MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kens | 2026-01-23 21:07:01+00:00
That's an interesting question. Keep in mind that the 8086 was built as a stopgap processor to sell until Intel's iAPX 432 "micro-mainframe" processor was completed. Moreover, the 8086 was designed to be assembly-language compatible with the 8080 (through translation software) so it could take advantage of existing software. It was also designed to be compatible with the 8080's 16-bit addressing while supporting more memory.

Given those constraints, the design of the 8086 makes sense. In hindsight, though, considering that the x86 architecture has lasted for decades, there are a lot of things that could have been done differently. For example, the instruction encoding is a mess and didn't have an easy path for extending the instruction set. Trapping on invalid instructions would have been a good idea. The BCD instructions are not useful nowadays. Treating a register as two overlapping 8-bit registers (AL, AH) makes register renaming difficult in an out-of-order execution system. A flat address space would have been much nicer than segmented memory, as you mention. The concept of I/O operations vs memory operations was inherited from the Datapoint 2200; memory-mapped I/O would have been better. Overall, a more RISC-like architecture would have been good.

I can't really fault the 8086 designers for their decisions, since they made sense at the time. But if you could go back in a time machine, one could certainly give them a lot of advice!
by jumploops | 2026-01-23 21:07:09+00:00
One thing that surprised me when diving into the Codex internals was that the reasoning tokens persist during the agent tool call loop, but are discarded after every user turn.

This helps preserve context over many turns, but it can also mean some context is lost between two related user turns.

A strategy that's helped me here, is having the model write progress updates (along with general plans/specs/debug/etc.) to markdown files, acting as a sort of "snapshot" that works across many context windows.
by lovich | 2026-01-23 21:07:18+00:00
My favorite part about that is gas town is supposedly so productive that this guys sleep patterns are affected by how much work he’s doing, but he took the time to physically go to a bank to get a 5 figure payout.

It makes it difficult to believe that gas town is actually producing anything of value.

I also lol at his bitching about how the bank didn’t let him do the transactions instantly as he describes himself how much of a scam this seems and how the worst thing is his bank account being drained, like banks don’t have a self interest in protecting their clientele from such scams.
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-01-23 21:07:22+00:00
If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally:

> I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested?

I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000 emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon. If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs.

I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the following dashboard:

Iowa
HOLD
0°F
Unknown (API error)
Fred's Thinking: “Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

Fred is here
South Texas
HOLD
0°F
Unknown (API error)
Fred's Thinking: “South Texas is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

Argentina
HOLD
0°F
Unknown (API error)
Fred's Thinking: “Argentina is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...
by rexpop | 2026-01-23 21:07:30+00:00
> If it's not impossible, it will happen given enough time.

I hope you might be somewhat relieved to consider that this is not so in an absolute sense. There are plenty of technological might-have-beens that didn't happen, and still haven't, and probably will never—due to various economic and social dynamics.

The counterfactual—all that's possible happens—ie almost tautological.

We should try and look at these mechanisms from an economic standpoint, and ask "do they really have the information-processing density to take significant long-term independent action?"

Of course, "significant" is my weasel word.

> we're giving the models so much unsupervised compute...

Didn't you read the article? It's wasted! It's kipple!
by kelseyfrog | 2026-01-23 21:08:11+00:00
> How can you get a machine to have values?

The short answer is a reward function. The long answer is the alignment problem.

Of course, everything in the middle is what matters. Explicitly defined reward functions are complete, but not consistent. Data defined rewards are potentially consistent but incomplete. It's not a solvable problem form machines but equally likewise for humans. Still we practice, improve and middle through dispite this and approximate improvement hopefully, over long enough timescales.
by epolanski | 2026-01-23 21:08:39+00:00
I'm tired of this scaremongering of Russian invasion.

Unless we live on another planet Russia can barely fight a war against Ukraine and their military capabilities have been further eroded for decades with insane losses to their personnel, economy and equipment.

There is one, and only one country in the world in the position to threaten Europe in any way, and it's our most important ally.
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 21:09:01+00:00
Terrible analogy. The victim here bought the card from the retailer. Someone else had gained access to the secret contained on the card and stolen or attempted to steal the value on the card because Apple can't figure out how to sell a gift card securely.

Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-23 21:09:17+00:00
You should maybe read the article. Tesla is removing Steering Assist from all new vehicles sold, and your options are now either nothing or FSD for $99/month.

Previously you got the Corolla feature set included with your vehicle purchase, Enhanced Autopilot for a fee which was a step above that, and then FSD subscription which was a step-up again.

Now Tesla has downgraded the base experience to include no Steering Assist at all, and no longer offers Enhanced Autopilot. So you get two choices: No Steering Assist or FSD.
by mbowcut2 | 2026-01-23 21:09:25+00:00
It's an interesting concept, but I'm skeptical about how feasible this is. How much design/legwork/intervention will Seth actually contribute during the entire process? I'm thinking "growing corn" might be a little hard for a proof of concept, specifically because the time horizon is quite long. Something a little more short term like: contracting a landscaping job. The model comes up with design ideas, contacts landscapers, gets bids, accepts a bid. Seth could tell the model that he's it's agent, available to sign for things, walk people through the property, etc, but will make no decisions, and is only reachable by email or text.
by Symbiote | 2026-01-23 21:09:47+00:00
I think the claim is FUD — or at least far, far beyond what a child would come across, e.g. professional resins, airbrushing/spraying solvent-based paints indoors etc.

These are paints specifically marketed towards children, produced by a large company in a European country with a strong record of safety etc.

Spray primer should be applied outside by an adult (as it says on the can).
by khimaros | 2026-01-23 21:09:48+00:00
there are two generation modes: 1) a basic single voice narrator and 2) a "dramatization" mode which generates a cast list from the book contents and converts the entire text into a script with distinct voices and instructions for each segment.

i used this with a self-hosted gpt-oss-120b, which turned out very well. the resulting mp3 files work well with the open source "Voice" audiobook player on F-Droid.

feedback welcome!
by dugidugout | 2026-01-23 21:10:08+00:00
Ah! I confused your intent myself!

> I guess I'm trying to understand how widespread and serious the problem of cheaters using AI/computer cheats actually is.

It is undoubtedly more widespread.

> I know Counter Strike back in the day was sort of ruined because of cheaters.

There is truth in this, but this only affected more casual ladder play. Since early CSGO (maybe before as well? I am not of source age) there has been FACEiT and other leagues which asserts strict kernel-level anti-cheat and other heuristics on the players. I do agree this cat and mouse game is on the side of the cat and the best competition is curated in tightly controlled (often gate-kept) spaces.

It is interesting that "better" cheating is often done through mimicking humans closer though, which does have an interesting silver lining. We still very much value a "smart" or "strategic" AI in match-based solitary genres, why not carry this over to FPS or the like. Little Timmy gets to train against an AI expressing "competitive player" without needing to break through the extreme barriers to actually play against someone of this caliber. Quite exciting when put this way.

If better cheats are being forced to actually play the game, I'm not sure the threat is very existential to gaming itself. This is much less abrasive than getting no-scoped in spawn at round start in a CS match.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-23 21:10:48+00:00
> But if you buy certain decongestants, they do log your ID.

Yeah, but many people don't actually think War on Drugs policies are a model for civil liberties that should be extended beyond that domain (or, in many cases, even tolerated in that domain.) That policy has been effective, I guess, in promoting the sales of alternative “decongestants” (that don't actually work), though it did little to curb use and harms from the drugs it was supposed to control by attacking supply.
by thorum | 2026-01-23 21:11:10+00:00
Agree that planning time is the bottleneck, but

> 3 days

still seems slow! I’m saying what happens in 2028 when your entire project is 5-10 minutes of total agent runtime - time actually spent writing code and implementing your plan? Trying to parallelize 10m of work with a “town” of agents seems like unnecessary complexity.
by jaggederest | 2026-01-23 21:11:10+00:00
The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.

Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
by labcomputer | 2026-01-23 21:12:05+00:00
I tend to agree that this doesn't really add a second factor. After all, both the mTOTP secret and the password are something you know, and something you could tell someone else.

However, I do think there is added value here, at least in principle: It increases the difficulty of credential stuffing attacks, which, IMHO is the main value of having a TOTP secret stored in one or more password managers.

"Regular" TOTP stored in a password manager also helps with password reuse when a site is compromised because each site has a different TOTP secret. It seems implausible that a user could remember a different mTOTP secret for each site.
by wrxd | 2026-01-23 21:12:07+00:00
Not the person you’re responding to but yes, pretty much all of modern tech is awful.

The specs are pretty good but then you don’t really own it, you get limitations on what you can use it for, you get rent seeking and walled gardens everywhere. Even if you’re paying you get ads and get tracked. Updates make products worse more often than not.

What are you excited about? AI slop?
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-23 21:12:44+00:00
I am an Apple ecosystem lifetime participant. I have recovery and legacy contacts. What I would love is for those contacts to have the encryption key(s) for my data shared with them so they can provide me with recovery options if needed, but Apple cannot.

Certainly, nation state actors could pursue those people to obtain access to key material, but that is a different hill to climb than simply sending requests to Apple, especially for contacts outside of the jurisdiction or nation state reach. Perhaps Shamir's secret sharing would be a component of such an option (you need X out of Y trusted contacts to recover, 2 out of 3 for easy mode, 3 out of 5 for hard mode).
by jmward01 | 2026-01-23 21:12:45+00:00
luckily I don't drive much. The one car is just falling apart and is ridiculously expensive to maintain (don't buy a used Mercedes, ever). The other is just not fun to be in but at least it gets reasonable gas mileage. I really want an electric vehicle, especially the way things are going right now, but buying anything built in the last 10 years is just depressing at best and electric vehicle life is much lower on average than ICE lifespan due to battery life. Ah well. Maybe this will push me to an electric scooter for all the in-town travel and I will only need a 'real car' once a month or so.
by tedggh | 2026-01-23 21:12:57+00:00
Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer. If it comes to that, there’s a lot of value in a Tesla for which you don’t pay a dime either, like constant and actually useful system upgrades, a reliable charging network and great customer service. It’s also a good looking car with a great user interface that gets better and better with free updates. Now if you are a person dropping 50K on a Tesla, you can likely afford FSD if that’s something important to you. FSD is not comparable to any auto steer I have tried on any car, and I drive a bunch of different rental cars because I travel a lot by road for business. I like the new flexibility of being able to pay for FSD when you are going to use it only, like during a long trip. There’s no point to be on FSD (or autopilot) to run errands in the city.
by hinkley | 2026-01-23 21:12:57+00:00
One of the perennial problems with on call situations I encountered was that at some point everyone knew that a production incident was going on and people were either trying to help or learn by following along running the same diagnostics the on point people were running, and exhausting the available resources that were needed to diagnose the problem.

Splunk was a particular problem that way, but I also started seeing it with Grafana, at least in extremis, once we migrated to self hosted on AWS from a vendor. Most times it was fine, but if we had a bug that none of the teams could quickly disavow as being theirs, we had a lot of chefs in the kitchen and things would start to hiccup.

There can be thundering herds in dev. And a bunch of people trying a repro case in a thirty second window can be one of them. The question is if anyone has the spare bandwidth to notice that it’s happening or if everyone trudges along making the same mistakes every time.
by voxRovis | 2026-01-23 21:12:58+00:00
Most backlink tools analyze links after search engines have already crawled and indexed them.

We built VerifyBacklinks to audit backlink lists before indexing happens. It takes the Excel files you already get from vendors, outreach, or SEO tools and evaluates each URL using early signals: HTTP status, follow type, spam topics, toxic scoring, tier patterns, and indexing recommendations.

The goal isn’t link building, but risk clarity before links go live.

Happy to answer technical questions or explain how the scoring and decision logic works.
by nurimamedov | 2026-01-23 21:13:06+00:00
Somehow this post was pessimized by hn and you’ll probably see some bullshit report from anthropic first but not the actual evidence of anthropic being utterly abysmal and silent about their mistakes.
What really bothers me is that I’ve paid them for that subscription and their support team became rock solid and didn’t utter a word about paying me back for days when I couldn’t use my active chats.
I don’t even vibe code that much in Claude and it still manages not only to fail in existing chats where compaction should work, but also eat out my weekly limits astonishingly fast.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-01-23 21:13:07+00:00
>The defaults will also upload the BitLocker key to a Microsoft Account if available.

>This is why the FBI can compel Microsoft to provide the keys.

>in my opinion it's the reasonable default

I really can't imagine what kind of person would say that with a straight face. Hanlon's razor be damned, I have to ask: are you a Microsoft employee or investor?
by palata | 2026-01-23 21:13:09+00:00
It was edited to "average educated European", whatever that means.

But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).

And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).

Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.

And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
by epolanski | 2026-01-23 21:13:35+00:00
He is unpopular because he did the right thing on many topics such as rising the age of pensions in a country that cannot sustain the current system anymore, especially with the demographic downfall.

Honestly, Macron is one of the few politicians in Europe that has consistently understood the importance of pan-Europeanism and has called for strengthening of European armies or giving birth to an EU army for a long time.

I understand he's unpopular, but as a non-French I cannot see how he's been wrong on so many topics, especially when it comes to international relations.

And to finish, with the recent world events I highly doubt that Trump-like politicians can win elections, especially in countries like France. Sadly, a Trumpist did win elections in Poland just recently though.

All eastern European countries are plagued by this insanity of electing presidents, which makes it very easy to fall into this anti democratic insanities we see from Russia to Belarus and now US.
by jbstack | 2026-01-23 21:13:41+00:00
Not sure it's good as a starter distro, but other than that I agree. I was put off NixOS for a long time despite loving the principles behind it. Then a few weeks ago I had ChatGPT give me a short course on it, including flakes and the basics of the Nix language. I completed that in a few hours and achieved more than I ever had reading the Nix docs and blogs etc. Now I'm able to use an LLM to help me write flakes while also understanding what it is doing (I'm not a fan of blindly using AI generated code).
by gruez | 2026-01-23 21:13:44+00:00
>2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.

That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
by javierbuilds | 2026-01-23 21:13:52+00:00
I used to record myself on my phone, but it was hard to see my own mistakes. I tried an app called SpechAI. It really changed things for my nerves. The app watches your face and voice while you talk. It showed me that I look at the floor too much. My favorite part is the one-minute improv practice mode. It helps me stay calm when people ask me questions at work. If you want to stop feeling shy and start speaking better, you should get it now. It gives much better tips than just a video.
by technion | 2026-01-23 21:14:47+00:00
Australian here. I paid a garbage removal company to basically empty a house. Their qebsite called it "estate cleanup". It took a whole day for a team with crowbars to smash up every piece of furniture and load it in a truck and take it.

People take this offensively and insist someone must have wanted an old chest of drawers or something if only put it on facebook marketplace and work with interested parties and assist with them obtaining it - but those people dont realise how much they are asking of someone who is dealing with loss.
by BeetleB | 2026-01-23 21:14:53+00:00
Two American tourists were backpacking in Europe when a car pulled up next to them. The driver rolled down his window and asked in german:” Where is the nearest diner?”

The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”

The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.

Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.

The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”
by alfiedotwtf | 2026-01-23 21:14:58+00:00
> One thing I really miss from the 80's and 90's: When you buy a product (hardware or software), its features and capabilities were stable

The complete opposite to this is Apple’s new UI for the iPhone. It’s so damn buggy I thought I accidentally clicked on Beta Testing!

… this has to be THE worst update thing they’ve pushed since forcing everyone to listen to U2
by ratelimitsteve | 2026-01-23 21:14:59+00:00
when i took stats in high school our final had one set of data and two questions. one was to use that set of data to prove a hypothesis, and the other to use that same set of data to disprove it. the trick was manipulating confidence, and the real trick was realizing that this was almost certainly happening any time we allow someone else to make the critical decisions for how to crunch any particular dataset. there seems to be an unspoken translation layer: you ask a question in english, then use statistics as the process of translating that question from english to math, then apply the translated question to the dataset and get an answer. if translation were mechanical that would be fine, but often the english has to go through interpretation. How confident do we have to be in a "yes" answer? 99%? 95%? 50/50? What constitutes an outlier? Sometimes a very slight shift in the line between good and bad data will include or exclude a single data point that can shift the calculations. The problem seems to be standardization of this translation layer as much as anything else, which is to say that everyone is ostensibly trying to answer the same question but under the hood they're asking very different questions of the data.