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Every time I hear about a tech firm trying to implement some dystopian/nightmarish sci-vision, I think of Tobias from Arrested Development saing '...but it might work for us.'
Forbes "30 under 30" actually has like 600 people a year in 20 categories, and that's just in the USA. Add in international lists and the number rises to well over 1000. Since 2011 there have probably been, what, 10-15 thousand total "honorees"? ~12 instances of fraud in total is probably significantly below the corporate average.
And the "risk index" is idiotic. Basically just companies the creator doesn't like, or is jealous of.
Heck, once I cycled for half an hour with my iPhone in my pocket, and somehow the phone against my leg was in just the right position that it kept interpreting my leg movements as trying to enter a passcode.
Got home, pulled out my phone, and it had a message that it was locked for several hours due to so many failed passcode attempts. Incredibly annoying.
Still, only happened once in well over a decade of owning an iPhone.
I was mostly frustrated that there wasn't some alternate way of regaining access, like via my Mac or iPad logged in with the same Apple ID. Or that the failed passcode attempts didn't start eventually playing a loud alert sound or something on each failure.
Cloning works rather well now. Here are six polo ponies, Cuartetera 01 through 06, all clones of a famous polo pony.[1] Their owner has been winning world class polo matches on these mares. They're strong and healthy and very real.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-he...
> Europe and other roil importing nations
Europe and Asia have been royally screwed by this war. Ironically, the winners are Russia, in absolute terms, and China, relative to its neighbors.
I've been thinking that you can divide businesses on two axes,
Scalable - Many customers
|
Short-term/ Ponzi Scheme | Monopoly Long-term/
Transactional -------------------------------------- Relational
Contracting / | Consulting /
Retail etc | Therapy etc
|
Non-scalable - Few customers
> In what world is it okay to say you have $19b in ARR when you have only ever generated $5b for the entire duration of your company's existence?
In the same world that it makes sense to say that your current speed is 57mph when you've only driven 15 miles since starting the trip.
Yeah, it's a conglomerate. Typically a bad idea from a business perspective, but can be a winner financially since "all" you need to do to gain shareholder value is spin off the units. (I say "all" because it might be simple but not easy.)
I wonder what kinds of control Elon will have on the company. Is it going to be like Google with special shares? Like Tesla having a board stacked with buddies?
I'm sure I'll pick up some exposure via index funds, but the governance would give me pause on being overweight.
Related:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.bbsdocumentary.com...
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://software.bbsdocumentar...
https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary
https://archive.org/details/BBS_Documentary_DVD_Set
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41848656
BBS: The Documentary (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746221 - December 2023 (65 comments)
Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS documentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740247 - June 2022 (39 comments)
Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140217 - November 2021 (230 comments)
The Full BBS Documentary Interviews Are Going Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16221915 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)
BBS the Documentary (2013) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867 - May 2015 (23 comments)
Others?
The people spamming curl did step one, "write me a vulnerability report on X" but skipped step two, "verify for me that it's actually exploitable". Tack on a step three where a reasonably educated user in the field of security research does a sanity check on the vulnerability implementation as well and you'll have a pipeline that doesn't generate a ton of false positives. The question then will rather be how cost-effective it is for the tokens and the still-non-zero human time involved.
I don't understand why the takeaway here is (unless I'm missing something), more or less "everything is going to get exploited all the time". If LLMs can really find a ton of vulnerabilities in my software, why would I not run them and just patch all the vulnerabilities, leading to perfectly secure software (or, at the very least, software for which LLMs can no longer find any new vulnerabilities)?
> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness
Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
Yes.
Citations:
Apollo Academy: S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://www.apolloacademy.com/sp-500-concentration-approachi... - March 14th, 2026
> The 10 biggest companies in the S&P 500 make up almost 40% of the index, and if Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are added later this year, the concentration could approach 50%, see chart below. The bottom line is that the S&P 500 basically doesn’t offer much diversification anymore.
Apollo Academy: Extreme AI Concentration in the S&P 500 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/extreme-ai-concentration-in-th... - January 13th, 2026
> The bottom line is that investors in the S&P 500 remain overexposed to AI.
TLDR Concentration risk https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/concentration-risk
(not investing advice)
Sadly, IBM 3270 is missing from the lot. How can I write professional looking code that lasts a lifetime in anything less?
I also remember some nice ones designed to look like a smoothed VT-220 one.
Everybody agrees that idiots were spamming curl with random just-plausible-enough-seeming output from old models.
Wonder how he'll survive on a mere $188 billion now.
Related:
The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577899 - March 2026
Shorting requires both being right and good timing on when everyone else figures out you're right.
Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry
> During his payments toward the credit default swaps, Burry suffered an investor revolt, where some investors in his fund worried his predictions were inaccurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Eventually, Burry's analysis proved correct: He made a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.
You mistook a marketing effort for science.
They did tons of data analysis across all aspects of profiles, and had a popular blog where they published the results.
They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.
I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.
Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.
The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.
Intelligence seems to have evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, octopuses, and corvids. These are different branches of the evolutionary tree, and the brain architectures are quite different. Octopuses have a distributed system. Corvids get more done with less brain volume and power than mammals.
Electrician, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC. I learned how to weld (stick "smaw", mig, tig) for <$1000 at my local community college at the time (circa 2008-2009 GFC), and was offered a job (which I luckily did not need to take) after completing the required courses.
I got an answer back from NARA:
Specifically, you seek records related to practical instructions on how to rebuild society after a nuclear war.
We searched our holdings in Record Group 397, Records of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency. We identified the series External Publications, 1955-1976 which may include records related to your query. A full citation is provided here for your reference:
Record Group 397
Records of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency
External Publications, 1955-1976
Entry A1 56
Boxes 1 thru 37@ 650/42/30/2
There's another driver, HDADRV9J, which was around long before LLMs and works on Windows 3.x as well as 9x.
This guy is all too right. Fortune.com today:
> A CEO trying to reindustrialize America says blue-collar pay is headed for ‘massive hyperinflation’ and kids should skip college to become welders
> Trump said the Iran war was ‘very complete’ three weeks ago.
> Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says ‘We’ve achieved AGI.’
It's like reading dispatches from an alternate post-truth universe.
> You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).
That's the worst. It's like it's now wrong to call CEOs on their bullshit.
Yesterday I noted that Donut Labs, with their heavily promoted solid state battery, had previously announced they would be shipping in volume in Q1 2026. I wrote on HN "They have until Tuesday." That was voted down.
If you had asked me in 1995 what was the one thing[1] that Boston could change in order to compete with Silicon Valley I would have told you "Make non-compete agreements illegal" Companies in the Bay Area whined about it all the time but it kept the ecosystem vibrant and a lot of technology exists because of that. In the late 90's early '00s a big reason for a lot of 'high profile' people quitting their cushy job and setting out in a startup was because 'management' wouldn't allow them to move forward on an idea that they felt would "disrupt our own business." Those same people could quit, create a start up, and make that idea real anyway. So this is excellent progress for Washington State. I wonder how many ex-Microsoft employees this effects.
[1] I vacillated between this and California law giving ownership of what you worked on in your own time on your own equipment yours, except the latter was pretty effectively neutered by big corps defining their businesses more vaguely.
Because Washington has a Constitutional provision requiring that no law shall take effect sooner than 90 days after the end of the session in which it is adopted [0] unless it is an emergency law passed with a 2/3 vote, and the common convention for most normal laws is to set the first January 1 certain to come after the 90-day period of the current session as the effective date so that "new law day" for non-emergency laws is consistent.
[0] Each state is different here, but a "90 days after end of session", or "90 days after passage" rule for the soonest a passed bill can go into effect, with exceptions for emergency bills with special rules including a supermajority requirement, are pretty common, as are conventions of setting a January 1 effective date in the legislation itself when the minimum is X days from end of session or passage.
Solaris in SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging.
Something that some security conscious folks care about.
I don't know the quote you're referring to, but if there were a CEO who I think understands the technical details of his products much better than most, it would be Jensen Huang.
And there is a huge difference between a CEO having "no clue" and a CEO trying to speak in terms that laymen and the business press can understand (even if a ton gets lost in translation).
Also we’re looking at periods that involve dramatically different monetary policy (gold standard before WWII, Bretton Woods from 1944-1976, then the current regime).
Should Spain get to run US airspace?
If not, why does the US get to run Spain's?
Yeah, they must have gotten it the wrong way around.
Federal complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/OkCupid-MatchCo...
Proposed settlement: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/MatchGroupAmeri...
If you want to understand a fairly non-trivial amount of the brokenness of the world, pondering the implications of "Hey, what if we thought about what our incentives will actually do instead of what we want them to do, and made plans based on that?" being a brilliant and bold breakthrough in the world of governance rather than common sense can take you a long way.
I didn't realize how much I appreciated writing having a distinct voice until LLMs made everyone sound the same. This strikes me as extremely LLMy:
> SaaS era: ~decade to go upmarket. Cloud era: ~5 years. AI era: <2 years. The gap between 'developers love this' and 'enterprises are asking for SOC 2' has never been shorter.
No judgement if you want to write your articles with LLMs or whatnot, you do you, I've just discovered that their default style grates a bit. It's like when Bootstrap came out, initially it looked amazing but very quickly it became the "default site" look.
If you have uv installed you can start a chat with the model (after a 2GB model download) with this one-liner:
uvx --with llm-mrchatterbox llm chat -m mrchatterboxI'm at a stage where I don't want to be doing network management on my weekends. I have a Ubiquiti router that's pretty good, and for my router I'd like something like TrueNAS for my NAS, a distribution that completely turns the hardware into an appliance I can configure once and forget about.
Is there something like that?
Courts also tend to have existing accessibility setups for these scenarios.
You sound like you're citing the general Internet understanding of "fair use", which seems to amount to "I can do whatever I like to any copyrighted content as long as maybe I mutilate it enough and shout 'FAIR USE!' loudly enough."
On the real measures of "fair use", at least in the US: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ I would contend that it absolutely face plants on all four measures. The purpose is absolutely in the form of a "replacement" for the original, the nature is something that has been abundantly proved many times over in court as being something copyrightable as a creative expression (with limited exceptions for particular bits of code that are informational), the "amount and substantiality" of the portions used is "all of it", and the effect of use is devastating to the market value of the original.
You may disagree. A long comment thread may ensue. However, all I really need for my point here is simply that it is far, far from obvious that waving the term "FAIR USE!" around is a sufficient defense. It would be a lengthy court case, not a slam-dunk "well duh it's obvious this is fair use". The real "fair use" and not the internet's "FAIR USE!" bear little resemblance to each other.
A sibling comment mentions Bartz v. Anthropic. Looking more at the details of the case I don't think it's obvious how to apply it, other than as a proof that just because an AI company acquired some material in "some manner" doesn't mean they can just do whatever with it. The case ruled they still had to buy a copy. I can easily make a case that "buying a copy" in the case of a GPL-2 codebase is "agreeing to the license" and that such an agreement could easily say "anything trained on this must also be released as GPL-2". It's a somewhat lengthy road to travel, where each step could result in a failure, but the same can be said for the road to "just because I can lay my hands on it means I can feed it to my AI and 100% own the result" and that has already had a step fail.
> It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive…
This just means you keep your powder dry until it's needed.
And even if it would be enforceable, would you be able and willing to go through the energy and monetary expenses to enforce it? Especially against a big corporation willing to fight you.
In a word: wow. That demo just kept getting better and better.
It's fine as long as both exist and third parties are not allowed to know which one you're running.
Otherwise, you have banks and MAFIAA and others off-loading their own security and compliance costs to users by flat out discriminating based on the status of the sandbox.
There are times I want that Chauffeur to have my back!
A company offering private smart glasses would have to offer them with an unlocked bootloader.
Yet the WebAssembly bros are into replicating application servers with Kubernetes pods running WebAssembly containers, go figure.
> it's Zoom
I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.
But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).
> On-board NN moderates all interactions. Moral NN core must be updated montlhy to support latest moral and legal checks by NN. This core reports when you are doing something suspicious.
This module is formally called "conscience" and fortunately, at this time, is securely sandboxed to not directly communicate with any device or service outside of the body.
A friend described it as "there's no blank page any more".
Exactly, I had to read way too far before giving up because I have no idea what Glassfish is.
> Is there some implication that selling oil to China is constraining sovereignty?
China helping Iran rebuild means China getting more say in Tehran than they have right now. And to date, nuclear non-proliferation has been a serious issue for Beijing. I can't see China being thrilled about a new nuclear power one country away.
> it circulates in exactly the kind of rightwing paranoia circles which strongly influence the current US government
When did it make the jump from the far left to the far right?
> issues of class were a huge part of cultural life throughout the 80s and 90s
Yes, and this is much less the case now. Changes to the economics of culture have closed a lot of doors. As well as the massive expansion of university, which magically conveys "middle class" status on people even if they are still heavily indebted wage slaves.
Lurking under a lot of this stuff are two nasty questions:
- whether the word "white" is attached to "working class", even invisibly
- whether people who are retired count as "working class", even if they are property owners with private pensions
> It's going to need to choose between sovereighty and wealth.
I don't follow this at all? Is there some implication that selling oil to China is constraining sovereignty? Is there some nuclear deal between Iran and China I'm not aware of?
As an autocratic regime, they (IRGC) have no choice but to pursue not only sovereignty but domestic control.
> Petrodollar hypothesis hasn't been a thing for decades
Yeah, this has always seemed overstated. However it circulates in exactly the kind of rightwing paranoia circles which strongly influence the current US government.
The non-standard floppy format was a huge annoyance for users. While the higher density formats were cool, the hardware could operate on PC-compatible format, but the OS wouldn’t support it.
ROM BIOS compatibility would have been nice, but it could be implemented at the custom MS-DOS version and run from RAM, but I’m not sure there were clean room implementations back at that point.
Comparing LLMs to Markov chains was funny in 2023.
Just like restrict never made it.
Someone has to write a proposal, bring it to the various meetings, and getting it to win the features selection election from all parties.
Also WG21 tends to disregard C features that can already be implemented within C++'s type system.
Assuming AMD, Intel, ARM, Apple in a few years haven't released new CPUs, otherwise the difference is the same as today.
They're not even wrong about both their complaints. The "damocletian sword of nuclear weapons" is actually what's been keeping humanity from setting the planet on fire for the past 60+ years.
Ease of repair and "build quality", are to some degree (although not entirely) tradeoffs against each other.
Thinkpads are a counterexample.
OpenAI were completely taken by surprise by the success of ChatGPT. Internally there were debates over whether they should launch it at all.
It's had a ton of hype since then of course.
Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.
I implemented Contracts in the C++ language in the early 90's as an extension.
Nobody wanted it.
China has been doing this sort of recycling for literally decades, at a massive scale.
That's LaTeX convention, double hyphen is an en-dash, triple hyphen is an em-dash.
It used to be possible to type immediately while the page is loading and have all key presses end up in the input field.
Why run this check before user can type?
Why not run it later like before the message gets sent to the server?
Has anyone been able to replicate the behavior described in this issue yet?
I think it's a very bad idea for a prescription glasses wearer to have only a single pair of glasses where that single pair has a built in camera.
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.
It's already impossible to stop someone from recording if they are really determined. Pen cameras, button cameras and all sorts of miniature devices exist and can be snuck through very easily. You enforce the restriction by prosecuting people who upload the footage.
Amazing article. What really stands out for me besides the obviously interesting electronics details is the incredible mechanical engineering. Quite a few of the frames and frame components look as if they've been milled out of aluminum billets.
In the 70's I bought a 300A 5V IBM power supply for parts, it took a couple of hours to get it home and lug it up to my attic where I spent a few weeks disassembling it and I came away with the same impression: that thing was engineered in a way that I had not yet seen in other electronics gear that I had come across. It got me a lifetime supply of RCA 2N3055's, (the good ones, the Motorola ones were junk in comparison) as well as all manner of capacitors (sizes 'large' and 'gigantic').
IBM really knew how to engineer hardware.
Right. This is one of my favorite examples of how badly bloated the web is, and how full of stupid decisions. Virtual scrolling means you're maintaining a window into content, not actually showing full content. Web browsers are perfectly fine showing tens of thousands of lines of text, or rows in a table, so if you need virtual scrolling for less, something already went badly wrong, and the product is likely to be a toy, not a tool (working definition: can it handle realistic amount of data people would use for productive work - i.e. 10k rows, not 10 rows).
> “The main message is that we’re going to get the energy transition forced on us in a very painful way that’s going to happen very quickly.
This forcing function will occur regardless of who is in power. The world (China, mostly) produces enough EVs, solar, and batteries to make it happen, it’s just a matter of economics and time.
The people in charge today are temporary, the investments made in clean tech today will last decades.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
(China is ~1/3 of global manufacturing capacity)
"The consequences are already visible."
I'm not familiar with how these IPTV companies market their services, but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
It's like those folks that sold bootleg DVDs out of their trenchcoats in Manhattan - the defense of "gosh, I never knew buying a just-released-in-theaters Hollywood blockbuster for $5 by some dude on the side of Broadway was illegal" was never going to fly.
Yes the browser still renders the text at the end - but you can now do fancy calculations in advance to decide where you're going to ask the browser to draw it.
Huh, Ireland has copied English law so precisely that it also has Norwich Pharmacal and Anton Pillar orders?
(De anonymozation of third parties and non-crime search warrants respectively)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930565 - February 2026 (90 comments)
You might enjoy "A Canticle for Leibowitz" on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...
Story discovered via usability of that site. Will use it more.
now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.
What types of jobs? I find that very hard to believe.
I don't understand your math. The 1mm (the wall) was there already, so why is it being counted here? Plus, multiplying by 1 doesn't do anything? Also, the 2mm extra won't be solid plastic (they'll be solid air, since that's why we're adding the extra thickness, for the room.
If anything, the extra material for the case would be the perimeter length times the perimeter wall width times the height.
But stearates are also chemically very similar to some microplastics, according to the researchers, and can lead to false positives when researchers are looking for microplastic pollution.
"Chemically very similar", as in "contains long hydrocarbon chains", something which even all biological matter (lipids) has. I've looked at a few microplastic studies and many of them use pyrolysis and mass spectroscopy to detect their presence, which is going to show almost the same results for animal fat as pure hydrocarbon plastics like PE (the most common plastic by production volume) and PP.
I think it is a primarily Republican issue. They have consistently demolished anything of value in the US, and now, the world (unnecessary Iran war is reducing global GDP growth by ~0.3% and boosting inflation by ~1.2%). Unfortunately for them, the damage to their brand is done for a generation. Very similar to Reform and Brexit in the UK.
I do a medical procedure several times a week that requires gloves.
If you don't flap your hands around for 30+ seconds, any remaining moisture from handwashing (or sweat) makes them stick to your skin and you wind up fighting them (and about half the time, ripping a hole). A towel is not enough.
What was the problem? If the local repair center couldn't reproduce it, what was going on?
And what do you mean they lost your return? Like it got delivered and then it was lost? Surely they gave you a working unit at that point?
I've had a bunch of experiences with Apple repair and always always been fast and great. I mean, they're definitely the best service of literally any corporation I've dealt with, by far. Sometimes you get unlucky I guess with a particular rep or something hard to reproduce, but it sounds like you got extremely unlucky? It definitely isn't representative in my experience, not even close.
Presumably this is all because OpenAI offers free ChatGPT to logged out users and don't want that being abused as a free API endpoint.
Is this meaningful at all, without a control?
How often does software fail in production with human-written code? How many times has a production failure been avoided because an LLM didn't make a typo or mistake that a human would have?
This is pushing an agenda. It's not measuring anything meaningful.
> Framework Laptop is more expensive than a Macbook Air with all around worse hardware.
Is it though? I'd agree the hardware is less capable but if your Macbook anything is really just one 'top case' repair away from being more expensive. RAM failure is 'motherboard replace', the display? it is similarly expensive to replace.
So I would agree that it is more expensive to purchase a Framework laptop than a Macbook laptop, but also feel it is more expensive to own a Macbook laptop than a Framework laptop. Also I just replaced the screen on my FW13 not because it was broken but because they have one with 4x the pixels on it now. That's not something I could have done with the Macbook.
D compilers have a "ramming speed" setting.
Why is the LiteLLM incident on there? The linked article for that one is a 404.
I didn't read any credible arguments suggesting that was caused by vibe coding. They had their PyPI publishing credentials stolen thanks to an attack against a CI tool they were using.
Plus the linked article for the Amazon outage is https://d3security.com/blog/amazon-lost-6-million-orders-vib... which appears to be some other vendor promoting their product without providing any details on what happened at Amazon.
I remember when I was young seeing videos of North Korea, of audiences always giving rapt standing ovations and many people fake fainting, and I always thought "How dumb and stupid does everyone have to be to carry on this absurd, ridiculous charade."
I don't wonder anymore.