MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lazystar | 2026-01-18 18:43:59+00:00
>> "I feel bad."

>> "I am a failure."

>> "Why can't I get anything done?"

> These are bad bug reports - because they have no stack traces and no context

heh, clever mind hack. kinda reminds me of Tony Horton's "Don't say 'I'm bad at x', say 'I presently struggle with x'".

Love the Spoelsky 'old code is battle tested/refactor instead of rewrite' - but there is one scenario it doesnt catch, though. traumautic events and abusive relationships can warp that old code quite a bit, making it difficult to trust that what youre debugging is actually your code, or whether its a virus. Sometimes you do have to rewrite.
by mullingitover | 2026-01-18 18:43:59+00:00
Also worth mentioning that this is blowing up the recent horrific one-sided trade deal that the EU agreed to, where they agree to zero tariffs and the US hits them with 15% tariffs[1]. The deal wasn't finalized and now it may never be.

Really impressive how long an enemy agent has been allowed to run the US executive branch, honest kudos to the enemies of the US for a successful operation.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/eu-set-halt-us-trade-21105693...
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-18 18:44:18+00:00
I think honestly the story would be much different with more product sense and better market intuition, Horizon is just a perfect example of pure idiocy. They may as well have just ported chat roulette.

Once Apple Vision Pro released I finally understood what VR really could be which is an incredible immersive escape. Once I watched an Apple Immersive movie, and then even a completely regular old 2D movie in theater mode at night in Joshua Tree, I got it. Obviously completely unattainable but it to me was very smart: low volume but execute the best version of your vision that you possibly can, and see how people respond to it. It proves out the vision and then you can start working down the price.

The only thing Meta VR got right is gaming: it's the only use case that works with the resolution & hardware at the price point that they're trying to occupy. AVP could obviously work too but look: I've nearly punched out a window with my quest pro. Sitting and playing a game is weird, standing and playing is tiring. What I like infinitely better is just: watching a movie. Escaping. Relaxing.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-18 18:44:45+00:00
Albert Einstein was also German.

> It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.

> Noch eine Art Anwendung des Relativitätsprinzips zum Ergötzen des Lesers: Heute werde ich in Deutschland als "deutscher Gelehrter", in England als "Schweizer Jude" bezeichnet; sollte ich aber einst in die Lage kommen, als "bète noire" präsentiert zu werden, dann wäre ich umgekehrt für die Deutschen ein „Schweizer Jude", für die Engländer ein "deutscher Gelehrter".
by vanderZwan | 2026-01-18 18:45:03+00:00
That looks interesting, I'm not likely to write any jQuery any time soon, but I'll check out the source code to see if I can learn anything from it.

Regarding adoption levels, the JsViews website made me think I had accidentally toggled the "Desktop Site" option in my Iceweasel browser, I wonder if that scared people off. Or perhaps it's because, as others mentioned, most jQuery development these days is in legacy codebases where the devs are not allowed to add any new libraries, reducing the adoption rates of any new jQuery libraries even more than you'd expect based on the raw nrs of jQuery users.

(the website does work though, and it loads fast. Which is something I've always appreciated about jQuery based sites still alive today. The only thing I'm missing is any indication of how big it is when minified + gzipped. EDIT: jsrender.js is 33.74 kB, jsrender.min.js a mere 12.82 kB)
by bauerd | 2026-01-18 18:45:12+00:00
The company's values may align to yours, even though they reject you. It's because the interview process doesn't need to have anything to do with their real-world process. Their engineers probe you for the same "best practices" that they themselves were constantly probed for in their own interviews. Interviewing is its very own skill that doesn't necessarily translate into real-life performance.
by tombert | 2026-01-18 18:45:43+00:00
I honestly think the racist stuff is the primary reason.

They can’t be impressed with his business acumen considering that he’s an objectively terrible businessman. They can’t be impressed with his academic record considering he doesn’t really have one. He has no military history, the only thing people know him from was a terrible reality TV show and his constant need to embellish everything he does.

Well, that, and the fact that he started saying a bunch of really racist shit in 2015 about how Mexico’s “not sending their best”, and how he’s not going to get a fair trial for Trump University because his judge has a Mexican-sounding last name.

I think a lot of his voters are cowards who are deeply unhappy and are too afraid to say that they believe that immigrants and DEI are the sole reason that their lives are terrible.

I find it funny because the reasons their lives are terrible are both more complicated but also simpler than DEI and immigrants. As far as I can tell, nearly all their problems boil down to self-interested sociopaths who have inserted themselves into power, and these sociopaths are completely ambivalent to the consequences of their decisions, so long as it doesn’t directly affect them.

To be clear, this is beyond “capitalism” or anything like that. Sociopaths controlling the world has been a thing for millennia, probably as long we’ve had any concept of “society”.
by comfysocks | 2026-01-18 18:46:14+00:00
I’ve considered Elon to be a bit of a bullshitter for almost as long as I’ve followed him. Back when he was an opportunistic Democrat, and now that he’s an ideological MAGA, his public statements always seemed to set off my bullshit detector. It seemed clear to me that his intention was more to manipulate perception rather than to disseminate factual information. While most business leaders are guilty of this to some degree, with Elon it seemed more cynically and nakedly so.

I’ve also come to consider him to be a skilled business person. He negotiated a ridiculous low price for the Fremont ex-NUMMI plant. He secured funding to enable Tesla to survive the GFC. The list goes on. I’d argue that Elon’s biggest wins were business related, not technical. Not that there weren’t technical accomplishments, it’s just that the technological accomplishments were more incremental SV type stuff whereas the business accomplishments were more heroic. I also give Tesla credit for the success of model S. But I consider that to be a function of good execution, not of technology. If that would have flopped it would have been the end. But there were many possible ways for Tesla to die back then.

One of Elon’s key business skills is his ability to sell a narrative. I guess that goes hand in hand with the “bullshitter” thing. He seems to have a magical ability to hypnotize fanboys and investors into believing that Tesla is more than it actually is.

The auto industry is not very sexy from an investor point of view. It’s a mature market, very capital intensive, high risk, low margin. Yet somehow Tesla achieves an outsized market cap.

As humorously noted in the HBO Silicon Valley “no revenue” scene, investors reward you for future promises and punish you on actual delivery. But what if you could promise a future that remains perpetually in the future? And every delivery is not an end, but only a step along the way to this utopian/distopian vision? What if you “promise the moon”, er, I mean Mars? If you did this, then maybe you could have a perpetual pure play that never expires.

So back to the article. Is this the demise of Tesla? I don’t know if Tesla necessarily has “no path forward” as “just a car company”. But I think Elon’s ability to sell the “sci-fi future” is wearing out. Tesla has delivered on some difficult business cases with incremental technology, but the track record on the “impossible future“ stuff isn’t good. Also, the mainstream EV industry will become increasingly commoditized with new Chinese entrants, eroding margins. Tariffs keep you in saturated markets and don’t help you in growing markets. So maybe a bit of a demise for all?
by listenallyall | 2026-01-18 18:46:20+00:00
> first critical thing

I disagree, for me, the most objectionable parts were subjective evaluations of Adams' last chapter of life, which come rather late in the article:

The man who had dreamed all his life of being respected for something other than cartooning had finally made it.

Obviously, it destroyed him.

and later, Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be White”

Who is Alexander to say he was destroyed, or sacrificed anything? Yes, it is factual that Dilbert was removed from newspapers and Adams' income probably dropped 99%. But Adams was already a senior citizen who had millions of dollars and no children. I doubt he cared about the money any more. Adams probably also lost a huge number of fans. But who cares? Those fans were at arms length at best. He found (or created) a community of people he could interact with daily who deeply, deeply admired him. He "found his tribe." I can't speak for you, or for most celebrities, as I've never been one, but I'd probably feel more satisfied having a few dozen super-close friends who I admire back and with whom I'm engaged in a two-way discourse than millions of anonymous admirers that I've never met and don't know anything about.

Adams was not entirely stupid. He knew that his comic strip would be in jeopardy if he made comments about black people, and he did it anyway. He made a calculation and proceeded. It probably isn't the same decision that most people, including Alexander, would have made, but that doesn't mean it "destroyed him" or even that it was a sacrifice. He shed all the "admirers" and distant "fans" and found out who his true allies were. Far fewer, yes, but now he knew those who stood by him were aligned. Especially later in life when you have less time and patience for fighting, for nonsense, for explaining things over and over, it seems like a win.
by reinvantveer | 2026-01-18 18:46:30+00:00
Brings back a range of memories. I was one of the archaeologists on the project near the Amsterdam central station, a dig site accessible through an airlock because it was inside of the "caisson" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisson_(engineering)) that was lowered into the old Amstel riverbed. It was the weirdest archaeological project I have participated in, by quite a wide margin, being inside a complex engineering project.

Also, after making a career switch from archaeology to software engineering, even weirder to see my former occupation and project dig site re-emerge here on HN
by dh2022 | 2026-01-18 18:46:34+00:00
There is a difference though: Kaiser’s power was un-checked. Currently there are some GOP senators who are looking to check Donnie’s ambitions. a couple of GOP senators said they will not even look at Donnie’s candidate for Fed Chairman role until the current investigation into Jerome Powell stops. And two other GOP senators are pushing a resolution to prevent Donnie from attacking any NATO countries.

Let’s see how it goes.
by rzerowan | 2026-01-18 18:46:35+00:00
>Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.

>In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.

Id put it that this is incorrect insofar - as the bazaar was/is a public commons with a dual regulatory environment city(state) and the guilds , which would enforce/regulate as needed.

The digital marketplaces we have would be more anologous to feudal plantations ,where each coder(sharecropper) survives at the whim of their particluar feudal lord , who have total control within that space and the state via lobbying mostly keeps off.Theer are no guild equivalent so when Playstore/Github makes a ruling like the recent hike of dev fees or ci runner. Theres no state or user leverage that can force a reversal other than complaints.

Paradoxically id say they are more megachurch than bazaars.
by networkadmin | 2026-01-18 18:47:03+00:00
The whole nation is eaten up by gambling and other vices at this time. It's not the first time such a thing has happened in a nation's history. Generally it occurs just after widespread money debasement and just before major, world shaking disasters. (You Are Here.)

Reference: Andrew Dickson White (first president of Cornell) "Fiat Money Inflation In France", published 1896:

"The government now began, and continued by spasms to grind out still more paper; commerce was at first stimulated by the difference in exchange; but this cause soon ceased to operate, and commerce, having been stimulated unhealthfully, wasted away.

Manufactures at first received a great impulse; but, ere long, this overproduction and overstimulus proved as fatal to them as to commerce. From time to time there was a revival of hope caused by an apparent revival of business; but this revival of business was at last seen to be caused more and more by the desire of far-seeing and cunning men of affairs to exchange paper money for objects of permanent value. As to the people at large, the classes living on fixed incomes and small salaries felt the pressure first, as soon as the purchasing power of their fixed incomes was reduced. Soon the great class living on wages felt it even more sadly.

Prices of the necessities of life increased: merchants were obliged to increase them, not only to cover depreciation of their merchandise, but also to cover their risk of loss from fluctuation; and, while the prices of products thus rose, wages, which had at first gone up under the general stimulus, lagged behind. Under the universal doubt and discouragement, commerce and manufactures were checked or destroyed. As a consequence the demand for labor was diminished; laboring men were thrown out of employment, and, under the operation of the simplest law of supply and demand, the price of labor--the daily wages of the laboring class--went down until, at a time when prices of food, clothing and various articles of consumption were enormous, wages were nearly as low as at the time preceding the first issue of irredeemable currency."
by roughly | 2026-01-18 18:47:49+00:00
> Suppose you're on an island where the economy only produces coconuts.

This is why nobody takes economists seriously. What you lose in simplifying down to this model is literally everything. The coconut economy has zero predictive power.

In the real world, distribution effects dramatically affect the functioning of the economy, because workers are also consumers and owners of capital are siphoning off the purchasing power of their customers. Productivity isn’t the question in the modern economy - we’re already massively overproducing just about everything - our problem is both our wealth and production allocations are borderline suicidal.
by sneak | 2026-01-18 18:49:03+00:00
> One recurring reaction to the video has been confusion. Viewers assume the imagery is AI-generated. According to Evercoast, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Every stunt, every swing, every fall was physically performed and captured in real space. What makes it feel synthetic is the freedom volumetric capture affords.

No, it’s simply the framerate.
by saila | 2026-01-18 18:49:09+00:00
The issue isn't intelligence per se. It's ignorance (often willful ignorance), dogmatism, media illiteracy, political illiteracy, etc. There are many intelligent (but evil) people in the Trump administration and not every Trump voter is a dunce. Framing them all as stupid isn't useful, because it doesn't help us understand and counteract what's happening.
by hexaga | 2026-01-18 18:49:15+00:00
Because it's not calibrated to. In LLMs, next token probabilities are calibrated: the training loss drives it to be accurate. Likewise in typical classification models for images or w/e else. It's not beyond possibility to train a model to give confidence values.

But the second-order 'confidence as a symbolic sequence in the stream' is only (very) vaguely tied to this. Numbers-as-symbols are of different kind to numbers-as-next-token-probabilities. I don't doubt there is _some_ relation, but it's too much inferential distance away and thus worth almost nothing.

With that said, nothing really stops you from finetuning an LLM to produce accurately calibrated confidence values as symbols in the token stream. But you have to actually do that, it doesn't come for free by default.
by SR2Z | 2026-01-18 18:49:44+00:00
The power of military weapons is great if you want to bomb buildings and burn down bridges, but there is no point fighting your own people just be crowned King of the ashes.

Estimates for counterinsurgency are that an occupier needs ~20 soldiers for 1000 occupied civilians. The US army has 1.3M troops - the entire might of the US military would be needed to pacify just CA alone, and that would leave the rest of the country virtually defenseless. It's easy to bomb a building from a jet; it's much harder to kick in doors and arrest dissidents _even if_ there is no armed resistance.

The hard truth that allows democracy to survive is that it is not possible to govern without the consent of the governed. It is certainly not possible to occupy a rich, productive region and have it remain rich and productive unless the occupier has overwhelming force.
by tel | 2026-01-18 18:49:59+00:00
Gaussian splatting is a way to record 3-dimensional video. You capture a scene from many angles simultaneously and then combine all of those into a single representation. Ideally, that representation is good enough that you can then, post-production, simulate camera angles you didn't originally record.

For example, the camera orbits around the performers in this music video are difficult to imagine in real space. Even if you could pull it off using robotic motion control arms, it would require that the entire choreography is fixed in place before filming. This video clearly takes advantage of being able to direct whatever camera motion the artist wanted in the 3d virtual space of the final composed scene.

To do this, the representation needs to estimate the radiance field, i.e. the amount and color of light visible at every point in your 3d volume, viewed from every angle. It's not possible to do this at high resolution by breaking that space up into voxels, those scale badly, O(n^3). You could attempt to guess at some mesh geometry and paint textures on to it compatible with the camera views, but that's difficult to automate.

Gaussian splatting estimates these radiance fields by assuming that the radiance is build from millions of fuzzy, colored balls positioned, stretched, and rotated in space. These are the Gaussian splats.

Once you have that representation, constructing a novel camera angle is as simple as positioning and angling your virtual camera and then recording the colors and positions of all the splats that are visible.

It turns out that this approach is pretty amenable to techniques similar to modern deep learning. You basically train the positions/shapes/rotations of the splats via gradient descent. It's mostly been explored in research labs but lately production-oriented tools have been built for popular 3d motion graphics tools like Houdini, making it more available.
by frereubu | 2026-01-18 18:50:31+00:00
The article says nothing about English language skills. It says:

'University officials have described the unwritten policy as a prudent response to the current uncertainty facing Chinese and other foreign students when they apply for visas to study in the United States. “They are telling us that these foreign students may not show up if we offer them a position,” the faculty member says. “And that could jeopardize our research.”'

My wife teachers in universities in London, and the issue of Chinese students turning up with little or no English is real, often having paid for someone else to take the required English language tests for them. She has had students write their essays in Chinese and then just copied and pasted from Google Translate, generating utterly unintelligible dross. But that is definitively not the explanation here - this is all Chinese students, proficient in English or not.
by kev009 | 2026-01-18 18:51:04+00:00
It's a portfolio, the guy did things that shipped in millions of units.

It was a good design, in critical environments small goose-neck lights are typically used, even if the buttons and indicators are backlit. I still prefer it to backlit keyboards which, with decreasing thickness, increasingly compromise the quality of the keyboard (I have tested this with later chicklet models running through all available keyboards for a few era ThinkPads). Having a small amount of ambient light is easier on the eyes, especially the yellow-shift on the X40, and you can run the screen at minimal brightness to increase battery life and whatever health benefits this all has.
by galsapir | 2026-01-18 18:51:17+00:00
i honestly dont think there's a simple y/n answer there - i think considerations include mostly like 'how costly it is to do so', 'how often do you think you'll need it', and so on.
traces are not as "ephemeral" as FT models - since you can use those to guide agent behaviour when a newer model is released (but still, not as evergreen as other assets - traces generated using say GPT4 would seem pale and outdated compared to ones created on the same dataset using Opus4.5 i reckon)
by agumonkey | 2026-01-18 18:51:52+00:00
I used to be a thinkpad head, less so these days, but even good dell with trackpoint don't have the same feel. For people like me it does affect my use and joy. Also build quality is great, I don't think I threw out a single thinkpad in 20 years...

If the thinkpad team and lenovo guys read this, keep it as long as possible
by tzs | 2026-01-18 18:51:52+00:00
One thing that could help would be for Democrats who live in congressional districts where there is no way a Democrat will ever get elected because there are too many people there who just vote for the candidate with the 'R' by their name on the ballot without actually looking into either candidate's positions to switch their registration to Republican.

That way they could vote in Republican primaries. Many if not most of those districts actually have Republican candidates in the primaries who are center right but they lose because primary turnout is very low, largely consisting of just the most extreme voters.

For example consider Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG). In the primary the first time she ran against a perfectly normal Republican. I don't remember all the details, but I believe he was a decorated military officer who after the military was a successful businessman and who had server in state offices.

MTG was a full on QAnon and other conspiracy theorist believer. But it is mostly the fringe that votes in primaries so she won. And it is a heavily Republican district with many people who don't really follow politics so she got their vote in the general election because they always vote R.

Register as a Republican if you are in such a district and vote in the primaries and then maybe we can get back to having sane Republicans winning those districts.

For safe Republican districts where they do elect sane Republicans, it is still worth switching registration. Let the current representative from that district know that you are doing this, and promise that if Trump gets upset at their vote on something and bankrolls a primary challenge, you will vote for them in the primary.
by faxmeyourcode | 2026-01-18 18:52:06+00:00
> The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral.

I didn't make it past the tldr lol is this some kind of poisoned data for GPT 6?