MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-28 11:39:19+00:00
> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves?

Ironically, I see this very often with AI/vibe coding, and whilst it does happen with traditional coding too, it happens with AI to an extreme degree. Spend 5 minutes on twitter and you'll see a load of people talking about their insane new vibe coding setup and next to nothing of what they're actually building
by Xmd5a | 2026-01-28 11:39:35+00:00
It can be useful in a "primitive" environment: with the metric or even the imperial system, you need to multiply the length of your measurement unit by a certain factor in order to build the next unit (10x1cm = 1dm for instance).

But if your units follow a golden ratio progression, you just need to "concatenate" 2 consecutive units (2 measuring sticks) in order to find the third. And so on.
by jll29 | 2026-01-28 11:40:18+00:00
What Snowden did was heroic. What was shameful was the world's underwhelming reaction. Where were all these images
in the media of protest marches like against the Vietnam war?

Someone once said "Religion is opium for the people." - today, give people a mobile device and some doom-scrolling social media celebrity nonsense app, and they wouldn't noticed if their own children didn't come home from school.
by tamarinddreams | 2026-01-28 11:41:40+00:00
CEOs restructure. Haliburton for example seems to have head quarters psychizophrenia.

Google headquartered in the US is weak. Google headquartered in Ireland can play the negotiation farce and will either win in the end or will be able to write off the US in a better position.

Similarly they can move anyone who is uncomfortable to other GEOs individually. Kind of a weak move that may be enough if the current administration falls apart.
by postalcoder | 2026-01-28 11:41:43+00:00
I think their pivot came after distress, and was not the cause of it. It'd be great to have @rushingcreek write a post-mortem. I think it'd benefit a lot of people because I honestly don't have a monday morning playbook of what could have saved them.

Like you said, perhaps the demise of phind was inevitable, with large models displacing them kind of like how Spotify displaced music piracy.
by mothballed | 2026-01-28 11:42:19+00:00
14th and 15th amendments were binding on government. The civil rights act was binding on private businesses, even those engaging in intrastate trade.

The civil rights act of 1875, which also tried to bind on private businesses, was found unconstitutional in doing so, despite coming after the 15th amendment. But by the 60s and 70s we were already in a post-constitutional society as FDRs threatening to pack the courts, the 'necessities' implemented during WWII, and the progressive era more or less ended up with SCOTUS deferring to everything as interstate commerce (most notable, in Wickard v Filburn). The 14th and 15th amendment did not change between the time the same things were found unconstitutional, then magically constitutional ~80+ years later.

The truth is, the civil rights act was seen as so important (that time around) that they bent the constitution to let it work. And now much of the most relied on pieces of legislation relied on a tortured interpretation of the constitution, making things incredibly difficult to fix, and setting the stage for people like Trump.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-01-28 11:42:24+00:00
Barring physical limitations, what you can and can't do is ultimately determined by what the society you are by and large a part of deems to be acceptable behaviour.

Government rules and social norms can change over time, it ultimately doesn't matter what you feel is "right" or what some law says is "right", it's really about what you can get away with.

A large part of what you can get away with is determined about whether or not you will ultimately be penalized for your actions (possibly through violence), and laws can keep people aligned on what is or isn't going to be accepted and when people deemed to be acting in a socially unacceptable way are likely to be penalized in some form.

While "rights" may be somewhat philosophical, they can have very real physical "weight" behind them in the form of other people "enforcing" them.

And finally, in case you are mistakenly under the impression that I think it's okay for anyone to do anything they want so long as they can get away with it, I don't, but that discussion drifts into the territory of morality and ethics which, while related, are nevertheless different and very large topics of discussion in themselves.
by bluecalm | 2026-01-28 11:42:32+00:00
Dividends in effect force you to sell while buybacks redistribute to people who want to sell/realize it. They are also more efficient tax wise.

The only good reason to pay out dividends instead of announcing buybacks is a view that your shares are overpriced. Then you can't buy them back without facing a potential lawsuit (you are making a company buy something you know is overvalued).
by mfld | 2026-01-28 11:42:58+00:00
I'd like to hypothesize a little bit about the strategy of OpenAI. Obviously, it is nice for academic users that there is a new option for collaborative LaTeX editing plus LLM integration for free. At the same time, I don't think there is much added revenue expected here, for example, from Pro features or additional LLM usage plans. My theory is that the value lies in the training data received from highly skilled academics in the form of accepted and declined suggestions.
by bodge5000 | 2026-01-28 11:43:04+00:00
To me it seems like it'd only get more visible as it gets more normal, or at least more predictable.

Remember back in the early 2000's when people would photoshop one animals head onto another and trick people into thinking "science has created a new animal". That obviously doesn't work anymore because we know thats possible, even relatively trivial, with photoshop. I imagine the same will happen here, as AI writing gets more common we'll begin a subconscious process of determining if the writer is human. That's probably a bit unfairly taxing on our brains, but we survived photoshop I suppose
by Otterly99 | 2026-01-28 11:43:14+00:00
I completely agree.

In my lab, we have been struggling with automated image segmentation for years. 3 years ago, I started learning ML and the task is pretty standard, so there are a lot of solution.

In 3 months, I managed to get a working solution, which only took a lot of sweat annotating images first.

I think this is where tools like OpenCode really shine, because they unlock the potential for any user to generate a solution to their specific problem.
by alamortsubite | 2026-01-28 11:43:39+00:00
It sounds like he touched a nerve but I don't think the comment to which you replied was suggesting it's everyone's duty to follow American politics, and complaining that we're egomaniacs because we discuss such topics here is akin to me whining that Panorama[1] on BBC One devotes too much time to the royals. In America, we have a common piece of advice for avoiding that problem, popularized by one of our past presidents (very different from the guy somehow in office today). It goes, "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama_(British_TV_programme
by crispweed | 2026-01-28 11:44:22+00:00
I'm working on a game arcade thing as a hobby project, themed around lockstep networking.

There's a website for this here: https://locksteparcade.com/

It's still very much a work in progress, with just two games. One is a version of the classic game "Lemmings". The other is a very minimal asteroids style inertial ship duel.

The games both use deterministic execution in lockstep across network participants, and provide interactive gameplay and smooth execution even if situations with up to quarter or half second lag times, and the methods used for this are then perhaps one interesting aspect of the project.

In each game, the local player sees their own controlled entities at current positions, and other player entities at historical positions.

In the lemmings game, the complication is that lemmings depend on their own world changes (e.g. they need to stand on a bridge piece they just built). So there is a kind of fork and merge mechanism that enables local and remote world changes to be eventually consistent.

In the inertial duel game, homing missiles have a deploy phase in which they transition between different update time frames, with exactly the same sequence of updates applied on each machine, but with these updates accelerated or slowed down to achieve the time frame synchronisation.

The networking uses a dedicated server and is currently invite only, but if anyone is interested in trying this then please shout and I can send out server credentials..
by glkindlmann | 2026-01-28 11:44:37+00:00
I learned about this not from Mathologer, but Numberphile [1]. The second half of the video is the continued fraction derivation. I remember this being the first time I appreciated the sense in which the phi was the most irrational number, which otherwise seemed like just a click-bait-y idea. But you've found an earlier (9 years ago vs 7) Mathologer video on the same topic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj8Sg8qnjOg
by storystarling | 2026-01-28 11:45:20+00:00
Isolated state is the sensible choice for embedding; fighting a GIL from the host language is miserable. I guess those shared-memory primitives are the escape hatch for when message passing serialization gets too expensive? The documentation seems consistent, though I'd be curious if the per-VM garbage collectors need to stop-the-world to scan those shared regions.
by tmarice | 2026-01-28 11:45:47+00:00
After working with Django for 8 years, I find it hard to move on to anything else. It's just the right amount of magic, and just the right amount of flexibility, and it's just such a joy to work with.

Re: Django is OK for simple CRUD, but falls apart on anything complex - this is just untrue. I have worked in a company with a $500M valuation that is backed by a Django monolith. Reporting, recommender systems, file ingestion pipelines, automatic file tagging with LLM agents -- everything lives inside Django apps and interconnects beautifully. Just because it's a Django app doesn't mean you cannot use other libraries and do other stuff besides basic HTTP request processing.

Recently I had the misfortune of doing a contract on a classic SPA project with Flask and sqlalchemy on the backend and React on the frontend, and the amount of code necessary to add a couple of fields to a form is boggling.
by KronisLV | 2026-01-28 11:49:24+00:00
> I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing.

Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy.

But obviously that’s not Serious Business™ and won’t give you zero downtime and high availability.

Though tbh most mid-size companies would also be okay with Docker Swarm or Nomad and the same software clustered and running behind HAProxy.

But that wouldn’t pad your CV so yeah.
by halapro | 2026-01-28 11:50:07+00:00
This isn't 2012 anymore, most businesses live in the browser, they couldn't care less what OS they're running. The only reason Windows is still so popular is due to inertia. Ever Excel-centric businesses can use Excel in the browser.

While it's true that Microsoft can live without Microsoft, it's still a huge channel. They already lost a whole very lucrative platform (mobile)
by storystarling | 2026-01-28 11:50:14+00:00
Do you have specific t/s numbers for those dense models? I'm curious just how severe the memory bandwidth bottleneck gets in practice.

I'm not sure I agree on the cost aspect though. For high-volume production workloads the API bills scale linearly and can get painful fast. If you can amortize the hardware over a year and keep the data local for privacy, the math often works out in favor of self-hosting.
by kace91 | 2026-01-28 11:50:49+00:00
Linux seems to be gaining a lot of traction, both with the fall of windows and gaming being more than feasible.

It makes sense for the tech savvy option to succeed, now that personal computing is disappearing. Average folks won’t use a windows/macbook, they’ll use phones and tablets.

My only concern is ending in a macOS+asahi situation where supporting a single device requires mountains of effort.
by dada78641 | 2026-01-28 11:51:03+00:00
> Two crypto thieves decided to settle an argument over who was wealthier by screensharing as they transferred crypto between wallets to prove ownership. In doing so, one of them — known online as "Lick" — revealed a wallet address that crypto sleuth zachxbt quickly tied to the theft of around $90 million from US government wallets containing seized crypto assets

Rapp snitches.
by armcat | 2026-01-28 11:51:23+00:00
This is so awesome, well done LemonSlice team! Super interesting on the ASR->LLM->TTS pipeline, and I agree, you can make it super fast (I did something myself as a 2-hour hobby project: https://github.com/acatovic/ova). I've been following full-duplex models as well and so far couldn't get even PersonaPlex to run properly (without choppiness/latency), but have you peeps tried Sesame, e.g. https://app.sesame.com/?

I played around with your avatars and one thing that it lacks is that it's "not patient", it's rushing the user, so maybe something to try and finetune there? Great work overall!
by edschofield | 2026-01-28 11:51:40+00:00
The design of Pandas is inferior in every way to Polars: API, memory use, speed, expressiveness. Pandas has been strictly worse since late 2023 and will never close the gap. Polars is multithreaded by default, written in a low-level language, has a powerful query engine, supports lazy, out-of memory execution, and isn’t constrained by any compatibility concerns with a warty, eager-only API and pre-Arrow data types that aren’t nullable.

It’s probably not worth incurring the pain of a compatibility-breaking Pandas upgrade. Switch to Polars instead for new projects and you won’t look back.
by vintermann | 2026-01-28 11:52:16+00:00
It was always people who ruled, it's just more apparent when the people who rule are bullies itching for a fight, who care even less about the appearance of consistency.

For moral accountability, it should always in the end be "I say", not "the law says". No one should "just be obeying orders", they should make choices they can stand behind on their own judgment, regardless of whether some group of possibly long dead legislators stood behind it or not.
by jll29 | 2026-01-28 11:52:30+00:00
You can use actually git (it's also integrated in Overleaf).

You can even export ZIP files if you like (for any cloud service, it's not a bad idea to clone your repo once in a while to avoid begin stuck in case of unlikely downtime).

I have both a hosted instance (thanks to Overleaf/ShareLaTeX Ltd.) and I'm also paying user for the pro group license (>500€/year) for my research team. It's great - esp. for smaller research teams - to have the maintenance outsourced to a commercial provider.

On a good day, I'd spend 40% in Overleaf, 10% in Sublime/Emacs, 20% in Email and 10% in Google Scholar/Semantics Scholar and 10% in EasyChair/OpenReview, the rest in meetings.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 11:52:42+00:00
If this allows one to still have (linux terminals?), then its (fine?) but Klaster_1 suggests that installing software would become hard without OS vendor blessing.

I mean, is this OS literally just android with a more desktop like UI?

Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Samsung+DeX&t=ffab&ia=images&iax=i...

What I would prefer is a linux device phone being more widespread than Android PC. Linux in PC is mostly pretty good.

We probably need some good linux phones. One of the biggest issues I find is that they are really price-y so even though I don't want much specs, I find it troubling to justify a 2x price increase in such sense.

> Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
by lvl155 | 2026-01-28 11:53:38+00:00
Went from pandas to polars to duckdb. As mentioned elsewhere SQL is the most readable for me and LLM does most of the coding on my end (quant). So I need it at the most readable and rudimentary/step-wise level.

OT, but I can’t imagine data science being a job category for too long. It’s got to be one of the first to go in AI age especially since the market is so saturated with mediocre talents.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-28 11:54:13+00:00
> Is this something you want applied _against_ you?

It’s literally happening. And sure. If I try to murder the Vice President or murder Americans as part of a political stunt, hold me to account. Those were the rules I thought we were all playing by.

> If you want something to change you stand no chance with this attitude

Strongly disagree. There are new political tools on the table. Unilaterally disarming is strategically stupid.

> if you want to avoid FBI attention then take your heart off your sleeve and smarten up

I’m going to bet I’ve gotten more language written into state and federal law than you have. That isn’t a flex. It’s just me saying that I know how to wield power, it and doesn’t come from trying to avoid crooked federal agents. If they’re crooked, they’ll come for you when you speak up. In my experience, they’re more bark than bite.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-28 11:54:50+00:00
I would agree that OAIs GPT-5 family of models is a phase change over GPT-4.

In the ChatGPT product this is not immediately obvious and many people would strongly argue their preference for 4. However, once you introduce several complex tools and make tool calling mandatory, the difference becomes stark.

I've got an agent loop that will fail nearly every time on GPT-4. It works sometimes, but definitely not enough to go to production. GPT-5 with reasoning set to minimal works 100% of the time. $200 worth of tokens and it still hasn't failed to select the proper sequence of tools. It sometimes gets the arguments to the tools incorrect, but it's always holding the right ones now.

I was very skeptical based upon prior experience but flipping between the models makes it clear there has been recent stepwise progress.

I'll probably be $500 deep in tokens before the end of the month. I could barely go $20 before I called bullshit on this stuff last time.
by jll29 | 2026-01-28 11:55:17+00:00
You are right in pointing out that the Web browser isn't the most suitable UI paradigm for highly interactive applications like a scientific typesetting system/text editor.

I have occasionally lost a paragraph just by accidental marking a few lines and pressing [Backspace].

But at the moment, there is no better option than Overleaf, and while I encourage you to write what you propose if you can, Overleaf will be the bar that any such system needs to be compared against.
by sn0wr8ven | 2026-01-28 11:55:22+00:00
It is nice for academics, but I would ask why? These aren't tasks you can't do yourself. Yes it's all in one place, but it's not like doing the exact same thing previously was ridiculous to setup.

A comparison comes to mind is the n8n workflow type product they put out before. N8n takes setup. Proofreading, asking for more relevant papers, converting pictures to latex code, etc doesn't take any setup. People do this with or without this tool almost identically.
by egorfine | 2026-01-28 11:56:01+00:00
> these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve

For whom? For OpenAI these tools are definitely the solutions. They are developing by throwing various AI-powered stuff at the wall to see what sticks. These tools also demonstrate to the investors that innovation did not stall and to show that AI usage is growing.

Same with Microsoft: none of the AI stuff they are shoving down the users' throats were actually designed for the users. All this stuff is only for the token usage to grow for the shareholders to see.

Similar with Google although no one can deny real innovation happening there.
by sfn42 | 2026-01-28 11:56:24+00:00
> The bouncing on tarmac is safe.

It's not long ago that I saw a video of a plane landing in Canada, the right landing gear collapsed and the whole plane rolled around crushing the wings and creating a huge ball of fire. Miraculously everyone survived but passengers described being showered in jet fuel while a huge fireball was going off outside so they clearly weren't far off getting roasted.

It obviously isn't safe. It's a situation where if anything goes wrong, there is a very high chance that everyone involved goes up in flames. Now we all know it usually goes well but saying it's safe is a stretch in my book.

Shit happens all the time in aviation. Planes are told to land on a runway where another plane is taking off. Plane manufacturers install buggy new systems without informing pilots causing hundreds of fatalities. Planes collide in mid air. Birds fly into the engine.

And yes, pilots make mistakes. They are absolutely not acting immaculately all the time. They're human, we all make mistakes. Some, more than others. And some times things go wrong no matter how perfectly the pilot flies.

I never said I feel safe in a car at all times. I just said I feel more in control. But I often feel unsafe in cars too, particularly when I'm a passenger. A lot of drivers drive unsafely by my judgement - they drive too fast for the conditions, too close to other cars, they're looking at passengers, phones, the view, or messing with car settings instead of looking at the road. They get angry for no reason and drive more aggressively. They expect everyone else to drive perfectly and if anyone doesn't do what they expect they have close calls and blame the other driver rather than realizing they should simply have given them more space.

Basically, most people drive in such a way that if anything goes too wrong or goes wrong at the wrong time, they will be helpless to do anything about it. I try to drive in such a way that when things go really wrong I can still compensate for other people's mistakes. Of course it's impossible to be 100% safe but I am quite confident that I'm very significantly safer than most drivers.
by suddenlybananas | 2026-01-28 11:56:35+00:00
If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties.

>Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention

Evolution doesn't "teach" anything. It's just an emergent property of the fact that life reproduces (and sometimes doesn't). If you're going to have this radically reductionist view of humanity, you can't also treat evolution as having any kind of agency.
by mrktf | 2026-01-28 11:56:36+00:00
Little misconception here (beware i'm using xlibre and causal user). On X11 you can find two mechanisms which can be called compositor :

1st: "enable display compositing" option - this one increases latency as every window draw need go though compositor application (in nutshell it exchanging opengl textures - only synchronization messages goes over "wire")

2nd: the Xserver rendering pipeline compositor, this one goes with modesetting (intel, amdgpu) driver TearFree option - almost everything inside X11 server in OpenGL textures and compositor perform direct blending to screen (including direct scanout).

What I want to tell, on modern X (there are merge requests for Xorg server to modesetting driver, amdgpu have this code) with TearFree enabled you by default optimal hardware acceleration - there comes lower latency