MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-20 11:08:04+00:00
I think you're being disingenuous as that's just one meaning of "lying". From your supplied link there's also:

an inaccurate or untrue statement; falsehood.

The point is that it was part of his job to know the answers to the questions put to him by the MPs which is why they were asking him those questions. If he didn't know the answer, then he should have made that clear, though that should also be grounds to get rid of him if he's that useless. If he wasn't deliberately lying (i.e. unintentionally lying), then that suggests incompetence and would be ample grounds to get rid of him.

Anyhow, I'm not interested in arguing semantics as the MPs were misled by him and it may be impossible to determine his exact state of knowledge at the time or his intentions.
by MITSardine | 2026-01-20 11:08:35+00:00
The representation might not need to explicitly encode "meaning", if it does so implicitly by preserving essential properties of how things relate to each other.

For instance, a CAD object has no notion of what an airplane wing or car wheel are, but it can represent those in a way that how a wing relates to a fuselage is captured in numerical simulations. This is because it doesn't mangle the geometry the user wanted to represent ("what it means", in a geometric sense), although it does make it differ in certain ways that are "meaningless" (e.g. spurious small features, errors under tolerances), much like this representation might do with words.

Back to words, how do you define meaning anyways? I believe I was taught what words "mean" by having objects pointed to as a word was repeated: "cat", says the the parent as they point to a cat, "bird", as they point to a bird. Isn't this also equality/correspondence by relative frequency?
by Bewelge | 2026-01-20 11:08:42+00:00
I'm struggling to form a definitive statement about my thoughts here, but I'll give it a try:

Every (useful) abstraction that aims to make an action easier will have to be more complex inside than doing the action itself.

Would love for someone to challenge this or find better words. But honestly, if that's not the case, you end up with something like leftPad. Libraries also almost always cover more than one use case, which also leads to them being more complex than a simple tailored solution.
by dangus | 2026-01-20 11:09:43+00:00
You either update the software in the background, you update it manually, or you leave the software out of date.

Microsoft offers you all three options and you don’t like any of them.

I don’t quite understand what mystery fourth option you prefer Microsoft provides for you.

Going back to my original comment, you could have tried Teams in a real web browser before deciding it sucks. Safari is trash.
by Closi | 2026-01-20 11:10:32+00:00
This was an argument that was used to not ban smoking for kids in the UK back in the day. From the parliment debate...

> [banning smoking would] afford a direct encouragement to children to smoke. Most boys of a tender age who might be seen smoking in public places did so, not because of any attachment to tobacco, but because they considered it a practice in advance of their years, and something moreover which their elders told them not to do, affording them, therefore, the added pleasure of disobedience which was so dear to boys of their age.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1908-10-13/debates/6aa...

Perhaps it does make it cooler - but undoubtedly the restrictions reduced availability and reduced the number of children being addicted.

As for the actual age cut-off, it's always going to be fairly arbitrary, or a 'balanced judgement'.
by dspillett | 2026-01-20 11:10:33+00:00
> > "you do not need to review the code"

> Did we just stop caring about the art of programming altogether?

Yes. Decades ago for some.

I'm sure there have been a number of significant bugs caused by someone taking work from an outsourced team into production without sufficient review. Or even work from a local junior. Heck, even a local senior!¹

Outsourcing work to GlorifiedPredictiveText and friends should be treated the same was as passing it on to other humans, but at the moment it too often isn't as many have fallen for the marketing. Always remember: the models were trained on public code, and public code is far from always right. And the models hallucinate³ on top of that.

--------

[1] Around this time last year, I was that senior… Fun times. Luckily no permanent damage done², but that'll teach people not to trust me too much!

[2] It wasn't as smooth as I would have hoped, but the roll-back plan worked.

[3] Going back to the analogy of outsourcing to other humans: this is akin to “making shit up as they go along and hoping for the best”, which also very much happens and has happened for decades.
by azan_ | 2026-01-20 11:10:38+00:00
400 billion dollars and it's like 5% of actual Western capacity. Imagine how obliterated Russia would get if West actually tried! I really wish that Western world would finally start giving ACTUAL support and not just drip. Russia has been meddling with world peace for far too long, even before you've invaded Ukraine you kept meddling with elections and stirring uncertainty all around the world. Defending against unprovoked Russian aggression absolutely is being on the right side of history. It's a shame that country with history of so many great figures has become such a cesspool.
by jxors | 2026-01-20 11:11:08+00:00
This flowchart hides the most awful parts (IMO) of x86 prefixes: some combinations of prefixes are invalid but still parsed and executed, like combining two segment overrides, or placing a legacy prefix after a REX prefix.

The CPU also doesn't care if you use prefixes that aren't valid for a specific instruction, for example a REP on a non-repeatable instruction. The LOCK prefix is the only prefix that makes the sane choice to reject invalid combinations, rather than silently accept them.

Also, the (E)VEX prefix doesn't behave like the other prefixes: it must be placed last, and can therefore only appear once. All other prefixes can be repeated.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-20 11:12:30+00:00
I've been pondering this, especially given that Japan is not an oil-producing country, and concluded: it's the internal politics of the engine group.

That is, the people who design engines and run the engines division have sufficient heft within the organization that they can prevent a good car being made that doesn't have an engine in it.

It's sort of worked out for them as they have a big niche in the taxi market, and other high milage users who've not taken the EV plunge yet. If you want the most efficient vehicle that still uses petrol, buy a Toyota.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-20 11:14:01+00:00
What amused me is shortly after cutting the UK off from pornhub etc, the UK then tried to ban porn sites from porn with strangling -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk3qzq7k7o

If they had instead gone on a "porn sites that would obey the ID law need to flag themselves via this system and ISPs/phone providers should block them by default and only the account holder can enable it", then they would actually have some leverage over mindgeek (or whoever), and would be able to remove that subset.

But instead people in the UK now either use a vpn to bypass it and thus will also bypass this new law, or go to far dodgier sites which ignore the requirements that the commercial ones follow, driving teenage boys (and adult men) into the arms of sites with incest, bestiality, snuff etc, rather than this generation's equivelent of playboy.
by tj-teej | 2026-01-20 11:14:16+00:00
Isn't this the intent of a prediction markets?

IIRC the original prediction markets existed to try and get as close as possible to finding the true answer to open questions. Someone willing to bet a lot of money on an outcome (because they have an edge/are very sure of an outcome) is the point, they're putting their money where their mouth is...
by LeFantome | 2026-01-20 11:14:20+00:00
I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale.

The license cost of the ISA is not that much per chip. It is not nearly enough to equal the extra cost per unit that is going to be added to any upcoming RISC-V chip due to the small production runs compared to x86-64 or ARM.

On the microcontroller side, we are seeing what you are saying. RISC-V has taken over the microcontroller world and chips are being produced in the billions. Scale, combined with the lack of licensing, means that you can get RISC-V microcontrollers for a couple of bucks.

The other thing is that there will still be license fees for RISC-V. You are not paying RISC-V International. But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Instead of paying ARM, you will be paying SciFive, or SpaceMIT or Andes, or Tenstorrent, or UltraRISC (for the Titan board this story is about).

But compare this to ARM where your choices are licensing from ARM or purchasing hardware from Qualcomm or Apple. Or compare to x86-86 where there is only Intel and AMD to choose from. There will be dozens of RISC-V suppliers and competition will drive innovation up and prices down.

Of course, you can of course always design your own! Or use an Open Source design. No license fees required. But the chips you will actually want to use as a consumer will probably come with licensing fees.

But 3-5 years from now, things may be different. I hope and believe that RISC-V will be successful. As RISC-V chips with competitive performance appear, volumes will go up and we will see the same pattern we have seen in microcontrollers. Many of the niches that are currently filled by ARM will start to be filled by RISC-V. This will include the SBC space and the server space for sure. We may see tablets and phones. With luck, it will also start to fill the periphery of the laptop and desktop space. Prices will be higher at first and then come down.

RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
by gf000 | 2026-01-20 11:14:46+00:00
I really recommend watching this section of this video. Embeddings do encode plenty of "human knowledge" into the vector values and their relations to each other.

https://youtu.be/wjZofJX0v4M?si=QEaPWcp3jHAgZSEe&t=802

This even opens up a more data-based approach to linguistics, where it is also heavily used.
by sputr | 2026-01-20 11:15:11+00:00
All of this would be easier if we just called Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all the others by a more correct name: “Sales-acceleration platforms” and it's mode of operation is "inducing emotional instability in consumers".

“Sales-acceleration platforms” should be regulated to protect consumers, no? Also, why do children need to be on “Sales-acceleration platforms”?
by BSDobelix | 2026-01-20 11:15:19+00:00
>I believe that Meshtastic uses the whole 250kHz of that subband by default. This is by far the most relaxed constraints of what is available in the EU and US.

Again wrong, just look at EU vs US:

https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#region

> beyond extremely small meshes, if at all.

180 online nodes (300 at max) is not extremely small (and that's our small mesh EU with medium_fast)
by momento | 2026-01-20 11:15:34+00:00
I agree with you on a few key points. Social media is structurally harmful, it amplifies those with money and reach, and good parenting and education are important. Where I disagree is in thinking that “good parents” and awareness are enough; you sound like you’re doing the right thing for your own kids, but that’s the exception, not the norm, and many parents are themselves oblivious to how these products work, so legal guardrails are needed in the same way we regulate alcohol or cigarettes.

If anything, a 16+ cutoff is still quite conservative. These platforms deliberately target developing reward systems and social comparison in the brain, and there is growing evidence (summarized well in the book “The Anxious Generation”) that the risk profile changes meaningfully only in the late teens, so pushing first exposure from 11–13 to 16 gives kids a better chance of resisting those algorithms.

Banning under‑16s from highly optimised, social feeds is also not the same as stopping them from talking to each other; you can still have calls, SMS, WhatsApp, group chats, email and offline social life. In my own case I’ve been social‑media‑free for about four years while still talking to friends and family regularly through these channels.

As someone who grew up all over the world and never stayed in one country for more than five years, I’m 35 and still in touch with close friends around the world purely through direct communication, which has also made it obvious how distorted social media’s notion of “friends” is. Once you leave, you quickly see who actually reciprocates effort instead of passively consuming a curated feed of your life.

You are right that bans don’t fix the deeper structural issues of commercial platforms or information asymmetries, but that’s not an argument against shielding children while we work on those deeper problems. In practice, a simple, blanket rule is often the only thing enforceable at scale that doesn’t depend on every parent being highly technically and psychologically literate.

In that sense, an under‑16 ban is not perfect and does not “solve the problem itself,” but it is still the right move compared to the current situation of throwing undeveloped brains into systems explicitly tuned to hijack their focus. The consequences of which we are only beginning to see now... the issue is tremendous.
by antonymoose | 2026-01-20 11:16:02+00:00
It does, I’m just emphasizing the lack of material injury. Spending 25 years in the military in an administrative office role and going “my hearing is less good, I have carpal tunnel, I have sleep problems” now give me $4,000 seems rather off when you’re otherwise a completely healthy normal human being.

After all, it’s not as if normal people in normal society lack these conditions as they age. Connecting them to the service is spurious and often fraudulent. By all means, let’s take care of the folks with serious physical and mental injury that cannot provide for themselves, but let’s be real our system is heavily gamed and abused.
by closewith | 2026-01-20 11:16:08+00:00
> Locking people out of good information means that you are essentially stopping them from seeing the wider picture.

Good information is impossible to define, not least because it's different for every person. There is no single wider picture, certainly not one any two people could agree on and certain not one that can be legislated.

> Moving closer to sensorship.

Censorship for children is an absolute and unabated good. We should be censoring what children can see. We already do in other forms of media and communications.

> For me, its frustrating that this the direction we are going in, but it doesn't actually solve the issue. It just passes it along to later on, further time away, for it to then cause more damage later on.

No, unfettered access to obscene, extreme, & traumatising information, and unfiltered communication with a globe's worth of predators, is orders of magnitude more damaging to children than to adults. Delayed access until both biological and psychological processes mature dramatically reduces overall harm and introduces no new harm.
by strogonoff | 2026-01-20 11:16:13+00:00
The reason for React’s “draw the rest of the owl” mindset is that it’s born not as a framework but as a library, and to this day self-identifies as such. It by design tells you nothing about and is agnostic with respect to how you organise your code, where to put tests, what bundler to use, etc.

IIRC React itself doesn’t even know anything about Web or DOM, as that integration is supplied by the pluggable reconciler, which lives in a separate library (ReactDOM).

One could argue that with the amount of batteries included perhaps it ought to undergo a grand status change, but until then it’s hard to blame on the authors of a library that they are not delivering a framework.
by jcattle | 2026-01-20 11:16:13+00:00
I think the professor here presented them with a "special" case which can not be generalized outside of the exam context.

If you're presented with the choice of "Don't use AI" and "Use AI, but live with the consequences" (consequences like mistakes being judged harsher when using AI than when not using AI), I do not think chatbots will be a desirable choice if you've properly prepared for the exam.
by gred | 2026-01-20 11:16:51+00:00
> Practicality beats enthusiasm for 95% of car use.

About two years ago I rented an electric car for a few days. I felt like I wasted a ton of time finding a charging station, jumping through phone app hoops to get the charging process started, and then waiting for the car to charge. I've stayed away from electric rentals since, even though they're often cheaper.
by tgv | 2026-01-20 11:17:26+00:00
> I can't see us ever letting our kid actually use social media till they understand it

The social pressure to get on those platforms grows rapidly, well before they are 16. It starts with group chats, and who wants to be left out, where kids start posting funny things from tiktok or whatever, and then it's game over.

We kept ours a bit tight: first phone at 12, no internet, but everyone in the vicinity had whatsapp. Not much later we succumbed. Recently, my daughter told me she felt isolated, because the other kids in her class had access to much more. And that's 12 years ago. I cannot image the current levels of pressure.

Regulation is the only way. Meta, ByteDance, etc. are only moving forward with ever more addictive patterns. And it's killing society.

Edit: I recently was in a conversation with young parents, and one of them said: I do hope there's a ban soon.
by average_r_user | 2026-01-20 11:17:40+00:00
I can’t confirm that exact percentage, but yes—“prime” placements on Amazon are driven by Amazon Ads.

the Sponsored Brands banner at the top of the search results page, and
the Top of Search Sponsored Products slots.

[1] https://advertising.amazon.com/lp/build-your-business-with-a...
by pandemic_region | 2026-01-20 11:17:46+00:00
Social media are detrimental for a young human being under development. A child's brain works in no way the same as our adult brains, so we cannot apply the same caring logic as you would with adults. I see this in the same category as cigarettes, drugs and alcohol.

Until you are old enough and we can assume (or hope) there is mental capacity to properly contextualize life choices and being able take a stance for / against these things, a ban is appropriate.
by spuz | 2026-01-20 11:17:59+00:00
You think Meta secretly wanted to remove 4.7m Australian users while saying:

> "We call on the Australian government to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age-appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans,"

because ultimately they think it will attract more users to their platforms?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-15/social-media-ban-data...

https://www.9news.com.au/national/australia-social-media-ban...
by sevenzero | 2026-01-20 11:18:53+00:00
> Even as an adult with a child, I can't see us ever letting our kid actually use social media till they understand it, and that comes down to parenting properly, teaching them the right way, and letting them know of the dangers

Just answering to this part explicitly: Proper parenting is not doable in a lot of modern societies. There are so many children being neglected by their parents. So we'd have to go for a mix of parenting and regulating.
by nl | 2026-01-20 11:18:54+00:00
> Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.

This isn't true.

each 10 per cent increase in gambling expenditure in NSW results in more than

4,500 additional assaults
2,800 additional home break-ins
1,300 additional break and enter (non-dwelling) offences
1,400 additional motor vehicle thefts
2,300 additional stealing from motor vehicle thefts
3,800 additional fraud offences each year

https://www.connections.edu.au/news/strong-link-between-gamb...

> Stock market integrity is important because of their function in the economy

Some might argue that people - including gambling addicts, and those impacted by their addiction - might possibly be more important than one of many possible financial mechanisms for free enterprise.
by dispo | 2026-01-20 11:19:24+00:00
Or they could consciously choose to not bypass the restrictions and to not consume pornography.

If they are seeking out vile material like incest, animal rape and sexualised murder then the blame lays entirely on them, not the government.

I mean what is even your point? Male depravity is unavoidable, and men are mindless ejaculators with no free will to curb abnormal sexual behaviours?
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-20 11:19:25+00:00
> Is there any reason America can’t continue that without giving every critical manufacturing industry to China?

Totally. The two things are actually quite different. You (US & industrialised countries) removed capital controls and the cost of transport dropped by a lot (shipping containers etc) which meant that it became more profitable to make things in much cheaper countries and so the businesses did that, and now you're/we're screwed.

Reintroduce capital controls and only trade with people with comparable labour rights and wage levels, and this problem goes away. But ultimately, this change was driven by western economic interests, not China/other countries.

That being said, China played this hand very well (from a manufacturing/export perspective) but they didn't cause this. The US & European businesses did, because they could make more money/pollute with less issues this way.
by akagusu | 2026-01-20 11:20:01+00:00
Something is really really wrong here. Apple, Google, Microsoft and many others companies and not only them, but lots of opensource projects too, they don't know how to design a good UI anymore.

It looks like they killed every person that knew how to design a UI, took random interns from non related areas and these interns are trying to figure out what they need to do
by camillomiller | 2026-01-20 11:20:02+00:00
Wrong. Meta has years of very well documented practices that are fundamentally detrimental to society when not clearly illegal.
Explain why politicians, which have not acted enough to avoid that, now should not act to limit the issue.
This line of thinking is detrimental and only defends the concentration of wealth that the online platform came to represent.
You should be the one doing some more research, I reckon.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-20 11:20:02+00:00
1. It's not unique to the play store, as a matter of fact, this started in the iOS app store and was "adopted" by Google. It could definitely be improved though, i.e. if all potential in-app purchases were listable via the store page, like on steam for example

2. The prices were mentioned in the comment you're responding to.
by tekkk | 2026-01-20 11:20:07+00:00
Well I want to give shadcn some credit, building a comprehensive open-source UI toolkit, on your own basically, isn't as easy as one would think. Yeah you can use native elements except for some tiny edge case with say Safari and then you go deeper into the rabbit hole, until you decide you'll just customize everything. But at this point you probably have lost a lot of time and sanity already.

I'd put the blame on React and poor Web APIs in this case. Both are way too complicated for mere mortals to understand fully, and even simplest things like maintaining 100% container height through nested elements, can become a ridiculous time-sink for something completely unrelated to what is your main objective.