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.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77124]

> It is obvious to anyone that if Iran put all the resources they poured into secret nuclear facilities and missiles into economic development, infrastructure, and education, Iran would be in a completely different place today

Funny, I was just thinking that about the US.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90188]

> Eleventy might not receive new features, your website will still work.

The beauty of SSGs, in one sentence, folks.

I'm not aware of any CVEs in HTML, either.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

That stuck out at me too, along with the em-dashes above.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160096]

https://soupault.net/ is about using plain HTML, but doing index pages, RSS feeds and so on from that. You even get away with not having frontmatter, because CSS like selectors allow those meta pages to retrieve title, date etc. from the HTML pages.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 97474]

CheapCharts + iTunes Store + Apple TV (non-subscription) = zero ads and offline viewing.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

The thing about SSGs is that you only need a small percentage of the functionality they offer and for what: so instead of some simple syntax for links you can remember in HTML

  <a href="there">description</a>
there is something weird and irregular I always have to look up in the manual in Markdown and all sorts of other Markdown WTFs. Every time I tried to get started on a personal site with an SSG I would get depressed looking at hundreds of ugly themes, get depressed with the mysterious and crappy cloud-side build systems, get depressed with the prospect of customizing them, etc. So I'd start experimenting, never finish and come back six months to make another attempt that fails.

When I really needed a landing page that looked like it fell off a UFO I did it in Vite-React (such a joy to use semantic components, like write

   <Event date="2026-04-18">Earth Day Parade Ithaca Commons</Event>
and it is a simple python script that uploads the dist files to S3 (no "WTF went wrong with the github action") invalidates Cloudfront [1], extracts metadata, maintains the metadata database. There's a clear path to extending the system to do exactly what I want to do in the future unlike some SSG which I will have to relearn from scratch in six months when I want to make a big change... and had it up and running and in front of end users in a weekend.

That is, SSG has no commercial potential because any individual or organization which is capable of maintaining and customizing an SSG can create one from scratch that does exactly what they need with less cost and effort and success is only possible through hypnotizing people into thinking otherwise -- in many fields of software this happens every day but I think not SSG, like those people are going to stay asleep and dream of Drupal and Wordpress.

[1] ... and if I want to move to some similar platform I just implement it instead of struggle with "plugins" and "modules" and other overcomplicated extension mechanisms

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 73248]

It has been a while (I think ever since Safari introduced Reader Mode), and I do almost all my reading on websites in Reader Mode. For some websites, I have set to “Use Reader Mode when Available,” such as that of paulgraham.com, daringfireball.net, and quite a few others with horrible Typography.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75917]

> Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.

Of course, wouldn't you expect that for a fairly mature technology that you'd get tons of false starts from competing tech before eventually getting one breakthrough that completely changed everything? I mean, you could have written a comment that was perfectly analogous to your paragraph above about how AI and neural networks never really amounted to much for about 50-60 years until, all of the sudden, they did (and even if you think AI may currently be overhyped, it's undeniable that in the past 5 years that AI has had an effect on society probably much greater than all the previous history of AI put together).

I prefer to read this academic paper as "Oh, this is a really interesting approach, I wonder what its limitations are" vs. interpreting at as a "this new storage tech will change the world!!!" announcement. I feel like the first approach leads to generally more curiosity, while the second just leads to cynicism and jadedness.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

Y’all don’t believe me when I say it but LLMs are good at language because they’re bad at reasoning about probability.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]
Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 73248]

Will it be possible to have a “Record” feature, say for a few minutes? Would be lovely to save videos, especially the landings.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

> If I am unemployed long enough in America, I will eventually die.

Not wrong.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418290]

This is a brochure site from "The Alliance for Secure AI", which I am unfamiliar with, but whose site gives "AGI weirdo". Am I misreading?

https://secureainow.org/

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

What are they finding? Buffer overflows? Something else?

Also, if someone has the time and tokens, would they please run the OpenJPEG 2000 decoder through this tester? It's known to be brittle. The data format has lots of offsets, and it's permitted to truncate the file to get a lower-rez version. That combo leads to trouble.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126148]

It’s crazy that you can compile a custom kernel and it’ll boot and the GUI will run.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99352]

I am using an 8 year old phone that was mid when I bought it for ~$300 or so new. It's only in the last year that I've begun to find it annoyingly slow. Now I prefer using an actual computer for most things and only rely on the phone for messaging and maps when I'm out and about (plus some lightweight web browsing) but my point is that mediocre actually works fine. I have hardly any apps on it, if there isn't a web interface I don't need to interact with it.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241648]

He would have designed something a lot nicer. These guys are worse than the nazi's in all but one aspect, but give them some time.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99352]

I am about the same age and tarted loading programs off cassette tapes. The fact that I can get a terabyte of storage in a micro SD card the size of my pinkie nail for under $200 still impresses me.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241648]

In a way that might have been preferable. It would raise the bar a bit. No doubt Trump is aware of what happened to Nixon and thought 'ok, so you can get away with it' and then realized that in this situation he could just completely ignore any kind of potential fall out. The thing that boggles the mind is that this could be fixed in 24 hours.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181050]

> it wouldn't stop them from getting guns

Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of making guns. But I'm aware of zero conflicts in which small arms were manufactured in situ. Even in e.g. Myanmar/Burma. The fact that even remote conflicts go through the trouble of importing arms suggests this might be more difficult than you suggest.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

"A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude."

Does that mean a scanning tunneling microscope is the I/O mechanism? That's been demoed for atom-level storage in the past. But it's too slow for use.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181050]

Better call Center for your ground speed [1].

[1] https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241648]

Oh sure, AI is a fantastic protection against copyright law. You do realize that if you're not going to be able that you wrote something you're wide open to claims of copyright infringement, especially if your argument is going to be 'it wasn't me that did the RE, it was the AI, the same AI that wrote the code'.

It's going to be very interesting to see 'cleanroom' kind of development in the AI age but I suspect it's not going to be such a walk in the park as some seem to think it will be. There are just too many vested interests. But: it would be nice to see someone do a release of say the Oracle source code as rewritten by AI through this progress, just to see how fast the IP hammer will come down on this kind of trick.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

It's a reasonable conclusion that Earth has the most competitive market and cheapest prices in the solar system and that there is not anything which is worth taking back to Earth.

Artemis is not motivated by the profit motive but by scientific value, mogging other countries, and other non-material values. And yeah, it transfers money from the taxpayer to many private organizations that can in turn kick back some to politicians to keep the money going. Something like that.

The moon landing is a much more difficult mission than just circling around the moon and I'd argue that we don't have a realistic plan for the landing right now.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

Here's a 10 year old study from Norway's navy.[1] It's a marginal technology for navies. It's more useful for defending urban areas from air strikes, because urban areas have lots of emitters, too many to attack.

There's a lot of current interest in what Iran is using for air defense. Search "Iran air defense passive radar". Some people speculate passive infrared. Some speculate passive radar. Nobody who's posting really knows, of course.

Ukraine uses many passive systems, including audio. Sort of like Shot Spotter, but for drones.

[1] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA470685.pdf

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

The headline is confusing the issue. Bitcoin miners are losing money because October's crash took Bitcoin from $126,000 to below $70,000, and the Iran war has pushed up oil and electricity prices. The minor difficulty drop is a result of that, as some Bitcoin miners drop out. It's not the cause.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99352]

Rome wasn't built in a day, and its computing and networking technology wasn't replaced in a day either.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75917]

It is how bitcoin is designed to work, but it also shows very directly how proof-of-work systems can never scale to be the global monetary replacement its boosters push. If the opposite happened, and the price for some reason sky rocketed to, say, $1 million per bitcoin, it would necessarily mean that it would induce more miners until the difficulty and consequent electricity cost (regardless of the efficiency in electricity generation) also would rise to the neighborhood of $1 million per coin. At the point you're far beyond "Argentina levels" of electricity and getting into "Europe levels" of electricity to run the network.

The electricity demand (and here I mean the overall cost of the electricity, so improvements in $ per kilowatt just mean you need to use more electricity) in proof-of-work systems fundamentally scales linearly with the overall valuation of the coins in the network, which means proof-of-work systems can never scale as large as their fanboys would have you believe.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91809]

I speculatively fired Claude Opus 4.6 at some code I knew very well yesterday as I was pondering the question. This code has been professionally reviewed about a year ago and came up fairly clean, with just a minor issue in it.

Opus "found" 8 issues. Two of them looked like they were probably realistic but not really that big a deal in the context it operates in. It labelled one of them as minor, but the other as major, and I'm pretty sure it's wrong about it being "major" even if is correct. Four of them I'm quite confident were just wrong. 2 of them would require substantial further investigation to verify whether or not they were right or wrong. I think they're wrong, but I admit I couldn't prove it on the spot.

It tried to provide exploit code for some of them, none of the exploits would have worked without some substantial additional work, even if what they were exploits for was correct.

In practice, this isn't a huge change from the status quo. There's all kinds of ways to get lots of "things that may be vulnerabilities". The assessment is a bigger bottleneck than the suspicions. AI providing "things that may be an issue" is not useless by any means but it doesn't necessarily create a phase change in the situation.

An AI that could automatically do all that, write the exploits, and then successfully test the exploits, refine them, and turn the whole process into basically "push button, get exploit" is a total phase change in the industry. If it in fact can do that. However based on the current state-of-the-art in the AI world I don't find it very hard to believe.

It is a frequent talking point that "security by obscurity" isn't really security, but in reality, yeah, it really is. An unknown but presumably staggering number of security bugs of every shape and size are out there in the world, protected solely by the fact that no human attacker has time to look at the code. And this has worked up until this point, because the attackers have been bottlenecked on their own attention time. It's kind of just been "something everyone knows" that any nation-state level actor could get into pretty much anything they wanted if they just tried hard enough, but "nation-state level" actor attention, despite how much is spent on it, has been quite limited relative to the torrent of software coming out in the world.

Unblocking the attackers by letting them simply purchase "nation-state level actor"-levels of attention in bulk is huge. For what such money gets them, it's cheap already today and if tokens were to, say, get an order of magnitude cheaper, it would be effectively negligible for a lot of organizations.

In the long run this will probably lead to much more secure software. The transition period from this world to that is going to be total chaos.

... again, assuming their assessment of its capabilities is accurate. I haven't used it. I can't attest to that. But if it's even half as good as what they say, yes, it's a huge huge huge deal and anyone who is even remotely worried about security needs to pay attention.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99352]

You can rationalize anything by only considering the upside relative to alternatives' downsides.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418290]

You're being nice about it but I think you're inadvertently expressing literally the sentiment Dan was referring to.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

Write up that stuff on a file and tell the agent to look at it. Say “take a look at file A as an example of how we do this sort of thing.” Good comments in the code help that explain how it works and what that patterns are are helpful, but you don’t need to go line by line duplicating the code.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]

"Stand on Zanzibar" (1969 Hugo Award Winner) — John Brunner

Great book.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]

>OK, so what are these recordings all about? Why are they here?

>Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay and 35 years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it's true: just like the people in the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns primarily for the purpose of playing with their payphones. I often brought along my trusty Craig 212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was before cassettes were popular) to record the phone noises and narrate information about them for my friends. I don't go on phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that this is because I grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone tripping is that all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays and they are really boring.

>This picture shows my recording equipment around 1968, which I used to edit these tapes and prepare them for playing on a public phone number. My current desk is just as messy, but with PC's instead of reel-to-reel tape recorders.

>There have been 1237108 accesses to this page.

.........................

>Secrets of the Little Blue Box (1971)

https://www.ckts.info/downloads/articles/Esquire%20Magazine%...

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90767]

Or the exact opposite. Cato are just neoliberal elite shills. Anything that hurts the bottom line of that class is "bad".

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90767]

Maybe try some water/juice drinking bottles with a cap and/or a large straw?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418290]

If you cut out the vulnerable code from Heartbleed and just put it in front of a C programmer, they will immediately flag it. It's obvious. But it took Neel Mehta to discover it. What's difficult about finding vulnerabilities isn't properly identifying whether code is mishandling buffers or holding references after freeing something; it's spotting that in the context of a large, complex program, and working out how attacker-controlled data hits that code.

It's weird that Aisle wrote this.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90767]

Almost everything you use came from academics and research labs.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113992]

Half-broken visualizations look suspiciously like ones I get from LLMs, so who knows, maybe it's some LLM setting up their first blog?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77124]

Hmm is there a field for that? I must have missed it while implementing, I'll look, thanks!

It does have the description of what you're buying ("Dead Man's Switch subscription") but I don't know if that gets to the bank statement.

steveklabnik ranked #30 [karma: 97246]
jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91809]

I don't need to conduct 1000 transactions per day. I don't forsee a world in which it will be some sort of fatal inconvenience to need to approve all purchases. I certainly don't plan on ever just handing over my credit card to an LLM, due to its fundamental architectural issues with injection, and I still don't anticipate handing it over to any future AI architecture anytime soon because I struggle to imagine what benefits could possibly be worth the risk of taking down such a basic, cheap barrier.

All that stuff about support, though, inevitable.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126148]

> That source is less than a million was bet, and now there are hundreds of millions bet on the ceasefire, and millions more on other Iran bets, and then even more bet on Russia/Ukraine.

I'd imagine those numbers are typical for any transaction facilitated by the Internet comparing 2003 to 2026.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126148]

If costs stay high, then people will drop out of bitcoin mining, which will cause supply to go down and bitcoin prices to go up.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]

"... fan's recordings of 10k concerts..."

59-year-old Aadam [sic] Jacobs made his first recording 42 years ago in 1984 when he was 17.

He would have had to average 238 recordings/concerts per year — nearly 5/week — over those 42 years to accumulate 10,000 of them.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]
ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91109]

Give it a bit!

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/g-s1-115240/iran-war-strait-h...

(I'm being snarky here, but COVID definitely exposed some supply chain vulnerabilities.)

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91109]

You're missing that humans are often irrational.

They may be hoping it goes back up.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91109]

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

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4311-...

> Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.

Not quite as long, but much more significant. (No violence exception, the criminal was the President, and they were crimes against the entire country, not some random drug/tax charges.)

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113992]

It's a gap, but not due to lack of trying.

I made https://github.com/TeMPOraL/cloze-call a little over 16 years ago, and this itself was inspired by something then at least that much old.

Screenshot: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/old-blog/download/projects/ClozeCal...

Wonder if I can turn this into browser-playable version with just LLMs.

EDIT: Put Claude Code on the task (reason for choice: Claude Desktop lets me just throw it at a folder with unzipped bundle of sources and assets I found laying around my blog archive).

EDIT2: Holy shit it worked. Will upload it somewhere soon.

EDIT3: Here it is, in its full 800x600, 30 FPS cap glory: https://temporal.github.io/ClozeCall-Web/

The process I used was, have CC run over the original sources and create this document:

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/ClozeCall-Web/blob/main/design.m...

Then after verifying it matches what I remembered and clarifying some decisions (section 4 and 5), just told it to make a static client-side no-build-step no-webshit-frameworks game deployable to github.io, and it did it in a single shot (+ a second small request to add a fix to transparency of some assets). Personally, I'm impressed at how well it went, what a nice highlight of the weekend for me.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

While a great improvement, the article also gives a good overview that cargo isn't without issues when going outside pure Rust desktop/server scenarios, maybe some ideas for improvements.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108129]

From one of the ground staff for Artemis: https://bsky.app/profile/captnamy.bsky.social/post/3mi36brfw...

"1968 and the country was on fire. Vietnam. Assassinations. Civil unrest. Protests.

Apollo 8 was the one bright event of a terrible year.

2026 and the country is on fire. Iran. Corruption. Fascists. Civil unrest. No Kings.

I hope Artemis II will stand out as a bright spot for our country."

Some more background on her: https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2026/04/01/chicagoan-amy-l...

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75917]

I liked this game a lot!

One thing I noticed is that I found the game to be pretty hard if I just tried to tap based on where I thought was a good "launching point". But then I realized I could use the dashed lines in the orbit circle as basically "arrows" pointing to where the ship would go if launched at that point in the orbit, and I instantly got much better if my strategy was (a) pick the dash in the orbit circle that points to the next planet, and (b) just then only focus on tapping when the ship hits that dash in the circle.

I think a "hard mode" would be to get rid of the dashes in the orbit circle and just make it a solid line.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77124]

> they had women and non white people on board

I thought this was a straw man, because surely wtf is even the point of this comment, but nope, sure enough, ctrl+f and there are comments like that here. Wow.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

Yeah, but they still don’t have a realistic plan to land astronauts there.

Like the space shuttle before it, Artemis proves that nobody can beat the US at spending money on boondoggles.

Lunar missions are inconsequential to problems here on Earth like we can’t afford to build high-speed rail and transit, that we can’t build housing affordable or otherwise, that we already lost the next war to Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, won’t build affordable electric cars, etc.

What we need is affordability porn!

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187939]

I will still wait for the heat shield analysis. Doing a crewed flight was not what I would have done - I’d use a Falcon Heavy to put one or more dummies through different trajectories to make sure we have enough experimental data to extensively model the shield behaviour, especially in non-nominal entries.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187939]

I would love to see a Unibody polished to a mirror finish. Would be a perfect match for Queen Amidala’s shuttle.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187939]

It becomes more interesting when you couple a flexible display with it.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

Tools have existed for decades, devs have to actually use them.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

Packing structures can improve performance and overall memory usage by reducing cache misses.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

People still think that this administration will play fair the next elections.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

You might be using a device powered by Tock OS.

https://www.tockos.org/

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

That is only for techies. WYSIWYG has won for a reason.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108129]

This is why shutting down the right to strike is a short term approach: you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshop, so eventually you run out of staff.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

What all projects?

It is relatively easy to find corporate libraries, or commercial products that still aren't using it, including Microsoft products still stuck in .NET Framework, or .NET standard 2.0.

If you want name shaming of commercial products with modern .NET, here is one, can provide more.

https://github.com/episerver/content-templates

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160096]

There is already lots and lots of non-GPL code in the kernel, under dozens of licenses, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/pac...

As long as everything is GPLv2-compatible it‘s okay.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127864]

Just like everything else outside PC thanks to clones becoming a thing.

One reason UNIX became widely adopted, besides being freely available versus the other OSes, was that allowed companies to abstract their hardware differences, offering some market differentiation, while keeping some common ground.

Those phones common ground is called Android with Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace, folks should stop seeing them as GNU/Linux.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108129]

As did Korea. When their president tried to impose martial law, a crowd including legislators stormed the building and impeached him.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82666]

This isn't really a given. Historically, whenever you have a civil war the existing state's military splits down the middle, with people generally unwilling to fire on friends, family, and neighbors. Former military officers usually form the core of the rebel military, taking their training, experience, and oftentimes equipment with them to fight for the other side.

The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

Many years ago, even a "Hello World" binary that wasn't compiled by MSVC but by a GNU toolchain was detected as "suspicious" or "potentially unwanted", and in some cases automatically deleted. MS clearly has a different definition of "malware" than many people, and while it may overlap with a majority opinion (e.g. viruses and worms), where its opinion differs is used to push an agenda.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

Or 4) patch the checks out yourself. As they say, "Firefox is open-source for a reason."

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

Where are the lines of that when it's physical things?

The automotive aftermarket has largely settled that; even without the original design files, it's perfectly legal to make compatible parts, patents and the like notwithstanding. You can build an entire "small block Chevy" engine wholly from parts that GM did not make, and it will fit perfectly in a car that originally had the "genuine" one.

IANAL but as long as you don't violate any patents they have (if any) nor use their trademark, feel free to make and sell keyboards that look like theirs (not that a keyboard of their design is particularly distinctive anyway.)

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

Many of those who saw the first moon landing as a child are still alive and remember what it felt like.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88998]

I first encountered this in-person on a Mac Mini many years ago, which to be fair is not meant to be touched all the time, but it was still slightly repulsive. It has a surprising weight and uncomfortable sensation like picking up a freshly-cut block of metal. Then I realised Apple did the same with their laptops which are meant to be touched. They do have rounded corners, but not on the axes where the roundedness is useful. In contrast, Thinkpads look sharp-edged with square corners but are actually confortable to hold.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79406]

You cannot really determine what the risks are before trying something new.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105025]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181050]

Buoyancy is an easier equation to solve than lift.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

Buzz Aldrin is reported to be watching this on TV.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77124]

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).

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74150]

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.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 145848]

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

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102271]

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.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90767]

"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?"

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

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)

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90767]

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.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77124]

But then this just gives the win to the first person to open their card, since in that round they had both selected Checkmate. Or, you have an incentive to rush to open your card when you know you've selected Checkmate, as you want to be the first one to open.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181050]

Is He1+ an ion while 2+ is not because no known chemical reactions produce the latter? (Is that true?)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181050]

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.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181050]

> explains why it is almost only an US phenomenon

Genuine question: is it?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418290]

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.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

Texas is a leader in renewables for the same reason it is a leader in oil and gas.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91109]

Fine. I wanna scrap the pardon power. Trade?

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-promises-mass-pard...

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

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.)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

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Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

It's OK to inject ads, but not OK to remove them, under Google's current policies.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107448]

I think a lot of Bay Area companies don’t come to their full potential because of their location. I think Apple does so well though that I couldn’t tell them to change anything,

They are singular in a lot of ways. I was working with a business development guy on something that could have been “like Palantir but 10x potential TAM” and we seemed to have a knack for getting people to tell us more than they should have. Like instead of breaking up we should have gone into industrial espionage but I’ve seen just enough of that world to know better.

We heard from all sorts of places where “people never talk” but never Apple.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160920]

"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.