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.
> a little bit of hammering got it looking good as new
A hammer and an oxy-acetylene torch is all that a good mechanic needs.
> If they can build a peaceful relationship with Taiwan without military involvement
Xi fucked this up because he’s a dictator.
Taiwanese polling on national identity was mixed until the 2010s [1]. Left at peace, it would have probably voted for reintegration in our lifetimes. But then Xi decided the post-Mao system of political competition within the CCP was inconvenient, launched his wolf warriors on all of China’s neighbors, annexed Hong Kong prematurely and started warmongering with Taiwan, all of which has lead to an avoidable but now-permanent polarization across the strait.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_Taiwanese_i...
Does ink still cost an arm and a leg though?
I'd call it write-only memory.
Plenty of people do.
AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ...
Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.
Obituary: https://archive.is/gQ3HB
This problem has been solved already by Lisp, Scheme, Java, .NET, Eiffel, among others, with their pick and choose mix of JIT and AOT compiler toolchains and runtimes.
That was solved long ago with invention of pockets.
SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/habermas...
My favorite quote of Habermas ist about Luhmann’s[1] theory: "It‘s all wrong, but it‘s got quality".
[1] the Zettelkasten person
SEP: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/habermas...
My favorite quote of Habermas ist about Luhmann’s[1] theory: "It‘s all wrong, but it‘s got quality".
[1] the Zettelkasten person
I love his
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
but feel this ponderous two-volume set
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac...
is thoroughly refuted by our last two decades of experience with electronic communications.
Still waiting for that Contact link...
>Suppose anthropic reached out to you and gave you a model id you could pin down for the next year to freeze any a/b tests. Would you really want that?
Where can I sign up?
This is a very interesting take.
From the article:
> Because sites on my.WordPress.net are private by default and not accessible from the public internet, they don’t behave like traditional websites. They aren’t optimized for traffic, discovery, or presentation, and they don’t need to be. Instead, WordPress becomes a personal environment where ideas can exist before they are ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared at all.
One of the main ideas of the internet, and therefore WordPress, is to be able to share stuff on the public internet.
Without that capability, I wonder who would this be targeted towards. For personal note taking there are numerous software already out there.
So enabled, in fact, that there's almost no point in downloading an already-made app when you can just trivially tailor-make your own. The builder is massively enabled to quickly make anything they want, for an audience of exactly one.
It is interesting to make the opposite case: particularly in the WinTel world we’ve been losing huge amounts of potential performance because we are still supporting computers that came out in 2008.
Not in many countries outside US, or similar salary levels, unless it comes bundled with some offer like a cable TV contract.
To be helpful, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
I'm confident "in most cases" is not correct there. If they lose money on the $200/month plan it's only with a tiny portion of users.
You've groupped LLMs into the wrong set. LLMs are closer to people than to machines. This argument is like saying "I want my tools to be reliable, like my light switch, and my personal assistant wasn't, so I fired him".
Not to mention that of course everyone A/B tests their output the whole time. You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs?
Yahoo was the front door of the Internet, once.
Getting stores to adopt this is unlikely, unless you get the European Union to mandate it or something like that. But using a crawler to find items for sale and an LLM to interpret the item listing might work. Then resell the processed pricing info. Publicize by using it for inflation calculations and such.
Thank you for the joke, it was good.
Government accounting operation on a strictly annual basis is ruinous.
From ガチャ; the "t" is not really there in the Japanese pronunciation, although it is used for transliteration of English words with T like チケット (chiketto, from ticket)
If managers can't understand why this isn't a brag, then your job is hardly safe.
I lived in XEmacs between 1995 and 2005, because in many UNIX variants having an IDE was a foreign word, not even something that could provide the affordances of a Turbo Pascal with Turbo Vision based IDE for MS-DOS.
Between Emacs, the improved XEmacs, and vi, the answer was obvious at the time, I joined the Emacs faction with XEmacs.
Mastered elisp good enough, had my configuration scripts, go to know enough vi to handle telneting (or sshing) into random UNIX servers without anything else installed.
Both are still kind of stuck in time, going back to them in random UNIX distribution feels like I am back in that UNIX decade.
The elephant in the room is "chi-fi". There's been a huge growth in small Chinese companies with unusual names making amazingly cheap, yet great-sounding over-ear headphones, IEMs, and earbuds within the past few years, and the vast majority of these are wired.
> All of this to get custom fonts in their messaging app or some other little feature they saw on someone’s phone.
Yes, and this is normal and right. They're expressing curiosity, and in the process also actually exercising ownership of their devices.
It's how most of us here learned computers, too.
The only problem in this picture, really, is that we've allowed - or even helped - software and platform vendors to disempower regular users so much that "to get custom fonts in their messaging app" they need to do something high-risk.
Most of what regular people try to do is like this anyway - something that should be a basic functionality, that used to be basic functionality, but has been taken away from users for their "safety" or because "sekhurity" or such.
In any programming language it's an interesting challenge to fit an entire functional program into under 140 characters.
APL: challenge accepted
https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
A quick search has not found any implementations of an APL-family language on the 2600, so let this comment be an inspiration for one of you madlads out there to actually do it. The 2600 has only 128B of RAM, but a lot of consoles around this era had additional bankswitched RAM on the cartridges.
I‘ll save you several clicks: if you login to Tumblr (because it seems they don‘t show posts openly anymore), you‘ll get an ad for an AI company.
> I don't like Musk politically but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he transformed 2 industries by sheer willpower and stubbornness.
If you talk to anyone who worked there, they will tell you that he had little to do with the innovation at any of his companies. His lieutenants and the people that worked for them had all the innovative ideas, and for the most part tried to either avoid Elon's ideas or convince him that their ideas were his so he would push them.
This is a very cynical take, and completely wrong.
My daughter is at level Z, and some of her peers are level P or Q. It's fine, and encouraged. She just gets different work while they are still working on up-leveling.
Only lazy or underpaid/under-resourced teachers give every kid the same work.
I've never had a pair of headphones with a cable connection that survived more than 2 years. Can't say that about the Airpods Max.
Like, I have opinions about high-end headphones based on how easy the cords are to replace. That shouldn't be the case.
I was a discrete headphone amp guy, just to situate myself in this market. I didn't expect to get good wireless headphones and think "I'm never going back", but that's precisely what happened.
Presumably the rest of the company operates like that too, so you were indeed not a good culture fit.
This should be marketed to hospitals, retirement homes, gyms, and such. Connect it to a remote with just channel up, channel down, volume up, and volume down.
This would definitely be useful for gyms. My gym has a tier of basic cable so low that their current programming is mostly a choice of "Walker, Texas Ranger", old episodes of "NCIS", Fox News, K-pop, or the Jewelry Channel.
Original mid-90s Toshiba "solid state floppy disk" SLC flash: 1M cycles
2000s SLC flash: 100K cycles
Modern SLC/pSLC flash: 30-60K cycles
2010s MLC flash: 5-10K cycles
Modern QLC flash: 300-500 cycles
...and I won't even get into the details of their retention characteristics, suffice to say they subtly redefined them over the years to make the newer numbers better than they really are.
It's a computer. CPU wise is about a slightly better M1 - which even today is quite a beast.
It's not surprising that it can run anything a 8GB M1 could... Geez...
The "ad free option" is also called "muting and looking away". Don't let them trick you into thinking they have the right and control to shove anything they want into your mind.
What a weird and inconsequential thing to focus on...
He's just fucking closely miced with compression + speaking fast and anxious/excited speaking to an audience
This is basically spread-spectrum / CDMA, but in a different frequency range? As others have mentioned in comments here, GPS signals are already far below the thermal noise floor.
This might explain why Grok went unavailable to non-subscribers at X the other day.
What does this have to do with what he just said?
Download → Mouser.zip (44 MB)
I smell LLM... and 44MB compressed for a mouse control panel applet (at least it's not an Electron app?) is still quite disturbing and a reminder of just how inefficient software has become.
Have to start somewhere, just keep tightening the ratchet.
Also even if they know you are transmitting, it may still be beneficial to prevent them from knowing how much you are transmitting.
Imagine the enemy detects some of your transmission, even knowing it's encrypted, they can still look at the data rate (or estimate order of it):
- 5 bps = probably a random transmitter, maybe audio spy device, maybe remote detonated weapon
- 5 Mbps = probably a feed from military hardware or personnel
Similar inferences can be made about volume, if they can identify distinct transmissions. Etc. If tricks like these can make the enemy confuse 5 Mbps TX for a 5 bps one, it has obvious tactical utility.
I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.
You could build this on ATProto.
Not necessarily? You can just as easily design an agent that only has access to one chat.
Great write up. Reminder that if you commit these to a Github Gist and the provider partners with GitHub for secrets scanning, they’ll rapidly be invalidated.
Who told you that? It wasn’t Trump.
“Orbital space centres and mass drivers on the Moon will be incredible.” - Musk
Right.
The product is the stock. TSLA: [1] Up by 3x in the last two years, despite no new models, the Cybertruck failure, the Robotaxi failure, the large truck failure, and an overall decline in sales. How does he do it?
It's a concern seeing Space-X, which builds good rockets, drawn into the X and AI money drains. Space-X is needed. If X and X/AI tanked, nobody would care.
> Most people run Windows just fine on cheap laptops with 4GB of RAM.
And if they can do that, they can get them (at full MSRP) for about half the price of a MacBook Neo.
Heck, you can get 8GB Windows laptops with twice the SSD size of the MacBook Neo's for a little over half of the Neo’s price (again, at full MSRP.)
> don't understand how that would limit evolution
Cardiac tissue is a surface. Blood is a volume. I think they’re saying blue whale hearts are near the largest current biology can evolve. Which is interesting because it suggests if we could e.g. engineer whales with carbon-fiber hearts or whatever, they’d evolve to grow even bigger.
The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study was methodologically flawed. “Children with two black parents were significantly older at adoption, had been in the adoptive home a shorter time, and had experienced a greater number of preadoption placements.”
Reframed, the study seemed to find (a) black kids are adopted less readily and (b) the longer a kid spends in the foster system, the lower their IQ at 17. (There is also limited controlling for epigenetic factors because we didn’t understand those well in the 1970s and 80s.)
Based on how new human cognition is, and genetically similar human races are, it would be somewhat groundbreaking to find an emergent complex trait like IQ to map to social constructs like race, particularly ones as broad as American white and black. (There is more genetic diversity in single African tribes than in some small European countries. And American whites and blacks are all complex hybridized social categories.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
It has always been like that, except we used to call it demos, sharewhare, beerware, postware,...
The free beer movement came out of UNIX culture, probably influenced by how originally AT&T wasn't able to profit from it.
Is there no mechanism to enable the EU to ban US providers being used and EU companies paying them? Payment rails are the gate.
In theory you can run any software on any hardware.
I've been on a grand jury... the cops lied through their teeth, couldn't keep their stories straight through a prepared monologues reading from notes and ... everyone in the room picked up on it and didn't indict the suspects. Our grand jury was so cynical the DAs stopped giving us cases and made the other two grand juries stay late to make up for the lost capacity. It was great. We did something good. And it was just a bunch of random people from Brooklyn.
The establishment likes to pat the establishment on the back but ordinary people seem to know what's up. In my minimal experience, anyway.
(One thing to keep in mind... grand juries really are a cross-section of the population, whereas lawyers get to select jurors after talking to them, so there is some selection bias on ordinary juries that grand juries don't have.)
I wish creators of local model inference tools (LM Studio, Ollama etc.) would release these numbers publicly, because you can be sure they are sitting on a large dataset of real-world performance.
The cost to make a digital copy from film stock has gone way down, to the point that fan groups [1][2] frequently encode and clean up old copies of film:
[1]: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/c/kinekovideo
This of course has various IP implications...
Desktop computers being as open as they are is an anomaly. It only came to be because the systems originated from research labs and hacker cultures rather than rent-seeking corporations. And even though corporations (like IBM and Microsoft) did push them, there was a lot more emphasis on business rather than consumer use at the time.
Vendors keep them open today only because there is a historical exception, but make no mistake if the laptop computer was first introduced to the masses in 2008 you would be downloading apps through official stores and paying a 30% fee on all transactions and would only be able to do a tiny fraction of what is possible on them today.
To me the surprise isn't that the phone is locked down, but that Apple allows MacBook Neo to do so much. Just look at its iPad counterpart.
I fake a tiling window manager on Mac with Hammerspoon, resizing to fit in specific corners/sizes:
-- resize based on ratios
function ratioResize(xr, yr, wr, hr)
return function ()
local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
win:moveToUnit({x=xr,y=yr,w=wr,h=hr})
end
end
-- 4 corners, different sizes
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "w", ratioResize(0, 0, 2/5, 2/3))
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "e", ratioResize(2/5, 0, 3/5, 2/3))
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "s", ratioResize(0, 2/3, 2/5, 1/3))
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, "d", ratioResize(2/5, 2/3, 3/5, 1/3))
-- send to next screen
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "ctrl"}, ";", function()
local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
local screen = win:screen()
local next_screen = screen:next()
win:moveToScreen(next_screen)
end)Claude Code 2.1.75 now no longer delineates between base Opus and 1M Opus: it's the same model. Oddly, I have Pro where the change supposedly only for Max+ but am still seeing this to be case.
EDIT: Don't think Pro has access to it, a typical prompt just hit the context limit.
The removal of extra pricing beyond 200k tokens may be Anthropic's salvo in the agent wars against GPT 5.4's 1M window and extra pricing for that.
Never worked on offshoring projects? That is exactly what the sweatshop coders do.
Note they put a Holter monitor on it
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1914273116
to get an ECG which is one of several strategies they could use. (e.g. lately I've been interested in Heart Rate Variability which has gotten me looking at reading heart rate with cameras, radars, pressure gauges, ultrasound, etc.)
I've wanted something like this for level of detail processing.
This is a render from Second Life, in which all the texture images were shrunk down to one pixel, the lowest possible level of detail, producing a monocolor image. For distant objects, or for objects where the texture is still coming in from the net, there needs to be some default color. The existing system used grey for everything. I tried using an average of all the pixels, and, as the original poster points out, the result looks murky.[1] This new approach has real promise for big-world rendering.
[1] https://media.invisioncic.com/Mseclife/monthly_2023_05/monoc...
1 click at most to install what I need to build, 1 click to build.
I ask the dev manager how long the build takes and get an answer that is within 20% of the ground truth.
Because they realized they need the data for AI
What would the cost be to deny these orbital altitudes?
"This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem."
It's both, although the latter is more prominent.
The whole concept of 'secret interpretations of law' is anathema to me. Secret information makes sense, there are lots of reasons a government might legitimately want to maintain a veil of obscurity. Secret interpretations of law are a manifestation of tyranny.
I like Ron Wyden but he should just employ his Congressional privilege here and read it out.
> it still looks like starlink is not net-profitable as a service
Starlink was profitable in 2024 [1] and should be materially profitable once V3 goes up.
> kessler syndrome avoidance is already pushing up costs with the lower orbits
This hits everyone. And it’s not a serious cost issue. Starlinks are still being deorbited before they need to be due to obselescence. And the propellant depots SpaceX is building for NASA tie in neatly if the chips stablise enough to permit longer-lasting birds.
> doesn't make all that much sense if your country is capable of basic infrastructure construction
Infrastructure gets blown up and shut off. Hence the military interest.
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-much-does-starlink-make-this-...
Useful tool, although some of the dark grey text is dark that I had to squint to make it out against the background.
FOIA it until it returns I suppose?
I remember the period of 1998-2008 or so when Windows seemed to be in absolute crisis because the average Windows user was not qualified to be using a computer connected to the internet.
I'd go visit my family in New England (more than one group) and they'd have a 640x480 screen and be doing all their web browsing through 70 vertical pixels because they'd installed 30 toolbars -- and they thought there was nothing wrong with this!
The world was reeling from a cyber war between two German teens who were trying to outdo each other with viral "love letter" programs because people would just click on... anything!
Plenty of us were looking for some platform, any platform, that would deliver us from that nightmare. It wasn't going to be the Sun Ray, it wasn't going to be Linux (talk about frying pan to the fire), it was going to be the iPhone.
Yeah, they kept the "MS" when they lost any connection with Microsoft, but they lost the "NBC" when they severed their connection from NBCUniversal.
> Are countries within the EU sovereign, or is the EU sovereign?
They’re both sovereign. When a king signs a treaty binding them in some way, they give up some sovereignty. But they don’t usually cease being sovereign.
So my first take is that there is something off about all WYSIWYG editors going back to Microsoft Word. Like you try to select some text to cut-and-paste and you can select the whole text except the first letter but if you try to get the whole text it suddenly jumps to select the whole document. Or hitting the "B" button sometimes bolds the paragraph above where you are, etc. It's like there is something wrong with the conceptual model behind all of these things.
So when I read "Group is purely structural (for balancing) and has no semantic meaning" my blood runs cold. Here's a mysterious something hidden in the document which bizzare misbehavors will be centered around. Like maybe when I try to select something and I got something else, it is one of those groups.
"AI gives you speed but takes your voice. Nobody has built the piece that weaves it back."
Money.
The general public thinks phones and computers are fundamentally different. Heck, I remember arguing this point even on HN back when smart phones were first coming out and being generally on the losing side as people got very excited about "app stores" and such. I see no practical path to getting to the point that enough of us realize that there is simply no reason for our phones to be locked down the way they are that the companies are forced to undo it, especially with our elites pushing with all they are worth to lock things down harder.
The companies take that confusion to the bank.
There have been numerous attempts at making phone/laptop crossovers, where you can plug your phone into a dock and get a computer, or slide your phone into a laptop case, etc. Some of them are even still around, but they're all definitely second-class citizens. There's a variety of problems that I think they've had in the market, not least of which is the fact that the average person still sees "phones" and "computers" as fundamentally different so the product makes no sense to them, but another issue that I think has held them back is that the product inevitably work by porting the limitations of the phone into the computer, rather than porting the freedom of the computer into the phone.
In the USB-C era, there is no excuse for every phone not having a mode where you can plug it into any ol' USB-C hub/dock and be able to get a desktop environment, even down to the "middle-of-the-line" phones. It would require in most cases no extra hardware. They just don't.
It's one of those glib statements that I never really believed.
If you got at something with the wrong mental model you are always going to be pushing a bubble around under the rug and you're going to feel tied up by constraints, find "correct" always elusive not matter how much time you take.
If you go at something with the right mental modal it often falls into place.
The "fast vs cheap" dilemma in a well-run operation is that once you have got efficient development under control (cheap for real) you can spend money to accelerate the schedule. "Efficient" and "under control" pretty much require correct. On the other hand I'd expect the average person using this slogan glibly is working on a project that will be late, expensive, and terribly incorrect.
> there is at least one tape that we know used to have Doctor Who on it but which now has another programme.
Recording over another recording does not completely erase the other. I wonder if it could be recovered.
Cost, maybe? It is one thing to ship up a valuable satellite (which they all can do). But to ship up 1000s of satellites (and keep doing it in perpetuity, because IIRC they don't have a long lifetime[0]) gets expensive.
0: Looks like 5 years. https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
TLDR
* Destructuring via Record Patterns
The most prominent feature is the ability to use a record pattern on the left-hand side of a local variable declaration. This allows you to "destructure" an object and initialize multiple variables in a single statement.
Traditional way:
Point p = getPoint();
int x = p.x();
int y = p.y();
Point(int x, int y) = getPoint();
Circle(Point(int x, int y), double radius) = getCircle();
You can now use these same record patterns in the header of an enhanced for loop to extract data from every element in a collection or array.
for (Circle(Point(int x, int y), double radius) : circles) {
// Directly use x, y, and radius here
}They don't really have a choice. The launch window is small and they either make it or they don't.
Reminds me of the PowerPC era, where Macs were ridiculously faster than anything x86.
I'm not sure people realize that HN is already at the most libertarian end, and all the discourse spaces which are much closer to actual power and legislation are much less pro-privacy.
"There are several writeups of large backends ported from node/python/ruby to Go which resulted in dramatic speedups, including drop in P99 and P99.9 latencies by 10x"
But that's not comparing apples to apples. When you get a dramatic speedup, you will also see big drops in the P99 and P99.9 latencies because what stressed out the scripting language is a yawn to a compiled language. Just going from stressed->yawning will do wonders for all your latencies, tail latencies included.
That doesn't say anything about what will happen when the load increases enough to start stressing the compiled language.
Dueling physical analogies is never a productive way to resolve a conversation like this. It just diverts all useful energy into arguing about which analogy is more accurate but it doesn't matter because the people pushing this law don't care about any of them and aren't going to stop even if the entire internet manages to agree about an analogy. This needs to be fought directly.
Link is the Youtube short, full video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtiiHXsnsrY
Original title "Why have far-forward nominal Treasury rates increased so much in the past few years? Old risks reemerge in an era of Fed credibility" compressed to fit within title limits.
This came up a few weeks ago. I don't think it's true. This lawsuit from 26 years ago is the only example anybody has come up with. Among the problems with this claim:
* Nobody can find a police department that administers any kind of general cognitive test.
* There are large states with statewide written police aptitude tests that are imperfect but correlated to general cognitive ability, and maximizing scores on that test is the universal correct strategy.
* It's a luridly stupid policy and most municipalities aren't luridly stupid.
I think this happened like, once or twice, in one or two of the 20,000 police departments across the United States, many of which are like one goober and his sidekick (no offense to them; just, you live in gooberville, you're a goober), and now it's an Internet meme that police departments specifically hire for midwittery. Nah.
> At least the US and Israel have a chance of improving their position in the geopolitical landscape.
This seems, uh, awfully optimistic.
Not really, it is a matter of having the right implementation.
- https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc
- https://www.aicas.com/products-services/jamaicavm
- https://www.azul.com/products/prime
Not all GCs are born alike.
Turbo Vision and Clipper want their glory MS-DOS days back.
For HN and other comment-oriented sites, local userscripts are supported by browser plugins, including mobile Safari. These can highlight known usernames and implement blocklists. Most LLMs can generate a userscript on demand for non-obfuscated sites, including userid list for manual edits of usernames.