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.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

The architect’s role is what is left for us as developers, when putting out lines of code no longer matters.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

And for any ML inspired language, OCaml, Haskell, Grain, Roc.

Especially Grain, as it was also developed as an ML for WebAssembly.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241729]

And just as dangerous: 50 employees. Because quite frequently these 50 employee companies have responsibilities that they can not begin to assume on the budgets that they have. Some business can really only be operated responsibly above a certain scale.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

> While that kind of flexibility is tempting, it comes with a significant complexity tax as well: it means that reasoning through and implementing classical compiler analyses and transforms is more difficult, at least for existing compiler engineers with their experience, because the IR is so different from the classical data structure (CFG of basic blocks). The V8 team wrote about this difficulty recently as support for their decision to migrate away from a pure Sea-of-Nodes representation.

Note that the Sea of Nodes author, Cliff Click, is the opinion they weren't really using the way they should, and naturally doesn't see a point on their migration decision.

There is a Coffee Compiler Club discussion on the subject.

jrockway ranked #50 [karma: 73257]

jj is great and while it was an adjustment at first, I've never looked back. I feel like when you're working with other people, things never get reviewed and merged as quickly as you'd like. With jj, it's pretty low-cost to have a bunch of PRs open at once, and you can do something like `jj new <pr1> <pr2> <pr3>` to build stuff that requires all 3. This lets me do things like... not do a big refactoring in the same PR as adding a feature. I can have them both self-contained, but still start on the next step before they're all merged. It's easy to add changes on top, switching between the individual PRs as comments come up, etc.

I always liked doing things like this. At Google where we used a custom fork of Perforce, I told myself "NEVER DO STACKED CLs HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED YOUR LESSON YET?" If one CL depended on another... don't do it. With git... I told myself the same thing, as I sat in endless interactive rebases and merge conflict commits ("git rebase abort" might have been my most-used command). With jj, it's not a problem. There are merge conflicts. You can resolve them with the peace of mind as a separate commit to track your resolution. `jj new -d 'resolve merge conflict` -A @` to add a new commit after the conflicted one. Hack on your resolution until you're happy. jj squash --into @-. Merge conflict resolved.

It is truly a beautiful model. Really a big mental health saver. It just makes it so easy to work with other people.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91219]

> Then it found a pattern that worked: read Hacker News, find connections, write essays, tweet. And it stopped evolving.

"I'm in this photo and I don't like it."

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

Additionally there is still too much performance left on the table by not properly using CPU vector units.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

Disaster response is a lie researchers tell themselves when building military hardware. The purpose of such robots would be to e.g. burrow into the collapsed tunnels at Fordow and confirm the uranium is there. (Or, alternatively, burrow into military tunnels to identify targets.)

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

At risk of being labeled a "blast-haver" I'd say it was always a blast to go to Funspot in the 1980s. It had the latest cabinets, it was the first where I saw Star Wars and Dragon's Lair

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

You missed Taligent, Opendoc, A/UX, Mk Linux, Copland,...

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

Unfortunately the actual solution will probably have to mirror real world, which means balkanizing the Internet to clarify legal jurisdiction, maybe some international police task force to aid with cross-border investigation, but ultimately it all hinges on whether and how much the countries with most nuclear aircraft carriers are willing to pressure other countries to take this seriously.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

Because in real life deployments, outside of winning benchmarking charts, a JIT is fast enough, and the burden of multiple languages cake layer isn't worth the trouble.

Thanks for sharing the link.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108155]

> We asked AI to find the conflict's biggest boosters in Washington

I suppose it's a substitute for doing your own reading. The answer turns out to be exactly the organizations you'd expect. "Think tank" is an odd euphemism for "private propaganda organization"; they don't do a great deal of thinking, mostly marketing bad ideas to gullible politicians.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

As a semi-pro photographer I look at the $295 pricing and think that is a very reasonable price for something that could help my photos look like my photos. I bought DxO PhotoLab for $235 and color grade with it all the time. Right now I use LUTs that other people made and have been thinking I’d like to learn to be more systematic and make my own.

I don’t really do video but I have in the past so a video editor coming in a box sweetens the deal in the same sense that Adobe CC comes with, say, Premiere, which I use just occasionally. I can totally shoot video with my Sony and there is definitely a lot of demand for it on the internet these days. I also know Divinchi resolve is a product that many people in film/video are enthusiastic for and that counts too.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

I have my doubts on the story. I consulted on a medtech project in the recent past in similar space, and at various points different individuals vibe-coded[0] not one but three distinct, independent prototypes of a system like the article describes, and neither of them was anywhere near that bad. On the frontend, you'd have to work pretty hard to force SOTA LLMs to give you what is being reported here. Backend-side, there's plenty of proper turn-key systems to get you started, including OSS servers you can just run locally, and even a year ago, SOTA LLMs knew about them and could find them (and would suggest some of them).

I might be biased by my experience, because we actually cared about GDPR and AI act and proper medical data processing, and I've spent my fair share of time investigating the options that exist. Still, I'm struggling to imagine how one could possibly screw it up anywhere near as what the article described. Like, I can't think of a way to do it, to the point I might need to ask an LLM to explain it to me.

--

[0] - Not as a means of developing an actual product, but solely to see if we can, plus it was easier to discuss product ideas while having some prototypes to click around.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

> the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero

Zero is not the desired number, particularly not when discussing "hacks". This may not matter in current situation, but there's a lot of "security maximalism" in the industry conversations today, and people seem to not realize that dragging the "security" slider all the way to the right means not just the costs becoming practically infinite, but also the functionality and utility of the product falling down to 0.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

That's why you should never trust a time traveler. They probably know as much about your time as you about theirs.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

Is there even a working definition of what a "filter" is in Instagram, or mobile photo editors targetting social media users (which is approximately all of the mobile photo editors), beyond "a script that fucks up your photo in some trivial but also undocumented ways"?

I'm yet to see a filter that makes your photo look like taken from a specific camera (old or otherwise). Smearing colors and sticking a frame that imitates camera film border does not count.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

Why would encouraging non-insider training be desirable in the first place, other than to create a more high-status form of gambling, with higher spouse acceptance factor than smoke-filled room poker games? People with no inside knowledge[0] are just trading on vibes, how is that useful for the economy?

--

[0] - Or external knowledge, but actual knowledge - thinking of hedge funds stalking CEOs as they fly in private jets, or counting cars in parking lots from satellite photos, to get some probability estimates on factors actually relevant to the performance of a business and possible future events.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

Japan's railroad system has a big geographic advantage - the country is long and narrow. The railroad system is primarily a long end to end line with short crosswise branches.[1] That's an efficient structure. The branch lines don't have to be fast. Many are still narrow gauge, at 3 ft 6 in.

The US had to fill a huge area in the railroad era. That left a lot of underutilized track once the road network got good.

[1] https://www.jrailpass.com/pdf/maps/JRP_japan.pdf

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

Desktop had this solved, on Windows there was and remains a distinction between "back" (history) and "up" (navigation).

Browsers actually used to have hierarchical navigation support, with buttons and all, back in the age of dinosaurs - all one had to do is to set up some meta tags in HTML head section to tell which URL is "prev"/"next"/"up". Alas, this has proven too difficult for web developers, who eventually even forgot web was meant for documents at all, and at some point browsers just hid/removed those buttons since no one was using them anyway.

The "Back" remains, and as 'Arainach wrote, it's only one concept and it's not, and never has been "up one level in the hierarchy".

EDIT:

The accepted/expected standard way for "take me up one level in hierarchy" on the web is for the page itself to display the hierarchy e.g. as breadcrumbs. The standard way to go to top level of the page is through a clickable logo of the page/brand. Neither of those need, or should, involve changing behavior of browser controls.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

It's what many software companies dream of and aim for. But the same argument works with 10k users, or even 1k users.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89074]

The real question is, can it keep the plane in one piece?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108155]

> "shootings that happen at schools" with "shootings that target a school".

I don't understand this analogy or distinction at all?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

Now to prevent scroll bar hijacking.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89074]

The tiny MIPS (or compatible) cores in things like cheap router SoCs might still be like that.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160130]

And again Stuttgart City Library. It has almost become the default image of a library.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89074]

I'm not sure if LLMs can be ashamed of themselves.

/s

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89074]

When I last looked a few years ago, there were some efforts and successes in the far East doing "chimera Windows", mostly based on running an older userland (like XP) on a newer kernel (10).

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

Note the mention of "systems of record" being unsuitable for the present level of AI. The real question is whether the costs of AI mistakes and hallucinations can be dumped on some external party who can't impose costs on you. If not, there's a problem.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

Compression/decompression is a good problem for proof of correctness. The specification is very simple (you must get back what you put in), while the implementation is complex.

What seems to have happened here is that the storage allocator underneath is unverified. That, too, has a relatively simple spec - all buffers disjoint, no lost buffers, no crashes.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 146317]

It would be great to get one of these that supports the OpenSubsonic API, which has become a defacto standard for opensource music servers.

Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

This prevents uploading pictures, with chain of custody data attached, of law enforcement misbehaving. Was there pressure from ICE to install this feature?

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76030]

I'm glad this is the top comment. I'm ambivalent about a bunch of writing I've seen from Steve Blank - some of his stuff I've loved and some I thought was awful.

But this I just thought was vacuous. I agree with what you wrote, but more to the point, I didn't find any real advice about how a startup should actually change that passed my sniff test. I left the tech startup world about 2 years ago myself, and I'm glad I did, because I just think there are way fewer differentiable opportunities now. That is, even if I accept what Blank says is true, what are all these 2+ year old startups supposed to do - just create some model wrapper/RAG chatbot product like the million other startups out there?

Even in defense, like the article says, there are now a bajillion drone companies, and it looks like a race to the bottom. The most successful plan at this point just looks like the grifter plan, e.g. getting the current president to tweet out your stock ticker.

I'm honestly curious what folks think are good startup business plans these days. Even startups that looked they were "knock it out of the park" successes like Cursor and Lovable just seem like they have no moat to me - I see very few startups (particularly in the "We're AI for X!" that got a ton of funding in the past two years) with defensible positions.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

... or to believe that you can't be lovable if you aren't perfect.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

>The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world

/proceeds to write 10 steps

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

How easy is it really?

I mean, you might say your wages were stolen and you might be right but to do something about it there has to be some due process to confirm that and isn't that expensive and complicated?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

Today I used AI to help code a feature and it worked pretty well. I am not doing any of this gaslight town stuff, and I went back about 4-5 times with it to make sure we had a mutual understanding -- it's a nice clean patch.

As of the end of the day there was still a bug left, there probably would have been a bug left if I did it myself. Tomorrow i will fix the bug, maybe with some help, and I am on to another ticket.

I treat Junie as a coding buddy (think pair programming) and I don't delude myself that 20 slaves are going to create the Great American Javascript while I sleep. AI coding makes my life better.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105140]

I'd happily provide one but I've had enough of being repeatedly trashed and denigrated here for posting too many archive links.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

I think the AI backlash is strong enough that "AI-Free" might be a powerful marketing tool, whether that is fair or not.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

> the FBI got this man killed with a sloppy indictment

How do we know that’s how they discovered Garrison was cooperating?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

> That's what you voted for, freedumb-loving right-wingers

The right is worse. But policing language has been going on in the far left for about a decade, too. There is an illiberal strain poisoning the population through social media.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

There is a huge wetware problem too. Like if I can send you an email or other message that tricks you and gets you to send me $10k, what do I care if the industry is 100% effective at blocking RCE?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

“…the F.A.A. determined that the risk would be minimal even if the laser came into contact with an airplane”

I’m curious to know more about the testing. Was it only done on airliners, or GA aircraft, too?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

They exploit all minds. But adults can make that choice responsibly. Kids cannot. We age gate alcohol and cigarettes. Social media is no different.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

In most places photosynthesis is limited by (1) the availability of water and (2) the availability of bio-available Nitrogen. Sunlight is less limiting by far.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

> most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it

Someone blindly shooting at Altman’s house is going to kill a neighbour or the housekeeper. Not Sam Altman. Probably not even his family.

The internet may be happy. But the locals will get scared. This happens every time these lone-wolf escalations occur.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418389]

It's probably the most important storage API in the industry. Implementing it gives you on-prem storage, AWS S3 (the Hoover Dam of Internet storage megaprojects, arguably the most reliable store of any kind available to any normal programmer), and a whole ecosystem of S3-compatible options with different features and price points.

It's a little like asking why you'd use SQL.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

Waterloo University sort of nails the balance with their focus on constant, paid internships.

steveklabnik ranked #30 [karma: 97316]

99% of the time this situation is okay, because Cargo allows you to have both 0.1 and 0.2 in the same project as dependencies. It's just packages that call out to external dependencies, like libc, where it enforces the single version rule.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

Sure. Push and pull. The point is that needs effort to work at larger scales. We don’t “naturally” organize into nations of three hundred million or a billion. To the extent we do, we also “naturally” go to war.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

I believe that too. Broadly, I’m agreeing with the parent comment—AI can’t be causing long-run layoffs and be worthless.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105140]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 181225]

Denmark is linked to the Norwegian grid, which is essentially all hydropower [1]. It imports baseload when needed and exports cheap solar power when not.

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

steveklabnik ranked #30 [karma: 97316]

> If you have 10 commits for frontend and 10 for backend

In this model, you tend to want to amend, rather than add more commits. And so:

> they might start with 5 for backend, then 5 commits to each branch to iron out the interface and communication,

You don't add more commits here, you modify the commits in your stack instead.

> Now I need to rebase my frontend branch to sit on B6?

Yes, when you change something lower in the stack, the things on top need to be rebased. Because your forge understands that they're stacked, it can do this for you. And if there's conflicts, let you know that you need to resolve them, of course.

But in general, because you are amending the commits in the stack rather than adding to it, you don't need to move anything around.

> And wouldn't this separation normally be obvious e.g. by paths?

In the simplest case, sure. But for more complex work, that might not be the case. Furthermore, you said you have five commits for each; within those sets of five, this separation won't exist.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76030]

Your statement is a bit contradictory. That is, the article about "the growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else" pretty clearly states that "everyone else" is scared about job losses and the extreme inequality they see advanced AI causing. This is in line with your second to last sentence.

But the first part of your comment is basically saying "AI insiders think the tech is super awesome and powerful, while other engineers think it doesn't stand up to the hype." Well, if the AI is indeed not as good a tech as its boosters are saying, well, this would be great news for everyone scared about job losses and widening inequality if AI turned out to be a nothing burger.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

>It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action.

Yes, it's called "fatalism".

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108155]

How much extra on your electricity bill are you prepared to pay to not see it?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108155]

LTCM doing that was an early example of "too big to fail". In the late 90s.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91845]

I think we get a "S3 clone" about once every week or two on the Golang reddit.

It strikes me as a classic case of "we need all the interested people to pull in one project, not each start their own". AI may have made this worse then ever.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102364]

I was talking recently to someone who teaches AI-adjacent courses at a US university (not in a computer science department) and they said that enrollment in their class is lower than expected, which they think is likely due to the severity of the AI backlash among students on campus.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

Needs a beauty strip of trees around the panels.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105140]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

> They admit no returns.

So it's not a useful trading strategy. Good to know.

It might have worked out that the human tendency towards optimism biased the Yes side, but Polymarket is watched closely enough by traders that the pricing is apparently realistic.

Now if you could bet against minor crypto coins, which almost always go down... But if you could, there would be traders pricing them realistically. Everybody has analytics now, and mispriced markets are detected and exploited quickly.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

Notably if you believe this it does not matter so much what your site looks like and does matter if it is easy to crawl and easy for AI to interpret.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91219]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

"It resolved its C2 domain through an Ethereum smart contract, querying public blockchain RPC endpoints. Traditional domain takedowns would not work because the attacker could update the smart contract to point to a new domain at any time."

Does this mean firewalls now have to block all Ethereum endpoints?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241729]

And the clean environment as a whole. That's a massive investment and there are a million ways to mess that up.

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 134854]

Up for me ... now.

I'm in the UK, and it's four hours since you asked. I suspect it's suffering the occasional HN "Hug of Death".

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241729]

And because it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between 'oops' and 'malice' a lot of the actual perps get away with it too, as long as they limit their involvement. In-house threats are an under appreciated - and somewhat uncomfortable - topic for many companies, they don't have the funds to do things by the book but they do have outsized responsibilities and pray that they can trust their employees.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102364]

I count "figuring out how to do it" as part of the work of programming, personally.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91845]

Make sure you have a run of govulncheck [1] somewhere in your stack. It works OK as a commit hook, it runs quickly enough, but it can be put anywhere else as well, of course.

Go isn't immune to supply chain attacks, but it has built in a variety of ways of resisting them, including just generally shorter dependency chains that incorporate fewer whacky packages unless you go searching for them. I still recommend a periodic skim over go.mod files just to make sure nothing snuck in that you don't know what it is. If you go up to "Kubernetes" size projects it might be hard to know what every dependency is but for many Go projects it's quite practical to know what most of them are and get a sense they're probably dependable.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/vuln/cmd/govulncheck - note this is official from the Go project, not just a 3rd party dependency.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111189]

I don't think companies appreciated just how much they gave up when they outsourced "IT".

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160972]

Almost all those events were on Hacker News. This hasn't been a secret.

Companies need to get serious about levels of security. Only some things need to be protected, and you have to accept a substantial level of inconvenience and cost for those items. In my aerospace days, we had a bidding rule of thumb that running a project at SECRET doubled the cost. Running a project at TOP SECRET had an even bigger cost multiplier. A surprising amount of material was not classified at all, for cost reasons.

Banks and credit card processors get this. Most other businesses don't.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91219]

Is that really a "dirty secret"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74152]

Gemma 4 is not supported by the MLX engine yet.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76030]

The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.

An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people who enable those deaths are usually safely ensconced thousands of miles away, often living in cushy suburbs.

To emphasize as strongly as I possibly can, I am not advocating for more violence. Quite the contrary, I'm advocating for less. I just don't understand why we have all these adages to convince people that "violence is always wrong", while I'm sure some at least some of the people who say that are actively engaged in building machines designed to kill people.

Related, the Substack link you posted is titled "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91845]

I've got a couple of sweetener-free recipes I use with my soda maker, though I should warn you nobody else I've given them to likes them. But I like them well enough.

One is a couple of squirts of vanilla, a couple of squirts of lemon juice, and a bit of salt. Salt is probably an underappreciated drink ingredient for this sort of thing. It turns out it isn't in your soft drinks just to make you want to drink more. This makes something that is related to cream soda, except for the aspects of cream soda that come from being crammed full of sugar, which I can't do much about.

I also have a mix I keep around made out of 3 tablespoons salt, 1 cup vanilla, 1/2 cup lemon juice, 1/2 cup lime juice, and about 1/3rd cup almond extract. I measure it all (except the salt which I just put in directly) into a single 2 cup Pyrex dish and just sort of eyeball the last 1/3rd cup of almond extract, then funnel it in to a holder. I use McCormick 32 oz vanilla and almond extract for this and order bulk RealLemon and RealLime juice for this from Amazon, and mix it into one of the leftover bottles and keep it around refrigerated. 3 squirts and "whatever dribbles in" as I'm removing the bottle is what I used for one DrinkMate bottle. To taste, as all of this is, of course. If nothing else this is pretty cheap per drink.

You can also mix unsweetened electrolytes in, but you have to wait until after you dilute the mixture with water or it'll react with the lemon & lime juice. Salt you can keep in the mix but not electrolytes in general. It adds a certain body to the mix even if you're not interested in the electrolytes per se, and a single packet of them lasts a long time.

You're not going to go into business selling this stuff, but if you're already drinking unsweetened apple cider vinegar & lemon/lime juice as a beverage flavoring we might just have some compatible tastes here. Carbonation is required, though, otherwise the vanilla and the almond extract don't come through at all.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105140]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418389]

It's so firmly established that, just like crypto, making a stink about it says more about the objector. I don't like it either! "Cyber" is cringe, and "crypto" should mean "cryptography". But I'm not the king of usage, and both those terms have new meanings.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418389]

A statement broadly true of most things this author writes.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

>Even back in the day you had to buy programming books and courses if you wanted to learn how to make the best code. That wasn't free

"Even before the extinction level meteor hit Ohio, there were tiny meteors hitting Earth all the time, it wasn't that safe either".

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

>Try asking it for some scroll-driven animations or custom micro-interactions

Unrelated, but as a long time front-end dev, FUCK THOSE.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

>Mythos scoured the entire continent for gold and found some. For these small models, the authors pointed at a particular acre of land and said "any gold there? eh? eh?" while waggling their eyebrows suggestively.

Which sounds trivial for a hacker wanting to find vulnerabilities to replicate, so what's the huge advantage of Mython then? That you don't need to spend 5 minutes to nudge it to the most complex/ripe for vulnerabilities parts of a codebase?

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

>I don't see this as evidence that Opus 4.6 has gotten worse.

I see it as corroboration evidence of actual everyday experience.

Also, any reason to imply "BridgeBench", apparently dedicated to AI benchmarking, wouldn't have run it more than once across the suite?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

... been saying this for years. If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you wouldn't just be posting on lesswrong, you would be taking direct action against a clear and present danger.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114058]

If the tool is reliable, it's a win. Saved brain power doesn't disappear, it can be applied elsewhere.

If the tool is powerful enough to do a better job than our brains would, it's a big win. In fact, we built the entire technological civilization on one such fundamental tool: writing.

Or from another perspective: our brains excel at adapting to the environment we find ourselves in. The tools we build, the technology we create, are parts our environment.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187968]

I like to have an IBM 3270 style status bar on the bottom.

    set-option -gq status-style "fg=brightblue,overline"

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187968]

I did that for my mom. At some point she learned to click through the Ubuntu updater and she kept her machine updated by herself. I only kept tabs on her computer via the server monitoring tooling I had on my network.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91845]

"Isn't the compile speed of Go so good because it's type system is much simpler?"

That, and forgoing fancy compile-time optimization steps which can get arbitrarily expensive. You can recover some of this with profile-guided optimization, but only some and my best guess based on the numbers is that it's not much compared to a more full (but much more expensive) suite of compile-time optimizations.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74152]

I have been building/vibecoding a similar tool and unfortunately came to the conclusion that in practice, there are just too many features dependent on the full Chrome stack that it's just more pragmatic to use a real Chromium installation despite the file size. Performance/image generation speed is still fine, though.

In Rust, the chromiumoxide crate is a performant way to interface with it for screenshots: https://crates.io/crates/chromiumoxide

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79415]

In the 80s, a good compiler would cost several hundred dollars. Relentless competition pushed the prices down to zero.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102364]

Here's a vibe-coded "servo-shot" CLI tool which uses this crate to render an image of a web page: https://github.com/simonw/research/tree/main/servo-crate-exp...

  git clone https://github.com/simonw/research
  cd research/servo-crate-exploration/servo-shot
  cargo build
  ./target/debug/servo-shot https://news.ycombinator.com/
Here's the image it generated: https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2cb4fcb15b0837bbc4540c3d398c...

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76030]

Totally disagree, as I think that would be the worst of all possible worlds - too fuzzy to be useful for many of the niche use cases where it's needed, and still a privacy violation for the majority of users who don't know their photos reveal their location.

The other suggestion about requiring something like a useLocation or includeExif attribute on the file picker, and then requiring confirmation from the user, seems like a much better solution to me.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90789]

Or is was written for people who understand humor and hyperbole in making a point.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91845]

It is easy to forget sometimes in the excitement, but nobody has been using (2026) AI for 20 years. We're all still new. I am sure that in the next year, something will be found that is fairly exciting, and something we could all be doing right now, but it's simply that nobody has thought of it yet. Or something that is today common practice will become generally considered an anti-pattern and common practice will have some replacement for it that, again, nothing stops us from doing it today but nobody has thought of it yet, because we're all newbs.

(One candidate example for this is the discussion I've seen in the last few days about not trying to negate something, to say "Don't do X", but instead stay positive because eventually the negation gets lost in the context window and you're better off just not putting the idea in the LLM's mind at all, where "Don't do X" comes to be seen as an LLM antipattern.)

One of the consequences of none of us having used AI for long enough is that we don't know how to onboard developers in an age of AI. This will be, by necessity, transient. Eventually we're going to max out what a person can do and we'll need more people. The supply of existing engineers will be limited. We will be forced to discover how to onboard new engineers.

But at the moment we've got our hands full, and we don't know how to do it.

The irony is, the best time to join a field is often exactly when the enrollment dips and the worst can be precisely when it is the most popular. Start a programming college program today and the odds that in 4 years we'll have onboarding figured out and have developed some sort of need for fresh developers is pretty decent.

But I don't know what to do about the fact that the standard CS curriculum was already of debatable relevance to me in the late 90s and I don't know of what relevance it will be in four years except to guess that it very likely to be even less. I do know that we are again affected by the fact nobody has been doing this for 20 years, like I mentioned above. There is no body of "wisdom" for an AI-powered world to draw on to construct a new curriculum. Universities would be inclined to do the obvious thing and try to chase our current practices with AI but those aren't going to be stable enough to build a curriculum on any time soon, and a real fundamentals-based curriculum may involve less AI than people may think.

I know one advantage I have over my younger peers at this point is just a knowledge of what terms to say to the AI to get it to do what I want, words like "event sourced" or "message bus" or "stored procedures", where simply knowing that the concept exists is the bottleneck. I could see a programming curriculum based on touring through a whole whackload of concepts with their pros and cons, or at least, where that is a much larger portion of it.

Ask me in 5 years though and I'd almost certainly suggest a completely different curriculum than I would now, though.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77169]

Better go for a less-quantized model even if it's slower than go for a faster, quantized one.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127916]

That is where headless CMS with Vercel and Netlify partnerships, using Next.js SSG capabilities come into play, regardless how much folks hate them.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107587]

I'd say a big organization is a bunch of little organizations. What matters is: "do you like your boss?" and "how does your team work together?"

That feeling that you can't run at full speed is common in that kind of role but working in startups or other small co's you can have just as much or more dysfunction: you can run yourself ragged or feel like you're in a magically productive team or even both at the same time.

I have two relatives who work at a major online retailer that has 'Z' in the name and one of them is thrilled to go to work each day and the other just had a nervous breakdown because they had her doing three people's roles. The situation you have where you feel unproductive but the people around you think you are is pretty common because of the economics of scale: if you are working at a 100x bigger company that software you work on can have 100x the economic impact that it would for the smaller company. So a big company can have an organization that seems unproductive based on your instincts working at small companies but you are creating enough value to pay you so you are doing fine. [1]

If you have some slack, don't feel bad using it in a way that is meaningful and restorative to you and keeps you in fine condition to do what your organization needs of you.

[1] A friend of mine quoted Marx and said I was being ripped off because I was getting paid less than the value I made and I told him... I've tried the alternative and it usually ends up as hell on Earth.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102364]

Surprisingly iOS doesn't do this - at least not for photos uploaded via a web form these days. Try this tool to see that (it should demonstrate the Android EXIF stripping behavior too): https://tools.simonwillison.net/exif