MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timschmidt | 2026-01-19 21:50:14+00:00
> The allocator work is facing a lot of obstacles, unfortunately.

Got any links? Sounds like interesting reading. Seriously. Kind of thing I come here for. I'd really appreciate it. Or I can ask the AI for some.

> I prefer it to be unstable for as long as it needs, though.

Sure, same. Fully baking things is a process, and it's nice when things are fully baked. So I agree. I think Rust's async could be a bit more ergonomic, though it wasn't too difficult to wrap my head around, and sort of shockingly simple to implement a basic no-std async executor (~10 lines), so maybe I'm coming around. I was pleased to find out that it was simple enough that I could do it, and understand how it worked, as I try to do with all my microcontroller code, and wasn't dependent on a big async runtime like Tokio if I didn't need it's features (or bloat).
by dist-epoch | 2026-01-19 21:50:17+00:00
It's not necessarily illegal use of secret information.

There exists "alternate data", some companies monitor all kinds of stuff, satellite pictures, etc, some of these companies surely saw the inevitable asset positioning just before such a big attack (150 planes).

Just like the Ukraine invasion was first visible on Google Maps as traffic jams !!! at the border at midnight

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/google-...
by krackers | 2026-01-19 21:50:33+00:00
I believe Apple stores used to use "Whoosh" cleaning spray along with a cloth replaced once a day. It's an alcohol free cleaning solution (very similar to alcohol free eyeglass cleaners).

Mild alcohol causing issues for MBP screens was primarily an issue with 2012-2014 "staingate" (due to defects in the coating process).

Lens wipes are only ~30% alcohol and are probably fine assuming correct application, but I guess given how often staingate has appeared as coatings get more complex there's a risk... Unfortunately you either have to tradeoff "contains alcohol but completely clean wipe" versus "alcohol free but using a cloth that might be contaminated by dust/grit".

Maybe you could do alcohol free eyeglass solution (or maybe even ROR fluid) + lens tissue (e.g. kimwipe).
by davebranton | 2026-01-19 21:50:37+00:00
The linked article on medium was also written by AI, which immediately disqualifies it from being interesting or useful.

"And the worst part? Apple didn’t provide a switch to turn it off."

Now see, this is AI. A normal human being would write, "Apple didn't even provide any way to switch off this non-feature" - for example. AI always, for reasons that are likely neither interesting nor especially illuminating, writes like this. Unnecessary and stupid stylistic choices everywhere.

Look, if you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's Good Earth would anyone bother to read it?
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-19 21:51:11+00:00
> You invented "7%" from thin air.

Yes. I said I did. Because when I openly talk about a hypothetical number, people have to focus on whether my logic is correct or incorrect. Because that part of the post was about what implies what.

> You claimed nobody was arguing about innocent convictions

No. I said nobody argued MOST convictions were innocent.

Because you keep talking about MOST convictions to make your arguments.

> "Unjust" doesn't mean wrong outcomes

Doesn't mean a specific number of wrong outcomes.

This is the key miscommunication that has caused the entire argument.

A system can be unjust in 100% of cases, but only give the wrong answer in a smaller percent of cases.

> "Coercive" doesn't mean producing false confessions, it just means... pressure exists, somehow.

coerce: To use force, threat, fraud, or intimidation in an attempt to compel one to act against their will.

Edit: To make a clearer statement, whether it's coercion is about whether there is an unreasonable amount of pressure being applied. This has no connection to whether the confession is true or false.

> Here's what you won't say directly but keep implying: that plea bargains routinely produce false confessions.

Yes.

> My position: the law is applied justly more often than unjustly. You either disagree with that or you don't. No more semantic gymnastics. Which. is. it?

Ugh, this is annoying when we're disagreeing about what "just" means.

The way you're using it, the law is just more often than not.

But "more often" is an absolute garbage threshold. We need way way way better than that.
by zahlman | 2026-01-19 21:51:23+00:00
> There are now dozens of videos of them harassing, intimidating, beating, or detaining people for exercising protected speech.

Show me one. I have already seen countless claims of this sort, only to later line them up with video footage that clearly demonstrates that "exercising protected speech" was not the cause of action and that the response was clearly justified.

For example, freedom of speech does not allow one to block traffic for protest purposes, or blocking entrances to buildings, or preventing pedestrians from passing by on the sidewalk (https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_pdf_file/kyr_...). And it certainly does not allow violence against ICE officers or other citizens, both of which I've seen a fair bit of.

I have even seen multiple examples of protesters enacting their own Terry stops against people they suspect of being ICE agents.

> openly said that they're allowed to arrest people based on "reasonable suspicion" which is unambiguously illegal.

Show the quote, and show the relevant law.
by danaris | 2026-01-19 21:51:29+00:00
The problem with that last is that if the Democrats do nothing, there's a very real chance that Trump deploys the military to either prevent the midterms from happening, or to force their outcome to be what he wants.

(Of course, if they do something there's still a chance he does that—they have to do the right thing and they have to do it well to reduce the chances by much!)

There's also that pesky matter of, y'know, their constituents. Who are getting bled dry by the stagflation that's happening.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-19 21:51:47+00:00
Large and complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable and have tradeoffs and consequences that can't be foreseen by anybody. Error rates are never zero. So basically anything large enough is going to kill people in one way or another. There are intelligent ways to deal with this, and then there is shooting the CEO, which will change nothing because the next CEO faces the exact same set of choices and incentives as the last one.
by rbbydotdev | 2026-01-19 21:52:05+00:00
That's a very good point! I think as it stands users probably are better suited with obsidian or even vscode. BUT let us not be to limited by what it is today, and think of what it could be tomorrow ;) - I am looking for other developers and contributors to join me in shaping the vision.

Plugins is a great idea. The ability to use existing obsidian plugins could be very powerful. Thank you for the idea!
by captn3m0 | 2026-01-19 21:52:46+00:00
I will actually pay for this if this includes the complete issue/PR data, as well as the ability to review/approve/merge PRs. The GitHub UI is so slow that loading each 5 line PR is just too slow and I have to open the diff in a new tab, because going back reloads the whole damn thing instead of the amazing jquery/pjax cached version from a decade ago that worked fast even on 3G networks.

Aside: you will need permission to use the Git trademark.
by namnnumbr | 2026-01-19 21:52:58+00:00
I tried backing out proprietary model sizes from benchmark scores, inspired by a Latent Space podcast where Artificial Analysis noted their Omniscience Accuracy numbers track parameter count better than anything else they measure.

I trained a bunch of simple linear regressions - while Omniscience Accuracy had the best fit (R2: 0.98), it predicted absurd multi‑trillion param sizes (Gemini 3 Pro ~1,254T total parameters). Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index provided more plausible results:

Gemini 3 Pro: 3.4T
Claude 4.5 Sonnet: 1.4T
Claude 4.5 Opus: 4.1T
GPT-5.x series in 2.9-5.3T range total parameters.

Interesting notes:

- task benchmarks (Tau²/GDPVal) aren't predictive of model size
- adding price made the fit worse
- sparsity or parameter activation ratios did not influence predicted sizes at all.
by impossiblefork | 2026-01-19 21:53:00+00:00
The CIA are probably for the most part reasonable people, or if they aren't, hopefully not that kind of crazy. They probably want people to look at their history stuff.

Think "look, our predecessor organizations helped defeat the Nazis/Imperial Japan and did reasonable stuff". I'm not sure whether this text is propaganda to get people to work more effectively or an actual sabotage manual, but whatever it is, that's still the signal, I think. At best keeping this on your website is like trying to say "Our stuff taught people to resist Nazis and similarly bad people", at worst it's like trying to say "look, here's a really entertaining way to trick people into being productive".
by ndiddy | 2026-01-19 21:53:07+00:00
You can see it in the Democratic party leadership's response to Renee Good's murder. Cory Booker just proposed ( https://x.com/SenBooker/status/2011795625835114641 ) that ICE should be reformed by adopting higher training standards and requiring body cameras, when her killer was a 10-year ICE veteran and Good's murder was caught on three different cameras.

The only practical response to the situation in Minneapolis is abolishing ICE, firing every employee from the top to the bottom, forbidding by law whatever agency replaces ICE from hiring anyone who has ever previously worked there, and appointing a special prosecutor to vigorously investigate any wrongdoing by former agents. Unfortunately, we're stuck with an opposition party with no clear vision and leadership that would rather do nothing even when their inaction leads to major social unrest and injustice.
by lxgr | 2026-01-19 21:53:08+00:00
> 5G cells are small and very dense

Not necessarily. In rural areas and using low frequencies, I believe they can even be larger than GSM.

> LTE and 5G are based on CDMA

No, the last CDMA based cell standards were 3G/UMTS and the Qualcomm equivalent (CDMA2000 or what it was). From then on, it’s all been OFDM.
by jtbaker | 2026-01-19 21:53:12+00:00
I'm a software and data engineer. I work with C# pretty extensively in my software day job. I've never seen a data engineer job listing mention C#.

Additionally, the way the OP's comment reads, I'm ok with the assumption I made. It reads like it was a unilateral decision on their part and not something that got buy in from the team.
by pear01 | 2026-01-19 21:53:15+00:00
Indeed, good point. Proper threat modeling is everything.

This also explains my original reply to the ancestor comment. As I see it, most people's personal threat model essentially already accounts for data breaches to the point that they are almost irrelevant. We hear about them all the time. More and more people are learning about credit freezes or 2fa or just getting these services baked into things they already use (more banks offer free credit monitoring, 2fa is increasingly a standard). It seems like we are in a place where data breaches just become essentially background noise to the average user.

In my view then, I would personally factor in physical theft as a higher threat than "phishing and data breaches". Even if low probability to begin with.

There is also the objective question of which occurs more or incurs more damages to individuals, the answer to which I do not know. I know companies often spend a lot of money to fix problems or deal with lawsuits, but individuals don't really get compensated by that the way they would if someone who ripped your phone away from you was tackled to the ground and your property got returned. For example.

As you say though, the threat model is everything.
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-19 21:53:29+00:00
> Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do on animals.

One possible example is the emotion manipulation study Facebook did over a decade ago[0]. I don't know how you would perform an experiment like this on animals, but Facebook has demonstrated a desire to understand all the different ways its platform can be used to alter user behavior and emotions.

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/06/30/32...
by XorNot | 2026-01-19 21:53:35+00:00
> I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment.

What do you think happens to people who do that though?

You keep telling me what you don't do and how it proves you're implicitly non violent but you can't even imagine framing that response in terms that don't include representatives of the state's monopoly on violence being within arms reach.

Implying violence is never necessary while repeatedly describing not doing violence even if the state's violence distributing apparatus isn't currently present rather undermines the case.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-19 21:53:49+00:00
> The fundamental distinction is between knowledge that compounds and knowledge that decays.

I don't agree with this at all. I don't think there's any such thing as "knowledge that decays" in this sense, and all knowledge compounds. I think that everything is worth learning and knowing.

But, to address the basis of the essay, in a world where I can't learn and know everything, how do I decide what to learn and know? For me, it's really, really easy. If I'm interested in it, then it's worth learning. It's just that simple and has yet to steer me wrong.
by anonnon | 2026-01-19 21:54:06+00:00
> In my experience (20+ years with C/C++, and about 4 years with Rust), Rust is significantly less complex than C++, while being similarly capable

OK, what about if you have an existing code base of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of lines of C or C++? Still think it's going to be better, and especially cheaper, to "rewrite it in Rust" instead of just porting it to Fil-C or something similar?
Show HN: Former Cloudflare SRE building a live map of what's running
by kennethops | 2026-01-19 21:55:01+00:00
Hey HN, I’m Kenneth. I spent several years as a Senior SRE at Cloudflare.

One thing that became painfully clear over time is that most outages, security issues, and compliance fire drills don’t come from a lack of tools. They come from missing context. People don’t know what’s running, how things connect, or what changed recently, especially once systems sprawl across clouds, repos, and teams.

That’s why I’m building OpsCompanion.

The goal is simple: keep a live, shared picture of what’s actually running and how it fits together.

OpsCompanion helps engineers:

See a live, visual map of services, infrastructure, and dependencies

Answer “what changed?” without digging through five tools, Slack threads, or outdated docs

Preserve operational context so the next person on call isn’t starting from zero

This isn’t about adding more logs or alerts, or slapping AI on top of existing dashboards. It’s about capturing the mental model experienced operators carry in their heads and keeping it shared and up to date.

It’s still early, and there are rough edges. I’ve opened it up to a small group of engineers who work close to production so I can get honest feedback. If it’s useful, great. If not, I genuinely want to understand why and what would make it better.

You can try it here:
https://opscompanion.ai/?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=show_hn&ut...

I’ll be around in the comments. Happy to answer technical questions, hear skepticism, get a bit roasted, or talk about what actually breaks in real systems.
by reddalo | 2026-01-19 21:55:07+00:00
You shouldn't look for interesting Lemmy instances; you can pretty much use any instance and subscribe to interesting _communities_ from there.

If English is not your native tongue, I'd suggest you to find an instance in your language, so you can easily see all kinds of content if you filter by "Local".

Some random active communities to follow:

- https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

- https://mander.xyz/c/science_memes

- https://feddit.org/c/europe

- https://lemmy.ca/c/pcgaming
by KaiserPro | 2026-01-19 21:55:21+00:00
Its much deeper than that.

Segmentation in 2d is mostly a solved problem (segment anything is pretty fucking great) Segmentation in 3d is also fairly well done. You can use dino V2 to do 3d object detection and segmentation.

The diffcult part _after_ that is interacting with the object. sparse and semi dense point clouds can be generated and refined in real time, but they are point clouds not meshes. this means that interacting with the object accurately is super hard, because its not a simple mesh that can be tested/interacted with. its a bunch of points around the edges.

Where this is useful is it allows you to generate a mostly plausible simple 3d model that can act as a standin for any further interactions. In VR you can use it as a collision object for physics. For robotics you can use it to plan interactions (ie place objects on the table)

Its also a step in the direction of answering "who's" object it is, rather than "what" the object is. Who's water bottle is much much harder to answer with machines (without markers) than "is this a water bottle" or "where is the water bottle in this scene"
Show HN: Sonar CiteScout – Find the links AI relies on to answer a prompt
by shukantpal | 2026-01-19 21:55:35+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm experimenting with tools that you help you understand what kind of content affects your visibility in AI search queries.

I built something that lets you quickly run a prompt on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview several times in the browser and grabs all the links AI cites and ranks them. The idea is to eventually help you reach out to authors and get backlinks to your own product.

You can try it out here: https://trysonar.ai/tools/citescout

Use discount code HACKERNEWS100 to get 10x, 25x queries for free
by xp84 | 2026-01-19 21:55:42+00:00
If you get on the bus with it, wouldn’t it not count as “separated from its owner”? Your phone, after all, sends out these pings as well even when off. So, the tag may know it’s with the phone even then.
Also I don’t think it has to be “marked as” lost. This stuff doesn’t depend on anything that the owner of the tag gets to configure, since the point is to make it harder to abuse this way.
I do think it’s dumb though. A real GPS tracker is not expensive - this stuff is only deterring the least-dedicated stalkers.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-19 21:56:38+00:00
While I agree that supporting "status quo" is a central part of electability in US politics, by all means, if you have strong opinions about things, go get elected. Go run. There are plenty of places where you can become very powerful without having to go through a primary - all Louisiana offices, San Francisco, and numerous non-partisan roles throughout government everywhere, and anyway, you can get RCV passed, just like it is in some big US cities, which is to say...

You're talking about ideas that keep failing in elections, and then you demand just one more election but with different voters, and then find out that voters there don't like it either, so at what point do you admit you are wrong? That your idea of "good stance" is actually a "bad stance"? Another POV is, your grievance is, fundamentally, projection.
by zahlman | 2026-01-19 21:56:48+00:00
Kavanaugh's concurrence (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf) literally says the opposite:

> To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s
case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a “relevant factor” when considered along with other salient factors. Id., at 887.
by mystraline | 2026-01-19 21:56:58+00:00
Its also appropriate to remember that MLK was friends with Malcolm X, and both chose their own means to support the same end goal.

MLK chose nonviolent shows of force, whereas Malcolm X chose more direct forms of violence.

Governments could save face by negotiating with MLK, as he used nonviolent means. They couldn't negotiate with Malcolm X because thats the whole "we cannot negotiate with criminals and terrorists".
Show HN: Txt2plotter – True centerline vectors from Flux.2 for pen plotters
by tsanummy | 2026-01-19 21:57:03+00:00
I’ve been working on a project to bridge the gap between AI generation and my AxiDraw, and I think I finally have a workflow that avoids the usual headaches.

If you’ve tried plotting AI-generated images, you probably know the struggle: generic tracing tools (like Potrace) trace the outline of a line, resulting in double-strokes that ruin the look and take twice as long to plot.

What I tried previously:

- Potrace / Inkscape Trace: Great for filled shapes, but results in "hollow" lines for line art.

- Canny Edge Detection: Often too messy; it picks up noise and creates jittery paths.

- Standard SDXL: Struggled with geometric coherence, often breaking lines or hallucinating perspective.

- A bunch of projects that claimed to be txt2svg but which produced extremely poor results, at least for pen plotting. (Chat2SVG, StarVector, OmniSVG, DeepSVG, SVG-VAE, VectorFusion, DiffSketcher, SVGDreamer, SVGDreamer++, NeuralSVG, SVGFusion, VectorWeaver, SwiftSketch, CLIPasso, CLIPDraw, InternSVG)

My Approach:

I ended up writing a Python tool that combines a few specific technologies to get a true "centerline" vector:

1. Prompt Engineering: An LLM rewrites the prompt to enforce a "Technical Drawing" style optimized for the generator.

2. Generation: I'm using Flux.2-dev (4-bit). It seems significantly better than SDXL at maintaining straight lines and coherent geometry.

3. Skeletonization: This is the key part. Instead of tracing contours, I use Lee’s Method (via scikit-image) to erode the image down to a 1-pixel wide skeleton. This recovers the actual stroke path.

4. Graph Conversion: The pixel skeleton is converted into a graph to identify nodes and edges, pruning out small artifacts/noise.

5. Optimization: Finally, I feed it into vpype to merge segments and sort the paths (TSP) so the plotter isn't jumping around constantly.

You can see the results in the examples inside the Github repo:

https://github.com/malvarezcastillo/txt2plotter

The project is currently quite barebones, but it produces better results than other options I've tested so I'm publishing it. I'm interested in implementing better pre/post processing, API-based generation, and identifying shapes for cross-hatching.
by victorbjorklund | 2026-01-19 21:57:40+00:00
I think the point is that they can't really stop it. Let's say that I purchase API credits, and I let the resell it to DeepSeek.

That's going to be pretty hard for OpenAI to figure out and even if they figure it out and they stop me there will be thousands of other companies willing to do that arbitrage. (Just for the record, I'm not doing this, but I'm sure people are.)

They would need to be very restrictive about who is allowed to use the API and not and that would kill their growth because because then customers would just go to Google or another provider that is less restrictive.
by vkou | 2026-01-19 21:58:39+00:00
> The flip side is that simple disobedience has far less effect in states less concerned with optics and values they claimed to live up to than the tail end of the British Empire or the US federal government at the height of the the Civil Rights era

Most importantly, the Civil-rights era US government was highly concerned with optics, because, you know, the world was being swept by Communist revolutions, and the last thing it wants to do is to provide further fuel to their fire.

The current US government couldn't give two shits about its optics, because none of the people in it can even conceive of there being consequences to their brutality.