MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bonkusbingus | 2026-01-10 22:43:09+00:00
"There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is "Does it work, and how does it work?" How does it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something comes through or it doesn't. There's nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret."
— Gilles Deleuze
by nh2 | 2026-01-10 22:43:28+00:00
I agree that logic is sound, but it is also not discoverable to the user:

They might open the list (with the cursor resting on one of the items, or use the keyboard to navigate out of comfort or for accessibility reasons), then notice "oh wait, I haven't actually enabled my phone's Wifi hotspot yet", enable that, and wait forever for it to appear.

That's why I'm thinking something should visually (and non-visually) change so the user can notice.

Maybe even cleaner would be to add a tooltip to the currently-hovered entry? That might work for both mouse and non-mouse use cases, and might even work for screenreaders.
by rmunn | 2026-01-10 22:43:33+00:00
That's how it should work, and does in terminals that are doing it right. Browsers, however, are looking at the monospaced font and saying "Okay, Source Code Pro doesn't have the U+2192 codepoint," (the → arrow) "so let me find a font that does." On my Linux+Firefox setup, the browser chose Menlo to render the → in the "The fastest way to go from 0 → 1" banner. Menlo's width isn't quite identical to Source Code Pro, so the ┃ character on the right of the box was every so slightly misaligned. Because Firefox isn't following strict fixed-width layout rules, and is allowing itself to use other fonts with different horizontal widths even inside a <pre> block. (I haven't looked at this article in other browsers but I bet they're the same since everyone's mentioning misalignment.)
by tolerance | 2026-01-10 22:43:36+00:00
I don’t like this product as a service to readers (i.e., people who read as a cognitive/philosophical exploit) but I do think that somewhere embedded in its backend there are things of benefit.

I think that this sucks the discreet joy out of reading and learning. Having the ways that the topics within a certain book can cross over in lead into another book of a different topic externalized is hollowing and I don’t find it useful.

On the other hand I feel like seeing this process externalized gives us a glimpse at how “the algorithms” (read: recommender systems) suggest seemingly disjunctive content to users. So as a technical achievement I can’t knock what you’ve done and I’m satisfied to see that you’re the guy behind the HN Book map that I thought was nice too.

At its core this looks like a representation of the advantages that LLMs can afford to the humanities. Most of us know how Rob Pike feels about them. I wonder if his senior former colleague feels the same: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/hum307/index.html. That’s a digression, but I’d like to see some people think in public about how to reasonably use these tools in that domain.
by apparent | 2026-01-10 22:43:38+00:00
This doesn't describe what UC is doing, however. LCFF is for (1) kids in foster care, (2) English learners, and (3) low income. If you go to a school that has lots of these kids, but you yourself do not have one of these disadvantages, then it doesn't mean that you've risen up out of poverty to achieve relative greatness. It means that you're not an immigrant/poor, but you go to school with a lot of such students. And in the age of grade inflation, getting good grades at a school with lots of low-performing kids is especially easy.
by dang | 2026-01-10 22:44:02+00:00
We've banned this account for using HN exclusively for political/ideological/national/religious battle and ignoring our requests to stop. That's not allowed here, regardless of which political position you're advocating.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Before somebody pounces with "so we're not allowed to post about $TOPIC now?": no, I'm not secretly advocating for circumcision (of all things) and this comment is not about $TOPIC. I just had to hang it somewhere so I chose the most recent thread.

The issue is the overall pattern of the account's behavior, which is clearly against HN's rules.)
by neobrain | 2026-01-10 22:44:14+00:00
Funny timing, I moved to Ghostty this week and just today I ran into OOM crashes in Ghostty while developing a terminal UI app. Coincidentally this TUI has a tab bar that looks like this, where each UTF8 icons are used for recognizability and activity indicators (using © and € as placeholders here):

1|Flakes © 2|Installed © 3|Store © € 4|Security © €
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

This works fine normally, but resizing the terminal would quickly trigger the crash - easy to avoid but still annoying!

I was already preparing myself to file a bug report with the easy repro, but this sounds suspiciously close to what the blog post is describing. Fingers crossed :)

(EDIT: HN filters unicode, booo :( )
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-10 22:45:00+00:00
Tiresome. You're quoting me out of context, and generally assigning me the POV you want to argue with. You come across as pro-AI looking for anti-AI to do combat with. First, I'm not the right guy, and second, all I'm really saying above is that if we're going to do argument-from-authority, maybe let's engage with what the authority is actually saying in TFA.
by kayodelycaon | 2026-01-10 22:45:03+00:00
You’re cocky. :)

Some people are special. The preferred term is neurodivergent. ;)

There are times you just can’t fix a broken brain by trying harder or finding an alternative.

It can be really difficult to understand if you’ve never experienced it yourself. For you there’s, always been a way to get something done.

What are you supposed to do when your brain randomly doesn’t follow what you tell it to do?
by rendx | 2026-01-10 22:45:08+00:00
I can, but I doubt you're going to like it. I invite you to reflect on it before you reject it outright, and maybe ask your favorite LLM or search engine for more information on this train of thought. Thanks.

Because of systemic racism, treating you and me "equally" as you ask for would continue the discrimination. In order to undo the discrimination, we're asked to take a step back and be truthful to yourself and others about your existing privileges and about all the systemic racism we're benefitting from. We don't have to agree with every single action of those trying to change it, and it's certainly not our "fault", but unless you have better ideas on how to fix the issues and repair some of the damages, and put those ideas into practice, we can at least show some respect and dignity in the face of centuries of very violent suppression of minorities and natives. Because not doing that would make us 'supremacists'. We have the privilege that we don't have to experience outright racism day by day by day, generation over generation over generation; we're asked to at least educate yourself about it, instead of crying out for not being treated 'equally'. Some humbleness.

There's plenty of good literature about that. If you're interested, I can recommend some. It will make this clearer. It's not meant to offend you as an individual. It's not your fault. But what you can do is understand where all the rage and despair is coming from. I agree that it can hurt to experience it in little things, but I am mindful that it is part of my contribution to accept it, and I understand that if I express my frustration it will cause pain in those that don't have my privileges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_defensiveness#White_frag...
by fiddlosopher | 2026-01-10 22:45:20+00:00
Pandoc does know how to expand LaTeX macros. For example, given the LaTeX

\newcommand{\pair}[2]{\langle #1, #2\rangle}
$$\pair{a^2}{\frac{\pi}{2}}$$

pandoc will give you the Typst

$ chevron.l a^2 \, pi / 2 chevron.r $

which is correct. Tylax, on the other hand, seems to have problems with this example, producing

$ angle.l^()frac(pi,)angle.r $

which does not compile with typst. Going the other direction, pandoc also understands typst scripting. For example, from

#let count = 8
#let nums = range(1, count + 1)
#let fib(n) = (
if n <= 2 { 1 }
else { fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) }
)

The first #count numbers of the sequence are:

#align(center, table(
columns: count,
..nums.map(n => $F_#n$),
..nums.map(n => str(fib(n))),
))

pandoc produces this LaTeX:

The first 8 numbers of the sequence are:

{\def\LTcaptype{none} % do not increment counter
\begin{longtable}[]{@{}llllllll@{}}
\toprule\noalign{}
\endhead
\bottomrule\noalign{}
\endlastfoot
\(F_{1}\) & \(F_{2}\) & \(F_{3}\) & \(F_{4}\) & \(F_{5}\) & \(F_{6}\) &
\(F_{7}\) & \(F_{8}\) \\
1 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 5 & 8 & 13 & 21 \\
\end{longtable}
}

With the same input, Tylax produces:

The first 8 numbers of the sequence are:

\begin{center}

\begin{tabular}{|c|}
\hline
\hline
\end{tabular}\end{center}

which is just an empty table.
by agentifysh | 2026-01-10 22:46:31+00:00
Great work I have some extra questions if you could help a noob like me:

Since I have to bring my own I/O, do you have a reference implementation or 'glue' code examples for tokio, Bevy ,std::net so I don't have to write the event loop from scratch?

How does this integrate with the existing webrtc-rs media crates? Can I still use the media crate for packetizing H.264/Opus, or do I need to handle payload processing manually too?

encryption (DTLS/SRTP) layer interface with the Sans-I/O model? Does it rely on ring or openssl does that introduce blocking or heap allocations?

benchmarks comparing CPU usage between the async webrtc crate and rtc under high load?

Is API stable or should I expect breaking changes to the poll_ or handle_ methods in the near future?

are theer plan to support web transport, or is the focus strictly on webrtc 1.0?

since the library doesn't control the socket directly, how does it accurately estimate bandwidth to tell the video encoder to scale down?
by SilentM68 | 2026-01-10 22:46:42+00:00
Ha, I have nothing on my machine that anyone would want. Yes, my life is that boring. So no, I keep nothing of importance in the drives, just old memories.

Out of the box, I've experienced less spyware-related issues with Linux. I have enabled UFW, installed ClamAV, closed or blocked communication with some ports. But for the most part, I've not had the same problems that had caused system and browser infections. If anything, the badly designed hardware of the machines and systems that I've built tend to cause the problems, for the most part, not to mention my own stupidity. If I do begin to experience, spy or adware-related issues, I suppose I could look into something like this:
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

Though if things got to the point where I'd need more protection, I'd think about the following:

-Keep system and software updated.
-Enable firewall (e.g., UFW).
-Use strong passwords and MFA.
-Install from trusted sources only.
-Encrypt disks (e.g., LUKS).
-Use SELinux or AppArmor.
-Sandbox apps with Flatpak/Wayland.
-Install antivirus like ClamAV.
-Disable unnecessary services.
-Monitor logs and use tools like OpenSnitch.
-Switch to CubesOS (qubes-os.org) but I'm not that paranoid, yet :)

I'm just not too tech savvy, but honestly if anyone had enough knowledge, they'd probably could get into my system. That being said, though I consider Linux to be more secure than Windows, no system is 100% secure, in my view.
Ask HN: What tools/workflow do you use to write technical books?
by JSLegendDev | 2026-01-10 22:46:51+00:00
What is the most straightforward way to write a technical book that needs to contain nicely formatted code snippets and images.

I've seen people using markdown, but how do you get a nice workflow where multiple markdown files gets converted into a single nicely formatted pdf/epub with a clickable table of contents and pagination.
by Rendello | 2026-01-10 22:47:06+00:00
I made it a few years ago. Tallow is trendy (and thus expensive), but you make it by rendering suet which is basically a throw-away product at butcher shops. Lots don't even bother selling suet, which is a pain. Rendering was just slow-cooking and removing the little pieces, then you're left with candle wax you can cook with.

I thought the candle wax consistency was a coincidence, but it was the main way to make candles for most of history. It tastes pretty good but has a strong smell when cooking (or burning as a candle, presumably).
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-10 22:47:08+00:00
> someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors for every subject

Is there any world in which the first student, struggling in that context, treads water at a UC?

I used to volunteer to tutor high-school aged students in New York. I gave up and moved to grade schoolers. A refugee who will take the SAT in six months and wants to go to college, but is struggling with basic reading comprehension and symbolic math is just not going to do well in college in a year.

Note: the student who excels in that first setting should absolutely be admitted. But they’re, by definition, already excelling.
by ako | 2026-01-10 22:47:17+00:00
According to Claude (easy guess from the wikipedia link?):

The book is almost certainly by *Franco Moretti*, who coined the term "distant reading." Given the timeframe ("maybe a decade ago") and the description, it's most likely one of these two:

1. *"Distant Reading"* (2013) — A collection of Moretti's essays that directly takes the concept as its title. This would fit well with "about a decade ago."

2. *"Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History"* (2005) — His earlier and very influential work that laid out the quantitative, computational approach to literary analysis, even if it didn't use "distant reading" as prominently in the title.

Moretti, who founded the Stanford Literary Lab, was the major proponent of the idea that we should analyze literature not just through careful reading of individual canonical texts, but through large-scale computational analysis of hundreds or thousands of works—looking at trends in genre evolution, plot structures, title lengths, and other patterns that only emerge at scale.

Given that the commenter specifically remembers learning the term "distant reading" from the book, my best guess is *"Distant Reading" (2013)*, though "Graphs, Maps, Trees" is also a strong possibility if their memory of "a decade" is approximate.
by jibal | 2026-01-10 22:47:36+00:00
It really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence of small changes, and without either planning and central authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological environment in biological evolution) the changes are directionless.
by neilv | 2026-01-10 22:47:43+00:00
Thank you. I've been doing distributed systems for years, when and to the degree appropriate, but this Worst Of Breed career guidance resource should help me position my skills, for current hiring priorities, to maximize my impact, towards enterprise objectives, going forward.

But seriously, it's not only cynical careerists who are pumping resume keywords like it's a game everyone is playing, and everyone keeps quiet about RDD, etc., because nobody wants to spoil it for everyone. It's also people who are really into one of the keywords, and think it's the most important thing, or the only important thing.

-- Past Case Study #1 --

Context: interview with systems research PhD brand-new founders, after my cold outreach pitch as a "startup generalist" (I think I said it in the headline) who would complement the scientists.

Me: (paraphrased) You're the experts in novel distributed systems research niche X, and I can't help you with that. What I can help with is all the other early startup work you'll need done, like bespoke infrastructure that works with X, Web consoles, mobile apps, some systems programming, product definition, project management, helping academic researchers and industry engineers work together, whatever needs to be done.

PhD founder: (this might be an exact quote) We need an expert, not a generalist.

-- Past Case Study #2 --

Context: interview with a mid-stage startup's CTO, who was hired for distributed systems expertise.

Me: I suspect that a Postgres server on a modest cloud server can handle the entire planet's activity of X. And (since the company's recruiting materials emphasized bias for action, and rapid iteration) we could very quickly build and validate that empirically with simulated transaction load. Of course, in production, we'd set up Postgres with distributed failover, etc.

CTO: I going to need a severalth one-on-one interview with you, an offer is imminent, but it's unclear whether you'll ever be allowed to talk with anyone else on the team, who you pointedly have still not yet met.
by zemvpferreira | 2026-01-10 22:48:12+00:00
It's a lot easier to double-check, cross-reference, or test the validity of advice given by a gpt. It has no authority, no persuasion mechanisms, and its opinions are there in plain text ready to be picked apart. You can ask it for references and non-confrontationally challenge it on the things you're sceptical about. It generally avoids woo in my experience though it's hardly always correct in specific advice, it can definitely point you in productive directions. Which is completely different from discussing anything health with a homeopath, who at best will try to get you to avoid productive treatment and at worst poison you.
by halostatue | 2026-01-10 22:48:32+00:00
Not to be flippant, but we know that the answer to that is "No" because of Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1].

I haven't read the article ("too hard, didn't care"), but as a foodie:

- in certain food circles, it never went away
- industrially, McD's in at least North America used beef tallow as one of the par-frying oils for their fries well into the 21st century -- which caused a stir amongst vegetarians and Hindu who had assumed that the fries were vegetarian (I remember stories here in Canada in 2002-2003)
- beef tallow is now fascionable, which accounts for the reactionary resurgence for something that never really went away
- the science is very clear that the new guidance from RFK's worm-eaten brain is junk
- the science is also very clear that while saturated fats like beef tallow are bad for you compared to olive oil and seed oils, they're better than hydrogenated fats and trans-fat products that were pushed on the world for a couple of decades a couple of decades ago

Beef tallow is a net good inasmuch as it helps ensure whole animal use, but that doesn't make it healthy or suitable for all diets.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
by defrost | 2026-01-10 22:49:00+00:00
Biden era cooperation with China on the issue was at the heart of this.

It wasn't about the direct supply of Fentanyl, or even (by that stage) the direct supply of Fentanyl precursor drugs .. (that gangs used to industrial shed chem lab into Fentanyl) ... this was cutting back and limiting bulk supply of the precursor precursors to shady onselling networks to starve the labs.

Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet for some other reason.
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-10 22:49:05+00:00
>Add README and LICENSE file
I'm pushing it out to github not because it needs to be public, but
because of my policy of using the internet as my backups. And because
it makes it so much easier to just sync between machines.

Very cool to see a legends side project. I'll check this out when I have time even though I can't understand C well.
by Neywiny | 2026-01-10 22:49:36+00:00
I don't understand why that is the preferred fix. I would have solved it other ways:

1. When resizing the page, leave some flag of how it was allocated. This tagging is commonly done as the always 0 bits in size or address fields to save space.

2. Since the pool is a known size of contiguous memory, check if the memory to be freed is within that range

3. Make the size immutable. If you want to realloc, go for it, and have the memory manager handle that boundary for you.

Both of those not only maintain functionality which seems to have been lost with the feature reduction but also are more future proof to any other changes in size.
by crawshaw | 2026-01-10 22:49:41+00:00
[exe.dev co-founder here] If you are curious, we have a `clone` command coming soon for sub-section creation of a new VM out of an existing VM. This is our first pass at checkpointing, rather than introducing an independent `snapshot` noun, you can keep a VM around as the snapshot.

We realize that is not going to cover all the business cases we have been discussing with customers and plan to introduce a snapshot concept (in particular for rewinding the state of a VM to an automatic backup), but we have a lot of FS work underway before we can launch it. There are some other things we want out of our VMs that we cannot do using conventional cloud techniques, so we have code to write.
Show HN: Understand your Claude Code sessions
by jjak82 | 2026-01-10 22:49:42+00:00
Fully built with Claude Code. Hook into Claude Code sessions to sync session data to https://confabulous.dev. From there, you can explore the transcript, create share links, calculate productivity metrics.

CLI piece is open source at https://github.com/ConfabulousDev/confab

Free while in beta. Likely there will be a free tier forever.

Give it a spin at https://confabulous.dev
by ttoinou | 2026-01-10 22:50:30+00:00
It's just my general sentiment when I see my french peers. It'd be interesting to try to turn this into data for sure, but "right wing" in France has a different meaning / reality than in others countries, not sure the raw stats would explain this difference.

If you like those kind of ideas you should def move in France and start building with others there little communist enclaves. Just be ready that in France we do think a lot before deciding to act, we don't have the same "get shit done" attitude like in the anglosphere world
by mathgeek | 2026-01-10 22:51:10+00:00
> Having the ways that the topics within a certain book can cross over in lead into another book of a different topic externalized is hollowing and I don’t find it useful.

Intuitively, I agree. This feels like the different between being a creator (of your own thoughts as inspired by another person's) and a consumer (although in a somewhat educational sense). There would need to be a big advantage to being taught those initial thoughts, analogous to why we teach folks algebra/calculus via formulas rather than having every student figure out proofs for themselves.
by tolerance | 2026-01-10 22:51:32+00:00
Manufacturers already indicate to the thickness of their paper with ply count: <https://blog.whogivesacrap.org/home/difference-ply-toilet-pa...>.

Although that doesn’t speak to the actual quality of the individual layers of paper. I’m not sure if weight is useful especially when manufacturers are already putting their thumb on the scale in other ways with the ‘2 Jumbo-Mega-Rolls are the equivalent of 8 Super rolls’ scheme that I initially referred to.

If all weight can tell me is that 2-Jumbo-Mega Rolls weigh the same as 8 Super rolls am I any better informed?

This is why I’m pretty content with using the price in cents per square foot as a baseline. In general it’s a useful metric when shopping elsewhere at the grocery store too.