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Ask HN: Do you believe aliens are visiting Earth?
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I would expect them to return again to see if they could find any signs of intelligent life this century.
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I think it's very, very unlikely. At least, to date, I haven't seen any evidence to suspect otherwise. > If we were to get "DISCLOSURE" (ie, the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true) woudl your ontology/worldview be "shattered" or "robust", or "otehr"? Such disclosure all by itself would mean nothing to me. The evidence, if any, to support the assertion would mean a lot. I don't think it would affect my worldview at all, but that may be one of those "you don't really know unless it happens" things.
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[delayed]
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I don't care enough about aliens to have an opinion. I haven't seen one, and the "abundance of testimony" convinces me of alien existence no more than religious gospel. > the "government authroity" of a "respect country" stating unequivocally that the reality of "alien" contact is true Stating the existence of aliens is not unequivocal or based in reality, even if a government does it. Don't forget that Russia claimed to cure cancer a few years ago, we've yet to see how unequivocally true that is in reality.
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That's a good viewpoint. You have to stay grounded in your own experience. This Russia cancer thing, what is that? Curious.
High-income job losses are cooling housing demand (jbrec.com)
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Can confirm via my own experiences. Had a job in a SV firm, and paid just barely enough to try and get on the housing ladder. Four years and a 40-60% price increase later, and I got laid off without managing to successfully buy a home. Since the layoffs, I’ve taken a sizable paycut (~$75k TC) to make ends meet with whatever I could find, but kept a pulse on the market in case things turned around. Locally, rents have gone down by ~$100-$500 a month (depending on when you renew) with one to two months free rent, while home prices have finally stopped rising. Homes are staying on markets longer, and bidding wars have dried up. I get about one to three price cut messages a day from Redfin, though nothing in my area or price range post salary cut. Unfortunately, I don’t expect this trend to continue. My landlord just introduced a new RealPage-alike to keep rents high, local developers have put a hold on new housing construction as resources get consumed for AI datacenters, and the same old red tape blocks meaningful progress in addressing availability gaps. The only real bright spot is that renters are pushing for statewide rent caps and controls with better progress than ever before, so there might be some relief in sight next election. It’s bad out there, ya’ll.
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Boston is seeing some headwind especially from slowdown in biotech, the main driver of growth over the past decade or so. Rents are also down. However, worth noting supply is still constrained especially if you exclude replacement-ready homes.
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Can confirm, this is where I’ve spent four years trying to buy a starter (2BR/2BA) home in on a single income. The biggest problem in older markets is that most housing stock is of appalling quality, requiring another five to six figures of work to get into a modern, habitable shape - unless you do the work yourself, which most can’t while they also hold down a FTE gig and deal with the return of urban commuting. It’s bad .
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The post doesn't have housing data to back up the claim, but the job growth by city is interesting. HCOL cities like DC and SF in the red, as you would expect. Government jobs down in DC is expected, but mostly green in other cities? What is Philly and New York doing right?
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A drop in housing prices might be the only silver lining if an actual recession hits (whether the official statistics will actually admit to a recession is debatable of course). That said, even if housing prices drop materially and eventually bottom it will provide little opportunity for "normal" folks to buy in if they're jobless. Will be interesting to see if Fed interest rate cuts translate to mortgage rate cuts, and whether those rate cuts lessen any price drops. I've said this before on here, but the historical price-to-income for housing has been something like 4x. Today it's 7x (that is as insane as it sounds). A long way to revert to the mean unless you really think "this time is different."
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Desirable metros seem to have very sticky prices. San Francisco, where I lived for 15 years, turned into a grotesque caricature of what it once was, but prices barely budged (and for most of that transition, they surged wildly). Sure, it's no longer the single most expensive rental market in the country, but it's still one of the highest despite quality of life degrading massively and even a big decline in population.
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Housing prices dropping aren’t so good for those who own homes. It is also likely there will be a feeding frenzy of investors snatching up homes. I had a hard time buying a few years ago, because investors kept out-bidding me with all-cash offers. I had to raise my price target to move outside of their impulse buy range, which I was not too happy about.
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So lower prices mean higher prices?
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It's 7x these days largely due to the 0% interest rate environment we had for so long.
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What I am worried about is won't building new homes slow down to a crawl or stop completely if the r word is confirmed?
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I think with the amount of corporations and existing homeowners buying homes that the demand is strong enough to keep prices high no matter what happens. There are billions of dollars set aside to gobble up homes in the event of a price drop. In my area, 20 percent of homes are owned by investors and realtors delist homes that don’t sell as opposed to drop price.
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Anecdotally, in my corner of the Silicon Valley, I've been looking to trade up homes from my 7/10 district to a nearby 10/10. Over the last year, I've seen the comparable properties in 10/10's rise about 10%, while my 7/10 has gone down about 5%. Both areas are very short commutes to high tech.
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But will lower demand coupled with still high interest rates actually lead to reduced housing prices?
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Somewhat, but remember that house prices are sticky. If I can't sell my house and get into one with a similar value (both price and features) with near net zero change in my debt and payments I'm likely to stay put. Of course once I decide to move I'll be looking at cheaper and more expensive places, but if I can't break even on a like for like move why would I move? I'll just ride this market out for another 10 years. (note too that my mortgage is less than 3% - one more reason moving anytime soon would be a terrible thing for my life) If my house is worth less than what I owe then moving (selling short) can make sense. Houses are not just an investment for most people. There are investment factors, but they are also the place you live. Thus most people cannot just sell or not - they also have to consider where will they live next if they sell. Even if I knew exactly where the bottom would be odds are I'd still not sell because I don't have options to live elsewhere.
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> If my house is worth less than what I owe then moving (selling short) can make sense. I believe this varies by state but I thought in some states the lender can come after you for the difference and in others you can just walk away (albeit with a credit ding).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonrecourse_debt https://www.financialsamurai.com/non-recourse-states-walk-away-from-mortgage/ (have walked away from underwater fha mortgage from 2008 gfc in a recourse state, ama)
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~4M homes transacted in 2025. Price levels will decline over time, it's just who has to sell first. Life/forced sales (divorce, death, relo, downsize for costs, etc) are up first vs irrational sellers pining for historical price levels. Foreclosures are rising (especially in Florida), but not materially imho. Delistings Jump 28% as Sellers Pull Homes Off Market Rather Than Settle For Low Prices - https://www.redfin.com/news/delistings-jump-sellers-pull-homes-off-market/ - November 25th, 2025 Foreclosures Rise for 8th Straight Month—These States Have the Worst Rates - https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/foreclosure-increase-attom-research-october-2025/ - November 14th, 2025 (real estate market participant, have some irons in the )
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> But will lower demand coupled with still high interest rates actually lead to reduced housing prices? One theory says that either lower employement causes lower demand and therefore lower interest rates OR lower employement causes the FED to lower interest rates to stimulate spending, and in EITHER case the response to your premise of "low employement + high interest rates" should be "interest rates will come down", and separately "low employment implies low demand implies house prices will come down".
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Talking from the Vancouver perspective where we have a similar situation - yes, house prices are going down. People list houses with the same price as 3-4 years ago but most close below the asking price.
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It has in several cities, including Austin, where I live.
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I feel like 50% of that is explained by the luxury housing build out bubble in Austin specifically.
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We just overbuilt everything. Condos, houses, etc. There's a lot of inventory no matter what type of housing you're looking for.
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Zillow publishes some interesting data: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/10221/austin-tx/ https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
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The illustration is misleading because it forces things into three buckets, two of which are colored to indicate "not good". But still, that bottom right corner of the graph is telling. Also pretty disgusting to me that healthcare is "growing faster than normal" across the board. You'd think it'd be "growing the normal rate" at least somewhere. It's not like population is growing faster than normal across the board. Isn't 20% of the GDP enough for an industry that's fundamentally a cost center of society? Wars have been fought over less.
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An aging population combined with people generally being a lot less healthy (eg look at obesity or diabetes rates) means we either let people die off, or else spend more and more on healthcare.
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What’s the maximum price you’d pay for a cure to a rare, fatal pediatric disease? Answer this question, and you’re on the journey to the solution to the problem you are talking about. Tell me some BS why the question doesn’t matter or is wrong or whatever, and discover why “Dunning Kruger” is at least part of the answer.
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From experience from my peers getting pregnant it's the cost of a "selective reduction" (which can be 1 to 0). Newly pregnant friends are spending $$$ on tests in utero to weed out children with such things.
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>Answer this question, and you’re on the journey to the solution to the problem you are talking about. Tell me some BS why the question doesn’t matter or is wrong or whatever, and discover why “Dunning Kruger” is at least part of the answer. I posit that the people who hold an ideology, moral compass, world view, or whatever else you want to call it, that permits the question to even be framed in this way are a root problem exacerbating many other problems in society, healthcare likely being one. I don't know what the "solution" is but the fact that ~1:5 dollars in this country is spent on maintenance of the human body is just wild and likely unsustainable or indicative of some gross error in how we measure such things.
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The large baby boomer generation is getting old, and thus their costs will go up just by nature of old people needing more. They are also realizing that health is the largest factor in how long they will live (not to mention that they likely started smoking before people realized how harmful it was - most have long quit but with unknown damage done. There are other choices that they often made that are now questionable) Which is to say I expect spending to go up just for demographic reasons of large numbers of people starting to care. Don't confuse this for thinking all is well with health care costs.
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Healthcare is a non-negotiable way to extract money from people. And the industry is swimming in opaque complexities, IP, monopolies, monopsonies, and sweetheart regulation. Why the h*ll should they limit themselves to a mere 20%?
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It's curious that the article combines education and health care into one category. I suspect that most of the growth is coming from the health care side. On the other hand, a quick search suggests that the growth in government jobs is mainly in education at the state and local level. Does anyone have further insight into that?
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Any evidence if this is global trend in developed countries?
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All of the examples in the article seem to be the us, so I think they're only looking at local trends. Are other developed countries firing people in the same way rn?
We're in a recession.
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We were already in one following the tech correction since Nov 2021. [0] The problem here is some waited for too long to be told we are now in a recession , then some politicians tried to redefine it. But that is nothing compared to what will happen in the next 5 - 10 years. Nothing goes up forever. The only hint is that we need to prepare before 2030. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
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objectively we're not yet, but things are certainly weird
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Objectively, I'm not sure we can reliably say any longer, given how much pressure has been put on formerly objective reporting agencies to conform to this administration's narrative.
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bifurcation, and more
I saw HUGE ramen displays yesterday at Safeway, including some of the less common flavors like blue (Soy Sauce, formerly "Oriental") and yellow (Creamy Chicken). I can't find the blog post from the last major recession where people were talking about all the crazy flavors you only see when the economy is REAL bad.
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Are you sure they're not trying to capitalize on the ramen craze from kpop demon hunters?
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I was always taking noodle bowls to work. Fill with water, microwave, enjoy at my desk. A dollar or two. Couldn't believe how many people would go to the sushi restaurant at the base of the building and spend $25 on lunch a couple days a week. Yikes.
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Unless you're making them yourself or at least customizing them a good bit, noodle bowls are pretty unhealthy food. Nothing fresh in them, high sodium, freeze-dried ramen or noodle bowls were originally survival food and should be treated as such. Not saying don't eat them, and I don't know your socioeconomic background or anything, but if you want to eat them or have to eat them, try to add a little something extra into them. A cup of shredded cabbage and/or a few cherry tomatoes and/or a half cup of onion slices and/or an egg, things like that should be cheap and easy to add and will help dilute the sodium and add a healthy component to the meal, and your kidneys and heart will thank you for it.
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Noodle bowls are usually pretty high in saturated fat (between 8-15 grams on average). I can't imagine eating them daily. At the very least you should consider steaming some vegetables (also very cheap), slice them up, and mix'em in to get some moderate nutritional value from it. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/whats-your-daily-budget-for-saturated-fat
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"Hey, I heard you like eating sushi. Have you ever tried having a bowl of par-cooked microwaved noodles, instead? It's basically the same thing!"
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Wheat in a watery soup flavoured with monosodium glutamate isn't very nutritious compared to rice and fresh fish. There's a reason ramen costs a dollar or two compared to sushi.
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It's not nearly as filling, but I saw a character on TV smashing up their noodles and pouring in the powder, shaking the bag, and eating them like popcorn. I've become incredibly addicted.
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Prepare it and eat it per the instructions and it's infinitely more filling. Also there's fairly wide variance in calorie count brand to brand for the same size square, not sure why.
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> Fill with water, microwave, enjoy at my desk Getting lunch with coworkers once in a while doesn’t hurt
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Sure. And there's also shared lunchroom areas you can take your own lunch to.
Someone please tell the stock market, I moved my investments to be more risk averse and it hurts to watch the green line go up.
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Almost all of the gains on SP500 are from 7 stocks - I'll let you guess which 7. The market overall is nowhere near as exuberant. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/24/sp500-stock-market-tech-nvidia/
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They say time in the market generally beats timing the market
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There is generally no point in doing this, keep a constant asset allocation that match your risk appetite, otherwise you're just playing the casino.
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The market can stay insane longer than you can stay insolvent. Also, its possible that the market thinks job losses are good (aka that AI is replacing jobs)
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The brutal truth… Stocks go up, wages and income go down, things keep on keeping on because AI has quietly replaced you.
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Except in reality this isn’t happening outside of press releases. God y’all drank the koolaid.
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First time?
Response to Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language (robbyonrails.com)
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There are major gaps in platforms slapped together in the VC Party / Ruby era that seem to have unresolvable tech debt. Or perhaps Ruby just attracts the types of people who would rather talk about F1 racecars on Twitter than instruct a few of their thousands of employees to fix the shipping calculator. Ruby was not designed to be a serious language. It was designed to be fun like PHP but not ugly like PHP. Meanwhile PHP grew up and Ruby grew out. It's okay to love a thing and realize that it has some unsolvable issues and some people around it destined to keep it that way. Most things are like that these days.
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This article feels like someone is defending their language. And that doesn’t bother me, but I don’t value that. I don’t care about what’s popular or what feels most familiar. What I want is a dispassionate discussion of how different language features impact code quality, and I think you can only find that in more abstract discussions. The kind that turns people off with its talk of monads and applicatives.
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Well said.
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> Culture doesn’t reliably reward the serious. Neither does business. It rewards the resonant. The clear. The human. The work that connects. Culture maybe, but business rewards what make business going on. Only that and Ruby proved that it can make businesses start and keep them going on. The few ones that exceed the capabilities of the runtime had to pivot to something else, in part or completely, but would we had a Twitter if they started coding in pick-your-favorite-serious-language? Maybe a competitor would have overrun them. We'll never know. What I know for sure is that Ruby has been paying my bills for nearly 20 years. That's more than any other language I used, serious or not serious. It worked for me.
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As a Python enthusiast for 20 years, just ignore and enjoy.
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I read this whoel article and I still do not understand what criteria make a programming language serious. Obviously it's very different from Python but I don't understand "serious" or "non-serious" as a way to describe this.
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> Ruby attracts a particular kind of person. Not better. Not smarter. Just… different. People who care how code feels to write and read. People who see programming as a craft that can be expressive. People who understand that most of our careers are spent living inside someone else’s decisions, so joy isn’t a luxury… it’s the only way this work stays humane. The idea that caring about how your programs feel to write or read is somehow “different” seems weird to me. I don’t write Ruby so maybe I just don’t appreciate this difference. But I mean, I write fun-to-write, silly little experiments in Octave, Fortran, and Python… I don’t know if anyone would enjoy reading them, but I don’t really see how a language could prevent you from finding joy in programming (other than Java of course /s).
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Ruby is a fine language that puts humans over machine. however the success of rails was also its biggest albatross. Ruby though fine for system tasks (such as system automation etc, chef existed yeah - but we haven't seen new gen tools built after) - people forgot it could do those. the other is failure of certain sjws to separate say dhh the programmer vs the person. & not being aware to how money (velocity & gravity) move the world e.g shopify involvement in the ruby ecosystem. failure to understand that beginners are the lifeblood of an ecosystem - till this date don't know if ruby can be effectively used on windows. most people have windows machines not mac's or linux boxes. it didn't fail cz it was too slow (its fast enough)
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It’s as serious as you want/need it to be.
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Ruby is a little silly, but given its pedigree of generational internet projects, Rails is indisputably a serious framework.
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I indeed really liked Ruby because of it's expresiveness, it being totally OO, the lovely readable and writeable syntax. But yeah, that was 20 years ago. These days I find Kotlin to be the perfect fit for my projects, because of the static typing and its ergonomic syntax. I just don't feel confident about Ruby projects when they start growing. But, I still love the language, although mostly for small things.
Ruby’s biggest flaw is that it insists humans matter. Some people hate that.
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As someone who doesn't know ruby i have literally no idea what you mean by this
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> it insists humans matter. Uh how?
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Uh read this and try using it. https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/about/
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As opposed to what?
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A.I. obviously.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf] (huggingface.co)
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what is the ballpark vram / gpu requirement to run this ?
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For just the model itself: 4 x params at F32, 2 x params at F16/BF16, or 1 x params at F8, e.g. 685GB at F8. It will be smaller for quantizations, but I'm not sure how to estimate those. For a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model you only need to have the memory size of a given expert. There will be some swapping out as it figures out which expert to use, or to change expert, but once that expert is loaded it won't be swapping memory to perform the calculations. You'll also need space for the context window; I'm not sure how to calculate that either.
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Well props to them for continuing to improve, winning on cost-effectiveness, and continuing to publicly share their improvements. Hard not to root for them as a force to prevent an AI corporate monopoly/duopoly.
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Worth noting this is not only good on benchmarks, but significantly more efficient at inference https://x.com/_thomasip/status/1995489087386771851
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Testing the model in OpenRouter, it's pretty speedy compared to Claude/GPT/Gemini.
People with basement rigs generally aren't the target audience for these gigantic models. You'd get much better results out of an MoE model like Qwen3's A3B/A22B weights, if you're running a homelab setup.
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Yeah I think the advantage of OSS models is that you can get your pick of providers and aren't locked into just Anthropic or just OpenAI.
I genuinely do not understand the evaluations of the US AI industry. The chinese models are so close and far cheaper
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Two aspects to consider: 1. Chinese models typically focus on text. US and EU models also bear the cross of handling image, often voice and video. Supporting all those is additional training costs not spent on further reasoning, tying one hand in your back to be more generally useful. 2. The gap seems small, because so many benchmarks get saturated so fast. But towards the top, every 1% increase in benchmarks is significantly better. On the second point, I worked on a leaderboard that both normalizes scores, and predicts unknown scores to help improve comparisons between models on various criteria: https://metabench.organisons.com/ You can notice that, while Chinese models are quite good, the gap to the top is still significant. However, the US models are typically much more expensive for inference, and Chinese models do have a niche on the Pareto frontier on cheaper but serviceable models (even though US models also eat up the frontier there).
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1. Have you seen the Qwen offerings? They have great multi-modality, some even SOTA.
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There is a great deal of orientalism --- it is genuinely unthinkable to a lot of American tech dullards that the Chinese could be better at anything requiring what they think of as "intelligence." Aren't they Communist? Backward? Don't they eat weird stuff at wet markets? It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; their Bolshevism dooms them; we have the will to power; we will succeed. Even now, when you ask questions like what you ask of that era, the answers you get are genuinely not better than "yes, this should have been obvious at the time if you were not completely blinded by ethnic and especially ideological prejudice."
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Back when deepseek came out and people were tripping over themselves shouting it was so much better than what was out there, it just wasn’t good. It might be this model is super good, I haven’t tried it, but to say the Chinese models are better is just not true. What I really love though is that I can run them (open models) on my own machine. The other day I categorised images locally using Qwen, what a time to be alive. Further even than local hardware, open models make it possible to run on providers of choice, such as European ones. Which is great! So I love everything about the competitive nature of this.
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but didn't Chinese already surpass the rest of the world in Solar, batteries, EVs among other things ?
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They did, but the goalposts keep moving, so to speak. We're approximately here : advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, reusable rockets, quantum computing, etc. Chinese will never catch up. /s
It's all about the hardware and infrastructure. If you check OpenRouter, no provider offers a SOTA chinese model matching the speed of Claude, GPT or Gemini. The chinese models may benchmark close on paper, but real-world deployment is different. So you either buy your own hardware in order to run a chinese model at 150-200tps or give up an use one of the Big 3. The US labs aren't just selling models, they're selling globally distributed, low-latency infrastructure at massive scale. That's what justifies the valuation gap.
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Assuming your hardware premise is right (and lets be honest, nobody really wants to send their data to chinese providers) You can use a provider like Cerebras, Groq?
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According to OpenRouter, z.ai is 50% faster than Anthropic; which matches my experience. z.ai does have frequent downtimes but so does Claude.
Valuation is not based on what they have done but what they might do, I agree tho it's investment made with very little insight into Chinese research. I guess it's counting on deepseek being banned and all computers in America refusing to run open software by the year 2030 /snark
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> Valuation is not based on what they have done but what they might do Exactly what I’m thinking. Chinese models catching rapidly. Soon to be on-par with the big dogs.
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> I guess it's counting on deepseek being banned And the people making the bets are in a position to make sure the banning happens. The US government system being what it is. Not that our leaders need any incentive to ban Chinese tech in this space. Just pointing out that it's not necessarily a "bet". "Bet" imply you don't know the outcome and you have no influence over the outcome. Even "investment" implies you don't know the outcome. I'm not sure that's the case with these people?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app (reuters.com)
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I assume that in the US, the major manufacturers of phones and their operating systems already have backdoors for national security reasons. I think back to the past leaks from Snowden regarding the PRISM program. That program specifically included Google and Apple cooperating with the government under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. So while this state-owned cyber safety app is authoritarian, I wonder if it reflects just the most practical way India’s government can achieve the same things that the US has.
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What should have happened is that they should have forced mobile vendors to allow users to uninstall all apps. What actually happened is that they are asking for their app to be installed as well, sigh.
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Do we have a breakdown of what this app actually does?
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https://sancharsaathi.gov.in - Report fraud/scam calls and SMS directly from your phone. - Block or track lost/stolen phones by disabling their IMEI so they can’t be misused. - View all mobile numbers registered under your ID and report any unauthorized SIM cards. - Verify if a phone is genuine with an IMEI/device authenticity check. - Report telecom misuse, such as spoofed calls or suspicious international numbers. The stated goal is protect users from digital fraud and safer telecom usage, who knows how good it’ll be. Probably a PITA.
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https://sancharsaathi.gov.in/ Basically IMEI stamping because sim card purchase with ID has come to be viewed as flawed/compromised by NatSec types in India.
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I'm shocked by people and state using the crutch of cyber crime or scams to push a totalitarian solution to a problem that is better solved by improved education and targeted campaigns against common security pitfalls. I abhor any decision that robs even a grain of my individual freedom.
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I share your abhorrence but are you really shocked? "Think of the children", "Stop the terrorists," these have been the foundations for the erosion of personal liberty for the past thirty years.
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And long before that too, it's just taken different soundbites that play on people's fears at the time.
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"With 5 million total downloads - the app has saved 3.7 million lost phones", this somehow doesn't add up for me, as this implies more than 74% of phones are stolen? Or this this govt lying to pad the numbers to make the app look like a sheep in wolves clothing.
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ref: "the new tobacco" this last year i'm seeing very concerning behavior in students in the 14-20 range. complete addiction to their phones. very deep interests in things i was completely unaware that they existed. similar to how when i started noticing anime girlfriends/waifus in 2016. about 40% are deep in discord communities where i literally cannot figure out a single sentence of what they're talking about. if society doesn't do something, and soon, say goodbye to the cognitive ability of a large chunk of future generations.
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I wouldn’t venture in the direction that many here will take. I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud. I personally know many people who have lost significant sums through social engineering attacks. The money is transferred to multiple mule accounts and physical cash is siphoned off to the fraudsters by the owners of those account. They choose helpless, illiterate, village dwelling account holders for this. Another huge issue is unregulated loan apps. There are horror stories of people installing apps in order to take high-interest loans and then those apps stealing their private photos and contacts or accessing camera to take photos in private moments, and then sending those photos to contacts via WhatsApp when interest payment is overdue. Then there are obvious security issues with terrorism and organized crime. The government wants data. It's clear why. There is huge potential for misuse.
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And you trust the government to only use it for good purposes? and not to track people who may be protesting or belong to opposing political/religious/cultural views? We know based on historical pegasus complaints that this trust has to be earned and can't be given. There are lots of ways to solve for this, mandating that these companies own the identification process through their systems, report misuse, govern apps. Why taken on the ownership of a process that is better handled outside of government while the government holds them to account via huge fines and timelines but giving these large companies ownership of protection from scams or stolen phones etc...? win win and I think these large companies are due spending extra money to protect their users anyway.
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> I will point out that India have the highest number of victims of cyber-fraud Based on what? > Another huge issue is unregulated loan apps You don't need to root everyone's phones to regulate financial crime. > Then there are obvious security issues with terrorism and organized crime India is building a centralised backdoor into every phone in the country. That's a massive national security risk.
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Google, the phone manufacturer and now the state running bloatware on my phone. I will have three dialers, calendars, etc. All of them uninstallable
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Get GrapheneOS. The installation is painless and the OS surperior. No mainstream phone OS is viable in the privacy and security nightmare of today. https://grapheneos.org/
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What stops someone from loading GrapheneOS on their (Indian) Android phone?
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It will be used as evidence that the person who has GrapheneOS on their phone is attempting to break the law. Telegram and Signal chats are often used as evidence of malfeasance in Indian national security cases, so the jump to using GrapheneOS as evidence of malfesance is tiny.
Honestly shocked it took this long for governments to start doing this; it seemed inevitable that governments would want all the data private entities have been enjoying. More and more it seems like the benefits of being connected are not worth the cost of being so visible to so many hostile (state and non-state) actors
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Yeah, internet is a dead star in so many ways this days. Repetitive, addictive and a private data sucker. I'm already starting to buy programming books and offline content preparing for a radical semi-disconnection.
Very concerning. I will be suprised if companies like apple comply though.
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You shouldn't be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26644216
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Why wouldn't they? If Apple doesn't comply, the Indian government could force them to withdraw from the market or otherwise make their lives difficult. I can't see Apple or their shareholders caring about privacy enough to abandon such a large market.
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Do they actually have a choice? Usually with laws and orders from the government, you can't do much than either go with the flow, try to lobby against it afterwards, or straight up refuse and leave the market. Considering Apple's ties to India, I feel like Apple is unlikely to leave, so that really only leaves Apple with the first; comply and complain.
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> Do they actually have a choice? Yes. Apple's revenues are half as much as the government of India's [1][2]. That's a resource advantage that gives Cupertino real leverage against New Delhi. [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/ $102.5bn / quarter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget $827bn / year
> I will be suprised if companies like apple comply though They will. All tech companies already comply with India's IT Act. And India now manufactures 44% of all iPhones sold in the US [0] while facing the threat of a $38B anti-trust fine [5], so Apple doesn't have much of a choice because both China and Vietnam (the primary competitors for this segment of manufacturing) have similar regulations. Same with Samsung at 25% in CY24 [1] which is trying to further entrench itself in India [2][7][8] due to existential competition from Chinese vendors [3][6]. Heck, Apple complied with similar regulations in Russia [5] before the Ukraine War despite being a smaller market than India with no Apple manufacturing, engineering, or capex presence. All large companies who face existential threats from Chinese competition have no choice but to entrench in India as it's the only large market with barriers against direct Chinese players - ASEAN has an expansive FTA with China and Brazil is in the process of one as well. And the Indian government is taking full advantage of this to get large companies to bend to Indian laws, as can be seen with the damocles sword of tax enforcement on Volkswagen [3] while negotiating an FTA with the EU and a potential $38B anti-trust fine against Apple [4] while negotiating a BTA with the US. It's the same playbook China used when it was in India's position today in the late 2000s and early 2010s. [0] - https://scw-mag.com/news/apples-supply-shift-to-india-speeds-up-to-44-surpassing-china-for-the-first-time/ [1] - https://www.techinasia.com/news/samsung-to-broaden-manufacturing-portfolio-in-india-minister [2] - https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2025/11/25/SLEYWTPTVRHBPPYPCNNEAP6CDQ/ [3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251118VL205/2030-samsung-sk-hynix-dram-ymtc.html [4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/apple-contests-indias-antitrust-penalty-law-with-risk-38-billion-fine-filing-2025-11-26/ [5] - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/16/apple-to-offer-government-approved-apps-russia/ [6] - https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=235998 [7] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250903PD208/samsung-india-investment.html [8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20241212PR200/samsung-india-education-semiconductors-design.html
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And these mofos complied to the request to block VPN apps on iPhones in Russia. Think about companies that cooperated with the Nazis.
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Even in mainland China, where iOS does have a large amount of changes to comply with local regulations, Apple does not pre-install any apps from anyone.
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> Even in mainland China [..] Apple does not pre-install any apps from anyone. That's because China has no regulation obliging them to do so. China takes the other, more comprehensive, route to privacy invasion. Sucking up every bit of data at the router.
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China don't require pre-installed apps but the Chinese government require all data processing and storage to be conducted within China with complete source code access. India chose to back off on data sovereignty [0] because it would have had a side effect of making Indian IT Offshoring less competitive. [0] - https://verfassungsblog.de/cross-border-data-flows-and-indias-digital-sovereignty/
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I don't think there is any reason to assume they would allow forced code execution just because they allow data residency for mainland accounts. And unfortunately, China is likely a much larger and more profitable consumer market than India - presumably they can still export phones produced inside India without this.
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This is the Achilles heel of having a closed platform. Eventually the government dictates what's supposed to be in it.
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Even an open platform would do nothing. If you are a suspect, your phone would be checked and if you were using something like GrapheneOS, it would be used as evidence against you. And anyhow, all Android vendors have aligned with the policy as well.
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If it was open, truly open, wouldn't using GrapheneOS be easier and far more common than it is now?
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Spleen Monospaced Bitmap Fonts (github.com/fcambus)
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This is the console font for OpenBSD (on x86-64, at least).
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I'm not sure I like it. A lot of the character shapes (like the C and S) feel too rectangular at large sizes. At smaller sizes, some of the alternate character shapes like the Y, and the rounded corners on characters like F and L, harm readability.
No, it's just an odd style of lettering inspired by graffiti throw-ups. I think this style is popular in the warez community. (It just says "spleen". Nothing exciting.)
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Thanks - really had no clue. Turns out reading warez-style ascii art is not my forte!
A new AI winter is coming? (taranis.ie)
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I think its worth discounting against the failure rates of humans also. > Depending on the context, and how picky you need to be about recognizing good or bad output, this might be anywhere from a 60% to a 95% success rate, with the remaining 5%-40% being bad results. This just isn't good enough for most practical purposes This seems to suggest that humans are 100%. I'd be surprised if i was anywhere close to that after 10 years of programming professionally
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I trully hate how absurdly over-hyped this LLM concept of AI is. However, it can do some cool things. Normally that's the path to PMF. The real problem is the revenue. There is no extant revenue model whatsoever. But there are industries that are described as "a business of pennies" Ex. telephony. Someone may yet eek out a win. But the hype-to-reality conversion will come first.
Most “AI is rubbish” takes treat it as an open-loop system: prompt → code → judgment. That’s not how development works. Even humans can’t read a spec, dump code, and ship it. Real work is closed-loop: test, compare to spec, refine, repeat. AI shines in that iterative feedback cycle, which is where these critiques miss the point.
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What’s tough for me is figuring out where people are realizing significant improvements from this. If you have to set up good tests [edit: and gather/generate good test data!] and get the spec hammered out in detail and well-described in writing, plus all the ancillary stuff like access to any systems you need, sign-offs from stakeholders… dude that’s more than 90% of the work, I’d say. I mean fuck, lots of places just skip half that and figure it out in the code as they go. How’s this meaningfully speeding things up?
I am simply stunned at the negativity. Yes, there is hype. But if you actually filter it out, instead of (over) reacting to it in either direction, progress has been phenomenal and the fact there is visible progress in many areas, including LLMs, in the order of months demonstrates no walls. Visible progress doesn’t mean astounding progress. But any tech that is improving year to year is moving at a good speed. Huge apparent leaps in recent years seem to have spoiled some people. Or perhaps desensitized them. Or perhaps, created frustration that big leaps don’t happen every week. I can’t fathom anyone not using models for 1000 things. But we all operate differently, and have different kinds of lives, work and problems. So I take claims that individuals are not getting much from models at face value. But that some people are not finding the value isn’t an argument that those of us getting value, increasing value isn’t real.
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I have pretty negative feelings about all this stuff and how the future will be but also have to admit it's crazy how good it is at so many things I would have considered safe a few years ago before chatgpt. There are a couple really disingenuous bloggers out there who have big audiences themselves and are "experts" for others audiences who really push hard this narrative that AI is a joke and will never progress by where it is today, it is actually completely useless and just a scam. This is comforting for those of us that worry more than are excited about AI so some eat it up while barely trying it for themselves
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Yeah, totally agreed - there is still far too little negativity in comparison to what is going on.
These same questions could be asked about self driving cars, but they've been shown to be consistently safer drivers than humans. If this guy is getting consistently better results from ai+human than it is from just humans, what would it matter if the former results in errors given the latter results in more and costs more?
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If the cars weren't considerably safer drivers than humans they wouldn't be allowed on the road. There isn't as much regulation blocking deploying this healthcare solution... until those errors actually start costing hospitals money from malpractice lawsuits (or not), we don't know whether it will be allowed to remain in use.
wrong. OpenAI is literally the only AI company with horrific financials. You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.
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> You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins. They can still be "bleeding money on AI" if they're making enough in other areas to make up for the loss. The question is: "Are LLMs profitable to train and host?" OpenAI, being a pure LLM company, will go bankrupt if the answer is no. The equivalent for Google is to cut its losses and discontinue the product. Maybe Gemini will have the same fate as Google+.
This article uses the computational complexity hammer way too hard, discounts huge progress in every field of AI outside of the hot trend of transformers and LLMs. Nobody is saying the future of AI is autoregressive and this article pretty much ignores any of the research that has been posted here around diffusion based text generation or how it can be combined with autoregressive methods… discounts multi-modal models entirely. He also pretty much discounts everything that’s happened with AlphaFold, Alpha Go etc. reinforcement learning etc. The argument that computational complexity has something to do with this could have merit but the article certainly doesn’t give indication as to why. Is the brain NP complete? Maybe maybe not. I could see many arguments about why modern research will fail to create AGI but just hand waving “reality is NP-hard” is not enough. The fact is: something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. That’s a discovery on the scale of the internet or google search and shouldn’t be discounted… and usage proves it. In 2 years there is a platform with billions of users. On top of that huge fields of new research are making leaps and bounds with novel methods utilizing AI for chemistry, computational geometry, biology etc. It’s a paradigm shift.
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Technologically, I believe that you're right. On the other hands, the previous AI winters happened despite novel, useful technologies, some of which proved extremely useful and actually changed the world of software. They happened because of overhype, then investor moving on to the next opportunity. Here, the investors are investing in LLMs. Not in AlphaFold, AlphaGo, neurosymbolic, focus learning, etc. If (when) LLMs prove insufficient to the insane level of hype and if (when) experience shows that there is only so much money that you can make with LLMs, it's possible that the money will move on to other types of AI, but there are chances that it will actually go to something entirely different, perhaps quantum, leaving AI in winter.
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> I could see many arguments about why modern research will fail to create AGI Why is AGI even necessary? If the loop between teaching the AI something, and it being able to repeat similar enough tasks; if that loop becomes short enough, days or hours instead of months, who cares if some ill-defined bar of AGI is met?
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> that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language I'd argue that it pretty effectively mimics natural language. I don't think it really understands anything, it is just the best madlibs generator that the world has ever seen. For many tasks, this is accurate 99+% of the time, and the failure cases may not matter. Most humans don't perform any better, and arguably regurgitate words without understanding as well. But if the failure cases matter, then there is no actual understanding and the language the model is generating isn't ever getting "marked to market/reality" because there's no mental world model to check against. That isn't going to be usable if there are real-world consequences of the LLM getting things wrong, and they can wind up making very basic mistakes that humans wouldn't make--because we can innately understand how the world works and aren't always just stringing words together that sound good.
I just want to point out a random anecdote. Literally yesterday ChatGPT hallucinated an entire feature of a mod for a video game I am playing including making up a fake console command. It just straight up doesn’t exist, it just seemed like a relatively plausible thing to exist. This is still happening. It never stopped happening. I don’t even see a real slowdown in how often it happens. It sometimes feels like the only thing saving LLMs are when they’re forced to tap into a better system like running a search engine query.
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Another anecdote. I've got a personal benchmark that I try out on these systems every time there's a new release. It is an academic math question which could be understood by an undergraduate, and which seems easy enough to solve if I were just to hammer it out over a few weeks. My prompt includes a big list of mistakes it is likely to fall into and which it should avoid. The models haven't ever made any useful progress on this question. They usually spin their wheels for a while and then output one of the errors I said to avoid. My hit/miss rate with using these models for academic questions is low, but non-trivial. I've definitely learned new math because of using them, but it's really just an indulgence because they make stuff up so frequently.
No it's absolutely not. One of these is a generative stochastic process that has no guarantee at all that it will produce correct data, and in fact you can make the OPPOSITE guarantee, you are guaranteed to sometimes get incorrect data. The other is a deterministic process of data access. I could perhaps only agree with you in the sense that such faults are not uniquely hallucinatory, all outputs from an LLM are.
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I don't agree with these theoretical boundaries you provide. Any database can appear to lack in determinism, because data might get deleted, corrupted or mutated. Hardware and software involved might fail intermittently. The illusion of determinism in RDBMS systems is just that, an illusion. The reason why I used the examples of failures in interacting with such systems that I did is that most experienced developers are familiar with those situations and can relate to them, while the probability for the reader to having experienced a truer apparent indeterminism is lower. LLM:s can provide an illusion of determinism as well, some are quite capable of repeating themselves, e.g. overfitting, intentional or otherwise.
This seems unnecessarily pedantic. We know how the system works, we just use "hallucination" colloquially when the system produces wrong output.
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Other people do not, hence the danger and the responsibility of not giving them the wrong impression of what they're dealing with.
> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't have an agenda.
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"I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything." Why does the LLM need to understand anything. What today's chatbots have achieved is a software engineering feat. They have taken a stateless token generation machine that has compressed the entire internet's vocabulary to predict the next token and have 'hacked' a whole state management machinery around it. End result is a product that just feels like another human conversing with you and remembering your last birthday. Engineering will surely get better and while purists can argue that a new research perspective is needed, the current growth trajectory of chatbots, agents and code generation tools will carry the torch forward for years to come. If you ask me, this new AI winter will thaw in the atmosphere even before it settles on the ground.
You appear to be a proper alchemist, but you can't support an argument of understanding if there is no definition of understanding that isn't circular. If you want to believe the friendly voice really understands you, we have a word for that, faith. The skeptic sees the interactions with a chatbot as a statistical game that shows how uninteresting (e.g. predictable) humans and our stupid language are. There are useful gimmicks coming out like natural language processing, for low risk applications, but this form of AI pseudoscience isn't going to survive, but it will take some time for research to catch up to understanding how to describe the falsehoods of contemporary AI toys
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Understanding is the thing that happens when your neurons coalesce into a network of signaling and processing such that it empowers successful prediction of what happens next. This powers things like extrapolation, filling in missing parts of perceived patterns, temporal projection, and modeling hidden variables. Understanding is the construction of a valid model. In biological brains, it's a vast parallelized network columns and neuron clusters in coordinated asynchronous operation, orchestrated to ingest millions of data points both internal and external, which result in a complex and sophisticated construct comprising the entirety of our subjective experience. LLMs don't have the subjective experience module, explicitly. They're able to emulate the bits that are relevant to being good at predicting things, so it's possible that every individual token inference process produces a novel "flash" of subjective experience, but absent the explicit construct and a persistent and coherent self construct, it's not mapping the understanding to the larger context of its understanding of its self in the same way humans do it. The only place where the algorithmic qualities needed for subjective experience reside in LLMs is the test-time process slice, and because the weights themselves are unchanged in relation to any novel understanding which arises, there's no imprint left behind by the sensory stream (text, image, audio, etc.) Absent the imprint mechanism, there's no possibility to perpetuate the construct we think of as conscious experience, so for LLMs, there can never be more than individual flashes of subjectivity, and those would be limited to very low resolution correlations a degree or more of separation away from the direct experience of any sensory inputs, whereas in humans the streams are tightly coupled to processing, update in real-time, and persist through the lifetime of the mind. The pieces being modeled are the ones that are useful. The utility of consciousness has been underexplored; it's possible that it might be useful in coordination and orchestration of the bits and pieces of "minds" that are needed to operate intelligently over arbitrarily long horizon planning, abstract generalization out of distribution, intuitive leaps between domains that only relate across multiple degrees of separation between abstract principles, and so on. It could be that consciousness will arise as an epiphenomenological outcome from the successful linking together of systems that solve the problems LLMs currently face, and the things which overcome the jagged capabilities differential are the things that make persons out of human minds. It might also be possible to orchestrate and coordinate those capabilities without bringing a new mind along for the ride, which would be ideal. It's probably very important that we figure out what the case is, and not carelessly summon a tortured soul into existence.
It astonishes me how people can make categorical judgements on things as hard to define as 'understanding'. I would say that, except for the observable and testable performance, what else can you say about understanding? It is a fact that LLMs are getting better at many tasks. From their performance, they seem to have an understanding of say python. The mechanistic way this understanding arises is different than humans. How can you say then it is 'not real', without invoking the hard problem of consciousness, at which point, we've hit a completely open question.
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I think it is fair to say that AIs do not yet "understand" what they say or what we ask them. When I ask it to use a specific MCP to complete a certain task, and it proceeds to not use that MCP, this indicates a clear lack of understanding. You might say that the fault was mine, that I didn't setup or initialize the MCP tool properly, but wouldn't an understanding AI recognize that it didn't have access to the MCP and tell me that it cannot satisfy my request, rather than blindly carrying on without it? LLMs consistently prove that they lack the ability to evaluate statements for truth. They lack, as well, an awareness of their unknowing, because they are not trying to understand; their job is to generate (to hallucinate). It astonishes me that people can be so blind to this weakness of the tool. And when we raise concerns, people always say "How can you define what 'thinking' is?" "How can you define 'understanding'?" These philosophical questions are missing the point. When we say it doesn't "understand", we mean that it doesn't do what we ask. It isn't reliable. It isn't as useful to us as perhaps it has been to you.
This has convinced many non-programmers that they can program, but the results are consistently disastrous, because it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations. I've been programming for 30+ years and now a people manager. Claude Code has enabled me to code again and I'm several times more productive than I ever was as an IC in the 2000s and 2010s. I suspect this person hasn't really tried the most recent generation, it is quite impressive and works very well if you do know what you are doing
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Last week I gave antigravity a try, with the latest models and all, it generated subpar code that did the job very quickly for sure, but no one would have ever accepted this code in a PR, it took me 10x more time to clean it up than to have gemini shit it out. The only thing I learned is that 90% of devs are code monkeys with very low expectations which basically amount to "it compiles and seems to work then it's good enough for me"
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (December 2025)
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SEEKING WORK Location: Liverpool, England Remote: Yes (Remote only) Willing to relocate: No Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS. Résumé/CV: https://craigtp.co.uk/cv Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development. I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field. I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value. Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you. Recent projects include: + Successfully lead a multi-team effort to re-engineer the core domain of a legacy monolithic application to a suite of well-designed, modern microservices utilising Domain-Driven Design, CQRS & Event Sourcing where appropriate for one of Africa's leading FinTech companies allowing them to scale their transaction processing from over 1 million active customers to over 10 million whilst simultaneously reducing their cloud spend by over 30%. + Successfully delivered large section of an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design. + Successfully designed & delivered large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base. + Successfully lead project to develop industry leading anti-motor fraud web application and API with advanced OLAP & OLTP system and data warehouse including one of Europe's largest anti-fraud databases for a Top 40 UK law firm.
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Location: San Francisco, CA Remote: OK Willing to Relocate: No Programming Languages: Ruby, Scala, Javascript, Python, TypeScript, Haskell, Scheme Programming Strengths: Data Structures and Algorithms, Data Engineering, Programming Language Theory, Type Theory, No-Code, AI&Prompt Engineering, Complex & Unusual Domains (Healthcare, Fintech, Music, Arts, Sciences) Frameworks, Databases & Tools: Vue, React, Rails, Flask, Postgres, HBase, MongoDB, Kafka, Jenkins, AWS, Docker Other Skills: Leading Teams & Managing Projects, Productizing LLMs, Managing Interview Pipelines, Architecting & Implementing Greenfield Solutions, Education & Team Growth, Leading Communication and Coordination Between Stakeholders Across Teams and Organizational Silos CV: Available Upon Request Email: poetic.artifice@gmail.com I am a seasoned (>15 years experience) full-stack staff-level software engineer specializing in the backend, systems architecture, AI, platform engineering, internal tools, prototyping, and data engineering. In addition to strong programming and architectural skills, I'm a force multiplier for any team in either role through the three T's -- teaching, talking, and tooling. I also hold a US patent in the AI space. In the past, I've taught a number of scientists and students to code in python; I've led and managed a number of high-impact engineering teams of up to 12; and pioneered a number of no- and low-code solutions for stream processing, data model and query generation, form building, workflow systems, and front-end construction for a variety of industries, including those with strong regulatory requirements and complex business rules such as healthcare and fintech. >10% of all medicare applications and millions of individuals currently flow through pioneering no-code systems I conceived and built and have ran in production for over a decade. More recently, I've built a no-code automated form-filler; a no-code web scraper (and an AI for generating such scrapers from a spec and 1-3 example urls from a page); and a workflow engine for coordinating LLMs and other generative AI processes, and on top of this a platform for both minimizing hallucinations and working with documents that are far too large for existing context window inputs or outputs using a novel, patented process that I invented; and applied these tools to various contracted projects requiring analysis and and cross-checking of information and other forms of integrity across textual and video/audio corpus data in a variety of domains (fiction and non-fiction). I am also an improvisational pianist, published poet, and I've created novel algorithms and tools for studying and composing both music and poetry, which I have given a talk on at a recent functional programming conference. I have extensive experience working for and running startups, software consulting shops, with some mid-sized company engineering experience as well; these give me a unique insight into speaking with customers and internal stake-holders, translating between engineering and other departments, gathering requirements, aligning stake-holders across departments on a vision and attainable timeline, and architecting/building/taking ownership over significant internal and customer-facing areas of responsibility. If any of the above seems like a match for you and your organization or project, don't hesitate to reach out. I am available for both short- and long-term contracts.
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SEEKING WORK | US | Remote OK I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks. My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/ My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Isn't WSL2 just a VM? (ssg.dev)
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While I understand _why_ they did WSL2 it's pretty sad that they at the same time they just dropped any WSL1 development. We're using a lot of WSL in CI - we're mostly Linux based, but for some stuff toolchains came up which didn't work nicely with wine (like MSVC). So for us we want a Linux system that seamlessly can execute Windows stuff in a Linux based build process. WSL1 can do that, WSL2 can be kicked into working somewhat, but needs quite a few ugly workaround as they're not sharing a process namespace or file descriptors. While the faster IO would be nice that's pretty much the only thing we'd care about - and wouldn't work here, as we need shared access to the files. And while we could access the WSL2 files from Windows side that's even slower than just using WSL1.
I think there is an auto shrink feature, but it might cause more trouble than good.
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cpu 100% and shitty integration.
Can you create multiple instances each with their own IP address like you can with Virtualbox? Networking was the reason I didn't stick with WSL2 when I tried it but that was a long time ago and it's probably improved.
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yes just use brige networking instead of nat
> Linux and Win32 filesystem APIs were too different, and translating them made some apps and some workflows seriously suffer. Is the reverse also true? Does Wine face any similar performance problems?
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wine gets support from the kernel, like case-insensitive directories on ext4.
I guess the main issue is, that Windows filesystem APIs are slow. Windows does a lot of things when opening/closing file handles (acls, virus scanning, and many more). Unix style applications with a lot of small files just perform really poorly. That's also why npm install takes ages on Windows. They made it much better with Dev Drives, that use ReFS instead of NTFS and disables most of the filters in the filesystem stack.
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Every FS I've ever had the misfortune of using chokes on lots of small files, especially if they're stored in a flat manner.
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The file operations on macOS are rather slow too. I needed to invest in some rsync-based syncing for an in-docker application build as accessing the mounted volume from a Docker container was around 20 times slower than on Linux :O
Imo, WSL2 is almost indistinguishable from a true Ubuntu VM. If you haven't tried it since WSL1, I'd give it a shot. Of course this comes down to whether you care or not about the integrations with Windows.
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We use it work to do things on WSL2 in Azure Desktop that don’t require a Linux VM and using Windows versions of tools that feel clunky like helm, kubectl, etc. We can easily interface with ACR and AKS this way.
WSL 2 runs on a subset of Hyper-V, and on a hypervisor, so basically yes. However , there's some interesting things going on in WSL 2 versus a "normal" Hyper-V virtual machine. For example, a Linux distro running on WSL can (and will) use GPU partitioning (aka PCI/GPU passthrough) and a special implementation of DirectX enabling the installed video card to accelerate graphics within X and/or Wayland. Although this feature can be enabled with a lot of hacking in both the Linux guest and vanilla Hyper-V on the host (the latter through Powershell) it is officially unsupported on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and is only supported on Windows Server.
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Don't WSL2 and the WinNT kernel both run on top of Hyper-V, on (very approximately) equal footing? The NT kernel, of course, has all the hardware access, not necessarily granted to other VMs, such as WSL2.
Thus far I have found the native WSL2 graphics integration to be pretty disappointing in comparison to what I used to get with X-server setup. Unfortunately the legacy X implementation doesn’t have the modern API and application developers are tapering their interest in it. Hopefully the groundswell of WSL2 support will improve this in time …
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Agreed. No way to really test WebGPU, for instance. You can't really test GPU drivers under Linux or using the native Windows browsers. Lots of incomplete attempts to make this work, none of which are reliable or easy to use.
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)
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Remake.ai | Founding Software Engr (or Cofounder) | Full-time | Remote (worldwide) Apps for robots - home vacuums, quadrupeds, drones, humanoids, etc. Think Apple remaking ordinary phones into smartphones with apps & app store - only for robots. Status: $1M pre-seed, prototype MVP works, pre-traction, ~16K ARR, manufacturing partnership(s) forming, headcount 2 full-time + 3 part-time Founding Software Engineer (or Cofounder) - full stack, ML, embedded Email iliao at remake dot ai
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Column ( https://column.com/ ) | San Francisco, CA (ONSITE) | Full Time | Software Eng (Infrastructure), Software Eng (Backend), Software Eng (Product) Column is building the infrastructure that powers the US dollar globally. We're a software first company, but also own a nationally chartered bank that we've built from the ground up. We're currently processing trillions of dollars annually (yes, that's with a T), supporting some of the largest and most sophisticated companies out there like Wise, Bilt, Brex, Ramp, Mercury and dozens of others. Started by the founder of Plaid (plaid.com), Column is focused on keeping an extremely lean and experienced team: currently 10 engineers that all report to the CEO. We are looking for an ambitious infrastructure, product, and backend engineer (one of each) that want to build incredible software from first principles. Profitable and 100% owned by employees and founders. Apply here: https://column.com/careers Feel free to email me with any questions: praful@
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Arcol | Senior Software Engineer | NYC, SF, or Remote (US/Canada) | Full-time Arcol (arcol.io) is a small, high talent density team building the future of building design - a future that's collaborative, fast, and intuitive. We're a web-native, fully collaborative 3d design tool modernizing the experience of architectural design for teams of all sizes. We're looking for senior engineers with experience in modern web technologies - some of our key technical building blocks are Typescript, Rust, wasm, WebGL - and a strong ownership mindset. Experience with computational geometry, computer graphics, or similar a strong plus. This role sits at the intersection of solving deep technical foundational challenges with shipping a product that solves real problems for real people. Reach out to me directly at thomas@arcol.io or peruse our careers page ( https://www.arcol.io/careers ) - we'd love to hear from you!
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Greptile | Software Engineer (junior, senior, staff)| San Francisco ONSITE | https://greptile.com Greptile is building AI agents that catch bugs in pull requests. Over 2,000 teams including Brex, Whoop, and Substack use Greptile to review nearly 1B lines of code every month. We're a team of ~20 in San Francisco, working on things like better agent evals and sandbox execution environments. We've raised $30M to date, including our recent Series A led by Benchmark. Stack: Typescript Open roles: greptile.com/careers Salary ranges: $140k-270k base (depending on seniority) + $40-100k/yr equity
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At Peregrine, we are transforming the way organizations engage with their data, making it easily accessible and immediately actionable for those who need it, when they need it most. SF / NYC / DC | In-office | Full-time | $130,000 - $275,000 [Leadership] Engineering Manager (SF) https://grnh.se/s7yxefzs5us [Leadership] Staff SWE, AI (SF) https://grnh.se/0w7ot24o5us Staff SWE, Product Security (SF / NYC) https://grnh.se/b2kbmt3j5us SWE, AI (SF, NYC, DC) https://grnh.se/yl9kuqrg5us Sr Software Engineer (SF, NYC, DC) https://grnh.se/gwf63pot5us Sr Product Designer (SF / NYC) https://grnh.se/s96svypy5us Sr Design Engineer (SF) https://grnh.se/z8ev1cgu5us Product Manager (SF) https://grnh.se/kyvpq2ww5us
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Onton.com | Fullstack & Research Engineers | San Francisco, CA | Hybrid Join us in pioneering the future of e-commerce search. 1M+ MAU growing rapidly. Large seed round raised from top-tier VCs and individuals with backgrounds from Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Stitch Fix, Whatnot, Stripe, and more. We're a hard-working team of 10. We have an office in Jackson Square with a great view that we're looking to fill with other high-performance people! Tech-wise, it's React/Typescript + Julia, if that's interesting (no worries if you haven't used it). We've also built our own graph and vector DB to cope with the scale, and the foundations of a neuro-symbolic AI agent that learns more about the world on every search! Job posting and more information here → https://onton.com/careers We read and respond to every application.
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Stellar ( https://stellarcs.ai ) | Founding Software Engineers | Amsterdam, the Netherlands | Full-time | No Visa Sponsorship Stellar is building the go-to AI voice agent platform for customer support, enabling incredibly human-like customer service over the phone. We're a young and rapidly growing startup that has already proven traction, with a number of well-known companies among our initial customers. To see some of our AI voice agents in action, see https://www.stellarcs.ai/demo-showcase We're looking for founding software engineers to help us scale Stellar's platform globally. As one of the first members of our engineering team, you’ll play a key role in Stellar's journey and have the opportunity to help shape our architecture, engineering culture and product and engineering roadmap. Tech stack: Go, Node.js, Typescript, React, Next.js, Encore Cloud, GCP What you’ll do: - Build performant APIs and backend services in Go and Typescript (Node.js) - Develop Stellar's frontend in React, TypeScript and NextJS, to allow companies to effectively design, test, deploy and monitor their AI voice agents - Design a scalable, fault-tolerant system architecture that can handle large volumes of concurrent real-time audio conversations & agent interactions while maintaining low latency - Work on Stellar's AI agent framework, at the intersection of software engineering and AI engineering - Design and implement a platform that meets enterprise standards in terms of security, compliance, resilience and data privacy - Build API integrations with external systems to enhance the capabilities of Stellar's agents - Help shape the early engineering culture as one of the first hires of a young and growing tech startup Why join: you'll be joining at a pivotal time in our growth, in a role with a high degree of ownership and strong growth potential. Join a small but talented team, coming from high growth startups and scale-ups such Framer, MessageBird and Adyen. More details about the role here: https://www.stellarcs.ai/careers/software-engineer Apply: Send us an email at info@stellarcs.ai, and mention you came from HN. Note that we do not provide visa sponsorship, and will only proceed with candidates who are able to work from our office in Amsterdam (~4 days in-office per week)
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Vestwell | Senior Software Engineer | HYBRID - NYC; Austin; King of Prussia, PA | https://www.vestwell.com/careers/7510610003 | $145K - $160K base + bonus & equity I'm the hiring manager for this role. Please see the job description for details, but I'm looking for someone who is, or is able to become, proficient in backend development for a public nest.js API suite using TypeScript. We don't have any hard requirements like a CS degree or prior nest.js experience, but candidates do have to complete a TypeScript coding challenge. It's a real-world problem, no leetcode. In total, our interview process is only 3 rounds, and we move pretty quickly. We also want someone who has systems design experience and good technical leadership skills. You also have to be self-motivated. We use a pull rather than push process, so work isn't assigned to people, and you have to be good at working efficiently without many hard deadlines or micromanagement. Happy to answer any questions here! If you'd like to apply, please email shane.vierra [at] vestwell [dot] com with your resume.
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Thunder Compute, YC S24 | https://www.thundercompute.com | In-person in San Francisco Hiring 4 full-time Software Engineers for low-level C++ systems work (HFT skillset), reporting to the CTO, team ex-Citadel, ex-Aquatic, ex-Bain We're a cloud provider using GPU virtualization software to arbitrage GPU prices. To our customers, we are a direct substitute for Runpod, Lambda, Coreweave, etc. with a simple UX and low prices. Our advantage is we have spent 3 years bringing research technology to market which lets us use each GPU more efficiently than competitors. We can buy GPU compute, make it more efficient, and resell it at 60%+ profit margins. We recently closed ~$4.5M of funding to triple our team size with a focus on recruiting the world's best low-level talent. If you're cracked at building C++ systems software, on noncompete and bored, or looking to do something more meaningful than creating liquidity (you can tell most of our team is from HFT), reach out. To apply: email met at carl@thundercompute.com and mention HN. I read every email.
Please stop. The way you're posting is not helping - it just makes things worse. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110145 .
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If the mods aren't going to enforce the rules what other options do we have? Serious question. This ad has been posted in 11/12 threads this year. Perhaps there should be a cooldown on the same posting after 3 months? Job applicants are under enough stress as it is, they shouldn't be fooled into wasting their time applying to ghost jobs.
Kind of crazy, but I've always written my own resume and cover letters and even my stuff is being drowned out by the same slop. It frustrating getting your AI resume filtered out - its an entirely different thing when you do things to stand out, and its still being drowned out. Says a lot about the current state of hiring in the tech.
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I wish I could just mail my printed resume. That extra little bit would add some authenticity…
Virtasant | SRE/Platform Engineer | REMOTE (US Pacific hours) | Full-time We're seeking an experienced SRE / Platform Engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable infrastructure for mission-critical systems in a fast-paced environment: Requirements: - 8+ years industry experience (3+ years in platform/SRE roles) - Strong Linux/Unix, networking, and system internals knowledge - Programming skills (Python, Go, Java) - Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Kubernetes - IaC tools (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi) - CI/CD and monitoring tools experience Apply at: https://virtasant.teamtailor.com/jobs/6703434-platform-engineer?promotion=1699526-trackable-share-link-037b7373-518c-45e4-b3e5-cd08bb922935
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I have done a lot of work in IaC space and DevOps in general, Would love to get in touch with you guys
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)
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Location: Lehi, Utah, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Rust, GoLang, TypeScript, SQL, HTTP APIs, React.js, HTML, CSS, k8s, AWS, CI/CD Pipelines, Docker, Terraform Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IjjpHzcgtkc8c5B154D3H-86Z-Ks4D18hw_o1AmaIno/edit?usp=sharing Email: john.redd702+hn [at] gmail [dot] com GitHub: https://github.com/john-redd I am a full stack developer with 6 years of experience working on SaaS products. My preference skews toward back-end development. I have experience across the whole stack and software development lifecycle, including infrastructure management, supporting production, database evolution, and CI/CD pipelines. At my current company I lead the effort in adopting DevOps principles such as trunk based development, continuous integration, continuous deployment, feature flagging, incremental rollout strategies, and tracking of DORA metrics. For me, it is not enough to develop features or bug fixes in isolation. Understanding the whole process of how the code that I write gets in front of end users and makes an impact for them is of the utmost importance. I am looking for my next full-time opportunity. In person opportunities would be my preference, but I am also open to remote work. I would be particularly ecstatic about any opportunity that would allow me to further refine my Rust skills. Thank you!
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FULL-STACK DEVELOPER - Location: India - Remote: yes, open to relocate - Technologies: GenAI(RAG, Langchain, langGraph, MCP), Python, React.js, Next.js,Node.js, Docker, AWS, SQL/NoSQL, CI/CD - Portfolio: https://www.akashdev.me/ - Github: https://github.com/akash1000x - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/akash-kumar-kumawat/ - Email: kumawatap63@gmail.com - Experience: 1+ years
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I'm looking for an active (open-source) robotics projects with rust / python. I maintain robotics presence in rust-land with some of simulation-based crates (bevy_mujoco, bevy_urdf), and now looking for a projects that either solves real-world problems or a have steady interest. my github: https://github.com/stillonearth
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Location: San Francisco Remote: Preferred, open to onsite Willing to Relocate: For the right role Technologies: Python, JavaScript, DC power systems (solar, batteries, charge control, inverters, system design), embedded systems (lighting, sensors, motor control) Resume: https://matthewgerring.com/resume Email: gerring.matthew@gmail.com 10 years of experience in climate tech, in utility industry software and clean energy hardware deployment. I have deep domain expertise in electricity price modeling, financing for distributed energy resources, and grid-independent system design and deployment. I have designed and built AI systems for extracting tariff document data, and if your company is pursuing this particular white whale, I’d be happy to help you. Seeking a high-impact role in climate tech, as close as possible to direct clean energy deployment.
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Location: Chicago Remote: Yes, remote only Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Swift, ARKit, SwiftUI, RealityKit, Reality Composer Pro, Shader Graph, SwiftData, object tracking, room tracking, LiDAR scene reconstruction, world tracking, hand tracking, Enterprise APIs, plane tracking, body tracking, postprocessing, face tracking, image saliency analysis, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, RoomPlan, SceneKit, Object Capture, photogrammetry, CoreML, Create ML, OpenAI API, Supabase, Metal, Combine, iMessage extensions, Firebase, Firestore Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atmorales0/ Email: tony [at-symbol] 1984 [dot] dev GitHub: https://github.com/robomex I am a freelancer/contractor who specializes in developing augmented reality, spatial computing, and computer vision apps for iOS & visionOS. Several of my apps were handpicked and featured worldwide by Apple. I've worked with solo founders, startups that went on to get acquired (OpenAI, Shopify), and R&D teams at large corporations. If you have any questions or you want to get a conversation started: Shoot me a message & let's talk!
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Frontend, Backend, Devops Full Stack Engineer with 25+ years of experience in complex Frontend components, Backend, and DevOps. Open Source Creator of libraries with [~10k stars ]( https://github.com/istarkov ). Former maintainer of Recompose. Architected and built end-to-end systems from scratch, scaling platforms to 1 million+ users and 20M daily requests. Master's degree in Mathematics. https://github.com/istarkov istarkov@gmail.com Remote.
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Location: Liverpool, England Remote: Yes (Remote only) Willing to relocate: No Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS. Résumé/CV: https://craigtp.co.uk/cv Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development. I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field. An accomplished team leader, mentor and architect, I'm skilled at taking a leading role in the overall architecture of a project, in driving team developments and employing proven industry disciplines and best-practices to deliver successful software projects that frequently exceed client expectations. I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value. Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you. Recent projects include: + Architected and executed a comprehensive overhaul of a core legacy system, migrating it to a robust microservices architecture. By strategically applying Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, we enabled a prominent African FinTech company to seamlessly scale from 1 million to 10 million active users while achieving a remarkable 30%+ reduction in cloud expenses. + Successfully delivered an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise their entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design. + Designed & delivered a large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base. + Spearheaded the creation of a groundbreaking anti-motor fraud solution for a prominent UK law firm. This industry-leading platform combined a user-friendly web application, powerful API, and sophisticated data systems, including Europe's largest anti-fraud database, giving the firm an edge in fraud detection.
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Location: San Francisco, CA Remote: OK Willing to Relocate: No Programming Languages: Ruby, Scala, Javascript, Python, TypeScript, Haskell, Scheme Programming Strengths: Data Structures and Algorithms, Data Engineering, Programming Language Theory, Type Theory, No-Code, AI&Prompt Engineering, Complex & Unusual Domains (Healthcare, Fintech, Music, Arts, Sciences) Frameworks, Databases & Tools: Vue, React, Rails, Flask, Postgres, HBase, MongoDB, Kafka, Jenkins, AWS, Docker Other Skills: Leading Teams & Managing Projects, Productizing LLMs, Managing Interview Pipelines, Architecting & Implementing Greenfield Solutions, Education & Team Growth, Leading Communication and Coordination Between Stakeholders Across Teams and Organizational Silos CV: Available Upon Request Email: poetic.artifice@gmail.com I am a seasoned (>15 years experience) full-stack staff-level software engineer specializing in the backend, systems architecture, AI, platform engineering, internal tools, prototyping, and data engineering. In addition to strong programming and architectural skills, I'm a force multiplier for any team in either role through the three T's -- teaching, talking, and tooling. I also hold a US patent in the AI space. In the past, I've taught a number of scientists and students to code in python; I've led and managed a number of high-impact engineering teams of up to 12; and pioneered a number of no- and low-code solutions for stream processing, data model and query generation, form building, workflow systems, and front-end construction for a variety of industries, including those with strong regulatory requirements and complex business rules such as healthcare and fintech. >10% of all medicare applications and millions of individuals currently flow through pioneering no-code systems I conceived and built and have ran in production for over a decade. More recently, I've built a no-code automated form-filler; a no-code web scraper (and an AI for generating such scrapers from a spec and 1-3 example urls from a page); and a workflow engine for coordinating LLMs and other generative AI processes, and on top of this a platform for both minimizing hallucinations and working with documents that are far too large for existing context window inputs or outputs using a novel, patented process that I invented; and applied these tools to various contracted projects requiring analysis and and cross-checking of information and other forms of integrity across textual and video/audio corpus data in a variety of domains (fiction and non-fiction). I am also an improvisational pianist, published poet, and I've created novel algorithms and tools for studying and composing both music and poetry, which I have given a talk on at a recent functional programming conference. I have extensive experience working for and running startups, software consulting shops, with some mid-sized company engineering experience as well; these give me a unique insight into speaking with customers and internal stake-holders, translating between engineering and other departments, gathering requirements, aligning stake-holders across departments on a vision and attainable timeline, and architecting/building/taking ownership over significant internal and customer-facing areas of responsibility. If any of the above seems like a match for you and your organization or project, don't hesitate to reach out. I am available for both full-time positions and short- and long-term contracts.
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Hello, I'm a former Staff Engineer branching out to help law firms and attorneys with AI product development and assessments. Looking for partners in the legal space who want to build the next big thing in legaltech or need help understanding how to best adopt AI in the legal space. Location: Golden, CO Remote: Onsite, remote, or hybrid are all okay. Willing to relocate: Negotiable Technologies: AI / PyTorch / Tensorflow / Typescript / Next.js / AWS / Node.js / Vercel / Swift / iOS / macOS Résumé/CV: https://fractional-engineer.com Email: kenny@ndukt.com
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Location: New York City Remote: Open (Chicago, LA or SF preferred) Willing to relocate: No, frequent travel ok Technologies: https://prisen.co Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-chisari-973074a8/ Email: tech@prisen.co ----- I'm primarily a startup contractor but open to a FTE founding engineer position with the right early stage startup. I'm flexible on salary but equity only is not an option. Open to Fractional CTO with the right pitch. 25+ years of experience in software development and been with the web since the early days. 15+ years in the startup space and nearly a decade building for non-profits before that. I can bring a breadth of experience that few can. My preferred stack is Golang, HTML+CSS+JS and Sqlite but I have years of experience with Nodejs, React, Typescript, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc. Years ago I used PHP for over a decade then moved on and way back when I started out with Perl, Apache and Oracle. Being an early-stage "one man army" contractor, I have a working understanding of ux/ui design, sysadmin and data science so I can fill those gaps when needed. Been learning about diffusion models for a year now and would love to work in that space. Drop an email or if you're in or near Manhattan, let's meet for coffee and talk shop. Michael tech@prisen.co
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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | US | Remote OK I am a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Google Style, with experience at both large and small organizations. I can help you build a Platform Engineering practice from the very beginning. I'm looking to help small dev teams increase their velocity by implementing best-practices of Devops: CI/CD, Kubernetes Deployments, and effective Monitoring frameworks. My resume: https://resume.gauntletwizard.net/ThomasHahnResume.pdf My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-hahn-3344ba3/ My Github: https://github.com/GauntletWizard
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Location: Europe Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: PostgreSQL, Clickhouse, Docker, Rust, Golang, Python, Django, Scikit-learn, Pandas, etc. Résumé/CV: reach out to me and I'll send a detailed resume Email: see my profile 10+ years of industry experience building and scaling distributed systems. I have experience with both big companies, scale-ups and tiny startups.
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Location: Curitiba, Brazil (I'm a US citizen traveling the world for 2 years) Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Python, FastAPI, Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, MySQL, React, React Native, NestJS, AngularJS, Backbone, Playwright, Drupal, Express, jQuery, D3.js, visx, GraphQL, Chrome extension, and AWS Résumé/CV: N/A Email: [HN username]@gmail.com My focus has been on browser automation and building browser agents since 2018, with 13 years of enterprise experience building dynamic data user interfaces for web and mobile. I have experience working at both medium 130 person AI companies and small, fast-moving 7 person teams wearing many different hats, which I prefer. I have been instrumental in taking multiple companies from 0 to 1, both as a consultant and as a full-time employee in media, real estate, marketing, streaming services, education, and fintech. Currently, I have a few side projects building Chrome extensions using VSCode’s core libraries. First is a fully automated algorithmic trading platform that uses a Chrome extension to control Robinhood and several information streams doing real time market intelligence using AI. [0] The second is recreating the Playwright / Puppeteer client API to use Chrome extension APIs and DOM APIs without the Chrome DevTools Protocol. I call it Cordyceps. [1] I look forward to speaking with you :) [0] https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal [1] https://github.com/adam-s/cordyceps
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Location: Dallas, Texas Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: SQL, Python, Ruby, Rails, Git, Java, C++ Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1REvH1fQgeohjr6lg6x9tHiPEYMWlOtFGwbFMg-CPTQc/edit?usp=sharing Email: max.hampton (at) gmail.com Hi, I'm a new grad looking to get my foot in the door somewhere. I'm currently using my time to learn ruby on rails by working on gyst.one, a web application I helped create. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or clarifications, I'd be happy to chat.
Google unkills JPEG XL? (tonisagrista.com)
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Like a lot of posts written by people who seem to think there's a JPEG XL-vs-AVIF "war", this post has a bunch of unfortunate mis-statements. JXL's war is not with AVIF, which is already a de-facto standard which has near-universal browser support, is enshrined as an Apple image default, etc. It's not going anywhere. That's not to say that JXL is bad or going away. It currently has poor browser support, but it's now finding its footing in niche use cases (archival, prosumer photography, medical), and will eventually become ubiquitous enough to just be what the average person refers to as "JPEG" 10 years from now. To address some of the more egregious claims made in the post: • "AVIF is 'homegrown'" – AVIF is an open, royalty-free AOMedia standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Mozilla, etc.). • "AVIF is 'inferior'" – AVIF significantly better than JPEG/WebP in compression efficiency at comparable quality, and comparable with JXL in most scenarios. • "AVIF is ridiculous in this aspect, capping at 8,193×4,320." — Yes, JXL's theoretical maximum image size is bigger. The author cites AVIF's Baseline profile (think embedded devices) limit. AVIF itself supports 16,384×8,704 per tile, and its HEIF container format supports a grid of up to 65,535 tiles (so logical images sizes up to 1,073,725,440 wide or 283,111,200 tall). JPEG XL is good! Yes, it's far behind AVIF in terms of adoption and ecosystem, but that will improve. AVIF is likely to erase any JXL quality advantages with AV2, but both JXL and AV1/AV2 encoders will get better with time, so they're likely to be neck-and-neck in quality for the foreseeable future.
I believe the appropriate term is ununaliving. Please communicate with care.
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That would make more sense than "unkill".
Then again PDF also technically supports embedded audio, video, 3D graphics, and arbitrary Javascript. If Flash hadn't died it would probably still support that too. It's a clown car format where everyone besides Adobe just tacitly agrees to ignore huge chunks of the spec.
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> It's a clown car format As is the destiny of any document format in wide spread use, PDF had flash, doc had ActiveX. Also this text is formatted using a mark down language fully capable of embedding entire applications.
> I think both Mozilla and Google are OK with this - if it is written in Rust in order to avoid that situation. It would need to be written in the Safe Rust subset to give safety assurances. It's an important distinction.
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99% safe with 1% unsafe mixed in is far, far better than 100k loc of c++ -- look at Google's experience with rust in Android. It's not perfect and they had one "almost vulnerability" but the rate of vulnerabilities is much, much lower even with a bit of unsafe mixed in.
>> 100M+ is a bit more than i would expect for an image format. have i not been paying attention > So at least if GP was talking about libjxl "100K+" would be more accurate. M can mean thousands and I think it's common to use it used that way in finance and finance-adjacent areas: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Abbreviations/faq0094.html : > A. You’ve identified two commonly used conventions in finance, one derived from Greek and the other from Latin, but neither one is standard. Starting with the second convention, M is used for amounts in the thousands and MM for amounts in the millions (usually without a space between the number and the abbreviation—e.g., $150M for $150,000 and $150MM for $150 million). This convention overlaps with the conventions for writing roman numerals, according to which a thousand is represented by M (from mille, the Latin word for “thousand”). Any similarity with roman numerals ends there, however, because MM in roman numerals means two thousand, not a thousand thousands, or one million, as in financial contexts... https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand-for : > An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M. Internet advertisers are familiar with CPM which is the cost per thousand impressions. > The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M.
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I assume this is regional... I work in accounting and finance in New Zealand (generally following ordinary Western/Commonwealth standards) and I've never heard of using M for thousands. If I used that I would confuse the hell out of everyone around me.
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"It's... a regional dialect." "What region?" "Er, upstate New York." "Really. Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase '100M' to mean '100 thousand'" "Oh, no, not in Utica. It's an Albany expression."
The only practical way to work with such large images is if they are tiled and pyramidal anyway
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Which JXL supports, by the way. Tiling is mandatory for images bigger than 2048x2048, and you can construct images based on an 8x downscaled version, recursing that up to 4 times for up to 4096x downscaling.
There’s something not quite right about saying one member of an oligopoly should be forced to follow the dictates of the other members of an oligopoly. I don’t feel like this actually solves anything. I feel like Mozilla would end up being a Google proxy in this case as they fear losing their funding and Apple and Microsoft would be incentivized to abuse their position to force Google not to do the best thing for the public but the best thing for Apple and Microsoft.
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I agree there's already a significant proxy risk with Mozilla (though Mozilla does consider many Google web proposals harmful today), but that is also no less true today, and in fact, today that means Google holds two votes not one. I would again agree Microsoft and Apple will heavily endorse their own interests, Microsoft much more so in terms of enterprise requirements and Apple much more so in terms of privacy-concerned consumers. The advertising firm influence will be significantly dimished and that is a darn shame .
Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI (stratechery.com)
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> OpenAI’s refusal to launch and iterate an ads product for ChatGPT — now three years old — is a dereliction of business duty, particularly as the company signs deals for over a trillion dollars of compute. I think this is intentional by Altman. He’s a salesman, after all. When there is infinite possibility, he can sell any type of vision of future revenue and margins. When there are no concrete numbers, It’s your word against his. Once they try to monetize, however, he’s boxed in. And the problem with OpenAI vs. Google in the earlier days is that he needs money and chips now. He needs hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars. Ad revenue numbers get in the way. It will take time to optimize; you’ll get public pushback and bad press (despite what Ben writes, ads will definitely not be a better product experience.) It might be the case that real revenue is worse than hypothetical revenue.
Most analysts seem to forget what actual consumers do. Normal people use ChatGPT. They accidentally use Gemini when they Google something. But I don’t know anyone non-technical who has ditched ChatGPT as their default LLM. For 99% of questions these days, it’s plenty good enough—there’s just no real reason to switch. OpenAI's strategy is to eventually overtake search. I'd be curious for a chart of their progress over time. Without Google trying to distort the picture with Gemini benchmark results and usage stats which are tainted by sheer numbers from traditional search and their apps.
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> But I don’t know anyone non-technical who has ditched ChatGPT as their default LLM. Google are giving away a year of Gemini Pro to students, which has seen a big shift. The FT reported today[0] that Gemini new app downloads are almost catching up to ChatGPT [0] https://www.ft.com/content/8881062d-ff4f-4454-8e9d-d992e8e2c4e3
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We can see what consumers do. The Gemini app is second most downloaded app for the iPhone, right behind OpenAI. Apple is certainly not trying to "distort the picture" as you evidently wish to believe that Google is doing. That's hardly an indication that actual "non-technical" consumers don't care, or that there is any sort of barrier to either using both apps or using whichever is better at the moment, or whichever is more helpful in generating the meme of the moment. If it were actually true that OpenAI was "plenty good enough" for 99% of questions that people have, and that "there is no reason to switch" then OpenAI could just stop training new models, which is absurdly expensive. They aren't doing that, because they sensibly believe that having better models matters to consumers.
openrouter.ai does exactly that, and it lets you use models from OpenAI as well. I switch models often using openrouter. But, talk to any (or almost any) non-developer and you'll find they 1/ mostly only use ChatGPT, sometimes only know of ChatGPT and have never heard of any other solution, and 2/ in the rare case they did switch to something else, they don't want to go back, they're gone for good. Each provider has a moat that is its number of daily users; and although it's a little annoying to admit, OpenAI has the biggest moat of them all.
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Non developers using Chatbots and being willing to pay is never going to be as big as the enterprise market or BigTech using AI in the background. I would think that Gemini (the model) will add profit to Google way before OpenAI ever becomes profitable as they leverage it within their business.
"advertising would make ChatGPT a better product." And with that, I will never read anything this guy writes again :)
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"advertising in ChatGPT would make DeepSeek/Qwen/<other AI> a better product" There, fixed.
The problem with ads in AI products is, can they be blocked effectively? If there are ads on a side bar, related or not to what the user is searching for, any adblock will be able to deal with them (uBlock is still the best, by far). But if "ads" are woven into the responses in a manner that could be more or less subtle, sometimes not even quoting a brand directly, but just setting the context, etc., this could become very difficult.
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I realized that ads within context were going to be an issue a while ago so to combat this i started building my own solution for this which spiraled in to a local based agentic system with a different bigger goal then the simple original... Anyways, the issue you are describing is not that difficult to overcome. You simply set a local llm model layer before the cloud based providers. Everything goes in and out through this "firewall". The local layer hears the humans requests, sends it to the cloud based api model, receives the ad tainted reply, processes the reply scrubbing the ad content and replies to the user with the clean information. I've tested exactly this interaction and it works just fine. i think these types of systems will be the future of "ad block" . As people start using agentic systems more and more in their daily lives it will become crucial that they pipe all of the inputs and outputs through a local layer that has that humans best interests in mind. That's why my personal project expanded in to a local agentic orchestrator layer instead of a simple "firewall". i think agentic systems using other agentic systems are the future.
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> i started building my own solution How much ?
And he's right (and the sources he points out), that some bubbles are good. They end up being a way to pull in a large amount of capital to build out something completely new, but still unsure where the future will lead. A speculative example could be AI ends up failing and crashing out, but not until we build out huge DCs and power generation that is used on the next valuable idea that wouldn't be possible w/o the DCs and power generation already existing.
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The bubble argument was hard to wrap my head around It sounded vaguely like the broken window fallacy- a broken window creating “work” Is the value of bubbles in the trying out new products/ideas and pulling funds from unsuspecting bag holders? Otherwise it sounds like a huge destruction of stakeholder value - but that seems to be how venture funding works
Huge DCs and Power Generation might be useful, long-lasting infrastructure, however, the racks full of GPUs and TPUs will depreciate rather quickly.
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I think this is a bit overblown. In the event of a crash, the current generation of cards will still be just fine for a wide variety of ai/ml tasks. The main problem is that we'll have more than we know what to do with if someone has to sell of their million card mega cluster...
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The problem is the failure rate of GPUs is extremely high
I am not 100% sure this is wrong? I frequently ask chatgpt about researching products or looking at reviews, etc and it is pretty obvious that I want to buy something, and the bridge right now from 'researching products' to 'buying stuff' is basically non-existent on ChatGPT. ChatGPT having some affiliate relationships with merchants might actually be quite useful for a lot of people and would probably generate a ton of revenue.
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It's likely they already make money on affiliates, but this is different, ads are product placement.
Ben Thompson is a content creator. Even if Ben’s content does not directly benefit from ads, it is the fact that other content creator’s content having ads is what makes Ben’s content premium in comparison. I would say that, on this topic (ads on internet content), Ben Thompson may not be as objective a perspective as he has on other topics.
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People aren’t collectively paying him between $3 million a year and five million (estimated 40k+ subscribers paying a minimum of $120 a year) just because he doesn’t have ads.
To be fair, businesses should assume that customers actually "want" what they create demand for. In the case of misleading or dangerously addictive products, regulation should fall to government, because that's the only actor that can prevent a race to the bottom.
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To be fair, organized predatory behavior is to be expected? joke- The World Council of Animals meeting completes with morning sessions with "OK great, now who is for lunch?"
yeah... and it's (partly) based on the claim that it has network effects like how Facebook has? I don't see that at all, there's basically no social or cross-account stuff in any of them and if anything LLMs are the best non-lock-in system we've ever had: none of them are totally stable or reliable, and they all work by simply telling it to do the thing you want. your prompts today will need tweaking tomorrow, regardless of if it's in ChatGPT or Gemini, especially for individuals who are using the websites (which also keep changing). sure, there are APIs and that takes effort to switch... but many of them are nearly identical, and the ecosystem effect of ~all tools supporting multiple models seems far stronger than the network effect of your parents using ChatGPT specifically.
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I’d argue that AI apis are nearly trivial to switch… the prompts can largely stay the same, and function calling pretty similar
Netflix kills casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs (macrumors.com)
I wish there was a service like steam for videos: not subscription but high confidence purchase of video content available "forever" (even if they remove it from the purchasing options, license would remain). Personally I watch so little tv/movies that any subscription was always overpaying. I still did it for a while, because the price wasn't high enough to push me to seek out other options. I'm no longer subbing and moved on, but the right holders are seriously detached from reality if they think this is a sane business strategy
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$30 for a season pass from iTunes seemed like a ridiculous price until you do the math and realize that it really isn't.
As with so much technology, the technology exists in part to provide a service to the customer, but more and more it exists to direct the customer into the behaviors desired by the technology owner and its advertising partners. This isn't always so evil or insidious, but the point stands that Netflix (or almost any modern service) doesn't want you to do what _you_ want with your devices. It wants to direct you towards whatever is most beneficial to Netflix. These companies don't really serve their customers, except confusingly, customers keep paying for these services.
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The problem is, opting out doesn’t provide signal by reallocating market share. It just shrinks the market.
there was an ad, or a presentation in a conference keynote, from when microsoft built phones, showing a user leaving the house and continuing what was he doing in the car in a very futuristic way. I can't find it now, but was something crazy by then, the continuum idea was also a good one, but here we are, walled gardens and nothing smart about them.
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I know exactly which one you're referring to! (it's a woman, presumably just arrived on a flight, catching a taxi to her hotel) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FpO-G5die4
I’ve run homebrew DVRs since the MythTV/Hauppauge era and it’s true My family won’t adapt to anything in the living room with a keyboard and mouse, and getting a reliable remote on any PC based solution is often problematic.
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Not even those dirt cheap bluetooth devices with a trackpad and mini keyboard? Those are great and it just works. Or what about the Steam Controller? It's UX is similar to some nicer smart TV interfaces. The real solution is you build an app that is nice for your family to use and just tells the boxes what to play. Sure hope your family doesn't use iPhones!
What is your local app of choice? Do you sync between devices?
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IINA on Mac, free & open source, has been perfect for everything for years: https://github.com/iina/iina While traveling I was so pissed with the Apple TV player's performance on less-than-lightspeed internet connections, I ragecancelled my subscription and just yo ho ho'ed the last couple episodes of Severance
That's not how casting works. It's actually super locked down: the TV loads a netflix website and you can't create your own Chromecast receivers.
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How does VLC do it then?
How is this different from recording video output from a not-casted stream?
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It isn't, some people just like to post completely made up nonsense on topics they don't understand. Edit: GP's username should have been a hint...
I can't take anyone that views regulation as universally evil seriously when history is full of stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
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Evidently HN doesn't like this particular history...
The Penicillin Myth (asimov.press)
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Best take on serendipty versus effort in the history of science is, naturally enough, from Monty Python: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1Hu0f_ti9EQ Text from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_3/99.htm "Presenter[John Cleese]: Penguins, yes, penguins. What relevance do penguins have to the furtherance of medical science? Well, strangely enough quite a lot, a major breakthrough, maybe. It was from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity if he hadn't been clever? All these tremendous leaps forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have split the atom if he hadn't tried? Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn't by pure chance spent years working at the problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong. "
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Hare's theory predicts that there would need to be a cold snap at just the right time, and lo and behold there was. Probability isn't an issue if the only reason you are considering the probability is because the event already happened. Indeed the low probability of such an event transpiring goes a long way towards explaining why the discovery was not made earlier. Root-Bernstein's theory makes no such testable predictions, and it solves the issue of an incomplete record on September 3rd with incomplete or inaccurate records elsewhere. It seems to me extremely plausible that fleming did not record the results of a botched, uncontrolled experiment but still recognized it as an indicator of something interesting that warranted follow-up. If I were in his position I would preserve the random dish for comparison to the more rigorous follow up experiment. I certainly don't put any stock into the argument that if the story had gone as Root-Bernstein describes it would have been too circuitous for scientific publishing, if anything it would be much more harmonious with standard scientific writing than the chance observation story.
Oh I really enjoyed this one. Got a quick insight about how penicillin works: interferes with cell-wall building which is a destroy and recreate process by preventing the recreate part. Got a quick view into the scientific process and communication: Fleming focused on the insight - penicillium kills staphylococcus - and left out the circuitous detail. This is important so that the big win here is very clear. And got an insight into human nature and memory: Fleming didn’t tell the accidental contamination story until much later. It could possibly be even an idea someone else might have come up with which then took root in his mind (ironic haha!) The communication aspect reminds me of Mendel’s far too perfect ratios for his pea plants. That kind of “repeat till difference clear” statistics would be decried today but perhaps that was to communicate rather than to determine. And finally, I really enjoy reading about human process innovation because I think it’s a big factor in how Humanity grows. The lab notebook has to be some kind of star performer here - Fleming’s notes allow us to look back like this. When I experiment with things, I naturally lean to keeping notes on my test protocol, observations, and results. But not because of some personal genius. It’s just the standard way I was taught as a child in our science labs. I won’t claim to the rigor of a microbiology lab but even just the process notes help a lot, which is useful since I’m just testing molecules on myself.
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So many other good details that get to how impossibly multivariate biology research is, like the need to have several days at the exact temperature. It's not uncommon for results in biology to have this kind of snag in reproducibility even now. Sometimes it's due to attributing variations to something like "steady hands at the bench", but other times it can even be a deliberate attempt to prevent rivals from duplicating a process before it can be patented and privatized.
Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland's Maps (eyeondesign.aiga.org)
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A different kind of map, but 3d level (map) designers seem to enjoy doing Easter eggs and hidden things in levels. There are the famous Half-Life G-man cameos for example, which aren't quite fourth wall as it were, but still something not many know of.
If you ever come to Switzerland download the swisstopo app. It is very detailed and useful for hiking but even in the city too, showing the locations of fountains, for example, rural and urban official and unofficial hiking trails, closed trails, slopes too steep to traverse, etc etc etc. The Swiss topographical institute is a treasure.
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This is where screenshot come from, official topo data are free. I use them all the time for hiking, ski touring etc. Good thing they cover also neighboring mountains a bit (to varying detail) so ie France or Italy can be enjoyed just with a single app. Then you go further and realize how much worse free easy to find things are. There are variations of opentopomap but they lack the finesse of this. Also available in various other layouts ie biking (veloland), canoeing or various winter sports (sadly no outright ski touring, the best there are still physical maps but then you need a hefty stash of various zooms at home, pricey too)
I've found this is an amazingly high conflict subject in life. I once had to manage someone that was one of those people that did things like these mappers. It drove me insane. I constantly had to tell them to redo their work. They loved trying to insert Simpsons(TV SHOW) references into everything. I had a serious talk with them about the fact that you cannot do things that are "fun" if it conflicts with the work accuracy/reliability/readability/maintainability. They never listened and I had to manage them out. One of only two employees I had to get rid of in my career, so far. I really don't understand these types and why they think its "harmless" to do this type of stuff. I don't want to create potentially more work for myself and I definitely don't want people that work for me to do so. I've also worked with people that did this many times. It seems to be something like 5-10% of the working population that has this weird near neurotic compulsion to do this sort of "funny-sabotage" at work and cannot seem to resist even at the cost of their job.
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What if it didn't conflict with the accuracy/etc? If you need names for an example scenario and Alice and Bob are already used elsewhere, what would be wrong with Bart and Lisa?
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You say you don't understand these types & that this is a high conflict subject for you. To offer a perspective, I think it has to do with how individuals cope with their existence. In every moment, we could be doing something more worthy of existence; worse, most of our life is sacrificed to working that definitely does not meet such lofty criteria. So take these small, but irrational acts just as minor self-therapy (vs rebellion) that is constructive to the individual -- hopefully it does not do any serious harm (I trust your judgement you made the right call). I wager this is going to become more and more common as humanity cries against the hyper-specialization and hyper-inferred MEANING on work that may be trivial in scope when juxtaposed that we really only know that ourselves our conscious (or choose your word for whatever illusion we're experiencing). I imagine there exists at least 1 UBER phd gig worker who did not fully take seriously the annotative training work he or she was doing, if you're familiar with that article that made rounds recently. People also change with age, and perhaps in 20 years you may find yourself doing these same things. Or, maybe now, coping differently in different ways, but that people find equally incomprehensible -- I know I do. Just mean the above for good, seriously.
Not none, just very little, like the obscure code corner case. If you are thinking about building something nearby, or specifically looking for interesting terrain to visit, you may be misled. The pig shaped cow spot, on the other hand, adds accurate symbology to the decal, with a wholesome helping of self deprecation. To allow de minimis excursions from ground truth is a necessary compromise, but purposely introducing them isn't.
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Oh please. Anyone looking to actually do something interesting with a piece of land is going to have to a much higher resolution map of the site, not use the extreme zoom and on a map covering a huge area. Or they may even go rogue and visit the place! Heavens to Murgatroyd!
A vector graphics workstation from the 70s (justanotherelectronicsblog.com)
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Storage tubes are amazing. I once had a Tektronix 464 scope. Unlike the ubiquitous 465, the 464 was an analog storage oscilloscope! The persistence of the storage tube let you capture pulses, visualize signal jitter, etc. And there was a very satisfying erase button that cleared the tube with the characteristic green flash. You could also just mess with the horizontal/vertical position knobs and use it as a very expensive Etch-a-Sketch.
> But can it run DOOM? >No[t yet…] I believe in the community making this a yes.
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I'd love to see that, but for this model that might be too much to ask. The 4054 had some options to accelerate drawings, and that might be able to pull it off! This video (timestamped) shows off some cool grahpic tricks it can do: https://youtu.be/M98VOoGFLL8?si=NRwLTqXqObvePrPk&t=190
An incredible machine. I didn't remember this one had a dot-matrix font - later ones had a vector-based one. I'd love to see the definitions for this latter screen font.
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Check out HP plotter fonts from the 1980's. You should have seen the digitizing tables 4 feet square, and the oversized plotters that were surplus from oil companies after the oil price crash at the end of 1981.
WhatsApp will become interoperable with other messaging apps in Europe (tuta.com)
WhatsApp is the only chat app I've encountered that refuses to work* if you don't give it access to your contacts. The last thing I want is to give it access to even more chats. Go eat a bag of dicks, Meta. More like "metastatic" * you can respond to messages but are very limited in what you can initiate (as such they got you as part of someone else's contact list)
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> WhatsApp is the only chat app I've encountered that refuses to work if you don't give it access to your contacts* I've never given it access to my contacts. (iOS.) It's worked fine. I recently started giving it access to a limited set of my contacts, but that was for convenience.
Perhaps you'd be interested in learning that you can initiate chats to phone numbers (regardless of contact status) by going to wa.me/<phone-number> I've never tested it without contacts permissions though.
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You can send the phone number to yourself in chat and then click it to open it for chat.
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They broke that just several weeks ago, at least for me.
Why xor eax, eax? (xania.org)
> In this case, even though rax is needed to hold the full 64-bit long result, by writing to eax, we get a nice effect: Unlike other partial register writes, when writing to an e register like eax, the architecture zeros the top 32 bits for free. So xor eax, eax sets all 64 bits to zero. I had no idea this happened. Talk about a fascinating bit of X86 trivia! Do other architectures do this too? I'd imagine so, but you never know.
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A lot of the RISC architectures do something similar (sign extend rather than zero extend) when using 32 ops on a 64 bit processor. MIPS and PowerPC come to mind off of the top of my head. Being careful about that in the spec basically lets them treat 32-bit mode on a 64-bit processor as just 'mask off the top bits on any memory access'. Some of these processors will even let you use 64bit ops in 32bit mode, and really only just truncate memory addresses. So the real question is why does x86 zero extend rather than sign extend in these cases, and the answer is probably that by zero extending, with an implementation that treats a 64bit architectural register as a pair 32bit renamed physical registers, you can statically set the architectural upper register back on the free pool by marking it as zero rather than the sign extended result of an op.
I'm curious, why is that? I know x86-64 zeroes the upper part of the register for backwards compability and improve instruction cache (no need for REX prefix), but AArch64 is unclear for me.
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It's to break dependencies for register renaming. If you have an instruction like mov w5, w6 // move low 32 bits of register 6 into low 32 bits of register 5 This instruction only depends on the value of register 6. If instead it of zeroing the upper half it left it unchanged, then it would depend on w6 and also the previous value of register 5. That would constrain the renamer and consequently out-of-order execution.
No one believes this story.
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I am sad you don't believe this story. The CEO was very technical and this is exactly the sort of thing he would spot.
> For the AMD 9950, we are talking about 1280kb of L1 (per core). 16MB of L2 (per core) Ryzen 9 CPUs have 1280kB of L1 in total . 80kB (48+32) per core, and the 9 series is the first in the entire history of Ryzens to have some other number than 64 (32+32) kilobytes of L1 per core. The 16MB L2 figure is also total . 1MB per core, same as the 7 series. AMD obviously touts the total, not per-core, amounts in their marketing materials because it looks more impressive.
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Yeah, the reason for that is that it's expensive in PPA for the size of an L1 cache to exceed number of ways times page size. The jump to 48kB was also a jump to 12 way set associative. As an aside, zen 1 did actually have a 64kB (and only 4 way!) L1I cache, but changed to the page size times way count restriction with zen 2, reducing the L1 size by half. You can also see this on the apple side, where their giant 192kB caches L1I are 12 ways with a 16kB page size.
That music when you click "int" is awesome. Reminds me of the good ol' days of keygens.
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Keygen music will always have a special place in my heart. This is a good one. I do wonder who was the first cracker that thought of including a keygen music that started the tradition. I also miss how different groups competed with each other and boasted about theirs while dissing others in readmes. Readme's would have .NFO suffix and that would try to load in some Windows tool but you had to open them in notepad. Good times.
UK Government plans new powers to label dissenting movements as 'subversion' (netpol.org)
Dunno for sure, but I'd suggest that mentioning Israel when it's the UK doing it, it might possibly look a bit like shoe-horning in a capital-A-Agenda. The UK doesn't really have much of a good history on the topic of listening to political dissent from within. The Sex Pistols comes to mind, and the Winter of Discontent, and the anti-Iraq-war march, and the Troubles, and police kettling a few decades back, and a bike safety protest a friend attended where a lot of people who couldn't hear a police order got arrested for not following that order, and there's a former partner of mine could give you a whole bunch of stories about protests you've probably never even heard of. IMO, the UK's led by aristocrats who only mostly deign to play the game of democracy, but the leadership doesn't really seem to think naturally in those terms and is a lot more comfortable at white tie events.
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Because there are huge protests in the UK at the moment for Palestine, which led them to "proscribe" the group Palestine Action. Then everyone (correctly) freaked out about civil liberties, and you can now see videos of grannies being arrested by the UK police for having an "i support Palestine Action" sign multiple times a week.
The fact that peaceful protesters against the Gaza genocide got labeled as terrorists should be sufficient evidence that the UK government still very much shares their bed with Israel.
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Palestine Action were proscribed for a level of violence ("property damage" against the RAF, vandalised aircraft, which makes it sound worse than it is because it was spray paint in the engines) that had previously been considered acceptable. But "peaceful"? A protest on 6 August 2024 resulted in a charge of grievous bodily harm after an activist allegedly struck a police officer with a sledgehammer, and a protest on 16 March 2025 resulted in three activists being charged with one count each of assault by beating. I get why they're doing this, but if I'm going to call the Jan 6 thing in Washington DC "attempted coup" (which I do), I have to also say this is not "peaceful".
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If the UK shut down everything that was related to occasional violence, there wouldn't be a pub left in England.
Critiquing Israel as well as any political or religious entity or set of beliefs should be allowed, or there will be problems. This is basically the Paradox of Tolerance coupled with the fact that intolerance itself seems to be a viral meme if left unchecked. I still can't believe the UK has arrested people based on their social media posts. Why are people standing for that, over there? (I'm a US citizen.) Meanwhile, one could make direct quotes from the Quran or Hadith and you'd likely remain unchallenged because religion gets a free pass from reasonable critique for some illogical reason. Appeasement will eventually lead to fear...
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I can't tell or not, but are you aware that the US has deported/arrested thousands of people for their social media posts?
> It's ridiculous to accuse me of peddling tribalism when my post intentionally pushed back against the very tribalism coloring your original post. No it didn't. You said this has just appeared, when actually it's been happening for years.
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Are you confusing me with the other user you replied to higher up?
And go where? The US is in pretty bad shape and sinking. Europe can be a bit better or much worse depending on your background. Is there any solid alternative?
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You’re right in that there is no one place which will solve all of one’s problems. There is an entire continent across the channel which will at least permit you to easily travel through, and settle in, a decent number of countries with very little effort. While it’s not a silver bullet by any means, being able to freely move between, and experience, multiple cultures outweighs the melancholy we have back in Blighty. We, in the UK, are constantly told how great we have it in terms of healthcare and welfare. The reality is the opposite. Our healthcare is barely fit for purpose. Our welfare system fails to help those who need it the most. The one thing I have noticed more than anything else during my travels is that we, in the UK, have resigned our ourselves to a mentality of hopeless acceptance of the status quo. We tend to shrug it off with reductive statements such as ‘well, X has Y problem’ as if that justifies the swathe of issues which should not be present in a country which has tried to position itself on the world stage as a vestibule for decency and morality over the past century. Nowhere is _perfect_, but many places are _better_.
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