MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vunderba | 2026-01-27 21:44:16+00:00
Good article. So this is sort of a tangent, but here's a bit of advice as someone who makes heavy use of GenAI imagery in the service of articles that I write.

Never use out-of-the-box images of CRT computers - 99% of the time the keyboards are an ergonomic train wreck and the text on the screen is a smeary blurry mess.

See the image here for a good example:

https://mordenstar.com/blog/win9x-hacks

This is a combination of a GenAI image from NB Pro layered with a loop of the Win95 start sequence into a single animated gif. Notice I sidestepped the inclusion of a keyboard altogether.

Now, more topically: since the actual list of IF games doesn't appear to be a secret, I think it would have been better to feature it more prominently in the article, rather than tucking it away in a side note in the footer.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-27 21:44:19+00:00
For the median wealth somewhat house price driven although there’s also the reality that median and mean wealth in Australia is remarkably close together. You can’t have median wealth driven by home equity if no one has a house yet in australia the median and say top 25% have remarkably similar houses.

So yes they are high but it’s not like the disparity in the USA where the median is well below Australia (lot’s of people in the USA lost wealth in 2008 and never recovered) while the mean is well above (driven by the few that are extremely wealthy living a lifestyle unattainable to the commoners).
by stackskipton | 2026-01-27 21:44:33+00:00
Tax policy is also used a method of encourage certain types of behavior and discourage others. EV Tax Credits and Solar Tax Credits are example of encouraging starting up industries which we need to assist with climate change in economic powered method.

At a broad level, offering benefits for marriage solves political problem, married people tend to vote so need to be catered to. It also solves societal one, marriage tends to be better at extremely broad strokes for society. Married Couples live longer, commit less crime, kids in married households generally have better outcomes and so forth. So politicians in United States decided to incentive it.
by Spivak | 2026-01-27 21:44:37+00:00
https://0pointer.net/blog/authenticated-boot-and-disk-encryp...

You. The money quote about the current state of Linux security:

> In fact, right now, your data is probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or MacOS devices, than it is on typical Linux distributions.

Say what you want about systemd the project but they're the only ones moving foundational Linux security forward, no one else even has the ambition to try. The hardening tools they've brought to Linux are so far ahead of everything else it's not even funny.
by jjice | 2026-01-27 21:44:59+00:00
Comments like this appear on every single post like this. Hacker New's algorithm lowers posts that have too much engagement too fast as a way to prevent flame wars. Is it perfect? No. But I highly doubt this is HN demoting this on purpose.

From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

This could very well be marked as an overheated discussion.

This comes up on HN constantly. The reason I feel confident that this is actually the case and not selective moderating is that these same exact comments pop up across posts from the entire political spectrum.
by mancerayder | 2026-01-27 21:45:17+00:00
I predicted someone would say something about that topic, though I didn't think someone would use the term gentrified anymore. That's why I qualified it as "And the prices are high in the expensive neighborhoods (and that's driven by proximity to offices in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn)".

That said Flushing is not only a long commute, I don't know if it would qualify as "pre-gentrified", would it?
by simianwords | 2026-01-27 21:45:28+00:00
Here's an actual idea.

With this, I can realistically use my apple watch as a _standalone_ device to do pretty much everything I need.

This means I can switch off my iphone, keep use my apple watch as a kind of remote to my laptop. I can chat with my friends (not possible right now with whatsapp!), do some shopping, write some code, even read books!

This is just not possible now using an apple watch.
by bhadass | 2026-01-27 21:45:32+00:00
oh interesting, so it just... didn't use them? lol. i guess the model's training data already has enough web knowledge baked in that it could wing it. curious if explicitly prompting it to reference the specs would change the output quality or time to solution.

very excited to see the agentic sessions when you release them.. that kind of transparency is super valuable for the community. i can see "build a browser from scratch" becoming a popular challenge as people explore the limits of agentic coding and try to figure out best practices for workflows/prompting. like the new "build a ray tracer" or say nanogtp but for agents.
by thunderfork | 2026-01-27 21:45:52+00:00
As a rational consumer, how would you distinguish between some intentional "keep pulling the slot machine" failure rate and the intrinsic failure rate?

I feel like saying "the market will fix the incentives" handwaves away the lack of information on internals. After all, look at the market response to Google making their search less reliable - sure, an invested nerd might try Kagi, but Google's still the market leader by a long shot.

In a market for lemons, good luck finding a lime.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-27 21:45:54+00:00
I can't say my fingers (codex's fingers) haven't been itching to add some small features which would basically make it a viable browser for myself at least, for 90% of my browsing.

But I think this is one of those experiments that I need to put a halt to sooner rather than later, because the scope can always grow, my mind really likes those sorts of projects, and I don't have the time for that right now :)
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-27 21:47:35+00:00
The US has executed people in international waters over the claim of fentanyl being trafficked into the country. Is Insta and TikTok as addictive as fentanyl? If so, does it warrant a similar response? I think a cheeseburger is not an equivalent analogy. Singapore also executes drug traffickers, for what it’s worth.

https://www.techpolicy.press/is-tiktok-digital-fentanyl/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/tiktok-is-chinas-digital-fenta...
by tromp | 2026-01-27 21:47:38+00:00
> The GeForce RTX 5090, which could typically be found for around $2,500 in November 2025, now sells for $3,300 or even far more, a hike of at least 65%.

Nope; that's a 32% increase. Looks like they edited the old price from $2000 to $2500 without adjusting the percentage.
by knallfrosch | 2026-01-27 21:47:38+00:00
> I don't understand why everyone is not taxed as an individual, regardless of marital status.

Because married couples form a household and it allows them to share child care and work as they see fit.

If you tax individuals, you're encouraging both to earn the same amount of money.

If you tax couples, it encourages the higher earner to keep working, thus you have a higher overall productivity.

Thus you have freedom and higher overall productivity in favor of shared tax burden.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-27 21:47:40+00:00
> There are often also invariants that can be used to identify bugs without ground truth, e.g rendering the page with slightly different widths you can make some assertions about how far elements will move.

That's really interesting and sounds useful! I'm wondering if there are general guidelines/requirements (not specific to browsers) that could kind of "trigger" those things in the agent, without explicitly telling it. I think generally that's how I try to approach prompting.
by the_fall | 2026-01-27 21:47:48+00:00
I think you might be underestimating the level of control that an average parent, especially a working parent, has over a teenage kid. Short of taking away devices, it's tough, especially if they're going through a phase of doing precisely the opposite of what you recommend / demand.

I'm not saying that parents don't have any responsibility, but it's about practicalities. If a teenager can easily buy smokes or alcohol, many will, no matter what the parents say. If you make the goods harder to buy, usage drops. So, shops / software vendors do have some responsibility for societal outcomes.

In a libertarian utopia, anything goes, but kids are... weird in that they often try to push the boundaries of their autonomy without always knowing the risk, and it's in our collective best interest not to let them go too far.
by thunfischtoast | 2026-01-27 21:48:02+00:00
A lot of tech-savvy people (like me) love solving meta-problems.
Doing the thing that would take 10 minutes? Na man, let me build an unnecessary complicated technical solution that in theory enables hundreds of people to do the thing much more efficiently in just 2 minutes. That takes a month and the thing has not been done, ha.
by thinkingtoilet | 2026-01-27 21:48:28+00:00
I think we would all agree that parents bear a lot of responsibility here. Also, if I think if we look at how we treat kids in other parts of society it's very clear it's a good thing when highly addictive things are kept away from them. It's a good thing cigarette companies can't advertise to children. It's a good thing serving children alcohol or allowing them to buy weed is illegal. And now that we have this new poison, the law hasn't quite caught up yet, but this is a poison, and it's being fed to children with a ferocity and sophistication that only modern technology can provide. A kid can't make a hamburger in their bedroom. They can sneak a phone in and use it. I think it's both. I shout from the roof tops to every parent who will listen to not buy their kid a smart phone. I also think we should hold companies accountable when the knowingly get children addicted to poison.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-27 21:48:30+00:00
> This is part of the spec, and there are no shipped firmwares that prevents you from going through this process.

Microsoft required that users be able to enroll their own keys on x86. On ARM, they used to mandate that users could not enroll their own keys. That they later changed this does not erase the past. Also, I've anecdotally heard claims of buggy implementations that do in fact prevent users from changing secure boot settings.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-01-27 21:49:09+00:00
I’m not dissuading or suppressing your point of view, mate. You’re clearly in some distress over this, but feel obligated (honor-bound?) to continue prosecuting your case. It’s a vicious cycle: the harder you hammer on this, the less persuasive you become, and accordingly the less satisfied you’ll be with the state of affairs. That’s all I’m saying.
by quietsegfault | 2026-01-27 21:49:21+00:00
If this was intentional workforce reduction, then the agencies affected should show improved efficiency or output with fewer people. We should see faster regulatory reviews, better grant decisions, stronger technical evaluations, just with leaner teams.

Instead, what we’re likely to see is degraded capacity, slower timelines, and reduced technical oversight. If that happens, will you acknowledge this was a mistake? Or will any negative outcome just get blamed on the remaining employees?
by epistasis | 2026-01-27 21:49:41+00:00
> the "resistance" rings in MN are behaving like the insurgents the US has fought for decades in the Middle East

This is a horrifying and very unpariortic thing to say about people who are trying to prevent their daycares from being tear bombed, prevent masked thugs from beating detained law-abiding citizens before releasing them without charges, from masked thugs killing law-abiding people for exercising basic rights.

King George would have used that language. We sent him the Declaration of Independence, and the list of wrongs in that document is mostly relevant again today.

If you are framing this as insurgency, I place my bet on the strong people fighting bullets with mere whistles and cameras, as they are already coming out on top. If they ever resort to a fraction of the violence that the masked thugs are already using, they will not lose.
by eptcyka | 2026-01-27 21:49:53+00:00
I have a projector that can project 4k at 60hz or 1080p at 240, and I can really notice it by just moving the cursor around. I don’t need to render my games anywhere near 240 to notice that too. Same with phones - moving from pixel 3 to pixel 5, scrolling through settings or the home screen was a palpable difference. Pixel 3 now feels broken. It is not.m, it just renders at 60 instead of 90 fps.
by antonvs | 2026-01-27 21:49:54+00:00
This reminds me of a US District Court judge's ruling about Tucker Carlson on Fox News: "Any reasonable viewer 'arrives with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements".

Sure, if you're talking about rubes who just got off the bus in the big city, then perhaps there's a point buried somewhere deep in the pile you're pushing. But is that who you think the HN audience is? Admittedly, talking to you, I can't rule it out.
by 9rx | 2026-01-27 21:49:56+00:00
Definitely not. The Art of Software Testing wrote about "module testing" in 1979, which was revised as "unit testing" in a later revision after "unit test" was part of the popular lexicon. Perhaps that is what you are thinking of?

Beck is clear that he "rediscovered" the idea. People most certainly understood the importance of tests being isolated from each other in the 1960s. Is that, maybe, what you mean?
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-27 21:50:34+00:00
It is a government agency spun up to use way more bodies and funds to do the same thing that was fairly effectively being done by private industry, has no penalty for being genuinely worse, is not popular, and is repeatedly used to funnel cash to connected people, groups and companies.

FDR himself would be embarrassed about this jobs program. Digging holes and refilling them would be more productive to our country.

>An interesting comparison would be FPS, which is the agency that does security checks for federal buildings, also under DHS same as TSA

This is not an interesting comparison. DHS didn't exist until recently either, and should be abolished. The private security we had before was much cheaper and not less effective. TSA would not have prevented 9/11

The point of all of the DHS was to oppress internal dissent internally. What do you think was Bush's plans if they didn't get served an opportunity to go screw around in the middle east? His administration was pushing using Predator drones domestically in the mid-2000s.

Read "Big brother" by Corey Doctorow, which laid this all out in plain english (to literal children no less) 20 years ago. It's free.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-27 21:51:01+00:00
Cynical responses like this are meant to make the speaker sound smart, but actually what you're doing is making further tyranny more likely, because you're deliberately overlooking that-- whatever the existing problems with the FBI-- there is a significant difference between their behavior now and their behavior before.

Not even bothering to run the established investigation playbook when law enforcement kills a civilian is a major departure, and one worth noticing. But if all you do is go "same old same old", then you can safely lean back in your chair and do nothing as the problem worsens, while calling yourself so much smarter and more insightful than the people around you.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-27 21:51:21+00:00
> Why is lengths and areas more important than angles?

Well, of course the answer is "it depends on what it is you want to learn from the map. If you're driving around and want to navigate, you'll take Mercator probably. But if you want to compare sizes of objects (like lakes or forests or islands or world states), especially when zoomed out, you'll prefer Gall-Peters.

Many argue, and I tend to agree, that when looking at a map of the whole world, you are typically better served with Gall-Peters in terms of what your interest is, and in fact, people _do_ use Mercator maps to semi-consciously compare sizes of things - and have false impressions about geo-politics because of it.
by shuntress | 2026-01-27 21:51:22+00:00
This guy is not totally wrong but he is also way off about pretty much everything even just simple basic facts. He writes "Michigan Stadium, the third‑largest sports venue on earth." which is not even remotely true. Michican Stadium isn't even in the top 5 of venues in the US never mind globally[0]. And thats if you just take capacity counts at face value and don't try to include places that have huge standing room capacity like horse racing tracks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_venues_by_capac...
by cogogo | 2026-01-27 21:51:31+00:00
Some people definitely do but how do they go and address it? A fresh example in that it addresses pure misinformation. I just screwed up and told some neighbors garbage collection was delayed for a day because of almost 2ft of snow. Turns out it was just food waste and I was distracted checking the app and read the notification poorly.

I went back to tell them (do not know them at all just everyone is chattier digging out of a storm) and they were not there. Feel terrible and no real viable remedy. Hope they check themselves and realize I am an idiot. Even harder on the internet.
by mikestew | 2026-01-27 21:51:32+00:00
“One of the higher-frequency harmonics inevitably created by any real-world DAC during playback will then be the original fundamental, which should leak to the environment as a short-range radio transmission via the ad-hoc antenna formed by the physical wires and circuit traces in the audio output path.”

Sometimes I think I’m a smart guy…and then I read of people doing shit like this.
by jamespo | 2026-01-27 21:51:47+00:00
Why is taxing households together the correct thing, other than the fact it presumably would improve your personal standard of living (it would also improve mine)? What are you trying to encourage? I could see if you want to encourage families having tax benefits based on children - but universal childcare provision seems more likely to succeed.

And as for not seeing how a tax cut based on 2 people living together could not be abused, you must be very short sighted.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-27 21:52:15+00:00
> I don't understand who this is for?

I think the answer is in the tagline: AI Agent writes JSX, you get videos.

Sounds like a decent approach for today. LLMs are overtrained on JSX (Claude in particular, due to Artifacts feature IIRC being originally based on React), which makes them particularly good at translating from natural language to JSX, and that in turns makes JSX a decent choice for a structured description format.

JSX is just ugly Lisp anyway, so it's not half bad a choice for something that's structured, general-purpose, flexible and well-supported by tooling.

In other words:

[You]--natural language-->[LLM]--JSX-->[Vagrai]-->Video
by criddell | 2026-01-27 21:52:31+00:00
I’m similar. I’ve installed the TikTok app a half a dozen times and it just doesn’t click for me.

YouTube I enjoy more, but I still don’t spend much time on it. I mostly go on there looking for something in particular and don’t spend much time scrolling. Their recommendations are terrible and creators chasing the algorithm is making every interesting corner round.

Instagram I like. I love to see updates from friends and family but that runs out quickly so I don’t end up spending much time there.

Facebook is good for their marketplace when I’m looking to buy something or give something away.

Mastodon is boring, X is offensive, posts on BlueSky and Threads feel fake and performative. LinkedIn is full of journeys and learnings and I’m not interested in either.

HN is the only social media site I visit with any kind of frequency.
by maxkfranz | 2026-01-27 21:52:51+00:00
That’s a good point. On the other hand, we’ve had that problem long before AI. You already need to mentally filter papers based on your assessment of the reputability of the authors.

The whole process should be made more transparent and open from the start, rather than adding more gatekeeping. There ought to be openness and transparency throughout the entire research process, with auditing-ability automatically baked in, rather than just at the time of publication. One man’s opinion, anyway.
by manmal | 2026-01-27 21:53:17+00:00
- Peter has spent the last year building up a large assortment of CLIs to integrate with. He‘s also a VERY good iOS and macOS engineer so he single handedly gave clawd capabilities like controlling macOS and writing iMessages.

- Leaning heavily on the SOUL.md makes the agents way funnier to interact with. Early clawdbot had me laugh to tears a couple times, with its self-deprecating humor and threatening to play Nickelback on Peter‘s sound system.

- Molt is using pi under the hood, which is superior to using CC SDK

- Peter’s ability to multitask surpasses anything I‘ve ever seen (I know him personally), and he’s also super well connected.

Check out pi BTW, it’s my daily driver and is now capable to write its own extensions. I wrote a git branch stack visualizer _for_ pi, _in_ pi in like 5 minutes. It’s uncanny.
by rurp | 2026-01-27 21:54:15+00:00
This keeps me away from these sorts of stores if I can avoid them, which is pretty much always (so far, anyway). I would be absolutely shocked if the error rate was comparable to a normal checkout process and I don't want to waste the cognitive overhead of either wondering how much I'm getting ripped off by a corporation or having to go back and review and try to resolve overcharges.
by KenoFischer | 2026-01-27 21:55:07+00:00
> Do they have "leggo my eggo" itself trademarked?

As a matter of fact, they do:

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=77021301&caseType=SERIAL_...

The full complaint linked above has a full list of trademarks. There's also a claim for trade dress infringement, since the food truck uses the same font and red-yellow-white color scheme.
by Hasz | 2026-01-27 21:55:52+00:00
I have been arguing this point for several years now -- but wrt to the Democratic party's relationship with guns. The same justification used to limit the second amendment is the same justification that can be used to limit the 1st, 4th, etc.

Both parties seem to be on an authoritarian bent over the last 10-15 years, which sucks.
by Bender | 2026-01-27 21:55:56+00:00
Will AIs Need Psychiatrists?

No. AI's have no intelligence, are not sentient and are not applicable to psychology. They are big-data sorting and language machines. LLM's do exhibit mimicry by design and can appear to have a conscience. They are made to make us feel like we are communicating with a sentient intelligent being thus making us more comfortable with sharing information with them and more likely to believe them. All of the psychology is applied to and directed at the consumer.

There are people that will strongly disagree with what I just typed and they indeed may need psychological assistance.
by wyldberry | 2026-01-27 21:56:09+00:00
They are running communications rings geographically distributed across the city via Signal. They organize into specialized roles for identifying suspected agents (spotters), tailing them, and moving to contact with ICE. They use the ARMY SALUTE[0][1] method to handle their reports.

Anyone who ran convoys in the Middle East, patrolled, or did intel around it will know this playbook. The resistance is impressive because it's taken lessons learned from observing the US Military overseas dealing with insurgencies.

0 - https://www.usainscom.army.mil/iSALUTE/iSALUTEFORM/
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHIPEVj0pRo