MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-03 01:54:53+00:00
Taking a breather from (nerd-)scubadiving.. so placeholdering old threads (what PG called closure/browser-tabbing):

Magic Mountain -> better place to look for (expert-)embarrassment-grandiosity ("lion"?) geodesics(?)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/31/the-master-of-...

Fox: "primordial" curiosity-indignation geodesic ?

TIS (as nonexpert): Evo bottleneck.. weakness is strength; cue other Taoist-inspired-anime (name of which I can't retrieve for now).. survival in the Jurassic?

FWIW I had "aeb"/"jurisprudence" top of my to-algo-fu list last Nov..
by ThatPlayer | 2026-01-03 01:55:43+00:00
Variable refresh rate is nice when your refresh rate doesn't match your output. Especially when you're getting into higher refresh rates. So if your display is running at 120hz, but you're only outputting 100hz: you cannot fit 100 frames evenly into 120 frames. 1/6 of your frames will have to be repeats of other frames, and in an inconsistent manner. Usually called judder.

Most TVs will not let you set the refresh rate to 100hz. Even if my computer could run a game at 100hz, without VRR, my choices are either lots of judder, or lowering it to 60hz. That's a wide range of possible refresh rates you're missing out on.

V-Sync and console games will do this too at 60hz. If you can't reach 60hz, cap the game at 30hz to prevent judder that would come from anything in between 31-59. The Steam Deck actually does not support VRR. Instead the actual display driver does support anything from 40-60hz.

This is also sometimes an issue with movies filmed at 24hz on 60hz displays too: https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/motion/24p
by Asooka | 2026-01-03 01:56:01+00:00
I've been thinking we could simply extend the ipv4 address to be 11 bytes by (ab)using the options field. That is, add an option that holds more bytes for the source and destination address, which are to be appended to the address already present in the header.

I am thinking that since an option starts with 2 bytes and everything must be padded to a multiple of 4 bytes, we can add 16 bytes to the packet, which would hold 7 extra address bytes per source and destination, giving us 11 byte addresses. ISPs would be given a bunch of 4-byte toplevel addresses and can generate 7-byte suffixes dynamically for their subscribers, in a way that is almost the same as CGNAT used today but without all the problems that has.

Most routers will only need to be updated to pass along the option and otherwise route as normal, because the top level address is already enough to route the packet to the ISP's routers. Then only at the edge will you need to do extra work to route the packet to the host. Not setting the option would be equivalent to setting it to all 0s, so all existing public hosts will be automatically addressable with the new scheme.

There will of course need to be a lot more work done for DNS, DHCP, syntax in programs, etc, but it would be a much easier and more gradual transition than IPv6 is demanding.
by Genego | 2026-01-03 01:56:43+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Full-stack Python/Django Developer (Gen-AI image and video generation)

Location: Thailand (UTC+7)
Remote: Only
Technologies: Django, Python, HTMX, Tailwind, Postgres, Replicate API, image generation pipelines, LoRA training workflows
Résumé/CV: https://edwin.genego.io/about
Email: edwin@genego.io

Sr. Software Engineer building production Django apps with practical AI integration. I specialize in creative AI tooling , image generation pipelines, multi-model orchestration (Flux, SDXL), prompt engineering systems, and cost-optimized workflows. Current work: 20+ custom management commands for AI image generation, character IP systems, scene replication with layered prompt architecture. I help teams ship AI-powered creative tools without risky rewrites, handling multi-model workflows, resume-capable operations, and obsessive cost tracking. Looking for fractional or project work (2-6 week cycles) involving generative AI, creative tooling, or content pipelines.

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by stavros | 2026-01-03 01:56:54+00:00
Yeah, similarly, my DSLR makes some huge video files, but they aren't that much better quality than my phone's. Of course, the sensor is massively better, and that makes a difference, but I don't know why the files are so much bigger.

My hypothesis is that they use a really high quality value, and that there are diminishing returns there.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-03 01:56:58+00:00
> Not really, no, any more than there is a way to unblur something that was shot out of focus.

This is actually possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution

If you have a high-quality image (before any compression) with a consistent blur, you can actually remove blur surprisingly well. Not completely perfectly, but often to a surprising degree that defies intuition.

And it's not a prediction -- it's recovering the actual data. Just because it's blurred doesn't mean it's gone -- it's just smeared across pixels, but clever math can be use to recover it. It's used widely in certain types of scientific imaging.

For photographers, it's most useful in removing motion blur from accidentally moving the camera while snapping a photo.
by nchmy | 2026-01-03 01:57:24+00:00
that's an abominable assessment of campbell. I'm not even going to bother responding to it, other than to point out this absolute nonsense:

> The monomyth is Campbellian imperialism. It's an appropriation of things he despises -- 'dreamlike mumbo jumbo', 'mystic[s]', and 'bizarre Eskimo fairy tale[s]' -- normalising them in an effort to make them tolerable

Jung, who is as associated with dreams as anyone, was one of campbell's greatest influences. Campbell deeply revered dreams, and you could probably find 1000 references of him talking about that's where myths come from.
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-03 01:57:37+00:00
I just started building my own website today with Django. I’m doing it because I just enjoy doing it. Most of my work is in data and ML infrastructure and it is just killing me. Working on the front end has opened my mind to possibility and given me new inspiration.

I love hn and was inspired by all the devs who have their own site. I was drowning in work, but put the Django architecture together on vacation, started putting things together today and it’s been a blast.

I don’t enjoy social media and was thinking to posse intrinsically.

I appreciate this post and the authors perspective.
by fl7305 | 2026-01-03 01:57:48+00:00
More like the VT-05. The VT-52 came a few years later. But yeah, the VT-420 is way later.

Fun fact: The VT-52 didn't have a loudspeaker for the bell sound. Instead, it had a electromechanical relay which was set up to self-oscillate.

"Typing a character produced a noise by activating a relay. The relay was also used as a buzzer to sound the bell character, producing a sound that "has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears."
by samcheng | 2026-01-03 01:57:59+00:00
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Our engineering team is distributed across the United States and internationally, and has been entirely remote for years now, but a desk can be provided in the above cities if you'd prefer.

We're open to both newly-graduated engineers or more senior engineers, provided they meet our bar. We're particularly interested in true full-stack engineers, with strong React / Typescript / CSS skills to complement comfort in a Python / Django environment. We're also seeking engineers with experience leveraging AI to automate complex operational processes.

Search term bingo: Logistics, Django, Python, Optimization, React, React Native, Postgres, Mobile Engineer, Automation, Delivery, OR-tools

https://www.rinse.com/careers/software-engineer/
by yakattak | 2026-01-03 01:58:06+00:00
> At the very least, when something goes wrong on Linux you have log messages that can let you know what went wrong so you can search for it.

It is hilarious how accurate this is. When something crashes on Windows you better hope it has its own logs you can find because the OS itself will tell you nothing. Event Viewer can't hold a candle to journald!
by snuxoll | 2026-01-03 01:59:23+00:00
"Simple" VPS providers like DigitalOcean, etc. really need to get the hell onboard with network virtualization. It's 2026, I don't want to be dealing with individual hosts just being allocated a damned /64 either. Give me a /48, attach it to a virtual network, let me split it into /64's and attach VM's to it - if I want something other than SLACC addresses (or multiple per VM) then I can deal with manually assigning them.

To be fair, the "big" cloud providers can't seem to figure this shit out, either. It's mind boggling, I'm not saying I've gone through the headache of banging out all the configuration to get FRRouting and my RouterOS gear happily doing the EVPN-VXLAN dance; but I'm also not Amazon, Google, or Microsoft...
by cyberax | 2026-01-03 01:59:56+00:00
Well, yes. Except that AC came to dominance much faster than IPv6, the AC/DC war lasted less than 10 years, with the AC quickly coming to domination. Because AC provides a clear performance advantage over DC.

This is not really true of IPv6. It _still_ has tons of actual operational issues, and in the best case, it does not provide any tangible improvements over IPv4+NAT for the vast majority of users.

For example, in-flight entertainment works by assigning you an IPv4 address and allowlisting it in the gateway rules. This does not work with IPv6 because of privacy addresses and SLAAC. You might think that you just need to do stateful DHCPv6, but Android doesn't support it. Heck, even simple DHCPv6 PD automatic configuration is _still_ not a standard ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9762/ )!

So to this day, some of the most visited sites like amazon.com, ebay.com, tiktok.com, slack.com or even github.com do not support IPv6. I also keep providing this example, year after year: there are no public VoIP SIP providers in the US that simply _support_ IPv6. Go on, try to find one.
by Sniffnoy | 2026-01-03 02:00:12+00:00
Location: New York City
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe if it's on the east coast
Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/trufflesuite/truffle/tree/develop/package...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!
by jacquesm | 2026-01-03 02:00:12+00:00
Linus has said a lot of stuff over the years and not all of it was on the money. Still, he did a lot of good and I'm very grateful for it, Linux has been my daily driver for almost two decades now (basically from when I stopped using SGI because there was no point any more).

But bugs in large codebases will always be a thing, and even though the eyes looking at FreeBSD are very, very good eyes, indeed there are not enough of them. The more interesting thing here is that they picked a really hard target. If they had done the same with Linux I would expect the number of bugs to be quite a bit higher.
by etempleton | 2026-01-03 02:00:51+00:00
I agree, it is bad and I don't like it, but I think it is bad in a way most users won't care about. I have not really considered a version of Windows to be good since...Windows 2000...maybe 3.1.1. They have all had major issues, so I just kind of shrug off the issues when I use Windows. The enshitification of MacOS is relatively new and so still stings a bit.

I think where Microsoft is playing with fire is that while most users will not care about some of these changes power users do. And the 5% of power users ultimately make the decisions and provide the recommendations for the other 95%. With so many apps and SAAS services going web or web app only there will be less and less reason to need to stick with Windows and that is where Microsoft will start to lose control.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-03 02:00:57+00:00
The AIDS crisis happened because it was unknown and very stealthy--nobody knew there was a risk to be guarded against. And it certainly didn't help that because of the association with gays the government response was slow-rolled. Same thing we saw with Covid--the US response was slow-rolled because at first it looked like it was selecting for blue areas.

Without the gays it might have gone a long time as a blood vector without being identified. When it was a "gay" disease it was busy killing old people who got transfusions but were never identified as having AIDS.
by leoc | 2026-01-03 02:01:00+00:00
I'm not an expert, but a quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow#History suggests that at least some people had figured it out by 1972 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD0772806 :

> By supplying addresses outside of the space allocated to the users program, it is often possible to get the monitor to obtain unauthorized data for that user, or at the very least, generate a set of conditions in the monitor that causes a system crash.

> In one contemporary operating system, one of the functions provided is to move limited amounts of information between system and user space. The code performing this function does not check the source and destination addresses properly, permitting portions of the monitor to be overlaid by the user. This can be used to inject code into the monitor that will permit the user to seize control of the machine.

However general awareness of the security implications seems to have been very limited before the Morris worm, and then even for several years after that. Even in late 1996 an article which in its own words "attempt[ed] to explain what buffer overflows are, and how their exploits work" could still be published in Phrack magazine, and in fact even be quite a milestone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow#History .
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-03 02:01:08+00:00
I don’t know I assume not but everyone has a product that could easily be profitable, it would just be dumb to do it because you will lose out to everyone else running at a loss to capture market share. I just mean the guy seems to have an aversion to business sensibility generally. I think he’s really in it for the love of the research. He’s of course rightly lauded for everything he’s done, he’s extremely brilliant, and in person (at a distance) very kind and reasonable (something that is very different than his LinkedIn personality which is basically a daily pissing contest). But I would not give him one cent of investment personally.
by gwern | 2026-01-03 02:01:23+00:00
To clarify the point here for people who didn't read OP: the oral exams here are customized and tailored to the student's individual unique project, that's the point and why they are not written:

> In our new "AI/ML Product Management" class, the "pre-case" submissions (short assignments meant to prepare students for class discussion) were looking suspiciously good. Not "strong student" good. More like "this reads like a McKinsey memo that went through three rounds of editing," good...Many students who had submitted thoughtful, well-structured work could not explain basic choices in their own submission after two follow-up questions. Some could not participate at all...Oral exams are a natural response. They force real-time reasoning, application to novel prompts, and defense of actual decisions. The problem? Oral exams are a logistical nightmare. You cannot run them for a large class without turning the final exam period into a month-long hostage situation.

Written exams do not do the same thing. You can't say 'just do a written exam'. So sure, the students may prefer them, but so what? That's apples and oranges.
by atroposDad | 2026-01-03 02:01:44+00:00
I would be really curious to see the money side of this. I am not sure about Powerball, but with EuroJackpot, some of the smaller wins can cover the cost of the ticket (or even cover a holiday!).

It would be really interesting to watch the expected value play out over repeated plays!! I am imagining a running balance where you keep track of total spend versus total returns. Most of the time the balance steadily goes more negative, with occasional jumps back up when you hit a partial match, and very rare big spikes from a larger win.

Very cool project!
by digitaltrees | 2026-01-03 02:02:01+00:00
Hard disagree based on neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. There are multiple systems of the brain that deal with emotional connection. Sexuality is one system but pair bonding is a more whole brain and body bond.

Further, porn is generally an act of consumption not interaction (I get that is changing) but interaction poses a new risk of an influenza feedback loop. That will affect a person’s entire life.

I could go on about the distinction but I don’t want to write a thesis with my thumbs.
by LogicFailsMe | 2026-01-03 02:02:07+00:00
At 5 cents or less per kWH these days, 10 kW is 50 cents per hour, well below minimum wage. LLMs aren't AGI and I'm not convinced we're anywhere close to AGI, but they are useful. That the people deploying them have the same product instincts as Microsoft executives seems to be the core issue.
by etempleton | 2026-01-03 02:03:56+00:00
Who installed linux and did the initial setup? And then I think there is a class of user that is savvy enough to say, update their graphics drivers but not willing to use a terminal and that is before you get into the mess that is Nvidia on linux.

I agree, under a managed setup scenario where a user is only really going to use a web browser and a few apps. Linux is just fine.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-03 02:04:02+00:00
> Not sure if anyone who works in the foundational model space and who doesn't directly depend on LLMs 'making it' for VC money would claim differently

This is the problem. The vast majority of people over-hyping LLMs don't even have the most basic understanding of how simple LLMs are at core (manifold-fitting the semantic space of the internet), and so can't understand why they are necessarily dead ends, theoretically. This really isn't debatable for anyone with a full understanding of the training + basic dynamics of what these models do.

But, practically, it remains to be seen where the dead end with LLMs lies. I think we are clearly approaching plateaus in both academic research and in practice (people forget or are unaware how much benchmarks are being gamed as well), but, even small practical gains remain game-changers in this space, and much of the progress / tradeoffs we actually care about can't be measured accurately yet (e.g. rapid development vs. "technical debt" from fast but not-understood / weakly-reviewed LLM code).

LLMs are IMO undebatably a theoretical dead end, and for that reason, a practical dead end too. But we haven't hit that practical dead end yet.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-03 02:04:58+00:00
I don’t agree with this at all. I’ll take AppKit (preferably with Swift, but Obj-C is fine too) over anything web. There’s a number of reasons, but the biggest is that AppKit has an expansive set of well implemented, accessible, flexible, efficient, and ready to use widgets that are all designed to work together, and the truth is that this isn’t something you can get on the web.

Even the most complete “UI frameworks” on the web are full of holes, leaving you to build a patchwork monster out of a laundry list of third party widgets (all of which themselves are full of shortcomings and concessions) or build your own.

As an aside, this gripe isn’t exclusive to the web. It’s a problem with many others such as Windows App SDK (aka WinUI) and Flutter, among others. At least for the things I build, they’re unsuitable at best.
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-03 02:05:08+00:00
Another thing to possibly consider would be ASN.1 (you can also use the nonstandard extensions that I made up, called ASN.1X, if you want some of the additional types I included such as a key/value list). (You are not required to implement or use all of the types or other features of ASN.1 in your programs; only use the parts that you use for your specific application.) Unlike EDN, ASN.1 has a proper byte string type, it is not limited to Unicode, it has a clearly defined canonical form (DER, which is probably the best format (and is the format used by X.509 certificates); BER is too messy), etc. DER is a binary format (and the consistent framing of different types in DER makes it easier to implement and work with than the formats that use inconsistent framing, although that also makes it less compact); I made up a text format called TER, which is intended to be converted to DER.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-03 02:05:36+00:00
> For example it would be a similar mistake to think that the recent swing in US politics is a uniquely American phenomenon to which one's own population is inherently immune.

Indeed it would be and I'm under no such illusion, rather the opposite. Unfortunately as much as I do it will never be enough. But I'm putting as much time, money and effort into that as my means and energy levels allow.

> If instead one thinks, maybe we're not so different after all, perhaps one may better understand how better to deal with it.

Oh, but we are different, on an individual level. It's as soon as you start talking about 'China' or the 'USA' as homogenous entities with plans and responses (rational or otherwise) that the trouble starts. Before you know it you've defined an in-group and an out-group and that is precisely when rationality gets thrown out.

> Especially if the alternatives are, "we just need to get rid of the bad people" or "I guess there's no hope for a better world"

I don't think we can get rid of bad people, but what we can do is identify them and keep them from the levers of power. The fact that the world over we keep finding megalomaniacs in these positions even though we full well know what it leads to is something that we will have to deal with sooner or later.

And as for hope for a better world, I think that that hope should be rooted in really learning our lessons from the past rather than insisting on re-learning them every couple of generations.
by nine_k | 2026-01-03 02:05:46+00:00
ISPs used to inject ads into HTTP-served pages as recently as 10 years ago, I personally remember that. Not only tiny ISPs. I'm not alone: https://superuser.com/questions/902635/isp-is-inserting-ads-...

Ads injection is a relatively benign kind of tampering. It could be much more creative and sinister.