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.
Buzz Aldrin is reported to be watching this on TV.
The Chinese models are distilled from GPT and Claude, so it's not like China would pull ahead if those companies went away for six months. They really are at the forefront of innovation right now, as much as I hate to think of the consequences of this (a single company owning a superintelligence is basically a nightmare scenario for me).
It most likely tripped the flame war detector heuristic (comments > points), and there is definitely a flame war here.
EDIT: Looks like a mod rescued it (surprisingly) and it is now back to #2.
LG sells a DualUp monitor that is 2560x2880, same size as two 2560x1440 displays stacked on top of each other: https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq780-b-dualup-monitor
Thaler v. Perlmutter said that an AI system cannot be listed as the sole author of a work - copyright requires a human author.
US Copyright Office guidance in 2023 said work created with the help of AI can be registered as long as there is "sufficient human creative input". I don't believe that has ever been qualified with respect to code, but my instinct is that the way most people use coding agents (especially for something like kernel development) would qualify.
"Our product can destroy humanity, and it's not some crank telling you this, it's the company and CEO making it themselves, but we'll continue to make it anyway, so suck it up" but also "I'm just a humble guy, why can't we all live in peace?"
I’d argue women’s jobs are not increasing in productivity and are caught up in Baumol’s cost disease.
There was a comic in Z magazine maybe 30 years ago where two women are asking why women who are working in childcare can’t afford to put the childcare and the punchline is ‘capitalism’.
I’d argue it a lack of capitalism. That is, Henry Ford could invest capital to build a factory in which workers were so productive they could afford a car which could change the world. On the other hand you can’t spend capital to make a woman who can care for 4 children today able to care for 40 children so people are always scratching their heads wondering why they can’t afford it.
Now your argument doesn’t apply to female-coded jobs (e.g. the child care worker is competent, their ‘lack of productivity’ is structural) and would be more interesting (whether or not it is true) reconfigured as “women bring something toxic to formerly male coded jobs” to which I would point the trope of the black woman politician who gives speeches to the effect that “we have good policies but we have a messaging problem” or a general idea that if we just picked the right words our perception of problems would change and then we wouldn’t have problems (it is equal opportunity though, I was as sick of Thomas Sowell and his ilk talking about “equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome” as I am of the liberal “equity vs equality” version of the same —- either way it is naive because you will never end people arguing over what they think is fair, at least in the conservative version you know what the two sides are whereas with the liberal version you might as well flip a coin)
Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
I’m trying to find the source, but I remember a primatologist claiming that humans and chimpanzees are the only two species that embark on genocide. Not being satisfied with simply defeating the enemy, but actively hunting them down to ensure they can’t harm you again. In other words, precluding retreat. (Which creates its own game-theoretical backlash: never retreat.)
There's nothing "un-controversial" about trying to mitigate a firebombing attack with a broad critique of capitalism. It's an edgy take, just own it.
It’s a distinct minority. They’re convinced they’re the majority because everyone they talk to is in the same bubble, especially online. I saw the same thing with Mangione and Kirk and Pelosi.
Texas is a leader in renewables for the same reason it is a leader in oil and gas.
Fine. I wanna scrap the pardon power. Trade?
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-promises-mass-pard...
The current administration is squishy-soft on white collar crime.
(The United States Department of Justice is mostly to handle white-collar crime. Most DOJ authority comes from the Federal power to regulate interstate commerce. Violent crime is primarily a state matter. Then came the ICE overexpansion.)
Huh? that link returned:
Your submission was sent successfully! Close
Thank you for contacting us. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Close
You have successfully unsubscribed! Close
Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates about Ubuntu
and upcoming events where you can meet our team. Close
Your preferences have been successfully updated. Close notification
Please try again or file a bug report. CloseIt's OK to inject ads, but not OK to remove them, under Google's current policies.
"Who's in charge here?"
"The Claw."
Some of this stuff is starting to look like technologies that worked, looked promising, but were at best marginally useful, such as magnetohydrodynamic generators, tokamaks, E-beam lithography, and Ovonics.
> Who did the US bomb before 9/11?
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?
Japan, though the US didn't bomb them, it instituted an oil embargo and asset freeze.
> Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?
Tripoli and Benghazi, Iran Air Flight 655.
I don't understand the purpose of these questions. Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it?
No it shouldn't. That makes the UX much worse, just to guard against the 0.00001% case where the FBI seizes your iPhone.
Only a subset of reflection is actually AoT safe, and you can run into issues like "the method you wanted to call wasn't statically referenced anywhere, so there is no compiled implementation of it".
Wait, how is the "put off checkmate" objective scored? Turns before checkmate? Or what?
Is it just a joke?
In other words, clickbait.
Fox News used to be awful in this respect, with ledes such as "(Important thing) happens in (unnamed city)". Now they name the city. So that trick apparently backfired. It seems to have died out, along with "One weird trick..." articles.
New York Times opinion articles, though, have become worse. Today, "This May Be the Most Important Medical Story of the Decade". It's not.
Myself I don't have the time to watch or listen to as much as I can read and that is probably true for the non-dyslexic 75%.
The crime is that we're living in a society where different laws apply to corporations than to people. If a corporation doesn't like you, you're toast, no matter whether you're wrong or right.
There are enough laws that they'll find something to nail you on.
There are pure rust, no c, embedded RTOSes, like Hubris.
Thanks for posting this. I think it's such a shitty thing to do. I don't have much of a problem if an original author wanted to do a closed fork of an open source project, but to start injecting ads, without warning, to folks who have already installed your generic JSON formatter and phrase it as "I'm moving to a closed-source, commercial model in order to build a more comprehensive API-browsing tool with premium features." - seriously, f' off.
I agree that browser extension marketplaces are a failed experiment at this point. I used to run security an a fin services company, and our primary app had very strict Content Security Policy rules. We would get tons of notifications to our report-uri endpoint all the time from folks who had installed extensions that were doing lots of nefarious things.
I'm particularly interested if someone with relevant expertise could comment on the types of bugs Mythos found, e.g. the 27 year old OpenBSD bug.
I ask because the media around Mythos is leaning into the "Mythos is a super intelligence that can find bugs that no human can" story. But in my mind it's pretty obvious that any software that is complex enough will have a lot of lurking zero days, and better tools will asymptomatically find more of them. So it seems to me something like Mythos would just be able to do more analysis/searching for bugs at a much faster rate than previously possible. But I'm skeptical that the bugs that were found required an insane amount of analytical abilities to locate, so would really appreciate if someone could comment on that (e.g. was it "yeah, with enough time we would have found it eventually" vs. "Wow, this was an insanely difficult bug to find in the first place")
I do agree that medium/long term that tools like Mythos will be a huge boon for cyber security, because it will inherently make it easier to write bug-free code in the first place. But yeah, we're now at a point where all these "pre-AI bugs" need to be fixed and patched before folks in the wild find all these zero days.
This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.
Even if you said AI programming is based on "knowing what to prompt" this still comes down to:
(1) understanding software engineering (for one thing knowing if answers make sense)
(2) subject matter expertise and the ability to communicate with SMEs, fake being an SME by reading books, see the old "knowledge engineer" construct from the 1980s.
(3) knowing specifics about AI coding.
I think (1) and (2) are 80-90% of what leads to success in the long term. My guess is the models are going to get better so (3) skills have a short half life and will matter less, but (1) and (2) will stay the same.
Maybe I'm cynical but if I was designing screeners for this thing I would ask people things like
"How many accounts do you follow on X about AI?" where the right answer is "I don't have an X account" and the higher the count the worse it is.
"What percent of your programming time do you spend thinking about AI programming tools?" and anything over 20% is suspect (but maybe it is a tooling job or something in which case I'd drop it)
That is, I want to see that somebody used AI tools to deliver something 100% done end-to-end that worked and I'd like to see them spending 80% of their time doing.
I'd also be thinking about screeners designed to detect FOMO attitudes and reject people for it.
yes, run by machines, read by humans. so ?
> People forget Carlin was a comedian.
That would seem to include you?
People keep pushing signal because it is supposedly secure. But it runs on platforms that are so complex with so much eco system garbage that there is no way know even within a low percentage of confidence if you've done everything required to ensure you are communicating just with the person you think you are. There could be listeners at just about every layer and that is still without looking at the meta-data angle which is just as important (who communicated with who and when, and possibly from where).
the original implementations of k were all proprietary
there are a few open source implementations as well by now
You missed the management factor. And even if managers don't explicitly ask you to build insecure stuff they will up to the pressure to the point that you have no choice or leave the company for someone who will do just that. So the end result is the same. Rarely will individual push back with some force and then they will eventually be let go because they're 'troublemakers'.
>I think I have just as good a shot at building what comes after git as their team does, and perhaps quite a lot better.
This sounds like one of those "Hacker News Dropbox" comments...
Another solution would be for people to make up their minds. Maybe it's time to give up entirely on multi-tasking support in the OS, because what's the point if all interoperability is going to be disabled "for security"? Might as well just go back to running one program at a time and close up all those security holes in one go.
>Coffee is an acquired taste, I think
Billions all over the world managed to acquire it just fine.
If that's an acquired taste, I doubt 99% of drinks that aren't an acquired taste would do much better, assuming there's anything doing better than coffee to begin with.
Not even Cola and tea come close.
>"MCP is less discoverable than a CLI" - that doesn't make any sense in terms of agent context. Once an MCP is connected the agent should have full understanding of the tools and their use, before even attempting to use them. In order for the agent to even know about a CLI you need to guide the agent towards it - manually, every single session, or through a "skill" injection - and it needs to run the CLI commands to check them.
Knowledge about any MCP is not something special inherent in the LLM, it's just an agent side thing. When it comes to the LLM, it's just some text injected to its prompting, just like a CLI would be.
> *particle that is emitted from an alpha decay isn't actually called a He atom”
“Because they are identical to helium nuclei, they are also sometimes written as He2+…” [1].
What prevents the phone from taking screenshots of you reading the messages in the app?
The actual one end is the phone, not the app, period.
> A recent leak of Claude’s code prompted the startup to publish a blogpost at the beginning of the month saying that AI models had surpassed “all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities” [...]
I've seen a bunch of people conflate the Claude Code source-map leak with the Mythos story, though not quite as blatantly as here. I'm confident that they are totally unrelated.
Have not. How widely supported are micropayments? It's been a minute since I looked, but I thought they were not very well supported.
(also at ERSC here, hi Austin!) Heck, I have not had enough bandwidth to do as much upstream work as I initially thought I would when I started there!
> viewed from a country with universal healthcare...it feels like comparing the US to “any democracy” is like comparing rocks to gold
Do most democracies, extant or across history, have universal healthcare? You're comparing a policy to a governance structure.
> If more Americans knew how much money was being funneled to non-Americans they would be outraged
The folks being hurt are, broadly, earning more than the average American. Generating outrage around H-1B, specifically, has always been difficult because it comes across as a champagne problem to the electorate. This is why broader anti-immigration messaging succeeds where targeted proposals have failed.
If you use a Voice PE, I made a server so you can use it without Home Assistant:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/havpe-server
It'll just send the recognized speech to your own API endpoint, and speak whatever is returned.
"...our robotic proxies can endure the chill and make the trip, and, as it happens, we humans are getting pretty good at making these machines."
I wonder at what point personal robotic proxies into the solar system becomes a <$10k proposition.
This article would be a lot more digestible if we didn't have actual scary data rather than just stories. Not a day goes by without some prompt injection oopsie, security gotcha, deepfake or some sandbox escape artist demonstration and tbh I'm impressed but more to the point where I don't doubt this is dangerous tech, I'm sure of it.
This is roughly 1995 again and we're going to find out all over why mixing instructions and data was a spectacularly bad idea. Only now with human language as the input stream, which is far more expressive than HTML or SQL ever were. So now everybody is a hacker. At least in that sense it has leveled the playing field I guess.
I mean, summoning a diplomat to issue threats is usually the opposite of “heat of the moment”, but...
At the same time, they keep hiking the other tiers, and cracking down on password sharing or kids off at college. These need to be factored in as well.
Quite an appropriate analogy: gun manufacturers were sued for their responsibility in US mass shootings. They won, so the mass shootings continue.
Yeah, regular web chat Claude and ChatGPT both have full container access (even on the free version, at least for ChatGPT) which can run CLI tools.
Both of them can even install CLI tools from npm and PyPI - they're limited in terms of what network services they can contact aside from those allow-listed ones though, so CLI tools in those environments won't be able to access the public web.
... unless you find the option buried deep in Claude for enabling additional hosts for the default container environment to talk to. That's a gnarly lethal trifecta exfiltration risk so I recommend against it, but the option is there!
More notes on ChatGPT's ability to install tools:
> they end up cargo-culting dense technical writing that they can’t yield well and just end up with bad writing.
It's "wield". I wasn't going to correct it but the irony was too much to pass up.
I'd say the filesystem is a database.
It would be straightforward, for instance, to implement a lot of the functionality of a filesystem in a database with BLOBs. Random access might be a hassle, but people are getting used to "filesystem-like" systems which are bad at random access like S3.
Good. The moment they add it, all kinds of apps will start to abuse it, for "sekhurity" (read: engagement) reasons. See e.g. all the apps that now disallow taking screenshots, for no legitimate reason.
Personally I'd be in favor of a hard app store policy, that if an app notifies you about something, all the importantdetails (like full message text) must be included - specifically to allow the user to view the important information without having to open the app itself.
It's complicated -- I used to feel like you did but then I worked on a patent search engine and learned a lot about it.
Many patent trolls are really trolls. But being a "non-practicing entity" doesn't make you bad. For instance an academic research group might invent a technology that is useful in making microchips but only a few companies are capable of benefiting from that so that research group/Uni is a "non-practicing entity" that can license the tech fairly to one of those companies.
You often see things like this garden hose
https://pockethose.com/pages/copper-head?variant=44089443483...
that are marketed under the "as seen on TV" brand. The company behind that licenses patents from inventors and they feel like they can invest in marketing and development because the patent holds back cheap competition.
In the case of that hose, competitors figured out other ways to make a hose that does something similar and you see a common scenario -- that page boasts about all the improvements they've made in the product, starting out with one patent helps them lead in a competitive market in which they've gotten many more patents to improve their product.
The ads for prediction markets on TikTok are aggressive - like (paraphrasing) "this is your new source of passive income and you'd be crazy to miss it" aggressive.
Playing Linux or Windows native games, because that is the whole issue, it is hardly any different than asserting there are Linux games when they are actually Amiga games running with UAE.
Those games running on Proton are still produced on a Windows factory.
> So who are the suckers who are losing all this money?
Random people who saw an ad or their favorite influencer shilling it.
Like when my neighbors started asking me about NFTs.
No they won't, because Apple is out of reach for their pockets, and most OEMs still don't sell Linux powered devices on the shops people go to.
I don't know about his career in general, but Hanselman once spoke at a conference I was helping organize here in Thessaloniki, and he was great. Really knowledgeable and very down to earth.
This should be made a problem for the social media companies (which it largely has, hence all the age verification fiasco), not absolutely everyone on the internet.
Freedom from suddenly being cut off is potentially important.
Complete in synch with the author MCP and A2A for the win.
Worth another mention here, it's so good.
> drop the idea of a spherical earth
I think I see a problem here.
> The government contractors (private enterprises) are usually tasked with building stuff
Ah yes, situation where the government makes a plan and then hands it to the one (1) qualified defense contractor whose facilities are build in swing states to benefit specific congressional campaigns is completely different from central planning.
IEC 61508 estimates a soft error rate of about 700 to 1200 FIT (Failure in Time, i.e. 1E-9 failures/hour).
That was in the 2000s though, and for embedded memory above 65nm.
And obviously on earth.
The first version was written in ten days apparently, so more in the ballpark of $17k.
Additional information that I hunted down, given the actual article information.
Folks can get a sense of C+@ from https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/DDJ/1993/9310/9310b....
The links to the figures still work, as of today.
Agree with the feedback.
Also the problem isn't creating a cargo like tool for C and C++, that is the easy part, the problem is getting more userbase than vcpkg or conan for it to matter for those communities.
Good luck with that, I would still be using subversion if given the choice.
The study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944
Haven't read all the materials yet, but I predict a Zachary's Karate Club situation.
As 70's child that was there when the whole agile took over, and systems engineer got rebranded as devops, I fully agree with them.
Add TDD, XP and mob programming as well.
While in some ways better than pure waterfall, most companies never adopted them fully, while in some scenarios they are more fit to a Silicon Valley TV show than anything else.
The amazing irony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)
This is basically an In-Circuit-Emulator (ICE).
This is a good example of Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Money is supposed to be a measure of value exchanged; the idea is that if you aren't receiving something actually useful in exchange for your money, you don't spend it. This assumption breaks down as the economy grows in complexity and it becomes harder to judge what you're actually receiving. It becomes increasingly easy to game the process of convincing people to give you money. People who get good at this outcompete people who don't, and there is a lot of money floating around out there without much accountability.
This also suggests ways to reverse this: 1) reduce the complexity of the economy 2) have more repeated interactions, where you cannot simply stiff someone and go away to do it to someone else 3) have more information about who has stiffed people and gone away to do it to someone else 4) reduce the costs involved in the sale process, so that this can become a part-time job of someone actually providing the service, rather than having people whose dedicated role is to make the money change hands managing people whose dedicated role is to actually do the job.
>3 people from my team recently switched to macOS and they never owned a mac before and they are all complaining about window management.
For legit reasons? Because many switchers complain for stupid reasons, like the macOS distinction between apps and windows.
I did with mine too in 2021. Mine was 1000+ articles with even more comments. Luckily for me, I’ve already closed the comments. So, had to just throw them away. For the search, I tried Algolia but hit the limit. I’m with https://pagefind.app for now.
I wrote about my journey from WordPress to Jekyll at https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/
On a factual level the relationship between kinship societies and economic headwinds is fairly well documented [1] [2]. The mechanism is the same reason that communist/socialist societies often fail: when wealth belongs to everyone, nobody has either the incentive or the means to accumulate wealth, which prevents capital formation within the society [3].
The part that the article glosses over is that "Kinship societies destroy economic growth" is a Russell conjugate [4] of "economic growth destroys family formation". Kinship networks provide important intangible support to several important community functions, notably child-rearing. That's the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" aphorism. When you allow people to defect on their social obligations in the name of accumulating wealth, then it turns out they do, and the village suffers. It is exactly as the article said: "The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you." That's exactly what we've observed happening in modern industrialized economies, where people become increasingly atomized and those informal community organizations that create things like belonging and mutual aid (not to mention group childcare and socialization) die off as everyone chases the promotion that will let them afford ever-higher institutional childcare costs.
And this is why the fertility rate in every major industrialized country has cratered, usually right as it industrializes.
[1] https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/forschung/paper_e.bulte...
[2] https://edepot.wur.nl/14918
"Everything is a derivative work", as the saying goes.
Dyson Swarm sounds like the name of an aggressive cleaning machine.
Strong extended kinship ties are associated with less economic prosperity all over the world, it just in Africa but Pakistan, the Middle East, etc.
There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reasons, including the Catholic church’s ban on cousin marriage—back in the middle ages, before Europe began pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. Even within the U.S., communities with weak kinship ties (e.g. Northeastern Anglo-Protestants) are more economically successful than communities with stronger kinship ties and clan structures (e.g. Appalachians).
Arguably, more atomized societies with weak kinship ties foster the development of civil institutions and governments to compensate for the social structural functions that would otherwise be performed by kinship networks.
This seems very different that what the article describes.
Sure, some young people may spend more than they can really afford on their wedding, but this still seems like a personal choice - tons of people have cheap weddings (or gasp, elope). I don't think may people are cutting back on eating (when they already suffer from malnutrition) to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.
Plus, I think the relatively few cases in the US where young people do feel intense family pressure to overspend on a "big wedding" show similar dynamics and downsides to the "kinship societies" that the article is really about.
So many people want to believe in this sort of thing for various reasons that I get fatigued at the very thought of trying to explain to people who believe in it earnestly that it is not a good idea. (e.g. commercial hosting services are really competitive; for a long time the cost of computing has been going down over time though I don't know if that is reversing because we've hit the end of the real Moore's law [1] or if it is a temporary blip)
[1] the motor behind it is cost reduction, once that stops it stops because we can't afford it anymore!
Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.
I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever.
I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology.
Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.
We also (I worked there at the time) had software that basically said, "Joe watches all of his disks every weekend and drops them in the mail on Tuesdays, let's just assume he's going to do that and ship his new disks Monday morning". And other such predictions.
If you had a very regular viewing behavior you could have your new disks the same day as you shipped your old ones. To the customer, it was magical.
Sometimes I think all the HN "get off my lawn" postings need to be moved to another site.
Trying > video > torture >> having to sign up to try.
OpenAI aren't the only ones who were increasing their datacenter capex.
God damnit I didn't know until 15 seconds ago that the Space-switching animation in macOS was annoying. Thanks a lot!
Why do you refuse to pay for the ad-free tier?
Oh wow. Enhancements for the Sharp MZ line! Wonderful. I spent a lot of time with those machines in the 1980s and own a few. Being able to emulate the Sharp MZ-80K's (https://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-ol...) MZ80FD would be cool.
Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.