MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antonvs | 2026-01-21 16:20:55+00:00
I suspect there are two points you haven't fully understood:

1. The equivalence being discussed is not supported in "every mainstream language" in practice. If you disagree, read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699933 for a good overview of the equivalence in question and explain how you think mainstream languages support that.

2. The current discussion is in the context of a language targeting CUDA. Currently, very few languages aside from C++ have good CUDA support, and C++ certainly doesn't achieve that by having its arrays be equivalent to functions "in practice" or in any other sense.

Just as an example of what OP is addressing, FTA:

> "To allow for efficient defunctionalisation, Futhark imposes restrictions on how functions can be used; for example banning returning them from branches. These restrictions are not (and ought not be!) imposed on arrays, and so unification is not possible. Also, in Futhark an array type such as [n]f64 explicitly indicates its size (and consequently the valid indices), which can even be extracted at run time. This is not possible with functions, and making it possible requires us to move further towards dependent types - which may of course be a good idea anyway."

As such, it seems to me your comments about this are wildly off the mark.
by Sam6late | 2026-01-21 16:21:06+00:00
I think cutting off money is like an emergency wound that needs a bandage right now to keep the school alive. AI is more like a difficult puzzle—universities can solve it eventually, but only if they are stable and have the budget. There are some lame attempts at taming the AI shrew:

In reality a far more serious threat is the loss of academic freedom. This guy must deal with that issue, and onslaught on academic freedom and that is the real question because in 2025, billions of dollars in federal research grants were frozen for institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, and UPenn.
The US federal government remains the single largest funder of university research, accounting for approximately 55% of all higher education R&D expenditures (this is a capitalist country btw).
by nicbou | 2026-01-21 16:21:22+00:00
> In Germany, the government recently decided that some minor applications to local governments must be answered within X days or else are automatically approved.

I believe it was just a crazy idea that was submitted recently.

The closest real thing is 75 VwGO which requires a decision in 3 months. The immigration office has been failing to meet that requirement for years with few consequences, because enforcing that right is expensive and takes even longer.
by solaire_oa | 2026-01-21 16:21:34+00:00
Which isn't to say that "making commerce cheaper in Europe" isn't a worthwhile goal, it is- but at face value this attempt looks comically inept. "We wrote an email to a politician! Progress due any moment! Like and share!"

Doing the insufferable, thankless work of mitigating the commercial choke-points of bureaucracy on a Continental scale makes this effort's failure a forgone conclusion. I would take the attempt more seriously if the individuals tried to make their own country more commerce-friendly, rather than all of Europe.

Even so, points for trying something- anything- and raising "awareness".
Ask HN: What single AI tool/technique 10x'd your productivity last year?
by laxmena | 2026-01-21 16:21:40+00:00
As someone tinkering with AI agents daily, I’ve seen massive shifts since mid-2025.

What’s the single AI tool, feature, or technique that gave you the biggest productivity leap in the last year? (Cursor Composer? Claude 4.5 projects? A custom RAG setup? Vibe-coding with o1?)
by breppp | 2026-01-21 16:21:44+00:00
Yes, I believe the reason we have got to this point is the destruction of institutions such as the press.

Historically the press had pushed narratives controlled by state elites who also had a vested interest in the state wellbeing.

Today these are pushed by foreign entities or the more extreme the more engagement.

That's why conspiracy theories replaced established truths, the populist left believes in anti-state slogans such as "defund the police" and the populist right wants to destroy the supreme court

AI alignment might return the elites controlled narratives which were apparently crucial for democracy
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 16:22:15+00:00
It probably is. Some of this stuff will hang around because power users want control. Some of it will evolve into more sophisticated solutions that get turned into products and become easier to acquihire than the build in house. A lot of it will become obsolete when the OEMs crib the concept. But IMO all of those are acceptable outcomes if what you really want is the thing itself.
by UncleMeat | 2026-01-21 16:22:38+00:00
Yes it is accurate.

By the time we had the full details the republican party had coalesced behind still supporting Trump. People either claim that Trump did win the election and he was fighting back or insist that the fake electors plot didn't really exist and this was all just the Biden administration weaponizing the DOJ against Trump as revenge.

The Supreme Court stepped in twice to protect Trump. Colorado tried to remove him from the ballot based on a clause in the 14th amendment that makes people who have engaged in insurrection ineligible for holding federal office. The Supreme Court said that doing this requires congressional action, which was controlled by the GOP at the time. The Supreme Court also stepped in to stop the federal prosecution of Trump for this crime, finding that most (or all) of the actions he took were protected under a new doctrine of presidential criminal immunity.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-01-21 16:23:18+00:00
> but I can get a quote from anyone I want to do the work, and if it's within x% of the preferred quote, it's automatically approved,

It would be the same in healthcare if quotes were for 4 and low 5 figures with no future costs.

Not only does healthcare easily reach into the 5, 6, and 7 figures, but the health insurance company is also on the hook for myriad known and unknown issues caused by the initial costs.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-21 16:23:29+00:00
People really overestimate the WEF's influence. It's basically a fairly boring corporate conference that consists of side means and some side parties. There might be some shenanigans happening, but that happens at "nerdy" GDC as well. Years ago, we had to "invite" Register, DarkReading, SDxCentral, etc "reporters" to free booze sessions during RSA to keep them happy in the era before Nikesh Arora called out conferences like RSA for their bullshit and their ecosystem of PR leaches like The Register (notice how they've reduced their snark about HPE becuase they have a partner content relationship now).

Finally, most police forces and interior ministries have had access to offensive security tools (often called "spyware") for over a decade now.
by huntergemmer | 2026-01-21 16:23:43+00:00
165 fps on that setup - that's awesome to hear! Thanks for testing on high-end hardware.

Love the benchmark button idea. A "Run Benchmark" mode that captures:
- Load time
- GPU time
- CPU time
- Min/max/avg FPS over 10-15 seconds
- Hardware info

Then export a shareable summary or even a URL with encoded results. Would make for great comparison threads.

Adding this to the roadmap - would make a great v0.2 feature. Thanks for the suggestion!
by throwaw12 | 2026-01-21 16:23:53+00:00
X is not a good representative to free speech.

1. It censors some topics. Just for fun, try to write something about Israel-Gaza, or try to praise Russia and compare the likes/views with your other posts and over the next week observe how these topics is impacting your overall reach even in other topics.

2. X amplifies your interests, which is not objectively true, so if you are interested in conspiracy or Middle East, it pushes you those topics, but others see different things. Although its showing you something you are interested in, in reality its isolating you in your bubble.
by dswalter | 2026-01-21 16:24:01+00:00
For many of us, even if drawing that line exactly is debatable, a prompt-generated image, where the "artist" didn't interact with any of the pixels is across the line for "too much AI".

It can definitely take creativity and fortitude to get an AI model to draw what you want it to. But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned. But you wouldn't get artistic credit for the resultant painting; the artist would! If AI is creating the piece, it is the artist; and you're merely the commissioner of the work.
by evilduck | 2026-01-21 16:24:15+00:00
Encapsulation, e.g. utility classes (and Tailwind, by extension) solve for project management or organization level problems, not styling problems directly. The nice defaults are a bonus but the actual value is a common and agreed upon approach to avoiding a write-only stylesheet that grows forever and for not fucking up cascading styles that impact someone else's feature or page you didn't intend to and causing releases to grind to a halt while they sort out what you did. Everyone here who misses that point is basically broadcasting how they are the cause of long term problems in their project or at their organization.
by chuckadams | 2026-01-21 16:24:16+00:00
Yeah I ultimately can't hate markdown, but it really was just specified more or less as "whatever markdown.pl does", and markdown.pl was not exactly the most rigorously engineered thing. Even bbcode of all things has more predictable structure to it. The commonmark/pandoc guy now has Djot, which is supposed to be a bit more sane, but I get the feeling it's probably too late :-/
by mnw21cam | 2026-01-21 16:24:20+00:00
In my case, I set some course-work, where they have to log in to a Linux server in the university and process a load of data, get the results, and then write the essay about the process. Because the LLM hasn't been able to log in and see the data or indeed the results, it doesn't have a clue what it's meant to talk about.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-21 16:24:34+00:00
- I am not interested in running claude or any of the agents as much as I am interested in running untrusted user code on the cloud inside a sandbox

- Think codesandbox, how much time does it take for a VM here to boot?

- How safe do you think this solution would be to let users execute untrusted code inside while being able to pip install and npm install all sorts of libraries and

- how do you deploy this inside AWS Lambda/Fargate for the same usecase?
by orwin | 2026-01-21 16:25:19+00:00
I'm sorry, but which leftist ideology promote capitalism and economic colonialism, which is 90% of what Davos elite talk about? Blair's 'third way'? I guess environmentalism pushed against climate change and sea plastics, but that's a stretch.

Stakeholder capitalism is basically saying 'we don't need to change the system to change things' or 'vote with your wallet', its keeping the status quo, _by definition_ right-wing politics.

DEI is trying to keep material conditions and systemic violence out of the discussion and individualize issues to make minorities participate/compete in the rat race, and avoid stuff like the BPP giving free meals to kids. It's like liberal feminist talking about 'empowerment' instead of 'emancipation'. It's less obviously about keeping the status quo, but it's still about keeping the system balanced, protecting capitalism. So not left wing.

> The fact that they are wealthy hypocrites doesn't make them right-wing

Wait until one of them get accused of sexual harassment/assault publicly, you'll see where those really comes from.
by rezmason | 2026-01-21 16:25:36+00:00
We also typically value things that are not tied to productivity/output, like product quality/reliability, security, and our own agency.

I want to be free to read, write, run, and share code, now and in the future. Relying on centralized services to do it for me (by extracting knowledge from countless other people) is certainly not a resilient strategy.
by toss1 | 2026-01-21 16:25:44+00:00
>>If you think some politician is paying to manipulate the market just take their money by taking the other side.

Yes, that is True -- IFF (and that is a big If and Only If) we can suss out in real time what is happening.

The other risk is the Polymarket (or other betting market) managers' calls on what gets meet or don't meet the criteria. Like that punter who made big bets on the Venezuela Maduro kidnapping operation, betting tens-of-thousands$$ on the "Invasion" proposition and initially looking like he made almost a half-million dollars, only to have Polymarket decide it was not an "invasion".

So there is both risk of "did I actually detect a ploy?" and counterparty payout risk. But if we can get past those two, we can definitely make bank!
by pixl97 | 2026-01-21 16:25:46+00:00
>society has always tied both,

Pretty strong statement, an as such needs a non-tautological proof. Rich people buying rare things as what society should consider art may not exactly fit that bill.

The thing is what is considered art at any particular time is very nebulous and quite often tied to what the rulers of a country would allow. Trying to say that modern institutions get to decide what art is and isn't is also going to cause definition problems. Does folk art not recognized by museums count at art. The said people who like it would say it does.

Does a person who spends a small amount of time creating something that others consider art, even though that's not what they do, nor will they do it again, have they actually made a piece of art?

Simply put trying to put these rules on the ethereal concept of art quickly devolves into pedantry that makes actual enemies in fields were factions say their ideas are the only true art, and other factions that attempt to destroy the concept altogether.
by huntergemmer | 2026-01-21 16:25:50+00:00
Thanks! Currently focused on 2D charts. That's where the "big data" performance problem is most painful.

3D is coming (it's the same rendering pipeline), but I'd want to get the 2D story solid first before expanding scope.

The slice animation is doable though - we already have animation infrastructure for transitions. An "explode slice on click" effect would be a fun addition to the pie/donut charts.

What's your use case? Dashboard visuals or something else?
by nZac | 2026-01-21 16:26:04+00:00
> SmartOS is a "live OS", it is always booted via PXE, ISO, or USB Key and runs entirely from memory, allowing the local disks to be used entirely for hosting virtual machines without wasting disks for the root OS.

Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Proxmox? I've got three servers I'm thinking of setting up as a small cluster and would like to boot them from a single image instead of manually setting PVE on each. Ansible or salt is an option but that tends to degrade over time.
by ericmay | 2026-01-21 16:26:10+00:00
Well even 0-96 would be better, but I think 0-100 scales are more useful. Temperatures in most places are within those bounds and it's like a test you are graded on. You get a 0 on the test, that's really cold. You get a 100 - smoking hot.

I'm not 100% sure of the normal upper/lower bounds in everyday life for most people on the planet for Celsius, but let's say it's 0-32. It' just feels weird to me to be operating on that scale versus 0-100 where I see in every day life from battery percentages to test scores.

> Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'?

In part, yea. But I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life and because it's fun and weird and historical in a way that Metric isn't.
Show HN: QTap DevTools – Chrome-style encrypted traffic inspector for Linux
by tylerflint | 2026-01-21 16:26:12+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Tyler Flint. Eight months ago we shared qtap here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43928118).

Today we're releasing DevTools - a browser-based interface that gives you the Chrome Network tab experience for server-side HTTP/S traffic.

The problem: You're debugging a production issue. An external dependency is returning errors. Your logs say "request failed" but not what was actually sent. Adding debug logging means redeploying and restarting services - which takes time and often changes the conditions you're trying to debug. tcpdump shows encrypted blobs. Setting up mitmproxy means certificates, restarts, reconfiguration.

Our solution: install qtap, enable DevTools, open localhost:10001 in your browser. You're now watching live HTTP/S traffic - every request, response, header, body - in plaintext. No restarts, no certificates, no code changes.

It works by hooking into TLS libraries (OpenSSL, Go crypto, Java SSL, Node.js, etc) via eBPF before encryption happens.

Getting started:

# Option A: Install script (inspect it first if you prefer)
curl -s https://get.qpoint.io/install | less
curl -s https://get.qpoint.io/install | sudo sh
sudo qtap --enable-dev-tools

If you're (rightly) skeptical of curl | sh, grab the binary directly or build from source. We get it.

# Option B: Direct binary download (use the link for your architecture)
curl -L https://downloads.qpoint.io/qpoint/qtap-latest-linux-amd64.tgz -o qtap.tgz
# curl -L https://downloads.qpoint.io/qpoint/qtap-latest-linux-arm64.tgz -o qtap.tgz
tar -xzf qtap.tgz
sudo ./qtap --enable-dev-tools

Then open http://localhost:10001

# For remote servers, use SSH port forwarding or Tailscale/Twingate
ssh -L 10001:localhost:10001 user@remote-server

Key features:
- Process/container attribution (which container made that call?)
- Real-time SSE streaming
- Copy any request as cURL
- Data never leaves your machine

DevTools is free and open source (AGPL-3.0).

GitHub: https://github.com/qpoint-io/qtap
Docs: https://docs.qpoint.io/release-notes/devtools

Questions we'd love feedback on:
- What debugging scenarios would you use this for?
- Any protocols beyond HTTP you'd want? (Postgres, MySQL, Redis coming soon)
by graypegg | 2026-01-21 16:26:27+00:00
Honestly, as someone that's been picking up OSRS again (and is actually now thinking about RS3 given all of the recent progress jagex is making on removing MTX in it!), I'd be good with that. I still like to play it myself without botting, so anything to move the bots somewhere else I think would be neat. PvP folk lose some easy kills but that's about it for impact on regular players honestly.

The problem is, the reason the bots exist now is to sell the account or farm gp. The only way this would work would be if that bot only world was gated off from the rest of the economy like special gamemode/league worlds, naturally destroying any reason most bot makers make bots. Your love of automating for sport puts you in the minority of botters sadly haha

Officially blessed OSRS private servers are on the roadmap IIRC... maybe there's a future for a bot-olympics in one of those?
by giraffe_lady | 2026-01-21 16:26:56+00:00
Yes, the moderators are in effect editors of a news media site with heavy social elements. Editorial decisions about articles should be handled differently from content moderation of user comments. There is a lot of editorial involvement (tweaking titles, hand placing articles on the front page, flag removal) but almost no transparency or communication. Sometimes a pinned comment from dang but that's it.

These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.
by analognoise | 2026-01-21 16:27:32+00:00
> not almost as toxic just in the opposite direction.

It’s not toxic to be like “everyone should have the same rights, invading Greenland is stupid, let’s all have healthcare.”

We can compare toxicities accurately, and comparing the cesspool of “thought” that is X to…anything else? Is like comparing Polonium 210 to Tylenol. Sure, they’re both toxic, technically, but there is some critical distinction between them, right?
by wrs | 2026-01-21 16:27:32+00:00
I'm not sure how you know you're correctly detecting LLM writing. My own writing has been "detected" because of "obvious" indicators like em-dashes, compound sentences, and even (remember 2024?) using the word "delve", and I assure you I'm 100% human. So the track record of people "learning to detect LLM writing" isn't great in my experience. And I don't see why I should have to change my entirely human writing style because of this.
by cthalupa | 2026-01-21 16:27:38+00:00
This argument resonates with me - but it's the same argument that has been made and artists have ignored or put up the same (unconvincing, in my opinion) arguments against the whole time. As you pointed out, this same discussion has been had every step of the way with digital art - from things like photoshop, to the tools that have been gradually introduced inside of photoshop and similar, to even things like brush packs, painting over kitbashes, etc. The traditionalist viewpoint holds strong, until the people arguing blink and realize everyone else eventually stopped caring and did what worked best for them.

At this point, I believe it's not a matter of intellectual honesty or actually disagreeing with any of it - it's just about outcomes. They don't want to see their work devalued, their sources of income drying up. It's an understandable fear. No one who enjoys the work they do enjoys the prospect of potentially having to change careers to keep making a living. Hell, most people that don't enjoy what they do have no desire to have to try and find a new career.

But humans are selfish. The same artists who are worried about technology taking their job will laud praise on technology in other areas that have eliminated jobs, with my recurring example being how happy they are for no longer having to pay a web dev to build them a portfolio site and can instead just go to squarespace and pay them a fraction of the cost. No one laments how there are basically no independent web designers building small sites anymore - it's just not a viable career. It's all been consolidated into shops working for big clients or pumping out themes for Wordpress, Squarespace, and Shopify. And of course, there are countless examples of this throughout history.

I'm not sure AI is going to be the great job destroyer we fear it is. I'm not sure it isn't, either. So I get it. This has a chance to force an issue on a massive scale that usually is much more limited in blast radius.

But to answer the question - I don't think it actually matters to them what the line is from any sort of rational perspective. It will move and shift based on the conversation to wherever they think it needs to be to protect themselves.
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-21 16:27:45+00:00
>They specify dimensions in feet, inches, and fractions of an inch. But not all of them do.

There are many more fun and exciting non-metric measurements you might encounter than plain old fractional inches.

A fabricator might encounter sheet metal thickness in "gauge". Wire sizes, ammunition, and machine screws also come in "gauge" sizes but all four are different scales. US drills come not only in fractional inch sizes, but letters and numbers as well. Furnace efficiency is often specified in percent, but air conditioner efficiency comes in SEER. Water softener capacity is in "grains". Pipe threads come in "inch sizes", but that usually means NPT.
Metal hardness and rubber durometer measurements have their own scale which doesn't really belong to either camp.

To be fair, a lot of these are categorical units. Screws come in #2 or #6 or #4, but you'll never need to worry about #3.7.

A wise professor once told me "All these different units will not be going away within your lifetime, so you better get used to working with them."