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.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

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

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

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

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 96164]

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

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 133217]

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

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

For example:

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

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

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #45 [karma: 74841]

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

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

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

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

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

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76604]

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

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

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126088]

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

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

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172226]

> a world destroyed by generations

This hyperbole isn’t helpful. The world won’t be destroyed. (If you promise annihilation and are visited simply by devastation, it reduces credibility in an unnecessary way.)

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 86771]

Maybe he’s hoping for sea level rise these days. Enough to submerge a particular island.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101699]

There was a guy who wrote a blog post in that style who was wondering how it was he'd posted hundreds of messages to people on LinkedIn and gotten no replies.

There are some people who insist on spamming out splog posts in that style, some of them think they are blogging, not splogging, and maybe they have good intentions but that style screams "SPAM!" and unfortunately people who are writing that don't understand how it comes across.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101699]

Or a step up from that: build a compiler that converts queries in a human-friendly or application-specific language to SQL or something similar.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 124935]

https://www.awrestaurants.com/press/press-release/101921-aw-... ("In the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with the immensely popular McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by offering a bigger, juicier ⅓ Pound Burger at the same price. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t so great at math. Confused consumers wrongly assumed that ¼ was bigger than ⅓ (You know, because 4 is bigger than 3) and the whole experiment went down in history as a huge marketing fail.").

jgrahamc ranked #30 [karma: 93367]

Oh wow. Did I really write that 11 years ago! How time flies.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]

>The EV company sold fewer than 39,000 Cybertrucks in 2024, according to Cox Automotive data — far below the company’s eventual goal of 250,000 per year. As of October, Tesla had delivered just 17,317 units in 2025, a 42% drop compared to the same period in 2024.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77225]

"OpenAI rejected me so the entire industry is going to collapse" is certainly a take. They are still probably one of the less arrogant engineers in silicon valley.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123225]

The idea of blending applications is as old as X Windows servers on Windows like Hummingbird, although it wasn't virtualization, the remote X Windows applications would blend on the desktop.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123225]

A minority that does most of the work, without which you wouldn't be posting that comment from a GNU/Linux system, using a kernel compiled with GCC.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123225]

This is really cool, the kind of content great to see here.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126088]

> Because zoning reforms that allow higher density may lower the value of the house

For most detached single family homes in in-demand areas where housing (and thus sustainable population) are constrained by the supply of housing units, they probably won't do that, either; not only will they increase the land value, the fact that they increases population while decreasing the supply of ainglet-family homes will drive up the price of existing single family homes.

What it does, though, is reduce the use value (experienced utility of use) for current owner-residents for whom the particular local character is a factor in enjoyment, and make alternative replacements with the quality that is now missing from the current home that are in the same area (and thus compatible with existing jobs, etc.) harder to find, as well.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

Feynman wrote in his autobiography that much of his success came from having different mathematical tricks than most of his peers. So when they were stuck, he could sometimes make progress.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

Not quite a "cooking robot". It's a really fancy blender.

As a company, they don't seem to have anything as complicated as the Neato robot vacuum. So they presumably lack the in-house expertise to maintain it.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

> Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)

For a lot of people I know, this is the light technique!

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

I wonder about this. There's all this noise about a great housing shortage in San Francisco, but the population of SF is up only 65,000 people in 10 years. There are a lot more tall buildings. This may be a monopoly overpricing situation rather than an actual shortage. There's a huge amount of empty office space.

Remember, the world passed "peak baby" back in 2013. Population is leveling off in the developed world.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

I'd like to see a more technical article on this. Airbus has triple redundancy in the flight control computers.[1] And they're different CPUs - one AMD, one Intel, one Motorola, all doing the same job. If flight was disrupted, they should have had lots of alarms.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26587285_Challenges...

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

Scrapping them off the wall is not pleasant, though. But throw enough of them at it, I guess the wall eventually goes down too.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

> There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms.

I think this is merely the shift from doing this as a hobby, to doing this for work. Random coding problems mixed with banter I posted or answered on IRC back in the day? Purely hobby stuff, things I done after school instead of doing my homework. No stakes beyond the community itself, I could disengage at any moment, nobody would care - there was no commitment of any kind involved.

Today? Even if we switched back from Slack/Teams/whatnot to IRC, the fact remains, the other people are my co-workers, and we're talking about work, and it's all made of commitments and I can't disengage, or else I starve.

That changes the dynamic quite a bit.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123225]

What about neither?

If it must be Web, run the application headless and launch the system browser.

But really if 50 year olds can jungle between native and Web, so do you.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87127]

They are virtualizing it!

This is incidentally how Windows 386-9x ran DOS applications - in a VM, using V86 mode.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77988]

We have the Dlang conference once a year where we all meet in person. It's amazingly productive. And yes, we do video chatting frequently. It just isn't the same.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97664]

Spherical geometers: the trolls of the math world

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97664]

Now you're just changing the argument. The mental copy of HN you have, besides being incomplete, is not copyable or resaleable.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77988]

My dad was an amateur photographer for a while, and even got one of his photos published in the newspaper.

He said nothing improves a landscape picture more than having a person in the picture. I didn't believe him.

Later, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and took maybe 300 landscape pictures of its beauty. Upon looking at them at home, I realized he was right. The ones with people in them, even random strangers, were always more interesting.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 101699]

I suspect that he has worked a 40 hour day.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79428]

You're asking how you opt out of taxes. You don't.

And everything you earn isn't rightfully yours. It's supported by an infrastructure of national defense, courts, police, building regulations, and so forth. You get many years of public school for free. Etc. etc. You didn't do this solo.

So the cost of all the benefits you get as a citizen is to contribute your rightful share, that share being decided democratically in which you have a vote.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90638]

The discussion is about triangles in hyperbolic space. In hyperbolic space, if you keep extending a triangle's lines out by moving the intersection farther away, you'll tend toward a triangle with a constant area (pi in the article because the curve was chosen for that, you can have any arbitrary finite value you want by varying the curvature) even though the perimeter keeps going up.

If that sounds like so much technobabble, that's because this article assumed what I think is a very specific level of knowledge about hyperbolic space, as it doesn't explain what it is, yet this is one of the very first things you'll ever learn about it. So it has a rather small target audience of people who know what hyperbolic space is but didn't know that fact about triangles. If you'd like to catch up with what hyperbolic space is, YouTube has a lot of good videos about it: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hyperbolic+spac... And as is often the case with geometry, videos can be a legitimate benefit that is well taken advantage of and not just a "my attention span has been destroyed by TikTok" accomodation.

Including CodeParade's explanations, which are notable in that he made a video game (Hyperbolica) in which you can even walk around in it if you want, with an option for doing it in VR (though that is perhaps the weirdest VR experience I had... I didn't get motion sick per se, but my brain still objected in a very unique manner and I couldn't do it for very long). It's been out and on Steam for a while now, so you can run through the series where he is talking about the game he is in the process of creating at the time and go straight to trying it out, if you want.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181308]
userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87127]

Unless you fly as often as pilots and other onboard staff, it's unlikely to be significant.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87127]

I'm disappointed that it doesn't fly.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88509]

It's a shame EmbeddingGemma is under the shonky Gemma license. I'll be honest: I don't remember what was shonky about it, but that in itself is a problem because now I have to care about, read and maybe even get legal advice before I build anything interesting on top of it!

(Just took a look and it has the problem that it forbids certain "restricted uses" that are listed in another document which it says it "is hereby incorporated by reference into this Agreement" - in other words Google could at any point in the future decide that the thing you are building is now a restricted use and ban you from continuing to use Gemma.)

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74522]

What, `def main():`? Or do you mean the __name__ == "__main__" thing for distinguishing whether the code was imported?

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74522]

I'm one of those people, but I have an absolutely bizarre response to the drug. I've tried to start it five times, and failed four.

I'll have one of two responses:

1. The drug works, and it completely eliminates food noise and the desire to eat unhealthy foods, but I'll get severe side effects (massive diarrhea, vomiting, burps that reek of rotten egg). I lose weight, but a lot of it because I can't keep anything down.

2. The drug doesn't work almost at all. I get minimal effects, and minimal side effects. This is where I am now, I've been consistently going up in dose (incrementally, so I don't trigger the side effects). I'm at 10mg now, and there's minimal effect.

Just mystifying.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414003]

There will likely never be federation between Signal's official servers and any other servers. Signal introduces privacy features semiregularly; we all saw with Matrix how difficult that is in a highly-federated environment.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

OTOH it's nice to have an alternative client. If E2EE messenger system is going to lock itself down hard, trying to "protect" itself from the user even harder than third party adversaries, then I personally see no point - might as well use Whatsapp.

I miss the times IM software respected, or at least didn't fight hard to defeat, the end-user's freedom to computing on their own device, which includes viewing and sending messages through whatever interface they see fit, including indirectly as part of a script/automation. But that was all before E2EE era, hell, before mobile dominance.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74522]

That's not the point the GP was making. They meant "I'd rather give up a bit of privacy for a big increase in usability, as I'm not in the group of people that needs extreme privacy". I happen to agree with them, I get more benefit from a fairly-private messaging app my friends can use than from an extremely-private messaging app nobody in my social circle can use.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

A belief system that there is value in this form of forum participation.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87127]

1960s/early 1970s for me.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

I love this, and would pay for native or electron app on Mac. Like Google Earth for global airspace.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94745]

Buyer could not fire existing customers, as Broadcom did with VMware.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90638]

Arbitration is still a pretty big money sink for them. If enough people do it then it becomes a problem for them. There have been instances of companies reinstating normal class action lawsuits back into their EULAs because it turned out that forced arbitration wasn't a magical wonderland of cost cutting for them after all. Forced arbitration and especially when they have a clause that forbids class-action arbitration can turn into a huge liability for them even if they nominally win every instance.

The fundamental financial maneuver of the modern world is to take modest risks of modest loss and financially engineer it into a smaller risk of much, much larger loss, with a higher expected loss (risk*size) in the end after the engineering than before. Forced arbitration (and especially when class arbitration is banned) is that manuever in the legal sphere. It isn't a ticket out of the risk entirely, it's shoving that risk under the rug and making it net larger. If you and a few hundred of your closest friends put their minds to it you can trigger that smaller-chance-of-larger-disaster scenario and all you have to do is file... you don't even have to win.

I won't deny it's an uphill battle but the forced arbitration clauses can be turned to consumer's advantage with relatively modest coordination, you just need to get enough annoyed people together.

(I can't help you with this one, I don't have a car with this problem. Your few hundred closest friends will need standing.)

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87127]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset

Apparently it has happened to an Airbus once before.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 94745]

"Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate account" (2022), 500 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 167730]

in german it’s

“Schere Stein Papier”

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]
minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 73057]

Don't use all-MiniLM-L6-v2 for new vector embeddings datasets.

Yes, it's the open-weights embedding model used in all the tutorials and it was the most pragmatic model to use in sentence-transformers when vector stores were in their infancy, but it's old and does not implement the newest advances in architectures and data training pipelines, and it has a low context length of 512 when embedding models can do 2k+ with even more efficient tokenizers.

For open-weights, I would recommend EmbeddingGemma (https://huggingface.co/google/embeddinggemma-300m) instead which has incredible benchmarks and a 2k context window: although it's larger/slower to encode, the payoff is worth it. For a compromise, bge-base-en-v1.5 (https://huggingface.co/BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5) or nomic-embed-text-v1.5 (https://huggingface.co/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v1.5) are also good.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79428]

Seriously. I thought about doing the same because I couldn't make heads or tails of the article, and then assumed it would just all be downvotes... glad to see it wasn't.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

More than halfway through the article: "I remember very viscerally when I’d just come out of the closet as bisexual in 2016." The article looks too much like someone projecting their own problems on society generally.

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74522]

I have solved this by not feeling like I need to apologise for my thoughts. I didn't know that anyone thinks otherwise, and I find it odd.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

Are we seeing lobbying for liability exemptions for AI errors? That's probably the biggest practical concern on the consumer side.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

Great work! Perhaps not the appropriate OSI layer, but would be cool if this could pull the imgur blob from the wayback machine if unavailable on imgur proper. You'd still need this networking setup, as archive.org is blocked as well in the UK per ground truth from others on HN.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

Linux.

I retired the last Windows machine last year.

Firefox on Linux, though, is not working very well. It keeps hanging during long typing inputs. No CPU or disk usage, just stuck. And it uses so much memory that the OOM killer sometimes kills it.

I was never a Linux fanatic. It's just that I considered an operating system with ads unacceptable. I rather liked Windows 7.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]
Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157584]

Just when you think Stellantis couldn't do anything worse...

This is the company that ran Chrysler into the ground. The only remaining Chrysler product is one mini-van.

They raised the prices on Jeeps so much that they lost their market. They went the "mild hybrid" route, with such silly things as 21 miles of electric range.

The Stellantis dealers signed a joint letter demanding that the CEO be fired. That was done. It didn't seem to help.

(I own a pre-Stellantis Jeep Wrangler, and would like to buy a replacement, but Jeep now has nothing I want.)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

Ehh, tell me the credit ratings assigned by rating agencies to mortgage backed securities circa 2005-2007. Its an ecosystem with misaligned incentives, and some cohort of investor will be left holding the bag. Big Tech, investment banks, and ratings agencies will get off with no consequences when this Jenga-esq capital apparatus eventually collapses.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

Makes me glad I have aphantasia, because "undressing someone with my eyes" is a metaphorical expression for me, and I don't have to worry about thinking something I might then need to apologize for. Now for the people who can visualize things in their mind, it's probably quite a lot more literal...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

Please continue to report business destroying vulns. The only thing that slows hype down is consequences.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 77988]

When I did a 4 year stint in college, nobody had ever heard of Microsoft.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88509]

My advice for building something like this: don't get hung up on a need for vector databases and embedding.

Full text search or even grep/rg are a lot faster and cheaper to work with - no need to maintain a vector database index - and turn out to work really well if you put them in some kind of agentic tool loop.

The big benefit of semantic search was that it could handle fuzzy searching - returning results that mention dogs if someone searches for canines, for example.

Give a good LLM a search tool and it can come up with searches like "dog OR canine" on its own - and refine those queries over multiple rounds of searches.

Plus it means you don't have to solve the chunking problem!

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

Fair, I was under the impression that some strains of influenza viruses are in the mix too, but apparently they're distinct and not part of the cocktail (surprising, given how the other viruses found themselves bucketed like this - they evolved to lose potency over time; I'd expect influenza strains would be on the same trajectory).

Still, my main point holds - you usually can't tell by symptoms alone, whether it's a common cold or a flu. In case you get severe symptoms, by the time you can, you've already been infectious for some time. So either way, the right time to call in sick is when you first notice the early symptoms - stuffy/runny nose, cough, headache, elevated body temperature. But obviously nobody does that, because it would mean calling in sick at random a dozen or more times per year.

Post-lockdown COVID was the only time I know of in the last few decades, and a brief time indeed, when it was socially acceptable to react to potential symptoms at the right time.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

In most vehicles, you can pull the cellular capability (either a physical sim or the RF component). You'll lose telematics, but will also lose this.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414003]

I don't think this is true. It's an anti-goal of "modern" IQ tests (with a generous definition of "modern").

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

Not to mention, most arguments about costs of AI inference are plain inane.

AI search being 10x more expensive than Google query? That's just a silly, meaningless number - especially considering that a good AI response easily stops the user from making 5+ search queries to get the same results, and AI query itself can easily issue the equivalent of 10-20 search queries + spends compute analyzing their results.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123225]

Depends.

Can they get rid of Typescript, npm, Github, VS, VSCode, .NET, C#, F#, C++ / DirectX, Next.js, vcpkg, Microsoft contributions to Java, Rust, and Linux kernel, on their students teaching materials?

If they can switch to UNIX FOSS technologies with zero trace of Microsoft's money sponsorship, and hinder the students careers in specific job markets, then surely.

People usually never look beyond getting rid of Office and Windows.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88509]

https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/717b3d64d6...

> [THIS IS AI GENERATED, NEED TO EDIT] The manga that asked [...]

They do at least have "NEED TO EDIT" in there, but this prose was openly generated by AI as a starting point.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79428]

Short answer: to Google it's not so bad but it's not like the legal risks are any different from Microsoft. And to the rest -- yes it is very hard.

Universities need cloud storage with online collaboration and a fully functioning office suite.

LibreOffice doesn't work because it's desktop-only and has no collaboration. However, there's an online-collaboration fork called Collabora Online, and you can use something like Nextcloud to provide your own privately hosted cloud backend. But obviously this is a gigantic effort for the university's IT department to provide and maintain with reliable redundancies and backups.

Also, LibreOffice/Collabora is pretty good if you stick to its native formats, but its interoperability with MS Office files has a lot of bugs.

In the end, it's just cheaper and more reliable to use MS or Google like everyone else. Students, professors and administrators wind up having basically the same needs around office software as businesses do.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126088]

In the US, you might wait for criminal action if it was progressing to initiate civil action because (1) a criminal conviction can be used as evidence (and it is asymmetrical, because an actual doesn't have the same weight), and (2) criminal process can result in a restitution order which makes civil action unnecessary (and in some jurisdictions may allow recovery from a dedicated fund for victims of crime even if no recovery is possible from the perpetrator, and in that sense may be better than winning a civil action), and (3) criminal prosecution doesn't cost the victim money, civil prosecution generally does.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126088]

> Adoption = number of users

> Adoption rate = first derivative

If you mean with respect to time, wrong. The denonimator in adoption rate that makes it a “rate” is the number of existing businesses, not time. It is adoption scaled to the universe of businesses, not the rate of change of adoption over time.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88509]

Apollo published a similar chart in September 2025: https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down... - their headline for that one was "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies".

I had fun with that one getting GPT-5 and ChatGPT Code Interpreter to recreate it from a screenshot of the chart and some uploaded census data: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/

Then I repeated the same experiment with Claude Sonnet 4.5 after Anthropic released their own code interpreter style tool later on that same day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/claude-code-interpreter...

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126088]

> Not to mention, cold is an infectious disease too (it's literally the same disease, just a weaker variant caused by strains that evolved their potency away)

“The cold” is actually any of a wide variety of different viral diseases (caused by various forms of rhinovirus, coronavirus [0], and, I think, a few other kinds of viruses), none of which are flu (influenza virus). It is not a less potent flu.

[0] so calling COVID-19 “a bad cold” is correct from a certain point of view, despite being substantively misleading.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414003]

Nobody has to implement the algorithm only NSA wants! That's not how RFCs work.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414003]

We just had a thread about this 4 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033151

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414003]

It's been under /lists practically since the site started, when /lists was just a dump of interesting rollups 'pg could think of. There's probably less thought put into its placement than you think.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79428]

If all you need is a bag of named blobs and you just want quick reasonable compression supported across all platforms, why not?

If you don't need any table/relational data and are always happy to rewrite the entire file on every save, ZIP is a perfectly fine choice.

It's easier than e.g. a SQLite file with a bunch of individually gzipped blobs.

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 96164]

It works fine with jj. I have a line in my Claude.md to tell it to make sure to close before committing, and I don’t use the hooks that are provided.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

https://archive.today/aqgj0

Study:

”Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5770722 - November 19, 2025

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

Stupid question, but:

- If it's safe to "ignore scripts", why does this option exist in the first place?

- Otherwise, what kind of cascade breakage in dependencies you risk by suppressing part of their installation process?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103155]

After impact is when any action would occur. Many automakers are using either supercapacitors or some smaller battery and logic to enable doors to function after impact.

My example of seat belt pretensioners wasn’t to demonstrate when the action would be taken, but that pyrotechnics and vehicle dynamics are components of orchestrating a controlled failure mode in the event of a crash.

> General Motors Co. has since made the Corvette door’s emergency release handle more visible, the company said. Graphics on the handle, which lies on the floor next to the door, illustrate its function. GM also has added a “bystander access” feature on its e-doors to unlock them after a crash, so first responders or good Samaritans can free the occupants.

> Stellantis NV engineered a similar system on Jeep and Dodge models with electric doors, where airbag deployment automatically unlocks all doors. Stellantis and Ford also have outfitted their electric doors with supercapacitors that act as a battery backup to keep the power flowing to the latches even when a car’s 12-volt battery has died. And Ford, in response to this year’s recall, updated the software on its Mach-E to keep electricity flowing to door handles for 12 minutes after the small battery that normally supplies them — separate from the electric car’s main battery pack — goes dead.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-electric-car-doors/ | https://archive.today/YETme

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

It was, back when software development was run by hackers and not suits and security people. Easy access was a feature for users, too; back in those days, software was a tool that worked on data, it didn't try to own the data.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99050]
crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79428]

Yeah but that approach using "sweeps" doesn't seem to be working. It's possible it actually requires a camera to do it reliably well.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112538]

So did I. I know Gemini the protocol exists, but the reality is, in almost every context "Gemini" is so much, much more likely to refer to Google's LLM that I'm taken aback when it doesn't.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123225]

Unfortunely it was to be expected, the mighty ones would not rest until they managed to make it happen.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88509]

User-facing software is full of language like that these days and I find it really frustrating, because it never helps answer the questions attentive people actually have, like will that mean my emails get dumped into the next Gemini training run?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234042]

It is a massive assumption that reform will win the elections.

simonw ranked #33 [karma: 88509]

The Beads project uses Beads itself as an issue tracker, which means their issues data is available here as JSONL:

https://github.com/steveyegge/beads/blob/main/.beads/issues....

Here's that file opened in Datasette Lite which makes it easier to read and adds filters for things like issue type and status:

https://lite.datasette.io/?json=https://github.com/steveyegg...