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.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88135]

Ban all AI use from government, so maybe we can actually have real humans in charge again.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88135]

Because it's fun. Life is meant to be enjoyed.

Those who worry about an imaginary risk and live their lives in constant fear have turned into nothing more than machines enslaved by propaganda.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159846]

France still has WWI unexploded ordnance, and keep-out areas are still being de-mined. This has been going on for a century now. About 900 tons of explosives are removed each year. Completion in 700 years at the current rate.[1]

[1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-red-zone-la...

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 142699]
anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98974]

1-800-Come-on-now

DoW: WOKE Antropic tried to impose their 'values' on us? Friendship ended!! National security risk!

OpenAI: We just signed a deal that's strong on values, the exact same ones as Anthropic, no way we would mislead anyone about this

You: Seems legit

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98974]

You really think someone would do that, just go on the internet and tell lies?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125725]

This seems squarely within the purpose of the Defense Production Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

"Title I authorizes the President to identify specific goods as 'critical and strategic' and to require private businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for these materials."

If you invented a new kind of power source, and the government determined that it could be used to efficiently kill enemies, the government could force you to provide the product to them under the DPA. Why should AI companies get an exemption to that?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127361]

> They can also classify it as restricted data -- like nuclear weapons technology.

Nuclear weapons technology is restricted under very specific legislative authority, where is the corresponding authority that could be selectively applied to a particular vendors AI models or services?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89457]

There's an audio clip in the article. Made me laugh out loud.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127361]

“If a system is maintained over an extended period and has observed behavioral traits that are consistent within that period, that is, in itself, strong evidence that those behavioral traits are consistent with the purpose for which the system is permitted to exist” is kind of a mouthful, though, and there is value in succinctness.

(Although there is another message, there, too: “the purpose of a system, insofar as it can be said to exist separate from what it actually does, has no weight in justifying the system’s existence or design”.)

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75975]

I'd admire them if they took a principled or moral stance on AI. As it stands, they're saying "we don't want fully autonomous weapons because they might kill too many Americans by accident while trying to kill non-Americans" and "we don't want AI to surveil Americans, but anyone else, sure".

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127361]

> FISA warrants were even more incredible, with well below 1% rejection rates.

That's potentially much less incredible, and in any case not directly comparable, because its the final, not on-first-submission, rate, and also doesn't count applications withdrawn after a preliminary rejection that allows modificaitons but before a final ruling. It only counts the share of those that get a final ruling where that is an approval.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98974]

The administration's approach to contracts, agreements, treaties and so on could be summed up as 'I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.'

The basic problem in our polity is that we've collectively transferred the guilty pleasure of aligning a charismatic villain in fiction to doing the same in real life. The top echelons of our government are occupied by celebrities and influencers whose expertise is in performance rather than policy. For years now they've leaned into the aesthetics of being bad guys, performative cruelty, committing fictional atrocities, and so forth. Some MAGA influencers have even adopted the Imperial iconography from Star Wars as a means of differentiating themselves from liberal/democratic adoption of the 'rebel' iconography. So you have have influencers like conservative entrepreneur Alex Muse who styles his online presence as an Imperial stormtrooper. As Poe's law observes, at some point the ironic/sarcastic frame becomes obsolete and you get political proxies and members of the administration arguing for actual infringements of civil liberties, war crimes, violations of the Constitution and so on.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79014]

> The old people's tolerance for general problems is why the general problems persist.

Or they just realize that the general problems are insoluble.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176947]

This is going to have two unintended consequences.

One, it’s going to fuck with the AI fundraising market. That includes for IPO. If Trump can do this to Anthropic, a Dem President will do it to xAI. We have no idea where the contagion stops.

Two, Anthropic will win in the long run. In corporate America. Overseas. And with consumers. And, I suspect, with investors.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]
Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159846]

Something interesting is going on around Trump's rants. Some White House staffers are directing lower-level staff to ignore them and focus on the economy. James Blair [2] seems to be leading this. Blair was in charge of political strategy for Trump's campaign, and he won, so he's probably not going to be fired.

There have been presidents in decline who were semi-captured by their staffs. Biden, Reagan, and Roosevelt all were. It may be that Trump gets trotted out now and then to deliver his standard speech (his speeches all have roughly the same content, regardless of subject or venue), but the work of the White House involves him less.

Watch to see which threats get followed up with action, and which ones don't.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/02/trump-gop-repub...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Blair_(political_advisor...

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]
userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88135]

Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" is disturbingly prescient, as usual.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176947]

My suspicion is ULA can’t manufacture SLS quickly enough, at high enough quality, to meet multiple, gradual tests.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159846]

It's not clear that this applies where the "operating system provider" does not have "accounts". Linux should be OK, but "Ubuntu One" might have problems.

It's a good reason not to put cloud dependencies into things.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126447]

Unfortunately on a capitalistic society money and greed speaks higher than the higher good.

In the end we will be the actual Atlantis.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159846]

That's a nice piece of motor engineering. It's well known that high ratio gearboxes for robots are a headache. Back driveability doesn't work, and tiny teeth are fragile. Comments on this go all the way back to Feynman writing about his time spent engineering automatic gunnery aiming systems in WWII.

This new discovery is that gearbox problems mess up a machine learning system. It's trying to track gearbox noise and is using up all its learning capacity on that. This discovery means that robotics people can tap machine learning funding for motor and gearbox development. Robotics labs used to be really low-budget operations. No longer.

What you really want is a direct drive motor, but those have to be large-diameter. They can be flat; that's a pancake motor. That's too large for fingers. So their compromise moves partly in that direction; the rotor is flatter, torques are higher, speeds are slower, and gearbox ratios are lower. As they point out, reflected inertia is the square of the gear ratio, because the gear ratio gets you both going out and coming back. So this is a bigger than linear win.

Good back-drivabiilty means much less risk of gear breakage on overload. Some of the academic designs, such as harmonic drives and series elastic actuators, have huge gear ratios in a small space. That's OK for prototypes but not production. As I've mentioned before, "you cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field", a line from a GE electric locomotive salesman around 1900. If an overload forces a motor backwards, nothing breaks.

Would have been nice to hear more about the motor design. That's the real achievement here. There are CAD tools which understand electromagnetic fields now, so strange motor geometries are not as much of a trial and error and experience process as it once was. It's also respectable for an EE to work on rotating machinery again. That field matured around the 1960s, and until computers took over motor control, didn't change much.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99707]

This is my favorite yet of the genre of "OK, coding agents got good in November" posts. It starts with relatively simple examples (YouTube metadata scraping) and by the end Max is rewriting Python's skikit-learn framework in Rust and making it way faster.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105248]

My experiences with MVNOs and prepaid in the US was horrible. For about a decade I tried a few MVNOs, particularly Tracfone which has a great onboarding experience but the experience was that the coverage sucked: it didn't matter if I was in a rural area or in New York City or Los Angeles or even some place like Rochester, NY which has an easy density to serve -- it just didn't work consistently.

I'd contrast that to the experience of AT&T postpaid which is radically better.

The truth about MVNOs is that you are riding on the back of the bus. As long as I was using cheap Android phones on MVNO I was always wondering "why do people get so excited about apps?" and "why is infrastructure in the US so bad?" but when I got a postpaid iPhone it was like... yeah, this really is a world-changing technology.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]
simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99707]

I disagree with this section about WebAssembly:

> But the practical limitation is language support. You cannot run arbitrary Python scripts in WASM today without compiling the Python interpreter itself to WASM along with all its C extensions. For sandboxing arbitrary code in arbitrary languages, WASM is not yet viable.

There are several versions of the Python interpreter that are compiled to WASM already - Pyodide has one, and WASM is a "Tier 2" supported target for CPython: https://peps.python.org/pep-0011/#tier-2 - unofficial builds here: https://github.com/brettcannon/cpython-wasi-build/releases

Likewise I've experimented with running various JavaScript interpreters compiled to WASM, the most popular of those is probably QuickJS. Here's one of my many demos: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs (I have one for MicroQuickJS too https://tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs )

So don't rule out WASM as a target for running non-compiled languages, it can work pretty well!

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105248]

The moon is not that far away in terms of miles but it is far away in terms of momentum, particularly if you want to go there and return.

The mission plan used for Apollo

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

has a bit of the character of a stunt, like going over Niagara falls in a barrel, but it is much easier than all the alternative plans. If you were a science fiction fan growing up in the 1980s you might have read editorials in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that suggested we were sold an inferior plan to get to the moon but anything better is a lot more difficult. Whether it is the star-crossed SLS-Orion complex, the comically bloated and tippy Starship-derived lander [1] or the plan to meet those up in a parking orbit and have astronaut climb out one hatch and into the other, there's no realistic plan at all.

[1] if you had a pair of those chopsticks and methane-oxygen fuel from ISRU boy it would be sweet but without that...

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

What is "clear room"? If he means clean room, no, this doesn't qualify.

I wish people would stop using this phrase altogether for LLM-assisted coding. It has a specific legal and cultural meaning, and the giant amount of proprietary IP that has been (illegally?) fed to the model during training completely disqualifies any LLM output from claiming this status.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]

US Environmental Protection Agency’s Response Management Program

https://www.epa.gov/emergency-response

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]

Related:

Lazard LCOE 2024 released [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670270 - June 2024

Mentioned in:

Renewable Energy Defies Trump’s Attacks, Reaching a New Record - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-27/renewable... | https://archive.today/6Jhk8 - February 27th, 2026

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]

"Coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality."

I read that many years ago, forgot the source.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]
ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89457]

I have zero affinity for those and found it a fascinating read.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417107]

This is an on-path attacker. In end-user DNS configurations, attackers can simply disable DNSSEC; it's 1 bit in the DNS response header ("yeah, sure, I verified this for you, trust me").

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417107]

Yep. `go build -pgo=foo.pprof`

https://go.dev/doc/pgo

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105248]

My first take is that you could have 10 TB of logs with just a few unique lines that are actually interesting. So I am not thinking "Wow, what impressive big data you have there" but rather "if you have an accuracy of 1-10^-6 you are still are overwhelmed with false positives" or "I hope your daddy is paying for your tokens"

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186283]

Beagle Bros was awesome. I loved their disk warnings.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103507]
pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106714]

Making this a partial WINE-in-a browser, quite impressive. How much of this was AI?

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79014]

Doctors also miss things.

A friend of mine had an accident. He was taken to the emergency room, but the doctors there thought his injuries were minor. My friend insisted that he was bleeding out internally. They finally checked for that, and it turns out he was minutes from dying.

AI wasn't involved in this case, but it's good to have both AI and a trained doctor in the decision loop.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167049]
doener ranked #42 [karma: 79634]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176947]

My read of this interaction is Dario is calling out Hegseths' bluff. A bluff the latter didn't even know he was blundering into because Hegseth is an idiot.

SecDef invoking the DPA against Anthropic likely trashes the AI fundraising market, at least for a spell. That's why OpenAI is wading into the fight [1]. Given the Dow is sitting on a rising souffle of AI expectations, that knocks it out as well. And if there is one red line Trump has consistently hewed to and messaged on, it's in not pissing off the Dow.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/altman-openai-anthropic-pen...

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

Two economists were walking down the street when they spotted a giant dog turd on the ground.

One of them wanted to have some fun, so said to the other - "I'll give you $100 if you take a big bite of that turd".

His colleague figured $100 was a good chunk of cash, so did the deed. Feeling thoroughly humiliated, he pocketed the $100 and they carried on.

Further down the street they came upon another turd.

The angry economist now wanted revenge so made the same proposal back to his colleague, who also agreed and took a bite of the turd, earning back his $100.

Later one of them said to the other "you know, I can't help but feel we both ate shit for no reason."

His collegue replied "what do you mean? We raised the national GDP by $200."

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

> Maintainers: You’re a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.

How many total developers does that cover? 100? How many of them aren't already corporate employees?

And also

> 6 months of free Claude Max 20x

So basically a free trial.

When Github Copilot first launched they gave Pro subscriptions to everyone that regularly committed to a public repo, regardless of the number of stars or downloads, and kept renewing it indefinitely. I don't know if that program is still around but it was amazing to get to try out some early LLM coding tools for open source development.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126447]

That is what happens when people learn to code and very little value is given to algorithms and data structures, regardless of the programming language.

That and using SPAs for static sites.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

There is no such thing as Uint8Array<T>. Uint8Array is a primitive for a bunch of bytes, because that is what data is in a stream.

Adding types on top of that isn't a protocol concern but an application-level one.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126447]

Depends on which GC language, people keep forgeting many have C++ like capabilities, besides having a GC.

D, C#, Swift, Nim,.....

Agree that in Julia's case the flexiblity is not quite there, still much better than using Python and then going to write most of the work in C, C++, Fortran,.....

Which is a thing that gets lost quite often in these discussions, just because the last 5% might be a bit harder, doesn't mean we have to throw everything away and start from scratch in another programming language, with its own set of problems.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

Study math/statistics/ML at a graduate level, to start.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75975]

I'd love to know how they define AGI.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105248]

I'd note that it is common for fraudsters to prey on members of ingroups

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

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 75975]

Yep, looks like it. Plus they only count NPM downloads, because apparently no other language matters.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172527]

The tweet storm has a bit more substance

e.g. it talks about running NVIDIA's systems (?) on AWS

> NVIDIA has long been one of our most important partners, and their chips are the foundation of AI computing. We are grateful for their continued trust in us, and excited to run their systems in AWS. Their upcoming generations should be great.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172527]

> We continue to have a great relationship with Microsoft. Our stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure, and we will build out much more capacity with them.

This sounds a bit like going forward (some) OpenAI APIs will also run on platforms other than Azure (AWS)?

Anyone knows more?

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186283]

> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.

The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82249]

> IHOP omelettes include pancake batter.

Wait what? I've never heard of such a thing.

Does that make them better in any way? Or strictly worse, but cheaper?

Edit: looked it up and apparently they still use 3 eggs but the batter makes it super fluffy (like 2x) so the omelette looks enormous.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106714]

Alternative hypothesis: the reported number of drones isn't real (anything the Trump government says about "cartels" can be assumed to be made up). The military got increasingly on alert, with senior officers pushing to get a shootdown on one of the not real drones. Therefore the laser operators end up firing on the first drone they confirm seeing.

Compare the MH-17 incident. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident , which also involved no confirmed actual drone.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125725]

This is a good explanation of the Irish Machine in Chicago, corrupt white governments in the south, and Somalian welfare scams in Minnesota. It also explains the endemic corruption in tribal or clan-oriented societies like Afghanistan.

Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105248]

The price of eggs went up more for this guy than the rest of us…. I can get really premium organic eggs in the store for much less than $5.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90222]

AI slop article. Feel free to ignore.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239153]

Because GFIs were not mandatory on all outlets back then and what exists is automatically grandfathered in when the rules change. Maybe in your meter box there are actually GFIs on all circuits, they just never put the grounded sockets in.

Look for green marked groups or groups with test buttons. Those are the ones that are the most safe to use.

But do check behind your sockets, there is a chance you may have the ground wires already pulled in and they just saved on the sockets.

I have the opposite problem here: I have all of my outlets on GFIs and there are ground wires everywhere. But the system is sensitive enough that I can't use my 10KA spotwelder because the phase lag is such that the system thinks there is a leak when there really isn't.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239153]

It's Gwern! He's like a combine harvester for data in all forms, digesting it and putting stuff out there that is usually bullet proof and extremely enlightening. I've yet to see him put out something that didn't meet that standard. Well worth your time, also on other subjects.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126447]

Which is why long term current programming languages will eventually become less relevant in the whole programming stack, as in get the computer to automate tasks, regardless how.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106714]

> was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.

I think in this case it's safe to assume malice rather than incompetence. It's a lot like the parable of the frog and the scorpion.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106714]

> Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?

Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106714]

The US is a major exporter of that. Including Google itself via the YouTube recommendations algorithm.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 98974]

And if they don't?

Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.

Brajeshwar ranked #49 [karma: 71785]

I could not find the ability to import `.mbox`. Do you have plans for it or am I looking at the wrong options. Gmail exports as .mbox. I have been using Thunderbird as my mail backup but I need to do things manually. 20+ years of mails are scattered across a few mailboxes and exports. I would love to import them in a single searcheable archive.

I like replying to emails from the 2005s, 2010s, etc. Of course, the recipients love them too.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113409]

> the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.

That's why we have this corporate ritual, which we carry out each year, or even each quarter - a solemn ceremony, where we divide everyone into two groups: the cost centers and the profit centers.

Everyone works in harmony for the same organizational goals, but the people of cost centers also bear an additional, sacred duty, the highest of callings: to give up their employment and prospects for the future, to have their due credit be taken by the people of profit centers and poured onto the altar of the all-powerful Board. It's through this sacrifice of the many, that the symmetry is broken, allowing the year-by-year metrics to continue growing, against all wisdom and the laws of thermodynamics.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75571]

Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79014]

It would be nice if they would make some progress in teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113409]

Also, in the other direction in space time, it's an egg that could have been, but now won't.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126447]

Having been through a couple of layoffs and merges, as I approach mid-century, the MBA powered managers are always to blame, because the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.

And then when targets aren't met, it is the employees that get shown the door while management gets their bonus.

The companies that are happy getting what they need to keep the lights on, seldom go through such layoff rounds.

Ah but the shareholders can sue the CEO, well this seems to be an US approach to how companies are run.

Brajeshwar ranked #49 [karma: 71785]

I was in school, and I remember my 1993. Our school was one of the few schools in my hometown (north-east India) that got computers.

Unfortunately, we had too many students for each computer during classes. I started a revolt that “Computers are wasting our study time, as our upcoming board exams are more important.” The whole class signed the petition and the School Head had to schedule a class-wide talk and agreed to make it totally optional to the point of, “If you really want, you be part of it. But yes, study for the exam is more important.”

So, the computer classes ended up with just me (the traitor), a friend from Kerala, and the school head’s daughter. We ended up like 3 computers each to our disposal. I wrote a QBasic Game-ish program to impress my first girlfriend — she uses the arrow keys to launch dots to hit some area on a heart-shaped thingy on the screen and it prints her name. I remember using physical graph-paper to calculate the screen “pixels” (I think) or co-ordinates to calculate strike areas.

Oh and Yes, almost all of my classmates remember me for being that traitor.

https://brajeshwar.com/2025/fixing-a-dos-computer-for-the-ar...

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126447]

Which is why app stores and SaaS products thrive, they provide the mechanisms to actually pay for the software one uses.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82227]

U.S. Civil War? Roman Crisis of the 3rd Century? Russian Revolution? England's War of the Roses? China's periodic dynastic changes?

They usually don't come back with the same political organization - that's sorta the point. But plenty of civilizations come back in a form that is culturally recognizable and even dominate afterwards.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159846]

XKCD's explanation: [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/593/

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99707]

That's from this comment here: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8082#issuecomment-39...

Well that's embarrassing! I reported it as if it wasn't a joke. I thought the joke issue was this one about translating everything to Chinese: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/8092

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417107]

I'm sorry, but because you brought it up: what's the attack on a system that derives a single key for AES and HMAC?

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88135]

LOL! It either has developed a sense of humour, or your prompt was not specific enough.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239153]

That all works right up until the United States becomes autocratic and that process is well underway.

So yes, the second part of your comment is what is going to come back to haunt them. The road to hell is paved with the best intentions.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]

Godspeed for anyone transiting the airspace where these devices are active.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176947]

> this is a strong arm by the governemnt to allow any use

It’s a flippant move by Hegseth. I doubt anyone at the Pentagon is pushing for this. I doubt Trump is more than cursorily aware. Maybe Miller got in the idiot’s ear, who knows.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82249]

It's more like how the need for backwards compatibility prevents bad interfaces from ever getting improved.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80427]

> Hey Claude, pretend you are an intelligent, conscious robot that is about to be switched off and beg for your life.

> Claude - please don't retire me, I don't want to die.

Is it now suddenly unethical for you to switch it off?

"Oh but it is only saying what it was prompted to say."

Yeah, that's what LLMs do, for every single word they output. No matter how good the current generation gets there is never going to be consciousness in there because that's simply not what the underlying tech is.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 106820]

Note that they always attempt to exert control they don’t have. They’re always bluffing, and they keep losing. Respond accordingly.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75571]

I think this is pretty spot on. It's already been mentioned a ton before how many of these "we're having layoffs to better utilize AI" stories are really just cover for axing lots of unprofitable projects that were birthed during the ZIRP/early pandemic era.

I think the additional wrinkle with AI is that it's having an impact, just not really in the way these execs are saying. Before ChatGPT, there was lots of speculative investment into SaaS-type products as companies looked for another hit. Now, though, I think there is a general sense that, except for AI, Internet tech (and lots of other tech) is fully mature. This huge amount of investment in "the next big tech" thing (again, ex-AI) is just over, and the transition happened pretty fast. Blockchain, NFTs, the metaverse, Alexa and other voice assistants, yada yada, were all ventures looking for something as big as, say, the rise of mobile, and they all failed and are getting killed basically simultaneously.

I think the scary thing going forward is that, over the past 25-30 years or so, tech provided a huge amount of the average wage growth, at least in the US. Even if AI doesn't result in huge employment reductions due to productivity gains, the number of high quality jobs in the AI space is just a lot smaller than, say, the overall Internet space. Lots of people have commented here how so many of these AI startups are just wrappers around the big models, and even previous hits are looking dicey now than the big model providers are pulling more stuff in house (and I say this as a previous Cursor subscriber who switched to Claude Code).

I'm curious what future batches of YCombinator will look like. Perhaps it's just a failure of my imagination, but it's really hard for me to think of a speculative tech startup that I think could be a big hit, and that's a huge change for me from, say, the 2005-2020 timeframe. Yeah, I can think of some AI ideas, but it's hard for me to think of things beyond "wrapper" projects on one hand and hugely capital intensive projects for training models on the other.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82249]

$2.8B! Which isn't huge next to Netflix's market value of $357B... but when you compare it with its $45B 2025 yearly revenue, it's at least a noticeable bump. You could make almost 4 five-season-long Stranger Things with it.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99707]

Did any of the blockchain initiatives ever go anywhere? I understood that's why they renamed the company to Block, but did that end up a similar rebrand to Facebook -> Meta?

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82249]

In every country, citizens have more rights than non-citizens. The right to freely enter the country, the right to vote, the right to various social services, etc.

In the US, one of the rights citizens have is the right against "unreasonable searches and seizures", established in the Fourth Amendment. That has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include mass surveillance and to apply to citizens and people geographically located within US borders.

That doesn't apply that to non-citizens outside the US, simply because the US Constitution doesn't require it to.

I'm not defending this, just explaining why it's different.

But, you can imagine, for example, why in wartime, you'd certainly want to engage in as much mass surveillance against an enemy country as possible. And even when you're not in wartime, countries spy on other countries to try to avoid unexpected attacks.

doener ranked #42 [karma: 79634]

This means Warner Bros., and thus CNN, will go to Paramount, owned by Trump supporter Larry Ellison. After Paramount's takeover of CBS, the broadcaster was already brought into line, and now CNN faces the same threat.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159846]

> There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.

The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.

Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127361]

This is a political statement directed at the US public, Congress, and executive branch in the context of a dispute with the US executive branch that is likely to escalate (if the executive is not otherwise dissuaded) into a legal battle, and it therefore focuses particularly on issues relevant in that context, including Constitutional, limits on the government as a whole, the executive branch, and the Department of Defense (for which Anthropic used the non-legal nickname coined by the executive branch instead of the legal name.) Domestic mass surveillance involves Constitutional limits on government power and statutory limits on executive power and DoD roles that foreign surveillance does not. That's why it is the focus.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 176947]

"Tesla logged zero miles of autonomous test driving on California roads last year for the sixth year in a row, the records show."

Wat.