MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-24 03:50:22+00:00
> The sooner it breaks down, the sooner something better will supplant it.

That's not always possible, because the counterparty - aka threat actors - is always growing bigger, and you practically need to be the size of Cloudflare, Akamai or the Big 3 cloud providers to be able to weather attacks. You need to have big enough pipes to data centers and exchange points worldwide, otherwise any sufficiently motivated attacker can just go and swamp them, but big pipes are helluvalot expensive so you need to have enough large and financially capable customers.

That's also why Cloudflare has expanded their offerings so much (e.g. Zero Trust), they need to have their infrastructure at some base load to economically justify it.

And that's also why Cloudflare will not be kicked off the throne any time soon. First of all, the initial costs to set up a competitor are absurdly high, second, how is a competitor supposed to lure large long term customers away from CF?

Any case, the real "fix" to Cloudflare being too-big-to-fail isn't building up competitors, it's getting the bad actors off of the Internet. Obviously that means holding both enemy (NK, Russia, China) and frenemy (India, Turkey) nations accountable, but it also means cleaning up shop at home - the aforementioned nation states and their botnet operators rely on an armada of hacked servers, ordinary computers and IoT devices in Western countries to carry out the actual work. And we clearly don't do anywhere near enough to get rid of these. I 'member a time when writing an abuse@ mail report that this would be taken seriously and the offender being disconnected by their ISP. These days, no one gives a fuck.
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-24 03:50:23+00:00
No, early internet decorum has broken down in general. Now it’s a Wild West of the worst hate and propaganda imaginable on even small forums without active moderation. It’s just what being on the internet means now. Big tech may have broken it but it’s universal now.

Think of what slashdot used to be or even the vast majority of usenet (though it had its own segregated problematic areas). Then look at what 4chan initially and then the rest of social media did to discourse.
by benatkin | 2026-01-24 03:50:57+00:00
To save a click, it's just a fancy front end for Whisper plus a weaker CPU-only model. It has a demo video that seems impressive, but the speech is careful to sound casual while having no meaningful flaws that would cause it to mess up. If you want to make a speech to speech tool, which is what this post asks about, it would make more sense to go straight to Whisper.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-01-24 03:52:25+00:00
Yeah. Whatever. The sort of person that would share their completely baseless assumptions of the motivations of people that aren’t them, is exactly the sort of person that I’d expect to be elitist enough to believe this delusion in the first place.
This is dripping with insecurity. If I were interviewing you I wouldn’t touch you with a 60 foot pole. A huge red flag for you to think that the reason that you don’t “get” something is because you’re so much of an enlightened artisan than everyone else.
by vinhnx | 2026-01-24 03:56:08+00:00
This came as a big surprise to me last year. I remember they announced that Codex CLI is opensource, and the codex-rs [0] from TypeScript to Rust, with the entire CLI now open source. This is a big deal and very useful for anyone wanting to learn how coding agents work, especially coming from a major lab like OpenAI. I've also contributed some improvements to their CLI a while ago and have been following their releases and PRs to broaden my knowledge.

[0] https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main/codex-rs
by FeteCommuniste | 2026-01-24 03:56:44+00:00
Social media degenerated as the companies behind it figured out how to better optimize for engagement (time spent on site, links clicked, comments posted), which is to show people all the things most likely to titillate, surprise, or piss them off.

So we get "social" feeds stuffed with thirst traps, culture war, and political slop, instead of a simple, fairly sedate chronological feed of what your friends have been doing, thinking, or photographing.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-01-24 03:59:21+00:00
> YC turns builders into formidable founders.

This is followed by a series of before and after pictures. YC offers not money but personal transformation. Their standard offer of $500,000 for 7% is not mentioned on the homepage, maybe because it would invite comparison ... when you see numbers like this your first thought is: I wonder what other accelators offer? The before and after pictures are something no other accelator can compete with.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-24 03:59:49+00:00
I was recently looking at screenshots of old Facebook, Orkut, and even old messaging apps like HipChat. It really feels like the inflection point began around 2016 and finally fully transformed once the pandemic hit.

It is just that more people become totally engrossed in online activity during the pandemic and never left? Or is it bots? Who are all these new corrosive users?
by Nursie | 2026-01-24 04:00:28+00:00
There must be a name for this sort of fallacy of thinking.

“A isn’t perfect therefore I choose to believe in B.”

Where A is an evidence-based discipline with some shortcomings and B is unevidenced woo. I’d rather something that works and can be proven to work over a good narrative, myself.

Several of your criticisms there also only apply to the American way of running a health system, that’s a choice that’s not taken everywhere.
by rmason | 2026-01-24 04:02:13+00:00
I have believed for a couple of years that AI could do a better job of managing farm crop marketing than the average farmer. It would remove the emotion involved in selling the crop.

Managing all the decisions in growing a crop is too far a reach. Maybe someday, not today. Way too many variables and unexpected issues. I'm a former fertilizer company agronomist and the problem is far harder than say self driving cars.
by rk06 | 2026-01-24 04:04:35+00:00
In one of the book on "10x myth", the author bluntly states that there is no objective way to measure "productivity". So any such report is purely subjective. Its a fascinating argument. I don't remember the book, but this author had actually read the papers while researching and based his conclusion of the research papers

As far is reality is concerned, the differences between average and skilled can be as much as 100x or more. It can be even more if you consider that some people add negative productivity
by rramadass | 2026-01-24 04:08:15+00:00
> “He was fiercely intelligent, and had a lot of confidence, but instead of trying to impress people, he looked and listened and felt.

> “Even his popular classics are enriched with multilevel meanings beneath the action-packed surface,” Labor says. “Jack was gifted with what Jung called ‘primordial vision,’ which unconsciously connects the author to universal myths and archetypes.

This right here is why Jack London is one of my favourite authors. The two-volume set published in the "Library of America" series is a must have for any aficionado. Not only does it have his novels and short stories but it also has his social writings which any American will do well to read today.

Novels and Stories : https://www.loa.org/books/99-novels-and-stories/

Novels and Social Writings : https://www.loa.org/books/100-novels-and-social-writings/

Reading his works, it is apparent that he was highly intelligent and really read and thought about everything in a very practical "here is how it is applicable to real life" manner. It is an object lesson on how mere schooling should not define you but what you make of yourself with what you study, learn and practice.
by rmunn | 2026-01-24 04:08:33+00:00
> ... numerous bugs that have gone unaddressed for months that people in their target market could fix.

THIS. I get so annoyed when there's a longstanding bug that I know how to fix, the fix would be easy for me, but I'm not given the access I need in order to fix it.

For example, I use Docker Desktop on Linux rather than native Docker, because other team members (on Windows) use it, and there were some quirks in how it handled file permissions that differed from Linux-native Docker; after one too many times trying to sort out the issues, my team lead said, "Just use Docker Desktop so you have the same setup as everyone else, I don't want to spend more time on permissions issues that only affect one dev on the team". So I switched.

But there's a bug in Docker Desktop that was bugging me for the longest time. If you quit Docker Desktop, all your terminals would go away. I eventually figured out that this only happened to gnome-terminal, because Docker Desktop was trying to kill the instance of gnome-terminal that it kicked off for its internal terminal functionality, and getting the logic wrong. Once I switched to Ghostty, I stopped having the issue. But the bug has persisted for over three years (https://github.com/docker/desktop-linux/issues/109 was reported on Dec 27, 2022) without ever being resolved, because 1) it's just not a huge priority for the Docker Desktop team (who aren't experiencing it), and 2) the people for whom it IS a huge priority (because it's bothering them a lot) aren't allowed to fix it.

Though what's worse is a project that is open-source, has open PRs fixing a bug, and lets those PRs go unaddressed, eventually posting a notice in their repo that they're no longer accepting PRs because their team is focusing on other things right now. (Cough, cough, githubactions...)
by jjulius | 2026-01-24 04:08:41+00:00
This. I've been saying it for years. You can trace the decline back a couple of decades.

All of these threads and comments people throw out about how "social media" is bad misses the forest for the trees. The Internet has put us, broadly speaking, in the position we are now. It's fucking garbage and it's ruining our ability to communicate and function together. The biggest impact most of us can make is right outside our front door, with those who we directly interact with throughout our fays. Instead, we'd rather argue about the world's problems online. Being aware of what's happening is great, don't get me wrong, but yelling into the void past one another is not how things get solved, and that's all this shit seems to be now.

I might get downvoted to hell for this, but I stand by it - the Internet was a mistake.

Edit: I'm all about people's faces these days. https://youtu.be/mvCKSuPq8o8?si=WAQ4ltArdjDPpt2u

Edit 2: I guess I'll put my money where my mouth is and make these my last posts.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-01-24 04:09:58+00:00
> And in that victory, we collectively agreed to pretend that a format designed for human readability in a REPL was suitable for machine-to-machine communication, for configuration, for anything requiring rigor. We relinquished the logical formalism for convenience with our tools.

This is an odd qualifier. Is human readability in a REPL different from human readability in an editor? What could be more important in a format -- as long as machines are able to parse it at all -- then human readability? Machines can parse both JSON and XML, so the only way to compare them is how well humans are able to read (and write) them.

The article admits that JSON has answers for many of the problems it points out, like schemas and comments (JSONC) but dismisses them as not widely used. Compared to what? Total JSON usage? Fair enough. But more people probably use JSONC then XML for config files at this point.
by zeroq | 2026-01-24 04:10:13+00:00
I see two distinct problems here:

(1) false advertisement

Companies like MS and Apple are telling their clients they offer a way to encrypt and secure their data but at best these claims are only half truths, mostly smoke and mirrors.

This is not OK. I don't want to get into legal parts of it, because I'm sure there's a fine print there that literally says it's smoke and mirrors, but it's despicable that these claims are made in the first place.

(2) the real need of ironclad encryption

I was born and raised in Eastern Europe. When I was a teenager it was common that police would stop me and ask me to show them contents of my backpack. Here you had two options - either (a) you'd show them the contents or (b) you would get beat up to a pulp and disclose the contents anyway.

It's at least 5h debate whether that's good or not, but in my mind, for 90% of cases if you're law abiding citizen you can simply unlock your phone and be done with that.

Sure, there are remaining 10% of use cases where you are a whistleblower, journalist or whatever and you want to retain whatever you have on your phone. But if you put yourself in that situation you'd better have a good understanding of the tech behind your wellbeing. Namely - use something else.
by mannykannot | 2026-01-24 04:11:46+00:00
Harsh as the Yukon is, it is a walk in the park compared to anything in space, where there is no realistic possibility of a rush of individual prospectors.

Several areas of the ocean floor are covered with valuable polymetallic nodules [1] which are way more accessible than anything in space, yet this has not led to the equivalent of a gold rush.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule
by mannanj | 2026-01-24 04:11:54+00:00
Thanks. Do you mean the Totally Under Control documentary from 2020?

One question, have you ever considered the opposite of what you're saying to be true, or looked for the evidence for that? Saying because I've heard of and looked at both opinions you've expressed in your comment and heard and seen evidence for them to be true. I also did the opposite. And looking at the opposite seemed more true objectively and with the emotions and popular biases like authority bias and other harmful ones removed.

"If you can't see anything wrong with the side you agree with, and you can't see anything right with the side you disagree with, you've been manipulated." Very wise quote.
by anonnon | 2026-01-24 04:12:45+00:00
> soft power

Go look at what these people thought of us before Trump: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...

> Sweden: 47% had a favorable opinion of the US.; Germany: 49%; France: 46%; The Netherlands: 48%

And this was after the US committed over $120 billion in aid (all weapons and cash) to Ukraine, and, for some reason, allowed Sweden to join NATO--the same Sweden that pledged neutrality when Finland was invaded by the Soviets, who stole the Karelian Isthmus and other bits of its territory, and similarly did nothing when Norway and Denmark were invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany.
by hutao | 2026-01-24 04:12:56+00:00
I'd never heard of "resumable exceptions" before, so I searched them up [1][2]. Is this another name for the language feature called "effect handlers" in OCaml 5?

[1] https://osa1.net/posts/2024-11-04-resumable-exceptions.html

[2] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8033...
by xboxnolifes | 2026-01-24 04:14:13+00:00
If I installed apps on linux at the frequency I installed apps on my phone, which is a few apps per year, I wouldn't care at all. That being said, I get fewer interruptions installing apps on my phone than I do on most linux CLIs, since on my phone I just press install and it installs, no question. The real problem is first-launch pop-ups/notifications/settings, and linux apps can have as many first launch popups as my phone does.
by ggm | 2026-01-24 04:15:23+00:00
That's a pretty one eyed take on the uncertainties of marine population dynamics. The reasons for thinking shark populations are in decline are pretty solid: overfishing is a worldwide problem.

Bullshark activity is pretty closely tied to levels of run off into water. They're the only significant species of risk which tolerates estuarine brackish water, juveniles avoid adults and they seek out turbid water for opportunistic bait fish feeding. Sydney has had massive run-off from storms. The sewer outfalls encourage bait fish, people are insufficiently cautious.

And to cap it all, News Ltd is a Murdoch press right wing anti climate change factory for outrage to sell ads. The same Web page with this humerous cynical take will also give you breast enlargement stories, royal outrage, and flog conspiracy theories.

Yes, its true. We don't know how to count sharks well. No, this is not some magic "truth" moment and no, scientists are not in denial about this because of grant funding.

The author, Fred Pawle is on Sky news. That's like Fox, or worse. He also is listed on the IPA website, which is a right wing think tank like the Koch foundation or the Cato foundation. If you think this is dispassionate truth-telling I think you have a problem. He's a recreational surfing journalist.
by andwur | 2026-01-24 04:15:37+00:00
They could have taken a more defence-in-depth approach to key storage and encrypted the cloud copy of the Bitlocker key with a random master key itself protected by a user password-derived key arrangement, with any crypto action occuring on the device to avoid knowledge of the plaintext key. That way the Bitlocker key stored in the cloud is opaque to Microsoft, and only by knowing the user's current cleartext password could they access the raw Bitlocker key.

The current approach is weak, and strikes me as a design unlikely to be taken unless all the people involved were unfamiliar with secure design (unlikely IMO), or they intentionally left the door open to this type of access.
by mannanj | 2026-01-24 04:15:46+00:00
Yes yes I've heard all this before.

Check out the Alice in Wonderland persuasive technique? Basically it works off of inducing confusion intentionally and then offering a suggestion that is anchored to as "safe" in the human psychology. Supposedly operating off programming that extends on the falling instinct where we anchor onto anything close by that feels safe (has our early weird monkey brain origins there!).

I think you'll see a lot of the public authoritarian CDC, Govt, mainstream authoritarian response was anchored in this. And it supports the psychosis theory I originally responded off of.
by echelon | 2026-01-24 04:16:01+00:00
Counter point: HN, Facebook before the timeline, the entire pre-Facebook internet, Reddit before the IPO path.

The giants grew market share and started deploying profitable advertising models. Once a giant gets the profit bug, they stop being stewards.

Open source social media and messaging largely sucks. Either the UI/UX sucks, like Matrix, or the demographics suck, like Bluesky's hyper-polarized audience.

None of this means it's impossible. We've just seen the successful attempts become evil and lots of bad attempts that fail.
by g-b-r | 2026-01-24 04:16:55+00:00
It's largely the same for all automatic updating systems that don't protect against personalized updates.

I don't know the status of the updating systems of the various distributions; if some use server-delivered scripts run as root, that's potentially a further powerful attack avenue.

But I was assuming that the update process itself is safe; the problem is that you usually don't have guarantees that the updates you get are genuine.

So if you update a component run as root, yes, the update could include malicious code that can do anything.

But even an update to a very constrained application could be very damaging: for example, if it is for a E2EE messaging application, it could modify it to have it send each encryption key to a law enforcement agency.
by neilv | 2026-01-24 04:17:53+00:00
Will this be deployed mostly by those with the worst judgment?

For example, that video is implied to be of some open source self-driving project, run on an active public road, at 42mph. A lot of sensible people would say that's irresponsible or unsafe, and not do it. Move-fast-and-break-things bros and narcissists, however, wouldn't see a problem.
by rz2k | 2026-01-24 04:18:17+00:00
They are like Vim. “Alt,letter,letter,arrow,letter,letter,arrow,enter”, etc. Rather than a single combination of keys, it is a series of key presses.

I agree that it might be trivial to set up for spreadsheets, and it would be really useful for other spreadsheets, and many other applications. I suppose a hurdle is how context sensitive the commands are depending on the cell or range of cells activated, and their contents and data type.
by ripped_britches | 2026-01-24 04:18:32+00:00
I'm sure the technology is great, but what would be really great for me to use theoretically use it would be for it to be if the company was liable if it caused an at-fault accident. I don't know much about the law around this, but I comfortably get in a Waymo all the time because I have some intuition about it that tells me that their lawyers are scared shitless of killing someone. It's a hard sell for me when it says "self-install at your own risk" but I appreciate the effort.
by kingofmen | 2026-01-24 04:18:50+00:00
They did, but not through any virtue or skill on her part. That was just the plain luck of Bitcoin happening to go way way up before the bankruptcy estate paid out using what it had, and the court that sentenced her couldn't know that would happen and if it somehow had, should not have taken it into account. You wouldn't advocate a lighter sentence for murder if the bullet had miraculously been struck by lightning on its way to the target's skull and thereby missed.
by mannanj | 2026-01-24 04:18:58+00:00
Right. By the way I think that last sentence of yours is a strong ad hominem argument and false equivalency also.

Oh by the way, I have a funny personal experience with the theory that it was meant to avoid supply runs on quality masks.

Early on I discovered any cloth layers would work good enough, and found and shared many quick 2 minute guides in my network. I heard a lot of the similar bullshit nonsense that was sounding like mass psychosis then too that "building your own mask risks supply runs on quality masks". I'm like how does that make any logical sense though it feels like a hypnotic sort of lockstep programming of not being able to feel the dissonance to ask certain questions.
by simonw | 2026-01-24 04:19:13+00:00
> were the agents working on it able to build it, or were they blindly writing code?

The project was able to build the whole time, and the agents were constantly compiling it using the Rust compiler and fixing any compile errors as they occurred.

The GitHub CI builds were failing, and when they first opened the repo people incorrectly assumed that meant the code didn't compile at all.

The biggest problem with the repo when they first released it was that there were no build instructions for end-users, so it was hard to try out. They fixed that within 24 hours of the initial release.

> What I don't know, and seemingly nobody else knows, is how functional the rest of the codebase is.

It's functional enough to render web pages - you can build it and run it yourself to see that, I have some screenshots from trying it out here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/scaling-long-running-a...

That said, it's very much intended as a research project into running parallel coding agents as opposed to a serious browser project that's intended for end users. At the end of my post I compare it to "hello world" - I think "build a browser" may be the "hello world" of massively parallel coding agent systems, which I find quite amusing.
by decimalenough | 2026-01-24 04:19:37+00:00
Maybe, on paper, some day in the indeterminate future, and likely without interest.

For comparison, MtGox went tits up twelve years ago in 2014 and they're still figuring out repayments for its BTC holders, which is both a hell of a lot simpler than FTX's grab bag of own tokens etc and has gone up a zillion percent since 2014.