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.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103800]

Personally I am attracted to the simplicity of the I Ching in that I can do a reading for someone very quickly in the field without a lot of explaining (off brand as-a-fox) so I pack an assortment of coins in my tail (ahem… backpack) though I am still looking for a second pocket I Ching so I have something other than Wilhelm.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 415955]

It's a fun class; worth keeping in mind that several topics with 1-2 units here are whole specializations in the field, including:

* memory safety and exploitation (the "buffer overflow" section is about 20 years out of date, though super appropriate for a first course)

* the WebPKI/certificates thing

* messaging security and messaging cryptosystems,

* microarchitectural security and hardware side channels.

Multiple full courses on each of these subjects would bring you up to "practitioner" levels of expertise.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

My experiments with AI generated code is you have to specify it like a programmer would, i.e. you have to be a programmer.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

Strongly agree, but this gets expensive fast when you account for all of the network, logging, and security trimmings.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 98405]

In all seriousness, I assumed that was part of why the US models itself on Rome rather than Greece. Not that there was no homosexuality in the days of the Roman empire, but there was a lot more performative masculinity to make up for it.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

The US will only learn by feeling pain, both the administration and the electorate. So, make them feel it politically and economically.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101198]
mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 87658]

I thought that there were some that were visible without an account:

---

The Mandalorian leading a birdwatching group:

This is the jay.

---

The Mandalorian after winning a preliminary injunction:

This is the stay.

---

The Mandalorian making cheese:

This is the whey

---

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89586]

He means other humans.

The stupid point it makes is "since we have AI now, why even accept human contributions to a FOSS project?"

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89586]

The post itself is AI (or co-AI) slop, which means it can be just ignored.

>If an idiot like me can clone a product that costs $30k per month — in two hours — what even is software development? (...) The new software developer is no longer a craftsman. It’s the average operator, empowered

If entire industries employee counts are decimated and/or commodified, this means the "new software developer" wont find people to pay for what they create (whether software or a software driven service). For the majority, it also means further degradation of the kind of jobs one will be able to find.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 415955]

Without trying to be glib about it, this post sounds like a description of second-system syndrome, applied to entrepreneurship. It happens to all of us.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105236]
userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 87693]

More like, why have it regurgitate something likely to have been in its training data?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

Because they are who create wealth from their labor. All the very wealthy do is capture it via paperwork and legal frameworks. The pendulum is simply swinging back towards fairly compensating labor for its work.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159022]

There was a "Never Trump" movement of Republican leaders. It's dead.[1] By now, most of the Never Trumpers are either out of power or have groveled to Trump. The National Review, a conservative publication, wrote: "At no point did Never Trump possess the basic traits of a political movement: a small number of leaders and large number of followers." It was all leaders, or former leaders, or people who thought they should be leaders. The article says Never Trump was composed of "1) experts in foreign policy, economics, and law ... 2) campaign professionals ... and 3) public intellectuals ..." Not Republican governors and members of Congress. Not big donors. Those people only matter when they're in power. There are small conservative journals in which they still write. Few read them. They're not on Fox News.

It's not at all clear what the GOP looks like after Trump. The most likely Republican successors are said to be Vance, Rubio, and DeSantis. The last two have failed badly at presidential bids before.

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-end-of-never-trump...

userbinator ranked #35 [karma: 87693]

There are still many companies with cubicles, although they do seem to be getting rarer.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126867]

When in the 1990s-00s people posted Dilbert strips, it wasn't, IME, because they identified with the character Dilbert.

They did it because they saw in their work environment echoes of the environment portrayed in the comic, of which Dilbert was as much a part as the PHB.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89586]

Well, PHB is not about simply being a manager, but about being a certain type of manager, so he might very well be justified in his wall decoration.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 184690]

I used to say seeing Dilbert strips in the office is a warning sign. People shouldn’t identify with Dilbert.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75157]

I liked this post. I may have some minor qualms (e.g. while I think execs should be proxies for the customer, they have many other competing motivations that can push customer needs way down), but I especially liked the closing section:

> Understanding before criticizing

> Large software companies have real problems. Some are structural. Some are cultural. Many are self-inflicted. But many of the behaviors people complain about are not pathologies – they are consequences.

> If you want to criticize how large organizations operate, it helps to first understand why they operate that way. Without that understanding, the criticism may feel sharp, but it will not be useful.

I see that kind of "criticizing before understanding" all the time on HN, and while that's probably just inherent to an open forum, commenters who do that should realize it makes them come across as "less than insightful", to put it generously. Like I see tons of comments often about how managers only get to their position through obsequious political plots. And sure, that may exist in some orgs. But you can always tell when folks have never even considered the competing forces that act on managers (i.e not just the folks they directly manage, but requirements coming from higher ups, and peer teams, and somehow being responsible for a ton when you actually have few direct levers to push) and solely view things through the lens of someone being managed.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

Pretty much everyone believes they can do the boss' job better than the boss. Until they get promoted and become like every other boss.

When you start your own business, though, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 97007]

What were you trying to “revert back”? You should have been able to just stop using jj, there’s nothing to revert back to. It’s also possible that I’m misunderstanding what you mean.

jedberg ranked #45 [karma: 76807]

Many of your examples came from people who were funded by Universities in the 80s, which was basically the VC of the time. And in the 90s, a lot of the core committers of those projects were already working at VC funded companies.

Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff.

And we weren't unique, this happened a lot.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

One requires more electricity than the other, and custodians of somewhat different skills. A sysadmin is a librarian and custodian with technology skills. If you can vault and custodian physical archives at scale, you can do the same for digital data (imho, based on experience with both). You’re simply building resilient systems on durable primitives.

I’m hopeful for a future where you can potentially carry all recorded knowledge on a device and media you can fit in something somewhat human portable [1]. But until then, humans interested will maintain and continually improve archival and information retrieval systems to preserve and make accessible knowledge.

[1] SPhotonix – 360TB into 5-inch glass disc with femtosecond laser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268911 - December 2025 (27 comments)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

Title does not match link, flagged for mod attention.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175100]

> If institutional investors don't raise housing prices, then how can they profit?

FTA: “large investors may well have economies of scale. They might hire maintenance people who work for them, and thus have an adequately suited number of tasks, rather than having to contract out to workers who charge a premium for not being guaranteed work, or be better at managing properties with software, or perhaps be a more trustworthy borrower and pay less for capital.”

TL; DR they make money on rents. Not appreciation. Obviously appreciation doesn’t hurt, which is why “them owning lots of properties may increase their market power, and thus they price the homes above what is optima” is also tested.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

> Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature.

I've lived in houses that certainly did not take into account sun, season and temperature. I learned a lot from that experience. My current house is optimized for it. I've learned a few more things about it, and could do better.

> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy

Not my experience with architects and builders.

For example, how many houses have a cupola? They're common on older homes, but non-existent on modern ones. What the roof does is accelerate the wind moving over the roof, then the air vents in the cupola let the wind through, which sucks the heat out of the attic.

Another design element is eaves. Eaves shade the house in summer and don't shade it in winter (for more heat gain). Eaves also keep the sides of the house dry, which means your siding and paint and window frames last a lot longer. Mine are 1.5 feet. Most houses around here have tiny or even non-existent eaves.

The advent of air-conditioning is when architects stopped paying attention to the sun.

jedberg ranked #45 [karma: 76807]

You can be a super productive Python coder without any clue how assembly works. Vibe coding is just one more level of abstraction.

Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python and Golang programmers for things that need to be more efficient than what was vibe coded.

But do you really need your $whatever to be super efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]
crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80649]

How does this work on laptop screens? E.g. running Chrome on my MBA with a notch, the Chrome menus take up 3/4 of the screen width, and then the remaining ~6 icons there is space for are utilities I need. There are even a couple more icons I regularly use and have to switch to Finder to access them, just because it has less menus. The idea is interesting, but it's not clear at all from the homepage how/if this works on laptops as opposed to large monitors, when you're using an application with lots of menus.

I'm also curious how this compares to other similar solutions -- QuickCMD, Raycast, Keyboard Maestro, Command Keeper, etc. It seems clear that its featureset is different, but it's hard to figure out which ones do which things. If you included a comparison features chart it might be helpful so potential customers can see what makes this one unique -- i.e. it's the only one that does X and Y and Z, because every other app only does 2 but not all 3.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

I’ve been an HN participant for ~14 years, the vibe ebbs and flows. You can hide and ignore the folks you mention, what’s important imho is that the mods continue to aggressively cultivate a specific community vibe. Nothings perfect, but this is as close as it’s going to get to perfect imho as it relates to intellectual curiosity and understanding how the systems we exist in work.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80649]

It's an interesting article on this one particular mansion, but the idea that "the same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs" seems pretty silly.

We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning.

> These are modest changes, imperceptible to most, and they won't enable us to forgo active heating and cooling entirely. But they do echo a way of thinking which, today, is oft ignored. Hardwick Hall was designed with Sun, season and temperature in mind.

Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature. This is very much a factor in determining the sizes and quantity of windows on south-facing vs. north-facing walls, for example.

Again, it's a very interesting article on this one particular castle, but the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy. We're already well aware of all these factors and how they interact with materials and design.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126867]

An em-dash (in this use, there are others where the normal style differs) set with regular spaces around it isn’t a grammar problem; it is a less common style preference (usually they are set closed—without spaces—or surrounded by thin spaces, or an en-dash surrounded by regular spaces is used instead.)

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 73436]

I was investigating a fun webcam-to-ASCII project so now I am tempted to take an approach at porting the logic from the blog post into something reusable.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

It appears to be a combination of racism, “crabs in the pot” mentality, tribalism and in group motivations, and people looking for another group to look down on because they have no opportunity ahead of them between now and death. Happiness is reality minus expectations.

His supporters still say “It’s not great but I’d vote for him again.” Well, the unfortunate news is he’s near end of life and they footgunned their own economic opportunity light cone. The global economy is going to route around the US accordingly, because it cannot be trusted to trade as an adult vs a bully. They will continue to have their vote and mental model regardless of rationality and logical reasoning. All you can do as a nation state counterparty is defend against military action and disconnect economically.

Same vibes as "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." —- LBJ

(derived from first principles)

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126867]

It stops drafts from the window before they reach occupants. Yes, it is less efficient in terms of total heat inside the structure, but its more effective at avoiding uncomfortably cold spots, which is (in most places at most times of year) more important, plus, the utility lost to the occupied under-window space is less than the utility that would be lost for the same space elsewhere; the window already limiting alternate uses.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 78171]

See the recent news about Canada strengthening economic ties with China and welcoming them into their auto market. This wouldn’t have happened in a million years had it not been for US tariffs and hostilities towards Canada. America is truly uniting the world (against them).

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]
simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95163]

> I believe that explicitly teaching students how to use AI in their learning process

I'm a bit nervous about that one.

I very firmly believe that learning well from AI is a skill that can and should be learned, and can be taught.

What's an open question for me is whether kids can learn that skill early in their education.

It seems likely to me that you need a strong baseline of understanding in a whole array of areas - what "truth" means, what primary sources are, extremely strong communication and text interpretation skills - before you can usefully dig into the subtleties of effectively using LLMs to help yourself learn.

Can kids be leveled up to that point? I honestly don't know.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80649]

People can play a role and clearly see the role they play as well.

Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 80649]

> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer.

Not to take away from this truly amazing write-up (wow), but there's at least one generator that uses shape:

https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/

See particularly the image right above where it says "Note how the algorithm selects the largest characters that fit within the outlines of each colored region."

There's also a description at the bottom of how its algorithm works, if anyone wants to compare.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 78171]

The risk is the same as it was a decade ago, and the decade before that.

The startup will take over your life. You will pour every bit of time and money you have into it. You will lose your sanity. And it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail.

Unless you already have a comfortable financial cushion and/or industry connections that will guarantee funding and partnerships, you have to be truly crazy to try that life. But, ultimately it’s the crazy ones that end up winning.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 96047]

> Understanding this doesn’t mean rejecting new tools. It means using them with clear expectations about what they can provide and what will always require human judgment.

Speaking of tools, that style of writing rings a bell.. Ben Affleck made a similar point about the evolving use of computers and AI in filmmaking, wielded with creativity by humans with lived experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s. Faster visual effects production enables more creative options.

Tomte ranked #10 [karma: 159430]

It reads a bit like my current position after two decades of on-and-off-GTD and ~three years of PARA: the project/area/resource distinction is practical, but not earth-shattering.

But what‘s really working is GTD, which the article doesn‘t call out, but implicitly lumps together with PARA: actionable next tasks and collecting everything in some kind of inbox.

I haven‘t found much use for PARA itself in my personal life, but for organizing my work OneDrive it shines.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75357]

"This is the Lockpicking Robot, and what I have for you today is 34 hours of brute-forcing a master lock."

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75357]

I'd ask online how to solve this billionth problem I've had with computers, get an answer, follow it and go on with my life, like I did when my OS updated and video files opened with MediaPlayer instead of VLC.

That didn't get thousands of upvotes, or any rage, let me tell you.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75357]

Be the change you want to see in the world.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175100]

> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans

Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124701]

Indeed, in 1998 I wanted a Voodoo for some 3D work I was going to do, and naturally wanted the best and also play with Glide.

However it had a problem with my PCI version, and the shop guy was nice to trade it back for a TNT, which not only had no issues with my motherboard, made me an early NVidia customer.

jedberg ranked #45 [karma: 76807]

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but if you pop into the DBOS discord, they can probably help you out.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175100]

> Self driving is not a commodity, because it is not fungible - you cannot take BYD's self driving and put in in your Tesla

Currently, no. All evidence points to it as a feature approaching fungibility once it’s good enough and plentiful.

Like, tires aren’t perfectly fungible. But functionally, they’re close to it.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

The barber I patronized for many years was a boat person. Wonderful people.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124701]

What goes around comes around.

Back in the 80's with OOP starting to take off, it was IC for Software, then Components (famously successful during the 90's on Windows world), now it is IKEA.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 175100]

>…a trend in which Mr. Trump has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to reward allies and those who have paid his associates or donated to his political operation.

This is a race to the bottom. Criminals confer political advantage by operating outside the law. If we tolerate this from one side we implicitly require it from all.

We need to strike the pardon power. Hamilton thought “the dread of being accused of weakness or connivance, would beget…circumspection” when it came to corrupt pardons [1]. That has not occurred.

Meanwhile, his argument against the Congress granting pardons through law was that “in seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth,” and that such a deliberative process “would have a tendency to embolden guilt.”

We’ve had a civil war. It was not prevented by pardons. At its conclusion, various groups in the executive and the Congress deliberated and passed measures of amnesty [2]. Our modern pardon process, moreover, has evolved into—more often than not— an entire office. And under Trump, its concentrated and corrupt application has directly emboldened those who seek to overthrow our Constitution by violent means.

[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed74.asp

[2] https://www.archives.gov/files/research/naturalization/411-c...

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

Who decides what information is "accurate"?

My trust in what the experts say has declined drastically over the last 10 years.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159022]

> highly inaccurate authority.

The presentation style of most LLMs is confident and authoritative, even when totally wrong. That's the problem.

Systems that ingest social media and then return it as authoritative information are doomed to do things like this. We're seeing this in other contexts. Systems believing all their prompt history equally, leading to security holes.

simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95163]

I believe it's $10,000/year for the top level brand plus $600/year/"affiliate account" https://help.x.com/en/using-x/premium-business

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126867]

> The US? No, Trump.

No, the US, through its government (which is not just the executive branch) as chosen (in theory, via election) and, in practice, tolerated by its population at large.

It's not just Trump. If the US decided not to follow him he would have no power.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 98405]

Do you have a more current example

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

While I have at least a decade or so before my son is an adult, I would be proud for him to be a stay at home son if that was his choice. As long as he's happy and cared for, he always has a place in our family's home.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101198]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]
WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

WYSIWYG came about when displays became bit-mapped graphics with a sufficient amount of dots per inch.

Previously, displays used a character generator ROM chip which mapped ASCII onto one character. For a terminal I designed and built in those days, I used an off-the-shelf character generator chip which had a 5x7 font.

The original IBM PC used a character generator.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78516]

I play disco music to keep the kids off my lawn.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126867]

Increased productivity increases the value of work and the number of areas it is useful to apply it. Yes, if you are working for a non-growth firm with basically fixed sales, a productivity increase translates to a headcount decrease in that firm, but across the industry it means more jobs at higher pay, as shown by the whole history of productivity improvements in software development.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75157]

I don't think the Great Papago Escape was that great - "Over the next few weeks, all of the escapees were eventually recaptured without bloodshed."

The thing that makes this balloon escape story is so enthralling is that it actually worked.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101198]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112918]

> Too often devs look at QA groups as someone to whom they can offload their grunt work they don't want to do.

That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and doing grunt work is a perfectly legitimate job to have.

Elimination of QA jobs - as well as many other specialized white collar jobs in the office, from secretaries to finance clerks to internal graphics departments - is just false economy. The work itself doesn't disappear - but instead of being done efficiently and cheaply by dedicated specialists, it's dumped on everyone else, on top of their existing workloads. So now you have bunch of lower-skill busy-work distracting the high-paid people from doing the high-skill work they were hired for. But companies do this, because extra salaries are legible in the books, while heavy loss of productivity isn't (instead it's a "mysterious force", or a "cost disease").

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112918]

In a computing system, LLMs aren't substituting for code, they're substituting for humans. Treat them accordingly.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112918]

> Even an ATM will resist power tools far longer than it will take the cops to show up.

It'll also spit in your face with a paint that's incredibly hard to wash off.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112918]

It's all fun and games until it changes the name of a drug on your prescription.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75357]

Do you think having your conversation on speakerphone in public is the same as talking to someone?

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89586]

>If they produce content with some truth in them, they're truthful, regardless of whether an AI agent did or didn't write them

Nope, they're still slop. Just like a spam message about a product you actually like is still spam.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]
coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89586]

>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was

Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75357]

I didn't believe such conspiracy theories, until one day I noticed Sonnet 4.5 (which I had been using for weeks to great success) perform much worse, very visibly so. A few hours later, Opus 4.5 was released.

Now I don't know what to think.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126867]

> Quality absolutely matters, but it's hyper context dependent.

There are very few software development contexts where the quality metric of “does the project build and run at all” doesn’t matter quite a lot.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]

Original title "FAA issues warnings to airlines on Central, South American flights over potential military actions" compressed to fit within title limits.

https://archive.today/kuo3d

> The Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday it is issuing a series of warnings to airlines to exercise caution when flying over Central America and parts of South America, citing the risks of potential military activities and GPS interference.

> The FAA said it had issued notices for parts of Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador as well as other parts of Central America and portions of airspace within the eastern Pacific Ocean.

NOTAM graphical representation: https://assets.newsweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Copy-... | https://archive.today/x5weG

from https://www.newsweek.com/faa-warns-us-airlines-mexico-centra... | https://archive.today/t1Awr

GPS accuracy maps:

https://gpsjam.org/?lat=17.10680&lon=-85.29003&z=4.0&date=20...

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/gps-jamming

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75357]

I need a name for people who dismiss an entirely new and revolutionary class of technology without even trying it, so much so that they'll not even read about any new ideas that involve it.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 87883]

One might say the same about HN comments.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89586]

"Person already sceptical of microplastics papers is convinced by a single counter-paper that he was right all along", news at 11!

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 101198]

$3,500 divided by $199[https://www.rayneo.com/products/rayneo-air-3s-xr-glasses?var...] = 17: close enough!

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105147]
tosh ranked #8 [karma: 169394]
pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 124701]

You can do manual memory management in .NET since the early days, it was designed to support C++ as well, first with Managed Extensions for C++, and then C++/CLI on .NET 2.0

So there were ways to do it, but not as straightforward from C# and co.

What Microsoft has been doing since the Core rewrite is exposing those capabilities in a more natural way, especially since C++/CLI is Windows only as it relies on Visual C++ backend.

As for the use after free, you can get a bit around it with using and Roslyn analysers, but yeah it would be better if directly supported on the language.

Note that manual memory management is exposed via System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal class. It exposes several ways to do it.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 236718]

AI allows companies to resell open source code as if they wrote it themselves doing an end run around all license terms. This is a major problem.

Of course they're not going to stop at just code. They need all the rest of it as well.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 184690]

I’ve never heard of it, but could easily read their homepage. I’m a Portuguese speaker, which is, IIRC, the fifth most spoken language. If it’s readily understandable by others who speak other neo-Latin languages, then it covers a whole lot of people in Europe and almost the whole American continent.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75157]

But still, I think the solution is brilliant and I can't wait to try it.

If you ask someone to turn it down, it can immediately come off as confrontational, even if you're being polite. With this solution, though, it's kind of hilarious because in one sense it's more confrontational, but the original music blaster would have to ask you to turn it down - but it's just their music.

I'm a pretty nonconfrontational person, but the one time I lost it was when this late middle aged woman kept chatting away on her cell phone in the quiet car of the LIRR despite other people previously telling her that she was in the quiet car (I believe my exact words were "Hey princess, what part of 'no cellphones' do you not understand" - there is a giant sign at the front of the car that says no cellphone use). But I don't think I'd ever do this in a public situation where the rules weren't so clearly spelled out.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125330]

EDIT: Sorry, thought that was $15 million per American.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103800]

Yeah, but there are enough passionate anti-AI people out there that reaching out to them could be the killer marketing move of 2026. The poll is 4% Yes, 96% No when I checked it. It's pretty clear that pro-AI marketing falls flat, see "Copilot + PC"

People pushing AI might get investors today, but companies that take a stand against it might get the customers. Pick one.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 73436]

This is a confusing marketing campaign because DDG is very much aware that the people voting on this poll are not a representative sample of DDG users.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 98405]

I have no wish to listen to other people's bodily functions when I'm working, or conversely to listen to them working while I'm answering a call of nature. The correct response to these behavior is to either hang up on them or tell them to shut the fuck up, respectively. It's not OK to impose yourself on others like this.

simonw ranked #30 [karma: 95163]

As usual, I was careful with my words:

> This project from Cursor is the second attempt I've seen at this now!

I used the word "attempt" very deliberately, to avoid suggesting that either of these two projects had achieved the goal.

I don't see how you can get to "baseless hype without a hint of skepticism" there unless you've already decided to take anything I say in bad faith.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 415955]

This app is even more hostile.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159022]

Right. The next step up is a robot that uses a Lishi tool and force feedback. Then one that just uses a single pin pick and a tensioning tool. This is a neat machine learning problem.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 105236]

That's basically it. The Chinese government views the rest of the world through Hobbesian self interest, but in the late 20th century financial way. They want your money, but lawfully.

The US has turned into something much more vindictive and unpredictable, including threatening to invade Canada.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103800]

For personal interest stuff I use my YOShInOn RSS reader which uses k-Means clustering and a BERT + SVM classifier to select articles for me -- and if you look at what I post from HN you will get a good idea of what it shows me.

These are fields where I am an interested outsider: I think biotechnology will be to the 21st century what electronics was to the 20th, I'm just as concerned about growing food in the global south and in Iowa or on Mars, think political science + politics outside the us is better than #uspol, like custom cars and 3-d printing, making the carbon cycle go backwards and think we have solutions for the very hard problems that we face.

Now I do a lot of learning in the areas of my work, but other than reading HN and occasional stuff that turns up on YOShInOn I do not look for "news" on these topics. For instance I have no fear that if I'm not following the most fashionable accounts on AI research on X I will fall behind, in fact, I know that if I did I would have a terrible fear of falling behind.

Instead my learning is focused primarily around projects that I do and I do projects that challenge my abilities. Right now I am working on biofeedback technology, heart-rate variability and stuff and I've rapidly learned about the web Bluetooth API and physiology and all of that. I can go to a lab where people do HRV research and demo something with my tablet and one or more Polar H10s that is light years ahead of what they've got in terms of convenience and clarity -- it's amazing to be able to talk to people about your physiology or their physiology or both in real time and see the phenomena with your own eyes.

I'm reading about research from the 1970s that has been forgotten and that's how you become the kind of person who sees "inevitable" where others see "impossible". Trying to keep up with the pack means you'll always be afraid of getting left behind. I've learned about so many other things the same way.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 96047]

Apple Configurator MDM profiles can control Siri behavior, e.g.

https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS

  Disable server-side logging of Siri requests for your Mac, iPhone and iPad
You can disable Siri (and Apple Intelligence) entirely via Apple Configurator or asking the nearest LLM for .mobileconfig file with:

  <key>allowAssistant</key><false/>

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 103800]

Boy my feelings about this are complex.

Right now I am in the middle of accessibility work for a game that students wrote and the hardest thing about the work is managing my emotions which involves a mixture of "unstable footing" and "moral injury".

The unstable footing is working with dull tools, having to find real solutions to real problems that don't break the game but also having to find ways to clear false alarms that SiteImprove finds and hopefully document it enough that the next people to work on the project can keep it accessible. I've found that most screen readers are trash (some lock up my computer) and have to test with a specific configuration that seems to work and just not concern myself with people using other tools. There is a lot of backtracking and asking "is there a different way we can do this?", etc.

The moral injury is that the whole process of WCAG, SiteImprove and all that actually erase the voices and experiences of disabled people. We are ticking boxes but never testing that disabled people can really use something, asking what they think, etc. Sometimes I feel that my values about craftsmanship are violated and that I am being accountable and my organization is being held accountable (our customers require this) but the WCAG standards people are not held accountable, SiteImprove is not being held accountable, vendors of trash screen readers are not being held accountable, the people who make frameworks like MUI aren't being held accountable, etc.

It helps that I believe in accessibility and that I believe in my organization and that it is seen as critical in my organization and that they give me the time and space to do work that feels like working in a collapsed building but on a bad day it feels like I am working very hard and giving my all for nothing.

---

As for the "invisible disabilities", I have one, they tried really hard to help me in school before there was a legal framework that enshrined the "students with a disability label can call Albany and Albany can light a fire under the ass of the superintendent and all the rest of the parents and students can just talk to the hand" regime. A good fraction of people who are fashionably autistic and ADHD and even transgender probably have what I have. 47 years after my first psych eval (all the signs and symptoms but no diagnosis) I turned it unequivocally into a superpower.

When I was an undergrad I knew a blind student who studied computer science, wrote C with a screen reader, volunteered for search and rescue and walked up a 13,000 foot mountain at night: he was asked what we could do for him and he said "i need to hold on the shoulder of someone ahead of me" and he was in the fastest group. There are two wheelchair icons in America: one of them suggests that someone is waiting passively for help in a wheelchair, the other one suggests you'd better watch out or you might get run down by someone in a wheelchair -- you know which one I like!

Many people who I would describe as "diss ability" activists would reject my story about my friend and they have a very anti-resilient attitude and what I'll say is that I do everything I can to shut those people out of my life. I feel my accessibility work is meaningless to those people, they are going to complain about everything in life and never recognize my hard work and dedication. But empowering people who will make the most of their abilities -- that gets me fired up and makes it all worth it.

I do see the class injustice. I've seen upper-middle class people with relatively little impairment get disability payments and severely impaired people not being able to get the paperwork started, even when I was personally helping them out.

So I can't accept the position of this article completely but I can't dismiss it either.