MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Post_Flynn | 2026-01-01 19:17:25+00:00
Author here.

I wrote this white paper to analyze the "Great Cognitive Transition" not as a labor issue, but as a resilience issue. My core argument is that we are confusing "automation" (which is good) with "cognitive atrophy" (which creates single points of failure).

If we lose the "first principles" understanding of the systems we build, we risk a form of "Vendor Lock-in" for the human mind. The paper compares the divergent strategies of the EU (regulation), China (vocational "master craftsmanship"), and the Nordics (analog educational reversion) in dealing with this risk.

I am particularly looking for feedback on the "Civilizational Resilience" section and whether the "Right to Analog Existence" is a viable legal framework for 2050.
by thesz | 2026-01-01 19:17:30+00:00
Blocks are Merkle trees, only the head transaction contains global seed. So, for one to mine block, one needs to walk Merkle tree up from head and then finish work with small amount of data in the block header.

Thus, the time spent mining block is directly dependent on the logarithm of number of transactions in the block.

If one can mine a block with 3000 transactions (11-12 hashes to the header) in 10 minutes, one can mine a block with one transaction (1 hash to header) about ten times as fast.

The construction of the block is negligible if we talk about complete block mining time.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-01 19:17:32+00:00
Here's an interesting experiment to try. Strip out the comments from your code, rename the variables to something generic, and feed it to Opus 4.5, Gemini 3, or GPT 5.2 with 'thinking' mode turned on. Ask it what the code does, and ask it to review it for possible areas of improvement.

If you don't have access to advanced reasoning models -- the kind that will crunch for 10 minutes before they give you any response at all -- put the sanitized code on pastebin and I'll try it with my accounts.

If you're right, then the models won't even recognize your code as a ray-tracer, much less be able to say anything meaningful about it.
by travisgriggs | 2026-01-01 19:17:53+00:00
This. It’s computation. Computation doesn’t really “get” geopolitical borders.

I’m so sick of the ever increasing variances between the different “store” offerings in different regions of the world. Seems like every time I push an update (every month or so), I have to answer updated questions and declarations, often relative to different parts of the world.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-01 19:18:15+00:00
> Democrats ran a long and successful campaign to crush anti-woke dissent, for instance. Broke lots of laws (and still do!)

Citation/elaboration needed. Same goes for the Title IX comment. How did Biden "compel speech" on campuses?

> and they wielded power to make sure the same was true in many non-gov institutions

Again, cancel culture, no matter how aggressive, is not the same as using the monopoly on violence to get your way. Woke mob vs federal agents. You could argue that some of Trump's actions like his lawsuit against the pollster aren't an official government action, but it certainly is a huge break from norms for a sitting President to sue over speech he doesn't like.

> explicitly make the leap from "flag burning" to "running a campaign of crushing dissent"

It's much more than just flag burning, as I've shown.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 19:18:19+00:00
It's normally easy to tell apart war and terrorism.

Look at the person who selects the target. What do they believe is at that point? Civilian--it's terrorism. Military/government, it's war or insurgency. Look at the pattern--taking out a guard post to get to the civilians behind does not make it legitimate.

Note that you need to look at the person who selects the target--a soldier in the field often knows little of what they're shooting at. And what do they *believe* is there? When we hit that Chinese embassy it was an intel failure, not terrorism--the bomb was dropped on what used to be in the building. Being wrong doesn't make it terrorism. Missing doesn't make it terrorism.

But when Iran drops a missile on an Israeli hospital and claims they were shooting at a "nearby" (no, there was nothing military within many CEPs of the impact point) military facility it's either terrorism, or since they are state actors, a Geneva violation. Especially as they did not apologize, nor even admit the hospital was hit.
by passing_by_and | 2026-01-01 19:18:42+00:00
No, and no one can.

My real point here is that this discussion specifically has been so thoroughly debated by brilliant people that I have trouble understanding why this hasn't been simply closed as proven like we do in math. Eventually you reach a level of argument where there is simply nothing left. We have reached it. Curtailing speech and thought simply never works as intended and always brings greater harms than the alternative.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-01 19:18:43+00:00
I've gotten to the point where I consider anything advertised to me to be at least somewhere on the "scam spectrum". With the actual value/scamminess being indicated by a number of factors:

1. Frequency: The more I see ads for something, the more of a scam / less value I believe it to be.

2. Channel: Anything on YouTube or social media is 100% unequivocally a huge scam. To the point where if I think a product is legit or worthwhile, and I happen to see it on YouTube, I will change my mind and not even consider purchasing it.

3. Algorithmic vs. word of mouth: Anything I see that is obviously algorithmically fed to me (like recommendations, "you might like" and "featured" products) increases the scamminess / decreases the value.

It's too bad that legit small businesses trying to crack into a market are collateral damage, and I feel for them, but the ad pond is full of scum and if you're legit and you dive into it, you're going to get scum all over you.
by allturtles | 2026-01-01 19:19:12+00:00
> Carefully consider the lifestyle of someone living several decades ago. Would you honestly want to live such a lifestyle yourself?

Sure, I lived it, and it was very pleasant at the time and in many ways better than now in retrospect. e.g. always-on access to infinite content engines like YouTube, TikTok, X, Facebook, etc. is probably a net negative, both for individuals and society. I wouldn't want to go back a century or more and give up air conditioning, dishwashers, washing machines, air travel, electric lights. But a few decades, sure, in a heartbeat.
by shakna | 2026-01-01 19:19:29+00:00
It's not a university or TAFE.

The teaching they do is conferences - they host archeology, psychology, and engineering mini-conferences and talks, today. Whilst also being one of the biggest libraries in the town.

This isn't somewhere handing out a bunch of useless Certificate IIs. Its somewhere you need a degree to even get in the door.

Their primary income is actually from trade unions - almost all of them rent their office out of the building, because of its established connections to everyone who knows something. And all members get access to the library, equipment and most talks. (Though not the rat warrens that still run under the town from the gold rush.)
by gpm | 2026-01-01 19:19:36+00:00
> "safety" does not show up in types

It does in rust. An `unsafe fn()` is a different type than a (implicitly safe by the lack of keyword) `fn()`.

The difference is that unsafe fn's can be encapsulated in safe wrappers, where as IO functions sort of fundamentally can't be encapsulated in non-IO wrappers. This makes the IO tagged type signatures viral throughout your program (and as a result annoying), while the safety tagged type signatures are things you only have to think about if you're touching the non-encapsulated unsafe code yourself.
by throw0101d | 2026-01-01 19:19:38+00:00
> I think what Cantrill is getting at here is that a running program necessarily consists of both code and hardware.

"The thing that is remarkable about it is that it has this property of being information—that we made it up—but it is also machine, and it has these engineered properties. And this is where software is unlikely anything we have ever done, and we're still grappling on that that means. What does it mean to have information that functions as machine? It's got this duality: you can see it as both."

It's not about software and hardware needing each other, but rather about the strange 'nature' of software.

He has made the point before:

> We suffer -- tremendously -- from a bias from traditional engineering that writing code is like digging a ditch: that it is a mundane activity best left to day labor -- and certainly beneath the Gentleman Engineer. This belief is profoundly wrong because software is not like a dam or a superhighway or a power plant: in software, the blueprints _are_ the thing; the abstraction _is_ the machine.

* https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2007/07/28/on-the-beauty-in-bea...

(Perhaps @bcantrill will notice this and comment.)

> If the hardware is not present, then the software will be just bytes on a storage device.

And what do you mean by "hardware" and what is meant by 'running software'? If you see a bunch of C or Python or assembly code, and you read through it, is it 'running' in your brain? Do you need 'real' CPUs or can you run software on stuff that is not made of silicon but the carbon between your ears?
by esseph | 2026-01-01 19:20:49+00:00
As a business, especially a small business, there is no financial reason to do so in the United States for the vast majority of businesses. This gets talked about on NANOG all the time.

It doubles the workload and knowledge required, doubles the security attack surface, and because of the 2nd part, doubles the security risk.

Right or wrong that's the calculation for most spots.
by AphantaZach | 2026-01-01 19:20:50+00:00
This is awesome feedback, thank you. Some of this I have been trying to dial in, and I just pushed an update to almost everything you mentioned:

Fixes Deployed:
Ghost Typing: You were spot on. I was defining the modal inside the main render loop. Moved it out, so the input is stable now.

Audio Focus: Removed the visibilitychange listener. It should now persist on multi-monitor setups without cutting out.

Texture Toggle: Added a specific button to toggle between "Neural Grain" (noise) and "Pure Light" (solid strobe) so you can customize the pattern.

Volume Taper: Switched the gain slider to logarithmic scaling so the jump from 0-10% isn't deafening.

UI Clutter: The "Tap to Minimize" overlay now fades out automatically after 3 seconds.

On Vibe Coding... guilty as charged.

This project evolved rapidly from a hacky passion project to help myself focus, into an attempt to build something worth sharing with others. I built the initial engine to prioritize the DSP/audio math, and the React architecture definitely suffered

Would love to know if the multi-monitor issue is resolved on your end now.
by alex1138 | 2026-01-01 19:21:17+00:00
I don't think it was Jack's fault, but Twitter went from something that (granted they did tend to do a few shady things from a UX perspective) was fine and largely worked but did have a massive censorship problem, to something that works less well (seriously? i can't see posts chronologically without an account? on TWITTER???) and apparently still has censorship (although I was mostly preoccupied with covid, actual doctors getting banned for truthful information, pre-Musk)
by firesteelrain | 2026-01-01 19:21:22+00:00
The install side is basically Merkle-friendly (immutable artifacts, append-only metadata, hashes, mirrors).
Search isn’t. Search results are derived, subjective, and frequently rewritten (ranking tweaks, spam/malware takedowns, popularity signals). That’s more like constantly rebasing than appending commits.

You can Merklize “what files exist”; you can’t realistically Merklize “what should rank for this query today” without freezing semantics and turning CLI search into a hard API contract.
by overfeed | 2026-01-01 19:21:28+00:00
> It's only a matter of time until it becomes too confusing and problematic to try and run the same system relatively openly in one country and walled in another

They will continue to do so for as long as it remains profitable. Navigating the complexities of multiple jurisdictions is the bread and butter of MNCs - it's the price of admission into the multinational club. Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, and executives already on the payroll for this task.
by randycupertino | 2026-01-01 19:21:43+00:00
> “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in an internal memo, according to Bloomberg. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”

> CNBC reports that affected employees will be notified by Feb. 10, giving them a month to stew over their fate and brace for the worst. Those let go will receive severance similar to what previous laid-off employees got, the report claims. In 2022, when Meta slashed nearly a quarter of its workforce, the company offered a severance package that included 16 weeks of base pay, plus two additional weeks for each year of service (with no cap), full payout of remaining PTO, six months of healthcare, three months of career support, and immigration assistance.
by oofbey | 2026-01-01 19:21:52+00:00
I think both points are fair. Python is slow - you should avoid it if speed is critical, but sometimes you can’t easily avoid it.

I think the list itself is super long winded and not very informative. A lot of operations take about the same amount of time. Does it matter that adding two ints is very slightly slower than adding two floats? (If you even believe this is true, which I don’t.) No. A better summary would say “all of these things take about the same amount of time: simple math, function calls, etc. these things are much slower: IO.” And in that form the summary is pretty obvious.
by yokoprime | 2026-01-01 19:22:00+00:00
Making "tech-minded persons" dump apple etc does NOTHING to move the needle in terms of what most people use.

For example I'm running a pretty sweet calibre-web automated setup with Kobo readers. Ive changed the storefront on my kobo and have seemless sync OTA of selected shelves. And even I struggle to get my wife to choose that setup over Amazon kindle. The very minute there is a single snag, normies (sorry wife dear) lose interest.
by andrewaylett | 2026-01-01 19:22:18+00:00
Unsafe isn't so unsafe that it disables the borrow checker!

The two main things the compiler allows in an unsafe block but not elsewhere are calling other code marked "unsafe" and dereferencing raw pointers. The net result is that safe code running in a system that's not exhibiting undefined behaviour is defined to continue to not exhibit undefined behaviour, but the compiler is unable in general to prove that an unsafe block won't trigger undefined behaviour.

You can side-step the borrow checker by using pointers instead of references, but using that power to construct an invalid reference is undefined behaviour.
by tshaddox | 2026-01-01 19:22:28+00:00
> Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe").

Nah, Americans aren’t particularly interested in which Europeans are offended by being identified as “Europeans” this week. If we say “Europe” without qualification we’re probably just talking about the continent. (And no, we don’t even use the word “continent” as a distinction within Europe, except when referring to hotel breakfasts.)

Americans don’t really have much of a concept of what European identity is, and we don’t really care (other than being grateful for a few decades of relative peace after 1,000 or so years of near constant war).
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-01 19:22:45+00:00
Suicide bombers don't make it terrorism.

Were the Japanese Kamikaze pilots terrorists? No--their targets were clearly military in nature. Likewise, was the US pilot that kamikaed a terrorist? No. (His plane had no hope of making it back to the carrier, he could have bailed out but the only possible rescue would be from the very fleet he was attacking. No path with a meaningful chance of survival, as soldiers in hopeless situations often do he chose to take as many enemies with him as he could.)

Terrorism is about the target, not the means.
by Sytten | 2026-01-01 19:22:52+00:00
Correct, I was reading a very interesting blog post [1] on how the rust compiler will change the LLVM annotaions like sending noalias for mutable pointer. This changes a lot the generated machine code. Disabling the borrow checker won't enable those LLVM flags.

[1] https://lukefleed.xyz/posts/who-owns-the-memory-pt1/
by nine_k | 2026-01-01 19:22:59+00:00
It won't be a... cloud?

To me, the principal differentiator is the elasticity. I start and retire instances according to my needs, and only pay for the resources I've actually consumed. This is only possible on a very large shared pool of resources, where spikes of use even out somehow.

If I host everything myself, the cloud-like deployment tools simplify my life, but I still pay the full price for my rented / colocated server. This makes sense when my load is reasonably even and predictable. This also makes sense when it's my home NAS or media server anyway.

(It is similar to using a bus vs owning a van.)
by arctic-true | 2026-01-01 19:23:20+00:00
Usage plunges on the weekends and during the summer, suggesting that a significant portion of users are students using ChatGPT for free or at heavily subsidized rates to do homework (i.e., extremely basic work that is extraordinarily well-represented in the training data). That usage will almost certainly never be monetizable, and it suggests nothing about the trajectory of the technology’s capability or popularity. I suspect ChatGPT, in particular, will see its usage slip considerably as the education system (hopefully) adapts.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-01 19:23:30+00:00
I’ve been reading this comment multiple times a week for the last couple years. Constant assertions that we’re starting to hit limits, plateau, etc. But a cursory glance at where we are today vs a year ago, let alone two years ago, makes it wildly obvious that this is bullshit. The pace of improvement of both models and tooling has been breathtaking. I could give a shit whether you think it’s “exponential”, people like you were dismissing all of this years ago, meanwhile I just keep getting more and more productive.
by FrinkleFrankle | 2026-01-01 19:24:01+00:00
You know, both sides can be bad. They're both led by bad people who do bad things and some good things. I've watched the Oct 10th attack videos. They're horrific. I've also watched the videos of civilian buildings in Palestine being have their roofs "knocked on" by a missile, followed shortly after by demolition by additional missiles.. And the Israeli solders dropping grenades on tents.. And the firsthand accounts of doctors talking of children and infants being shot through the head with sniper rounds.

Both country's governments are in the wrong and their civilians are suffering because of it.
by airstrike | 2026-01-01 19:24:19+00:00
I believe you.

I don't know the specifics of your company so I can't give you valuation advice, but I'd just like to add that, in my experience, I've seen lots of C-level teams and Directors refuse to sell even when a great offer was on the table because they believed they were worth more. In numerous cases, it turns out they were wrong and the company either fizzled out or sold to a different buyer a year or two later for much less than they could have gotten.

I'm talking refusing a $3.5 billion offer because you think you're worth $4B, only to sell for $2B later.

Not every deal is a good deal, but remember as an insider who's built the company you're also likely somewhat biased. There's nothing morally wrong about selling if it is quote-unquote "the right price".

I can't really name names in public, but email is in profile if you ever want to chat
by ben_w | 2026-01-01 19:24:33+00:00
I'm saying from the outside, it doesn't look like that. That's a much weaker statement, as should've been obvious from what I went on to say about propaganda.

Example of cheating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officials_implicated_by_the_an...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Arre...

Nevertheless, it would be interesting if someone could, you know, prove, and not merely allege, that Xi Jinping's family or friends cheated.
by locknitpicker | 2026-01-01 19:24:40+00:00
> Anyway if the "DX" is a kind of runtime, in which actual contexts is it better than the incumbents, e.g. Node, or the newer ones e.g. Deno or Zig or even more broadly WASI?

I'm not the blogger, I'm just a developer who works professionally with Cloudflare Workers. To me the main value proposition is avoiding vendor lock-in, and even so the logic doesn't seem to be there.

The main value proposition of Cloudflare Workers is being able to deploy workers at the edge and use them to implement edge use cases. Meaning, custom cache logic, perhaps some pauthorization work, request transformation and aggregation, etc. If you remove the global edge network and cache, you do not have any compelling reason to look at this.

It's also perplexing how the sales pitch is Rust+WASM. This completely defeats the whole purpose of Cloudflare Workers. The whole point of using workers is to have very fast isolates handling IO-heavy workloads where they stay idling the majority of the time so that the same isolate instance can handle a high volume of requests. WASM is notorious for eliminating the ability to yield on awaits from fetch calls, and is only compelling if your argument is a lift-and-shift usecase. Which this ain't it.
by pstuart | 2026-01-01 19:24:53+00:00
I wonder if they would have succeeded if they didn't try to go so big so fast.

Another thing would have been if they had worked with Black Soldier Flies and focused on sourcing feedstock for them and scaling in a cheaper manner -- cheap/modular bins that leverage their tendency to "self harvest" -- the BSF larvae will climb up a ramp when ready and drop right into a collection bucket.

Automating the care and feeding of those pods in a cost-conscious manner and then being able to package that facility at scale at the feedstock source, e.g., parking shipping containers at a dairy farm where they're happy to consume the livestock waste. Then collect and bring back to a central processing facility.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-01 19:24:54+00:00
I've always thought the same. Obviously there isn't much of a technical hurdle since they have the engineering talent. But, keeping track of all these cross-region rules and training your staff+customers on it has to be quite costly in multiple respects (time, energy, mental models, etc.)

My personal opinion is that keeping the browser engine locked down isn't much of a profit generator, unlike maintaining full reign over the app store would be.
by mystifyingpoi | 2026-01-01 19:24:58+00:00
You are right, but it's a feature of Kubernetes actually. If you treat nodes as cattle, then it doesn't matter if there is 10 or 100 or 1000, as long as the apiserver can survive the load and upgrades don't take too long (though upgrades/maintenance can be done slowly for even days without any problems).

But all the stateful crap (like databases) gets trickier and harder the more machines you have.