MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ppqqrr | 2026-01-25 23:21:11+00:00
in a world where getting 3 people to show up to dinner is a challenge, a coherent, organized group large enough to be visible as a percentage of the population is an exceedingly rare and powerful entity. but history shows that such an entity is usually either 1) stable and peaceful, but actively decaying due to its position of hegemony or 2) unstable and violent, using conflict to sharply define its boundaries and growing by dividing the rest of society into "insiders" and "outsiders". some days i feel like we're microbes stuck in microbiological cycles. but if we make it past this rut, we will have all that we need to lay down an even stronger foundation, to codify systems and organizations designed to scatter and suppress hate and intolerance.
by wvenable | 2026-01-25 23:22:17+00:00
I've been using it to do big refactors are large changes that I would simply avoid because, before, the benefits don't outweigh the costs of the doing it. I think half the problem people have is just using AI for the wrong stuff.

I don't see why it doesn't help with reviewing, testing, or refining code either. One of the advantages I find is that an LLM "thinks" differently from me so it'll find issues that I don't notice or maybe even know about. I've certainly had it develop entire test harnesses to ensure pre/post refactoring results are the same.

That said, I have "held it wrong" and had it done the fun stuff instead and that felt bad. So I just changed how I used it.
by thesh4d0w | 2026-01-25 23:22:18+00:00
This is the only way I could come up with that would allow an end user to do a full factory reset, and end up back in a known good secure state afterwards.

Storing it in the firmware would mean every user has the same key. Storing it in eeprom means a factory reset will clear it. This allows me to ship hardware with the default key on a sticker on the side, and let's a non technical user reset it back to that if they need to.

It gives you a 256bit block to work with - https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/...
by mlyle | 2026-01-25 23:22:47+00:00
Same reason why Cerebras doesn't use DRAM. The whole point of putting memory close is to increase performance and bandwidth, and DRAM is fundamentally latent.

Also, process that is good at making logic isn't necessarily good for making DRAM. Yes, eDRAM exists, but most designs don't put DRAM on the same die as logic and instead stack it or put it off-chip.

Almost all these microcontrollers that are single-die have flash+SRAM. Almost all microprocessor cache designs are SRAM for these reasons (with some designs using off-die L3 DRAM)-- for these reasons.
by hedora | 2026-01-25 23:23:00+00:00
If Apple's still selling it, they'll almost certainly support it at least as long as an above-average Android manufacturer.

The current iOS supports things back to iPhone 11 and the SE2, so you can expect the SE3 and iPhone 13 to get at least two more years of support (no real guarantees, but they're still selling new stock of both, and they have a reputation to protect).
by peyton | 2026-01-25 23:23:07+00:00
It would seem the air defense systems used could not reliably determine what you imply they should [1][2]. I’m not sure where you’re coming from, or why it would matter what one country was known or not known to do.

[1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/07/18/12951/how-can-a-...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/07/18...
by qdog | 2026-01-25 23:23:24+00:00
IMHO, the value of the protest is to demonstrate a portion of the electorate does not agree with whatever they are protesting. There are a lot of people in a bubble that seem to think the majority always views things exactly the same as they do. Maybe you will always default do doubling down on the status quo, but some people will eventually inquire as to why someone is willing to inconvenience themselves to protest. Once someone starts to be curious about other people's motivations and reasoning, it often does impact their own opinions, for good or bad.
by imoreno | 2026-01-25 23:23:39+00:00
There's a spectrum of writing, corresponding to supply/demand or push/pull. The article is giving advice for oversupplied writing, where the audience doesn't really want to hear you, and you're trying to badger it into reading it anyway - typically, for some sort of personal gain (getting an interview, making a sale, promoting a political cause). Yes, attention hacking is important in this case.

There is also a writing where people are looking for the information, and they are showing up at your door because they already care. Presumably you wrote, because you saw the open question, and want to try answering it. History books, encyclopedias, classic literature by dead people, falls under this. Ironically, so does the example of Venice - you would read about Venice if you were already curious; there is little profit in "making someone care" about Venice otherwise. An attention grabby style would be forced and counterproductive in this.
by ajross | 2026-01-25 23:24:49+00:00
> But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.

Not sure where you're going with this metaphor. We absolutely should be helping out people who are financially struggling with advice about how to manage their funds. Don't go clubbing if you're behind on your rent. Cook your own food instead of grabbing another burger. Talk to a bank about consolidating your credit cards.

And of course we do. And it works, and is helpful.

But somehow you don't see that, or how it might apply to thing like "change crop and livestock choices to reflect resource availability" or "change taxation strategy to the externalities are borne fairly and not by consumers"?
by jjsullivan5196 | 2026-01-25 23:24:50+00:00
America has always asserted its greatness, even through struggle and hardship. All countries, all peoples have dark chapters, we're no exception. We used to teach our own history, the good and bad. We used to rebel against tyrannical authority, against corporations, governments, kings and corrupt police. It's time we wake up and remember what actually made this country great, which has always been the people's right and willingness to assemble and fight.
by ptero | 2026-01-25 23:25:27+00:00
The counter argument to that is in the age of the social media there is no need to take to the streets to show that there is dissent. Everyone the folks on the street could reach will know about the dissent anyway.

Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either. A fraction of the folks who would support the issue regardless may join the protest on the street. But that would be those who support the issue already.

Change comes from the ballot box. Enough people in the street might influence the next election (sometimes for the issue they are advocating; sometimes in the opposite direction). But 6+ months from the next election the effect I suspect is small. My 2c.
by fallingfrog | 2026-01-25 23:25:35+00:00
I visited Centralia about 20 years ago, I remember that we stopped the car on the way into town because there was a crack going all the way across the road with smoke coming out of it. But we kept walking and found a few abandoned houses and empty streets. We were too intimidated by all the scary signs to wander far off the road but took some pictures on a disposable camera and eventually returned home.
by tombert | 2026-01-25 23:27:08+00:00
I don't have a Tiktok account so I don't really have a means to search that, and it's tough to find stuff on YouTube because the recent murder is (understandably) hogging the headlines and the top searches, and I cannot be bothered doing more than a cursory search considering I don't really think you're arguing in good faith anyway. Regardless, I don't really think this is the slam dunk that you seem to think it is. You "not seeing MPD interact with protestors" is hardly strong evidence of anything.

But let's pretend you're right, MPD is completely absent, it doesn't forgive anything ICE has done, actually. It is disingenuous to act like it does.
by stn8188 | 2026-01-25 23:27:51+00:00
I put together some of my thoughts on the latest generation of AI tools. Whether you love to use these tools, or actively avoid them, nearly everyone is most certainly intrigued by them. Personally, I'm super conflicted. I've seen some really awesome ways they have been a help, but I'm honestly a bit worried about the society-wide impacts they may have.
by cauch | 2026-01-25 23:28:03+00:00
I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?

I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.

This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.

edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".

(And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)
by bramhaag | 2026-01-25 23:29:16+00:00
> all classic signs of centralisation.

No, these are classic signs of decentralization.

> I lost my Mastodon account history because I moved once

Your posts still exist on every server that federated with you, there's just no central authority to coordinate reclaiming them.

> couldn't interact with half the network or apps because I was on a non-Mastodon codebase instance

Independent implementations having compatibility issues is what happens when there's no central authority enforcing conformance. Frustrating, yes, but it's a symptom of decentralization.

> lost my account again because I stopped paying for access to the instance I was on

That's just how paying for services works. You could host your own instance, and nobody but yourself can revoke your access.

On Mastodon, if something goes wrong, nobody can cut you off the network entirely. On Bluesky, the author deleted an empty test account and is now blacklisted network-wide until Bluesky support decides to help. That is a classic sign of centralization.
by zahlman | 2026-01-25 23:29:54+00:00
> He wasn't necessarily wrong in all his conclusions, but neither were the other researchers that he rightly criticized for their own statistical gymnastics earlier.

In hindsight, I can't see any plausible argument for an IFR actually anywhere near 1%. So how were the other researchers "not necessarily wrong"? Perhaps their results were justified by the evidence available at the time, but that still doesn't validate the conclusion.
by Sharlin | 2026-01-25 23:30:05+00:00
CWT is laid in such a way that it has net zero stress in a "neutral" temperature, which naturally depends on the climate. Both extreme heat and extreme cold can cause damage, buckling and fracturing/embrittlement respectively, and choosing the neutral temperature is balancing act. But even if completely cut, track cannot shrink longitudinally much at all, it's the job of the sleepers and the ballast to keep it anchored in place. And if the track is laid on a concrete slab rather than ballast, it isn't moving anywhere.

Fun fact: the reason modern concrete or composite sleepers (e.g. [1]) have a slightly concave profile is to better resist lateral forces (i.e. buckling) than traditional straight-profile wooden sleepers.

[1] https://www.romicgroup.com/permanent-way/concrete-railway-sl...
by jy-tan | 2026-01-25 23:30:49+00:00
Unfortunately nested bubblewrap sandboxes don't work.

When you run `fence flatpak run <app>`, Fence creates a bwrap sandbox with its own user namespace, Flatpak then tries to create another user namespace inside, so you'd get something like `bwrap: setting up uid map: Permission denied`.

The outer sandbox doesn't grant the capability for nested namespace creation (otherwise it would defeat much of the security), so Fence can't wrap Flatpak (or similar namespace-based sandbox tools) in a useful way. Ideally you'd need something at the network level outside any sandbox.

That said, open to suggestions if anyone knows of a feasible solution.
by aaplok | 2026-01-25 23:31:31+00:00
> The very fact people think they need to read (fiction) books released this year more than ones released before is baffling.

Do they really?

I was comparing rates of production vs consumption. It doesn't follow that what is being consumed on a given year is this year's production.

My guess is that most of the books written are read by hardly anyone. A few authors have a faithful following that will read their books as soon as it's out (which isn't too baffling). Reviewers and critics may indeed be more likely to review new books, which might impact people's decisions (again, not necessarily baffling). Book shops also put new books forward, but all those books tend to be the ones by trendy authors.

Other than the few fashionable books that come out each year you'll find reviewers like the one described in the article who don't seem to focus on new books (e.g. they talk about Dostoïevski), so it is not obvious that people feel that compelled to read new books.

> the backlog of books spread across millennia, not a century.

How much I agree with this! Plus, time does such a great job at filtering out the good from the bad (or the exceptional from the mundane). That's where lists of books entering the public domain, like this one [0], are important. Or the reviews [1].

Ultimately, the fact that there is more available to read than is possible even to the most voracious of readers means that most people will rely on guidance on what to read.

[0] https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026

[1] https://publicdomainreview.org/
by jrm4 | 2026-01-25 23:31:40+00:00
This continues to confirm for me that there's nothing particularly valuable about ATProto, and that some of the percieved "flaws" in models like Mastodon's model are features just as much as bugs.

Honestly, this is making me go further in the other direction, can we just do "twitter but owned by a trust" or something?
by cbeach | 2026-01-25 23:31:40+00:00
You’re free to live in some dense urban environment where amenities are a five min walk away, and everyone relies on underground trains, busses and taxis.

If you think “freedom” means not having a car, then there are options for you.

I moved out of a dense urban public-transport-and-cycling environment into a countryside town with heaps of space, and where everyone happily owns cars to give them the freedom to go wherever they like, whenever they like, taking family and cargo with them, without issue.

I would never go back to the urban environment, waiting around for public transport, being limited to the routes served by public transport, useless cycle lanes everywhere (what good is a bike when I need to transport my 3 year old, 6 year old, and all our shopping?). And the stifling density of housing and amenities was oppressive and unpleasant.

There is a better way. Move to countryside town, buy an EV that cost negligible amounts to run, cases negligible local pollution, and is a joy to own.
by ccozan | 2026-01-25 23:32:37+00:00
It was a busines decision for me: being in customer meetings and suddenly dropping out was unacceptable. Or not being able to access critical data. Vodafone LTA coverage is average at best and data is severily limited ( 15 GBs ). Really out of options here!!

While I chuckled at "American neonazi", the company SpaceX is doing great things.
by zahlman | 2026-01-25 23:33:21+00:00
> The public thinks lives are infinitely valuable.

In rhetoric, yes. (At least, except when people are given the opportunity to appear virtuous by claiming that they would sacrifice themselves for others.)

In actions and revealed preferences, not so much.

It would be rather difficult to be a functional human being if one took that principle completely seriously, to its logical conclusion.

I can't recall ever hearing any calls for compulsory public interaction, only calls to stop forbidding various forms of public interaction.
by XorNot | 2026-01-25 23:33:57+00:00
> The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.

No they do not. Quote, from your own link:

> According to an April 2025 freedom of information report filed by The Times, over 12,000 people were arrested, including for social media posts, in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

Emphasis mine. "Including". Not exclusively, not only, including.

Now what does the law being cited actually say[1]?

> It is an offence under these sections to send messages of a “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing” character or persistently use a public electronic communications network to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.

With additional clarification[2]:

> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.

> “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.

So you're deliberately spreading misinformation here, as was the original article by the Times and as is everyone else who keeps quoting this figure. Because by means of lying by omission they want to imply one very specific thing: "you will be arrested for criticizing the government on social media". But the actual crime statistic is about a much more common, much broader category of crime - namely: harassment. That 12,000 a year figure includes targeted harassment by almost any carriage medium, as well as crimes like "prank" calling emergency services. It means it includes death threats, stalking, domestic abuse and just about every other type of non-physical abuse or intimidation.

Of course you could've also figured out this is bullshit with a very simple litmus test: 12,000 people a year wouldn't be hard to find if the UK was mass-jailing people on public social media. But it's not what's happening.

The text of the law as well, for anyone interested: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...

[2] https://archive.md/bdEqK#selection-3009.0-3009.194:~:text=A%....
by yesco | 2026-01-25 23:34:04+00:00
Assuming critics are just reflexively resistant is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit. "They'd get it if they were more curious" is unfalsifiable.

Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear. The question is whether street protests add anything to that awareness, and whether the way they're conducted generates curiosity or just irritation. For a lot of people it's the latter, and waving that off doesn't make the problem disappear.
by pooploop64 | 2026-01-25 23:34:24+00:00
The reaction to this would have been different two or three years ago but it looks extremely lame when you open January 2026 hackernews and this is the kind of thing a tech company is trying to persuade you into thinking is exciting or useful.

You've heard about what people are doing in the medical industry. Using AI to accelerate diagnosis and analysis of biological material. In astronomy it's showing us things that no human had ever seen before. You hear about all these things changing the world at large and the smaller worlds of individual people and families.

Then you look at the actual IT industry and we've got... some premade libraries duct taped together into a crappy browser that barely works. Of course when the value of this is compared to the cost, the response is that it's fine because it was never actually intended to be useful in the first place. Well we're actually a step ahead of you there.

The phrase "high on their own supply" describes all the people involved in this very well. I assure you we understand the goal of this project perfectly. It just wasn't a good, worthy, or even interesting goal. The immense amount of resources that went into this should have gone into something better. That's all there is to it.
by tavavex | 2026-01-25 23:34:48+00:00
I don't think accelerationists would mind - even if they believe that what's happening is wrong, going further in is the backbone of the whole ideology, so why would they be having second thoughts?

I think the real group behind this is people who are capable of sensing that this is wrong at least on some deeper level, but who are so complacent that they just want not to think about it too much. Maybe it's because they're in too deep, maybe they make too much money off of it to care, maybe their heels are too dug in on social issues for them to ever try to reconsider. Possibly a combination of any of the three.
by fL0per | 2026-01-25 23:34:54+00:00
> Romania is a good example of what happens when lots of small operators aggressively wire dense apartment blocks: brutal competition, low barrier to entry, and suddenly everyone has insane internet.

And it propagated to Spain thanks to the Romanian DIGI playing their strong bets for a while. I've had the access to the cheapest while also best-uptime-service option because of them on the two places I've lived in the city. They're still deploying as much as they can and meanwhile they offer VULA access where they don't have (In Spain thanks to the NEBA regulation, biggest ISPs are obligated to ease local access for any other operator) own infrastucture.

So it's available also at my parents' as well since a few months ago (Internet access still contracted with another company which honoured the low price offered back then which was subject to some conditions, and even having risen prices as much as three or four times, they've respected them for staying clients). I didn't see the need for the switch, but wouldn't had given much thought to it.
by nippoo | 2026-01-25 23:36:29+00:00
eFuses have been a thing forever on almost all MCUs/processors, and aren't some inherently "evil" technology - mostly they're used in manufacturing when you might have the same microcontroller/firmware on separate types of boards. I'm working on a board right now which is either an audio input or an output (depending on which components are fitted) and one or the other eFuse is burned to set which one it is, so subsequent firmware releases won't accidentally set a GPIO as an output rather than an input and potentially damage the device.