MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vee-kay | 2026-01-28 20:19:29+00:00
> There is a marketing lesson there somewhere.
Microsoft once had the IT world at its feet, because not only was its Windows 9x OSes ubiquitous everywhere, but it had many millions of programmers who had become experts at Visual Basic and Visual C++, so almost all corporates used programs written in these easy to learn, not too difficult to master, fun to program in (yay for Intellisense and Drag-n-drop ActiveX controls), and versatile despite some limitations. This was also the era where many corporates had complicated databases set up in MS Access or MS SQL Server, because they were easily accessible and usable from front-end applications written in VC or VC++.

Microsoft even evolved it all to adapt to and compete with new ideas from rivals, such as COM+ as alternative to CORBA, ASP.Net as alternative to JSP, etc.

Then Microsoft did the unthinkable. It inexplicably threw away all these IT dependencies away, that it had spent decades to build across the worlr.

Microsoft unleashed .Net on an unsuspecting IT world.

And M$ arrogantly expected the world to also throw all their years of efforts of building applications and databases revolving around VB/VC++.

To save their careers, millions of VB/VC++ programmers tried hard to scramble and learn these new technologies, but Microsoft just kept updating and upgrading the .Net landscape with increasing frequency and leading to more chaos and confusions. And as the learning curve steeper and the .Net scope became too hard for sane people to master in a short time, it became apparent that to the entire IT world (except Microsoft) that it had become too difficult and cumbersome to build applications for corporations using Microsoft's new-age tools. Thus, the interest and ambitions of the programmers and corporations quickly waned towards Microsoft tools, especially when they realised that .Net was a mess for installations, and it called expensive licenses to build and ship.

So programmers and SOHO/medium-scale companies, pivoted to alternatives to Microsoft imposed nightmares. Python, PHP, MySQL, Linux, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, JSP, etc. took centre stage, even as the IT world moved away from .Net.

The worldwide chaos caused by Windows Vista and Windows 8, did nothing to improve upon IT people's disdain for all things Microsoft.

And Microsoft's rivals pounced at such golden opportunities, and they slowly ate away at Microsoft's dominance in corporate world.

Yes, there is indeed some lessons for Micro$oft to be learnt from these debacles.

"Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started."
~ Mary Midgley

"And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
by godelski | 2026-01-28 20:19:35+00:00
I apologize for misunderstanding your comment, but I hope mine still stands to help others recognize the issues you brought up aren't as large as some may actually believe. I agree with you, companies that abuse us, the users, want to amplify that fear. It empowers them. It's why I am encouraging anyone who reads my comment to ask themselves where that line is. Personally I'm with you, the line has already been crossed. I've made the move and don't regret it for a second. Nothing changes for the better when no one is willing to take the first step.
by runjake | 2026-01-28 20:19:36+00:00
> How do you know?

I looked at the code and have followed Peter, it's developer, for a long time and he has a good reputation?

> Sponsored by the token seller, perhaps?

I don't know what this means. Peter wasn't sponsored at the time, but he may or may not have some sort of arrangement with Minimax now. I have no clue.
by tzs | 2026-01-28 20:19:52+00:00
> I suggested this as a possible solution in another HN thread a while back, but along the lines of "If a bank wants me to have a secure, locked down terminal to do business with them, then they should be the ones forking it over, not commanding control of my owned personal device."

Most banks already do that. The secure, locked down terminals are called ATMs and they are generally placed at assorted convenient locations in most cities.
Show HN: MoaV – Mother of all VPNs
by shayanbahal | 2026-01-28 20:20:10+00:00
Multi-protocol censorship circumvention stack optimized for hostile network environments.

Multiple protocols - Reality (VLESS), Trojan, Hysteria2, WireGuard (direct & wstunnel), DNS tunnel
Also runs and donates bandwidth to Tor Snowflake and Psiphon Conduit
by array_key_first | 2026-01-28 20:20:16+00:00
It's not relevant because neither are justications for a shooting.

Why did George Floyd counterfeit a 20 or whatever? I don't know, but I do know he deserved due process, not a public execution. Regardless of your political affiliation.

Also, nobody tried to run anyone over. That's just straight up not true and I won't humor it, so don't bother.
by caminante | 2026-01-28 20:21:01+00:00
> Do you care to explain how tariffs wouldn't be inflationary if the actions matched the rhetoric?

It's like you're asking people to explain something that happened as if there's no explanation beyond your hatred of Trump. Why do you choose to dismiss drivers like stockpiling inventory, increased USMCA compliance, broader economic offsets (AI/tech boom, energy production) that could explain how tariffs aren't necessarily inflationary?

> Look at how much we import vs how much we export. What would you call an economy that imports more...

You ask this as if I didn't say the US imports more than it exports.
by kkfx | 2026-01-28 20:21:14+00:00
Banks have some of the worst IT in the world. Being purely manager-led, with developers completely subservient to the bean counters, the results are terrible.

This is one of the reasons why in 2019 they wrote about their own demise https://web.archive.org/web/20240213185758/https://www.cimb.... against fintech (which is only slightly less archaic) and how cryptos, I don't know which ones, but maybe some yet to be born, will eventually displace them because regardless of their dominant position, the level of poor service and archaic systems is not humanly/socially sustainable for much longer.

Their leadership is mentally incapable of changing. Unfortunately, I fear that most of the population isn't either.
by CMay | 2026-01-28 20:21:18+00:00
Thanks for grabbing the correct link. So I checked it and here are my thoughts.

- One of the first things he states is that this is irrefutably cold blooded murder. That is absolutely legally and logically false. It could be murder, but that would require information that is not present in any of these videos, because murder has a very specific definition. Look up the definition. If this guy was law enforcement he should know the difference.

- He then claims that Alex is being pushed back to the curb and that Alex is complying, when you can see in the video that Alex seems to lean his weight into the officer in resistance.

- Alex physically lays hands on the officer which is a bad idea, but this guy never mentions that. If he was LEO, it is very careless to overlook this observation.

- Alex is wearing glasses and yet this guy never mentions this when claiming Alex is blinded by this spray. The activists look prepared to get sprayed and are wearing glasses and goggles. You can see this more clearly in better footage here: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/minute-minute-timeline-fatal...

- He's talking about how the weapon is removed, but not talking about how that doesn't mean there is no longer a weapon in the situation. If you have 1 gun, you can have 2 guns. He claims he is completely unarmed, but the officers cannot know if that is true in that moment. They don't have the benefit of hindsight.

- He claims he points the gun at the back of his head and shoots, but that is not what the video shows. Whether that is what later evidence shows is another matter, but that is not what is clear in this video.

- He complains that Youtube is going to demonetize this. Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't want to enable monetization on a video about someone dying like this, because it just stinks of profiting from someone's death. If he left monetization on, that lowers my opinion of him, but that's just an aside and not relevant.

If you want my honest opinion of this guy's analysis, it is that he either does not have the military and law enforcement qualifications that he says he does, or he is intentionally misrepresenting the facts, or he is simply being very loose with language and biased towards an interpretation. Either way, this is not an objective analysis. I can't speak for the rest of the videos on his channel and nobody is perfect, but at least on this topic in this specific video the number of logical errors he makes is staggering.
by quentindanjou | 2026-01-28 20:21:21+00:00
I am not sure on what you are basing this. Even the post itself looks written by an LLM.

I might be wrong, things are always evolving and it is going to be more and more difficult to spot. But I was genuinely asking OP, and I don't have the intention of undermining their achievement! (it stays cool even with use of LLM)
by matteocantiello | 2026-01-28 20:21:52+00:00
At first I was a bit puzzled about why OpenAI would want to get involved in this somewhat niche project. Obviously, they don't give a damn about Overleaf’s market, which is a drop in the bucket. What OpenAI is after -- I think -- it’s a very specific kind of “training data.” Not Overleaf’s finished papers (those are already public), but the entire workflow. The path from a messy draft to a polished paper captures how ideas actually form: the back-and-forth, the false starts, the collaborative refinement at the frontier of knowledge. That’s an unusually distilled form of cognitive work, and I could imagine that's something one would want in order to train advanced models how to think.

Keeping LaTeX as the language is a feature, not a bug: it filters out noise and selects for people trained in STEM, who’ve already learned how to think and work scientifically.
by almosthere | 2026-01-28 20:21:54+00:00
This isn't going to get to someone at HSBC. Nothing will change.

They hired another company to do it.
The project has been over for 4 years.
The man who determined the requirements no longer works at HSBC or the other company.
The coder doesn't even know HSBC is using his code.

It's absolutely useless - humans going into the age of software. It's a death spiral of I don't know's for a hundred miles.
by fasterik | 2026-01-28 20:22:08+00:00
As always: use standard libraries, profile, then write your own if the data indicates it's necessary. The following is an interesting talk where the author used a spinlock to speed up a real-time physics solver significantly.

Dennis Gustafsson – Parallelizing the physics solver – BSC 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvsvd67XUKw
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-28 20:22:26+00:00
You misinterpreted the outcome of that case. The ninth circuit ruling was in favor of VIP. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling and said the lower court needed to discard the rogers test as exculpatory for VIP/BS.

I’ll use a direct quote from your own source to explain how the actual ruling ended up losing the case for BS:

…the district court found that it nevertheless dilutes the fame and distinctiveness of the whiskey maker’s reputation, thereby still running afoul of the Lanham Act’s anti-dilution provisions. The amended order follows the Supreme Court’s decision ending the application of the more liberal Rogers First Amendment test in trademark cases involving expressive works used as source identifiers. In doing so, while finding that the parody of the “Bad Spaniels” dog toy decreased the likelihood of confusion with Jack Daniel’s by modifying the analysis of certain factors in a light more favorable to VIP, the district court ultimately found VIP’s parody of the famous whiskey brand to be a double-edged sword that contributed to finding dilution by tarnishment.
/quote

The Supreme Court case said that because they were using a trademark as a brand identifier they couldn’t argue for a rogers test exemption. In other words if you use someone else’s trademark, even as a riff or joke, in your trademark, the bar is much higher. L’Eggo my Eggroll is doing exactly that.

Your argument that “In the food truck case, clearly they are using it as their own brand identifier (so it's analogous to Bad Spaniels)” perfectly encapsulates why this is a violation once you grok the outcome of the court case. Bravo for phrasing it so succinctly.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-28 20:22:28+00:00
If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here: well, sure. That would be hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil.

They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.
by weinzierl | 2026-01-28 20:22:46+00:00
Do you have an example? All the 8-bitters I know drew the characters from memory, which was a character ROM per default but could be changed either with a screw driver or by bank switching some RAM in-place.

EDIT: If you mean they were not copied in a frame buffer first, you are right. I should not have written 'blitting'.
by goatlover | 2026-01-28 20:22:51+00:00
I don't agree that more verbose code is necessarily more readable when the shorter code looks like familiar math. All you have to do is learn how operators broadcast across array-like structures, how slicing and filtering works. Perhaps with more complicated examples the shorter code becomes harder to read after months away? Mathematicians are able to handle a lot of compact equations.

No doubt some of this comes down to preference as to what's considered readable. I never really bought that argument that regular expressions create more problems than they're worth. Perhaps I side on the expressivity end of the readability debate.
by lxgr | 2026-01-28 20:23:03+00:00
Ah, you mean for cases where you want both stable addresses (even if only internal) and globally reachable ones (even if non-constant)?

Yeah, that works, but everything gets much easier if your internal DNS can just support the varying prefix natively, e.g. via integration with the external-facing DHCP or PPPoE or whatever other address configuration protocol you use, since then you can reach everything both locally and globally by name.
by hickelpickle | 2026-01-28 20:23:19+00:00
I've gotten interested in local models recently after trying the here and there for years. We've finally hit the point where small <24GB models are capable of pretty amazing things. One use I have is I have a scraped forum database, and with a 20gb devstral model I was able to get it to select a bunch of random posts related to a species of exotic plants in batches of 5-10 up to n, summarize them into and intern sqllite table, then at the end go through read the interim summarization and write a final document addressing 5 different topics related to users experience growing the species.

Thats what convinced me they are ready to do real work, are they going to replace claude code...not currently. But it is insane to me that such a small model can follow those explicit directions and consistently perform that workflow.

I've during that experimentation, even when not putting the sql explicit it was able to craft the queries on its own from just text description, and has no issue navigating the cli and file system doing basic day to day things.

I'm sure there are a lot of people doing "adult" things, but my interest is sparked because they finally at the level they can be a tool in a homelab, and no longer is llm usage limits subsidized like they used to be. Not to mention I am really disillusioned with big tech having my data or exposing a tool making API calls to them that then can make actions on my system.

I'll still keep using claude code day to day coding. But for small system based tasks I plan on moving to local llms. Their capabilities have inspired me to write my own agentic framework to see what work flows can be put together for just management and automation of day to day task. Ideally it would be nice to just chat with an llm and tell it to add an appointment or call at x time or make sure I do it that day and it can read my schedule and remind-me at a chill time of my day to make the call, and then check up that I followed through. I also plan on seeing if I can also set it up to remind me and help to practice mindfulness and just general stress management I should do. While sure a simple reminder might work, but as someone with adhd who easily forgets reminders as soon as they pop up if I can get to them now, being pestered by an agent that wakes up and engages with me seems like it might be an interesting workflow.

And the hacker aspect, now that they are capable I really want to mess around with persistent knowledge in databases and making them intercommunicate and work together. Might even give them access to rewrite themselves and access the application during run time with a lisp. But to me local llms have gotten to the point they are fun and not annoying. I can run a model that is better than chatgpt 3.5 for the most part, its knowledge is more distilled and narrower, but for what they do understand their correctness is much better.
by zahlman | 2026-01-28 20:23:25+00:00
I have not been shown "contrary evidence". And I have repeatedly been accused of "lying" for making statements that are clearly evidenced by video that I have personally watched and analyzed.

If you think he was filming from the sidewalk, how did it happen that a woman filming from the sidewalk captured the event by pointing the camera towards the road? What is the line next to his feet at :22 in that video, and how can it be that a car swerves to the right to avoid him at :27?
by aniijbod | 2026-01-28 20:23:39+00:00
The History of the word "Apricot"

The word originally entered English as an adaptation of the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque.

However, it was subsequently changed to match the related French word abricot (where the 't' is silent).

It is also useful to compare this to the Italian albercocca or albicocca and the Old Spanish albarcoque.

These all stem from the Spanish-Arabic al-borcoque, which itself comes from the Arabic al-burqūq (literally "the" + "birqūq").

This Arabic term was adapted from Greek, appearing in the writings of Dioscorides around the year 100 AD.

The Greek word was probably adapted from the Latin præcoquum, a variant of præcox (plural præcocia), which translates to "early-ripe" or "ripe in summer."

In earlier Roman times, the fruit was actually called the "Armenian plum" or "Armenian apple."

By around the year 350, the writer Palladius was using both terms, referring to them as "Armenian or early-ripe" fruits.

The reason we use a "p" in English (apricot) instead of a "b" (abricot) is likely due to a mistake in etymology.

In 1617, the scholar Minsheu explained the name as if it meant in aprico coctus, or "cooked in a sunny place."

This "sunny" explanation stuck, even though it was technically incorrect!
by sally_glance | 2026-01-28 20:24:18+00:00
I'm aware of that particular chapter of history, my master's thesis was on conversational interfaces. I don't think the potential of the algorithms (and hardware) back then was in any way comparable to what's currently going on. There is definitely a hype cycle going on right now, but I'm nearly convinced it will actually leave many things changed even after it plays out.

Funny thing is that meanwhile (today) I've actually been on an emergency consulting project where a PO/PM kind of guy vibecoded some app that made it into production. The thing works, but a cursory audit laid open the expected flaws (like logic duplication, dead code, missing branches). So that's another point for our profession still being required in the near future.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-28 20:24:29+00:00
> A Trump-appointed judge set a hearing about a situation where he was told a US citizen was being deported.

He's quoted as having a "strong suspicion" that a US citizen was deported.

> The same org that is claiming what?

DHS claims it was a voluntary deportation. But DHS also claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin. They're simply not credible.

> They didn't allege in that document that it was coerced.

I directly quoted it. Here it is again:

"When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."

> You think active cases are closed without involving the judge?

Again, "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".

> Sure, but it didn't fit the criteria.

Given the above, and your other comments on incidents even Trump, Miller, and Noem are walking back their statements on, I'm not certain you're really reading anything.
by Herring | 2026-01-28 20:24:52+00:00
> Additionally, the model demonstrates that racial resentment is a far greater predictor of White support for Donald Trump than measures that capture economic anxiety.

That paper isn't quite saying the same thing I'm saying.

Author wants to argue racism is a bigger factor, sure that's fine with me. I think he's probably right. My point is economic anxiety is also a factor, and more importantly it's modifiable. It's a lot easier to pass healthcare/unemployment/etc laws than to convince millions of racists about literally anything, they're so dumb.

And I'd prefer if the paper was studying multiple countries to get a better picture. There's a (negative) correlation between robust welfare states and far-right penetration. It's weakening a little lately for various reasons, but it's there.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
by vrn21 | 2026-01-28 20:24:57+00:00
tbh, this is kind of a gray area, i should have thought little bit more on how it should have been architectured,

for me this was the ideal scenario: a cloud model on web with its own sandbox (something like claude with read/write to files and run commands)

i dont really think this could be considered as a fox guarding the hen house, its not that ai wants to infect your computer with its commands, if ai is provided the mcp server, it will it instead of using the tools like bash in most cases [if in a local setup]. I feel its more of a lumberjack guarding his weapons.
by smusamashah | 2026-01-28 20:25:16+00:00
Please try https://filepilot.tech/
Its like explorer but so much faster in every single way.
I have it pinned on the taskbar, it launches quickly than a new explorer window.

Main one is no-multiline support atm. Which means that the icon view does not show full file name, list view etc are perfectly fine though.

Current problems I have with it are no native zip support, which means you must use 7-zip, winrar etc and set them as a defualt viewer for zips. Otherwise, double clicking zip opens the explorer.exe.