MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by resters | 2026-01-30 22:59:47+00:00
For the sake of friendly discussion (I realize this is tangential), my (unusual) take on China is:

Authoritarianism doesn't emerge for its own sake—it emerges when a population is politically engaged enough to threaten state control. China has a long history of mass mobilization and popular unrest: peasant rebellions, labor strikes, and yes, the events of 1989. This creates pressure for centralized authority. The United States, by contrast, has an unusually passive citizenry—low voter turnout, widespread political disengagement, and a culture that channels grievances into consumption rather than collective action. American "freedom" has been cheap to maintain because it's rarely exercised.

But when Americans do resist, what happens?

Consider Alex Pretti and Tank Man. Tank Man stood before a column of tanks and was not fired upon in that iconic moment. Alex Pretti stood with a phone, intervened nonviolently to protect a woman who had been shoved to the ground, and was shot ten times by federal agents while surrounded and pinned. One government showed restraint in its most infamous moment of confrontation; the other did not.

But the deeper contrast is in the aftermath. The Chinese government never claimed Tank Man attacked the tanks. The US administration, by contrast, immediately constructed an elaborate counter-narrative—claiming Pretti "attacked" officers and committed "domestic terrorism"—directly contradicted by multiple verified videos showing him holding a phone with his hand raised. The ugliness isn't just in the violence; it's in the brazen dishonesty that follows.

And this is not an isolated data point. Consider the broader picture: the US incarcerates more people per capita than any nation on Earth—2.3 million people, disproportionately poor and non-white, warehoused in a system that functions as social control while calling itself justice. Tiananmen was a visible atrocity. American incarceration is a slow, normalized one. Compare the casualties of a single crackdown to the bodies ground through American courts and prisons year after year, and ask which system has produced more human suffering.

Then add the architecture being built around it: the constitutional dead zone within 100 miles of any border, where Fourth Amendment protections evaporate. Masked federal agents operating in cities whose elected officials cannot stop them. Surveillance contracts expanding the state's reach into private life. A president willing to undermine the Federal Reserve for short-term political gain.

Meanwhile, China maintains tighter monetary policy, invests heavily in infrastructure and foundational technology, and takes a longer view of economic development. One can criticize its system on many grounds—but the American narrative of authoritarian dysfunction versus democratic flourishing looks increasingly like projection.
by swed420 | 2026-01-30 23:00:23+00:00
No. Once again you're referring to liberals even if you don't know it.

You might be confused because several forces want you to be exactly that:

1) The right lumps/conflates everything from centrist liberal to far left as "the far radical left" with no in-between, which blurs many lines.

2) Center liberals who want a social media veneer they can feel good about will literally pose as leftists/marxists, but if you look at their other beliefs and behaviors (were they trying to sink Bernie, or not?) then it becomes immediately obvious they're ultimately loyal to the Dem party, and that means center liberals serving capital interests.

But I can't blame you or anyone else for falling for the above unless you've seen enough to know, like following both of Bernie's presidential runs and how he was systematically smeared by both liberals and their corporate media.
by thepoet | 2026-01-30 23:00:34+00:00
This looks cool, congratulations. We investigated WASM for our use case but then turned to Apple containers which run 1:1 mapped to a microVM for local use here, which is being used by a bunch of folks https://github.com/instavm/coderunner

We are currently also building a solution InstaVM which is ideologically the same but for cloud https://instavm.io
by edb_123 | 2026-01-30 23:00:42+00:00
So they're basically role-playing or dry-running something with certain similarities to an emergent form of consciousness but without the ability of taking real-world action, and there's no need to run for the hills quite yet?

But when these ideas can be formed, and words and instructions can be made, communicated and improved upon continuously in an autonomous manner, this (assumably) dry-run can't be far away from things escalating rather quickly?
by crote | 2026-01-30 23:00:47+00:00
It's the same with KiCad!

Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist.

Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs.

It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.
by hd4 | 2026-01-30 23:00:49+00:00
Fair to assume trillions of the physical metal weren't simultaneously dumped onto the market in the past day; this is entirely ETF driven therefore it's also safe to assume there is manipulation taking place to drive the price down.

What I don't understand is why, when there appear to be signs of a supply shortage, market forces appear to want to drive the price down and cause any remaining inventory to flow towards China where there is a $30~/oz arbitrage to be made.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-30 23:00:53+00:00
> but the full manuscript isn’t out yet.

Aww that's bad.

I remember years ago they claimed that a bacterium was using arsenic instead of phosphorus - turns out the data they produced was all made up:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258

This was here in this article most likely not the case, I assume, but still it is bad to talk about the data without having published the article already.
by k310 | 2026-01-30 23:01:14+00:00
Bill Gates issues FURIOUS response to Epstein files claim he slept with Russian 'girls' and caught STD... and suggests late pedophile was desperate to be his friend [0]

> In a rare statement that clearly conveys the depths of his anger over the latest Epstein files release, a spokesperson for the Microsoft billionaire told the Daily Mail: 'These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false.

> 'The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein's frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.'

I couldn't find a copy of Gates' full reply.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15514221/bill-gates...
by jdietrich | 2026-01-30 23:02:51+00:00
Lithium primary cells have a shallower discharge curve than alkaline, but not completely flat; measuring state-of-charge is essentially trivial for any competent design engineer. Medtronic specifically recommend FR6 lithium cells in their insulin pumps.

https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/l91.pdf

https://www.medtronicdiabetes.com/sites/default/files/librar...
by tunesmith | 2026-01-30 23:02:59+00:00
I think a super common problem with any todo system is the "capture anything" mindset. They've even redefined what "focus" means, like now it just means to focus on whatever thing you're focused on at that moment.

Focus is supposed to mean you have a clear idea of who you are and what you need to work on, and also what you don't.

So I've taken to follow a (bespoke) process where I identify what my own personal principles are, and what priorities and efforts they imply. Then, of all the "oh I could/should do this" potential tasks that occur to me, I have an out: if it doesn't align with my own personal focus, then I can delete it.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-30 23:03:13+00:00
I just keep it simple. I have very simple todo lists and work on them
as I feel like it.

A few ruby scripts help a bit automatically cleaning them up, keeping
track of their status and what not - but at the end of the day they are
just text files really. I would not want to make this more complicated
than that. My brain kind of is the real decider what is the main priority.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2026-01-30 23:03:21+00:00
I think the reason why people are willing to believe this company's PR statement (and would be much more hesitant to believe some others) is that there have so far been relatively few publicized incidents overall, and AFAIK none where Waymo was caught lying/downplaying.

> Who at Waymo will face similar consequences or risk for the same outcome?

I'd argue that the general pushback against self-driving cars and immense PR and regulatory attention makes the consequences of accidents much more severe for the company than for a driver. (For comparison: How many kids do you think were hit by human drivers in the past month in the same general area, and how many of them made international news?)

I highly doubt a non-distracted driver going at/below the speed limit hitting a child that darted into the road would be at any realistic risk of facing jail time, especially in the US.
by losvedir | 2026-01-30 23:03:48+00:00
They're saying that the volume of the silver market is such that "tiktok influencers" and their followers (i.e. "retail" traders, not institutional investors or mega corporations hedging their supply chain) are insignificant in affecting the price. This is not a situation like bankrupt Gamestop.

I'm seeing the 30% price drop, e.g., here: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/metals/precious/silver.volu..., which shows a volume of 300k contracts, where each contract is 5,000 ounces of silver, for a notional value of more than $100 BILLION dollars. Now, that much money didn't necessarily change hands but tiktokers and their followers are not going to realistically move the needle there still.
by joemazerino | 2026-01-30 23:04:12+00:00
This may be a weird take for some but I don't care if cartel members or fraudsters get the right to privacy. That's not why I've been following and donating to the EFF since the mid 90s.

Making sure I get unfettered access to the OS I run and devices I buy is a good cause. Defending criminals (many violent) or directly interfering with law enforcement doing it's job is not.
by xenodium | 2026-01-30 23:04:31+00:00
I had been hoarding links/notes to movies/tv shows for some time, saved to a plain text file. Often by sharing links from other apps (ie. Reddit or Letterboxd), paired with hashtags, using an iOS app I built.

Finally extracted the data for these hashtags and fed it to an LLM to organize. I'm happy with the result https://xenodium.com/film-tv-bookmarks-chaos-resolved
by swed420 | 2026-01-30 23:04:55+00:00
No. Pre-Musk twitter was a liberal cesspool (and now it's a conservative one). Most of those liberals jumped ship to Bluesky.

Again, that's not to say lefists don't exist, but they are a tiny fraction, and always were a tiny fraction no matter what platform.

Don't rule out bots that exist in numbers to make the actual left appear like a deranged spectacle as a form of controlled opposition. Both parties of capital interests have a role in and benefit from these.
by its_ethan | 2026-01-30 23:05:03+00:00
What is it that you're arguing for then? That there be some entity that gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of all of our excess money? Who gets to decide what's excess? Who gets to decide what is and isn't a productive use of the money?

How is this any different than buying a house? Buying a house that's already been built is pretty damn close to the same thing as buying gold. No new "work" is being done into the economy, you're just exchanging dollars for an asset that will likely appreciate a bit faster than inflation but less than $SPY.

The person you bought it from can do something else with that money, sure, but that's also true of the other person in your transaction to buy gold.

Maybe you'll say a house has more utility than bars of gold, but all of this at the end of the day, seems to come down to your specific views and judgements of what it means for capital to be used productively. So to circle back to the beginning, what is it you're advocating for here? That because you don't see gold as a low risk hedge against inflation as being "productive" it should face more taxes to incentivize it not happening?
by tobyjsullivan | 2026-01-30 23:05:25+00:00
Isn’t this a form of what he labels the “human coefficient”?

Some businesses prefer tools built by other businesses for some tasks. The author advocates pretty plainly to identify and target those opportunities if that’s your strength.

I think his point is to recognize that’s moving toward a niche rather than the norm (on the spectrum of all software to be built).
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-30 23:05:43+00:00
That seems like exactly the wrong lesson to learn from LLM "AI". Under no circumstances does such an "AI" understand anything, much less important semantics, so human understanding becomes that much more important.

I realize that director level managers may not get this because they've always lived and worked in the domain of "vibes" but that doesn't mean it's not true
by delaminator | 2026-01-30 23:05:54+00:00
"can you get me some anti-biotics"

not

"can you get me some anti-biotics, I've got an std from a russian child prostitute"

you can buy anti-biotics over the counter in plenty of places in the world

In 2000, a teenage kid name Raphael Gray made himself famous by hacking into some credit card records, ordering Viagra on Bill Gates personal credit card and having it delivered to Gates' home address.
by jonathanstrange | 2026-01-30 23:06:10+00:00
My take, and also perhaps hope, is that the kind of software has best survival chances that is developed by reasonable, down to earth people who understand human needs and desires well, have some overall vision, and create tools that just work and don't waste the user's time. Whether that is created with the help of AI or not might not matter much in the end.

On a side note, any kind of formula that contains what appears to be a variable on the left hand side that appears nowhere on the right hand side deranges my sense of beauty.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-30 23:06:44+00:00
Cool. Some people complained about broken demos, I uploaded the mdwiki.info [1] website unaltered and seems to work fine [0]. MDwiki is a single .html file that fetches custom markdown via ajax relative to the html file and renders it via Javascript.

[0]: https://peerweb.lol/?orc=b549f37bb4519d1abd2952483610b8078e6...

[1]: https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/
by echelon | 2026-01-30 23:07:05+00:00
It's funny to see as a joke, but you can go the other way with this too. Image editing models and LoRAs for "previz-to-render upscaling" workflows are actually incredibly useful.

I was just writing about this (scroll about halfway down to the images of Sam Altman - though if you like that, do watch the second video):

https://getartcraft.com/news/world-models-for-film

The best model I've found for this, that almost bakes in full ControlNet capability, is oddly gpt-image-1.5. It's absolutely OP at understanding how to turn low-fidelity renders into final draft upscales.

Here are some older experiments:

https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U

https://imgur.com/gallery/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij...

https://imgur.com/aOliGY4

I just wish it didn't require invoking such heavy-weight, slow, and expensive models to do this. I'm sure open models will do this work soon, though.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-30 23:07:32+00:00
The PLATFFORM from a game publisher's perspective is still going to be Steam/Proton on Linux... More likely than not, it's all still mostly going to be Win32/64, but with improved Proton testing/targetting... this will be for SteamOS or Steam on other Linux distros... it's the same.

From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.

But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.

Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.
by cyrusradfar | 2026-01-30 23:07:34+00:00
The metaphor I'd use is, can you understand the a story if you don't read it in the original language? Code is a language that describes the function.

I want to say, I've lived through the time (briefly) where folks felt if you didn't understand the memory management or, even assembly, level ops of code, you're not going to be able to make it great.

High level languages, obviously, are a counter-argument that demonstrate that you don't necessarily need to understand all the details to deliver an differentiable experience.

Personally, I can get pretty far with a high-level mental model and deeper model of key high-throughput areas in the system. Most individuals aren't optimizing a system, they're building on top of a core innovation.

At the core you need to understand the system.

Code is A language that describes it but there's others and arguably, in a lot of cases, a nice visual language goes much further for our minds to operate on.
by sharadov | 2026-01-30 23:07:59+00:00
Trump announces Warsh and this happens. Can't be a coincidence.

Incidentally Warsh's father in law is billionaire Ronald Lauder who is trying to get Trump to capture Greenland. Sounds like father-in-law got him the role.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...
by SantalBlush | 2026-01-30 23:08:12+00:00
>Poof! There goes any point in investing in gold and silver.

This is not how taxes work at all, my guy. There is a thing called tax elasticity, which is a measure of the proportional change in buying/selling to change in taxation. If you want to have a good-faith discussion about taxes, at least acknowledge that these measures exist instead of pretending that any degree of taxation makes economic activity go "Poof!". It's intellectually dishonest and is not useful conversation.
by viraptor | 2026-01-30 23:08:27+00:00
For a private server with not many users this is mostly irrelevant. Use low ttl if you want to, since you're putting basically 0 load on the DNS system.

> such that all online caches get updated

There's no such thing. Apart from millions of dedicated caching servers, each end device will have it's own cache. You can't invalidate DNS entries at that scope.
by rtpg | 2026-01-30 23:08:37+00:00
> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly, fully opt-in by default of course.

It's not "zero cost" but plenty of proprietary software with native linux clients will do things like set up Ubuntu package repos. You're pasting a handful of lines in the command line (or for the fancier stuff downloading the isntaller that does that for you) and you're off to the races

There might be a boutique business that could help with installer/package repo mgmt for people wanting to ship linux clients and take advantage of the auto-updaters and the like. Maybe.
by microtherion | 2026-01-30 23:08:46+00:00
As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.

But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.
by crote | 2026-01-30 23:08:52+00:00
I'm definitely one of those strictly-programming people.

Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!
by morcules | 2026-01-30 23:08:53+00:00
SwiftNet is a networking library written in C.

It is designed to be fast, customizable at compile time, easily debuggable, and unique.

The best use cases for this library are:
- Video games made with OpenGL/Vulkan
- Desktop applications
- Any project that uses C/C++ for both client and server

It works at Layer 2 networking using PCAP. The primary focus for future versions is to improve performance by adding AF_XDP support and implementing additional code optimizations.

Right now, it is not as fast as it will be in the future, but speed was not the primary focus at this stage.

0.4.0 New features / updates:
- Thread conditional pausing using semaphore
- Background memory cleanup service
- Thread data race fixes
- Optimized alignment
- Remove debug flag function
- Unicast instead of broadcast for packet sending
- Performance tests

Supported platforms (as of now):
- MacOS arm64
- Linux arm64

If you want to check it out, here’s the link:
https://github.com/Morcules/SwiftNet
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-30 23:08:59+00:00
> without the ability of taking real-world action

Apparently some of them have been hooked up to systems where they can take actions (of sorts) in the real world. This can in fact be rather dangerous since it means AI dank memes that are already structurally indistinguishable from prompt injections now also have real effects, sometimes without much oversight involved either. But that's an explicit choice made by whoever set their agent up like that, not a sudden "escalation" in autonomy.
by tacostakohashi | 2026-01-30 23:09:11+00:00
This is the same line of thinking that drove the railway bubble, the dot-com bubble, and probably a bunch of others... "it's a winner-takes-all race, so it's worth spending unlimited $$$ to be the winner, and then we capture the market and print money forever!".

Maybe that works in markets with big moats, switching costs, barriers to entry and stuff, but for commodities, not so much.
by ndiddy | 2026-01-30 23:09:26+00:00
Of course they're pitching it like everything's above board, but from the article:

> While many residential proxy providers state that they source their IP addresses ethically, our analysis shows these claims are often incorrect or overstated. Many of the malicious applications we analyzed in our investigation did not disclose that they enrolled devices into the IPIDEA proxy network. Researchers have previously found uncertified and off-brand Android Open Source Project devices, such as television set top boxes, with hidden residential proxy payloads.