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.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

Yeah, at some point people are going to work out that the problem isn't Johnny, it's email. Email is distinctively hostile to secure messaging. No matter what software Johnny uses, "secure" email will always be inferior to alternative options.

https://www.latacora.com/blog/2020/02/19/stop-using-encrypte...

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87192]

To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.

After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer

I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things

That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

The trouble with formal specification, from someone who used to do it, is that only for some problems is the specification simpler than the code.

Some problems are straightforward to specify. A file system is a good example. The details of blocks and allocation and optimization of I/O are hidden from the API. The formal spec for a file system can be written in terms of huge arrays of bytes. The file system is an implementation to store arrays on external devices. We can say concisely what "correct operation" means for a file system.

This gets harder as the external interface exposes more functionality. Now you have to somehow write down what all that does. If the interface is too big, a formal spec will not help.

Now, sometimes you just want a negative specification - X must never happen. That's somewhat easier. You start with subscript checking and arithmetic overflow, and go up from there.

That said, most of the approaches people are doing seem too hard for the wrong reasons. The proofs are separate from the code. The notations are often different. There's not enough automation. And, worst of all, the people who do this stuff are way into formalism.

If you do this right, you can get over 90% of proofs with a SAT solver, and the theorems you have to write for the hard cases are often reusable.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]

I can see "no progress in 50 years" in fundamental physics where the experimental frontier seems to be running away from us (though recent gamma astronomy results suggest a next generation accelerator really could see the dark matter particle)

In biology or chemistry it's absurd to say that -- look at metal organic frameworks or all kinds of new synthetic chemistry or ionic liquids or metagenomics, RNA structure prediction, and unraveling of how gene regulation works in the "dark genome".

Progress in the 'symbolic AI' field that includes proof assistants is a really interesting story. When I was a kid I saw an ad for Feigenbaum's 3-volume "Handbook of AI" and got a used copy years later -- you would have thought production rules (e.g. "expert systems" or "business rules") were on track to be a dominant paradigm but my understanding was that people were losing interest even before RETE engines became mainstream and even the expert system shells of the early 1980s didn't use the kind of indexing structures that are mainstream today so that whereas people we saying 10,000 rule rule bases were unruly in the 1980s, 10,000,000 well-structured rules are no problem now. Some of it is hardware but a lot of it is improvements in software.

SAT/SMT solvers (e.g. part of proof assistants) have shown steady progress in the last 50 years, though not as much as neural networks because they are less parallelization. There is dramatically more industrial use of provers though business rules engines, complex event processing, and related technologies are still marginal in the industry for reasons I don't completely understand.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97821]

Bleen Jay. It's more blue than green, and and also forms a mildly amusing pun, which is good for marketing.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97821]

You're mad about a 'split of opinions on new thing' story from nearly 4 years ago?

I don't believe you're serious. If Mr Rogers were broadcasting for the first time now opponents of public media would be deriding it as woke propaganda and worse.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103479]
rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125113]

How were we not already doing this?

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89356]

Parent meant this as a statement of fact (stating it's x that lies, and implying it's not y, or that x lies more than y). As such (true or not) it makes perfect sense, and requires only a very intuitive and casual understanding to get it.

Your comment reads as if it was some failed attempt at some kind of axiomatic construction (x lies _therefore_ y doesn't).

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

Right. Congress has the power to preempt state law in an area related to interstate commerce by legislating comprehensive rules. The executive branch does not have the authority to do that by itself.

This is like Trump's "pardon" of someone serving time for a state crime. It does little if anything.

Quite a number of AI-related bills have been introduced in Congress, but very few have made much progress. Search "AI" on congress.gov.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89356]

>Dyslexia seems to be more of an issue in English than other languages right?

I don't think so. It's medicalization or pathologization of dyslexia that's probably more of a thing in Engish. Same way many issues get medicalized and whole cottage industries and jobs grow around them

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

> "Below are the brands I’ve identified as most likely to have dumb TVs available for purchase online as of this writing."

That just has to be an LLM at work.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181710]
coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89356]

I wouldn't send all my typing across all apps on a third party company. Even worrying they get to the mobile OS company it's already stretching it...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99736]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]

As a Plex user I'd recommend a used last-gen game console as a TV source. In my AV room upstairs I've had an XBOX ONE S for a long time and more recently I got a PS4 Pro for the spare room downstairs -- both at Gamestop. I have some games for both of them but I am more likely to game on Steam, Steam Deck or mobile.

Every Android-based media player I've had tried just plain sucks, the NVIDIA Shield wasn't too bad but at some point the controller quit charging. You can still get a game console with a built-in Blu-Ray player too and it's nice to have one box that does that as well as being an overpowered for streaming.

I have a HDHomeRun hooked up to a small antenna pointed at Syracuse which does pretty well except for ABC, sometimes I think about going up on the roof and pointing the small one at Binghamton and pointing a large one at Syracuse but I am not watching as much OTA as I used to. It's nice though being able to watch OTA TV on either TV, any computer, tablets, phones, as well as the Plex Pass paying for the metadata for a really good DVR side-by-side with all my other media.

As for TVs I go to the local reuse center and get what catches my eye, my "monitor" I am using right now is a curved Samsung 55 inch, I just brought home a plasma that was $45 because I always wanted a plasma. I went through a long phase where people just kept dropping off cheap TVs at my home, some of which I really appreciated (a Vizio that was beautifully value engineered) and some of which sucked. [1]

[1] ... like back in the 1980s everybody was afraid someone would break into your home and take your TV but for me it is the other way around

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

I think the standard answer here is modernc.org/sqlite.

simonw ranked #32 [karma: 90154]

It's a folder with a markdown file in it plus optional additional reference files and executable scripts.

The clever part is that the markdown file has a section in it like this: https://github.com/datasette/skill/blob/a63d8a2ddac9db8225ee...

  ---
  name: datasette-plugins
  description: "Writing Datasette plugins using Python and the pluggy plugin system. Use when Claude needs to: (1) Create a new Datasette plugin, (2) Implement plugin hooks like prepare_connection, register_routes, render_cell, etc., (3) Add custom SQL functions, (4) Create custom output renderers, (5) Add authentication or permissions logic, (6) Extend Datasette's UI with menus, actions, or templates, (7) Package a plugin for distribution on PyPI"
  ---
On startup Claude Code / Codex CLI etc scan all available skills folders and extract just those descriptions into the context. Then, if you ask them to do something that's covered by a skill, they read the rest of that markdown file on demand before going ahead with the task.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

> In 1994, came the Pentium with its FDIV bug: a probably insignificant but detectable error in floating-point division. The subsequent product recall cost Intel nearly half a billion dollars. John Harrison, a student of Mike’s, decided to devote his PhD research to the verification of floating-point arithmetic.

No mention of the effort by Boyer and Moore, then at their Computational Logic, Inc., to do a formal verification of the AMD FPU for the AMD5K86TM. The AMD chip shipped with no FDIV bug. [1]

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1109/12.713311

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181710]
crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

I'm very confused. This is the font that matches the Google branding, and that they started using as a UX font in Gmail, Docs, etc.

I hate it in UX because it's so "geometric" -- works well for a logo, but not body text, so it's just a bizarre choice for UX. Unlike Roboto which continues to be great for that. (Google Sans is fine as display text though -- headings, logo, etc.)

But my understanding was that Google wanted to differentiate its first-party apps from other Android apps with a proprietary Google font.

But now they're opening that font up for everyone to use, so Google's apps will no longer look uniquely Google-branded.

I'm so confused what the heck is going on over there in Mountain View.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

I think the point was that it's not a machine.

Stuff that we can deduce in math with common sense, geometric intuition, etc. can be incredibly difficult to formalize so that a machine can do it.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

Z-Image Base and Z-Image Edit have been announced as being the same size (or, at least, the whole set has been announced as being in the 6B size class) as Turbo, but slower (50 steps with CFG, apparently, from the announced 100 NFEs compared to Turbo's 9 NFEs, where turbo doesn't, in the use they reference, use CFG.)

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

Define "washed out"?

The white and black levels of the UX are supposed to stay in SDR. That's a feature not a bug.

If you mean the interface isn't bright enough, that's intended behavior.

If the black point is somehow raised, then that's bizarre and definitely unintended behavior. And I honestly can't even imagine what could be causing that to happen. It does seem like that it would have to be a serious macOS bug.

You should post a photo of your monitor, comparing a black #000 image in Preview with a pitch-black frame from a video. People edit HDR video on Macs, and I've never heard of this happening before.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

Yes, it is the prominent anti-vax (and vaccines-cause-autism) activist (and Andrew Wakefield defender after his fraud and data manipulation was uncovered) Jenna McCarthy. Why does this inspire skepticism? (Skepticism that she would be the co-author; it should certainly inspire skepticism of the work itself.)

danso ranked #9 [karma: 166500]

One of the few unqualified improvements that “X” (aka Twitter) made was rendering the usernames in a font that has wings for the lowercase L

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

Indeed. Plus basic facts like: is it serif or sans? Proportional or monospace? Designed for GUI interfaces, terminals, or print? I still don't know.

Just showing a single screenshot of it in its intended use would go a long way.

I clicked on one of the charts and had no idea if the font itself was bitmap, or if it had just been rendered at a tiny size without antialiasing.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89356]

>A model doesn’t “know” facts or measure uncertainty in a Bayesian sense. All it really does is traverse a high‑dimensional statistical manifold of language usage, trying to produce the most plausible continuation.

And is that that different than what we do under the scenes? Is there a difference between an actual fact vs some false information stored in our brain? Or both have the same representation in some kind of high‑dimensional statistical manifold in our brains, and we also "try to produce the most plausible continuation" using them?

There might be one major difference is at a different level: what we're fed (read, see, hear, etc) we also evaluate before storing. Does LLM training do that, beyond some kind of manually assigned crude "confidence tiers" applied to input material during training (e.g. trust Wikipedia more than Reddit threads)?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

Lots of elegant, minimal things are hard to use effectively.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 173049]

> All these weird mental gymnastics to argue that users should have less rights

We probably agree more than not. But users getting more rights isn’t universally good. To finish an argument, one must consider the externalities involved.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

I wasn't happy with yet another RIR, however apparently plenty folks of core team, including Guido, seem to be up for it.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]

I can't imagine a person who's asking this question is cut out for (2)

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]

Cadbury always made me want to gag -- I don't think it ever met the strict definition of "Chocolate". But I'm a Yank.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 110728]

Why do people call is "Artificial Intelligence" when it could be called "Statistical Model for Choosing Data"?

"Intelligence" implies "thinking" for most people, just as "Learning" in machine learning implies "understanding" for most people. The algorithms created neither 'think' nor 'understand' and until you understand that, it may be difficult to accurately judge the value of the results produced by these systems.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97821]

Mainstream media just reflexively equivocates now, because actually making a positive statement just leads to immediate attacks.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

> Do you (and should you) need permissions to do a translation of a show for the audience?

Should you? Obviously subjective opinion. Do you? Yes, a translation is derivative work under copyright and requires permission from the copyright owner.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99736]
ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 87163]

> thought to be able to build AGI first

Who still thinks this?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 173049]

It’s comments like these that make me love HN. Thank you.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 87163]

> LLMs are great for this, for the plot and character questions, etc.

The article links to a clear, direct counterexample of this claim. By Amazon, even.

https://gizmodo.com/fallout-ai-recap-prime-video-amazon-2000...

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

Funny how the "story" doesn't link to the announcement it mostly copied from the CWA.[1]

Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though.

Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists.

A key point in TAG contracts is how "crunch time" is handled. It's allowed, but overtime rates go way, way up as the hours go up. This is standard procedure in Hollywood. Some terms from TAG's standard contract:

All time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification.[3]

This encourages management to schedule realistically. The Id/CWA deal isn't far enough along for those terms to be visible yet. But such terms are common in CWA contracts.

[1] https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/video-game-developers-te...

[2] https://code-cwa.org/

[3] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2024-2...

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 110728]

I miss Gassée's the Monday Note, it seems he hasn't published one since 2023.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

> Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to?

The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)

IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104497]

If software workers were that replaceable, they wouldn't be paid huge salaries to sit in offices in San Francisco, they'd be outsourced already.

(Mind you, that very individualism is why they're not already unionized)

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 87163]

> the company could easily outsource development and license their ip and fire everyone…

This turns out to be a lot harder in practice than in theory.

paxys ranked #42 [karma: 77650]

While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

I think the "inviolability" thing is useful just to understand what's actually happening here, but it's also important to understand that the US and Germany have very different criminal justice, search, and evidentiary systems. Germany doesn't have an exclusionary rule for evidence, for instance.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

> The toilet paper thing didn't really happen [...]

Yes, it did.

> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.

No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

I'm going to start encrypting the bottom 2/3rds of all my comments and charging a subscription fee for the unlocks. I can be my own Substack, dammit.

steveklabnik ranked #28 [karma: 96504]

Rust has no malloc in the language whatsoever. In embedded, you don't even include the libraries for dynamic allocation in the first place, unless you want to. And it's very normal not to.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90756]

In a nutshell, the sovereign debt crisis. If you don't realize there's a sovereign debt crisis (ongoing across years), or even more accurately, a wide variety of sovereign debt crises, or even more accurately, a wide variety of debt crises of both sovereign and private entities, well, your governments and some of the more government-adjacent private entities have bent a lot of resources into make sure that's the case and convincing that it's just peachy when they borrow money, if not outright a boon, without regard to how much they borrow or how much they've already borrowed. They may have convinced you that this is true, but they know better.

Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]

I'm not sure at all if it is relevant because hardly anybody watches broadcast TV but I was thinking how the interactive features in ATSC 3 could be used to add on-screen sports gambling and that might be the only thing that motivates the industry to go down that road -- and of course news gambling is the same.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

At the time “microservices” was coined, “service oriented architecture” had drifted from being an architectural style to being associated with inplementation of the WS-* technical standards, and was frequently used to describe what were essentially monoliths with web services interfaces.

“Microservices” was, IIRC, more about rejecting that and returning to the foundations of SOA than anything else. The original description was each would support a single business domain (sometimes described “business function”, and this may be part of the problem, because in some later descriptions, perhaps through a version of the telephone game, this got shortened to “function” and without understanding the original context...)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99736]
pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

While having Epic Store, Fortnite "mini store", and being perfectly fine with Nintendo, Sony and XBox.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103479]

The US will be dragged kicking and screaming to renewables, it has no other option.

walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 95393]

https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/12/05/exclusive-memory-...

> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.

https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...

> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

Not really. Tribes generally lived in specific areas, and would go to war with other tribes if those tribes tried to expand into their turf. Or would go to war to expand their turf. That's basically the early version of nationalism and borders, with the tribe as the nation, and neighboring tribes understanding which area was whose. Even nomadic tribes would be nomadic within a certain area, and jealously protect the area they would go to at the start of every spring, for example.

Even modern primates establish territories for their groups, and warn off and fight other primates attempting to encroach. So this general behavior is quite natural. The concept of open borders where anyone can just waltz in and live somewhere where they're not from or didn't marry into and haven't been invited -- that's actually the relatively newer idea, historically speaking.

I'm not arguing for more closed borders today, but I don't think we're should pretend that the historical human condition has somehow been "open".

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

For very simple JSON data whose schema never changes, I agree.

But the more complex it is, the more complex the relational representation becomes. JSON responses from some API's could easily require 8 new tables to store the data in, with lots of arbitrary new primary keys and lots of foreign key constraints, your queries will be full of JOIN's that need proper indexing set up...

Oftentimes it's just not worth it, especially if your queries are relatively simple, but you still need to store the full JSON in case you need the data in the future.

Obviously storing JSON in a relational database feels a bit like a Frankenstein monster. But at the end of the day, it's really just about what's simplest to maintain and provides the necessary performance.

And the whole point of the article is how easy it is to set up indexes on JSON.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90756]

Humans don't understand their thought process either.

In general, neural nets do not have insight into what they are doing, because they can't. Can you tell me what neurons fired in the process of reading this text? No. You don't have access to that information. We can recursively model our own network and say something about which regions of the brain are probably involved due to other knowledge, but that's all a higher-level model. We have no access to our own inner workings, because that turns into an infinite regress problem of understanding our understanding of our understanding of ourselves that can't be solved.

The terminology of this next statement is a bit sloppy since this isn't a mathematics or computer science dissertation but rather a comment on HN, but: A finite system can not understand itself. You can put some decent mathematical meat on those bones if you try and there may be some degenerate cases where you can construct a system that understands itself for some definition of "understand", but in the absence of such deliberation and when building systems for "normal tasks" you can count on the system not being able to understand itself fully by any reasonably normal definition of "understand".

I've tried to find the link for this before, but I know it was on HN, where someone asked an LLM to do some simple arithmetic, like adding some numbers, and asked the LLM to explain how it was doing it. They also dug into the neural net activation itself and traced what neurons were doing what. While the LLM explanation was a perfectly correct explanation of how to do elementary school arithmetic, what the neural net actually did was something else entirely based around how neurons actually work, and basically it just "felt" its way to the correct answer having been trained on so many instances already. In much the same way as any human with modest experience in adding two digit numbers doesn't necessarily sit there and do the full elementary school addition algorithm but jumps to the correct answer in fewer steps by virtue of just having a very trained neural net.

In the spirit of science ultimately being really about "these preconditions have this outcome" rather than necessarily about "why", if having a model narrate to itself about how to do a task or "confess" improves performance, then performance is improved and that is simply a brute fact, but that doesn't mean the naive human understanding about why such a thing might be is correct.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 181710]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

Whatever thing you're talking about, it does not appear to be DANE stapling.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89356]

>Their biggest issue is when you walk blindly, LLMs will happily lead the unknowing junior astray.

The biggest issue is outsourcing agency and skills atrophy

nostrademons ranked #38 [karma: 81649]

Basically you're lending your name and identity as a front for someone with malicious intentions.

There are a few different angles to this. Other people have already mentioned the North Korean state-sponsored espionage, but honestly I think this is a small minority of this market.

The other two big ones are visa fraud and employment fraud. With the first one, you have a developer, possibly even skilled in a low-wage overseas company (say Thailand) that wants to make American wages. If he applies as who he actually is, he makes Thai wages, which can be as low as $10K/year. If he uses your identity to apply, he makes American wages, say $200K+/year. He can split that with you and make 10x what he would otherwise, while you get $100K/year for doing nothing (assuming he's honest enough to pay out, which is not a guarantee. There's no honor in thieves).

With the second, they use his interview skills and your identity to get the job, and then do nothing except get other jobs. It's remarkably hard to fire a U.S. employee without risks of lawsuits. If the employer does seem to catch on, he has a lawyer and a psychiatrist on the payroll too. The psychiatrist produces a doctor's note that you are disabled, the lawyer threatens to sue if you are fired. "You" go on disability, where you can stay for up to a year and they can't fire you. Collect the salary, move on after the year. In the meantime, "you" (or the organization using your identity) has done the same thing to hundreds of other corporations. I personally know 2 managers that have been victimized by this scam.

In all 3 cases, you're not the direct victim of the scam. They're using your identity as a shield to legitimize the scam. When it's discovered, it's you who suffer the reputational risk and/or criminal charges.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79735]

I don't see it. With Chrome devtools, for the posted URL I see X-Clacks-Overhead, X-Content-Type-Options, and X-Frame-Options. No X-Robots-Rag.

And no <meta name="robots"> in the HTML either.

What URL are you seeing that on? And what tool are you using to detect that?

Edit: cURL similarly shows no such header for me:

  curl -s -D - -o /dev/null https://journal.james-zhan.com/google-de-indexed-my-entire-bear-blog-and-i-dont-know-why/

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99736]
nostrademons ranked #38 [karma: 81649]

Knowing not so much about Tor but some about math: the number of nodes you need to compromise in order to de-anonymize a Tor user is exponential in the number of hops. Google says there are roughly 7000 Tor nodes, including 2000 guards (entry) and 1000 exit nodes. If you have a single hop, there's roughly a 1/1000 chance that you will connect to a single malicious node that can de-anonymize you, going up linearly with the number of nodes an attacker controls. If you have 3 hops, you have a 1 in 1000 * 7000 * 2000 = roughly 14 billion chance. 2 hops would give you 1 in 2 million, 4 hops would give you 1 in 1000 * 7000 * 7000 * 2000 = 98 trillion. In practical terms 1:14B is about the same as 1:98T (i.e. both are effectively zero), but 1:2M is a lot higher.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99736]

https://archive.ph/aZ6f2

>Mapping the genetic landscape across 14 psychiatric disorders

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09820-3

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74702]

I came here to be dismissive ("power is power, what's the big deal?"), but this is a legitimately useful guide on how to fake a battery. Thanks for this.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

The OS was kind of cool, even if Dylan missed the boat, the mix of NewtonScript with C++ was still kind of cool, and on its last days a JIT was being introduced.

Yet another device ahead of its time.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112651]

For these types of problems (i.e. most problems in the real world), the "definitive or deterministic" isn't really possible. An unreliable party you can throw at the problem from a hundred thousand directions simultaneously and for cheap, is still useful.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89356]

No, for everybody. We should absolutely bring back some kink-shaming.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

> Coders don’t have liability for shipping shit code

Depends on the industry, and shipping shit code is the reason cybersecurity laws are starting to be a thing.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

A startup looking to something to hold on, being a VSCode fork isn't really a business plan.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

You should look into the latest posts on the subject.

> Just as a reminder, even without --incremental, TypeScript 7 often sees close to a 10x speedup over the 6.0 compiler on full builds!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/progress-on-typesc...

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

You mean, like Microsoft themselves?

.NET COM support was never as nice, with the RCW/CCW layer, now they have redoned it for modern .NET Core, still you need some knowledge how to use it from C++ to fully master it.

Then there is CsWinRT, which is supposed to be the runtime portion of .NET Native, which to this day has enough bugs and not as easy to use as it was .NET Native.

Finally, on the C++ side it has been a wasteland of frameworks, since MFC there have been multiple attempts, and when they finally had something close to C++ Builder with C++/CX, an internal team managed to sell to their managers the idea to kill C++/CX and replace it with C++/WinRT.

Nowadays C++/WinRT is sold as the way to do COM and WinRT, it is actually in maintenance, stuck in C++17, those folks moved on to the windows-rs project mentioned on the article, and the usuability story sucks.

Editing IDL files without any kind of code completion or syntax highlighting, non-existing tooling since COM was introduced, manually merging the generated C++ code into the ongoing project.

To complement your last sentence, seeing Microsoft employees push COM from first principles in 2025 is jarring.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123690]

Yes, the alternative universe had Nokia board not hired Elop.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 173049]

> No matter how the ad is made, it is still an ad

I disagree. An ad is always an ad. But it can also be art. This ad has artistic merit, and I think people are reacting to that.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75014]

It would be impossible to do without taking breaks, as explained in the article:

> Due to visa limits, Bushby has had to break up his walk. In Europe, he can stay for only 90 days before leaving for 90, so he flies to Mexico to rest and then returns to resume the route.

Given that he literally swam across the Caspian Sea in order to avoid Russia and Iran because of legal issues, nevermind bring imprisoned in Russia due to what sounded like bureaucratic BS, it's more impressive than I first thought.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76647]

I have a friend attempting to solve this. He's basically creating oauth for age verification. You sign up with his service and verify your age. After that it works similarly to oauth, but instead of return your identity, it just returns your age.

It's not a perfect solution, as he would still know who you are, but it's built in a way where you create a token locally to pass to the site that includes your age, and that site passes it to his site, which verifies the signature. So he knows who you are but not what sites you visit, and the sites know your age but not who you are.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

> It's an acceptable way to quickly scale up real mashed potatoes...

Goes with Hamburger Helper.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

That's good for blocking. Then, for movement, what? Probably not Labanotation.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97821]

tl;dr

My Dad loves instant mashed potatoes. I think they taste awful. A long history of potato consumption. People like potatoes, particularly mashed potatoes. Thus there is money to be made out of selling them as a product, allowing people to skip the peeling, boiling, and mashing. People still buy the product even though it is objectively bad and not even proper mashed potato. This phenomenon seems ubiquitous. Maybe industrial capitalism itself is bad.

  Generate more handy summaries like this with Instant Mashed Prose - just 0.000001 BTC per serving!

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234708]

I can easily imagine auto insurers facing exactly that kind of liability if a self-driving car release is bad enough.

mooreds ranked #36 [karma: 86325]

Thanks. It was 6 characters too long if I added that.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 158023]

> Where they put nets over the road for camouflage or physically catching the drones, right?

Yes. But it didn't work for long. The Russians have an answer to that.[1]

[1] https://www.thesun.ie/news/16173281/russian-dragon-drone-str...

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234708]

I still have an N800-tough, it still works. It even holds a five day charge. This is from after the reboot, it runs linux and so far it has been ultra reliable. I have an older one as well that still works but this one is just a little more useful (it can serve as a wifi access point).

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

That's an interesting argument, given the whole impetus behind pushing for DoT vs. DoH was to allow network administrators the discretion to block encrypted DNS (by blocking DoT).

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

It is an interesting theory that AI generated art is unmonetizable, and, yet, people are, in fact, monetizing AI generated art, both directly and by monetizing products which incorporprate it.

Given a theory, and facts directly contrary, one would normally conclude that it is the theory, not the facts, which are in error.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414636]

Let me say first of all: super chill response and I really appreciate that.

On point (1), I've got reason to question the claims of genocidal intent that get bandied about in these kinds of conversations. Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece for The Atlantic debunking one of the most frequently cited "amalek" claims. It's easy to find people on either side of the conflict espousing genocidal views, but harder to map specific actions to realistically genocidal intent (especially when the views are ascribed to people with no decisionmaking authority over how the campaign is being waged).

I hate having to be so hedgy but I'll do it anyways: none of that is to say that the Gaza campaign was waged ethically or with meaningful concern for civilian life, and I fervently hope many of its architects end up imprisoned for their roles in it. But that's a cards-on-the-table statement, not a clinical assessment.

On point (2) about Ukraine: Russian decisionmakers at the highest level have repudiated the existence of Ukrainian ethnicity; Russia has deliberately --- in ways I don't think map cleanly to how the IAF has prosecuted the war in Gaza --- targeted civilian populations (Bucha is an obvious example), and, most damningly, Russia embarked on a campaign of family separation and coerced adoption with the specific intent of disrupting Ukraining ethnicity.

You point out that Israel wants to "cleanse" the land (call it Greater Israel, from the Jordan river and including the Gaza strip) of Palestinians. I'm not as sure about that, but I can stipulate to it. That by itself does not constitute genocide!† (Ethnic cleansing? A crime against humanity? Very possibly!) Genocide as a concept does not encompass any link between blood and soil.

It really pisses Palestinian advocates off to hear this, and I get why, but there is by rights already a Palestinian state in the Levant: it's called Jordan, where Palestinians have, at multiple points over the last 50 years, made up a majority of the resident population. Similarly, if we're doing comparative statecraft, Assadist Syria successfully cleansed itself of its concentrated Palestinian population, over just the last 10-15 years. See how often you see Palestinian advocates make claims about Yarmouk camp, though. You start to understand why advocates for Israel (I am not one of those) are jaded about this whole thing.

You get a similar thing about "apartheid", a term I'm more comfortable using with Israel, from people who correctly observe that Israeli Arab citizens, of whom there are a great many, have vastly more rights than black Africans had under apartheid, to the point where the term makes more sense applied to other larger, more salient ethnic divides elsewhere in the world. But like, preemptively: I'm with you, it's effectively an apartheid system in the West Bank.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

> Honestly when are we going to impeach Trump, he's basically the same Hitler.

When did Germany impeach Hitler?

Also, Donald Trump has already been impeached as many times all other Presidents combined.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103479]

Russia is also running out of resources at current global oil prices. China’s rapid electrification and EV deployment is destroying oil demand growth, causing global oil oversupply, a confounding factor on top of sanctions. If you’re a petrostate, the future is not bright.

Strikes on critical Russian oil infrastructure would likely speed this along.

https://www.energyintel.com/0000019b-082a-d02f-adfb-cebb5e2a...

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/12/09/russian-oil-prices...

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 76647]

Apparently fish aren't animals. :)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103479]

Record button in the app if you’ve got the feature.

doener ranked #45 [karma: 76452]

The word in the German original is "Gutachten", so better translation would be "expert opinion."

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126345]

Capitalism does not need and has never had free markets, though some arguments for capitalism being ideal rest on the assumption of free markets, along with a stack of other idealized assumptions, like human behavior conforming to rational choice theory.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 173049]

> The proscription is ridiculous

They broke into a military base. If that was sanctioned by the organisation, they should be shut down.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102306]

I do it sometimes and usually notice that I did it and reverse it. I do with the flag button too.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104497]

You support the ban but also circumventing it?