MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pcrh | 2026-01-21 19:36:00+00:00
It took me a few minutes to track down the original source of this. It is a paper by Dr George Walkden published in 2013 called "The status of hwæt in Old English" You can access the pdf from the link below [0].

The abstract reads:

>It is commonly held that Old English hwæt, well known within Anglo-Saxon studies as the first word of the epic poem Beowulf, can be ‘used as an adv[erb]. or interj[ection]. Why, what! ah!’ (Bosworth & Toller 1898, s.v. hwæt, 1) as well as the neuter singular of the interrogative pronoun hwa ̄ ‘what’. In this article I challenge the view that hwæt can have the status of an interjection (i.e. be outside the clause that it precedes). I present evidence from Old English and Old Saxon constituent order which suggests that hwæt is unlikely to be extra-clausal. Data is drawn from the Old English Bede, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints and the Old Saxon Heliand. In all three texts the verb appears later in clauses preceded by hwæt than is normal in root clauses (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.0001 in both cases). If hwæt affects the constituent order of the clause it precedes, then it cannot be truly clause- external. I argue that it is hwæt combined with the clause that follows it that delivers the interpretive effect of exclamation, not hwæt alone. The structure of hwæt-clauses is sketched following Rett’s (2008) analysis of exclamatives. I conclude that Old English hwæt (as well as its Old Saxon cognate) was not an interjection but an underspecified wh-pronoun introducing an exclamative clause.

[0] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/413d...
by cstdsmrtcntrct | 2026-01-21 19:36:12+00:00
Multisig with no smart contract is the simplest escrow.

It's probably simple to find a validated smart contract that splits its inputs to multiple outputs?

If there is transaction privacy for the smart contracts, then how to verify that the contract actually still sends to the correct - initially configured - parties?

And then logging. Task accounting implies logging, but logs are bytes that cost money in a blockchain so is the transaction log sufficient
by AkshatM | 2026-01-21 19:36:24+00:00
First off, my heart goes out to you. Thinking that you chose to be a bystander must have cut really core to your sense of identity. It's been difficult to reconcile being a good person and choosing to do nothing for you, and I don't wish that kind of doubt and angst on anyone. I'm sorry that it's affecting you now in ways you are worried can be counterproductive.

Second, I want to offer an unsolicited perspective that may help you. I read your linked post about Lowtax's death and how it went down for you. You're blaming the 2021 version of yourself for not making the right choice, but what I read wasn't selfishness or cowardice stopping you from speaking up - it was an assessment of your ability to make a difference. I'm not saying you should never speak up when you feel something is off, or demonstrate concern, but that person in 2021 understood the many, many barriers to saving Lowtax: the unpredictability of his response, the ambiguity of the message, the concern that it wasn't your place, the large possibility you were overreacting. What would you have done? What would you have said? How would you have been able to reach them that closer friends, family, and others would not? You are telling yourself you somehow had the knowledge, therefore the responsibility and power, but in reality you had no power and only the barest hint of knowledge. You had no idea if what you were doing was right or not, how it would be taken, how it would have been perceived, or what the consequences were. You are only _guessing_ that by taking some miraculous action you could have averted the outcome, but in truth no action might have been good enough - you could have spent a year and three months getting them the resources they need, and still they could have done this.

When someone takes their life, it isn't the fault of the lone stranger who wanted to say hello. You did not choose to be a bystander - rather, by taking their life, they made you a bystander. You have to separate your sense of moral esteem from the consequences of someone else's choices. Yes, anyone could have done something, said something - and for all you know people did!

Inaction by itself is not a moral hazard. Inaction when armed with the facts, the ability to make a difference, the understanding that the difference made will be significant or material, and where the action is scoped enough to not jeopardize the situation - this is the real hazard. In 2021, you did not have the facts or the ability to make a meaningful difference - only the slim possibility that a message in the dark might have ruined nothing and saved life. But that is fantasy talking, not genuine pragmatism.

I hope this gives you some permission and at least a framework to measure your "overhelping" against. Therapy has been helpful for me in the past when dealing with complicated emotions.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-21 19:36:30+00:00
Where does "politics" end, then? What about articles pointing out a tech company's ethical wrongdoing? Or about their legal troubles? How about the technology behind war fighting drones? Or software's role in mass surveillance, war crimes and ethnic cleansing? Are these all off limits because they are inherently political? By banning these and similar topics, HN's purpose becomes more and more about whitewashing the industry and less and less about honest discussion.
by petre | 2026-01-21 19:36:35+00:00
> a) titles, and b) whom may use those titles

We had a German acquaintance who has registered with the bank here as Dr. Jane Doe and ran into issues because Dr. appeared nowhere on her ID. The funny part is that she emigrated from Eastern Europe during her 30s, but was somehow brainwashed by German culture. Whenever I see someone obsessively listing their title I'm reminded of her story.
by throwaway150 | 2026-01-21 19:36:43+00:00
*smh*

Every time I hear a story like this (and there's one like every month) I wonder how we ended up here. The internet was meant to be this place where anyone could set up a website, run a business, and reach customers directly. Instead it has turned into a collection of walled gardens, where your existence and livelihood depend on the whims of an opaque algorithm.

Fortunately in my country Amazon does not have the level of market control it has in the US and some other places. People still walk or drive to local shops and when they order something for delivery they usually do so from their websites.

But reading many of these HN threads gives the impression that in the US and elsewhere Amazon controls a huge share of the market. If it functions as such a powerful exchange for both merchants and buyers, should there not be regulation to prevent injustices like this?
by colechristensen | 2026-01-21 19:36:53+00:00
Is it not reproducable? Someone up thread reproduced it and expanded on it. It worked for me the first time I prompted. Did you try it or are you just guessing that it's not reproducable because that's what you already think?

I'm not talking about completely replacing humans, the goal of this exercise was demonstrating how to use an LLM to filter out garbage. Low quality semi-anonymous reports don't deserve a whole lot of accuracy and being conservative and rejecting most reports even when you throw out legitimate ones is fine.

You seem like regardless of evidence presented, your prejudices will lead you to the same conclusions, so what's the point discussing anything? I looked for, found, and shared evidence, you're sharing your opinion.

>IIRC DOGE did something like this to analyze government jobs that were needed or not and then fired people based on that. Guess how good the result was?

I'm talking about filtering spammy communication channels, that has nothing like the care required in making employment decisions.

Your comment is plainly just bad faith and prejudice.
by huntergemmer | 2026-01-21 19:36:56+00:00
Interesting idea - I haven't explored wavelet-based approaches but the intuition makes sense: decompose into frequency bands, keep the low-frequency trend, and selectively preserve high-frequency peaks that exceed some threshold.

My concern would be computational cost for real-time/streaming use cases. LTTB is O(n) and pretty cache-friendly. Wavelet transforms are more expensive, though maybe a GPU compute shader could make it viable.

The other question is whether it's "visually correct" for charting specifically. LTTB optimizes for preserving the visual shape of the line at a given resolution. Wavelet decomposition optimizes for signal reconstruction - not quite the same goal.

That said, I'd be curious to experiment. Do you have any papers or implementations in mind? Would make for an interesting alternative sampling mode.
by matkoniecz | 2026-01-21 19:37:03+00:00
> is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos?

I guess if you look for one you can find Linux distribution with ads in start menu

> But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.

not to me

> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.

For me on Lubuntu my two desktops work well. Required a bit of googling how to setup, but it took me more time to fail at removing similar Windows annoyance.

Package managers are great, I have configuration of my packages in Ansible and single script run installs all my software except VSCodium and Android Studio.

Stuff nearly often just works.

Not sure what you mean by gestures.

> installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.

Even that beats what I remember from my Windows days that required going through billion of installer wizards, with decent chunk of them trying to bring some unwanted stuff.

And my install is nearly pure install from OS packages with some minor annoyance for Android Studio and VSCodium.
by kalkin | 2026-01-21 19:37:03+00:00
Neither in my previous comment nor in my actual views do I dismiss the human element or expect to isolate myself from societal effects.

> I was pleasantly surprised that this was not yet another argument of "AI is (not) good enough"

The article does assert that, and that's important for its argument that ordinary workers just need to convince decisionmakers that things will go poorly if they replace us.

"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem... But AI can’t do your job."

This isn't ambiguous.
by KK7NIL | 2026-01-21 19:37:07+00:00
> And the important part you need for that inspiration is a lot narrower than full equivalence.

The blogpost is discussing exactly what you gain (and lose) when arrays and functions fit this strict definition, allowing a unification of the syntax and possible compiler optimizations.
I think the point they're making is exactly that having only a loose equivalence between arrays and functions might be a programming status quo that could be holding us back from a higher level abstraction.
by agentifysh | 2026-01-21 19:37:19+00:00
This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ?

Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications.

I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.
by ACCount37 | 2026-01-21 19:37:28+00:00
It's probably used for context self-distillation. The exact setup:

1. Run an AI with this document in its context window, letting it shape behavior the same way a system prompt does

2. Run an AI on the same exact task but without the document

3. Distill from the former into the latter

This way, the AI internalizes the behavioral changes that the document induced. At sufficient pressure, it internalizes basically the entire document.
by kergonath | 2026-01-21 19:37:54+00:00
> To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS being an UNIX or not. It's a bit weird to see the allusion to UNIX to be fair: Howard Oakley is deep enough down the rabbit hole that I would expect him to know that History is full of proprietary and closed UNIXes.
by einr | 2026-01-21 19:38:19+00:00
This is the same stuff that comes up every time in these threads, and at some point, you have to consider that maybe you're holding it wrong. For example: "installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source"? Like Windows and macOS aren't hellish wastelands of unreliable and inconsistent installations? Really?

Microsoft Store? .msi? Custom .exe installer that litters random junk in inscrutable places and that is impossible to know how to cleanly uninstall? Just a zip file that you dump somewhere? Chocolatey? WinGet?

Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications? A standard installer? A custom installer that does who knows what? App Store? Homebrew? MacPorts? Just a tar.gz with random crap in it?

Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.

Linux can be a much cleaner and more coherent desktop experience than Windows but at some point you have to respect that you are using a fundamentally different operating system. If you're trying to use Windows on your Linux computer, you are going to have a bad time.
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-21 19:38:25+00:00
That only punishes the taxpayers after all.

I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers. We can jail negligent or reckless public officials, the financial costs of investigating and compensating people are an economic incentive to promulgate better standards in the first place.
by weisnobody | 2026-01-21 19:38:36+00:00
I think the crawled data should have to be shared, but I'm not convinced that Google should have to share their index.

It may be impracticable to share the crawled data, but from the stand point of content providers, having a single entity collecting the information (rather than a bunch of people doing) would seem to be better for everyone. Likely need to have some form of robots.txt which would allow the content provider to indicate how their content could be used (i.e research, web search, AI, etc.).

The people accessing the crawled data would end up paying (reasonable) fees to access the level of data they want, and some portion of that fee would go to the content provider (30% to the crawler and 70% to the crawler? :P maybe).

Maybe even go so far as to allow the Paywalled content providers to set a price on accessing their data for the different purposes. Should they be allowed to pick and choose who within those types should be allowed (or have it be based on violations of the terms of access)

It seems in part the content providers have the following complaints:

* Too many crawlers (see note below re crawlers)
* Crawlers not being friendly
* Improper use of the crawled data
* Not getting compensated for their content

Why not the index? The index, to me, is where a bunch of the "magic" happens and where individual companies could differentiate themselves from everyone else.

Why can't Microsoft retain Bing traffic when it's the default on stock Windows installs?

* Do they not have enough crawled data?
* Their index isn't very good?
* Their searching their index isn't good
* The way they present the data is bad?
* Google is too entrenched?
* Combination of the above?

There are several entities intending to crawl all / large portions of the Internet: Baidu, Bing, Brave, Google, DuckDuckGo, Gigablast, Mojeek, Sogou and Yandex [1]. That does not include any of the smaller entities, research projects, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#2000s–present:_P... (2019)
by Eric_WVGG | 2026-01-21 19:38:53+00:00
> Since I already committed to ditching my partner in favor of a more attractive ex…

This was a funny sentence to read, as my first thought as I started the article was “Windows users are starting to remind me of people stuck in cycles of abusive relationships.”

Windows has been in a cycle of abusively bad releases followed by sheepish "sorry, we learned our lesson" releases for nearly thirty years. What is the author’s plan for five years from now, just hope that Windows 12 isn't garbage?

All I can figure is that every generation spawns a new set of users who never knew any better, a segment of them reaching the breaking point, but can't be bothered to influence the next generation.

regardless: this is always who Windows was. Get out and get help.
by m463 | 2026-01-21 19:39:09+00:00
I think this thinking is very common at the end of life. You want to do Something Meaningful for your family, and passing on the fruits of your labor to grandchildren is meaningful, giving them education, medical care and opportunity.

There are lots of tax laws that support this.

Do you think it is immoral for creative ip, ip in general, or even money?
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-21 19:39:26+00:00
So you defend freedom of speech, but not for the people and the ideas you don't like. That's not freedom of speech, and you have a lot in common with Putinists on that matter.

They also sanction who they perceive as western assets, by the way. And see nothing wrong sending dissidents to jail with similar vague hate speech laws that we have in the EU [0]. In fact, they even eradicated their far-right! [1] Navalny was prosecuted because he was "extremist", for instance.

So how do you feel being in such ideological proximity with Putin's Russia? Just like others, you enjoy gloating about feel-good "values" but don't believe at all in them, which would require some discomfort and radicality.

[0] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/freedom-and-restriction-s...

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/12/16/the-death-of-t...
by eikenberry | 2026-01-21 19:39:40+00:00
> The first is the articulation of a process by which an intent gets actualized into an automation. The second is the translation of that intent into instructions that a machine can follow.

IMO this pattern fails on non-trivial problems because you don't know how the intent can be actualized into automation without doing a lot of the mechanical conversion first to figure out how the intent maps to the automation. This mapping is the engineering. If you can map the intent to actualization without doing it, then this is a solved problem in engineering and be usable by non-engineers. Relating this to your simile, it is more like a developer vs. an architect where the developer uses pre-designed building vs. the architect which needs to design a new building to meet a certain set of design requirements.
by kayodelycaon | 2026-01-21 19:39:40+00:00
There isn’t any app on windows or linux that can match what Preview does.

One thing you may not know about is you can map anything in the menu bar to a keyboard shortcut. The application doesn’t even know you did that. That’s an operating system feature that neither Windows nor Linux can implement reliably.

Accessibility is another one.

It’s like this all over the operating system. There’s a deep integration with the apps and the UI you wouldn’t notice unless you’re a power user.
by necovek | 2026-01-21 19:40:03+00:00
This was probably the best thing I've done to learn the ins and outs of a running Linux system: I think it would be amazing to re-do it with a modern Linux stack (systemd + Wayland), but it can really remove all the "magic" from the full OS implementation for you.

However, I've done it in 1999 and ran that system until 2001 when it became too much of a trouble to recompile everything and battle dependencies manually — note that LFS was not as detailed then either, so many dependencies you had to track yourself, and some were very obscure!

Yes, the time investment was high, but I was a high school student starting college with too much interest in something like this and obviously enough time on my hands (after which I was so "smart" to switch to Slackware, a one-man show where I also ended up having manually compiled versions of "small packages" like XFree86 and GNOME, which I was contributing to: when "GARNOME" showed up, that was a revelation! etc)

So if you can afford it, do it: using Linux will never be the same again!
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-21 19:40:08+00:00
Perhaps so, but there are only 5 uses of 'authentic' which I feel is almost an exact synonym and a similarly common word - I wouldn't think you need a thesaurus for that one. Another relatively semantically close word, 'honest' shows up 43 times also, but there's an entire section headed 'being honest' so that's pretty fair.
by jy-tan | 2026-01-21 19:40:10+00:00
Fair point, it does raise the bar! The distinction I'm drawing is between "semi-trusted" and "actively malicious".

Fence handles well supply-chain scripts that phone home, tools that write broadly across your filesystem, accidental secret leakage, the "opportunistic" stuff that makes up most real-world supply chain incidents.

I hedge on malware because: (1) Domain filtering relies on programs respecting HTTP_PROXY, and malware could ignore it (though direct connections are blocked at the OS level, so they'd fail rather than succeed), (2) OS sandboxes (sandbox-exec, bubblewrap) aren't VM-level isolation and I believe determined attackers could exploit kernel bugs, (3) there are no resource limits or content inspection.

The threat model is really "reduce blast radius from code you're running anyway". For a stronger containment boundary you'd want a proper VM.

More thoughts in the security model doc (https://github.com/Use-Tusk/fence/blob/main/docs/security-mo...) if you're curious!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-21 19:40:18+00:00
I would assume that anyone optimizing kernels at Anthropic has full documentation and specs for what they are working on, as well as a personal butler attending to their every need. This is big money work - every 1% performance improvement must translate to millions of cost savings.

Maybe they specified the challenge in this half-assed way to deliberately test those sorts of skills (even if irrelevant to the job), or maybe it was just lazily put together.

The other thing to note is that if you look at what the reference_kernel() is actually doing, it really looks like a somewhat arbitrary synthetic task (hashes, wraparound), so any accurate task specification would really need to be a "line by line" description of the steps, at which point you may as well just say "here's some code - do this".
by nailer | 2026-01-21 19:40:22+00:00
> all the actions taken against American citizens and legal migrants.

Yes, for example this guy. He was indeed an american citizen, and anti-ICE activists framed it has him being kidnapped and driven around for two hours. The wider story is much more interesting: https://x.com/TriciaOhio/status/2013317071342317918

> I would not take his talking points to reflect Democratic Party orthodoxy.

Yes, agreed. That's the point. Bill Maher's views haven't changed much compared to 15 years ago, the Democratic Party's views have.

Also 'talking points' is a silly word for things people say. I write things, you write things. You don't have 'talking points' an I don't have 'talking points'.
by ValdikSS | 2026-01-21 19:40:22+00:00
I cracked into many x86-based arcade machines (and non-arcade gambling machines), and none of them used anything really bespoke. I never seen non-BIOS/UEFI x86 system in my life.

Not going to say they are non-existent, but probably the only mention of not using UEFI on Intel chips was in the presentation of Linux optimization for automotive from Intel itself, where they booted Linux in 2 seconds from the cold boot.