HN Leaders

What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

So many people want to believe in this sort of thing for various reasons that I get fatigued at the very thought of trying to explain to people who believe in it earnestly that it is not a good idea. (e.g. commercial hosting services are really competitive; for a long time the cost of computing has been going down over time though I don't know if that is reversing because we've hit the end of the real Moore's law [1] or if it is a temporary blip)

[1] the motor behind it is cost reduction, once that stops it stops because we can't afford it anymore!

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75894]

Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever.

I'd like to see them make some costly signalling to indicate that they are going to turn it around like maybe buy two Superbowl ads in a row and let the CEO make a personal apology.

Isn't going to happen because the competition is Microsoft and Intel and Dell who won't hold them accountable and it is just too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78498]

We also (I worked there at the time) had software that basically said, "Joe watches all of his disks every weekend and drops them in the mail on Tuesdays, let's just assume he's going to do that and ship his new disks Monday morning". And other such predictions.

If you had a very regular viewing behavior you could have your new disks the same day as you shipped your old ones. To the customer, it was magical.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180724]

> our input devices remain focused on the previous space until the animation fully completes

This strikes me as the fuckup more than anything else.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

Sometimes I think all the HN "get off my lawn" postings need to be moved to another site.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113979]

Trying > video > torture >> having to sign up to try.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113979]

OpenAI aren't the only ones who were increasing their datacenter capex.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418129]

God damnit I didn't know until 15 seconds ago that the Space-switching animation in macOS was annoying. Thanks a lot!

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418129]

Why do you refuse to pay for the ad-free tier?

jgrahamc ranked #31 [karma: 93928]

Oh wow. Enhancements for the Sharp MZ line! Wonderful. I spent a lot of time with those machines in the 1980s and own a few. Being able to emulate the Sharp MZ-80K's (https://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-ol...) MZ80FD would be cool.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

There's a lot of people who are comfortable (socially or professionally) with diagnosing and analyzing problems. Those same people are often indifferent or outright hostile to people proposing solutions, not least because solutions that brought about change would make the analysts less relevant.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

Not if you're shadowbanned

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82708]

> Bitmap fonts are the ones that look perfect at their intended resolution.

This seems to be the center of the author's argument.

But I prefer legibility, readability, being easy on the eye. I also prefer antialiasing for its smoothness.

Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies.

I don't want my computer to feel like some nostalgic 1980's computer. I just want to get my work done, which involves a lot of reading and writing, both code and non-code, which is just more legible with vector fonts on a retina screen.

At the end of the day, jaggies are a visual distraction. They're cool if you want a retro vibe that distracts and calls attention to itself for aesthetic purposes. But not for general computer usage.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82708]

I mean, I don't like Meta at all, but what do you expect? If you want to run a full-page in the New York Times that criticizes the New York Times, they're going to refuse to run it as well. Private companies generally don't publish things that run counter to their interests.

It would certainly be interesting if we wanted legislation to force private companies who provide paid ad space to publish ads that paid the most regardless of the content, but then that opens up a whole other can of worms. What if the ad offering the most money is racist and horrible, or disgustingly obscene? At that point you start needing the government to decide what is allowed to be banned and what isn't, and then it's meddling in speech which is prohibited by the first amendment.

So this just seems like an obvious non-story to me. Of course Meta is removing these ads, because pretty much any advertising platform would do the same about ads that criticized it.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

Loggers are like beavers. They cut down all the trees they can in an area and move on and then say the environmentalists shut them down.

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 116508]

On the Ruby Native pricing page [0], do the pricing tiers include the app store charges?

What I mean is, if I were to take the starter bundle at $299/mo, do I still need to pay Apple and Google their store subscription charges?

[0]: https://rubynative.com/pricing

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91783]

At the risk of going against the gestalt, Facebook openly and publicly rejecting the ads is actually one of the better outcomes. They could have just put their thumbs on the scale, deprioritizing them, serving them to people they think are least likely to bite, etc. Lying about the number of times it was served because, after all, who can check? Many of us suspect the ad platforms already do this pretty routinely through one mechanism or another anyhow, after all.

It isn't reasonable to ask a platform to host content that is literally about suing them, not because of "freedom" concerns or whether or not Facebook is being hypocritical, but more because in the end there isn't a "fair" way for them to host that. The constraints people want to put on how Facebook would handle that ends up solving down to the null set by the time we account for them all. Open, public rejection is actually a fairly reasonable response and means the lawyers at least know what is up and can respond to a clear stimulus.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

Why do you still need the CEO? With this, Claude should be able to do the job. Maybe have the board look at a weekly summary and tweak policy.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

It doesn't even start with the cow!

The cow is the index case of microbiome über alles, that is the cow cannot digest grass at all but rather it is colonized with bacteria that eat the grass and then the cow eats the bacteria and the volatile fatty acids made by the bacteria.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

There's a raw milk lobby. [1][2]

But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.

Alta-Dena Dairy in Southern California used to be the nation's largest producer of raw milk, but too many people died.[3]

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...

[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing...

[3] https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241625]

That's because they don't stay in their lane as business owner, but use the proceeds of that business (and a bunch of others) to influence world politics in a way that no single individual should ever be able to.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

It is the way they express those views.

I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]

Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.

[1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectual...

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241625]

Ok, so you have a problem with your boss. Fine. Solve it, sue them, whatever. But you don't go and endanger the lives of your co-workers and countless emergency responders. What an idiot.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

My take is that the idea of "Net Zero" is somewhat popular, like in this study

https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-calif...

62% of Californians are for it but I think people perceived it as involving trade-offs that interest would prove really thin, in

https://news.gallup.com/poll/704228/energy-concerns-not-spik...

they ask "What is the most important issue facing the country?" and it is under %1.

So long as it can be framed as "let's take away Elon Musk's private jet" (somebody else pays) it fits comfortably in the left-wing unicause but if it comes down to a $400/ton carbon tax that adds $4 to a gallon of gas I think it will be unpopular.

You might convince some billionaires that there are billions are made from it but to the average wage earner who already feels like they are barely treading water any real sacrifice could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Personally I think we lost, like civilizational suicide lost, when "net zero" replaced "get off fossil fuels" because "net zero" seems to really mean: pump out all the carbon you want now, we will DAC it out in 2045 or right now you can fly on that jet and pay some tropical gangsters who say they planted some trees.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82646]

I had the opposite impression, that this decision was primarily economic in nature. People (or at least the sort of people interested in the EFF) simply aren't on X/Twitter anymore, and so it's not worth posting there.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418129]

That's explicitly not the logic EFF is using; they come close to outright rejecting it.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

As of late 2024, Thunderbird was doing well financially.[1] About $8 million a year in donations, most spent on developers. What went wrong?

It's basically in maintenance mode. Are they trying to add features nobody really wants to justify their existence, like Mozilla?

[1] https://chipp.in/news/thunderbird-financials-doing-really-we...

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160087]

This is about the secondary use case, namely in packaging.

If you like to pop the bubbles the correct orientation is indeed the one you‘ve been using all along: bubbles towards your fingers.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

This is actually a reprint of a 1997 article, rather than being from 2019.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

I installed Thunderbird for the first time in a couple of decades recently. My impression was that it's very feature rich but also quite ugly and not friendly to new users. It comes with a lot of assumptions about what the user wants to do and how, and I found myself having to use cheats and workarounds from the outset. I wanted to import a batch of disparate .eml files that had been seperately exported, and after 15 minutes I was starting to think it might have been easier to just do it in Python.

I also didn't care for the tabbed panels, which make it feel as if the entire thing was just ported from a browser. It really needs some fresh design and user interface work.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108081]

British "anglo-catholics" exist, and are weird in a different way.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91038]

Brand reputation from staying on Twitter is part of the math.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108081]

The reach and impressions on Twitter are fake though, and posts containing links are suppressed.

(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74139]

Tweeting is easy. Managing the weirdos that respond to your tweets is hard.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

Agreed. He is imho a very smart guy, just one who holds radically different values. It seems to me an awful lot of people get stuck in the trap of believing everyone else is fundamentally like them, and differences of opinion are based soly on differences in information or intelligence. The reality is that people can be smart and have fundamentally different views about what what constitutes fair, reasonable, decent, etc.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78498]

The thing that AI is best at is summarizing vast quantities of information. That means the most natural thing for an AI to do is be "the one tool to rule them all".

The more information it has access to, the more useful the answer can be. But that also means that it can answer all the questions.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104977]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

Well I post a lot of articles about grippers and agricultural robots that almost never get upvoted so if you don't know about these things I blame y'all.

I think if you want to change the world robots that can pick strawberries and change bedpans are it. People like to gush about "more Nobel prize research" an such but Nobel prizes are valuable because a limited number are given out, not because the research is valuable in and of itself. (e.g. Kuhn would tell you normal science is "apply for grant - write paper - repeat")

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127851]

The biggest issue is missing plugins, but they have an extension point to add them.

Naturally they expect them to be written in Rust, which might be an issue for some then again Vite folks are also going into RIR.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

It's kind of a weird title that doesn't really match the article but I guess the whole point is that the author doesn't want to reify the concept of "backlash"

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

Wow.

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Sure this will slow down the personal injury lawyers finding clients but it won't stop them, meantime it is more ammunition for Facebook's enemies to use against it.

It is one thing to do shady business, it is another thing to incriminate yourself. If you were involved with weed and somebody sent you an email asking if they could come around and pick up a Q.P. next Saturday I'd expect you to give the person a correction in person that they shouldn't do that again.

Not to say you should be like Epstein but I mean he and the people he corresponded with had some sense so there is is very little evidence of criminal activity in millions of emails.

At Facebook on the other hand all the time people sent emails about things that could just as easily been left as "dark matter" unexplained and minimally documented decisions but no it is like that M.F. Doom song "Rapp Snitch Knishes", like a bunch of children or something with no common sense at all.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91038]

I remember when Paris Hilton was shilling NFTs.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241625]

It is kind of funny. It also puts the lie to their 'respect for religion'. I can see Trump declaring himself to be pope next.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91783]

By the nature of the LLM architecture I think if you "colored" the input via tokens the model would about 85% "unlearn" the coloring anyhow. Which is to say, it's going to figure out that "test" in the two different colors is the same thing. It kind of has to, after all, you don't want to be talking about a "test" in your prompt and it be completely unable to connect that to the concept of "test" in its own replies. The coloring would end up as just another language in an already multi-language model. It might slightly help but I doubt it would be a solution to the problem. And possibly at an unacceptable loss of capability as it would burn some of its capacity on that "unlearning".

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

It's not, though. There simply wasn't enough malware to worry about. Why would I run a firewall when I was unlikely to ever encounter a malicious program?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104977]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I liked the writing:

> You are difficult to work with in the ways all serious people are difficult to work with. This is not a diagnosis. It is a compliment.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113979]

> Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).

How does that look when you correct for costs of living, because I imagine that would put London at the bottom of the list, as one of those places where senior-level tech salary is not enough to afford living in the city itself (and I don't mean the City of London, but the rest of it too).

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241625]

What I like most about the Fifth Element is that they didn't milk it through a bunch of sequels.

pseudolus ranked #6 [karma: 183714]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241625]

Never get between a journalist and their scoop.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113979]

I've been saying this for a while, the issue is that what you're asking for is not possible, period. Prompt injection isn't like SQL injection, it's like social engineering - you can't eliminate it without also destroying the very capabilities you're using a general-purpose system for in the first place, whether that's an LLM or a human. It's not a bug, it's the feature.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127851]

That soon is like a decade in the making.

And with many folks going into alternatives like Godot, it means C# ends up losing the mindshare it got.

Yes, you can use C# with Godot, but most folks end up with GDScript, or GDextension.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

America has lost the entire world. Everyone has realized that they can't depend on the US as much as they did and are looking to distance themselves.

It's too bad, because the unity that we had before Trump was great for peace, but now the rule of the strong is plunging the world back into wars and uncertainty.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

Because physics is knowable, and I don't think an unknowable thing can be created from a knowable thing.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113979]

> Poverty is relative. If you have a small apartment in a city of McMansions, you're poor, but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich.

That worked before globalization. Nowadays, having a small apartment in a city of McMansions means you're upper middle class. Poor people in the west have no apartments and no goats.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187914]

What's not to love? A small and beautiful PowerPC Unix workstation, something IBM hasn't done in a long, long time. How far does MacPorts go with a PPC?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127851]

Yes, provided you are running vim on macOS, and calling into the xcode command line tooling.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108081]

> Transparency needs no further analysis of second order effects.

Everything needs analysis of second order effects. Otherwise you wreck lives without even realizing that's what you're doing. It's the negligence of a drunk driver.

On the other hand, this also applies to Bitcoin. Satoshi, if he is real and alive and in control of his wallet, is a billionaire. Billionaires need to be kept under careful watch unless they, too, wreck lives without realizing.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127851]

Some interesting stuff you will get out of Dr. Dobbs articles, as someone that was an avid reader.

- The Small C compiler set of articles, where you will get the sense not even K&R C was used outside UNIX for quite some time, only a common subset.

- The toolbox articles creating a Turbo Vision like framework in Object Pascal

- The evolution of Python and related adoption

- Strange programing languages like Actor, C@+ (try to search this one nowadays), Sather, BETA

- The fashionable compiler benchmarks that used to be quite common back in the day

- The evolution of C and C++ at ISO, while their standards were being started

- A more heterogenous way of software development, when it wasn't only UNIX clones and Windows.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127851]

You can fake type providers with code generators though.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem. There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before.

It didn't help.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187914]

Just wait a generation or two.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88975]

It doesn't even look like particularly optimised Asm (could immediately spot a few savings, despite how horrible GAS syntax is to read...), but is definitely not "compiler slop"[1] either, which shows just how inefficient the majority of programs actually are. Of course even the ELF header takes up a significant amount of space, but this reminds me of how PC magazines would print short listings of utilities like this, often a few dozen up to a few hundred bytes at most --- in DOS .COM format, which is headerless and thus pure machine instructions.

[1] In the late 80s and early 90s, the battle between those writing handwritten Asm and those using compiled HLLs has many similarities to AI-generated vs non-AI code today.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88975]

Reminds me of the old saying "don't interrupt the one doing it, to tell him it can't be done."

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418129]

When someone who programs mostly in Rust responds to someone who programs mostly in Go I would like an animated bouncing icon that says "fight! fight! fight!" and when I press it it should leave a comment that instigates a fight, like "Serde is not really all that good".

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241625]

> Why do you still believe there's any crime at all that could somehow turn around the people who support Trump?

Did I say that? Or did your reply get attached to the wrong comment? Either way, no I don't believe that at all.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

Being a mediocre writer, I don't know what it means to write like you talk, but I know I've noticed a strong correlation between how ornate one's language is and how little one knows what they're talking about. The people who know the most use the simplest words, and if someone uses complicated language, they're either trying to deceive or to hide the weaknesses of their argument.

This only goes for specific cases, of course. E.g. it probably applies more to business language than to novels.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88975]

Chances are you might find a compatible replacement from China on Ali and the other usual sites for a fraction of the price.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75894]

Yeah, I found this was definitely a case of "the book was much better than the movie", especially odd since most of the dialog was word-for-word, yet they skipped over the small parts that gave the story its lesson and relatability. Like the whole "officially or unofficially" part is one of my favorite parts of the original story, as it makes it seem like these intergalactic beings have to deal with the same concerns as Bob in corporate HR.

I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

Cashing in on a high-trust society?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

It just doesn't work that way.

To some extent you can append some knowledge to a model with low-rank adaptation and other techniques but if you want to train a model which is substantially better than your old model you need to train a new model which is much bigger and/or more efficient than your old model and it learns a whole new representation.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference for one problem.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418129]

There is no such line. The actual line is whether someone is newsworthy; the safeguard you have against journalism abusing random people (which it has done, often, over the last 150 years) is that journalists ordinarily don't write intrusive stories about random people.

(There are some other safeguards, but they're highly situational.)

The conflict between journalism and "doxxing" is a Redditism that people are frantically trying to import into real life. Maybe Reddit norms will upend the longstanding norms (and purpose) of journalism! But nobody should kid themselves that the norms have always been compatible.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91038]

But they mention species with a meat phase.

The concept of meat isn’t foreign. Meat that’s sentient and has no cybernetic parts or phase is.

And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75894]

Guess this doesn't count as a hobby since I switched careers, but I left software recently to attend violin making school. I'm happier than I've been in a long time.

I'd encourage all "mental work" folks to engage with something physical in the 3D realm (art, cooking, gardening, etc.). I really believe humans have a special affinity for creating refined objects, and I don't think software "scratches that itch".

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75894]

Totally agree. One thing I really like about HN is it reminds you that nobody's individual experience is indicative of the industry at large.

The parent comment stated "Most codebases I encounter just have "changed stuff" or "hope this works now"." I worked at 6 tech companies in my career and a slew of contracting gigs, and I literally never encountered the problem of commit messages being uninformative. Most of the companies developed strict rules for commit comments like always including an issue number (with occasional [NO-ISSUE] tags allowed for minor changes) or something like Conventional Commits, https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/ .

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102245]

Pelicans: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/8/muse-spark/

I also had a poke around with the tools exposed on https://meta.ai/ - they're pretty cool, there's a Code Interpreter Python container thing now and they also have an image analysis tool called "container.visual_grounding" which is a lot of fun.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band – a “safety gap” – capable of penetrating ANC headphone filters. This range lies between 750 and 780 Hz.

Building an entire product around EQ crossover frequencies (which are not standardized or regulated in any way) seems a bit risky to me. Those are things that could change at any time, as could the shapes of the EQ curves themselves. there are fads in engineering design like anything else and in this wholly digital era they tend to cycle and proliferate faster because increased performance (or at least hte temporary consumer perception of such ) is only a software update away. People are extraordinarily susceptible to placebo effects in the audio realm (probably because most people prioritize their visual sense), so just moving EQ crossovers around or making them dynamically adjustable is an easy path to consumer buzz. You see this all the time with pro audio plugins.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180724]

> They agreed to base negotiations on Iran's 10-point proposal

What is your source for this? My understanding is terms were privately negotiated between unnamed representative of America and Iran.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

Well I just learned all my hobbies are boring, so bah.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180724]

Is the number of Flock Safety cameras in America going up or down?

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99318]

Kinda off topic but I wonder why they picked this name, knowing of Nvidia's Spark. They're different products, obviously, but the potential for confusion is real as both brands are competing for mindshare in the AI space. I opened this story expecting to read they'd deployed on a cluster made of Spark machines or somesuch.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107147]

It's common that they don't even let you into the venue if you have a interchangable lens camera. I wouldn't even try going into a pro game with a camera if I didn't have a credential.

At my Uni I usually go right in without any trouble, the only case I got hassled was a woman's hockey game and that time I kept repeating "I've never had trouble getting into a game before" (true) until they gave up and let me in. (Which doesn't leave me inclined to try again, but I'd already bought a ticket and didn't want to back and stash my gear in my office) I hear in hockey they are really worried about wildcat video streams.

Some of the sports at Cornell are exceptionally laid back. We are one of a few schools that plays sprint football which is 100% the same as regular football except players have to weigh less than 178 lbs [1], I know the head coach, I know people in the parent's association, they leave the gate unlocked and i go right down to the sidelines.

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

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104977]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

We've been trying to get a Claude Code subscription for my company, the pricing page says $25 but they actually charge £25, 34% higher. I've been trying to talk to them for months, their support people don't even read what I'm saying and insist that it's somehow because of proration.

I'm fairly sure their billing backend is vibe-coded and their support is worse than Google's.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

Yes. I once wanted C unions limited to fully mapped type conversions, where any bit pattern in either type is a valid bit pattern in the other. Then you can map two "char" to "int". Even "float". But pointer types must match exactly.

If you want disjoint types, something like Pascal's discriminated variants or Rust's enums is the way to go. It's embarrassing that C never had this.

Many bad design decision in C come from the fact that originally, separate compilation was really dumb, so the compiler would fit in small machines.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77099]

I'm not really very up to speed on this, can someone explain how the strait is actually closed? Are the Iranians threatening to sink any ships that pass by, or what? How come any ships don't turn their transponders off and try to make a run for it?

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79392]

My dorm room was next door to Hal Finney. He was a freakin genius at every intellectual endeavor he bothered to try. My fellow students and I were in awe of him.

But you had to get to know him to realize what he was. To most people, he was just a regular guy, easy going, friendly, always willing to help.

He was also a libertarian, and the concept of bitcoin must have been very appealing to him.

And inventing "Satoshi" as the front man is just the prankish thing he'd do, as he had quite a sense of humor.

I regret not getting to know him better, though I don't think he found me very interesting.

My money's on Hal.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

Changing the title was a good call.

The article has a good take on the "lie" problem. We know about the hallucination problem, which remains serious. The "lie" problem mentioned is that if you ask an LLM why it said or did something, it has no information of how it got a result. So it processes the "why" as a new query, and produces a plausible explanation. Since that explanation is created without reference to the internals of how the previous query was processed, it may be totally wrong. That seems to be the type of "lie" the author is worried about in this essay.

(Yes, humans do that too.)

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90739]

>what is the point of links/edges when the llm can figure out the relations by itself

Making it work less, faster, and saving tokens. Duh!

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91038]

Maybe!

I might question the benefits of making the poor area even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.

paxys ranked #40 [karma: 82170]

Mythos is a news article. This is an actual model you can use.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91038]

We have a EU dev we tried to have submit a GDPR request for human review on something on Facebook.

There’s no apparent mechanism to do so. Support was clueless. The privacy email address responded weeks later with “not out department”.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 108081]

Things which are relatively standard tend to get good generic support: Ethernet devices will generally be USB/CDC/ECM or RNDIS, for example. That may Just Work (tm) if it has the right descriptors.

The userland approach is much more useful for weird or custom devices. In particular, on Windows you can do one of these user space "drivers" without having to bother with driver signing, and if you use libusb it will be portable too.

(I maintain a small USB DFU based tool for work)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160895]

Right. From the article:

Through acoustic testing, the research team identified a narrow frequency band – a “safety gap” – capable of penetrating ANC headphone filters. This range lies between 750 and 780 Hz.

Is there a standard specifying this "safety band"? Is whatever Apple does for AirPods a de-facto standard?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104977]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113979]

Unless you're aware that such powerful commands are something you need once in a blue moon, and then you're grateful that the tool is flexible enough to allow them in the first place.

Git may be sharp and unwieldy, but it's also one of the decreasing amount of tools we still use - the trend of turning tools into toys consumed the regular user market and is eating into tech software as well.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104977]

Not one comment praising the existence of this site. Remarkable.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82646]

It would not surprise me if these actions are coming at the requests of governments. Strong encryption is one of the few things that challenges their monopoly on information; they have a very strong incentive to apply political pressure to the maintainers of these projects to, well, stop maintaining the projects. We've seen this in overt actions that the EU takes; in more covert actions that the U.S. government is suspected of taking; and in the news headlines about third-world dictatorships that just shut off the Internet. Tech companies are perhaps the most convenient leverage point for these actions.

More regulation won't help here, because the regulation-maker is itself the hostile party.

What would help is full control over the supply chain. Hardware that you own, free and open-source operating systems where no single person is the bottleneck to distribution, and free software that again has no single person who is a failure point and no way to control its distribution.