MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-01 01:20:18+00:00
When I played an anamorphic PAL DVD on a 4:3 CRT, the picture would look vertically stretched until I pressed the 'aspect ratio' button on the TV.

This would correct the display, but how did it do it? Was it by drawing the same number of scanlines, but reducing the vertical distance between each line?
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-01 01:20:21+00:00
The obsession with wars plays a cruel joke with its adherents. China will not go to war with Taiwan unless something really stupid is done against China.

"> multiple doomsday options..." - doomsday for whom exactly? China doesn't import anything vital from Taiwan but the West does. Both Taiwan and the West are dependent on China too.

Moreover, the Chinese have other options: sanctions, blockades, covert military, etc. the precedent has already been established with Venezuela.

If China disrupts Taiwan's fragile economy, the fabs will doomsday themselves and the West will go along with them.

> I don't think there's any real upside to actually taking Taiwan

You're thinking in terms of plunder but that's not how China thinks. China is being pressured economically and threatened militarily - Venezuela supplies oil to China, and the Chinese have investments there - Taiwan is just a pawn in a much bigger, existential game of survival.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:20:26+00:00
> There's no Buffett's strategy

There is and it’s found in float, leverage and low-volatility assets [1].

If you look at what he does, that becomes clear. If you only pay attention to how people talk about him on the internet, you’ll be misled into seeing trend following.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19681/w196...
by grenran | 2026-01-01 01:20:49+00:00
Most people ditch GAFAM because they want to own their digital identity and not just trade one gatekeeper for another, even if it's "hassle free" to start off with.

And with the setup of Happymail renting out individual email addresses under the same domain to different users, it makes it impossible for them to leave the platform. Have you considered letting people own their domains?
by londons_explore | 2026-01-01 01:21:57+00:00
> It’s especially common in vertical videos like YouTube Shorts, where the stored resolution is a square 1080 × 1080, and the aspect ratio makes it a portrait.

My guess is this is because encoding hardware can do max 1920x1080, and there is no easy way to make that hardware encode 1080x1920, so you are forced to encode as 1080x1080. Swapping rows and columns in hardware tends to be a big change because caches and readahead totally changes when you process the data in a different order.
by teraflop | 2026-01-01 01:24:21+00:00
Careful -- that statement is half true.

It's true that no matter what symbolic representation format you choose (binary or otherwise) it will never be able to encode all irrational numbers, because there are uncountably many of them.

But it's certainly false that computers can only represent rational numbers. Sure, there are certain conventional formats that can only represent rational numbers (e.g. IEEE-754 floating point) but it's easy to come up with other formats that can represent irrationals as well. For instance, the Unicode string "√5" is representable as 4 UTF-8 bytes and unambiguously denotes a particular irrational.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-01 01:24:29+00:00
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but the flip side of that argument is that whenever you do see higher investment and better amenities in a historically marginalized neighborhood, that gets loudly deplored by faux-progressive activists as harmful "gentrification" and "changing the character" of the neighborhood. Y'all should pick one stance or the other; you can't have it both ways!
by EGreg | 2026-01-01 01:24:30+00:00
I don't know why this is downvoted, it's a great question.

1st Amendment: Congress shall make No Law

14th Amendment: Due process... incorporate the Bill of Rights against the states

I often wondered whether the next case after MacDonald vs Chicago and Heller would do the same for the 2nd amendment, i.e. wipe away the ability of cities to require gun licensing and registration.
by davidw | 2026-01-01 01:24:42+00:00
I don't think he's a hero, particularly, but he also does not strike me as a villain like some of the modern day billionaires either. I read a biography of him and he seems like an interesting guy. I don't think the 'humble lifestyle' thing was a schtick, like some suggest. I mean he mostly lived in Nebraska... give me a tiny fraction of his wealth and I would have taken right off out of Nebraska as the first thing I did, to go live somewhere warm and sunny.

He also seemed a bit more aware of how much power money can translate into, and it seems he kind of stuck to "being rich" rather than shooting for "rich and also politically powerful" (although I'm sure there are probably a few exceptions).

Compare his investment in the Washington Post with Bezos'. Buffett actually made money off it, and kept his hands off the direction of the paper. We all saw how much Bezos started leaning on it - which has had the effect of shedding subscribers as no one trusts it any more, and it's not attracting new readers of... the Fox News persuasion I guess we can call it.

It also seems he mostly stuck to what he knows in terms of kind of boring investments rather than flashy rockets and other showy things.

And of course he's been good with giving his money away and convincing others to do likewise.
by aussieguy1234 | 2026-01-01 01:25:37+00:00
> The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance #

On this including AI agents deleting home folders, I was able to run agents in Firejail by isolating vscode (Most of my agents are vscode based ones, like Kilo Code).

I wrote a little guide on how I did it https://softwareengineeringstandard.com/2025/12/15/ai-agents...

Took a bit of tweaking, vscode crashing a bunch of times with not being able to read its config files, but I got there in the end. Now it can only write to my projects folder. All of my projects are backed up in git.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:27:22+00:00
> I just asked ChatGPT

Please don’t do this.

> what Warren Buffett's strategy is, and it said buying undervalued companies and holding for a long time

No. It’s cheap leverage applied to low-volatility assets bought for a fair price [1]. (Munger got him off the ‘cigarette butt’ strategy of buying on the cheap.)

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19681/w196...
by gtowey | 2026-01-01 01:27:38+00:00
Start putting it in your calendar -- meal times as well as "start cooking". I make enough for the family for have at least two meals. One-pot meals means less fussing with trying to get multiple dishes to be ready at the same time.

I keep a Google doc of our dinner recipes. These are things that we know everyone likes, and usually I make tweaks to Internet recipes to either make them more to my taste, or easier to make. It also means I can split the effort -- my wife picks what we're having from our list and shops for the ingredients. Then I cook. If you have around 20 recipes you can just keep rotating and not get tired of them, and I like that I get to practice making the same recipes and make little changes to improve how I cook them each time.

Basically dinner takes very little thought or effort right now. Which is great for the stage of my life I am in right now. It doesn't always have to be this structured but it's nice to have an easy fallback.
by jart | 2026-01-01 01:28:39+00:00
Literally everything you say and do with the robot is uploaded into the cloud for someone else's benefit. You'd have to be getting something really good out of using the robot for that to be worth it, and I think that's been the case with me so far, mostly because I'm someone who doesn't really have much in the way of confidential information. The advantage of having a bunch of claudes and geminis running around doing things for me is too much fun to turn down. The best benefit though is just being less lonely, since it's never been easy for me to find other people who care about the set of weird things I'm interested in, which is constantly changing, and even harder to find someone who not only knows but is willing to collaborate too, during all the oddball times of any given day or night I happen to be both productive and awake.
by doodlebugging | 2026-01-01 01:28:45+00:00
I am on my last smart phone now. I almost "upgraded" to a flip phone when I got this one but I decided at the last minute to keep an iphone so that I could get regular photo updates from the kids. I don't see this as important any more. Real cameras take better photos.

Funny enough, my workstation here that I am ditching is a 2006 Xeon dual core with 32 - 8 GB of RAM and a nice NVidia GPU (can't remember which one). The "-8" is because a couple of RAM slots are dead, LOL. It has three dead caps that I can see but still boots if you're extremely patient and lucky. The main HD also has some boot sector issues that nearly prevent a Win7Pro boot but with the right combo of disk repair tools I can boot on the 10th or 12th attempt. That's the main reason I am moving on. I have a brand new NZXT machine with PopOS that I bought several years ago that is just sitting here waiting for someone to power it up and I bought a high spec mini-pc to see what that world offers.

I ditched MSFT stock a few years ago in favor of AMD. That's worked out pretty good so far. I'm no fan of AI. I'm sure there's a legitimate use case but today most of the players seem to be on a cash grab and I hate thieves and liars so I have a natural disinclination to support that shit.
by itsthecourier | 2026-01-01 01:28:54+00:00
tokens are tokens, shorter or larger, they are tokens

in that sense I don't see how this is more succinct than phyton

it is more than typescript and c#, of course, but we need to compete with the laconic languages

in that sense you will end up with Cisc vs Risc dilemma from the cpu wars. you will find the ability to compress even more is adding new tokens to compress repetitive tasks like sha256 being a single token. I feel that's a way to compress even more
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2026-01-01 01:29:26+00:00
Thanks for the link. There are counterpoints in the linked article, including:

> Yousef Munayyer, an Israeli citizen and the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, wrote that Palestinians only have varying degrees of limited rights in Israel. He states that although Palestinians make up about 20% of Israel's population, less than 7% of the budget is allocated to Palestinian citizens. He describes the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel as second-class citizens while four million more are not citizens at all. He states that a Jew from any country can move to Israel but a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. Munayyer also described the difficulties he and his wife faced when visiting the country.[301]

Hope over time this changes for the better. If they can start letting people expelled years ago to return too. Maybe not to their old address but work something out.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:30:51+00:00
> You don’t have time to do those things if you are poor and working 2-3 jobs

I know multiple folks who did this. Poor people aren’t mentally deficient. (Often they’re sturdier than those of us who grew up comfortably enough.)

> unexpected expenses and cost of living increases destroy your budget a lot more than McDonald’s

This is correct. But it’s true for most Americans when we consider medical debt.

Budgeting and analyzing spending and risk is still sensible.
by synalx | 2026-01-01 01:31:03+00:00
One major disadvantage here is the lack of training data on a "new" language, even if it's more efficient. At least in the short term, this means needing to teach the LLM your language in the context window.

I've spent a good bit of time exploring this space in the context of web frameworks and templating languages. One technique that's been highly effective is starting with a _very_ minimal language with only the most basic concepts. Describe that to the LLM, ask it to solve a small scale problem (which the language is likely not yet capable of doing), and see what kinds of APIs or syntax it hallucinates. Then add that to your language, and repeat. Obviously there's room for adjustment along the way, but we've found this process is able to cut many many lines from the system prompts that are otherwise needed to explain new syntax styles to the LLM.
by bedelman | 2026-01-01 01:31:07+00:00
I believe in class actions as the most efficient way for large groups (of consumers or small businesses) to resolve disputes. Have to think about the specific claim. Yesterday's write-up covers a scheme harming other affiliates (creators, influencers, reviewers, etc.) and also harming merchants and networks. I don't know if users are direct victims of the stand-down violations and concealment.
by bane | 2026-01-01 01:32:13+00:00
A true pioneer who helped popularize computing in so many ways. Computer Chronicles absolutely helped catalog so many things that happened in computing, and in itself captured the changing computing culture of its era.

Suits, ties, combovers, oh my! But it also helped put faces and voices to names, introduce and show video of computing in action, trying to solve real problems, and showcasing businesses trying to figure out how to carve a niche for themselves in an emergent market.

It's also some of the best TV ever made, snappy, restrained, strangely calming.

RIP Stewart.
by sethev | 2026-01-01 01:32:34+00:00
We should never idolize a person (in my opinion). Here are some things Buffet has done that I admire (notice that phrasing):

- He consistently communicated with shareholders of Berkshire in a straight-forward and transparent way in his letters and annual reports. If you read these documents, I believe that you will have a solid understanding of how he built Berkshire.
- He maintained a disciplined approach to investing and managing risk over 60+ years.
- He still lives in the same home he bought when he was 28 years old.

Our society has become moralistic. It's so much more useful to identify behaviors to learn from - either to emulate or to avoid - than to debate whether various public figures are good or bad people.

That said, it makes me a little sad that we've read the last of his annual letters.
by i80and | 2026-01-01 01:32:53+00:00
If a startup were able to truly solve the first two issues alone, they would not be burning those world-changing engineering solutions on flying taxis.

I don't know if a silent, fail-safe, and efficient method of flight is physically impossible or not, but I do know this is low on the list of applications it would be first seen in.

EDIT: I'm looking at the air taxi companies this thread started with, and no, they have not solve any of the relevant problems.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:33:05+00:00
> if you have billions that could be spent on taking tangible action to change such taxation

Do you have evidence he didn’t try? He’s been a prolific (albeit measured) donor to candidates who have pushed for this [1].

From what I can tell, Buffett enjoyed making money. He outsourced his philanthropy to Bill & Melinda Gates. Their focus has tended to be global poverty.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/search?order=desc&q=warren+buffe...
by knlb | 2026-01-01 01:33:53+00:00
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer

In the fullness of time, you end up having to. Or at least I have. Which is why I always dislike additional layers and transforms at this point.

(eg. when I think about react native on android, I hear "now I'll have to be excellent at react/javascript and android/java/kotlin and C++ to be able to debug the bridge; not that "I can get away with just javascript".)
by wilsonnb3 | 2026-01-01 01:34:57+00:00
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."

I debug at my abstraction layer because I can trust that my compiler actually works, LLMs are fundamentally different and need to produce human readable code.
by teecha | 2026-01-01 01:35:59+00:00
fairly new to lifting myself (2+ years taking it seriously) but this thing seems to jive with what I've read across different areas

bodybuilders can build muscle size with high reps and lower weight or lower reps and high weight as long as they do it close to failure with only a few reps in reserve (rir)

powerlifters, or those focusing on strength, usually go for high weight and lower reps because they might be training for a competition that focuses on 1 rep max and/or the body can really only handle so many reps when pushing it at 80-90% of 1 rep max

neither is inherently better but a matter of what goals you have in mind, plus, hypertrophy contributes to overall strength, too
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:37:03+00:00
Why one time? Why not a 1% wealth tax on over $1bn?

Hell, make it revenue neutral—use it to cut everyone else’s taxes by a per-capita amount. (About $875/voter/year [1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_voter_...
by allan_s | 2026-01-01 01:37:45+00:00
I think I know where they're coming from as I used to have a similar wrong model. I thought strength = more muscle cells and endurance = just better heart/lungs to deliver oxygen and clear waste like CO2 and lactic acid.

Turns out muscle fibers mostly grow bigger rather than more numerous, and there are different fiber types (slow-twitch vs fast-twitch) that adapt based on how you train. So for the same muscle, an Ironman runner and a guy doing heavy low-rep squats will develop different fiber characteristics: you can't fully max out both.

I'm simplifying, but learning this changed a lot about how I understand exercise at the biological level.
by lrvick | 2026-01-01 01:39:20+00:00
I literally burned and sold bootleg software to churches as one of my go to hustles as a kid, and have a blu ray burner handy.

Knowing how, and being willing to do it for piles of titles and make cases that are nice to display and browse in the real world alongside mass produced copies, takes a lot of effort and I have better things to do with my limited time.

As is tracking down very rare titles in blu ray quality. Often easier to just buy the most decent cased copies I can and rip for long term storage.
by globalnode | 2026-01-01 01:41:23+00:00
I was going to try and resist posting for as long as possible in 2026 (self dare) and here I am on day 1 -- this is a pretty bad idea. are you going to trust the llm to write software you depend on with your life? your money? your whatever? worst idea so far of 2026. wheres the accountability when things go wrong?
by wilsonnb3 | 2026-01-01 01:42:01+00:00
> "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?" 40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up.

How much of the code is read by humans, though? I think using languages that LLMs work well with, like TS or Python, makes a lot of sense but the chosen language still needs to be readable by humans.
by simonw | 2026-01-01 01:42:15+00:00
I really hope so.

The big labs are (mostly) investing a lot of resources into reducing the chance their models will trigger self-harm and AI psychosis and suchlike. See the GPT-4o retirement (and resulting backlash) for an example of that.

But the number of users is exploding too. If they make things 5x less likely to happen but sign up 10x more people it won't be good on that front.
by DSMan195276 | 2026-01-01 01:43:29+00:00
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No.

I can't speak for the author, but I do often do this. IMO it's a misleading comparison though, you don't have to debug those things because rarely does the compiler output incorrect code compared to the code you provided, it's not so simple for an LLM.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-01 01:43:46+00:00
> Sounds an awful like The Right to be Forgotten under GPDR Article 17

Does DROP let you censor search records?

I’d encourage anyone in Europe to compare California’s CCPA to the EU’s GDPR. It was inspired by the latter, and fixes a lot of its problem. (The Swiss referendum system was based on learning from and improving on California’s.)
by tialaramex | 2026-01-01 01:44:04+00:00
So the thing about "Ya'll should ..." is that it's often mistaking "Group A and Group B hold conflicting beliefs but share a characteristic" with "Group C, all the people with this characteristic, all exhibit an incoherent belief structure".

For example suppose you apply this to the US Senate. So instead of Group A (Democrats and a those who caucus with them) and Group B (Republicans) we instead think there's a single Group C, Senators. Now their behaviour seems incoherent, this Group C seems to hold contradictory opinions and behaves irrationally, why can't they get their act together? The actual answer is that we misunderstood and they're not a single coherent group so that's why they don't act that way.
by sho_hn | 2026-01-01 01:44:18+00:00
Sure -- but that's fair game in engineering. I work on cars. If we kill people with safety faults I expect it to make more headlines than all the fun roadtrips.

What I find interesting with chat bots is that they're "web apps" so to speak, but with safety engineering aspects that type of developer is typically not exposed to or familiar with.
by quietsegfault | 2026-01-01 01:44:40+00:00
That isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Saying “China is safer than Mississippi” depends entirely on defining safety as low visible street crime and ignoring state power.

China is safer only for people who are compliant, apolitical, unorganized, and unremarkable. For a disadvantaged person, the main risk is not random crime. In China there is no independent court, no reliable legal recourse, no protected media scrutiny, and no guaranteed exit. When something goes wrong, it cannot be challenged.

Mississippi has real and serious problems, but the state is constrained by federal courts, national law, public reporting, and internal mobility. Those constraints materially change the risk profile when abuse occurs.

Low street crime under an unconstrained government is not “safety.” It is conditional calm. Treating that as “safer” than a place with enforceable limits on state power misunderstands what actually puts disadvantaged people at risk.
by dgreensp | 2026-01-01 01:44:54+00:00
A curly brace is multiple tokens? Even in models trained to read and write code? Even if true, I’m not sure how much that matters, but if it does, it can be fixed.

Imagine saying existing human languages like English are “inefficient” for LLMs so we need to invent a new language. The whole thing LLMs are good at is producing output that resembles their training data, right?
by phil21 | 2026-01-01 01:46:17+00:00
So all the predictable arguments aside...

Why is no one talking about the "other grid" capacity here?

Natural gas at this scale cannot be delivered by truck. It's piped in direct from fields, typically.

When do we run out of natural gas "grid" capacity in these locations? I can't imagine we're that overbuilt compared to the electrical grid itself?

The big freeze in Texas is a recent example of the natural gas grid having localized "brownouts" due to a few factors - one of which being the demand of all the natural gas peakers trying to fire at once.

Seems like this is the next infrastructure piece to have a supply crunch to me? There are places (North Dakota) so contranstrained by capacity to deliver gas to the "grid" that they simply flare it off because it's cheaper to pay the government to do that vs. lay pipe. This implies to me that natural gas is about to become more valuable.