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.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189403]

To me it’s clear adding the ability to express intent to parallelise is the Right Thing. This is the only way the compiler can actually know what you want it to do.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189403]

One of the smallest sculptures in the universe.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189403]

What is the designed lifespan of a Starlink satellite?

Brajeshwar ranked #48 [karma: 75998]

Once upon a time, whenever I interview developers, most of them proudly announced their expertise in jQuery. I have to bring them down to the basics and ask them about JavaScript. Almost all of them were lost. I asked them, if not for this, but to learn JavaScript and all the other framework will that; a framework on top of JavaScript which one can just use (perhaps take a week or so ro learn).

The same goes for CSS. Everyone bolded, and highlighted their experience with Bootstrap but missed the CSS. I did used Bootstrap, Foundation, Skeleton, Bourbon, and many others, especially when working with the team, so we all can speak the same language. This is true for Tailwind too. I remember when Tailwind was still in alpha and I realized that was the perfect tool to bring the team together and move fast. I was able to use it both as a utility and like most other people as the HTML polluter (but it worked).

If one is keen, it is always a good idea to learn the core - HTML, CSS, JavaScript; all the frameworks that wraps them should just be syntactic sugar. Bootstrap came and went, so will Tailwind.

PS. With AI/LLM Coding Assist, writing in plain CSS is becoming beautiful again. I can outline what I want, give it a checklist and make it do the strenuous part of writing them. I don’t even have to remember the cascades.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89569]

The IBM MDA also had a 6845, and since it was driving a fixed-frequency monitor of extremely simple design, any deviation from the standard timings could definitely let the magic smoke out of the flyback transformer.

https://marc.info/?l=classiccmp&m=119637265107100

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 112234]

I always enjoy projects like this. Both because the are artistically neat and because the give me all sorts of ideas.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89569]

Weapons in general are far more highly regulated in Japan, and of course the citizens don't have the right to bear arms.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79697]

In 1978 I built a single board computer with a 6800 uP and a 6845 to drive the display. Made a keyboard for it, and it worked.

Unfortunately, in my many moves it has disappeared, though I still have the schematics for it.

Somehow I missed the boat on being a billionaire!

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89569]

Lots of it, especially in embedded systems.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

Apart from everything else people have said in response to this, it's rude to presume that an article has HN as an audience simply by dint of it being available for us to link to. It's totally reasonable for people to write for an audience they know understands these terms.

So, in fact, you must not beg to have authors include courtesy definitions for you. That's not reasonable. Instead, you should simply ask here, on the thread, without complaining about the article.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

But why would you show the MCP server URL as a clickable link in the first place, if it's not meant to be clicked? Put it in a monospaced box with a "copy to clipboard" button, it's not the fault of the user for not "thinking ahead" when they click a clickable link that wasn't actually meant to be clicked.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

Same showrunner is doing the current season of The Terror (a/k/a "North Pole Bear Show" in my review notes; that first season was excellent).

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

Are there any good robot animatronics for Halloween? I want a wendigo to walk around my yard.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Depends on elasticity, if you could have easily sold that $1000 worth of product and made $10k, then you spent $10k.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

This may be a nit or it may be something deeper, but I think you've jumped the rails when you attempt to associate Hindu nationalism with TESCREAL. Hindu nationalism is a much bigger (and older) phenomenon than anything happening in SFBA.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

That's happened to me a lot, to get a 503 service unavailable from a restaurant server.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Also the IATA code for the Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, could have meant one or the other, no way to know which.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

They retconned it as a typo for antipode in their headcanon.

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 83097]

Because that's the incentive that management faces. Their promotion is dependent upon having more headcount under them. The key metric in their resume that determines which jobs they are qualified for is how many people did they manage. They don't personally pay for that headcount. If they meet some baseline of output people don't really ask questions (or are able to judge) whether that headcount was necessary. So of course they seek more headcount.

I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76547]

This comment is completely divorced from the facts given in the article.

The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79697]

Check out the book "The Red Queen". The author points out that even chromosomes fight for survival at the expense of other chromosomes and the body. X chromosomes try to destroy the Y chromosome, for example.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...

This is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99686]

Why hire them at all then, just ask them what their favorite AI is and use that

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79697]

The most horrible example is the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Early commercial VHS tapes of it have the original music. Later tapes, and the DVDs, have all the music replaced with just awful generic music. That bad music just makes it unwatchable.

Music is an enormous factor in movies, I wonder why nobody mentions it. For example, the Lord of the Rings soundtrack is spectacular and adds greatly to the pleasure in watching it. In contrast, the soundtrack to The Hobbit sounds completely generic and boring, and the result is unwatchable.

Another example is Star Wars. The first two movies had amazingly good soundtracks. The later sequels had boring music, and whaddya know, the sequels were boring.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

Fucking hell, finally, some serious suggestions with teeth. Save our republic: Reform the judiciary, end gerrymandering, and take money out of politics.

Request: name names. Having this at the start is way better than letting it get watered down in conference down the road.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

The secret was .NET Native and C++/CX.

Contrary to Windows Phones, Android was still mostly JIT compiling, with Dalvik.

Windows Phone 8, used technology from Singularity, .NET Native apps were compiled on the cloud and what was downloaded was MDIL (Machine Dependent IL), on device only linking was performed.

Starting with Windows 10, everything was done on cloud and you got a binary targeted to device.

Android had to go through AOT compiler in version 5, 6, reintroduction of JIT with AOT on idle on 7, staring of PGO data across devices on 8, until it got into a similar kind of performance.

And to this day, NDK sucks compared with Windows Phone 8 C++/CX experience.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

> even as a fall back

Why this?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

Like many alternative implementations,I forsee Bun losing the little mindshare it has managed to achieve.

I don't have a single reason not to pick nodejs when doing JS.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

We also need to have StarLisp back, it would be quite fitting.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

We agree the correlation exists. The incredible materiality of it is what's in dispute. The obvious problem with these arguments is that people point to the correlation and say "see, I'm right about the materiality!".

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

Then people will stop using that software.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Yeah these cards have modern Greek words on them.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]
toomuchtodo ranked #25 [karma: 107955]

I’ve worked with Jason processing physical collections and he is one of my favorite humans. +1

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

In Portugal you have to do that at the bank terminals, otherwise going to the counter implies paying a services tax, depending on the kind of customer one happens to be.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

As Portuguese that was of great help, given the amount of words with Greek roots, understanding the alphabet automatically made me available several words that I already knew.

Naturally had to skill up on everything else.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91294]

>but most importantly: this means you must take seriously the possibility that we are gonna get superintelligence quite soon.

So, his point with all the demand for rigor is to end on a hand-waved jump of faith from "improved AI models" to the mythical "superintelligence"?

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189403]

> OpenClaw was OpenClaude

It can still be both.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91294]

>and to me Bun was less interesting because a.) it seemed like a much-less-ambitious Deno

I don't know, I've followed Deno, and it appeared to me an incredibly low ambition from the get go.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91294]

>Kinda yikes, not going to lie. I wonder if it's a setting on his side, or Apple in their infinite wisdom think they know better and just put the compressor/limiter knobs at eleven and call it a day.

The waveform seems to me more like normalized than totally squashed. Somewhat heavy on the compressor but still better dynamics than Death Magnetic.

In any case, the 80% use case for a laptop microphone is not to record music or even podcasts.

It's teleconferences, voice notes, voice recognition, and such. You don't want subtle dynamics and losing what's being said. You want heavy noice suppresion and automatic gain control.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92180]

If universities jailed everyone who did something stupid on their network, they'd have to close their computer science department for lack of students.

I once stood up a DHCP server without realizing I'd start serving addresses to my entire dorm. I shut it down after just a minute or so having served 10 or 15 addresses out. A few minutes later my dorm phone rang asking about what I had done. Fortunately I could say with a straight face I'd already shut it down.

(Before anyone says "why didn't they just", this would be 1997 or 1998. Networks and their tooling have come a long way since then.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

> such as making life difficult getting Schengen visas for all those US citizens you constantly read about on the CNN website who are flocking to Europe

Trashing your own tourism sector is a very European defense mechanism.

The truth is there is one and only one way Europe can try reclaiming sovereignty, and it’s the one that’s most painful—rebuilding its own military.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

Programming languages and operating systems as well.

Even if open source, currently there is no European plan on how to take care of supply chain on those.

Huawei came up with a full stack, after the ties were closed, as an example. OS and languages.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

Tailwind crazy adoption is something that makes me happy to nowadays be doing mainly boring stuff in distributed cloud systems and agents, instead of WebUIs.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]
coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91294]

GitHub is. Git doesn't care one way or another.

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92260]

Hey, that’s unfair.

He threw several.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108349]

Reruns were on for a long time after that. I remember the show fondly even though I was 8 when it ended.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108349]

Or any other country. It is not like you can keep that genie inside the bottle.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108349]

About 1/50 as popular as LAPACK!

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]

Single-question aptitude test: choose one

a. dead

b. in a nursing home

c. retired

d. one of the above

e. none of the above

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 110145]

"Education is just a CTF for the valuable flag of a credential. In this essay I will --"

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Nuclear isn't the enemy here.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 88069]

hello,

would you please recommend a good resource to get started with elixir ?

thanks for your time !

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

Here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79697]

This difficulty has been greatly reduced by git. With git, you can have the complete provenance of every line of code.

Git has ended the accusations people have leveled at me for code theft. (I beat them all back because I had meticulous documentation and the accusers always had nothing. Git just made that easy.)

For my work, Git (and Github) have been a godsend.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128975]

Given the kind of computer I had in 1996, you can even run in less, because I did so when the official name was still Objective Caml, and Caml Light was heavily used in education.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160612]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 110145]

Reform (Farage) got a different £5m under the table donation.

Robinson is gutter racism. Farage is trying to be its respectable face.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89569]

The Z80 is pipelined and thus has a higher latency but also higher throughput. Besides, memory was the bottleneck, in particular instruction fetches, so multicycle instructions made more sense. Related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6341137

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

> if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter

I'm seeing it with lawyers, too. Like, about law. (Just not in their subject matter.) To the point that I had a lawyer using Perplexity to disagree with actual legal advice I got from a subject-matter expert.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Roses are red

Violets are blue

AI is great

And so are you

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

> Should a person I don't like really have rights, or privacy?

For a society striking a British balance between security and privacy, I'd say it's fair to require people with violent convictions to (a) register public protests they plan to attend and (b) consent to facial-recognition surveillance in public. (One could hash, locally store and potentially hardware enforce the restriction on the device level.)

That doesn't mean I think it's okay for everyone around him to have to give up those rights. And I wouldn't support even that in America unless the individual is on probation.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

I don't know how they don't notice thousands of users driving through these "cornfields" at 60mph every day, though. You'd have thought that'd raise some alert?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

That's easy, and already done. Phones only touch untrusted content when they need to, it's just that they need to touch it immediately upon receipt

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 110145]

Oracle have routinely had multimillion pound contract failures and people keep buying from them. Big vendors are too big to fail.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 110145]

Not having the hardware vertical integration until buying Nokia was a big limitation. As was the use of resistive touchscreens, which usually requires a stylus to achieve any accuracy.

CE wasn't too bad. It was nice having mostly the same API as desktop windows, so you can easily cross-test.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83605]

Overall in the economy, no, rate is discoveries is not going to drop off.

But in any specific industry or area? You often get a bunch of big discoveries, and then there is a long period of no important discoveries, because we've figured out the main aspects of that technological paradigm. The technology becomes commoditized and standard.

And that's the trillion dollar question with AI right now -- will we soon exhaust the potential of the current LLM paradigm? And we'll just have 20 or 30 years of figuring out mainly how to make LLMs cheaper and how integrate them into business processes, before somebody comes up with another fundamental breakthrough?

Or are we only 10% of the way in developing the current LLM paradigm? Where a decade from now models virtually never make mistakes and are smarter than basically any tenured faculty member in their field?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Wtf people are doing this on purpose? What's wrong with people?

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 83097]

Did you ever hear the jingle? [1]

The main issue is that it's a bunch of kids (~5-8yo) singing "1-877 cars for kids, K-A-R-S Kars 4 Kids, 1-877-KARS-4-Kids, donate your car today". Given its resemblance to preschool-age kids songs, and that it was a bunch of very young kids singing it, and that it played incessantly over California radio stations, many people thought that it was a charity funding local underprivileged kids of preschool/school age, not gap years for 17-18 year old NYC and NJ residents in Israel. They were always up-front on the website about what it is (presumably how they avoid fraud charges), but how many people are going to check the website when they have the 877 number burned in their brain?

If you look at the lawsuits against them, they almost all fit that pattern: someone (often elderly) who heard the kids singing on the radio, had a junk car, and figured they'd go help some underprivileged kids. Sure, always read the fine print, but the judge listened to the jingle and agreed that it was pretty misleading. So did other judges in Pennsylvania and Oregon.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8UV7SAhvG4&list=RDK8UV7SAhv...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77601]

Wow, that's... quite the precedent. Presumably this is a Reform UK event, which I'm not a fan of, but still, I don't think this escalation of surveillance will end well.

The article says that drones "will scan the faces of suspects", suspects of what exactly? What crime has been committed that they suspect people for?

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92260]

> But I don't see what other options are available for states to compete with each other if not through tax breaks.

Federal ban on tax breaks for companies over a certain market cap?

Why can't they compete on "we have a good regulatory setup" or "we have good schools for your employees" or "we are a nice place to live"? Why compete on "we'll soak or own taxpayers more than the next state over so you can make even more obscene profits"?

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108349]

Out-of-spec flags are a classic tactic of imagineering.

There is a “flag code” which is basically an honor code (no real punishments for violating it) which holds that you are supposed to put a flag up in the morning and take it down at night unless you illuminate it. From time to time a visitor to Disney’s Main Street USA will note there are an awful lot of flags all over the place and there is no way they could be giving them the proper respect.

At this point a cast member steps in and explains that there is only one American flag in all of Main Street USA and all the rest of the flags are off-spec, like they have the wrong number of stripes or the wrong number of stars. They have a really nice ceremony at the end of the day when they take the one flag down and that person who cares about the flag code might get to take it down himself.

(Reminds me of that dark time in the pandemic when identitarians were interested in strange flags such as the blue stripe flag and pride flag variations… Ouch!)

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

I have an extended take on things like Drata and Vanta elsewhere in the thread. I think they're great if you know what you're doing, but dangerous if you don't: the expenses they incur are insidious, because they're not the sticker price of the software or the audit, but rather the unnecessary engineering they lead you to do.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

No. People have weird beliefs about what fiduciary duty means. It does not mean that companies are required at all intervals to maximize revenue or profit.

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 74633]

It is not illegal to be petty during business negotiations.

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92260]

Is there any reason to believe "an Orthodox Jewish program in New York and New Jersey" is run by Israeli citizens and not Americans?

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92260]

I didn't realize this was an actual company; I only know of it from The Good Place.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

I went back on Archive.org, and it does seem to be the case that they've been up front about their religious affiliation (online) at least since 2013, when I stopped looking.

The pitch K4K has had for most of this time isn't about the good that they do so much as that they're very good at picking up your car conveniently and maximizing the IRS impact of the donation.

(Donating your car is probably not a good deal and you might be better off just having it bought and picked up by a salvager, and then taking the money and donating that.)

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420445]

There is no such thing as "average IQ" for countries. An ultra-common low-IQ take, ironically.

What is the average IQ of Malawi? Literally nobody knows. Anybody who claims one is lying to you. In "IQ & The Wealth Of Nations" (the Ur-source for these kinds of claims), they got a number for Malawi by averaging Congo, Zaire, and Tanzania. In turn, the Congo numbers were based in part on general cognitive test scores taken from 40 rural children being treated for parasitic infections, projected out to the whole population, and then modified down to "correct" for the Flynn Effect.

Those are the kinds of numbers you're citing when you make these kinds of claims.

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 74633]

I suspect "Rust is fast/low memory utilization" is the more common value proposition, with memory safety as the bonus that can push it over other fast languages.

Related: If AI writes your code, why use Python? (which notes why Rust has taken off for LLMs) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48100433

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 183480]

> Can you cite a reference for this assertion?

It's not. The current vogue in the American social sciences is projecting America's Black-White / colonist-colonised dualism onto the world regardless of the facts on the ground.

Malawi was hunting and gathering until the 10th century [1] and colonised by Europeans in the late 19th century. That makes it simultaneously one of the last places in the contiguous old world to be settled and one of the last in Africa to have been European colonised. If the standard outliers to any macroeconomic theory are Japan and Argentina, then Malawi occupies a similar niche in theories of history and development.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162348]

> "Tbh they could've just hooked up zig translate-c to c2rust".

Have you ever seen what comes out of c2rust? It's awful. It relies on a library of functions which emulate unsafe C pointer semantics with unsafe Rust.

A few years ago, when I was struggling with bugs in OpenJPEG (a JPEG 2000 decoder), someone tried running it through c2rust. The converted unsafe rust segfaulted at the same place the C code did. It's compatible, but not safe.

Main insight: don't do string manipulation in C or unsafe Rust. It's totally the wrong tool for the job.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 162348]

That's a tough problem - distinguishing wet pavement from deep water. Humans make that mistake frequently. Autonomous vehicles should probably be equipped with a water sensor. (We did that in our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle back in 2005). Then they can enter water very cautiously and see if it's too deep. This may make them too cautious about shallow puddles on roads, though.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83605]

> It also reminded me what an excellent job Wikipedia does with their hierarchical classification

As someone who once tried to use that supposedly hierarchical classification for data organization, it is unfortunately not excellent at all.

It is rather arbitrary, inconsistent, extremely incomplete, and not infrequently circular. Think of it more like a bunch of haphazardly applied tags that make perfect sense in the context of a single page, but quite frequently make very little sense when you look at the actual pages and sub categories that belong to a category. Category membership is just not something visible enough for it to wind up being organized and curated in any kind of systematically accurate way.

On the other hand, the presence of an infobox of a certain type is extremely reliable for categorizing many types of articles.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99686]

Maybe they could devote some resources to updating Amazon's customer facing AI instead. I ordered some programming books last night, and was told they'd arrive tomorrow (I'm a prime member and live near a major hub so this is the norm). This morning I found the date had been pushed back to May 27, a very surprising outcome (these were popular books from O'Reilly and similarly high volume publishers, not some obscure imprint).

I asked Alexa (on the amazon web page) about it and it couldn't tell me which carrier had the items or why they were delayed, directed me to a non-existent phone number and then denied it had done so. The customer service bot I was eventually redirected to was even worse, and started telling my that items would be delivered both tomorrow and by May 27 in the same message. Finally I got human intervention, who said the items would arrive tomorrow and that the delivery status had been updated, but the order page still says they're arriving at the end of next week.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127871]

This might be breach of contract, fraud, or violation of some more jurisdiction-specific business law, but you really need to talk to a lawyer about the specific details of your case to get advice on the legalities and your options and the prospects of each in pursuing a remedy.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92180]

It's an interesting idea, and it may be something that could be mathematically justified, but I do think this is an abuse of Lindy's Law in the absence of such a justification. Per Wikipedia [1]:

"The Lindy effect applies to non-perishable items, like books, those that do not have an "unavoidable expiration date"."

And later in the article you can see the mathematical formulation which says the law holds for things with a Pareto distribution [2]. I'd want to see some sort of good analysis that "the life span of exponential growth curves" is drawn from some Pareto distribution. I don't think it's completely out of the question. But I'm also nowhere near confident enough that it is a true statement to casually apply Lindy's Law to it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]
coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91294]

>Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then.

So? No shortage of "multi-billion dollar companies" that became footnotes. Blackberry. Nokia. SGI. ...

Let's be overly dramatic, cause it's more accurate to how bad they had it.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126525]

> Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you.

Us lawyers. Using AI isn't a binary decision. Your attorneys can use AI to be more efficient, and you can use AI to better understand what's going on, what your lawyers are telling you, or to learn what questions to ask. Or you can use it in lower-stakes situations where nobody is going to pay for a lawyer.

I'm cautiously optimistic about AI for legal work. So much of legal work can be drudgery, mucking through documents, etc. There's a lot of room to apply LLMs even just for the kind of tasks we know they can do. But I think the Claude approach using agents is the way to go for legal work. LLM context windows are far too small to hold the documents for even a small case. So you have to use it the way programmers use it: to work on a file structure, saving state in .md files, etc. That approach is well developed for programming, but the legal AI companies haven't even scratched the surface of it. (And frankly, the products they have put together, which hide the LLM behind some sort of interface, aren't very good.)

Unfortunately, I think the example you mentioned (helping individuals defend against suits at lower cost) is where AIs won't help much. A lot of that work is people work. Something happened. Then you gotta talk to everyone it happened to, sort through conflicting stories, hopefully work out a deal, if not, try to persuade a judge in court, etc. AI unfortunately is more applicable to allowing big companies to throw more papers at each other in big lawsuits while controlling legal spend.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92180]

Which isn't a hierarchy, it's a tagging system. The tags have some hierarchy but that's not uncommon. The distinguishing characteristic of "nested hierarchy" is that a particular thing should only appear exactly once in the hierarchy.

Since this is so terribly impossible most systems almost immediately make it possible for things to show up in more than one place, which means it's actually hierarchial tagging, whether or not the organizer(s) realize it.

You could also make a distinction based on how many tags things end up with; if it's almost always one, you could call it a nested hierachy with some exceptions, but if it's almost always more than one, and often much, much more than one, it's a tagging system. Even by that criterion that creates a spectrum rather than a binary distinction, Wikipedia is very much organized by tags and not hierarchies. I don't know what the average is but every Wikipedia page I've ever looked at the tags for has quite a few.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 106590]
jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92180]

Except the GP quote actually happens.

For example, if you've ever wondered why useless art trades at such eye-watering valuations, the answer is that the high valuations are fictions that governments will accept for tax purposes, from which you can derive a variety of exciting tax consequences: https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f... more-or-less because they agree among themselves what the art is valuated at for their own benefit.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92180]

I don't think anyone is asking you to stupidly follow the advice off a cliff. You're welcome to call "stripping all your screw heads" broken and take appropriate action.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76547]

Your comment is responding to an issue that is different from what GP said. GP was talking about Chinese open source particularly, i.e. their open source models, which AFAIK have consistently been keeping up with (albeit a few steps behind) the closed source OpenAI and Anthropic models.

Hardware capacity is a separate issue entirely.

jerf ranked #33 [karma: 92180]

I've been using this as a touchstone for whether or not we are actually going to take security seriously for a long time.

We've moved slightly closer to this, but in a world where we're still arguing over memory safety being necessary we've probably still got a ways to go before we notice that addition silently overflowing is a top-10 security issue. It's the silent top-10 security issue, I guess.

ceejayoz ranked #32 [karma: 92260]

Those two aren't quite comparable; Orkney's been inhabited since before ancient Egypt. Tristan's much more recent, from when we needed stopping points everywhere for sailing ships to pick up water etc.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 110145]

Lots of people reporting their "I had to use up my tokens, so I burned them on worthless stuff" stories. Incredible thing to do in a climate emergency. Push harder guys, maybe we can hit 3C warming?

This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.