MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drnick1 | 2026-01-01 02:48:16+00:00
> As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.

Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
by pbh101 | 2026-01-01 02:50:13+00:00
I’m familiar with this neighborhood. If this were my commute I’d probably walk often.

But:

It’s 42 minutes by foot one way, which is on the longer end for most people. About half of it is pleasantly walkable, the rest looking like no trees and along a busy street.

… For probably six months out of the year, the rest being too uncomfortably hot or windy/cold for most people.

And he’s probably wearing a suit and leather shoes every day, so you risk wet/muddy shoes, road salt, or dripping in sweat or rain. Mess up your hair with a hat in the winter.

And if you are going anywhere after, you’ll need a car anyway. The rest of Omaha is not walkable and quite hilly.

And he’s old, quite old. He’s been old for decades. Some people can do 3.6mi/day in their 50s-80s but most will not.

And his time value in literally among the… top ten in the world or so? And has been for decades?

I say all this as a relatively extreme walking advocate: for most people in some locales (including most of America), it just doesn’t make sense, and this criticism is very silly.

He’s Warren Buffet, so he could make this work if he wanted to. He could insist everyone come to him at his home while he wears pajamas.

But it’s not unreasonable to drive this commute.

And you can get a decent breakfast at McDonald’s too :D
by jchw | 2026-01-01 02:50:41+00:00
What I'm saying is, I disagree that "we know" these things. We know that there are bugs that can be statically prevented by having non-nullable types to enforce contracts, but that doesn't in itself make null the actual source of the problem.

A language with non-nullability-by-default in its reference types is no worse than a language with no null. I say this because, again, there will always be situations where you may or may not have a value. For example, grabbing the first item in a list; the list may be empty. Even if you "know" the list contains at least one item, the compiler does not. Even if you check the invariant to ensure that it is true, the case where it is false may be too broken to handle and thus crashing really is the only reasonable thing to do. By the time the type system has reached its limits, you're already boned, as it can't statically prevent the problem. It doesn't matter if this is a nullable reference or if its an Option type.

Because of that, we're not really comparing languages that have null vs languages that don't. We're comparing languages that have references that can be non-nullable (or functionally equivalent: references that can't be null, but optional wrapper types) versus languages that have references that are always nullable. "Always nullable" is so plainly obviously worse that it doesn't warrant any further justification, but the question isn't whether or not it's worse, it's how much worse.

Maybe not a billion dollars worse after all.

P.S.: NaN is very much the same. It's easy to assign blame to NaN, and NaN can indeed cause problems that wouldn't have existed without it. However, if we had signalling NaNs by default everywhere, I strongly suspect that we would still curse NaN, possibly even worse. The problem isn't really NaN. It's the thing that makes NaN necessary to begin with. I'm not defending null as in trying to suggest that it isn't involved in causing problems, instead I'm suggesting that the reasons why we still use null are the true root issue. You really do fix some problems by killing null, but the true root issue still exists even after.
by uf00lme | 2026-01-01 02:50:44+00:00
Mirrors are not effective enough. Shielding drones from energy weapons seems like a similar problem to entering Earth’s atmosphere, you want to shield it in a way that will blast away safely and ideally diffuse the laser, so the energy is spread over a larger space.
I suspect larger lasers will likely aways win, since there is only so much shielding can do. At which point we could end up with transformers like drones that are built to be broken apart mid flight and yet still deliver damage.
I feel like defending drones could become possible with energy weapons but only under ideal weather conditions.
by anon7000 | 2026-01-01 02:50:50+00:00
Polluting the environment in any form is a violation of property rights. It’s unfortunate our government hasn’t codified that reality.

My neighbor’s don’t have a right to pollute my property by shining a bright light on it or blowing smoke into it or dumping chemicals into my underground well. Even if it’s mostly legal, it’s still a violation of my underlying right to property
by snigsnog | 2026-01-01 02:51:29+00:00
The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. LLMs are not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using them.

The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too disconnected with normies but I don't see this taking off. Fun as a novelty like those AI Ring cam vids but I would never spend all day watching AI generated media.
by blowsand | 2026-01-01 02:51:44+00:00
Why $1bn? Is that $1bn in cash? Cash plus rare gems, excluding Sierra gold nuggets? Equities plus commercial real estate over 10 floors tall? What makes 1% a good threshold? Why not 4? Why not tax all assets on a recurring basis? Do California taxpayers still trust their government will properly and responsibly spend a $100bn tax windfall? What happens when that is spent and deficits return? Another “one time tax” on multimillionaires?

Just making a point about the poor handling of existing tax income and spending discipline, as well as the very arbitrary nature of these tax-seeking initiatives.
by cavalcantii | 2026-01-01 02:52:17+00:00
Our open-source project implemented a neural A.I. classification to bridge Quantum computing to a biomimetic practical nanotechnology integration into the up coming telekinesis systems, that uses your brain connectivity. The dataset has a 96.11% accuracy to control devices with your thoughts, opening the gates to a both ways of brain entanglement or activation using solfeggio binaural beats and Trifecta Perfect Geometry to decode the matrix.

We released 10,000 .txt brainwave files with the code base on Python/Rust/QML using our cloud based human system architecture and EEG biology direct and reverse communication concepts.

Despite the overwhelming amount of data and a large code-base available on GitHub as an open-source initiative, the peer review process started playing malicious attack against our organization, as it can be checked in our full disclosure of the events available in the free access on Wasabi S3 Data bucket and GitHub.

While under peer review, we faced malicious administrative attempts to downgrade the visibility of this work despite the contributions of 54 open-source developers. It is crucial to avoid patent trolls from large corporations from owning your brain connectivity that aims to entangle your brain into the debit matrix.

In case Biomimetics end up not publish the work submitted for publication, we donate it to humanity as an open manifesto aimed to free humanity triad:

Your thoughts and brain should be open and free. We own it to future generations. Your mind has the power, if you believe or not, you are right both ways. Hackers united to free your mind!

Feel free to access the whole content - full paper: Adriano Cavalcanti, Yash J. Patel, John Knudson, and Wei-Ying Hsaio, BCI Cybersecurity for Neurohaptics Telekinesis Avatars, Biomimetics, MDPI, pg 1-61, December 2025. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XDtbVQouQ-93LrUC6RDO...

You can also join us to fight for your brain sovereignty: https://github.com/3C-SCSU/Avatar

Ref. – Sci-Fi becoming reality:
The Force: Empire Strikes Back
Avengers: Endgame
House Of Flying Daggers
Edge of Tomorrow

Signed: Adriano Cavalcanti, Yash J. Patel, John Knudson, and Wei-Ying Hsaio, Cloud Computing Club (54 Contributors) - December 31, 2025
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-01 02:52:17+00:00
Not really. In all of our physical theories, curved paths are actual curves. So, (assuming circular orbits for a second) the ratio between the length of the Earth's orbit around the Sun and the distance between the Earth and the Sun is Pi - so, either the length of the path or the straight line distance must be an irrational number. While the actual orbit is elliptical instead of circular, the relation still holds.

Of course, we can only measure any quantity up to a finite precision. But the fact that we chose to express the measurement outcome as 3.14159 +- 0.00001 instead of expressing it as Pi +- 0.00001 is an arbitrary choice. If the theory predicts that some path has length equal exactly to 2.54, we are in the same situation - we can't confirm with infinite precision that the measurement is exactly 2.54, we'll still get something like 2.54 +- 0.00001, so it could very well be some irrational number in actual reality.
by sothatsit | 2026-01-01 02:53:23+00:00
You did not make a negative critique. You completely dismissed the value of coding agents on the basis that the results are not predictable, which is both obvious and doesn’t matter in practice. Anyone who has given these tools a chance will quickly realise that 1) they are actually quite predictable in doing what you ask them to, and 2) them being non-deterministic does not at all negate their value. This is why people can immediately tell you haven’t used these tools, because your argument as to why they’re useless is so elementary.
by aristofun | 2026-01-01 02:54:14+00:00
Sorry to disappoint but unless you possess some rare and unique skill in the grand scheme of things you are a commodity.

Business is not your mommy nor a nobel prize committee, it doesn’t care if you are smart or not. It only cares if you can execute your function good enough to justify your salary and get the project out of the door on time.

If 2 candidates are good enough - the cheapest wins.

Therefore there is no point in marketing yourself. Just learn to play by the rules (i.e. how to pass interviews, make up resumes etc) or get unique and extraordinary in your niche.
by jamwil | 2026-01-01 02:55:02+00:00
This is crazy to me. I almost think it’s rage bait but will give you the benefit of the doubt. The lifestyle you describe leaves no room for friends, relationships, or hobbies. Working 72 hours a week is not sustainable for anyone over the long term unless they truly have no interest in any of the three things I listed. That may be the case for you, but that’s exceedingly uncommon.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-01 02:56:55+00:00
It's a long sail for China to do anything about it for Venezuela and Russia, neither of which are in any position to do anything about it.

Venezuela Oil Output Slows 25% in Orinoco Belt Under US Pressure - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-31/venezuela... | https://archive.today/wUsmE - December 31, 2025

How Venezuela’s aging Soviet-era military stacks up against US forces in the Caribbean - https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/13/americas/venezuela-military-u... - November 13th, 2025
by anonnon | 2026-01-01 02:58:04+00:00
Why do the mods allow Simon to spam HN with his blogposts and his comments, which he often posts just for the sake of including a link back to his blog? Seriously, go look at his post history and see how often he includes a link to his blog, however tangentially related, when he posts a comment. I actually flagged this submission, which I never do, and encourage others to do likewise.
by maxbond | 2026-01-01 02:59:00+00:00
The same reason we sandbox anything. All software ought to be trustworthy, but in practice is susceptible to malfunction or attack. Agents can malfunction and cause damage, and they consume a lot of untrusted input and are vulnerable to malicious prompting.

As for humans, it's the norm to restrict access to production resources. Not necessarily because they're untrustworthy, but to reduce risk.
by snigsnog | 2026-01-01 03:00:08+00:00
It's not worthless, it's just not worldchanging as is even in the fields where it's most useful, like programming. If the trajectory changes and we reach AGI then this changes too but right now it's just a way to

- fart out demos that you don't plan on maintaining, or want to use as a starting place

- generate first-draft unit tests/documentation

- generate boilerplate without too much functionality

- refactor in a very well covered codebase

It's very useful for all of the above! But it doesn't even replace a junior dev at my company in its current state. It's too agreeable, makes subtle mistakes that it can't permanently correct (GEMINI.md isn't a magic bullet, telling it to not do something does not guarantee that it won't do it again), and you as the developer submitting LLM-generated code for review need to review it closely before even putting it up (unless you feel like offloading this to your team) to the point that it's not that much faster than having written it yourself.
by Xyra | 2026-01-01 03:01:31+00:00
in the direction of "empowering the public with new capabilities they didn't have before", Scry offers, with the copy and paste of a prompt and talking with an agent:

1) Full readonly-SQL + vector manipulation in a live public database. Most vector DB products expose a much narrower search API. Basically only a few enterprise level services let you run arbitrary SQL on remote machines. Google BigQuery gives users SQL power, but it mostly doesn't have embeddings, connect public corpora, have as good of indexes, and doesn't have support an agentic research experience. Beyond object-level research, Scry a good tool for exploring and acquiring intuitions about embedding-space.

2) An agent-native text-to-SQL + lexical + semantic deep research workflow. We have a prompt that's been heavily optimized for taking full advantage of our machine and Claude Code for exploration and answering nuanced questions. Claude fires off many exploratory queries and builds towards really big queries that lean on the SQL query planner. You can interrupt at any time. You have the compute limits to do lots of exhaustive exploration--often more epistemically powerful than finding a document often, is being confident than one doesn't exist.

3) dozens of public commons in one database, with embeddings.
by rayiner | 2026-01-01 03:01:59+00:00
Forget how we live. Take the per capita CO2 output of Norway—which already generates 99% of its electricity using renewables—and somehow halve it. If the Indian subcontinent increases to that level, the added CO2 output alone will be double that of the entire EU currently.

And that’s the steady-state number. It’s impossible to believe that these countries can become twice as efficient as Norway, which already has a fully renewable grid, while building a ton of housing and infrastructure that Norway doesn’t have to build because it’s already built.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-01 03:02:36+00:00
> I feel like I would definitely notice if I went from 12 to 25 reps on any exercise I do.

To be clear, the implication is that 12 and 25 have different weights so they tire you the same amount. Do you think it would be a very strongly felt difference in that situation? What would the difference feel like?
by stuffn | 2026-01-01 03:03:33+00:00
The reason no one has found a better way is because hypertrophy is because it’s well understood and there’s no “better” solution. mTOR is the primary hormone pathway.thy increase the adaptation ceiling by increasing RBC, reducing protein breakdown, etc. Thereby reducing rest needed, so mTOR is heavily unregulated.

This is one of the view places where “if we could we would” is the correct answer. There is so much money in the space of anabolic cheating, the clandestine scientists would’ve already developed it.
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-01 03:03:46+00:00
You are right. I re-read the text carefully, and your timeline is accurate.
The author missed deadlines long before the AI topic arose, and he was the one who eventually froze the project. I stand corrected on calling it "Constructive Dismissal."

Perhaps the root cause of the missed deadlines was actually a "loss of conviction."
The author touches on his own doubts: "With LLMs around, no one needs this book anymore."
While the publisher didn't legally force him out, the "AI pressure" (both from the publisher and the market) might have eroded his belief in the product's value.

It wasn't a murder (firing), but it might have been a death by loss of passion.
by fpoling | 2026-01-01 03:05:59+00:00
That laser station will not last in Ukraine an hour and will be destroyed either by missiles or drone swarm.

What Ukraine have found a net launcher is effective and cheap solution against drones and may allow more use of tanks and heavy armor vehicles again in 2026. Then shotguns with a special ammunition is effective. Then against fiber drones a fence with moving wire works surprisingly good to cut the fiber.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-01 03:07:14+00:00
what does greed have to do with it? The issue at hand is that for many decades now visual mass media have taught children that constant stimulation and entertainment has to be omnipresent.

It's much worse than just greed, it's about attention. Fundamentally at this point, very few people, including adults are unable to accept boredom or lack of instant gratification. Commercial or non-commercial.
by ogou | 2026-01-01 03:07:43+00:00
This is a good tooling survey of the past year. I have been watching it as a developer re-entering the job market. The job descriptions closely parallel the timeline used in the post. That's bizarre to me because these approaches are changing so fast. I see jobs for "Skill and Langchain experts with production-grade 0>1 experience. Former founders preferred". That is an expertise that is just a few months old and startups are trying to build whole teams overnight with it. I'm sure January and February will have job postings for whatever gets released that week. It's all so many sand castles.
by sleepyguy | 2026-01-01 03:10:12+00:00
This tanker is carrying weapons for delivery. Russia is using it's tanker fleet as spy ships (drones over EU from Baltic Sea), cutting under sea cables (Finland has charged a Russian crew), delivering weapons (tanker fleeing US Coast Guard), moving agents abroad (ship sunk in Mediterranean by Ukraine last week), and even trying to send nuclear reactor/engines to North Korea for their submarines (ship sunk by torpedo near the straights of Gibraltar).

They need to be blocked entirely from the worlds Oceans, cut of from leaving any ports in Russia or hunted when leaving ports from Africa.
Ask HN: What is the best microVMs for AI agents?
by zfoong | 2026-01-01 03:10:20+00:00
Three weeks ago, we just launched an open-source computer-use agent: https://github.com/zfoong/WhiteCollarAgent

However, we are currently looking for self-hosted and easy-to-set-up microVM solutions for the agent's GUI mode. The idea is to let agents operate in an isolated environment for its GUI operation, like web-browsing, launching an app, and using the app, etc.

Anyone with any experience with microVM, feel free to let me know in the comments. Many thanks!
by rietta | 2026-01-01 03:10:38+00:00
Extremely interesting read. I need to go back over it again in detail on my computer not just my phone while holding my baby.

A key theme in a future fiction I am writing (slowly) is that all digital data has been lost and the time we are in now is known as a digital dark age where little is known about our society and culture. Resurrecting an archeologically discovered DVD is a key plot point I am working through. That it will be the first insight into our time in over a millennium. Other conflicting interests will be finally succeeding at re-introducing corn at commercial scale after all hope had been lost and past attempts at re-germinating from the frozen seed bank had failed for hundreds of years. It's a work in progress.
by SgtBastard | 2026-01-01 03:12:14+00:00
… the internet was not immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person.

Even if you skip ARPAnet, you’re forgetting the Gopher days and even if you jump straight to WWW+email==the internet, you’re forgetting the mosaic days.

The applications that became useful to the masses emerged a decade+ after the public internet and even then, it took 2+ decades to reach anything approaching saturation.

Your dismissal is not likely to age well, for similar reasons.
by hephaes7us | 2026-01-01 03:12:28+00:00
Hard disagree. I may trust the people on my team to a make PRs that are worth reviewing, but I don't give them a shell on my machine. They shouldn't need that to collaborate with me anyway!

Also, I "trust Claude code" to work on more or less what I asked and to try things which are at least facially reasonable... but having an environment I can easily reset only means it's more able to experiment without consequences. I work in containers or VMs too, when I want to try stuff without having to cleanup after.
by phire | 2026-01-01 03:13:30+00:00
Yes, the actual bandwidth of the last-mile analog line was much, much higher. Hence why we eventually got 8mbit ADSL or 24mbit ADSL 2.0+ running across it. Or even 50-300mbit with VDSL in really ideal conditions.

Though the actual available bandwidth was very dependent on distance. People would lease dedicated pairs for high bandwidth across town (or according to a random guy I talked to at a cafe: just pirate an unused pair that happened to run between their two buildings). But once we start talking between towns, the 32kbit you could get from the digital trunk lines was almost always higher than what you could get on a raw analog line over the same distance.
by skybrian | 2026-01-01 03:13:36+00:00
Ways it helps America:

* His shareholders include many Americans. The cash pile is concentrated as far as corporate governance is concerned, but lots of people own a piece of it in their retirement accounts. (Often indirectly via index funds.)

* Many employees work for businesses owned by Berkshire Hathaway. I'd guess they're pretty stable businesses, not about to get bought out and shut down? Maybe decent places to work? (Not sure about the railroad, though.)

* Many people are customers of these businesses. Mostly a good thing?

Admittedly there are lots of Americans that don't participate in that, though.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 03:16:18+00:00
> Do we start sinking Russian flagged tankers in international waters?

Absolutely not. But in cases where the ship was originally identified with faulty registration and is otherwise behaving suspiciously, it’s fair to forcibly board.

That said! This will vary based on what’s on that ship. If it’s drone killers, that’s annoying but fine. If it’s anti-ship missiles, that’s putting American sailors at risk.
by anonnon | 2026-01-01 03:16:48+00:00
> He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs

Is he, really? Most of his blog posts are little more than opportunistic, buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post or article, often with a bit of AI apologia sprinkled in (for example, marginalizing people as paranoid for not taking AI companies at their word that they aren't aggressively scraping websites in violation of robots.txt, or exfiltrating user data in AI-enbaled apps).