MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2026-01-27 02:08:21+00:00
It's garbage in the same way that the Bourne shell is garbage. People can pontificate 19 replies deep in the comments about the right way to express a problem using sum types in Rust, but sometimes you just want to check the script in and move on.

Same deal here: there is value to having a product that stops squeaks, cleans rust and de-goo's gunk on the supermarket shelf. 70% of the time, snobbery is just snobbery. The world runs on Getting Stuff Done.
by laurencerowe | 2026-01-27 02:08:23+00:00
I think it’s more historical at this point. 20 years ago SMS was expensive in Europe as we had cheap plans and expensive calls/texts vs US which had expensive plans but free calls/texts. That made things like WhatsApp take off in Europe while Americans would just SMS.

(Although most Americans have iPhones so just transparently avoid SMS for most of their conversations.)
by leguminous | 2026-01-27 02:09:15+00:00
What is the advantage over blue noise? I've had very good results with a 64x64 blue noise texture and it's pretty fast on a modern GPU. Are quasirandom sequences faster or better quality?

(There's no TAA in my use case, so there's no advantage for interleaved gradient noise there.)

EDIT: Actually, I remember trying R2 sequences for dither. I didn't think it looked much better than interleaved gradient noise, but my bigger problem was figuring out how to add a temporal component. I tried generalizing it to 3 dimensions, but the result wasn't great. I also tried shifting it around, but I thought animated interleaved gradient noise still looked better. This was my shadertoy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/33cXzM
by fn-mote | 2026-01-27 02:09:44+00:00
> I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt and it came back with a terrifying diagnosis

I don't get it... a doctor ordered the blood work, right? And surely they did not have this opinion or you would have been sent to a specialist right away. In this case, the GP who ordered the blood work was the gatekeeper. Shouldn't they have been the person to deal with this inquiry in the first place?

I would be a lot more negative about "the medical establishment" if they had been the ones who put you through the trauma. It sounds like this story is putting yourself through trauma by believing "Dr. GPT" instead of consulting a real doctor.

I will take it as a cautionary tale, and remember it next time I feed all of my test results into an LLM.
by FarmerPotato | 2026-01-27 02:09:52+00:00
+1 for the mention of Forth. I use it often. LLM answers are possible now, but they are like translated C. It’s very bad style.

The standard: Forth words should be a few lines of code with a straightforward stack effect. Top level of a program might be 5 words.

LLM will generate some subroutines and one big word of 20-50 lines of nested IF..THEN..ELSE and DO..WHILE just as if it writing C.
by G_o_D | 2026-01-27 02:10:13+00:00
I still only have CRT, No matter how much i browse shopping sites or visit showrooms, i cannot make up my mind buying newer tv, lcd, led, plasma, oled etc, so much new technologies have arrived but i have'nt tried them for TV Yet as of today

My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories

During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years

I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung,
channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time

Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes,

Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top
by stockresearcher | 2026-01-27 02:10:29+00:00
So far in the 119th congress there have been 3688 bills filed in the Senate. A fraction of a percent of them will ever get talked about, voted on, or passed an sent to the House. It’s performative theatre for the constituents back home.

And especially, if you’ve noticed, lately the Senate has taken to gaveling into session for the sole purpose of declaring a recess until the next day - being in session for less than 30 seconds a day! Today, they were in session for 11 seconds…
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-27 02:10:33+00:00
The Luddites indeed lost their jobs to machines, but they could find other jobs, and their children adapted to the changed world.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks that this disruption be different from that one. From his article The Adolescence of Technology, currently on HN's front page:

> AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them. This is very different from previous technologies like mechanized farming, transportation, or even computers. This will make it harder for people to switch easily from jobs that are displaced to similar jobs that they would be a good fit for. For example, the general intellectual abilities required for entry-level jobs in, say, finance, consulting, and law are fairly similar, even if the specific knowledge is quite different. A technology that disrupted only one of these three would allow employees to switch to the two other close substitutes (or for undergraduates to switch majors). But disrupting all three at once (along with many other similar jobs) may be harder for people to adapt to. Furthermore, it’s not just that most existing jobs will be disrupted. That part has happened before—recall that farming was a huge percentage of employment. But farmers could switch to the relatively similar work of operating factory machines, even though that work hadn’t been common before. By contrast, AI is increasingly matching the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be good at the new jobs that would ordinarily be created in response to the old ones being automated. Another way to say it is that AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-27 02:13:13+00:00
"20 year Global War on Terror which cost $6T+"

This was enabled by the US population not even feeling any of the effects of the war: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/were-at-war-americas-at-the-mal...

"Healthcare costs which far outstrip other western nations, mostly paid for out of pocket, and which increase every year"

This is a reason Trump was elected. I already mentioned this in costs. Imagine what will happen if China takes Taiwan, inflation WILL creep into this with increased medicine costs (many pmade in China) and throughout the stack.

"Opioid Crisis which killed more people than all our 20th century wars combined"

Regional pain does not equal national pain. Ask West/East coasters and they dont know this problem as deeply as the deindustrialized Trump voting rustbelt.

"Lack of workplace protections, time off, etc which our peer nations enjoy"

Why do you think AI is being pushed so hard. This is a coming pain that I hope will finally push the US into a true leftist position.

"The Chinese have not dealt with any of these things, so yeah, they have more available capacity to manage new social disruptions. That said, Americans love war, so we could probably add another war without disrupting things too badly."

Do you have any evidence to support this assertion? Do you live in the US?
by egourlao | 2026-01-27 02:13:27+00:00
> The only benefit Canadians get compared to others is the opportunity to work for employers on TN status which is a temporary non-immigrant-intent work visa.

That doesn't strike me as "not at all" when the TN status is 1/ effectively a work visa, whether you like the strings attached or not, and 2/ a foot in the door that lets you move to a more permissive status down the line. A Waterloo or UofT grad can go from applying to a US job to their first day in a few weeks, and the only interaction they'll have with the immigration system will be getting asked for paperwork at the border. Compare that to a British or Japanese new grad, for whom there is essentially very few options unless they have excellent connections or that they display enough extraordinary abilities to be eligible for O-1.
by tick_tock_tick | 2026-01-27 02:14:02+00:00
I've never argued with you that they can't export any oil of course they can. I'm simply stating they don't have the capacity to shit away from exporting to the USA nor do they plan to build said capacity. Maybe if Alberta's proposal actually gets fast tracked approval and isn't bogged down in a decade of court battles with environmental and indigenous groups and I'll consider changing my view.
by defrost | 2026-01-27 02:14:18+00:00
Currently doing the rounds of non US but allied special forces and commando chat groups is the blunt response of US General Tony Thomas, former head of the Special Operations Command (2016 to 2019) to each and every one of the senior Trump administration pushing the domestic terrorist line.

Stephen Miller (for one of many) tweeted:

A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.

General Tony Thomas responded with a high resolution image of the first shot taken, from the rear, execution style:

https://x.com/TonyT2Thomas/status/2015629593265250810

I hope the US population can reign in Hegseth, Miller, Bondi, et al clown car.

It's obvious to all across the globe what's going here.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_A._Thomas can be compared to the bio of the day drinking weekend warrior currently heading the US DoD.
by sinzin91 | 2026-01-27 02:14:43+00:00
disclosure: I have a horse in this race

Beyond a certain scale, you can't keep a mental model of the entire system in your head. What matters then is accessing accurate, up to date information the moment you need it (troubleshooting an unfamiliar subsystem, making a cross-cutting change). Table stakes are IaC, APM, structured logging.

Code-generated docs sound great in theory, but a huge category of knowledge never lives in code (RFCs, deployment processes, how to get prod access). Humans have to write and maintain those. That requires a culture where people believe their effort matters (and ideally gets rewarded). Without that, docs rot regardless of tooling.

Then there's discovery. The docs often exist; they're just buried. RAG tools actually help here imo. When people can find what you wrote, you're more motivated to keep it accurate. As we increasingly rely on agents to tell us about our system, we're going to have to ensure the docs they're reading are not woefully out of date or inaccurate.
by adithyassekhar | 2026-01-27 02:15:03+00:00
This is exactly why I come here. I just woke up and didn't feel like dealing with people today and made that comment. Now you got me thinking, I do like to be social. Just not the kind where the other person is actively trying to sell me something often by being dishonest.

I remember a sales person in a store actively trying to shame me for purchasing from a brand he didn't prefer. I gave him a lot of chances to get off of me, respectfully and firmly. Some really are like blood sucking leeches, they don't come off. He was probably paid to do that.
by uncommoncents | 2026-01-27 02:15:07+00:00
'People' will crawl out of the woodwork to complain about this like it doesn't reflect the necessary and proper conditions of a nation. This has to be one of the most obvious sentences ever written. People these days will gleefully sign themselves into sole and exclusive allegiance with a profit-aligned corporation, but balk when a society they are born into, mandated to protect and represent them, would require the same kind of loyalty.

Go ahead, defend having higher loyalties to another country as a US citizen. We've been dealing with foreign agents and dissidents like you since our founding. There are still plenty of wartime laws we can activate to deal with that kind of sedition.
by FridayoLeary | 2026-01-27 02:15:13+00:00
I would love to visit the US one day and i do understand that it has no obligation to just let me in, but this seems a bit excessive for a short visit especially seeing as my country has a deal with the US not to require visas. I wonder if i would have to disclose my hn account(s). My cover would be blown! I guess i'm lucky i've made pro Trump comments...
by Xmd5a | 2026-01-27 02:15:32+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO

A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)

- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.

- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.

- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.

- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.

- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
by chasil | 2026-01-27 02:15:45+00:00
The Chipolos that I have purchased appear on my phone when first presented, then do not offer to pair to other users' Find Hubs unless I deregister.

I imagine that Airtag functionality is disabled when Find Hub configures these tags.

I have heard in the commentary here that Chipolo is now making dual-network devices, but only one can be active at a time.

Apple has a larger and more sensitive network, so uses requiring tracking quality would lean that way.

I would prefer to find a tag that can be provisioned on both networks. I don't know if any actually work that way.

I'd also like a tag that would let me take it apart and disable the speaker. For my car, that seems appropriate, if I can also find a placement location which is extremely difficult to access.

Edit: Google is saying that "they generally require switching between networks rather than operating on both simultaneously."
by AstroBen | 2026-01-27 02:15:59+00:00
Yeah, take Ryan Dahl:

His tweets were getting ~40k views average. He made his big proclamation about AI and boom viral 7 million

This is happening over, and over, and over again

I'm not saying he's making shit up but you're naive if you don't think they're slightly tempted by the clear reaction this content gets
by Telaneo | 2026-01-27 02:16:31+00:00
The distance between the promise and the reality really is huge. On some level I wished they'd just promise less, because it's not like LLMs compleatly useless. I don't find much use in them, but some clearly do. They do them. But since the entire economy has apparently bet the farm on AI, underpromising isn't really an option, while underdelivering is a problem for future Microslop and co.
by boarsofcanada | 2026-01-27 02:17:13+00:00
The city does go after the people illegally tagging properties: https://sfstandard.com/2024/10/17/san-francisco-prolific-gra...

https://sfdistrictattorney.org/prolific-tagger-charged-with-...

https://sfist.com/2016/01/25/prolific_tagger_fined_over_200k...

Many more results if you search for “prolific tagger San Francisco”.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-27 02:17:22+00:00
> There are standards for ARM, and they are called UEFI, ACPI, and SMBIOS.

The most popular ARM dev and production board - the Raspberry Pi - doesn't speak a single one of these on its own, so do many of the various clones/alternatives, and many phones don't either, it's LK/aboot, Samsung and MTK have their proprietary bootloaders, and at least in the early days I've come across u-boot as well (edit: MTK's second-stage seems to be an u-boot fork). And Apple of course has been doing their own stuff with iBoot ever since the iPhone/iPod Touch that is now used across the board (replacing EFI which was used in the Intel era), and obviously there was a custom bootloader on the legacy iPods but my days hacking these are long since gone.

I haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with ARM Windows machines, maybe the situation looks better there but that's Qualcomm crap and I'm not touching that.
by augusteo | 2026-01-27 02:17:33+00:00
The frustrating part isn't that the project failed. It's that it was marketed as a success.

I use AI coding tools daily. They're genuinely useful for real work. But stunts like this make it harder to have honest conversations about what AI can and can't do. When executives see "AI built a browser in 3 million lines," they form expectations that set everyone up for disappointment.

The gap between AI demos and AI in production is wider than most people realize. We'd all be better off if people stopped optimizing for impressiveness and started optimizing for honesty.
by augusteo | 2026-01-27 02:17:57+00:00
Large, hard-to-review PRs existed long before AI. The fix is the same: reject them, ask for smaller chunks. If your team doesn't have the culture to do that, AI just accelerates the dysfunction that was already there.

The teams I've seen struggle with this usually have a review bottleneck problem. One or two people doing all the reviews, so they wave things through. AI didn't cause that.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-27 02:18:03+00:00
Anything I know the best practices on how to architect. I don’t do “agentic coding”. I treat AI as a junior developer I have to tell everything and check the work at every phase.

I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. I know AWS well (trust me on this). I don’t know Terraform or the CDK. I use CloudFormation. I was very comfortable not knowing either on projects because I knew I could troubleshoot issues and be prescriptive and detailed.

I wouldn’t try to be an “Azure Architect” and not know the first thing about Azure and depend on AI.
by augusteo | 2026-01-27 02:18:14+00:00
On the API vs local model question:

We went with API embeddings for a similar use case. The cold-start latency of local models across multiple workers ate more money in compute than just paying per-token. Plus you avoid the operational overhead of model updates.

The hybrid approach in this article is smart. Fuzzy matching catches 80% of cases instantly, embeddings handle the rest. No need to run expensive vector search on every query.
by komali2 | 2026-01-27 02:18:15+00:00
I really don't understand the connection between street art and the George Floyd protests. I understand that you generally don't like the idea of people operating outside of the State-mandated heteronormative way, in which case I say, the best way to prevent a riot is not have cops murder people.

We whitewash crime every day here, for example theft of labor value. It's not a crime in the USA but it is a crime insomuch as it's unethical.
by windexh8er | 2026-01-27 02:18:41+00:00
I've done it in the past (~2015). Honestly if Google locked me out of all of those other purchases it'd be great grounds to sue them. If everyone started doing this it would prevent them from doing this in the first place and may be additional fodder for (hopefully) continued anti-trust losses in court. If your life is tied to Google in that way then it's a risk no matter what you do and you should probably think about how to reduce that risk. I don't have anything other than purchases tied to my Google accounts anymore.
by daotoad | 2026-01-27 02:19:23+00:00
For a motivated learner with access to good materials, schools provide two important things besides that very important piece of paper:

1. contacts - these come in the form of peers who are interested in the same things and in the form of experts in their fields of study. Talking to these people and developing relationships will help you learn faster, and teach you how to have professional collegial relationships. These people can open doors for you long after graduation.

2. facilities - ever want to play with an electron microscope or work with dangerous chemicals safely? Different schools have different facilities available for students in different fields. If you want to study nuclear physics, you might want to go to a school with a research reactor; it's not a good idea to build your own.
by ooooppppppp | 2026-01-27 02:19:24+00:00
Attractiveness to talent?

Fairly senior dev, US citizen here (20 years experience).

After what I've seen this past year, but more the past month, I will work for peanuts for a path to citizenship in Canada. US in 5 years is not a place I want to be, looking into all options and very serious.
by halfcat | 2026-01-27 02:19:44+00:00
I think you’re onto something. Frontend tends to not actually solve problems, rather it’s mostly hiding and showing parts of a page. Sometimes frontend makes something possible that wasn’t possible before, and sometimes the frontend is the product, but usually the frontend is an optimization that makes something more efficient, and the problem is being solved on the backend.

It’s been interesting to observe when people rave about AI or want to show you the thing they built, to stop and notice what’s at stake. I’m finding more and more, the more manic someone comes across about AI, the lower the stakes of whatever they made.
by stubish | 2026-01-27 02:20:27+00:00
An AC/DC power converter works the same, either built into the bulb or in a separate unit. But yes, a separate power converter is almost certainly going to do a much better job of removing the 50/60Hz voltage drop. Not sure if it would be cheaper, given the economies of scale on AC bulb manufacture. Higher quality AC bulbs may come out ahead for flicker free lighting.
by komali2 | 2026-01-27 02:21:04+00:00
Then why is Clarion Alley covered in graffiti that hundreds of people a day come to look at? Why is said graffiti often applied by residents?

City ordinance is not an accurate reflection of the desires of all subsections of a city. It's a reflection of the desires of the ruling caste, whose needs sometimes, but frequently don't, align with those of "lower" castes.

A bench is a great place for a nap, unless the mayor happens to see you sleeping on one, gets scared, and calls the cops about it.
by augusteo | 2026-01-27 02:21:22+00:00
I left a large tech company for a startup partly because of this. The politics of shipping were exhausting. At a certain scale, what gets rewarded isn't always what's valuable.

But I'd push back on the idea that all tech companies work this way. Smaller companies and startups can be different. The feedback loops are shorter, you're closer to customers, and it's harder to hide behind the appearance of shipping.

The trick is finding places where the incentives actually align with the work.
by epolanski | 2026-01-27 02:21:45+00:00
Again, if it wasn't for the Soviet Union whole Europe would be speaking German today.

After ww2, the overwhelming majority of french people credited the soviet union as the major contributor to German defeat.

On top of that, the communist party was very important at the time of german occupation as it formed the core of the french resistance. Even today the french communist party still takes 2/3% of votes in elections, albeit a shade of the 20/30% it once had.

So obviously there are going to be french sympathetic to the soviet union due to historical reasons and some hardcore communists leftists.

On the other hand, there are 0 valid reasons to consider any use of the nazi flag sane and even barely comparable.