MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danpalmer | 2026-01-26 00:11:47+00:00
Being beholden to a particular server I have no control over sounds like what happened with Twitter/X.

The posts might exist, but they aren't associated with me. Why not? Because I was locked into somewhere and unable to vote with my feet and go elsewhere.

Maybe I stopped paying because the instance owner enforced sanctions against my country? Why should I lose my identity because of that?

> Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

Compatibility issues means lock-in to instances under individual control. Shared protocols means lock-in to a protocol, but ultimately freedom to move. We know that open protocols trumps opt-in collaboration by private entities for freedom.

> You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

See also: instances not federating with other instances that are too small. You technically can, but in practice it goes nowhere.

> On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely.

Bluesky is not perfect, but where it's approaching full decentralisation quickly on a solid foundation, ActivityPub has become the Mastodon show, and is less a decentralised social network, and more a federated set of centralised services with little accountability to users. You can't move, you can't control the content you see, you can't even search. It's a reversion to the days of 14 year olds drunk on power as a mod on a phpbb forum, or the Reddit mods of today.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-01-26 00:12:56+00:00
Couldn't help but notice this absolutely worthless article never mentions heat, which is really of utmost importance during a WINTER STORM. A fossil fuel backup furnace is an absolute requirement anywhere that gets snow and can be used in conjunction with a heat pump on normal days. Solar/battery powers the furnace while propane provides the heat source.

Not being able to make coffee, charge your phone or use Internet is a distant secondary to freezing to death or having pipes burst.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-26 00:12:59+00:00
Ok, let me give you examples.

Much of what many learned about life came from their parents. That included lots of foundational knowledge that was either true or worked well enough.

You learned a ton in school from textbooks that you didn't personally verify.

You learned lots from media, online experts, etc. Much of which you couldn't verify.

In each case, they are making eyewitness claims that are a mix of first-hand and hearsay. Many books or journals report others' claims. So, even most education involves tons of hearsay claims.

So, how do scientists raised, educated, and informed by eyewitness claims write reports saying eyewitness testimony isn't reliable? How do scientists educated by tons of hearsay not believe eyewitness testimony is trustworthy?

Or did they personally do the scientific method on every claim, technique, machine, circuit, etc they ever considered using? And make all of it from first principles and raw materials? Did they never believe another person's claims?

Also, "scientists that have studied this over long periods of times and diverse population groups" is itself an eyewitness claim and hearsay if you want us to take your word for it. If we look up the studies, we're believing their eyewitness claims on faith while we've validated your claim that theirs exist.

It's clear most people have no idea how much they act on faith in others' word, even those scientists who claim to refute the value of it.
by awesome_dude | 2026-01-26 00:13:59+00:00
I'm not sure why you are attacking me, I am clearly replying to someone who is claiming that recent times the retort of "paid demonstrators" is effective, and I have pointed out that the claim of people being paid to demonstrate has been made for decades, if not centuries.

Thank you for articulating the accusation, giving me the opportunity to respond, but try to take your own advice and read what's actually being said.
by NegativeK | 2026-01-26 00:14:17+00:00
I now try to follow something like bottom line up front (BLUF) when I'm trying to quickly communicate something and respect someone's time: the most important, actionable detail first with details expanding as you read more.

I first heard that it has a standard in an email from someone ex-military; they started the email with "BLUF: blah blah blah". Turns out the military had (has?) it as a standard for emails. Go figure.

Before then, I remember someone asking Adam Ragusea (Youtube cooking channel) why he gives away the point of the video at the very beginning. Ragusea explained that he was previously a journalism professor, and he refused to bury the lede.

I don't watch cooking content anymore, but I've remained impressed that he was able to have a Youtube career while avoiding that manipulate-the-audience behavior to drive stats.
by bitwize | 2026-01-26 00:14:20+00:00
Newton studied his forebears and understood their findings before contributing his own. He was stressed with the knowledge of his own ignorance, but then he learned and set himself up to make more profound discoveries. That's what it means to "stand on the shoulders of giants". Not to be a perpetual idea guy, outsource the hard part to someone else's computer with little to no effort or learning on your part, and roll on HN like "bitches mad 'cause I found the royal road to geometry".
by danpalmer | 2026-01-26 00:14:22+00:00
I'll admit it's a bit charged, but I'm frustrated with bad faith takedowns of ATProto/Bluesky, while Mastodon (and it is Mastodon, not ActivityPub) solves almost none of the actual problems. I tried implementing my own ActivityPub server and the spec is so hilariously lacking that it's understandable that everyone just uses the Mastodon API instead.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-26 00:14:33+00:00
As someone who isn’t familiar with the deep details of the hardware side of the AI industry, I’m curious if these chips are “easy” to write AI software for, or if there is a big barrier. How significant is Nvidia’s moat on the software layer, which I often see talked about in articles, when people seem to be willing to adopt AI accelerators. And if AI accelerators can be adopted, why aren’t other competitors to Nvidia (AMD, Intel, etc) able to break in?
by alyxya | 2026-01-26 00:14:45+00:00
I think the standard way to convert repeating decimals or decimals that appear to have a certain repeating pattern to fractions is to take the first repeating period and divide by 0.999.. with the number of 9s matching the period length.
0.163272727.. = 0.163+0.00027/0.99 = 163/1000+27/99000 = 449/2750
by wvenable | 2026-01-26 00:15:25+00:00
I read all the code and it sometimes make mistakes -- but I wouldn't call it really bad. And often merely pointing it out will get a correction. Sometimes it is funny. It's not perfect but nothing is perfect. I have noticed that the quality seems to be improving.

I still think whether you see sustained value or not depends a lot on your workflow -- in what you choose to do or decide and what you let it choose to do or decide.

I agree with you that this idea of just pushing out AI code -- especially code written from scratch -- by an AI sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But honestly a lot of organizations let a lot of crappy code into their code-base long before AI came long. Those organizations are just doing the same now at scale. AI didn't change the quality, it just changed the quantity.
by mmooss | 2026-01-26 00:15:32+00:00
What you are saying is that lawyers sometimes respond to problems by just throwing meaningless solutions at it. Sure, but every other profession sometimes does the same; see the example in my prior-prior comment.

It's the person, not the profession. There are good, bad, incompetent, committed, etc. in every profession - heck, in every person, to varying degrees.
by v_CodeSentinal | 2026-01-26 00:15:36+00:00
I've been working on this problem specifically in the context of autonomous coding agents, and you hit the nail on the head with 'implicit context'.

The biggest issue isn't just that documentation gets outdated; it's that the 'mental model' of the system only exists accurately in a few engineers' heads at any given moment. When they leave or rotate, that model degrades.

We found the only way to really fight this is to make the system self-documenting in a semantic way—not just auto-generated docs, but maintaining a live graph of dependencies and logic that can be queried. If the 'map' of the territory isn't generated from the territory automatically, it will always drift. Manual updates are a losing battle.
by daveguy | 2026-01-26 00:15:42+00:00
Maybe you should change the channel from Fox News, NewsMax and "apolitical" forums. It is happening everywhere dumpty and his goon squad decides to make it happen. Do you not realize these ICE agents are Federal agents? Sure, completely incompetent, racists that choose to join so they can go after immigrants (legal or otherwise) with cover, but officially sanctioned Federal agents nonetheless. Your ignorance and acceptance is sad.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-26 00:16:30+00:00
To claim that his role at DOGE was clear is incorrect. Musk’s position was unclear.

Even the DOGE was opaque and its status unclear. Having him with a black eye and chainsaw organising anything was madness. Even Trump eventually saw it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
by techcode | 2026-01-26 00:16:46+00:00
Of course you can fake a small/large crowd in a protest.

From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.

Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".
by hollow-moe | 2026-01-26 00:17:04+00:00
Email is the prime example of federated communication. From protocol inception to painful expansion and aging protocol all until corporate apropriaton. But I still think federation is the way forward, absolute centralisation is bad I'll let you figure why, but absolute decentralization is also bad, limitations due to its nature, unusual working for most users... Meanwhile federation is right in the middle, and users already use it with email without even noticing!
by rlt | 2026-01-26 00:17:04+00:00
If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be then I think you'd see more people speaking up, but there's not. People don't have to caveat their support of every policy with hypotheticals.

I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 00:17:23+00:00
There are some open firmware, or partially open firmware projects, but they're more proof-of-concepts and not popular/widely-used. The problem is the FCC or corresponding local organization requires cell phones get regulatory approval, and open firmware (where just anybody could just download the source and modify a couple of numbers to violate regulations) doesn't jive with that.

https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/open-firmware-for-pinephone-...
by perching_aix | 2026-01-26 00:17:48+00:00
> No, they asserted their opinion as a fact.

Interesting idea, let's see if they confirm they were talking facts. I'll be very surprised.

I'm the worst person to take issue with this. This has been my biggest pet peeve for the longest time as well. Right until my frame of mind flipped randomly, and I recognized that by getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person, and upsetting myself on purpose.

You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire. For example, this may have very well been a perfectly cromulent alternative reply:

> Sounds subjective, and indeed, I disagree. Not a fan of dogma like this anyhow.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-26 00:17:50+00:00
Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions?

And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
by NegativeK | 2026-01-26 00:19:33+00:00
First, make me care and tell me the answer. In 30 seconds.

Then expand on it in increasingly advanced levels of detail.

If your knowledge is high, I won't care about the video production. If you're not getting to the point quickly, you're manipulating the audience into getting views; education and sharing knowledge isn't the main driver of your video.

But what I want is idealistic.
by josephcsible | 2026-01-26 00:19:35+00:00
One of these things is true:

1. Training AI on copyrighted works is fair use, so it's allowed no matter what the license says.

2. Training AI on copyrighted works is not fair use, so since pretty much every open source license requires attribution (even ones as lax as MIT do; it's only ones that are pretty much PD-equivalent like CC0, WTFPL, and Unlicense that don't) and AI doesn't give attribution, it's already disallowed by all of them.

So in either case, having a license mention AI explicitly wouldn't do any good, and would only make the license fail to comply with the OSD.
by paulmooreparks | 2026-01-26 00:20:46+00:00
Exactly what I came here to say. I've been programming for 40 years, 35 professionally, and I didn't find my ergonomic, no-pain, no-RSI happy place until I stopped following advice to sit up straight. I set my chair with just enough resistance, set the head rest where it puts my eyeline directly on my monitors, which are set considerably higher than average and about a metre from my head. I can work for hours like this now, with no pain.

I could never use an app like this. Maybe I should write one that blurs the screen when I don't slouch.
by v_CodeSentinal | 2026-01-26 00:21:02+00:00
This is the classic 'plausible hallucination' problem. In my own testing with coding agents, we see this constantly—LLMs will invent a method that sounds correct but doesn't exist in the library.

The only fix is tight verification loops. You can't trust the generative step without a deterministic compilation/execution step immediately following it. The model needs to be punished/corrected by the environment, not just by the prompter.
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-26 00:21:31+00:00
Here are a few.

https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...

https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-com...
by ezst | 2026-01-26 00:21:36+00:00
> a simple DMCA takedown notice

DMCA takedown has no legal basis outside the US. And it's funny you bring that up: the only reason why this has any relevance at all is because of the established norm for countries to sacrifice some of their sovereignty in exchange for being allowed to trade with the US. Now, with the US breaking trade norms and agreements, those countries can (and eventually will) stop complying, because they have nothing to gain (and everything to lose) promoting hostile foreign competition.
by Symbiote | 2026-01-26 00:21:38+00:00
> It added that three trains that had gone over the tracks at 17:21 on Sunday, 19:01 and then 19:09 had similar notches "with a compatible geometric pattern".

Then the crashed train passed at 19:45.

I don't see why an overnight inspection must have caught this, it could have happened just before the 17:21 train, or even have been caused by it.

We will need to wait for the investigation to continue, and I hope Japan's rail people will not be so arrogant as to assume they can't learn something from it.
by MikeNotThePope | 2026-01-26 00:21:45+00:00
I don’t disagree with you, but there are diminishing returns on making your test suite complex. To make async test work properly, you need to know what you’re doing in regards to message passing, OTP, mocks, shared memory, blah blah blah. It can get really complicated, and it is still isn’t a substitute for real user traffic. You’re going to have to rely on hiring experienced Elixir developers (small talent pool), allow for long onboarding time (expensive), or provide extensive training (difficult). Personally for most cases, writing a sync test suite and just optimizing to keep it not to slow is probably more practical in the long term.
by mmooss | 2026-01-26 00:22:51+00:00
Gwern's point stands on its own merits regardless of what you think of the rest of their blog. And the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way: Lots of people, and especially lots on HN, are very engaged with Gwern's writing, so Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?

That would be valuable analysis. Or provide constructive feedback. The complaints aren't constructive and don't inform us about the OP. To me they seem pointless and in the wrong spirit, especially when someone is in the room, within earshot.

Edit: removed an error in what I said originally, sorry.
by jibal | 2026-01-26 00:23:10+00:00
What assumed impact?

> A crowd showing up doesn't automatically translate to minds changed or policy moved.

Strawman much?

> If the tactics alienate more people than they persuade, visibility alone isn't doing much.

What tactics? What evidence is there that people are being alienated by the peaceful protests, rather than by the murders and other violence and lying of administration officials?
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-26 00:23:33+00:00
Here’s Googles response:

Yes, arrests for social media activity occur in the UK under laws like the Communications Act 2003 and Malicious Communications Act 1988, targeting offenses such as sending offensive/menacing messages, false communications, hate speech, or child grooming, with thousands arrested annually, though charges and convictions vary, and new laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 add further regulatory scope.
by lazyasciiart | 2026-01-26 00:24:16+00:00
> Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear.

No, they really don’t. Have you never heard someone say that they have never met anyone who is X so it can’t be that popular? My own sister thought 2000 was going to be a landslide for Gore because she “hadn’t met anyone who was going to vote for Bush”.
by mittensc | 2026-01-26 00:24:25+00:00
How would you put coal in EV?! They're electric, you plug them in!

You provide the research to prove ICE is cleaner.

Go in detail, I'll check everything:

- cost of extraction

- cost of byproducts

- cost of refining

- waste during refining

- cost of transporting oil to the pump (what do oil transport ships burn?)

- cost of burning that oil

- analysis on car age affecting emissions

- analysis of cheating like volkswagen

- full analysis of ICE car manufacturing

- Cost of wars to give us oil

- cost of weaponry needed to make oil producers behave and sell it at a decent price

- cost of aircraft carriers positioned around the world to enforce that.

- health cost of breathing in fumes.

- total cost of lead poisoning done by ICE cars until it was forbidden.

- health costs of noxes from diesel cars.

- costs of cars with dpf off or cat converter removed or just bad engines.

- Environmental impact of shale oil and water aquifers destruction and earthquakes.

- (reserve the right to add more after you provide the above)
by deeg | 2026-01-26 00:26:42+00:00
I think a lot of voters were fooled (or foolish) into thinking that Trump would limit himself to go after other people; he got a higher percentage of minority votes in 2024 then prior elections. That's not good but the mask is off and I think Trump has lost a lot of those voters.

It's also hard to quantify how much the pandemic and inflation moved some voters away from Biden/Harris.

I think Dems will win big in the next election. The question is how long this lesson will last with voters.
by discarded1023 | 2026-01-26 00:28:36+00:00
At the risk of telling you what you already know and/or did not mean to say: not everything can be a value. If everything is a value then no computation (reduction) is possible. Why? Because computation stops at values. This is traditional programming language/lambda calculus nomenclature and dogma. See Plotkin's classic work on PCF (~ 1975) for instance; Winskel's semantics text (~ 1990) is more approachable.

Things of course become a lot more fun with concurrency.

Now if you want a language where all the data thingies are immutable values and effects are somewhat tamed but types aren't too fancy etc. try looking at Milner's classic Standard ML (late 1970s, effectively frozen in 1997). It has all you dream of and more.

In any case keep having fun and don't get too bogged in syntax.
by mlyle | 2026-01-26 00:28:45+00:00
With embedded SRAM close, you get startling amounts of bandwidth -- Cerebras claims to attain >2 bytes/FLOP in practice -- vs H200 attaining more like 0.001-0.002 to the external DRAM. So we're talking about a 3 order of magnitude difference.

Would it be a little better with on-wafer distributed DRAM and sophisticated prefetch? Sure, but it wouldn't match SRAM, and you'd end up with a lot more interconnect and associated logic. And, of course, there's no clear path to run on a leading logic process and embed DRAM cells.

In turn, you batch for inference on H200, where Cerebras can get full performance with very small batch sizes.
by gorbachev | 2026-01-26 00:28:59+00:00
There's nothing surprising about it given US history.

The US administration has always labeled any resistance against it as terrorism at least ever since 9/11. You might remember the justification of killing young Afghani males, who were posthumously labelled as terrorists. They drone strike an apartment complex and report 25 dead terrorists, conveniently omitting to report on dead children or women, because there were 25 males between the age of 15 - 25 among the dead. No evidence of terrorist activity required.

The only change is that the same justification is now being used within the US borders.

The dead are still, however, The Other, which is how it's being justified now as it was when the dead were foreigners in a war zone.
by achillean | 2026-01-26 00:29:30+00:00
I had a similar experience where a competitor released an academic paper rife with mistakes and misunderstandings of how my software worked. Instead of reaching out and trying to understand how their system was different than mine they used their incorrect data to draw their conclusions. I became rather disillusioned with academic papers as a result of how they were able to get away with publishing verifiably wrong data.
by ekipan | 2026-01-26 00:30:11+00:00
(Edit: in the old post title:) "everything is a value" is not very informative. That's true of most languages nowadays. Maybe "exclusively call-by-value" or "without reference types."

I've only read the first couple paragraphs so far but the idea reminds me of a shareware language I tinkered with years ago in my youth, though I never wrote anything of substance: Euphoria (though nowadays it looks like there's an OpenEuphoria). It had only two fundamental types: the atom, a possibly floating point number, and the sequence: a list of zero or more atoms and sequences. Strings in particular are just sequences of codepoint atoms.

It had a notion of "type"s which were functions that returned a boolean 1 only if given a valid value for the type being defined. I presume it used byte packing and copy-on-write or whatever for its speed boasts.

https://openeuphoria.org/

https://rapideuphoria.com/