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.
Some other ones, in case you aren't aware of.
Oberon,
Go,
https://github.com/golang/go/blob/2bd7f15dd7423b6817939b199c...
https://github.com/golang/go/blob/2bd7f15dd7423b6817939b199c...
D,
https://github.com/dlang/dmd/tree/master/druntime/src/core/i...
Or even Smalltalk,
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/blob/pharo-10/smal...
Upside may be just that the equivalent first-party system doesn't exist or performs worse? ATC tower isn't a SCIF, they probably get their real-time news from Twitter like everyone else, too.
> You had me at EHL0.
You just reminded me of my time working at Sendmail, where I often had to telnet to port 25 of some machine, and pretend to be a mail server sending email.
I used to be able to send all the commands without having to look them up. Not sure I could still do that today.
Finally a real computer mouse! What a funny story :)
Safe languages have nothing to do with it, case in point, the choice of programming languages available on VMS.
Which contrary to UNIX did not had the C mistake.
Rather Structured BASIC, Extended Pascal, COBOL, Modula-2, Fortran and Bliss.
It is really sloppy programming nowadays, regardless of the languages.
And yet Big Tech depends on technology owned by IBM, and also has luck the company isn't one that routinely does lawsuits due to patents.
Anything Red-Hat touches, like GNOME, GCC, Linux kernel, postman, anything Java is mostly done by Oracle, Red-Hat and IBM as the main ecosystem corporate drivers, PS3 used Cell,....
Amusingly, I had the same question and asked Claude Code to vibe code me something similar. :)
It isn't.
I have done projects across Azure, AWS and GCP, and without a doubt would always pick Azure.
AWS is a master in complexity, one almost requires a PhD in cloud infrastructure to make sense of how everything works.
GCP is the usual "talk to the bots" when something happens, unless it gets escalated.
Azure can be as complicated as AWS, or one can enjoy the nice GUI tooling similar in spirit to VS or InteliJ like confort.
Even for timesharing like workflows with a cloud shell and Web IDE, it appears AWS and GCP take pride on being a clunky bad experience.
Funny, I read it as a very high level compliment.
Your plan, whatever it is is still predicated on the world as it is today being more or less as it is today. The problem with anything truly disruptive is that it may very well cause your plan to become infeasible for a variety of reasons. For your sake I hope that you were aware of that little detail and made your plan bullet proof or flexible enough that that is not going to cause you any headaches.
A reasonable guess.
As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos.
This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle).
Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader.
Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody?
I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.
Essentially a clone of Windows 11, and those screenshots make me realise just how much I hate the rounded corners, borderless vagueness, and excess padding of "modern" UI.
For contrast, this UI is more my style: https://serenityos.org/screenshot-b36968c.png
And what would he do with them?
Tesla got the job done, which was empower Musk, not manufacture EVs at scale. The stock is the product.
I struggled with this in Wine. "malloc" type memory allocation involves at least two levels of spinlocks. When you do a "realloc", the spinlocks are held during the copying operation. If you use Vec .push in Rust, you do a lot of reallocs. In a heavily multithreaded program, this can knock performance down by more than two orders of magnitude. It's hard to reproduce this with a simple program; it takes a lot of concurrency to hit futex congesion.
Real Windows, and Linux, don't have this problem. Only Wine's "malloc" in a DLL, which does.
Bug reports resulted in finger-pointing and denial.[1] "Unconfirmed", despite showing debugger output.
We, humans, will read this and laugh, chuckle, but the AI Overloads will not understand that. This will be added to the training data and become a truth. But what if that is?
They should reboot Silicon Valley with this premise.
> I can tap my card. I can tap my phone
It was convenient in Whole Foods. Prime discount and payment together. Remembering to keep the card on file updated was annoying, though.
Until it wears just a smidgen and explodes violently!
That word works two ways: it shows that Trump would like to be feared, but he's not, it also shows that he's probably very scared, especially of the people he's sucking up to.
The printing press also led to books changing from being something only rich people had to everyone having books. This also enabled the industrial revolution, as books made literacy worth having, newspapers, and became a great storehouse of knowledge.
I.e. it created far, far more jobs than it destroyed.
The photo was praised by Kirill Dmitriev, one of Russia’s key negotiators
I think it's part of his strategy of getting on Putin's good side.
That's an incredible resource, thank you again. I've been reading for the last hour and it is only getting better.
This is also an interesting development:
No, he's rich because (1) he had first mover advantage (credit to him) (2) he has a good sense of how to run a business (3) he exploits a large number of people to his own benefit.
Any word on what Optimus might be able to do, or what it would be priced at?
> Therefore, phones are bad?
Phones are utilities. AI companies are not.
Very interesting, thanks that helps me understand.
It seems like you have what might be called an extreme sense of loss aversion, and so the more control and independence you have, the more you can prevent loss.
In contrast, I don't really have that. Sure I get annoyed when a software interface changes, but at the same time I see that the updates overall have also given me 10 other features I really appreciate, and so I see it as a net win. On the whole, I find that being embedded in a web of up-to-date dependencies has always been a large net positive on the whole. There are losses, but they are far outweighted by the wins, so whenever a loss bugs me I just remind myself of all the new helpful stuff. Like, Spotify's changes to UX drive me nuts sometimes. But they recently launched prompted playlists that have been a game changer for me. They added transitions between songs which is awesome. I'm using them to listen to audiobooks my library doesn't have. So I can put up with the UX.
But if you experiences losses psychologically as 10x the size of wins of the same "objective" size, then your calculus could be different. Pretty much everybody has loss aversion to some extent, it's considered a standard human trait -- I have to remind myself to put things into perspective myself sometimes -- but it sounds like you have a much stronger sense of it, so the control that greater independence gives you is much more valuable to you than it is to someone like me.
So that's why, when you say, "i hope it should be self-evident" -- it's not self-evident to someone like me at all, but I can see why it seems self-evident to you.
Bandwidth is only expensive if you're getting it from Amazon or Google. Cloudflare gives it away for free.
> If a 20 year old olympian dies 70 years later, then when their family gets $100,000 USD nominal, it will be the equivalent of getting $8,400 in today's money
Did you inflate over 70 or 50 years?
My read of the original article [1] is it’s a defined benefit. That said, “athletes will receive $200,000 for each Olympics they compete in,” so an athlete who competes for four seasons could stand to get $400,000 when they turn 45 and potentially borrow against their death benefit.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/sports/olympics/team-usa-milan-cortina-e...
You forgot about 'open source contributors' and 'musicians'.
That’s progressive taxes. Consider that roughly the bottom 60% of Americans have no federal income tax liability, simply because they do not make enough. That 60% cannot meet their basic needs on their incomes, very roughly speaking. Any increase of taxes on them would be regressive.
Yeah, and as part of the "class war", a majority of the lower classes decided to elect a billionaire whose first order of business was to implement giant tax cuts for the richest Americans while cutting programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
Class war will never work in America because we're too stupid.
> Tariffs are price increasing (colloquially "inflationary"), but not definitionally inflationary in the economic meaning. Look it up.
Weird (okay, not all that weird, but ironic, in context) thing to be confidently incorrect about.
Outside of the overtly ideology-over-description Austrian School of economics, which has a different jargon designed to advance their ideology, the general definition of (unqualified) inflation in economics is a sustained increase in general price levels.
And belief that the Austrian School usage is just the “economic meaning” is a pretty good sign that someone doesn't understand even Austrian School economics beyond rote recitation of doctrines and aphorisms.
They tried that. The judge, correctly, went "uh the fuck you will".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
> While Apple implemented App Store policies to allow developers to link to alternative payment options, the policies still required the developer to provide a 27% revenue share back to Apple, and heavily restricted how they could be shown in apps. Epic filed complaints that these changes violated the ruling, and in April 2025 Rogers found for Epic that Apple had willfully violated her injunction, placing further restrictions on Apple including banning them from collecting revenue shares from non-Apple payment methods or imposing any restrictions on links to such alternative payment options. Though Apple is appealing this latest ruling, they approved the return of Fortnite with its third-party payment system to the App Store in May 2025.
This is a meta-hype article. It's an article about the hype.
I've talked to a team that's doing the dark factory pattern hinted at here. It was fascinating. The key characteristics:
- Nobody reviews AI-produced code, ever. They don't even look at it.
- The goal of the system is to prove that the system works. A huge amount of the coding agent work goes into testing and tooling and simulating related systems and running demos.
- The role of the humans is to design that system - to find new patterns that can help the agents work more effectively and demonstrate that the software they are building is robust and effective.
It was a tiny team and they stuff they had built in just a few months looked very convincing to me. Some of them had 20+ years of experience as software developers working on systems with high reliability requirements, so they were not approaching this from a naive perspective.
I'm hoping they come out of stealth soon because I can't really share more details than this.
A much more detailed and better-linked writeup: https://cdm.link/ni-insolvency/
As noted, the company has been in decline since going into private equity in 2020. Pro audio users have felt it was less and less about innovation and more about selling preset packs and slim-value upgrades, as well as increasingly onerous license management. At the same time people are distressed because the firm has a very impressive history of software and hardware products.
Inmusic (which owns Akai, Moog and several other premium pro audio brands) is a potential buyer to acquire them as they already have some product crossover in the form of NI plugins available exclusively on Akai hardware. However this would mean two flagship products that compete against each other (NI's Maschine and Akai's MPC, two very advanced drum pad/sequencing powerhouses). That would mean abandonment of Maschine, whose development was already stalled, and disappointment/bad feeling from many owners; pro audio consumers are necessarily emotional about their creative tools and tend to hold grudges.
OF course, the best of both products could be combined in a Secret Third Thing that embodied the best features of both, but the reality is that Inmusic has just released new flagship Akai MPCs (the 3rd generation of the current design paradigm), and they're such a big upgrade upgrade in both hardware and software terms that they're steamrolling their direct and indirect competition. Those flagship units (and some lighter-weight entry level units to come) have a ~5 year sales life before being replaced, and the latest software still runs well on the Gen 1 machines from 2017, albeit more slowly and without the fancy additional hardware features. So Inmusic is positively basking in brand loyalty at the moment, because they've prioritized capital investment for product development across multiple brands. They've saved by optimizing supply chain efficiencies, manufacturing more stuff in Asia, keeping materials costs low and exploiting economies of scale, while still encouraging designers and engineers to follow their hearts which has resulted in a lot of very happy customers.
Native Instruments had all this, with a very deep software stack and very well-engineered hardware offerings that operated perfectly together (ie no synchronization issues, no or minimal manual configuration required for hardware user interface mapping etc). But the product line got more and more bloated, the license management more of a pain, and development on the hardware stalled. When they were taken over by their existing PE owners in 2020 they seemed not to have any innovation or investment ideas of their own but were more focused on how to squeeze more money out of existing IP. This lead to a series of missteps - low value 'upgrades', abandonment of beloved software flagships, and the absence of any discernible roadmap for the hardware side of the business. This really matters in the pro audio space because as I mentioned above creative people are passionate about their tools. It's not unusual to see people who have the latest and greatest sequencer or audio interface hooked up to a 45 year old synthesizer and/or a slavish modern clone of that older design with additional features. music tech buyers want the heritage of the past to be maintained, but also to be excited with a steady supply of new music technology, and NI's private equity owners have completely failed to deliver the latter,w ith no significant hardware developments since 2019. The company went from arguably having the best hardware offerings in its niche (in terms of capabilities, ergonomics, firmware reliability, software integration, consumer loyalty) to seeing those edges disappear to their primary competitors one by one.
It's hard to guess what happens from here. Good managers could revive the company and build it back to its previous greatness, but the market has already seen it wrecked once by private equity and is wary of getting/staying invested in a product ecosystem that may not have a long term future. Music tech people are also acutely aware of the impact of tariffs and AI on hardware component pricing and product design. Currently the mood about NI's long term future is pessimistic; people are already talking about preserving existing setups as museum pieces, ie maxxed out as much as possible and then disconnected from the internet so they can be maintained in working order but otherwise frozen.
> What’s the main use-case for this?
Running weights available models.
> I get that I can run local models, but all the paid for (remote) models are superior.
If that's clearly true for your use cases, then maybe this isn’t for you.
> So is the use-case just for people who don’t want to use big tech’s models?
Most weights available models are also “big tech’s”, or finetunes of them.
> Is this just for privacy conscious people? Or is this just for “adult” chats, ie porn bots?
Sure, those are among the use cases. And there can be very good reasons to be concerned about privacy in some applications. But they aren’t the only reasons.
There’s a diversity of weights-available models available, with a variety of specialized strengths. Sure, for general use, the big commercial models may generally be more capable, but they may not be optimal for all uses (especially when cost effectiveness is considered, given that capable weights-available models for some uses are very lightweight.)
This particular one wasn't going anywhere useful.
That's presumably why the comment said "when [collective they] finally get lucky", not "when [individual they] inevitably get lucky".
A certain percentage of your species having genes encouraging risky/stupid behavior is likely somewhat useful.
The whole point of the sequence is that there's no chance that these "badass penguins" are going to make new species. There's no food where they're monomaniacally heading. They're going to die.
The article asserts that, since this is a one-time tax, billionaires will have no incentive to leave: "The tax’s designers, however, think they’ve come up with a clever solution to capital flight: a one-off tax that is retroactive, based on a billionaire’s residency status on January 1, 2026. In other words, unless they’ve already fled the state, billionaires won’t be able to move to avoid paying the tax. 'At this point, there’s no financial incentive to leave California,' Zucman said. 'You’re going to pay the same amount either way.'"
That misses the point. A one-time wealth tax to plug holes in the state's finances reeks of short-termism and desperation, like Chicago selling off its parking meters. Even if I wasn't affected by the tax, I'd be alarmed at the implication. It would have been much better to implement a well thought out and orderly recurring tax on capital gains or whatever.
Define "low-effort". I recently posted two Show HNs that were mostly written with Claude Code, but overall each took more man hours than my typical (less-ambitious) projects. Reception to both was positive.
> Show HN: Miditui – A terminal app/UI for MIDI composing, mixing, and playback
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543359
> Show HN: An interactive physics simulator with 1000’s of balls, in your terminal
Ubisoft shares continue to collapse after announcements of cuts and closures: from a total value of $11 billion in 2018 to just $600 million today - https://hive.blog/hive-143901/@davideownzall/ubisoft-shares-... - January 26th, 2026
https://xcancel.com/_Tom_Henderson_/status/20147434951355967... - January 23rd, 2026
> Following the announcement of Ubisoft's restructuring and third round of cost-cutting measures, Ubisoft's internal communication channels are full of employees shaming upper management and asking for change. It's quite something seeing people very openly criticising a company they work for to such an extent, but after years of struggle, it's not surprising.
> Some employee's tell me that this was the final nail in the coffin for them, and that they will be seeking employment elsewhere, and others have decided to fast-track their already existing contingency plans in case they were laid off. More have taken to LinkedIn to publically announce they are now looking for work, despite still having a job at the company.
> Ubisoft is going to experience a massive exodus of talent, even without the impending layoffs.
> Want them to really listen to you? Cancel your accounts
Just loop in your regulators. This costs them far more and properly documents the problem for follow-up in case it becomes a pattern. Possibly more annoying than moving accounts. But far more effective (unless you have nine figures with the firm).
Interesting to see everyone seemingly writing their own browser lately. Ironic to think that AI assistance, from Google itself, might be what ends up breaking their browser monopoly.
(Speaking as someone who also started writing my own long ago, and it's far from complete.)
The EU has already forced WhatsApp to be interoperable. Of course, Meta complied maliciously, making it a setting that you have to enable, but at least it's a start.
I don't see anything wrong with attempting this. A significant number of people mistype/change their e-mail address, and security messages from banks can be important, so anything that catches no-longer-working e-mail addresses is better for everyone involved. And I assume a very small proportion of people try to disable tracking pixels.
But this post is entirely speculation. The author has no evidence they're basing it on tracking pixels. They're literally just guessing.
And I'm dubious that tracking pixels would be a reliable enough signal to be worth it. Doesn't Gmail download images in advance anyways? Plus, I regularly filter predictable emails or just archive them directly from my inbox based on the subject line without opening.
I'd more likely assume they have an e-mail bounce detector that just has a bug in it.
I did that years ago, at the end of Windows 7 and the beginning of the need for a Microsoft account.
I seem to have a much lower tolerance for enshitification than most people. I'm off Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Purely because they became annoying.
I'm curious about why they delisted it. When running operations for Blekko (another search engine that would back fill with Yahoo/Bing results when we didn't get a lot of hits in our own index). Of course people like DDG could index it themselves like they do Wikipedia and some other sites.
While Blekko was active there really were one three reasons we could be "forced" to de-index a site, it was being used by a 'bad' country (N. Korea, Iran, Etc.), it was serving up CSAM, or was participating in Ad fraud. Now Microsoft also would delist places that were in the crime underworld so they wouldn't index the <random-string>.ru sites and things like that. They should be able to give you an answer though unless they have an NSL that says they can't talk about it.
That makes me wonder if web sites that have "anti government / anti ICE" content will start getting delisted by US web indexes.
If that's the level of text size you require, you should be using sites on a large tablet, not a phone. A phone screen isn't large enough for your vision period. This is like expecting a website to be usable on an Apple Watch display. Be reasonable here.
At some point you just have to accept that your vision accommodations need to be met with a combination of hardware and software, not just software alone.
LMStudio introducing a command line interface makes things come full circle.
> then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.
I don't think this is true. I use non-integer scaling on my Mac since I like the UX to be just a little bit bigger, and have never observed any kind of ringing or any specific artifacts at all around text, nor have I ever heard this as a complaint before. I assume it's just bilinear or bicubic unless you have evidence otherwise? The only complaint people tend to make is ever-so-slight additional blurriness, which barely matters at Retina resolution.
What are you hitting the Google Books API for?
Another day. Another waitlist.
> Oban allows you to insert and process jobs using only your database. You can insert the job to send a confirmation email in the same database transaction where you create the user. If one thing fails, everything is rolled back.
This is such a key feature. Lots of people will tell you that you shouldn't use a relational database as a worker queue, but they inevitably miss out on how important transactions are for this - it's really useful to be able to say "queue this work if the transaction commits, don't queue it if it fails".
Brandur Leach wrote a fantastic piece on this a few years ago: https://brandur.org/job-drain - describing how, even if you have a separate queue system, you should still feed it by logging queue tasks to a temporary database table that can be updated as part of those transactions.
You're completely correct, except that I do see it. In fact, I was talking with another Bengali just the other day about how our parents aren't viscerally offended by Trump the way many Americans are, because he's like an Indian or Bangladeshi politician.
Trump himself reflects how immigration is changing America. Blue Rose Research projects that Trump tied or narrowly won naturalized citizens like me: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (page 9). Democrats historically got 80% of the Bangladeshi immigrant vote. But last year, Trump actually campaigned in Queens and Little Bangladesh in Jackson Heights swung a net 50 points to the right. Mitt Romney isn't a viable Republican today. Trump is.
So your diagnosis is correct. But I think your prescription is like telling liberals "why don't you just pay more taxes if that's what you want?" I would like to return to an America where my options are between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. But I don't see how unilaterally disarming gets me there. We're locked in a prisoner's dilemma. As more and more of the electorate is comprised of people who don't have traditional Anglo cultural sensibilities, both sides have strong incentives to capitalize on that however they can. Mamdani is what that looks like on the left, Trump is what that looks like on the right.
Depends. Probably not usually. I've thought about this a bunch and I think the serious "threat" here isn't the agent acting maliciously --- though agents will break out of non-hardened sandboxes! --- but rather them exposing some vulnerability that an actual human attacker exploits.
> Americans voted to end the open borders
Correct. ICE should do that. Instead, Trump’s deportation numbers trail Obama’s despite blowing the military budget of Saudi Arabia because Noem, Bovino and Miller would prefer to make TikTok videos than do actual enforcement.
The domestic talent exists, and companies can leverage it or be punished financially for attempting to “contain labor costs” through leveraging visa workers.
I think you're correct that independents are broadly non-liberal, but I don't think it's accurate to say that they're in "lockstep" with anyone. Largely because the modern GOP is quite factionalized: https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso..... See Figure 2.
Harvard-Harris does great issue polling that breaks down views on issues by political affiliation. Check out page 23 of the following: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP...
Independents clearly are aligned with Trump on many issues. For example, 63% support eliminating racial preferences in hiring and awarding government contracts, 65% favor closing the border, and 63% align with Trump on various gender-identity issues.
On the other hand, independents also in-conflict with the establishment GOP on a number of other issues. 86% favor measures to lower Medicare drug prices, while only 36% support adding work requirements to Medicaid. (Harvard-Harris doesn't poll on abortion, but independents tend to be genuinely between the parties on that issue.)
I think in the social circles of people who are still dating, whether someone is liberal or conservative is defined in terms of views on immigration or gender, rather than medicaid work requirements. So independents present as overwhelmingly conservative in that context. But that doesn't mean that independents are "lockstep aligned with the Republican Party" on tax cuts or other issues like that.
You wave your hand over a camera.
At this point I presume they collect such biometrics whether I like it or not; they have cameras everywhere.
I just scan the QR code from the Whole Foods app on my phone. Then tap the button to pay with the credit card linked to the account.
For security reasons, it makes sense that if you use your phone number rather than the QR code, of course you don't have the option to utilize the linked card.
Meant to register the palm thing but just never got around to it, wasn't even really sure how/where? That was the main blocker for me -- was never prompted to do it as part of checkout, and didn't want to waste time going over to customer service to ask how.
Click on the link to read about this:
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"xyz" is a magic spell that makes you into an NPC because "xyz" is frequently blocked!
Yes. We used it for the structures underlying the digital fade algorithm for marine radar images.
It's probably no longer "Commercial In Confidence" ... I should probably write it up sometime.
> This child's mother had a choice to bring her along or not, and she brought her.
A Trump-appointed Federal judge clearly did not find that excuse compelling.
The same org claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin who was attempting to massacre ICE, remember. They lie; that's a matter of public record.
They allege the note you link was coerced:
https://nipnlg.org/sites/default/files/2025-07/2025_jvl-acun...
"Some time that night, an officer who was supervising Julia and her daughters at the hotel instructed Julia to write down on a piece of paper that her U.S. citizen daughter Jade will travel to Honduras with her. When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her. Under duress, Julia did as instructed and wrote down in Spanish: “I will bring my daughter [Jade] with me to Honduras.”"
> He inquired, and found out that it was the mother's choice, not ICE's.
That's directly contradicted by your link; "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
> does the difficulty in surfacing a case
I have no difficulty at all finding this case; I replied to your comment about five minutes after you posted it.
> I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-cannes open source projects.
Given how much of these companies runs on such projects, it really shouldn't be surprising. It's a numbers game for them; Facebook doesn't mind if 300 little OSS initiatives fail if it gets them React.
The major problem with sticking an Android tablet on to exercise equipment is the difference in life spans. Android tablets are generally going to last you 4-5 years. Weight equipment should be able to last decades. There is some simple & cheap hardware that can last decades, but it is legitimately harder to program.
Even worse was an article some months back about Android tablets hooked to heating & cooling systems expected to last 20 years. There's no way those things are making it at scale.
The golden ratio is very mathematically interesting and shows up in many places. Not as prolific as pi or e, but it gets around.
I find the aesthetic arguments for it very overrated, though. A clear case of a guy says a thing, and some other people say it too, and before you know it it's "received wisdom" even though it really isn't particularly true. Many examples of how important the "golden ratio" are are often simply wrong; it's not actually a golden ratio when actually measured, or it's nowhere near as important as presented. You can also squeeze more things into being a "golden ratio" if you are willing to let it be off by, say, 15%. That creates an awfully wide band.
Personally I think it's more a matter of, there is a range of useful and aesthetic ratios, and the "golden ratio" happens to fall in that range, but whether it's the "optimum" just because it's the golden ratio is often more an imposition on the data than something that comes from it.
It definitely does show up in nature, though. There are solid mathematical and engineering reasons why it is the optimal angle for growing leafs and other patterns, for instance. But there are other cases where people "find" it in nature where it clearly isn't there... one of my favorites is the sheer number of diagrams of the Nautilus shell, which allegedly is following the "golden ratio", where the diagram itself disproves the claim by clearly being nowhere near an optimal fit to the shell.
Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".
Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.
Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
Yes, all the studios that get money from Amazon Luna, NVidia GeForce NOW, Sony PS Portal, and Microsoft GamePass offerings.
And only to the extent it is a pure Rust codebase, add a few other languages to the mix, and it becomes a build.rs mess as well.
> government is not one entity and it is perfectly possible for one sub-entity to have certain data and for another not to be able to have that same data
Sure. Again, we agree. What I’m pushing back on is the notion that it was inappropriate for any branch of the government to have these data, or that any of this has anything to do with private dragnets.
They’re addresses. This isn’t a possession problem, it’s one of access.
> the USA does not have the equivalent of a GDPR
You could have super GDPR that bans all private dragnets and HHS would still have home addresses. This is a Privacy Act and HIPAA problem.
That… doesn't seem to be accurate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._46
> This essay examines the relative strength of the state and federal governments under the proposed United States Constitution. It is titled "The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared"… he describes at length in this paper a series of hypothetical conflicts between state and federal government. Madison does not expect or hope the constitution to lead to the kind of conflict between state and federal authority described here. Rather, he seeks to rebut the arguments that he anticipates from opponents of the constitution by asserting that their "chimerical" predictions of the federal government crushing state governments are unfounded
It’s more than that though. It’s phones, social media, and an unsustainable system of unaffordability where people have to live on credit and have a combination of no time and desire for social interactions.
Economic human factory farm you cannot escape with social media and short form video as the dopamine hit, so line keeps going up.
Still reading the article, but early on it says:
"Also, is it weird that I still remember the specs of my first computer, 22 years later?"
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 1.78 Mz Z80 with 16 KB RAM.
That was 48 years ago. Is it weird that I remember that?
Available at Saturn, Media Market, FNAC, Cool Blue show floor.
All those kinds of Casio models were cherished in Portuguese engineering universities, they were the models to own.
We did not had any big TI or HP followers, back when I was doing my degree.
I still have my Casio FX-880 P in working condition, and the little cousin I used on high school as well, the FX-4500 P.
"We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better... stronger... faster."
I come from one of the most disturbed and violent states in India. During high school and college, I worked with a few local Newspaper Publishers, finishing up layouts in Aldus PageMaker. Along with the reporters, I was involved in many parts of the final decisions that made the news mellowed/changed when printed in the Paper in the morning, making it more consumable for readers. I have seen photos of bloodshed and mutilations that trained my brain to normalize rotten.com in later years of my life. The ones printed in the morning paper were always curated; the ones that got away unprinted were things we would keep under key and lock.
More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them.
Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else.
https://gisthost.github.io/?a41ce6304367e2ced59cd237c576b817... - which built https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions exactly the way I wanted it to be built
Chickens have two feet. Humans have two feet. Therefore, chickens are human.
I think datasette-transactions https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions is pretty novel. Here's the transcript where Claude Code built it: https://gisthost.github.io/?a41ce6304367e2ced59cd237c576b817...
That transcript viewer itself is a pretty fun novel piece of software, see https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts
Denobox https://github.com/simonw/denobox is another recent agent project which I consider novel: https://orphanhost.github.io/?simonw/denobox/transcripts/ses...
Absolutely Do Not Want.
EDIT: Tell us what characters you want to see in the comments and we can make them for you to talk to (e.g. Max Headroom)
Sure, that kind of thing is great fun. But photorealistic avatars are gonna be abused to hell and back and everyone knows it. I would rather talk to a robot that looks like a robot, ie C-3PO. I would even chat with scary skeleton terminator. I do not want to talk with convincingly-human-appearing terminator. Constantly checking whether any given human appearing on a screen is real or not is a huge energy drain on my primate brain. I already find it tedious with textual data, doing it on realtime video imagery consumers considerably more energy.
Very impressive tech, well done on your engineering achievement and all, but this is a Bad Thing.
This is a reasonable choice, but of course also one that is only people who can be pretty confident of not being personally affected by newsworthy events.
> played by Trump’s book
I'm betting that's exactly what will happen - the FBI will single out some core organisers and let them serve as an example.
The industry decided that decades ago. We may like to talk about quality and forethought, but when you actually go to work, you quickly discover it doesn't matter. Small companies tell you "we gotta go fast", large companies demand clear OKRs and focusing on actually delivering impact - either way, no one cares about tech debt, because they see it as unavoidable fact of life. Even more so now, as ZIRP went away and no one can afford to pay devs to polish the turd ad infinitum. The mantra is, ship it and do the next thing, clean up the old thing if it ever becomes a problem.
And guess what, I'm finally convinced they're right.
Consider: it's been that way for decades. We may tell ourselves good developers write quality code given the chance, but the truth is, the median programmer is a junior with <5 years of experience, and they cannot write quality code to save their life. That's purely the consequence of rapid growth of software industry itself. ~all production code in the past few decades was written by juniors, it continues to be so today; those who advance to senior level end up mostly tutoring new juniors instead of coding.
Or, all that put another way: tech debt is not wrong. It's a tool, a trade-off. It's perfectly fine to be loaded with it, if taking it lets you move forward and earn enough to afford paying installments when they're due. Like with housing: you're better off buying it with lump payment, or off savings in treasury bonds, but few have that money on hand and life is finite, so people just get a mortgage and move on.
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Edited to add: There's a silver lining, though. LLMs make tech debt legible and quantifiable.
LLMs are affected by tech debt even more than human devs are, because (currently) they're dumber, they have less cognitive capability around abstractions and generalizations[0]. They make up for it by working much faster - which is a curse in terms of amplifying tech debt, but also a blessing, because you can literally see them slowing down.
Developer productivity is hard to measure in large part because the process is invisible (happens in people's heads and notes), and cause-and-effect chains play out over weeks or months. LLM agents compress that to hours to days, and the process itself is laid bare in the chat transcript, easy to inspect and analyze.
The way I see it, LLMs will finally allow us to turn software development at tactical level from art into an engineering process. Though it might be too late for it to be of any use to human devs.
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[0] - At least the out-of-distribution ones - quirks unique to particular codebase and people behind it.
This is the best thing I've seen from Scientific American in a decade.
Some screen captures of the apps mentioned would be nice too.
ProCalc is pretty sophisticated.
I knew they had an authoritarian streak. This is not surprising, and frankly horrifyingly dystopian.
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
As far as I am aware, there no integrations available with Visual Studio, and not sure about C++20 modules and import std support.