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.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

They can make it unnecessary for you to understand.

Consider hash tables. Nobody implements a hash table by hand any more. I've written some, but not in this century. Optimal hash table design is a specialist subject. Do you know about robin hood algorithms? Changing the random number generator's seed to discourage collision attacks? A basic hash table starts to slow down around 70% full. Modern hash tables can get above 90% full before they have to expand.

Who keeps Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms handy any more? I own both the original edition and the revised edition. They're boxed up in the garage. I once read that book cover to cover. That was a long time ago.

That's not AI. That's solving the problem and putting it in a black box. That's how technology progresses.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182966]

> Does Anthropic not just have right of first refusal?

They do. SPV transfers don’t usually involve a transfer of the underlying stock. Unfortunately, that lets bad actors represent to selling stock they don’t yet own.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79655]

Except gmail is hardly a cartel, etc. I've never had a gmail account.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 104965]

This is such a misleading title. The post isn't about software engineering not being a lifetime career, it's about this:

> If AI does turn out to make you dumber, why can’t we just keep writing code by hand? You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools.

The argument the piece makes is that being a software engineer who insists on writing code by hand may no longer be a lifetime career.

I think the definition of "software engineer" is changing, and it's not even changing that much. We construct software to help solve human problems. We can keep on doing that, just now we get to do it more.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77496]

I think that's the point, these spaces greatly prefer recurring donations because a) the aggregate value is usually more than a one-off and b) they're much easier to reason about, as they're more "evened out".

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

Governance: basically anarchic, but with one person ultimately calling the shots.

That's the classic problem with pseudo-anarchies. They're really dictatorships.

The larger scale form of this is the non-profit with the self-perpetuating board, where the board of directors appoints its successors. It's the standard form for big non-profits, such as hospitals or national organizations. Non-profit organizations with real elected officials, where the incumbents get kicked out now and then, are rare. They take too much attention by the members.

Nobody knows how to run a meeting under Robert's Rules of Order any more. The whole point of such meetings is that the group is in charge and the outcome is a binding decision. Most organizational leaders don't want that.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

Wholesale population displacement is explicitly not (by itself) genocide under the convention. Genocide is an intent crime, and the intent has to be the eradication of the targeted ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. Kidnapping all the children in an occupied territory and dispersing them so they can't be returned to their families is genocidal. Mass displacement isn't.

The fixation on the term "genocide" has been a major own-goal for advocates of Palestinians. It was deliberately defined to be a difficult bar to clear. "Warm crimes" and "ethnic cleansing" are easy claims to make in the region, and ordinary people don't care about the distinction between "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide"; that term would have served just as well, without the escape hatch "genocide" provides.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92138]

Mythos hasn't been released yet, but there seems to be some evidence that GPT-5.5, which has been released, is already a touch better anyhow in some dimensions: https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/gpt-5-5-vs-claude-mythos-cybe...

Close enough that you can probably get a good sense of Mythos' performance by using GPT-5.5.

One thing I noticed while using GPT-5.5 for this is that the ability of the model to turn the bug into an outright vulnerability is less relevant than you might intuitively think. All that is really necessary is for the model to point out that something is smelly, and you should just fix it. Turning it into a runnable exploit has very limited utility for the defender. It does turn heads and may get the attention of some otherwise reluctant people, but everything I found was obviously enough wrong that the exploit was just decorative.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99662]

The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182966]

> Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media

Well, yeah.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92138]

I remember the distinctly mixed feelings I got in the late 90s to early 2000s watching a search of my real name go from nothing but me, to mostly me, to "hey I'm still in the top 10", to not even on the front page depending on what search engine you use. (I still see myself on Google's front page, but not Bing's. Bing suggests that if I want more information on my real name I should postfix it with the word "fired", so, hey, I guess things could be worse because that's not me....)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

So Israel is switching to Google and Amazon. Hm.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

>as they are also in their 40s but drink a lot and worse do cocaine. They also are really into making fun of each other.

Can I get your friends?

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

>I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall1.

That statement is enough of an evidence

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

Mojo remains to be seen if it isn't another Swift for Tensorflow, apparently 1.0 won't even support Windows properly.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79655]

My own code is contortious. I refactor it regularly to reduce that, but it still can be better.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108232]

Evaluation is harder than you think because of statistics.

Like if you want to accurately know if one model is better than another you have to test it on hundreds if not thousands of examples which are carefully graded in difficulty, not in the training sets, etc.

Practically you might try model A and model B and use each one 2-3 times on different tasks and walk out with the impression that A is really good and B sux, but it could be model A got lucky because you asked it to do things it is good at or maybe it just got lucky and got the right answer anyway.

See https://arxiv.org/html/2410.12972v1 and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14810 -- those papers are considering a general space of tasks but you could totally do the same kind of eval for the tasks you care about.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92138]

In 2020, there are two companies that are competitors with each other. They each employ 100 programmers to do their job, and we all know how those organizations operated; perpetually behind, each feature added generating yet more possible future features, we've all lived it and are still largely living it today.

In 2026, both companies decide that AI can accelerate their developers by a factor of 10x. I'm not asserting that's reality, it's just a nice round number.

Company 1 fires 90 of their programmers and does the same work with 10.

Company 2 keeps all their programmers and does ten times the work they used to do, and maybe ends up hiring more.

Who wins in the market?

Of course the answer is "it depends" because it always is but I would say the winning space for Company 1 is substantially smaller than Company 2. They need a very precise combination of market circumstances. One that is not so precise that it doesn't exist, but it's a risky bet that you're in one of the exceptions.

In the time when the acceleration is occurring and we haven't settled in to the new reality yet the Company 1 answer seems superficially appealing to the bean counters, but it only takes one defector in a given market to go with Company 2's solution to force the entire rest of their industry to follow suit to compete properly.

The value generation by one programmer that can be possibly captured by that programmer's salary is probably not going down in the medium and long term either.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

It's not going to happen, just as it didn't happen for skilled industrial workers whose jobs got outsourced to China. The government will pay just enough in welfare to keep the situation manageable. Then they'll demonize you in the culture, as a Luddite, etc.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79655]

I think Full Metal Jacket is the only war movie that correctly delays the sound of an explosion.

The sounds in combat footage of WW2 are all dubbed in, as the cameras did not record sound.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

Right. Like the Lightning Connector and Apple SIM, replaced by USB-C and eSIM. It's like saying ISA slots were "killed by Intel."

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 104965]

Really good piece about the growing impact of AI writing online.

I particularly liked this definition of the "Zombie Internet", as distinct from the Dead Internet which is just bots talking to each other.

> I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it’s people using AI talking to other people who are using AI. It’s influencer hustlebros who are teaching each other how to make AI influencers and have spun up automated YouTube channels and blogs and social media accounts that are spamming the internet for the sole purpose of making money. It is whatever the fuck “Moltbook” is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It’s AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that’s actually being run by a marketing firm. [...]

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

No it isn't. Schools are, and by a long way. People are confused by this because most municipalities have multiple taxing bodies; schools and municipalities work from different budgets, and the police are the largest line item in a budget that basically captures only police, fire, and public works.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

>AI is unlikely to make people like me, or most already established professionals, lazy.

Lol, that's already a lazy take.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189012]

And here I am measuring the distance from Dublin (Ireland) to Holyhead - would be ok for fast rail, but then it's between 3 to 5 hours of rail to London.

I wonder if Ryanair pays rail companies to offer poor service.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

They will be discovered and used in litigation, and the results will be hilarious. Think about how much lawyers pick apart language (like statutes or the constitution) that was written deliberately by humans and subject to review and revision. Now we're going to have lawyers, e.g., seizing on word choice in AI notes that might have a sinister connotation when the original wording was innocuous.

PaulHoule ranked #24 [karma: 108232]

Kinda funny that I wrote (100% manually) a short report to a collaborator about an event I went to this weekend and made a special effort to avoid AI language patterns, like I reversed the order of a structure with negation, etc.

   It is A.  Not B, Not C, Not D.
as opposed to current AIs which are trained to do it the other way.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

Tooling, because CUDA has support for C, C++, Fortran, Python JIT, and anything else targeting PTX, graphical GPU debugger, and the accelerated libraries ecosystem.

It just needs to be better than what Intel and AMD have been delivering since OpenCL 1.0.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

Developers that have taken a proper Engineering degree and taken the exam, instead of calling themselves engineer, also know, because ethics is part of the process.

Now if they follow up on that, or decided other matters are more relevant for them, it is another matter.

Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct for Portuguese Engineering Order,

https://www.ordemdosengenheiros.pt/fotos/gca/blocks_items/co...

Similar document for Germany,

https://www.vdi.de/fileadmin/pages/mein_vdi/redakteure/publi...

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

Unfortunely not every operating system on planet Earth has a package manager, nor developers have enough time to support all the ones that have such feature.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

It's not a "weird complaint" at all. The cut goes to the heart of why it's supposedly impressive. Because of the cut, all he had to do was say one sentence before the rocket lifts off (which is happening at a time that's known down to the second).

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182966]

> Marketing is not intentional

Mythos put Anthropic back into the White House’s good graces. It also branded Anthropic as badass, something their softener image probably needed to win government contracts.

Maybe it wasn’t marketing. But the product’s configuration, and how Anthropic talked about and released it, sure as hell played beautifully. (The timing, while Musk and Altman are distracted with each other, also couldn’t have been better.)

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

If it works for me it works for me. Sample size of 1 is all I need to tell that.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

UNIX still trying to catch up with Xerox workstations in the REPL experience, or general Lisp machines for that matter.

Inline graphics from 1981,

https://youtu.be/o4-YnLpLgtk?t=376

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109747]

People opt in to the panopticon and then discover they have no more secrets. I'm surprised lawyers fall for that as well.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109747]

The pitch for AI from its proponents is the destruction of all white collar and creative jobs, while simultaneously making all the content they consume worse and Internet socialization with human strangers replaced by doppelgangers? And you wonder why people are upset?

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

Ah, Blinker! Never used it, but remeber the ads in magazines.

Same in Iberian penisula regarding software acquisition, even during university, the same copy centers for books, also offered catalogs of which software we would like to have, or street baazars even, only in the 2000's the goverment (in Portugal) actually started hunting down those practices.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109747]

The 6502 is one of the most heavily preserved technologies: http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html

Full die capture, full transistor level simulation.

Most of the others are being emulated in proportion to their importance to games, in arcade machines and consoles. Those emulations are going to be as cycle-accurate as required.

There are some issues around things like the Yamaha synth chips, which are mixed-signal and depend on analogue properties that can be difficult to emulate.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

Easy, it shows what is achievable if there is a high bar for quality in every single line of code that gets commited, reviewed and merged, regardless of the programming language.

However in the days of race to bottom, offshoring for penies, and now LLM powered code generation, this is a quality most companies won't care unless there is liability in place.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109747]

It's a notational issue. IIRC Pascal used := for assignment and = for equality testing.

Where this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choice of = for assignment and == for equality testing won, but of course that's not a choice in a vacuum and it's tied up with a thousand other choices.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

VB.NET is open source, supports AOT, and there is little else that VB 6 does better, other than COM integration, which .NET was always a bit lower level

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn

Now I bet what you mean is the graphical part, and yes that is only partial open source.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

>It's a good reminder for us all that the competition in this space is rough and lots of more or less subtle marketing is involved.

About as subtle as a personal injury lawyer's billboard

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

Obsidian sounds like a nightmare security wise in general.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 91249]

Maybe because the system in China has been lifting 100s of millions out of poverty for the last 40 years, whereas the neoliberal corporate rule in the US has been tanking the middle and working class for the same period.

Now people are supposed to trust the same corporations that enshittified everything?

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189012]

Awww… but they are soooo cute <3

BTW, I remember a fatal accident at Brasilia’s zoo with them when I was a kid.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

There's an answer for that now: "Release ALL the Epstein files."

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189012]

I actually like it better than plain Rust…

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109747]

You can. I've even seen intentional 4:3 used as an "80s" signifier.

Quick googling suggested that square video under 3 minutes will be automatically classed as "shorts", which much of HN hates and may never have seen.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 128789]

I am still mostly coding by hand, other than meeting the KPIs of AI use at the company, required trainings, use of agents and whatever.

Eventually like every hype wave the dust will settle, and lets see where we stand.

By now all the AI companies have consumed all human knowledge so they either learn to actually think for themselves, or that is it.

Either way, that won't change the ongoing layoffs while trying to pursue the AI dream from management point of view.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 189012]

I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

Here's a similar video for BART's Transbay Tube, which was built in a similar way.[1] The major differences come from building in an earthquake zone. The Transbay Tube is mostly steel, rather than concrete, for flexibility. There are expansion joints. And the Transbay Tube sits on a gravel and sand base rather than hard rock, on purpose.

The Transbay Tube sections were built in the Bethlehem Steel shipyards in San Francisco. A museum opens this month to commemorate that shipyard. It's in Dogpatch in SF, if you know the area. The shipyard still has a submersible drydock, but it hasn't worked in ten years and will be demolished soon, hopefully before it sinks.

The SF Bay Area once had far more heavy industry than most people realize.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=247JT7ctQ_I

[2] https://bethlehemshipyardmuseum.org/

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78749]

Today I learned the Transbay Tube is the longest immersed tube in the world. Given that it opened in 1974, it presumably has held that record for 52 years!

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89525]

I hope it's because she realised its hidden purpose of advancing towards authoritarian dystopia.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127864]

That's first to file with a particular (and onerous) set of requirements for filing, not first to implement.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 182966]

If you’re not, and I say this in good faith, take your own advice around your tone. Making assumptions about other people, and then doubling down when they correct you, comes across as a kind of horrible I doubt you truly are.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 148441]

Microsoft's volume licensing, from the perspective of sysadmins and other folks trying to actually obtain software for use, is known to be some cross product of "byzantine" and "kafkaesque".

I fail to see how this is a win for the vast majority of folks impacted by the licensing process...

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167693]
rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

I think older people who have more patience are supposed to help. We moved to America when we were young so my mom had raise my brother and I by herself, which was very hard coming from somewhere people live in multi-generational households. She had very little patience for it. But she and my dad have way more patience for my kids. My mom lived with us for a year and then my wife’s mom lived with us for a year while our youngest was 2-3. Then we moved 10 minutes from my parents. My middle child kept getting ear infections so he went to my parents’ house every day for two years. These days my boys (4 and 7) go to my parents’ house every weekend.

I don’t think younger people are wired to be taking care of babies full time. I’d imagine in nature they’d be out hunting or gathering and our attention spans are wired for doing that.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

The author of this post understands that private keys are never exchanged. Read it more carefully.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

It is an article of faith on message boards that IQ tests are somehow unlawful in employment in the US because of Griggs. That's patently not the case. Plenty of large corporations with deep pockets do general cognitive testing (and even IQ testing) of incoming applicants. The companies that administer these tests have logo crawls, like every other product company, and the names are companies your mom will recognize.

Griggs says that you can't employ IQ tests to discriminate for jobs where the IQ threshold you established is immaterial to the job. For modern knowledge work, that's a trivial bar to clear. It is essentially the case that Griggs is a nonfactor in white collar employment.

My motivation for calling this out isn't that I'm OK with discriminating against Black people; quite the opposite, in fact. IQ tests aren't used more widely because they aren't effective at qualifying employees. IQ is an idee fixee among A Certain Part Of The Internet, and part of their pitch is that IQ tests are a secret cheat code that would enable hiring purely on merit, if only the woke wouldn't prevent it. No, false.

zdw ranked #12 [karma: 148441]

This seems to have happened about a year before "The IT Crowd" episode "Smoke and Mirrors" aired.

In that episode Moss, one of the IT denizens, goes to a TV studio where he is mistakenly put on a news program and interviewed about a war.

I wonder if they're related...

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89525]

If I want a model I'll go download one. (And I did, not long ago, to play around with image generation.)

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

That's mostly incorrect. In Maryland, like in most places in the country, the distribution infrastructure is controlled by regulated monopolies that buy power on the market from generators. Your bills separate out the fees for usage and the fees for distribution, and the Maryland PSC has to approve both.

crazygringo ranked #39 [karma: 83534]

I use an extension that gives me a customized homepage, but I still always get the "what's new" tab on every major version upgrade.

It's a totally separate tab that opens. It's got nothing to do with what you use as your homepage.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89525]

A 486 already had over a million transistors. These are in the thousands.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91966]

Well, no shit. First grants went out in 2024, right in time for the administration to change; Lutnick put it on hold almost immediately. It also hasn't cost $42B; "By 2026, about half of the $42.45 billion allocated by Congress during the passage of the IIJA remained unused".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Equity,_Access,_and_...

Incidentally, BEAD includes LEO satellites as part of it. SpaceX got grants from it. (https://texasstandard.org/stories/spacex-demands-changes-fed...)

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 89525]

That's not a problem at all. It's an artificially created distraction, created to manufacture consent, by those pushing for this shit.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77496]

If you can't get results with the thing I'm getting results with, what other explanation would you give?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77496]

I wanted to get LLM feedback while writing without having the LLM suggest/write text for me, so I built https://www.writelucid.cc

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 109747]

I struggle with this too in Edinburgh; I make a point of trying to stay engaged and keep recognizing how amazing the place is from the outside.

Going to the festival (and the book festival, back when that was in Charlotte Square) is improved by leaning into your local status and knowing how to duck in and out. And ideally knowing someone with a lanyard who can get you into the media bar: it's not cooler and more happening in there, it's actually quieter.

There's a vennel route across the city. It's an odd experience going through a deserted and mildly unpleasant alley, stepping out into a shuffling horde of tourists, cutting sideways across their paths, and ducking behind some bins into another quiet path. Like walking from the wings of the stage across it.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

Question: for software development, how much of an AI do you need for local development? Can it be run locally? Can someone train something that knows a lot about software but lacks comprehensive coverage of history, politics, and popular culture?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

YC has funded over 5000 companies, and this page catalogs 39 that failed, many of which, on the sites own terms, are simply business failures, with no additional drama. I don't think the authors of the site realize the case they're actually making here.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76503]

But all commodities are like this. It is actually pretty easy to send some electrons great distances, or heck at least it's a well understood, solved problem. It's just that those interconnections haven't been built yet.

Heck, oil is probably the "default" example of what a commodity is, but we're now all acutely aware of what happens when moving that oil from one place to another becomes exceedingly difficult.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

Chill out on my porch, read a book, make a salad? I don't think that's what the post is getting at.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160430]

Not a Show HN, just some article in a language only a minority here can read.

Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160430]
Tomte ranked #11 [karma: 160430]

A prime example how German dubbing tried to make films more comedic. Like the Bud Spencer/Terence Hill films that were a huge success in Germany because of the slapstick dialogue not present in the Italian original.

In Dark Star they renamed Alien to Hüpfgemüse, which roughly translates to hopping vegetable. It‘s a hoot!

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99662]

"the most normal type of thing you can think of"

I can believe that (and your sudafed guess is likely correct), but then why be obscure about it, when you could say 'turns out xyz is illegal in Japan, do not let your well meaning friends/family mail you medicine of any kind'? However, I don't watch the whole video. I know this hyper-edited style is popular nowadays but to me it feels like advertising/bait and I don't want to invest the energy to parse it.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 112184]

This is a really good thread on why this technology is becoming a problem for "open" anything. The argument "we can create our own separate web" is fine until all of your services are behind the web that locks you into owning a Google approved or Apple approved mobile device.

ColinWright ranked #14 [karma: 135605]

I had trouble reading the web site ... I'm sure someone can provide a link to an archive or something.

Meanwhile, I used "lynx -dump" and lightly edited the result, so the plain text is here:

https://solipsys.co.uk/documents/AI_Doxxing.txt

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76503]

To be honest, I liked your original response about returning a 409 - it's not something I'd done before and I like how it keeps things simpler.

But your follow up responses here are making me rethink. Now you have to have all these special cases where the original request is still in process. I think or assertion of "99% are simple POST operations" is bullshit. For the times where idempotency is hard and really matters, often times you're calling a third party API, like a payment processing API.

I would think a better approach would be to always return a 409 on a subsequent request, regardless of whether it passed or failed, and then have a separate standard API that lets you get the result of any request by its idempotency key.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77496]

Excellent, I'm glad this is resolved.

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 116907]

From 5 days ago, 1138 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219

thunderbong ranked #19 [karma: 116907]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77496]

It's not like you have a choice, the printer doesn't work locally unless you enable LAN mode, and then it only works locally. Bambu make you pick either "closed servers" or "the mobile app doesn't work" for no reason.

I'll chip in to this developer's legal defense fund because I want to be able to do whatever I want with my printer, and "I can't do what I want with my printer" is a bigger problem for me right now than "the developer made a TCP connection on my behalf to a server he didn't own".

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77496]

No. It took the entire crate and paid nothing.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

There's an election in the chain. Voters elected the national MPs who then selected the national PMs, who then selected von den Leyen. Democratic-ish.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 92138]

That just leads to bigger fools. I don't just mean that as clever wordplay, but as a serious point. No matter how sloppy you make your API someone else will use it even more sloppily. Now you've got an enormous sloppy surface you can't properly contain or maintain, and people still transgress its boundaries even so.

The robustness principle has its times and places but the general consensus that it should be applied everywhere to everything was a big mistake. The default should be that you are very rigid and precise and only apply the robustness principle in those times and places it applies, and I'm perfectly comfortable waiting to deploy something precise and find out that this was one of them. The vast majority of APIs is not the time and place for the robustness principle. It's the time and place for careful precision on exactly what is provided, and detailed and description error messages, logging, and metrics for when the boundaries are transgressed.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 91966]

> it's really weird to say that the forks "resulted" in the license changes when those forks where a response to the license changes

But those license changes were a response to how AWS was monetizing their work in ways unsustainable for the upstream projects.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126443]

Wow enforcing laws and cultural taboos deters crime?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

Right. An operation is idempotent only if doing it twice has the same result as doing it once. If you have to worry about whether an operation has already been done, it's not idempotent. If you have to worry about order of operations, it's not idempotent.

What's being asked for here is eventual consistency. If you make the same request twice, the system must settle into a the same state as if it was done only once. That's the realm of conflict-free replicated data types, which the article is trying to re-invent.

   x = 1
is idempotent.

   x = x + 1
over a link with delay and errors is a problem that requires the heavy machinery of CRDTs.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105823]

¥99,000 [$632 USD]

"Limited to 650 units. Sold Out"

https://www.casio.com/jp/basic-calculators/product.S100X-JC1...

Brajeshwar ranked #48 [karma: 75525]

Something parallel, there is a Black Mirror episode 7.1 (Common People) where he pulls out his own teeth, tongue in a mousetrap, torture/harm his body, etc. to earn money on the Internet.

Edit/Add: I asked Claude to find that episode as I explained part of the storyline and is now asking me to seek help. Early Internet would now, definitely, be totally banned.

Edit2: Is this new, or am I stumbling on something new? I cannot reply to my replier below. I’m sure @stavros hasn’t blocked me. But, yes, we will always call him Roy. That is the only way we remember him.

Brajeshwar ranked #48 [karma: 75525]
dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127864]

This is just lazy AI use as a replacement for lazy stock image use. The details of exactly how it sucks at its job while providing something that fills a checkbox for someone who has no concern for quality are somewhat different, but the basic failure is the same.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 114314]

Most people also understand that, because they're not "frequent" users of a thing, they absolutely suck at using it, and set their expectations accordingly. In particular, they realize that doing anything non-trivial with the thing requires them to spend some learning and practice time, or asking/hiring a "frequent" user to do it for them.

So the reasonable response to being told you're holding your scissors wrong is to realize that yes, you most likely are holding your scissors wrong[0], and ask the other person for advice (or just to do the thing), or look up a YouTube video and learn, or sign up to a class, or such.

Expecting mastery in 30 seconds is not a reasonable attitude, but it's unfortunately the lie that software industry tried to sell to people for the past 15 years or so.

--

[0] - There's much more to it than one would think.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 161960]

The low execution quality of Meta's metaverse effort surprised me, too.

But they wanted it to run on their relatively weak headgear. A good metaverse needs a decent gamer PC, a serious GPU, and a few hundred megabits per second of Internet bandwidth. (I've written a Second Life client in Rust, so I'm very aware of the system requirements.) Facebook needs to serve a user base which is mostly phones and people with weak PCs. Not Steam users.

If you have to squeeze it onto underpowered hardware, you get something like Decentraland or R2 or Horizon - low rez, very limited detail, small contained areas. Roblox has made some progress on this problem, but it took them two decades, even with a lot of money.

The real problem with metaverses is that a big, realistic virtual world is a technical achievement, but not particularly fun. It's a world in which you can spend time and meet people, but the world is not a game. It has no plot or agenda. This throws many new Second Life users. They find themselves in a virtual world the size of Los Angeles, with thousands of options, and are totally lost. It's not passive entertainment. As Ted Turner (CNN, TBS, etc.) used to say, "the great thing about television is that it's so passive."

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 420071]

It is not in fact the same in the USA. You cannot be held indefinitely without a judicial hearing and without access to a lawyer in the US. You can in Japan, and in fact that's the norm.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 105823]
hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 76503]

You're replying to the original author of Bun. Given the usage of Bun, and the fact that his company (primarily him, actually) was recently acquired by Anthropic for what I'm guessing was a bajillion dollars, I think he probably already knows his work is significant and that he made something interesting.