MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matwood | 2026-01-26 12:44:53+00:00
> There has always been politics in SV, this is a weird rewriting of history.

Not rewriting at all.

Nien-hê Hsieh, a professor of business ethics at Harvard University says that in the 1990s, “there was a real reluctance or reticence to engage in Washington” from the leading tech companies of the day.

...

The early 2010s saw huge growth in lobbying spending by tech companies. A plateau in the late Obama years was followed by another steep increase once Trump took office. But in recent years some major players have slowed or even decreased their spending, suggesting that major corporations are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to wielding power on Capitol Hill.

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/reve...
by weitendorf | 2026-01-26 12:45:08+00:00
I guess my meta-point is that "marketing" shouldn't be such a dirty word, because done well enough, it's effective communication that gives people what they want/helps them AND makes them feel good. My comment actually did the same thing I said gwern was doing, lol.

The point of calling it marketing is that this blog post is explaining hooks, basic content marketing (ie be entertaining or interesting), progressive disclosure, and understanding your target audience: standard marketing concepts. You can find a lot of info if you research them by those terms.

Gwern's audience, in an ironic twist of fate, think that being marketed to = being tricked or manipulated by an evil person, so here he is explaining basic content marketing concepts to the people his blog is marketed towards, who hate marketing and believe themselves immune to it.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-26 12:45:15+00:00
It's not limited to Shorts, even normal longform videos have had this crap for years now. I hate it too - fortunately SponsorBlock can take care of this, they have optional categories you can enable beyond just sponsors, including the "hook".

I was looking into making an automatic detector for this kind of thing (basically detect if anything in the first ~30 seconds repeats itself later in the video, and if so mark it) but my DSP skills aren't up to the task (and turns out LLMs are useless for these kinds of novel tasks).
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-01-26 12:45:25+00:00
> it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer

Exact values matter. Some power plants had been found dumping +10 C water into lakes/rivers, while they had permit only for +5, and it totally destroyed local ecosystem. And most efficient (in terms of money) is evaporation cooling, where at least part of water is "lost".
by seec | 2026-01-26 12:45:36+00:00
Yeah, the gatekeepers just want their political power, and that's it. Also, education/academia is a big industry nowadays; it feeds many people who have a big incentive to perpetuate the broken system.

We are just back to the universities under the religious control system that we had before the Enlightenment. Any change would require separating academia from political government power.

Academia is just the propaganda machine for the government, just like the church was the tool for justifying god-gifted powers to kings.
by mort96 | 2026-01-26 12:45:43+00:00
This is slightly off topic, but do you know of a graphics debugger on macOS which supports OpenGL? ...or a graphics debugger on Linux which supports Wayland?

We used to have the Apple OpenGL Profiler etc on macOS, but all of Apple's tools these days are only focused on Metal. We used to have RenderDoc on Linux, but it got left behind by the Wayland transition and doesn't work anymore. So I'm kinda lacking anything to debug OpenGL at the moment...
by zerosizedweasle | 2026-01-26 12:46:55+00:00
"SoftBank Group Corp. has halted talks about an acquisition of US data center operator Switch Inc., a setback to founder Masayoshi Son’s ambition to roll out Stargate AI infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter.

For months, Son pursued a deal of around $50 billion for Switch, convinced that direct control of the latter’s network of energy-efficient data centers would help the $500 billion Stargate push to generate computing power for partner OpenAI."
by tlb | 2026-01-26 12:47:53+00:00
I think the PG designers would be surprised by the claim that it wasn't designed for this. Database designers try very hard to support the widest possible range of uses.

If all queue actions are failing instantly, you probably want a separate throttle to not remove them from the Kafka queue, since you'd rather keep them there and resume processing them normally instead of from the DLQ when queue processing is working again. In fact, the rate limit implicitly enforced by adding failure records to the DLQ helps with this.
Show HN: LLM Sanity Checks – A practical guide to not over-engineering AI
by 44za12 | 2026-01-26 12:49:12+00:00
I keep seeing teams use frontier models for tasks a regex or a 4B model could do cheaper and faster.

This repo is a collection of opinionated patterns and heuristics to help you rethink the architecture of your AI workflows and ease the decision-making process while ensuring maximum efficiency.

It covers:

- A decision tree for architectural sanity checks.
- Tradeoffs between JSON and delimiter-separated output.
- Patterns for cascading models (verifying small models before calling big ones).

Open to feedback on other anti-patterns you've seen in production.
by bringitup | 2026-01-26 12:49:55+00:00
We really appreciate your feedback

For policy updates, the biscuit token store reference to the role and optionally a tenant. This means that any extensions or restrictions you make to the policy will be applied directly

For token invalidation, you can either invalidate any token generated after a certain period or manage a blacklist for individual tokens (this is not yet implemented). Regarding rotation, we are currently exploring the use of standard MCP OAuth to deliver biscuit tokens per session. This process is ongoing and will be compatible only with HTTP deployments of Cori.

Concerning extensibility, the current policy format aims to cover 80% of standard use cases. For custom workflows, we are developing a dedicated component that will allow the orchestration of multiple services, whether APIs or MCP servers
by seec | 2026-01-26 12:49:56+00:00
Econ is the only social science that isn't completely bogus. The replication rate isn't too bad, even though it is still worse than STEM of course.
Everything else is basically like rolling a dice or even worse. Special mention to "pedagogy," which manages to be systematically worse than random; in other words, they only produce bullshit and not much else.
by bilsbie | 2026-01-26 12:51:01+00:00
I feel like the brine issue is a red herring. Coming from first principles the ocean is unbelievably big such that no practical amount of desalination will change the oceans salinity. (Plus most desalinated water will make it back to the ocean eventually anyway)

It really is just a matter of distributing the brine water over a large area.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-26 12:51:10+00:00
> Parents are obviously far too stupid to do what's in their children's best interests re social media and smart phones.

Then you'll need to address elections too, banning such parents from voting - or standing.

> I think desktop computer use under some level of parental supervision is fine

So... ban laptops, tablets .. and any other device under 10kg?
Show HN: Storage.to CLI, upload a file, get a link
by rsbadger | 2026-01-26 12:51:17+00:00
I kept running into the same annoyance: I want to upload a file from a script and just get a link back — without setting up S3 buckets, auth flows, or SDKs.

I built a small service + CLI to scratch that itch:

https://storage.to
https://github.com/ryanbadger/storage.to-cli

The CLI does the heavy lifting (single PUT vs multipart automatically), so the mental model is just:

storageto upload huge-file.zip

→ prints a public link you can pass to another step.

It’s very early and intentionally simple:
- Anonymous uploads (no signup yet)
- Public links
- CLI groups multiple files into a collection automatically

This is meant for quick, ad-hoc sharing and scripted workflows where setting up buckets feels like overkill.

I’m posting mainly to sanity-check whether this solves a real workflow problem, or if most people already have a cleaner pattern for this.
by simion314 | 2026-01-26 12:51:20+00:00
Does router setting spply when the child is at school and using data? I do not think so. So you need to have the averager parent setup DNS records and probably pay some subscription to soem people doing the filtering?

It is not easy, if there was just a simple toggle and iOS/Android would ask the parent what kind of religious extremist or prude they are and then do the filtering then sure, but you want a parent to know what a router is, or DNS, or buy some subscriptions for some big tech app?

I agree that parents should do the filtering, but I think big tech should cooperate here, for example I could allow my young child on a PlayStation since Sony did ask the age of the account user and did apply filters in the store and chats.

But what is your objection? Is it really, REALY to much to ask for the Os to ask the birthday of the account user and then the browser to set the appropriate age range flag in the requests? Then the websites can deny the requests instead of the "Are you over 18" popup? Is that too expensive? too dificult? is it too communist?
by holowoodman | 2026-01-26 12:51:27+00:00
Not really. Nvidia-OpenGL is incompatible to all existing OS OpenGL interfaces, so you need to ship a separate libGL.so if you want to run on Nvidia. In some cases you even need separate binaries, because if you dynamically link against Nvidia's libGL.so, it won't run with any other libGL.so. Sometimes also vice versa.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-26 12:52:05+00:00
The article reads as a list of bug gripes.

I agree, Apple needs a focus on quality. Plenty of Apple fans have been asking, for years, for a bug-fix release of all the OS's.

I don't know where the buck stops. I would point to Craig Federighi, but no doubt if Tim Cook told him he had to pivot to quality over features, Craig would do as Tim asked.

(I went to one Federighi feature meeting where engineers from the various teams show up with a demo ready to show and Craig goes round robin within the conference room watching each demo, asking questions, and then generally giving a thumbs up or not. It is done very rapid fire though—we were expected to show up "ultra-prepared". I watched him go from team to team before getting to us and my impression of his capabilities and understanding of the OS as a whole was in no way diminished by the experience. Craig is a capable guy. I want him and Apple to succeed.)
by moritonal | 2026-01-26 12:52:53+00:00
That's a really fair point. I suppose it's reasonable to point out that adults do have to provide ID quite often to buy things, but it's skipped so often because people can just look at us so we don't "feel" it. I think my problem comes from how I don't believe my cornershop records my ID when they see it, whilst I imagine these services would.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-26 12:53:10+00:00
While I partially agree with what it says at your link, about specs depending on the context, I am also well aware about the actual performance of quadruple Cortex-A53 CPUs and how it compares with alternatives, because about a decade ago I have used many single-board computers with various kinds of such CPUs (including Raspberry Pi, but also other very different SoCs). I eventually abandoned them for better alternatives.

If you have modest requirements, you can be content with such a CPU, e.g. for reading and editing simple documents or browsing the Internet with scripting disabled.

The point is that there is no need to restrain yourself to cope with its limitations, because for more than a decade there have been much better alternatives.

Even when your target is a sub-$100 computer, it makes no sense to use any CPU weaker than a quadruple Cortex-A76, like in the many computer models using Rockchip CPUs or in the current Raspberry Pi. While there are much more sources of Cortex-A76 based computers, the number of those offering much faster Cortex-A78 based CPUs using Qualcomm or Mediatek SoCs, including this smartphone, are steadily increasing.
by kuschku | 2026-01-26 12:53:11+00:00
High-powered computers are a niche issue, which means on a society level there's little benefit to restricting them.

Lightbulbs on the other hand affect all of society, so they've got a much larger impact to the overall CO2 budget.

Additionally, the average person uses a laptop or mobile devices, all of which use less power than even a single typical incandescent bulb (and people usually have many lightbulbs).

Replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs saves a lot of CO2 at basically zero cost, while getting rid of computers saves less CO2 for a much larger economic impact.

And even the effect described by this article has to be looked at in context, considering most of the light people experience in a day — and have experienced for the since homo sapiens existed — is natural sunlight, even in northern Europe during the winter (that's why EU law mandates windows with sunlight in every office, apartment, bedroom, etc.)
by GuB-42 | 2026-01-26 12:53:17+00:00
I wasn't referring to the absolute cheapest, more of a representative price.

If you want to go cheap, the Samsung Galaxy A17 5G, a perfectly fine, recent phone is $200, which is still a 1:3 price ratio to the $600 iPhone.

And you can go even cheaper than that, as in $150, new, though at that point, we are entering a territory where many people will feel the limitations.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-01-26 12:53:59+00:00
> All he wanted was to make his job easier and now he's shackled to this stupid system.

What people failed to grasp about low-code/no-code tools (and what I believe the author ultimately says) is that it was never about technical ability. It was about time.

The people who were "supposed" to be the targets of these tools didn't have the time to begin with, let alone the technical experience to round out the rough edges. It's a chore maintaining these types of things.

These tools don't change that equation. I truly believe that we'll see a new golden age of targeted, bepsoke software that can now be developed cheaper instead of small/medium businesses utilizing off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solutions.
by fatherwavelet | 2026-01-26 12:54:03+00:00
Unfortunately, they are extremely competent at holding on to power. Inflation has been oscillating between 20% and 50% since 2019 yet here we are.
It is hard to over throw the people who have all the guns.

I am usually pretty isolationist in my thinking but I really wish the US would have already invaded.

Millions of young Persians who are absolutely no different than you or I. It is now or never. If the regime can put down this uprising it is going to be hard to form another uprising for a long long time.
by graemep | 2026-01-26 12:54:24+00:00
They also answer might these things quite casually. The response may not come from people who know. Its probably been delegated to someone quite junior.

I once saw a survey question (on what the view was of economic outlook and exchange rates) been bounced to someone junior, who then looked to an external source which based its answer partly on the previous version of the same survey.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-26 12:54:39+00:00
> Text is searchable, skippable, scrollable, compact, transmissible, and accessible in a way that audio and video have never managed to be.

That's just a very long way of saying it's difficult to monetise; it's why audio and video are preferred by producers of content.

Few people are interested in disseminating an idea, a concept, anything... they are interested in levelling up their fame and followers. Text is typically no good for that.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-26 12:54:55+00:00
> You won't admit anything generated with LLMs is good?

Nowhere in my comment did I say this, so this is quite a non-sequitur you've based the following personal attack upon. Regardless of whether it's possible to use LLMs to generate good things, the vast majority of things generated with them are not good, and if the good things exist, they are being drowned out in a sea of spam, increasingly difficult to discover along with the good human-generated content.

I have to say, I would characterise both your comment and the original comment I replied to as being considerably more "unfair" than mine. The first comment was clearly written in such a way to get a rise out of people. Your reply is directly insinuating that I'm out-of-touch and ranting at clouds.
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-26 12:55:20+00:00
> "Most engineers prefer feeling appreciated over having a ping-pong table."

Truer words have never been spoken. Note the OP put the word "Most" in there. Sure... there are a few ping-pong fanatics, but not as many as there are humans who like an emotionally fulfilling work environment.

A related sentence I've uttered is "Most engineers prefer more control over their daily tasks than cash bonuses." But again, the word "Most" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. My experience is no more than 25% of devs will trade cash for micro-management. YMMV.
by tmarice | 2026-01-26 12:55:29+00:00
This kind of EM-focused articles often mention "coaching" and "career growth" -- I always wonder what does this concretely mean. Are they all managing teams of juniors straight out of college?

What can a career EM, or even an engineer-to-EM convert who has been out of the coding game for more than a few years, teach a non-junior engineer on their team?

I understand we can talk and exchange our concrete life experiences, same as I would talk to and listen to any other person, but the word "coaching" implies one party is superior to the other in one very concrete area.
by xandrius | 2026-01-26 12:55:32+00:00
Yep, a next token predictor is comparable to the fall of the roman empire. That makes total sense.

In all seriousness, who upvoted this kind of content? I am not saying that it's impossible for us to be headed anywhere negative in the future (literally who knows where we're going to be in 50-100y) but taking LLMs as the culprit for our society to finally crumble and not even mention the climate crisis shows how little thought has gone into this submission.
by dragonelite | 2026-01-26 12:55:45+00:00
The global cybersphere will split up, the west and other parties have shown they will use social media networks to organize regime change and take over legitimate protests.

Especially now that China is taking an ever increasing share of the global information streams. Given the increased panicked the US had about tiktok. Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza. They had to enforce ownership handover of tiktok US to a group of US based entities.

So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
by grugdev42 | 2026-01-26 12:55:48+00:00
It's been a while since I did these, but I used to charge $1k to get it set up, then $500 per year to keep it going.

I will say I was very cheap though. But I made my money on quantity. I would do two a month on the side of a full time job.

They were very simple websites though. But most of the time that's all people need.
by budududuroiu | 2026-01-26 12:55:52+00:00
icloudpd - https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

for the rest of the migration I had to take it piece by piece, luckily my iPhone had enough storage, I got iCloud to download everything to my iPhone, then syncthing-ed everything to another machine. I then backed up everything that I just downloaded from iCloud to a Hetzner Storage Box via restic.
by t-3 | 2026-01-26 12:55:55+00:00
Most recordings are not guaranteed to last even one lifetime. No matter the medium, the vast majority of written text will be lost to time as has happened to the tablets and parchment and paper that have been recovered from past ages. Digital data storage media don't possess much longevity compared to the analog stuff, but data will continue to be passed on as long as networked computers exist.
by nik282000 | 2026-01-26 12:57:36+00:00
It's a money pit.

You get x-many joules of energy from combining each carbon atom with two oxygen atoms, then you have to capture that energy and turn it into useful work, but that is a lossy process. So even if your gaoline-from-air machine was 100% efficient you would still need to burn more carbon than it captures just to run the machine, so to make it run you need to supplement it with some other energy source.

If you already have an additional energy source with which you can run your gasoline machine then why make the gasoline at all? Just use the energy source you have directly in an electric car.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-26 12:57:38+00:00
The US is in a bit better position on more nuclear than Europe, because the EPR was an overdesigned mess, while the AP1000 was just badly executed. The AP1000 is actually quite a nice design (it actually has a completed design now). The Chinese are offering a version of it for sale abroad; they tried the EPR too and have done nothing more with it.

If the US is for some reason to do nuclear going forward, just building AP1000s would probably be the least insane way to do it. These SMRs? Maybe investigatory builds but don't count on anything.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-26 12:58:04+00:00
> As for the provider, there is not prhibition on communicating with him, with or without ID. Just on him providing service to other than verifed adults.

Oh okay yea I don't mean that exactly but from my original comment what I meant was that the service of VPN is still essentially just a communication layer of sorts between two devices where a middle man can sit technically.

I was referring to this as still a communication creating a network between these two vis a vis VPN

And they are having restrictions on VPN's, my point of fear in this context is that suppose I host anything between two computers, technically its still a VPN (think a proxy or even a VPS or even cf tunnels alternative or heck even my self hosted tmate)

My point is that they are all still technically VPN's and this rule can still apply. I don't think that they can refer to VPN as wireguard or something as we imagine and this gives immense power to them

It's absolutely scary to say the least.
by yehat | 2026-01-26 12:58:12+00:00
You're playing so defensive (for LEDs) wonder why - just to argue? If one uses the same logic - does anybody states that LED are GOOD for the health? What the lack of such statements means - they're bad, or have no effect?
At the end - is it your business at all if I want to use incandescent lights, or CFLs, because I find them more suitable for my personal needs in MY home?
by nroets | 2026-01-26 12:58:17+00:00
Here's crazy idea: Instead of the US spending all this money on restraining the Iranian government through military build ups and sanctions,
rather drop hundreds of thousands of Starlink kits by drones.

Then Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.

One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.