MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gamegoblin | 2026-01-29 03:52:17+00:00
AI detectors in general are unreliable, but there are a few made by serious researchers that have only 1-in-10000 false positive rate, e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873

Having worked in a bigcorp, I've read my fair share of management-speak, and none of it sounds quite as empty as the allegedly AI text.

The AI sounds like someone conjuring a parody emulation of management speak instead of actual management speak.

More broadly — and I feel this way about AI code at well as AI prose — I find that part of my brain is always trying to reverse engineer what kind of person wrote this, what was their mental state when writing it?

And when reading AI code or AI prose, this part of my brain short circuits a little. Because there is no cohesive human mind behind the text.

It's kind of like how you subconsciously learn to detect emotion in tiny facial movements, you also subconsciously learn to reverse engineer someone's mind state from their writing.

Reading AI writing feels like watching an alien in skinsuit try to emulate human face emotional cues — it's just not quite right in a hard-to-describe-but-easy-to-detect way.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-29 03:52:38+00:00
I think the one that made the biggest news cycle splash this last month was the FastRender experiment https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender from Cursor, but I've also seen some others posted this last month. Simonw's blog seems to be tracking some under the browser-challenge tag https://simonwillison.net/tags/browser-challenge/ such as one-agent-one-browser and HiWave.
by socialcommenter | 2026-01-29 03:53:19+00:00
It's much easier for someone who blurs the facts to keep a clear conscience because they don't have to acknowledge (to themselves) what they've done.

Someone who's clear-eyed about the facts is much more likely to have a guilty conscience/think someone's actions are unconscionable.

I don't mean to argue either side in this discussion, but both sides might be ignoring the facts here.
by woooooo | 2026-01-29 03:53:31+00:00
I think you're being a little unfair to the civil servant who has to follow the law regarding procurement.

I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".
by somenameforme | 2026-01-29 03:53:42+00:00
Estimates for deaths we caused in Iraq range from the low hundreds of thousands to the millions, and that's going to be overwhelmingly civilians. [1] And given those are all very short time estimates (generally 2003-2007), and since many studies are from violent deaths only (excluding subsequent caused famine/disease/despair/etc) the millions is likely closer to the mark than not.

Compare that to the death toll in any comparable war, event, or behavior that we politicize against domestically. Now imagine yourself seeing these things from the outside. That's how the world looks to the 'real' rest of the world, and not the ~15% and declining percent of the world that people call the 'rest of the world', when they mean Europe, the Anglosphere, and a handful of occasional oddballs like Japan or South Korea.

And when you see this world through their eyes, you start to see an entirely different world, and it's the world that we are also starting to see now as all masks and pretexts have been coming off for years now. And in general I think that's a good thing. People can't form realistic and meaningful worldviews if they're stuck in a Marvel Comic Universe perspective of international relations.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-29 03:53:46+00:00
LLM is not real AI, would take 75% of our galaxy energy to reach human level error rates, and is economically a fiction.... but it doesn't have to be "AGI" to cause real harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...

The damage is already clear =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYNHYIX11Pc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
by AngryData | 2026-01-29 03:55:24+00:00
Where do you live that skilled seamstress is such a valuable job? Just because a handful of people make bank doesn't mean there is some large unfilled market for those skills. I can find some highly paid blacksmiths too, but 99% of people who know how to blacksmith well will never make more than a paltry sum if anything at all off of it.
Show HN: The Unix compress algorithm with approximate matches
by keepamovin | 2026-01-29 03:56:03+00:00
LZW is the algorithm used in compress and also in GIF. It is a beautifully elegant and simple algorithm (based on learning a dictionary of words, and encoding the source as their indices) that converges in the limit on the Shannon entropy of the source.

In 2013, I was studying bioinformatics and had an idea to apply something like sequence alignment and edit scripts to compression instead of just, as LZW, addition at the end of the string. So, the idea for LZW-X was born long ago, but it wasn't until recently, by the power of AI, that I could implement and test it properly.

This is that proper implementation and it reveals what I intuited: that there are gains to be had using a method like this. I consider this a first rung, a starting point for further exploration.

Check it out: https://github.com/BrowserBox/LZW-X
by Andrex | 2026-01-29 03:56:35+00:00
> The only hope for fast and reliable Adobe-apps-on-Linux IMO is through a Windows VM with GPU pass-through and a focus on making that as easily and seamless as possible.

I've heard of people doing this, do they?

I'm so desperate for Premiere, even 6+ years after switching OSes. Resolve won't install on Fedora (???), our all-Flatpak future cannot get here soon enough...
by ticulatedspline | 2026-01-29 03:56:41+00:00
Was super confused about the leak vector cause I was thinking in HTML terms not javascript. Found a nice paper that illustrates the timing attack

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-1846...

Having read that I'm surprised they haven't done a hybrid approach. store the site key with the cache but also the initial download time. If a site requests a resource that's cached but not for that site don't go download it but artificially delay it's delivery from the cache such that it's indistinguishable from a normal fetch (utilizing the original time maybe with some variance) then log the new site key such that further requests from that site appear to be using an isolated cache.

while you don't get any real first-time performance boost you do save actual bits over the wire so there is real life impact and savings while eliminating the source of the timing attack.
by tetromino_ | 2026-01-29 03:57:17+00:00
Quoting an article about sidewalk replacement in NYC (a city generally not associated with low construction costs):

> ADA or Corner Adjustments: If you’re on a corner, curb ramp or flag work might add $500 to $2,000.

https://www.onrec.com/news/news-archive/nyc-concrete-sidewal...
by heavyset_go | 2026-01-29 03:57:22+00:00
If you can't use your own keys and verify the process yourself, then no, that is not a guarantee.

Malware developers just have their software signed by the gatekeepers your device is programmed to inherently trust, because the gatekeepers don't give a shit.

The App Store and Play Store are the largest vectors of malware out there, and every year they are responsible for letting their users get scammed to the tune of billions of dollars.
by davkan | 2026-01-29 03:57:26+00:00
Yes I agree there is no pure hosting/cloud company that comes close to the scale of the big 3 who also use their cloud infrastructure expertise and inventory to subsidize all the other parts of their businesses. Maybe it’s only possible to be reach the top if you already have all the money and infrastructure in the world, but just pointing out that for the top two cloud providers these platforms are at the core of their business and are their most profitable units.
by mrandish | 2026-01-29 03:58:15+00:00
> Before 2025, nobody talked like this.

I enjoy writing posts online and I've been doing it since the days of BBSs and 300 baud modems, transitioning to Usenet and nowadays on a handful of social media communities. People seem to find my posts generally informative and often mention they're well written. In school I always got good marks on creative and essay writing and in the early days of my startups I wrote some of the user documentation and all the advertising copy (some of which won awards). So, I think I'm at least a bit better than average at writing. And I've never used AI for writing anything.

But in the last few months I've had posts accused of being "AI writing" twice (including once here on HN). So I Googled through a random sampling of maybe 50 of my own posts going back a couple decades and found three examples which are kind of like that pattern you described.

I guess I'm screwed because apparently that's just how I sometimes write and no one ever minded before. And I have proof I wrote that way long before AI did... oh. I just occurred to me that maybe some of my 90s Usenet posts are small part of why AI writes like that. But, damn it, I was here first! I should have dibs on writing like me.

Regardless, I definitely don't want anyone to think my writing is AI output - using AI would be disrespectful to the community I enjoy participating in. Recently, I've noticed a few times where I started second guessing something I wrote before hitting "Reply" which makes it not fun. Once, I just hit delete and logged off without posting. Now it occurs to me I'm not really sure what my point is other than venting. I guess I'd like people to at least be really careful about making accusations - unless you're really sure. I mean, I get it. I hate AI slop too. I enjoy reading good posts here even more than writing and slop sucks. But errant accusations can have a chilling effect, or at least they did on me.

Oh, wait was that last sentence too much like THE pattern? No... I don't think so. Never mind, all good.

And, to be clear, I promise I didn't plan that sentence as some kind of example. I wrote it and only then did I wonder if it might be too much like THE pattern. Maybe this is one of the ways AI destroys community. Simply by making us all second guess each other - and then that gets some of us second-guessing ourselves. Shit, I just noticed I used a dash... but at least it's not and em dash, so I should be good. Wait, did I use any dashes anywhere else? Lemme check... shit. I did. Fuck.
by koverstreet | 2026-01-29 03:58:28+00:00
I've got microbenchmarks for the bcachefs btree here: https://evilpiepirate.org/git/bcachefs.git/tree/fs/bcachefs/...

They're ancient, I only have pure random and sequential benchmarks - no zipf distribution, which really should be included.

Feel free to play around with them if you want :) I could even find the driver code, if you want.

I've always been curious about PostgreSQL's core b-tree implementation. I ran into a PostgreSQL developer at a conference once, and exchanged a few words that as I recall were enough to get me intrigued, but never learned anything about it.

In a system as big, complex and well optimized as either bcachefs or postgres, the core index implementation is no longer the main consideration - there's layers and layers, and the stuff that's fun to optimize and write paper about eventually gets buried (and you start thinking a lot more about how to lay out your data structures and less about optimizing the data structures themselves).

But you know in something like that there's going to be some clever tricks, that few people know about or even remember anymore :)
by doanbactam | 2026-01-29 03:59:14+00:00
I've been using Ollama for local dev, but the model management here seems easier to use. The new UI looks much cleaner than the previous versions. Has anyone benchmarked the server mode against Ollama yet? The model management here is fantastic, but switching environments is a pain if the API compatibility isn't solid. Let's go with a mix of appreciation for the tool and a technical question about integration/performance, as that's classic HN.
by sam537 | 2026-01-29 03:59:56+00:00
I have completely lost track of what I have read and my thoughts. I really should journal.
That being said as somebody else mentioned this is very pleasing to the eye. The UI with no ads and no buy buttons is so refreshing.
I see that some of the covers are from specific editions. Any way to change those? Where are they coming from?
I will give it a try and add a few books and see.
Good job!
by jmyeet | 2026-01-29 04:01:09+00:00
The only thing keeping Tesla afloat currently is tariffs and restrictions on far cheaper and far better foreign alternatives. That's not a solid foundation. It's certainly not a trillion dollar company.

The dam is breaking. We have Canada lowering tariffs and agreeing to allow the import of Chinese EVs (limited, at least to start with) and the US administration goes off on Canada for doing it because they know what it means: crumbling American influence.

South America, Africa and Asia are likely forever lost to Tesla. And European sales are tumbling.

The supercharger network will maintain some inertia for some time but only for so long.

You can see this in Tesla announcements about attempts to diversify. AI robots? I'll believe it when I see it. Robotaxis? Well you're reliant on FSD for that and you have stiff competition in Waymo and who knows what China is cooking up there.

The GP was correct: it's a meme stock. It's no longer an investment in a business. It's an investment in Elon and, more generally, an investment in the administration. There's no fundamental way to predict how that goes and on what time scale. If you want to gamble, gamble. But gamgling is what it is. And, just like Twitter, I guarantee you the people at the top won't be left holding the bag.
by rhplus | 2026-01-29 04:01:21+00:00
The S is simply too expensive. People in the market for $100K+ sedans/coupes are gonna perceive more curb appeal from a Mercedes, Audi, BMW or Porsche.

Tesla crashed the allure of its brand by lowering the price point of the Y and 3. The X and S aren’t different enough to attract $100K+ purchasers.

(It’s one reason why Toyota and other brands use different marks like Lexus for their high end offerings).
by mindslight | 2026-01-29 04:01:31+00:00
The "happy ending" where one of the parents and their three other kids find out that the other parent likely killed the older brother they never met? That doesn't sound very happy to me, but maybe we have different definitions of happy?

When I tried reading into the causes of so-called SIDS it seemed like at least some of the cases were a catch-all diagnosis that included cases where parents inadvertently killed their infants (eg co-sleeping and rolling onto them). Fundamentally I think there often isn't much upside to fully fleshing out the truth of cases where parents have already paid the heaviest price.
by 2III7 | 2026-01-29 04:01:37+00:00
It is understandable that every cable doesn't have to and shouldn't support every feature. USB cables would be insaney overpriced in that case. For simple charging you don't need a high speed 40gbps cable that can connect an external GPU.

To mitigate the confusion, all simple charging cables should be universally labeled as such and all high speed cables should also have some markings that indicate the maximum speed of the cable or something similar.
by necovek | 2026-01-29 04:03:32+00:00
Even with sales tax being on consumption, rich people and their accountants always look how to reduce the burden: say, that trip to Hawaii was a business trip, and that expensive suit a business cost, and sometimes you can claim some of that is "wholesale" purchase to avoid it.

In jurisdictions using VAT (like most of Europe), there are whole schemes like that to effectively reduce your VAT burden through use of company purchasing.
by epiccoleman | 2026-01-29 04:04:23+00:00
A little different than what you're saying, but you reminded me of an experience I had with Inside - which I enjoyed a lot overall, but -

There were a number of puzzles involving pushing boxes around, and something that really irritated me was that I would understand the solution but then have to go implement it by moving around and doing the pushing with somewhat clunky controls.

It was sort of interesting from a gameplay perspective - that feeling of "eureka" followed by "dammit, now I've gotta do this schlep work".
by kukkeliskuu | 2026-01-29 04:06:36+00:00
Most Django projects just need a basic way to execute timed and background tasks. Celery requires seperate containers or nodes, which complicates things unnecessarily. Django 6.0 luckily has tasks framework -- which is backported to earlier django versions has well, which can use the database. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/topics/tasks/
by gussuarez092 | 2026-01-29 04:07:00+00:00
Camerascii — "Let your camera express itself in symbols."

Camerascii is a creative web project that transforms your camera into a new visual language. By combining real-time camera input with ASCII characters, symbols, emojis, and dynamic color effects, Camerascii allows users to generate unique visual compositions directly in the browser.

This project is designed for creators, developers, digital artists, startups, and companies looking for an original visual experience that goes beyond traditional video or image processing. All processing runs locally on the user’s device, with no accounts, no cloud storage, and no external dependencies required.

Camerascii is built using clean and well-structured HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making it easy to understand, customize, and integrate into larger projects, websites, or experimental platforms. The project is ideal for learning, inspiration, creative showcases, or commercial use within exclusive or private environments.

Key Features:

- Real-time camera-based visual rendering
- ASCII, symbols, and emoji-based visual output
- Dynamic color effects and transformations
- Fully client-side (no servers required)
- Lightweight and browser-based
- Customizable and modular code structure

Whether you are exploring new forms of digital expression, building an interactive experience, or acquiring a unique creative web project, Camerascii offers a distinctive approach to visual storytelling through code.
by dang | 2026-01-29 04:09:17+00:00
You guys beat me to it - I was working on the list!

Btw for those wondering about reposts: reposts on HN are just fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and reposts of classics every now and then are good because it's important for new users to learn the classics!

Can an email go 500 miles in 2025? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466030 - July 2025 (122 comments)

Can’t send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37576633 - Sept 2023 (198 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213064 - Nov 2021 (93 comments)

We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775404 - July 2020 (135 comments)

500 miles (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18675375 - Dec 2018 (32 comments)

We can't send mail more than 500 miles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17602158 - July 2018 (1 comment)

The case of the 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676835 - July 2017 (56 comments)

Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13347058 - Jan 2017 (82 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10305377 - Sept 2015 (1 comment)

The 500-mile email (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338708 - April 2015 (139 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701063 - June 2011 (18 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652 - April 2010 (24 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068 - Dec 2008 (28 comments)

The case of the 500-mile email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489 - Feb 2008 (7 comments)
by mh2266 | 2026-01-29 04:09:38+00:00
is it really a puzzle game? I recently dragged myself through The Witness finally and found it to be mostly not that interesting, most puzzle games have bounced off me similarly.

Outer Wilds, though, what a game. but it felt more like exploring in BotW, even although there is obviously no combat... kinda? there is sort of "combat" in one of the planets, although the only thing that you can do is lose. hmm, that planet is like BotW, but you have 3 hearts and a stick, and every enemy is a Lynel.
by text0404 | 2026-01-29 04:09:52+00:00
Exactly. Comply with the armed men and you won't die. Compliance is required for a healthy society. Just comply and you won't be hurt. Compliance is required for a functioning society. Comply and purge society of undesirables. Even if your rights are violated, comply or you will be hurt. Remember America's slogans: land of the free, home of the brave if you comply with the masked mens' orders. Remember the hacker ethos: compliance with the government is required for your safety. Otherwise, you are engaging in domestic terrorism and will be dealt with swiftly by anonymous agents of the state.
by AngryData | 2026-01-29 04:09:53+00:00
Ill believe it when I see people with cash in hand. Otherwise I will continue to believe this is just another financial grift, like everything else billionaires do publicly with their money. If billionaires weren't the most greedy people in existence to start with, they wouldn't have ever become billionaires, they would have learned how meaningless endless greed is 900+ million dollars ago when everything they, their kids, their grand kids, and great grandkids could ever want was already paid for.
by literallywho | 2026-01-29 04:10:18+00:00
I think only the folder is still named Ubuntu12 or something (like Dota 2's folder is still called Dota 2 Beta), libraries in it surely are more recent than that. And even then, native Linux ports of games don't run that well anyway. Especially older ones, like Tomb Raider 2013, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien: Isolaton, those all will run much better over Wine. I kind of expect newer ports to fall apart as well in the future. I was playing Hollow Knight the other day (native port) and it drops FPS quite often on my laptop (hybrid amd+nvidia), while through Wine those drops don't exist almost at all.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-29 04:10:37+00:00
I think it's probably significant and at least as big as the crazification factor https://shebloggedbynight.com/2025/the-27-club-or-lizard-peo...

Of course we haven't actually defined what we mean by significant, so I suppose we will have to drop back to that old standby of 5%.
by AnonC | 2026-01-29 04:10:42+00:00
I actually love Apple for pushing this matter this hard and sticking to its guns. This will bring in more regulatory scrutiny not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well. That will force Apple to give up (maybe in a decade or so) this practice of arbitrary rules and squeezing the last penny from others.

Thanks a lot, Eddy Cue, for all that you do to bring Apple down to its knees!
by gnabgib | 2026-01-29 04:10:48+00:00
A lot of self-promotion in your submissions, may it's time to share something you're curious about.

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html