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.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104444]

You can't run a turbine 24/7 either, they require maintenance windows.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104444]

The Canada trucker COVID protests are the standard example.

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 133260]

Quoting ...

"... our 11-yo shared a Google Slides deck titled "The New Chat Room" that is approximately 500 slides long, where each slide is students in his class posting pop culture pictures &/or memes & using the Slides comments to chat with each other about them..."

stavros ranked #47 [karma: 74695]

I don't know about the "ouch" but the rest of the comment seems pretty clear that they didn't intend to imply the clickbait.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123592]

Yes it does, alongside C++, Rust isn't available everywhere.

There are industry standards based in C, or C++, and I doubt they will be adopting Rust any time soon.

POSIX (which does require a C compiler for certification), OpenGL, OpenCL, SYSCL, Aparavi, Vulkan, DirectX, LibGNM(X), NVN, CUDA, LLVM, GCC, Unreal, Godot, Unity,...

Then plenty of OSes like the Apple ecosystem, among many other RTOS and commercial endevours for embedded.

Also the official Rust compiler isn't fully bootstraped yet, thus it depends on C++ tooling for its very existence.

Which is why efforts to make C and C++ safer are also much welcomed, plenty of code out there is never going to be RIR, and there are domains where Rust will be a runner up for several decades.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123592]

It is kind of ironic, given the existence of Orthodox C++, and kind of proves the point, that C isn't as simple as people think, having only read the K&R C book and nothing else.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 112613]

Honestly? I kind of like this hypothetical future this purports to be a snapshot of. Sounds hopeful.

(EDIT: Not so much after seeing the expanded variant with full submissions and comment threads...)

Also, nailed HN perfectly.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 168007]
userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87163]

Regulations cannot change the laws of physics.

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123592]

Thing is, FPS don't make fun games, what makes games fun is a great design, delivered in a way that overall performance doesn't hinder the experience.

That is why games like Minecraft, Roblox, Celeste, Balantro make it big. None of them would have happened if the creators followed the advice 100% C coding (or C++ for that matter) was the only way, and yet their design is what made them shine.

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78180]

I used to hear the 16KHz whistle of CRT monitors. Of course, there is no whistle with LED monitors, but I stopped hearing the CRT whistle before they went obsolete. It was my first sign my hearing was declining.

I thought I was protecting my ears from loud noises like rock concerts and gunshots. But I didn't know that driving with the window down damages the hearing. I crossed the country many times with the window down. I'm pretty sure that was the cause as my left ear is much worse off than my right.

I don't need a hearing aid yet, but I'm pretty careful in wearing ear plugs whenever there are loud noises.

simonw ranked #32 [karma: 89603]

If something is open source and follows an OSI approved license I don't have to ask a lawyer to review the license before I integrate with that code.

The moment you change a single line of that license I now have to pay extremely close attention to those details again.

This isn't a naive idealism thing - there are very solid, boring, selfish reasons for caring about this.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87163]

Unless it means sacrificing freedom.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

EV shuttles will come in lots of capacities. Vans, buses. But you won't need to worry about schedules or preset routes because it's all dynamic.

Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari

Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125136]

No, individualized point to point travel is better. I just got back from Tokyo and Taipei, which have transit systems better than any European country. And it was still faster to Uber everywhere.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 74919]

This is not accurate. The WHO (which recommends lower levels than US authorities) recommends an annual PM 2.5 level below 5 µg/m³: https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/WHO-Air-Quality-Gu...

But more importantly, when it comes to PM 2.5 levels, there are really no safe levels, the risks are just dose dependent, so lower is always better. In a city the size of NYC, lowering air pollution by 20% means a significant decrease in effects.

To give a good analogy, driving a car on the US is still quite safe, most of us take that risk, but still, thousands die annually from car accidents. A one fifth reduction in deaths from car accidents, even from its current low level, would be a major deal. In NYC, around 1 in 20 deaths is linked to air pollution.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172878]

> sheer number of disingenuous objections

This is unfair. Nobody wants to pay more for anything. And many of the objections resulted in policy adjustments that made the programme better.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414373]

I'm never going to use a tiling window manager, but I also never touch Mission Control (or Spotlight). I use Alfred.app to call things up; before Alfred.app, all the way back into the early aughts, I was using Quicksilver.app, which does the same thing. CMD-Space, type a couple letters, blam.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234625]

I have an uncle that is extremely old and until a year and a half ago he was still working. But he needed a car for his job and he decided that he's going to get rid of the car before he ends someone else's life and so he had to give up his job too. He's a super nice character, has a great sense of humor and in general is probably one of the most fun and optimistic people that I know. He'd be working still if not for the car and I know that the loss of the job and a chunk of his independence is hard for him. But he does not let it get him down for long, just finds new things to do (he's currently studying bridge like his life depends on it).

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

I don't think so.

Consumers don't care about whether an LLM is local, and one that runs on your phone is always going to be vastly worse than ChatGPT.

I see zero indication that Apple is going to replace people going to chatgpt.com or using its app.

All I see Apple doing is eventually building a better new generation of Siri, not much different from Google/Alexa.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97796]

While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.

In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.

As far back as I can recall, this is a politician who has railed against 'political correctness'.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 74919]

This is awesome, but minor quibble with the title - "hallucinates" is the wrong verb here. You specifically asked it to make up a 10-year-in-the-future HN frontpage, and that's exactly what it did. "Hallucinates" means when it randomly makes stuff up but purports it to be the truth. If some one asks me to write a story for a creative writing class, and I did, you wouldn't say I "hallucinated" the story.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125136]

> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.

I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.

userbinator ranked #34 [karma: 87163]

The compilers available at the time that the 8087 was commonplace were overall horrible and easily beaten anyway.

On the other hand, skilled humans can do very very well with the x87; this 256-byte demo makes use of it excellently: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53816

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 73111]

Yesterday I released a Rust-with-Python-bindings package that was mostly coded with Claude 4.5 Opus: https://github.com/minimaxir/icon-to-image

I'll write about the process after I've released a few more things as I have some disagreements with the current discourse.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

The Supreme Court requires Century (which for any use other than maybe a newspaper is infinitely better than Times New Roman—and for a newspaper, Times is better than TNR.)

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

> Good. In this case, let it be diluted! These extra "restrictions" don't affect normal people at all,

Yes, they do, and the only reason for using the term “open source” for things whose licensing terms flagrantly defy the Open Source definition is to falsely sell the idea that using the code carries the benefits that are tied to the combination of features that are in the definition and which are lost with only a subset of those features. The freedom to use the software in commercial services is particularly important to end-users that are not interested in running their own services as a guarantee against lock-in and of whatever longevity they are able to pay to have provided even if the original creator later has interests that conflict with offering the software as a commercial service.

If this deception wasn't important, there would be no incentive not to use the more honest “source available for limited uses” description.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414373]

That's probably true: of Jewish people in Israel, "most" originate in the MENA countries surrounding Israel, both in the Levant and from places like Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq. As the Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war, so too were Jewish people from their homes throughout the rest of the region.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234625]

Hehe, that's lovely.

Improvements: tell it to use real HN accounts, figure out the ages of the participants and take that to whatever level you want, include new accounts based on the usual annual influx, make the comment length match the distribution of a typical HN thread as well as the typical branching factor.

> Garbage collection pause during landing burn = bad time.

That one was really funny. Some of the inventions are really interesting. Ferrofluidic seals...

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414373]

2025 called and wants your argument back.†

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434

this is a joke; i feel it works on multiple levels

WalterBright ranked #41 [karma: 78180]

Some things I've learned over the years:

1. do not show a slide full of code. The font will be too small to read. Nobody will read it

2. don't read your slides to the audience. The audience can read

3. don't talk with your back to the audience

4. make your font as big as practical

5. 3 bullet points is ideal

6. add a picture now and then

7. don't bother with a copyright notice on every slide. It gets really old. Besides, you want people to steal your presentation!

8. avoid typing in code as part of the presentation, most of the time it won't work and it's boring watching somebody type

9. render the presentation as a pdf file, so any device can display it

10. email a copy of your presentation to the conference coordinator beforehand, put a copy on your laptop, and phone, and on a usb stick in your pocket. Arriving at the show without your presentation can be very embarrassing!

11. the anxiety goes away

12. don't worry about it. You're not running for President! Just have some fun with it

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414373]

The rules are written; they're just not all in that one document. The balance HN strikes here is something Dan has worked out over a very long time. There's at least two problems with arbitrarily fleshing out the guidelines ("promoting" "case law" to "statutes", as it were):

* First, the guidelines get too large, and then nobody reads them all, which makes the guideline document less useful. Better to keep the guidelines page reduced down to a core of things, especially if those things can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the rules you care about (or most of them plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't come up often enough to need space on that page).

* Second, whatever you write in the guidelines, people will incline to lawyer and bicker about. Writing a guideline implies, at least for some people, that every word is carefully considered and that there's something final about the specific word choices in the guidelines. "Technically correct is the best kind of correct" for a lot of nerds like us.

Perhaps "generated comments" is trending towards a point where it earns a spot in the official guidelines. It sure comes up a lot. The flip side though is that we leave a lot of "enforcement" of the guidelines up to the community, and we have a pretty big problem with commenters randomly accusing people of LLM-authoring things, even when they're clearly (because spelling errors and whatnot) human-authored.

Anyways: like I said, this is pretty well-settled process on HN. I used to spend a lot of time pushing Dan to add things to the guidelines; ultimately, I think the approach they've landed on is better than the one you (and, once, I) favored.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414373]

I think it hasn't clicked with you that you're effectively advocating for the end of all renting.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157981]

That's great!

Take a look at the HTML. The layout is all tables!

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

> There wasn't any German internment

There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.

> White people got a pass.

Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

A key feature of liberal democracy over the pre-existing aristocratic oligarchies was providing a classless society (which, superficially, as classes were defined under aristocratic systems, it does.)

The entire analysis of capitalism which articulated the class system with which it replaced that of the pre-existing aristocracy and revealed the elimination of class to actually just be a switch in its structure and elevation of a new ruling class was by Communists.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99678]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

Its plainly using a charity as a mechanism to funnel work to the founder's for-profit business, so that the 501c3 is, in fact, organized and operated for the benefit of a private interest, which isn’t merely “dubious”.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157981]

> Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make.

There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way:

I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor...

Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources.

What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help.

Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1]

[1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]

Hasn’t worked based on the evidence, so we’re moving on to something effective. Australia is up first, others will follow, just as we limit access to nicotine and other drugs or harmful products. The data is robust social media is toxic to kids, and Meta even knew about it and doesn’t care.

Social media bans are like GLP-1s: we know that will power is not a thing, so we use an intervention to help the human. Same deal. “Just do better good luck” is not actionable.

“We have seen the enemy and he is Big Tech.”

simonw ranked #32 [karma: 89603]

Personally I would find a video that's slides with audio just as compelling as a video where the speaker was visible in terms of helping me understand if that person could give a competent presentation or not.

ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 87066]

> Now everyone pays e.g. 30% but gets a $12,000 credit, so someone who makes $40,000 is effectively paying zero, someone who makes $80,000 is effectively paying 15% and the effective rate approaches 30% as the number goes up.

This only maybe works if you count capital gains as regular income. Otherwise they do the Steve Jobs $1 salary thing.

Even the capital gains can be largely evaded. https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidanc... https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec... etc.

simonw ranked #32 [karma: 89603]

I've vibe coded a few things in C now as experiments, but I haven't been brave enough to put any of them into production code yet. I don't trust myself to review them properly.

C extensions for SQLite: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/23/building-c-extensions-...

This one is closest to something I might use because it's C compiled to WebAssembly, so the blast radius for any dumb bugs is strictly limited: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/cmarkgfm-in-pyo...

simonw ranked #32 [karma: 89603]

They're a neat design. I started using them on my blog the other day as part of trying out Django 6: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/faec3532183...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
ceejayoz ranked #35 [karma: 87066]

> I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke.

Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 414373]

It was never a reasonable goal of the WebPKI to authenticate entities; only to help establish end-to-end encryption between unrelated parties on the Internet. The WebPKI can ensure you're talking to whoever controls `ycombinator.com`, but it has to be up to some other layer of the security stack to decide whether you want to be talking to `ycombinator.com`. (This is in fact part of the logic behind FIDO2 and phishing-proof authentication).

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102189]

It's a problem.

I see it the most with blogs, I'd say there is a "2025 voice" which you hear a lot on LinkedIn that will get people to accuse you of using an LLM -- when I made this accusation of one blogger he told me that he'd gotten a lot of pushback for writing a blog post with AI and he'd resolved never to do it again.

But yeah, you're doing the right thing to show your creation process, sooner or later the haters will look bad.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102189]

I think you're going to need a superhuman intelligence's idea of a super-superhuman intelligence at the very least if you're going to expect C programs that are memory safe.

I'll admit that I'd like to do a programming challenge with or without AI that would be like "advent of code" in assembly but if it was actual "advent of code" the direct route is to write something that looks like a language runtime system so you have the dynamic data structures you need on your fingertips.

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90721]

You know I would be happy to offer this service to investors for a mere tens of millions of dollars. I'll send you photos of our weekly money bonfire, built with your money, and when you're tired of pictures of your money on fire, I'll simply... stop.

Heck, in accordance with the several zeitgeists of our age, I'll even do you the solid of fraudulently generating the money-on-fire pictures with AI, so when you get tired of seeing your money on fire I'll even hand, say, 25% of it back to you, as the result of my tireless efforts to bring value to my shareholders. That's a better return than you'll get from most of these investments!

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172878]

> PE buyers use 60% bonus depreciation and cost segregation studies to create a $70-80K writeoff on a $120K asset

Source? That looks like a juicy target for state taxation…

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

I actually disagree, in certain cases. Just today I saw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46204895

when it had only two comments. One of them was the Gemini summary, which had already been massively downvoted. I couldn't make heads or tails of the paper posted, and probably neither could 99% of other HNers. I was extremely happy to see a short AI summary. I was on my phone and it's not easy to paste a PDF into an LLM.

When something highly technical is posted to HN that most people don't have the background to interpret, a summary can be extremely valuable, and almost nobody is posting human-written summaries together with their links.

If I ask someone a question in the comments, yes it seems rude for someone to paste back an LLM answer. But for something dense and technical, an LLM summary of the post can be extremely helpful. Often just as helpful as the https://archive.today... links that are frequently the top comment.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

That's a really, really interesting point.

It makes me imagine a programming language designed for LLMs but not humans, designed for rigorous specification of every function, variable, type, etc., valid inputs and outputs, tightly coupled to unit tests, mandatory explicit handling of every exception, etc.

Maybe it'll look like a lot of boilerplate but make it easy to read as opposed to easy to write.

The idea of a language that is extremely high-effort to write, but massively assists in guaranteeing correctness, could be ideal for LLM's.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157981]

I put up metaverse rendering tests on Hardlimit.

https://video.hardlimit.com/c/aninats/videos

(It's discouraging having put in so much effort on trying to make the Metaverse work, and then having the entire sector die.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 172878]

> can't think of a single reason why you would need an LLM to search through PowerPoint files

Kati’s Research AI is genuinely great at search. It tries to answer your question, but also directly cites resources. This can help you when you’re not sure where the answer to a question lies, and it winds up being in multiple places.

Unless your query is super simple and of low consequence, you still need to open the files. But LLM-powered search is like the one domain (apart from coding) where these fuckers work.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

The socialist sense of “private property” refers specifically to ownership of physical (or at least, nonfinancial) means of production, other than by the workers whose labor is applied to it.

It does not refer to all ownership by individuals of real and personal property, restrictions on other personally-held property are separate concerns from the abolition of private property, and socialists regimes, including those in the Soviet bloc, frequently have retained private home ownership, which is not fundamentally inconsistent with socialist theory.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

There is an AI bubble just like there was a dotcom bubble; the fact that it is a real technology with real uses we with world changing long-term impacts does not mean that the recent investment hype will not soon be recognized as excessively exuberant given the actual payoffs to investors and the timelines on which they will be realized.

(And putting masses of people out of work and and thereby radically destabilizing capitalist societies, to the extent it is a payoff, is a payoff with a bomb attached.)

pjmlp ranked #18 [karma: 123592]

So what? There is more to the economy than AI startups with SV money.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]

I’m sure this is the school someone will want to get this sort of credential from /s

minimaxir ranked #49 [karma: 73111]

This is fun. Fun is allowed on Hacker News, just disappointingly rare.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 166485]

A real “so you hate waffles?” moment for HN

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102189]

I navigated using touch on my iPhone and it felt a lot like playing Genshin Impact

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102189]

Strikes me as super-informal language as opposed to sycophancy, like one of those anime characters that calls everyone Aniki (兄貴) [1] I'd imagine that the OP must really talk a bit like that.

I do find it a little tiring that every LLM thinks my ever idea is "incisive" although from time to time I get told I am flat out wrong. On the other hand I find LLMs will follow me into fairly extreme rabbit holes such as discussing a subject such as "transforming into a fox" as if it had a large body of legible theory and a large database of experience [2]

In the middle of talking w/ Copilot about my latest pop culture obsession I asked about what sort of literature could be interpreted through the lens of Kohut's self-psychology and it immediately picked out Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby and Neon Genesis Evangelion which it analyzed along the lines I was thinking, but when I asked if there was a literature on this it turned up only a few obscure sources. I asked Google and Google is like "bro, Kohut wrote a book on it!" [3]

[1] "bro"

[2] ... it does, see https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Fox-Popular-Religion-Imperial/dp... and I'm not the only one because when I working down the material list from Etsy I got a sponsored result for someone who wanted to sell me the spell but bro, I have the materials list already

[3] ... this "bro" is artistic license but the book really exists

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 126257]

Consider the subject of the post, not just the username in isolation.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

Sure, and cache and cloche.

But the question here is chs, not ch. Which though rare, is widely understood to be a kind of guttural sound or "k" sound followed by an s. In -uchs or -ichs coming from German.

Not the "sh" sound in fuchsia.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 99678]
crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

You don't need to use language like "moron". It doesn't help the conversation and it's not appropriate. Trying to convince people you are right because you think other people are less intelligent is generally not a strategy that works.

And yes, all of the icons you are describing and linked to can be drawn. I even described these types of combinations myself. The point you're missing is that they are nearly impossible to visually distinguish at a quick glance. When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid. They're difficult to decipher. You have to stop and think about what they actually mean and hope you don't make a mistake.

I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for. They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it. Which is why it's a feature, not a bug, even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action. At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted. Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon is bad design because it makes it slower to figure out the right item, not faster.

Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs. These trade-offs are the kinds of things you learn when you study design, and a huge part of graphic design is getting the trade-offs right in a given context.

simonw ranked #32 [karma: 89603]

Mistral have used janky licenses in that a few times in the past. I was hoping the competition from China might have snapped them out of it.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

Why bother with which? I don't understand the question.

Delivery is for less frequent things that last much longer.

Local ships are for more frequent things that spoil quickly.

And adding the heavier/bulkier things to my local trips, even in smaller quantities, just makes the bags too heavy and unwieldy in the end. I only have two hands. Plus it's way more expensive to buy paper towels as individual rolls than in packs of six.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

I don't know what you're basing any of that on. I've never heard of such a thing. Like, on the lists of enterprise pros and cons of migrating from MS365 to Workspace, I've never once heard of that.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]

https://archive.today/Yz45e

Related:

Wood banks in Maine are increasing and so is the need for heat - https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/11/21/hancock/increased... - November 21st, 2025

Residential Heating Fuel Sources in Maine - https://www.maine.gov/energy/sites/maine.gov.energy/files/in... - October 2024

Alliance for Green Heat: Funding for Firewood Banks - https://www.firewoodbanks.org/

Maine Wood Banks Network - https://woodbanks.org/explore-our-network

National Wood Bank Project - https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/woodbanks/

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]

Sometimes doing nothing is the winning move.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104444]

Somewhat more difficult to run a business when an American multinational steals your revenue and your content.

On the other hand, the complainer mentioned is the Daily Mail.

I'd much rather see a non specific ruling over whether or not summarizing already short articles is copyright infringement - regardless of who's doing it. Copyright litigation and legislation tends to favor the richer party no matter where it happens.

Newspapers are notorious for lifting stories and photos from social media. They rarely bother to compensate the original creator either.

Perhaps a better approach is to make sure that the AI summaries are just as liable for libel actions, and regulator mandatory corrections, as the newspapers.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
nostrademons ranked #38 [karma: 81577]

If you've actually mastered that quadrant - why would you be an engineer? Learn fundraising too (which in this environment is super-easy if you're AI-related, I've heard multiple reports of people in their 20s being offered $5M+ in seed funding if they start a company that has "AI" in the name) and make them acquire you. If you've got management and sales skills your startup might even succeed before they acquire you.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 182865]

At this point in time I’d ask who doesn’t. He himself stated rather correctly he could just shoot a random person in broad daylight and his supporters would continue to support him.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 103416]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 234625]

A pocket calculator that would give the right numbers 99.7% of the time would be fairly useless. The lack of determinism is a problem and there is nothing 'uncharitable' about that interpretation. It is definitely impressive, but it is fundamentally broken, because when you start making chains of things that are 99.7% correct you end up with garbage after very few iterations. That's precisely why digital computers won out over analog ones, the fact that they are deterministic.

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

I don't think you understand.

Citations need to generate reference lists. Footnotes require automatic placement at the bottom of each page. Your examples of numbered tables are numbering the rows, not the tables. And figure numbers need to be referenced in the text.

None of what you're pointing to does what academic papers need. Why are you trying to push this agenda?

jerf ranked #31 [karma: 90721]

I haven't played the first one but I played Grandia II on the Dreamcast and I think it's still my favorite battle system in a JRPG to date. Not only does it have the obvious details you can see on a YouTube playthrough, but higher-end play with it also requires managing positioning, which is easy to miss as an option at all in the menus, or to think it has no purpose. A low-level challenge run would probably be a lot of fun.

Unfortunately in my casual playthrough I accidentally broke the combat system and by the end of the game nothing was a challenge; as with many other games there are "resistances" and "vulnerabilities" but also as with most non-Shin Megami Tensei games of the era, they aren't really strong enough or frequent enough to matter. I just pumped all my upgrades into Fire upgrades until eventually my routine end-game battle was one character to wipe all the enemies in one move, move to next battle. You could easily pump an elemental bonus enough to overwhelm the resistances the enemies had. More resistances and immunities distributed around would have helped prevent a degenerate strategy.

And of all the battle systems to have a degenerate strategy for, this one hurts the most because it is otherwise so good.

(Sadly, Grandia III was never completed. It was released... but it was never completed. The game as shipped has visible gaping holes in it, which is sad because what is there was quite good.)

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 113678]

In most elevators around the world, there are buttons to keep the doors open and also to get them to close. I've only seen symbols on them. Once, however, in the US, one gentleman got in, and instead of pressing the close button, pressed on the open button. So the doors, which were just going to close, opened again.

He complained - Why do they have these symbols, why can't they they just write Open and Close?

I've wondered about this every since - is it an American thing to have an expectation to have text everywhere? I have never heard anyone complain about those symbols before or since!

crazygringo ranked #40 [karma: 79673]

It's not a strawman.

> No, they haven’t coded a “country-wide kill kill-switch” but having the ability to kill individual accounts, and being in a jurisdiction that demands accounts to be disabled from time to time is equivalent to having such a thing.

That's preposterous. Disabling a couple of online accounts, versus disabling the computers of an entire nation, you think are the same thing?

I don't understand how you can make that argument in good faith. What are you even trying to achieve?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 102189]

This. I've been doing a lot of accessibility work and it seems like the one thing nobody ever does is talk to a screenreader user.

rayiner ranked #17 [karma: 125136]

> Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform

No you can’t.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89343]

The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait.

That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs.

At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement.

Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104444]

Buried anything is just horrendously expensive. Partly because of other things that are already buried.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 168007]

It would be great to have the saturn version + translation as well as the improved movie sequences

maybe there is a way to port them using the saturns mpeg add-on (?)

otoh probably fine to watch them on youtube in parallel

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 104444]

Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 89343]

>Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?

Isn't the answer on SO the result of a human intelligence writing it in the first place, and then voted by several human intelligencies to top place? If an LLM was merely an automated "equivalent" to that, that's already a good thing!

But in general, the LLM answer you appear to dismiss amounts to a lot more:

  Having an close-to-good-human-level programmer 
  understand your existing codebase
  answer questions about your existing codebase 
  answer questions about changes you want to make
  on demand (not confined to copying SO answers)
  interactively 
  and even being able to go in and make the changes
That amounts to "manually typing an SO answer" about as much as a pickup truck amounts to a horse carriage.

Or, to put it another way, isn't "the logical endpoint" of hiring another programmer and asking them to fix X "equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into their computer"?

>And I pick Stackoverflow deliberately: it's a great resources, but not reliable enough to use blindly. I feel we are in a similar situation with AI at the moment.

Well, we shouldn't be using either blindly anyway. Not even the input of another human programmer (that's way we do PR reviews).

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 182865]

True, but you could make a warehouse of sysplexes work together using the same mechanisms we use for warehouses of generic servers, but, if each system takes four racks, and one sysplex takes 128 racks, it’ll be thousands of times fewer systems to be coordinated.

All that would remain is an eye-watering hardware and licensing bill.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 110707]

This was perhaps my favorite part of Physics 390 ("modern physics") which was about quantum dynamics and relativity. The speed of light is defined in terms of a velocity (~300,000,000 m/s) but if you were traveling at the speed of light time stops (which keeps the rule that its constant in all frames of reference). That and time passes more quickly at higher altitudes and these days we can actually measure that. Wild stuff.

Animats ranked #11 [karma: 157981]

The last cafeteria chain seen in the SF Bay Area was Fresh Choice.[1] The business problem was that the outlets attracted too many old people who didn't buy the more expensive add-on items but just bought the fixed-price salad bar.

Today, the only remaining cafeterias in the SF bay area seem to be in-house feeding operations for employees. Many of the ones in hospitals are open to the public.

There's a minimum traffic level for a cafeteria, and it's fairly high. With low traffic, the food sits out too long and becomes leftovers. Like Whole Foods' salad and hot bars.

Restaurants seem to have fads. In the SF bay area, there are few French restaurants any more. California cuisine is dead. Fish is down. (Amusingly, on Doordash, all types of fish are treated as synonyms for "salmon".) Many restaurants no longer serve bread.

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

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97796]

Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.

2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.

3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.

4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.

5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.

Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.

anigbrowl ranked #27 [karma: 97796]

What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?

What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?

One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.