MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by macintux | 2026-01-26 00:31:16+00:00
I was surprised to find on an old USGS map (while researching a typo in the GNIS; it turns out the National Map Team is very responsive, they fixed the typo within 48 hours of reporting it) that there used to be Coast Guard navigation lights on the Ohio River. Makes perfect sense in hindsight, just never dawned on me that they would have responsibilities on large navigable rivers as well.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-26 00:31:22+00:00
The majority still use bluesky PBC's infra but that's increasingly less true.

- Blacksky has their own full appview for bluesky nowadays + relays and PDS w/ something like 60-70k users. It's small compared to the total bluesky count but it's still very sizable.

- There are countless atproto relays running independent of "big bluesky" and they only cost like 20usd/month max nowadays to run.

- Likewise it's trivial to host your data on any thirdparty PDS and scaling up a PDS community isn't terribly hard (PDS scale linearly up to like 500k users and then it scales linearly past that by just periodically launching a new PDS part of your "cluster")

- And most importantly the UX on migration is getting a lot better so it's reasonably approachable for average users.

--------

Side note but I noticed your name. Are you "the direwolf20"?
by Mr_Minderbinder | 2026-01-26 00:31:35+00:00
> YouTube is an absolute clown show. It's so bad that I'm certain Google devs are actively making it terrible on purpose.

Exactly, which is why I thought this was a terrible and meaningless benchmark. It completely obfuscates the actual video playback performance of these machines. It is more a measure of how awful and inefficient YouTube is. I am surprised that the author did not remark on or seem to be aware of this at all.
by mmooss | 2026-01-26 00:31:46+00:00
Expanding Gwern's well made point, just a little, is that writing of any length needs a thesis statement in the first paragraph or so.

Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time.

I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.
by QuiEgo | 2026-01-26 00:33:35+00:00
OTP memory is a key building block of any secure system and likely on any device you already have.

Any kind of device-unique key is likely rooted in OTP (via a seed or PUF activation).

The root of all certificate chains is likely hashed in fuses to prevent swapping out cert chains with a flash programmer.

It's commonly used to anti rollback as well - the biggest news here is that they didn't have this already.

If there's some horrible security bug found in an old version of their software, they have no way to stop an attacker from loading up the broken firmware to exploit your device? That is not aligned with modern best practices for security.
by azan_ | 2026-01-26 00:34:02+00:00
> In my mind everyone would be better off if we all maintained order so these clashes didn't have to happen in the first place.

In my mind everyone would be better off if current incarnation of ICE was disbanded so these clashes didn't have to happen in the first place. You've completely switched cause and effect - ICE behavior is the CAUSE of protests, not the effect!
by bsder | 2026-01-26 00:34:03+00:00
The Three Mile Island disaster had similar problems with notifications.

The problem at TMI was that the teletypewriter delivering the alerts wasn't fast enough to finish typing before new alerts came in. As time went on, the information it was emitting got further and further behind. Even if the operators wanted to make intelligent decisions, they were operating on hours old data that no longer applied.
I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies
by ok_orco | 2026-01-26 00:34:17+00:00
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick.

I'd done napkin math beforehand, so I knew it was probably a bug, but still. Turns out it was only partially a bug. The rest was me needing to rethink how I built this thing.
Spent the next couple days ripping it apart. Making tweaks, testing with live data, checking results, trying again. What I found was I was sending API requests too often and not optimizing what I was sending and receiving.

Here's what moved the needle, roughly big to small (besides that bug that was costin me a buck a day alone):

- Dropped Claude Sonnet entirely - tested both models on the same data, Haiku actually performed better at a third of the cost

- Started batching everything - hourly calls were a money fire

- Filter before the AI - "lol" and "thanks" are a lot of online chatter. I was paying AI to tell me that's not feedback. That said, I still process agreements like "+1" and "me too."

- Shorter outputs - "H/M/L" instead of "high/medium/low", 40-char title recommendation

- Strip code snippets before processing - just reiterating the issue and bloating the call

End of the week: pennies a day. Same quality.

I'm not building a VC-backed app that can run at a loss for years. I'm unemployed, trying to build something that might also pay rent. The math has to work from day one.

The upside: these savings let me 3x my pricing tier limits and add intermittent quality checks. Headroom I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Happy to answer questions.
by zugi | 2026-01-26 00:34:30+00:00
Yes, that was egregious and well-publicized. I've seen another case of a small-town sheriff arresting someone for a Facebook post that absolutely was not a threat of violence. Both were released and I believe the latter won a lawsuit for wrongful arrest.

But in general in the US "offending" others is not a legal basis for arrest, as much as some in power would like it to be.
by anonnon | 2026-01-26 00:34:31+00:00
> When I think about the counterfactual me that grew up in a large American city, New York or L.A. instead of Toronto, I see someone who's more stunted than me, in important ways. No skating classes, libraries too far to walk to on a regular basis and more poorly stocked. Student debt. Without generous public incentives, that version of me would only have the life that her own parents can afford to provide for her.

Is this what Canadians actually believe? NYC has, off the top of my head, the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art--does Toronto, or even the entire rest of Canada, have anything remotely comparable, to even just one of those institutions? And these museums, BTW, are typically free or "pay what you want" for NY residents and children. And the NYPL has plenty of locations, though I'm not sure what the author's definition of "walking distance" is: https://www.nypl.org/locations

I never thought I'd see someone describe life in NYC or LA as "stunting," especially relative to Toronto, yet here it is.
by tripletao | 2026-01-26 00:34:36+00:00
I mean that in the context of "Most Published Research Findings Are False", he criticized work (unrelated to COVID, since that didn't exist yet) that used incorrect statistical methods even if its final conclusions happened to be correct. He was right to do so, just as Gelman was right to criticize his serosurvey--it's nice when you get the right answer by luck, but that doesn't help you or anyone else get the right answer next time.

It's also hard to determine whether that serosurvey (or any other study) got the right answer. The IFR is typically observed to decrease over the course of a pandemic. For example, the IFR for COVID is much lower now than in 2020 even among unvaccinated patients, since they almost certainly acquired natural immunity in prior infections. So high-quality later surveys showing lower IFR don't say much about the IFR back in 2020.
by zero-sharp | 2026-01-26 00:34:54+00:00
So I just searched my email on HIBP again. Most of the leaks I see there were from old websites I hardly cared about securing from many years ago. But, in general, how do I found out what has actually been leaked (if it's not website specific)?

I'm not going to change all of my passwords every time a random website that I used briefly ten years ago leaks my low effort password.
SHDL – A Minimal Hardware Description Language Built from Logic Gates
by rafa_rrayes | 2026-01-26 00:34:58+00:00
Hi, everyone!

I built SHDL (Simple Hardware Description Language) as an experiment in stripping hardware description down to its absolute fundamentals.

In SHDL, there are no arithmetic operators, no implicit bit widths, and no high-level constructs. You build everything explicitly from logic gates and wires, and then compose larger components hierarchically. The goal is not synthesis or performance, but understanding: what digital systems actually look like when abstractions are removed.

SHDL is accompanied by PySHDL, a Python interface that lets you load circuits, poke inputs, step the simulation, and observe outputs. Under the hood, SHDL compiles circuits to C for fast execution, but the language itself remains intentionally small and transparent.

This is not meant to replace Verilog or VHDL. It’s aimed at:

- learning digital logic from first principles

- experimenting with HDL and language design

- teaching or visualizing how complex hardware emerges from simple gates

I would especially appreciate feedback on:

- the language design choices

- what feels unnecessarily restrictive vs. educationally valuable

- whether this kind of “anti-abstraction” HDL is useful to you

Repo: https://github.com/rafa-rrayes/SHDL

Python package: PySHDL on PyPI

Thanks for reading, and I’m very open to critique.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-26 00:35:21+00:00
There is no ambiguity that needs further clarification, I am talking about the words as written. Their entire message clearly conveys they believe there is an objective design standard that everyone should strive to adhere to, and they are criticising a website for daring to deviate from their ideal standard as though it were an objective flaw and not a matter of personal preference.

> getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, then I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person until I upset myself. You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire.

It's not about cushioning. They are explicitly criticising the website ("pity", "forgot to take basic principles into account"), and saying broadly that everyone should do X, where X is their own preference. That is the fire. That will invariably rub people the wrong way. It is inherently not an amicable way to communicate about differences in design opinions.

That's not to say you can't give critical feedback. "I'm not a fan of the font, I prefer fonts that are easier to read" would be perfectly reasonable. It's specifically the assertion that there is a way that things ought to be done, as though there are not trade-offs depending upon what each person values but rather one objectively superior way, that causes friction.
by litoE | 2026-01-26 00:36:22+00:00
If your definition of Democracy is based on how we elect our leaders, then Hitler's Germany was a Democracy because Hitler was elected Chancellor by a majority. You need to define Democracy based on how we replace our leaders. In that case, Hitler's Germany was not a democracy since it was impossible for the people to replace the Fuhrer had they wished to. In Trump's case, we may still be a Democracy but there are worrysome indications ("Trump’s recent musing that there should be no 2026 election may or may not have been jocular").
by slg | 2026-01-26 00:36:27+00:00
Bovino has said the agents involved in the shooting are back at work today. Even if you believe that they were 100% justified in their actions, they killed a man, any decent organization that cared about human life would believe that has an impact on people and would put those involved on some sort of paid leave to process it. But that isn't how this organization works. This organization believes that taking a human life is just something that might happen over the course of your average workday and you'll be back at work the next day like nothing unusual happened.
by appplication | 2026-01-26 00:36:56+00:00
> You can't get COVID if you get the vaccine (A lie), You can't spread COVID if you get the vaccine (A lie).

I don’t recall this. My memory was that the messaging was primarily around reduced risk of serious illness
/death and reduced risk of transmission.

I do recall the CDC or whoever in the early days saying not to wear masks, which felt like an obvious lie, I presumed at the time to protect supplies for medical professionals. I also recall it was a few years before they acknowledged it was airborne, despite having sufficient evidence it may be quite some time (and previously messaging was that it was affirmatively not airborne).

The pandemic sucked but the politics around it were just so gross and disheartening. Anyhow, this is all way off topic for the original article.
by hurubaw | 2026-01-26 00:37:51+00:00
This. Laws mean nothing, if there is no one to enforce them. If a single elected leader can decide that only certain laws are enforced or how they are enforced, then you have no laws, or rights, you have a dictator.

Strong and ethical leaders with wide administrative powers (="good dictators") make nations very strong, effective and capable of adapting to anything. But this is such a two edged sword, that most countries have removed most of presidents (or monarchs) administrative powers, even at the cost of weakening themselves. Mostly due to having a "bad experience" in their histories.
by apatheticonion | 2026-01-26 00:38:32+00:00
Yes, anti competitive practices are good for business regardless of geography.

Americans may be the biggest offenders but the pro-competition rules should apply to all.

Personally, I have the skills and interest to write a custom OS for my phone (Linux, custom DE, and waydroid for Android compat) - but it's literally impossible to due to anti competitive practices (I can't reverse engineer drivers and clean room driver development is practically impossible).

Similar story for my router, my "smart" TV and arm64 MacBook pro (or even an arm64 surface laptop).
by Shivatron | 2026-01-26 00:38:34+00:00
It seems extremely relevant. Your argument suggests the president need only appoint a subordinate who will themselves give the desired illegal order without the president's public command. In the unlikely event the subordinate is called to account, the president can simply pardon them.

This is certainly not a hypothetical "parade of horribles", since Trump has already pardoned military officers convicted of war crimes.[1]

1. https://apnews.com/article/257e4b17a3c7476ea3007c0861fa97e8
by dang | 2026-01-26 00:38:38+00:00
What you call "taking finger off scale" would turn HN into a politics / current affairs site. I know that some of you want that, and a few even wonder how we could possibly be so evil as not to do it, but it is simply not the kind of site that HN is. That is the case regardless of what terminology you use - fingers on scales, curation, moderation, - they're all different ways of describing the same thing.

I'm not sure why you need to conjure up ultra-cynical motives for us running HN this way, since the reasons we give for this (i.e. the real ones) explain things better. (for example, if we only cared about suppressing this stuff, why would HN be having frontpage threads about it at all? that doesn't make much sense.) But that's just me.

I think it would help you guys to understand that most of the HN community, even most who agree with you politically, do not want us to throw in the towel and let HN become just like the rest of the internet. Only a small portion of users actually want this, though they do post intense (and sometimes even aggressive) comments about it. Given that HN has always stuck to its mandate and that the community wants us to keep doing that, I don't see this as a close call.
by foxes | 2026-01-26 00:39:25+00:00
How is graphene considered the most secure phone os but you can still flash on new firmware?

I don't care if they can downgrade the device, just that I boot into a secure verified environment, and my data is protected.

I also think thieves will just grab your phone regardless, they can still sell the phone for parts, or just sell it anyway as a scam etc.
by fooker | 2026-01-26 00:39:33+00:00
> Programming languages are a set of rules that ~guarantee predictable behaviour down to the bit level.

No, that’s your interpretation of what a programming language is, based on nostalgia and wishful thinking.

If you get a programming system that sacrifices these and works better, people are going to use those.

FYI I am a compiler developer who has contributed to about three widely used compilers, I assure you I understand what programming languages and compilers are.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-26 00:39:36+00:00
Given I can be 2 inches taller if I stand up perfect. That's the one I want.

How to achieve it? Not sure. Years of physical therapy and I know the position, but:

>I can't remember to do it.

>I feel my body is tight and pulls me back, so I'm constantly fighting it.

>It hurts. Both tiring, and I feel pains in other parts of my back
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-26 00:39:43+00:00
His base are the 0.01%. They could end this tomorrow by phoning their pet senators and having a quiet word.

The people on the front lines - including the ICE thugs - are entirely disposable. They people using them have zero interest in their welfare or how this works out for them in the long term. (Spoilers - not well.)

Of course they don't understand this. But this is absolutely standard for authoritarian fascism - groom and grudge farm the petty criminals and deviants, recruit them as regime enforcers with promises of money and freedom from consequences, set them loose, profit.
by smackeyacky | 2026-01-26 00:39:53+00:00
Except that the amount of water needs to be augmented as it disappears through usage and evaporation. So you’d run out pretty quickly.

Large scale desalination might be necessary but I think the article is downplaying the brine issue. I don’t think we’re running out of table salt so trying to use it for harvesting metals will be an environmental challenge at the scale being proposed here.
by tim333 | 2026-01-26 00:40:41+00:00
I have to say having watched an original and a 'troll' version it's fairly natural taking the piss.

real one https://youtu.be/2UI1ZqGpqXk

anti islam one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu2K48F71rg

And someone doing a meme coin isn't a "one of the most surreal twists" - people do that for everything these days as the cost of making one is ~$0 and they may may a few bob off suckers.
by noxer | 2026-01-26 00:41:23+00:00
I never made such statements, I refuted the parent posts statement that the protest against musk "won" that's all I did before the goal post moving replies came talking about DOGE.

Elon Musk's role in DOGE was limited because he was designated as a "special government employee", a federal employment category defined under 18 U.S.C. § 202 that restricts service to no more than 130 days in any 365-day period.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202

This was publicly know back in February. The exact date wasn't know since it was not public when he because such a "special government employee".
It turns out they started counting days straight from the inauguration date or rather the Executive Order 14158 (Creation of DOGE) date which was on the same day.

It is totally accurate to say he left as planned and thus also totally accurate to say that one of the statements above claiming the protest "won" by pushing him out of the administration is factually incorrect.
by jcparkyn | 2026-01-26 00:42:10+00:00
Thanks, some interesting reading there that I will check out (I wasn't aware of PCF). Perhaps I should've used more precise wording: "All types are value types".

> Standard ML [...] It has all you dream of and more

The main thing here that's missing in Standard ML (and most other functional languages) is the "mutable" part of "mutable value semantics" - i.e., the ability to modify variables in-place (even nested parts of complex structures) without affecting copies. This is different from "shadowing" a binding with a different value, since it works in loops etc.
by AngryData | 2026-01-26 00:43:08+00:00
"the firearm may discharge when it is dropped and the back of the slide hits the ground at a 33-degree angle"

That is pretty hard to accomplish while its in a holster unless the guy was suplexed and his entire spine turned to jello giving the gun a multi-foot uncushioned drop.

"misfire was due to "a partial depression of the trigger by a foreign object combined with simultaneous movement of the slide"

Which is irrelevant when in a shielded holster like this guy has.

On top of all this, even had the gun went off, which I have found zero evidence to support, how would that guy know who's gun went off to start with? Guns don't light up with a bunch of LEDs to show you it has been fired. If you aren't staring directly at the gun, which isn't really possible in the scenario that played out, you wouldn't know whos gun went off. And even if someone was staring at the gun and saw it go off, how does a holstered gun that nobody is holding represent any sort of threat? You think the guy is controlling his gun with his mind powers?

I don't even know why im bother argueing with you because this entire thing is ludicrous. I find it hard to believe you have watched any of the video of the incident at all and came to this conclusion.
by numitus | 2026-01-26 00:43:33+00:00
I’m not talking about difficulty; I’m talking about uniqueness—uniqueness for me personally. There are people who spend their whole lives designing bridges. I, on the other hand, have been writing software for 15 years, and almost every task I encounter is unlike the previous one. I’m not saying it’s difficult, but solving it requires gaining new experience that will be useless for future tasks. Sometimes, I have to do something similar to a previous task, but in 90 percent of cases, I first need to create documentation on how it currently works, figure out how to turn a task description consisting of a 15-word headline into a set of concrete actions, and then test it.
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-01-26 00:43:41+00:00
Yes, exactly. But, I’ll admit it took me until the republican primary before the 2016 election for this to register in my mind. I was born in the US in the 80s & fell into the “what you see is all there is” bias (and hadn’t read enough history before then either).

Another opinion that I’m sure will get me downvoted is that this is the primary reason I support gun ownership by private citizens. I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter like in Iran and Syria is overall better than the downside.

Bottom line is that human nature has not changed. Some of us westerners take comfortable lives for granted because we’ve been lucky.
by beAbU | 2026-01-26 00:43:46+00:00
Not really, a Mini Cooper has a payload capacity of 450kg according to some googling.

That gives us ~2.7 Minis.

If we factor in the weight of the driver, then we can comfortably get away with 4 Minis, each taking 312kg of gold which leaves us with 138kg per Mini for the driver and any gear that might be needed for the heist.