MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by galangalalgol | 2026-01-29 19:13:44+00:00
Bit late, but I made a small program that did network and file io as well as using a variety of containers and running system commands. I couldn't get the default release over 650kB. Using a single codegen unit lto strip and panic=abort got that down to 432kB. Using build-std didn't get it any smaller still. When I added optimization for size was the only way I got build-std to shrink things any further than the other options alone, and that only got me 10kB. My conclusion is that build-std is not a substantial contributor. Using std seems to add 300kB-500kB depending on how much you use. That seems like a lot to me because I am old, but elf binaries add several kB of header so maybe I should stop worrying so much.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-29 19:14:00+00:00
WindowsAppSDK (and its direct predecessor) was installed only by the OS in Windows 8 and early Windows 10 and everybody hated the OS updating it and needing to know things like which specific Windows 10 update a user was on to access features. It's a mess either way it is installed.

> A sane person might ask why not just use Qt (smaller distribution!) or Electron (about the same size) at that point, since they're cross platform and you can easily get fluent themes that look the same as WinUI3?

The "good news" about this tool is that it is partly for making it easier to use WinUI3 from Electron, so that you can have both large distributions at the same time.
by tootie | 2026-01-29 19:14:06+00:00
I was diagnosed a while back with a chronic neurological disorder. One that has a heavy effect on my mood and can conversely be triggered by my mood. The underlying cause is scientifically proven to be physiological. I lack a specific neurotransmitter due to inactive cells in my hypothalamus.

For a long time I wrote off my symptoms as being all in my head. And after a formal diagnosis, I am 100% certain they are all in my head because that's where my brain is. Symptoms are also unequivocally psychosomatic. What I'm feeling can influence my physical symptoms and rather abruptly at that. It's right in the definition of the illness. None of this means that disease is imaginary or not real or I can talk myself out of it. It's as physically irreversible as losing an arm. There are some very good treatments, but I will never ever be cured (barring a miraculous breakthrough).

While the causes of mood or personality disorders are less well understood, it seems entirely plausible that they can be just a physically inevitable. Every thought, feeling, sensory input and motor output is a physical process originating in your brain and your brain can malfunction if it's ill. And we can treat illness with medicine.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-29 19:14:06+00:00
Sorry, I shouldn't comment before I have my coffee. Saying it "reeks of hyperbole" was unnecessarily rude.

That does sound frustrating. You're working with APIs that I don't usually touch (audio, canvas) so it's not surprising that I haven't experienced that. I was thinking back to the days I had to support IE 8, trying to debug weird issues in production like scripts not working because `console.log` wasn't defined unless the developer tools were opened.
by tg1482 | 2026-01-29 19:14:11+00:00
When an agent processes information, it needs somewhere to put it - somewhere it can search, reorganize, and grow organically. For any type of knowledge base like agent memories, product taxonomies, etc the challenge was enabling recursive interaction without a pile of specialized tools (search, create, delete, etc.) that are added to context.

Recursive Language Models (RLMs) introduced the idea of putting the entire context into a Python variable and let the model recursively interact with it, instead of reasoning over everything in one shot. RLMs: https://alexzhang13.github.io/blog/2025/rlm/. I really liked it, but enabing a python REPL seemed like a bad tradeoff for generality.

Loopy imposes a known structure (a tree / filesystem), and replaces the REPL with composable Bash-style commands.

Why this approach:

- simple - a single string can represent the full data
- known structure - stored in a file system format agents already know and love
- composition - compose search commands to quickly navigate the data
by aristofun | 2026-01-29 19:14:19+00:00
There is no the right way to building a software. Anything more complex than a hello world. And if project is large enough (google scale) - no single person really groks it fully and arrogant enough to claim knowing how it should be done.

All these clean architecture, design patterns are myths, wishful thinking, marketing memes, or someone’s successful experience overgeneralized and cargo culted at best.

There couldn’t be anything less meaningful than “best practice” idea. It encourages dangerous illusion of shared understanding. Ive seen projects bestpracticed to death.

Best from who’s point? Best for what goal? Best in what context, for what kind of team? How the bad-good scale is defined?

All you can do is patiently learn on a case by case basis, slowly building up your own intuition and style of work (ideally raising awareness the limitations of your own experience and preferences at the same time).

So basically yes, throw out all hi level theoretical concepts to trash (they have already served their purpose) and approach new projects from ground principles.

And from the fact that your craft is not the goal but only means to an end, to serve business, users, customers.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-01-29 19:14:32+00:00
I would like to be able to say that it is uncommon, but based on what I am seeing in my neck of the woods, all sorts of, one would think, private information is ingested by various online llms. I would have been less annoyed with it had those been local deployments, but, uhhh, to say it is not a first choice is being over the top charitable with current corporates. And it is not even question of money! Some of those corps throw crazy money at it.

edit: Just in case, in the company I currently work at, compliance apparently signed off on this with only a rather slim type of data verbotten from upload.
by perardi | 2026-01-29 19:14:45+00:00
Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…

…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.
by JeremyNT | 2026-01-29 19:14:52+00:00
Yeah I have a whole lot of trouble imagining this replacing traditional video games any time soon; we have actually very good and performant representations of how physics work, and games are tuned for the player to have an enjoyable experience.

There's obviously something insanely impressive about these google experiments, and it certainly feels like there's some kind of use case for them somewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where they fit in.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-29 19:14:54+00:00
The title could be re-stated:

The economy is screwed, tech is just the scapegoat.

People who already had plenty absorbed the cheap money, until there was basically not enough value left to go around for consumers to be able to carry on the way that was expected.

>this isn’t a tech specific "failure",

Nope, looks like every "market" has become more nonideal, and the more "financialized" they are could be what's making certain markets worse.

Not every job is actually on a "market", some are deep in and others not so much.

In the old days people held on to their jobs for so much longer that it's a really big difference when the actual "job market" in so many areas was virtually insignificant compared to 21st century rambling as the norm.

Regardless of pay, the more your job is part of a market, the more you would be subject to market forces beyond your control.

Markets are "always" irrational except for those times when they are neither in your favor nor against you. If a neutral situation holds for a period of time, that can be negotiated with a more "straightforward" approach than when volatility is the dominating factor. People might think with almost "engineering-style certainty". Once there are wild swings, it can be like a sine wave where half the curve is positive and the lower halves are negative. It still balances out to neutral but you may not know where you are at any one time. Every positive excursion will not last very long and be followed sooner rather than later by a negative equivalent in some way.

With a significant cycle occurring, then the only truly rational, neutral times are those brief zero-crossing events when the market reverses from favorable to unfavorable or back again.

If your only real opportunities occur when the market is in your favor, then you are dependent on the market being irrational which you need, but is about as uncertain as it gets. Opportunities like this can reverse more easily than the mainstream where they more often merely fade.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-29 19:15:07+00:00
Something I’ve been sort of wondering about—LLM training seems like it ought to be the most dispatchable possible workload (easy to pause the thing when you don’t have enough wind power, say). But, when I’ve brought this up before people have pointed out that, basically, top-tier GPU time is just so valuable that they always want to be training full speed ahead.

But, hypothetically if they had a ton of previous gen GPUs (so, less efficient) and a ton of intermittent energy (from solar or wind) maybe it could be a good tradeoff to run them intermittently?

Ultimately a workload that can profitably consumer “free” watts (and therefore flops) from renewable overprovisioning would be good for society I guess.
by boxincautada | 2026-01-29 19:15:15+00:00
Hi, I'm glad to hear that comment... First, these are the transitions that caught my attention the most:

Levels 6-7, going from something easy, almost a gift, to something that for many is impossible (H utmw ylpl ntsb gleti).

Another level that caught my attention is level 2. Although the rules say that brute force can't be used, we all know that 100% of the players used it.

And there's more, which I can't mention here because it would give away too much information to other people.
by AlexanderGrooff | 2026-01-29 19:15:38+00:00
I appreciate your comment, but I made mermaid-ascii OSS under MIT license so that everybody can use it in whatever fashion they like, be that in another OSS project or in your company.
I’m just happy to contribute back to the ecosystem, and I’m excited seeing my projects being used by others.

Nothing but good vibes to these guys. Let’s all strive to keep making cool things, and leave things a little better than how you found it ;)
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-29 19:15:40+00:00
It’s fine if it’s just filling Chinese manufacturing. Low-cost VPS hosts are going to be using brands like Supermicro anyways. It still gets exported.

Except for RAM from YMTC, which the USA gave a near-death sentence to by placing it on the Dept. of Commerce “Entity List” so no USA-associated business can do business with YMTC now.
by dpedu | 2026-01-29 19:15:46+00:00
While not a small host, I thought I would mention what I observed with OVH's VPS offering. I was considering their line of VPSes recently because of how generous the cores/ram quantities were given the price. For example, the smallest offering is 4 cores / 8GB at just over $4 a month.

What I found is that it is cheap because the cores, and presumably ram, is old. Like, 2013 era Xeon E3-1275 v3 old. But that's fine! Old hardware like this uses old ram that is less affected by the current shortage. It's good enough for my needs.
by themafia | 2026-01-29 19:15:47+00:00
> It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

> a huge portion of human drivers

What are you basing any of these blind assertions off of? They are not at all born out by the massive amounts of data we have surrounding driving in the US. Of course Waymo is going to sell you a self-serving line but here on Hacker News you should absolutely challenge that. In particular because it's very far out of line with real world data provided by the government.
by hinkley | 2026-01-29 19:16:07+00:00
I find the thesaurus helps a lot with this. Actually more than just naming, because often a word in the synonym list will stand out as a more accurate representation of the concept you’re trying to add to the code, in a way that reveals subtasks that will substantially increase the value of the feature.

In short I use it as a form of rubber ducking. No it’s not like this word, it’s more like that one, but most of all like this one.
by avaer | 2026-01-29 19:16:14+00:00
> If making games out of these simulations work, it't be the end for a lot of big studios, and might be the renaissance for small to one person game studios.

I mean, if making a game eventually boils down to cooking a sufficient prompt (which to be clear, I'm not talking about text, these prompts are probably going to be more like video databases) then I'm not sure if it will be a renaissance for "one person game studios" any more than AI image generation has been a renaissance for "one person artists".

I want to be optimistic but it's hard to deny the massive distribution stranglehold that media publishing landscape has, and that has nothing to do with technology.
by sowbug | 2026-01-29 19:16:19+00:00
Sorry, I was being oblique. Humans kill other humans with cars every day. They kill even more on Halloween. Let's start addressing that problem before worrying whether Waymos might someday decide it's OK to drive through ghosts.

Autonomous vehicles won't be perfect. They'll surely make different mistakes from the ones humans currently make. People will die who wouldn't have died at the hands of human drivers. But the overall number of mistakes will be smaller.

Suppose you could wave your magic wand and have a The Purge-style situation where AVs had a perfect safety record 364 days of the year, but for some reason had a tricky bug that caused them to run over tiny Spidermen and princesses on Halloween. The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?
by godelski | 2026-01-29 19:16:21+00:00
> Why are they not training models to help write games instead?

Genie isn't about making games... Granted, they for some reason they don't put this at the top. Classic Google, not communicating well...

| It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds, while its breakthrough consistency enables the simulation of any real-world scenario — from robotics and modelling animation and fiction, to exploring locations and historical settings.

The key part is simulation. That's what they are building this for. Ignore everything else.

Same with Nvidia's Earth 2 and Cosmos (and a bit like Isaac). Games or VR environments are not the primary drive, the primary drive is training robots (including non-humanoids, such as Waymo) and just getting the data. It's exactly because of this that perfect physics (or let's be honest, realistic physics[0,1]). Getting 50% of the way there in simulation really does cut down the costs of development, even if we recognize that cost steepens as we approach "there". I really wish they didn't call them "world models" or more specifically didn't shove the word "physics" in there, but hey, is it really marketing if they don't claim a golden goose can not only lay actual gold eggs but also diamonds and that its honks cure cancer?

[0] Looking right does not mean it is right. Maybe it'll match your intuition or undergrad general physics classes with calculus but talk to a real physicist if you doubt me here. Even one with just an undergrad will tell you this physics is unrealistic and any one worth their salt will tell you how unintuitive physics ends up being as you get realistic, even well before approaching quantum. Go talk to the HPC folks and ask them why they need superocmputers... Sorry, physics can't be done from observation alone.

[1] Seriously, I mean look at their demo page. It really is impressive, don't get me wrong, but I can't find a single video that doesn't have major physics problems. That "A high-altitude open world featuring deformable snow terrain." looks like it is simulating Legolas[2], not a real person. The work is impressive, but it isn't anywhere near realistic https://deepmind.google/models/genie/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ZYzbKaVyQ
by volkl48 | 2026-01-29 19:16:31+00:00
Current use is still a problem AFAIK (not sure on weed).

That said I can confirm that a few years back a friend who had previously used/experimented with a wide variety of substances (EDM scene, psychs), had no trouble getting a clearance.

They disclosed all of it, said they weren't currently using it and wouldn't for as long as they were in the job role, passed the drug test, and that was fine.

That said, to add to the "lying is a bad idea" point: I believe some of their references were asked about if they'd ever known that friend to have a dependency + if they were aware of any current/very recent use.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-29 19:16:37+00:00
"Most people who drive cars now couldn’t find the radiator cap if they were paid to, and that’s fine."

That's not fine IMO. That is a basic bit of knowledge about a car and if you don't know where the radiator cap is you will eventually have to pay through the nose to someone who does know (and possibly be stranded somewhere). Knowing how to check and fill coolant isn't like knowing how to rebuild a transmission. It's very simple and anyone can understand it in 5 minutes if they only have the curiosity.
by ericmcer | 2026-01-29 19:16:37+00:00
"in the 1920s and 1930s, to be able to drive a car you needed to understand things like spark advance, and you needed to know how to be able to refill the radiator halfway through your trip"

A car still feels weirdly grounded in reality though, and the abstractions needed to understand it aren't too removed from nature (metal gets mined from rocks, forged into engine, engine blows up gasoline, radiator cools engine).

The idea that as tech evolves humans just keep riding on top of more and more advanced abstractions starts to feel gross at a certain point. That point is some of this AI stuff for me. In the same way that driving and working on an old car feels kind of pure, but driving the newest auto pilot computer screen car where you have never even popped the hood feels gross.
by rkagerer | 2026-01-29 19:16:38+00:00
What would you do with a satellite, if I gifted you one for free?

Let's forget orbital mechanics for a while to make this answer more fun. It would follow me around and provide a dedicated, private lifeline of communication anywhere I go, real-time aerial surveillance of my surroundings, and eventually lasers to zap anyone who pisses me off.
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-29 19:16:50+00:00
> Somehow the more senior you are [in the field of use], the better results you get.

It's a K-type curve. People that know things will benefit greatly. Everyone else will probably get worse. I am especially worried about all young minds that are probably going to have significant gaps in their ability to learn and reason based on how much exposure they've had with AI to solve the problems for them.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-29 19:17:22+00:00
So let me get this straight, the car should have been going less than the speed limit, but the fact that it was going a hair over the speed limit is the problem?

The car clearly failed to identify that this was a situation it needed to be going slower. The fact that it was going 17 instead of 15 is basically irrelevant here except as fodder for moral posturing. If the car is incapable of identifying those situations no amount of "muh magic number on sign" is going to fix it. You'll just have the same exact accident again in a 20 school zone.
by mox1 | 2026-01-29 19:17:38+00:00
I think this is a very strong and simple argument to use with regulators, politicians etc.

When I put my credit card into Apples ecosystem they take a 0.15% cut of the transaction and appear to be very happy with the results. When I put my application into the ecosystem they take 30%..

You can then break down why this is, but boy is that an interesting contrast.
by Fischgericht | 2026-01-29 19:18:13+00:00
If you do not want to run a car company, maybe do not... run a car company? Get an ice cream truck.

It absolutely makes no sense to convert a car manufacturer into an AI company. Or a robotics company after you have build CAR FACTORIES around the planet.

If you as a CEO don't like the business you are running for your shareholders, it is time to get a new CEO that does. There still are managers that really like running car companies.

I don't get the feeling that BYD management is bored about the EV business...
by ultrarunner | 2026-01-29 19:18:26+00:00
My brother bought a Tesla recently. They dicked him around with delivery, and he had to pay a ton to get charging infrastructure installed at his house, but it's fast so he's happy. On a recent visit, he finally showed me the car, and it was hilarious how janky the final product is. Everything seems cobbled together-- a good example is that there's apparently two separate voice assistants (plus his phone) and none of them can talk to each other, so commands like "turn on the defrost" are responded to with "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".

Controls as simple as the door handles are unintuitive, with the handle apparently being the emergency release that doesn't lower the window (for who knows why). You have to brief your passengers on egress like it's an airplane.

EVs might be a solved problem, but Tesla is still fighting their own additional layer of complexity that they added on top. The added subscription nonsense makes him look like a fool for having bought in, something I am definitely even more reluctant to do now that I've seen it play out.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-29 19:18:30+00:00
I did not and I am telling you I do not believe that it is that simple. You do not need to waste time arguing against your incorrect interpretation of my comment. If you need me to say I could have phrased it better, sure, I could have phrased it better. But I am now telling you exactly what I mean and think so we don’t need to do this song and dance.

For emphasis: I do not think it is simply/exclusively “chemical imbalance.”
by gjurhgd | 2026-01-29 19:18:36+00:00
You could never, in a million years, have guessed by "broken" they meant "it can be decrypted by the public with little effort?" I doubt that. I see no evidence they are talking about a password hash. Here's what they actually cited:

> The DES and Triple DES ciphers, as used in the TLS, SSH, and IPSec protocols and other protocols and products, ...

They're clearly talking about it's use as a cipher. Again, someone who has been here as long as you have should understand that you shouldn't put words in their mouth or be evasive in this way.

The conversation would still have touched on these interesting topics, and would likely have done so more immediately.
by Zopieux | 2026-01-29 19:18:54+00:00
Cheers to cities pedestrianizing school streets even in busy capitals (e.g. Paris). Cars have no place near school entrances. Fix your urbanism and public transportation.

Yes, kids in developed countries have the autonomy to go to school by themselves from a very young age, provided the correct mindset and a safe environment. That's a combination of:

* high-trust society: commuting alone or in a small group is the norm, soccer moms a rare exception,

* safe, separated lanes for biking/walking when that's an option.