MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cons0le | 2026-01-06 19:29:50+00:00
Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.

Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.

I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.
by sowbug | 2026-01-06 19:30:06+00:00
It's helpful to distinguish problem solving from creative thinking. The main goal of problem solving is to make a problem go away. The main goal of creative thinking is to come up with new problems to solve. Some also call this convergent vs. divergent thinking.

When I want to think creatively but need to solve problems that feel more like housekeeping or toil, LLMs are a useful tool to stay in the right mindset. I have yet to successfully engage with an LLM to help with creative thought. All I've gotten is uninspiring brainstorming.
by dxdm | 2026-01-06 19:30:09+00:00
That's a good point. Goes to show how quickly things get arbitrary once you start chopping off heads in the name of ideas. It's disturbing how quickly people get their axes ready, even just from their behind their keyboards. I'm used to it from other places, but it's sad to see this here.

I wish there'd be some sort of dream-like simulation for people to experience the consequences of their ideas: "Congratulations, your policy killed millions of people and fed them to the pigs. Due to the sloppy definition, and a blind spot on your behalf, this includes yourself. Then there was a war and your family is now dead. Would you like to try again?"

Sorry for not-so-politely wondering what was behind your question. It's a fraught topic.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-06 19:30:11+00:00
My objection to stuff on the steering wheel is that in my experience the buttons are often multifunction. I.e. a "+" and "-" button that do different things depending on a mode that is selected with some other button. Takes too much thinking while your attention should be devoted to driving.

My Mercedes is absolutely terrible at this. Having owned it for a couple of years now I still have no intuition about what most of the steering wheel buttons do. On the other hand, they get cruise control right: It's a simple stalk on the steering column. Up for faster. Down for slower. Easy to find and operate without even a glance off of the road.

If there were a few carefully chosen single-purpose buttons on the steering wheel I could maybe get on board. But if there are too many or they are multifunction then it's cognitive overload.
by pdimitar | 2026-01-06 19:30:45+00:00
I have worked with Rust for ~3.5 years. I had to use the `unsafe` keyword, twice. In that context it's definitely not everyday code. Hence it's difficult to use that to gauge the language and the ecosystem.

Of course it's a bug in Rust code. It's just not a bug that you would have to protect against often in most workplaces. I probably would have allowed that bug easily because it's not something I stumble upon more than once a year, if even that.

To that effect, I don't believe it's fair to gauge the ecosystem by such statistical outliers. I make no excuses for the people who allowed the bug. This thread is a very good demonstration as to why: everything Rust-related is super closely scrutinized and immediately blown out of proportion.

As for the rest of your emotionally-loaded language -- get civil, please.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-06 19:31:14+00:00
The Facebook and Instagram iOS apps were/are enormous codebases. Absurd, sprawling monsters with tons of dead code, duplication, and old stuff.. like being written in mostly Objective-C.

I imagine the Gmail app also suffers from having zillions of engineers touch it without being incentivized to make it better or smaller, only to add features and impact for the all-important performance review.

Add zillions of instrumentation and third-party frameworks, each with piles of dependencies, and apps will grow without bounds like molecules of gas to fill the container.
by ferguess_k | 2026-01-06 19:31:19+00:00
I'm going to do the same thing when my son is older. 6-yr old is a bit stretch as he is easily addicted to TV so I think computer is definitely another level up. Maybe 7-yr old is better. But I need to do it before his friends introduce pads and phones to him so definitely before 8.

I'm thinking about getting a Rpi box slapped with an old monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. It should go straight into MS-DOS after booting -- from an emulator of course. Then I'll introduce my childhood to him. Not sure if it's the best idea, but at least he can play old MS-DOS games starting from the self-bootable ones like Alley cat.

I'll introduce game programming to him using QBASIC. I probably have to learn it with him as I never learned it when I was young.
by vemv | 2026-01-06 19:31:22+00:00
There are always middle grounds to be explored. The way I see it, 80% of a "codebase" would be data and 20%, code.

Both worlds can be cleanly composed. For instance, for backend development, it's common to define an array (data) of middleware (code).

At a smaller scale, this is already a reality in the Clojure ecosystem - most sql is data (honeysql library), and most html is data (Hiccup library).
by masklinn | 2026-01-06 19:31:42+00:00
Electric taxiing (on APU) has been in development for over a decade, but it's mostly intended for single aisles (the shorter the flight the more the taxi overhead), and the relatively low fuel prices has led to these projects mostly dying off: L3 shuttered their effort in 2013, Honeywell and Safran's EGTS joint venture was dissolved in 2016, and wheeltug... apparently still lives (with no support from either boeing or airbus), though it was initially supposed to enter service in 2018.
by ndr | 2026-01-06 19:32:06+00:00
Is it an opinion?

And try to check EU GDPR territoriality and tell me whether you're of a different opinion:

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

> The GDPR applies to:
> a company or entity which [...]; or
> a company established outside the EU and is offering goods/services (paid or for free) or is monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU.

Now imagine running a forum or any other service from outside of the EU, on the open web. Does the EU think GDPR applies to you?
by the__alchemist | 2026-01-06 19:33:00+00:00
Cool project! I have a question based on the video: What sort of work is it doing from the "Upload mmCIF file and specify number of molecules to generate" query? That seems like a broad ask. For example, it is performing ML inference on a data set of protein characteristics, or pockets in that protein? Using a ligand DB, or generating ligands? How long does that run take?
by pluralmonad | 2026-01-06 19:33:23+00:00
I know plenty of folks here make lots of money off it, but ad tech is straight up malware. I got lucky and found uBlock Origin many years ago so I did not get slowly boiled in worsening ad tech. I can't believe what people put up with just to not pay a few dollars for software they use daily. Not to even mention that the worst part of it all is ad tech has ruined the internet beyond repair.
by scottbez1 | 2026-01-06 19:33:28+00:00
Can you be more specific about these “mandates” you take issue with?

IIHS doesn’t have any mandate power over manufacturers (they are not a regulatory body) but they do align with insurance company interests, whose goals are to pay out less for damages from vehicle incidents, and therefore IIHS logically would theoretically be focused on actuarial data-driven analysis. If you have specific examples of where this has not been the case, I’d love to learn more.
O(1) Memory Architecture: Constant-Time Lookups Across 7 Layers
by buttersmoothAI | 2026-01-06 19:33:29+00:00
Most AI systems struggle with memory. As context grows, lookup time increases. O(n) complexity means slower responses as data accumulates.

*The Problem:*
Traditional memory architectures slow down as they grow. More data = slower access = degraded performance.

*The Bravetto Solution:*
O(1) memory architecture. Constant-time lookups across 7 memory layers. No matter how much data, access is instant.

*Technical Details:*
- 7-layer memory architecture
- Constant-time lookups (O(1))
- Hierarchical organization (short-term → long-term → semantic)
- Efficient data structures (hash maps, indexed storage)

*Why This Matters:*
- Instant context access (no matter how much history)
- Scalable systems (handle millions of conversations)
- Better performance (consistent speed)
- Lower costs (efficient memory usage)

*Real-World Application:*
Healthcare workers using North Shore Voice get instant context access. No matter how many patients, how much history, responses are instant.

*The Innovation:*
This isn't just better memory. This is memory that scales perfectly.

What memory challenges have you faced with AI systems? What are your thoughts on O(1) memory architecture?
by agsnu | 2026-01-06 19:33:36+00:00
It's not just the WebKit bit, basically the entire app implementation is actually shipped as a "Private Framework" which lives outside the .app bundle. e.g. on macOS
% otool -L /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 623.1.14)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1356.0.0)

There's a bunch of other private frameworks (SafariCore.framework, SafariFoundation.framework, SafariPlatformSupport.framework, SafariShared.framework, SafariSharedUI.framework, SafariSwift.framework) as well. I haven't checked but I assume it's similar on iOS.
by btown | 2026-01-06 19:33:39+00:00
As a full mea culpa, I once implemented this years ago for an open-source project (non-ad-related) that could have an unpredictable number of steps with unpredictable timing. We went with an algorithm that would add a % of the remaining progress on each status tick, so, while it would inevitably decelerate, at least users would know that the processing wasn't just frozen.

It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
by metalman | 2026-01-06 19:33:51+00:00
even though I have more data than I ever use on my plan, after 15yr's exclusivly on mobile data, I reflexivly look at the size of anything before I download something, 700mb is bonkers for email, and I have started to reject many other apps, based on there improbable sizes.
useing android my phone has gmail iremovably installed on my phone, but was disabled before I even put a sim in it, but in spite of this, having just checked, it has user data, something in cache, and has used some internet data.
how creepy is that.
by filleduchaos | 2026-01-06 19:34:03+00:00
If the point of a Google Photos app is to access / back up your photos via Google Photos (web), then it seems rather dubious that making API calls to a cloud server is an endeavour that takes hundreds of megabytes of code and resources.

If, rather more accurately, the point of a Google Photos app is to provide a photo editor and various other photo-adjacent functionality coincidentally including the ability to back up photos to Google's servers, then again that raises the question of why Apple's equivalent app is so much smaller. Are there image-related system frameworks that Google cannot use that Apple is using? Then sure, feel free to count them in Apple Photos' "true" size. But if Google simply won't use them then IMO it's fair to ask if the size of what they're shipping is worth it.
by doganugurlu | 2026-01-06 19:34:08+00:00
I’m 40+. Lived in 2 countries, Southern California, Northern California. Visited all the major cities on the West Coast, did a road trip through Nevada, NYC, Miami, Denver, Boulder.
I talk politics pretty much with everyone.

I haven’t met a single communist in my life. These delusions people have truly scare me.

Edit: Forgot to mention I’ve also been to Mexico, Jamaica, 2 different states in Brazil, Netherlands, France, England, and Canada. I must repel communists.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-06 19:34:26+00:00
No, I do own some (actually it was more in the VHS days so tapes) and I just found that I never really watched them again. So I stopped buying movies. I'm the same with books. Once I read it, I've read it. I would rarely read a novel twice. I know what's going to happen, so what's the point? Reference books are different of course.
by Desafinado | 2026-01-06 19:35:03+00:00
I converted my Windows PC to Linux Mint and let my kids play GCompris on there, which is an educational, non-addictive game suite. As of now neither of them know that the internet exists, and my wife and I keep them away from screens as much as possible.

Once the flood breaks and they discover the internet we'll be using NextDNS.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-06 19:35:09+00:00
Was it ever raveled? :P Rather than a tale of engineering--good or bad--perhaps we should look at this thing through the lens of psychology and organizations.

Namely, the contortions of thought and (non-)feedback that happens in the proximity of a king with grandiose plans, an enormous amount of cash to disburse, and a penchant for assassinating dissidents.
by bastardoperator | 2026-01-06 19:35:29+00:00
Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-06 19:35:36+00:00
I see it says that it may throw bad_alloc, but it's not clear why, since the algorithm itself (e.g see "Possible implementation" below) can easily be done in-place.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/rotate.html

I'm wondering if the bad_alloc might be because a single temporary element (of whatever type the iterators point to) is going to be needed to swap each pair of elements, or maybe to allow for an inefficient implementation that chose not to do it in-place?
by giardini | 2026-01-06 19:35:58+00:00
Have you ever dealt with an alcoholic when he's drunk or a schizophrenic when he's acting out?

You use the word "suffering" as if they had no part in their own condition. I'm reminded of Duke, the skinhead in "Repo Man" who, as he dies, says "I blame society!":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo
by echelon | 2026-01-06 19:36:20+00:00
Are you seriously trying to argue the world is better off without YouTube?

I derive incredible value from YouTube. It wasn't always great, but it is recently full of extremely good educational content, tech talks, independent journalism, how-tos, independent film and animation, and so much more.

I'd wager that you use and benefit from a lot of services that are paid for via advertising. Even public transit is subsidized by advertising.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-01-06 19:36:26+00:00
If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like Netguard or even PCAPDroid

Then can use the game without annoyance of ads

As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS

This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't
by bregma | 2026-01-06 19:36:27+00:00
I have an induction range with touch controls, and I'll tell you they are the most frustrating thing about it (other than half my old pots not working, but that was a one-time hit).

Why are they frustrating? Because every time I have to clean the stove top (which is after most uses) wiping the controls results in activating them. Sometimes things boil over or spit out hot fat while cooking and you need to clean it up right away (or it will get cooked on like welded steel) and you end up switching the simmer on the back element to high and drop the oven temperature by 100 degrees. A zillion beeps and cute jingle tones don't help, they just contribute to sensory overload.

It's a great cooktop but I would prefer physical controls that are not on the cook surface.
by b3lm0nt | 2026-01-06 19:36:39+00:00
Necessary link to Maciej Cegłowski's talk "Web Design: The First 100 Years:" https://web.archive.org/web/20230210133927/https://idlewords...

Because the technologies we had were good enough. It turned out that very few people needed to cross an ocean in three hours instead of six hours. On my way to this conference, I flew from Switzerland to San Francisco. It took eleven hours and cost me around a thousand dollars. It was a long flight and kind of uncomfortable and boring. But I crossed the planet in half a day!

Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight.

The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-06 19:36:41+00:00
You should have seen my 70s era Kawasaki 3 cylinder 500 cc road bike back in the day.

I’m pretty sure the blue cloud that thing belched at startup alone aired more pollution than a weed eater makes all year.

Weight and speed carried more weight than emissions back then. I acknowledge a healthy planet is better, but boy were those bikes fun.
by lisbbb | 2026-01-06 19:38:01+00:00
Let me tell you something about Magic Kingdom: Everything between the parking lot and the rides exists the way it does in order to SLOW YOU DOWN so you spend more money. All of it! Okay, maybe not the parking lot trams, but all their other gimmicks are just part of a funnel to keep you away from the rides as long as possible and once you're inside, to keep you from leaving.
by mzajc | 2026-01-06 19:38:22+00:00
The "we know better than you" attitude unfortunately seems increasingly popular at KDE as well[1][2][3].

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/02/09/this-week-in-kde-inchi... search "Active screen follows mouse"

[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481069

[3] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
by burkaman | 2026-01-06 19:39:00+00:00
That article says it was higher in 2023 compared to past years like 1961 and 1900, not that it as increased continuously during that time. See page 4 of the PDF at the bottom where "traditional biomass" ("wood, charcoal, agricultural residues and/or animal dung" - https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...) has been falling since 2000.

It does also say that forestry production, charcoal, and wood pellets have been rising, so I guess I don't know, this is difficult to measure and different sources disagree.
by Veserv | 2026-01-06 19:39:15+00:00
The proposal is more generic than that, it is throwing away translation of any kind. If all you do is replace virtual memory to physical memory translation with object ID to physical memory translation then you buy almost nothing in terms of access complexity.

That means there is no indirection between reference and the backing physical store. To change the backing memory you need to change the reference.

As you point out, within a program you can solve fragmentation by using a compacting GC. However, you will still suffer from cross-program fragmentation. You can not move the backing store of those programs without rewriting their references. You can not even page out those programs and reload them into new locations without rewriting all their references. You effectively need a global, shared, cross-program compacting GC to handle fragmentation; a hardware or kernel GC.
by echelon | 2026-01-06 19:39:24+00:00
Regulation is always too slow and too stupid. By doing this, you'll chase the ads into embedding themselves into the content itself. And that's just the start. Creators are already doing this, and now we're seeing tooling emerge to support it. Wait until the platforms get in on the game.

I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and correlating user activity.

Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking rather than trying to predict how markets should work.

Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians do.

If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels, platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that actively stymie the creation of new competition.

Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check a bunch of boxes.
by neilv | 2026-01-06 19:39:25+00:00
I want to distinguish what I think are two distinct things, and also make a point about one of them.

* As dang and many know and appreciate, online communities themselves "age", and if you don't keep getting fresh new people in, they shrink. And, regardless, the focus tends to change over time, from original topic, more to meta and/or familiar/comfortable socializing. From what I've seen in some communities, I'm not so sure that aging of the participants is the main factor behind that.

* I think HN should be more conscientious about stereotypes around age, and making generalizations about that. Not only because much of HN is closely adjacent to hiring, and in the US, that's getting into illegal territory. Also, because ageism is often unfair, in general, and to individuals, yet is already widespread in the tech industry. We risk the new people that HN does acquire picking up messages about what ages, genders, ethnicities, etc. they should be hiring, and those messages right now are dim.

If you don't appreciate or care about this now, because you're not yet on the receiving end, I think you probably will within a few years, unless you help change the techbro culture now.

If you find it hard to believe that you'll be on the receiving end, because you are so highly-skilled, have a prestigious resume, have stellar recommendations, have always been a 10x rockstar ninja whatever, you keep updating your skills, you've memorized every LeetCode question, etc.: my experience is that it will be hard to believe when it happens, but it nevertheless will. You'll be in an interview, and the interviewer will make a snide remark that's ill-founded, but regardless, you're probably not getting an offer. And then it will happen many times. And your best "network" will FIRE and be out of the game, or be facing ageism themselves and not in a position to refer you. Then you'll jack in to the HN holographic VR AI cyberspace hivemind of a few years from now, and see people promoting the ideas that seem to match the snarky interviewer's thinking.
by BowBun | 2026-01-06 19:39:33+00:00
Not to pile on, but the reason we're pissed at Plex is because they did a classic rug-pull: advertise to nerds like us who own our servers + media, then slowly make deals with publishers, requiring them to police _my_ content. Then start adding subscriptions and limiting how I can share (again) _my_ content - what are they offering me anymore?

The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.

Happy to help others do the same!