MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-28 23:22:45+00:00
Hang on. The OP gets a paper statement already (there's a picture). If the email address is correct, and OP does nothing, what's the worst that could happen?

If the bank wants to waste time and energy with this nonsense, that's their business. As long as nothing real bad can happen, let them at it.

I don't think I'd be inclined to do the "bank's job" when it affects me not a bit. As sure as eggs is eggs, I wouldn't spend hours on the phone or chatline explaining what their problem is. It seems like it's their problems and not the OP's.
by vhantz | 2026-01-28 23:22:59+00:00
Real nice project!

If you removed the explicit declaration of every gate in a preamble and then their wiring as a separate step, you could reduce the boilerplate a lot. This example could look like this:

component FullAdder(A, B, Cin) -> (Sum, Cout)
{
A XOR B -> AxB
A AND B -> AB

AxB XOR Cin -> S
(AxB AND Cin) OR AB -> C

Sum: S
Cout: C
}
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 23:23:51+00:00
I find it absolutely crazy how I spent around 20 minutes trying to find the rough estimates and predictions with everything to essentially summarize into the same statement which you wrote.

Although I would consider that even reddit might not be enough to cause a death wall if the infrastructure behind it is organized.

There could be a software mis configuration option, I find it the most plausible option personally.
by gwern | 2026-01-28 23:25:11+00:00
> E.g. gemini-3-pro tops the lmarena text chart today at 1488 vs 1346 for gpt-4o-2024-05-13. That's a win rate of 70% (where 50% is equal chance of winning) over 1.5 years. Meanwhile, even the open weights stuff OpenAI gave away last summer scores between the two.

Why do you care about LM Arena? It has so many problems, and the fact that no one would suggest using GPT-4o for doing math or coding right now, or much of anything, should tell you that a 'win rate of 70%' does not mean whatever it looks like it means. (Does GPT-4o solve roughly as many Erdos questions as gemini-3-pro...? Can you write roughly as good poetry?)
by gomoboo | 2026-01-28 23:25:32+00:00
I love reading battlefield notes like this for RAG/search systems. Anyone shooting for useful output is going to hit the same pain points but each article like this has a different set of solutions.

I’m leaning on OpenAI for my embedding needs but will be trying llama-server in the future. I stuck with Postgres because it was easy to run it on my Dokku installation. Great to know sqlite is an option there too. My corpus is too small for Postgres to elect to use an index so it’s running the full table scans that sqlite would. For seeding I use a msgpack file and ship that with the code when deploying.

This is my site: https://customelon.com (niche need of tariff and excise information for shipping to The Bahamas)

It’s built with ASP.NET, Postgres/pgvector, and OpenAI embedding/LLMs. Ingestion is via Textract with a lot of chunking helpers to preserve context layered on top.

Again, great article.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-28 23:25:38+00:00
> Why is this set to 400ms?

I can't test it on my current computer, but does the setting affect menus that are triggered by hovering over something?

If so, then 400ms makes more sense, and the real bug is that menus summoned by an explicit click should be exempt from the delay.

The reason for a hover-delay is that it allows someone to flick their mouse to their real destination without triggering a "trap" of content which pops up on the way to obscure their goals.
by michaelt | 2026-01-28 23:25:48+00:00
In my experience, big corporate employers get extremely nervous when their employees start doing anything high profile (i.e. successful) in the political sphere.

After all, if 250 people report to me, probably some of them are going to have opinion A and some are going to have opinion B. If I take a strong public stance in support of A and against B, some of the more nervous B supporters are going to worry I hate them personally and fear I'm a threat to their career - and they're probably going to go to HR about it.

And even if my job doesn't give me any hiring-and-firing powers - if I'm high profile enough that a load of random haters decide they're going to try to get me fired by subjecting my employer to a campaign of harassment, well, now folks like HR and customer services are getting harassed.

Obviously, though, I've never seen a corporation have a blanket policy saying employees can't engage with the political system - that would be pretty bad as a policy. Instead they'll quote policies about 'bringing the company into disrepute' and similar.
by Amorymeltzer | 2026-01-28 23:26:00+00:00
There was a discussion recently on the Wikimedia wikitech-l discussion list, and one participant had a comment I appreciated:

>I'm of the opinion if people can tell you are using an LLM you are using it
wrong.

They continued:

>It's still expected that you fully understand any patch you submit. I
think if you use an LLM to help you nobody would complain or really notice,
but if you blindly submit an LLM authored patch without understanding how
it works people will get frustrated with you very quickly.

<https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists...>
by ColinWright | 2026-01-28 23:26:06+00:00
Hmm.

This was a long time ago, so we didn't have GPUs or fancy rendering h/ware. We addressed every pixel individually.

So a radar image was painted to the screen, and then the next update was painted on top of that. But that just gives the live radar image ... we wanted moving objects to leave "snail trails".

So what you do for each update is:

* Decrement the existing pixel;

* Update the pixel with the max of the incoming value and the decremented value.

This then leaves stationary targets in place, and anything that's moving leaves a trail behind it so when you look at the screen it's instantly obvious where everything is, and how fast they're moving.

Ideally you'd want to decrement every pixel by one every tenth of a second or so, but that wasn't possible with the h/ware speed we had. So instead we decremented every Nth pixel by D and cycled through the pixels.

But that created stripes, so we needed to access the pixels in a pseudo-random fashion without leaving stripes. The area we were painting was 1024x1024, so what we did was start at the zeroth pixel and step by a prime number size, wrapping around. But what prime number?

We chose a prime close to (2^20)/phi. (Actually we didn't, but that was the starting point for a more complex calculation)

Since phi has no good rational approximation, this didn't leave stripes. It created an evenly spread speckle pattern. The rate of fade was controlled by changing D, and it was very effective.

Worked a treat on our limited hardware (ARM7 on a RiscPC) and easy enough to program directly in ARM assembler.
by habinero | 2026-01-28 23:26:17+00:00
Agreed. Humans are insanely good at figuring out intent and context, and running stuff through an LLM breaks that.

The times I've had to communicate IRL in a language I don't speak well, I do my best to speak slowly and enunciate and trust they'll try their best to figure it out. It's usually pretty obvious what you're asking lol. (Also a lot of people just reply with "Can I help you?" in English lol)

I've occasionally had to email sites in languages I don't speak (to tell them about malware or whatever) and I write up a message in the simplest, most basic English I can. I run that through machine translation that starts out with "This was generated by Google Translate" and include both in the email.

Just do your best to communicate intent and meaning, and don't worry about sounding like an idiot.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-28 23:26:39+00:00
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me.

It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.
by ggfdh | 2026-01-28 23:26:47+00:00
> That left a roughly $20 billion annual shortfall in California’s health-care budget. … In response, one of the state’s largest health-care-employee unions teamed up with a group of progressive economists and lawyers to come up with a way to make up the difference: impose a one-off 5 percent wealth tax on California’s billionaires.

It’s wild how dominant this proposal is. Not reducing costs. Not cutting benefits. Not a broader tax increase. Not a combination of ideas. Just “f*k these guys in particular.” If this is what passes for governance in California I’d leave too.
by mbreese | 2026-01-28 23:26:59+00:00
> I can almost guarantee this is from some endpoint management software your company installed.

I know you're getting hammered on this, but this is also an indicting statement. If your brand-new OS requires you to have endpoint management that locks it down so much that it affects how long it takes to open files, that's on the OS, not the endpoint management.

Okay, it's on both... endpoint management as a rule is horribly written software, which is shocking knowing how intrusive it is into the system. But, if the OS has so many vulnerabilities that you're required to have endpoint management, that's not a good look on the OS.

My current and former $JOB both required endpoint management on Macs (and a limited amount for folks who used Linux), so it's not a blanket statement. But the impact of the endpoint software on Mac and Linux were still much lower. That is, once I figured out that a certain (redundant) enterprise firewall was crashing my work Mac anytime I plugged in a USB network adapter.
Ask HN: Who does online joins anymore?
by simianwords | 2026-01-28 23:27:20+00:00
This is probably the only place I can ask this and get coherent answers.

Do people really still do online SQL joins for read type queries that tolerate eventual consistency (this is the most common type of read btw)?

If so, why do joins? Why not materialise the correct shape of the data and use it directly? Surely storage is cheaper than having to spend compute doing online joins. Doesn't doing joins online hurt latency?

I could be missing something obvious. But if I am right, in what case do online joins make sense?
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-28 23:27:47+00:00
>I'd also be weary with your examples; many hospitals are experiencing effective strikes or law firms that capitulated are struggling finding clients or lost valuable workers.

Well yes. That was partially my point. Tech is no different; there's a lot of companies capitulating but I see a huge surge of people speaking out against this. Even people you largely think of as non-partisan previously. I don't think it's fair to pit me into some fascist state because of a company I no longer work for nor perhaps never worked for.

But tech lacks the unions that other industries have and by its nature is a lot more scattered out. I can't do much more than the ones criticizing the companies with regards to providing a "Dutch resistance"; I don't work for them (heck, I don't even have a full time job as of now) and I've done a lot of culling of what I use over the decade. Probably more than what many have done, but still seemingly insignificant in terms of their bottom line.

I'm all for collective action, but I'm still looking for that collection. It seems like things need to get as bad as Minneapolis before that collection emerges.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-28 23:27:47+00:00
Today out of curiosity, I tried looking at what is the cost of one PVA (Pre-verified account) of google. I found it to be around ~$0.03 (3 cents) or it could be an amazon account idk or maybe an youtube account

Like my point is that atleast for amazon/yt, these bots usually cost this much ~$0.03 to buy once.

Then we probably see a scammer buy many of these accounts and then (rent it?) on their own website/telegram groups to promtoe views/ratings etc./ comment with the porn ridden bots that we saw on youtube who will copy any previous comment and paste it and so on.

So technically these still cost 3 cents & scammers are happily paying the rate.
by wordpad | 2026-01-28 23:27:52+00:00
I don't see why AI would be able to help you solve all your legacy code problems.

It still struggles making changes to large code bases, but it doesn't have any problems explaining those code bases to you helping you research or troubleshoot functionality 10x faster, especially if you're knowledgable enough not to take it at its responses as gospel but willing to have the conversation. A simple layman prompt of "are you sure X does Y for Z reason? Then what about Q?" will quickly get to them bottom of any functionality. 1 million token context window is very capable if you manage that context window properly with high level information and not just your raw code base.

And once you understand the problem and required solution, AI won't have any problems producing high quality working code for you, be it in RUST or COBOL.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-28 23:28:48+00:00
1. This would not deter bad actors in any way, spammers already have no issue paying for junk mail. An 0.01 cost means nothing if the action they're taking generates more than 0.01 for them (it generally does). In fact this essentially incentivizes bad actors; you get punished for not profiting off your messages, so people would be more inclined to find ways to monetize their posts.

2. The costs for this would be ridiculous. I have probably sent over a million public messages on Discord in the decade I've been using it. $10,000 is a pretty steep fee to do some chatting.

3. This is essentially a digital ID scheme with extra steps, and requires ceding privacy completely to communicate on the internet.

I understand your comment was probably an off-hand joke and not to be taken seriously but if you think about it for very long it becomes apparent that it would actually make the problem worse.
by fasterik | 2026-01-28 23:28:52+00:00
This is a nuanced point that anti-science people often get wrong.

The existence of fraudulent studies, dishonest researchers, the replication crisis, etc. does not invalidate science as an institution. It just means we need to be careful about distinguishing between individual opinions and the scientific consensus. We also need to keep in mind that the consensus is never 100% correct; it's always subject to change and we need to update our beliefs as new evidence comes in.
by AuthAuth | 2026-01-28 23:29:01+00:00
It is a real problem but its presented in a misleading way.

If you inherit a farm worth 1m and you have to pay estate taxes on that of 100k. You do not have to sell the farm, you can instead take out a mortgage to cover that 100k.

When we frame it that we its still very fair to the person inheriting the farm because who wouldnt want a $1m farm for 100k.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-28 23:29:12+00:00
>I really don’t understand this attitude.

It's not an attitude, it's an observation. Corporations almost never change their behaviors because of protests and people bitching about them. It's one of the least effective ways of implementing change, especially when said company holds a locked in/monopoly position.

The thing is the end consumer is mostly hidden from the problems of Apples over charging, it deeply affects the companies selling services on the Apple platforms. What would affect Apple far more is not consumers not buying, but a huge part of the people offering on Apples market pulling out. But, Apple has that game rigged to. Particular suppliers get special deals with far lower costs. The competitors to those suppliers are now screwed. Apple will not offer them lower costs (again, Apple hides these contracts until they eventually get disclosed in court), every other company ends up paying a huge Apple tax because pulling out hand the competitor a huge market.

Honestly I'm fine with Apple charging whatever it wants for on its store. I am not fine with Apple selling you what should be a general purpose device and saying only its store can be used. Competitive stores on the device would quickly break Apple of it's monopoly behavior.
by rav3ndust | 2026-01-28 23:29:35+00:00
i like a few multiplayer shooters, fortnite being one of them. i also exclusively use gnu/linux on my machines, so i got around this issue of games like fortnite/battlefield/etc issue a long time ago by simply doing what i've always done for years, playing these on xbox. i even 'stream' these games to my linux machine from my xbox if i want to play them from the computer with the xbox controller, and can join and create xbox live parties through the xbox web interface.

i only do this for those couple of games i play with friends that won't support linux because of the aforementioned rootkit it wants to run on windows machines. console for those games, and all my other games run happily either through steam+proton or natively on linux, and there are a fair few FOSS games with amazing multiplayer. i love luanti, xonotic, openarena, veloren, etc, and play them frequently with some friends. :)
by tim333 | 2026-01-28 23:29:35+00:00
The whole business of invading neighboring countries to grab their land seems a bit out of date these days. After WW2 most countries decided it was a bad idea and signed agreements to not do it and there hasn't been that much since.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait but that didn't work out well for him. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan didn't work out that well for the invaders. About the only one I can think of that worked ok for the invaders was China taking Tibet in 1950.

I think Putin doesn't use the internet and was reading history books from a century ago before the invasion. I'm not sure the strategy works very well anymore.
by randycupertino | 2026-01-28 23:29:48+00:00
My favorite one is "Emo JD Vance" with the heavy eyeliner and the scene haircut: https://www.amazon.com/Vance-Meme-Emo-Republican-Conservativ...

Yassified Vance, which a Republican congressman actually created and posted as a legit fan edit is also very funny: https://x.com/KatAbughazaleh/status/1841491297145634831
by sejje | 2026-01-28 23:30:21+00:00
I guess you mean informed people. There's a whole lot of smart people in this thread who aren't talking about differentials.

I don't know shit about tariffs, except what everyone said in the news. It was going to tank the economy. Everyone's retirement was going to poof into smoke. Everything was going to cost 2 or 3x previous prices. None of that came to pass.

I bought gas at 2.27 a couple hours ago. Groceries are cheaper than last year. I'm personally making more money than I was a year ago. My business depends on other people having entertainment/spending money.

I'm just a dummy though, so I can't glean some expert insight into the differential. I don't have a model for you, just the real world.

How do you think the economy is doing? What do the differential impact models, that aren't a waste of time, say about it?
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-28 23:30:38+00:00
> And yeah, chinese models, but look at what they did to tiktok. No way they are going to let the Chinese government be peoples confidants

You're playing wack-a-mole with a paper mallet against a tank brigade. It's not only China, the EU is going to compete too in the "5-10 yr horizon".

The Chinese manage to compete while deprived of top semiconductor gear, which happens to be made only in the EU.

The Chinese models don't have to stay in China, they can be fine-tuned and used by many other countries, named differently, etc. Even if you try to block them all, others won't which would put the US in a sever competitive disadvantage, inflated and isolated, the dollar will be in the sewer, who cares how much openAI makes.
by avadodin | 2026-01-28 23:31:25+00:00
Firmware upgrades don't need to use the same protocols. Without secure boot any applet can take a security hole escalate and persist until you take a trip to a zone of interest.
With secure-boot+attestation, the vendors can choose not to let you download the latest map data, report you to the authorities, etc.

Why do people take DA as "Hail Satan" anyways.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-28 23:31:38+00:00
> Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it

Do you think the government is going to react with mass nationalisation of private companies to fight wealth inequality? What would the threshold be? The top 1% owning half of everything? 70%? I share no such optimism. The wealthy already have their interests much better represented in politics than their share of votes should allow (and this is a really difficult problem to tackle!), this is only gonna get worse and any government action against rich people interests is going to be increasingly difficult to trigger and sustain.

Even if such mass nationalisation happened, why would you expect a better final outcome than every attempt at communism got (while doing the same thing): Namely, government just splitting up those spoils with their cronies?
by tannerc | 2026-01-28 23:32:00+00:00
If you read his original draft you can see how much of it was still carried over, as well as how his original writing conveys much of your same arguments that an AI wrote the final text.

I don’t think your point is as strong as you believe it is.

Lastly, I work directly with AI models and utilize all popular generators every single day, so I don’t know why you think you’re the expert here.
by bb88 | 2026-01-28 23:32:02+00:00
You may already know this, this is meant for others hitting this issue frankly.

In Django, you can count the number of queries in a unit test. You don't need 1M objects in the unit test, but maybe 30 in your case.

If the unit code uses more than X queries, then you should assume you have an N+1 bug. Like if you have 3 prefetch related and 2 select related's on 30 objects, but you end up with more than 30 queries, then you have an N+1 someplace.

Even better that unit test will protect you from hitting that error in the future in that chunk of code accessing that table.
by kreetx | 2026-01-28 23:33:21+00:00
I don't live in the US and do agree that Trump is hectic at times. I don't really argue for ICE because of some emotional reason.

Trump had deportions of illegals on his agenda, they were creating trouble at certain locations (perhaps a tiny minority on US map), people voted Trump, he is keeping his promises. The protesters probably don't even know who is being currently captured..

They are protesting against the democratic outcome. But don't understand that when you're the minority, you can't have both the (1) "what you want", and (2) democracy.
by thewebguyd | 2026-01-28 23:34:13+00:00
Yeah. Iirc, I used to have to pay $0.20 per SMS message, sent and received, before unlimited plans became a thing. Also had a limited amount of minutes for phone calls.

I remember Verizon wireless at the time had a plan with unlimited nights and weekends for calls and texts, so my friends and I would message each other like crazy on the weekends when it was free. Got grounded when I got my first girlfriend in high school for racking up the phone bill from text messages and promptly got my phone taken away.