HN Leaders

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Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161843]

Not quite that high. Around 15KHz. (15,734 Hz for NTSC, 15,625 Hz for PAL.)

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89325]

Who else expected the "certain elements in the shot to be out of focus" link to lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh ?

If you don't want any frame stacking, you'd need to use a dedicated camera instead of a smartphone, because a smartphone without HDR isn't viable.

I have an old Android with a 13MP camera (Sony IMX214, 1/3.06") that leaves HDR off by default. I haven't had a need to turn HDR on except if I'm trying to photograph something with regions of extreme contrast.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

I don't think anyone says that really poor people are caused by the existence of really rich people. The argument, as I understand it, is that spreading the wealth of billionaires around would mean fewer really poor people.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79615]

Equity and fairness are at odds with each other.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89325]

It wasn't until fairly recently

By "recently" you mean Win95? MSVCRT.DLL has been there for at least that long.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

"This is actually good news for the US."

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

This is 100% accurate. I've seen someone apologizing for being stepped on (accidentally, of course). It really does mean "we have, unfortunately and inadvertently, crossed paths and must now ward off the evil spirits by acknowledging this".

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89325]

I'd rather have no ID verification at all. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 419734]

I see claims like this all the time on HN. Where is this data supposed to be coming from? When I look it up on Google, I get data ultimately sourced from shady online IQ tests (which nonetheless purport to provide a monotonic ranking of every country in the world from China to Nauru, despite the fact that virtually none of these countries collect IQ scores from their populations).

I have no reason to doubt that China is modernizing and improving their gross aptitude for knowledge work! The directional point you're making may very well be valid! I'm just wondering how anyone could be quantifying it in terms of "average IQ", a metric that generally does not exist.

nostrademons ranked #40 [karma: 82978]

I wonder if some of this is because of the "prices are set on the margins" effect of markets. The price of anything is set by the folks who are actively transacting at any given time; if you're not buying and selling, your opinion doesn't matter.

Oftentimes, near a market top, the people who are value investors and actually care about price end up selling off all their holdings. But because they have already sold, and are not buying, they drop out of the market entirely. Prices get set by the people who are price insensitive, because they're the only ones willing to participate. As a result, you often get the "blow off top" right before a market crash, where the stock market moves sharply upwards even though fundamentals say it should crash. All the folks who believe it will crash have already left and no longer participate in price-setting.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

Yes, as retaliation of a US/Israel invasion that is against international law.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91814]

Why would one not blame the US for this situation?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182427]

> Anthropic, who argue AI is a fundamentally different technology

They’re arguing it’s a service. I think Aramark could refuse to contract to provide employees to the U.S. military for a campaign on Chicago.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

I've been offered a Book of Shadows for cryin' out loud.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91814]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/reporters-keep-calling-t...

> If everyone can call the president, does it matter if anyone does? It sounds like a koan but isn’t that far from reality. Donald Trump’s personal cellphone number has been making the rounds among Washington reporters, dozens of whom have used it over the past few weeks to score brief interview after brief interview with the leader of the free world about his ongoing war with Iran. A partial list of media organizations that have published “exclusive” or “scoop”-y quotes after hitting up Trump’s iPhone includes leading print publications like the New York Times, TV networks (ABC, NBC, PBS, and CNN), foreign newspapers (the Daily Telegraph and Times of Israel), and no fewer than four outlets with Washington in their names (the Post, Examiner, Reporter, and Free Beacon).

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-reportedl...

> A comedian pretending to be Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., says he talked on the phone with President Donald Trump earlier this week in an epic recorded prank call during which the president discussed a range of policy topics.

sohkamyung ranked #41 [karma: 82718]

The graphs are in the video. As stated at the top:

> [Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91814]

Why? It’s negligent homicide.

It’s just so diffuse that it doesn’t fit in our crime model. Like polluters who shave years off an entire neighborhood’s lives via health impacts.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83460]

Do you have an alternate solution? When we hear so many stories from HN'ers of their websites being hammered by out-of-control crawling and fetching and new levels of AI slop spam?

This is something site owners choose to implement or not. They're the ones paying the extra hosting fees to handle potentially unwanted traffic, and dealing with spam that traditional CAPTCHA's are no longer effective against. Google's not forcing this on anyone else.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91814]

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

All that gets you 70kW of cooling. Radiating to vacuum isn't very efficient.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241982]

Well, in large part by murdering those that were actually trying to self-determinate...

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90832]

It depends on your use case.

If you are a B2C app, you are probably more concerned about:

- social providers (Apple and Google being the big ones, but others could play a role--FB or Tiktok for example)

- easy registration (but not too easy, you want to avoid bot spam)

- self-service account management (updating profile fields, consents [CCPA, GDPR, others], resetting passwords

- single sign-on between your apps (if you have multiple)

- language support (for your backend, and mobile/web front end)

- cost

- possibly MFA, possibly passkeys

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161843]

The OP has an amusing side point - LLMs have automated sucking up to management. There is a large market for that.

His main point, though, is this:

I have a colleague ... who spent two months earlier this year building a system that should have been designed by someone with formal training in data architecture. He used the tools well, by the standards by which use of the tools is currently measured. He produced a great deal of code, a great deal of documentation, a great deal of what looked, to anyone who did not know what to look for, like progress. He could not, when asked, explain how any of it actually worked. The work was wrong from the first day. The schemas, and more importantly the objectives, were wrong in a way that would have been obvious to anyone with two years in the field.

I've been reading many rants like that lately. If they came with examples, they would be more helpful. The author does not elaborate on "the schemas, and more importantly the objectives, were wrong". The LLM's schema vs. a "good" schema should have been in the next paragraph. That would change the article from a rant to a bug report. We don't know what went wrong here.

It's not clear whether the trouble is that the schema can't represent the business problem, or that the database performance is terrible because the schema is inefficient. If you have the schema and the objectives, that's close to a specification. Given a specification, LLMs can potentially do a decent job. If the LLM generates the spec itself, then it needs a lot of context which it probably doesn't have.

This isn't necessarily an LLM problem. Large teams producing in-house business process systems tend to fall into the same hole. This is almost the classic way large in-house systems fail.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

Exactly what we see.

And the worst offenders are those insisting this isn't the case.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

I made the same thing months ago, so you don't need to wait:

https://encyclopedai.stavros.io

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

>The goal was to test our structured-generation algorithms and their open-source counterparts, replacing the naive “does it accept this string?” with something closer to the real problem: “does it produce the right token distribution?” The experiment kept coming up in conversation, then returning to the roadmap. Last month, I spent half an hour explaining the method to Codex. A few hours later, it had produced a working first version. That’s all it took.

Proving that the bottleneck, was, in fact, the code. It's just that the AI wrote it now.

The person who thought "the bottleneck wasn't the code" already had the goal discussed and coherent in their mind.

Code as bottleneck doesn't have to mean "I wanted this feature but it took me many months to finally code it". It is also "I wanted this feature for 2 years, but the friction in sitting down to put it in code and spending 5-10 days on it, etc, put me off".

If the code wasn't the bottleneck, they could just sit and write it themlseves. But, they didn't want to go through the effort and time spent of coding it themselves, as they knew it wouldn't take as little as with the LLM.

(And even when you don't have a clear final spec in mind, the exploratory code+check+discard+retry-new-design, is also faster with an LLM, precisely because the "code" part is).

In other words, the code was the bottleneck.

The post appears AI-generated itself, just with instructions to avoid obvious constructions, which still makes for tedious reading.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241982]

That's not a caveat, that's a 100% disqualifier.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 184353]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 419734]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241982]

So, in the true spirit of the HN dismissive comment, but this time I think it really does have its place.

Ultrasonic is DOA, sorry, but that just won't do. It's already a nuisance to have all these switching supplies that mess up your hearing (and some can be surprisingly loud), using it for power delivery is really a non-starter.

There was a company that planned on using ultrasonic for power delivery to smart phones, every engineer with some ultrasonic experience said it wasn't going to work and they just kept going until they - predictably - went out of business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicEnergy (formerly Ubeam).

Just wishing it exists does not mean it is possible or practical, that's right up there with Theranos (and I think Theranos actually had a better chance of working even though that chance was extremely slim).

There are interesting start-ups around the theme of energy scavenging though, that's a far more realistic but still extremely challenging proposition.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

I was driving around the other day with my wife and I said "Hey, you should see how i can order from the McDonalds app and the food is ready when you show up" and in the end she was appalled with what a Fillet-o-Fish costs for how much food you get.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.

I remember reading

https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi...

in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.

I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 104875]

This was a podcast, not a pre-scripted talk. I suggest listening to the audio version - it makes it more clear that this was thinking out loud, not carefully considering every word.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

... kinda funny that I was working on stuff about 10 years ahead of its time and was having the biggest argument with my cofounder and other people that "subscription plans that aren't cost-based (or at least cost-aware) won't work for intelligent applications" and it seems the world has caught up.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79615]

I usually ask them if I could watch them work. They always say yes. Then I watch what tools they use and how they use them and ask about them. They're always happy to tell me.

For example, I watched the cable guy install coax. I then bought the same tools he used, and later wired up the coax myself in the next house. I also watched tradesmen cut & sweat pipes, service my furnace, install molding, etc. All very interesting and useful.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90832]

So the argument is that the brand will understand the problem domain well enough to define it so an outsourced software factory can build it. That factory will also run it and maintain it.

I've seen this in the consulting world with long term relationships between a brand and a consulting company, where the consulting company is the technology partner.

I don't think there's anything to stop that from happening with agents; it's just a different means of producing software.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92101]

I recall in the late 1990s that physical synthesis was thought to possibly be the next big thing, that it might take over synthesis of musical instruments entirely from the options of wavetables and FM synth at the time. It didn't, but my point here is that is where it was, a prominent alternative that everyone in the relevant fields was aware of and many people tried to make work, not a recent invention and not just an obscure academic pursuit.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

> First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.

Ok I guess, this was a bit of a hassle, but you're not increasing my weekly allowance, you're just not annoying me as often.

> Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.

It wasn't a limit reduction (as in, I didn't have a lower 5-hour limit), it was "tokens are more expensive" and it ate my weekly limits faster. This should never have been instituted to begin with.

> Third, we’re raising our API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models, as shown in the table below:

Meh.

This is why I don't care for all the "it's a subscription, you're free to not use it!" arguments here. It's not an all-you-can-eat subscription with some generous fair use limits, it's a "X tokens per month for $Y", and they keep lowering the X unilaterally and in secret.

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 74591]

> First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.

The fine-print-omission appears to be that weekly limits are not doubled. The progressive 5-hour rate limit shrinking was indeed an efficiency blocker that finally convinced me to cancel, but being only able to get 4 full sessions a week as opposed to 8 doesn't compell me to resubscribe.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Until the current management retires, as it usually goes.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

Aren't you supposed to return a 0 status code when "yea done!" and some other status code when it wasn't done?

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

The original comment has conflated every ill into "have to", combined with political fatalism. Not unreasonable given the way things have turned out, but yes it's not inevitable either. It's just the direction of travel that the majority chose.

Certain "have to" are imposed by the physical world. The world will have to use less oil in 2026 than in 2025, because production has been so heavily impacted by the war. What happens beyond that .. well, only a fairly small number of people get to make that decision. Next US presidential election is in 2028.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

> made-up numbers

It's important to note that in most jurisdictions you can't actually do this legally? Like, you may be able to get away with it, but it is actually illegal to sell financial services by misrepresentation?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241982]

I think both Elsevier and the people that appropriate IP for training commercially deployed AIs purpose without the consent of the author(s) should be legal.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241982]

I don't think that's the reason. Modern supercars have so much power that the average person that can afford them is going to wreck the drivetrain in a very short while if they have to manage all that power themselves. Automatic gearboxes are far more forgiving. You see the same with Porsches that have manual gearboxes, if you read out the ECU you'll see them overrev many times more than with the autos, if at all (in fact I don't recall seeing an auto that had overrevved).

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105752]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

Discovery is a lot more intrusive than people expect.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105752]
PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

Notably, this applies to the "product tour" a lot of products want to give you when they've added new features and I find this particularly obnoxious, especially with Adobe tools.

Like a lot of times when I am using Lightroom I just shot 3000 photos at a sports game and feel under the gun to select a few out and develop them or I am using Acrobat to handle some stressful paperwork which is late. I close 100s if not 1000s of modal dialogs that never should have been opened every day and just don't need another one.

It's bad from the viewpoint of Adobe because I wind up dismissing these messages out of hand.

Adobe wants me to see the value I am getting from my Creative Cloud subscription, like I am likely to keep paying for it if I enjoy more features in more of the products. Like lately I discovered Adobe Fonts is great: like I find looking for free fonts is the most depressing thing in web development and graphic design, I can spend hours looking at fonts and making comps and thinking "I can't stand that 'k'". Adobe Fonts on the other hand has quality fonts that are well organized and often I can put in 15 minutes and walk out with something that works so well with my brand that if I want to set stuff in that font with Pillow of course I am going to plunk down $90 and buy it -- I don't feel bad at all that the fonts are tied to Adobe tools and my CC subscription.

In terms of execution you just expect something like this to be crap. The integration of Adobe Fonts into Photoshop is broken: it can lock Photoshop hard and force you to kill the process. On the other hand it works great with Illustrator. Marketing-driven development always seems to have a lack of empathy and attention to quality that in the end is self-defeating.

---

Lately I've gotten hooked on the mobile games Arknights which has extensive lore, too many game modes to count and very complex mechanics and hundreds of characters who have unique abilities (e.g. even the "trash" 3-star characters usually have something special about them and are designed to make teams that punch above their weight)

Arknights gamifies learning the game and engaging with the mechanics by offering daily, weekly, and campaign rewards for taking actions, completing levels, developing characters, etc. This is part of a number of mechanisms that gradually get you up to speed on the game mechanics, reveal the world, etc. These kind of mechanisms, used gently, could work for applications software.

But I think timing is everything. One of the most annoying people in downtown Ithaca is a panhandler who comes up from behind and starts demanding money or the bandanna off your head, he doesn't bother to make eye contact, he doesn't look to see if you're receptive or for a moment when you might be open, he just makes demands and gets angry when you deny or ignore him. I give money to panhandlers quite often if they engage me person-to-person and are agreeable but this guy is like so much application software today.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Thanks for sharing, that brings back good memories.

Here is another one, from the first JavaStation,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM

Sun was my favourite UNIX vendor, oh well.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92101]

Probably CGNAT, "Carrier-Grade NAT": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

Huge, huge numbers of machines behind a single external IP mean that your internet access carries all their reputation by proxy. Since switching off Comcast to a smaller fiber company that uses CGNAT I've seen somewhat more Cloudflare challenges.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 175738]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182427]

> useless policy season

What does this mean?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182427]

> these companies

I think the conclusion the market is rapidly and correctly reaching is we aren’t in an AI bubble, we’re in an OpenAI bubble.

Google, Amazon and Anthropic look likely to see ROI on their capital investments because they’ve made them halfway reluctantly. Microsoft is up in the air. Not sure what Meta is doing. And with the benefit of hindsight, OpenAI used capex as a marketing strategy with investors (while Sam Altman materially lied about his compensation and somehow looped Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, founder of The Information, into his racket).

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

It's definitely the sort of thing that Crowley from Good Omens would be working on.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

For when you need to store a copy of the internet, and have been granted immunity for your copy of Anna's Archive.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 188756]

A long time ago I did that to make Canonical's Launchpad easier to read - mostly making tables look nicer and so on. I was really nice. I saw similar initiatives at Workday as well - browser plugins that added extra functionality to the development instances of the application.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

While it incurs a programming issue, the microcontroller will generally be more stable, less temperature sensitive, and consume less power.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

I don't think anybody implied or thought of Android in this subthread, just because it nominally runs the Linux kernel. I for sure understood it as just "Linux = whole OS-level distros of the laptop/PC bound type" not "anything with a Linux kernel even if it's a proprietary mobile phone OS".

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

LLMs are accelerants. They enable people to do patent and copyright infringement at a much larger scale. As we know from previous examples, if you break the law enough as a company eventually they have to let you keep doing it.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

It was notable that in Minneapolis enough people were doing this kind of thing that ICE were seriously impaired, and had to resort to escalation and shooting Americans in the street.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Yes, Microsoft suffers from schizophrenic management, it is easier for externals to talk between teams than internal teams themselves, there are quite a few stories on the matter.

Apple really doesn't care how apps are used, Radar issues go untouched for several releases.

EDIT: missing "management".

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Those Windows mistakes have been sorted out for a long time now.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Yes, and all the paper straws in the world isn't going to save it, between wars, attacks on critical infrastructure and AI overlords.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Agreed, which is why my stance on the matter at least on what I have control over, is either GPL/LGPL, or commercial license.

"Be entitled to whatever one is willing to give upstream" is my motto.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161843]

3 DOF per leg, so it needs 12 motors and controllers. Getting that under $1000 is nice.

Here's the US$18 motor: [1] Those things are getting really cheap. He did have to rewind it, though, for more turns with thinner wire. The manufacturer mentions that you can order with "custom Kv", which means you might be able to get a different winding from the factory if you order a reasonable quantity. Especially if you tell them that makes them "robot motors".

Motor overheating might be a problem. The dog, just standing, has its motors stalled under load, converting power to heat. Drones don't do that. Temperature feedback would help if this thing has to operate for extended periods. Remember yesterday's article on humanoid robots and their cooling problems.

The motor controller is nice too, and cheap at $49. Needed fixes to the firmware, but that's not surprising at the price. High performance motor controllers used to cost about $1000.

Repurposed drone technology has done wonders for legged robots. We're not quite at the point where limb drive hardware is off the shelf, but it's way better than it used to be.

[1] https://www.xntyi.com/tyi-5008-kv335/kv400-high-speed-brushl...

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78679]

> But these LLMs are like Happy Gilmore. They get to the green in one shot then they orbit the hole with an extremely dubious short game.

Except that he got good at his short game by the end. LLMs will get there sooner than we think.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

True, but contrary to the fruity models, some of these are upgradedable.

My Asus netbook started with basic configuration and was maximised during its lifetime, just like any PC desktop.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 188756]

The transfer rates limit how much each chip can be active at any given time, so a heat-aware writing allocator can pick the least active blocks for the next writes and distribute the heat accordingly. Even if it’s not heat-aware, the tendency will be that the writes will be distributed over as many chips as there are, and so will be the heat generated.

Now, I would LOVE to see this much SLC flash on a direct to bus attachment setting.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89325]

QLC NAND

The datasheet shows 3GB/s sequential write, which for 245.76TB means writing the whole drive takes around 22h45m. Odd that the endurance is specified as "1.0 SDWPD", which is almost meaningless since the drive takes roughly that long to write at full speed.

At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment

...but those HDDs are going to hold data for far more than twice as long. It's especially infuriating to see such secrecy and vagueness around the real endurance/retention characteristics for SSDs as expensive as these.

On the other hand, 60TB of SLC for the same price would probably be a great deal.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161843]

Trump also fired the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.[1]

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128527]

Which is why exclusives matter, you don't go to Steam if the game is only on one of Switch, PlayStation, XBox, XBox PC, Android, iOS, Apple Arcade,.....

Brajeshwar ranked #48 [karma: 75453]

Oh! Dear Lord. I still want to hear my Indian friends speak Indian to me during Support Calls. These days, I’m hearing American accents trying to calm me down over my complaints on that excess masala in the idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken combo in the El Camino Eatery in the outskirts of Jhalandar.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

Not the OP, but it might be that AI isn't as good at systems programming as it is at other domains, or it might be that you're using it differently than I am. I don't know which one it is (maybe AI just isn't good at writing the language you work with).

For things like web frontents/backends, though, it works beautifully. I ship things in days that would take me weeks to write by hand, and I'm very fast at writing things by hand. The AI also ships many fewer bugs than our average senior programmer, though maybe not fewer bugs than our staff programmers.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

I just created (yesterday) a product tour I'm pretty proud of:

https://www.writelucid.cc

It's a writing reviewer app, and the landing page is the product. It's literally a document with a critique. You can write in it, use the editor, even delete the whole page.

I always skip tours, but I think this kind of thing (if your product can support it) is much better. Then again, this isn't so much a "you've logged in, now let us teach you how to use this product" as a "welcome, here's what this product does".

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99607]

You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era.

Yes, that's the problem

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76480]

> the LLMs will ship code the LLMs understand, and whether any human specifically understands any particular part will mostly not matter.

I find this particularly funny. There were more than a couple Star Trek Episodes where some alien planet depends on some advanced AI or other technology that they no longer understand, and it turns out the AI is actually slowly killing them, making them sterile, etc. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr... )

Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but "humans rely on a technology that they forget how to make" is a pretty recurrent theme in human history. The FOGBANK saga was pretty recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

It just amazes me that people think "Sure, this AI generated code is kinda broken now, but all we need is just more AI code to fix it at some unknowable point in the future because humans won't be able to understand it!"

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89325]

Not too long ago, someone submitted an AI demo to HN that resulted in a 3.1GB download upon visiting the page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823460

It reminds me of the "dialup warnings" common 2 decades ago on huge pages (often containing many images). Yes, bandwidth and storage has gotten cheaper, but the unwanted waste should still be called out. I'm not even anti-AI, having waited several hours recently to get some local models to experiment with, but that's because I wanted to and made the decision to use that bandwidth.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

>That is exactly where the disagreement stems from. That app is a draft version that might work for a couple people. It won't scale. It won't be secure. It won't handle edge cases. It won't be flexible enough to iterate based on customer feedback.

As if startup code doesn't have the same issues pre-AI? And still they get to billions of valuations with such code.

They can always pay some beefier consultants when they absolutely have to, for scaling it up or hardening it.

That "it won't be flexible enough to iterate based on customer feedback" is more wishful thinking. It would be code like any other code, following some patterns. In fact, the architecture can be fine tuned by the human in the loop anyway - they just wont be needed 5 more humans to assist them to code it.

>Because if all they do is: What humans do, just faster... cool, useful, but not worth all the hype.

That's literally what automation in any field is. Why should be something more, as if this huge breakthrough is already taken for granted within a few years of being available?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 419734]

Germany appears to depend on it. Virtually none of North America does. I'm pretty satisfied with how this whole thing shook out!

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77429]

Yes but the process was so painful (it was very hard to tell what sections it referred to and to talk about each piece of feedback) that I created a tool just to help with presenting the feedback better:

https://www.writelucid.cc/

I made that because of this post. Here's the precursor:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/graphe

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 104875]

It would be useful if this site included a human-readable explanation of what terms like "Disposition: Diversion" compared to "Disposition: 871PC/No Sufficient Cause" meant.

Or a clear definition of what the question "Which released charge sounds worse?" means.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 184353]
bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105752]
rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126344]

> was surprising. Goes against the idea that deregulation allows companies to squeeze consumers and earn excess profits.

That's because this assertion is economically illiterate. Deregulation can lead to increased profits where otherwise companies have monopoly power. But often, the regulation was there in the first place to ensure that companies had sufficient profit to invest in expensive infrastructure. (E.g. railroads).

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

He was always a tool outside his narrow field. Just got a lot of fans for saying basic atheist 101 as if he invented it (and even that, naively).

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182427]

Unless Apple comes up with a novel memory, which I wouldn’t put beyond Cupertino, it makes more sense to participate in economies of scale.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 104875]

> She also successfully applied for an outdoor seating permit through the Police e-service, which didn’t require BankID. Her first submission included a sketch she had generated herself, despite having never seen the street outside the café. Unsurprisingly, the Police sent it back for revision. [...]

> When she makes a mistake, she often sends multiple emails to suppliers with the subject “EMERGENCY” to cancel or change the order.

I really don't like these research projects which waste the time of real human beings who haven't opted into the experiment.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

>Memory designs are pretty entrenched with the various patents involved...

Can't be any more entrenched than CPUs, GPUs, and broadband chips, which Apple still designs.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91132]

Doesn't matter. He did it through the use of AI, and AI, despite explicitly told otherwise, deleted the database.

Both he should learned his lesson AND AI should not be trusted.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126344]

> Of course, people who never approached agriculture will be appalled at this, and call it great injustice.

Uneducated rice farmers in Bangladesh would understand the problem better than the people complaining about this.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182427]

> for food security

They overproduce for votes. Countries without farmer blocks swinging elections stockpile non-perishables for food security.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

As an owner of an apple tree: that's great for about two months, but I don't have commercial quantities of cold storage.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109594]

Very real risk of this going in reverse: people building inaccessible websites to prevent AI use.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182427]

> a model is not software

When does code become software?

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108120]

That app really sucks. In fact the app that mobile sites want you to download is almost always so bad that it should be required by law to have a STEAMING PILE OF POO EMOJI on the UI element that nags you to download it.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127855]

> The great injustice is very much me paying however much per pound of peaches when the supply is so great that they should be much cheaper.

But its not, because the supply and competing demands for motor fuel and all the other things that are required between the orchard are involved, not just the supply of peaches at the orchard.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241982]

That says a lot more about them than it did about you.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83460]

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it.

Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practical discussion to have. Framing it around consent is unnecessarily inflammatory and makes it harder to have a discussion, not easier.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 184353]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 188756]

> I would guess that using the tab key in this way was part of a patent they were pursuing and Microsoft's use would show this to be 'obvious' and thus not patentable.

IBM insisting it not to be tab wouldn’t make sense. Microsoft was working for them and the programs should adhere to the CUA (Common User Access) standard.