MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tdfirth | 2026-01-28 00:11:37+00:00
Great post! I've worked on a few query generating systems of varying degrees of complexity, and SQL is pretty rough as a compilation target. I've spent more time than I'd have liked wrestling with queries as comparably ungodly as the beauty you have presented.

One trick that I always find helpful is to unroll the subqueries into a long sequence of CTEs. You can do a depth first traversal of whatever data structure produces your subqueries and build a list of CTEs as you go (and track of all the CTE names of course). The ordering 'just works'!

Slightly nicer SQL doesn't seem important at first for stuff like this, but it's actually a godsend for debugging. Every operation in the query gets a name that's accessible in the outermost scope, so you can slap a `select * from cochoice_abc123` on the end and see what's going on.

Figuring out what's going on in those subqueries was no doubt hellish at times.
by gcr | 2026-01-28 00:13:13+00:00
That can't be right. My onyx boox note air 2 eInk tablet lets me install the google play store by registering myself as an AOSP developer and enrolling my device's serial number or GSF identifier with Google using some Google Form that some android team somewhere's automated by now. The device has no hardware security features from what I can tell. There's no way this platform would pass muster with any bank.
by orwin | 2026-01-28 00:14:10+00:00
I think i disagree? Socdems are mostly weird keynesians, and think of the economy from the demand side. For them, inequality is fundamentally bad because it reduce aggregate demand. You know the legend about Ford paying its employee more so they could afford cars (it was not, competent auto/metallurgy workers were rare and took time to train, he paid them more because he had to to keep them working for him)? That's basically a socdem wet dream (that's why some socdems accepted trickle-down economics like neolibs (i.e without any shred of evidence), because it conform with the theory).

But that's true that a lot of socdems don't really understand economic theory and so some criticism seems empty, because they repeat a criticism they did not understood. And that's ok, because macroeconomics is the less scientific of all social science field (for good reason), and who would want to bother with it (unless you're an idiot who took that in college because it seemed to pair well with math :/)
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-28 00:14:15+00:00
Ah :) On the browser part, I've spent huge chunks of time inside of the browser viewport as a frontend engineer, also as a backend engineer and finally managing infrastructure, but never much inside browser internals and painting, layouting and that sort of stuff. I wouldn't even say that frontend performance (re trashing, re-calculating layouts, etc) is my forte, mostly been focusing on being able to mold codebases into something that doesn't turn into spaghetti after a year of various developers working on it.

The prompts themselves were basically "I'd like this website to render correct: https://medium.com, here's how it looks for me in Firefox with JavaScript turned off: [Image], figure out what features are missing, add them one-by-one, add regression texts and follow REQUIREMENTS.md and AGENTS.md closely" and various iterations/variations of that, so I didn't expressively ask it to implement specific CSS/HTML features, as far as I can remember. Maybe the first 2-3 prompts I did, I'll upload all the session files in a viewable way so everyone can see for themselves what exactly went on :)
by rhcom2 | 2026-01-28 00:14:32+00:00
Their deaths are an outcome of the heavy handed immigration enforcement that has caused the outrage. The raw number of deportations is not the only metric. The enforcement tactics of the Obama admin are not the same as Trump's, this is obvious and incontrovertible.

You don't have to agree with the criticisms but to not even be able to understand why people are upset stretches believability.
by overfeed | 2026-01-28 00:15:06+00:00
> Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song search, album art etc.

I do care for song search in sets; has the use of .cue files fallen out of fashion as a solution[1]? Amarok supported .cue files since forever, its descendants (Clementine, Strawberry) probably do too.

1. Insofar as you can handle hundreds/thousands of tracks in your library named `ID` because the song hadn't been titled at the time of upload (or uploader didn't know the title).
by wyldberry | 2026-01-28 00:15:18+00:00
You're projecting a values claim on the American wars in the middle east on me that I didn't make. It's pretty clear that the ME wars were all around bad and evil.

It doesn't change the organization and tactics used to identify targets are the same methods and strategies used by insurgent groups to select targets and attack. AQI was very sophisticated for the technology they had. Their warriors were brave, cunning, and true believers with efficacious systems for what was available to them.

Twenty years of that, plus the rest of the middle east has now made it particularity common knowledge how to run insurgency cells worldwide. This combined with American expertise brought back and with people legally aiding these groups in setting up their C2 structures with what is effective and what works is no surprise.

This investigation should be no surprise to anyone. They use these techniques because they work. They are so effective at target acquisition, monitoring, and selective engagement that if they flipped from their current tactics to more violent ones it would be a large casualty event.
by noosphr | 2026-01-28 00:15:19+00:00
There is an old saying back home: an idiot never tires, only sweats.

Claude isn't tenacious. It is an idiot that never stops digging because it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Chain of thought's whole raison d'etre was so the model could get out of the local minima it pushed itself in. The issue is that after a year it still falls into slightly deeper local minima.

This is fine when a human is in the loop. It isn't what you want when you have a thousand idiots each doing a depth first search on what the limit of your credit card is.
by SirMaster | 2026-01-28 00:15:46+00:00
And are their laws about how much I can go gamble at the casino right now or how much I can go buy at a liquor store and drink tonight?

Pretty sure too much gambling and too much alcohol is worse than watching too many short videos. So how can we say that spending time on figuring out how to block people from watching too many short videos is a better use of our time and resources than limiting gambling and drinking.
by davewritescode | 2026-01-28 00:16:47+00:00
Nice straw man.

Nobody is talking about banning anything, we’re talking specifically about holding social media companies accountable for marketing to children a product that is knowingly addictive and potentially harmful to their health.

Part of the issue with social media is that no reasonable parent lets their 12 year old watch porn or drink but Instagram and ticktock are on a lot more 12 year old’s phone’s than you realize. Social media has network effects and creates tremendous social pressure to not make your kid “different” when half the classroom is sharing TikToks.

I’m not conservative in the slightest but I see no reason to treat social media any differently than alcohol, tobacco or gambling. Available without restriction to adults but limited to children under a certain age.
by Hikikomori | 2026-01-28 00:17:18+00:00
>Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.

I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-28 00:17:20+00:00
Yes. Cheap–identity systems such as Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to this, and your only defence is to not give out your address as they are unguessable. If you have someone's address, you can spam them, and they can't stop it except by deleting the app or resetting to a new address and losing all their contacts.

SimpleX does better than Session because the address used to add new contacts is different from the address used with any existing contact and is independently revocable. But if that address is out there, you can receive a full queue of spam contacts before you next open the SimpleX app.

Both Session and SimpleX are trivially vulnerable to storage DoS as well.
by jasonfarnon | 2026-01-28 00:17:21+00:00
I'm certain your journal will be using LLMs in reviewing incoming articles, if they aren't already. I also don't think this is in response to the flood of LLM generated articles. Even if authors were the same as pre-LLM, journals would succumb to the temptation, at least at the big 5 publishers, which already have a contentious relationship with the referees.
by dimatura | 2026-01-28 00:17:24+00:00
About 5-6 years ago, I worked a fair bit on an iOS app, primarily in swift (there were some obj-c and C++ bits). Until then, 90% of what I had written was either C++ or python on Linux, and I had never worked on a mobile app and had barely used MacOS (or iOS for that matter, I've always had android phones). From that experience I had an unexpectedly favorable impression of the swift language. I thought the ergonomics of the typing system and error handling compared quite favorably to C++, with better performance and safety compared to python. I didn't really like the Apple frameworks though, it felt like they were always making new ones and the documentation was surprisingly poor. Nor did I really gel with XCode (which is virtually a requisite for iOS development) or MacOS itself. But I actually liked swift enough that I give it a try outside of ios for a few test apps. Unfortunately, at the time swift outside iOS wasn't really mature and there wasn't much of an ecosystem. Not sure how much that has changed, but these days I'd probably reach for rust instead.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-28 00:17:33+00:00
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority

Hmm, I guess I read this as a requirement to find enough supportive evidence to establish your argument as novel (or at least supported in 'established' logic).

An appeal to authority explicitly has no reasoning associated with it; is your argument that one should be able to quote a blog as well as a journal article?
by sublinear | 2026-01-28 00:17:57+00:00
I can't tell if I'm fooling myself or if this actually (partially) worked. Is it possible for only the hour and seconds to sync if the signal isn't perfectly received? How long is it supposed to take to sync the time? Is it possible that this can confuse clocks that get a strong enough real signal while the phone is running this nearby?

I just tried it on a clock that has only ever successfully synced once many years ago, and it's still in the same bad location that never seemed to get a strong enough signal.

Its crappy little LCD animation did indeed seem to dance in sync with when I would turn the signal on and off on my phone. It took a few minutes of trying but then suddenly the hour and seconds updated to the exact time. Had to set the minutes manually :/
by arjie | 2026-01-28 00:18:06+00:00
I used one in San Francisco once because I wanted to try it out. It was honestly a rather flawless experience for me and I liked it because the scan gate and minders (it was when it launched - I don't know if they kept them) kept the shoplifters out. Shoplifters are unpleasant to share a store with. Unsurprisingly, those who skip some social norms also skip other ones.

Anyway, I didn't go back after the first time because it was more like a corner store than a grocery store. Bags of chips and sandwiches in plastic boxes and so on. Overall, the modern Whole Foods is a much better experience. Guards at the entrance to keep unpleasant people out, a fairly quick check-out experience, and the ability to scan your palm instead of having to pull out a credit card or tap your watch.

About the only improvement that I would personally like is a Fast Shopper bonus where you scan something that maps you to your Amazon Prime profile and if you finish checking out fast you get access to a faster lane. The only downside is when people with large bags of things insist on using the self check-out counters and then stand there having mis-scanned items.

Speeding up check-out is a personal life improvement but realistically it would not cause me to shop more, so I understand discontinuing the store.
by simonw | 2026-01-28 00:18:55+00:00
I don't buy this.

It implies that the agents could only do this because they could regurgitate previous browsers from their training data.

Anyone who's watched a coding agent work will see why that's unlikely to be what's happening. If that's all they were doing, why did it take three days and thousands of changes and tool calls to get to a working result?

I also know that AI labs treat regurgitation of training data as a bug and invest a lot of effort into making it unlikely to happen.

I recommend avoiding the temptation to look at things like this and say "yeah, that's not impressive, it saw that in the training data already". It's not a useful mental model to hold.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-01-28 00:18:56+00:00
There's no fear (a bit of anger I must admit). I suspect nearly all of the reaction against this comes from a similar place to where mine does:

All of the real world code I have had to review created by AI is buggy slop (often with subtle, but weird bugs that don't show up for a while). But on HN I'm told "this is because your co-workers don't know how to AI right!!!!" Then when someone who supposedly must be an expert in getting things done with AI posts, it's always big claims with hand-wavy explanations/evidence.

Then the comments section is littered with no effort comments like this.

Yet oddly whenever anyone asks "show me the thing you built?" Either it looks like every other half-working vibe coded CRUD app... or it doesn't exist/can't be shown.

If you tell me you have discovered a miracle tool, just some me the results. Not taking increasingly ridiculous claims at face value is not "fear". What I don't understand is where comments like yours come from? What makes you need this to be more than it is?
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-28 00:19:23+00:00
Are you looking at the Eggo logo in that filing from the 30s? If you look at the modern Eggo logo shown later in the filing compared to the egg roll trucks usage of it in “L’Eggo my eggroll” it is clearly so similar that it is hard to distinguish which “L’Eggo” belongs to the truck if you isolate them.

Parody and fair use are also significantly weakened in law when the use is commercial and without social commentary. Protected parody needs to be more than “I copied your branding style for my business”.

Again I’m not arguing that the law is moral or immoral, just that Kellog’s has a strong claim here under the law given that the branding as a whole is clearly copied from the Eggo brand, and that there is no evidence here that the food truck is trying to make fair use for the purposes of free speech, commentary or parody.

Is anyone going to confuse a waffle with an eggroll? No. But it is perfectly reasonable to think that the food truck is somehow associated with the Eggo food brand. Large corporations do stuff like operate offshoots and pop ups in adjacent niches. Look to IHOP’s brief marketing stunt rebrand to IHOB for an example.
by wyldberry | 2026-01-28 00:19:30+00:00
Like i've said over and over, the tactics used are the distilled what works from those insurgencies honed over decades. They are incredibly effective. The network that was built (several max signal chats, organized territory, labor specialization) has essentially created an effective targeting mechanism.

This isn't a bunch of people organically protesting, this is an organized system designed to "target" ICE agents. The only difference is the payload delivery between physical disruption vs weapon based attacks.
by spiderice | 2026-01-28 00:19:59+00:00
That seems like circular logic.

You're saying parental responsibility should govern because TikTok is legal, while cigarettes require state intervention because they're illegal. But they are only illegal because we made them illegal (for minors). And isn't that exactly what is being discussed here?

For the sake of consistency, do you think cigarettes should be legal for minors if they have parental consent? If not, what is the distinction between TikTok and cigarettes that causes you to think the government should be involved in one but not the other?
by mc32 | 2026-01-28 00:20:14+00:00
I see the issue raised with the process owner being all Executive --but on the other hand due process frequently inadvertently affects non-criminals (i.e. not all suspects are the guilty party in a given case; however many suspects go through a process where they are finally eliminated as a suspect --but that sometimes can carry on for many years as in the Ramsey case and people spend tens of thousand and millions while they are under suspicion (i.e. not cleared of wrongdoing). So due process doesn't guarantee an innocent person is not inadvertently "dragged though mud".
by Bender | 2026-01-28 00:20:16+00:00
The person in front said "I've got the gun, I've got the gun", and I can tell that quite clearly in the videos.

That means there is an even better version that what I saw and heard which means normies will figure out fairly quick this was not malicious intent. Perhaps malicious incompetency but certainly not an intentional execution.

I just want to highlight a reason why you may feel that this level of unrest is meant to "radicalize people".

I would accept that if these were just protesters, stood at the side of the road holding up signs but a number of them are far from it. They have formed military squads, dox agents and attack them at home and in their personal vehicles, coordinate their attacks between multiple groups of "vetted" agitators. They are tracking their personal vehicles and their family members. They are blocking traffic and forcing people out of their cars. At best this is an insurgency being coordinated from out-of-state agitators and at the behest of the state governor. They are egging people on to break numerous laws, obstruct federal agents, throw bricks at agents or anyone they think is an agent, use bull-horns at full volume in the ears of anyone supporting the agents. I could go on for hours regarding all the illegal shenanigans. So yeah these are people trying to radicalize others and trying to get people hurt or killed. This is primarily occurring in sanctuary cities where the government is actively encouraging their citizens to attack federal agents. That is not even close to anything that resembles protesting and is not anywhere near a protected right.

I also blame President Trump for not invoking the insurrection act and curtailing this very early on.
by tverbeure | 2026-01-28 00:20:22+00:00
Thanks for that link.

This part made me laugh though:

> These detectors, as I understand them, often work by measuring two key things: ‘Perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’. Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor."

I can't be the only one who's brain predicted "mat" ?
by throwthrowuknow | 2026-01-28 00:20:26+00:00
Only if you are paying per token on the API. If you are paying a fixed monthly fee then they lose money when you need to burn more tokens and they lose customers when you can’t solve your problems within that month and max out your session limits and end up with idle time which you use to check if the other providers have caught up or surpassed your current favourite.
by basilgohar | 2026-01-28 00:20:35+00:00
The elephant in the room of all of this is that TikTok was the social media platform that allowed for the genocide taking place in Palestine by Israel to reach audiences directly. All other major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) heavily censored this information or outright deplatformed and canceled accounts of prominent dissemination of information about the war crimes being committed by Israelis.

TikTok, outside of the US and Zionist-controlled sphere of influence, remained the one place for this information to be available widely far beyond what was possible on other platforms.

All the other platforms have the same concepts of algorithms and targeting and bubbles. TikTok was uniquely not under Western control, and thus, needed to be pressured to conform.

The significant shift in young people's opinions about Israel in recent years is heavily attributed to the unfiltered information about their ongoing genocide against the Palestinians that they could uniquely see on TikTok and must not be understated, especially in light of all the major shifts in news, media, and social media over the past few years as they grapple with the fallout of losing the narrative.

I don't deny that social media as a whole has many harms and negatives, but there's no action like this being taken against Meta, Google, or Twitter despite the exact same harms present, sometimes even more so, on their platforms. They're already in the same overall group that supports the narrative and have done so by self-censoring their platforms accordingly. TikTok didn't play ball and got trampled.
by pas | 2026-01-28 00:21:38+00:00
that's not the technology

of course it's silly to talk about manufacturing methods and yield and cost efficiency without having an economy to embed all of this into, but ... technology got cheaper means that we have practical knowledge of how to make cheap clocks (given certain supply chains, given certain volume, and so and so)

we can make very cheap very accurate clocks that can be embedded into whatever devices, but it requires the availability of fabs capable of doing MEMS components, supply materials, etc.
by zmmmmm | 2026-01-28 00:22:17+00:00
I wish it could be more granular and ban the actual toxic elements rather than the concept as a whole. In general, people communicating with each other and forming social relationships is good. I get that it is hard to create granular laws that don't then get worked around. But I would predict that banning social media and not the toxic elements of it just means those same toxic elements will now shift to the nearest non-banned form and take root and grow from there. Then we will be banning that, and the next thing and the next ...
by youarentrightjr | 2026-01-28 00:22:26+00:00
> So your device had no user freedom. You're not doing much to refute the notion that these technologies are only useful to severely restrict user freedom for money.

Would love to hear more of your thoughts on how the users of the device I worked on had their freedom restricted!

I guess my company, the user of the device that I worked on, was being harmed by my company, the creator of the device that I worked on. It's too bad that my company chose to restrict the user's freedom in this way.

Who cares if the application of the device was an industrial control scenario where errors are practically guaranteed to result in the loss of human life, and as a result are incredibly high value targets ala Stuxnet.

No, the users rights to run any code trumps everything! Commercial device or not, ever sold outside of the company or not, terrorist firmware update or not - this right shall not be infringed.

I now recognize I have committed a great sin, and hope you will forgive me.