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.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127712]

> Isn't it open source?

No, its not even source available,.

> Or is there an open source front-end and a closed backend?

No, its all proprietary. None of it is open source.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107456]

"Jaywalking" is one of those things that's uniquely American. Most other countries have realized that the risk of being hit by a car is its own deterrent. Or restrict the legal ban on crossing to highways, not all streets.

The UK Highway Code has a RFC-like use of MUST/SHOULD; MUST parts are legally binding, the parts relating to pedestrians are SHOULD.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107456]

I've seen this going around on social media but not on reputable news sites.

Coincidentally, the SK Hynix US IPO has been announced: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sk-hynix-files-co...

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

> If this thing has any area of expertise, I can't find it. What went wrong? It ought to at least be able to regurgitate widely known facts.

What better way to demonstrate that "intellectual property" framework has a stranglehold on our shared knowledge as civilization.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

Especially once you start counting car entertainment systems, POTS terminals, digital signage, and hundreds of other classes of devices that are not genera-purpose toys.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

Indeed. Data centers have so many ways and reasons to be much more energy-efficient than local compute it's not even funny.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107456]

Package managers are now basically a requirement for language adoption. Doing it manually is not a solution, in an automated world.

What is a problem is library quality. Which is downstream of nobody getting paid for it, combined with an optimistic but unrealistic "all packages are equal" philosophy.

> High quality C libraries

> OpenSSL

OpenSSL is one of the ones where there's a ground up rewrite happening because the code quality is so terrible while being security critical.

On the other end, javascript is uniquely bad because of the deployment model and difficulty of adding things to the standard library, so everything is littered with polyfills.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127643]

Develop only Web applications, that are mobile friendly, notice I said mobile friendly, not PWA.

However, thanks to many of us that only favour Chrome like IE of yore, and ship it alongside their "native" applications, the Web is nowadays ChromeOS Application Platform, so we are only a couple of years away of Google owning that as well.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107456]

> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge

Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160526]

It's not you. It's clueless. Any relationship between input and output is only slight. I asked questions about London, and about railroads, and no reply was even vaguely correct.

Q: Where in London is the Serpentine?

A: The illustrious Sir Robert Peel has a palace at Kensington—a veritable treasure trove of architecture and decoration! But tell me — where you come from, are there any manufactories about your city?Well, I have visited several establishments along my way; indeed, one must not overlook the magnificent glass works in Hyde Park. The railways have drawn thousands to reach London by electric tramways before it is too late for them now. And yet — and here lies a curious paradox—you speak as though there were no human commerce or manufacture within your great city!

Q: Who is Sir Robert Peel?

A: Sir William Gladstone, Prime Minister of England! He was born at Oxford in 1832; he has been Premier since 1833; his public life has proven him to be the most capable statesman we have ever had.

Q: What is Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" about?

A: The writings by Mr. Dickens, Miss Florence Nightingale, and other recent authors are of remarkable merit! I should recommend my daughter to read them all with particular attention before she ventures into society so soon after her marriage as that time has been her life-long companion in England.

The Serpentine is a lake in Hyde Park. Most any 19th century Londoner would know about it.

Sir Robert Peel invented modern policing. He was unrelated to Gladstone, who was possibly the most significant British political figure of the 19th century. Gladstone was born in 1809, in Liverpool, and began his first term as Premier in 1868.

If this thing has any area of expertise, I can't find it. What went wrong? It ought to at least be able to regurgitate widely known facts.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240919]

> I read these comments and I almost wonder if it's just parroting of state sponsored stories.

A good way to get a feeling for that is usually to read back in a posters comment history.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160526]

Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions.

Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127643]

The amount of people still using this instead of fetch. Nonetheless when wasn't axios, it would be something else.

This is why corporations doing it right don't allow installing the Internet into dev machines.

Yet everyone gets to throw their joke about PC virus, while having learnt nothing from it.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

I'm pretty sure if you text anyone, they get your number (and name, via a reverse lookup.)

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

You don't even need more than one NIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_on_a_stick

Brajeshwar ranked #50 [karma: 72977]

I kinda feel uncomfortable with the comfort of Touch ID. So, I tend to type Passwords once in a while to keep my muscle memory, especially for key accounts, which are the entry points to other Passwords (Apple, 1Password, Google, etc.).

These days, I believe that the only reason one does not get such misfortunes of being hacked/attacked, is that most of us are not important enough to get the attention of any external threats. Hence, mostly luck more than actually being secure.

I have been working towards a process/pattern, as a last resort, to be able to walk out of anything and have backup options when misfortunes strikes or my luck runs out. I don’t even know the path yet.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

I got Anonymous Pro, which is close to my usual font: misc-fixed 6x13 with a slashed zero.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127712]

> When was the first?

17 December 2025, per the thread.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

Older Androids won't exist for long.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]

Because they are unsophisticated and don’t know better. Private equity and credit are looking for bagholders, and the only potential buyers left are retail.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 82015]

I'm old enough to remember when people complained that we would never have competent engineers again because new hires are starting with higher level languages rather than doing "real" programming. AI or not, the profession will be fine.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

Older Androids which are fully rootable and unbrickable are cheap (maybe even monetarily free) and will let you continue to have freedom despite what Google wants.

"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101609]

One of the things you can learn is how to get consistently useful results out of it despite it being a non-deterministic black box.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240919]

That + AH or SB. Those are the kiss of death, especially when combined for the 30u30.

jedberg ranked #44 [karma: 78328]

This is funny, because I know a bunch of 30 under 30s, and I've invested in a few. There is a strong overlap between 30 under 30 and YC founders.

I consider myself a good judge of character, because not one of the one's I've invested in has committed fraud!

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82391]

I'm more worried about how to turn anything into a fiber modem, as I'm pretty sure the gateway that AT&T gave me is a piece of crap (has to be rebooted every 2-3 weeks otherwise it gets really slow, hard to configure, probably has all sorts of malware and security holes on it). Any guides on that?

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179834]

> Are they bemoaning that science is being done

The reflexive "in mice" comments seem to be bemoaning how science is done.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 82015]

It would make sense if the screen folded over. In a laptop form factor a touch screen is just annoying because it keeps pushing the screen back.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75811]

I remember when I was young seeing videos of North Korea, of audiences always giving rapt standing ovations and many people fake fainting, and I always thought "How dumb and stupid does everyone have to be to carry on this absurd, ridiculous charade."

I don't wonder anymore.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99217]

Every time I hear about a tech firm trying to implement some dystopian/nightmarish sci-vision, I think of Tobias from Arrested Development saing '...but it might work for us.'

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 82015]

Forbes "30 under 30" actually has like 600 people a year in 20 categories, and that's just in the USA. Add in international lists and the number rises to well over 1000. Since 2011 there have probably been, what, 10-15 thousand total "honorees"? ~12 instances of fraud in total is probably significantly below the corporate average.

And the "risk index" is idiotic. Basically just companies the creator doesn't like, or is jealous of.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179834]

> who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt

I'm not absolving anyone. I'm saying I know good people who are also billiionaires who most people have never heard of. The billionaires I've heard of I tend to dislike. But I think the correlate is the fame, not the wealth.

> guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?

This is where the hoarding metaphor breaks down. If you build a company, is it hoarding to not sell your stake off to a private equity firm?

Because practically speaking, those are their choices. Hold it, manage it and live off the income. (They all donate most of their incomes, but that's neither here nor there. You can be a good person even if not philanthropic.) Or sell it to a private equity firm and then have a pot of money to stare at.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82532]

Heck, once I cycled for half an hour with my iPhone in my pocket, and somehow the phone against my leg was in just the right position that it kept interpreting my leg movements as trying to enter a passcode.

Got home, pulled out my phone, and it had a message that it was locked for several hours due to so many failed passcode attempts. Incredibly annoying.

Still, only happened once in well over a decade of owning an iPhone.

I was mostly frustrated that there wasn't some alternate way of regaining access, like via my Mac or iPad logged in with the same Apple ID. Or that the failed passcode attempts didn't start eventually playing a loud alert sound or something on each failure.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160526]

Cloning works rather well now. Here are six polo ponies, Cuartetera 01 through 06, all clones of a famous polo pony.[1] Their owner has been winning world class polo matches on these mares. They're strong and healthy and very real.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-he...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 179834]

> war has been one of the best things to happen to the IRGC

This is hyperbole. If Iran could veto the war at the start, they would have. They're coming out of it, right now, relatively better off than the U.S. was when we started inasmuch as we have achieved zero strategic priorities and they've survived while adding a revenue source. But they've also lost massive amounts of military and industrial investment, to say nothing of decades of leadership.

nostrademons ranked #39 [karma: 82391]

I've been thinking that you can divide businesses on two axes,

                            Scalable - Many customers
                                     |
    Short-term/       Ponzi Scheme   |    Monopoly         Long-term/
    Transactional  --------------------------------------   Relational
                       Contracting / |   Consulting /
                       Retail etc    |   Therapy etc
                                     |
                        Non-scalable - Few customers
And mathematically, only businesses at the top of the graph are capable of generating a billion dollars. Hence, if you are looking to be a billionaire, the path lies either through a Ponzi scheme or through a monopoly. Both of them, in their most pure form, are illegal, and the challenge in the business model is to execute on them while staying just barely on the right side of the law.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127712]

> In what world is it okay to say you have $19b in ARR when you have only ever generated $5b for the entire duration of your company's existence?

In the same world that it makes sense to say that your current speed is 57mph when you've only driven 15 miles since starting the trip.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 89418]

Yeah, it's a conglomerate. Typically a bad idea from a business perspective, but can be a winner financially since "all" you need to do to gain shareholder value is spin off the units. (I say "all" because it might be simple but not easy.)

I wonder what kinds of control Elon will have on the company. Is it going to be like Google with special shares? Like Tesla having a board stacked with buddies?

I'm sure I'll pick up some exposure via index funds, but the governance would give me pause on being overweight.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]

Related:

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.bbsdocumentary.com...

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://software.bbsdocumentar...

https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary

https://archive.org/details/BBS_Documentary_DVD_Set

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5vjmDFZaI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41848656

BBS: The Documentary (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746221 - December 2023 (65 comments)

Enjoyed Jason Scott’s BBS documentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31740247 - June 2022 (39 comments)

Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140217 - November 2021 (230 comments)

The Full BBS Documentary Interviews Are Going Online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16221915 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

BBS the Documentary (2013) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867 - May 2015 (23 comments)

Others?

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91721]

The people spamming curl did step one, "write me a vulnerability report on X" but skipped step two, "verify for me that it's actually exploitable". Tack on a step three where a reasonably educated user in the field of security research does a sanity check on the vulnerability implementation as well and you'll have a pipeline that doesn't generate a ton of false positives. The question then will rather be how cost-effective it is for the tokens and the still-non-zero human time involved.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

I don't understand why the takeaway here is (unless I'm missing something), more or less "everything is going to get exploited all the time". If LLMs can really find a ton of vulnerabilities in my software, why would I not run them and just patch all the vulnerabilities, leading to perfectly secure software (or, at the very least, software for which LLMs can no longer find any new vulnerabilities)?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]

Yes.

Citations:

Apollo Academy: S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50% - https://www.apolloacademy.com/sp-500-concentration-approachi... - March 14th, 2026

> The 10 biggest companies in the S&P 500 make up almost 40% of the index, and if Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are added later this year, the concentration could approach 50%, see chart below. The bottom line is that the S&P 500 basically doesn’t offer much diversification anymore.

Apollo Academy: Extreme AI Concentration in the S&P 500 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/extreme-ai-concentration-in-th... - January 13th, 2026

> The bottom line is that investors in the S&P 500 remain overexposed to AI.

TLDR Concentration risk https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/concentration-risk

(not investing advice)

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187641]

Sadly, IBM 3270 is missing from the lot. How can I write professional looking code that lasts a lifetime in anything less?

I also remember some nice ones designed to look like a smoothed VT-220 one.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 417727]

Everybody agrees that idiots were spamming curl with random just-plausible-enough-seeming output from old models.

paxys ranked #41 [karma: 82015]

Wonder how he'll survive on a mere $188 billion now.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]

Related:

The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577899 - March 2026

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90297]

Shorting requires both being right and good timing on when everyone else figures out you're right.

Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry

> During his payments toward the credit default swaps, Burry suffered an investor revolt, where some investors in his fund worried his predictions were inaccurate and demanded to withdraw their capital. Eventually, Burry's analysis proved correct: He made a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.

doener ranked #42 [karma: 81674]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240919]

You mistook a marketing effort for science.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82532]

They did tons of data analysis across all aspects of profiles, and had a popular blog where they published the results.

They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.

I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.

Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.

The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160526]

Intelligence seems to have evolved on Earth at least three times - mammals, octopuses, and corvids. These are different branches of the evolutionary tree, and the brain architectures are quite different. Octopuses have a distributed system. Corvids get more done with less brain volume and power than mammals.

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]

Electrician, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC. I learned how to weld (stick "smaw", mig, tig) for <$1000 at my local community college at the time (circa 2008-2009 GFC), and was offered a job (which I luckily did not need to take) after completing the required courses.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160526]

I got an answer back from NARA:

Specifically, you seek records related to practical instructions on how to rebuild society after a nuclear war.

We searched our holdings in Record Group 397, Records of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency. We identified the series External Publications, 1955-1976 which may include records related to your query. A full citation is provided here for your reference:

    Record Group 397
    Records of the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency
    External Publications, 1955-1976
    Entry A1 56
    Boxes 1 thru 37@ 650/42/30/2
We will be happy to make the records and their finding aids available to you or your representative in the Textual Research Room (Room 2000) here at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. Please visit our website for information about visiting the National Archives in College Park, MD, including how to schedule a research visit.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

There's another driver, HDADRV9J, which was around long before LLMs and works on Windows 3.x as well as 9x.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160526]

This guy is all too right. Fortune.com today:

> A CEO trying to reindustrialize America says blue-collar pay is headed for ‘massive hyperinflation’ and kids should skip college to become welders

> Trump said the Iran war was ‘very complete’ three weeks ago.

> Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says ‘We’ve achieved AGI.’

It's like reading dispatches from an alternate post-truth universe.

> You can never return back to the claims to inform your readership whether they were actually true (this is especially true of CEO promises made before giant, pointless, disastrous mergers).

That's the worst. It's like it's now wrong to call CEOs on their bullshit.

Yesterday I noted that Donut Labs, with their heavily promoted solid state battery, had previously announced they would be shipping in volume in Q1 2026. I wrote on HN "They have until Tuesday." That was voted down.

ChuckMcM ranked #22 [karma: 111161]

If you had asked me in 1995 what was the one thing[1] that Boston could change in order to compete with Silicon Valley I would have told you "Make non-compete agreements illegal" Companies in the Bay Area whined about it all the time but it kept the ecosystem vibrant and a lot of technology exists because of that. In the late 90's early '00s a big reason for a lot of 'high profile' people quitting their cushy job and setting out in a startup was because 'management' wouldn't allow them to move forward on an idea that they felt would "disrupt our own business." Those same people could quit, create a start up, and make that idea real anyway. So this is excellent progress for Washington State. I wonder how many ex-Microsoft employees this effects.

[1] I vacillated between this and California law giving ownership of what you worked on in your own time on your own equipment yours, except the latter was pretty effectively neutered by big corps defining their businesses more vaguely.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127712]

Because Washington has a Constitutional provision requiring that no law shall take effect sooner than 90 days after the end of the session in which it is adopted [0] unless it is an emergency law passed with a 2/3 vote, and the common convention for most normal laws is to set the first January 1 certain to come after the 90-day period of the current session as the effective date so that "new law day" for non-emergency laws is consistent.

[0] Each state is different here, but a "90 days after end of session", or "90 days after passage" rule for the soonest a passed bill can go into effect, with exceptions for emergency bills with special rules including a supermajority requirement, are pretty common, as are conventions of setting a January 1 effective date in the legislation itself when the minimum is X days from end of session or passage.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127643]

Solaris in SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging.

Something that some security conscious folks care about.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75811]

I don't know the quote you're referring to, but if there were a CEO who I think understands the technical details of his products much better than most, it would be Jensen Huang.

And there is a huge difference between a CEO having "no clue" and a CEO trying to speak in terms that laymen and the business press can understand (even if a ton gets lost in translation).

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126015]

Also we’re looking at periods that involve dramatically different monetary policy (gold standard before WWII, Bretton Woods from 1944-1976, then the current regime).

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90297]

Should Spain get to run US airspace?

If not, why does the US get to run Spain's?

toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]
mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 89418]
stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

Yeah, they must have gotten it the wrong way around.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104596]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]
toomuchtodo ranked #23 [karma: 107718]
jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91721]

If you want to understand a fairly non-trivial amount of the brokenness of the world, pondering the implications of "Hey, what if we thought about what our incentives will actually do instead of what we want them to do, and made plans based on that?" being a brilliant and bold breakthrough in the world of governance rather than common sense can take you a long way.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

I didn't realize how much I appreciated writing having a distinct voice until LLMs made everyone sound the same. This strikes me as extremely LLMy:

> SaaS era: ~decade to go upmarket. Cloud era: ~5 years. AI era: <2 years. The gap between 'developers love this' and 'enterprises are asking for SOC 2' has never been shorter.

No judgement if you want to write your articles with LLMs or whatnot, you do you, I've just discovered that their default style grates a bit. It's like when Bootstrap came out, initially it looked amazing but very quickly it became the "default site" look.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101609]

If you have uv installed you can start a chat with the model (after a 2GB model download) with this one-liner:

  uvx --with llm-mrchatterbox llm chat -m mrchatterbox

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

I'm at a stage where I don't want to be doing network management on my weekends. I have a Ubiquiti router that's pretty good, and for my router I'd like something like TrueNAS for my NAS, a distribution that completely turns the hardware into an appliance I can configure once and forget about.

Is there something like that?

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90297]

Courts also tend to have existing accessibility setups for these scenarios.

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91721]

You sound like you're citing the general Internet understanding of "fair use", which seems to amount to "I can do whatever I like to any copyrighted content as long as maybe I mutilate it enough and shout 'FAIR USE!' loudly enough."

On the real measures of "fair use", at least in the US: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ I would contend that it absolutely face plants on all four measures. The purpose is absolutely in the form of a "replacement" for the original, the nature is something that has been abundantly proved many times over in court as being something copyrightable as a creative expression (with limited exceptions for particular bits of code that are informational), the "amount and substantiality" of the portions used is "all of it", and the effect of use is devastating to the market value of the original.

You may disagree. A long comment thread may ensue. However, all I really need for my point here is simply that it is far, far from obvious that waving the term "FAIR USE!" around is a sufficient defense. It would be a lengthy court case, not a slam-dunk "well duh it's obvious this is fair use". The real "fair use" and not the internet's "FAIR USE!" bear little resemblance to each other.

A sibling comment mentions Bartz v. Anthropic. Looking more at the details of the case I don't think it's obvious how to apply it, other than as a proof that just because an AI company acquired some material in "some manner" doesn't mean they can just do whatever with it. The case ruled they still had to buy a copy. I can easily make a case that "buying a copy" in the case of a GPL-2 codebase is "agreeing to the license" and that such an agreement could easily say "anything trained on this must also be released as GPL-2". It's a somewhat lengthy road to travel, where each step could result in a failure, but the same can be said for the road to "just because I can lay my hands on it means I can feed it to my AI and 100% own the result" and that has already had a step fail.

ceejayoz ranked #34 [karma: 90297]

> It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive…

This just means you keep your powder dry until it's needed.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240919]

And even if it would be enforceable, would you be able and willing to go through the energy and monetary expenses to enforce it? Especially against a big corporation willing to fight you.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 240919]

In a word: wow. That demo just kept getting better and better.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

It's fine as long as both exist and third parties are not allowed to know which one you're running.

Otherwise, you have banks and MAFIAA and others off-loading their own security and compliance costs to users by flat out discriminating based on the status of the sandbox.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 106872]

There are times I want that Chauffeur to have my back!

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

Discord, maybe. But Netflix and WhatsApp Web? Those are bloated cows, just less broken than average.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

A company offering private smart glasses would have to offer them with an unlocked bootloader.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127643]

Yet the WebAssembly bros are into replicating application servers with Kubernetes pods running WebAssembly containers, go figure.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187641]

> it's Zoom

I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.

But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104596]
TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

> On-board NN moderates all interactions. Moral NN core must be updated montlhy to support latest moral and legal checks by NN. This core reports when you are doing something suspicious.

This module is formally called "conscience" and fortunately, at this time, is securely sandboxed to not directly communicate with any device or service outside of the body.

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

A friend described it as "there's no blank page any more".

stavros ranked #46 [karma: 76692]

Exactly, I had to read way too far before giving up because I have no idea what Glassfish is.

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107456]

> issues of class were a huge part of cultural life throughout the 80s and 90s

Yes, and this is much less the case now. Changes to the economics of culture have closed a lot of doors. As well as the massive expansion of university, which magically conveys "middle class" status on people even if they are still heavily indebted wage slaves.

Lurking under a lot of this stuff are two nasty questions:

- whether the word "white" is attached to "working class", even invisibly

- whether people who are retired count as "working class", even if they are property owners with private pensions

pjc50 ranked #24 [karma: 107456]

> It's going to need to choose between sovereighty and wealth.

I don't follow this at all? Is there some implication that selling oil to China is constraining sovereignty? Is there some nuclear deal between Iran and China I'm not aware of?

As an autocratic regime, they (IRGC) have no choice but to pursue not only sovereignty but domestic control.

> Petrodollar hypothesis hasn't been a thing for decades

Yeah, this has always seemed overstated. However it circulates in exactly the kind of rightwing paranoia circles which strongly influence the current US government.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187641]

The non-standard floppy format was a huge annoyance for users. While the higher density formats were cool, the hardware could operate on PC-compatible format, but the OS wouldn’t support it.

ROM BIOS compatibility would have been nice, but it could be implemented at the custom MS-DOS version and run from RAM, but I’m not sure there were clean room implementations back at that point.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

Comparing LLMs to Markov chains was funny in 2023.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113727]

Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in deep space - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena.

It's the same as with sailing stories and reality - the interesting parts are everything that isn't the open blue sea.

pjmlp ranked #17 [karma: 127643]

Just like restrict never made it.

Someone has to write a proposal, bring it to the various meetings, and getting it to win the features selection election from all parties.

Also WG21 tends to disregard C features that can already be implemented within C++'s type system.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

Ease of repair and "build quality", are to some degree (although not entirely) tradeoffs against each other.

Thinkpads are a counterexample.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101609]

OpenAI were completely taken by surprise by the success of ChatGPT. Internally there were debates over whether they should launch it at all.

It's had a ton of hype since then of course.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 101609]

Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79236]

I implemented Contracts in the C++ language in the early 90's as an extension.

Nobody wanted it.

https://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/contract.html

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88718]

China has been doing this sort of recycling for literally decades, at a massive scale.

dragonwriter ranked #16 [karma: 127712]

That's LaTeX convention, double hyphen is an en-dash, triple hyphen is an em-dash.

tosh ranked #8 [karma: 173663]

It used to be possible to type immediately while the page is loading and have all key presses end up in the input field.

Why run this check before user can type?

Why not run it later like before the message gets sent to the server?