MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-21 00:46:15+00:00
I have a love/hate relationship with soft deleted. There are cases where it’s not really a delete but rather a historical fact. For example, let’s say I have a table which stores an employee’s current hourly rate. They are hired at say $15/hour, then go to $17 six months later, then to $20/hour three months later. All of these three things are true and I want to be able to query which rate the employee had on a specific date even after their rate had changed. When I have a starts_on and an ends_on dates and the latter is nullable, with some data consistency logic I can create a linear history of compensation and can query historical and current data the same exact way. I also get

But this is such a huge PITA because you constantly have to mind if any given object has this setup or not and what if related objects have different start/end dates? And something like a scheduled raise for next year to $22/hour can get funny if I then try to insert that just for July it will be $24/hour (this would take my single record for next year and split it into two and then you gotta figure out which gets the original ID and which is the new row.

Another alternative to this is a pattern where you store the current state and separately you store mutations. So you have a compensation table and a compensation_mutations table which says how to evolve a specific row in a compensation table and when. The mutations for anything in the future can be deleted but the past ones cannot which lets you reconstruct who did what, when, and why. But this also has drawbacks. One of them is that you can’t query historical data the same way as current data. You also have to somehow apply these mutations (cron job? DB trigger?)

And of course there are database extensions that allow soft deletes but I have never tried them for vague portability reasons (as if anyone ever moved off Postgres).
by prats226 | 2026-01-21 00:48:15+00:00
Instead of markdown -> LLM to get JSON, you can just train a slightly bigger model which you can constrain decode to give JSON rightaway.
https://huggingface.co/nanonets/Nanonets-OCR2-3B

We recently published a cookbook for constrained decoding here:
https://nanonets.com/cookbooks/structured-llm-outputs/
by nospice | 2026-01-21 00:49:20+00:00
Big Tech can afford to be selective, so if you don't have a degree, the basic answer is that you need to stand out in some other way. This can be several years of interesting industry experience or other publicly-visible work (open source code, winning some competition, or even having a good blog). It also helps to know someone who works there and can help you get the first interview.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-21 00:49:25+00:00
Both companies bought a set of taxis in the past. Presumably at the same time if we want this comparison to be easy to understand.

If company A still has debt from that, company B has that much debt plus more debt from buying a new set of taxis.

Refreshing your equipment more often means that you're spending more per year on equipment. If you do it too often, then even if the new equipment is better you lose money overall.

If company B wants to undercut company A, their advantage from better equipment has to overcome the cost of switching.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-01-21 00:49:31+00:00
I actually went to get away from some friends, whom were presenting that year (they needed prep time — and I needed escape). Top 10 memories made by myself out at Hoover Dam, watching as the bypass got completed (that is another incredible feat of engineering).

Definitely a cool experience, and I'm glad I did. My last year attending DEF CON me and a Hadoop buddy (nobodies) just walked up onto a stage [during a terrible presentation] and started drinking whiskey with the ESL speaker (again: nobodies) — predicting we'd get banned from attending (but didn't — nobody cared... audience appreciated the break from hard-to-understandings).
by m132 | 2026-01-21 00:51:09+00:00
Linux out of all those three is very specific in that it can be configured to be perfectly secure and, at the same time, if you explicitly ask it to shoot you in the foot, it will.

Generally the out-of-the-box experience of Ubuntu and Fedora is at least as secure or better than that of Windows. macOS tends to lean towards a more hardened configuration. Matching that is possible (Android being a great example), but will require some work on your part and is generally not worth it unless you download and run untrusted software.

And one area where desktop Linux really shines is how easy it makes it to only limit yourself to software you can generally trust: that in the default repositories. If you use a well-maintained distribution, keep your system up to date, and only use software that your distribution delivers, chances of your machine getting compromised by anything other than a strictly targeted attack are very slim.

It's understandable that eventually you might want to run third-party software. In that case, I'd definitely advise against running random scripts or commands from the Internet, especially the `curl | bash` kind, and adding third-party repositories to your system unless you absolutely trust their source. This and running out-of-date Internet-facing software are the most common attack vectors.

For third-party software, consider using Flatpak (desktop) and Podman/Docker (server). These sandbox software by default, limiting the damage it can do to your system. With Flatpak, always pay attention to what permissions your application will be granted (those are listed at installation time) and try to limit their scope as narrowly as possible. You can manage the permissions with `flatpak info -M` and `flatpak override`. There's also Flatseal, a GUI alternative which I personally haven't tried.

One more thing to watch out for: extensions. Some software, such as Visual Studio Code and derivatives, has very lax policies on extensions. Even if you install it from a trusted source, but then install an untrusted extension, the extension will run with full access to your files! If you're using such programs, I recommend installing them in Flatpak and limiting their permissions as well. I've been burned by some VSCode extensions in the official marketplace that immediately contacted Chinese IPs upon installation.

Of course, those are tips for those looking to get started. Long-time users interested in hardening should definitely look into SELinux, seccomp, namespaces, and their associated utilities.
by jerrythegerbil | 2026-01-21 00:51:36+00:00
There’s a lot going on in this blog. Interestingly, the core mechanism at play here is the http-01 challenge validations which they state is fetched by the CA over HTTPS. This is particularly amusing when you consider that http-01 is explicitly NOT HTTPS (it’s HTTP), and this is actually the entire reason there’s a different code path to take.

The modern web requires secure (HTTPS) context for many things to work, so it’s commonplace to do so “HTTPS enforcement”; all requests are forcibly upgraded to HTTPS. However, you can’t do that to the CA when it’s performing a http-01 challenge validation. This necessitates a “well known” URL route be used for challenges so that they can very deliberately take a different code path that doesn’t enforce HTTPS (and be routed differently).

This is true of basically every ACME client used for http-01 challenges, not just cloudflare. So while they’ve unfortunately missed the mark on correctly explaining the mechanism at play here, I hope that I succeeded in making it a bit more clear. Other implementations are, of course, similarly exploitable.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-21 00:51:39+00:00
I don't think the European cops are all that much better people, even if not as murderous.

Living in Paris a couple of years ago I used to regularly see cops street racing to a local restaurant for lunch with their sirens on. Their driving style was basically exactly what you'd expect street-racer kids in Eastern Europe.

That kind of casual abuse of power is very telling.
by big_toast | 2026-01-21 00:51:51+00:00
I largely agree with you on the relative scales.

But I definitely notice a pretty significant portion of the academic CS community are beginning to materialize on bluesky. You can probably start with Nathan Lambert (natolambert) or Jeremy Howard's bsky and branch out from there. (They tend to be schelling points for open AI networks, simonw also, swyx would be if he started using bsky also.)

Paper skygest curates people you follow into a feed of posts mentioning papers if you want to cut down on other noise. (https://bsky.app/profile/paper-feed.bsky.social)

You can browse starter packs (https://github.com/stevendborrelli/bluesky-tech-starter-pack...) to get an idea of where the communities are forming. For instance, the macOS/iOS people I used to follow on twitter are posting more on bluesky. If steipete started posting there, that would be half my twitter/x feed anyway..
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-21 00:52:00+00:00
Not great up here in Vancouver either - lots of rain but not snow. The problem with this is that even though we'll have full reservoirs at the start of the summer, when the rain ends, we deplete the lakes rapidly, and that slope downward gets steeper every year. It really makes me think that we'll need more dams, more reservoirs, to hold in more of the precious fresh water rather than letting it all run out. All winter long the rivers have been at really high flow rates because the lakes are full and the dams are wide open letting it go... but we'll miss that water in a few months!
by al_borland | 2026-01-21 00:52:17+00:00
Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago.

Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
by causalscience | 2026-01-21 00:52:18+00:00
> An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized (scientific, technical or other) opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion".

Thanks for reinforcing my point.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-21 00:53:17+00:00
I mean if we really cared about this one bit we'd stop making a car based society in the US and save far more energy and pollution. That's not politically expedient and there are powerful vested interests in ensuring it doesn't happen.

That's why I think most of this data center energy use, especially over longer terms is a joke. Data center can pretty easily run on solar and wind energy if we spend even a small amount to political capital to make it happen.
by heresie-dabord | 2026-01-21 00:53:57+00:00
"Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The phenomenon is named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. [...] variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns.

The Earth's rotation around its axis, and revolution around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the Solar System. The variations are complex, but a few cycles are dominant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
by ComputerGuru | 2026-01-21 00:54:02+00:00
Sibling comment mentions less space but also your alternative doesn’t (naively) handle supporting values that differ but hash to the same value.

Of course the hash index also outperforms a unique (btree) index on top of separately calculating the hash, in addition to the storage overhead, row bloat, lack of guarantees regarding the hash unless you expose it to Postgres as a user-defined function AND add a check constraint.
by tadfisher | 2026-01-21 00:54:57+00:00
Ironically this is because of federation; if your carrier just uses Jibe (e.g. if you live in the US) then you don't deal with spam because Google has effective tools and a profit motive.

Also ironic: Google spent a decade forcing the world's carriers onto the worst messaging standard, only to end up where they started with Google Talk and XMPP; they are the only ones with significant market share on the protocol.
by fooker | 2026-01-21 00:55:35+00:00
> so maybe you mean you’d love to buy a discounted one

Yes. I'd expect 4 year old hardware used constantly in a datacenter to cost less than when it was new!

(And just in case you did not look carefully, most of the ebay listings are scams. The actual product pictured in those are A100 workstation GPUs.)
by Aloisius | 2026-01-21 00:55:38+00:00
While definitely not a startup, the National Archives made https://clintonwhitehouse1.archives.gov/ and https://clintonwhitehouse2.archives.gov/ IPv6-only.

While I don't think a couple administration's website archives are enough to drive adoption, one could imagine there might be some government resources that might.

Of course, it's not readily apparent to someone without IPv6 why they can't connect to an IPv6-only site.
by jtbulluw | 2026-01-21 00:55:44+00:00
Here’s how we went from first commit to production-ready: PostgreSQL, Redis, Stripe, NextAuth, 99.74% test coverage, 3,621 passing tests, and $825.69 in JetBrains AI credits over 12 days of intensive development — a number that reveals hard truths about AI-assisted development economics at scale.
by Majromax | 2026-01-21 00:55:56+00:00
From this article:

> For the purposes of this post, I’ll use the figures from the 100,000 “maximum”–Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.5 both have context windows of 200,000 tokens, and I run up against them regularly–to generate pessimistic estimates. So, ~390 Wh/MTok input, ~1950 Wh/MTok output.

Expensive commercial energy would be 30¢ per kWh in the US, so the energy cost implied by these figures would be about 12¢/MTok input and 60¢/MTok output. Anthropic's API cost for Opus 4.5 is $5/MTok input and $25/MTok output, nearly two orders of magnitude higher than these figures.

The direct energy cost of inference is still covered even if you assume that Claude Max/etc plans are offering a tenfold subsidy over the API cost.
by rainsford | 2026-01-21 00:56:21+00:00
Any reasonable substantive analysis of the situation can't possibly limit itself to just the direct benefits of "having Denmark in our camp", especially considering the context of this thread. Would having the support of Denmark be the make or break factor in a war between the US and China? Almost certainly no. Would the second and third order effects of the US ending its alliance with Denmark and/or NATO, and potentially turning them into enemies, by forcibly taking over Danish territory or something similar impact the US ability to fight a war with China? Almost certainly yes.
by raddan | 2026-01-21 00:57:01+00:00
At the university level in the US, few faculty get any kind of training before they are expected to start teaching. And the teaching requirement is more or less “do no harm.” If you’re at a research university, which includes many publicly funded universities, then your career trajectory is based almost exclusively on your research output. I could go on, but it suffices to say that it’s not surprising that the teaching could be better.

That said, most institutions have teacher training resources for faculty. I was fortunate to be able to work intensely with a mentor for a summer, and it improved my teaching dramatically. Still, teaching is hard. Students sometimes know—but often don’t know—what is best for their learning. It’s easy to conflate student satisfaction with teaching effectiveness. The former is definitely an important ingredient, but there’s a lot more to it, and a really effective teacher knows when to employ tools (eg quizzes) that students really do not like.

I am frequently amused by the thought that here we have a bunch of people who have paid tons of money, set aside a significant fraction of their time, and nominally want to learn a subject that they signed up for; and yet, they still won’t sit down and actually do the reading unless they are going to be quizzes on it.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-21 00:57:28+00:00
I would never debate NAT was marketed as security (as marketing is often detached from the reality of what's being sold) but I'd be interested why it's a material factor in securing networks independent of the stateful firewall mentioned which most seem to actually rely on.

I.e. it would seem whatever argument could be made about security from NAT, poor or not, would be immaterial in context of stateful session tracking with outbound originate allowed alone w/o doing the NAT on top.
by mdotk | 2026-01-21 00:58:07+00:00
I actually built a tool called FlowPDF - https://www.flowpdf.app/ - specifically to solve this "logic" problem. I found that single-button tools were too limiting for things like "Merge -> Check Size -> Compress".

It uses a node-based graph so you can literally string those steps together (e.g., Merge files -> Split out page 35 -> Compress the rest) and save it as a repeatable workflow.
by mdotk | 2026-01-21 00:59:20+00:00
I've been working on exactly this with FlowPDF (https://www.flowpdf.app/). It was a huge pain to find a tool that didn't rely on Google APIs.

I integrated a local translation model. It downloads the model to your browser cache on the first run (so it's a bit heavy initially), but after that, you can OCR and translate documents 100% offline without uploading anything.
by freeopinion | 2026-01-21 00:59:39+00:00
NAT absolutely does provide good security. It denies all incoming traffic that is not part of an established connection.

Of course, that can be accomplished trivially without NAT. It can be done in IPv4 and in IPv6 with the simplest of routing rules.

So there is nothing about a lack of NAT in IPv6 that makes it less secure.
by ashishb | 2026-01-21 00:59:54+00:00
As someone who has multiple mobile apps as side projects, I can tell you that app maintenance is not easy. [1]

And that's why all good apps either come as a largesse of those whose bills are paid by some other initiative. Or have the scale to make money from ads without being intrusive.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214835
by anonnon | 2026-01-21 01:00:40+00:00
> Soft power is a thing

This is the usual claptrap Euros and Eurosimps come up with when Americans gripe about subsidizing Europe's defense. "Soft power" isn't putting more money in Americans' pockets, and the primary beneficiaries of NATO clearly didn't like us very much even before Trump's return, when Biden was still president and the aid flowed freely to Kyiv: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/views-of-the-u...

Sweden: 47% had a favorable opinion of the US.; German: 49%; France: 46%; The Netherlands: 48%

This is the "soft power" that Americans should rue having lost under Trump? A continent of entitled ingrates?
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-21 01:00:41+00:00
> I pointed out that Denmark is a country the size of Maryland and couldn't meaningfully move the needle in any serious engagement involving the U.S. military. If the U.S. went to war with China, having Denmark in our camp versus not having Denmark in our camp would make literally no difference.

Destroying NATO and our relations with the western states that have heretofore been either formal allies or friends-inclined-to-cooperate with the US has much wider consequences than not having Denmark “in our camp”, both on security issues in the narrowest physical sense and on the broad range of softer issues that impact the security landscape, as the almost immediately way the current crisis over Greenland has resulted in overtures from erstwhile allies to China demonstrates pretty dramatically.
by cyberax | 2026-01-21 01:00:44+00:00
> LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/, and all the others could build their own RCS client

And it will be useless. They likely won't be able to connect to their mobile network's RCS or to Google's RCS. A user with an official Android phone will be able to reach you only over regular SMS.

The way RCS works, the mobile _operator_ uses your corresponder's phone number to look up their RCS server. So that's also why RCS connectivity is so patchy, not all cell phone operators peer with each other.

> I get why people want Google to just stuff their RCS library into open source Android the same way they do SMS/MMS, but to say it's impossible to write a client for, especially when running at the permission level MicroG runs at, is not the whole truth.

It is. The Google's RCS endpoint requires attestation that is available through Play API only.

My personal advice is to avoid RCS at all costs, and use something that is not infested by mobile phone operators or Apple.
by panopticon | 2026-01-21 01:00:54+00:00
> I hope there's some layer between Apple and Gemini

In the press release Apple said they will be running this on their own hardware (both on-device and private cloud). They're not going to be directly routing requests to Gemini hosted by Google.

This obviously doesn't preclude some kind of data sharing arrangement, but there is at least some indirection between the two.
by nojs | 2026-01-21 01:01:24+00:00
It seems like everyone wants to avoid running a local VM manually and I'm not sure why. It's a very simple solution that solves all these issues.

If you're on a Mac working on a linux docker containers, your Docker engine is already running a VM (and a linux VM doesn't need one). So you're still only "one VM away" from the real environment. Most IDEs support directly working in the VM via SSH if you need to inspect the code.

You then run --dangerously-skip-permissions and do all changes via PRs. I have been running this combined with workmux [0] for a couple of months and highly recommend it. You can one-shot several whole PRs concurrently with this setup.

The reason it beats a cloud VM is because when you're running multiple concurrent copies of all containers in a project, it quickly eats up memory. Running a cloud VM 24/7 with high enough memory is expensive.

0. https://github.com/raine/workmux
by mdotk | 2026-01-21 01:01:38+00:00
You're right, the market is flooded with simple "button grid" apps. That saturation is actually why I built FlowPDF.

I didn't want another list of basic tools; I wanted to chain them. I built a node-based editor so you can create actual pipelines (Merge -> OCR -> Filter -> Compress) rather than just doing one-off tasks.

I think that's the only way to actually add value over the 50 other "Hello World" clones.

https://www.flowpdf.app/ if you wanna check it out!
by donw | 2026-01-21 01:02:30+00:00
I mentioned this to Claude and this was the response:

Ha! The irony is not lost on anyone.

"We've built the world's most advanced AI coding assistant. It can refactor entire codebases, debug complex issues, and ship production features autonomously. Anyway, here's a terminal bug that makes your screen look like a slot machine. We'll get to it eventually."
by ipnon | 2026-01-21 01:02:36+00:00
I think this number is derived from the water used to create all the goods they consume. Let's say every American eats 1lb of beef per day, and nothing else, to create a simple model. Then every American has a water footprint of about 1,850 gallons.

[0] https://watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-wate...