MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ktzar | 2026-01-31 23:07:36+00:00
Didn't know about Grokipedia, I've just opened an article in it about Spain, scrolled to a random paragraph, and the information in it is plain wrong:

From https://grokipedia.com/page/Spain#terrain-and-landforms
> Spain's peninsular terrain is dominated by the Meseta Central, a vast interior plateau covering about two-thirds of the country's land area, with elevations ranging from 610 to 760 meters and averaging around 660 meters

Segovia is at 1.000 meters, and so is most of the top half of the "Meseta".
https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-763q/Spain/?center=41....

I still stand on not trusting any of what AI spits out, be it code or text. And it takes me usually longer to check that everything is ok than doing it myself, but my brain is enticed by the "effort shortcut" that AI promised.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 23:08:17+00:00
> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not.

This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here?

Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. I just assume people write stuff they know from their field, then mostly look to add the minimum number of plausible citations after the fact, and then most people never check them, and everyone seems to just accept it's better than nothing. But I also suppose it depends on how niche the page is, and which field it's in.
by shepherdjerred | 2026-01-31 23:08:17+00:00
Wow that's really interesting. Something I do very often, for libraries, languages, APIs, even shopping is:

"look into the possibilities for X search the web, do thorough comparison. look on HackerNews both to gather sources and gauge sentiment in the comments"

this yields pretty good results IMO.

If I am using an API/library, I will also ask "is this approach idiomatic? what does the documentation say? look through at least 10 pages online"
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-31 23:08:23+00:00
I don’t know if Lemon actually committed all those different acts that would be needed to treat him as a criminal and not just someone documenting the incident as a journalist. But what I will say is that the Trump DOJ is absolutely selective in where they spend taxpayer resources (the DOJ’s people and time), who they defend, and who they attack.

It’s odd to raid the Washington Post journalist, arrest several people who are documenting ICE activities in Minneapolis, and then arrest Lemon as well, while doing nothing about the trend of right-wing provocateurs harassing minorities and daycare centers. And doing nothing about ICE agents executing people in the streets. Or ICE agents detaining US citizens and letting them go later without any explanation or justice. Or warrantless home invasions.

The way in which the new GOP under Trump had turned the government into a one-sided weapon is unprecedented. It’s weird to think just a year ago, they were all complaining about the trend of rising lawfare, only to become the absolute worst version of it themselves.
by Trattue | 2026-01-31 23:08:44+00:00
Additionally, there‘s a difference between Apple Photos the app and Apple Photos the system component (in lack of a better name, maybe someone knows the correct one). Even if you uninstall Apple Photos the app, iOS still retains its basic functionality, for example when viewing photos in the Camera app. The folders where photos are stored don’t change. You just use a different app to view and sync them.
by sib | 2026-01-31 23:08:53+00:00
>> Nothing can stop the tower equipment manufacturer like Ericsson from knowing the location of your phone

> False. You can:
> 1) Leave the phone at home

If you're going to be pedantic, at least be pedantically correct. The tower (and carrier) would still know the location of your phone in that case. (It just wouldn't be with you.)
by arikrahman | 2026-01-31 23:08:56+00:00
Interesting, I have taken a stab at maintaining a repo on the nixpkgs and using a --sparse approach, i.e. `git clone --filter=blob:none --sparse --branch nixos-25.11 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git nixpkgs-dorion
cd nixpkgs-dorion`
by mc32 | 2026-01-31 23:09:07+00:00
It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

Is a journalist someone who prints out a press badge? Can YouTubers with mics go out there and shadow people who’re going to commit crime?

If you witness a crime in progress and record it presumably that’s okay. If you know a crime is going to be committed in advance and you record it but don’t get involved in the crime, are you an accessory of some sort?

Like if you know your friends are going to snatch purses at ATMs but you’re not part of it and only film it to uploads to YouTube, are you in trouble?

Because he was previously a newscaster of a reputable organization, he’ll likely get more leeway and likely will face light if any penalties.
by beshrkayali | 2026-01-31 23:09:38+00:00
Writing Swift is really fun! Last year I built a game and a macOS app (now working on another app) to get some proper hands on experience and I was very impressed. Wrote about it here[1].

I'd love for the experience outside of Xcode to get better (even on a mac, developing for macOS/iOS) but I have to say that I didn't find Xcode to be _that_ aweful. I've certainly used worse IDEs, which is partly why I dislike IDEs altogether.

1: https://log.beshr.com/notes-on-swift-from-building-an-ios-ga...
by tastyface | 2026-01-31 23:09:50+00:00
"Speaking over a video link, the tech billionaire criticised 'uncontrolled migration', later adding: 'Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.'" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m4rz0pvmno.amp

"Elon Musk says 'civil war is inevitable' as UK rocked by far-right riots." https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/06/tech/elon-musk-civil-war-uk-r...

"Elon Musk calls for dissolution of parliament at far-right rally in London" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/13/elon-musk...

"Musk reposted meme saying people who benefit from federal programs are the 'Parasite Class'" https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-musk-reposted-meme-120...

Calls to violence and illegal action, dehumanization, demands for exclusion, rejection of individual rights and constitutional order -- oh yes. All of the above. These are his Twitter-brain-rotted bread and butter.

Also, did I say we should arrest Elon Musk for hate speech? I said that inflammatory white supremacist rhetoric viscerally disgusts me, as does using a social platform owned by a white supremacist, and I want none of my attention or money going to any of his warped enterprises. This is not exactly rocket science and does not require a philosophical dissection.

(I assume you generated your response with an LLM so not sure why I even bother.)
by gary17the | 2026-01-31 23:10:05+00:00
If you want more convenience from Rust and do not want to mess with Rust borrow checker, you do not really have to switch to Swift: you can rely on Rust reference counting. Use 1.) Rust reference-counted smart pointers[1] for shareable immutable references, and 2.) Rust internal mutability[2] for non-shareable mutable references checked at runtime instead of compile time. Effectively, you will be writing kind of verbose Golang, but keep Rust expressiveness.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h...
by learingsci | 2026-01-31 23:10:51+00:00
I hear TikTok is on the decline, and arguably the forced change of ownership is a sort of regulation. Instagram is owned by meta who has an interest in not letting it overtake Facebook in terms of popularity I imagine. It seems like a sort of hedge against other platforms mostly, but I really don’t know much about any of these platforms tbh. I use YouTube very heavily, but have only used twitter, Reddit and tinder in the distant past. I’ve never been on Facebook, TikTok, snap, etc… To me, irc and usenet were greatly superior and I’m waiting for people to return to their senses.
by kccqzy | 2026-01-31 23:11:08+00:00
My understanding is that Node still doesn’t give you low-level C APIs into the language itself. It gives you JavaScript APIs that call into I/O libraries (libuv basically).

Python it’s not hard to write a module in pure C that manipulates other Python objects. This means the representation of Python objects has to be stable enough for the C code. V8 does not allow that.
by bijant | 2026-01-31 23:11:35+00:00
The Register stooping this low is the only surprise here. I'm quite critical of Teslas approach to level 3+ autonomy but even I wouldn't dare suggest that there vision based approach amounted to bolting GPT-4o or some other VLLM to their cars to orient them in space and make navigation decisions. Fake News like this makes interacting with people who have no domain knowledge and consider The Register, UCLA and Johns Hopkins to be reputable institutions and credible sources more stressful to me as I'll be put into a position to tell people that they have been misled or go along with their delusions...
by mogoh | 2026-01-31 23:12:08+00:00
> There is a perception that Swift is only a good language for Apple platforms. While this was once true, this is no longer the case and Swift is becoming increasingly a good cross-platform language.

How good is the developer experience on a non-Apple platform really? Linux is my primary platform and my perception is, that allmost all of the swift eco system is for Apple. Libraries, tools, documentation, IDEs, tutorials, etc. all assume, that you use an Apple.

Can someone tell me who does not use an Apple-device and uses swift?
by awithrow | 2026-01-31 23:12:38+00:00
I'll bite. I use NixOS as a daily driver and IMO makes the underlying FS type even less important. If my main drive goes I can bootstrap a new one by cloning my repo and running some commands. For my data, I just have some rsyc scripts that sling the bits to various locations.

I suppose if I really wanted to I could put the data on different partitions and disks and use the native fs tools but it's a level of detail that doesn't seem to matter that much relative to what I currently have. I could see thinking about FS details much more for a dedicated storage server

Fs level backups for an OS sounds more relevant when the OS setup is not reproducable and would be a pain to recreate.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-31 23:12:57+00:00
Some of humanity’s most significant inventions are
language (symbolic communication), writing, the scientific method, electricity, the computer.

Notice something subtle.

Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency.

This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.
by qwerpy | 2026-01-31 23:13:18+00:00
Agree, I consider Reddit worse than Tiktok because of the downvote. Even a mild lean in one direction immediately results in extreme viewpoints bubbling up to the top and all other opinions silenced. Few people I know spend much time there, but the one that does sticks out like a sore thumb, always finding every opportunity to get upset about whatever the outrage of the day is.

It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut people down when there are real issues with threads randomly devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy sessions.
by st3fan | 2026-01-31 23:13:23+00:00
"and dropped it like a stone with little warning or ceremony"

What?! This is complete nonsense. Swift was introduced 11 (!) years ago and it was clear from day one that it was going to be the future. Every single year since the introduction there was no subtle message in documentation and WWDC that Swift is in and Objective-C will _eventually_ be out.

Little warning? Maybe if you kept your eyes closed the past 11 years.

And do not forget that today you can still write apps in Objective-C.
by noduerme | 2026-01-31 23:13:42+00:00
I think you hit the nail on the head. Without years of learning by doing, experience in the saddle as you put it, who would be equipped to judge or edit the output of AI? And as knowledge workers with hands-on experience age out of the workforce, who will replace us?

The critical difference between AI and a tool like a calculator, to me, is that a calculator's output is accurate, deterministic and provably true. We don't usually need to worry that a calculator might be giving us the wrong result, or an inferior result. It simply gives us an objective fact. Whereas the output of LLMs can be subjectively considered good or bad - even when it is accurate.

So imagine teaching an architecture student to draw plans for a house, with a calculator that spit out incorrect values 20% of the time, or silently developed an opinion about the height of countertops. You'd not just have a structurally unsound plan, you'd also have a student who'd failed to learn anything useful.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-31 23:15:11+00:00
> Latency variability is huge ...

Yup. For example from my city to one of my dedicated server whose location is fully well-know (in France), I know there's 250 kilometers as the crow flies. Yet if I ping that server and draw a circle around my place (considering ping travels as fast as light in a vaccuum, which we know ain't happening but, hey, it's something) I get a radius of 2000 kilometers. About 8x the distance. I can prove that my IP ain't in the US but that's still not very precise.

And indeed many servers in the UK, which is 2x the distance than my server is, gives me constantly a lower ping.

TFA's approach, especially with the traceroute instead of Ping, is nice.
by splix | 2026-01-31 23:15:51+00:00
I had a bad Cloudflare experience. So, my card on file got no balance one day (my bad, I forgot to update to a new card), and they just turned off the services.

They somehow managed to charge partial amount (like 80% of the bill), but decided to turn off everything anyway, even the services that could be covered by those 80%. They turned off what they offer for free, and we were unable to change the setting, like instead of their CDN point traffic to an S3 bucket, etc.

When they do that they basically freeze your account. I mean you cannot provide a new card to pay the outstanding bill, or do anything at all actually. You're not welcomed here anymore. Locked out. That's is a terrible way to react to a payment failure after being a paying customer for a few years.

It was hard to reach the support, and it took multiple days until I found someone on Reddit who looked at our ticket and it eventually helped.

PS I had much worse experience with GCP after being a loyal customer of them for like 15 years, so Clouflare is good.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-01-31 23:15:56+00:00
> If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive

It makes them prey to and dependent on those who are building and selling them the thinking.

> I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.

That's like saying ultra processed foods provide the best results when eaten sparingly, so it will become useful when people adopt overall responsible diets. Okay, sure, but what does that matter in practice since it isn't happening?
by randycupertino | 2026-01-31 23:16:00+00:00
> In a new class of attack on AI systems, troublemakers can carry out these environmental indirect prompt injection attacks to hijack decision-making processes.

I have a coworker who brags about intentionally cutting off Waymos and robocars when he sees them on the road. He is "anti-clanker" and views it as civil disobedience to rise up against "machines taking over." Some mornings he comes in all hyped up talking about how he cut one off at a stop sign. It's weird.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-31 23:17:42+00:00
Of course he does. He’s also posting about the Epstein files today saying that people need to be convicted. He of course means only his political enemies. For some reason, the entire right wing influencer ecosystem is focusing on Bill Gates and Bill Clinton today and not saying a word about Musk or Trump.

Back in September, Musk said “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED”. Now the Epstein files show clearly that he literally asked Epstein “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”. He planned to participate in this party with his wife.

Another person from the PayPal mafia group that isn’t getting mentioned much is Peter Thiel. Turns out he is also all over the Epstein files, meeting with foreign politicians in secret at Epstein’s home, including his Russian handler. Here’s a compilation of what’s going on with Peter Thiel:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstNazis/comments/1qsbifr/...
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-31 23:17:50+00:00
I don't think this plot is very convincing. I will grant there's a feasible path that would imply causation, and Ferrari imports have increased just as BTC, SP500, and NASDAQ have. But aside from the macro-trend, the oscillations in the Ferrari import lines really don't seem to correlate with those investments. In fact, if you ran a linear regression on the numbers I bet you would find a _weak_ dependence. I can give you other things that correlate with BTC's move just about as much as Ferrari's do, just by manually looking for examples. For example, google search trends for 'electric vehicle'[1] and 'seed oil'[2] are both pretty close.

[1] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=electric%2520vehicle&dat...

[2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=seed%2520oil&date=2020-0...
by zugi | 2026-01-31 23:20:14+00:00
This will be an interesting case. Lemon has been adamant that far from "conspiring", he hadn't even known the target of the operation until he showed up that morning "to cover it." So I was sure the government had no case whatsoever.

These quotes make it clear that, despite Lemon's statement being true, he then carefully hid the news until the protestors wanted it revealed. That alone probably wouldn't stick either, as requiring journalists to immediately reveal such information from sources would stifle free press.

Claims that he blocked parishioners from leaving will be hard to prove too in a crowded chaotic scene.

Misdemeanor trespassing for not leaving the building when so directed might stick, but that's a local charge, not federal.

Ultimately now independent journalist Lemon wins regardless of the verdict, due to the added publicity of the charges.
by coherentpony | 2026-01-31 23:20:43+00:00
I’m trying to make sense of this question.

GEMMs are dense O(N^3) work operations that have roughly the same access pattern and data reuse properties across all matrices. Of course, I’m simplifying things a lot here; tall-skinny and short-fat patterns are much harder to get performance out of but the spirit of the approach is the same as big square matrices.

Sparse LU solves have a different character. There is nowhere near O(N^3) work. You typically expect something closer to O(N^2) but getting performance out of these operations is notoriously difficult because it depends a lot on the sparsity pattern of the linear system. Making matters worse is that you may commonly have a sparse A that factorises to dense L and/or U matrices.
by ritvikarya98 | 2026-01-31 23:20:52+00:00
Thanks! but these are builder images, not the final runtime. Chisel only really makes sense after the binary is built and you know what it needs at runtime. Before that you are pulling in whole packages, which is why things like ncurses might show up, similar to chainguard's image. For a builder, it is just SBOM noise and not something the app ever executes. Its hard to identify what you need before running the application, and you can always find a library you don't need.
The “only your app should be executable” idea works for fully static binaries, but once you use glibc or CGO you already have other executables.
Hinton is a fear monger, worse than Dario Amodei
by cadabrabra | 2026-01-31 23:21:39+00:00
It makes me sad to think about the millions who have been tricked by him, thinking that their careers are about to come to an end. He’s a truly evil person, and it’s not surprising when you look at his background. He’s a materialist (doesn’t believe in God), and he hates the human species. On top of that, he’s very old and has probably grown bitter with age. So it’s really no wonder that he can’t wait for his AI to take over and destroy everything. If it doesn’t, then his Nobel Prize would have been for nothing.
by rcarmo | 2026-01-31 23:21:59+00:00
Riiiiight. No. I'm a Mac user for decades, former Obj-C hacker, have tried and tried again and again to use Swift (and I have quite a few CLI apps written in it), but the thing has been a clusterfuck of paper cuts and very minor but significant changes over the years, and I gave up waiting for it to settle.

And it's not a more convenient Rust. I'd rather use Zig or Go (neither of which are worthy in the eyes of true Crustaceans, but which just get the job done).
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-31 23:22:25+00:00
>You've made outrageous claims, backed up with no data

In general, over the long term most amateurs do better investing in real-estate rather than the stock market. This is a well proven fact true for over a century, and making it some sort of personal argument is bizarre behavior.

You can spend 30 seconds looking it up, or continue to shovel your BS. =3
by Aurornis | 2026-01-31 23:22:38+00:00
> 1. Make it illegal and punish people.

Which you will prove how? With no record of which ID was used and with the person who used it being under 18 by necessity, this means there would be no evidence to even punish anyone old enough to be punished.

> 2. Have a certain limit (like 5) on virtual ids one person can register. Allow to withdraw consent and close virtual ids.

If the ID is only checked in a zero-knowledge way to register accounts, you don’t even need multiple IDs. You just need access to one, which can be used a million times.

All of the schemes to check if it’s being used multiple times start exposing more info or requiring a central party to manage. We start sliding down the slope of having the government manage ID checking centrally, which conveniently gives them a way to check which people are accessing which services.
by ViktorRay | 2026-01-31 23:22:59+00:00
Wait isn’t this the other way around?

In reality lifestyle modifications are more conservative than using a medication so lifestyle modification would be first line from an ethical perspective.

In reality though it does seem like statins are used first line by many clinicians. But ethically speaking conservative interventions like lifestyle modification in terms of changing diet and exercise should be used prior to medicating a young otherwise healthy person.

In other groups such as when someone has had a recent heart attack of course the thought process is different. Such people should be immediately placed on a statin.