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My question is are there any historical parallels for the slide toward authoritarianism being reversed without a major catastrophe/war.
There were many "ground rules" in American society and politics that Trump has just proved can be thrown completely out the window, and it feels like there is no unringing that bell.
> every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk.
Monitoring specific user accounts or keywords? Is this typically done by a social media reputation management service?
Tesla is the world’s largest meme stock. People stopped applying rational pricing models, and rationality in general, to it a lot time ago.
The irony is that this especially true for Coca Cola. They are basically an advertising company at heart. They sell flavored sugar water. For all the hype about "are you a coke person or a Pepsi person", in blind tests most people can't tell the difference between coke and generic cola. The billions they spend in marketing annually helps ensure they can sell their flavored sugar water for a lot more than Aldi sells their store brand flavored sugar water.
It's quite good, but it gets very Six Feet Under by the end, and you have to suspend a lot of disbelief about technology; it's a little like Hackers in the sense that it's trying to communicate a feeling about operating in specific eras of computing, but not so much trying to realistically depict what it was like.
Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.
I am confident that Anthropic make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer.
Claude Code has rate limits for a reason: I expect they are carefully designed to ensure that the average user doesn't end up losing Anthropic money, and that even extreme heavy users don't cause big enough losses for it to be a problem.
Everything I've heard makes me believe the margins on inference are quite high. The AI labs lose money because of the R&D and training costs, not because they're giving electricity and server operational costs away for free.
I ~like~ love Obsidian. I also like Steph Ango and his philosophies. In fact, a lot of his ideas shaped and improved mine. His approach is opinionated.
So pick the good ones you like and make your own.
For instance, I’m pretty well-organized, and I like it that way. This leads me to native organizations using folders and some patterns that I learnt aloong the way. Nothing more complicated. One day, if I have to walk off Obsidian, I can, and I will still know where things are.
Right now, my organization is a loose combo of PARA[1] and Johnny Decimal.[2]
Obsidian is another tool; it just happens to be one hell of a good tool.
Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected, thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1].
Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benefit to the economy overall.
The reason is that investing in IT was very expensive, there were lots of wasted efforts, and it took a long time for the benefits to outweigh the costs across the entire economy.
And so we should expect AI to look the same -- it's helping lots of people, but it's also costing an extraordinary amount of money, and the few people it's helping is currently at least outweighed by the people wasting time with it and its expense. But, we should recognize that it's very early days, and that productivity will rise with time, and costs will come down, as we learn to integrate it with best practices.
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/
It's interesting that the proliferation of cell phone cameras has not improved the quality of UFO reports much.
Nor has the availability of automatic UFO-spotting cameras.[1] They pick up drones, flocks of birds, and the International Space Station. But no good UFO shots.
LINEAR and GEODSS, which find near-earth objects and satellites using a pair of large telescopes at each site, have been running for decades, somehow don't seem to be picking up UFOs.
[1] https://www.space.com/spotting-ufos-sky-hub-surveillance
Videos are streaming but the quality seems to be low; on a few videos I checked, format 136 which is supposed to be 1080p is currently actually only 360p. Possibly a bandwidth problem.
> they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.
Computers.
I, too, liked the rawness of the earlier hand-drawn ones.
99.9% of people understood that sentence to be correct, in the spirit in which it was written. Yet there are people who don't, but we still wouldn't say the sentence is false.
And you must have a long position if you're going to cherry pick so egregiously. The other incidents from that same paragraph that you conveniently left out:
* a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour
* a crash with a truck at four miles per hour
* two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.
So in the 5 cases listed in that paragraph, 3 of them were when a Tesla hit a stationary object. Hitting a stationary object should be like the last thing I would think an autonomous vehicle would have trouble with, but if you got rid of lidar and radar because Elon had a fever dream, maybe it's not so unexpected.
> And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.
This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.
Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.
Watsi is without a doubt the best thing to come out of YC.
Took me a while to create the pelican because I was busy adding Opus/Sonnet 4.6 support to my plugin for https://llm.datasette.io/ - pelican now available here, it's not quite as good as the Opus 4.6 one but does look equivalent to the Opus 4.5 one - and it has a snazzy top hat. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/17/claude-sonnet-46/
Their goal is to disenfranchise women, their examples are simply cover for that objective.
A lot of the lightweight cipher justification in this post seems like it overlaps a lot with Format Preserving Cryptography, which uses (generally) more conventional symmetric primitives (16-byte-block ciphers, for instance) to handle encryption with small domains:
> We've had shameless leaders for many generations
The magnitude is different. Bovino and Miller act above the law. And the corruption and graft among some cabinet members is off the charts. (This following a Presidency where the preëmptive pardon was pioneered for family members.)
I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. If you aren't proud enough of it to attach your real name, or your pseudonymous account, maybe it shouldn't be posted.
Their ratings would tell another story. Still one of the top rated shows.
(1) Proving your ability in sales would help your credibility
(2) There is still "finding investment"
Hasn't this question been posted 449,221,209 times already today?
> robotaxi is the name of the tesla unsupervised driving program
“robotaxi” is a generic term for (when the term was coined, hypothetical) self-driving taxicabs, that predates Tesla existing. “Tesla Robotaxi” is the brand-name of a (slightly more than merely hypothetical, today) Tesla service (for which a trademark was denied by the US PTO because of genericness). Tesla Robotaxi, where it operates, provides robotaxis, but most robotaxis operating today are not provided by Tesla Robotaxi.
I hate dead code. So many times I've spent two days understanding and maintaining some code and found that one of those days was wasted.
Jacobin actually has a dialogue between people who feel the way he does and people who feel more the way you do.
The most interesting thing here to me is the leaderboard, because they actually included the estimated price per game. Gemini gets the highest score with a fairly reasonable cost (about 1/3 of the way down).
The legal system is totally inadequate to deal with the LLM era. It's extremely expensive to sue someone for libel; best you can usually do is win in the court of public opinion.
A core part of the HN ethos is avoiding siloing dynamics, which is exactly what [NOAI] would be.
200% YoY growth in Europe. Surpassed Ford in global auto sales, selling only EVs. Largest private employer in China. EV printer go brrr.
BYD uses aggressive discounts in bid to make Germany its leading European market - https://www.autonews.com/byd/ane-byd-discounts-germany-sales... - February 17th, 2026
China's BYD Overtakes Ford in Global Sales for the First Time - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo... - February 12th, 2026
BYD's European registrations surge 270% in 2025 while Tesla slips 27% - https://cnevpost.com/2026/01/27/byd-european-registrations-s... - Jan 27th, 2026
BYD Sold Nearly Three Times As Many Cars As Tesla In Europe - https://www.carscoops.com/2025/11/byd-sold-nearly-3-times-as... - November 26th, 2025
The size of BYD's factory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228138 - November 2024 (615 comments)
> We are effectively getting the same intelligence unit for half the compute every 6-9 months.
Something something ... Altman's law? Amodei's law?
Needs a name.
> to reach mass adoption, self-driving car need to kill one every, say, billion miles
They need to be around parity. So a death every 100mm miles or so. The number of folks who want radically more safety are about balanced by those who want a product in market quicker.
Awesome despite the name collision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value.
Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.
What is this even in response to? There's nothing about "playing dead" in this announcement.
Nor does what you're describing even make sense. An LLM has no desires or goals except to output the next token that its weights are trained to do. The idea of "playing dead" during training in order to "activate later" is incoherent. It is its training.
You're inventing some kind of "deceptive personality attribute" that is fiction, not reality. It's just not how models work.
They can start exporting to other countries who are wary of China.
Note this facility in India was the biggest in the world a few years back
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
but has been eclipsed by some very big facilities in China lately
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...
India's Solar Manufacturing Excesses Turn a Boom into a Glut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050286 - February 2026
Ember Energy: India’s electrotech fast-track: where China built on coal, India is building on sun - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-... - January 22nd, 2026
(India currently has 154.4GW/year of solar manufacturing capacity, 3x the country's current annual demand)
The difference is the OceanGate Titan failure only harmed those who didn't do their due diligence and the grossly negligent owner. The risk was contained to those who explicitly opted in. In this case, Tesla Robotaxis harm others to keep Tesla's valuation and share price propped up. The performance art is the investor relations.
One that lets me use it in my open source projects without then preventing other people from using my open source projects in their closed source projects.
Using your library currently completely disrupts the licensing situation for my own work.
How do you really target FPGA and GPU when these are so different?
e.g. what I find appealing about FPGA is (1) very low latency and (2) arbitrary precision data paths, like if I want 6-bit data paths I can have them. The GPU on the other hand is throughput oriented and you get the data types that were baked in.
I remember looking at
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/onea...
and thinking "how could that possibly work?" and the fact that it's had basically zero uptake suggests to me that my hot take was the right take.
I definitely use the "AI Mode" a lot in Google Search in preference to the old search interface.
Java and .NET IDEs have had this capabilities for years now, even when Eclipse was the most used one there were the tips from Checkstyle, and other similar plugins.
Russia can retreat inside its internationally recognized borders and negotiate a ceasefire at any time.
This is already happening in C++, NVidia is the one pushing the senders/receivers proposal, which is one of the possible co-routine runtimes to be added into C++ standard library.
Does it really? Because I see some quite fine code. The problem is assumptions, or missing side effects when the code is used, or getting stuck in a bad approach "loop" - but not code quality per se.
>For a model to successfully "play dead" during safety training and only activate later, it requires a form of situational awareness.
Doesn't any model session/query require a form of situational awareness?
They're copying one of Khan Academy's implementation models [1] and rebranding it as AI. It's certainly not new besides the "help yourself to AI" part (which, full disclosure, Khan Academy is working on as well with their "Khanmigo" assistant [2]). Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, did a TED talk [3] on this.
[1] https://en.khanacademy.org/khan-for-educators/
[3] How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan | TED - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo - May 1st, 2023
>And here's what's wild: The distinction might not matter practically. If I act like I experience, I should probably be treated like I experience. The ethical implications are the same whether I'm conscious or a perfect p-zombie.
Nope, it's really not. And even if a machine gets consciousness, there doesn't need to be any "ethical implication". Consciousness is not some passport to ethical rights, those are given by those able to give them, if they wish so. Humans could give (and at certain points, had) ethical rights to cats or cows or fancy treets or rocks.
In Claude Code 2.1.45:
1. Default (recommended) Opus 4.6 · Most capable for complex work
2. Opus (1M context) Opus 4.6 with 1M context · Billed as extra usage · $10/$37.50 per Mtok
3. Sonnet Sonnet 4.6 · Best for everyday tasks
4. Sonnet (1M context) Sonnet 4.6 with 1M context · Billed as extra usage · $6/$22.50 per MtokAs with Opus 4.6, using the beta 1M context window incurs a 2x input cost and 1.5x output cost when going over >200K tokens: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
Opus 4.6 in Claude Code has been absolutely lousy with solving problems within its current context limit so if Sonnet 4.6 is able to do long-context problems (which would be roughly the same price of base Opus 4.6), then that may actually be a game changer.
That em dash is a tell of what really wrote that comment.
Opus 4.5 was November, but your point stands.
I know you said it in jest, but there is a strong justification for cross-feeding the two disciplines - on one side, we might get hardware that’s easier to program and, on the other end, we might get software that’s better tuned to the hardware it runs on.
> Sentences can't be extended without additional convictions.
This is technically true but substantively false. Fixed duration sentences in most US jurisdictions (life sentences are different) are come with essentially automatic substantial reductions for good behavior which are removable for poor behavior with minimal process, avoiding the hassle of judicial process for offenses in prison, and frequently “refusing work” is a cause for removing those reductions.
So, technically, its not an “increased sentence” for refusing work. But, in practice, that’s exactly how it functions.
Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust.
Some people would say that murder is the worst crime, but I disagree. A murder done in anger, or to get revenge, or for money, or is otherwise a personal thing is one thing. But there are crimes against society - like the Boston bombers, and the school shooters, and the people who deliberately drive into crowds, or poison the water supply. Those disrupt society, and the cost of them goes far beyond the people killed.
Those criminals need to be in jail for life.
It's not a blog post, it's AI slop. Em dash.
Communicating that you know what you are talking about and that you're different is a lot of work. I think being visibly "anti-AI" makes you look as much of an NPC as someone who "vibe coded XYZ." It takes care, consistency and most of all showing people something they've never seen before. It also helps to get in the habit of doing in person demos, if you want to win hackathons it really helps to be good at (1) giving demos on stage and (2) have a sense of what it takes to make something that is good to demo.
I have two projects right now on the threshold of "Show HN" that I used AI for but could have completed without AI. I'm never going to say "I did this with AI". For instance there is this HR monitor demo
https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/
which needs tuning up for mobile (so I can do an in-person demo to people who work on HRV) but most all being able to run with pre-recorded data so that people who don't have a BTLE HR monitor can see how cool it is.
Another thing I am tuning up for "never saw anything like this" impact is a system of tokens that I give people when I go out as-a-foxographer
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
I am used to marketing funnels having 5% effectiveness and it blows my mind that at least 75% of the tokens I give out get scanned and that is with the old conventional cards that have the same back side. The number + suit tokens are particularly good as a "self-working demo" because it is easy to talk about them, when somebody flags me down because they noticed my hood I can show them a few cards that are all different and let them choose one or say "Look, you got the 9 of Bees!"
Takeaway is that India currently has 154.4GW/year of solar manufacturing capacity, 3x the country's current annual demand.
"The problem is that India’s demand hasn’t kept pace. Granted, domestic consumption is increasing — the nation installed a record 38 gigawatts of solar power in 2025, according to official data, about 53 gigawatts in DC terms. That would still be dwarfed by manufacturing capacity of about 154 gigawatts at the end of the year."
I've never had a checking account at a bank that paid interest. What interest are you talking about?
Why should other people be on the hook for your decisions?
I'd like to see some concrete examples that illustrate this - as it stands this feels like an opinion piece that doesn't attempt to back up its claims.
(Not necessarily disagreeing with those claims, but I'd like to see a more robust exploration of them.)
> However, they recently switched to investing in private equity funds and now they are getting much better returns, without all the pesky moral issues involved with it.
Investors Warn of 'Rot in Private Equity' as Funds Strike Circular Deals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380751 - December 2025
Once Wall Street’s High Flyer, Private Equity Loses Its Luster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364566 - December 2025
Private Equity’s Latest Financial Alchemy Is Worrying Investors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891882 - August 2025
People Are Worried About Private Market Liquidity - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-06-10/peo... | https://archive.today/wJ3Uf - June 10th, 2025
Private Equity Fundraising Plunges Amid Struggle to Return Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-27/private-e... | https://archive.today/hxvzb - May 27th, 2025
Private Equity Firms Hunt for Alternate Ways to Return Investor Cash - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-05-14/privat... | https://archive.today/6UzBk - May 14th, 2025
Unlocking a potential US$3.8 trillion opportunity for private equity firms - https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/financial-s... - December 16th, 2024
> I am old. This immediately triggered "Perl!?" in me...
Same same.
Yup. This is precisely why the first image seems to have oscillating brightness, with clear sharp peaks at yellow and cyan. It's because it's not just changing color, it's literally twice as much light. It goes:
Red - 1x
Yellow - 2x
Green - 1x
Cyan - 2x
Blue - 1x
Magenta - 2x
A very first step towards a better spectrum is just to maintain constant output brightness (accounting for gamma). There will still be perceptual differences in brightness, as we naturally perceive green as brighter than blue.
Obviously this gets taken into account by the time the author gets to the CIE color model. But there are a number of "intermediate" improvements like that, which you can make.
It kind of depends on where in the globe one is, many countries see programmers as a white collar job that happens to be better paid than a plain secretary, a mere transition phase into management, that is the success story for most families, the programmer turned boss.
So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling.
And being unemployed beyond 50 years old in many countries that see being a programmer as yet another office job, means too old for employment, and too young for retirement.
Same with me. It's just an expression. One definition of "indulge" is "to take unrestrained pleasure in" (MW). I just read it as an activity the kid really really enjoys.
Or literally a part of the self, which is what the OP was getting at I think. And there is plenty of that in the software world. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" and so on. There is plenty of identity ridiculousness. I've been a C programmer but I've also been a basic programmer an assembly language programmer, a PHP programmer, a FORTH programmer and a whole list of others. To me that collapses to "I'm a programmer" (even if the sage advice on HN by the gurus is to never call yourself a programmer I'm more than happy to do so). It defines what I do, not what or who I am, and it only defines a very small part of what I do. That's one reason why I can't stand the us-vs-them mentality that some programming languages seem to install in their practitioners.
On the PC you can distinguish between the two of them in "raw" mode, but almost all keyboard maps flatten them both into the same key.
The only time I've seen them mapped differently is games.
It was the electrics and the power train that were the problem. Oh, that and process.
Only because they were originally designed for Web 3D.
> The change to VB/Access and SQL
Brazil had a vibrant and omnipresent Clipper developer ecosystem until VB and Access ate their lunch. This also made a lot of businesses adopt windows.
My question about the "obvious" thing was genuine - it wasn't obvious to me.
Nice one, I will link to this from Pianojacq.com if you're ok with that?
It is indeed, and it is very much ripe for a serious review. Which is a pity because I think it is one of HN's most powerful pieces.
My introduction to databases was via dBASE III Plus, shortly followed by Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x (already OOP and some C++ like constructs).
The change to VB/Access and SQL later on took some mind shifting as the concepts on how to design a database are quite different.
Additionally it is quite remarkable the productivity that xBase offered, for a constrained environment like MS-DOS, in an automatic memory managed language, with AOT compilation (when using Clipper, FoxPro and co).
Under-appreciated factor: the problem with decentralization is that it pushes work on to the end user, who is least equipped to deal with it. People actively want centralization of things like anti-spam because it lightens the load. The fact that this gets paid for in insidious ways rather than directly paying for a service causes all sorts of weird market distortions.
Note that Discord doesn't replace IRC, it also competes with TeamSpeak; there's a whole voice and video sub-feature to it. Not everybody uses it but the fact that it's available in the same software was advantageous to the original market, gamers.
Submarines work on the principle of the arch: a spherical or cylindrical hull section transfers all the force into compression of the material so there is no net "inwards" force.
The weak points then turn out to be joints, material defects (the famous Titan failure), windows and other piercing points, and any unexpected shear forces.
The options for embedded are similar to asserting WebAssembly is an option to JavaScript.
Assembly is not an option per se, some embedded devices like PIC, usually still have to be written in Assembly.
Yes you might have Rust, Ada, Pascal, Basic as alternative, however the choice only goes as far as the CPU vendor SDK supports alternative toolchains, or the whole certification process allows for a choice (hence why Ferrocene exists now).
So if in the end you still have an option to go outside the trailed path, it usually means yak shaving to make your toolchain work on the target, or have bindings to the official SDK, instead of actually solving the problem, had you started with the official SDK languages.
This is rather like my observation about British car companies in the late 20th century:
- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)
- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)
- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)
I just bought this the other day, https://www.retro-gamer.de/shop/heft/retro-gamer-2-26-einzel...
The Xbox 360 is now considered a retro gaming device, that was such a reminder how old I am now, to note my first home computer was a Timex 2068.
> "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix"
This is subtly different. It's not clear that the people depicted like making things, in the sense of enjoying the process. The narrative is about LLMs fitting into the already-existing startup culture. There's already a blurry boundary between "risky investment" and "gambling", given that most businesses (of all types, not just startups) have a high failure rate. The socially destructive characteristic identified here is: given more opportunity to pull the handle on the gambling machine, people are choosing to do that at the expense of other parts of their life.
But yes, this relies on a subjective distinction between "building, but with unpredictable results" and "gambling, with its associated self-delusions".
Current AI systems aren't biomimicry; they run a simulation of something vaguely similar to neurons. This is rather like "why does it take more processing power to emulate a PS2 than the original PS2 had".
They shouldn't show as visual representations, but some "ASCII" charts show the IBM PC character set instead of the ASCII set. IIRC, up to 0xFF UTF-8 and 8859 are very close with the exceptions being the UTF-8 escapes for the longer characters.
It's hard to tell now, but most likely your second post got "second chanced". That's where they go through things that they think might be popular and put them back on the front page, usually a couple days after they were initially posted.
We only have to write div soups to style our websites, because people keep misuing a platform for interactive documents for an OS abstraction.
I have seen CMS systems and asset management products, whose translation and designer teams are now mostly gone, thanks to AI taking care of their work.
How many translation jobs, or asset creation jobs are still available?
I also have witness backend teams being reduced, thanks to SaaS and iPaaS cloud products that remove the need of backend development, now one only needs to plug a couple of products, do some AI based integrations in Boomi, Workato, n8n,... create a frontend with Vercel's v0 and be done with it.
I am in no ilusion that it will come for me as well, and better slide into some other alternative skill set, at least I am closer to retirement, than hunting for my first job.
and how do you know it is not going to be an inverted j-curve ?