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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.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

"The second, more fundamental reason is that the relevant features are not given in advance. A large part of what the expert learns through experience is which features of the environment matter."

Yes.

"This is the deepest reason why experience cannot be compressed."

No. Finding relevant features and compressing their valuation is what ML systems do. Especially in vision systems. Early attempts at machine vision had human-chosen features and detectors for them. There used to be papers with suggested features - horizontal lines, vertical lines, diagonal lines, patterns of dots, colors, and such. That's where things were in the 1990s. Those have now been replaced by learning-generated low level feature detectors, which work better.

This does need a lot of training content. The training process is inefficient. It definitely compresses, though.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90472]

In an attempt to preserve the rights of Ukrainian citizens in the long run. Surrendering to Russia would have more impact than the draft does.

The UN acknowledges this conflict to some extent; https://www.ohchr.org/en/conscientious-objection

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82573]

I know an ex-Facebook employee who told me that "Nobody at Facebook ever makes a conscious decision about whether something is good or bad. You are given a metric, and your job is to make that metric go up. If it turns out that making the metric go up has negative consequences [for the business, I don't think it's anyone's job to worry about the rest of society], then somebody else is given another metric to ameliorate the negative consequences of you making your metric go up."

He didn't last all that long, he had a conscience. I've heard similar things, but not quite in such clear words, from several other people I know who have worked at Facebook/Meta.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104884]

1. Water is child safe

2. Steri-strips are available over the counter at any supermarket or pharmacy (in the U.S.)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

The large transformer shortage has been a problem for years. Large transformer making is a craft, where the winding supports are made of hardwood, like furniture, and wound by hand. Then the windings go into a case that's an oil tank.

The build teams aren't that big - 30-50 people. The main barrier to entry is that it takes people who know how to hand-build big transformers. Utility buyers want a supplier who's going to be around half a century from now, since these things last that long.

Here's a summary of the market, from a transformer maker in China.[1]

Here's an AI-generated fake video of large transformer manufacturing. It's about half wrong.[2] But right enough to be worth watching. I'd like to see the prompts for this.

Virginia Transformer is the US's biggest maker of large transformers.[3] They advertise their "short lead times" of two years. The margins are low, and makers don't want to go idle between orders. This is a problem with much heavy machinery. It could be built faster, but when you catch up, everybody gets laid off and the factory sits idle. There goes your profit margin.

[1] https://energypowertransformer.com/2025-u-s-power-transforme...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVVCCG0KkaE

[3] https://www.vatransformer.com/shortest-lead-times/

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90472]

We've been told their air defenses are completely wiped out.

Why do we need stealthy cruise missiles now?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90472]

Yes, and doing that still takes time. Murder trials take years and significant human time. Even parking tickets require several people to show up in a physical location to address if you contest them.

So, you either do the proper, constitutionally required procedure - which takes time - or you take the Nazi approach of... significant shortcuts. And even there, it remains quite labor intensive.

And now, oops… lettuce is $20/head, and the international community is working to send you to The Hague.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79337]

Intuition is just our brains' amazing pattern recognition ability at work.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90472]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180344]

“Following the 12-day war with Israel in June, Iranian authorities learned that Israel could easily locate their radar systems and take them out, leaving Tehran’s forces blind to the skies above, Avivi said. Unlike the radar installations, the cameras don't transmit a signal that Israel can use to locate them, he added.”

Damn innovative.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127748]

In Portugal as well, both genders get listed when their time comes up.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90472]

> The White House website is rebuilt by each administration.

The Federal government is very large bureaucratic organization with more inertia than most. (And probably long-term contracts in this realm!)

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417825]

Yes it is. They're not not false positives until they're reported and consume maintainer time.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

It’s a great job path: good wages, guaranteed demand, and portable to other countries if you decide to leave the US.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127752]

Its pretty much impossible to have a substantial discussion because the facts (beyond the fact of the allegations) are opaque. Its a highly emotionally charged issue involving a divisive figure where pretty much no one has any access to useful facts. Discussions are destined to be all noise, no signal.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90694]

>In 2021 I had the worst accident of my life. I misjudged a jump from a rooftop to a fence, fell badly, and ended up in a coma for three days. When I woke up, my vestibular system was damaged. The apparatus that controls balance. For weeks I couldn't walk straight without the world spinning. Most people would have quit parkour after that. I did the opposite.

Sounds like practice for a major athletic event https://darwinawards.com/darwin/

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90472]

> Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable.

You should read up on what "inalienable rights" are about. Even the first couple of paragraphs on Wikipedia will suffice.

They get violated all the time and need constant protecting.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90694]

>And if you fail to seek permission nothing happens. You can ignore it without consequence

The consequence is you violated the law, and they can have you at any time, even retroactively, for that.

That they don't is merely a detail. If it really has "no consequence" they should remove it.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127752]

Both non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements should—just as many jurisdictions have for non-compete agreements, which do not even implicate free speech the way the others do—be sharply limited as a matter of public policy (non-disparagement even moreso than non-disclosure.) Both are routinely used to inflict public harm for private gain, and government enforcement of either is in tension with freedom of speech; while there is a legitimate case to be made that non-disclosure agreements within certain bounds have a certain degree of necessity in enabling legitimate business, this is a much harder case to make for non-disparagement agreements, at least for ones that are not temporally bounded within an active business relationship.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90694]

>If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem.

Is it? Django was just a personal project that started as a CMS for a newspaper. And that's pre-AI, and pre tons of libraries handling all kinds of functionalty like 2FA to offload features to.

And the core backend design and functionality for a CMS is a stable target that hasn't changed in 3 decades, unlike with other software.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417825]

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good

No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417825]

The essay also didn't kick anything off; it was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90694]

Didn't you just restate what the parent claimed?

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

Indeed. For me, it's also a good reminder that AI is here to stay as technology, that the hype and investment bubble don't actually matter (well, except to those that care about AI as investment vehicle, of which I'm not one). Even if all funding dried out today, even if all AI companies shut down tomorrow, and there are no more models being trained - we've barely begun exploring how to properly use the ones we have.

We have tons of low-hanging fruits across all fields of science and engineering to be picked, in form of different ways to apply and chain the models we have, different ways to interact with them, etc. - enough to fuel a good decade of continued progress in everything.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.

You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127748]

Most likely no-one runned them, given the developer culture.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

Makes me realize that "Worse is Better" was, in today's terms, apologism for vibe-coding.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127748]

CMS is pretty much alive, even if most of them are now headless, oriented towards MACH deployments and AI based workflows.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102017]

I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems.

I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.

Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.

My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104884]
walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 97444]

Ask the moderators? Today's videos include an account with < 50 points and one with < 5 points, https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com,

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88829]

Not "hidden", but probably more like "no one bothered to look".

declares a 1024-byte owner ID, which is an unusually long but legal value for the owner ID.

When I'm designing protocols or writing code with variable-length elements, "what is the valid range of lengths?" is always at the front of my mind.

it uses a memory buffer that’s only 112 bytes. The denial message includes the owner ID, which can be up to 1024 bytes, bringing the total size of the message to 1056 bytes. The kernel writes 1056 bytes into a 112-byte buffer

This is something a lot of static analysers can easily find. Of course asking an LLM to "inspect all fixed-size buffers" may give you a bunch of hallucinations too, but could be a good starting point for further inspection.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107761]

Well, that's the brexit outcome.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127748]

Interestingly enough for the C and C++ folks, compiler specific dialects for embedded without standard library, are still argued for as if being C and C++.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127748]

I don't see the purpose to run containers on Android, the managed userspace provides everything I need, including code on the go apps, already sandboxed.

Also not a termux fan.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

à la carte is honest; overprovisioning just slows progress by preventing demand from creating pressure to innovate proper solutions.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107761]

The Troubles had a lower per capita body count than Detroit during the 80s. Part of their doctrine was "bomb with warning", usually to maximize property damage without random civilian casualties.

(Still quite a bit of murder of informers, soldiers, lawyers, and a teenager who happened to be in the wrong car. As well as government snipers firing into a crowd, planting a bomb on a band, and so on)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

Wright designed a gas station, with a control tower office from which the manager can look down on the gas jockeys.[1] It looks like it belongs in Southern California, but it's in Minnesota.

His Marin Civic Center is nicely integrated with the terrain. Gattica, the movie, was filmed there. Like the gas station, it includes a non-functional pointy tower. Wright went through a pointy object period.[2]

Wright emphasized materials and surface treatments, to complement the plain lines of his buildings. That tended to run up costs. But if you use Wright's lines without the materials, you get brutalism.

[1] http://www.flwright.us/FLW414.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_County_Civic_Center

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

And here I thought it was all shoot on soundstage on Mars.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79337]

I wouldn't want to live in it, though, because everything would be damp.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74124]

The text implies it’s more due to the alleged license violation of a YC startup’s IP than the alleged fraud.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241275]

It's a special level of disgusting, that's for sure. And I though Installmonetizer was pretty bad, this one goes well beyond that.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

Wow. This reflects the price of gold going up. A lot.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180344]

> Are indexes not covered by copyright, even if you don't mention the underlying data source by name?

If there were a good autopilot energy policy option, it would probably entail doing the opposite of whatever Germany votes to do.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180344]

> cockroach mode

What does this mean?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241275]

No, what they should do instead is decentralize energy generation to the point that we're in cockroach mode. And if that means that transportation of goods gets priority over transportation of people then so be it until we've figured that one out.

The sooner we get this over with the better. Install as much solar and wind as we can and get to the point where we have a glut and then back the up with decentralized storage.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241275]

The only thing that makes delve worse in my book is that they're selling compliance, they have zero excuses. But the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic even if they don't sell compliance do whitewash bulk copyright violations and they have valuations far in excess of Delve. Too big to fail I guess.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90694]

>How can an OpenClaw user use 6 times what a human subscriber is using when I'm four hours into the week and 15% of my weekly limit is already used up, just by coding?

Perhaps because your Claude agent usage is not representative of the average user, and closer to the average OpenClaw user levels...

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127752]

The problem with refraining from political violence where it is warranted is that the other side will do it anyway and you end up dead.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104884]
JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180344]

> the entire House would be flipping out. They aren't

Based on reporting and fundraising, it looks like GOP members with races this midterm are, but I guess we’re both going off vibes and loose data.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

Oh, it's a billing thing. Not fear that Claude coupled to something that can actually do things is dangerous.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417825]

The instinct to preserve and honor Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, where I live, has basically frozen the place in amber, which isn't something Wright would have wanted, and also worked synergistically with exclusive zoning to keep the Village ultra-expensive (it directly abuts the Austin neighborhood in Chicago, which is low-middle income) and white (unlike Austin, which is 90+% Black).

No idea what Wright would have thought about racial housing segregation, but it was certainly a knock-on effect of the preservationist cult he accidentally created.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

Anti-pattern imho. Agents should operate within granular identity and permission scopes, with audit and log trails for all data operations (read, write, etc).

Copilot: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/agent-id/identity-pl... | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/audit-copilot (for example)

TLDR Maintain an identity boundary whenever possible.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 145274]

If you ever visit Taliesin in Wisconsin (which has a pretty bland), you should also visit the nearby House on the Rock which is a fascinating and very weird collection of esoteric and kitschy items.

The contrast in attitudes and aesthetics between the two is incredibly stark, and it's very interesting to see the reactions of visitors to each location.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88829]

and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed

Imagine not being able to connect services together or compose building-blocks to do what you want. This is absolute insanity that runs counter to decades of computing progress and interoperability (including Unix philosophy); and I'm saying this as someone who doesn't even care for using AI.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

Transformers are also manufacturing constrained.

Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106944]

"I choose the mind that never tires of mine."

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76826]

> The solution as usual is open source.

> Obviously step-3.5-flash is nowhere near the raw performance of sonnet

I feel like these two statements conflict with each other.

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74124]

Codex just ended their double-usage offer and OpenAI just had an exec shakeup, so it'll be interesting to see how Codex reacts, or if people have usage issues with Codex.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180344]

> why does it take months and months for even experienced devs to land a job?

Software is undergoing a secular downsizing. It increasingly looks like we have too many SWEs, and that we need to support them retraining. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a labor shortage in other industries.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79337]

Haven't any of the space probes taken such pictures as they left to wander through the solar system?

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126027]

> America is at near full employment

What America is full of is fake employment statistics that are artificially inflated by young people hiding out in school to avoid the bad job market.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82573]

In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's what has happened empirically in countries undergoing significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war, there have been many centralized systems built on top of it (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to the functioning of what we know of as the Internet.

If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how to host local copies of data and develop local-scale communications for the people you regularly talk with. The Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are engaged in a real existential war.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 89726]

Don't forget underseas cables: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

We know that to be the case with Musk. He's admitted it. Andreessen, don't know.

jrockway ranked #49 [karma: 73254]

It gets better every release, but there are missing language features:

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/

And parts of the stdlib that don't work:

https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76826]

Why would I want to own a cut-off datacenter in Dubai?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104884]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

Healthcare will carry the economy, 4M Boomers retire every year and these jobs cannot be offshored like finance and tech.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

Issuing US treasury debt to those still willing to buy it.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

No, but determinism reduces the number of stones you need to turn over when debugging hairy problems such as your program occasionally returning different results for the same inputs. You may not have control over the timing of I/O operations or order of external events (including OS scheduler), but at least you know that your side of the innovation/response is, in isoaltion, behaving predictably.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88829]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

Good. Call your reps and ask for more action.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76826]

Say what you want about cryptocurrency, at least their bug bounties pay well.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88829]

Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107761]

The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88829]

Richard Stallman's "Right to Read" is worth reading again, because it portrays a very similar scenario.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104884]
simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102017]

This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.

jgrahamc ranked #31 [karma: 93902]

There is no point engaging in any way with people who believe in such "theories". They are like trolls, the only way to deal with them is not at all. Don't engage, don't disagree, just nothing, total silence. One can choose to be a wilful edit and waste your life and time on complete bullshit, but the rest of us should just ignore those people completely.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106944]

hate to break it to you but life is probabilities all the way down

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99261]

The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.

building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people

Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.

Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_Iran

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82573]

The rare earth dependency on China is very much overblown. The U.S. has very significant natural reserves of rare earth minerals. The problem is the same with all mining - it's uneconomic to mine minerals in the U.S. because the job of "miner" is unattractive to Americans (both the laborers and the governments that sign environmental permits) when there are cleaner, safer, and more highly paid jobs available.

They're also just as much of a CO2 solution as electric trains are, i.e. it depends on the fuel source for the local electric grid (which today is overwhelmingly solar in most of the places where EVs are popular).

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106944]

(1) conventional spell checkers still exist

(2) it's ok to ask "is this grammatical?"

(3) I will bounce ideas off chatbots but I think I've used just once AI generated sentence in the last two years. On one hand it is not my voice and it also sticks out like a sore thumb. I mean, if I hear "you're not a fur, you're a therian" another time I'm going to howl at the moon or something.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106944]

We have some friends who have a really well-built chicken coop. Sometimes we help them with the birds when they are out of town and bring back eggs.

A while back they had a stump in front of the house with a family of foxes living in it and they pointed a game camera at it.

Night after night they got footage of the fox mama bringing back other people's chickens to feed to her kits.

The moral is, I think, that the well-built chicken coop is a good investment.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417825]

SSH certificates aren't X.509 certificates.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106944]
nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82573]

It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a common convention. So were asterisks to display a bulleted list, blank lines to separate paragraphs, and indenting 4+ spaces to write code.

It's a good example of "pave the path" design philosophy, where you do what users are already doing rather than trying to impose some platonic ideal of what the world should be like. And it works quite well at that.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160775]

Useful study. UK-based.

The "authenticity" thing of podcasters is only meaningful if the podcaster was there. Sometimes that happens, and those are the good ones. There are good protest videos. Not many war videos. Secondary sources are just pundits, of which we have too many. It's easy to be an influencer who covers entertainment - entertainment wants to be watched. It's hard to be an influencer who covers, say, unemployment. It's possible, but you have to go and talk live to people who just got laid off. That's reporting.

It's not the delivery system. It's whether the source goes out and pulls in news. Most don't.

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." - City Editor of a Chicago newspaper, 1918. Look at a news story and ask "did this begin with a press release or a speech?". If so, it's publicity. HN had an article from a few days ago about "CEO says" journalism. It's worse on the political front.

Democracy requires that a sizable fraction of voters know what's really happening. This is a big problem.

Influencers can be controlled. Dubai has cracked down on war reporting by the large number of influencers there.[1] Right now, Iran claims a missile hit on an Oracle data center in Dubai. The UAE denies this. Did anybody in Dubai drive over and take pictures? Call up Oracle and ask? Nah.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/03/dubai-...

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107811]

The corporate version of Stockholm Syndrome.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78404]

Aaron had very little to do with Markdown, other than reviewing the spec once at the end.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113825]

Right. R in RAG stands for retrieval, and for a brief moment initially, it meant just that: any kind of tool call that retrieves information based on query, whether that was web search, or RDBMS query, or grep call, or asking someone to look up an address in a phone book. Nothing in RAG implies vector search and text embeddings (beyond those in the LLM itself), yet somehow people married the acronym to one very particular implementation of the idea.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102017]

So this is the end of the Drift project, right?

Back at the top of the crypto hype cycle I wouldn't be surprised to see a project survive even a situation like this one, but now that the hype has died down is it still possible to come back from a loss of this magnitude?

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107761]

The transition is happening rapidly in Pakistan: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76826]

Obviously it can, but it usually isn't. If 90% of your target market isn't there, the economics are different.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160039]

Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Usually at that point the bird has gone away, too.

The iNaturalist app doesn‘t. It has more features, but Seek‘s former advantage „let me just the a photo and auto-identify“ is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my default now.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102017]

The iNaturalist API is an absolute gem. It doesn't require authentication for read-only operations and it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials.

My partner and I built this website with it a few years ago: https://www.owlsnearme.com/

(I realize this is a bit on-brand for me but I also use it to track pelicans https://tools.simonwillison.net/species-observation-map#%7B%... )

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102017]

That's the bit that scares me. I've often found myself installing software in a hurry to join a meeting on some platform that I've not previously used via my current machine.

The time pressure means I'm less likely to pay attention to what I'm installing.