MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by burkaman | 2026-01-28 21:01:10+00:00
Obviously a lot of this was exaggerated for effect (dare I say attempting to entertain the reader, even though reading for entertainment is apparently obsolete), but I still couldn't agree with any of it. Clearly "everyone alive today has the same perspective" is not true because I can't really imagine having the perspective of the author.

> The average ancient historian led troops, tutored a prince, governed a province, advised a king, made a fortune, fell from favor, was exiled, and buried 7 of their 10 children.

No they didn't? I'm sure there are exceptions but I'm not even sure what exceptional case you're trying to use as the "average". The average ancient historian was a highly educated man who wrote a lot and corresponded with other highly educated people. "advised a king", sure, but it's not that unusual in modern times for academics to be appointed as advisors to world leaders. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a famous case in the US.
by paganel | 2026-01-28 21:01:23+00:00
When it comes to Roman history, and for those that can read French, I heartedly recommend Histoire romaine - Tome 1 - de origines à Auguste, by François Hinard, beats the Mary Beard slop by a very long mile. I only knew the greatest of facts about the Romans going into this book, but after reading I can say I'm way better informed on how the Romans were and thought.

Also, I was literally thinking about these very lines just before clicking on this link:

> The average modern historian passed a few tests then wrote a book on their laptop next to their cat. And worse, they all passed the same tests at the same institutions.

not specifically about historians (even though I mostly had them in mind). Not sure if there's an easy solution for that, at least not when it comes to "soft" sciences. For what it's worth it looks like the scientific departments the less influenced by the Anglo worldview are the least affected by that, but they're getting very few and far between.

[1] https://www.fayard.fr/livre/histoire-romaine-tome-1-97828185...
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-01-28 21:01:25+00:00
I use celery when I need to launch thousands of similar jobs in a batch across any number of available machines, each running multiple processes with multiple threads.

I also use celery when I have a process a user kicked off by clicking a button and they're watching the progress bar in the gui. One process might have 50 tasks, or one really long task.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-28 21:02:29+00:00
I have, or rather, had, a friend that lost it. He was the nicest guy. Then 9/11 happened and both him and his wife got into this 'it's all special effects' (they worked in special effects) thing and there wasn't anything you could do about it. Intelligent, creative, very skilled. But on that subject they were completely dug in and any evidence to the contrary was dismissed. Their parting words were that I must be 'one of them' and we are no longer friends.

There are a couple of subjects that seem to do this to people, immigration is one of them, 9/11 is another. Then there are holocaust deniers and people who seem to - without any kind of prompting - find it in them to be defending the actions of the various strong-arm government components in the United States.

I have no idea if there is something in the water or not but it is very scary to see otherwise intelligent people completely lose it over such objectively simple things. Once dug in the only solution seems to be to dig further and to cut off all input to that might lead to introspection.
by nis0s | 2026-01-28 21:03:09+00:00
Let’s get a reality check. Current agent performances are no where near that kind of threat, and it’s uncertain when we get there.

I think people continue bullshitting in this domain because they’re worried they have no moat, so they have to discourage via sophistry or bold claims.

Don’t take my word for it, here are the stats https://scale.com/leaderboard

For reference, 25% means getting 1 in every 4 question right.

Secondly, if we ever do get to that point, people have lots of social mechanisms they’ve developed over millions of years of evolution which will kick into place. I am not sure anyone dreaming of this “utopia” is then going to be around to see it.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-28 21:03:29+00:00
> the key can be generated and then used to encrypt the disk

Right, you can't recover or copy that specific key, but you also don't have to for accessing your data, if you set up some redundancy before disaster struck.

AFAIK: 99% of your storage is encrypted by a giant fixed unchanging master-key, and that is itself encrypted again with a non-master key/LS or passphrase, which is stored in the remaining "LUKS header". There's room to store multiple copies of the same master-key encrypted with different non-master options.

In that model, the TPM is simply providing (in a convoluted way) its own passphrase for one of those co-equal slots, so having one or more alternates prepared is sufficient to protect your drive from motherboard failure.
by muyuu | 2026-01-28 21:04:03+00:00
idk what other people give passes to, but I had been a Linux desktop user since the mid 90s and Mac laptop user since ~G3 iBook years and I finally gave up on their laptops a few years ago; so it's mainly linux-linux now

i think the last straw was the added telemetry that required so much effort to get rid of, but also for years they have made clear moves to make their laptops iOS-like progressively, which I cannot stand on so many levels
by slwvx | 2026-01-28 21:04:15+00:00
> Contrast Xenophon with Mary Beard, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Cambridge. She holds the same opinions as everyone else at Cambridge. She’s remarked before that, “I actually can’t understand what it would be to be a woman without being a feminist.” This seems like a peculiar failing for an ancient historian.

One can read old books to get a perspective on what "great" old writers think, and one can read Mary Beard to get the perspective of a "great" Cambridge don. You can even read writers that you don't agree with!

The "new books aren't worth reading" title is click-bait as is the rest of the article.
by thunderfork | 2026-01-28 21:04:43+00:00
The market for multiplayer games, shooters especially, is already a mess, because people don't want to play a game that doesn't have an infinite pool of players to matchmake into, or a game that doesn't have all their cosmetics, or... etc. etc.

So this ends up being easier said than done. I've had success, but that's my friend group out of however many.

Try to find a shooter with a playerbase that doesn't use EAC/etc. - it's a crapshoot, unfortunately. You've got Valve's stuff and one or two outliers, but if those don't meet your group's genre needs, you're whomped.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-28 21:04:56+00:00
MAME is an emulator running games in fully emulated machines, Proton/Wine is a compatibility layer that runs games natively by the interfaces they expect.

The closest situation would be with comparing Wine running via CPU translation under ARM or RISC-V with how RPCS3 recompiles PowerPC games to native x86 code, but even then the comparison wouldn't be accurate as RPCS3 still does full system emulation whereas Proton/Wine integrates with the underlying OS.

Proton/Wine is closer to Java/JVM than MAME (or any other emulator) and that is when running on a different CPU than x86/x86_64 as on the latter it is just a PE loader with a bunch of DLLs reimplementing various APIs.
by DarkNova6 | 2026-01-28 21:05:10+00:00
I was mostly having typical application programming languages in mind such as C# and Java. Go doesn't exactly fit that bill and I've seen it be used more for technical plumbing that needs a good concurrency model. And Maven isn't exactly new.

Frankly, PHP also has a very good packet manager with Composer. In general, PHP has done surprisingly good and sane decisions for the language and extremely solid support for static typing by now.

But yeah, Cargo definitely had the benefit of Hindsight.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-01-28 21:05:14+00:00
Agreed. I try to avoid using anything that has this freemium model of opensource, but I let it slide for products that provide enterprise features at a cost.

This feels like core functionality is locked away, and the opensource part is nothing more than a shareware, or demo/learning version.

Edit: I looked into it a bit more, and it seems we can launch multiple worker nodes, which doesn't seem as bad as what I originally thought
by some_random | 2026-01-28 21:05:31+00:00
You and most of the other people in this thread clearly do not understand what's going on here. I and everyone else you're griping about do not give a shit about Slop Spoogers 7 from 1998 running great on Linux, we care about the games that we play with our friends being playable.

https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount

This is what matters, on Windows every single one of these is Native. Switching to Linux will be painful at best until every single one is at least Gold if not Platinum or Native.
by iwanttocomment | 2026-01-28 21:05:37+00:00
> That's cause you're using a distro like mint which is using older builds of stuff.

The context here is that I was commenting on the parent's assertion that one "can just use a pre-configured system like Mint Cinnamon and never know about any of these things." Nope!

> It will continue to degrade for you unless you fully switch to a Wayland DM. Anything built on X11 is basically deprecated now and no one is building on it anymore.

That's my impression as well, and again, with the 2nd most popular Linux distro using X11 by default and with "experimental" Wayland support, that only reinforces my rebuttal of parent's claim.
by ai_critic | 2026-01-28 21:05:47+00:00
This is super neat, don't get me wrong, but....

Please, please, please require HTTPS. Dear god.

The network is not secure.

Your example:

```

# Start a discovery server

python -m server.lad_server --name "My Agent" --port 8080

# Discover agents (in another terminal)

python -m client.lad_client --url http://localhost:8080

```
by calebmer | 2026-01-28 21:06:15+00:00
I spent the last three years building Alpine because when I left Meta I was shocked at how bad the standard Slack/Notion/Jira productivity stack felt compared to Meta's internal tools (Workplace).

Even though each individual tool at Meta was behind the best-in-class tool, the fact that they were integrated made the holistic experience so much better.

Alpine is one thing for you to search, one place for all your notifications, and everything at your company goes into a personalized algorithmic feed. Check it out, let me know what you think.
by rayiner | 2026-01-28 21:06:16+00:00
The article asserts that, since this is a one-time tax, billionaires will have no incentive to leave: "The tax’s designers, however, think they’ve come up with a clever solution to capital flight: a one-off tax that is retroactive, based on a billionaire’s residency status on January 1, 2026. In other words, unless they’ve already fled the state, billionaires won’t be able to move to avoid paying the tax. 'At this point, there’s no financial incentive to leave California,' Zucman said. 'You’re going to pay the same amount either way.'"

That misses the point. A one-time wealth tax to plug holes in the state's finances reeks of short-termism and desperation, like Chicago selling off its parking meters. Even if I wasn't affected by the tax, I'd be alarmed at the implication. It would have been much better to implement a well thought out and orderly recurring tax on capital gains or whatever.
by vinay427 | 2026-01-28 21:06:30+00:00
In the US, you also wave your phone over the card reader, it goes "Pling!" and that's your stuff paid for. The GP comment is not about paying (although it can do that too [1]), but rather about providing their Amazon account details for Amazon Prime discounts and other benefits.

A similar process is the case in the UK as well at Amazon Fresh stores, last I checked.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
by taeric | 2026-01-28 21:06:36+00:00
This hints at a major misunderstanding that, frankly, drives me nuts. If people are getting paid in stock, they pay taxes on the value of the stock they are paid with.

Can they take a loan on existing stock? Yes. You can leverage assets and this, itself, leads to some pretty unfair things. No need to inflate it to the idea that "getting paid in stock means you don't pay taxes."
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-28 21:06:38+00:00
One needs to go a fair ways off the beaten path before they'll start running into trouble like that under macOS and Windows.

For macOS in particular, most trouble that more tinker-y users might encounter disappears if guardrails (immutable system image, etc) are disabled. Virtualization generally "just works" by way of the stock Virtualization.framework and Hypervisor.framework, which virtualization apps like QEMU can then use, but bespoke virtualization like that QEMU also ships with or that built into VirtualBox and VMWare works fine too. No toggles or terminal commands necessary. Linux does get virtualized a lot, but people frequently virtualize Windows and macOS as well.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-28 21:06:38+00:00
Paper checks aren't nearly so common for anything other than maybe a local tradesman or if you're renting from an individual. It's not uncommon to see high traffic places like gas stations refuse paper checks outright, or only accept them from local banks, as the onus is on the receiver if it doesn't clear.

NFC payments have been around for a bit but are only recently very widespread, COVID really pushed that forward.

The only notable big name holdout is Walmart. Somehow, they're still on either chip+pin or magnetic stripe cards only.
by lukan | 2026-01-28 21:07:15+00:00
I mean, what comes after the quote is even worse

"The only people who still read books for entertainment are women who prefer their porn to have DIY visuals. The stats back me up on this. If you’re tempted to disagree, go walk the aisles of Barnes & Noble"

And does not make me want to engage with the article neither for entertainment, nor information.

Either way, no. Reading a book stimulates one own fantasy and imagination in a way no movie can - you have to create the pictures, sounds and sensations of the story by yourself.

Text -> 3D picture

All in the mind, I find that entertaining in a way no movie can, if the text is good.
by like_any_other | 2026-01-28 21:07:22+00:00
> Is there an actual bodycam?

There is, but I may have misremembered that it is on the bodycam video that the wheel direction is visible. In any case, you can see it here (focus on the video, as what the video shows and what the NYT says are not always the same):

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000010648638/ice-shootin...
by observationist | 2026-01-28 21:07:25+00:00
That's how new species happen. Over time, the penguins who get sufficiently tired of all the other penguins' shit march off to the edge of the map, and when they finally get lucky, enough of the smart, independent minded penguins survive to produce a new generation. The new adventure flock eventually garners enough members to march back to the feeding grounds and seize the territory from the loser normy penguins.

Thus the arc of the universe bends towards badass penguins.
by AlanYx | 2026-01-28 21:07:31+00:00
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the conclusion, but from a different perspective. One of the interesting things I've found about literature is that it's hard to fully appreciate the nuances in the decade it's written.

It's a bit like nose blindness; you don't appreciate the subtle way that your house smells until you've been away from it for a while. Books have a similar "smell" in the sense that it becomes easier to see what aspects are tethered to a particular era and what aspects are more universal when some time has passed. Even "fun" works like Snow Crash have aspects of this; there are parts of the book that stand out as pretty timeless and others that feel early 90s-west coast ways of viewing the world and people. When I read it for the first time years ago, none of that really stood out.

Same thing applies to film though. Ignoring pacing, My Dinner with Andre is IMHO way more fascinating to watch today than it was 45 years ago, because what's wheat and what's chaff is clearer in retrospect.
by MengerSponge | 2026-01-28 21:07:44+00:00
Aside from Fusion360, is there a Free (or FOSS) cad package that uses breps and is scriptable?

Fusion360 is just stupid fast at perforations and sophisticated modeling constructions via its python API. I use it because it works well, but I'd be happier if I didn't have to maintain that Autodesk dependency...
by crazygringo | 2026-01-28 21:08:28+00:00
Huh, very interesting.

OK, I just grabbed my loupe to make sure I'm not missing anything, and pulled up an app in dark mode (so ringing should be more visible) on my MBA M4. I'm using its built-in display. I've cycled through all 4 available resolution settings in Display, and absolutely zero artifacts or ringing. Then tried connecting to my LG UltraFine 4K which connects over Thunderbolt, that gives 5 resolution settings instead of 4, and zero artifacts/ringing on any of those either.

So I have no idea what's going on. I don't doubt that you're seeing it, and it's there in that Reddit photo. But maybe it's something specific to external monitors over a certain connection type or something? Seems very strange that Apple would use a different downsampling algorithm under different circumstances though.

I'd normally assume the most likely culprit would be some kind of sharpening setting on a monitor, as that can absolutely cause the type of ringing seen in that Reddit photo. But on the other hand, if you're testing it right now and not seeing it at native 2x, then that would seem to be ruled out, at least in your case. Maybe it's some kind of resolution negotiation mismatch where it's actually the monitor applying a second scaling that has ringing, since monitors can accept signals that don't match their native hardware resolution?
by olafmol | 2026-01-28 21:08:32+00:00
Almost nothing i assume. NI really lost the plot several years ago when the original founders left the company. Crappy after-sales support, lack of product vision and corresponding crappy execution, and a ton of technical debt all over their product-range. Plus competitors made better/right moves, came alongside, and then moved faster and better, leaving NI in the dust. It's sad to see a company that once was leading in several categories now in this state.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-28 21:08:35+00:00
So the attacker compromises the user's device ... and then sets up a MitM? This is making about as much sense as the typical Hollywood plot that involves computers so I guess that means we're on track.

> Priviledge escalation on an old OS version allows an attacker to get root access.

At which point hardware attestation accomplishes nothing. Running in an enclave might but attesting the OS image that was used to boot most certainly won't.

Many consumers use older devices. Any banking app is forced to support them or they will lose customers. There's no way around that. (It doesn't matter anyway because these sorts of attacks simply aren't commonplace.)

> but malware does exist.

I didn't ask for an example of malware. I asked you to point to an example of a widespread attack against secured accounts using malware as a vector. You have invented some utterly unrealistic scenario that simply isn't a concern in the real world for a consumer banking interaction.

You're describing the sort of high effort targeted attack utilizing one or more zero days that a high level government official might be subject to.
by dang | 2026-01-28 21:08:51+00:00
> The pull request is to delete the project

Ouch. Please don't attack someone's work this way. It's way too aggressive and against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I'm sure you didn't intend it as an attack, but it's all too easy to cross into poisoning the community without meaning to. Swipes like that are well over the line. Many people have been hounded into abandoning HN because of this type of thing, or at least into never sharing their work again. We all lose when that happens.

It's a pity, because what you wrote was otherwise a fine contribution. if you had begun your comment at the good part ("It looks like a nice alternative [etc.]") it would have been great.
by Pet_Ant | 2026-01-28 21:08:52+00:00
My personal favourite work of his is "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga". Most of the people are doing immediate purposeful work and are much more present. There is so much resilience (the bear destroyed hut), and there is also tragedy in it as well (the fire).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_People:_A_Year_in_the_Ta...
by FateOfNations | 2026-01-28 21:09:07+00:00
Thankfully no signatures involved. You roll up, swipe/dip/tap your card in a reader on the gas pump, enter your postal code (archaic security measure from the pre-chip card era), wait a few moments for the electronic authorization (they pre-authorize an amount in the $75-150 range), then pump, and leave.

If you are paying cash, you generally have to go inside before pumping and prepay, and then go back inside afterwards to get your change, if applicable.
Show HN: Ziva – Cursor for Godot Game Engine
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2026-01-28 21:09:08+00:00
After returning to game development a couple months ago, it felt like the stone age. Unlike most software, game development is massively sped up by Game Engines which support building 3D models, scenes, physics, etc - Which means no Cursor, and no Claude Code.

Godot is one of the fastest growing game engines on the market, but the existing AI agent plugins kinda blow.

Ziva is built on top of ~50 MCP tools for doing things like code, animations, tilemaps, scene generation, node customization and more. The agent-loop is client side for lower latency, and we let the user pick whichever model they want. I know HN likes to ask "Where's the proof that AI makes you faster?", so we did some user testing (n=26); the median time for users building a relatively simple game with Ziva was over 2x faster (88 min -> 37 min).

Happy to answer any questions about Ziva/building agent loops/MCP tooling/game dev you might have :). And if you're a game dev - come check try it out!
by some_random | 2026-01-28 21:09:13+00:00
First off, a hell of a lot more of those top 50 are unplayable. But more importantly the thing that you are ignoring is that every single one works on Windows. By choosing to use Linux you are choosing to not be able to play these games and an unknown number of future games for... what? If you only have a PC to play games with your friends, what could possibly be more important to you than the ability to play games with your friends?
by makeramen | 2026-01-28 21:09:47+00:00
> The fact that I can unlock and relock the bootloader is not a security issue or a risk. People who don't know what that means cannot possibly do it by mistake.

The second sentence is false. Lots of people blindly follow things and don't understand consequences until they brick their devices. Those who don’t break something won’t notice if they’ve silently backdoored themselves.

People asking for support after getting themselves into some weird hole they never should have been in because some friend or online article said so is super common.