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.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80488]

I'm happy for the existence of the e line mainly because it forces them to bump up the specs on the base iPhone. 17 is so good that there's very little reason to get the 17 Pro.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

>Which is really silly, because if someone needs to do actual work they are not going to do it on an iPad no matter how capable it is. The form factor simply does not work for getting work done.*

Nonsens. The iPad is basically a 11 to 13 (Pro) monitor+computer with an amazing touch screen. Adding the official keyboard folio, or any bluetooth keyboard/mourse is trivial, and it makes for an excellent on-the-go machine. Not different to the 12-inch MacBook (circa 2015) and the older fan favorite 12-inch PowerBook G4 (circa 2003), and I know several devs who swore by them. Linus used and loved one of the latter (with PPC Linux on in his case).

The only issue is the lack of OS level support for some stuff, not the form factor.

Admins, devs working mostly on the Cloud, photographers, and writers already use it for "getting work done", I've seen execs too.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105292]

I'd argue that people can put words together to make new meanings or coin new words when they have to. The real magic of language is not "we have words for everything" but we have grammar.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159904]

"Today, Motorola also introduced Moto Analytics, an enterprise‑grade analytics platform designed to give IT administrators real‑time visibility into device performance across their fleet."

So they put in a back door for business users?

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

I made a secure one:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

Everything runs in containers (I run it on a server along with everything else), plugins have a permission system so eg the AI can read emails but not delete or send, etc.

I really like it, I run it as my main agent and it has been extremely helpful.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127435]

> If you had a 386DX then I believe you had the math copro? The 386SX did not have an FPU and needed the additional 387SX.

The 386DX/386SX distinction was the external databus (32-bit on the DX, 16-bit on the SX)

DX was “Double word eXternal", SX was “Single word eXternal”. Neither had an FPU builtin, and there were corresponding 387DX and 387SX coprocessors.

Then Intel used the same naming split (despite the abbreviations not applying) for high-end vs low-end of the 486 where the DX had a builtin FPU and the SX required a “487SX coprocessor” to get an FPU (which IIRC was internally just a 486DX processor which went into a separate “coprocessor slot” which just bypassed the “main” processor when populated.)

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79043]

Germany didn't have patent laws in the 1800s. Their economy rapidly industrialized and boomed.

I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things better if they couldn't patent it?

Note that Tesla open sources its patents.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126524]

Ideally Apple would finally do their Surface/2-1 with iPads, but Apple being Apple, rather sell an overpowered tablet, and a Mac laptop to go alongside with it

Some places even do a bundle "discount".

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127435]

> Cops can't move vehicles that they don't own because of liability. The only way for them to move a vehicle without liability is to use a tow truck.

While the precise boundaries of liability depend on the laws of the particular jurisdiction (they aren't consistent across the whole US) police generally can take reasonable action to move vehicles obstructing the road in an emergency without liability for any damages incurred, whether or not they use a tow truck to do it.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82274]

People take tons of photos and videos on their phones. Download 40 GB of music and podcasts on Spotify. Keep 50 GB of videos in their messages. All at once.

iPads usually aren't used as much for these things. They're used for browsing, streaming, gaming, reading... mostly things that don't take up nearly as much space.

It's not spite, just matching device capabilities to user needs without unnecessary upgrades that will lead to a higher price point.

I use tons of storage on my phone. Not much on my iPad. Pretty much just downloading TV shows before a flight, but 128 GB gives you plenty of hours of that.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127435]

> There is a legally protected right of publicity.

There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected.

There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107012]

Cooling growth and expectations are allowing folks to have improved quality of life at an earlier age, which seems like an objective win versus grinding during the best years of your life for an unknown positive EV. Of course, China having built enough housing for everyone and related infrastructure during their boom years enabled this.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417152]

Where did you hear that? The IRGC is the creation of the revolutionary clerical movement. It exists specifically to prevent outcomes like Egypt, where a powerful national armed service operates as a check on political Islam.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177148]

As an outsider, why is this a credible institution over the jury and judge?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107012]

It’s only illegal if they don’t get away with it. Most get away with it in corporate America. If bad actors are going to push the bounds of the legal framework, good actors should as well when the rules don’t matter. Rule of “Fuck you make me.” To improve odds of success, one could operate from a position of being judgement proof, organizing corporate and legal entities accordingly from a charging perspective. Laws are not objective, it’s all interpretative dance. Know how to dance for the performance you choose to participate in.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125803]

The protests involved what activists call “direct action,” which involves trespassing on private property, blockading workers, or damaging equipment in an effort to prevent otherwise lawful activity. For example, activists admitted to setting fire to equipment and pipeline valves in an effort to stop construction: https://www.kcci.com/article/2-women-admit-to-causing-damage.... That’s legally straightforward conduct outside 1A protections.

The more tenuous thing here is proving Greenpeace incited people to do that. Without having seen the evidence, I’m guessing there were internal documents that were bad for Greenpeace. Activist organizations sometimes adopt pretty militant rhetoric in an effort to get protesters fired up. I bet these internal documents could seem sinister to a jury of ordinary people.

The legal issue here is that there should be a very high bar for saying that first amendment protected speech amounts to incitement. But that’s not a principle of law as far as I’m aware. So any organization that adopts this militant posture for marketing reasons (which is a lot of them these days) could run the risk of that being used against them if any of the protesters end up damaging or destroying property.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239350]

> Apple Podcasts app decided to download 120GB

That's one way to drive sales for higher priced SSDs in Apple products. I'm pretty sure that that sort of move shows up as a real blip on Apple's books.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239350]

Unlike oil companies who would of course never do such a thing.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127435]

> It's not hard to imagine a small capable model that can boot strap itself into running on consumer hardware and stolen cloud resources being problematic on the net spreading its gremlin like behavior wherever it could.

If you understand what a model is and how you need separate traditional software to run it and turn is output from tokens into text and then (often in a separate piece of software) from text into interactions with the user or other i/o functionalities of the bost computer, it becomes harder to imagine a scenario where that is a problem primarily with an open model and not with the traditional software making up an open agentic framework (an OpenClaw successor is the threat here, not a Llama successor.)

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89485]

Rough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99786]

How much do you automate things in your life using Zapier and Automator?

I know about those tools, and I'm always in the mood for automating thing... and yet I don't use them.

I'm not yet running a Claw because of the prompt injection / lethal trifecta risks, but I absolutely understand the appeal. Reducing friction to automating stuff from "figure out Automator again" to "message your bot" is a material difference.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105292]

I worked at a startup where it was a running gag that we had an "all hands" every two weeks and somebody put their hands up and said that they couldn't find documents in the places we kept them and suggested the answer was adding a new place to store files -- somehow we never got insight into a group about this.

There are two sensible answers to this problem:

(1) Treat it as a wetware problem, that is, if people are well organized in a team they are going to figure out what their business process is and stick with it regardless of what tools you use.

(2) Treat it as a technology problem. The obvious thing here is some kind of system which can not only search over a large number of "documents" (e.g. a message on Slack is a tiny document) but understand the relationships between the documents.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 88594]

I don't know. It is in my area (according to some gardener friends).

https://support.getchipdrop.com/article/35-is-chipdrop-activ... is one of the FAQs.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177148]

What are the tangle consequences of losing status? Medical tests before travel? New visa requirements?

(Separately, if America’s states were each countries, who would and wouldn’t be losing status?)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]

Because fanbois don't want to wait another year for M5?

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239350]

Speed cameras are a source of income, they are not for enforcement or safety.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126524]

Additionally, the HPC folks are looking into Chapel, which also has a mixed mode approach to memory management, similar to Swift with memory ownership, than either C++ as it has always been, or looking into Rust.

Turns out a little bit of ergonomics actually matter.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126524]

Constructors and destructors can have function level try-catch blocks.

Yes the syntax could have been much better.

As proven by ongoing work done by Khalil Estell, in some embedded scenarios exceptions aren't that great only due to quality of implementation, someone added the support and call it done, no effort at all to improve it.

Even Ada's Ravenscar profile does allow for exceptions in high integrity computing scenarios, in embedded systems.

Well I for one, if that would mean less "C programming with C++ compiler" that still plagues the security history to this day, great they can keep using C for that.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 105292]

It's not the future — it's the past!

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125803]

It’s protectionism. These lab positions are basically like residencies. They are government paid research spots that enable people to do government funded work in furtherance of their PhD. Why should American taxpayers basically be paying for foreign nationals to complete their PhDs?

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106768]

A significant portion of the WW2 scientists were refugees from _before_ the US joined the war but after persecution had started. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/scientist-refugees-and-manhatt...

(later notable entry: Andy Grove, Intel CEO, was born Andreas Grov:

"By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them")

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126524]

I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239350]

The Mondrian estate... don't get me started on that one.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

>Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

To what?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

I made something to help me with this exact process:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/i-made-a-voice-note-taker/

I usually forget what steps I've taken, but using the recorder above, I can dictate short clips of the steps. An LLM assistant I've built takes the clips and adds them to my Joplin, which then gets published:

https://notes.stavros.io/

It's been extremely helpful for keeping logs.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

>If this translates to longer device retention (if you enable battery changes, a current gen device can easily last a decade), people will care. $200 phone that you can use for 5+ years without handicapping the user will be a much bigger hit

Would it? Most people, including in the developing countries, like changing phones. It's one of the small consumerist joys they get, plus they show the Joneses that they can keep up.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

No one who doesn't waste their time doesn't.

But what if they find willing stupid audiences?

After all people read Buzzfeed and other such crap, or all the older pre-AI human made self-help, outrage, gossip slop.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239350]

A Velomobile is not a socially acceptable vehicle, it is very fast compared to a normal bike but still limited to bike infrastructure and other cyclists absolutely hate them. Yes, they solve the leg suck problem and if all of the cars would be gone and you could use the roads then that would be a great solution.

I lived right next door to the guys that developed it and in the Groningen country side you could see them zoom by with some regularity. But where I live now I think I've seen exactly one in five years and that was after it had bowled into a mom on a cargo bike... the stigma roughly identical to driving a Canta on the bike path.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 239350]

They are magical! A radio powered by the transmitter, it's an incredible thing, really. The trick is that the diode is a very low forward drop one, typically Germanium, which has only 0.2V forward drop. But for more magic, you can also use a razor blade or a little bit of lead and then seek for naturally occurring diodes on the surface of the material. These can be even more sensitive than the Germanium ones.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

If it's been trying to get passed for years and hasn't yet, I think it's fair to say the EU very much doesn't want.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126524]

Nokia N900 was really great, Jolla has some of the former team people.

I only jumped into Android after my Symbian phone died, and by then Symbian Belle, with QT and PIPS (PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian OS), it was already shapping great.

That Burning Memo was really a downer.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106768]

> Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code

Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple.

Ironically one of the things that the Quake engine relies on is clever culling. Like Doom, the level is stored in a pre-computed binary space partition tree so that the engine can uniquely determine from what volume you're in what the set of possibly visible quads is (if my memory is correct, oddly the engine uses quads rather than triangles) AND how to draw them in reverse order using painter's algorithm, because the software renderer doesn't have a z-buffer.

https://www.fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/quakeSourceRendit...

The BSP partitioning used to take several minutes to run back in the day.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Carmack used a few, clever, high-impact techniques to achieve effects, which were also "imperfect but good enough".

If you're not Carmack, don't over-optimize until you've run a profiler.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 172648]

ty, I made a pull request: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/ok/pull/111

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106768]

This does remind me of the brief period after the TikTok annexation where people moved to Xiaohongshu (RedNote) .. for about three days.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106768]

All the agentic AI projects remind me of "draw the rest of the owl": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl - there's a lot of steps missing.

Unlike many people, I'm on the trailing edge of this. Company is conservative about AI (still concerned about the three different aspects of IP risk) and we've found it not very good at embedded firmware. I'm also in the set of people who've been negatively polarized by the hype. I might be willing to give it another go, but what I don't see from the impressive Show HN projects (e.g. the WINE clone from last week) is .. how do you get those results?

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 126524]

Some people also don't use protective gear when going downhill biking, it is a matter of feeling lucky.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79043]

There are several in my neighborhood, and I enjoy patronizing them. The only difficulty is the same books sit in them for months at a time. What might work is having a backing store of books, and rotate them through the library once a month or so.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75589]

It took exactly 24 hours, to the minute, from the time I received the "we're generating an export" file until I got the download link, so guessing they're either batching it or deliberately sending after 24 hours because it adds friction to the account deletion process.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 77759]

The way I write code with AI is that I start with a project.md file, where I describe what I want done. I then ask it to make a plan.md file from that project.md to describe the changes it will make (or what it will create if Greenfield).

I then iterate on that plan.md with the AI until it's what I want. I then ask it to make a detailed todo list from the plan.md and attach it to the end of plan.md.

Once I'm fully satisfied, I tell it to execute the todo list at the end of the plan.md, and don't do anything else, don't ask me any questions, and work until it's complete.

I then commit the project.md and plan.md along with the code.

So my back and forth on getting the plan.md correct isn't in the logs, but that is much like intermediate commits before a merge/squash. The plan.md is basically the artifact an AI or another engineer can use to figure out what happened and repeat the process.

The main reason I do this is so that when the models get a lot better in a year, I can go back and ask them to modify plan.md based on project.md and the existing code, on the assumption it might find it's own mistakes.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417152]

A starting point would be excluding Show HNs with generated READMEs, or that lack human-written explanations.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127435]

Actually, all you need is an interface that lets you manipulate the token sequence instead of the text sequence along with a map of the special tokens for the model (most [all?] models have special tokens with defined meanings used in training and inference that are not mapped from character sequences, and native harnesses [the backend APIs of hosted models that only provide a text interface and not a token-level one] leverage them to structure input to the model after tokenization of the various pieces that come to the harnesses API from whatever frontend is in use.)

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125803]

It would be an afrocentric trope because it’s Europeans that have the most neanderthal genes.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99018]

I bet you'd reach an even bigger market if you made this for Twitter, which is awash in this BS.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82274]

I was going to say that I was surprised that enough "normal" users had heard about the Pentagon news story that it would make a difference.

Then I remembered that the app store rankings [1] seem to be based on activity from just the past day or so.

And so a lot of "plugged-in" users switching to Claude all at once then would be enough to briefly send Claude to #1, since the migration would be sizeable in comparison to the normal daily download baseline.

But we can also expect that this would probably be just a blip for a couple of days, as it's unlikely to make much difference in the baseline ratio for the general population.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82274]

Obviously that's a ton more work, and not something most people have any desire to do. They just want to upgrade their phone and have all their data and apps migrate seamlessly.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89485]

> Who ever enables that for users best will get the users.

And if it's anything like Uber, that'll be when the enshittification really kicks into gear.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89485]

I think the engineers working on "AI datacenters… in spaaaaaace!" largely realize it's never really gonna happen.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82274]

There are plenty of politicians who get into politics precisely because they love interacting with everyone.

It doesn't take the pleasure out of it, it doesn't make it transactional. It just gives them incredible job fulfillment, at least in that part of it.

Bill Clinton was famous for this. It was incredibly frustrating to his staff because he was constantly late for his next event, because he always wanted to keep talking to the people he'd just met. They'd have to build in buffer time to plan around it, because otherwise it wound up disrupting his schedule and logistics too much.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
doener ranked #42 [karma: 80372]

I actually miss the days when the US administration in charge at least tried to appear not to be corrupt and malicious.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

If you started learning from the "bottom-up", you wouldn't think it's intimidating. Fortunately, it's never too late to start learning.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Cold War era definitely resulted in a lot of comms infrastructure being hardened against attack.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

It still works if the file doesn't fit in RAM

No it doesn't. If you have a file that's 2^36 bytes and your address space is only 2^32, it won't work.

On a related digression, I've seen so many cases of programs that could've handled infinitely long input in constant space instead implemented as some form of "read the whole input into memory", which unnecessarily puts a limit on the input length.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125803]

What do you want the government to do when your parents decide to abandon civilization and then live out without plumbing in the Oregon wilderness and then your dad abandons the family to do drugs and alcohol? How can you blame “the system” for that?

My wife is also from Oregon. Her grandma was “marry a random truck driver at 14 for a ticket out of town” poor. The guy abandoned the family and drank himself to an early death. And her dad was similarly situated to this guy—my wife lived part of her childhood in a converted barn. Her takeaway from her family history was the opposite: people are often incredibly self destructive and you can’t help those people.

The problem isn’t that lawmakers were never poor. Many were. The problem is that all the ones who were were high-functioning enough to escape poverty. So our systems for helping poor people assume a level of competence and administrative capacity that’s simply beyond the capability of a lot of poor people. For example, a third of uninsured people are actually eligible for Medicaid. Someone in my wife’s family racked up 50,000 in medical bills because they didn’t sign up for Medicaid despite being eligible the whole time.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159904]

I'm dreading having to buy a new rugged Android phone. I have one where all the stuff I don't want is turned off. F-Droid, Firefox, FairEmail, DuckDuckGo, no Google account. Getting a new phone into that configuration may not be possible. The major brands are more and more locked down, and the minor brands can't be trusted.

I have a Cat phone now. The actual manufacturer, Bullett, went bankrupt. Can't get the small rubber parts needed to maintain the waterproofing.

Suggestions?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89485]

Kalshi's pulling a "he's not out of power, he's dead" technicality, apparently. https://bsky.app/profile/slukemorgan.bsky.social/post/3mfyzr...

> "we design the rules to prevent people from profiting from death"

Read the fine print!

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 177148]

For consumer ChatGPT accounts, go to their privacy portal [1] and, first, delete your GPTs, and then, second, delete your account.

[1] https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

XML has been "spooky old technology" for over a decade now. It's heyday was something like 2002.

Nobody dares advertise the XML capabilities of their product (which back then everybody did), nobody considers it either hot new thing (like back then) or mature - just obsolete enterprise shit.

It's about as popular now as J2EE, except to people that think "10 years ago" means 1999.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

If anything, memory ain't getting cheaper, disks aren't either, and as for graphics cards, forget it.

People wont be competing with even a current 2026 SOTA from their home LLM nowhere soon. Even actual SOTA LLM providers are not competing either - they're losing money on energy and costs, hopping to make it up on market capture and win the IPO races.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #46 [karma: 75589]

Only for very narrow definitions of "we".

I think it's pretty obvious when betting on events that are inherently just decisions by one or a few people (e.g. when will Trump launch an attack on Iran, when will a company launch a new product, will some company acquire another one, etc.) that they will attract insider trading and corruption by their very nature - all that's necessary is to have information about the decision maker. This is fundamentally different than events that are subject to forces that no single individual controls - e.g. who will win an election, where will a crypto price be in a year, movie box office results, etc.

I think betting on "single decision maker" events is just a "sucker is born every minute"-type bet.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99786]

MCP makes sense when you're not running a full container-based Unix environment for your agent to run Bash commands inside of.

danso ranked #9 [karma: 167049]

I literally discovered Ghostty yesterday when googling "best terminal macos" and surfaced a ~year-old reddit thread recommending it [0]. Just needed something other than Terminal so I could Cmd-Tab between distinct command-line work (e.g. claude code and ipython tabs). Was nice to find something that just worked

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1loiw2z/comment/n0...

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82271]

It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.

The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.

It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.

coldtea ranked #33 [karma: 90312]

>What’s the importance of then learning to contribute if they will probably jump ship anyway when they get good enough? Your HR department is not going to give them a market rate raise to keep them - see salary compression and inversion.

Obviously that hasn't historically been true, else there wouldn't be any senior developers as companies would have wised up to that and nobody would hire them as juniors.

- Not everybody is a job hopper (even in Silicon Valley one sees that most junior FAANG devs stick around for a good while).

- The HR department is absolutely going to give junior developers that pass the cut after a year or so a market rate raise.

- In limited hiring periods, they'd be grateful to have the chance to stick around, while in bullish "boom" periods companies can afford to spend to keep people, expand and give them bigger roles, and so on. It's in the in-between that it becomes more problematic, but now we're in a "limited hiring" era.

>Yes not having juniors become seniors is an industry problem. But my goal is to reach my company’s quarterly and anual goals - not what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

That's how companies fail.

It's also not a good strategy at the personal level. If you command more devs, you get more leverage.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125803]

> all over the Epstein files

I’ve been too busy to read them, can you point me to what you think the smoking gun is?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107012]

“Prices take the elevator up and the stairs down.” Sellers will make peace eventually that their prices are unreasonable, with those who must sell leading the downward price trajectory and setting comparables.

There is a price any property will sell at. Price discovery continues. To sell, lower your price until you have a firm offer.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 125803]

Sunni Muslims will be upset too, because Israel was involved.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 99786]

My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.

I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.

I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106768]

There's several buildings in Edinburgh that have designation "military base" (mostly Territorial Army) and are within a few hundred yards of a school or nursery. Probably the same in many cities.

It's up to the people with bombs not to bomb schools.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 80488]

I have tried every possible setting but SSH ends up breaking more often than not. As opposed to iTerm which just works.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 89485]

They’d ignore it like they did with copyright law.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 186366]

Maybe the briefing didn’t specify if the Spanish speaker was or wasn’t supposed to speak Spanish.

signa11 ranked #37 [karma: 86762]

prolog in another skin is called erlang you know.

doener ranked #42 [karma: 80372]

Sorry, I did not notice that this article is from 2024.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 103669]
stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

What's the conspiracy theory here? That Samsung don't allow unlocking the bootloader?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

Wait, Trump didn't kill any US citizen? Have we been watching the same news?

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

Seriously, it's a great time to be a hacker.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 76020]

Thanks, I'm glad you like them!

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

I've never seen the word "delve" show up with such frequency in the pre-AI era, but now it's an overwhelmingly large signal of LLM-generated text, so I'm not sure where that came from. Ditto for vomiting emojis everywhere.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro.

It's clear that no one at Apple (or any other big tech company these days) has ever watched old demoscene productions, then contemplated their performance against the available computing power of their current products and the experience thereof, and thought "something is very wrong".

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 106768]

However there's one overriding concern which has got American to this point: "anti woke". That is, reinstating the load bearing racism and sexism.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88169]

Not sure we need another term for this, as "utilities" has been the accepted term for various one-off programs that do miscellaneous things, and of which power-users will tend to have a rather large collection of.

However, the term reminded me of a memorable interaction I had many decades ago with an old woman who wanted to write a program in x86 Asm to manage various aspects of the plants in her garden. (She did succeed at doing so.)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 159904]

Can you still install F-Droid?

Can you still run without a Google account?