MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freehorse | 2026-01-06 11:02:19+00:00
An author of a personal blog does not have to care about judgements of usability vs what they find appealing. A personal blog is a place of self-expression firstmost, not a public service nor a product that targets users. When usability is not the primary goal, you may take unconventional design decisions. If the author likes snowflakes all over the canvas, snowflakes it is. They put an easy way to disable them, I did it in <1 second through disabling JS before I even noticed there was a switch, that's all. Similarly, I would not care about the design choices of apple if I could just disable them even if it took me 5 minutes to do so.
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-01-06 11:02:37+00:00
>So, errors can clearly happen, but they happen less often than they used to.

If you take the comment at face value. I'm sorry but I've been around this industry long enough to be sceptical of self serving statements like these.

>"draft" clearly implies a human will will double-check.

I'm even more sceptical of that working in practice.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-06 11:02:40+00:00
I've on two occasions been told by government goons of some kind that "if you just use your phone we won't get called to monitor your photoshoot" while filling in for my girlfriends photographer.

We were just taking fashion photos on the street in front of our building, turns our neighbours across the street at the MI5 were not super excited about this though.
by nicodjimenez | 2026-01-06 11:02:42+00:00
What I dislike about Claude code and vibe coding in general is that I haven’t seen Claude code users learn a whole lot about how to do their jobs better. A terminal pane is just too small to be a good place to learn.

With vibe coding you just give the code some constraints and then system will try to work within those constraints, but what if those constraints are wrong? What if you’re asking the wrong question? Then you’ll end up with over complicated slop.

It’s a shame that vibe coded slop seems to be a new standard, when in fact you can use AI tools to produce much higher quality code if you actually care to engage in thoughtful conversations with the AIs and take a growth mindset.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-06 11:04:31+00:00
A little odd perhaps - but is it really that offensive?

The interesting bit is that almost everyone has a bit of there mother in them, and mothers have bits of their children in them - long after birth.

Language is odd - all depends on how you read a phrase - so some feminist's pushed to replace the phrase 'women and children' with 'women and girls' because they felt women being lumped together with children was demeaning and enforcing stereo-types.

However there are uses of the phrase 'women and girls' which seems to erase boys from the conversation completely - and actually strengthen stereotypes of weak women. For example - the number of women and girls killed in Gaza.

https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/news/2025/05/un-wome...

Aren't small boys likely to be just as innocent ( in fact more so ) than women? Is the death of a 5 year old boy not worthy of counting?

Why not count civilians and children?
by Applejinx | 2026-01-06 11:04:39+00:00
No, when you bring in the genetic algorithm (something LLM AI can be adjacent to by the scale of information it deals in) you can go beyond human intelligence. I work with GA coding tools pretty regularly. Instead of prompting it becomes all about devising ingenious fitness functions, while not having to care if they're contradictory.

If superhuman intelligence is solved it'll be in the form of building a more healthy society (or, if you like, a society that can outcompete other societies). We've already seen this sort of thing by accident and we're currently seeing extensive efforts to attack and undermine societies through exploiting human intelligence.

To a genetic algorithm techie that is actually one way to spur the algorithm to making better societies, not worse ones: challenge it harder. I guess we'll see if that translates to life out here in the wild, because the challenge is real.
by buzzardbait | 2026-01-06 11:04:43+00:00
Different companies can have vastly different work cultures, even if they're in the same location. So in a sense we're all a bit "out of touch" with each other.

Most days I go to work, I try my best, because if it turns out I don't get paid what I'm worth, I will F off somewhere else and take all this experience with me. And every time I've done that, I've had a significant pay rise.
by ben_w | 2026-01-06 11:04:55+00:00
Mm. I think "any" update would be sufficient for 95% of cases, doesn't have to be high-quality.

Even if it's just the copyright date changing at least once per year, that tells you one specific named entity is claiming to care about it: when nobody does even that much, everyone automatically has the right to do whatever they want with the software.

Which reminds me, I need to update the copyright date on my website…
by mistermaster1 | 2026-01-06 11:06:16+00:00
This is such a small amount that either this is one of many accounts the user made in order to mask said activity or this was just a lucky bet (people make stupid lucky bets on hunches all the time).

Imagine the massive value of having such a world changing event in advance (the search volume alone probably affected an order of magnitude more in online advertising revenue at least). $430k?! Are you F’ing serious?
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-06 11:06:17+00:00
Speaking of the Mirror, I think suffragettes with swords may do for me what 9-tailed fox spirits do for PH: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=DMIR&u=bham_uk&id=GALE%7CIIZWY...

ELI5: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510680
by throwaway777x | 2026-01-06 11:06:52+00:00
I had a job at a small investment firm at the time in college and to me it is nothing like the dotcom bubble.

The dotcom bubble was the "new economy", the old economy had changed forever and was dead. No one thought it was a bubble. Even when the bubble popped it took until 9/11 to wake us up from the mass hysteria.

I can't think of another "bubble" that practically everyone thinks we are in a bubble. To the point that I think many would find it irrational to believe we are not in a bubble. That is not what bubble is. A bubble is the madness of crowds, not the wisdom of crowds and the crowd certainly believes we are in a bubble.
by alecco | 2026-01-06 11:07:07+00:00
I really, really want Intel to do well. I like their open oneAPI for unified CPU-GPU programming. It would be nice to have some competition/alternative against NVIDIA and TSMC.

But I wont be investing time and money again on Intel while the same anti-engineering beancounter board is still there. For example, they never owned the recent Raptor Lake serious hardware issues and they never showed clients how this will never happen again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake#Instability_and_de... "Intel has decided not to halt sales or recall any units"
by artur-gawlik | 2026-01-06 11:07:47+00:00
I'm using vscode for couple of years now. I have disabled all AI related features with "chat.disableAIFeatures" option and it worked really well in my case.
But I was convinced by this article to checkout zed mainly tempted by the promise of much better performance because it is written in native language instead of javascript. So to test it out I've opened https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/compil... file and zed after "ctrl + o" command frizzed. Also when scrolling this file in zed there is noticeable drop in FPS, where in vscode scroll with checker.ts file opened is very smooth.
So I guess I'm staying with vscode :)
by saubeidl | 2026-01-06 11:08:15+00:00
This false equivalency is just more normalizing of Nazi ideology.

Wanting to fight Nazis is not the same as being Nazis.

Don't let the Nazis lull you into some sort of polite restraint. They're not polite people, they don't have polite aims and they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Fight them now before it's too late!
Tell HN: My Experience with Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) in 2025
by rudderdev | 2026-01-06 11:09:11+00:00
It was counter-intuitive to see this much cost saving by vertical scaling, by increasing CPU. VPA played a big role in this. If you are exploring to use VPA in production, I hope my experience helps you learn a thing or two. Do share your experience as well for a well-rounded discussion.

# Background (The challenge and the subject system)

My goal was to improve performance/cost ratio for my Kubernetes cluster. For performance, the focus was on increasing throughput.

The operations in the subject system were primarily CPU-bound, we had a good amount of spare memory available at our disposal. Horizontal scaling was not possible architecturally. If you want to dive deeper, here's the code for key components of the system (and architecture in readme) - https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server, https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-transformer, https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudderstack-helm.

For now, all you need to understand is that the Network IO was the key concern in scaling as the system's primary job was to make API calls to various destination integrations. Throughput was more important than latency.

# Solution

Increasing CPU when needed. Kuberenetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) was the key tool that helped me drive this optimization. VPA automatically adjusts the CPU and memory requests and limits for containers within pods.

# What I liked about VPA

* I like that VPA right-sizes from live usage and—on clusters with in-place pod resize—can update requests without recreating pods, which lets me be aggressive on both scale-up and scale-down improving bin-packing and cutting cost.

* Another thing I like about VPA is that I can run multiple recommenders and choose one per workload via spec.recommenders, so different usage patterns (frugal, spiky, memory-heavy) get different percentiles/decay without per-Deployment knobs.

# My challenge with VPA

One challenge I had with VPA is limited per-workload tuning (beyond picking the recommender and setting minAllowed/maxAllowed/controlledValues), aggressive request changes can cause feedback loops or node churn; bursty tails make safe scale-down tricky; and some pods (init-heavy etc) still need carve-outs.

That's all for today. Happy to hear your thoughts, questions, and probably your own experience with VPA. I did learn that k8s team is working on some of these feedback and we might see it get solved in 2026.
by BiteCode_dev | 2026-01-06 11:11:28+00:00
All web providers do this, not just google.

I have hosting that regularly shut down my servers based on legal demands from jurisdictions that should have no reach my service whatsoever, or on total bogus claim.

If I refuse to act, they shut me down. If I'm late in acting, they shut me down.

Zero check on the legitimacy on the claim, zero trust in my debunking the claim.

The reality is, it's not economically viable to do so. I'm not giving them enough money to be worth it. So as long as I'm a small actor, anything that looks remotely legit is just processed as-is with no recourse.

The entire world can basically impose its view on me as long as they find a convincing way to tell my hosting "you are at risk".

And it's not one single provider either. Most of them do that: domain name, vps hosts, proxies, caches, etc.

The system is broken.
by torginus | 2026-01-06 11:12:01+00:00
Thanks for the detailed writeup! This made me think of an interesting conundrum - with how much RAM modern computers come with (16GB is considered to be on the small side), having the CPU read the entire contents of RAM takes a nontrivial amount of time.

A single threaded Zen2 program could very well take 1 second to scan through your RAM, during which it's entirely trivial to read stuff from disk, so the modern practice of keeping a ton of stuff in RAM might be actually hurting performance.

Algorithms, such as garbage collection, which scan the entire heap, where the single-threaded version is probably slower than the naive zen 2 memcpy might run for more than a second even on a comparatively modest 16GB heap, which might not be even acceptable.
by aflukasz | 2026-01-06 11:12:22+00:00
> However, they absolutely also lower the barrier to entry and dethrone “pure single tech” (ie backend only, frontend only, “I don’t know Kubernetes”, or other limited scope) software engineers who’ve previously benefited from super specialized knowledge guarding their place in the business.

This argument gets repeated frequently, but to me it seems to be missing final, actionable conclusion.

If one "doesn't know Kubernetes", what exactly are they supposed to do now, having LLM at hand, in a professional setting? They still "can't" asses the quality of the output, after all. They can't just ask the model, as they can't know if the answer is not misleading.

Assuming we are not expecting people to operate with implicit delegation of responsibility to the LLM (something that is ultimately not possible anyway - taking blame is a privilege human will keep for a foreseeable future), I guess the argument in the form as above collapses to "it's easier to learn new things now"?

But this does not eliminate (or reduce) a need for specialization of knowledge on the employee side, and there is only so much you can specialize in.

The bottleneck maybe shifted right somewhat (from time/effort of the learning stage to the cognition and the memory limits of an individual), but the output on the other side of the funnel (of learn->understand->operate->take-responsibility-for) didn't necessary widen that much, one could argue.
by zmgsabst | 2026-01-06 11:12:26+00:00
3 is also the product of the sets {3, 1}, {3, 1, 1}, etc.

We’re excluding the unit when defining these factor sets (ie, multiplicative identity) because it removes unique factorization.

That 1 is the unit is also why it’s the value for the product of the empty set because we want the product of a union of sets to match the product of a product of sets. But we don’t exclude it from the primes for that reason.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-06 11:13:09+00:00
The idea that EU surveillance is greater than US surveillance is almost certainly mistaken.

In fact, a huge reason that the EU is looking to move away from U.S. commercial providers is that they can’t guarantee they won’t be giving the U.S. govt information about EU users even if they setup completely independent EU based entities.

The reason why it might appear that the EU is more heavy handed is because the EU is actually passing limited tailored laws, publicly, that explicitly state the limitations of those laws.

The US govt, on the other hand, has already passed broad blanket laws that allow them to get any data from any U.S. corporate entity with the flimsiest of warrants which those entities are not even legally allowed to publicly reveal.

The U.S. govt doesn’t need to pass any surveillance laws because they already essentially have unlimited power over the data being collected by US corporations.
Dev visibility for non-technical founders
by akhnid | 2026-01-06 11:13:18+00:00
If you're a founder who doesn't code, you probably rely on engineers to tell you what's shipping. That works until investors ask for updates, customers want a changelog, or you just need to know where things stand.

*What it does:*

Connect your repos. Ask questions:
- "What shipped last week?"
- "What's in progress?"
- "Who worked on what?"

Get plain English answers from your commit history.

*Automated reports:*

Schedule weekly or monthly summaries. Delivered to Slack or email. Forward to investors or your board.

*Other features:*
- Slack bot for team-wide access
- Contributor stats

*Security:*

Webhooks only. We store commit messages, PR titles, timestamps, and authors. We never access source code.

Stack:
- Token encryption: Fernet (HMAC-SHA256 + AES-128-CBC)
- Webhook verification: HMAC-SHA256
- 2FA support

Verify by checking your repo's webhook settings after connecting.

Free for 1 repo: https://gitmore.io
by prmoustache | 2026-01-06 11:13:52+00:00
That's probably regional then. In my area most people using watches nowadays are usually into sports.

I must admit I don't understand the point of a smart watch when most people have their smartphone in their hand a significant amount of time a day and said smartphones screen sizes have been increasing over the year because people want to be able to doom scroll at pictures and videos and interact with whatsapp all day. I don't know how you can do that from a tiny screen on a watch.

Those like me who don't subscribe to that way of living don't want distractions and notification so they use regular watches and would see as a regression a device that needs to be charged every few days.

Some people said payments but I see peolle paying with their smartphone all the time since they have it at hands or in a pocket very close anytime having it in a watch doesn't look like a sigmificant improvement. I'd be curious to see a chart of smartwatch adoption by country.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-06 11:14:36+00:00
Spam, astroturfing, sockpuppetry are just some of the costs of anonymity, as it removes accountability.

It's also the flip side of people feeling free to say what they want under the cover of (pseudo) anonymity.

I wonder if one solution is to partition the web into places where anonymity isn't possible, and places where it is.
by pamcake | 2026-01-06 11:14:48+00:00
Cracking the key?

A WPA3 network with a strong unique key should be safe. Sometimes defaults are predictable and users don't change.

Sometimes "getting free internet" doesn't involve cracking WPA keys. Think unencrypted hotspots with bypassable captive portals and devices with ancient firmware and exploitable CVEs.

I think what we can safely say is that negligent wifi access point operators exist in most residential areas.
by downsplat | 2026-01-06 11:15:44+00:00
It goes much further than that.. a single moderately sized VPS web server can handle millions of hard-to-cache requests per day, all hitting the db.

Most will want to use a managed db, but for a real basic setup you can just run postgres or mysql on the same box. And running your own db on a separate VPS is not hard either.
by monocasa | 2026-01-06 11:15:44+00:00
> Generally speaking, a bunch of Russian silos lighting up would put us at DEFCON 1. We’re not waiting until it passes Ukraine. It we want to engage any boost-phase ABM, we’re not going to let it. (Which leads to its own issues.)

I already said they'd be at DEFCON 1.

> At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.

Waiting might also keep you out of a nuclear war. They know exactly how long they can wait.

> I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.

Convential forces are inconsequential wrt a full nuclear strike.

> Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.

I already quoted you the exact policy from one of your examples.

> Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.

If you were retaliating because NK had already set off a tactical nuke in your territory? Once again, the orbital mechanics don't work like that. Looking at it, the only thing you could hit from US silos launched so that they look like they're hitting North Korea would maybe be Hong Kong. Which once those missiles go past North Korea, China is already considering it a first strike and retaliating, so you didn't really gain anything.
by defrost | 2026-01-06 11:16:12+00:00
Trains in tubes have a lot of suction that draws in condensation from outside air.

A curious advantage of instrumenting all axles for wheel turn counting is calibration against actual known distances (end to end, etc) over time reveals slow wheel degradation that can trigger carriage maintainance.

Not all operators do this, it's been done at various times for heavy rail mining operators with loooong trains and heavy daily usage.
by gnull | 2026-01-06 11:16:32+00:00
You got me, it doesn't have arguments. Luckily, my argument did not critically rely on this bit, and it's still valid. Instead of occasional disconnected thoughts and vulgar attempts to insult, try to construct a complete, coherent argument for why you think your view is valid.

A suggestion on how you could approach it: try to make a table with 2-3 columns for the solutions you and I are comparing. And add a row for each aspect or characteristic you want to compare them with respect to; for example, usability, ease of implementation, room for error, you name it. In each cell, put either + or - if a solution is clearly managing that aspect well or badly, or a detailed comment. Try to express all of the things you're feeling and that are coming to your mind. My comments are written with a table like that in mind, they easily translate to one. Once you have made your table and established that we disagree on what some cell should contain or what rows/columns should be present, feel free to get back to have an actual discussion.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-06 11:16:36+00:00
> their accuracy is down to metres rather than centimetres. If you want to monitor track conditions, the more accurate the location of the suspected fault, the less time staff spend repairing it.

Considering the tracks are linear, I would estimate the additional time needed to locate a fault within two meters as compared to two centimeters at "negligible".

On the alternative assumption that the faults are too small for humans to detect and we just need to replace the affected track... I would also estimate the additional time needed to replace two meters of track, as compared to two centimeters, at "negligible". It doesn't actually take less time to cut out a specific 1cm strip (containing no visible indications!) from a piece of cloth as to cut out a 1m strip that includes the 1cm strip somewhere.
by avianlyric | 2026-01-06 11:17:11+00:00
> I would wager that actually this is probably just a way of funnelling money into research around quantum rather than genuinely trying to solve this specific problem.

You’re absolutely correct, from the government’s perspective the interest in the technology is for high accuracy inertial navigation systems for defence purposes, not for the London Tube. If you look at the other companies involved in this project, there’s a number of defence contractors involved.

This project isn’t really new, and historically the pitch has always been: We want to develop GPS grade navigation that doesn’t depend on satellites, and is smaller and better existing inertial navigation units. Oh look the London Underground is the perfect test bed for our technology!

It’s underground, so no GPS or many external signals. It’s already well mapped so we have something to compare against. Tube trains are loud, hot and vibrant a lot, which makes it a challenging environment for inertial systems. Plus it’s cheap and very easy to roll a box on an existing train, drive a few km under the city, and then compare your results to GPS from when you go underground, to when you surface again.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/15/lond...

The idea of using it map the underground I think is a bit of a red herring. Makes a good story, and TfL will probably be grateful for the data. But it’s not the kinda thing anyone thinks is worth developing quantum accelerometers for.