MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chewz | 2026-01-19 23:37:37+00:00
It is posturing for internal effects.

The position of Europe vs USA is analogous to Greek States vs Roman Republic. Good art and lifestyle but nothing in terms of military and economic power.

When Roman Republic got more authoritarian (transforming to Roman Empire) - Greek states had lost the remnants of its independence.

Being a satellite state works that way.

The issue is that in terms of military and economic power EU used to be much stronger 20 years ago and that strength have been deliberately wasted by current generation of politicians still in power.

Political class in Europe made multiple wrong choices in the last years despite warnings.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-01-19 23:37:42+00:00
"Gut Ding will Weile haben." / "Haste makes waste."

I've got good memories waiting on the platform in Arnhem for my train back into Germany in the early morning, after a night in the coffeeshops there in the nineties.

Observing all the commuters holding on to their coffee to go, and balancing it in their hands, anticipating the jerky start of these things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Mat_%2764 :-)

Looked hilarious. All in sync. Like orchestrated.

Regarding the percieved slowness, and differences on both sides of the border(at the times?).

When doing the same route by car, your motorways felt supersmooth, even with all the strange markings and traffic signs :-)

Crossing back into Germany toward Oberhausen-> Ruhrpott came the Autobahn made of concrete slabs, and gaps between them. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump!.

Very annoying when still 'under the influence' of that grassy green stuff :-)
by subscribed | 2026-01-19 23:37:59+00:00
Well, it's not illegal per se.

On the cruise I'd need to seek the written permission of the vessel's master's to operate :) (and ideally cruise company permission to even bring the transmitter on board)

Unlicenced passengers could probably plead ignorance and sneak UHF DMR radios.

Or get a business allocation and use P25 radios and once again plead ignorance :)
by dundarious | 2026-01-19 23:38:04+00:00
I disagree, as group lifetimes are conceptually and architecturally often easier and simpler than having lots of individual lifetimes managed by smart pointers. And sure, you can often slap shared_ptr around the place, or hopefully a less lazy smart ptr choice, but it makes the code harder to understand by obscuring ownership rather than eliminating it as a concern.
by rayiner | 2026-01-19 23:38:53+00:00
The spike in the 1940s is the war itself and recovery from the Great Depression. Obviously NATO and the reserve currency and whatnot came after that spike. If you look at the second chart, we’re right around the same point as the historical 1.7% growth curve. If you look at the fifth chart, the large european economies also seemed to have grown slightly faster after the war than before it. So I’m not sure how much the U.S. is benefitting from being the hegemon.

The real reason the U.S. is so rich is that it was already the richest country in the world in 1900. The U.S. had almost 50% higher GDP per capita than western europe in 1900: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Population-GDP-and-GDP-p.... Today, its still about 50%.
by dathinab | 2026-01-19 23:39:18+00:00
> This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies and to make society worse in order to increase profits.

going beyond social media it's IMHO the side effect of a initially innocent looking but dangerous and toxic monetization model which we find today not just in social media but even more so in news, apps and most digital markets
by leeny | 2026-01-19 23:39:50+00:00
This is very good advice. Because OP doesn't talk about how to write emails, here's how to write good cold emails to hiring managers/employees/CEOs: https://interviewing.io/blog/how-to-get-in-the-door-at-top-c...

P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-19 23:40:56+00:00
> Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independant ethics committees / reviews. They're free to experiement as they like on the entire population.

If they are going to publish in academic journals, they will have to answer to those bodies. Whether those bodies have any teeth is a whole other matter.
by koiueo | 2026-01-19 23:41:02+00:00
How dare you even trying to compare otherworldly nanotexture™®© to a regular horrible PC matte screen!

Unappealing PC matte screens are for old farts who can't appreciate sexy rounded corners and perfectly rendered fonts¹

¹ assuming your display yields over 300dpi

If you are a cool kid, you'll prefer glossy screen any day. Only with deep contrasty blacks will you be able to appreciate your low-contrast macos interface or your low-contrast VScode solarized theme. Occasional gorgeous reflection of stunning you squinting at the screen is just a nice bonus.

But I have to give it to Apple: PC glossy screens are mostly even worse.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-19 23:41:39+00:00
>then they should also argue strongly to get rid of the Electoral System in the US and let the presidential popular vote be the decisive factor.

I don't think that's an unpopular idea as of 25 years ago now. With current technology, nationals should be a direct democracy (and with ranked choice votes, not FPtP), the house should be doubled (if not tripled since we stopped growing 100 years ago), and the supreme court should be expanded to at least 15.

And that's just the start of small updates we need for government.
by worldsayshi | 2026-01-19 23:42:43+00:00
Yeah, I tinker with hardware embarrassingly seldom and my impression was that it was very easy to work with. The screen, which was the issue, is designed to be replaced and I realized it was fixable when I was trying to figure out if I could replace it.

My impression was that they had never seen the model before and for some reason they weren't interested in trying. I think I talked to the shop owner and it wasn't at a chain store.

The actual screen had dislodged from its detachable frame so I glued it back to that. And the screen connector pins were a bit bent so I bent them back. Then it worked. Figuring out how the broken parts were supposed to fit together were a little bit finicky I suppose. If I hadn't launched it into a concrete wall it would've been easier to figure out.
by dijit | 2026-01-19 23:42:49+00:00
You demanded I provide numbers for "vast majority" and "edge cases" in your first reply. I provided data: 375 exonerations over 35 years in a system processing 20 million cases annually. You then spent two dozen comments redefining terms and refusing to commit to any position.

Now you claim your speculation "should not be rejected for lack of citations" whilst having opened by demanding exactly that from me. That's not intellectual honesty, that's having it both ways.

On "fundamentally": you've argued the system is unjust in 100% of cases, that plea bargains are inherently coercive, and that false confessions happen routinely. Whether you used that specific word is irrelevant. Those are claims of fundamental dysfunction.

You ask which comment I mean. Here's the thread: verisimi asked "when is the law just in its application?" implying rarely or never. I said more often than not. You've argued with that for two dozen comments whilst refusing to state your own position. When pressed, you admitted you "don't have strong claims, just worries." That's fine, but it's not a basis for a dozen-comment argument.

The pattern here is clear: you make strong implications without committing to them, demand evidence from others whilst providing none yourself, redefine terms when pinned down, and retreat to semantic quibbles when substantive points fail. That's not productive discussion.

I engaged seriously when you made your cost barrier point. That was substantive. But you've chosen to return to arguing about whether you said "if" and who used which word.

I'm done. You've had multiple opportunities to state a clear position. You haven't. Readers can judge for themselves whether that's because you don't have one or because you're unwilling to defend it.
by AIorNot | 2026-01-19 23:43:13+00:00
Yeah agreed - It all depends on how quickly AI (or more aptly, ai driven work done by humans hoping to make a buck) starts replacing real chunks of production workflows

“prediction is hard especially about the future” - yogi berra

As a hedge - I have personally dived deep into AI coding, actually have been for 3 years now - I’ve even launched 2 AI startups and working on a third - but its all so unpredictable and hardly lucrative yet

As an over 50 year old - I’m a clear target for replacement by AI
by numpad0 | 2026-01-19 23:44:03+00:00
No, LIDAR data are necessarily taken from a single position. They are 3D, but literally single eyed. You can't tell from LIDAR data if you're looking at a half-cut apple or an intact one. This becomes obvious the moment you tried to rotate a LIDAR capture - it's just the skin. You need depth maps from all angles to reconstruct the complete skin.

So you have to have minimum two for front and back of a dancer. Actually, the seams are kind of dubious so let's say three 120 degrees apart. Well we need ones looking down as well as up for baggy clothing, so more like nine, 30 degrees apart vertically and 120 degrees horizontally, ...

and ^ this will go far down enough that installing few dozens of identical non-Apple cameras in a monstrous sci-fi cage starts making a lot more sense than an iPhone, for a video.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-19 23:44:19+00:00
That's actually true in India, because India has a huge population. So no matter where you are in India, you are never too far from civilization. Some people have backpacked across India with just a few essentials.

Nepal and Bhutan has less population, so the density of humans vs nature is less there.

But if you stick close to the hiking trails in this vast & beautiful subcontinent, you can backpack easily from one rest stop to another.

And after some hours of tough trekking, when you encounter the warm welcome, bonhomie, food & drinks, music & laughter from the natives/locals, it is an amazing experience, worthy to be cherished. Faith in humanity - restored!
by adw | 2026-01-19 23:44:53+00:00
What this is saying is "you need an objective criterion you can use as a success metric" (aka a verifiable reward in RL terms). "Design of verifiers" is a specific form of domain expertise.

This applies to exploits, but it applies _extremely_ generally.

The increased interest in TLA+, Lean, etc comes from the same place; these are languages which are well suited to expressing deterministic success criteria, and it appears that (for a very wide range of problems across the whole of software) given a clear enough, verifiable enough objective, you can point the money cannon at it until the problem is solved.

The economic consequences of that are going to be very interesting indeed.
by netsharc | 2026-01-19 23:46:09+00:00
I wonder how much one can analyze with timings and sizes. If a news article on a known hostname has 5 Xitter embeds and 4 Instagram ones, the Creep in the Middle can count how many bytes are transferred in the HTTPS requests to Xitter/Instagram (there won't be 9 separate TCP connects due to connection reuse), and compare that to its own scrape of news articles of that host...
by djwide | 2026-01-19 23:46:11+00:00
It’s a call to patriotism. China versus America. “Who will you back?” This has become a common plea from the Silicon Valley elite over the last six months. I heard the move up close at the Harvard Kennedy School, where a visiting Eric Schmidt warned that AI may soon cross into autonomous self-improvement, argued that someone will need to “raise their hand” and impose limits, and then pivoted into the geopolitical register, contrasting American and Chinese trajectories and urging policy and funding choices aligned with “American values.” Others have also made versions of this argument in different forums. Tarun Chhabra, head of national security policy at Anthropic, has made a similar argument, urging an “American stack” and treating model governance as a geopolitical contest. Putting aside the awkwardness of nationalist messaging coming from the Bay Area’s long-time borderless “global citizens,” the incentives are not hard to see. If you can frame the open vs closed models debate as a national security referendum, you can frame restrictive rules as patriotism and you can frame “responsible control” as synonymous with dominance by a small circle of incumbent providers.

The posture makes sense once you consider two facts. One: industries which may live and die on capricious regulatory rule making must make their case to those with their hands on the levers of power. In 2026 America, those hands are professed patriotic Republicans. Two: Big Frontier LLM is losing the tech battle, or at least losing the easy assumption that America’s lead is automatic and permanent. They are on their back foot so they must frame the open vs closed model debate wrongfully as a fight between America and China. America cannot afford to lose a battle to China and by extension Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet cannot afford to lose to their competition.

Yet there is nothing inherently Chinese about open models and nothing inherently American about closed models. If anything, it is the opposite. Open models are decentralized, inspectable, forkable, and difficult to monopolize. That aligns with an American instinct to diffuse power, prefer competition over permission, and distrust single points of control. Closed models concentrate capability behind a small number of gatekeepers, wrapped in secrecy, and sustained by privileged access to regulators. That logic is far closer to centralized control than to open competition. The real fault line is not America versus China. It is democratic diffusion versus unnatural scarcity, and good tech versus bad tech.

Full article linked.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-19 23:46:32+00:00
I don't understand why you see it that way... Whether using an arena allocator or smart pointer, in both cases you need to allocate the individual object (p = arena_allocate(arena, ...), or p = std::make_unique<T>()). In the case of a smart pointer that is all you have to do - deallocation will be automatic. In the case of the arena allocator you will need to deallocate the entire arena at the appropriate time.

How are you conceptualizing this that the arena allocator is simpler?

How are you conceptualizing smart pointers as "obscuring" ownership, when the entire point of them is to make ownership explicit! The smart pointer IS the owner!
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-19 23:47:43+00:00
> USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.

Oh don't worry, Trump's already kneecapped both of those for a decade to come from 2025's actions alone. Y'all got time to catch up.

China, much scarier. But we all kinda let that happen over 30 years. Too late to complain now. I'd say we work together but uhh... I think we both understand (or rather, fail to understand) modern US policy these days.
by vessenes | 2026-01-19 23:47:54+00:00
A lot of this depends on your workflow. A language with great typing, type checking and good compiler errors will work better in a loop than one with a large surface overhead and syntax complexity, even if it's well represented. This is the instinct behind, e.g. https://github.com/toon-format/toon, a json alternative format. They test LLM accuracy with the format against JSON, (and are generally slightly ahead of JSON).

Additionally just the ability to put an entire language into context for an LLM - a single document explaining everything - is also likely to close the gap.

I was skimming some nano files and while I can't say I loved how it looked, it did look extremely clear. Likely a benefit.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2026-01-19 23:48:36+00:00
Real talk, if you hit me with a vehicle and put my life in jeopardy, I might call you a fucking bitch in the moment.

Regardless of all other facts of that incident, she chose to hit the gas, like her wife chose to yell DRIVE BABY, DRIVE DRIVE. That’s kind of rude to do an officer.
by rvz | 2026-01-19 23:48:42+00:00
Tells you all you need to know around how extremely weak a C executable like QuickJS is for LLMs to exploit. (If you as an infosec researcher prompt them correctly to find and exploit vulnerabilities).

> Leak a libc Pointer via Use-After-Free. The exploit uses the vulnerability to leak a pointer to libc.

I doubt Rust would save you here unless the binary has very limited calls to libc, but would be much harder for a UaF to happen in Rust code.
by perihelions | 2026-01-19 23:49:32+00:00
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this discovery. I noticed when this story was posted on HN earlier, that this "news" domain (thedefensenews.com) is an LLM product; and all of the expert "quotes" it quotes, are hallucinations.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260119203631/https://www.thede... ("Pentagon Places 1,500 Arctic-Trained Airborne Troops on Standby as Greenland Dispute Escalates")

I.e., the quote attributed (falsely) to a CSIS analyst, "A domestic mission provides legal cover to load aircraft, marshal equipment, and place units on short notice. The moment of truth is the flight plan", is unique to this domain. Pretty sure no CSIS person ever said that.

And: "This is an Arctic hammer being readied for an urban nail" has no results anywhere else on the internet. Nor even just the substrings, "arctic hammer" + "urban nail".

The LLM nature is subjectively obvious, too, even without the verifiably fake quotes.
by dathinab | 2026-01-19 23:51:35+00:00
> interesting that TV is regulated

soso, it's mostly that freely accessible channels need their content to be in a certain ~PG/age protection range (and in many countries that also changes depending on the time of the day, not sure about the US)

beyond that the constitution disallows any further regulation of actual content

through that doesn't mean that they can't apply subtle pressure indirectly.

Is that legal? no.

Anyway done for years? yes.

But mostly subtle not forced, i.e. let's say you give "suggestions" not required changes.

Except in recent years it has become a lot less subtle and much more forced. Not just giving non binding "suggestions" but also harass media outlets in other seemingly unrelated ways if they don't follow your "suggestions".
by simonw | 2026-01-19 23:51:38+00:00
I went looking for a single Markdown file I could dump into an LLM to "teach" it the language and found this one:

https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/blob/main/MEMORY.m...

Optimistically I dumped the whole thing into Claude Opus 4.5 as a system prompt to see if it could generate a one-shot program from it:

llm -m claude-opus-4.5 \
-s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/refs/heads/main/MEMORY.md \
'Build me a mandelbrot fractal CLI tool in this language'
> /tmp/fractal.nano

Here's the transcript for that. The code didn't work: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7847f022566d11629ec2139f1d109...

So I fired up Claude Code inside a checkout of the nanolang and told it how to run the compiler and let it fix the problems... which DID work. Here's that transcript:

https://gisthost.github.io/?9696da6882cb6596be6a9d5196e8a7a5...

And the finished code, with its output in a comment: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e7f3577adcfd392ab7fa23b1295d0...

So yeah, a good LLM can definitely figure out how to use this thing given access to the existing documentation and the ability to run that compiler.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-19 23:51:45+00:00
> Nice, so you didn't watch the video completely.

I did: he talks about the 3.5% is "just" walking and chanting down the street, but about structure changes 'behind the scenes'.

But the video is generally irrelevant to the point being made in the comment, as Stoermer (video creator) recognizes the people who came up with the rule are criticizing some who are putting it forward certain ideas about.

Stoermer is putting forward the idea that the 3.5% needs to be done in a certain way to actually be something meaningful, which doesn't disprove the rule nor the originating comment: that you'll be more liekly to get to a critical mass of movement supporters by eschewing violence.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-19 23:52:10+00:00
> The parts that touch hardware (or similarly bare kernel interfaces) must be so.

That's just a choice and no you are incorrect. It is perfectly possible to deal with hardware in managed languages.

> Sure, you could split device driver implementations and so on, but somewhere there's a meaningful lower level of software within the system.

This is optional. Been there, done that. Many times.

> No. The kernel must provide for context switching. It would be like migrating threads IPC, but one-way. No threads, no scheduler, no dedicated data transfer. In other words, the bare minimum necessary to make a sensible abstraction around switching processes.

Yes, IPC is context switching. Timer interrupts can cause extra context switches.

> seL4, according to its developers, is not absolutely a microkernel. I believe the rationale mainly points to the in-kernel scheduler, but seL4's IPC interacts with the scheduler and is noticeably more elaborate than a mere context switch. Even if seL4's IPC is, by most standards, minimal, I do not consider it to be so objectively. I described a meaningfully more minimal alternative.

It is a pretty poor implementation in my opinion.

> Delegating scheduling to userspace is trivial. If necessary, designate a scheduler to run if no scheduling decision is available. It has been done before, and the only usual objection is performance.

It's trivial, except for the little problem that your userspace program can be killed and then you have no scheduler.

> Just as hardware interrupts can be abstracted into messages, syscalls can be abstracted into messages. I'm not saying that the hardware implementation directly conforms to the abstraction.

Ok. If you want to use a different description of the term syscall than is common then that's fine but you should define that up front. Your definition of a syscall simply does not match mine.
by v_CodeSentinal | 2026-01-19 23:52:21+00:00
This is a fascinating pattern—treating 'agent skills' as composable dependencies rather than monolithic prompts.
I'm curious about the execution model: How are you handling the security implications of an agent pulling and executing arbitrary skill code? Is there an inherent sandboxing layer for these skills, or do they inherit the full privileges of the host agent?
In my experience with agentic tools, managing the 'permissions scope' of 3rd party capabilities is the hardest part of moving from demo to production.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-19 23:52:44+00:00
All Obama had to do - to have some modicum of respect by the world (despite him doing wars, but world already is accustomed to US being involved in wars, meh) - was to reject the Nobel Peace Prize. But he failed.

And by doing the opposite, despite all his idealistic "humanitarian" speeches, he simply proved himself as a warmongering hypocrite to the world.

In that aspect, Trump did try desperately to play "the Big Brother, the peacemaker" role in conflicts across the world, in an obvious (childish) attempt to outdo Obama's (dubious) legacy, but he failed.

So he's dropped his mask, the velvet gloves are off, and it is every man (country) for himself (itself) as the King of the Hill decides which hill to stake his next flag on.

Oily toy has been seemingly grabbed, and now the King has set his eyes Northwards. And that bodes ill for those who question his will. Because a troublemaker child may smash or throw some things when he has a temper tantrum.