MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-12 19:26:25+00:00
It also made it harder to track. One way to see what Grok is doing is to look at the Grok account’s replies. So you can see the image it generates in response to someone - for example - undressing a woman who appears in a photo. You can then go visit THAT thread to see what the exchange with Grok was, which often would show a long series of lewd images. A few days ago, nearly the ENTIRE stream of the Grok account’s replies at any moment were deepfakes without consent. Mostly in response to women’s posts, but sometimes to generate racist attacks.

I’m not against people using AI to generate a fantasy image for their own needs. I guess in a way it’s like what people imagine in their own heads anyways. But I do think it is problematic when you share those publicly because it can damage others’ reputation, and because it makes social media hostile to some groups of people who are targeted with misogynist or racist deepfakes. It may seem like a small problem but the actual final effect is that the digital public square becomes a space only for identity groups that aren’t harassed.
by flyinglizard | 2026-01-12 19:26:30+00:00
Israel has had nukes since the 1960’s, and has been wiping the floor with its adversaries since before even that. What changed now that would push Saudi Arabia and Turkey to get nukes? Nothing really. On the contrary: it is Turkey that’s projecting power in Syria, Libya and Somalia, and likewise Saudi Arabia projecting power in Yemen.

Israel’s war on Iran was an important piece in the way to the collapse of the regime. It exposed how incompetent the regime truly is in protecting Iran, and how the Iranian “ring of fire” project (masterminded by Qassem Suleimani) to encircle Israel with proxies, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, was taken apart by Israel in the course of a year. All of this investment, in direct funding as well as sanctions over the past 40 years came to naught when Israel struck back. Mullahs were exposed as weak, irrelevant, only able to oppress their own.

Furthermore, Israel essentially decapitated the Iranian state apparatus in those 12 days. Everyone who mattered in the government and IRGC was killed. It just completely pulled the rug from under this regime.

I’m almost confident this is over. And with it there’s going to be a huge shift in Middle East politics. Likely more countries will align with Israel, but the removal of the primary Shia power might push the Sunnis to negatively fixate on Israel.
by shagie | 2026-01-12 19:26:33+00:00
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation

> While nearly three-quarters of the world’s cargo is carried by ocean-going ships, road vehicles like trucks and vans make up the majority, 65%, of freight’s emissions. Most ships burn fossil fuels and emit carbon, but they carry large amounts of freight at the same time, making them the most efficient way to move cargo. Road freight, however, can emit more than 100 times as much CO2 as ships to carry the same amount of freight the same distance. Road transport is also a fast-growing sector—80% of the global increase in diesel consumption can be attributed to trucks. E-commerce and home delivery are two reasons for this growth.
by smeeagain2 | 2026-01-12 19:26:34+00:00
> I left high school with average results and immediately got a job as a junior web developer

Sure, I could have done something like that too! If I had only zigged instead of zagged.

The problem happens when you leave high school and become [$XYZ] instead, do that for a while, realize it's a dead end career, then decide to return to your roots and become a programmer. At the same time you had also taken a year off to relax, only to later realize that "one year of unemployment" in 2010 (just after 2008) translates as "unemployable" to HR.

In general, if you don't make it your #1 top priority to get back into the rat race and stay there permanently, you are treated as an outcast and scorned by all the slaves. You also might, in your frustration, begin doing some research and start to learn what a racket it all really is. You could very easily find yourself slowly drifting apart from the rest of the herd, unable to ever be employed again without an exceptional desire to rejoin the herd. (Which I lack.)

Want to be "self employed" for a while? You know, exercise some self direction in life, which should be considered a good thing by anyone with a brain? Good luck ever getting a job again, lol. You're unemployable.

There is MUCH you still have to learn about life. But fortunately for you, a big learning opportunity is coming up. The current IT malaise is only the beginning of a very big economic crash. Enjoy your commute while it lasts.
by 542354234235 | 2026-01-12 19:26:37+00:00
It's almost like the difference in the way ultra processed foods are digested, absorbed, and the way hormones are released in response has something to do with that. It's almost like this is a biological process. It's almost like the brain is an organ and if its hormones and chemicals are messed with, that can have health implications. Or maybe it just "don't be lazy".
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-12 19:26:38+00:00
> Anyhow, Apple & Android should just support old hardware for longer.

Apple already does. The iPhone 6s, released 2015, got a security update just a few months ago [1]. That's ten years worth of security updates, I'm amazed that people are still using such old phones.

If we go by the metric of "app developers can still publish app updates", the minimum target version is iOS 18 [2], which means you can still target the iPhone XS from 2018, that's a 7 year old phone.

The true catastrophe is Android, and that's actually not Android's fault. That's the fault of Qualcomm, MTK, Samsung and other more obscure SoC vendors - only in 2023, with the Pixel 8 [3], came the first SoC with seven years of support. As said: most BSPs are utter dogshit, and so are the firmwares for all the tiny chips and IP cores. The Linux kernel is a very fast moving target and it's (by intent) a gargantuan effort to keep forked kernels up to date. And it's made even worse by the embedded industry's trend of continuously "improving" their chips/IP cores without changing model numbers, making it sometimes outright impossible for a kernel module to deal with two different steppings and respective quirks on its own.

Apple in contrast insists on writing everything themselves - that's why they fell out of love with NVIDIA a decade ago, NVIDIA refused to give Apple that level of access. That allows Apple to keep even very outdated stuff supplied at least with critical security fixes.

Google could do something here, say by adding a requirement to the Play Store license that BSPs must be actually accessible open source and vendors have to commit reasonable effort in upstreaming their kernel level drivers, but I guess Google is too afraid of getting hit by anti-trust issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

[2] https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/?id=0...

[3] https://blog.cortado.com/en/7-years-of-software-updates-for-...
by EA-3167 | 2026-01-12 19:26:45+00:00
People love to remember the hits and forget the misses. They'll happily chat about how "hunger was the key to the French Revolution" while forgetting how many starved in the USSR, North Korea, China, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, etc...

They love to imagine that the suffering of a populace is some guarantee of both a revolution and the success of that revolution. For some reason the near-total destruction of Syria and ongoing conflicts in the MENA region don't seem to register. At this point I'm convinced that social media creates an environment that rewards wishcasting more than logical analysis based on precedent.
by Joker_vD | 2026-01-12 19:27:01+00:00
Yes, actually:

$ cat kekw.zc
include <stdio.h>

fn main() {
var f = fopen("file.txt", "r");
defer fclose(f);

var ch: byte;
if fread(&ch, 1, 1, f) <= 0 { return -1; }
return 0;
}
$ ./zc --emit-c kekw.zc
[zc] Compiling kekw.zc...
$ tail -n 12 out.c
int main()
{
{
__auto_type f = fopen("file.txt", "r");
uint8_t ch;
if ((fread((&ch), 1, 1, f) <= 0)) {
return (-1);
}
return 0;
fclose(f);
}
}
Show HN: ConfigDiff – understand what a config change does
by ogorun | 2026-01-12 19:27:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small tool to help reason about configuration changes.

You paste an old config, a new config, and optional context (e.g. “AWS ECS + RDS Postgres, production traffic”), and it explains what changed and what might be operationally risky.

The motivation is very simple: config diffs are easy to see syntactically, but much harder to reason about operationally. Increasing a pool size, changing timeouts, toggling a feature flag — all of these look trivial in a diff, but can have non-obvious impact in production.

This is not meant to replace reviews or deep system knowledge. It’s closer to a “second pair of eyes” that summarizes changes and points out things worth thinking about.

No accounts, no setup. Just paste → explain → share if useful.

Live demo: https://configdiff.net

Happy to hear feedback, criticism, or ideas for improvement
by tariky | 2026-01-12 19:27:21+00:00
I have friends who wore going to Iran for business meeting. Friends are from former Yugoslavia state who still have connections to Iran. They export sparkplugs to Iran.

Interesting thing is that they say they never seen such a beautiful country with even more beautiful people. Also they said they filled up two full car tanks for ~5€.

Their conclusion is that people there live much better life(more fulfilling) then people in western countries.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-12 19:27:44+00:00
I'm trying to work towards that goal by training a model on mostly German science texts up to 1904 (before the world wars German was the lingua franca of most sciences).

Training data for a base model isn't that hard to come by, even though you have to OCR most of it yourself because the publicly available OCRed versions are commonly unusably bad. But training a model large enough to be useful is a major issue. Training a 700M parameter model at home is very doable (and is what this TimeCapsuleLLM is), but to get that kind of reasoning you need something closer to a 70B model. Also a lot of the "smarts" of a model gets injected in fine tuning and RL, but any of the available fine tuning datasets would obviously contaminate the model with 2026 knowledge.
by uslic001 | 2026-01-12 19:28:02+00:00
I saw someone on You-Tube that soaked them overnight and then used Grandpa's Goody Getter nutcracker to open them. The shells shattered less, he got much bigger pieces, and it wasn't as messy. I have tried both with and without soaking them overnight and I agree that soaking overnight is better than not soaking. You still need a very good nutcracker. https://www.grandpasgoodygetter.com/products/black-walnut-nu...
by seanhunter | 2026-01-12 19:28:42+00:00
Right. For people who don't know the wealth of evidence we are talking about here, the Egyptians left very detailed records including wages of the people working on the pyramids[1], paintings showing the numbers of people needed to move heavy objects and how they lubricated the sand beneath the skids[2] etc

[1] They weren't slaves, they were salaried workers, and there are records of how much they got paid and how many of them there were.

[2] and the numbers check out when you do the standard "block on an inclined rough plane" thing you learn in 1st year mechanics. Check out https://sites.uwm.edu/nosonovs/2017/11/05/about-djehutihotep... where you can clearly see the pains they have gone to in order to ensure the numbers of workers are accurately portrayed
by jcjn | 2026-01-12 19:29:12+00:00
Everything John Nagle said is true. But to have a meaningful discussion about it on HN is futile because we need to come together and first admit and agree that exporting everything to China has ruined the economy and culture in the West. That isn’t happening. The best we can do is remind ourselves to follow the guidelines while we get downvoted by brigades.

I watched the video and sent it to family members who are deeply involved and ve$ted in manufacturing in the West. These two boys are unlikely to see anything like this at scale in Europe. That ship has sailed while no one was looking, and it’s not coming back.

Major multi-decade fuckup.
by subpixel | 2026-01-12 19:30:32+00:00
> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US

The American diet is insane, full stop. However, I've just begun a GLP-1 regimen to address a willpower problem, not a nutritional problem. I'm not quite young anymore and have given lots of other approaches a shot over the years, but have persistently failed to achieve a weight that is not a threat to my health.

So far, what being on a GLP-1 gives me is a steady state that most people probably find quite unremarkable: I don't crave a snack, and I don't thirst for alcohol. Both of those desires have had real control over me for a very long time.
by wasmperson | 2026-01-12 19:31:11+00:00
> It's not possible to make a competitively priced product that way. What are you going to do, sell artisanal circuit boards on Etsy?

10 years ago in the US I met someone who owned a company of about 5 people that he largely built off of the acquisition of a single broken pick-and-place machine which he repaired himself. They applied the solder paste manually and finished the boards in what looked like a toaster-oven. Each production run consisted of around 100 units which were sold at $50 apiece. The company is still in business today, as far as I'm aware.
by mrandish | 2026-01-12 19:31:19+00:00
Yep, I have two and am always moving them around between various rooms at home where I only occasionally need a keyboard/mouse. Home theater: setting up a new media streaming stick, Arcade room: tweaking the settings on the PCs in my arcade or virtual pinball cabinet, IT closet: adjusting some pre-boot setting on a Raspberry Pi. It's really perfect because it's small, complete (keyboard and mouse in one device/port), flexible (USB, Bluetooth, RF Dongle) and actually has a good keybed (unlike most small portables). I also like that its auto-shutoff works well, meaning it's usually charged even if I haven't used it in a month.

When I say "There's nothing I don't like about it", it's actually pretty high praise because I'm finicky, demanding and notice the details in stuff I use.
by johnfn | 2026-01-12 19:31:23+00:00
Somewhat off-topic, but when I click on "Case-Mate - Case for 2009 LG Xenon - Marsala"[1], the "About this item" section simply states:

About this item

- Do

- Not

- Buy

- This

- Product

What on earth is going on here?

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09D51KNQM
by ogorun | 2026-01-12 19:31:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this small tool to help reason about configuration changes.

You paste an old config, a new config, and optional context, and it explains what changed and what might be operationally risky.

This is a minimal MVP, mostly built because I got tired of “looks fine” config changes that later turned out not to be fine at all.

Happy to hear feedback.
by stevenwoo | 2026-01-12 19:31:53+00:00
An anthropologist writes about communication and language in The Language Puzzle, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/steven-mithen/the... , TLDR, a little speculative but no primate exhibits evidence beyond a very primitive form of communication - only the extreme outliers are used in demonstrations, which are not much upon closer examination, there’s probably an evolutionary step needed for any other primate than man to use language as far as we can tell. There are key differences in brain and vocalization physiology between humans and other primates .
by crumpled | 2026-01-12 19:32:15+00:00
I think they let you (not YOU necessarily, but the proverbial you.) get away with stuff because they know your habits and you probably make more money for them than you realize.

I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.

Edit: I'm taking part of this to the root of the thread
by emodendroket | 2026-01-12 19:32:20+00:00
> Does anyone say "we don't know if Einstein could do this because we were really close or because he was really smart?"

It turns out my reading is somewhat topical. I've been reading Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and of the things he takes great pains to argue (I was not quite anticipating how much I'd be trying to recall my high school science classes to make sense of his account of various experiments) is that the development toward the atomic bomb was more or less inexorable and if at any point someone said "this is too far; let's stop here" there would be others to take his place. So, maybe, to answer your question.
by samuelson | 2026-01-12 19:32:28+00:00
Preface: Most of my understand of how LLMs actually work comes from 3blue1brown's videos, so I could easily be wrong here.

I mostly agree with you, especially about distrusting the self-interested hype beasts.

While I don't think the models are actually "intelligent", I also wonder if there are insights to be gained by looking at how concepts get encoded by the models. It's not really that the models will add something "new", but more that there might be connections between things that we haven't noticed, especially because academic disciplines are so insular these days.
by matheusd | 2026-01-12 19:32:40+00:00
How about this for an evaluation: Have this (trained-on-older-corpus) LLM propose experiments. We "play the role of nature" and inform it of the results of the experiments. It can then try to deduce the natural laws.

If we did this (to a good enough level of detail), would it be able to derive relativity? How large of an AI model would it have to be to successfully derive relativity (if it only had access to everything published up to 1904)?
by ofrzeta | 2026-01-12 19:32:41+00:00
The USA have backed the coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mossadegh, to begin with.

"In 1953, the CIA- and MI6-backed 1953 Iranian coup d'état overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
by Finnucane | 2026-01-12 19:32:59+00:00
I've been using trackballs since the early 1980s (that was a custome-built thing attached to a DG Nova, but still). Can't go back to a regular mouse. But yeah, I don't see what this does that my current trackballs don't do, or at least that I would ever use. And it looks really awkward to use. I also don't really care that much about the half-second it takes to move my hand. I don't touch-type or type nonstop. So practically that means nothing to me.
by a_e_k | 2026-01-12 19:33:01+00:00
A nice example of this is shown in Figure 2 of the paper "Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2" [1] from Valve. It shows how they tried to make the silhouettes of each character class distinct and readable. (And the paper also discusses the choices that went into the color palette.)

[1] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/NPAR07_Illus...
by atmavatar | 2026-01-12 19:33:02+00:00
> I never understand what's the point of those protests.

For one, it's about showing politicians just how unpopular these policies are. If you can convince a large enough swath of Republican congressmen their seats aren't so secure, they may start to break with the administration.

On the more extreme end: I doubt many of the protesters are familiar with it, but there is a 3.5% rule[1] in political science that states when nonviolent protestors grow to about 3.5% of the population, authoritarian regimes become likely to fall from power.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
Does anyone else want good conversations – not another relationship to maintain?
by Indigomarfa | 2026-01-12 19:33:16+00:00
This might sound oddly specific, but I’m curious if anyone relates.

I’m busy. Work takes a lot of energy, life is full, and most days I feel like I’m already at capacity.

I don’t feel lonely. I have people around, things to do, a routine.

But I do feel like I’m missing real conversations — the kind where you talk about ideas, interests, how you think about things. Not small talk, not updates, not networking.

The weird part is: I don’t actually want more friends or long-term relationships right now.
Not because I don’t like people — I just don’t have the time or energy to keep something going consistently. And I don’t want to half-ass friendships.

I’ve tried a few things and none of them really worked:

Dating or “friend” apps quickly turn into constant chatting and expectations. Even if people say it’s casual, it never really is.

Meetups and group events feel noisy and shallow. You talk to a lot of people, but nothing really sticks - and honestly it’s draining.

Networking is fine for work, but that’s not what I’m missing.

Online communities are interesting, but comment threads don’t replace actually talking to someone.

So I’m kind of stuck in this in-between space.

I want meaningful, interest-based conversations — but without turning them into friendships I have to maintain, without constant messaging, without guilt if weeks go by.

Just… show up, talk, think together, and that’s it.

Does anyone else feel this?

What do you do with this kind of need?
by tptacek | 2026-01-12 19:34:08+00:00
So the claim here is that by backing any coups and revolutions, the US tacitly backed all of them? Ok!

Like: yes, I lay a lot of the responsibility for the nightmare state Iranians live in at the hands of Cold War NATO policymakers, for sure, but I don't think it's all that useful as a positive claim of what happened in the 1970s. The US did not support the Ayatollahs.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-12 19:34:32+00:00
I've yet to spot a full aluminum frame in any Windows laptop even matching Apple's price point. And I've yet to come across to a touchpad comparable in size, feel (Apple's is virtually flush with the case, most Windows touchpads are recessed, every one I came across was plastic while Apple's is glass) and gesture behavior either.

> Anything comparable in price to a MacBook?

The current MacBook Air is at ~1100€ here in Germany. That's not that expensive, particularly as even the entry models still blow away the competition for CPU.
by nailer | 2026-01-12 19:35:28+00:00
From Wired's original article, at https://archive.is/https://www.wired.com/story/grok-is-pushi...

> Every few seconds, Grok is continuing to create images of women in bikinis or underwear in response to user prompts on X, according to a WIRED review of the chatbots’ publicly posted live output. On Tuesday, at least 90 images involving women in swimsuits and in various levels of undress were published by Grok in under five minutes, analysis of posts show.

ChatGPT and Gemini also do this: https://x.com/Marky146/status/2009743512942579911?s=20
by saaaaaam | 2026-01-12 19:35:30+00:00
I guess the difference is that it requires a certain amount of time, ability and skill to make creepy pictures using photoshop - which limits the number of people who will actually do that.

Photoshops also does not have a direct distribution channel built in, which means that if even if you had the wherewithal, knowledge, and nothing better to do, your creepy images would likely stay on your computer, and never see the light of day.

As I understand it, with Grok you simply give it a sexualised prompt and it does it for you in seconds, and immediately distributes the results to a potential audience of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people, where it will likely stay for a long period of time.

To my mind that's definitely rather different.