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.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78024]

As always, free markets are a chaotic system of creative destruction.

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89267]

>One major thing this has exposed is how many people from non US countries are grifting on the cultural war between the left and right in the US by pretending to be on either side.

The US has shoved so much of its internal politics and culture over the whole world's throat, and dominates so much of the internet, and US-inspired regional politics in a lot of the world, that many people legitimately get caught up and chime in on US hot topics even the culture war too

zdw ranked #13 [karma: 136587]

Can I file a claim if I'm related to folks who shared their (and by extension, my) DNA with this company?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

That's an OVH Singapore IP, did they flag this to OVH? That server should be taken offline and the contents preserved for forensics.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

Related:

DNA testing firm 23andMe fined £2.3m by UK regulator for 2023 data hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44300220 - June 2025 (1 comment)

23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856412 - January 2024 (368 comments)

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89267]

As per the comment about the book above, "she would use in front of him".

In any case, using drugs is something people do. Whether famous or not. Famous people, in fast paced professions, dealing with fame, use them 10x more.

People also cheat or end relationships and go with another person, often younger. Not even in small numbers, even above 50% of marriages end like that. Passion fades, another person might reignite the joy of love.

It is what is is. Nothing especially bad as far as things people do is concerned, except if one thinks like some kind of prude.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94765]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

You can simply not drive a modern car.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

Because it is not to their advantage. I suspect they always bought it to shut it down and this is just the opening moves.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

Game selection is terrible on a Mac. I find it mindblowing that my Linux desktop/laptop run all my games, bar none, but a very small percentage runs on my Mac.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 74847]

> The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google.

Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414016]

A significant fraction of every high-profile industry security person I know has signed this thing. There are people on that list that I'm not super impressed with, but also people everybody is impressed with. No argument that this thing is motivated by commercial interests is going to survive, and a lot of this is advice that security cool kids have been giving for upwards of 10 years.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88537]

I didn't see anything in that story that suggests he was responsible for capacity management.

His argument in favor of the changes was that Digg was at risk of going out of business and needed to take big swings to try and turn things around.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88537]

Charlie Marsh tweeted 7 hours ago "ty is coming" - https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/1995153742040330467

Then "Release post will cover all of this" in reply to a question asking for a detailed comparison to alternatives: https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/1995163183808643466

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

> How is it possible that a president of a country can close the airspace of another country?

It is a de facto declaration of war, focussed (on its face, it has other propaganda and diplomatic purposes) on informing civilians of the imminent actions and associated risks so that they can conduct themselves accordingly.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172335]

I wonder if this could be broadened to a list of Wikipedia links to humanitarian content folks in repressed regimes are or might get blocked from. Tiananmen Square [1]. Wen Jiabao's staggering corruption [2]. Epstein's e-mails [3]. Et cetera.

Like Netflix launching Fast.com, this would directly weaponise these regimes' censoring tendencies against themselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of...

[3] https://jmail.world

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172335]

My parents run a Windows PC as, from what I can tell, a home for stray botnets. The main uses are checking email and working on Word documents. (They have a laptop and iPad, respectively, which does most of their work, so it's an infrequently consulted machine.)

What Linux build would you recommend that I can fire and forget, that would be compatible with the Windows 10 machine they have running and will likely never replace.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

Note that most of the signers are from companies which collect substantial consumer information for revenue purposes. Hence the emphasis on "updating". And the absence of "turn up browser security levels to max" or "get a good ad blocker".

Also, any password manager that's "cloud based" is potentially a security hole. Yeah, they say the server is secure. Right.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

If 8 bit: 6809. If 32 bit: 68K. Those are miles ahead of the 6502. Otoh if you want to see a fun quirky chip the 6502 is definitely great, and I'd recommend you use a (virtual) BBC Micro to start you off with.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 81548]

Would assume it's to check if a site is foreign propaganda. A lot of the lesser-known news sites that you see linked on social media are actually psy-ops pushing an agenda, many of them foreign-based. Follow the technique in the article and you can easily blacklist Iranian ones.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

And the fact that even if you don't want it, don't use it they still charge you as if you do.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172335]

The only advantages I can see to America pushing for Maduro’s removal are unlocking mismanaged oil supplies and removing a hive of Russian, Iranian and Chinese activity from the Western Hemisphere.

Those are the upsides. The downsides are prompting anti-American balancing moves across South America, Bay of Pigsing and increasing Maduro’s legitimacy, giving Russian air defences a paintbrush to our kit and fucking it up completely and sparking a refugee crisis.

In practice, I’m increasingly convinced we’re about to go to war because of what a dead pedophile knows about the President.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

They would, but even orgs that have historically had .int domains tend to move off them to either their own TLD (like CERN moving to .cern) or to other gTLDs (like the Commonwealth of Nations from commonwealth.int to commonwealth.org.) Ironically, NATO was using .nato briefly in 1990 before moving to .nato.int

So, CSTO using csto.org rather than csto.int is probably just keeping up with the times, not failing to get an .int

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

Yes. For example, this story about Ukraine [1] is credited to WNYT as first, but the story itself credits the Associated Press. This problem is worth solving, because it's something search engines should be doing.

[1] https://wnyt.com/ap-top-news/rubio-says-us-ukraine-talks-on-...

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

The year of Linux on the desktop, at last.

What may make this happen is political risk. The rest of the world outside the US doesn't like the excessive dependency of Microsoft systems on servers in the US, especially when that may mean snooping or disconnection. This used to be just a theoretical objection, but under the Trump administration it's a practical one.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

Type annotations on functions in Haskell (or similar languages) are useful for:

1. leveraging the type checker to verify (aspects of) the correctness of your function, and

2. communicating intent to humans

I've found in my own explorations with Haskell that its useful to write with functions with them, then verify that they work, and then remove them to see what the inferred would be (since it already compiled with the annotation, the inferred type will either be identical to or more general than the previously declared type), and generally (because it is good practice to have a declared type), replace the old declared type with the inferred type (though sometimes at this point also changing the name.)

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

> And instead of saying we need microservices, let's start with just a service oriented architecture.

I think the main reason microservices were called “microservices” and not “service-oriented architecture” is that they were an attempt to revive the original SOA concept when “service-oriented architecture” as a name was still tainted by association to a perceived association with XML and the WS-* series of standard (and, ironically, often systems that supported some subset of those standards for interaction despite not really applying the concepts of the architectural style.)

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

> It's not about immediate intentions, but about strategic options. Imagine Russia decided to form a military alliance with Mexico with the expected intention of deploying weapons on the Mexican border.

The problem with pretending this analogy is relevant as a justification (or at least an "other people would have one the same thing" argument, which isn't really a justification to start with) of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (besides the fact that it relies on dubious assumptions about a counterfactual) is that the only reason Ukraine resumed its long-abandoned pursuit of relations with NATO was a direct result of the invasion by Russia in 2014.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

I think they mean that "ideal" springs don't feel realistic (because they aren't).

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79444]

You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?

I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the government preventing companies from adding features a whole lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.

(To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI features to be something you don't... like? That's not a legitimate reason for government intervention.)

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 74847]

> So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.

But that perfectly highlights why the "startup gamble" is a great bet for VCs but a horrible bet for most employees. Let's say N is, generously, 50 (i.e. 1 in 50 startups are a resounding success, which seems probably a bit over-optimistic but reasonable). VCs can easily spread investment around to 100 startups, but employees get a few swings at bat at most when it comes to where they work.

For most things in life, you often just don't have that many chances. E.g. most people don't date a hundred people before finding their spouse.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

It's going to be a very long 12 months though.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

In my BYD Seal, I removed the SIM card that's easily accessible from inside the armrest compartment.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78024]

26 drives should be enough for anyone.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

TLDR Europe is relying too heavily on Norway for dispatachable hydro, pushing up power prices for domestic electricity users in Norway due to their exposure to Europe wide electricity prices. Potential short term solution is to increase electricity prices for exported power to reduce power prices domestically, while the long term solution is more battery storage across all of Europe. Broadly speaking, Europe has not prioritized energy storage economically (for both energy arbitrage and grid services), leading to teething pains as renewables carry more of the generation burden (Spain's recent national blackout caused by lack of non thermal grid services and battery storage available, for example).

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

https://archive.today/wCUhX

Previous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42399917 - December 2024 (0 comments)

Related:

Norway may break up with Europe's power grid over soaring energy prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46099592 - November 2025

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123245]

C# supports dynamic loading in AOT compilation.

Native AOT, and the oldie NGEN only do dynamic linking.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

.NET Native can do both,

Applications are statically compiled, libraries are compiled into WinRT components, COM's evolution, introduced in Windows 8.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/dotnet-native/...

Just watched the 2024 talk by the way, quite interesting.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101703]

I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal.

The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it.

Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here.

The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc.

HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive.

Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call?

[1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs?

[2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing

[3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 113299]

There's a typo in the first line - the author's name should be 'Ayn Rand', not 'Ann Rand'

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94765]

In the Apple ecosystem, iPad Mini + LTE + VOIP for voice/SMS is a mobile backup device that can double as 2nd monitor for laptop, or dock with an external monitor and keyboard via USB-c. It does require avoiding sevices that mandate non-VOIP SMS 2FA. iPad cost is balanced by use or resale after several years.

Sadly, there is no Google Pixel Tablet Mini (or even Pixel Tablet 2). Hopefully the upcoming OEM release of a GrapheneOS-compatible phone will be successful.

zdw ranked #13 [karma: 136587]

If you want even more minimal, Gerrit is structured as a Java app with no external dependencies like databases, and stores all it's configuration and runtime information on the filesystem, mostly as data structures in the git repos.

Shared filesystems is all you need to scale/replicate it, and it also makes the backup process quite simple.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94765]

Will there be future hardware optimized for physical simulations, or should existing/faster hardware be stockpiled now?

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90638]

Any such license is basically impossible to work with. It amounts to "I reserve the right to sue anyone who uses this software in the future for effectively random reasons". Because I could go on about the lack of a universally agreed-upon "good" or "evil" and the fact that what you call evil is people who think they are being good (the number of people who outright identify themselves as evil is a rounding error), but there's an even bigger problem, which is that who you think is evil today may change over time. How is anyone supposed to keep up with that? If you put a license like this on your software and you decide eightteen months from now that actually $POLITICAL_STANCE, which you previously thought was evil, has a point, and then you-four-years-from-now comes around to the idea that what they thought was good when they wrote the license is actually quite evil, what is any user of your code supposed to do with that?

In general, $YOUR opinions are too flighty to be basing licensing decisions on.

There's a generally established exception for military use, which works anyhow because even if you are hypothetically perfectly morally fine with military use you may not want to permit them to use it on the grounds you haven't tested it enough. See also the perfectly well-established "not to be used on medical devices" exemption. But if you want to conditionalize your license on, say, "whether or not you're willing to sign this petition about $POLITICAL_TOPIC", that's not something anyone can build on. It'll be a terminal license in the code tree.

If this means you don't want to contribute to open source because you are unwilling to accept this... by all means! If you don't like a contract, don't sign it. Nobody's forcing you to write open source software for free. But there isn't a practical "well, what if only people I agree with are allowed to use it" option, because then even the people you agree with today really can't base any significant decisions on that sort of foundation.

(And, in general, anyone who lives, say, 25 years, and has absolutely no changes of political opinion in that time period... yeah... that's probably a bad sign. I don't hate 25-year-ago-me or anything, but I've got a lot of disagreements with him, and I don't expect 25-year-from-now-me to completely agree with me today either. Certainly not enough to write anything into a license agreement.)

Finally, as another practical manner, this license is also signing up to someday appear in some court of law to litigate the matter of whether or not some person or other does or does not agree with you on some political matter, in a situation where it will be a judge deciding that and not you, and wow am I just not being paid enough for my free contributions to open source to go through that under any circumstances.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79444]

> Sorry if I came off as insulting; I admit I thought your original arguments were too bad-faith to not have been made by a bot or a foreign state actor.

I don't need to listen to you doubling down on insults. Your tone is completely inappropriate for HN.

To answer your final question: yes, I really am that sure. iOS now prevents apps from spying even on your clipboard without permission. I have a decent technical understanding of iOS's sandbox. It appears you do not.

But again. Please take your snark elsewhere. It's simply not appropriate for HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88537]

I'd love to hear the inside story of GitHub's migration of their core product features to React.

It clearly represents a pretty seismic cultural change within the company. GitHub was my go-to example of a sophisticated application that loaded fast and didn't require JavaScript for well over a decade.

The new React stuff is sluggish even on a crazy fast computer.

My guess is that the "old guard" who made the original technical decisions all left, and since it's been almost impossible to hire a frontend engineer since ~2020 or so that wasn't a JavaScript/React-first developer the weight of industry fashion became too much to resist.

But maybe I'm wrong and they made a technical decision to go all-in on heavy JavaScript features that was reasoned out by GitHub veterans and accompanied by rock solid technical justification.

GitHub have been very transparent about their internal technical decisions in the past. I'd love to see them write about this transition.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101703]

I can’t remember replacing fans because they stopped spinning but I have EOLed them because the bearings went bad and they started to screech.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123245]

Actually we should as well, given the shady deals some of them make with politicians, which create a set of cascading events that end up in school shootings as if they were good old saloon fights.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79444]

None of this is true.

Collusion on rent is a relatively new phenomenon around RealPage and is being banned. Meanwhile, regulations like rent stabilization in NYC benefit existing tenants, not landlords.

And the taxes you describe having nothing to do with collusion. Collusion is fought using anti-collusion laws. What could possibly lead you to believe that multi-home taxes would reduce corporate collusion?

Yes, obviously RealPage should be banned everywhere. But corporate capture is not the underlying economic issue at all behind high prices. Lack of supply is.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234063]

Is there a way you could use this system to track propaganda?

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79444]

It's generally much easier and cheaper to just go to a tanning bed once a week, than buy your own Sperti "mini tanning bed". A full-size tanning bed will be much more even across your skin. Unless there are no tanning salons in your area.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 81548]

So Australia & New Zealand are the next superpowers.

I remember when I was around middle school or early high school, I attended a geopolitical simulation at MIT that wargamed out a crisis between major world powers, and that was the exact result. New Zealand won, in alliance with Australia. They were able to invest heavily in technology while everyone else was nuking each other, and then ended up with space lasers or whatever the endgame tech was while everyone else ended up back in the stone age.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

But the main characteristic of malware is that it works for someone other than the user, no? Research software works for the user themselves.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123245]

One thing it clearly doesn't do well is performance.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123245]

The most important fact, that people overlook, is that its industrial capacity was never bombed during the war, and Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123245]

Kind of hard unfortunately, now when one gets evaluated how much we're improving our daily work with AI, when the annual feedback meeting comes.

The no AI devs will get a "needs improvement" report.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78024]

Big business drives the economy. Small businesses are the future big businesses.

For example, automobiles cannot be made by artisans for anyone but the wealthy.

doener ranked #45 [karma: 75153]

Context: About a week ago, Z-Image was launched, an open-source model from Alibaba that delivers pretty good results, but does so much faster than its competitors (6B parameters).

https://github.com/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 74847]

Thanks, I thought this was a very insightful comment that helped me think about the problem differently.

I would add, though, that I think "co-op universities" have a good solution. That is, places like Northeastern and Drexel when the undergrad program is 5-ish years and a good portion of that time is working in paid co-op positions. This ensures that students graduate with at least some real-world experience in their field but still get the benefit of classroom study and the full college experience.

doener ranked #45 [karma: 75153]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

Essentially correct, QUERY is safe, like GET, not merely idempotent, like PUT. Safety implies idempotence, but not vice versa.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78024]

> giving him $300K

Yes, and cities are filled with $300K and up houses. The idea that Bezos started Amazon with unusual vast wealth is wrong.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414016]

Also Chicago (Oak Park, really, but lots of Chicago experience too).

Bike theft is in fact pretty common? Bike thieves are charged when police luck into catching the thief like a block from the scene, but the police will be the first to tell you you aren't getting your bike back. I have friends who've had trackers on their bike, could pinpoint the actual location of the bike, and zero help from the police.

I agree with you about the connection to homelessness.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125117]

That's historical revisionism. The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.

The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

Godspeed. Wishing you a favorable outcome and more time ahead. We can’t change the past, we can only learn from our mistakes and try to do better in the future. We win or we learn. Appreciate you candidly sharing your thoughts.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

It's always a tradeoff. Nothing is ever going to have zero benefit, the problem is that these laws use the marginal benefit as an excuse to institute something that actually has massive downsides.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

What I don't understand is how it's possible for 90% of people to have a vitamin D deficiency, or whatever that crazy number was. Surely by that point it's just normal?

doener ranked #45 [karma: 75153]

A few points from the website:

- Out-of-the-box support for Xbox, Wii, Switch, PS3, PS4, PS5, and numerous other controllers.

- Nvidia drivers and the latest Mesa for AMD & Intel pre-installed, with tweaks applied as needed

- Bazzite ships with support for additional Wi-Fi adapters, display standards like DisplayLink, and more

- Out of the box support for not only desktop PCs, but handhelds, tablets, and home theater PCs.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

I just had that kind of experience, but with Stack Exchange.

The Ubuntu people seem to have recently pushed to users a new version of the CUPS printer scheduler that doesn't like the syntax of some old cupsd.conf files. This breaks all printing on affected machines.

So where are the bug reports? Stack Exchange. Nobody over there is going to fix it. This needs to be discussed on Ubuntu Forums, where the maintainers might read it. For now, I posted similar discussions on the CUPS forum and Ubuntu's own forum, and linked them to each other. There's a finger-pointing problem coming up - is this a CUPS bug or a Ubuntu bug? (What writes the cupsd.conf file anyway? Ubuntu Settings?) I don't want to file a bug report until the finger-pointing phase has commentary from people who actually know the innards of Linux printing, or I'll get shot down by one side blaming the other. Let those guys fight it out.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125117]

Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it?

Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112565]

The good ol' "we don't like the EU, so we'll sink ourselves and everyone else trying to sabotage it, just to prove everyone that EU was a bad idea".

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112565]

> It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous.

It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99131]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112565]

Bait & switch, though.

“All it takes is for one to work out.” is not the same as "You just need the one [job] that’s the right fit." or "You just need the one [house] that feels like home." or "You just need the one [life partner]."

Author's examples are, spiritually, the opposite of their friend's advice - in fact, "all it takes is for one to work out" is something often said to people who lost hope because they got lost being too picky.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

Indeed. "Just one more roll of the dice and I'll be ahead."

Worse, this guy isn't trying to get a job. He's just trying to get into grad school. Which is no longer a guarantee of a good career, but may be a guarantee of a big debt. Remember that "I did everything right" post on HN a few weeks ago? CS degree from a good school, but nobody wants junior CS people any more.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

TechShop used to use large HP plotters repurposed as vinyl cutters. Unfortunately, HP's product now comes with overpriced "cloud-based software."[1]

[1] https://uscutter.com/hp-latex-54-basic-plus-cutting-solution...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

How does this compare to Svix?

https://www.svix.com/

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46089908 (NY Times obituary)

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157651]

Although Ford's CEO now gets it, Ford's product line doesn't reflect it yet. Farley has been bringing a few sample BYD cars to the US, for Ford people to drive around and to take apart. Farley dragged his executive team to China to see a BYD plant. They came back scared. But what Ford actually sells is 1) an F-150 converted to electric, 2) a Ford Mustang converted to electric, and 3) a Ford Transit converted to electric. They're all more expensive, and heavier, than their gasoline-powered versions.

BYD shows that electric cars are cheaper if designed properly from the ground up. The problem is that the US no longer makes many cars. Mostly giant trucks and SUVs. Hauling all that mass around requires a huge battery, resulting in 3-ton vehicles.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

Tesla got far enough for Musk to have the power he wanted and then gave up innovating and expanding. China will win the race, they have a third of global manufacturing capacity and already sell as many NEVs (battery electric and plug in hybrids) domestically as are sold in the US every year, while continuing to scale.

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3334300...

https://insidechinaauto.com/2025/11/01/live-blog-china-octob...

https://www.byd.com/us/news-list/First-BYD-Electric-Vehicle-...

https://rhomotion.com/news/byd-announces-further-global-expa...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-tesla-and-byd-...

coldtea ranked #32 [karma: 89267]

>In fairness to researchers, it can be difficult to run a randomized clinical trial for vitamin D supplements. That’s because most of us get the bulk of our vitamin D from sunlight

And how hard is it to make such controlled studies on prison populations (where both sun and food intake is also a known value)? Make it voluntary and give some incentives for those wanting to participate. Can study supplement effects for one or even five years, it's not like they're going anywhere.

That's also a question I have when I hear about diet studies. What's easier than doing such in prison populations? Make it as voluntary as it's for people outside, and there's no ethical issue. We're talking like checking the effect of this or that food or diet style, which they can let different people chose their own. They already eat what they're given anyway, that would be an improvement.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77231]

Tesla was dead in the water when it became obvious that they couldn't make a sub-$30K car happen. They will still probably do well as a luxury brand, but China is going to fill in the demand for affordable EVs in the rest of the world outside USA/EU.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74540]

The problem isn't that doors don't unlock, it's that you can't open the door against the massive water pressure, or against the door crumpling in itself and ruining the mechanism.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

Seed from a PeerTube instance outside of the jurisdiction? You cannot rely on hope that enough peers will join the swarm and seed, so you will still need durable storage somewhere to be origin. Streaming to the client is the easy part imho.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103222]

Chrome does a pretty good job translating that site to english on the fly fwiw.

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 96185]

Two of the authors are libc++ maintainers and members of the committee, it would be pretty odd if they were anti C++.

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 133256]

My understanding is that there is a difference between the concept of a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), and then the applications that such a thing is possible.

In the example given, I can prove that N is composite without revealing anything (well, almost anything) about the factors. But in practice we want to use a ZKP to show that I have specific knowledge without revealing the knowledge itself.

For example:

You can give me a graph, and I can claim that I can three-colour it. You may doubt this, but there is a process by which I can ... to any desired level of confidence ... demonstrate that I have a colouring, without revealing what the colouring is. I colour the vertices RGB, map those colours randomly to ABC, and cover all the vertices. You choose any edge, and I reveal the "colours" (from ABC) of the endpoints. If I really can colour the graph then I will always be able to reveal two different colours. If I can't colour the graph then as we do this more and more, eventually I will fail.

So you are right, but the message of the post is, I think, still useful and relevant.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 74847]

AI slop has infiltrated so many areas. Check out this article that was on the front page of HN last week, "73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering", with hundreds of points and lots of comments arguing for or against: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024644

The problem is the entire article is made up. Sure, the author can trace client-side traffic, but the vast majority of start-ups would be making calls to LLMs in their backend (a sequence diagram in the article even points this out!!), where it would be untraceable. There is certainly no way the author can make a broad statement that he knows what's happening across hundreds of startups.

Yet lots of comments just taking these conclusions at face value. Worse, when other commenters and myself pointed out the blatant impossibility of the author's conclusion, got some responses just rehashing how the author said they "traced network traffic", even though that doesn't make any sense as they wouldn't have access to backends of these companies.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112565]

Not to mention, technicial solutions are usually the only viable ones. It's not like, in practice, we solve social problems in other ways.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76609]

> No, I have an iPhone Pro and am in the PST time zone, set to English. It has the exact same finger print as millions of other devices among the 40 million people in the PST time zone.

Your IP address, ASN, and location make this not true.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126096]

> What happened to the days where software engineers were the experts who decided tech priority?

Outside of a very small number of firms that were called out as notable for being led in a way that enabled that, often by engineers that were themselves still hands on, they never existed, and even there it was “business leadership that happened to also be engineers, and made decisions based on business priorities informed by their understanding of software engineering”, not “software engineers in their walled-off citadels of pure engineering”, and it usually involves, in successful firms, considerable willingness to accept tech debt, just as business leadership can often not be shy about accepting funancial debt.