MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by manuelmoreale | 2026-01-24 06:48:52+00:00
The moment you insert algorithmic curation it stops being “just” a forum IMO. The moment you add gamification on top (karma points, likes, rewards) it stops being just a forum.

Reddit is definitely not a forum the same way old-school forums were forums. And I don’t believe you can, with a straight face, say that they’re the same.

Also, “Forums are platforms where the main purpose is to discuss the topic of any given thread”. That’s a very broad definition. Depending on how loose you want to enforce that you can convince me that Twitter and YouTube are forums.

Plus, “discuss the topic of any given thread” you say this in a thread about TikTok collecting more data while you’re clearly talking about something unrelated to that.

These definitions are blurry. If I told you “we should set up a forum” you’d not instinctively think we’re creating Reddit, and for good reasons.

But I’ll agree that HN is probably the more forum than social media if we were to place it on a scale. And that’s how these platforms should be judged imo: on a scale.
by chimeracoder | 2026-01-24 06:49:46+00:00
> In the unlikely, for San Francisco, event that the day is too hot, less-urgent tasks can be delayed, or some of the racks can have their clock rate reduced, disks put into sleep mode, or even be powered down. Redundancy means that the data will be available elsewhere.

So it sounds like they have data in other locations as well, hopefully.
by terabytest | 2026-01-24 06:50:07+00:00
> FastRender may not be a production-ready browser, but it represents over a million lines of Rust code, written in a few weeks, that can already render real web pages to a usable degree

I feel that we continue to miss the forest for the trees. Writing (or generating) a million lines of code in Rust should not count as an achievement in and of itself. What matters is whether those lines build, function as expected (especially in edge cases) and perform decently. As far as I can tell, AI has not been demonstrated to be useful yet at those three things.
by electroly | 2026-01-24 06:50:58+00:00
I'm not OP but the bit of their post about colocation facilities seems to be a genuine and reasonable question. My assumption is the same: it would be cheaper to rent cabinets in a standard colocation facility. You get the cheapest transit prices when you're "on net," and data centers get better bulk rates on power than non-data-centers do. Power and transit are your two big costs as a hoster with "run until it's dead" hardware. These are fairly un-zesty assumptions, and I don't think OP was out of place for posting them. They might be wrong, but that's why we're here talking and that's why they finished their post saying they were "genuinely curious."

I'm genuinely curious, too. IA must have reasons other than money to buy a church and self-host it this way, but what are they? It seems like they're relatively strapped for cash and saving money would be at least some priority. The explanation given in the article presumes that they already bought the church, but why buy a church in San Francisco to host IA there in the first place?
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 06:51:07+00:00
What's hilarious to me is that this scenario is framed as such an impossibly difficult thing for self-driving technology to accomplish. Detecting a car in front of you, and maneuvering left or right is doable without even using advanced models, nevermind the fact that we have them now. The other supposedly impossible feat is for the self-driving car to create a lane when there's been so much snow that the lines and thus lanes aren't visible. Given high quality sensor data, does it really seem that impossibly hard for the computer, which is already competently driving on the road in practice, in SF and Phoenix and LA; it seems impossibly hard for that computer to take the full width of the remaining road, divide in two, assuming it's a bidirectional road, and then create as much lanes + safety margin as can (safely) exist, and then pick one? Proof is in the pudding and all, so here's a 4 year old video showing that comma.ai's capable of that, in the sunny winter but snowy road condition in that video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oCCn96N2ys
by snvzz | 2026-01-24 06:53:31+00:00
> Once you enable XLibre namespaces filtering it breaks screensharing, global hotkeys. Obviously. It is breaking change.

Ah, the classic moving of goalposts.

I'll bite: It is far from impossible, and already solved elsewhere: Most applications do not need such functionality.

For those that do, provide mechanisms to request and facilitate access to such functionality when needed. Like portals do for other functionality. And a wrapper to request automatically for e.g. old binaries without source.

> (further slander on Lunduke and community)

Uncool.
by lukan | 2026-01-24 06:53:35+00:00
Hey I feel your space enthusiasm and would really like to be in space at least once and preferable to the moon, but I don't see how it can be economical for mining for earth. Space mining makes sense to build things in space for further space colonisation, but I guess we will have to invent other reasons to justify it.

(For me exploring space and working towards becoming a multi planet species is justification enough)
by olalonde | 2026-01-24 06:54:13+00:00
I think that because of my own judgment, not because the market told me. It also seems unlikely that someone would burn money to manipulate this market—there's nothing to gain from it.

By the way, Trump literally said he won't pardon SBF[0]. It seems money is not the only factor he considers when handing out pardons.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-not-pardon-sam-bankman-...
by athrowaway3z | 2026-01-24 07:01:44+00:00
> Buried in the chaos are sketches of future agent orchestration patterns

I'm not sure if there are that many. We need to be vigilant of "it feels useful & powerful", because it's so easy to feel that way.

When I write complex plans, I can tell Claude to spawn agents for each task and I can successfully 1-shot a 30-60 minute implementation.

I've toyed with more complicated patterns, but unlike this speculative fiction, I did need my result both simple and working.

A couple of times now I've had to spend a lot of hours trying to unfuck a design i let slip through because of lack of review. The kind where 1 agent injects some duplicate code/architecture pattern into the system that's correct enough not to be flagged, but wrong enough to forever trip up every subsequent fresh agents that stumble on it.

I tell people my job now is to kick these things every 15 minutes. Its a kinda joke kinda not. But they definitely need kicking. Without, the decoherence of a non-trivial project is too high, and you still need time to know; where and how to kick.

I'm not sure what I'd need to be convinced a higher level of orchestration can do that. I do like to try new things. But my spider-sense is telling me this is a Collatz-conjecture-esque dead-end. People get the feeling of making giant leaps of progress, which anybody using these things should be familiar with by now, but something valuable is always just out of reach with the tools we currently have.

There are some big gains by guiding agents/users to use more sub agents with a clean context - perhaps with some more knobs - but I'd advise against acting under the assumption using grander orchestration tools has a positive ROI or is inevitable.
by f1shy | 2026-01-24 07:02:22+00:00
Thank you! Because I wanted to point exactly that. When I was very junior programmer, and coded alone, I used to have “that elemental header” where lots of things were inside. Many of them to convert C in what I wished it was.

Now I think is between no good idea, and absolutely awful.

Yes, sometimes you wish some thing were different in a programming language “if only these types had shorter names”. But when you work in a team, first you should have consensus, and then modifying the language becomes a heavy load, that every new person in the project will have to lift.

“Modifying C is porting the Lisp curse to C” is my motto. Use all as standard, vanilla as possible.
Ask HN: How do you discover real user needs without relying on keyword tools?
by jackzhuo | 2026-01-24 07:07:10+00:00
I’ve been using tools like SEMrush and Similarweb to find keywords for small tools, but I increasingly feel stuck:

- Most “easy” keywords have very small volume
- Harder keywords often point to domains I don’t actually understand
- Even when I find a keyword, the real user intent is often unclear
- There’s a big gap between a keyword and knowing who the users are, where they hang out, and how to talk to them

SEO feels passive, while talking to real users feels active — but much harder to systematize.

For those who’ve built small tools or indie products: how do you approach demand discovery today? What did you replace keyword-driven thinking with, if anything?
by safety1st | 2026-01-24 07:08:27+00:00
The root problem isn't really multi-purpose tech. It's the perennial coercive tendencies of monopolies being multiplied by their modern capability to update software in the blink of an eye.

If a company develops a monopoly in virtually any part of your life these days, and if a $1 network connected SoC can be added to their product, they can start abusing their position within a matter of months. The standard playbook is some combination of advertisements, notifications, and subscription charges (sometimes for stuff that used to be free!). None of those things are met with enthusiasm from consumers. But if the consumer has no other choice, it's almost a guarantee that the business will add them eventually.

Lock in and abuse. This isn't a new business model, we've just watched it spread from being a Microsoft PC thing in 1990s IT departments to pretty much everywhere now. (Speaking broadly about MSFT's business strategy back then, but they were also literally the first ones to try and shove unwanted Internet ads down your throat by streaming Active Desktop Channels on top of your wallpaper in 1997...!)
by SirMaster | 2026-01-24 07:09:55+00:00
As a company yeah they probably won't survive in the long term. But since the software is open source forks like SunnyPilot should remain updated for existing owners and such. People will likely even make DIY comma hardware devices too if the company stops selling them.

Although even if the devices stop getting updates, that makes them on par with most built in car software and lane assist stuff which never gets updated in the car's life anyway.
I hate Sentry, so I built a Telegram alternative for my Rails app
by Fh_ | 2026-01-24 07:11:17+00:00
Hadaa Ai has been growing steadily and with users increasing, application monitoring and error logging has grown so critical. I decided to built a simple bot that works by subscribing to Rails error reporter and sending me the errors right before they hit the logs. The more silence I see in the channel, the happier I get :)
by tucnak | 2026-01-24 07:11:30+00:00
I mean, you see this with MikroTik all the time. The recent L3HW-enabled devices (up to 400G now) are so good it's crazy, and European onshore manufacturing, too. However, it doesn't support a subset of legacy "Enterprise" features, even though there's always a way to do the same thing using different architecture to how ISP guys have been trained many years ago, so instead we hear all the time that it's inadequate.

5G is a breath of fresh air in the sense that a lot of new techniques and broadly-applicable architectures were introduced to ISP's. I'm telling you, they HATED it. They absolutely hate learning new thing and that may as well be the largest blocker for disruptive players in the market.
by epistasis | 2026-01-24 07:13:35+00:00
Everybody hates Trump, he's the least popular president ever.

Unless these crypto folks have massive money and are using it right now to pay Trump tk not pardon SBF, what would they do? What backlash could crypto do? It's not like he can unpardon Trump. Crypto just joins the long line of people who fell for it again and nothing happens.

What, is a Republican going to vote against Trump? Hah! Impeachment? What trouble could crypto cause for Trump? Even if they could cause trouble, Trump would just make up charges and send the DOJ after crypto.
by nxtfari | 2026-01-24 07:16:59+00:00
I’m a fan of what Comma is working on, but to say it’s about as good as FSD (!!) would be a big misunderstanding of both products. Comma is L2 assist: basically in a lane it will keep the lane, and if a car stops ahead it will stop. It’s equivalent to Tesla standard Autopilot, but FSD is an L3 bordering on L4 system. It navigates traffic lights, intersections, indicating, merging, etc none of which Comma can do. Still good product though.
Ask HN: Is it the right time to spend on electronics(AI Bubble get worse)?
by shivajikobardan | 2026-01-24 07:17:17+00:00
My question is will the AI bubble get worse? And the RAM and SSD price keep on increasing? I am thinking about waiting for 3-6 months for a laptop. All I could afford at present is i5 12th generation laptop with 16GB RAM at best. That too from Acer brand(Nepal it's the affordable).

Or should I buy immediately? People working on AI domain, could you help me take the decision?
by rendx | 2026-01-24 07:17:47+00:00
I don't see how something can be "ableism" that can be learned by anyone. You may not want to, which is totally fine, or you may not know how to, which is also fine, but to claim you couldn't do it without even trying is just yet another convenient and comforting display of avoidance.

It's OK not to want to be in connection with others whose behavior you don't agree with, but it's not necessary and from my perspective counter-productive for yourself and society as a whole to turn that into a permission to act in hostile ways against them, especially if you're not providing clear feedback. In fact, unless you provide that in an open way, they will not change their ways around you, so you're losing a lot of chances to influence people around you in situations where you simply cannot decide to avoid them altogether. You're not in control over which humans you interact with, and you're turning interactions into exchanges of aggression unnecessarily.
by hobofan | 2026-01-24 07:18:20+00:00
> he knows when to just let the speaker speak

I think similar to Joe Rogan that's the main value he provides to listeners. He identifies guests that have some veil of intellectualism and provides them with a platform to speak.

However I don't think that makes for an interesting interviewer. There are no challenging questions, only ones he knows will fit into the narrative of what the guest wants to say. I might as well read a 2-3 hour PR piece issued by the guests.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-24 07:18:52+00:00
While I broadly agree with your general point, in that engineering is making a set of trade-offs, I don't necessarily agree that ditching type-safety in the example contexts you posted is the appropriate trade-off.[1]

I'll ditch type-safety in experimental/exploratory code; I'll use Lisp (or, more recently, Python) to test if something is a good idea. For anything that ships to production, I think a basic level of type enforcement is necessary, even if you don't want the whole type zoo.

For your Javascript f/end context, I like the proposed TC39 approach (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations?tab=readme...). The typing is optional, does not break existing syntax and can still be used to enforce a basic level of type safety if the developer wants it.

----------------------------

[1] I upvoted you anyway. Your broader point is still valid.
by Nursie | 2026-01-24 07:20:49+00:00
This is absolute nonsense.

Doctors test for deficiencies in vitamins and minerals
and recommend cheap effective supplements to address them and other conditions all the frickin time.

My partner is currently taking completely unpatentable iron supplements for a deficiency and I am taking cheap, unpatentable psyllium husk for gut health and cholesterol management, both on the advice of our (Western, evidence-based) doctors.

This meme that ‘western’ doctors are only interested in peddling expensive pharmaceuticals and don’t look ‘holistically’ at patient health, or recommend cheap, effective treatments … it’s just not true at all.
by jdboyd | 2026-01-24 07:22:09+00:00
It starts with the assumption that the VM/370 machine will be virtual.

Ignoring the XT/370 and P/370, where there any other System/370 systems that could run on a 15 amp 220v/240v outlet? If not, it would be difficult to put into the living room, in most parts of the world.
by drysine | 2026-01-24 07:22:36+00:00
You are right. Apologies for spreading false information(

"We provide strong evidence that memory errors are dominated by hard errors, rather than soft errors, which previous work suspects to be the dominant error mode." [0]

"Memory errors can be caused by electrical or magnetic interference (e.g. due to cosmic rays), can be due to problems with the hardware (e.g. a bit being
permanently damaged), or can be the result of corruption along the data path between the memories and the processing elements. Memory errors can be classified into soft errors, which randomly corrupt bits but do not leave physical damage; and hard errors, which corrupt bits in a repeatable manner because of a physical defect."

"Conclusion 7: Error rates are unlikely to be dominated
by soft errors.

We observe that CE [correctable errors] rates are highly correlated with system utilization, even when isolating utilization effects from the effects of temperature. In systems that do not use memory scrubbers this observation might simply reflect a higher detection rate of errors. In systems with memory scrubbers, this observations leads us to the conclusion that a significant fraction of errors is likely due to mechanism other than soft errors, such as hard errors or errors induced on the datapath. The reason is that in systems with memory scrubbers the reported rate of soft errors should not depend on utilization levels in the system. Each soft error will eventually be detected (either when the bit is accessed by an application or by the scrubber), corrected and reported. Another observation that supports Conclusion 7 is the strong correlation between errors in the same DIMM. Events that cause soft errors, such as cosmic radiation, are expected to happen randomly over time and not in correlation.

Conclusion 7 is an interesting observation, since much previous work has assumed that soft errors are the dominating error mode in DRAM. Some earlier work estimates hard errors to be orders of magnitude less common than soft errors and to make up about 2% of all errors."

[0] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
by Expurple | 2026-01-24 07:22:43+00:00
You should compare exceptions to Result-style tagged unions in a language with exhaustiveness checks, like Rust. Not to return codes in C, lmao.

Everyone (except Go devs) knows that those are the worst. Exceptions are better, but still less reliable than Result.

https://home.expurple.me/posts/rust-solves-the-issues-with-e...
by sivanhavkin | 2026-01-24 07:23:06+00:00
I’m sharing an early-stage, open-source research prototype exploring persistent AI agents, internal conflict, and moral self-regulation through dialogue.

Entelgia is not a chatbot or prompt-based demo. It’s a single-file Python system where agents maintain continuity via a shared memory store and evolve their dialogue over time.

This is an experimental project, not a finished product. Some components are conceptual or partially implemented, and I’m mainly interested in feedback, critique, and discussion from people working on agentic systems, AI safety, or cognitive architectures.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-24 07:23:46+00:00
The C standard committee even refused Dennis Ritchie proposal for fat pointers.

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/varar...

Meanwhile after UNIX was done at AT&T, the C language authors hardly cared for the C standard committee in regards to the C compiler supported features used in Plan 9 and Inferno, being only "mostly" compatible, followed up having a authoring role in Alef, Limbo and Go.

> The language accepted by the compilers is the core ANSI C language with some modest extensions, a greatly simplified preprocessor, a smaller library that includes system calls and related facilities, and a completely different structure for include files.

https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/comp

I doubt most C advocates ever reflect on this.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-24 07:25:41+00:00
> So you use strlen() a lot and don't have to deal with multibyte characters anywhere in your code. It's not much of a strategy.

You don't need to support all multibyte encodings (i.e. DBCS, UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-16 or UTF-32) characters if you're able to normalise all input to UTF-8.

I think, when you are building a system, restricting all (human language) input to be UTF-8 is a fair and reasonable design decision, and then you can use strlen to your hearts content.
by nagaiaida | 2026-01-24 07:25:47+00:00
you've baked in an unfounded assumption that bitlocker is even initially enabled intentionally by someone who knows that's a choice they can make:

> Here's what happens on your Dell computer:

> BitLocker turns on automatically when you first set up Windows 10 or Windows 11

> It works quietly in the background, you won't notice it's there

> Your computer creates a special recovery key (like a backup password) that's saved to your Microsoft account

> You might be reading this article because:

> Your computer is asking for a BitLocker recovery key

...such as after your laptop resets its tpm randomly which is often the first time many people learn their disk is encrypted and that there's a corresponding recovery key in their microsoft account for the data they are now unexpectedly locked out of.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/el-gr/000124701/automatic...
by anonnon | 2026-01-24 07:27:20+00:00
> Sam was part of YC's inaugural batch in S05 and founded OpenAI as YC Research in 2015

Notice how they omit any mention of Loopt, and almost try to imply that he's famous for founding OpenAI, when the trajectory was really Loopt -> YC President -> other stuff -> OpenAI, and Loopt was a failure that was acquired for barely more than it raised in VC money, and spent its waning days as a seedy gay hookup app.

Sam's success was preordained, and failure, for him (and his VC backers), was never an option.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-24 07:28:26+00:00
It is like those folks that rather write JSDoc comments than using a linter like Typescript, because reasons.

Given the C++ adoption on 1990's commercial software and major consumer operating systems (Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Be), I bet if the FSF with their coding guidelines had not advocated for C, the adoption would not taken off beyond those days.

"Using a language other than C is like using a non-standard feature: it will cause trouble for users. Even if GCC supports the other language, users may find it inconvenient to have to install the compiler for that other language in order to build your program. So please write in C."

The GNU Coding Standard in 1994, http://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/standards_7.html#SEC12
by hackyhacky | 2026-01-24 07:30:09+00:00
> there is no guarantee `char` is 8 bits, nor that it represents text, or even a particular encoding.

True, but sizeof(char) is defined to be 1. In section 7.6.2.5:

"The result of sizeof applied to any of the narrow character types is 1"

In fact, char and associated types are the only types in the standard where the size is not implementation-defined.

So the only way that a C++ implementation can conform to the standard and have a char type that is not 8 bits is if the size of a byte is not 8 bits. There are historical systems that meet that constraint but no modern systems that I am aware of.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/n49...