MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2026-01-26 22:14:03+00:00
Right, so that was exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that. All three of Flash, PDF, and the browser DOM are expansive, ambitious metaformats, containers for every piece of technology that has ever had a bug.

Your take on why Flash didn't survive is more cynical than mine. I genuinely think Apple threw up their hands at the prospect of attempting to solve a security problem on the same scale as the browser itself (something it took them a long time to get a handle on --- along with everyone else --- even after they put the kibosh on Flash).
by gjm11 | 2026-01-26 22:14:05+00:00
> they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions

That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of something is put out it's (at least nominally) because they've made improvements.

("At least nominally" because it may happen that a publisher puts out different editions regularly simply because by doing so they can get people to keep buying them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of book B then students may feel that they have to get that specific edition, and the university may feel that they have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's just different for the sake of being different then that may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true for most books with multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically better than earlier ones.)
by lysace | 2026-01-26 22:15:17+00:00
He was also being widely ridiculed in the west over this interaction with Elon Musk in August 2019, back when Elon was still kinda widely popular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3lUEnMaiAU

"I call AI Alibaba Intelligence", etc. (Yeah, I know, Apple stole that one.)

Reddit moment:

"When Elon Musk realised China's richest man is an idiot ( Jack Ma )"

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/cy40bc/when_elon_mu...

I can see the extended loss of face of China (real or perceived) at the time being a factor.
by shrubble | 2026-01-26 22:16:01+00:00
If you are printing a book in China, you will not be allowed to print a map that shows Taiwan captioned/titled in certain ways.

As in, the printer will not print and bind the books and deliver them to you. They won’t even start the process until the censors have looked at it.

The censorship mechanism is quick, usually less than 48 hours turnaround, but they will catch it and will give you a blurb and tell you what is acceptable verbiage.

Even if the book is in English and meant for a foreign market.

So I think it’s a bit different…
by procflora | 2026-01-26 22:16:02+00:00
The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-26 22:16:11+00:00
> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

¿Porqué no los dos? Guess what, it's a lot more likely that insurance companies will go corrupt if what they interact with - healthcare - is corrupt.

> private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Guess what is limiting private equity's ability to compete amongst themselves in expanding the effective provision of healthcare and driving costs lower for the ultimate stakeholders i.e. patients? That's right: doctors, hospitals (including those that are nominally not-for-profit, but where the profits just turn into salary for those who can control that flow of money) and government regulation throughout the sector.
A tool to log your daily spending on go and gives you finance insights
by osmx | 2026-01-26 22:16:35+00:00
Hello everyone, this is my first submission on Hacker News. iam looking for your feedback on my latest tool, which I have luanched which is expenselizer a tool that lets you add your spending on time, simply by talking to a Telegram bot, and gives you insights about your daily/monthly spending. I would love to hear from you. www.expenselizer.com
by tom1337 | 2026-01-26 22:16:53+00:00
Yea there are some weird replies in that thread. My few highlights were "This is my livelihood, not a hobby or sideproject" or "I just purchased a third $200 MAX plan and instantly hit rate limits". While I agree that it might not be Anthropics fault I've gotta admit that I found Anthropic to be rather vague regarding their rate limits. They seem to have totally dynamic rate limits based on usage and not a fixed "messages per hour" or "tokens per hour" based approach. Their free tier usage page states "Also, the number of messages you can send will vary based on demand, and we may impose other types of usage limits to ensure fair access to all users." [1] while the Pro plan page just says "During peak hours, the Pro plan offers at least five times the usage per session compared to our free service." [2] and Max then 5x or 20x it depending on the price you pay. If they just have more demand or reduced the free tier rate limit, all plans have a reduced limit and it will be totally within their communication. OpenAI at least gives you a specific amount of messages per timeframe (which I find more transparent). [4]

1) https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8602283-about-free-cl...
2) https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8324991-about-claude-...
3) https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11014257-about-claude...
4) https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11909943-gpt-52-in-chatg...
by kibwen | 2026-01-26 22:17:03+00:00
If someone wants to be bad or shitty in a way that harms nobody but themselves, then more power to them. That's freedom.

If someone wants to be bad or shitty in a way that makes their lives own better while making the lives of everyone around them worse, that's evil and parasitic, and I'm not going to wring my hands about labeling it as such.
by estearum | 2026-01-26 22:17:04+00:00
Well it’s directly relevant to the claim “most Rs voted for T (fact) therefore you can infer most Rs support T_{specific policy}.”

Just simple logic!

No, I am actually not relying on a single poll. Pretty much all polls, even those with a conservative bent, converge on my claim and dispute yours.

This can’t possibly be news to you, otherwise you’d be sharing evidence to the contrary.

Instead you’re just openly declaring your own inability/unwillingness to assess information quality, and being proud of it?

Strange interaction indeed!

I can think of a few motivations one would have to knowingly deceive themselves into believing the immigration enforcement actions are popular, and all of those motivations are bad. Even aside from the basic violation of intellectual honesty.
by csressel | 2026-01-26 22:17:21+00:00
That tokens per second you're describing is the token bandwidth to and from the API provider of the model, and that particular throughput doesn't cause the UI flicker. It likely only affects the interactive portion within the UI at the very bottom. Since most of the actual context tokens aren't shown (thinking tokens, structured json for tool calls or outputs, etc), it's likely much less than 60 FPS

The problem here was that before the December update, any time contents in the transcript history would change, they would include the entire history as part of the render loop, and completely clear and then completely reprint it on ever frame tick. For one brief rewrap of history, it's just a quick stutter, but when anything offscreen was changing for multiple seconds at a time, this created a constant strobe effect. Not a good look! https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/1913

This diagram explains the nature of the new vs old architecture a bit more visually https://x.com/trq212/status/2001439021398974720
by ymir_e | 2026-01-26 22:17:58+00:00
I really like how AI opens the possibility of more performant software due to being able to write more code quicker.

I'm curious to how or if this work could be adopted by homebrew, most likely they wrote in ruby(?) since that's what they're productive in.

One approach I find interesting is if we see repos that are actually "specs" for AI to mirror in a more performant language.

I'm sure the core optimisation techniques of this could be done in ruby as well.
by dvdkon | 2026-01-26 22:18:11+00:00
In the EU, lights have to be sold with a mandatory energy efficiency label. A lesser-known component of this is that this label includes a link to a standardised datasheet, which includes things like flicker metrics, CRI, chromaticity, and a measurement of the spectrum.

It doesn't fully quantify the light, but it's good enough to distinguish trash or even passable lights from actually good ones.
by mgfist | 2026-01-26 22:18:25+00:00
Yes, then you must have a rough estimate for that. Or in the other extreme example - in the case of an outage, estimates must be much more precise (i.e. "we should have a workaround in ~30 minutes").

But neither case requires too much thought or discussion. My point was more that estimation ends up overwhelming time and energy, when you can just do the thing instead. I've worked on teams where we've spent more time arguing about how complex a task than it would've been for someone to crank out a solution.

I also don't mean engineers shouldn't collaborate, just that it should be more ad-hoc and not manager/tpm/scrum-master driven.
by simonw | 2026-01-26 22:18:26+00:00
Which part of their CEO saying "It kind of works" are you interpreting as "trying to get people to believe that it’s a working browser"?

The reason I won't let this one go is that I genuinely believe people are being unfair to the engineer who built this, because some people will jump on ANY opportunity to "debunk" stories about AI.

I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-26 22:18:27+00:00
I'm definitely not the ultimate authority on this subject or any other but you are either interested and want to know about this or you can keep putting up objections that are masked as questions which seems to be what you are doing.

The main reason we are talking about this is because 'environmentalists' (which in itself gives a hint about the levels of expertise) are worried, they are not worried for no reason. Listing a multitude of reasons should at least make you pause about whether or not they are sincere in their concern.

The degree to which industry would wreck the environment if we let it is by now very well documented. But the EPA has been gutted and lots of safeguards have been abandoned in the name of 'progress'. This is not without risk and I am very happy that in spite of all this a lot of people are still willing to speak up and to make sure that at least the worst excesses are curbed.

You can approach this with curiosity to try to learn about the subject and to try to understand what drives the worry of people that have studied this stuff for a long time. These are not just idle musings. Or you can put up a barrage of questions effectively casting doubt on anything that might be of concern.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 22:18:36+00:00
> They don't have to be "good" tests, just good enough tests to get the AI writing not crap code. Think very small unit tests that you normally wouldn't think about writing yourself.

Yeah, those for me are all not "good tests", you don't want them in your codebase if you're aiming for a long-term project. Every single test has to make sense and be needed to confirm something, and should give clear signals when they fail, otherwise you end locking your entire codebase to things, because knowing what tests are actually needed or not becomes a mess.

Writing the tests and let the AI write the implementation ends you up with code you know what it does, and can confidently say what works vs not. When the IA ends up writing the tests, you often don't actually know what works or not, not even by scanning the test titles you often don't learn anything useful. How is one supposed to be able to guarantee any sort of quality like that?
by joshstrange | 2026-01-26 22:19:07+00:00
Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy but my eyes about rolled out of my head reading this. The same article could probably be written about multiple companies and it'd be just as uninteresting. It's my understanding that there isn't anything special about WD-40, as in alternatives exist that can work just as well. Now, I think WD-40 is a brand name that can be trusted to work well more often than most alternatives but that is more about process than recipe (I would think).

I've long thought that every restaurant/bakery/etc could publish their full internal cookbooks and not see a drop in sales. People don't buy it because they are incapable (or think they are) of making something, they do it because it's faster, they don't have all the ingredients, they don't have the time, they don't have the skill, the list goes on. I bet I could give the instructions, the equipment, and the ingredients to people and they'd still choose to buy it. Sure, you might lose a tiny bit of sales to "home bakers" [0] but I think it'd be eclipsed by people that saw/read/heard about the cookbook (maybe never even saw it) and that was enough "marketing" to get them in the door.

I've always found "secret knowledge" to be a little silly. A sort of, security through obscurity. Knowing a recipe doesn't make you special, being able to build/run a company around it and make it consistently good does.

[0] I love to cook, I sometimes like making copy-cat recipes. I cannot think of a copy-cat recipe that I made more than 2-3 times. While it's fun to do, it's never exactly the same, and I also believe that "food tastes better when someone else makes it". Also it can sometimes be just-as or more expensive to make some food items due to needing a bunch of ingredients that they don't sell in exactly the quantity the recipe calls for.
by nazgul17 | 2026-01-26 22:19:26+00:00
Could it be the pendulum swinging hard before selling in the middle?

Once we learn from our mistakes we can find the frequencies that do yield the best outcome and at the same time consume (say) ¼ the energy of an incandescent bulb.

Or the minimum set of species yielding optimal outcomes, without the answer being "all of them"
by bsder | 2026-01-26 22:19:39+00:00
> Fantasy can be profound and thought provoking.

It can be, but there has always been a lot of garbage like any art form. "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" is more than 40 years old now. https://news.ansible.uk/plotdev.html

And even the best authors are infested with "series-itis" and especially the fatal malady "series incompletus".

My sci-fi/fantasy reading habit broke because I refused to start any series that wasn't finished. Suddenly, 99% of sci-fi/fantasy disappeared.

My only hope for David Gerrold to finish the "War Against the Chtorr" series is for him to have notes that he hands to someone else. The last book was 36 years ago! Don't complain to me about George R. R. Martin. Amateurs.
by talla_unica | 2026-01-26 22:19:42+00:00
Over here in some European countries TV license fee is mandatory even if you don't own a set. The licence funds watchable content, so it makes sense to have one. (I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system). Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers. (Of course, nothing can match youtube)

BTW, I also still have a CRT in constant use - but the sources are now digital (It's my kitchen background TV - I feed it from a Raspberry PI with Kodi). On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
by AngryData | 2026-01-26 22:19:55+00:00
This is why I favor tractors, tooling, and bulk material like steel and copper over sending food aid. Give a hungry man bread and he eats for a day, give a hungry man a tractor and a lathe and he will become a farmer/machinist/well driller.

Gangs can only want so many machine tools and steel plates, if you don't use them they are just in the way. But people who do use them and learn how to do it well become immensely valuable and beneficial to all.
by KnightHawk3 | 2026-01-26 22:20:08+00:00
I use nix, but I assume the same goes for guix, you write a package or run it with something that emulates a FHS (like steam-run, don't mind the name) and hope it works.

Writing a package is not as bad as it sounds, nix and guix have very little difference between "package maintainer" and "user" so most users probably can package software. Normally copying something from nixpkgs or similar will get you most the way there.
by cauch | 2026-01-26 22:20:28+00:00
I've lived in several civilized in Europe, and they don't do raid like it is happening in Minnesota.
What is happening in Minnesota makes the front pages in Europe, and a lot of people are saying that according to them, it will never be possible here (I'm not sure I agree with them, but it shows that the idea that the ICE methods are "the usual way to deal efficiently with immigration" is totally crazy).

I guarantee you, in Europe, illegals are arrested and deported regularly, and yet, the large majority of people don't even notice. There is no masked troops doing raids. And some people push for more care in managing illegal migrants expulsion, they do demonstration, they organise events and sometimes even are present and makes small obstruction during interventions. Yet none of them are being killed.

There is a huge disconnect with reality in US right now, with a part of the population so uneducated with the "usual" migration regulation and so fed with fear that they are painting the situation as if having unhinged ICE acting outside of due process is the only alternative to "open border and lawlessness". What a joke.
by Modified3019 | 2026-01-26 22:21:19+00:00
Sure, and sand is a lubricant in the right scenario. This of course completely misses the point.

Anyone who actually use wd40 will eventually notice it not only has poor ability to stick around under load, but also likes to oxidize, forming a varnish or horrible goo depending on how thick it was left on. While this doesn’t matter (or is even desirable) for loosening a bolt, it’s a poor choice on tools, hinges, etc.

If long term lubrication is needed, then people should just use an appropriate grease or a non-oxidating* oil meant for staying around and lubricating.

*Plant based oils generally contain high amounts of polyunsaturated fats, which love to oxidize. Great for seasoning cast iron, but bad for other things. The goo/lacquer you get on kitchen pans and around the oven is oxidized fats linking together.
There are rare exceptions to plant based oils being a bad idea for lubrication, involving genetic modification to produce mostly monounsaturated fats and further processing, like with alg’s “go juice”.
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-26 22:21:34+00:00
Low or no code tools abstract away the idea of code being used. You are working with high-level concepts like workflows or in the case of coding assistants PRDs, etc. These coding assistants produce code but if you don't read the code at all it might as well not exist and frankly users who use Lovable (like may 10yo to make a website) have a vague idea that there is code behind all of this but frankly it does not really matter. So these are technically low-code tools - not in a traditional sense like workflows but still low code tools.
by terhechte | 2026-01-26 22:22:03+00:00
KDE has a setting to switch the cmd & command keys so that e.g. command+c copies instead of ctrl+c. This works in all KDE apps (it will not work if you install any Gnome/GTK app, though). I forgot the setting but its something in advanced and used to be called Emacs key binds, but now I think it just refers to the keys.

Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
by realityfactchex | 2026-01-26 22:22:13+00:00
> user permissions/groups never come into the sandboxing discussions

Sometimes *nix user accounts for AI agent sandboxing does come up in discussions. At [0], HN user netcoyote linked to his sandvault tool [1], which "sandboxes AI agents in a MacOS limited user account".

Actually seems like a great idea IMO, to be lightweight, generic, and robust-enough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760777

[1] https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
by ggm | 2026-01-26 22:23:37+00:00
Something which still confuses me is the nature of the illuminations in the roadway. Because we can see edge elements, we see things on stalks. I don't see how that can work, for things the tires run over. But, the illuminations are there. They must be super-designed cats-eyes.

Also, the approach lighting has very good engineering to keep you in the safe slot for approach angle. The lights must have fresnel lenses or shading or something to keep a very narrow angle of approach lit up "best"

On take off if I have a window, I now look for the banding which I mentally model as "not yet.. " "almost .." "if you are doing <x> kph then YES" .. and "nope. don't wanna see this one"

Gate approach, there are clues that pilots drive by following lines. So many lines! marked by aircraft type: if you are a <this> then follow <this track> type markers.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2026-01-26 22:25:01+00:00
State of Windows?

It's so out of touch, people hate it.

People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user. Windows 11 is a very, very long way from this.

Honestly Windows 95 is closer to ideal than Windows 11.

The state of Windows is: disaster.
by TheJoeMan | 2026-01-26 22:25:14+00:00
As an alternative for better lubrication of two-metals-rubbing together (door hinges, simple tools, etc) I use Tri-Flow because it has PTFE that stays as a white powder. If you have a stuck bolt, PBBlaster wicks into the threads better. And if you have sticker glue, use GooGone.
by evv | 2026-01-26 22:25:23+00:00
Dumb question: whats the difference between "low-code" and "libraries+frameworks"?

Usually the point of a library or framework is to reduce the amount of code you need to write. Giving you more functionality at the cost of some flexibility.

Even in the world of LLMs, this has value. When it adopts a framework or library, the agent can produce the same functionality with fewer output tokens.

But maybe the author means, "We can no longer lock in customers on proprietary platforms". In which case, too bad!
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-26 22:25:27+00:00
> Just simple logic!

It's simple "logic", for sure.

> Instead you’re just openly declaring your own inability/unwillingness to assess information quality, and being proud of it?

That's your interpretation, which is far from reality. I think the big difference here is you put way more value on polls than is warranted. It's not like you've provided a ton of sources, either.

I likely won't be relying to you further, as I don't see the point. Cheers.
by zephen | 2026-01-26 22:25:32+00:00
> Obviously, I would never use it for data interchange (e.g. SOAP) anymore.

Well, those comments were arguing about how it is the absolute best for data interchange.

> I still use it from time to time for config files that a developer has to write.

Even back when XML was still relatively hot, I recalled thinking that it solved a problem that a lot of developers didn't have.

Because if, for example, you're writing Python or Javascript or Perl, it is dead easy to have Python or Javascript or Perl also be your configuration file language.

I don't know what language you use, but 20 years ago, I viewed XML as a Java developer's band-aid.