MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trane_project | 2026-01-24 06:13:10+00:00
This is completely incorrect. The process of Tukdam has nothing to do with diet.

I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.

The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.
by vee-kay | 2026-01-24 06:13:38+00:00
I use an old Lenovo AIO PC to dual boot Linux Mint and Windows 10. It works well from a hardware and firmware perspective, but I've deliberately avoided Windows 11 as it is crapware.

I have done triple booting of MacOS, Linux and Windows on an old Mac Mini, and it was a nightmare to get them working, but worked well once set up.

I think well known brands and models of PCs are better for such alternative setups, rather than obscure PCs.
by arjie | 2026-01-24 06:14:17+00:00
This is very cool. One thing I am curious about is the software side of things and the details of the hardware. What is the filesystem and RAID (or lack of) layer to deal with this optimally? Looking into it a little:

* power budget dominates everything: I have access to a lot of rack hardware from old connections, but I don't want to put the army of old stuff in my cabinet because it will blow my power budget for not that much performance in comparison to my 9755. What disks does the IA use? Any specific variety or like Backblaze a large variety?

* magnetic is bloody slow: I'm not the Internet Archive so I'm just going to have a couple of machines with a few hundred TiB. I'm planning on making them all a big zfs so I can deduplicate but it seems like if I get a single disk failure I'm doomed to a massive rebuild

I'm sure I can work it out with a modern LLM, but maybe someone here has experience with actually running massive storage and the use-case where tomorrow's data is almost the same as today's - as is the case with the Internet Archive where tomorrow's copy of wiki.roshangeorge.dev will look, even at the block level, like yesterday's copy.

The last time I built with multi-petabyte datasets we were still using Hadoop on HDFS, haha!
by oenton | 2026-01-24 06:14:25+00:00
TLDR - malicious VS Code extension named "ChatGPT" sends the full contents of any file you open to servers based in China by using a hidden iframe in a webview. There's a second mechanism that runs a command that bulk sends 50 files at a time from your workspace to the same servers. Third also uses a hidden iframe (zero pixels) in a webview to load 4 SDKs that track activity in the editor.

I have to admit I laughed when I saw the marketplace screenshot of "ChatGPT" from some unknown author (not OpenAI or Microsoft) with a non-English description. If anything screams "sus" to me that would be it.
by g-b-r | 2026-01-24 06:15:18+00:00
First, you're describing the parsing side, while the message I was replying to claimed that it can't be written by hand.

Anyhow, schemas, XInclude and even namespaces are what I was referring to as additional languages of tools.

In your application you use them if you want, they're not really part of XML.

Of course even a parser for plain XML is a lot more complex than one for JSON, but people usually use libraries for that...

In any case, in your application nothing prevents you from using a dumbed-down version of XML, without entities, white space handling, and even only looking at elements and attributes; there were some applications that did that.

That already gives you a format that's easier to read and write manually than json.

I had more to say about "attributes versus child elements", but it's taking me too much time, I'll probably do that tomorrow.
by consumer451 | 2026-01-24 06:16:16+00:00
This is a super interesting dynamic! The CCP is really good at subsidizing and flooding global markets, but in the end, it takes power to generate tokens.

In my Uber comparison, it was physical hardware on location... taxis, but this is not the case with token delivery.

This is such a complex situation in that regard, however, once the market settles and monopolies are created, eventually the price will be what market can bear. Will that actually create an increase in gross planet product, or will the SOTA token providers just eat up the existing gross planet product, with no increase?

I suppose whoever has the cheapest electricity will win this race to the bottom? But... will that ever increase global product?

___

Upon reflection, the comment above was very likely influenced by this truly amazing quote from Satya Nadella's interview on the Dwarkesh podcast. This might be one of the most enlightened things that I have ever heard:

> Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella#:~:text=Us%20self%2...
by pjmlp | 2026-01-24 06:16:25+00:00
ART is updatable via PlayStore since Android 12, however in 2026 the latest is a Java 17 subset, while the latest LTS is Java 25.

Kotlin only worked properly on Android after some folks pushed it from inside, and then they used Java 6 vs Kotlin samples to advocate for it.

In 2015 the latest Java version was 8, which never was properly supported on Android, the community had to come up with RetroLambda, before Google created desugaring support, think Babel but for Java.

Naturally it also meant that the performance of Java 8 features wasn't the same, e.g. lambdas make use of invokedynamic on the JVM, on Android they used to be rewriten into nested classes.

Even today, although Android documentation has Java and Kotlin tabs for code snippets, the Java ones are hardly taking advantage of modern features.

Naturally who learns Java on Android gets an adulterated view on the matter.
by thegrim000 | 2026-01-24 06:19:43+00:00
I was visiting my parent's home recently and driving their new car. Was driving down a road and there was some debris in my lane, so I started to steer to the outside of the lane to avoid hitting it, and the car decided to apply counter steering input to keep me in my lane, pushing me back towards the debris, ignoring my commanded steering input. The fact that stuff like this exists and is common now and is wildly accepted is absolutely insane to me.
by onion2k | 2026-01-24 06:20:46+00:00
In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine.

It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response.

"It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-24 06:21:30+00:00
Huh, I'm the exact opposite. With the exception of Hannah Fry's work at deepmind (where she acts as a charismatic proxy for the more nerdy guests), he is by far the best interviewer on technical stuff (AI stuff mostly, but some early robotics stuff as well). He knows the field, he asks pertinent questions and more importantly he knows when to just let the speaker speak.

Compared to someone like Dwarkesh, it's night and day. There's a fine line between pushing the guest and just interrupting them every 2nd thought to inject your own "takes".
by epistasis | 2026-01-24 06:21:47+00:00
Wha backlash? Trump pardoned a Honduran ex-president convicted of smuggling tons of drugs, right in the midst of using the military to bomb boats for unproven drug smuggling, and kidnapped Maduro presumably because of drugs too (or was it oil?). Zero repercussions except for futile anger from internet weirdos like me.

This administration seems to relish getting away with things that would destroy any other presidency.
by unscaled | 2026-01-24 06:22:00+00:00
> JSON has no such mechanism built into the format. Yes, JSON Schema exists, but it is an afterthought, a third-party addition that never achieved universal adoption.

This really seems like it's written by someone who _did not_ use XML back in the day. XSD is no more built-in than JSON Schema is. XSD was first-party (it was promoted by W3C), but it was never a "built-in" component of XML, and there were alternative schema formats. You can perfectly write XML without XSD and back in the heyday of XML in the 2000s, most XML documents did not have XSD.

Nowadays most of the remaining XML usages in production rely heavily on XSD, but that's a bit of a survivorship bias. The projects that used ad-hoc XML as configuration files, simple document files or as an interchange format either died out, converted to another format or eventually adopted XSD. Since almost no new projects are choosing XML nowadays, you don't get an influx of new projects that skip the schema part to ship faster, like you get with JSON. When new developers encounter XML, they are generally interacting with long-established systems that have XSD schemas.

This situation is purely incidental. If you want to get the same result with JSON, you can just use JSON Schema. But if we somehow magically convince everybody on the planet to ditch JSON and return to XML (please not), we'll get the same situation we have had with JSON, only worse. We'll just get to wear we've been in the early 2000s, and no, this wasn't good.
by bsder | 2026-01-24 06:25:41+00:00
> The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology

The Romans were engineers par excellence.

They worked both steel and glass in this time frame. Look at how they built Pompeii for the local conditions. They built the Colosseum with lead clamps and rebar to prevent it from collapsing with earthquakes (it eventually collapsed because everybody stole the valuable lead as Rome failed). Their art was better than anything produced until the Renaissance happened. I can go on and on ad nauseam.

Romans most certainly did not look down on engineering and technology.
by doganugurlu | 2026-01-24 06:26:27+00:00
Very interesting to read people’s belief in English as an unambiguous and testable language.

One comment claims it’s not necessary to read code when there is documentation (generated by an LLM)

Language varies with geography and with time. British, Americans, and Canadians speak “similar” English, but not identical.

And read a book from 70-80 years ago to see that many words appear to be used for their “secondary meaning.” Of course, what we consider their secondary meaning today was the primary meaning back then.
by csande17 | 2026-01-24 06:26:54+00:00
Native speaker here: yeah, it's awkward.

It's possible to use a multiplier like "10x" or "5x" as a verb like that, but the object has to be the thing being increased, like "productivity" or "sales". And it's usually best to put a word like "the" or "your" in there to avoid confusing it with the case where you're using 10x as an adjective (like in "10x developer" or "10x growth"). So there are a lot of articles and books and stuff with titles like "how to 10x your wealth" and that's fine, but "AI can 10x developers" both sounds kind of wrong and implies that the AI is hiring more developers onto your team.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-24 06:28:45+00:00
Compared to Apple and Microsoft, Android development is mostly outsourced.

None of the development environments is from Google, none of the languages as well, or the build tools for app developers (Internally they use Bazel and Soong).

Naturally having gone into bed with JetBrains for the IDE, after leaving NDK users without IDE tooling for almost two years during the IDE transition, the deal was in place to push Kotlin as well.

I am surprised Google hasn't yet bought JetBrains.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-24 06:29:45+00:00
I thought the point of an armed citizenry is so that they could shoot at each other as both sides think the other has gone bad. Let’s face it, even right now it isn’t the people unified for or against the government, it’s roughly two groups of people that hate each other, one side has control of the federal government, the other side has control of some local and state governments, either side sees the other as tyrannical, and it’s just luck that they haven’t started shooting at each other yet.

This idea that citizens would somehow unite against a tyrannical government has always been a fantasy, even during the revolutionary war.
by yu3zhou4 | 2026-01-24 06:30:16+00:00
This is hilarious, 5 years ago I built a very similar cli tool based on the same idea and with the same name (whosthere but in Polish, ktotu [0]). I wonder if you used AI to generate the project and the idea

Congrats for the execution, it looks more complete and feature rich and Go is a better choice for sure

[0] https://github.com/jmaczan/ktotu
by cthalupa | 2026-01-24 06:32:12+00:00
That's still different from a bunch of researchers being specifically put in a negative light purely to sell a product. They weren't criticized so that they could do better, be it in their own error checking if it was a human-induced issue, or not relying on LLMs to do the work they should have been. They were put on blast to sell a product.

That's quite a bit different than a study being funded by someone with a product to sell.
by unscaled | 2026-01-24 06:32:46+00:00
SGML was designed for documents, and it can be written by hand (or by a machine). HTML (another descendant of SGML) is in fact written by hand regularly. When you're using SGML descendants for what they were meant for (documents) they're pretty good for this purpose. Writing documents — not configuration files, not serialized data, not code — by hand.

XML can still be used as a very powerful generic document markup language, that is more restricted (and thus easier to parse) than SGML. The problems started when people started using XML for other things, especially for configuration files, data interchange and even for programming language.

So I don't think GP is wrong. The authors of the original XML spec probably envisioned people writing this by hand. But XML is very bad for writing by hand the things that it eventually got used for.
by doonielk | 2026-01-24 06:33:04+00:00
I did a MLX "streaming ASR + LLM + streaming TTS" pipeline in early 2024. I haven't worked on it since then so it's dated. There are now better versions of all the models I used.

I was able to conversational latency with the ability to interrupt the pipeline on a Mac, using a variety of tricks. It's MLX, so only relevant if you have a Mac.

https://github.com/andrewgph/local_voice

For MLX speech to speech, I've seen:

The mlx-audio package has some MLX implementations of speech to speech models:
https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio/tree/main

kyutai Moshi, maybe old now but has a MLX implementation of their speech to speech model:
https://github.com/kyutai-labs/moshi
by fakedang | 2026-01-24 06:37:58+00:00
France will not risk Paris, but if Moscow launches a nuke on Tallinn and Estonia is in the French nuclear umbrella, then France will retaliate by launching its own nuke. That's what being under a nuclear umbrella means.

Of course, Russia won't waste its first strike on Tallinn. Their first strike will be aimed at French nuclear facilities if it comes to that. Again, that's what offering a nuclear umbrella entails.
by at1as | 2026-01-24 06:38:16+00:00
> I'm not making any claims... Clearly being a creep with the glasses is popular enough to create a whole cottage industry.

I think this is pretty much a claim. But in any case, it's not unique to smart glasses. Smartphones also have this problem, which is why they're legally required to make an audible shutter noise in many jurisdictions. And unlike glasses that power on when unfolded and worn on the face, phones and other types of devices can be much more discreet.

You can address AR glasses by changing the laws - Québec has uniquely strong privacy laws against photographing people, even in public places. The rest of Canada and the US have much weaker protections in this area.

You can also change the regulations for the companies that produce the devices. The Ray Ban Metas will not function if the light is tampered with, but clearly there is a cat and mouse game where people temporarily evade those restrictions until they're tightened again. It's obviously not in Meta's interest to allow people do this. But a comparison will inevitably play out as the tech is commoditized and people find off-brand alternates in the back of Shenzen markets.

New technology will bring much bigger challenges than smart glasses. A few I worry about are every conversation being recorded and transcribed by personal AIs (with ultra discreet devices), and the authenticity of audio, video, or image content may one day be unproveable (in which case every recorded corruption scandal becomes a plausible denial).

The article's claim, however, is that we're starting to find off-ramps to many one or two-player marketplaces, and the domain that the meta Ray bans operate within will be one of those (in the interim we should probably be thankful it's not just another Apple product, and that they actually have to play catch up. A weaker Apple will have to treat consumers and partners better). The article's point is that the future of tech looks fun, and should provide consumers with more choices.

Sure, the side effects of future tech could be very bad, but that'd be the case whether or not the points in the article are true.
by 4k93n2 | 2026-01-24 06:40:14+00:00
the 'light pedal' by gamechangeraudio would pair well with this. it uses a real spring inside the pedal to create an analog spring reverb. theres also some sort of laser used as well since the spring isnt long enough

https://gamechangeraudio.com/light-pedal

there is also their 'motor pedal' which uses a spinning motor similar to one that would be found in a drone, and then a laser again or something optical to pick up the movement and turn it into a digital signal.

they actually have a synth that uses 8 of these motors to generate the sounds/voices
by lelanthran | 2026-01-24 06:40:59+00:00
This.

As someone who spent most of their career as an embedded dev, yes, this is fine for (like parent said) some types of software.

Even for places where you'd think this is a bad idea, it's still can be a good approach, for example allocating and mapping all memory up to the limit you are designing. Honestly this is how engineering is done - you have specified limits in the design, and you work explicitly to those limits.

So "allocate everything at startup" need not be "allocate everything at program startup", it can be "allocate everything at workflow startup", where "workflow" can be a thread, a long-running input-directed sequence of functions, etc.

For example, I am starting a tiny stripped down web-server for a project, and my approach is going to be a single 4Kb[1] block for each request, allocated via a pool (which can expand on pressure up to some maximum) and returned to the pool once the response is sent.

The 4Kb includes at most 14 headers (regardless of each headers size) with the remaining data for the JSON payload. The JSON payload is limited to at most 10 fields. This makes parsing everything "allocate-less" because the array holding pointers to the keys+values of the header is `const char *headers[14]` and to the payload JSON data `const char *fields[10]`.

A request that doesn't fit in any of that will be rejected. This means that everything is simple and the allocation for each request happens once at startup (pool creation) even while parsing the input.

I'm toying with the idea of doing the same for responses too, instead of writing it out as and when the output is determined during the servicing of the request.

-------------------------

[1] I might switch to 6Kb or 8Kb if requests need more; whatever number is chosen, it's going to be a static number.
by scrubs | 2026-01-24 06:41:09+00:00
As recently reported on politico.eu, the absolute stupidity of Trump's desire for Canada, Greenland, Venezuela play, his foul ignorant mouth on NATO, and criticism of Euro countries has made him too risky to be associated with. He's becoming radioactive skank on parade bad.

For those in the US like me: Trump will be the single largest reason for the rise of popularist left politics here, which we don't need either.

Granted like the Marshal Tucker song "I heard it in a love song" ... "can't be wrong" Trump isn't actually popular right. Trump is about vanity and self enrichment.
by OptionOfT | 2026-01-24 06:42:38+00:00
> If a CPU is already operating near the edge, aging might cut this slack all the way down to zero, causing the core to fail consistently.

This to me is really interesting. I've always assumed (incorrectly) that CPUs themselves don't age. It's the stuff around it (capacitors etc) that eventually cause a failure that might cascade to the CPU, but the CPU itself couldn't degrade.
by zaphirplane | 2026-01-24 06:44:02+00:00
All that is true and the spin I focus on is can Microsoft have implemented it such that they have zero (ish) knowledge by default.

We know iCloud has configurations that can’t disclosed, and I wonder if there is a middle ground between if you loose the recovery key you are stuffed and maybe have a recovery key unblocked by a password similar to ssh keys
by MoltenMan | 2026-01-24 06:44:44+00:00
> And because of Bitlocker, their encryption is worth nothing in the end.

No, it's worth exactly what it's meant for: in case your laptop gets stolen!

> flawed default

Look, in terms of flaws I would argue 'the government can for legal reasons request the key to decrypt my laptop' is pretty low down there. Again, we're dealing with the general populace here; if it's a choice between them getting locked out of their computer completely vs the government being able to decrypt their laptop this is clearly the better option. Those who actually care about privacy will setup FDE themselves, and everyone else gets safety in case their laptop gets stolen.
by neya | 2026-01-24 06:47:26+00:00
>That whole part feels like a race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones involved to do what they do.

This is what people said while transitioning from horse carriages to combustion engines, steam engines to modern day locomotives. Like it or not, the race to the bottom has already begun. We will always find a way to work around it, like we have done time and again.
by snvzz | 2026-01-24 06:47:43+00:00
Ladybird has detached itself from SerenityOS[0].

It is unfortunate it doesn't even run on SerenityOS anymore.

This does at least partially eliminate the appeal. e.g. SerenityOS has its own decoders for PNG, JPEG and other image formats and they are not bad, but the boring libpng, etc. were adopted instead.

It should be a net positive if not everybody uses the same implementations of everything.

0. https://ladybird.org/posts/fork/