MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-29 03:30:26+00:00
I could have sworn I remember hearing about some historical satellites involving wood in some way and I guess it was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanhui_Shi_Weixing

>The successful recovery of an FSW-0 recoverable satellite in 1974 established China as the third nation to launch and recover a satellite

>A novel feature of the spacecraft's re-entry module was the use of impregnated oak, a natural material, as the ablative material for its heat shield.

Edit: as usual, Scott Manley has it covered
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtxYP9fLMmk
by throw0101c | 2026-01-29 03:30:34+00:00
> And I'll celebrate with my lawyer if it does.

LOL. Why do you assume you'll get a hearing?

As Timothy Snyder (an historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust) observed last year:

> If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

* https://xcancel.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/190429656556234343...
by deaux | 2026-01-29 03:30:49+00:00
> For some, it's better for emotional and mental wellbeing to ignore the problems of reality and remain ignorant.

I think it isn't just some, it's effectively everyone, the nature of being human. Instead, there's a group of people who are willing to sacrifice their emotional and wellbeing to face these problems of reality, and try to use the limited power they do have to improve them, for the greater good.
by lazyeye | 2026-01-29 03:31:50+00:00
"I get it - you love Republicans and hate Democrats..."

I don't think you are remotely close to "getting it". My point was accurate and valid. You replied with a vague deflection followed by abuse. Not worth engaging.

Incidentally here's a video of the "poor, innocent nurse" Alex Pretti interacting with law enforcement a week before his fatal altercation where he turned up with a weapon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzNvxc-Q5wo

Of course he doesnt deserve to die as a result but in a highly, volatile environment he sure is acting pretty stupidly.
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-29 03:32:01+00:00
The demand for memory is going to result in more factories and production. As long as demand is high, there's still money to be made in going wide to the consumer market with thinner margins.

What I predict is that we won't advance in memory technology on the consumer side as quickly. For instance, a huge number of basic consumer use cases would be totally fine on DDR3 for the next decade. Older equipment can produce this; so it has value, and we may see platforms come out with newer designs on older fabs.

Chiplets are a huge sign of growth in that direction - you end up with multiple components fabbed on different processes coming together inside one processor. That lets older equipment still have a long life and gives the final SoC assembler the ability to select from a wide range of components.

https://www.openchipletatlas.org/
by reaperducer | 2026-01-29 03:32:20+00:00
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster.

Except they didn't in the real world.

The only place I ever saw these was at Whole Foods, and the store's POS terminals don't let you tap or palm until all items are rung up and there's a total available.

Usually when the cashier is down to the last two items, I have my card already out and hovering over the chip reader. The transaction completes in under two seconds.

Palm scanning is slower than any payment method other than cash or checks.
by Fnoord | 2026-01-29 03:33:35+00:00
On the bottom of the website, several use cases are mentioned. It is a fairly robust list of examples.

Anything with USB-A is neat with this type of device. For example, a LimeSDR USB would work (even a uSDR for M.2, though I'd wait for the successor).

For Kali, I sport a GPD Pocket 2, and that works well, but I'm in the process of switching that to my Hackberry Pi CM5.

Still, I bought that end of last summer. I honestly would not buy any computer right now. The RAM prices are simply insane.
by logicprog | 2026-01-29 03:35:37+00:00
What are you talking about? He goes into plenty of data, domain relevant definitions, specific cases, etc? Links to reliable sources for every numbers claim, of which there's several per paragraph, shows graphs, pictures, and does a lot of math (all of which I manually checked myself on paper as I went through). Also, the writing style is very much not ChatGPT-like, especially with all of the very honest corrections and edits he's added over time, which an AI slop purveyor wouldn't do.

The deep analysis starts at this section:
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

You can't just dismiss anything you don't like as AI.
by deaux | 2026-01-29 03:35:48+00:00
> If there's any, even the slightest, chance that buying from a business might one day reflect badly on the civil servant in the procurement office, then they won't buy from that business.

This is an absurd statement that might as well come straight out of Yes Minister. Buying from PWC reflects badly on them already, let alone when their next scandal happens. Which is of course never far away [0].

I'm sure Fujitsu met similar "criteria" when selected for Horizon. How well that selection reflected on the procurement office..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PwC#Litigation
by in-silico | 2026-01-29 03:36:15+00:00
The models don't need to be perfect. They only need to be as reliable as humans.

Emergency department doctors misdiagnose about 5% of patients [1], so replacing them with an LLM that hallucinates on 1% of cases would actually be a significant improvement.

1: https://effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov/products/diagnostic-err...
by wiml | 2026-01-29 03:36:40+00:00
That used to be typical in the US as well. I think that when pay-at-the-pump became the norm (using a card), prepayment became expected even when paying with cash inside, at around the same time. I expect there are some gas stations here and there in the US that still operate the way you describe though.

An increasing number of gas stations are completely unattended though — the attached store might close overnight but the pumps are still usable.
by Nicholas_C | 2026-01-29 03:37:27+00:00
There are a lot of people with incentives to hype the AI industry (VCs, founders, CEOs, internet personalities that need clicks, people that sell courses, etc). Last week everyone was hyping Claude Cowork, this week it's Clawdbot. Don't get me wrong I think there are a lot of cool things going on but there is a lot of hype (similar to the original internet bubble).
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-29 03:37:37+00:00
Temporary is useless and undesirable except for vanishing few applications except things like missiles that it was originally designed for and erroneously cargo-culted as magical missile oil. Sewing oil and similar thin oils stick around longer.

Silicone-based lubricants persist in contact with rubber. Water or soap and water is safer and cheaper for rubber hoses for manipulation.

Just don't make the mistake of routinely inhaling or dipping one's hands in toxic compounds like MEK, carbon tet, TCE, and gasoline+TEL that my dad or grandpa did cumulatively because some of the cancers and other conductions are awful yet avoidable. Petroleum distillates are literally petrochem shit.
by defrost | 2026-01-29 03:38:13+00:00
Or, local to where I am, rural farmers using AI bots to hint them on capital machine repairs (their gear runs into the millions), summarise ANOVA trials on grain crop samples, reinforce their personal conspiracy theories and biases, and answer a huge run of everyday queries.

Some can see the benefits. Some (with overlap) can see the downsides (wrong answers and enforcing bad traits).

> But policy makers, technologists, economists, the elite a[nd] other educated people ..

also overlap with rural farmers.

I think a problem here is your image of what a rural farmer is.

A good many here are multi millionaires, in assets at least, have children in elite private schools, have family members in local, state, and federal government who started out farming, went to university, have careers that may include farming on the side, and retire to farming.

Next you'll be saying grandmothers can't code weather modelling and prediction software on Cyber 205's or something equally daft.
by popalchemist | 2026-01-29 03:38:36+00:00
Haven't you read Capital? Marx's core premise which nobody actually working in economics denies is that the nature of wealth is to consolidate in the hands of the few. So while wealthier people may consume more, that does not factor into "fairness" because they are hoarding their wealth, amassing power over others, and using it disproportionately to maximize their please, power, influence, etc at the cost of the suffering of others.

But I take it from your glib comment you'll disagree or deny that.
by hackingonempty | 2026-01-29 03:39:01+00:00
A paper on this was just submitted.

"We demonstrate that this class of defenses is insecure against two practical attack classes: the copy-type attack, in which a human transcribes LLM-generated text producing authentic motor signals, and timing-forgery attacks, in which automated agents sample inter-keystroke intervals from empirical human distributions."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17280v1

There are tons of USB dongles available for about $10 containing a programmable microcontroller. You connect to the dongle from another device over wifi and it can act like a keyboard typing out whatever text you want using a model of human typing, perhaps even your own.
by surajrmal | 2026-01-29 03:39:21+00:00
I agree, but if you use more of the std library it will contribute more to the final image. I can write a 100 line rust file that ends up being 1MiB (even after lto) because I maximize as much code from the standard library as possible. This is not a knock on rust, but your statements can be a misleading as well. In practice most folks ignore the majority of the standard library so only a few hundred kib of std library end up in their binary.
by gortok | 2026-01-29 03:40:24+00:00
ICE uses administrative warrants; and while administrative warrants do not allow for seizures inside a home, see my comment about the legal argument of “you can’t suppress the body” for why there’s not a whole lot that can be done if they do decide to kick down your door. The latest Serious Trouble podcast goes into this at the 12 minute mark. https://www.serioustrouble.show/p/120-days

In this case the story didn’t make it clear whether or not they even had an administrative warrant. I’d be interested to find out if they did.
by necovek | 2026-01-29 03:40:33+00:00
I believe it is a reasonable hypothesis that if payroll taxes were removed, 2nd order effect would be that employers have more money to offer for all positions, and in a market driven job market, prices would increase and thus salaries would converge to X+Y, yet they would be worth the same as X today.

Yes, likely not exactly the same (a bit more kept by employers in overcrowded job markets, a bit less in others), but it would essentially support the interpretation that most of that is really a tax that goes out of employee "budget", or their total comp.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-29 03:40:51+00:00
With -$4.50 revenue per new customer, these gamblers are demonstrably creating an externalized debt for society when it inevitably implodes the market.

Some are projecting >35% drop in the entire index when reality hits the "magnificent" 7. Look at the price of Gold, corporate cash flows, and the US Bonds laggard performance. That isn't normal by any definition. =3
by ziml77 | 2026-01-29 03:41:12+00:00
Human time estimates are bad, but the ones that AI gives are just absurd. I've seen them used from small things like planning interviews and short presentations, all the way up to large scale projects. In no case do they make any sense to me. But I think people end up trusting them because they look so confident and well planned due to how the AIs break things down.
by SJC_Hacker | 2026-01-29 03:41:36+00:00
>The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones. There are some smart and sharp kids everywhere in even the lowest ranked schools. But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.

I'm convinced that the code screen functions as a somewhat arbitrary filter/badge of honor.

FAANG and equivalents get tens of thousands of applicants and they cannot hire them all

If too many pass the code screen, they will just make it harder, even though the job hasn't gotten any more difficult.

Or they get failed at system design. Which is BS in many cases.
by koverstreet | 2026-01-29 03:42:29+00:00
I think their claims of write amplification reduction are a bit overstated given more realistic workloads.

It is true that b-trees aren't ideal in that respect, and you will see some amount of write amplification, but not enough that it should be a major consideration, in my experience

You really have to take into account workingset size and cache size to make any judgements there; your b-tree writes should be given by journal/WAL reclaim, which will buffer up updates.

A purely random update workload will kill a conventional b-tree on write amplification - like I mentioned, that's the absolute worst case scenario for a b-tree. But it just doesn't happen in the real world.

For the data I can give you, that would be bcachefs's hybrid b-tree - large btree nodes (256k, typically) which are internally log structured; I would consider it a minor variation on a classical b-tree. The log structuring mean that we can incrementally write only the dirty keys in a node, at the cost of some compaction overhead (drastically less than a conventional LSM).

In actual real world usage, when I've looked at the numbers (not recently, so this may have changed) we're always able to do giant highly efficient b-tree writes - the journal and in-memory cache are batching things up as much as we want - which means write amplification is negligible.
by UltraSane | 2026-01-29 03:42:31+00:00
"Why does my bank need to know whether the machine in my hands that is accessing their internet APIs was attested by some uninvolved third party or not?"

Because there are an infinite ways for a computer to be insecure and very few ways for it to be secure.

Checks were a form of attestation because they contained security features that banks would verify.

Would YOU be willing to use a bank that refused to use TLS? I didn't think so. How is you refusing to accept remote attestation and the bank refusing to connect to you any different?
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-29 03:43:15+00:00
Wow! It has this:

Subgraph Direction Override: Using direction LR inside a subgraph while the outer graph flows TD.

With this, you should be able to approximate swim lane diagrams, which is something Mermaid lacks.

The last time I checked, Mermaid couldn't render subgraphs in a different direction than the overall graph.
by Klonoar | 2026-01-29 03:43:34+00:00
I was going to comment the same thing.

The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably).

Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.
by energy123 | 2026-01-29 03:45:04+00:00
I'm talking more about intra-country dynamics, rather than inter-country. Momentum, good or bad, is a thing. It's not that mysterious, we can trace it to things that feed off each other, like the inflation <-> populism loop, which makes civic institutions progressively worse over time. Turkey is a modern case study. This is the opposite of the "coiled spring" analogy, where if a country get worse it is bound to get better even stronger.
by wiml | 2026-01-29 03:46:12+00:00
You don't need to press your palm, you just hover it over the plate for a moment. I think the hardware is just an IR illuminator+camera.

It does seem like a technology that should have a useful niche. Unlike fingerprints you don't leave partial copies of your vein pattern on everything you touch; unlike face recognition it's an explicit act you take so it can be used for attestation-type actions (like paying). It still has all the usual disadvantages and advantages of any other biometric. Perhaps the unique niche isn't big enough to fit a new product into though.
by necovek | 2026-01-29 03:46:48+00:00
In market dynamics, a worker becoming cheaper means that some employers will fight to hire/keep an employee on that surplus, thus driving the employment cost up for everybody else.

Yes, it probably would depend on positions and available talent, but overall and over a longer period, if applied universally to a market (say state like CA), it will be reasonable to expect salary increases (but not increase of how much is that worth because of increasing purchasing power, and increase in prices due to higher willingness to pay).
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-29 03:46:48+00:00
>Which banks do you use? I’m looking to switch away from Chase (which does this).

Do you mean SMS codes or a Chase Bank App?

I have to deal with the former because I auto-delete cookies when I close tabs and use Multi-account containers on Firefox.

I've never been required to install any application (Chase branded or otherwise) on my phone in order to use the Chase website. I'll note that I've been a Chase customer since they acquired Chemical Bank in 1996.

Am I missing something important here? If so, I'd love to hear about it.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-29 03:47:08+00:00
"Someone had to actively choose to serve content over http in 2026."

To be fair, people actively choose to do this every day

For example, millions of people actively choose to do this for HTTP-01 ACME challenges

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc8555.txt

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/

Certificate authorities also actively choose to do this for

1. TLS Certificates

For example, http://www.ssl.com/repository/SSLcom-RootCA-ECC-384-R1.crt

2. TLS Certifcate Revocation Lists (CRLs)

For example, http://crls.ssl.com/ssl.com-ecc-RootCA.crl

3. Online TLS Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) responses

For example, http://ocsps.ssl.com

NB. If the statement was more specific, something like, "HSBC chose to use HTTP for return receipts in 2026" then I would have no reason to comment. Instead the statement suggests HTTP is no longer a useful nor appropriate choice for _anyone_. That of course is false, as shown above
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-29 03:47:15+00:00
So? At the end of the day, regardless of how skilled one has to be to use it, a tool is not considered morally responsible for how it is used. Nor is the maker of that tool considered morally responsible for how it is used, except in the rare case where the tool only has immoral uses. And that isn't the case here.
by fuzzybear3965 | 2026-01-29 03:48:30+00:00
Of course mileage may vary with different workloads, but are there any good benchmarks/suites to use for comparison in cases like these? They used YCSB but I don't know if those workloads ([1]) are relevant to modern/typical access patterns nor if they're applicable to SQL databases.

You thinking about running some benchmarks in a bcachefs branch (:pray:)?

I want to see this data structure prototyped in PostgreSQL.

[1]: https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB/tree/master/workloa...
by YZF | 2026-01-29 03:48:39+00:00
I do talk to progressive people. They are not informed about anything. They just look at everything as the struggle of the "wronged" against those that have historically committed wrongs (in their eyes) and this mystical alignment of all "wronged" to bring about change.

I'm sure there are many "progressives" who do think for themselves and have some rational agenda but those are not the (very smart but) people I interact with.
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-29 03:49:19+00:00
I think we're sort of back at the beginning here. They are welcome to focus on their bestsellers. Traditional automotive wisdom would favor halo models and upper trim models so people can boast about a sedan that can out-drag a Supra.

> Companies like Ford constantly discontinue models, but they don't get the level of attention Tesla does.

If they axed 2/5 of their models it might. But they're also not run by an attention wh- addict with an Apple-like fanbase.

Oh and also they're axing 2/5 of their models to build teleoperated robots. Seems like the attention is well deserved here.
by ninjagoo | 2026-01-29 03:49:46+00:00
Switching OSes is a major undertaking for power users, which I assume you are. Less so for someone who uses the browser, email, and plays some games.

As a power user, there's no point trying out OSes occasionally, unless that's your hobby. Think of it as switching between flying Boeings or Airbuses as a pilot; there's going to be a learning curve that you're going to have to commit to if you want the full benefits. I use the analogy to illustrate the point; OSes as users are definitely not nearly as complex to drive.

That said, the unstable experiences you're describing are odd. Maybe you're running into some odd edge case because that unstable experience hasn't been the case for mainstream Linux users for a couple of decades.

Neither is there a need to tinker with the big mainstream distros either. Most are install-and-forget these days and have been so for a while.
by in-silico | 2026-01-29 03:49:58+00:00
> Current LLMs struggle here because they’re trained on imitation. They learn what people said about competitive dynamics, not how competition unfolds. They can recite game theory but can’t simulate a price war.

I don't think this is true. LLM training data almost certainly contains accounts of competitions and other events unfolding. In fact, depending on how the data was filtered, there might be more data of competitions and price wars unfolding than data about game theory.

I would challenge the author to actually task a frontier LLM with simulating a price war and see if it fails, rather than assuming it would. In fact, that would be my feedback on many of these "LLMs can't do X" articles, because often the best models can in fact do X.
by jiveturkey | 2026-01-29 03:51:10+00:00
When Gmail downloads the image it identifies itself as GoogleImageProxy, and will be coming from a GCP/Google ASN.

Similar signal will be there for any email provider or server-side filter that downloads the content for malware inspection.

Pixel trackers are nearly never implemented in-house, because it's basically impossible for you to do your own email. So the tracker is a function of the batteries-included sending email provider. Those guys do that for a living, so they are sophisticated, and filter on the provider download of images.
by nl | 2026-01-29 03:51:27+00:00
Progress has not become linear. We've just hit the limits of what we can measure and explain easily.

One year ago coding agents could barely do decent auto-complete.

Now they can write whole applications.

That's much more difficult to show than an ELO score based on how people like emjois and bold text in their chat responses.

Don't forget Llama4 led Lmarena and turned out to be very weak.