MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bronco21016 | 2026-01-02 18:51:19+00:00
My gut says yes and no. Generally I think jobs pushing atoms are probably safer but there's been headway on this as well. Maybe not total elimination but further skill and human labor intensive reduction seems to be the trend. For example: a fast food restaurant maybe needed 5 employees before and with these advances needs 2. Things like automated order kiosks, automatic fry machines, or bots that restock pre-packed inventory. More labor intensive tasks though like plumbing, electrical, etc already pay somewhere around the 50% mark anyway because of a lack of skilled workers.

On the physical side of jobs, robotics definitely has heavy investment and I think it will continuously and slowly eat away at some of these physical tasks. Look at a modern warehouse for example.
by LightBug1 | 2026-01-02 18:51:21+00:00
Even if that were true - and it's likely true in some cases - the disregard Israel has shown has been appalling. You don't get out of this by blaming Hamas. You simply don't. If you believe you do - I'll be writing you off as a disgusting apologist.

I'm not going to rehash the war crimes Israel has committed during the last two years. It's likely a waste of time as you already appear to be said apologist. A useful tool to those I don't see as any different to Nazi expansionists ...
by bflesch | 2026-01-02 18:51:29+00:00
Maybe "issue" should then be renamed into "TODOs". Because end users have "issues" with a product, it is up for someone with more knowledge to identify if the "issue" is PEBKAC, WONTFIX, FEATURE, or actually a TODO for the developers.

The term "discussion" does not have anything to do with this.

I understand these are all github choices of terms, and it should also be reframed properly by github.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-01-02 18:52:24+00:00
Whenever it concerns expensive production, and historical pieces are inevitably not „Blair witch“ cheap, financial model is very important. Given that this suggestion implies that copyright still exists, the film makers will have to choose either to raise money from state or donations to make something from public domain works or to explore material that is still copyrighted and count on box office and streaming revenues. The boundary between those choices is set to a random expiration number, the incentives are obviously skewed towards better pay, so chances are high that whatever enters public domain will be quickly forgotten by the public.
by MichaelNolan | 2026-01-02 18:52:38+00:00
Chaos testing is such an interesting idea. At my last job we didn’t have access to any of these tools. So I made a poor man’s chaos testing library for Java and spring services. At the application level we would inject random faults into method calls.

It doesn’t test nearly as much as the real tools can, but it did find some bugs in our workflow engine where it wouldn’t properly resume failed tasks.
by epistasis | 2026-01-02 18:53:10+00:00
Because the entire cgroup gets killed rather than individual processes, there's zero trace left. When k first encountered it I was running a multi day compute pipeline in tmux, and I saw my compute pane gone, and thought that I just have accidentally nuked the entire pane, killing the job. A few more attempts and I finally realized it wasn't me, and I checked journactl to find out that it was OOM killed but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the shell got killed to, what's the point of killing a process with tiny memory? Turns out that is the desired behavior of systemd, and thus of many distributions now.
by baq | 2026-01-02 18:53:14+00:00
> Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.

Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.

The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.
by bartread | 2026-01-02 18:53:18+00:00
> RIAA

I get you but there’s also an element of pick your poison. Not all the online options are great either, particularly not on the streaming front (cough, Spotify, cough[0]) in terms of their treatment - and payment - of artists. I think Bandcamp might be decent, and is generally the place I go for FLAC.

I buy a lot of pre-owned CDs as well: upside, less hard/impossible to recycle waste (discs), and less plastic waste (cases), doesn’t support the RIAA; downside, it also doesn’t support the artists. Somewhat regularly I find pre-owned is the only option though, at least if I want a physical copy.

[0] One could perhaps argue that the RIAA set the standard for turgid money grabbing scumbaggery that modern services have chosen to adopt, I think.
by Etheryte | 2026-01-02 18:53:24+00:00
I think this mixes up two separate things. If you're working with Java, it's conceivable that you could probably update with some effort. If you're an aerospace engineer using software that was certified decades ago for an exorbitant amount of money, it's never going to happen. Swap for nearly any industry of your liking, since most of the world runs on legacy software by definition. A very large number of people running into issues like these are not in a position where they could solve the problem even if they wanted to.
by buzer | 2026-01-02 18:54:03+00:00
I would disagree somewhat on his stance that video quality is not affected by container format (especially on part "Here is a list of things that people commonly associate with a video's quality"). Different container formats have different limitations regarding what video (and audio) formats they support. And while it subtitles support doesn't directly affect video quality, it does do so indirectly. If you cannot add subtitles without hardsubbing or subtitle formats are so limited that you end up needing hardsubbing anyway then the choice of the container format ends up affecting the video quality.
by GTP | 2026-01-02 18:54:04+00:00
This isn't the first post I read on HN about this topic. While the content differs, the core ideas tend to be similar. The problem isn't about knowing that we can do it, the problem is actually getting around doing it.

I have two blogs, one with a specific topic [1], another I created to share everything else that I feel like writing about [2]. Plus a personal "profile" page [3]. Both blogs only have one post, the first one perhaps a couple of drafts I never got around polishing to publish them. The personal page I still have to update after quitting a PhD months ago.

Why is this? Is it due to some lack of self discipline? Is it because, if I write why I quit a PhD, I would end up complaining about the current status of academia, and this could be at odds with my current employer's guidelines about posting on social media? Or is it because, if I stop and list all the things I have in the back of my mind that would require "just half an hour a day", I would end up filling a whole day? What are your thoughts on this?

[1] https://crypto.gtpware.eu/
[2] https://ramblings.gtpware.eu/
[3] https://gtpware.eu/
by squibonpig | 2026-01-02 18:54:09+00:00
Gun ownership isn't a terrible example honestly. I would have been probably 8 or so when I was allowed to traipse around in the woods near my dad's house with a BB gun, following extensive safety teaching of course. We would go out in the yard and shoot a shotgun and a rifle around that same age. People are probably not careful enough with guns right now in America given the stats, but it's not at all unreasonable in a rural context for a relatively young kid to be trusted with use of a firearm, even for short unsupervised periods. The real thing that a parent has to do (beyond still waiting until an appropriate age) is to extensively drill in the safety habits and proper use and know their kid well enough to determine whether they're ready for that responsibility.
by observationist | 2026-01-02 18:54:17+00:00
Pirate everything. Stop feeding beasts and they have no power.

The idea that you need intrusive surveillance in order to make games fair is absurd. If you need fair games, you need referees and moderation, which means you need to train and pay competent people and establish open and transparent rules and tools. You can also give your refs latitude, so if someone is obviously cheating, they have the power to do something about it. You should also require and implement publicly transparent and auditable actions with recourse for players to prevent abuses of power.

That's expensive. It's much easier to create a terms of service with vague guidelines, implement a totally intrusive, absurdly invasive rootkit that does some bare minimum scanning for known cheats and patterns, which establishes an arms race and provides bad actors a nice little point of ingress when the responsible company inevitably fails to protect their users competently.

Just like media platforms, if you cannot moderate at the scale at which you're operating, then it shouldn't be legal to operate at that scale.

People should stop giving money to companies that don't deserve it. No game is worth sacrificing your integrity for. "Just trust us, we know what we're doing" is a huge red flag, and it should be criminal to do what they do.

AI refs are going to be a very real possibility in the near future that can be just as fair and competent as humans, so the "necessity" for rootkits won't be a valid argument for much longer. It'll still be expensive, but multiplayer gaming fairness shouldn't ever serve as a reason for nuking privacy.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-02 18:54:33+00:00
If mathematics is understood as axioms + formal rules of inference + symbol manipulation, then no physical interaction is required for learning. A mind could, in principle: receive axioms, apply logical inference, derive theorems (Hilbert / formalist view).

The catch is, however, where do the axioms and concepts come from. Even the most abstract mathematics relies on conceptual primitives like number, equality, ordering, continuity, infinity, symmetry and these concepts are not innate in full mathematical form, but are bootstrapped from counting physical objects, spatial navigation, motion and change, containment and boundary, symmetry and repetition.

Cognitive science strongly suggests that human mathematical intuition is deeply grounded in embodied experience.
by b_t_s | 2026-01-02 18:55:05+00:00
same. I've settled on Empower + google sheets. Empower mostly as a free shortcut to pulling a dozen account balances in seconds. Sheets for keeping quarterly snapshots(in case empower goes away like mint did) and for turning those snapshots into a graph. Took a little setup, but then it's like 15 minutes once a quarter when I get the calendar reminder. Wish I had data going further back in time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with more detail/a full budget. The only things I've ever really cared about are approximate net worth/investment returns as a sanity check on retirement assumptions.
by tseropian | 2026-01-02 18:55:16+00:00
Senior / Lead software engineer specialized in web technologies - 18+ years of experience across startups and bigger organisations.

Location: Netherlands or Remote Europe / UK/ US
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Typescript, Node.js, Typescript, AWS, Serverless, PostgreSQL, Docker, AWS, React, GraphQL, Python, pen and paper
Résumé/CV: https://seropian.io
Email: thomas AT seropian DOT io
by dismalaf | 2026-01-02 18:55:18+00:00
Honestly, Ruby being "niche" helps prevent its enshittification... JS and Python are being turned into Java.

Ruby is still a great language for individuals who want to do things as opposed to simply create slop so they can get a chill job.

Forget TIOBE, maybe look at how much actual software or how many startups use Ruby. I bet it outperforms relative to the total amount of people who use it.
by vintermann | 2026-01-02 18:55:19+00:00
> So all authority/validity/legitimacy the US constitution has comes from the population, back then

Exactly, back then. But those people are dead to a man. They are no longer people of the United States. Even if you count them as such, they would be extremely outnumbered by currently living people of the United States, and thus, democratically they can no longer confer any legitimate authority to the constitution. If they do confer any authority, it isn't democratic authority, because it has to be based on something else than the people.

> And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.

I think that's a pretty tenuous argument, all the time people constantly point to the constitution itself as authority for why they accept the constitution, rather than pointing to themselves as they should if they truly believed in the people's authority as opposed to gods, kings and holy texts. But even accepting that argument, at the very least you'd have to agree that if the people decided to change the constitution through means other than those the constitution propose, then that could still be perfectly democratic.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-02 18:55:33+00:00
In that time the java app parsed 50 strings for object hierarchies (using a regex that isn't cached) and extracted values from a request object to a processing object, handled errors, and logged results.

3 times.

This is the naive version of that code, because "I will parallelize it later" and I was just getting the logic down.

Turns out, when you use programming languages that are fit for purpose, you don't have to obsess over every function call, because computers are fast.

I think people vastly underestimate how slow python is.

We are rebuilding an internal service in Java, going from python, and our half assed first attempts are over ten times faster, no engineering required, exactly because python takes forever just to call a function. The python version was dead, and would never get any faster without radical rebuilds and massive changes anyway.

It takes python 19ns to add two integers. Your CPU does it in about 0.3 ns..... in 2004.

That those ints take 28 bytes each to hold in memory is probably why the new Java version of the service takes 1/10th the memory as well.
by melissamrec | 2026-01-02 18:55:35+00:00
Starbridge | Senior Engineers (Kotlin/Java/React/Typescript) | NYC or Remote | Full-time | starbridge.ai
Starbridge is building an AI platform that turns large-scale public and enterprise data into reliable sales insights. We are early, moving fast, and building from zero to one, so this role will have huge ownership and product impact.

Product Engineer: (React/Typescript) who would work closely with product and design to build user-facing parts of the platform. You will craft performant, stable frontends that explain technical concepts to non-technical users and help us iterate fast based on customer feedback.

AI Engineer: Applied AI plus strong software engineering. You will build, evaluate, and deploy LLM-driven features like deep document analysis and interactive chat, working with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Expect hands-on Python, ML system design, experimentation, and production reliability. Bonus for RAG depth and frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or Hugging Face.

Backend Engineer: (looking for Kotlin/Java/Scala experience). You'll work across the backend: building enterprise integrations, large-scale scraping and parsing pipelines, and systems that let users apply LLMs to millions of documents to generate insights at scale.

We're looking to build our in-person team in NYC but also open to remote!

Apply: https://starbridge.ai/careers and mention HackerNews or email recruiting@starbridge.ai with your resume.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-02 18:55:46+00:00
Japanese competition has absolutely improved US car manufacturers.

They have leaner assembly lines. More sophisticated supply chain. They now make a product that it turns out people want (reliable/economy)

One big one to consumers is the focus on long term reliability. This was a complete joke in the 1980s-1990s for US cars. Everyone knew Toyota and Honda would last 300k miles and an American car would crap out at 80k miles. We are in a completely new world of more consistent reliability with cars. Even if Ford is 90% Toyota - that’s a much better place to be.

Everyone wanted trade barriers in the 80s and 90s but without the pain of competition our cars would feel like the modern equivalent of a bad Eastern European shitbox - only optimized for power and not economy.
by sleeplessworld | 2026-01-02 18:56:08+00:00
I have just been subjected to a Paradox Exception caused by reading that the memory safe Rust language has and can cause undefined behaviour. My spatial location code in the Universe has been marked with a Time-Space::Paradox violation and is awaiting debugging by celestial dev-ops. Luckily I am currently a live process, so my space and memory will not at this time be reclaimed by the Global-Universal Operating System.
by joshlemer | 2026-01-02 18:57:18+00:00
I agree about the marketing. I just heard about this phone now and was confused about if I could just use it as a primary phone. It would be nice if they talked more about what the phone is like to use, show what is the home screen and stuff. I'm wondering if I can use it well with some other utility apps that I don't think I'd want to do without like Maps, Parking payment apps, Podcasts and Spotify.
by tantony | 2026-01-02 18:57:29+00:00
Claude Opus 4.5 has been a big step up for me personally, and I used to think Sonnet 3.5 was good. It is an amazing deal at $20.

Just yesterday, it helped me parse out and understand a research paper - complete with step-by-step examples (this one: https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2016-03...). I will now go ahead and implement it myself, possibly relegating some of the more grunt-work type tasks to Claude code.

Without it, I would have been struggling through the paper for days, wading through WGSL shader code and there would be a higher chance that I just give up on it since this is for a side project and not my $job.

It has been a major force multiplier just for learning things. I have had a $20 subscription for about a year now. I bump it up to the $100 plan if I come across some project that eats through the $20 allocation. This happens to be one such month. I will probably go back to the $20 one once this one runs out. I continue to get a lot of value out of it.
by xl0 | 2026-01-02 18:57:34+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Nomadic, Colombia at the moment
Technologies: PyTorch, Deep Learning, LLM, Diffusion models, NumPy, JAX (a bit), CUDA | SvelteKit, TypeScript, tailwind, drizzle | DevOps: Linux (25 years), AWS, Docker, common sense
Email: alexey.zaytsev@gmail.com

URL: https://alexey.work/?ref=hn46467231

I'd love to get back into Deep Lerning (torch, cuda, etc, etc), but also cofortable with the usual "Agenetic AI", whatever you want it to mean, and :heart: SvelteKit. In my past lives: Linux kernel development, Molecular Biology masters, Electronics engineering in Shenzhen.

Some cool stuff, or just check my gh:

https://github.com/xl0/lovely-tensors

https://chat.congusto.ai/chat

https://lovely-docs.github.io/

https://pelican.alexey.work/
by smearly | 2026-01-02 18:57:37+00:00
What to know about Nick Shirley, the YouTuber alleging day care fraud in Minnesota:
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5662600/nick-shirley-mi...

Nick Shirley’s Somali Daycare Fraud Video Is Bullsh*t. Here’s Why It Worked Anyway: https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/nick-shirleys-somali... :

> Shirley‘s video has now been pretty thoroughly taken apart by numerous news organizations, and many of his core claims have been debunked or at least called into serious doubt. In one case, Shirley arrived when the facility was closed. In another instance, security footage from the daycare center shows children being dropped off on the same day Shirley was there claiming that no children were anywhere to be seen. In two other cases, Shirley showed up to non-operational child care facilities.
by shivekkhurana | 2026-01-02 18:58:18+00:00
I have been recording every txn with GnuCash for the last 8 years. I reached a point where I started writing scripts on top to support my multi-currency setup.

Then Claude became a thing, and I thought what if I use Hledger and let Claude manage my books ? I was reluctant to migrate years of txns, so I started with an opening balance.

This has been the highest leverage usage of Claude for me. I drop everything: bank statements, invoices, etc and ask Claude to make entries. When it makes a mistake, I add a new rule for future. Privacy issues aside, I cannot go back to traditional tools.
by swivelmaster | 2026-01-02 18:58:19+00:00
Here's what I think is happening:

Market research says "Parents want control."

In the journey from CEO mandate "build a product that gives parents control" to developer implementation, "parents want control" somehow turns into "What parents want is extremely fine-grained controls," which isn't the same thing.

So a bunch of product managers brainstorm a huge list of ways that parents might want "control," hand that off to some developers, and voila: Everything becomes way too complicated for everybody and the company is able to say they offer "control" while abdicating their stated obligation of giving parents the "safe" product that the parents expect.
by mkleczek | 2026-01-02 18:58:28+00:00
With current military technology it is not really possible, isn't it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdppYYfQJgg describes it really well.

So the question is more about what part of means of defense you outsource. And what parts of means of defense are outsourced by your enemies.

You don't want to base your defense on inferior shipbuilding capabilities, do you?
by klogw | 2026-01-02 18:58:28+00:00
Location: India
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Systems Engineering, Basic electrical prototyping, Shell scripting (Bash), scientific programming (C, Python, MATLAB)
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A37IsS_kBqwYGWBG9eK4l2FYTHzh7b4i
Email: vishwajeetx@gmail.com

Hello! I am Vishwajeet. I am an EE who also holds a degree in liberal arts. I have 3+ years of experience working on integrating electro-mechanical sub-systems to train control networks. I am returning to work after a career break. My core strength are system analysis and integration, scientific research, engineering strategy, and managing teams.

I am looking for work including, but not limited to: Hardware Systems Engineering, Technical Program Management, Product Management, Consulting, Sales, Founder's Office/Chief of Staff, Teaching (Math, Physics)
by lmc | 2026-01-02 18:59:01+00:00
"the real problem is a feeling that my computer isn't mine, that I am somehow renting this thing I put together with my own two hands from an AI corporation in Redmond."

I've installed Windows on all the PCs I've built for home and work over the last 20 years or so, until my latest in October. It was the ads in the lock screen that pushed me over the edge. Why should I pay for a license for that? Double-dipping fools. Am happily running Bazzite now.
by philip1209 | 2026-01-02 18:59:21+00:00
Chroma | ONSITE - San Francisco | Full-time | https://trychroma.com

Chroma is the open-source search and retrieval database for AI applications. It supports dense vector, sparse vector, regex, and full-text search. We support local, single-node, and cloud hosting.

We're a team of 14, all engineers today. We work in Rust, Python, Typescript, and Go.

We're hiring for these areas:

- Product design

- Production engineering

- Platform engineering (Rust)

Apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/trychroma/9ed3aee8-07dd-44e3-9ca1-d...

More details at: https://careers.trychroma.com