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> it was not really open content anyway
Practically no quality journalism is.
> we need something like wikipedia for news
Wikipedia editors aren’t flying into war zones.
One of the first widely used compiler toolkits with multiple frontends, intermediate language for the phases and a common backend.
Contrary to common understanding LLVM wasn't the very first one, ACK also not, there are others predating it when diving into compiler literature.
I've always been skeptical of the celebrity engineering managers/software entrepreneurs like Graham, DHH, Atwood, Spolsky [1], etc. Just because you made and marketed one or even two successful products doesn't mean you have any useful generalizable advice.
Today people who made something with AI think they have something profound to say about their experience but they don't.
All the projects I do now have a significant amount of input from AI assistants but I am going to post "Show HN: my heart rate variability biofeedback webapp" and not add "... that i vibe coded" because the latter one codes me as yet another NPC.
(e.g. if I am more successful as AI-assisted developer than some people it is not because I know anything about AI-assisted development which is interesting or generalizable, but it is because of the toolbox I've been using in a lifetime of software development!)
[1] Carmack is a true genius who is the exception that proves the rule
>videos that had some viewership base, there may be a consideration
Those would be the worst of the lot regarding how valuable they are historically for example. Engaging BS content...
I love how people in the thread are like "if I'm going to ask my group of friends to switch to this, I need to know it's not written by security-issue-generator machines", meanwhile at Discord LLMs go brrr:
https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-...
And then you have the "Alas, the sheer fact that LLM slop-code has touched it at all is bound to be a black stain on its record" comments.
Please name 50 other companies it's not.
It's good that they were responsive in the disclosure, but it's still a mark of sloppiness that this was done in the first place, and I'd like to know so I can avoid them.
I think it depends on the codebase. There are some reflection calls that you can make that can cause dead code elimination to fail, thought I believe it's less easy to run into than it was a few years ago. One common dependency, at least in my line of work, is the Kubernetes API and it manages to both be gigantic and trigger this edge case (last I looked), so yeah, the binaries end up pretty big.
Another thing that people run into is big binaries = slow container startup times. This time is mostly spent in gzip. If you use Zstandard layers instead of gzip layers, startup time is improved. gzip decompression is actually very slow, and the OCI spec no longer mandates it.
Those people can contribute to Xorg server further development.
Recommended link to the Blu-ray collection for archival purposes?
Citizens can choose to prioritize quality of life over maximizing housing stock to increase the domestic population. “We’re all full up.” It is their country after all, it is their choice. Those who want in are not stakeholders nor have a vote.
I dunno if my Uni dodged the bullet because it was one step down in status or if it was the shitty airport.
You know what else I don't see? Google Reader, because Google killed it!
The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:
1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement
2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it
3. Companies who write things because they sell things
A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.
Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.
Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.
The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.
See self checkouts at supermarkets, with teams reduced to when checkouts go bad, or filling the shelves.
Not only do the prices increase, now we get pushed to their jobs for free, while the chains layoff their employees.
Hence why I usually refuse to use them if I have to take some additional extra time queuing.
It comes down to trust. There are ways to protect your own integrity and equanimity in a low-trust environment but most people will suffer in that kind of situation.
Before agile you could “kick the can down the road” for six months before the senior people realize what they wouldn’t hear from the new guy on the project: nobody knows how to make a production build! Until then though life can be cozy on a day to day basis. In agile on the other hand, you have nerve-wracking meetings every day but somehow it never gets out that the engineering manager has no idea how long it takes to build the product or that the code violates all the rules [1] laid down by that engineering manager despite that engineering manager asserting that “we do code reviews”
[1] reasonable if not inspired
Given how worried everyone is about the AI slopocalypse where the internet is drowned in LLM-generated junk content maybe it's time for a resurgence of human curated directories like this one.
taped and transcribed by Jeff Fox
Another one to the list, however it hardly sounds like a killer application.
Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.
Except that's sort of... exactly what they do.
The food industry has pretty much invented the whole process of making "addictive" products and then "test[ing] out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive". Of course, we usually call it making products that taste good, and running taste panels with the public for product development (making a new tasty thing), quality control (ensuring the tasty thing stays tasty), and market research (discovering even tastier things to make in the future). Each part of it employs all kinds of specialists (and yes, those too - nutrition psychology is a thing).
The process is the same. The difference between "optimized for taste" and "addictive" isn't exactly clear-cut, at least not until someone starts adding heroin to the product (and of the two, it's not the software industry that's been routinely accused of it just for being too good at this job).
Not defending social media here in any way. Cause and effect is known these days, and in digital everything is faster and more pronounced. And ironically, I don't even agree with GP either! I think that individuals have much less agency than GP would like it, and at the same time, that social media is not some uniquely evil and uniquely strong way to abuse people, but closer to new superstimulus we're only starting to develop social immunity to.
> Both of these are based on userspace stack switching, sometimes called “fibers”, “stackful coroutines”, or “green threads”.
There are M-Disks. These are CD/DVD/BluRay disks which use a drive with a higher power laser and work by ablating a metal layer, rather than a photosensitive dye as in the lower-powered disks. Regular drives will read both kinds.
For a small amount of data (crypto keys?), consider deep laser engraving on stainless steel. That's very durable. Or even engrave text into stainless steel with a small CNC mill.
You can engrave QR codes, bar codes, etc. But there's a lot to be said for engraving plain text.
Oh, that's why the DOJ didn't want to release these. Ok! :)
> Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people
But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.
> automation tools ... eliminates the boring part of the job, and then the job description shifts.
But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.
There's also a tradeoff between automation flexibility and cost. If you need an LLM for each transaction, your costs will be much higher than if some simple CRUD server does it.
Here's a nice example from a more physical business - sandwich making.
Start with the Nala Sandwich Bot.[1] This is a single robot arm emulating a human making sandwiches. Humans have to do all the prep, and all the cleaning. It's slow, maybe one sandwich per minute. If they have any commercial installations, they're not showing them. This is cool, but ineffective.
Next is a Raptor/JLS robotic sandwich assembly line.[2] This is a dozen robots and many conveyors assembling sandwiches. It's reasonably fast, at 100 sandwiches per minute. This system could be reconfigured to make a variety of sandwich-format food products, but it would take a fair amount of downtime and adjustment. Not new robots, just different tooling. Everything is stainless steel or food grade plastic, so it can be routinely hosed down with hot soapy water. This is modern automation. Quite practical and in wide use.
Finally, there's the Weber automated sandwich line.[3] Now this is classic single-purpose automation, like 1950s Detroit engine lines. There are barely any robots at all; it's all special purpose hardware. You get 600 or more sandwiches per minute. Not only is everything stainless or food-grade plastic, it has a built-in self cleaning system so it can clean itself. Staff is minimal. But changing to a product with a slightly different form factor requires major modifications and skills not normally present in the plant. Only useful if you have a market for several hundred identical sandwiches per minute.
These three examples show why automation hasn't taken over. To get the most economical production, you need extreme product standardization. Sometimes you can get this. There are food plants which turn out Oreos or Twinkies in vast quantities at low cost with consistent quality. But if you want product variations, productivity goes way, way down.
[1] https://nalarobotics.com/sandwich.html
That's 70% of the population living in ghettos and the economy collapsing through lack of people with disposable income with extra steps.
I really like https://handy.computer for this.
How many would those people be?
We forget that it's what the majority does that sets the tone and conditions of a field. Especially if one is an employee and not self-employed
This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis.
This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.
Here in Greece it always asks "Euro or USD?". Most merchants know to press Euro, the rest ask me. I think I've maybe had one merchant press USD by accident in ten years or so.
“Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012” [1].
I imagine that apostrophes in legal writing are trouble, much like commas. It's too easy to shift or even drop one them by mistake, which can alter the the meaning of the whose sentence/section in unfortunate ways.
There is meaningful new information in this post.
>I think TUIs-that-want-to-be-GUIs (as opposed to terminal commands just outputting plain text) are sad.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Case in point from Emacs/Vim and the Borland IDEs to Claude, plus all kinds of handy utils from mc and htop to mutt.
>They flatten the structure of a UI under a character stream. You’re forced to use it exactly the way it was designed and no different. Modern GUIs, even web pages too, expose enough structure to the OS to let you use it more freely
That's not necessarily bad. Not everything has to be open ended.
It's hard to get someone to do literature first when they get free publicity by not doing literature search and claiming some major AI assisted breakthrough...
Heck, it's hard to get authors to do literature search, period: never mind not thoroughly looking for prior art, even well known disgraced papers get citated continue to get possitive citations all the time...
> Do we hold gun manufacturers responsible for the deaths from their guns?
In a lot of the world, yes, and in America we would as well if it weren’t for the modern take on the Second Amendment. AI has no similar legal purchase.
What I love about Gemini mobile is that, if you look at the app wrong, it completely loses the response. It still generates it (and uses up your quota), but it never displays it!
This is the company that made Android, and it can't make an Android app that fetches a response from a server. Astonishing.
That's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically.
> something comparable to what the Roman Empire had done
Not in sophistication. For examples:
The Pantheon - https://www.pantheonroma.com/en/pantheon-history/ There are no domes in Mayan architecture.
The aquaducts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct The romans mastered the arch. The Mayans never used them.
Roman iron and steel - the Mayans used copper and gold.
Roman ships had keels - Mayan ships did not. Cannot sail upwind without keels.
Romans used the wheel - Mayans did not.
Romans used papyrus for writing, and would send letters around the empire - the Mayans wrote on bark.
And so on.
How’s that working in Germany, the UK, Italy, etc? The only way that actually works is for left wing parties to adopt restrictive immigration policies, like Denmark did: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo
I hope this doesn't come across as being cynical in my old(er) age, but instead I just hope it's a reflection of reality
Lot's of organizations in the tech and business space start out with "high falutin", lofty goals. Things about making the world a better place, "don't be evil", "benefitting all of humanity", etc. etc. They are all, without fail, complete and total bullshit, or at least they will always end up as complete and total bullshit. And the reason for this is not that the people involved are inherently bad people, it's just that humans react strongly to incentives, and the incentives, at least in our capitalist society, ensure that profit motive will always be paramount. Again, I don't think this is cynical, it's just realistic.
I think it really went in to high gear in the 90s that, especially in tech, that companies put out this idea that they would bring all these amazing benefits to the world and that employees and customers were part of a grand, noble purpose. And to be clear, companies have brought amazing tech to the world, but only insofar as in can fulfill the profit motive. In earlier times, I think people and society had a healthier relationship with how they viewed companies - your job was how you made money, but not where you tried to fulfill your soul - that was what civic organizations, religion, and charities were for.
So my point is that I think it's much better for society to inherently view all companies and profit-driven enterprises with suspicion, again not because people involved are inherently bad, but because that is simply the nature of capitalism.
You've always been able to delete for 2 hours and then the post becomes effectively permanent, modulo emailing dang to get it deleted by an admin.
They did win back a little bit of their open-ness with the gpt-oss model releases, but I'd like to see updated versions of those.
I've seen videos where people will put in removable drywall panels that can just be lifted out for access.
There are a lot of downsides though. You lose airsealing, if you don't have an airtight building envelope on the outside of the drywall. You lose fire resistance. You often lose aesthetics, although I've seen this done extremely tastefully. You lose childproofing, and run the risk of a kid electrocuting themselves or destroying your plumbing or dropping stuff in the wall. You impose constraints on what can go on the walls and where your furniture can go.
Given that drywall is pretty easy to cut and replace, most people figure it's just not worth the costs for something you do infrequently.
The Issues on the crabby-rathbun are a fun read: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/crabby-rathbun/issues
Most of the issues (now Closed) are crypto scammers attempting to prompt engineer it into falling for a crypto scam, which is extremely cyberpunk.
You can see the official mission statements in the IRS 990 filings for each year on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...
I turned them into a Gist with fake author dates so you can see the diffs here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc...
Wrote this up on my blog too: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/13/openai-mission-stateme...
What, you've never seen industrial strength sandwich production?
> This is no longer about money, it's about power
This is more Altman-speak. Before it was about how AI was going to end the world. That started backfiring, so now we're talking about political power. That power, however, ultimately flows from the wealth AI generates.
It's about the money. They're for-profit corporations.
Looking at the front page now and I cannot see it. Do you have a link?
(pause)
Ah, now on the second page ...
Thanks for letting me know.
Try Dissolution by Nick Binge. Same weird vibes.
Read a good biography of Disraeli. Can't help looking his arc being "couldn't make up his mind about the corn laws" but maybe a good politician can't make up his mind when the public can't.
I am still laughing my ass off that The Economist gets flagged today as a left leaning publication when it was founded to advocate for free trade and still does... And of course they are politically homeless in the UK these days!
Commerzbank bank is Germany's second largest bank.
Related:
Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958399 - February 2026 (1020 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963089 (subthread)
Not exactly the same thing, but I know of at least two professors that would try to list their cats as co-authors:
If The Princess Bride is to be believed, MCP stands for the "Mutton Context Protocol".
Make it L. Ron Hubbard fighting Jack Parsons and that would be more like it.
> The first time I came across this phenomenon was when someone posted years ago how two AIs developed their own language to talk to each other.
Colossus the Forbin Project
Facebook was doing that 10 years ago
I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further.
And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403
It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.
Make him bet his total comp on a prediction market. Words are cheap.
I subscribe to keep the reporting going. Journalism costs money.
Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982633 - February 2026
(ProPublica, 404media, APM Marketplace, Associated Press, Vox, Block Club Chicago, Climate Town, Tampa Bay Times, etc get my journalism dollars as well)
According to the thesis of this article, releasing the weights would be approximately the worst thing OpenAI could do for these people.
From the viewpoint of self psychology people are limited in their ability to seduce because they have a self. You can't maintain perfect mirroring because you get tired, their turn-on is your squick, etc. In the early stage of peak ensorcelement (limerence) people don't see the "small signals", they miss the microexpressions, sarcastic leaks, etc. -- they see what they want to see. But eventually that wears out.
It can be puzzling that people fall for "romance scams" with people whose voice they haven't even heard but actually it's actually a safer space for that kind of seducer to operate because the low-fi channel avoids all sort of information leaks.
At this point this whole thing has to be a stealth marketing campaign by Apple right? Hordes of people buying new $600 Macs to jump in on the trend when a $3 VPS or $15 Pi Zero or $50 NUC or really any computer that can run a basic Linux server would do the job exactly the same or better.
What's that, doing actual work rather than labor-of-love open source stuff? Seems reasonable.
Did you not raise a bunch of money from Sequoia? Sounds like you're in a perfect place to quit your job and hack on GPUI for us.
Personally I prefer my agents not to run random commands on my machine without me telling them to first.
Imagine you just cloned some random project from GitHub and fired up Claude Code in that folder, but it turned out to be malicious and running 'npm test' stole all your files.
There's a big security issue with OpenClaw, and it won't be fixed with network/filesystem sandvoxes. I've been thinking about what a very secure LLM agent would look like, and I've made a proof of concept where each tool is sandboxed in its own container, the LLM can call but not edit the code, the LLM doesn't have access to secrets, etc.
You can't solve prompt injection now, for things like "delete all your emails", but you can minimize the damage by making the agent physically unable to perform unsanctioned actions.
I still want the agent to be able to largely upgrade itself, but this should be behind unskippable confirmation prompts.
Does anyone know anything like this, so I don't have to build it?
Then you're going to have a hard time learning any subject.
Because it's pretty common for educational materials to start with the first-order approximation, then go into the places where you need second-order corrections to it.
If you think the first-order approximation is false because there are exceptions, and you aren't even willing to read a few paragraphs down to find out about the exceptions and nuances, then hey, it's your loss.
> Clearly the stock market isn't rational, and prices of stocks are not tied to financial fundamentals.
Stock prices are tied to anticipated future earnings, not past or present financials.
> only people with disposable income can afford
Anyone can invest in stocks with $100 or less. As for disposable income, anyone that can buy beer, drugs, or lottery tickets has disposable income that can be invested in stocks.
> part of the funnel that increases the wealth of the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class
Corporations make money by creating wealth, not "funneling" it from other people.
Yes, Cerebras is very cool. But that sort of thing is also becoming the exception. I use the homepage of HN as a sort of thermometer, the trend seems to be towards 'more' rather than 'better'.
Here's what it gave me for a kakapo on a skateboard https://gist.github.com/simonw/5e2041c32333effd090e3df42b64d...
That is a wild thing to admit in writing.
I had an iPhone for three months until I switched back to Android because the keyboard was trash. The one thing I could not believe is how even SwiftKey on iOS is horrible, even though it's my default keyboard on Android, and I've been very happy with it.
Anything that isn’t point to point transit, or requires interacting with the public, is a non-starter for most people in the developed world.
Even in Japan, half of commutes are by car and that number has been growing.
People don’t realize they’re also making really good progress with GMO crops!
Musk definitely turned a corner, converting to the right-wing Unicause.
At the end of day, Amazon is a business, not an extension of the police or the FBI.
They initially partnered with Flock because they thought this would be a feature people would want. They literally bought a crazy expensive Super Bowl ad to show it off.
Turns out people didn't. So now they're not doing it.
Amazon's only interest is to make money.
Project not found: The project you are looking for does not exist or has been removed.
In my mind the answer to this is something like "Breakthrough Starshot" but greatly scaled down in terms of energy and mission duration. I mean, we would like to take close looks at thousands if not millions of stars and that kind of mission to the SGL is the next best thing to going there.
This one is my favorite, a 'cyclocopter':
End with a three-pack <ul> and we'll assume you've found some help in your struggles. Use an <ol> and we won't be sure.
I wouldn't blame you. But: hypes come and hypes go, this one will go too. But it will destroy the funding environment for a while when it does, the same happened the previous times this happened.
In five years time AI will be just another tool in the toolbox and nobody will remember the names of the hypers. I agree it is depressing: there are quite a few people banging this drum and because of that it becomes harder to be heard. They, like AI have the advantage of quantity. There is one character right here on HN that spews out one low effort AI generated garbage article after another and it all gets upvoted as if it is profound and important. It isn't. All it shows is how incredibly bland all this stuff is.
Meanwhile, here I am, solving a real problem. I use AI as well but mostly to serve as a teacher and I check each and every factoid that isn't immediately obviously true. And the degree to which that turns up hallucinations is proof enough to me that our jobs are safe, for now.
A good niche is cleaning up after failed AI projects ;)
best of luck there!
Jacques
I'm reminded of the Lloyds/TSB IT failure, where they specifically didn't have a rollback plan and ended up getting fined £50m by the regulator: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64036529
It's not a guidebook, it's a thought experiment on "what if you could do that", and that's the entire point.
I assume the backup is the copy in R2.
What astounds me the most about this whole thing is that the sort of hit testing involved here is a solved problem in UI, and has been for decades, yet there are still plenty of others here and elsewhere arguing about how it isn't. Even with those horrid rounded corners it's not hard, as shown in the article, which makes me wonder whether there is some internal fight between those who didn't want rounded corners (developers?) and hence tried their hardest to make it buggier, and those who wanted them (designers?), with lots of back-and-forth that eventually gave us this outcome. A disturbing amount of time and $$$ was probably spent on it, as is usual for any bureaucracy.
100%
I didn't understand GP's point at all because I think the author makes this exceedingly clear: if you want to paint only for you, and only stuff that appeals to you and a limited few, that's totally fine (and I think the author really emphasizes that's totally fine), just don't expect to make a living off of it.
I thought this article was excellent. In particular, I liked the emphasis that you really just have to produce lots and lots of art to find "image market fit", because it's nearly impossible to know what will resonate with people before you create it. There is just an undeniably huge amount of luck in finding something a lot of people like, so it's important to give yourself as many swings at bat as possible.
> What if the models have just gotten really good?
Kagi Assistant remains my main way of interacting with AI. One of its benefits is you're encouraged to try different models.
The heterogeneity in competence, particular per unit in time, is growing rapidly. If I'm extrapolating image-creation capabilities from Claude, I'm going to underestimate what Gemini can do without fuckery. Likewise, if I'm using Grok all day, Gemini and Claude will seem unbelievably competent when it comes to deep research.