MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2026-01-02 15:50:11+00:00
You seem to have lost the plot here. I started out by saying Apple is anticompetitive in plenty of areas.

But that's not what the conversation is about. I pointed out that in this area, it doesn't appear to be.

So I don't know why you keep pushing this PDF. It doesn't say anything about this specific area. I already checked.

And if you don't care about what Firefox does, then I think it's clear you're not having this conversation in good faith. You're not open to evidence or counter-argument, you just have a knee-jerk reaction that Apple is bad. Well, I'm not going to waste any more time with someone who "doesn't care" about the most obvious counterpoint to their argument.
by acabal | 2026-01-02 15:50:16+00:00
The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain, including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license. (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files, except for SE Blackletter when necessary, which is a font we developed especially for our use based on public domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-02 15:51:06+00:00
In the US I have noticed that the tier 2/3 tech cities SWE salaries seemed to raise a bit with covid and level off. The Tier 1 tech cities they seem to (outside of AI) have dropped a bit after the covid boom amid massive layoffs. Remote seems to be kind of independent of location but I see some remote places paying more Tier 2/3 level salaries
by vitaelabitur | 2026-01-02 15:51:13+00:00
Yeah, but I tried switching to minified JSON on a semantic labelling task and saw a ~5% accuracy drop.

I suspect this happened because most of the pre-training corpus was pretty-printed JSON, and the LLM was forced to derail from likely path and also lost all "visual cues" of nesting depth.

This might happen here too, but maybe to a lesser extent. Anyways, I'll stop building castles in the air now and try it sometime.
by OutOfHere | 2026-01-02 15:51:15+00:00
Agreed, although the issue is that it's damn difficult to find something real that is at the intersection of: (1) pleasing users, (2) making them pay, (3) actually being useful, (4) being possible to get off the ground without a huge investment in time or money, and (5) remaining profitable or even revenue-generating for at least say three years before competition or evolution gets to it. It's a lot easier to hack something nice when you don't have to sell it.
by belter | 2026-01-02 15:51:28+00:00
I suspect Netflix built the Simian Army largely out of necessity, since at the time, AWS did not offer much native ways to deliberately inject failure or validate resilience or compliance at scale.

Today, many of these ideas map directly to some of their managed services like AWS Fault Injection Simulator, AWS Resilience Hub, or AWS Config, AWS Inspector, Security Hub, GuardDuty, and IAM Access Analyzer for example.

There is also a big third-party ecosystem (Gremlin, LitmusChaos, Chaos Mesh, Steadybit, etc...) offering similar capabilities, often with better multi-cloud or CI/CD integration.

Some of these Netflix tools, I dont think they get much maintenance now, but as free options, they can be cheaper to run than AWS managed services or Marketplace offerings...
by amtamt | 2026-01-02 15:51:32+00:00
While this is a sound theoritical advice, the real world has changed a lot.
Parents and elder siblings are not the only people kids interact with. For every parent mindful of dangers of unsupervised internet access, there are many parents who give unrestricted access to tiktok (and rest of the internet) because everyone other person does that, and then kids share.

Businesses don't care for the careful minority when they know such advices will be shared, silencing those who really care.

Even the feature name "parental control" is chosen to induce guilt in parents.
by juanmiruadev | 2026-01-02 15:51:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on Rescathena, an early-stage open initiative exploring how blockchain technology could be used to support transparency and accountability in social and humanitarian contexts — without hype, tokens, or speculative incentives.

The project is intentionally slow, open, and experimental.
Right now, I’m less interested in “building fast” and more interested in thinking well about:

governance

trust

incentives beyond money

where decentralized tech actually helps (and where it doesn’t)

I’m sharing this here because I’m curious to hear from people who:

care about social impact or public good

are skeptical but open-minded about blockchain

might want to contribute ideas, research, writing, or code over time

No pressure, no roadmap promises — just an honest attempt to explore a hard problem in the open.

Project page: https://rescathena.com/

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, critique, or pointers to people/communities thinking along similar lines.
by weli | 2026-01-02 15:51:42+00:00
I agree with you so much. Great parenting is education, not restriction. I don't want my kid to not talk to strangers because I told him its something bad that you shouldn't do. He won't talk to strangers because he understands the implications and what can happen.

A kid with no education and restricted access will just find a way to do whatever he wants to do. A kid with good education and unrestricted access will know to steer away from bad stuff and talk to adults when he finds something strange.

One of the proudest moments of my grandfather (in my household, he was the most tech savy) was when I found a way to "bypass" an restriction program around age 11. From then on he decided I "outgrew" this kind of limits and just gave me unlimited access to the family computer and the internet.

But years later he confessed, the "click" moment for him was not that I could bypass the restriction, but that I trusted him enough to show him and that I self-reported the situation. And this is pure education and has nothing to do with restrictions.

I read so many parents here that want to "educate" their children but want to offload that work to some service or program instead of putting the work in. You prefer spending 5 hours configuring your child's nintendo switch rather than sitting down with him for 1 hour to explain to him what he can encounter on the internet, how he should behave and react and building the bond needed for him to trust you enough to come to you when needed.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-02 15:51:59+00:00
I've had another annoying problem with some gigs recently where the employer insisted on MacOS for developer workstations.

While I (generally) like the hardware, I don't like the UX in MacOS but more than that I have a strong distaste for having my runtime deployment environment be entirely different from my working environment. I prefer to eat my own dogfood and have Linux all the way through, and I really like my own tooling and configuration I've set up over the years.

I had a job recently where the whole deployment stack was NixOS (to Aarch64) but the issued devices were Mac laptops, and you couldn't even build the software on MacOS (not even Nix Darwin) so had to do everything inside Parallells etc and it was a giant PITA.

I've never understood why .. if you're going to pay people six figure salaries for their time why would you slow them down with process and tooling that makes them less efficient...
by odyssey7 | 2026-01-02 15:52:09+00:00
UC Berkeley: “Top-level functional equivalence requires that, for any possible set of inputs x, the two pieces of code produce the same output. … testing, or input-output (I/O) equivalence, is the default correctness metric used by the community. … It is infeasible to guarantee full top-level functional equivalence (i.e., equivalence for any value of x) with testing since this would require testing on a number of inputs so large as to be
practically infinite.”

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2025/EECS-2025-...
by xp84 | 2026-01-02 15:52:30+00:00
Handbrake is fine if you truly need to reencode (aka “transcode”) your video, but if you find yourself with a video that your player can’t read, you might be able to just change the container format (remux it) using ffmpeg, copying the video and audio streams directly across.

With video there are 3 formats: the video stream itself, the audio stream itself, and the container (only the container is knowable from the extension). Formats could technically be combined in any combination.

The video stream especially is costly in CPU to encode, and can degrade quality significantly to transcode so it’s just a shame to re-encode if the original codec is usable.

Container format mkv is notorious for not being supported out of the box on lots of consumer devices, even if they might have codecs for the audio and video streams they typically contain. (It has cool features geeks like, though, but for some reason it gets less support.)
by acabal | 2026-01-02 15:52:33+00:00
We have a list of wanted ebooks here: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks

First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started.

Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted
by olliepro | 2026-01-02 15:52:56+00:00
Three things that shook me awake to the idea that the information barrage of the internet is a tranquilizer/red herring:

- Bad Mental Health: At the start of the war in Ukraine I read/listened to the news every day. I’d frequently cry, hearing an interview from someone who was trapped in a bombed out building etc. After a few weeks I realized I was being emotionally exhausted by something around the world about which I had no control.

- Enshitification: Working for a b2b “tech/coding education web app” company as a data scientist and realizing the perversity of incentives which were ruining the product.

- Increasing Opportunity Cost: Working on LLMs and realizing that the possibilities for what I could do were expanding because I would now have more answers and information at my fingertips than ever before.

Great post… it was useful to be able to reflect and understand my experiences with these abstractions.
by RankingMember | 2026-01-02 15:52:59+00:00
> Tastes differ, but 30-45 minutes a month to hand-key data (or write the scripts that avoid that) isn't my taste.

I'd wager it isn't most peoples' taste, which is why the off-the-shelf cloud-based options are as popular as they are. I see people in here doing things like writing PDF statement parsers and then dealing with the maintenance that this strategy entails whenever formatting changes and, well, I appreciate the people to whom this appeals, but I am not one of those people. :)
by _wire_ | 2026-01-02 15:53:29+00:00
U.S. is most media saturated realm in the world. Americans minds have been saturated by artificial information for 50 years and since mid-2000 FAANG the American psyche is cracking apart with the strain. In 2025 AI is amplifying the psychic chaos and creating an economic existential disaster while accelerating the most tragic and corrosive aspects of monetary wealth. But others than this, what's to hate?
by mothballed | 2026-01-02 15:53:46+00:00
It's not a federal law, you can buy and drink alcohol at 18 in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico for instance, so definitely possible to drinking at 18 legally in the USA. I don't know if there is a federal drinking age but it's definitely not above 18.

Also in I want to say about half the states (could be wrong here, but at least a few), it is legal to drink well below 18 in a private home.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-02 15:54:28+00:00
Some popular selections with discussion so far:

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453204

Hacking Washing Machines [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46428496

Escaping containment: A security analysis of FreeBSD jails [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436828

All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411930
by avtar | 2026-01-02 15:54:36+00:00
Learning effort aside, there’s also the ZFS hardware requirements issue. I bought a four bay NAS couple years ago and looked into TrueNAS. I (somewhat) remember coming across details such as ZFS benefitting from larger amounts of ECC RAM and higher number of drives than what I had. This post covers details about different types of caches and resource requirements:

https://www.45drives.com/community/articles/zfs-caching/
by jez | 2026-01-02 15:54:39+00:00
Less can be configured with a ~/.lesskey file

I have a single line in my config[1] which binds s to back-scroll, so that d and s are right next to each other and I can quickly page up/down with one hand.

If you’re on macOS, you may not be able to use this unless you install less from Homebrew, or otherwise replace the default less.[2]

[1] https://github.com/jez/dotfiles/blob/master/lesskey#L2

[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27269/is-less1-mis...
by paxys | 2026-01-02 15:54:45+00:00
Everyone - not just America - hates AI, because it has now become clear that the tool isn't a way to empower the masses (as it was initially sold) but instead to move power and wealth up the ladder. Automated (shit) customer support. AI interviewing. Brainrot content creation. Deepfakes. Parasocial relationships. Dangerous medical advice/therapy. Propaganda. Surveillance.

AI is simply not making anyone's life better, so what's there to love exactly?
by garylauchina | 2026-01-02 15:55:01+00:00
Small correction on my own post: I just went back and measured things properly and… I was way off.

The codebase isn’t ~30k lines anymore – it’s around 223k lines of code, plus about 243k lines of Markdown (research notes, design docs, experiment logs, etc.). So the “large system + context window” pain I’m describing is happening at a significantly bigger scale than I initially claimed.

Which also explains why I’ve become slightly obsessed with measurement, contracts, and forcing everything through text before letting the “programmer” AI touch the code.
by scotty79 | 2026-01-02 15:55:11+00:00
> Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center?

Yes. At some point the demand will be so high that imported workers won't suffice and local population will need to be trained and hired.

> And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built?

They are going to be moved to a new place where the datacenters will need to be built next. Mobility if the workforce was often cited as one of the greatest strengths of US economy.
by acabal | 2026-01-02 15:55:34+00:00
As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930).

We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art that was convenient. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published.

(My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!)

1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if possible. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels...

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...
by palata | 2026-01-02 15:55:42+00:00
Android/iOS do sandbox user apps by default, for instance. When you run a script on Linux, it has access to everything your user has.

Access control is also more advanced, e.g. apps need to request permissions to the user. Not saying that desktop OSes are not making progress, but they are behind.

I don't know if Qubes qualifies here. Qubes runs Linux instances in VMs to compartmentalise them, but then each Linux instance has the Linux security model.
by koiueo | 2026-01-02 15:55:46+00:00
By your logic if a father made love to a mother as a symbolic gesture and didn't intend to have a kid, then it's totally ok to murder the kid 40 years later. Just restoring historical justice, right?

I have a good dozen of friends from Crimea despite visiting Crimea just a few times as a little kid – thousands of young people were forced out of their homes.

The russian logic is very perverted, yet completely predictable. If you are a national minority (even if your 7% claim was true) surrounded by russians, you should leave, and all your belongings should be redistributed among russians.
But if you are a russian minority surrounded by different nations, then everyone around you should learn russian language, respect russian culture, otherwise russian tanks will come. Or maybe they won't, but only for the sake of global stability (otherwise it's justified)
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-02 15:56:04+00:00
The issue is, and always will be, 3rd party trust. You cannot assume your child is safe using XYZ until you thoroughly audit the app/game/device and enumerate all their loopholes, plug-ins, and rushed updates. The sensical method would be a device-wide deny all firewall rule, where no TCP connection is allowed in or out without explicit parental consent. E.g. Alice wants to chat with Bob via chatmonkey. Approve this one time connection? Good luck finding anything on the market that supports and enforces this very sane level of parental control.
by frantathefranta | 2026-01-02 15:56:49+00:00
This is obviously anecdata but I was back home in Central Europe over Christmas and a staggering amount of people use ChatGPT (in public). Most usage I've seen was on public transit and in restaurants. My mom has replaced her Google usage with ChatGPT. Meanwhile in the US, my friend group makes it a point of pride to not use "AI" for anything, and 90% are not in tech. I had a feeling that us Americans are being forced to use Copilot/Gemini/whatever more than Europeans and have slightly more animosity towards it.
Show HN: Text-to-3D Motion Generator (Hunyuan 1.0 wrapper)
by yeekal | 2026-01-02 15:56:51+00:00
Hi everyone,

I built a UI for the new open-source Hunyuan Motion model to generate 3D animations from text:
https://hy-motion.ai

It generates BVH files instantly. I'm trying to bridge the gap between "cool AI demo" and "useful game dev tool".

Question for 3D devs/animators:

If you were to use this in production, what is the single biggest missing feature?

1. Export Pipeline: Auto-conversion to FBX for Unity/Unreal?
2. Motion Fusion: Blending multiple prompts into one long sequence?
3. Rig Variety: Support for non-humanoid skeletons?

Feedback is much appreciated.
by jlarocco | 2026-01-02 15:56:53+00:00
I think people see through it as a way for corporations to cut spending and jobs while offering a lower quality product.

My apartment complex recently switched to an "AI assistant" that replaced the front office person. I haven't heard a single positive thing about it from anybody. It's utterly terrible, and they're absolutely not "passing the savings on" to residents by lowering rents.

Even with "vibe coding", we accept that it does a shit job, because it does an "okay enough" shit job that it's often usable.
by DELTA-X | 2026-01-02 15:57:03+00:00
This work proposes ΔX (DELTA X), a non-decision AI governance framework.

Core rule:
If an AI interaction does not produce a measurable positive delta (ΔX > 0),
the system must halt or remain silent.

AI is strictly limited to:
- measurement
- verification
- conformity checks

Humans retain:
- intent
- trade-offs
- accountability

The framework is documented as a fully auditable corpus (27 PDFs),
with explicit stop conditions and human-responsibility invariants.

Silence is treated as a valid output, not a failure mode.

Feedback and critique welcome.
by layer8 | 2026-01-02 15:57:06+00:00
> In December of 2015, audiences will once again return to the cinemas -- as ancient peoples once gathered round a fire or into an amphitheater -- and collectively partake in the magic of myth. As Lucas and Campbell sat together in front of a silver screen to share an experience, so too shall we with our friends and family. It’s time for another good story!

Well, that wasn’t to be, unfortunately.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-02 15:57:22+00:00
I mean, I have to verify stuff in human-written tutorials too. Humans are wrong all the time.

A lot of it is just, are its explanations consistent? Does the code produce the expected result?

Like, if you're learning ray-tracing and writing code as you go, either it works or it doesn't. If the LLM is giving you wrong information, you're going to figure that out really fast.

In practice, it's just not really an issue. It's the same way I find mistakes in textbooks -- something doesn't quite add up, you look it up elsewhere, and discover the book has a typo or error.

Like, when I learn with an LLM, I'm not blindly memorizing isolated facts it gives me. I'm working through an area, often with concrete examples, pushing back on what seems confusing, until getting to a state where things make sense. Errors tend to reveal themselves very quickly.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-02 15:57:34+00:00
Sorry, I misunderstood you. My comment was comparing the cost of DIY hardware with buying a Gb10 based system. I thought you'd meant I should pay someone $5/hr to build manage the hardware for me (presumably by outsourcing).

The cloud is fine, if you're OK with your workload being on someone else's computer. I'm not. Plus with my usage levels I would be in the red within 2 months when comparing costs.

Your point about server hardware might make sense for some folks. I haven't actually looked, because in my case I'm using it as a dev system that sits on my desk. Part of it's appeal is that it's small/quiet.

I COULD opt to just buy the hardware and get a real server though, since I run my spark headless. I just assumed the cost of colo'ing it someplace would rule that out. I haven't actually done the math though. Have you?
by gordian-mind | 2026-01-02 15:57:49+00:00
Reading this, I kept wondering whether it would stay on the technical level or whether it would immediately start broadcasting the author’s cultural politics. It does, and the first giveaway is the kind of sentence you’ve seen a thousand times:

“These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.”

That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause.

And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.”

The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on.

So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.