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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.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

Great, yet another reason not to use it.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111109]

Pretty awesome. The only thing I would change is to put a USB battery between the usb wall power and the D1 mini. That way for power outages of < a couple of days or so you're clock will be fine.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111109]

Okay I'm thinking of a very Shenzen kind of gizmo for your car that projects a bright red laser "keep out" box on the road in front of your car which is adjusted in size for your current speed.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

Very few newspapers today have many reporters. This shows. Look at the front page of most newspapers, and ask, did this story start as an official announcement or press release? The answer is usually yes. There's not enough info coming in.

The strongest effect of this is invisible - if nobody well-known is talking about it, it disappears from the mainstream news. Note how little is appearing about the war in Ukraine. (Peace talks going nowhere, but there was a prisoner swap.) Or the aftermath of the big ice storm that just passed through the southeastern US. (Texas avoided large power outages. "The biggest difference between 2021 and the last freeze is the amount of battery storage we have available.") Or what ICE is up to outside Minnesota. (73,000 people detained, plans to convert warehouses to detention center.) Or what's going on in Gaza. (556 Gaza residents killed since the cease-fire.) None of those stories are on the WP front page. Washington Post's Trending: Bad Bunny, Super Bowl commercials, Seahawks defense, Exercise and weight loss, Olympic ice dance, Ghislaine Maxwell. None of those are hard news.

"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity". Hard news stories require reporters out there digging, and those reporters are gone from the big papers. Local sources, the Associated Press, and the BBC provide some coverage. Far less than a decade or two ago.

So few people know what's really going on. You have to read about ten news sources and dig to get a picture. This is too time-consuming. And most of them are paywalled now.

nostrademons ranked #38 [karma: 82130]

The thing is that real security isn't something that a checklist can guarantee. You have to build it into the product architecture and mindset of every engineer that works on the project. At every single stage, you have to be thinking "How do I minimize this attack surface? What inputs might come in that I don't expect? What are the ways that this code might be exploited that I haven't thought about? What privileges does it have that it doesn't need?"

I can almost guarantee you that your ordinary feature developer working on a deadline is not thinking about that. They're thinking about how they can ship on time with the features that the salesguy has promised the client. Inverting that - and thinking about what "features" you're shipping that you haven't promised the client - costs a lot of money that isn't necessary for making the sale.

So when the reinsurance company mandates a checklist, they get a checklist, with all the boxes dutifully checked off. Any suitably diligent attacker will still be able to get in, but now there's a very strong incentive to not report data breaches and have your insurance premiums go up or government regulation come down. The ecosystem settles into an equilibrium of parasites (hackers, who have silently pwned a wide variety of computer systems and can use that to setup systems for their advantage) and blowhards (executives who claim their software has security guarantees that it doesn't really).

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105796]

WTF Happened in 2012? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46796039 - January 2026

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125540]

It's in the legal filings: https://www.universalhub.com/files/attachments/2026/culleton...

"Culleton concedes he is removable under the VWP. Reply 10."

He came to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program, which is limited to 90 days, back in 2009.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 86672]

didn’t cv raman prove just that via his raman-effect for which he got the noble prize ?

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185483]

And we all know ed is the standard Unix text editor. If you want vim you should be able to install it.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

NeXT added a Java variant to WebObjects and it was for several years the main server side infrastructure, after being acquired by Apple.

Nowadays you can usually still find Java and JVM languages like Clojure (Apple Maps), on Apple's job ads.

How much of it is still Java based, no idea.

I imagine XCode Cloud has nothing to with it for example.

WalterBright ranked #42 [karma: 78877]

I've thought of doing that, but it's too much fun writing an optimizer and code generator!

(My experience with "compile to C" is with cfront, the original C++ implementation that compiled to C. The generated code was just terrible to read.)

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75638]

If you're looking for something low brightness, I made one: https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-another-little-bedside-c...

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89843]

Can we get a bloody better sound driver, protection from ANC feedback shriek, one or two physical buttons (or at least a raised haptic buttons, not just a touch sensitive stem area), and battery level on the case?

We don't want no fucking infra cameras for "better hand gestures and enhanced spatial audio experience".

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

I think the real problem is that the car industry is refusing to make affordable vehicles and a big part of that is size. Americans might want huge vehicles but they can't all afford them. Chinese manufacturers, alone, are pursuing the affordable EV market, the same way that Chinese manufacturers, alone, are pursing the affordable drone market.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127212]

> Which ratified treaty did the US's operation in Venezuela violate?

Even if it hadn't violated a ratified treaty (it did violate several, starting with the UN Charter and OAS Charter), it would still violate international law; the US has recognized (among other places, in the London Charter of 1945 establishing the International Military Tribunal) that the crime of aggressive war exists independently of the crime of waging war in violation of international treaties.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89843]

>the only person to suffer had been one of the top-10 worst alive humans in the world

That's just what they told you to justify taking their oil

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]

I wonder what this would do to battery life -- continuously-on IR cameras are going to be a significant power draw. And then there's the question of whether the video processing is done on the earbuds, or how much Bluetooth bandwidth is used sending the video stream to your phone for processing.

Using this to detect gestures does seem very cool, however. Seems like a fascinating engineering challenge.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

Microsoft Copilot can certainly talk a good game about the structure of romance literature even though it's never felt a thing. If any kind of literature can be made up out of bits and pieces of other literature in the genre... it's that.

https://archive.ph/ne6hF

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185483]

My biggest concern is the apparent lack of testing and validation. After the Apollo 1 accident uncrewed flight of Apollo, we had half-a-dozen flights, 3 of which uncrewed, before they did an end-to-end validation on Apollo 10, to finally land with Apollo 11. Is NASA that confident SLS and Orion will perform adequately that they will add astronauts to SLS's second (and Orion 3rd) flight?

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127212]

I feel like we have had discussions on HN about very serious legal problems associated with previous “maarketplaces” using exactly this model.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106098]

The lifetimes argument is extremely sound: this is information which you need from the developer, and not something that is easy to get when generating from a language which does not itself have lifetimes. It's an especially bad fit for the GC case he describes.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75376]

Welcome to the real world. The UK is obviously in no position to challenge China. And with the US invading and threatening to take over other sovereign nations solely because "it's in our national interest", we're certainly not one to talk.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89843]

Every other advancement in office productivity and software has intensified work. AI will too. It will also further commodify it.

simonw ranked #28 [karma: 98346]

If AI was indeed replacing human labor I would expect HBR to be among the first publications to cover it.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77007]

Oh yay, the company that told me to "just use your wife's phone" when I couldn't verify my own phone number, instead of even trying to fix the problem, now wants a copy of my face?

Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

"This took longer than doing it manually."

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]

This is so clever and interesting. Congratulations!

But... I want to see a photo! Or at least what it looks like in Google Earth, with a red arrow marking the furthest point.

It feels like the site is setting you up for the big suspense of the longest line of sight... and then it's just a line on a 2D map.

I think it would also really help if the maps themselves were at an angle in 3D with an exaggerated relief, with the line drawn in 3D, so you can get a sense of how it travels between two peaks.

It seems like you've put a ton of effort into this project. I think with just a tiny bit more work on the page, you could really put the "cherry on top".

And with those visualizations, get it picked up by a lot of major news outlets. This is a really fun story, the kind of stuff newspapers and magazines love to run. It's easily understandable, it's a cool new "record", it's a story of someone's perseverance paying off, and then you show a Google Earth image simulating the view as the payoff. (And from slightly above, if necessary, to take account for refraction.)

EDIT: Here, I used Google Earth to show the two points. Unfortunately it's from high above, since otherwise Earth wouldn't show the pin for Pik Dankova, but it at least gives a general idea of the area:

https://imgur.com/hindu-kush-to-pik-dankova-530km-adbVFwb

And here is the Google Earth link for the view, but it doesn't contain the pins:

https://earth.google.com/web/search/41.0181,77.6708/@36.6644...

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

(1) I've somewhat stumbled on a persona as a Fox-photographer who strongly communicates that he is a public affordance which (a) helps me get better photos of people, (b) gets me flagged down by people telling me about interesting things going on like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116021033821248982

and (c) results in handing out several business cards a day

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115901190470904729

and I'm within sight of having to reorder cards. I just finished a landing page for the cards (before they went to one of my socials)

https://gen5.info/demo/fox/

but having to reorder the cards I am planning on making a next generation card which has a unique chibi and unique QR code that will let me personalize the landing page for cards, particularly I will be able to share a photo just with the person who has the card.

============

(2) I've been doing heart rate variability biofeedback experiments and I have this demo

https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/

which is still not quite done but has source code at

https://github.com/paulhoule/VulpesVision

It works with most heart rate monitors that support the standard BTLE API not just the H10. I run it on the Windows desktop with Chrome and with Bluefy on iPad. Once it displays the instantaneous heart rate I can control

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

by following the slope of the instantaneous heart rate, breathing out when it is slowing down and breathing in when it is speeding up. This greatly intensifies the Mayer_wave and increases the SD1 metric. I think this drops my blood pressure significantly when I'm doing it. This needs better instructions and some kind of auditory cue so I can entrain my breathing when I am looking at something else. Longer term I am interested in incorporating some other biofeedback gadgets I have like a respiration monitor (got an abdomen band and a radar which could probably even read HRV if I had the right software for it) and a GSR sensor, and EMG sensor, etc.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106098]

It's one of those irregular nouns: _your_ thought terminating cliche, _my_ founding principle.

Although also a reasonable criticism of the far left. Orwell has a whole essay on this. "The fascist octopus has sung its swan song". It's especially annoying when it's a slogan that has been clumsily translated from German by Marxists or from Chinese by Maoists (although the rise of Chinese capitalism has rather cut of the supply of the latter).

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125540]

I don't understand how this isn't a bigger deal. Why are people are quibbling about how it isn't a particularly good C compiler. It seems earth shattering that an AI can write a C compiler in the first place.

Am I just old? "How did they fit those people into the television?!"

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

It's a glib argument that "state capacity" is the problem here, and it is partially true, but it's also a reality that the moon is much further away in momentum than it in position, particularly if you are making a round trip.

If "state capacity" is the problem, it is manifesting as an inability to be honest about the challenge.

Warner von Braun considered hundreds of possible mission plans before arriving a the one that Apollo used and probably despaired of the possibility of realizing Kennedy's dream until he discovered the one that made it possible. Any other plan to return astronauts from the moon is much more difficult and expensive.

In particular, Starship won't save us at least not in a "return the whole vehicle" configuration. Assuming they get it to orbit and solve refueling, it is a huge vehicle that can return a tiny payload back from the moon. Sending a large number on a one-way trip and breaking them up to establish a base might work, and a similar vehicle using hydrogen-oxygen fuel might be refueled from the glaciers we believe exist at the poles, but any mission like that is difficult and expensive and not being talked about seriously.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89843]

>I will never use Homebrew again because I'm still sore that they dropped support for a Mac OS version that I was still using and couldn't upgrade because Apple didn't support my hardware anymore.

How old was it? With macOS "running an old version" is not really a viable or advisable path beyond a certain point. Might be something people want to do, might it a great option to have, but it's not very workable nor supported by Apple and the general ecosystem.

>Any decent project should have a way to install without Homebrew. It's really not necessary.

We don't install homebrew because it's necessary, but because it's convenient. No way in hell I'm gonna install 50+ programs I use one by one using the projects' own installers.

Besides, if "Homebrew dropped support" is an incovenience, "manually look for dozens of individual installers or binaries, make sure dependencies work well together, build when needed, and update all that yourself again manually" is even more of an inconvenience. Not to mention many projects on their own drop support for macOS versions all the time, or offer no binaries or installers.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125540]

> I didn't get meds when I was younger. Now I have top 1% IQ (likely average here on hn), but work as a butcher at a slaughterhouse. My mom didn't want to stigmatise me with a diagnosis

Yeah, get your kids diagnosed and get them medicated if they need to be. Adderall is one of the most well studied medications in the world. Whatever downsides there are pale in comparison to the academic and social downsides of untreated ADHD.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 166699]

tl;dr: automated/AI-driven accounting startup with ~$90M in funding, including a $42M round in 2021 [0], announces it will be shutting down

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/botkeeper-raises-42...

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

Public relations is an art in itself. That is, getting media to cover something is a specific talent.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238251]

> And a thinkpad running Linux is just not doing it for me. I want my power efficient mac hardware.

I'm using a decade old thinkpad running linux and it is definitely 'doing it for me'. And I'm not exactly a light user. Power efficient mac hardware should be weighed against convenience and price. The developer eco-system on Linux is lightyears ahead of the apple one, I don't understand why developers still use either Windows or the Mac because I always see them struggle with the simplest things that on Linux you don't even realize could be a problem.

Other OSs feel like you're always in some kind of jailbreak mode working around artificial restrictions. But sure, it looks snazzy, compared to my chipped battle ax.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238251]

More interesting: amazing sleuthing to figure out that that was the root cause.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106098]

This is bananas. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k for a whole 3.9kW installation, which has now more than paid for itself. I can see why everyone in the US is saying "get a trade job", you can rip off householders to a massive extent.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106098]

Regardless of how the copyright suits work out, AI absolutely does not help you evade patent law. However, it does make it possible to spit out sufficiently large amounts of code that it will only be enforced against high-profile cases.

Could someone who has access to a range of models please try prompting them for (a) libdvdcss, the content scrambling keys and (b) some working HDMI HDCP keys?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 106098]

Yes? I'm not sure what the point is of re-litigating this now. The more recent conflict with Venezuela was even more explicitly oil focused.

Similarly, Iran is a traditional enemy of the US for decades, and a murderous regime that kills their own citizens in the streets; but when the US-Iran war is over, the US oil industry will be in control of the Iranian oil reserves.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

> China has many faults. Invading other countries is not one of them

Literally have ongoing border disputes with practically all of their neighbors, a few of which they’ve been shooting at (India) and ramming at sea (the Philippines) in the last few years.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

Maybe this is new in US, but paying recruiting agencies is nothing out of the ordinary in many European countries, at least if you actually want to have a recruiter that cares about where you land as position.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

Well, I remember watching Asteroids as a kid on the coffee place my parents used to hang around, latter replaced by Kung-Fu Master, and to see DYI build your own computer before the Speccy became widspread, guess how old I feel.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

There are piezo buzzers and beepers, of course.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

The successor to SGI, after several acquisitions and bankruptcies, is Hewlett Packard Enterprise. There's a forum for abandoned HP products.[1] The SGI O2 has been mentioned, but not in recent years.

[1] https://community.hpe.com

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

That was already the case when comparing the Borland compilers for MS-DOS, and Windows 3.x.

Hence why I eventually found refuge in XEmacs, and DDD, until IDEs like KDevelop and Sun Forte came to be.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

Including the AI, which generated it once and forgot.

This is going to be a big problem. How do people using Claude-like code generation systems do this? What artifacts other than the generated code are left behind for reuse when modifications are needed? Comments in the code? The entire history of the inputs and outputs to the LLM? Is there any record of the design?

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

I never use it when I can have my way.

The UNIX in macOS is good enough for my needs, and I manually install anything extra that I might require.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 125682]

From Apple's point of view it is perfectly fine for such purposes.

> From its earliest conception, Swift was built to be fast. Using the incredibly high-performance LLVM compiler technology, Swift code is transformed into optimized machine code that gets the most out of modern hardware. The syntax and standard library have also been tuned to make the most obvious way to write your code also perform the best whether it runs in the watch on your wrist or across a cluster of servers. And Swift is the best choice to succeed C++. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators, and provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics.

> Swift is efficient enough to be used in constrained environments like embedded devices, and powerful enough to scale all the way up to servers and cloud infrastructure.

-- https://developer.apple.com/swift/

From my point of view, if Go does it, Swift is much better at the same game.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 170658]

for me the main thing about Tauri is not that it is built with Rust (that's interesting as well though)

but that it uses the webview implementation of windows and macos instead of bundling its own browser

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

This is do-able on the moon without humans. Just keep sending teleoperated robots and parts. Tesla already has semi-teleoperated robots - balance and locomotion are automatic and onboard, manipulation is teleoperated remotely. Eventually build enough that humans can visit.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

Which Apple products run arm32 XNU? Their first Apple Silicon CPUs were already arm64.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105796]

Electricity prices have gone up due to datacenters as well as neglected grid infrastructure needing investment. Natural gas prices are going up because of LNG export infrastructure causing US consumers to compete against global LNG consumers for fuel to heat, as well as domestic electrical generation demand. Pick your poison.

Electricity prices might come down over time (renewables push down generation costs), natural gas prices won’t due to global demand for it.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]

Has anyone ever paid you?

The technical side of this seems easy enough. The human side, that seems more complicated.

Like, if I were your doctor or contractor or kid's schoolteacher or whoever you hadn't happened to already whitelist, and had sent you something important for you, and got that back as a response... I'm sure as heck not paying when I'm trying to send you something for your benefit.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]

> Reading and understanding other people's code is much harder than writing code.

I keep seeing this sentiment repeated in discussions around LLM coding, and I'm baffled by it.

For the kind of function that takes me a morning to research and write, it takes me probably 10 or 15 minutes to read and review. It's obviously easier to verify something is correct than come up with the correct thing in the first place.

And obviously, if it took longer to read code than to write it, teams would be spending the majority of their time in code review, but they don't.

So where is this idea coming from?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

You want to self-host a model?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

Overall the theme for Superbowl ads was "getting high on our own supply." When you've got an audience that big you need to to be speaking to everyone in a language they can understand and way too many ads, tech or not, were just unfunny inside jokes.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks? I doubt my employer would.

For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75638]

There are some great alternatives, like Zulip and Twist. Unfortunately, ~nobody uses them.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]

Fun fact: Chinese has separate "financial numerals" precisely to prevent one digit being changed to another, the way that could be easily done with regular numerals like turning 一 (1) into 三 (3) or 十 (10). A lot harder when they look like 壹, 叁, and 拾 instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Financial_num...

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

People in the US are giving up on our senescent culture industry. Go to Target and you find the new music is: Taylor Swift and K-Pop. My son and I are starting a anime theme song cover band and tell potential vocalists that it is easy to sing in Japanese even if you don't know what it means.

Hollywood is so busy getting high on it's own supply that it hasn't even noticed that you can't understand what people are saying even if you speak English so young people today turn on the subtitles habitually which means it it is all the easier to watch subprime/subtitled TV on Tubi.

So when it comes down to it, US-ians care less and less if it is in English.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

Who builds the gold-standard spam filter?

I run Gmail at work and Outlook at home and am thoroughly disappointed by both.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

FTFA: “This is almost identical to the previous attack via ChatGPT.”

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

Do you give attribution to all the books, articles, etc. you've read?

Everything is a derivative work.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 73576]

More recent models are better at reading and obeying constraints in AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md.

GPT-5.2-Codex did a bad job of obeying my more detailed AGENTS.md files but GPT-5.3-Codex very evidently follows it well.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113260]

> An agent that can truly “use your computer” is incredibly powerful, but it's also the first time the system has to act as you, not just for you. That shifts the problem from product design to permission, auditability, and undoability.

Or rather, just reveals that the industry never bothered to properly implement delegation of authority in operating systems and applications, opting instead to first guilt-trip people for sharing their passwords, and later inventing solutions that make it near-impossible to just casually let someone do something for you.

Contrast with how things in real life function, whether at family level or at the workplace.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]
walterbell ranked #30 [karma: 96184]

> The act of providing someone with a tool to change how their own property works ("trafficking in circumvention devices") is a felony.

Can code generators and related agents capture media streams to generate clips for social media commentary?

Can video creators set an attribute or otherwise declare their stance on clips?

Can commentators film video clips using a secondary device?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

So? Democratic Lawmakers care about donors, not voters. If they were interested in winning elections as opposed to collecting rent they would have picked a different leader, not a "minority" leader who will keep them forever in the minority -- but it is worth trillions to donors to spoil the emergence of an actual left party in America.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416741]

It's Children of Men crossed with The Big Lebowski, with Pynchon instead of noir characters. When you get what it's trying to do, it gets better.

I bounced off of it at first, but I bounced (hard) off of Lebowksi as well.

I don't think it's PTA's best film (or that I will come around to that opinion eventually), but it's pretty good.

doener ranked #43 [karma: 78597]

As far as I know the author never believed LLMs are the road to AGI.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105796]

Do you support DJI drone orchestration?

simonw ranked #28 [karma: 98346]

I got that too, but then I tried the link a second time and it worked.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 105796]

More than 60 million Americans own a home with a garage (where a charger can be installed) and most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger. Edge cases continue to shrink and be solved for, electricity is ubiquitous and batteries keep improving rapidly.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]

"Ownership" is frequently a bad smell, it makes me think of the NFT nerd who crashed your party or a high-pressure sales pitch for a timeshare in Florida.

What's wrong with an honest day's pay for an honest day of work? Maybe the working class is fine with being the working class, but it just wants a fair deal. See

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwxQb1CIIyo

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

I've never felt the need to use a separate boolean type in C; zero and nonzero are enough and very natural to use.

Seeing "== false" and variations thereof always triggers the suspicion that its author doesn't fully understand boolean expressions. I have once seen the even worse "(x == false) == true".

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo , although I have used that as a metasyntactic variable before.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

In the PC world this would be known as "BIOS modding".

The first two instructions looked legitimate, but the third looked unlikely to be a real instruction.

Given that the first appears to be a branch, that's not surprising. When disassembling, not following the flow will likely not give you anything meaningful. If the author is reading this: have you tried Ghidra?

That said, this seems a lot simpler than PC BIOSes in structure, as the latter are usually written in a combination of C and Asm (I can see why no one wanted to write MIPS Asm) and are self-extracting compressed archives.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 102844]
Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

Remember those Donut/Verge solid state batteries, which were supposed to ship in Q1 2026? That just slipped to the end of 2026 or 2027.[1] Supposedly they're delayed by needing "certification" for their motorcycle.

(The motorcycle is real, and has been out for years. This is just a battery upgrade.)

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/786388/verge-motorcycles-donut-la...

mooreds ranked #34 [karma: 88388]

Story about a startup from the former CEO of Sphero.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125540]

Yeah, this heat up effect is massive for around-town use. We have had below freezing weather for two weeks, which is very unusual here in Annapolis. That’s had a huge impact on my wife’s use case, which involves a bunch of 5-10 mile trips to drop the kids off at school, go on a grocery run, pick the kids up, take the kids to math tutoring, etc. She ran out of charge the other day during drop-off b/c the “37 miles left” we had the night before was actually a lot less than that accounting for warming the battery up the next day.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 81725]

> There needs to be a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property

Does there? Why? There's no legal means to keep private aircraft (e.g. a Cessna) from flying over your property as long as they're over 500 feet. Then drones are below that, typically between 50-400 feet.

They're already not allowed to interfere with your property or privacy however. They can't hover to annoy you, or get close to snap pictures or whatever.

If you're concerned about accidents and safety, then the solution is safety regulation. But the idea that drones must keep track of which individual properties allow flight above and which don't, and try to navigate some around some kind of patchwork accordingly, is simply unpractical and unreasonable.

If drones turn out to be a general nuisance then cities/counties can ban them altogether or whatever as a collective decision, but the idea that individual property owners should be able to ban them is a terrible idea.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75638]

This is an educated guess, but I think it becomes less efficient, so it heats up, and then performs better as it heats. I assume this to be the case because I charge my RC plane LiPos the same way every time, and they take the same amount of energy, but flying in the winter gives much shorter flight times. Since the battery is warm after a flight, even in the cold, I don't think the energy is still there the battery is still discharged when I take it home), so it must just be much less efficient and wasting a lot of energy as heat.

I assume it's just that its internal resistance rises when it's cold, but I might be wrong.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 159419]

Another one of the greats gone.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89843]

We need a high trust society.

Everything else is band aids on a broken one.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75638]

That's so reductive as to be useless. You might as well replace "clanker" with "computer" or "pencil" or whatever else you want.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 182591]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 416741]

Without commenting on the racial biases of IQ tests (we probably directionally agree), the idea that IQ tests in employment are legally risky is an Internet myth. The companies that offer employment-screening general cognitive tests have logo crawls of giant companies that use them.

They're not unusual because they're legally risky; they're unusual because they don't work well.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75638]

Wait, what's the play on words in The Martian?

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 75638]

It's just an example of what you can do, not a global feature that will be mandatory. If I trust someone on one of my projects, why wouldn't I want to trust them on others?

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 87940]

Even with that, your hardware is still running Windows.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 185483]

I have to say I disagree about containers and Kubernetes as being BS - they are tools that have very legitimate use cases. Most companies, though, don't need K8s, but containers and container images are very handy.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 104633]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

I’ve looked into buying grassland. It’s in in the middle of nowhere. $25k/year is before maintenance and grid hook-up costs, both of which will be substantial in the middle of nowhere.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

> trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce"

This is a graph search. If the person you’re evaluating vouches for people those you vouch for denounce, then even if they aren’t denounced per se, you have gained information about how trustworthy you would find that person. (Same in reverse. If they vouch for people who your vouchers vouch for, that indirectly suggests trust even if they aren’t directly vouched for.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

> question is: is the date mismatch an accident or is it not

Literally what I need. Context. Whether errors like this are common in this format. If anyone has noted this before.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176393]

> let’s get rid of wire transfers, and transactions by bank id / account number

You can’t sent a Fedwire with only account number [1]. And this woman wasn’t shot because of wires, the man was told to hand over hard cash.

[1] https://onrr.gov/document/fedwire.pdf

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 102844]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 238251]

Funny thing: I never liked shared libraries. There is something fundamental about them that is broken: it changes the execution context from the one that you had when you were testing your code prior to shipping. The space savings argument only made sense for a little while, what they should have done instead is build a much better linker that only includes the smallest subset of code that your program should have access to. That as well as a predefined set of file system bits which system calls you are allowed to make and which you are not.