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.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113905]

I regret not learning about this before, but apparently "sidereal" is from Latin, and not what I always assumed, i.e. "side real" as in "kinda not quite real, wtf?!" day.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113905]

That actually deserves a competition of its own. Just what can you accomplish with a 256 bytes prompt? Or maybe 32 bytes, to compensate for expressiveness of natural language.

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90735]

Yeah, why trust your actual experience over numbers? Nothing surer than synthetic benchmarks

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127816]

Is anyone that matters actually using jj?

coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90735]

>I also want Claude to work reliably but very few (no?) companies have ever seen this level of rapid growth.

You do understand however that aside from the growth/maturity path, this is also a path to enshittification and skinning their users, which might come even faster to LMMs than say Google , because the latter managed to have hundres of billions in investments in record time to recoup and IPOs on sight.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113905]

Or could sell it on eBay for an amount of money that's nontrivial from POV of a gig economy worker.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

Those resins are absolutely fantastic but do read the MSDS and be very careful, it doesn't take much to get yourself in the emergency ward with that stuff. Another risk to be acutely aware of is that these reactions usually are exothermic and can go runaway faster than you can blink of the conditions are right.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

Future Crew's "Second Reality" was my introduction to demos, back in the 486 PC days.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180650]

> then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches

SLS will never be worth it. But I'd discount from that price tag the continuity benefits of keeping the Shuttle folks around, and aerospace engineers employed, across the chasm years of the 2010s.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187899]

> Do you have an example use case?

The one that comes to mind is HPC, where you avoid over allocation of the physical cores. If the process has the whole node for itself for a brief period, inefficient memory access might have a bigger impact than memory starvation.

IBM also has their RAID-like memory for mainframes that might be able to do something similar. This feels like software implemented RAID-1.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

You couldn't be more wrong about that.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180650]

> it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies

We can actually tell from their dice that they don’t.

I believe in the book Against the Gods the author described ancient dice being—mostly—uneven. (One exception, I believe, was ancient Egypt.) The thinking was a weird-looking dice looks the most intuitively random. It wasn’t until later, when the average gambler started statistically reasoning, that standardized dice became common.

These dice are highly non-standard. In their own way, their similarity to other cultures of antiquities’ senses of randomness is kind of beautiful.

pjmlp ranked #15 [karma: 127816]

Maybe they could just, I don't know, use Claude to research their bugs. /s

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160883]

Building a nuclear weapon that can be carried by Iraq's missiles is relatively difficult, because miniaturizing nuclear weapons requires much more complex designs. It took the US and the USSR quite a few test explosions to achieve such a warhead.

Building a bulky nuclear weapon that fits in, say, a shipping container, is not hard if sufficient highly enriched uranium is available. That's Hiroshima level nuclear technology, the gun-type bomb.[1]

This is the difference between the "years away" and the "weeks away" estimates. Depends on whether the the delivery method is an ICBM or a shipping container.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88961]

The VBIOS is around 32-64k. The modesetting path is probably a few k.

And it depends on DOS configuring the memory space to leave an INT 20h call (to terminate the program) at a place that's easy to RET to.

This has always been the case, and actually inherited from CP/M.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88961]

disabling secure boot

...making it even more clear what "secure" boot actually secures: the control others have over your own computer.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

Gibraltar's political situation is what it is because this was sorted out in the Treaty of Utrecht three hundred years ago, and Europe got very tired of leaders that thought they could redraw the map at the cost of millions of lives.

Probably the best we can expect from Iran is a frozen conflict like Korea or Cyprus, that stays frozen.

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418066]

This is like saying we should have halted all RSA deployments until improvements in sieving stopped happening. The lattice contestants were all designed assuming BKZ would continually improve. It's not 1994 anymore, asymmetric cryptography is not a huge novelty to the industry, nobody is doing the equivalent of RSA-512.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180650]

> This is the counter argument

When the French helped us during the Revolutionary War, they didn't shore bombard the colonists' kids because it would have been bad and counterproductive.

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180650]

Had a minor conniption until I saw the year. OpenAI just struggled to close a round. And the New Yorker just published an unflattering profile of Altman [1]. So it would make sense they'd go back to the PR strategy of "stop me from shooting grandma."

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

JumpCrisscross ranked #7 [karma: 180650]

I guess I didn't see the inequality focus in your first comment. At least, not beyond the qualitative assets as cash and sundries vs assets as financial assets. I pointed out that real wages are up in response to your claim about people being paid dollars. (The dollars we're paid are worth more. They're individually less. But the total take home is more. Hence real wage.) I think it's a non sequitur to then turn around and say well I was actually arguing about inequality from the start.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

Data Collection and Estimation Methodology: https://electricity.heatmap.news/methodology

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99296]

Perhaps stop taking the administration's claims at face value. Their army has not been destroyed. They continue to launch missiles daily and have been extraordinarily successful in targeting US/Israel radar and defensive assets throughout the region. They have suffered air force and naval losses, but if you look back at analysis from before the war started, exactly nobody considered the Iranian air force or navy to be of any strategic significance. Iran operates on a distributed military structure rather than a centralized command, so the assassination of senior political and military leaders is not the crippling blow the US expected it to be.

And really, that expectation is itself stupid. Suppose the US got involved in a hot conventional war with another superpower, and in the first week they killed the President, the vice President, a bunch of Representatives and Senators, and a bunch of senior figures at the Pentagon. Would the US just fold, or would it fill those positions via the line of succession, declare a national emergency, and fight back vigorously? You know the answer is #2, and the idea that other countries might do the same thing should not be a surprise. It appears the US administration has fallen into the trap of believing the shallowest version of its own propaganda about other countries, and assuming that Iran was just like Iraq under Saddam Hussein but with slightly different outfits.

The Iranian strategy is basically Mohammed Ali's Rope-a-dope: absorb punishment administered at exhausting cost (very expensive munitions with limited stocks) while spending relatively little of their own (dirt cheap drones with small payloads but effective targeting, continually degrading the aggressor's radar visibility and military infrastructure). The one limited ground incursion so far (ostensibly to rescue an airman, but almost certainly a cover for something else) resulted in the loss of multiple heavy transport aircraft, helicopters, and drones at a cost of hundred$ of million$.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88961]

Lifting of all US sanctions on Iran

I do not see that happening.

userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88961]

That example you gave is extremely memorable as I recognised it as exactly one of the insanely stupid false positives that a highly praised (and expensive) static analyser I ran on a codebase several years ago would emit copiously.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]
userbinator ranked #36 [karma: 88961]

Nor should they be admissible as evidence in court.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

I was hoping you'd comment here. Thank you. Amazing bits of lore.

hn_throwaway_99 ranked #47 [karma: 75875]

It's not just the 10,000 hours, it's learning it very young.

I am an ex-professional ballet dancer, and one of the things I always find interesting is that any experienced ballet dancer can instantly tell who trained as a child and who didn't solely by how they stand (literally not even moving) at the barre. But the thing is, children with only a few years of training under their belt will often show this good form, while I have literally never seen someone who started as an adult, even dedicated adults who take class 4-5 times a week, get rid of that "I started as an adult" posture.

As an example, I was actually quite impressed at how Natalie Portman really managed to "look the part" in her role as a ballerina in Black Swan. Still, she wasn't fooling anyone with training - even with just a simple port de bras (raising of an arm), you could easily tell she wasn't a dancer.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

This thread is not about Claude or LLMs.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 90851]

Israel seems likely to do anything they can to start things up again.

anigbrowl ranked #28 [karma: 99296]

You are the only one making fake arguments. The threat was explicitly to destroy 'a civilization', which nobody but yourself considers equivalent to 'infrastructure'. Ply your lame rhetorical fallacies elsewhere.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126033]

> No more cheap borrowing, no more low interest rates, hello constant high inflation.

Do you mean that we’ll have high inflation because we’ll keep running massive deficits? Because many countries that don’t have the reserve currency also have low inflation.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

Iranian-Affiliated Cyber Actors Exploit Programmable Logic Controllers Across US Critical Infrastructure - https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa... - April 7th, 2026

doener ranked #42 [karma: 81742]

Seems like Trump agreed to give Iran control over the Strait of Hormuz:

https://xcancel.com/araghchi/status/2041655156215799821

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

Battery storage is now cheap enough to unleash India’s full solar potential - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/battery-storage-is-... - April 7th, 2026

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Battery-storage...

WalterBright ranked #43 [karma: 79369]

I was at a dance hall the other day, and this young lady came floating in. It's hard to describe how she walked - just like she was effortlessly gliding. It looks easy, but anyone else would look like a moose trying it.

It's the result of a lifetime of ballet dancing. Probably 10,000 hours, at least.

I was just in awe.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77061]

I love it. I also really really like the brutalist/derelict aesthetic, and I think this nails it. Well done.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]
walterbell ranked #29 [karma: 97452]
tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418066]

Lattice cryptography was a contender alongside curves as a successor to RSA. It's not new. The specific lattice constructions we looked at during NIST PQC were new iterations on it, but so was Curve25519 when it was introduced. It's extremely not a rush job.

The elephant in the room in these conversations is Daniel Bernstein and the shade he has been casting on MLKEM for the last few years. The things I think you should remember about that particular elephant are (1) that he's cited SIDH as a reason to be suspicious of MLKEM, which indicates that he thinks you're an idiot, and (2) that he himself participated in the NIST PQC KEM contest with a lattice construction.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]

That movie is powerful and well worth watching.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]

I LOVED the physical magazine, read every word, from the time I started subscribing as a college freshman in 1966 until they started to pile up unread around 2015. Nearly 50 years seems like a good run.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102203]

Not only did this one draw me an excellent pelican... it also animated it! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/7/glm-51/

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102203]

I buy the rationale for this. There's been a notable uptick over the past couple of weeks of credible security experts unrelated to Anthropic calling the alarm on the recent influx of actually valuable AI-assisted vulnerability reports.

From Willy Tarreau, lead developer of HA Proxy: https://lwn.net/Articles/1065620/

> On the kernel security list we've seen a huge bump of reports. We were between 2 and 3 per week maybe two years ago, then reached probably 10 a week over the last year with the only difference being only AI slop, and now since the beginning of the year we're around 5-10 per day depending on the days (fridays and tuesdays seem the worst). Now most of these reports are correct, to the point that we had to bring in more maintainers to help us.

> And we're now seeing on a daily basis something that never happened before: duplicate reports, or the same bug found by two different people using (possibly slightly) different tools.

From Daniel Stenberg of curl: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116336957584445742

> The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.

> I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.

From Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel maintainer: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_...

> Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality. It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us.

> Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real.

Shared some more notes on my blog here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/7/project-glasswing/

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126033]

> most metro (including NYC) recycling is effectively a scam. How do you mandate composting in NYC

Also a scam.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

Submitter here, I posted because I think there is a confluence of interesting macroeconomic factors at work here. Certainly, immigration policy is factoring into this, as the restaurant industry is highly dependent on such labor. At the same time, we're still seeing 55+ leave the labor force rapidly (~4M Boomers continue to retire per year, ~330k/month), leaving only younger prime working age cohort, which continues to shrink. At the same time, we're seeing youth unemployment around 6%, including those with a college degree [1].

As the piece mentions, young men are "staying on the sidelines" versus engage in low wage, low status restaurant work (in this context). So, who can hold out longer: businesses and industries historically underpaying workers but "desperate for them"? Or potential workers? Because as long as US immigration is constrained, as a business, you get to pick from who is on the soil at whatever that market clearing price for labor is.

[1] Young men are struggling in a slowing job market, even if they have college degrees - https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/young-men-strugglin... - August 13th, 2025 ("Men ages 23 to 30 are discovering that a bachelor's degree doesn't offer the same protection from unemployment that it used to")

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

Great article. You really start to appreciate floating point when you have to squeeze some arbitrary level of performance out of an underpowered (say embedded) CPU and you decide to use fixed point. Suddenly all those nasty little edge cases that the floating point library would have handled silently, reliably and hopefully correctly for you need to be dealt with.

Just keeping track of the shifts during a chain of multiplications and additions can really ruin your day. And the good code will look exactly the same as the bad code. I'm doing something like that right now and have moved from doubles to fixed point 64 bit ints (32.32), it works, but it took me much longer than I thought it would (phase angle estimator for SDR output).

tptacek ranked #1 [karma: 418066]

Big open question what this will do to CNE vendors, who tend to recruit from the most talented vuln/exploit developer cohort. There's lots of interesting dynamics here; for instance, a lot of people's intuitions about how these groups operate (ie, that the USG "stockpiles" zero-days from them) weren't ever real. But maybe they become real now that maintenance prices will plummet. Who knows?

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 90851]

Sure, but "the same results" will rapidly become unacceptable results if much better results are available.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]
jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

Non proliferation is over and done with. Every country that can afford it and has the capability will have the bomb. There is no way this genie will go back in the bottle. And that means that a future nuclear war - if not today - is all but a certainty.

jacquesm ranked #2 [karma: 241588]

Europe has one 'weapon' they can use but they can use it just once: dump the bonds. The problem with that is that you need a reason big enough that by the time you're going to do it it will likely be too late to be effective and as a punitive measure it makes little sense, it's just one step short of a declaration of war. If Trump goes ahead with this madness then tomorrow morning the world economy will be in shambles, no matter what. Note that we got here ostensibly to 'free the Iranian people', apparently they need to be murdered to make them free. It's grotesque.

stavros ranked #45 [karma: 77061]

My local tennis court's reservation website was broken and I couldn't cancel a reservation, and I asked GLM-5.1 if it can figure out the API. Five minutes later, I check and it had found a /cancel.php URL that accepted an ID but the ID wasn't exposed anywhere, so it found and was exploiting a blind SQL injection vulnerability to find my reservation ID.

Overeager, but I was really really impressed.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]
minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74134]

> Contrast this to the recent trend of dropping in-line references to project names

Can you give an example? A reference to a project, without a link directly to the project, doesn't meet general definitions of spam.

Animats ranked #10 [karma: 160883]

Response from Iran: "Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it will respond outside the region and deprive the United States and its allies of oil and gas “for many years” if the US crosses “red lines” and attacks civilian facilities."[1]

"Iran has closed all diplomatic and indirect channels of communication with the United States, the state-run Tehran Times reported ..." US media does not seem to have picked up on this, but media in India and China have.[2] But the common source seems to be "Tehran Times", and it's unclear who runs that or where they get their info. New York Times, AP, and AlJazeera are not saying that. Xinhua has a one-line note with no source. The US White House says Vance is talking to somebody. Politico says Vance is on "standby".[3]

A negotiated cease-fire seems unlikely now.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2026/4/7/iran-war-li...

[2] https://www.the-independent.com/bulletin/news/iran-mediators...

[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/06/vance-is-on-standby...

minimaxir ranked #48 [karma: 74134]

The focus on the speed of the agent generated code as a measure of model quality is unusual and interesting. I've been focusing on intentionally benchmaxxing agentic projects (e.g. "create benchmarks, get a baseline, then make the benchmarks 1.4x faster or better without cheating the benchmarks or causing any regression in output quality") and Opus 4.6 does it very well: in Rust, it can find enough low-level optimizations to make already-fast Rust code up to 6x faster while still passing all tests.

It's a fun way to quantify the real-world performance between models that's more practical and actionable.

dragonwriter ranked #17 [karma: 127772]

It is not quoted, it is summarized. You are quoting the first sentence of the post, but the certainty implied in that sentence is immediately undercut by the next; “I don’t want it to happen but it probably will”, and made even more muddy by the rest, which continues: “However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]
jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91741]

I see two basic cases for the people who are claiming it is useless at this point.

One is that they tried AI-based coding a year or two ago, came to the IMHO completely correct at that time conclusion that it was nearly useless, and have not tried it since then to see that the situation has changed. To which the solution is, try it again. It changed a lot.

The other are those who have incorporated into their personal identity that they hate AI and will never use it. I have seen people do things like fire AI at a task they have good reasons to believe it will fail at, and when it does, project that out to all tasks without letting themselves consciously realize that picking a bad task on purpose skews the deck.

To those people my solution is to encourage them to hold on to their skepticism. I try to hold on to it as well despite the incredible cognitive temptation not to. It is very useful. But at the same time... yeah, there was a step change in the past year or so. It has gotten a lot more useful...

... but a lot of that utility is in ways that don't obviate skilled senior coding skills. It likes to write scripting code without strong types. Since the last time I wrote that, I have in fact used it in a situation where there were enough strong types that it spontaneously originated some, but it still tends to write scripting code out of that context no matter what language it is working in. It is good at very straight-line solutions to code but I rarely see it suggest using databases, or event sourcing, or a message bus, or any of a lot of other things... it has a lot of Not Invented Here syndrome where it instead bashes out some minimal solution that passes the unit tests with flying colors but can't be deployed at scale. No matter how much documentation a project has it often ends up duplicating code just because the context window is only so large and it doesn't necessarily know where the duplicated code might be. There's all sorts of ways it still needs help to produce good output.

I also wonder how many people are failing to prompt it enough. Some of my prompts are basically "take this and do that and write a function to log the error", but a lot of my prompts are a screen or two of relevant context of the project, what it is we are trying to do, why the obvious solution doesn't work, here's some other code to look at, here's the relevant bugs and some Wiki documentation on the planning of the project, we should use {event sourcing/immutable trees/stored procedures/whatever}, interact with me for questions before starting anything. This is not a complete explanation of what they are doing anymore, but there's still a lot of ways in which what an LLM can really do is style transfer... it is just taking "take this and do that and write a function to log the error" and style-transforming that into source code. If you want it to do something interesting it really helps to give it enough information in the first place for the "style transfer" to get a hold of and do something with. Don't feel silly "explaining it to a computer", you're giving the function enough data to operate on.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]
PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107002]

Mostly.

Remember the orange trees took the CO2 out of the atmosphere to make the peels. Some of it, probably most of it, is going back into the atmosphere but some of it is going to become soil carbon which could be retained for decades

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

Soil carbon is like dark matter in that there is a lot of it and it is poorly understood.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82699]

It really says something about the current state of affairs that after reading the headline, my first thought was oh god no, the photos are probably all hallucinated...

But it's actually really cool how they used AI to better determine the locations of the photos. I love this!

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82699]

"Stop paying for"?

But you have to pay for your own S3 bucket as well... and it's generally several times more expensive per terabyte, though this depends on different factors. (Not to mention you might still have to pay for Google if your e.g. Gmail doesn't fit into the free tier anymore.)

If this is supposed to be financially motivated, the creator seems to have it somewhat backwards.

ceejayoz ranked #33 [karma: 90851]

That we accept the lying doesn't mean it's good.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]
tosh ranked #8 [karma: 174527]

Which llm is best at driving DuckDB currently?

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107002]

I think H-1Bs have always been good for big companies like IBM, Google and Infosys and bad for startups. I mean, at a certain size, many of your hires are key employees and winning the lottery is not a business plan. To big co's though workers are fungible and if only 20% of the people win you can still open an office in Bangalore or Shanghai and tap foreign talent that way.

I am no fan of the H-1B program and think we should do something else like give out more green cards. I am happy to 'compete' with them if they are getting paid market rates like me, in fact working together with talented people puts my skills on wheels. I have known so many H-1Bs who were treated terribly, like the kind of situations that make HR staff quit.

jgrahamc ranked #31 [karma: 93927]

Cloudflare has long been doing work on PQ (sometimes in conjunction with Google) and rolled out PQ encryption for our customers. You can read about where this all started for us 7 years back: https://blog.cloudflare.com/towards-post-quantum-cryptograph... and four years ago rolled out PQ encryption for all customers: https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-for-all/

The big change here is that we're going to roll out PQ authentication as well.

One important decision was to make this "included at no extra cost" with every plan. The last thing the Internet needs is blood-sucking parasites charging extra for this.

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

4 day week advocates for 32 hour week at full pay, which can be afforded by observing aggregate profits in economic systems.

https://www.4dayweek.com/ (global) | https://workfour.org/ (US)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/21/icelan...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39992783 (citations)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

Sounds like Fiberhood is adjacent to https://solarunitedneighbors.org/ ?

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

I keep multiple copies across systems, as is tradition.

(25+ years in tech, ymmv)

toomuchtodo ranked #24 [karma: 107951]

Are there any efforts to fix this?

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91741]

"Also, it seems like all the Copilot 'connected experiences' are really just a chat window without any real integration with the applications they are embedded in."

I was triple-booked today. Two of the meetings in question should have had significant overlap between attendees. I figured, hey, there's this Copilot thing here, I'll ask it what the overlap is, that's the sort of thing an AI should be able to do. It comes back and reports that there is one person in both meetings, and that "one person" isn't even me. That doesn't seem right. One of the autocompleted suggestions for the next thing to ask is "show me the entire list of attendees" so I'm like, sure, do that.

It turns out that the API Copilot has access to can only access the first ten attendees of the meetings. Both meetings were much larger than that.

Insert rant here about hobbling 2026 servers with random "plucked out of my bum" limits on processing based on the capabilities of roughly 2000-era servers for the sheer silliness of a default 10-attendee limit being imposed on any API into Outlook.

But also in general what a complete waste of hooking up an amazingly sophisticated AI model to such an impoverished view of the world.

simonw ranked #27 [karma: 102203]

Thanks for this, the anecdote with the lost data was very concerning to me.

I think you're exactly right about the WAL shared memory not crossing the container boundary. EDIT: It looks like WAL works fine across Docker boundaries, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637353#47677163

I don't know much about Kamal but I'd look into ways of "pausing" traffic during a deploy - the trick where a proxy pretends that a request is taking another second to finish when it's actually held in the proxy while the two containers switch over.

From https://kamal-deploy.org/docs/upgrading/proxy-changes/ it looks like Kamal 2's new proxy doesn't have this yet, they list "Pausing requests" as "coming soon".

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91741]

I would personally pay money not to have this thing.

It's wonderful and I love that someone else loves it. The care put into it is fantastic. Vive la différence.

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vive_la_diff%C3%A9rence for those who may not recognize that phrase.)

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]
pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

pAIgliacci: as a large language model, I am unable to experience live comedy.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

In fairness, you can also have that experience with Microsoft OneDrive.

crazygringo ranked #38 [karma: 82699]

> Would We Choose SQLite Again? Yes. For a single-server deployment with moderate write volume, SQLite eliminates an entire category of infrastructure complexity. No connection pool tuning. No database server upgrades. No replication lag.

These are weird reasons. You can just install Postgres or MySQL locally too. Connection pool tuning certainly isn't anything you have to worry about for a moderate write volume. You don't ever need to upgrade the database if you don't want to, since you're not publicly exposing it. There's obviously no replication lag if you're not replicating, which you wouldn't be with a single server.

The reason you don't usually choose SQLite for the web is future-proofing. If you're totally sure you'll always stay single-server forever, then sure, go for it. But if there's even a tiny chance you'll ever need to expand to multiple web servers, then you'll wish you'd chosen a client-server database from the start. And again, you can run Postgres/MySQL locally, on even the tiniest cheapest VPS, basically just as easily as using SQLite.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

5 years is a ridiculous underestimate. 20 is more reasonable.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]

Demur. RayBan Meta and Oakley Meta glasses are fantastic devices.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

The airliner shootdown? The polonium poisonings? Miscellaneous sabotage attempts in Europe? In addition to, you know, the active war.

There's a lot of things that China "might" do but hasn't so far translated into significant violence, beyond the low-intensity border dispute in the mountains with India. Do they have power? Yes. Are they making threats? Other than a war of words with Japan, not really. What is this "history of aggression"?

Between China and the US, only one of those two has made threats to the territorial integrity of Europe.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187899]

Someone has their bonus tied to how many copies of Edge are installed.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

I like how C# handles this. You're not forced to support cancellation, but it's strongly encouraged. The APIs all take a CancellationToken, which is driven by a CancellationTokenSource from the ultimate caller. This can then either be manually checked, or when you call a library API it will notice and throw an OperationCancelledException.

Edit: note that there is a "wrong" way to do this as well. The Java thread library provides a stop() function. But since that's exogenous, it doesn't necessarily get cleaned up properly. We had to have an effort to purge it from our codebase after discovering that stopping a thread while GRPC was in progress broke all future GRPC calls from all threads, presumably due to some shared data structure being left inconsistent. "Cooperative" (as opposed to preemptive) cancel is much cleaner.

rbanffy ranked #5 [karma: 187899]

Interesting and fun read - we are well into the terrain of what was completely impossible to do back then. Now I can't wait to see a faster AppleSoft ROM ;-)

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90064]

Ah, okay. Something like https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schwenkschuster-oauth-... might also be of interest, though it is still nascent.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107002]

(1) Regular storage procedure. Same as all the other software. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiyPqbyHXIg)

(2) The usual problem is that a lot of vendors mistake this experience for security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ObCoCm61s No matter what you need some strategy for managing credentials for dev, test and production that is not "check them into version control"

(3) Never an external platform. Take a minute. Stop. Breathe. Think about it. Before you get the external platform you have to integrate with one thing. Add the external platform you have to integrate with two things. Don't go there.

(4) Platforms like Zapier rely on management being intimidated by the trauma of developing UI software. In UI software people quote a week to develop something and it takes five. When people quote 30 minutes to make a web scraper they often have it running in 10 minutes.

(5) There is a lot of fear that that web scraper will have to change as the target site changes, and occasionally that's a problem but (a) it is so expensive to make changes to GUIs that most web sites go for years between major changes and (b) a site that ranks well on Google today will probably lose it's rankings if it changes anything major so -- odds are that 10 minute web scraper will still be running in five years.

(6) In the AI coding age people are discovering just how easy it is to write scrapers and other integrations -- it's not that you need AI to code them, but that AI gives people the courage to try.

(7) Always look at the scraper as an option to the API client if it is possible. More often than not the API has restricted functionality and content compared to the web site and authentication is almost always more difficult. (e.g. to authenticate on a web site you just use a http client that has a cookie jar and submit your username and password to the form -- 20 APIs require implementation of 20 different auth methods, 20 scrapers use 1 authentication method, the only thing that is different is what the username and password fields are called)

jerf ranked #32 [karma: 91741]

"say that AI developers should incorporate more real-world diversity into large language model (LLM) training sets,"

Are you kidding me?

How much more "real-world diversity" could they possibly incorporate into the models than the entire freaking Internet and also every scrap of text written on paper the AI companies could get a hold of?

How on Earth could someone think that AIs speak like this because their training set is full of LLM-speak? This is transparently obviously false.

This is the sort of massive, blinding error that calls everything else written in the article into question. Whatever their mental model of AI is it has no resemblance to reality.

rayiner ranked #18 [karma: 126033]

Wow I stopped following hardware releases after the GeForce 2 and that was in 2004?

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113905]

You're talking about system altering the environment. GP was talking about the system altering itself. The system is a massive self-stabilizing collection of feedback loops. Unlike the static environment[0], it's incredibly hard to intentionally move such system to a different equilibrium. If it weren't, we'd already solved all the thorny world problems long ago.

--

[0] - Any self-stabilizing system that operates much slower than us - such as ecosystems or climate - is, from our perspective, static.

TeMPOraL ranked #20 [karma: 113905]

> but that there's app for mobile and desktop operating systems which deeply integrates it in the OS so it's just like a local folder that's magically synced

Which mobile OS would that be?

The big reason I stopped being excited about cloud storage is that on mobile, from what I can tell, none of the major providers care about "folder that syncs" experience. You only get an app that lets you view remote storage. The only proper "folder that syncs" I had working on my phone so far was provided via Syncthing, but maintaining that turned out to be more effort than my tiny attention span can afford these days.

PaulHoule ranked #25 [karma: 107002]

Germans are notorious for having a hard time procuring straightforward things you could buy out of a catalog, like helmets

https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-military-upgrade-hampered-by-...

Warships, on the other hand, are devilishly hard.

mooreds ranked #35 [karma: 90064]

This is so accurate. When you make one component of a system less expensive (in terms of time or money), the complements get more valuable.

What are the complements of code?

- Distribution

- Operation

- Marketing

- User experience

- Attention

All of these are going to get more valuable. We're at the beginning of this, but I don't see those components becoming less important.

This quote also hit home: "But software is mostly a thing people use, and getting people to use things is not a building problem. It never was."

As engineers, we think that everything is a building problem. Building is fun and seems less risky. It's our natural bent. That's why the canonical advice for software startup founders is to talk to customers as much as possible.

pjc50 ranked #23 [karma: 107989]

I've seen quite a few blog posts of "old door on breeze blocks", the canonical brutalist/abandoned warehouse desk.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]

Yet another way the mere possibility of AI/LLM being involved diminishes the value of ALL text.

If there is constant vigilance on the part of the reader as to how it was created, meaning and value become secondary, a sure path to the death of reading as a joy.

bookofjoe ranked #26 [karma: 104936]
coldtea ranked #34 [karma: 90735]

The outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.