MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by milchek | 2026-01-22 08:59:03+00:00
I used to believe the same thing but now I’m not so sure. What if we simply cannot fathom the true nature of the universe because we are so minuscule in size and temporal relevance?

What if the universe and our place in it are interconnected in some way we cannot perceive to the degree that outside the physical and temporal space we inhabit there are complex rules and codes that govern everything?

What if space and matter are just the universe expressing itself and it’s universal state and that state has far higher intelligence than we can understand?

I’m not so sure any more it’s all just random matter in a vacuum. I’m starting to think 3d space and time are a just a thin slice of something greater.
by pmontra | 2026-01-22 08:59:06+00:00
My first reaction has been: when we install some node modules, import them and eventually run them, we do grant local execution permissions to whatever the authors of those modules coded in their scripts, right? More or less every language already suffer from the same problem. Who vets the code inside a Ruby gem, a Python package, etc? Add your favorite language.

However I did not know about tasks.json (I don't use VSC) and when I googled it I found the example at https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/task-prov... and that is about running rake (Ruby.) So this is a little worse than installing malicious packages: the trigger is opening a malicious repository from the editor. Is this a common practice? If it is, it means two things: 1) the developer did not take an explicit choice of installing and running code, so even the possibility of an attack is unexpected and 2) it affects users of any language, even the ones that have secured package installation or have no installation of packages from remote.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-22 08:59:10+00:00
> It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer.

That's not true. Sometimes there's not a lot of demand and you pay much less than average market price.

If something is priced super low then someone might step in to arbitrage, but even with perfect knowledge in a perfectly efficient market, an arbitrager will only be willing to pay the true value minus the cost of relisting, the cost of reshipping, the cost of their time, the cost of tying up their money, and the cost of the risk it won't resell. If you beat that by fifty cents you'll get a great deal on the item.
by Archer6621 | 2026-01-22 08:59:22+00:00
That's a nice anecdote, and I agree with the sentiment - skill development comes from practice. It's tempting to see using AI as free lunch, but it comes with a cost in the form of skill atrophy. I reckon this is even the case when using it as an interactive encyclopedia, where you may lose some skill in searching and aggregating information, but for many people the overall trade off in terms of time and energy savings is worth it; giving them room to do more or other things.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-22 08:59:26+00:00
> In an ideal world, there would be a header-only C library provided by the Linux kernel; we would include that file and be done with it. As it turns out, there is no such file, and interfacing with syscalls is complicated.

Because Linux is the exception, UNIX public API is the C library as defined later by POSIX.

The goal to create C and rewrite UNIX V4 into C was exactly to move away from this kind of platform details.
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-22 09:01:07+00:00
Group join in academia generally points to having GROUP BY and one join in the same operation (since it's common to having aggregation and at least one join on the same attribute(s)). But just making a hash table on each side doesn't really do anything in itself (although making it on _one_ side is the typical start of a classic hash join); in particular, once you want to join on different keys, you have to regroup.
by sothatsit | 2026-01-22 09:01:16+00:00
I think we all just need to avoid the trap of using AI to circumvent understanding. I think that’s where most problems with AI lie.

If I understand a problem and AI is just helping me write or refactor code, that’s all good. If I don’t understand a problem and I’m using AI to help me investigate the codebase or help me debug, that’s okay too. But if I ever just let the AI do its thing without understanding what it’s doing and then I just accept the results, that’s where things go wrong.

But if we’re serious about avoiding the trap of AI letting us write working code we don’t understand, then AI can be very useful. Unfortunately the trap is very alluring.

A lot of vibe coding falls into the trap. You can get away with it for small stuff, but not for serious work.
by qweiopqweiop | 2026-01-22 09:01:16+00:00
It's an easy and convenient position. War is bad, maybe my government is bad, ergo they shouldn't have anything to do with it.

Too much of the western world has lived through a period of peace that goes back generations, so probably think things/human nature has changed. The only thing that's really changed is Nuclear weapons/MAD - and I'm sorry Ukraine was made to give them up without the protection it deserved.
by sehansen | 2026-01-22 09:01:19+00:00
"Most of the European EVs are basically just electric city cars, unable to drive long ranges due to small batteries and limited fast charging"

The top 10 most sold European EVs in Europe in 2025 were the Skoda Elroq, VW ID.7, VW ID.3, Skoda Enyaq, BMW iX1, Audi Q4 e-tron, VW ID.4, VW ID.Buzz, Audi Q6 e-tron and Volvo EX30. All but the iX1, the ID.Buzz and the EX30 you can get with >300 miles range. All but the iX1, the Q4 and the EX30 you can get with >150 kW DC charging.

Whether any of these is a city car depends on your definition; to me a city car is something like a Toyota Aygo. The current version, the Toyota Aygo X, has an overall length of 3700 mm. The shortest car in the top 10 list from earlier is the Volvo EX30 at ~4200 mm. I think being 0.5 m longer than an Aygo disqualifies even the Volvo from being a city car.

Source for sales numbers: https://eu-evs.com/bestSellers/ALL/Brands/Year/2025
by phatskat | 2026-01-22 09:01:20+00:00
I think if you want to go high-dom manipulation a la jQuery, and want some form of complex state, storing the state _on_ the DOM might make sense? Things like data attributes and such, but I also feel like that’s itching for something more like htmx or maybe svelte (I’ve not looked into either enough, so I may be completely off base).

I do agree with the notion that jQuery is easy to mishandle when logic grows beyond a pretty narrow (mostly stateless) scope. It’s fantastic up until that point, and incredibly easy to footgun beyond it.
by throwaway422432 | 2026-01-22 09:01:32+00:00
I am not a US citizen, just an observer.

What is the alternative when the Democrats appear just as much beholden to corporate finance, and position themselves as the party for city dwellers?

I also disagree on the wealth redistribution. Government agencies are managers of risk. *

Is there a risk to the country's food security if farmers go bust on mass? Then the Government needs to mitigate that risk. Fairly simple.

* This was the explanation from the director general of non-US primary industries department as to the whole reason they exist. Managing biosecurity risks are particularly important, but also managing fishing stocks and helping farmers mitigate their risk.
by mdrzn | 2026-01-22 09:01:41+00:00
Tens of small/one-time apps or scripts that I needed done, and Claude provided them in seconds.

A few medium to big projects:

- a scraper of product pricing in shops near me, to track inflation over time

- a clone of typeform, but more customized on my needs

- end-to-end automation of managing facebook ads campaign (create/track/scale)

- dashboard to automate managing comments on multiple facebook pages

- a classic polymarket bot

- a pdf editor inbrowser so all my data stays local

- a landing page generator for ecommerce, just give the product description

- a slideshow generator using nanobananapro

- an infinite canvas to work in to generate images, with nodes

- agent automations to test AI voice agents in calls

Anything that comes to mind I can setup and deploy in a few minutes.

Nothing groundbreaking but it's all stuff that I didn't know how to do before, and now I know how to build/maintain/backup/upgrade with ClaudeCode. I know most senior devs would say "well this was all doable before" but they forget that not everyone had all the necessary skills to do all this stuff. Now it's a one man job.
by unglaublich | 2026-01-22 09:02:00+00:00
People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives.

If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds.
by newswasboring | 2026-01-22 09:02:07+00:00
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

- Socrates on Writing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-22 09:02:26+00:00
Assuming that pricing is vaguely competitive is conflating cost and price, since competition would cause margins to be thin. The general issue is that domestic production often has a higher cost, e.g. because domestic labor is more expensive, or because foreign production has already amortized some long-term fixed costs over past sales that a new domestic manufacturer would yet have to recover over future sales. It then needs a higher price, at least temporarily, in order to be competitive, which is what tariffs do.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-22 09:03:24+00:00
> 0 lines up with freezing point is useless for most purposes

Rubbish. Absolute nonsense. It's very useful.

But, each system has points where you can say that it is more convenient . You could defend Fahrenheit all day. I could counter with Celsius usefulness. "below zero" being a synonym for "below freezing" is one of those.

But you miss the context - you will defend whichever one you grew up with. You look for reasons to defend what you know. It is mere familiarity, nothing more.
by ares623 | 2026-01-22 09:04:10+00:00
That's cool that you're looking into it. Are you saying that in any "official" manner as a Kagi employee? Or something more personal?

I've been meaning to write an RFC or open-letter of sorts to collect ideas for what a neo or parallel web could look like, but I'm just a nobody so shrug. It'll probably be something very fragmented and very very niche but nowadays I think that can be seen as a good thing.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-01-22 09:04:36+00:00
To me, below zero Centigrade lines up with "really darned cold". It's all subjective.

> zero indicating when things might freeze is useful

Of course it is, parent is being silly.

Picking some other non-zero random number for freezing just seems absurd to me. But that's because Centigrade is what I am familiar with.

Say pick freezing = 12, or 47?. If those numbers for freezing seem absurd to you, then consider that the only advantage that "32" has for you is that you're familiar with it. People will find reasons to defend whichever one they grew up with.
by niilokeinanen | 2026-01-22 09:04:41+00:00
Nice to see WebGPU experiments in data visualization field. But the description is certainly misleading.

All the optimizations mentioned except LTTB downsampling in compute shaders can be done in WebGL.

Web charts with > 1 M points and 60 FPS zooming/panning have been available since 2019. For example, here's a line chart with 100M points (100x more): https://lightningchart.com/lightningchart-js-demos/100M/

But still, love to see it. WebGPU will surely go forward slowly as these things naturally do, but practical experimentation is essential.
by almet | 2026-01-22 09:05:11+00:00
(Hi, disclaimer: I'm one of the current dangerzone maintainers)

That's a good question :-)

Opening PDFs, or images, or any other document directly inside your machine, even with a limited PDF viewer, potentially exposes your environment to this document.

The reason is that exploits in the image/font/docs parsing/rendering libraries can happen and are exploited in the wild. These exploits make it possible for an attacker to access the memory of the host, and in the worse case allow code execution.

Actually, that's the very threat Dangerzone is designed to protect you from.

We do that by doing the docs to pixel conversion inside a hardened container that uses gVisor to reduce the attack surface ¹

One other way to think about it is to actually consider document rendering unsafe. The approach Dangerzone is taking is to make sure the environment doing the conversion is as unprivileged as possible.

In practice, an attack is still possible, but much more costly: an attacker will be required to do a container escape or find a bug in the Linux kernel/gVisor in addition to finding an exploit in document rendering tools.

Not impossible, but multiple times more difficult.

¹ We covered that in more details in this article https://dangerzone.rocks/news/2024-09-23-gvisor/
by curl-up | 2026-01-22 09:06:42+00:00
Prompt they use in `Figure 28.` is a complete mess, all the way from starting it with "Your are an expert" to the highly overlapping categories to the poorly specified JSON without clear direction on how to fill in those fields.

Similar mess with can be found in `Figure 34.`, with an added bonus of "DO NOT MAKE MISTAKES!" and "If you make a mistake you'll be fined $100".

Also, why are all of these research papers always using such weak LLMs to do anything? All of this makes their results very questionable, even if they mostly agree with "common intuition".
by ornornor | 2026-01-22 09:07:06+00:00
What do you do that doesn't need to be tested?

I have a playbook for my dotfiles/rebuilding a personal machine from scratch. So I test that the files end up where they're supposed to be, the permissions, the packages, that whatever software I installed from source are indeed setup correctly and running, etc.

Same for roles that need to provably configure a piece of software.
by sroussey | 2026-01-22 09:07:20+00:00
What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport?

During war in the Middle Ages? Ethnic cleansing? What did they consider at the time?

BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.

Eventually we will realize in 100 years or so, that direct human-computer implant devices work best when implanted in babies. People are going freak out. Some country will legalize it. Eventually it will become universal. Is it torture?
by zahirbmirza | 2026-01-22 09:09:02+00:00
Impressive work.

How do you manage promotion? I have a moderate amount of success with Reddit Posts, there is always a spike in downloads. But, going for a specific niche (a scrollable feed notes app) https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/notesub/id6742334239 means that I am never sure where I can find people who may like my app.

I like the UI of your app btw.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-22 09:09:57+00:00
Probably the usual models of offering support, training, and commercial add-ons.

Independent UI frameworks like this don't stand a chance in closed source form if the main competition is all free and OSS, widely used, and high quality.

Interestingly, they went for LGPL 3 here. Nothing wrong with that as an OSS license. But I don't think it's the best license for the job here depending on their intentions. This might actually limit the enthusiasm of people to jump on this. At least they didn't go for AGPL 3 here. That would be a show stopper for many companies. Not much better than just flat out requiring a commercial license.

However, if you want to go all in on free and open source for commercial usage by whomever, probably a permissive license provides the least amount of friction for that. Since it just explicitly allows and encourages that sort of thing rather than attempting to constrain it.

If your goal is wide adoption and supporting a diverse community of contributors that are getting paid through their day job to work on this, that's generally what works best. Most of the mainstream UI frameworks are under licenses like that and for good reasons. SwiftUI, Flutter, Compose Multiplatform, React and React Native, etc. are all licensed permissively. There's a rich ecosystem of independent component and tool developers around those frameworks using similar licenses. Lots of competition as well; this is a very competitive space.

Permissive licensing is what enables ecosystems like that to form. And whether Skip likes it or not; that kind of is the competition. That's where most of the OSS developers are. Developer communities that include developers from companies that commercially depend on the software are stronger and more resilient long term. Building such communities is hard work. Unfortunately, that usually means letting go of being in control.

Small OSS companies tend to be conflicted between their own needs (monetization, protecting their IP, VC interests, etc.) and the needs of the user and especially developer community (unencumbered usage, freedom to adapt and use, etc.). That's all understandable and easy to sympathize with. But it doesn't change the reality of users and developers voting with their feet and mainly using permissively licensed stuff. Because it's there and it works. Also, diverse communities mean that is likely to stay that way. It's a thing I look for in OSS stuff I choose to use.
Ask HN: Does Apple not have *any* QA for their older macOS releases?
by richrichardsson | 2026-01-22 09:11:08+00:00
Since upgrading to 15.7.3 on my main machine (M4 Pro mini), every time I start I get asked if I want to enable automatic updates or just download only. Regardless the response I then get a welcome message and it happens again at the next boot.

I have installed the latest Tahoe on my 2nd machine (M1 mini) and it's complete dog shit. I refuse to subject myself to that until they fix some of the egregious problems (as documented numerous times on this forum).

Apple seem to be desperate to alienate their userbase.
by WJW | 2026-01-22 09:12:14+00:00
You really seem to want to believe Bending Spoons buys companies just to shut them down, for reasons that are not entirely clear unless you believe that they're owned by a secret conspiracy made out of note-taking, file transfer and video hosting companies that is willing to engage in a multi decade plot to very slowly buy out competitors. They then shut down the acquired businesses for no clear benefit, even though they're still profitable and new competitors could easily start up. So this conspiracy (if it exists) would be very slow and not very effective in keeping down competitors, especially compared to all the other things the conspiring companies could be doing.

Each individual company Bending Spoons acquires has a limited lifespan, so if you only look at a single deal it can indeed look myopic. But the whole point of their business model is that they use the cash flow thrown off by the acquired businesses (which are much more profitable for a short while due to firing 75% of personnel) to fund the next acquisitions. This can keep going on indefinitely, or at least until there are no more businesses to acquire.
by JhonPork | 2026-01-22 09:12:26+00:00
Good question the distinction is intentional.

Falcon’s profiles are not meant to be “dialects you mix freely” like Rust’s unsafe blocks. They represent different execution contracts, not different safety levels inside the same runtime.

In Rust, unsafe still lives inside one program with:

- one allocator
- one runtime model
- one ABI
- one set of linking assumptions

In Falcon, each profile defines a different world:

- userland assumes a runtime: heap, panics, rich abstractions
- kernel assumes no runtime: no heap, no panics, stricter aliasing
- baremetal assumes no OS at all: raw pointers, direct memory, UB allowed

Mixing them at runtime would force the strongest constraints everywhere, or require dynamic checks — which defeats the goal.

Instead, Falcon treats profiles as compile-time execution modes, not scoped escape hatches.

The reason non-selected profiles are erased before IR is so:

- LLVM never sees incompatible assumptions
- no dead-code elimination or guards are needed
- profile-specific rules can be enforced structurally, not heuristically

You still share logic by compiling the same source multiple times:

falcon build app.fc --profile=userland
falcon build app.fc --profile=kernel
falcon build app.fc --profile=baremetal

Or:

falcon build app.fc --profiles=all

This produces multiple artifacts from one codebase, each valid by construction for its environment.

So the comparison isn’t “why not Rust unsafe blocks”, but: “Should fundamentally different execution contracts coexist at runtime, or be selected at compile time?”

Falcon chooses the latter to avoid hidden coupling and runtime cost.
by Madmallard | 2026-01-22 09:12:36+00:00
Thought I recall Vinay Prasad saying (back in 2020 or 2021) that masks don't really work well enough for us to force all kids to wear them. Like chance passing encounters they have some effectiveness, but an imperfectly used non-n95 mask is basically worthless. But the latter scenario is what nearly everyone was doing.
by sfn42 | 2026-01-22 09:12:42+00:00
To myself and many others, vscode is not the defacto answer. JetBrains is. IntelliJ was miles ahead of eclipse last time I checked. Rider is miles ahead of Visual Studio. WebStorm is miles ahead of vscode for js etc.

It's not even a competition, to me. I've had to use Visual Studio instead of Rider for work the past year and it's been a very bad experience.

The biggest difference is JetBrains intellisense feels like it's reading my mind, I'll just type a couple characters and hit tab most of the time. Visual studio on the other hand has the worst intellisense I can imagine. It very frequently just messes up what I'm doing - I'll write what I want correctly, hit space and VS will just change it to something entirely different and import a package while it's at it. It's incredibly annoying. And when I actually want to use auto complete, say for example I've declared a variable on the line above and I want to use it, I'll write a couple characters and then without fail the variable I just declared on the line above is like option 6 down the list behind a bunch of crap that doesn't even make sense in the context at all. And as if it wasn't enough that the IDE is crap when it's working correctly, it very frequently craps out and just stops providing syntax highlighting and such in .razor files, or showing errors in files that compile just fine, forcing me to restart it and delete the .vs folder. Like every day.

Personally I think the only people who prefer other products than JB are people who don't know what they're missing. JB is literally just better in pretty much every way. At least the products I've used. I think I'll turn down the next job that asks me to use VS.
by withinboredom | 2026-01-22 09:13:20+00:00
There is absolutely a way to incrementally update scrollback in a terminal, 100% flicker-free. Whether it works in every terminal is a different question. But if you can accept that your code will work in pretty much every modern terminal -- this is absolutely doable. I double people are still using xterm and other older terminals for this. And in that case, you can fall back to this more compatible way.