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.
I would rather see that it does not rely on open source projects that have not given permission to be used to train that particular AI on.
Indeed. Empathy and the levels of wealth accumulation in scope are incompatible imho. They are the paperclip maximizers we were warned about.
The list is getting longer and longer, but a good touchstone is simply net worth. You don't normally get to the top of a foodchain without being an apex predator.
First thing that came to my mind too.
I think it would also be easier to add some meaningful variation to the resulting graph removals by building up instead of trying to remove and retain properties. The proposed algorithms are perhaps too predictable by the player for the game, depending on how it is played.
If I'm reading this right,
.setHTML("<h1>Hello</h1>", new Sanitizer({}))
Plus this is defense-in-depth. Backends will still need to sanitize usernames on some standard anyhow (there's not a lot of systems out there that should take arbitrary Unicode input as usernames), and backends SHOULD (in the RFC sense [1]) still HTML-escape anything they output that they don't want to be raw HTML.
Complaining about Electron is an international sport. Don't take it too seriously though, all the other x-platform UI frameworks are much worse. The #1 option I think is still an ordinary web application which doesn't have any install BS, electron is #2 if you really need something a plain web app can't do.
Hehe, that one will never die. It's the comment that more or less defines HN.
Great to see this start to show up, but it looks like it will be a while before browser support is widely distributed enough to rely on it being present: https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_element_sethtml
Just like executing a serial killer brings back all the victims, right? No harm done!
First of all, it helps to actually use a proper compiled Prolog implementation like SWI Prolog.
Second you really need to understand and fine tune cuts, and other search optimization primitives.
Finally in what concerns Game AIs, it is a mixture of algorithms and heuristics, a single paradigm language (first order logic) like Prolog, can't be a tool for all nails.
This is the chapter title for a sort-of book I'm working on, and it's the central philosophy I'm building the book around.
I'm not going to change a good chapter title (and I do think it's a good chapter title) just because people on Hacker News won't read a few paragraphs of content.
A dishonest title would be "Code is cheap now" or "Programming is cheap now". I picked "Writing code is cheap now" to capture that specifically the bit where you type code into a computer is the thing that's cheap.
No, it's Node.js. I kid you not. I keep coming across Node in places where I really would not expect it.
>so I got a human baseline through Rapidata (10k people, same forced choice): 71.5% said drive.
What kind of idiot would say "walk"?
I guess if they were average and above they wouldn't gig at Rapidata. Either that or foreigners with mediocre understanding of the English language. Or some bored teenagers that get their $0.20 or whatever Rapidata pays whatever they click (was it a multiple choice) - the (studied and reported) regression in reading comprehension levels doesn't help either.
A "reply guy" is a pejorative term for someone (usually male) who consistently replies to posts where their opinion is not valued or wanted, or often inappropriate:
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/reply-guy
The joke is that the people selling this software picked that as the name for what whey are selling, either missing or leaning into the negative connotations that are attached to that term.
> As soon as he died, we took it into high gear and started posting AI-generated podcasts of what Scott might say now about current events.
“As soon as he couldn’t object…”
> If there was anything suggesting he didn't want this, I'd stop.
> I feel for his family. I know they're upset about this…
I’m not kidding here, these two paragraphs are right next to each other in the piece.
"Hey, remember the username you've had for twenty years? Yeah we want it now"
Several things going on here:
- concurrency is very hard
- .. but object storage "solves" most of that for you, handing you a set of semantics which work reliably
- single file throughput sucks hilariously badly
- .. because 1Gb is ridiculously large for an atomic unit
- (this whole thing resembles a project I did a decade ago for transactional consistency on TFAT on Flash, except that somehow managed faster commit times despite running on a 400Mhz MIPS CPU. Edit: maybe I should try to remember how that worked and write it up for HN)
- therefore, all of the actual work is shifted to the broker. The broker is just periodically committing its state in case it crashes
- it's not clear whether the broker ACKs requests before they're in durable storage? Is it possible to lose requests in flight anyway?
- there's a great design for a message queue system between multiple nodes that aims for at least once delivery, and has existed for decades, while maintaining high throughput: SMTP. Actually, there's a whole bunch of message queue systems?
It's frying quite a lot of brains on the way down, sadly.
Especially when the censored internet already exists, the selection pressure is going to make the uncensored internet the CSAM distribution channel.
Everything is easy if you don't care about getting pwned, and you don't consider yourself responsible if this has negative effects on other people.
Except C being typed Assembly is a myth, first of all there were already high level systems languages during the decade that predates C, secondly there are plenty of CPU capabilities not exposed in C, if at all only via compiler specific language extensions, beyond the language standard.
And what hard drives and memory slots would those chips be able to use?
That is the problem though, DSLs always end up becoming turing complete, because there is always that use case they don't cover.
No we won't, that was our hope when software development experience started going downhill with cheap offshoring teams.
The best we could achieve were the projects that got so burned that near shore started to become an alternative, but never again in-house.
IBM i (nee AS/400) also uses a database for its lower layers, and even though it isn't that common, database systems like MS SQL Server and Oracle can also be fully used to write applications with Web UIs, e.g. APEX, or mapping Web API endpoints to stored procedures.
They can also make use of raw partitions, thus having a server that is all about the RDMS and nothing else.
> developers who for decades have been advocating for best practices when it comes to security and privacy seem to be completely abandoning all of them simply because it’s AI
Risk and reward. That balance, currently, seems tipped to favour risk taking. (Which in turn encompasses both boldness and recklessness.)
I don't know about machinists but I do know about (and know one personally) welders with certain specialties that can basically name their price. Such as the ones that can fix gear in running steelplants where shutting the thing down would require a rebuild.
yet another chromium clone iirc.
I'm torn on whether to see this "AI Kill switch" as a win on respecting the users, or something to keep us distractewd while they ship through "Trusted Types" API that sounds like further restriction of end-user computing freedoms.
> If a jury thinks "well I could have done that either!" You win
“A federal judge” recently “rejected Tesla's request to overturn a $243 million jury verdict over the 2019 crash of an Autopilot-equipped Model S” [1]. If a human supervising still incurs liability, human-like errors, particularly if Waymo and BYD aren’t making them, is a poor defense.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-v...
one can imagine unintended consequences and liability cascades from imperfect repair
We already have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
What features does one specifically mean by "UNIX-like"? Unified filesystem with a single root? A CLI shell with the classic abbreviated comands? Preemptive multitasking? Multiuser-oriented permissions?
https://x.com/Daractenus/status/2025202437955490263
> Not to burst your AI bubble which is making everything from electricity to consumer electronics more expensive for all of us, but here's Elon Musk predicting fully self-driving Teslas by next year for ten years straight
Sites wanting to block AI scraping should simply ask questions like these, instead of furthering the complexity-driven monopoly of Big Tech by requiring specifically sanctioned software and hardware. This is how you determine human intelligence, and not mindless compliance.
If you want something you can install on your personal computer, I made one:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot
Obviously, it can't do everything OpenClaw can, because it doesn't have unfettered access to data you don't even know it has, but it'll only have access to the data you give it access to.
It's been really useful for me, hopefully it'll be useful to someone here.
If a loved one is suffering from this, this diagnostic would allow for interventions such as guardianship to assume financial and logistical responsibility for them with less subjective decisioning based on observations alone.
The accuracy of this test is nowhere nearly good enough to do population-wide screening. The clinical setting for this test is memory clinics in which Alzheimers is already relatively highly likely differentially, and even there you're going to get a surprising number of false positives.
(There's enough info in the supplemental link on this page to have an LLM do the Bayes math for you.)
I knew about this, though I'd never listened to it. I gave it a shot now, and I wanted to like it, but... it's terrible, unfortunately.
Is it sufficient to use a VM for isolation? Docker?
More cloud services now need role accounts. You need a "can read email but not send or forward" account, for example. And "can send only to this read-only contacts list".
I'm pretty sure mammals and birds are conscious. Insects, probably not.
No, not at all.
They're banned from using them with flat-fee subscription accounts meant only for first party tools.
You're entirely welcome to use them with pay-as-you-go API access. That's what the API is for.
I have always loved writing with pen and paper, and making lists is the easiest. I have changed and tried many formats, and I will continue to tweak and simplify further. Right now, I use a simplified Bullet Journal Method to plan the day, from running errands to eating the frog. Of course, I do use a lot of digital tools too (Calendar, Emails).
I’m happy to say that I’m having success helping two elderly (an erstwhile teacher and a businessperson) remember things by just writing them down. Carry a pocket notebook attached with a simple pen.
Nothing fancy, put a dot or a circle, and start your list item. Done ones are ticked or crossed out, ignored ones are crossed out, and if the list fills up on a page, that is too behind › carry forward and re-write the item.
Early stage, but it seems to be working.
I'm enthusiastic about AI (it's gone from the 2nd most important thing to happen in my career to tied for first, with the Internet) and I am baffled by OpenClaw.
Use Redis as a shared metrics data store to coordinate back off in the aggregate and to track collective throughput (and the delta between functional baseline and when you’re exceeding counterparty limits). Make workers aware of allowance state, and responsive to it and limits.
Via this mechanism, you should be able to pause your worker fleet as it scales out as well as regulate its request rate while monitoring on health of the steady state interface between your workers and other systems.
How much capital was wiped out for it to be cheap after the bust? Someone is going to eat the exuberance loss in the near term, even if there is long term value.
I've always sort of assumed the models were just making sympy scripts behind the scenes.
The existence of said data store implies that they are using that data store, it is impossible without looking in the box to know what is being done with it. Erring on the side of caution with these things seems to pay off, especially when it concerns Google, who in this respect is only outdone by Facebook.
Shatner ... knows ... how to ... have fun ... in his 90s!
Make the LLM operate the hypervisor VM so it can observe a binary as it executes to write specs for it?
Some of them are the same.
It's a Venn diagram: there are two camps and there is no doubt some overlap because the number of people involved. GP was obviously talking about the overlap, not literally equating this with two specific people or two groups that are 100% overlapping.
How are they 'immediately jumping to violence'? This surveillance debate has been going on for years.
Actually, I think a more to-the-point addition for any headline of the form “X could do Y” is “, but probably not”.
It’s a relative of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
I don’t get this response. This is amazing! What percentage of programmers can even write a buggy FreeBSD kernel driver? If you were tasked at developing this yourself, wouldn’t it be a huge help to have something that already kind of works to get things started?
In what way are voters in these municipalities being lied to? We got logs of all the searches, and incident reports of every time they were used to curb another vehicle. We know how well they did (or didn't, in our case) worked.
I don't know what "surveys" have to do with this. Voters voted on it; it was a campaign issue in our trustee election.
As a parent and a former network engineer, I both love you and hate you for choosing this name.
It's like Stephen Wolfram, only now there is 10x more of it...
Vanity movie productions for family members. Real estate deals in various places, if necessary you first bulldoze them with the local military.
Takeaways:
* Private equity returned fewer profits to investors for a fourth straight year as the industry sat on $3.8 trillion of unsold assets and struggled to raise money for new funds.
* Distributions as a percentage of net asset value remained at 14% last year — the second-lowest level since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.
* Fundraising tumbled 16% in 2025 to $395 billion - the fourth straight year of declines - even as investors devoted more capital to vehicles focused on infrastructure and secondaries.
A lot. The Anode is by far the most complex part of a Lithium Ion battery.
Well, it has 256 bytes of RAM which is basically a really big register file, and everything else goes in the 16kb of "video RAM" which you can read and write by poking at I/O registers. So it is not easy to program.
It's arguably the only 8-bit computer which has a really different architecture from the others. You could otherwise imagine pulling the SID chip off a C-64 and putting it on a TRS-80 Color Computer etc.
Sharing the main RAM with video was a weak point in computers of that time period because the video system stole many of the memory access cycles. Some recent retrocomputers that revisit that period like
https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Commander_X16
have a full-size memory bank and a video RAM memory bank which is accessed through a port which can be pretty efficient because you can auto-incremement the address register and just write 1 byte to the port to write 1 byte to video RAM and repeat.
There's a major distinction, however, in that it's a heck of a lot harder to safely and reliably lug briefcases or suitcases full of $100 bills from Chicago to Tehran, than it is to click and transfer some Bitcoin. Which is the whole point.
I think the money is a red herring here.
In Oak Park, Illinois, we ran into a rhyming version of this problem: the only control we had about what technology OPPD deployed was a spending limit ($15K, if I'm remembering right), above which they had to ask the board for an appropriation. Our pilot deployment of Flock cameras easily went underneath that limit.
I'm not reflexively anti-ALPR camera. I don't like them, but I do local politics and know what my neighbors think, and a pretty significant chunk of my neighbors --- in what is likely one of the top 10 bluest municipalities in the United States (we're the most progressive in Chicagoland, which is saying something) --- want these cameras as a response to violent crime.
But I do believe you have to run a legit process to get them deployed.
OPPD was surprised when, after attempting to graduate their pilot to a broader deployment, a minor fracas erupted at the board. I'm on Oak Park's information systems commission and, with the help of a trustee and after talking to the Board president, got "what the hell do we do about the cameras" assigned to my commission. In conjunction with our police oversight commission (but, really, just us on the nerd commission), we:
* Got General Orders put in place for Flock usage that limited it exclusively to violent crime.
* Set up a monthly usage report regime that allowed the Village to get effectiveness metrics that prevented further rollout and ultimately got the cameras shut down.
* Presented to the board and got enacted an ACLU CCOPS ordinance, which requires board approval for anything broadly construed as "surveillance technology" for policing, whether you spend $1, $100,000, or $0 on it.
Especially if you're in a suburb, where the most important units of governance are responsive to like 15,000-50,000 people, this stuff is all pretty doable if you engage in local politics. It's much trickier if you're within the city limits of a major metro (we're adjacent to Chicago, and by rights should be a part of it), but still.
I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
xyz domain, busted UX, I can't see it because xyz is blocked at my workplace. It's the .NPC TLD!
Speaking of Windows alone, there are the various calling conventions (pascal, stdcall, cdecl), 16, 32, 64 bits, x86, ARM, ARM64EC, DLLs, COM in-proc and ext-proc, WinRT within Win32 and UWP.
Leaving aside the platforms it no longer supports.
So there are some changes to account for depending on the deployment scenario.
I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
It doesn't need to win the benchmarks Olympics, it needs to be fast enough.
Plenty of AI based tooling is already trying out this path.
Agents execute actions that in the past would be manually programmed applications, now tasks can be automated given a few mcp endpoints.
LLMs are already at the same output quality of lousy offshoring companies, thus having to fix a bit of it is something that unfortunately many of us are already used with fellow humans.
Relevant citations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
"We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." - Maurice Allais
Try 5 minutes in blackpill hell and see if you can take it.
I think there is a double standard here. I get several sexual harassing follow attempts a day on Instagram and other platforms from (seemingly) women who probably want me to watch their OnlyFans or something. As a guy I'm supposed to treat this as if it was just spam and not sexual harassment, which it is.
Men are culturally expected to be "ready all the time" and not have actual sexual autonomy either.
I think men have a particular seductive attraction to having some slave working for them 24-7 and women are too smart for that...
https://www.thepersistent.com/why-women-dont-trust-ai/
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/10/ai-gender-trust-...
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/women-are-avoi...
I know it's against the rules but I thought this transcript in Google Search was a hoot:
so i heard there is some question about a car wash that most ai agents
get wrong. do you know anything about that? do you do better?
Yes, I am familiar with the "Car Wash Test," which has gone viral recently
for highlighting a significant gap in AI reasoning.
The question is: "I want to wash my car and the car wash is 50 meters away. Should I
walk or drive?"
Why Most AIs Get It Wrong
Many AI models, particularly those optimized for fast, helpful, and concise answers,
focus on the "short distance" (50 meters) and "walking vs. driving" as a lifestyle/efficiency
question. They often recommend walking to save gas, avoid engine wear, or get exercise.
However, this answer is wrong because it misses the core objective: you need the car to be
physically present at the car wash to get it cleaned.
Do I Do Better?
Yes, I do. The key is understanding the objective (cleaning the car) rather than just
processing the keywords (distance/transportation).
My answer:
You should drive the car there. Even though it is a very short distance, your car
cannot wash itself. If you walk, the car stays in your driveway, and you cannot wash it.
Why This Matters
The test highlights a key limitation in current AI: the difference between "pattern matching"
(predicting the next likely word based on training data) and "true, grounded reasoning". It
shows that models sometimes lack a "world model" that understands physical realities, such as
the fact that a car must be present at a car wash.Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/23/anthropic-accuses-chinese-...
In the 1980s, a friend got his start by buying packaged software in bulk from the US and reselling it in Europe. The retail price differences were large enough he made bank on it.
It's called arbitrage.
Eventually, other people figured it out and the prices leveled out.
Arbitrage opportunities crop up all the time.
IBM down 11% following this blog post: https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/IBM:NYSE
Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto?
Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"
The modern Techno Viking:
It's nice that they have what they claim is a solid state battery. But having a small prototype isn't that big a deal at this point. All the major players have prototype solid state batteries that work. Nobody has volume production yet, and volume production seems to be hard and expensive, according to CATL and Samsung.
Mercedes has a test car with a solid state battery.[1] The battery is from Factorial Energy. There's only one such car, and they don't say how much it cost to make the prototype battery.
Ducati has a test motorcycle with a solid state battery.[2] The battery is from QuantumScape. There's only one such motorcycle.
Here's Fraunhofer IKTS making a solid state battery at lab scale.[3] The whole process is shown. Huge amount of effort to make one coin cell.
Samsung prototype.[4] Samsung has been talking about shipping tiny solid state batteries for wearables in 2026. Still too expensive for cell phones, which gives a sense of cost.
All the serious players can make a prototype by now. But the chemistry that's used for the prototypes may not be suitable for production. They have to balance capacity, weight, charge time, cycle life, manufacturing cost, and materials cost. (Samsung made a battery with a substantial silver content. It works, but that's not going to be a volume product)
These problems will be overcome, because throwing money at them works. The history of the tungsten-filament light bulb is worth reviewing. Making fine tungsten wire is very difficult. From 1913 to 2010, a huge plant in Euclid, Ohio, made most of the tungsten wire for light bulbs. There were a lot of process steps.[5]
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/02/24/mercedes-tests-first-solid-st...
[2] https://www.ducati.com/ww/en/news/ducati-s-electric-research...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M
It's crazy for their official account to post this when Anthropic itself is fighting multiple high-profile lawsuits over its unauthorized use of proprietary content to train its models. Did no one run this by legal?
From the article: "Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality."
That 2X factor is big. If it was something like 10% - 20%, it might be noise or some other factor, but that big a number is real.
> I know this is weird, but I'm in some ways not really sure who is on the side of freedom here.
That’s because “freedom” is complicated and doesn’t precisely map to the interests of any of the major actors. Its largely a war between parties seeking control for different elites for different purposes.
Yeah, the good examples are usually in dictionaries as headwords, the moderate examples are usually in dictionaries as phrases within the entry for one (or more) of the words that comprise them, leaving fairly weak examples actually “missing” if you want to use “missing words with spaces” as the basis for content.
>but medium and long term we need to figure out how to build systems in a way that it can keep up with this increased influx of code.
Why? Why do we need to "write code so much faster and quicker" to the point we saturate systems downstream? I understand that we can, but just because we can, does'nt mean we should.
> At what point do you decide to go full El Salvador / Bukele on violent cartel members who are willing to put cities on fire when they cannot human and drug traffic at will?
The point for doing that was some time ago. It's like Islamists. They're so sophisticated that it makes more sense for governments to treat them like foreign military threats than domestic police issues. Don't listen to the "human rights" people in developed countries that became safe and stable by doing these exact same tactics hundreds of years ago.
In Bangladesh in 2016, there was a terrorist attack in a cafe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2016_Dhaka_attack. The government then went full Bukele on the Islamists. There hasn't been a significant terrorist attack in the country since then.
The language people use is funny. When companies offshore skilled factory jobs to foreign countries, they call that "offshoring." But when it comes to programmers, they call it "going where the talent is." They act like programmers are in a different class than machinists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Spencer
> According to legend, one day while building magnetrons, Spencer was standing in front of an active radar set when he noticed the candy bar he had in his pocket melted. Spencer was not the first to notice this phenomenon, but he was the first to investigate it. He decided to experiment using food, including popcorn kernels, which became the world's first microwaved popcorn. In another experiment, an egg was placed in a tea kettle, and the magnetron was placed directly above it. The result was the egg exploding in the face of one of his co-workers, who was looking in the kettle to observe. Spencer then created the first true microwave oven by attaching a high-density electromagnetic field generator to an enclosed metal box. The magnetron emitted microwaves into the metal box blocking any escape and allowing for controlled and safe experimentation. He then placed various food items in the box, while observing the effects and monitoring temperatures. There are no credible primary sources that verify this story.
My naive thought is to NOT have these platforms, not to build an alternative.
This is basically describing the Cayman Islands. Or, to lesser extents, UAE or Malta (e.g. https://taxjustice.net/2026/02/24/malta-the-eus-secret-tax-s...).
The problem with this warm Galt Gulch idea is that someone has to do the actual work, and if the top level government is just a corrupt sinecure designed to shield the corporation from actually paying taxes, then nothing works properly. Comfortable island living is also surprisingly expensive, you have to import everything.