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.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

Crypto for websites is completely broken (because the server can serve you whatever it wants), so doing crypto for websites at all is suspicious.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

Is there a good TL; DR for what's going on with Matt, Silver Lake, WordPress and this?

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 394574]

Because not having to trust the provider is the entire premise of these services, and without that premise, you might as well just store things in GDrive.

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]
stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

Yes and yes, pretty much all tech workers here speak English, and there's talent available. I don't know about firing, I imagine it's mostly the same as other European countries.

As the sibling said, there are tech conferences, Athens and Thessaloniki are your best bets for offices, and Thessaloniki has recently seen very large growth in the tech sector, as firms like Accenture, Pfizer, etc have built offices here.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

Was it glioblastoma in the end? The author never said.

nostrademons ranked #34 [karma: 78883]

It'd depend heavily on what the specific circumstances of the FBI's actions were.

Creating a coin to investigate pump & dumps is not entrapment. That's a legal action, and one that many legit people and businesses do. It's akin to standing up a server on the Internet to see who hacks it.

If they approached a market maker who was not otherwise marketing pump & dumps and said "Hey, I have this coin, can you pump it up so I can exit with a profit?" and the market maker replies "This is not normally something we do, we're not interested" and then the FBI keeps approaching them with progressively higher prices until they give in, they'd have a good case for entrapment. If they threaten the market maker's family, it'd be a very good case. But note that even if it's the FBI doing the approaching, but the market maker just says "Sure, here's the price", it's still not entrapment. In that situation they're still clearly willing to commit crimes.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 394574]

This is the kind of copyediting advice ChatGPT gives. I think everyone gets that the author doesn't know what you, in particular, think about TypedDicts. Read things more charitably; this is not a good use of time to discuss.

ceejayoz ranked #38 [karma: 74751]

It’s only entrapment if you push someone into doing something they wouldn’t normally do.

If the FBI threatens your family to get you to commit a crime, that’s entrapment.

If you pull up to a sex worker and proposition them, but it turns out to be a cop, that’s not entrapment. Because you were looking to commit the crime.

crazygringo ranked #43 [karma: 70157]

Yup, using "you" in headlines is a pattern that needs to die.

I get that it's attention-grabbing, but it's because it's rude.

You don't know anything about me. You don't know what I think or what I already know or what I won't believe.

I know it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's just one of those little aggravating things that makes life just a little bit worse each time you come across them.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

At the 25 year mark? A sizable part of the movie-going audience wasn't even born then.

(Looked for statistics on movie-goer demographics. Found this on Statistica: "In 2019, there were 5.5 million frequent moviegoers aged 60 or above, up from 6.6 million in the previous year."[1] They need to upgrade their LLM.)

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251466/us-movie-theater-...

jedberg ranked #39 [karma: 73028]

FWIW, in a lot of cases Amazon (and Google and Meta and all of those top tier companies requiring RTO) do in fact pay at least 30% more. And in the case of Google and Meta, they provide food and other things too.

People are really upset at Amazon because the office doesn't provide anything more than what they can get at home (and in a lot of cases provides less). At least at the others you can get some extra stuff you can't get at home.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

What kind of costs are associated with something like this, and what sort of visitors are you getting? I'm wondering what kind of infrastructure you need.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

Because they couldn't just also move off of the blockchain?

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

I still want to know if companies that can get out of their office leases still want employees to be in the office. Amazon tends to own real estate outright, but many companies don't.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

I don't know, if the film starts at 9, start it at 9, don't start it at 9:15. I don't want to see the trailers, I'm just there for the film. Start the trailers at 8:45 if you want, but have the actual film start at the time it says, so I know how to skip the trailers I don't want to see.

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

Have you asked them if they would pay more for more features? Perhaps some work to be done around perceived value and pricing, and to understand if putting more resources in is actually going to generate the revenue lift you’re looking for.

jerf ranked #29 [karma: 85435]

A Lord of the Rings Extended Edition replay recently went through the theaters a couple of months ago, so I took my two sons, one of which had seen it already, one for which they were new movies.

To my absolute shock, at the 7pm movie time, the movie... started.

No muss. No fuss. No previews. No ads. Just the New Line Cinema logo and the opening monologue. Be there on the time shown on the ticket or miss the movie.

How amazingly nice that was. Just fantastic. And those movies benefit from nothing else trying to wedge themselves into the mood, but I can say that about a lot of movies.

It was a bit of a trip and I was being causal about getting there on time. I did, but not by much. At least the next two days I knew what I needed to do.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

Who eats the cost of a stolen package?

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 106064]

> but at one time HN had people with critical reasoning skills reading

As long as HN keeps people with reading skills at all...

The GP directly argued against the blog post, and in favor of showing the extras before the movie, because "majority of Re-release audiences have seen the movie before and don't want to sit through the credits for extras".

(I happen to disagree with the argument on the basis of "who on Earth cares about extras anyway", but still, GP correctly made a coherent point.)

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

> With what money?

The world’s richest man owns it as a plaything.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 109516]

As Portuguese I have my doubts about this actually being successful.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 109516]

C23 has just been ratified, and C2y has already quite a few proposals.

Programming languages are like any other software product, evolution or stagnation.

Eventually they might implode, however whatever comes after will follow the same cycle yet again.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

Some OBB locomotives have their PWM systems tuned so that when they change frequency, they're always on a standard musical note. There's one example of that in the video. It's a cute feature, people like it, and it's probably all in software.

anigbrowl ranked #24 [karma: 91157]

No it isn't. There people are not clueless ignoramuses, they're paranoid assholes who have chosen to weaponize their dislike of anything 'official' for political ends. There is a market for propaganda and it is thriving, because many people want their biases reinforced.

Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.

There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.

crazygringo ranked #43 [karma: 70157]

I love the idea of finding new and better interfaces for spreadsheets, and I applaud this effort!

That being said, if you want this to be useful for people in general, not just programmers:

- People like WYSIWIG. Markdown and the split-pane view seems to be something only programmers like. So I'd suggest being able to do everything, or mostly everything, directly in the rendered/HTML panel. (Maybe the Markdown panel is for power users only)

- This is great for working with individual calculations, but a lot (most?) of spreadsheet use is about applying formulas to whole rows, columns, and tables of values. I see you support basic tables, but they're a huge pain to encode/format/edit in Markdown, and I don't see any ability to support things like 200 rows x 5 columns and do things like calculate sums and averages

So I think there's a ton of potential here! But I think WYSIWIG and easy tabular data support are going to be key here for broader usage. While the kinds of programmers this seems aimed at now, are already using Jupyter notebooks and Matplotlib for this kind of thing. (Like, when you describe "why did I build this", I don't understand why you didn't just fire up a Google Colab notebook.)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

Maybe people are getting dumber because of COVID.[1] Even after recovery, having mild COVID seems to cost 3 IQ points.[1] Reinfection, 2 more IQ points.[2] This is for people who have recovered, and does not include "long COVID".

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-iq-brain-age-cognitive...

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2400189

anigbrowl ranked #24 [karma: 91157]

I hate this kind of mendacity. Wanting to protect their dairy industry is understandable, but perpetuating a fraud upon consumers is not the way to do it.

zdw ranked #16 [karma: 117799]

I think that's game footage, but not sure what game it is. The train game or sim genre has a bunch of folks who go incredibly deep and accurate in their representations of real trains.

If you want an incredibly detailed 3 hour history of the genre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vwE_p9SCXw

Tomte ranked #8 [karma: 150086]

Players comfortable with the ASCII graphics version (the one that existed for years) often just paid for Steam release with pretty graphics just to support the brothers. And then kept playing the "hardcore" version they are used to.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

> similar to the Michelin restaurant awards

Michelin stars remain coveted and are a sure-fire way for fine-dining restaurants to fill their seats.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

> Is "falls to" the correct interpretation here?

Y…yes? When a number is lower than it was before it fell? If I’m supposed to be flying at 10,000 feet and I go from 140 to 120, I fell even as I remain 2,000 feet above my target.

dragonwriter ranked #15 [karma: 118287]

> Programmers should not be empowered to perform roles for which they are an ill fit. In general, programmers are detailists who speak the language of the computer

“Programmers” are not, software developers/software engineers, who are more like systems analysts than programmers in scope of job role at the full working level, though generally employed in organizations that do not also employ separate programmers, however, are and should be.

The kind of organization with wide organization/and interaction distance between users and people working on code with large numbers of over-the-wall handoffs in between is obsolete in many areas of software development because of advances in tooling, because of recognition of the quality costs imposed by that structure given the dynamics of many application domains where whiteboard analysis without real active use is not effective in getting accurate requirements, and because of the costs of that organization style which has long cycle times and high coordination overhead.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

> Would you argue that people who smoke crack aren’t doing cocaine?

Yes. This is true colloquially and legally.

crazygringo ranked #43 [karma: 70157]

Government bonds aren't buying influence with anyone though.

Campaign contributions, sure.

But the idea that there is any kind of compulsion for citizens to buy government bonds seems false. I don't know, maybe in some dictatorships or something, but certainly not in western democracies.

JumpCrisscross ranked #9 [karma: 146233]

> Swiss constitution was actually modeled after that of the US

“The Amercian national constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was constructed on the Swiss model of a confederacy of some over sovereign states. Then, Americans repudiated confederal government in 1787 as impotent and unworkable and adapted a new federal constitution. The opponents of the new charter, the Anti Federalists argued that a Swiss style government was still a viable model which offered the best hope for the preservation of American liberty. The Swiss themselves repudiated confederate government in 1848 using many of the same arguments Americans had marshalled against it in 1787 and adapted a Federal constitution modelled after the American constitution of 1787. After the Civil War many American state and local governments adapted constitutional reforms borrowed from the Swiss. The initiative and referendum – which continues to this hour to give the politics of California and other influential states their distinctive tone.”

https://www.legalanthology.ch/hutson_swiss-and-american-stat...

paxys ranked #48 [karma: 66489]

No date printed on a food item is ever going to be accurate to the day. Unless something is wildly out of date, just use your senses. If it looks, smells and feels fine, it is fine. You’d be surprised by how much longer everything in your friend (and outside) can last.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 109516]

As if WebAssembly doesn't impose similar restrictions, with specific kinds of toolchains, and now the whole components mess.

This WebAssembly marketing is incredible.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #44 [karma: 68211]

No, removed. "Sell by" is not the same as the now mandated "Best if used by"

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 109516]

From my point of view, it builds on BEAM, and while Erlang might have been a success story in telecommunications, there is no reason for any of my employers to use it instead of JVM or CLR, and the languages available to them.

PaulHoule ranked #35 [karma: 78585]

So? The FBI seizes a lot of crypto during investigations and probably finds it best to keep it as is until the fate of the assets is known; maybe it goes back to its owner (may or may mot have been holding the “keys”) who might want it as it was. If the government keeps the money they would need a sophisticated trading program to sell large amounts without moving prices against themselves even if their goal was “turn ETH to USD quickly but economically”.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 93835]

Cloudflare get the best deals on bandwidth. It will usually be cheaper to serve a terabyte from Cloudflare than to do it yourself: you could probably run the wiki on the free plan!

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 93835]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Bank hit $15bn of unrealized losses and exploded. It was destroyed by the collective action of its depositors in a classic bank run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_Quinn is another example; he managed to persuade the bank, via accomplices, to lend him €451 million to buy its own shares in a sort of circular pyramid scheme to inflate its value.

pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 93835]

Not quite - "everything is a blob" has very different concurrency semantics to "everything is a POSIX file". You can't write into the middle of a blob, for example. This makes certain use cases harder but the concurrency of blobs is much easier to reason about and get right.

Personally I think you might actually need a DB to do the work of a DB, and you can't as easily build one on top of a blob store as on a block device. But I do think most distributed systems should use blob and/or DB and not the filesystem.

jerf ranked #29 [karma: 85435]
toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

> Eventually, in 1994, the economist Lant Pritchett discovered the most powerful national fertility predictor ever detected. That decisive factor turned out to be simple: what women want. Because survey data conventionally focus on female fertility preferences, not those of their husbands or partners, scholars know much more about women’s desire for children than men’s. Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

Mods are aware, there is a backlog task to ask for confirmation when flagging.

bookofjoe ranked #31 [karma: 81047]
toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]
pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 109516]

Maybe I suffer from brain damage due to knowing C++ since 1993, starting with Turbo C++ 1.0 for MS-DOS, however Rust is indeed getting into C++'s complexity.

Lets not forget people tend to compare 40 year old language complexity, ampered by backwards compatibility and large scale industry deployment, with one that is around 10 years old, with lots of features still only available on nightly.

The Unstable Book has an endless list of features that might land on Rust.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 109516]

While I agree, it was what eventually made us move into .NET, and the founders of the startup I started in 1999, eventually went on to create OutSystems.

Too much code being rewriten from Tcl into C for performance and scalabity reasons, and it still doesn't have a proper JIT.

Now as a way to script C code, it is even easier than CPython.

jgrahamc ranked #25 [karma: 90383]

He didn't. If you break down that field you see:

    $2a$
    10$
    Bho2e2ptPnFRJyJKIn5Bie
    hIDiEwhjfMZFVRM9fRCarKXkemA3Pxu
    ScottHelme
2a = bcrypt, 10 = 2^10 rounds, Bho2e2ptPnFRJyJKIn5Bie is the 22 character salt, hIDiEwhjfMZFVRM9fRCarKXkemA3Pxu is the 31 character hash value, and then there's ScottHelme. Best guess is that the archive.org folks just appended the user name to the stored hash. Maybe once upon a time they didn't have a username column in their table and this was a creative way of adding it.

ColinWright ranked #12 [karma: 127732]

This isn't my usual kind of post, and this isn't the sort of thing that usually survives here on HN, but I saw this and immediately thought of the genuine generation gap I sometimes see here.

I remember coding in BASIC on a TRS-80, smashing the stack to get to machine code[0], writing my own monitor program and assembler, then a compiler in BASIC from BASIC direct to Z80.

The story of Mel[1] is real, and I really do think people should have the opportunity to see how things were, and recognise that things now are AMAZING !!!

[0] Not even assembler

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=story+mel

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

I'm sure you're familiar with versions. What happens when your software depends on a libc that has a function that was removed on the newer version, or added since the previous one? Now older or newer versions of libc don't work with your software, even though they're "there".

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

If my job is to prioritize work and understand all the tradeoffs involved in that work, you can be damn sure I'll go understand the tradeoffs. If Product don't understand that technical debt makes things slower, and exactly how much slower it makes them, then they aren't doing their jobs.

My current role is "Director of Product and Technology", so I have to look after both domains. I have deep knowledge in technology, but if I'm not going around the company asking other departments what the impact of the work they want is (and what happens when they don't get it), I'm just plain bad at the product side of my role.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]
pjc50 ranked #22 [karma: 93835]

This is small-p politics.

In a hierarchical organization, you can give directions to your direct reports. You cannot give directions sideways. You certainly cannot give directions upwards, unless it's for something legally binding like safety.

This means you need to ask nicely, to persuade, invite, and probably compromise. It's a very different set of skills.

(a "non hierarchical" organization has a hierarchy too, but it's more fluid and hard to see)

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 159284]

> insist on uppercasing reserved words,

It makes code a lot more readable

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 66789]

Unfortunately, clicking outside the modal (by far the biggest target to hit) doesn't actually close the modal, you need to click the (relatively small) close button.

jedberg ranked #39 [karma: 73028]

They could still spend the money in academia if they didn't the option to spend it themselves. When I was in college we had labs named after different companies, and those companies sponsored the research in those labs and had first dibs on commercialization.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 106064]

I do, but only because it's a stupid-ass shortcut I keep triggering on accident.

jedberg ranked #39 [karma: 73028]

> But some right-handers who have been forced to (by breaking an arm for example) can learn to write with the left hand.

I'm right handed and taught myself to write left handed out of boredom. In college I would just start taking notes with my left hand in classes where they prof conveyed information slowly enough that I had the time to do it. It was a good way to stay engaged and awake.

As a consequence I can still today, 25 years later, write with both hands (although to be fair, my handwriting is terrible with both hands so that could be why it's hard to tell the difference).

jedberg ranked #39 [karma: 73028]

I started learning pottery at 43. Four years later I'm decent at it. It's all about practice. I do two hours of classes and two hours of practice each week.

Some people in my class started learning after me but put in many more hours of practice, and are a lot better than I am (and also started as adults in their 30s and 40s).

I also started doing drawing classes with my daughter during the pandemic. I'm not very good at it because I only did it once a week for an hour, but I got better!

It's really just all about practice.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 394574]

Java Applets and ActiveX had less-mediated (Applets, somewhat; ActiveX, not at all) access to the underlying OS. The "outer platform" of WASM is approximately the Javascript runtime; the "outer platform" of Applets is execve(2).

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

Overview of guardrails - reasonably good video. [1]

Motor Trend: "America's vehicles are fat, and its guardrails suck."[2] Motor Trend is critical of the U.Texas tests, because they didn't test larger gas-powered trucks. The current guardrail test weight for pickup trucks is 5000 pounds. That was increased from 4500 pounds in 2019. Current Ford F-150 trucks can be over 7,000 pounds, empty. The Rivian EV pickup is listed as 7,148 lbs. The Hummer EV is over 9000 lbs.

Guardrails have ratings - TL1 through TL6. TL3 is most common. That's the 5000 pound pickup truck level. The standard test is not straight-on; it's 45 degrees. After all, these things are alongside roads, and are rarely hit straight on at high speed.

The last big problem with guardrails was collisions with guardrail ends, especially at freeway offramps. There are good solutions for that in place now. Take a good look at the high-traffic Interstate offramp you see. There are various different crushable systems used, and they work reasonably well. The main problem is replacing them after use. They're a consumable.

Low center of gravity is a big problem. Guardrail heights have been increased over the last few decades as cars got bigger. Low-CG electrics push their way under. Notice, though, that the Tesla test resulted in the vehicle traveling parallel to the guardrail after the vehicle went under it. Enough energy was absorbed to redirect the vehicle. The Rivian went clear through.

Maybe for pickups above some weight drivers should have to have a commercial driver's license, the one you need to drive a real truck.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6CKltZfToY

[2] https://www.motortrend.com/news/guardrail-safety-study-evs-p...

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

"But those clouds and servers will not be maintained indefinitely, and once they go down, the cars that depend on them will lose features that owners may be relying upon."

This may prevent cars being advertised for "sale" in California after January 1.

AB 2426: Consumer protection: false advertising: digital goods.[1]

“Digital application or game” means any application or game that a person accesses and manipulates using a specialized electronic gaming device, computer, mobile device, tablet, or other device with a display screen, including any add-ons or additional content for that application or game.

That's a car with an infotainment system.

This law makes it a crime to offer something "for sale" if it can be remotely disabled later, absent a separate acknowledgement that it's a lease.

[1] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB2426/2023

steveklabnik ranked #23 [karma: 91451]

I write it in play.rust-lang.org, then indent using the vim keybindings. I do this even for not rust code.

userbinator ranked #33 [karma: 79318]

one piece of this was noticing EVs weigh 20 to 30% more than their gas-powered counterparts.

...which isn't much on the absolute scale; the difference in weight between a small sedan and a larger one, or an SUV or truck. If EVs weren't being stopped by guardrails, neither were the latter.

thunderbong ranked #21 [karma: 96957]

This is a fascinating article.

> The true romantics of the ocean, some seahorses never re-mate, even after their partner dies.

> The most well-known and fascinating aspect of seahorse reproduction is male pregnancy. Male seahorses aren’t the only animals that put a great deal of effort into raising their young, but they are the only ones that become pregnant, subject to all aspects of the phenomenon—even stretch marks.

> On a gorgonian coral as big as a 34-inch television screen, these individuals spent their entire lives confined to an area as small in some cases as three adjoining Post-it Notes

paxys ranked #48 [karma: 66489]

Then you really need to pick better investments. Say, any broad market index fund.

crazygringo ranked #43 [karma: 70157]

I really wonder if it has something to do with humans using tools, and it just works better for a tribe if most people use tools with the same "handedness", because they can share more and be more efficient. Like if hunters could swap bows when one broke, their tribe would get more meat?

paxys ranked #48 [karma: 66489]

Even if you paid by credit card, there's zero chance they processed the payment themselves.

zdw ranked #16 [karma: 117799]

Second recommendation for MacPorts

It predates Homebrew by a bit and is under Apple's http://www.macosforge.org umbrella of OSS projects, so as close to 1st party support as you can get.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 394574]

In what way am I "out of luck"? It's trivial to express a tree, including one with backlinks, in Java.

jedberg ranked #39 [karma: 73028]

It seems some people are surprised that they were able to buy data on who voted and how they lean.

I wasn't surprised because I worked on a campaign before. It's ridiculous how much information you can get about voters for not a lot of money.

You can get their phone number and email address that they provided with their voter registration, and the do not call list does not even apply (nor the do not spam list). You can call and email with reckless abandon.

It's kinda crazy how basically every law meant to protect people from spam has a special carve out for political campaigns.

ceejayoz ranked #38 [karma: 74751]

Does this extend to putting a military base next to a shopping mall?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaKirya

What’s the permissible distance in a three mile wide strip of land among the most densely populated in the world?

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

If you're not having any more kids (or are childfree by choice), no need for the fallopian tubes, and the ovarian cancer reduction risk is material [1]. Bilateral salpingectomy (or a "bisalp") is also the standard of care for voluntary permanent sterilization. In the US, this procedure is covered at 100% as preventative care if your health insurance is ACA compliant, or government provided (mentioned as relevant but this piece is from Canada).

(IVF is still an option after a bisalp, with a potential reduction in success rate)

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137013/ ("Bilateral salpingectomy to reduce the risk of ovarian/fallopian/peritoneal cancer in women at average risk: a position statement of the Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology (KSOG)")

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8785125/ ("Ovarian cancer is the seventh leading cause of cancer mortality in women worldwide, and the fifth leading cause in women in Europe and the USA. National UK statistics report five-year survival for ovarian cancer of 31.0%. This poor survival is partly attributable to late stage at diagnosis: in both UK and US populations, about two-thirds of women have advanced disease (stage III or IV) at diagnosis.")

ceejayoz ranked #38 [karma: 74751]

> WordPress has recently updated their terms of use to reflect this.

That’s… a very odd way of portraying this.

The policy, for like a decade, was:

“The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1foknoq/the_word...

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

Build systems at scale to serve the human.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

Here'e an old article about how they do it.[1]

The Waffle House storm center.[2]

They have an emergency menu mode. Only a few items are available, and those are all ones which can be prepared rapidly in bulk.

Waffle House locations deliberately do not use any systems which require continuous Internet connectivity.

[1] https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/waffle-house-stay-open-...

[2] https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1843844655743688806

anigbrowl ranked #24 [karma: 91157]

They have a Telegram channel and there's some blurb about it being pushback on US support of Israel, but it reads as bullshit. Probably a script kiddie.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 72108]

What country wouldn't love to have a Google? And the US wants to break its good fortune up.

Like all dominant companies, Google will eventually fall via strangulation by its internal bureaucracy. There's no reason to hand the market over to another country.

jerf ranked #29 [karma: 85435]

"I'm often thwarted by the fact that for anything requiring remotely decent speeds, python most of the time already delegates to C extensions and so any rewrite is not as useful"

Be sure you verify this is the case for whatever you think it is, though. Pure Python is so much slower than compiled languages (not just Rust) that you don't have to do much percentage-wise in pure Python before you've badly fallen behind in performance versus the pure-compiled alternatives.

I think this is asserted a lot more often then it is benchmarked. I am reminded of the way people for a long time asserted that the performance of web languages doesn't matter because you spend all your time waiting for the database, so it never mattered. People would just whip this argument out reflexively. It turns out that if you take a non-trivial codebase written in such a language and actually benchmark it, it is often not true, because as applications grow they tend to rapidly outgrow "all my code is just running a SELECT and slamming the results with minimal processing out to the web stream". I hear this a lot less often than I used to, probably through the slow-but-effective process of a lot of individuals learning the hard way this isn't true.

I've seen a lot of Python code. Very little of it that was not "data science" was just a bit of scripting around lots of large C-based objects, such that Python wasn't doing much actual work. And even some of that "data science" was falling back to pure Python without realizing because NumPy actually makes that shockingly easy.

ColinWright ranked #12 [karma: 127732]

For other HN discussions of this phenomenon you can see some previous submissions of another article on it.

That article doesn't have the nice animations, but it is from 14 years ago ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3995615

And from October 29, 2010:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1846682

pseudolus ranked #4 [karma: 160221]

Aside from Klimt it could be argued that Maurizio Cattelan has successfully incorporated gold into his work - although in the form of sculpture. His work "America", a solid gold functioning toilet, attracted quite a few crowds (apparently over 100K people "used" it), one notable theft, and certainly made a statement. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_(Cattelan)

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 143578]

My big problem with Rust is too much "unsafe" code. Every time I've had to debug a hard problem, it's been in unsafe code in someone else's crate. Or in something that was C underneath. I'm about 50,000 lines of Rust into a metaverse client, and my own code has zero "unsafe". I'm not even calling "mem", or transmuting anything. Yet this has both networking and graphics, and goes fast. I just do not see why people seem to use "unsafe" so much.

Rust does need a better way to do backlinks. You can do it with Rc, RefCell, and Weak, but it involves run-time borrow checks that should never fail. Those should be checked at compile time. Detecting a double borrow is the same problem as detecting a double lock of a mutex by one thread, which is being worked on.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #44 [karma: 68211]

Hmm, I can imagine the comments would be a shit show, but I personally am glad I saw this submission. It's something I hadn't seen previously before, and while Hinton's views on AI safety are well-known at this point, I didn't know he had such a strong opinion of Altman. The quote from the article is:

"I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman."

Like, that's not subtle, and he said that while accepting his Nobel! I think that alone makes it relevant and newsworthy and not deserving of a flag.

Edit: As an aside, has dang or anyone else ever said why HN doesn't support a "lock comments" option, instead of just an outright flag? While I definitely think that most of the value I get from HN is from the comments, there are cases like this one, where particularly flame war-inducing topics still have informative value in the article.

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

If you think in systems, you can see the python squeezing everywhere: companies squeezing for profits as labor costs increase due to structural demographics and the cost of money has increased substantially from low or zero rates, public investment being squeezed because taxes won't go up to pay for teachers and ancillary staff (1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to retain teachers [1] [2]), etc. I have seen pay for school bus drivers in fairly standard COL areas approach $25-$30/hr. That is what it takes to put people behind the wheel for those jobs now.

It's a natural experiment to behold as a curious scholar of systems, but also deeply disappointing to watch as Rome does not burn, but fades out in various ways. We could make better choices; we choose not to at scale.

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/16/4/558/97130/Are-All-F...

[2] https://direct.mit.edu/view-large/figure/4256961/edfp_a_0031...

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #44 [karma: 68211]

Sorry to repeat the "if you're not paying, you're the product, not the consumer" adage, but I think that's critically important when evaluating Google. These things aren't free, they're paid for by billions in advertising, and it's not like Google was the first to figure out this business model - radio and TV was "free" in the same manner for decades prior.

I honestly would love it we would ditch surveillance capitalism and went back to a simpler option of paying for products and services. I think that essentially all of the complaints you here about Google (their lack of any responsiveness/customer support, their constant spying on users, the constant "Google graveyard" of discontinued products, their current corporate ossification, etc.) can be directly linked to the fact that users don't pay for their products.

toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]
bookofjoe ranked #31 [karma: 81047]
toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]
hn_throwaway_99 ranked #44 [karma: 68211]

As the article says, the PBC structure has never been tested in court, therefore this is all speculation at this point, so it seems a bit premature to despair.

Yes, a big benefit of a PBC is that you're not only beholden to increasing shareholder value - that's obviously inherent to the PBC model, and I think it could be used for both "good and bad". At the same time, PBCs need to say what their "public benefit" is, and (my understanding is that) they have fiduciary responsibility to others besides just shareholders. This, I imagine they could also be sued by people saying they aren't fulfilling their public benefit mission. Point being, PBCs have pros and cons, and it will take some court cases to find out where the line truly lies.

bookofjoe ranked #31 [karma: 81047]
toomuchtodo ranked #26 [karma: 88469]

Florida has neither the will nor the belief system to properly engineer or pay for the climate future that awaits it.

(Florida resident)

anigbrowl ranked #24 [karma: 91157]

One of the annoying things about widespread use of computers has been the butchering of apostrophes by 'smart' quotes because programmers won't take the time to develop understanding and appropriate user interface, eg 1979 -> [open quote]79. Even if the user knows it's wrong, getting the computer to use the closing quote mark instead of 'correcting' it is a trial.

WalterBright ranked #40 [karma: 72108]

English is a barbarian language with French nouns, as a result of the Norman conquest of England.

Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).

anigbrowl ranked #24 [karma: 91157]

Let me save you a click: Goldsmithing Was the Klimt Family Business

This is TMZ-level art journalism.

crazygringo ranked #43 [karma: 70157]

The article doesn't mention it, but am I right in assuming this basically comes from McDonald's? There are a lot of places around the world that copy the "'s" where it doesn't exist natively, but only for restaurant names or similar -- like "Bob's" is the McDonald's clone in Brazil [1].

I'm mostly curious whether "Rosi's" and "Kati's" in the article are seen by Germans as intentionally trying to look "foreign", rather than the apostrophe "invading" German.

Like, if I go to a Sausage Haus, I'm not exactly worrying about "Haus" creeping into English to replace "House". Nor would I ever call it the "idiot's house" because that would be crazy insulting and perjorative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s

jgrahamc ranked #25 [karma: 90383]

You can visit my retro-computing site: twostopbits.com. No AI there!