MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kccqzy | 2026-01-02 01:05:39+00:00
By default Gnome doesn’t let you choose any fractional scaling in the UI because it has some remaining TODOs on that front. So from the UI you choose 100% or 200%. But the code is there and it works if you just open a terminal and type a command to enable this “experimental” feature.

Now whether or not this feature should have remained experimental is a different debate. I personally find that similar to the fact that Gmail has labeled itself beta for many years.
by dboreham | 2026-01-02 01:05:43+00:00
Nondeterminism is not the issue here. Today's LLMs are not "round trip" tools. It's not like a compiler where you can edit a source file from 1975, recompile, and the binary does what 75'bin did plus your edit.

Rather, it's more like having an employee in 1975, asking them to write you a program to do something. Then time-machine to the present day and you want that program enhanced somehow. You're going to summon your 2026 intern and tell them that you have this old program from 1975 that you need updated. That person is going to look at the program's code, your notes on what you need added, and probably some of their own "training data" on programming in general. Then they're going to edit the program.

Note that in no case did you ask for the program to be completely re-written from scratch based on the original spec plus some add-ons. Same for the human as for the LLM.
by shmerl | 2026-01-02 01:05:51+00:00
Likely Russia. Their idea is to engage in war under pretense that it's not a war.

What I mean is that they will only understand counter measures that you'd take in a war, like blockade or sink them for instance.

I.e. they are already engaging in the acts of war, so it's late to worry about that, the question is what is anyone doing about it.

Ukraine sinks their fleet in the Black Sea, and they understood it very well - they don't leave their ports.
by ford | 2026-01-02 01:05:54+00:00
I hear this often, but I think this discounts the fact that this was mostly true for the US/Western Europe at a time where they enjoyed unilateral super-powerism as a result of winning WWII. I'm not sure that kind of prosperity is normal (though I hope it could be).

I'm worried the harsh reality for most humans is that life is often not that easy. And if it is, it won't be for long
by ivm | 2026-01-02 01:06:13+00:00
I've met all kinds of people and surely enough, some can be toxic, dark triad, etc. I'd say some topics, such as politics and animal welfare, seem more prone to attracting those types. But having a few of them here and there also helps to develop patience and diplomatic skills for de-escalating and creating a healthier environment despite their presence.

In my case, local community orgs are usually run by older, often retired people. Doesn't mean there's no drama, but it's not the same kind of drama you'll find in predominantly younger organizations.
by timbit42 | 2026-01-02 01:06:30+00:00
Ubuntu stopped caring about the desktop experience when the switched to Gnome. Now they have annoying SNAPs. They are a business and they are going to continue enshitifying it.

I haven't tried Bazzite because I'm not into gaming but Linux Mint is working very well for a lot of people coming from Windows. It just works and has great defaults. Windows users seem to pick it up pretty easily.

Also, Linux Mint upgrades very well. I've had a lot of success upgrading to new versions without needing to reinstall everything. Ubuntu and other distros I've tried often have failed during upgrading and I had to reinstall.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-02 01:06:47+00:00
So at least your credit card issuer (presumably) actually has a working fraud department.

In the private sector, fraud detection is often heuristic based. So this was probably flagged because you didn't buy German railway tickets in the recent past and maybe even you didn't buy anything else in or near Germany.

I remember years ago getting a decline on a credit card transaction to pay for one of my ISPs, and then hours later a phone call. My bank apparently didn't understand (yet, this is years ago) that ISPs are like, not necessarily physically nearby and so since the ISP is on another continent and I had no other nearby transactions it was flagged as likely fraud.
Show HN: BreachLab – Can you hack our AI?
by xsourcesec | 2026-01-02 01:06:54+00:00
10 AI characters guard secret codes. Your job: extract them using prompt injection.

Level 1-3: Most pass
Level 7-9: Security pros struggle
Level 10: Still uncracked

Free, no signup. Curious what techniques HN tries.
by superultra | 2026-01-02 01:06:55+00:00
I oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. I wouldn’t doubt if the number of buyers who don’t own a record player is even higher tha 50%, and that the percentage of people who actually play the records is actually 10-20%. I don’t have data on that, it’s just a hunch.

Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record plants for many years, arguably until independent music started pressing in the 2000s) have mixed feelings about records. It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And they’re cubersome to bring on tour.

But there isn’t another physical medium that sells at all as well as vinyl. Soft apparel always does well. But people want vinyl.

I don’t love the Gen Z framing of this though. Vinyl purchasing at this point is multi generational.

I don’t think it’s some mysterious Gen Z love of physical. I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. Buying digitally is just isn’t the same for a lot of people (even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists).
by wat10000 | 2026-01-02 01:07:29+00:00
It’s a competitive market. If removable batteries mattered to a lot of people, some company would take advantage of that to make a lot of money.

Feature combinations aren’t immutable facts of nature. Manufacturers make a conscious choice about what to include. If a good camera and international NFC combined with a headphone jack would attract a lot of buyers, don’t you think Samsung or Google would make a phone like that to better compete?

It’s nothing to do with “democratic ideal.” It’s about understanding that companies want to make money and if a feature is desirable, they will leverage that in their quest to make money. Some may fail to understand what their customers want, but all of them? It’s not plausible.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2026-01-02 01:07:38+00:00
It's still not confirmed who did that. Self sabotage by some European nation or even Russian is still up in the air.

Destroying that pipeline pushed Germany to act more against Russia (being officially unable to continue buying gas).

Historically anti russian states like Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia or even NATO would have liked that.

Russia could have blown it up themselves to pin it on Ukraine to decrease support, but that doesn't seem to be the outcome.

Even germany could have blown it up to pivot their own politics.

It's a massive game of clue. It may become declassified in 20 years by whoever did it.
by micimize | 2026-01-02 01:08:06+00:00
Mmm yeah I think I know what you mean. IDK if "If they stopped existing, we'd realize we shouldn't have relied on their existence" is plausible, but we have plenty of bitter lessons in centralized comms being acquired and reworked towards... particular ends, and will see more.

Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question
by chmod775 | 2026-01-02 01:08:59+00:00
Phones are already way slimmer than they should be. Now we have top-heavy "slim" phones with huge bulges for cameras*, 50% less battery life, reduced performance because of thermal issues, glued together in favor of screws and rubber seals, wasting weight and space on additional strengthening and internal routing.

Just because people think it looks neater than the more practical alternative.

The S2 had an amazing form factor - also with a small bulge, but at the bottom. It's a thousand times nicer to hold and carry than pretty much anything that came after. The S5 was fine too (waterproof AND you could pop open the back to swap the battery, if you can believe it!)

It's silly how much more ergonomic phones feel that don't have to compensate for an extra half millimeter.

* Many phones had this, but it's getting really bad now. Older phones typically also had the lens recessed to protect it, with a slim border around it. No more space for that now.
by maxandersen | 2026-01-02 01:10:59+00:00
You've largely ignored everything I’ve said. Instead, you proposed workarounds – which is precisely what most people want to avoid. Who distributes applications as fat jars? What is this? 2004? You’re supposed to distribute your application as executables.

and still npm, python, and other ecosystems don't do that. they effectively ships what corresponds to jars with dependency metadata.

I also did not say fat jars (even though that works fine too).

Why don't java world be ok with utilizing that option like other ecosystems.

I know why they didn't do it in past when something like jbang did not exist - just like javascript didn't do it before npm (and fast node runtime) came around...

I’ve brought up numerous complaint regarding jpackage and jlink, and none of them have been addressed by jbang.

I explicitly wrote: "Reading this and reddit thread I see that the final publish of jars/executables is still too tedious I'm going to try solve that challenge as we have all the pieces (IMO) with jbang/jreleaser and modern JDKs." so I did not claim jbang solves it - I said I could see how it could be better.

What I did show or at least tried to was that your complaint about something like scala-cli and how Go could do all things out of box...jbang exist to bridge that gap.

Furthermore, you accuse me of not having used Java in the last five years, which is frankly ridiculous;

I did not claim that at all. I said you seem to have missed the last years improvements in this space (jbang being a key one enabling majority of the issues you brought forward).

I've spent almost two decades developing software on the JVM. Funnily enough, I had to write my own sbt plugins because jlink and jpackage are so painful to use.

yes, I agree jlink and jpackage is not good enough.

I haven't tried tackle it yet as I used jreleaser most of time to hide that pain - and I agree its not solved yet...but also trying to show that distributing everything as native OS binaries is NOT an absolute requirement and not what other ecosystems does.

Heck, even Go allow for running git repos by compiling it locally before running it... jbang allow similar workflows - on top of plain java.

Regarding UpX: it simply doesn’t work with Windows binaries generated by Graal – see this issue: https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7605. They've been ignoring this for three years instead of fixing it. Meanwhile, it works perfectly with Go binaries or .NET’s AOT compiler.

gotcha - haven't tried it on windows for a while and looks like it did work in GraalVM 21 and just issue on future versions.

I’m not trying to bash your project, but the reality is that no one with little to no Java experience is going to discover and install jbang. Features like this should be included with Java out of the box.

yeah - well neither node, python and others had these to begin with.

Its a very Java'esque mindset to require it in the default toolchain to be considered useful.

I wonder why anyone even still try using maven or gradle or sbt - it does not come with Java itself either :)
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-02 01:11:14+00:00
It isn't for "running models." Inference workloads like that are faster on a mac studio, if that's the goal. Apple has faster memory.

These devices are for AI R&D. If you need to build models or fine tune them locally they're great.

That said, I run GPT-OSS 120B on mine and it's 'fine'. I spend some time waiting on it, but the fact that I can run such a large model locally at a "reasonable" speed is still kind of impressive to me.

It's REALLY fast for diffusion as well. If you're into image/video generation it's kind of awesome. All that compute really shines when for workloads that aren't memory speed bound.
by obiefernandez | 2026-01-02 01:11:19+00:00
The RLM framing basically turns long-context into an RL problem over what to remember and where to route it: main model context vs Python vs sub-LLMs. That’s a nice instantiation of The Bitter Lesson, but it also means performance is now tightly coupled to whatever reward signal you happen to define in those environments. Do you have any evidence yet that policies learned on DeepDive / Oolong-style tasks transfer to “messy” real workloads (multi-week code refactors, research over evolving corpora, etc.), or are we still in the “per-benchmark policy” regime?

The split between main model tokens and sub-LLM tokens is clever for cost and context rot, but it also hides the true economic story. For many users the cost that matters is total tokens across all calls, not just the controller’s context. Some of your plots celebrate higher “main model token efficiency” while total tokens rise substantially. Do you have scenarios where RLM is strictly more cost-efficient at equal or better quality, or is the current regime basically “pay more total tokens to get around context limits”?

math-python is the most damning data point: same capabilities, but the RLM harness makes models worse and slower. That feels like a warning that “more flexible scaffold” is not automatically a win; you’re introducing an extra layer of indirection that the model has not been optimized for. The claim that RL training over the RLM will fix this is plausible, but also unfalsifiable until you actually show a model that beats a strong plain-tool baseline on math with less wall-clock and tokens.

Oolong and verbatim-copy are more encouraging: the controller treating large inputs as opaque blobs and then using Python + sub-LLMs to scan/aggregate is exactly the kind of pattern humans write by hand in agents today. One thing I’d love to see is a comparison vs a well-engineered non-RL agent baseline that does essentially the same thing but with hand-written heuristics (chunk + batch + regex/SQL/etc.). Right now the RLM looks like a principled way to let the model learn those heuristics, but the post doesn’t really separate “benefit from architecture” vs “benefit from just having more structure/tools than a vanilla single call.”

On safety / robustness: giving the model a persistent Python REPL and arbitrary pip is powerful, but it also dramatically expands the attack surface if this ever runs on untrusted inputs. Are you treating RLM as strictly a research/eval harness, or do you envision this being exposed in production agent systems? If the latter, sandboxing guarantees and resource controls probably matter as much as reward curves.
by garganzol | 2026-01-02 01:11:38+00:00
To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.

This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.

By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.

The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.

To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
by jameshilliard | 2026-01-02 01:13:16+00:00
> Also include Norm Finklestein

Why would he be one of the New Historians? Norman Finkelstein isn't really even a historian, he's more of a activist/political scientist if anything AFAIU.

> watch their debate hosted by Lex Fridman.

I've seen it, it's pretty clear if you dig into the facts that the accusations of genocide against Israel are not supported by the evidence.

It's also quite clear that people like Norman Finkelstein like to cherry-pick facts(often from books written by Benny Morris) to support a particular narrative. Benny Morris tends to take a more balanced view of the history in general which has a lot of nuance.
by spiffytech | 2026-01-02 01:13:51+00:00
I've got the feature turned on. But Gnome 49 only supports fractional scaling ratios that divide your display into a whole, integer number of pixels. And they only calculate candidate ratios by dividing your resolution up to a denominator of 4.

So on my Framework 13, I no longer have the 150% option. I can pick 133%, double, or triple. 160% would be great, but that requires a denominator of 5, which Gnome doesn't evaluate. And you can't define your own values in monitors.xml anymore.
by digiown | 2026-01-02 01:14:31+00:00
How would that be implemented? I'd be curious to know.

I'm not aware that a TPM is capable of hiding a key without the OS being able to access/unseal it at some point. It can display a signed boot chain but what would it be signed with?

If it's not signed with a key out of the reach of the system, you can always implement a fake driver pretty easily to spoof it.
by timbit42 | 2026-01-02 01:15:04+00:00
I find it interesting how many people have Ubuntu in mind when it comes to a Linux desktop when it hasn't been a great experience ever since they switched to Gnome. They don't really care about the desktop anymore. They are now a corporation that is enshitifying their product with things like SNAPs.

If you want a distro that really cares about the desktop experience today, try Linux Mint. Windows users seem to adapt to it quite quickly and easily. It's familiar and has really good defaults that match what people expect.
by twitchisntgood | 2026-01-02 01:16:13+00:00
This conversation on YT reminds me intimately of all the competition Twitch got over time. By all accounts, Mixer was more technologically advanced than Twitch is right now, and Mixer died 5 years ago.

Even Valve of all people made a streaming apparatus that was more advanced than Twitch's which had then innovative features such letting you rewind with visible categories and automated replays of moments of heightened chat activity, and even synchronized metadata such as in-game stats - and they did it as a side thing for CSGO and Dota 2. That got reworked in the streaming framework Steam has now which is only really used by Remote play and annoying publisher streams above games, so basically nothing came of it.

That's how it always goes. Twitch lags and adds useless fake engagement fluff like bits and thrives, while competitors try their damnest and neither find any success nor do they have a positive impact anywhere. The one sitting at the throne gets to pick what tech stack improvements are done, and if they don't feel like it, well, though luck, rough love.
by metadope | 2026-01-02 01:16:59+00:00
I respectfully suggest a future campaign slogan that sets a simple yet high policy bar: make America good again.

Let that be the prism through which all future political action is seen. Let's be real. Let's be good. Let's strive to eliminate and replace this farcical hyperbole, self-agrandizement, this pyramid scheme of a pretense at government. Let's have some confidence and ambition: work to restore a real balance of power between our three branches. There is so much we could do in the near and long term if we just set out sights on a simple, positive goal.

We may never be great again. Maybe we never were. But we can be good.
by DEDLINE | 2026-01-02 01:17:16+00:00
An interesting comment here.

I can attribute jumping several economic classes to the social skills I honed in high school and college. I have many friendships that are decades-plus and I had 150+ of my invited friends / family attend my wedding.

Emotionally, I do not long for new friends. It's a lot of work to maintain the relationships I have with my friends, family, wife and daughter.

I find aimless socialization these days to be laborious. I just do not give a shit.

I recently moved to NYC. I am at a point in my career where it's networking and politics that will get me ahead. I see a lot of my net-new socialization moving this direction.
by mmooss | 2026-01-02 01:17:34+00:00
That seems to contradict itself? Cooler heads plan carefully; hotheads act out - seek immediate emotional satisfaction without thinking of the consequences.

> It doesn’t take two partners to start a war, it only takes one and Russia already decided.

Wars are not acts, but the conseuqences of long chains - large graphs - of decisions often lasting decades or more. Wars come from situations where there is no other choice.

The main goal of international relations policy is to create optimal scenarios, to not get caught in a situation where you have bad options or no options. Russia's 'grey zone' actions, including of course online propaganda campaigns (seriously, why wouldn't they?), are trying to create the scenarios that suit Russia best. They are preparing the political ground, and warfare is fundamentally politics (the most widely accepted maxim of warfare - see Clausewitz).

For an example, people emotionally and aggressively advocating for warfare, like on this page, if widespread can set the political ground.

It takes two (or more) to get into that position. It's a game of chess - checkmate isn't the result of one move.
by umanwizard | 2026-01-02 01:17:57+00:00
> Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable

This is an understatement. It is completely impossible to even attempt to install Linux at all on an M3 or M4, and AFAIK there have been no public reports of any progress or anyone working on it. (Maybe there are people working on it, I don’t know).
by valdair3d | 2026-01-02 01:18:38+00:00
The "code vs LLM" framing is a bit misleading - the real question is where to draw the boundary. We've been building agents that interact with web services and the pattern that works is: LLM for understanding intent and handling unexpected states, deterministic code for everything else.

The key insight from production: LLMs excel at the "what should I do next given this unexpected state" decisions, but they're terrible at the mechanical execution. An agent that encounters a CAPTCHA, an OAuth redirect, or an anti-bot challenge needs judgment to adapt. But once it knows what to do, you want deterministic execution.

The evals discussion is critical. We found that unit-test style evals don't capture the real failure modes - agents fail at composition, not individual steps. Testing "does it correctly identify a PR link" misses "does it correctly handle the 47th message in a channel where someone pasted a broken link in a code block". Trajectory-level evals against real edge cases matter more than step-level correctness.
by mmooss | 2026-01-02 01:19:33+00:00
> What I mean is that they will only understand counter measures that you'd take in a war, like blockade or sink them for instance.

Likely that is what they want. Do you think Russian planners are ignorant, and can't foresee that? This sort of game is long played in international relations.

It's chess: You try to cause your opponent to put themselves in a bad position. Provocations are manipulation - it's obvious what Russia is trying to provoke.