small embeddings models due to global LLM improvements has increased dramatically both in information representation and distinctiveness in the embedding space. Even modern text embedding models not explicitly trained for multilingual support still do extremely well on that type of data, so they may work better for the Voynich Manuscript which is a relatively unknown language.

The traditional NLP techniques of stripping suffices and POS identification may actually harm embedding quality than improvement, since that removes relevant contextual data from the global embedding.

steveklabnik ranked #26 [karma: 93697]

crossbeam is a package name. It would be like googling “Nokogiri XML” and only getting Ruby results.

The generic name is just Deque. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-ended_queue

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

After a year with record earnings, be loyal to team mates, not the company.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

Your comment is exactly the reason why while I find Rust a cool language, I would be using C++ instead.

That is the systems language most JVM implementations make use of, alongside Java, and what is directly supported by JNI tooling, including on Java IDEs mixed language debugging.

And in what concerns Java, native is anyway the synonym for unsafe.

However to each their own.

mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 79644]

This!

I'm in the middle of this path of independence with my kids and it is bittersweet. (I too felt the weight when they were younger.)

Those small, common moments of love and intimacy you get when your kids are small fade away and become infrequent. Stuff like hugs, them wanting to hang around you, them doing things with you just to do things with you. Still amazing when they happen, though.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110816]

> You’re not creating art at that point, you’re simply another cog feeding the machine.

That's the definition of commercial art, which is what most art is.

> “Art” is not drawing random pictures.

It's exactly what it is, if you're talking about people churning out art by volume for money. It's drawing whatever they get told to, in endless variations. Those are the people you're really talking about, because those are the ones whose livelihoods are being consumed by AI right now.

The kind of art you're thinking of, the art that isn't just "drawing random pictures", the art that the term "deconstruction" could even sensibly apply to - that art isn't in as much danger just yet. GenAI can't replicate human expression, because models aren't people. In time, they'll probably become so, but then art will still be art, and we'll have bigger issues to worry about.

> There are outliers, sure, but the web is already inundated by shit images which nonetheless fool people. I bet scamming and spamming with fake images and creating fake content for monetisation is already a bigger market than people “genuinely” using the tools. And it will get worse.

Now that is just marketing communications - advertising, sales, and associated fraud. GenAI is making everyone's lives worse by making the job of marketers easier. But that's not really the fault of AI, it's just the people who were already making everything shitty picking up new tools. It's not the AI that's malevolent here, it's the wielder.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110816]

I'm of two minds about it. Duolingo is off-putting for me, not because of gamification as a concept, but rather because of their particular implementation - with tons of clearly user-abusive bullshit with gems and chests and watching ads and shit.

I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so slightly positive feelings.

simonw ranked #45 [karma: 72387]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110816]

Here's an underappreciated problem with biking in cities: storage. Most people in cities live above ground[0], and buildings don't have dedicated bike storage. Bike theft is common, and is a unique crime in being simultaneously highly disrupting to the victim, trivial to pull off, and not big enough monetarily for the police to bother pursuing - so you can't really park on the street overnight like you'd do with a car; it's too risky. This means people end up storing bikes in their apartments. Bikes are heavy and unwieldy and full of pointy bits and hard edges; going up and down with them is super annoying, especially if you don't have a lift (or it isn't big enough to fit a bike).

Solve the storage problem, and a lot more people city dwellers owning a bike will start using it daily, and many of those who don't will buy one.

--

[0] - Follows obviously from assuming most buildings have at least one floor.

PaulHoule ranked #28 [karma: 90904]

Siegel CRM -> Salesforce

CP/M -> DOS

Yahoo -> Google

MySpace -> Facebook

Commercial UNIX -> Linux

mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 79644]

Wow, that's a blast from the past!

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

Pascal derived languages also enjoy this capability.

Your example across most of them is something like:

    type 
        precision = array [-100..100] of double;

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

Having to depend on msvbvm60.dll was hardly any different than msvcrt.dll, but try to explain that to most folks.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 115958]

Thankfully, like many other languages that rather combine models instead of going full speed into affine types, OCaml is getting both.

Besides the effects type system initially introduced to support multicore OCaml, Jane Street is sponsoring the work for explicit stack allocation, unboxed types, modal types.

See their YouTube channel.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 173822]

> Heh, I think this is a subtle joke, and if so, well done o/

Thanks.

> I actually have been trying for the longest time to get access to the Unisys MCP emulation platform that they used to make available.

The closest I got was running it on an emulated B-5500. Keeping it hidden may be a strategy to drive consultancy customers, but if feels more like a way to milk whatever little is left of the product from those who still haven’t moved on.

A shame, really. They could have gone the same route as IBM and kept investment on their proprietary tech, but they went Wintel for a long time before embracing Linux. As far as I know, latest versions of MCP run on Linux under emulation.

simonw ranked #45 [karma: 72387]

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right?

I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.

My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.

Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 157276]

We‘ve got Rust fanfic now?

And https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991221 is the equivalent to Harry-slash-Snape?

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 172694]
userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

I think you're missing a didn't before "fall".

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 82011]

The fundamentals include things like teamwork and following orders. You can learn those on a sailing ship just fine.

Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 157276]

Learning the fundamentals.

Germany puts all aspiring naval officers through a tour on the Gorch Fock.

It‘s kot just culture, although those ships also serve as excellent ambassadors to far-flung countries.

danso ranked #7 [karma: 165091]

https://archive.is/oP1pz

This article interviews 8 people, mostly from non tech jobs. e.g. this salon owner:

Samantha Lackney Salon owner Alexandria, Virginia

I cannot tell you how many times in the last six to eight months that clients have come in and shown me photos of stuff they’re looking at, and I have to explain it’s an AI photo. You’ll see images online where hair looks super voluminous, super dense and thick, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that very few people truly have that length of hair and that volume and texture. Or the color is beautiful, but the longer you look at it, it’s very uncanny valley—way too dark in certain areas and way too light in others. I worry about the impact of all this on the beauty standards we hold ourselves to.

On the business side, AI has been super helpful. I’ve used it to help me fine-tune my employee handbook or to assist me when my lawyer was busy, having it look over a copy of a lease before he could get back to me. It was great at summarizing documents or determining the cost of painting an interior in this ZIP code.

A lot of salons use it for caption generating, but you can tell when ChatGPT wrote something, by the format and how it’s laid out. It sounds like Vanna White telling you what’s on the Wheel of Fortune board—it’s too game-show-announcer-y. It’s like: “Trending now! Come get blond for summer.”

I’ve stopped using it. Sometimes I’ll leave one or two small typos in my captions on social media to prove that I’m real.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 403886]

There are a lot of reasons, but Colm MacCárthaigh has some particularly interesting ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25380301

zdw ranked #15 [karma: 126255]

There's also a 1MB EEPROM mod you can do on a Mac Plus that gives you a built-in ramdisk: https://www.bigmessowires.com/mac-rom-inator/

I wonder if one could put this larger ROM, and the other files into a custom built image so no swaps are required.

rayiner ranked #16 [karma: 123682]

We can’t keep kicking this can down the road. We are going to have to transition away from ICE vehicles and we should do it asap. At the very least sales of new ICE vehicles should be banned; people can keep their grandfathered ones as long as they work.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

I wonder if the entropy of model weights and their size causes statistical false positives to appear often?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 403886]

What did this site do? I use forecast.weather.gov as my weather site; it still works.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

I am hopeful China’s EV, battery, and renewables manufacturing machine steamrolls the world. Developed world fossil fuel and legacy auto will try to slow down the transition, so only overwhelming force solves for it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/byd-ai...

https://www.iea.org/news/more-than-1-in-4-cars-sold-worldwid...

https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-renewable-energy

Current US admin only has 3.6 years left, ~2M voters 55+ age out every year, etc. Maintain momentum, be ready to spin up faster after regime change.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

I read your comment after the article and didn't believe it. JP>EN is one of the trickiest pairs for MT and there are usually interesting phrases, understandable but distinctive, that would appear even if an actual human did it.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 403886]

They should use their endowment to mitigate this. People should be concerned about that. But (1) other schools aren't in that position, and (2) whether or not the Harvard admin makes the right calls, we either are or aren't funding cancer research; we should be angry at anybody compromising that.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 122366]

Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 70415]

Can you not configure the text speed?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

Def going to test drive it and buy at that price point. Please consider FastMail support for those of us who avoid big tech email.

https://www.fastmail.com/dev/

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 88009]

>I think it's a pretty stupid question to begin with as it ignores visas.

Why should it take them into account? 99% of the time they're a trivial matter.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 173822]

Good luck not being shot down during a mostly ballistic flight.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 79644]

Also interesting was mintlify's decision to start one and then shut it down.

https://mintlify.com/blog/why-we-sunsetted-mcpt

Nice story of startup focus.

jedberg ranked #41 [karma: 75241]

Space is a premium. They already don't have room for the ones they've got. Can't afford the space for another one that only two people can use.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 82892]

(2020)

I have an old unbranded Chinese tablet that came with a CD-ROM containing the driver, configuration utility, their source code, and even a datasheet for the MCU it used. A huge contrast between merely selling a product, and trying to control the whole "experience". IMHO we need more of the former, but corporate attitudes strongly encourage the latter.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 152542]

At the time, there was said to be a seduction script for the Eliza engine. Has it ever been found?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

Very cool. Meta thought is to monitor the YC portfolio for what is and isn't getting traction and enable rapidly vibe coding clones, brute forcing towards success (there was an EU accelerator/umbrella group that did something similar pre Gen AI, but the name escapes me). "Platform of generators" sort of thing. Regardless, well done!

(foundational models->foundational agents->platform for orchestration)

jedberg ranked #41 [karma: 75241]

I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation.

I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.

Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".

The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists.

But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.

Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

nostrademons ranked #37 [karma: 79523]

I tried, and yes, an inverted balsa-wood glider will still fly. Actually just tried right now with a styrofoam glider, upside-down, and it's fine. Marginally less range than when flying right-side-up, but it's a very small difference.

I suspect that what's going on is that the center-of-gravity interacts with the center-of-lift to create a slight angle of attack regardless of what orientation the plane itself has. Then there is some unknown feedback loop that keeps that angle of attack from getting too large and stalling. It's not unlimited - if you make a paper airplane whose wings are too far forward or center of gravity is too far back, it will still stall - but it keeps most reasonable planes moving forward rather than down.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 70415]

You don't have to use WiFi, this whole argument is just invalid. Use Zigbee instead.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

I am not so naïve to think that people will return en masse to IRL connecting primarily for seeking interpersonal connectivity, but it seems like the whole "Match Group soaks up any dating app that gets traction" play is running out of steam due to exhaustion.

Why the Young and the Single Can’t Commit to Dating Apps - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/style/gen-z-dating-apps.h... | https://archive.today/xuaUC - March 14th, 2024

Forbes Health Survey: 79% Of Gen Z Report Dating App Burnout - https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-app-fatigue/ - July 16th, 2024

Pew Research: Key findings about online dating in the U.S. - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findi... - February 2nd, 2023

Wikipedia: Dating services owned by Match Group - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_ow...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 96091]

Perhaps an opportunity for more models like remote colocation of equipment, either for profit or non profit.

https://starfront.space/

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 122366]

This assumes that none of the effects of making a project public or private have any impact on the output of your personal utility function, which may be true for you personally, but certainly cannot validly be assumed to be generally true.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 79644]

"A study gives clues to cosmic origin of gold and heavy elements, and they were created earlier than we thought." - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/5/have-scientists-solv...

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 173822]

MercuryOS reminds me of the Apple Lisa - The way it managed applications invisibly was a step in the direction of selecting tools based on intentions. It was a document-centric system, which MercuryOS isn't, but a step in the same direction.

For some time, Windows 95 (IIRC) had a Templates folder. You'd put documents in it and you could right-click a folder and select New->Invoice or something similar based on what you had in the Templates folder. It was similar to Lisa's Stationery metaphor.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 75706]

> In 1973, it decreed that factories of a certain size must allocate 20% of their surface area to green spaces.

This sounds like such a fine idea.

In my yard, I wanted to expand the parking space with some temporary parking, but didn't want ugly paving. With the generally wet weather, that meant mud and ruts. A contractor I talked to suggested "grasscrete".

https://grasscrete.com/

Mine is just using cinderblocks laid on their side. The vegetation grows up through the holes in the grasscrete, while the cinderblocks support the weight of the car without disrupting the vegetation. The holes let the water sink in instead of running off.

Over time, it has been colonized by native vegetation, and you can't even see the grasscrete. I've been very pleased with the results, and wonder why its use isn't common. It's rarely used for parking, which lets the vegetation recover.

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 79644]

Hi JJ!

What does AI-native mean in the context of on-call and incident management?

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 88173]

Cyclomatic complexity may be a helpful warning to detect really big functions, but the people who worry about cyclomatic complexity also seem to be the sort of people who want to set the limit really low and get fiesty if a function has much more than a for loop with a single if clause in it. These settings produce those code bases where no function anywhere actually does anything, it just dispatches to three other functions that also don't hardly do anything, making it very hard to figure out what is going on, and that is not a good design.

simonw ranked #45 [karma: 72387]

ty is so new right now - it only got its current name a few weeks ago!

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]

>New audio tech could let you listen privately without headphones. With acoustic metasurfaces, researchers bend sound waves to their will

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/audio-tech-listen-privat...

bookofjoe ranked #29 [karma: 90815]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110816]

Yeah, if places like RAND or Xerox PARC or the OG Skunkworks, or even Manhattan Project and Apollo Program taught us, is that you cannot let engineers and domain experts run the show, because if you do, they start doing some world-upending shit like putting GUIs on the Moon, or building nukes, or supersonic jets, or inventing new materials that violate the natural order of things, or they generally just rock the boat too much, continuously disrupting the corporate and political pecking order.

Nah, you have to put them in hamster wheels so they keep generating steady value for the shareholders, and put those in open plan offices so they get too mentally exhausted and distracted to try and change things. Throw in free cheese during good economy to keep them happy, but that's strictly optional.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 110816]

you be all like, "eloquence is a faux pas; directness is rude; a fifth-grade vocabulary is welcoming". Then the internet be like, "yo, pretentious much?", and then they be like "eloquence is some rascist victorian shit-e", and then be like, "directness is privileged and oppressive", and then be like, "your educated vocabulary is, like, so rich and neurotypical"

then you be all like, "but! but! that's not what i mean", and then they be like, "ok boomer" and then they be sharing tiktoks of yo red face on red dit(!) and img2img you into Wojak memes

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Couldn't resist. I feel like you feel, and I'm saddened by the fact that there seems to be no way to hold any quality standards in modern society. Yes, standards of writing and speech and culture are arbitrary, but it's valuable to have them; meanwhile, we live in times where you can't require anything of people, because there's always someone ready to argue the expectations are unfair or malicious, and there's no culturally valid counterargument to that.

walterbell ranked #30 [karma: 89952]

Earlier, "Build iOS Apps on Linux and Windows", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952239