MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gnabgib | 2026-01-27 20:20:23+00:00
Hackers stole information of 29.8M accounts (~20% of users). SoundCloud is downplaying the data beyond email address as "publicly available", but the data wasn't scraped. "Profile statistics" aren't public either. Their main response[0], seems to focus on passwords and payment details being the only risky data. They even imply email addresses are public.

> no sensitive data was taken in the incident.The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles (not financial or password data)

[0]: https://soundcloud.com/playbook-articles/protecting-our-user...
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-27 20:20:23+00:00
Yeah, I just had to re-pave an M1 MBP with Monterey. That was an adventure. Got the installer. Ran through part one, "This is no longer supported, click here to run in reduced security mode, or cancel the install?" Reduced security mode. "The installation of reduced security mode failed." Cool.

My journey to figure it out found me a Monterey IPSW image. Try to install it via DFU and a second Mac. "Nah, you can't do that, I won't even let you try."

ChatGPT hinted that I needed to do it from a similar vintage OS. "Even an Intel Mac running Ventura could work for this." As luck would have it, my partner still had her old MBP Core i5 running Ventura!

Alright, install Apple Configurator on the Ventura Mac.

"Nah. You need a Mac running 15.7 to install Apple Configurator."

Chicken and egg.

I mean, this OS (Monterey) only came out FOUR YEARS AGO. Ventura was three.

I got lucky with a Reddit post where someone asked for and got a zip file of an old version of Configurator.

I was then able to DFU re-image the M1 Mac with Monterey.

(Why do I need Monterey on it? Because someone else abandoned their software.)

So this Kafkaesque process to even get a four year old OS on a four year old Mac laptop means we shouldn't just be slobberingly praising Apple.

(I realize you, personally, weren't. Just when you said 10.12, I got flashbacks.)
by cobolcomesback | 2026-01-27 20:20:37+00:00
At minimum this thing should be installed in its own VM. I shudder to think of people running this on their personal machine…

I’ve been toying around with it and the only credentials I’m giving it are specifically scoped down and/or are new user accounts created specifically for this thing to use. I don’t trust this thing at all with my own personal GitHub credentials or anything that’s even remotely touching my credit cards.
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-27 20:20:46+00:00
> And they were and are of course right to feel those feelings, but it doesn't change the fact that the world is changing. Rarely do large changes benefit everyone in the world.

I'm not sure who you are arguing against. No one here said that the world isn't changing. But it seems to me that the people who are disadvantaged by AI, which is potentially everyone who doesn't own a data center, should take efforts to ensure their continued survival, instead of merely becoming serfs to the ruling oligarchs.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-01-27 20:20:46+00:00
From the perspective of an archive, library, or museum preservation isn't really the goal in itself, just a strictly mandatory prerequisite. The pieces have to be made available to researchers (and depending on the institution the public) for the archive to be able to consider itself fulfilling its mission.

There is kind of a cost/preservation/accessibility triangle with curatorial preservation, and museums already normally choose storage that is somewhere other than the most expensive/best preservation corner of that triangle. Oxygen-depleted facilities significantly extend that corner, but if we're already not using what we have there then it may not be a useful addition.

Low-oxygen environments also have their own preservation issues. I'm not actually a museum curator so I don't know the specifics. But it is a very complex and old discipline and they've tried just about everything. The problem is usually funding, which unfortunately boils this whole thing down to another boring "you can't solve social problems with technical solutions."
by jmaker | 2026-01-27 20:20:48+00:00
That is terrible. I’ve been out of the loop with consumer Windows for like 20 years and enterprise Windows for a decade, last time was at a .NET shop. Two years ago or so, after watching a couple Microsoft folks give their talks, I tried one of the Microsoft Surfaces at a store and got quickly frustrated with it.

What you’re describing about Windows is very reminiscent of what Pixel users describe on Reddit.

I’m totally with you, I wouldn’t use Windows voluntarily. I’m not in a position to tell whether it’s more or less ready though, just no recent experience with it.
by kcb | 2026-01-27 20:20:58+00:00
How does that even work? What does it apply to? Say I own a 100% share in a business, each year does the government appraise it and pretty much require me to divest a portion of it to pay the tax?

Unrealized capital gains taxes are crazy all in an effort to own the rich or something. Meanwhile the people they're perceived as targeting have all the resources to avoid it.
by Retric | 2026-01-27 20:21:19+00:00
The US government operates with such a huge debt that we aren’t paying for these things. Instead we are paying for the long term effects of such spending.

Cutting 10k scientists could therefore result in increased taxes without anyone ever seeing any savings. Or it could result in net gain from 1$ all the way up to what their cost * interest in the debt.

Therefore there’s no obvious side who takes the default win here. Instead you need actual well supported arguments.
by ash_091 | 2026-01-27 20:21:43+00:00
I don’t think anything you said is wrong, but I do think you’re misreading the intent of the channel.

Practical Engineering is very deliberately framed as edutainment. The animations, pacing, and level of depth are conscious choices meant to keep non-specialists engaged rather than to maximize technical rigor.

In that sense, it belongs alongside other popular "science-y" channels like Kurzgesagt, Vsauce, and Technology Connections: content that prioritizes narrative and engagement over completeness or instruction.

The target audience is the broad middle of the technical bell curve. Animations of runway layers may make the video less appealing to you, but more accessible to a much larger, less technical audience.

Different goals imply different success criteria. If the goal is reach rather than comprehensive education, a million views in seven days looks like success.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-27 20:22:11+00:00
Was there ever good coffee in NYC? I was a kid in the 90’s so I wouldn’t remember any time before. I grew up in NE and am convinced we

1) just haven’t really ever been on the forefront of coffee

2) invented Dunkin Donuts to flip off the coffee world (I know people sometimes say it is good but I think they are just being contrarian (although I will agree it is really not much worse than, or is just as good as, Starbucks))

Anyway, I’m pretty glad for the explosion of hobbyist coffee, it is pretty easy to make a good espresso at home these days.
by simonw | 2026-01-27 20:22:17+00:00
(This relates to my note at the end of https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/one-human-one-agent-on... )

The things that make me think this is still a huge project include:

1. JavaScript and the DOM. There's a LOT there, especially making sure that when the DOM is updated the page layout reflows promptly and correctly.

2. Security. Browsers are an incredibly high-risk environment, especially once you start implementing JavaScript. There are a ton of complex specs involved here too, like CORS and CSP and iframe sandbox and so on. I want these to be airtight and I want solid demonstrations of how airtight they are.

3. WebAssembly in its various flavors, including WebGPU and WebGL

4. It has to be able to render the real Web - starting with huge and complex existing applications like Google Maps and Google Docs and then working through that long tail of weird old buggy websites that the other browsers have all managed to render.

I expect that will keep people pretty busy for a while yet, no matter how many agents they throw at it.
by moregrist | 2026-01-27 20:22:22+00:00
I haven’t had the need to in decades either but I can still do it. Similarly with the standard algorithms for multi-digit addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

I think learning these algorithms was useful not because we use these tools ourselves but because it taught us useful concepts: very practical step-by-step algorithms, and a hands-on introduction to decimal places and powers of ten.

There are other ways to learn these things but I learned them in elementary school by doing hundreds of arithmetic problems over 4-5 years. That knowledge stays with me even if I don’t pull out long division for anything practical.
by techterrier | 2026-01-27 20:22:27+00:00
It would be considered way on the right generally. To the right of the Telegraph, the main right wing broadsheet.

It's a funny old magazine though, they really do get all sorts in there and print stuff that others wouldn't. It's entirely editorial though with huge biases.

I'm glad it exists and read it often, but I'd go checking everything I read in it if I was after some facts.
by dakiol | 2026-01-27 20:22:34+00:00
I kinda agree, but I also gain pleasure from doing all those things that are not supposed to be "the thing". The thinking, the dreaming, the visualizing... I just like that. I do it a lot when working on personal projects (which some of them I never ship). I think it's fine, and I wouldn't go as far as saying that those things are "not doing the thing"; in many ways those things are "the thing", at least for me.
by palmotea | 2026-01-27 20:22:36+00:00
> No? The point is that the US government made this deal with Tiktok so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like.

That's too black and white. The Tiktok sale isn't just one thing by one actor for one reason, it's more complicated. There's the Biden administration bill, there's Trump's deal implementing it, etc. I don't think the bill that forced the sale was passed "so the US can censor stuff the US government doesn't like." Before Trump got involved, it was heading for a straight blackout (which IMHO would have been better for everyone).
by toast0 | 2026-01-27 20:23:05+00:00
It is the fault of systemd that there's no interactive control.

On other inits, I can hit ctrl-C to break out of a poorly configured setup. Yes, it's more difficult when there's potentially parallelism. But systemd is not uniformly better than everything else when it lacks interactivity.

And it might not be better than everything else if common distributions set it up wrong because it's difficult to set it up right. If we're willing to discount problems related to one init system because the distribution is holding it wrong, then why don't we blame problems with other init systems on distributions or applications, too? There's no need to restart crashing applications if applications don't crash, etc.
by hulitu | 2026-01-27 20:23:18+00:00
> Never understood why it went away from most distributions forever.

CADT.

"Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks... "

Xmms uses gtk 2 i think.
GTK is now at version 4 or 5.
by mrkeen | 2026-01-27 20:23:19+00:00
I don't think we did security 20 years ago, even if there were lessons.

Maybe the path was:

* Build it
* Build it right
* Build it fast
* Build it secure

It felt like we made it somewhere into the 'built it fast' phase before getting yanked onto the next feature.

These days it feels more like:

* Build it
* Build it with k8s
* Build it with observability
* Get sidetracked and play with AI
* Debug it
* Debug it some more
* Give up on debugging it
* Do a tech debt sprint
* Refactor the deployment pipeline

I would love the Overton window to somehow shift back to topics like "how do we know the code is correct and addresses the right problem?" over "how many tickets or LOC did your agent do for you today?". I don't know how we get back.
by cwillu | 2026-01-27 20:23:26+00:00
It very clearly is restrictive of software freedom. I've never suffered from an evil maid breaking into my house to access my computer, but I've _very_ frequently suffered from corporations trying to prevent me from doing what I wish with my own things. We need to push back on this notion that this sort of thing was _ever_ for the end-user's benefit, because it's not.
by SR2Z | 2026-01-27 20:23:31+00:00
Unless they compel people at gunpoint (which prevents the government from bringing a case), they will probably not have much luck with this. As soon as a user sets up a passcode or other lock on their phone, it is beyond the ability of even most parts of the US government to look inside.

It's much more likely that the government convinces one member of the group chat to turn on the other members and give up their phone numbers.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 20:24:20+00:00
Hey this looks great? Is it available on Openrouter.

I wish if AI2 could release a more denser model on Openrouter for free than the 8B model as I was using Devstral model for agentic purposes.

If we can get an agentic good 32B like model on openrouter for ~free, then I feel like it will be very interesting to see how things would go imo.

Good luck with AI2! The premise of truly open source models is really interesting and I feel like it could help bring more innovation in the space imo!
by cheeseomlit | 2026-01-27 20:24:39+00:00
Agreed 100%, C# is obviously a second-class citizen and I'm not going to waste my time with GDScript. It really is a shame because there are so many things to like about Godot, but the litany of issues with C# support due to their focus on GDScript has just soured the whole thing for me. Unity is just not an option as far as I'm concerned due to their bizarre licensing fiasco (and their own mountain of technical issues). So it's Monogame/FNA for me I suppose.
by jaredklewis | 2026-01-27 20:24:45+00:00
Maybe I’m missing something, but why can’t it be true? If I’m a PhD deciding what to do with the next few years of my life, the fact that government jobs currently seem very unstable might make PhDs hesitant to choose this path. There’s probably also at least some PhDs (given the overwhelmingly left leaning politics of grad students) that don’t want to be involved with this administration. So maybe more PhDs are going into the private sector.

On the other side, budget cuts might mean that you have less money to spend on the PhDs that are interested.

So it doesn’t seem inherently contradictory to me.
by oconnor663 | 2026-01-27 20:24:48+00:00
As far as I know, most CDC schemes requires a single-threaded pass over the whole file to find the chunk boundaries? (You can try to "jump to the middle", but usually there's an upper bound on chunk length, so you might need to backtrack depending on what you learn later about the last chunk you skipped?) The more cores you have, the more of a bottleneck that becomes.
by lupsasca | 2026-01-27 20:24:55+00:00
I am very sympathetic to your point of view, but let me offer another perspective. First off, you can already vibe-write slop papers with AI, even in LaTeX format--tools like Prism are not needed for that. On the other hand, it can really help researchers improve the quality of their papers. I'm someone who collaborates with many students and postdocs. My time is limited and I spend a lot of it on LaTeX drudgery that can and should be automated away, so I'm excited for Prism to save time on writing, proofreading, making TikZ diagrams, grabbing references, etc.
by disqard | 2026-01-27 20:24:55+00:00
The fact that we didn't jail/banish him after leading an insurrection against the US Capitol was the "too far gone" moment.

Anything after that, is just Yet Another millimeter along the same trajectory:

Well, if we let him get away with J6, then I don't see how this is too much worse.

To tie this to your point, I honestly don't see why the Greenland letter should suddenly be the straw that shatters this particular dromedary's spine.
by bloppe | 2026-01-27 20:25:04+00:00
I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions. There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay for the wasted time.

Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-27 20:25:09+00:00
“More efficient” is relative. While tauri and dioxus can lower the install size, they’re not going to be meaningfully more efficient than electron for memory usage or speed since Chrome probably does better than the other frameworks, and consistently across OSes which dioxus and tauri struggle with since they are dependent on the host OS’s web implementation. Slint is interesting here but then it’s more rust and less web coding.
by simonw | 2026-01-27 20:25:16+00:00
GPT-5.2 has a 400,000 token context window. Claude Opus 4.5 is just 200,000 tokens. To my surprise this doesn't seem to limit their ability to work with much larger codebases - the coding agent harnesses have got really good at grepping for just the code that they need to have in-context, similar to how a human engineer can make changes to a million lines of code without having to hold it all in their head at once.
by auxym | 2026-01-27 20:25:21+00:00
Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).

I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/
by kevinsync | 2026-01-27 20:25:29+00:00
You being an outside observer of my country, what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective? I imagine even if people we need are welcomed back with open arms, they're not going to want to come. I sure wouldn't want to go back to a bar where the bouncer kicked the shit out of me!

Just curious, it's hard to see things clearly from inside the carnival.
by spankalee | 2026-01-27 20:25:52+00:00
The J6 insurrectionists committed real crimes, and it's very good that they were rounded up, but afaiu most of the evidence had to do with them provably assaulting officers, damaging property, and breaking into a government building. Not that they messaged other people when they were legally demonstrating before the Capital invasion.

The real protection for the legal protesters and observers in MN is numbers. They can't arrest and control and entire populace.
by Intralexical | 2026-01-27 20:25:58+00:00
> So congratulations to the Trump team: your stupidity and your hate for intellectualism is directly fueling new technologies to the country you consider 'your enemy'.

Do we have any evidence that they actually consider China (or Russia) to be "the enemy"? They are fellow authoritarians, with a shared goal of normalizing domestic political suppression.
by mycodendral | 2026-01-27 20:26:22+00:00
18 U.S.C. § 372 — Conspiracy to impede or injure officer

If two or more persons in any State, Territory, Possession, or District conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof, or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave the place where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or to injure him in his person or property on account of his lawful discharge of the duties of his office, or while engaged in the lawful discharge thereof, or to injure his property so as to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties, each of such persons shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six years, or both.

Federal felony
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-01-27 20:26:35+00:00
I'm a phd who used to be in civil service.

What you write here is certainly the goal, and I had a lot of colleagues who agreed with you. I thought it was bogus then, and I think it's bogus now.

Also people quit jobs all the time because of the boss. Usually it's the direct one, but not always, and as above, so below.

> reasonable scrutiny and auditing

It's been well over a decade since I left, and I'm sure it's gotten worse for those who stayed, but: lol. lmao.
by retired | 2026-01-27 20:26:52+00:00
Spain. And I have to apologise, I call myself retired but in reality I'm just unemployed. It's more of a year long sabbatical, but I jokingly call it retirement since I moved to Spain and many Dutch people do so for retirement. I'm planning on setting up a company here.

Spain isn't great for being employed or freelance (autonomo) but if you set up a limited liability company (SL) and work from there it is not that bad. Tax on investments are averagely taxed compared to other countries.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-27 20:27:02+00:00
Secure Boot only extends the chain of trust from your firmware down the first UEFI binary it loads.

Currently SB is effectively useless because it will at best authenticate your kernel but the initrd and subsequent userspace (including programs that run as root) are unverified and can be replaced by malicious alternatives.

Secure Boot as it stands right now in the Linux world is effectively an annoyance that’s only there as a shortcut to get distros to boot on systems that trust Microsoft’s keys but otherwise offer no actual security.

It however doesn’t have to be this way, and I welcome efforts to make Linux just as secure as proprietary OSes who actually have full code signature verification all the way down to userspace.
by zeroc8 | 2026-01-27 20:27:05+00:00
I believe the damage is done and there will be no going back to the old ways.
This time around I'm sensing a real change in attitude. People in Europe are sick and tired of all the US bullshit that's been going on for far too long. It's not just the lunatic in the White House. It's the whole system that's being rejected. The endless greed. The bigotry. The war on everything.
Peaceful cooperation and coexistence, that's what we want. I'm for my part quite happy and optimistic about the deal with India and I hope more regions will follow soon.
by janalsncm | 2026-01-27 20:27:07+00:00
Yeah whenever people say “the first amendment is not a freedom from consequences” it is only a freedom from certain consequences (and that freedom only goes as far as the government is willing to protect it). It is a freedom from being convicted. They can still arrest you, you can still spend time in jail, prosecutors can even file charges. A court is supposed to throw those charges out. And in extreme cases you can be convicted and sent to prison for years before SCOTUS rules.