skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 19kg of Fentanyl got smuggled from Canada into the US in 2024, not even 1% of the total.

I realize this is the Liberal's talking point, but it just doesn't add up. For starters they are talking about detected/caught smuggling, which is a terrible metric to use.

Then there's the problem of how much is being produced domestically. Just in Q4 of 2024, in Canada found:

* Super lab with 55 kilograms of fentanyl, 390 kilograms of methamphetamine, 35 kilograms of cocaine, 15 kilograms of MDM - https://globalnews.ca/news/10840910/largest-drug-superlab-bu...

* 30 tons of precursor chemicals - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/30-000-kilog...

* 31 kg of fentanyl and 7.6 tons of precursors - https://edmontonjournal.com/news/crime/merchants-of-death-to...

So that leaves us in a very awkward position with three possibilities:

* Canada has busted virtually every lab in Canada within the span of one quarter and was consuming amounts of fentanyl domestically that would render every Canadian an addict.

* Somewhere in Canada, someone is stockpiling absurd amounts of fentanyl just for fun.

* Canada is catching a negligently small fraction of what their crime syndicates are smuggling into the US.

I know which seems more likely to me.
Basically this is why pure democracy doesn't work. There is usually some kind of "moderation" element to temper the wild impulses of the crowd.

And anyway, why shouldn't 49 deeply invested people get their way over 51 "meh" responses? That's maximizing utility. And this is usually what happens in practice - focused pressure groups, lobbyists etc press their case and get what they want, beating out average public opinion more often then not. Always has been this way.
That is not my experience. I wrote recently [1] about how I use it and it’s more like an intern, pair programmer or rubber duck. None of which make you worse.

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/1/30/how-i-ai/
Your point could be made, probably even stronger than it is currently, by omitting the insult at the start.
I have picked up the cursor tool which allows me to throw in relevant files with a drop down menu. Previously I was copy pasting files into the chatgpt browser page, but now I point cursor to o1 and do it within the ide.

One of my favourite things is to ask it if it thinks there are any bugs - this helps a lot with validating any logic that I might be exploring. I recently ported some code to a different environment with slightly different interfaces and it wasn't working - I asked o1 to carefully go over each implementation in detail why it might be producing a different output. It thought for 2 whole minutes and gave me a report of possible causes - the third of which was entirely correct and had to do with how my environment was coercing pandas data types.

There have been 10 or so wow moments over the past few years where I've been shocked by the capabilities of genai and that one made the list.
Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.
This tracks so well as an indicator, with many other products. As soon as the company starts making money, their product is going to become awful and it's time to find an alternative. Why can't tech escape this cycle?
Color Generation in IBM CGA, EGA and VGA (2018)
We can’t just start calling everything “slop” just because “AI slop” has become cool to say.
> We shouldn't be accepting even talking about the US annexing Greenland FFS

Genuine question: why? Expansionism may be out of style, but I don't see how it's inherently evil.
You didn't have to do this, there was no EO.
Modern open-source time-tracking app
You can customize the immutable commits option to specify which commits you want to be blocked from changing.

By default that’s only the main branch and untracked remote branches. For me that makes sense as I’m generally fine with constantly rewriting my feature branches.

However, if you want it to e.g. block you from rewriting anything that you’ve already pushed to the remote, you can set it to treat anything that’s pushed to the remote as immutable, too, as another commenter described [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940329
iCloud+ is just extra space; the other "features" are free addons.

That's how everyone I know uses it.
And (as a complete side note) it has all worked out very poorly for Twitter, as a revenue-generating platform.

No reason to think it will be better when applied to the federal government.
echo chambers bad
Australia bans DeepSeek on government devices over security risk
Nice! I'm comfortable with git, but something better can still be invented. Thank you for the information.
>"but Rust is actually a replacement for C++. "

I would disagree. C++ provides way more features than Rust and to me Rust feels way more constrained comparatively.
I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.

For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.

I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.
Just another way for the people on top to siphon money from everyone else. No individual contributor is going to be rewarded for any productivity increase beyond what is absolutely required to get them to fulfill the company’s goals, and the goal posts will be moving so fast that keeping up will be a full time job. As we see from the current job market, the supply of problems the commercial software market needs more coders to solve maybe isn’t quite as bountiful as we thought it was, and maybe we won’t need to perpetually ramp up the number of developers humanity has… maybe we even have too many already? If a company’s top developer can do the work of the 10 developers below them, their boss is going to happily fire the extra developers— not think of all the incredible other things they could use those developers for. A lot of developers assume that one uber-productive developer left standing will be more valuable to the company than they were before— but now that developer is competing with 10 people that also know the code base willing to work for a lot cheaper. We get paid based on what the market will bear, not the amount of value we deliver, so 100% of that newfound profit goes to the top and the rest of it goes to reducing the price of the product to stay competitive with every other company doing the exact same thing.

Maybe I’m being overly cynical, but assuming this isn’t a race to the bottom and people will get rich being super productive ai-enhanced code monsters, to me, looks like a conceited white collar version of the hustle porn guys that think if they simultaneously work the right combo of gig apps at the right time of day in the right spots then they can work their way up to being wealthy entrepreneurs. Good luck.
I do legit AI research but I don't use "AI" in my marketing
I built a tool for which I did actual original AI research. Maybe I should have published the findings, but I'm in a competitive space so I just kept them as features / trade secrets. Unlike every company and their mother though, I hate how people plaster the word AI everywhere even when they're just hooking up an API to ChatGPT, so I didn't.
It's not necessarily top down. I genuinely don't know a single person in my organization who doesn't use LLMs one way or another. Obviously with different degrees of applications, but literally everyone does. And we haven't had a real "EVERYONE MUST USE AI!", just people suggesting and asking for specific model usages, access to apps like Cursor and so on.

(I know it because I'm in charge of maintaining all processes around LLM keys, their usages, Cursor stuff and etc.)
The French one there's an English language remake happening now called The Agency but I've heard mixed reviews
It's the same. They are all walled gardens (whether hardware walled gardens or software walled gardens)
I can corroborate this.

When I was using dating apps I kept a spreadsheet to track the response to like ratio, and indeed, the amount of women who liked me back in any given month was exactly 5% of those whom I liked.

Much as I wish that ratio was higher, data is data. The Tinder style matchmaking will always bring out this behaviour.
If you don't understand what it does the fault is all mine!

The arrows represent dependencies. For example, if you create a function A that calls a function B in a pull request:
1. We'll render function A as a diff on the top part of the canvas
2. We'll render function B as a diff on the bottom part of the canvas
And we'll draw an arrow from A to B, to represent that A is calling B

In this way, you can more easily understand the relationships between different parts of what someone is editing. We hope that this reduces the amount of mental modeling or mapping someone has to do during code review!
You have it exactly right. I always told the candidate in my introductory email that the segment is optional and I like to learn all varieties of new things and they should feel free to pick any topic they want.

And then when they were teaching me, I made sure to pay attention, ask questions about anything I didn't understand - not to judge their teaching skills but to show I was interested and listening.
Believe it or not IE was still supported in some capacity until 2022, and the underlying Trident engine is still supported until at least 2029. Edge has an official "IE Mode" which switches the backend from Chromium to Trident, effectively turning it into IE with a modern skin. Microsoft support lifecycles are no joke.
Possibly. My use of texting groups is relatively recent.
“The west” as a culture or thought definitely doesn’t include Russia - like in a other comment in this thread it’s the US, EU and allies, so mostly NATO
Thanks. These are really good points.
Maybe you are right and it is still risky for sleeping adults. In any case, even high risk the standard that needs to be followed might be as simple as 'must have a physical cutoff at 30C'.
> And the cheapest tier is $0.99/mo. for 50 GB so it's not exactly breaking the bank.

This is a huge trick. Like any other service where the most friction is setting up billing... then they can increase the price easily. Do upgrades to other tiers require confirmation?
Is MIUI Xiaomi’s fork of Android or something else? I had to look it up so I’m half guessing here, but what I wrote is for iPhones and iPads. I don’t know how different YouTube is on Android but it was my impression they kept the implementations pretty close to feature and behavioral parity, but I haven’t used an Android phone full time in almost 8 years.
My wife is an event planner, and events as a technology space has never been great. At this point there's basically Facebook and Eventbrite, both of which are very established in their lanes and face very little competitive pressure.

I don't love the idea of Apple dominating this space either, but there's a lot of opportunity to improve things, so I'm glad to see it.
It's a nazi salute, not fascist. Obviously he's not a nazi.

To be considered fascist he would take over control of gov. Instead he's removing it...

What starts to become obvious to me is people use "fascist" as a derogatory insult without understanding what it means.
> Regarding iOS, they have made some progress in adopting webpush, but it does not seem possible to push for mobile applications with it yet.

This is a key point right at the very end. It has always been much easier to implement push notifications to Android devices, even when only Web Push is implemented.
Google has been the main force behind the adoption of PWAs as Native apps on devices, even by immediately showing a "Install this app?" popup when navigating to a PWA-enabled website/web app.

iOS permits "Installing to home screen" but there is no popup shown natively, nor any indication from the OS that the website you're visiting is a PWA. The user has to go through several steps to add the app to his device.

Once it is added, it's possible for the device to receive web push notifications and show them as native push notifications (IIRC), even with the app is closed, however the reliability is inconsistent. Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't. At least that was my experience still about 6 months ago when I tried implementing web push with PWA for iOS.

I gave up trying to go the pure PWA route and instead wrapped my web app with PWABuilder into a native app, and went through the whole process of submitting to the App Store, getting APN, registering the web app in Firebase, then sending the push notifications to the native app via Firebase Messaging. Works great then, but it's a lot more work than keeping everything simply as a web app and using web push.
moralistic relativism creates cover for egocentrism to destroy us
Apple: How can we make iCloud+ subscriptions viral? A subscriber throws a party and invites all their friends via iCloud+.
There are parts of Australia Outback that burn regularly and have homes there.

https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/editorial/features/...

The structures are essentially fire resistant and with appropriate local control of vegetation make it entirely possible to avoid fire loss.
I've shared a few hundred examples of how I'm using this stuff, with full prompt and response transcripts. You can find them linked from items on these tags on my blog - they're usually gists.

- ai-assisted-programming: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

- prompt-engineering: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-engineering/

And my series on how I use LLMs: https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/
And at some places like Hinge, they'll identify your type so well that your "standouts" page (the one you have to pay to message people on) will be composed of 100% people you would probably like to speak to while your free feed will just be composed of people you have no interest in talking to!
> Part of the issue is that ID’s are expensive. When I moved from one state to another a couple years ago, a new driver’s license was $50.

That doesn't sound that expensive at all. It's actually on par with other countries across the world, if you account for difference in average income. I wouldn't want a person who doesn't have $50 for a proper ID to be able to vote anyway.

However, I agree that (1) tying id to driving is weird, and (2) random circumstances completely out of your control should not stop you from voting.
That.. is a new one. I thought I am fairly aware of various forms of coded language. Care to elaborate?
Google totally controls that ability. Apple is not any better here, but it's weird to call out Apple as being the only meanie here, when both Apple and Google are equally terrible when it comes to cross-platform e2e messaging.

Thankfully we have Signal, which solves the problem better than either platform option.
I am with you, it's so stale and dull as an offering. No one would even use the calendar stuff even if it was an open format. The fact it isn't even that....
The first wave was not chat, it was completion. Instead of saying "suggest some names for an ice cream shop", the first wave was "Here are some great names for ice cream shops: 1. Nice Cream 2." Chat was a lot more intuitive and low effort than this.

Chat is also iterative. You can go back there and fix things that were misinterpreted. If the misinterpretation happens often, you can add on another instruction on top of that. I strongly disagree that they'd be fixed documents. Documents are a way to talk to yourself and get your rules right before you commit to them. But it costs almost nothing to do this with AI vs setting up brainstorming sessions with another human.

However, the rational models (o1, r1 and such) are good at iterating with themselves, and work better when you give them documents and have them figure out the best way to implement something.
The Canadian system is much better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada#History
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42940371
Just call it ECMAScript and forget about "Java".

"JavaScript" was not a good choice of name to begin with. The original JavaScript did not have much in common with Java.
Where did he signal this?

Once you find the quote, go onto politco (a not exactly pro-trump site) fact-checking service to get the full context.
It's definitely an opinion Google employees had in the last decade.

Actually I think a lot of people have it - just yesterday I saw someone on reddit claim Google was evil because it was secretly founded by the US military. And they were American. That's their military!
I'm conflicted with this.

On the one hand Google started out with the intent to not be evil. Weapons seem pretty evil to me.

But on the other hand, one of the best way to maintain peace is to carry a really big stick.
Even if some iCloud+ things could work without any Apple devices, I'm not sure why anyone would want it. Most of them only get value from the integration (like hide my email, storage space, etc).
Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.

When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.

The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.
Any problem can be solved with enough data munging.
As far as I know, the desktop requires you to sign-in via QR code from a mobile phone that you're logged into whatsapp on.
The word got used to mean everything from "complaining about a bystander using a rude word on twitter" to "finally prosecuting somebody after enough credible rape allegations went public".
The fist one I got was Foreskin piercing. With a penis photo all across the screen. Is it too much to ask to flag this as NSFW?
That’s neat. Not sure it’s offered to me but I’ll look for the experiment. I like to double check software behaviors when I write comments like the one above, and I was lamenting behind the scenes that actually, I would like Shorts to have PiP. I didn’t used to want that, but PiP has grown on me.
9% drop after hours on this news? Seems like an overreaction. But what do I know?
Is translation necessary to port the complete SQLite test suite?

sqlite/sqlite//test: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/master/test

tursodatabase/limbo//testing:
https://github.com/tursodatabase/limbo/tree/main/testing
It's not necessarily just monitoring though. I actively ask that question when I don't see certain keys not being used to inquire their relevancy. Basically taking feedback from some engineers, and generalizing it. Obviously in my case we're doing it in good faith, and assuming people will try to get their work done with whatever tools we give them access to. Like I see Anthropic keys get heavily used among eng department, but I constantly get requests for OpenAI keys for Zapier connects and etc. for business people.
Palantir doesn't make autonomous weapons, they sell SQL queries and have an evil-sounding name because it recruits juniors who think the name is cool.

Might be thinking of Anduril.
I don't think HN wants to be the place for these sorts of stories, however important they might ultimately feel.
Not earth shattering, but in a country with 30 years of stagnant wages, prices of everything going up, plus many have little savings here... That 130usd per person can start to look kinda tough for many families.
> no such inhibitions

Propping up evil figure/regime/ideology (Bolsheviks/Communists) to justify remorseless evilness (Concentration camps/Nuclear bomb) isn't new nor unique, but particularly predictable.
Yup, I'm surprised by the quality of the list too. Day 1: Autodesk, stripe (spain), zoom, but also plenty of junior roles, contracts paying $100+/hr. Lots of companies I never would have considered. Finding mobile jobs and hiring for mobile is also very difficult for many people, glad it's there.

You might want to drop a donation box there too in case we find jobs.
I think we’re going through a cultural shift. Looks is becoming the most important thing across the board. Most people won’t meet your partner but they’ll see them on social media. You need someone you feel proud about and secure of. On top of this, women are becoming more superficial than in previous years due to relationships being luxuries.

If a man was a solid laborer, upstanding citizen, and otherwise a dedicated family man - he would’ve done alright in certain periods of our history. But now, that’s not really that attractive. Women are much more susceptible to shifting societal trends. You can see this around the world. As women become more online, marriage rates plummet.

We’re moving further and further away from meeting your partners in real life. It’s going to be an uncommon way to meet in the future and what we will find isn’t that everyone just meets online - it’s that most people refuse to be together overall.
Citing Naked Gun: Nice Beaver!
Want to laugh, but this is classic bad economics take. SMBC-Comics could do this one.

The $1m can be spent fixing potholes. Massive waste of time, but if the next $1m is used to make potholes, a self-sustaining cycle of making and filling potholes can boost the local economy for just a small dribble of $1m per year input, to the alternating cycle.
DoD invests in company making it commercially viable

Company says won't work for DoD

DoD initiates arm twisting and FOMO

Company now works for DoD

The origins of investment will often lead to relative outcomes of that investment. It's almost like DoD invested in Google for an informational weapon, which really should surprise no one.
ICE wasn't created until 2003, so no one.
I've been using GenSpark.ai for the past month to do research (its agents usually does ~20 minutes, but I've seen it go up to almost 2 hours on a task) - it uses a Mixture of Agents approach using GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro and searches for hundreds of sources.

I reran some of these searches and I've so far found OpenAI Deep Research to be superior for technical tasks. Here's one example:

https://chatgpt.com/share/67a10f6d-28cc-8012-bf98-05dcdb705c... vs https://www.genspark.ai/agents?id=c896d5bc-321b-46ca-9aaa-62...

I've been giving Deep Research a good workout, although I'm still mystified if switching between the different base model matters, besides o1 pro always seeming to fail to execute the Deep Research tool.
For a short period of time back in 2013 or so, we had AnyVite, which was so much better than Evite in all ways. I wonder what happened to them. I think they basically disappeared.