MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DangerousPie | 2026-01-16 13:12:07+00:00
I had a look at what it actually does in the Firefox settings and all it seems to do is to disable one AI feature flag, change the default search engine, and then set a few other flags that are changes that you may or may not want to make, unrelated to AI. Not sure you want to run a 3rd party shell script just to do that…
by bee_rider | 2026-01-16 13:12:23+00:00
There must already be protocols in place that prevent any random Amazon employee from getting access to sensitive data (like, the folks in the warehouses can’t just walk in to the AWS datacenters, I assume).

That’s who those US employees would be, from the point of view of the EU branch… no reason to assume they’d let them in. Flying people over to do crimes seems like a risky idea.
by estearum | 2026-01-16 13:12:25+00:00
Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.

Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.

But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
by benrutter | 2026-01-16 13:12:27+00:00
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?

I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate.

It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.
by rpdillon | 2026-01-16 13:12:50+00:00
Yeah, I haven't gotten through the 40 pages myself, but skimming through the material, it does seem that the arguments rely on an assumption that AI will be employed in a particular manner. For example, when discussing the rule of law, they assert that AI will be making the moral judgments and will be a black box that humans will just turn to to decide what to do in criminal proceedings. But that seems like it would be the dumbest possible way to use the technology.

Perhaps that's the point of the paper: to warn us not to use the technology in the dumbest possible way.
by pjjpo | 2026-01-16 13:13:30+00:00
I was happy to see them give this clear headline

> Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems

That being said, given the huge uptick in Linux articles lately, I can only believe Canonical is funding something here. It's just too sudden of a surge.

I'll probably still game on Linux, but who knows if that will last after a few more "freeze on resume" situations. These just don't happen on Windows and most Linux sentiment seems to be coming from anti-Onedrive feelings, which is fair, but the popups are easy to click through. Random Linux instability, not so.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-16 13:14:10+00:00
Yes.

There is also the problem of housing "lost" to the lifestyles of the well-to-do - whether that's 1%'ers who own multiple houses, or regular housing which becomes short-term rentals (Airbnb or whatever). In places, those are major problems. Overall - the biggest problem those cause might be that they're socially divisive distractions from bigger issues.
by gary_0 | 2026-01-16 13:14:52+00:00
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).

Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
by FiveOhThree | 2026-01-16 13:14:54+00:00
I understand that you buy heavily into one side of this narrative, but statements like "everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate" come across as naive rather than informed.

Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.
by brody_hamer | 2026-01-16 13:15:26+00:00
A few weeks ago I noticed some mysterious app was killing my (poor) internet downloading a large file.

It was chrome, downloading a multi GB file without any sort of UI hints that it was doing so. A generative AI file.

Is this why chrome uses so much ram? They’ve just been pushing up the memory usage in preparation for this day, hoping I wouldn’t notice the extra software now running on my (old, outdated) system?
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-16 13:15:28+00:00
The Overton window isn't shifting. It's shattering.

Take gay marriage, for instance. There was a time when 95% (number made up, but I think it's roughly right) of the population thought that obviously gay marriage wasn't real marriage. There was a clearly defined window, and 95% of the population's position fit within 95% of the population's idea of what the window was.

Now you have maybe 40% of the population thinking that if you don't support gay marriage, you're a fascist oppressor and persecutor. You still have 30% thinking that no, gay marriage does not fit what marriage is. And you have the middle 30% thinking some variant of "they can marry, but you can question that without being a nazi". And each of those positions holds their own idea of where the Overton window is supposed to be.

In that landscape, there is no view of where the Overton window is that is 1) held by the majority of people and 2) the majority of people hold views that fit within that window. That's what I mean by the window shattering, not just moving.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-16 13:15:34+00:00
Anthropic has great marketing. They get shit (and I do mean shit) to stick in a way that I don't think anyone else in the AI space could. MCP and skills were both obvious duds to people who understand the tech.

Simon is more influencer than engineer at this point, he's incentivized to ride waves to drive views, and I think the handwaiving "this will be amazing" posts have been good to him, even if they turn out to be completely wrong.
by fluoridation | 2026-01-16 13:15:34+00:00
Chatterbox does something like that. For example, if the input is

"so and so," he <verb>

and the verb is not just "said", but "chuckled", or "whispered", or "said shakily", the output is modified accordingly, or if there's an indication that it's a woman speaking it may pitch up during the quotation. It also tries to guess emotive content from textual content, such if a passage reads angry it may try to make it sound angry. That's more hit-and-miss, but when it hits, it hits really well. A very common failure case is, imagine someone is trying to psych themselves up and they say internally "come on, Steve, stand up and keep going", it'll read it in a deeper voice like it was being spoken by a WW2 sergeant to a soldier.
by stevesimmons | 2026-01-16 13:17:05+00:00
We totally found this doing financial document analysis. It's so quick to do an LLM-based "put this document into this schema" proof-of-concept.

Then you run it on 100,000 real documents.

And so you find there actually are so, so many exceptions and special cases. And so begins the journey of constructing layers of heuristics and codified special cases needed to turn ~80% raw accuracy to something asymptotically close to 100%.

That's the moat. At least where high accuracy is the key requirement.
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-16 13:17:23+00:00
>I wonder on what basis Boeing thought that damage to a load-bearing part could be safely ignored?

Usually this is because the design constraints are complex and in satisfying one you wind up having orders of magnitude more overkill than you need on others.

For example, in situations involving hollow shafts with through shafts or perhaps fluid passages often times you wind up with insanely huge for the load bearing supporting the outer most part because it simply needs to be that big in order to fit around the shaft and have space for reasonable sized roller elements for the speed and realistic race thicknesses, etc. Sure you could go custom, but $$, sure you could use needles or balls, but maybe the stuff on either side has reasons it shouldn't be hard like a race and that might add assembly/construction cost. Now say this overkill bearing is held up by a big web in a big honkin cast housing, because the housing needs to be like that for structural reasons (say it's a specialty pump or maybe this housing is load bearing in the overall assembly, like a tractor's gearbox). Now, say this bearing is in some more complex gearbox that has lubrication windage problems. A valid fix might be to go and cut out a chunk of the web that holds this bearing. Sure it's only supported by 300deg now instead of 360, but it was so overkill to begin with that doesn't matter.

Edit: better example: You can roach dozens of automotive cartridge style wheel bearings without hurting the knuckle it presses into because the knuckle has to be so strong to withstand suspension forces you basically can't apply enough force via the wheel failure to break it and the assembly becomes unserviceable faster than you can get to the point of damaging it by wearing through it.

Edit2: You also need to consider the cost of QA and testing. Sometimes it's cheaper to do a simple overkill waste of material design than something than to do speed holes and engineered webs, etc, etc, because all those features add testing cost as well as manufacturing cost and (especially in ye olden days of the slide rule) make it harder to predict stuff like resonance, exact failure mode, etc, etc and every feature has to be QA'd to some extent. And this all needs to be balanced against expected production volume.
by InitialBP | 2026-01-16 13:17:31+00:00
This comes entirely down to the scope of the agreement for the assessment. Some teams are looking for you to identify and exploit vulns in order to demonstrate the potential impact that those vulnerabilities could have.

This is oftentimes political. The CISO wants additional budget for secure coding training and to hire more security engineers, let the pentesting firm demonstrate a massive compromise and watch the dollars roll in.

A lot of time, especially in smaller companies, it's the opposite. No one is responsible for security and customers demand some kind of audit. "Don't touch anything we don't authorize and don't do anything that might impact our systems without explicit permissions."

Wiz is a very prominent cloud security company who probably has incredibly lucrative contracts with AWS already, and their specialty, as I understand it, is identifying full "kill chains" in cloud environments. From access issues all the way to compromise of sensitive assets.
by ksec | 2026-01-16 13:18:39+00:00
>And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago.

I encounter it on a weekly or monthly basis before Safari 18.0, but then subsequent release 18.2 along with latest 26.2 I finally have yet to encounter one.

I am hoping they will shift a little more focus on multi Tab usage, less paging, address bar, and some other desktop browser features.
by mxey | 2026-01-16 13:19:09+00:00
Not sure if that’s what you mean but we have apps where all you need to deploy them to Kubernetes is run “cue cmd deploy”.

> The problem is, once you have to wrap CUE, the loss of flexibility within a special-purpose language like CUE is enough for people to ask why not just bother writing the scripts in a general purpose language with better ecosystem support.

cue cmd is nice but it’s not the reason to use CUE. The data parts are. I would still use if I had to use “cue export” to get the data out of it with a bit of shell.
by saimiam | 2026-01-16 13:19:37+00:00
Just like you aren’t in traffic, you are traffic, you aren’t part of the society, you are society.

Every idea like “let’s have icecream socials at..” started as one person’s pipe dream which they then acted on and executed. No one is coming to rescue us. There’s no secret hand guiding humankind.

You definitely can’t solve loneliness for society but you can solve loneliness for your immediate circle by organising activities and that’s already a huge improvement.

In contrast, sitting back and saying this needs to be solved at a higher level does nothing at all.
by hobofan | 2026-01-16 13:21:24+00:00
As a German, I very much share those observations, and it seems to be underdiscussed and not that apparent to most people here.

The German social scheduling culture can definitely be a viscous circle, where everyone having to plan their calendar in advance forces everyone else to plan even further in advance if they want to have a chance to meet up.

I do think it's probably felt the strongest for adults between ~18-35, where your circle of friends spreads out across the country/surrounding cities/world, and any get together necessitates travel. After that, when people settle down (potentially have children) they usually form new circles of friends that are more local again with more opportunities for spontaneous meetings.
by tomni | 2026-01-16 13:22:34+00:00
I was able to find this blog post of a deep-dive into the ALPSTUGA: https://danieldk.eu/Hardware/Smart-Home/IKEA-ALPSTUGA.

The part from the post that answers your question is this:

The sensing platform used is a Sensirion SEN63C, which uses a STCC4 for CO₂ measurements. Unfortunately, this is not an NDIR sensor. Instead it uses less accurate thermal conductivity sensing. This allows building smaller/cheaper sensors, but it depends on the input of the temperature/humidity sensor, because e.g. humidity influences measurements. Also, the sensor relies on the air mixture being 78% N₂, 21% O₂, 0.93% Ar, 400 ppm CO₂ and will stop giving accurate readings when this composition changes (modulo CO₂). The operating conditions are also more limited than most other CO₂ sensors (10–40 °C, 20–80% RH).

From what I could gather and what is also mentioned in the conclusion is that the sensor is fine to get a general feeling of the CO2 trends, but that you're better off getting a better sensor if you care about exact values.
by b112 | 2026-01-16 13:22:42+00:00
I looked back in your post history a couple of pages, didn't see said comment.

However, there is no way it's 10% more expensive than the original Pi with inflation. It's easily double, if not more.

You can buy low end tablets significantly cheaper now. A tablet with a screen, more ram, storage, a battery.

A Pi is a rip off, for what it costs to build.

It's not like they make the OS or kernel either. They basically copy and paste Debian, and add some fluff modz, most of it OSS they didn't write.

https://www.amazon.ca/Expansion-Octa-core-Processor-Touchscr...

https://www.amazon.ca/Raspberry-Pi-8GB-2023-Processor/dp/B0C...
by rhplus | 2026-01-16 13:22:48+00:00
Humans, man.

The Tree of Ténéré was a solitary acacia that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth. It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert in northeast Niger, so well known that it and the Lost Tree to the north are the only trees to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. The tree is estimated to have existed for approximately 300 years until it was knocked down in 1973 by a drunk truck driver.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_T%C3%A9n%C3%A9r%C3%A9
by jchw | 2026-01-16 13:24:12+00:00
Accusing people of using generative AI is definitely one of those things you have to be careful with, but on the other hand, I still think it's OK to critique writing styles that are now cliche because of AI. I mean come on, it's not just the negative-positive construction. This part is just as cliche:

> It is like having a Lego set where the bricks refuse to click if you are building something structurally unsound.

And the headings follow that AI-stank rhythmic pattern with most of them starting with "The":

> The “Frankenstein” Problem

> The Basic Engine

> The Ignition Key

> The Polyglot Pipeline

I could go on, but I really don't think you have to.

I mean look, I'm no Pulitzer prize winner myself, but let's face it, it would be hard to make an article feel more it was adapted from an LLM output if you actually tried.
by schmuhblaster | 2026-01-16 13:24:26+00:00
Opus 4.5 helped me implement a basic coding agent in a DSL built on top of Prolog: https://deepclause.substack.com/p/implementing-a-vibed-llm-c.... It worked surprisingly well. With a bit of context it was able to (almost) one-shot about 500 lines of code. With older models, I felt that they "never really got it".
by jfengel | 2026-01-16 13:24:39+00:00
There is concern that the US may also go from chronic concerns to acute ones. Opponents of the government accuse it of serious crimes, and are already perceiving violence used to suppress dissent. The administration is not popular and may lose a lot of power in the upcoming election.

It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-16 13:25:23+00:00
>> This gets to the heart of my problem with Prolog: it's sold as if it's logic programming - just write your first-order predicate logic and we'll solve it. But then to actually use it you have to understand how it's executed - "understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place".

Prolog isn't "sold" as a logic programming language. It is a logic programming language. Like, what else is it?

I have to be honest and say I've heard this criticism before and it's just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The criticism is really that Prolog is not a 100% purely declarative language with 100% the same syntax and semantics as First Order Logic.

Well, it isn't, but if it was, it would be unusable. That would make the critics very happy, or at least the kind of critics that don't want anyone else to have cool stuff, but in the current timeline we just have a programming language that defines the logic programming paradigm, so it makes no sense to say it isn't a logic programming language.

Edit:

>> At that point, I would just prefer a regular imperative programming language, where understanding how it's executed is really straightforward, combined with some nice unification library and maybe a backtracking library that I can use explicitly when they are the appropriate tools.

Yeah, see what I mean? Let's just use Python, or Java, or C++ instead, which has 0% of FOL syntax and semantics and is 0% declarative (or maybe 10% in the case of C++ templates). Because we can't make do with 99% logic-based and declarative, gosh no. Better have no alternative than have a less than absolutely idealised perfect ivory tower alternative.

Btw, Prolog's value is its SLD-Resolution based interpretation. Backtracking is an implementation detail. If you need backtracking use yield or whatever other keyword your favourite imperative language gives you. As to unification, good luck with a "nice unification library" for other languages. Most programmers can't even get their head around regexes. And good luck convincing functional programmers that "two-way pattern matching" (i.e. unification) is less deadly than the Bubonic Plague.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-01-16 13:25:38+00:00
> Are those days permanently gone?

Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity.

As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save.

Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons.

It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-16 13:25:40+00:00
When I did my degree in Software Engineering, logic programming (with Tarsky's World), and Programming with Prolog were required classes.

There were only two prevalent attitudes, some of us really loved FP (me included), others hated it and could hardly wait to get it done.

Somehow there was a similar overlap with those of us that enjoyed going out of mainstream languages, and those that rather stay with Pascal and C.
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-16 13:26:10+00:00
I dunno what the budget is, I've not had time to watch it all. however getting a second hand dell md3060 (they are rebadged from an OEM) for about £1k is also a good option.

Its 60drives and mostly bulletproof. Downside is that you'll either need SAS controller on your server, or find the vanishingly rare Sata controllers.

JBOD that badboy into ZFS and you'll have something fast enough for most things (streaming)

How we used them was hardware raid 7 in 4 groups of 13 with the rest as hot spares. LVM raid 0 and good to go (this was a time before production ZFS on linux)

I'm not sure what the compatibility is with larger sata drives given how old it is. I suspect you might be limited to JBOD.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-16 13:26:31+00:00
Mobile phones with "Mesh networking" built-in have now started to appear in the market. E.g Tecno Spark Go 3 - https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/s... - recently launched in India has a feature called Freelink 2 that claims to connect with other Tecno phones to provide "connectivity" without wifi or cellular network up to a range of 1.5 kms. More here: https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-use-your-techno-phon... .

(Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.)
by crosslayer | 2026-01-16 13:27:48+00:00
A pattern I’ve seen bite systems like this isn’t compute or storage first… it’s semantic drift in metric definitions over time.

When you have ~1,200 deterministic metrics sharing primitives, the real cost driver becomes definition coupling, not execution. If metrics are “configurable” but allowed to encode control flow, branching semantics, or hidden normalization rules, you end up with 1,200 soft-coded functions anyway… just harder to reason about.

One approach that’s worked well for me is to explicitly separate:

• Primitive signals (pure, immutable, versioned)
• Metric transforms (strictly functional, no side effects, no cross-metric reads)
• Aggregation/composition layers (where ranking and composite indices live)

The key constraint… metric definitions must be referentially transparent and evaluable in isolation. If a metric can’t be recomputed offline from recorded inputs and its definition hash, it’s already too powerful.

On representation… I’ve had better outcomes with a constrained expression tree (or typed DSL) than raw JSON/YAML. The goal isn’t flexibility… it’s preventing the system from becoming a general purpose programming environment.

For Phase 1, I’d strongly cap scope at:

• A small, fixed primitive vocabulary
• 100–200 metrics max
• Explicit versioning + replay tooling
• Hard limits on metric execution cost

The biggest cost explosions I’ve seen come from

• Allowing metrics to depend on other metrics implicitly
• Letting “configuration” evolve without versioned invariants
• Optimizing performance before semantic boundaries are locked

Curious whether you’re thinking about definition immutability and replayability as first class constraints, or treating them as implementation details later.