MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim-tday | 2026-01-15 15:51:04+00:00
I hate clickbait headlines. You might want to know why but to get there you’ll wade through 10,000 words and maybe you’ll get what’s promised, but probably not. Because science doesn’t make such firm claims a) ever b) certainly not after the initial study.
It’s perfectly fine to match the headline to the certainty the study provides. And doing so would result in a very different headline.

https://archive.ph/fjwqS
by tonyplee | 2026-01-15 15:51:10+00:00
Here's what G AI estimates when asked about "base on public data, estimate how many mm^2 of apple/Nvdia silicon are produce in TSMC for the past 3 years."

Apple:
2023 A16, A17 Pro, M2, M3 ~330M ~135 ~4,455M
2024 A17 Pro, A18, M3, M4 ~350M ~150 ~5,250M
2025 A18, A19 (pre-launch), M4 ~415M ~200 ~8,300M

NV:
2023 Ada (RTX 40), Hopper ~60M ~280 ~1,680M
2024 Hopper (H100), Blackwell ~85M ~450 ~3,825M
2025 Blackwell (B200), Rubin ~105M ~775 ~8,135M
by etyp | 2026-01-15 15:51:24+00:00
To quote the very first paragraph of the bytecode interpreter section[1]:

> The style of interpretation it uses—walking the AST directly—is good enough for some real-world uses, but leaves a lot to be desired for a general-purpose scripting language.

Sometimes it's useful to teach progressively, using techniques that were used more often and aren't as much anymore, rather than firehosing a low-level bytecode at people.

[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com/a-bytecode-virtual-machine....
by znpy | 2026-01-15 15:51:24+00:00
I think Taiwan invasion by China will happen after foundries are built in the UI.

My conspiracy theory is that there is some kind of "gentleman agreement" on this topic between the US and China.

As soon as Taiwan is not needed anymore by the US for chip fabrication, the US will at the very least loose their grip on it.

Note to commenters: that's my theory, does not mean I endorse it in any way.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-15 15:51:34+00:00
With current AI pricing for silicon, I think the math’s gone out the window.

For Apple, they have binning flexibility, with Pro/Max/Ultra, all the way down to iPads - and that’s after the node yields have been improved via the gazillion iPhone SoC dies.

NVIDIAs flexibility came from using some of those binned dies for GeForce cards, but the VRAM situation is clearly making that less important, as they’re cutting some of those SKUs for being too vram heavy relative to MSRP.
by morley | 2026-01-15 15:51:50+00:00
I really miss gallo pinto. I went to Costa Rica in 2009, and since then, nothing has been the same (in NYC).

It's mind-boggling that such a simple recipe can be so good in CR but so bad over here! I hear there are some Costa Rican restaurants in Paterson, NJ, but I haven't had the chance to check yet.
by luthiraabeykoon | 2026-01-15 15:51:50+00:00
I’ve been working on an open-source project called Julie (desktop AI assistant, local-first, agentic computer use). It started as a personal tool and has grown enough that I’m considering turning it into a real product. I have a ton more features i didnt push yet, including bug fixes and determinisim in the agent behaviour.

I have about $5k I can realistically put toward this and I think it could be sustainable if I can get a small but real group of users.

I’m trying to sanity check a few things before committing:

Is this the kind of thing people actually pay for, or does it stay a hobby/open-source tool?

What would you focus on first to validate demand without burning the budget?

Any advice on early distribution for dev tools like this?
by jobs_throwaway | 2026-01-15 15:51:56+00:00
TMSC's Arizona fab is up and running producing 4nm chips

There's ~a dozen in the works or under construction

TMSC plans to have 2-3nm fabs operational in the next 2-3 years

So we're 2-3 years behind the standard (currently 2nm), and further behind on the bleeding edge sub-2nm fabs
by klaussilveira | 2026-01-15 15:52:10+00:00
Also worth mentioning for Thief fans: The Dark Mod started as a Doom 3 mod, but now is a completely standalone, free and open source game: https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/

Hundreds of missions, an amazing Radiant fork maintained by the team, as well as an active and passionate community. They are awesome.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-15 15:52:14+00:00
How do you fit a 40ft ladder inside a van? How about a mound of mulch or compost? How about hauling away customer's old plumbing? Or any number of filthy things you don't want in a car interior?

First of all I'm not convinced that the utility of the trucks is mostly unused. This seems like a trope from anticar people. But second of all and more concretely, I've done a lot of trade work that would have simply not worked in a van, so seeing your common sentiment is always bemusing.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2026-01-15 15:52:24+00:00
I think the internet peaked in about 2008. I pick that year because by then, everything I care about worked fine: online banking, online shopping that wasn't mostly just Amazon, newspapers and magazines, and that summer, I watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics over a relatively slow network link (I think a 2 Mbps DSL line or something like that), so streaming video worked fine by then. I also learned a ton of stuff from various bloggers after the 2008 financial crisis. And Netflix was still DVD by mail, which I liked a lot better than the Netflix of today.

Not easy to think of things that have actually gotten better since then. Many of the stores I used to shop at have been driven out of business by Amazon and what's left of the blogosphere of the time has migrated to things like Medium and Substack, which I guess is more convenient (and monetizable) for writers, but is more annoying for readers.

Newspapers and magazines mostly still work fine but it's hard to think of a way in which they're actually better, they just haven't gotten very much worse.
by jaegerma | 2026-01-15 15:52:43+00:00
From the email sent by OVH to its Object Storage customers:

---

Hello,

As part of our effort to provide you with the freedom to innovate and choose,
we are excited to announce that we are removing egress fees (outgoing public
traffic) from our Object Storage.

Starting this month, you will no longer be charged for outgoing public traffic
from our Object Storage solutions.

This change is effective immediately and is visible on the January 2026 invoice
for December 2025 consumption.

This applies to all outgoing public traffic from all OVHcloud Object Storage
classes, from all regions and local zones, including both S3-compatible and
Swift-based Object Storage.

Any data transferred from OVHcloud infrastructure to the public Internet,
including to another cloud provider, is no longer subject to egress fees.
More information will be available on pricing page, which will be updated in
January.
by joshmn | 2026-01-15 15:52:45+00:00
I've been on the receiving end of federal enforcement (DOJ, high-profile "cybercrime"). When they want you, they don't need a confidence score. There is no quota—they take time to build a case. The existence of these tools tells you this isn't targeted enforcement, it's industrial-scale population processing dressed up in an algorithm.

I live in Minnesota. This is my backyard.
by thatguy0900 | 2026-01-15 15:52:48+00:00
And in 2032 everyone just crosses their fingers this doesn't happen again? Unless 2029 includes a structural overhaul of the entire government I really don't see how the US regains it's status as the capital of the world. We are doing everything in our power to permenantly isolate ourselves from the rest of the world at the moment. Attacking a nato state, even threatening to attack a nato state really, is not something everyone will overlook in a years time. The wheels are turning now to divest from the us.
by daveguy | 2026-01-15 15:52:52+00:00
Which is absolutely unconstitutional. The constitution says the 4th amendment protects all people, not just citizens. It's been upheld many times by the supreme court. This administration is knowingly and willingly trampling the constitution. The midterm elections can't come soon enough. And in the meantime we all need to get in the streets. Anyone can manipulate social media. But you can't manipulate the narrative when there is an overwhelming number of brave people in the streets clearly and peacefully protesting.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-15 15:53:16+00:00
Nobody on HN is a bigger AI stan than I am -- well, maybe that SimonW guy, I guess -- but the truth is that problems involving unit conversions are among the riskiest things you can ask an LLM to handle for you.

It's not hard to imagine why, as the embedding vectors for terms like pounds/kilograms and feet/yards/meters are not going to be far from each other. Extreme caution is called for.
by jcynix | 2026-01-15 15:53:43+00:00
Oh, "once upon a time" I did set emacs to be my login "shell" and emacs can call other binaries via execve, handle sub processes, etc. Worked as expected.

Getting a Linux or Unix system to boot without a proper shell would be another complication, so a system completely without a she'll? I expect that to either be easy nor useful.
by pif | 2026-01-15 15:53:46+00:00
> It's always a statement 'to protect the children' or 'fight piracy'

Both of which make a lot of sense.

And the contrarian view is always expressed as a matter of "privacy", as if remote privacy had ever existed before a couple decades ago.

Laws must be discussed based on their intentions and their expected result. Inventing dogmas doesn't help societal advancement.
by sjw987 | 2026-01-15 15:53:51+00:00
That's quite hardcore. Well done.

I've noticed the same flatness you're describing with a similar product. The other week I had two items spaced across different meals. I'm still permitting bread as long as it's real or homemade (4 ingredients max, hard after 2/3 days), which was the first, and then later I had "made-in-store" chips with the a bunch of UPF and spices (preserved).

After about 2 weeks of minimising UPF, the bread tasted much better than it usually would, even on its own. Then not only did the chips taste flat like you've experienced, but they didn't taste good, and I felt I could almost tell what they'd added to try and get you to finish them.

I find it quite insidious how much food is falsely branded as healthy ("Just Natural" snack bars) or fresh. Not just items that are dressed up as if they are made fresh in-store, but foods proudly showcasing claims about things added, or nothing bad being added, only to be invalidated by checking the ingredients on the back.

The extra difficulty to eat was a pretty big takeaway for me from that book. Imagining most processed food as having been broken down and reformed, the breaking of the food matrix, the sort of pre-digestion that stops my body doing that instead, the hurrying of the eating process to get more in before the body works out its full, have all been useful for me to slow down my eating and avoid this stuff in general.

I have noticed that my scattergun approach of avoiding stuff that's been transported long distance and overly branded (judged by packaging in both cases), has made supermarket trips very quick and simple. 80% + of the big stores must just be rubbish.

It's led to me doing most of my shopping at local markets, where things are loosely packaged in paper. The book > avoiding branded packaging got me down the road of avoiding plastic wrapped consumables wherever possible, because plastic leeching is also a concern.

The only disadvantage is that my food environment has shrunk a lot, and as an endurance runner it's made it quite hard sometimes to get enough energy in. For that reason I don't think I can drop pasta and bread entirely.
by kergonath | 2026-01-15 15:53:52+00:00
Around here, asking "does this number make sense?" when coming across a figure is second nature, reinforced since early in engineering school. The couple of engineers from the US that I know behave similarly, which makes sense because when your job is to solve practical problems and design stuff, precision matters.

> difference between needing 26666666.667 and 266666666.667 <units> of <widget> is pretty meaningful

To be fair, that’s why we’d use 2.6666666667e7 and 2.66666666667e8, which makes it easier to think about orders of magnitude. Processes, tools and methods must be adapted to reduce the risk of making a mistake.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-15 15:54:14+00:00
It's sort of hilarious to me that for anything high performance-- or indeed low-middle performance, Windows is entirely out of the question. C++ compilation under Windows is 60-80% slower than in a Linux VM on the same machine. The EM simulations we do at work are several times faster on Linux.

That aside, the Windows API is one of the most godawful, miserable pieces of code I've ever had to work with. I've been up to my neck in WinRT writing Bluetooth drivers and holy fuck I wouldn't wish this misery on anyone. I don't know how any developer or engineer ever gets anything done on Windows.

Last job let me use Linux where it mattered most, and new job doesn't care so long as the work is done. I don't think I'll accept a job anywhere that requires Windows in the future. There is just plain and simple no feasible way to do my work on Windows anymore.
by m0llusk | 2026-01-15 15:54:18+00:00
Still not convinced.

Advocates claim this helps, but imply that programmers should now be constantly evaluating a dozen or more assistants in various ways and honing prompting strategies. Does that not take time and effort? Wouldn't it make more sense to let the technology develop more?

And then there is this claim that it makes things easier and faster, but what is actually being coded? Has anything remarkable ever come out of vibe coding? Seems like nothing but a lot of unremarkable applications that push no boundaries.

Really coming up with new ideas often means coming up with variations and then honing the results. When iterating like that the speed of coding is already a minor input because what really matters is the judgement calls of knowing what kinds of things to try and when to abandon approaches that are not working out.

And what about all the negative implications that we are still trying to figure out. Just because no vibe code has yet triggered intellectual property lawsuits doesn't mean that won't happen because there is already a lot of that kind of thing going on in the LLM space. And what about the damage that data centers are doing to the environment, to the grid, to markets for processors and memory? When I code things by hand the amount of liability and wreckage I generate is minimal.
Show HN: Compressing a Histogram from 16GB to 2KB
by alexkranias | 2026-01-15 15:54:46+00:00
Thought I'd dive into this cool streaming/approximation algorithms problem I encountered a few months ago.

TLDR: we can create our own custom floating point representation for encoding and decoding integers and use this to index into a tiny 2D histogram, upper-bounding approximation error based on the number of bits per integer we specify to keep.

---

Broadly useful for aggregating statistics from massive data streams of user data. Also turns out this is incredibly similar to data structures used in production, like HDRHistogram.
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-15 15:54:47+00:00
Putting aside the execution:

It's interesting to see people creating and 'selling' agent skills. This one asks for donations, but I was expecting to see a stripe link and 'download for 4 dollars, yours forever' (personally I think that would convert better...)

I wonder if there will be full-blown skill marketplaces soon. Would that be a way for some experts to recoup some (presumably very small portion) of the income they might lose due to generative AI market effects?
Ask HN: Anyone else finding it impossible to land a job?
by Arch485 | 2026-01-15 15:54:54+00:00
I rang in the new year this January with 1.5 years of unemployment. (yippee...)

It's not like I haven't been applying to jobs. At this point, it's actually part of my daily routine to log on to various job sites every morning and go on an application spree. But, usually, I never hear back from any jobs I apply to, or if I do hear back, it's a rejection email 3 months later.

In total, I've had 1 interview through traditional job applications in the past year, and 2 interviews from talking to people on HN. (thanks HN!)

This is just crazy to me. Back when I properly got into the industry (circa 2022) I could land an interview every couple of weeks. But now, there's nothing. As far as I can tell, my resume and CV are both good (I've received feedback from several different people), and I think I'm OK at writing cover letters. It sort of feels like nobody is looking at my applications or anything. I'm curious if anyone has some insight into this beyond "there's a recession"?

It's getting pretty bad out here y'all, I'm running out of instant ramen and my wife's boyfriend says I have to stop asking him for money.
by re-thc | 2026-01-15 15:55:03+00:00
Get testers to collect feedback without paying for hosting costs. To kill off competition with closed off models that are behind services.

Some countries have rather specific reasons e.g. China. Most high end AI tooling e.g. Nvidia GPUs are "banned" or capped. They're low on capacity. So they train their models with Nvidia GPUs outside of their country (i.e. avoid import ban), publish the model and then fine tune it back home for their market.
by sagacity | 2026-01-15 15:55:44+00:00
For reference, the surface cache referred to in the article is similar to the one in Quake. Basically, you have a bunch of regular textures that you want to use when rasterizing your polygons. On top of that you want to blend low resolution lightmaps. These lightmaps need filtering (typically bilinear) to appear smooth when blended on top of the original texture.

It's wasteful to do this expensive filtering and blending every frame since the player typically sees those blended textures for a large number of frames when they're traversing the environment, so you keep a LRU cache of blended textures around. That's the surface cache.
by shlip | 2026-01-15 15:55:51+00:00
> Specifically, the VPNs argued that their “no-log” policy means they do not track user IP addresses or geolocate their users. Therefore, a court order to block access only for French users would violate their contractual obligations.
> For now, however, the targeted VPN providers have to find a way to implement the blocking order.

I'm curious about this point. What solution do they have if they want geolocalisation without giving up on privacy ?
by tencentshill | 2026-01-15 15:56:02+00:00
It was a boring database product in 2011. It expanded in scope over many years, and now has a much larger budget.

"That changed in the second Trump administration, with Palantir now working on ICE’s deportation efforts."

https://www.palantir.com/newsroom/press-releases/homeland-se...

"...Since 2011, Palantir has partnered with HSI"
by tpurves | 2026-01-15 15:56:10+00:00
[this is a reply to fourseventy]
Looking up the violent crime rates by migrants in places like MN, it's effectively zero. As a rule, migrants and immigrants don't commit crimes at anything close to the rate of native US citizens.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes (including aggravated assaults, theft, murders and sexual assaults) are being committed by ICE agents.
by aduffy | 2026-01-15 15:56:29+00:00
> - They assume their hard-to-program but faster architecture will get figured out by devs. It won't.

Or it will get figured out in the niche fields where people are willing to figure out really hard stuff to squeeze out max performance (PE, hedge funds, intelligence)

Either way agree, it's hard to get mass adoption without the software ecosystem feeding back in
by u03c6 | 2026-01-15 15:56:33+00:00
Is really interesting how language breaks sometimes.
I guess I am from a really different context than you, while reading those words (parasite, non-productive) I had to choose an interpretation and depending on that I might be really close to what you say or really against it.
On this case I think some of the replies took a different option and that is why the answered like that.
by tim-tday | 2026-01-15 15:56:56+00:00
I mean, theoretically they were already taxed on it once. A wealth tax taxes accumulation, which happens after the tax on income.

In practice billionaires are taxed at about half the rate of minimum wage workers. I was so mad when I got my first minimum wage paychecks. I worked so hard for so little and got taxed at such a high percentage. It seemed deeply unfair that billionaires and corporations paid a lower tax rate than me.
by an0malous | 2026-01-15 15:57:09+00:00
First, there's no way you could even know that.

Second, that justification doesn't make sense because you could just not read the post. There's even a feature to hide it for yourself.

Third, that's not what flagging is for. Per the HN guidelines, posts should be flagged if they're spam or off topic, not if you personally find them tiresome.
by JeremyNT | 2026-01-15 15:57:12+00:00
Incus is great for this use case, I did something similar. I volume mount specific stuff into the guests and let OpenCode loose with all tools enabled.

I used OpenCode to vibe code the shell script I use to manage it.

I actually use VMs rather than LXC, which makes it easier to run e.g. docker.
by Lio | 2026-01-15 15:57:13+00:00
I used to think that.

I really don't care about most new phone features and for my laptop the M1 Max is still a really decent chip.

I want to run local LLM agents though and I think a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra (when it comes out) is probably how I'm going to do that. I need more RAM.

I bet I'm not the only one looking at that kind of setup now that was previously happy with what they had..
by rpigab | 2026-01-15 15:57:16+00:00
Ha ha, I think the busybox rm implementation also doesn't have it, be careful, it's present in lightweight containers, even though it's probably a recent thing. Can't speak for MacOS too.

TBF, this safeguard has never saved me, being careful saved me. You can afford to take the time to be careful, because writing the powershell equivalent is probably at least ten times longer (just kidding, or am I?), and clicking buttons in the file explorer is a hundred times longer. Always write the "-rf" after writing the path! I never run rsync without a dry-run, too, even without --delete.
by leviathant | 2026-01-15 15:57:42+00:00
>Whatever Levi’s did, their jeans went from lasting years to literal months before they would rip.

Before they went public, the trick with Levi's was to basically shop with two things in mind: price point, and finish. I personally stick to non-stretch 501s. If you were sorting price low to high, you were buying low quality 501s. If you sorted price high to low, there were a bunch of "fashion" 501s at the top of the list, but when you got a pair of expensive 501s in "rigid" or some other simple wash, that was where the quality was. They used to publish the weight of the denim on the product detail page. Bonus points if they're Shrink to Fit.

Pre-IPO they'd also do much more experimentation. I have a pair of 501s made of Dyneema that I have been abusing for about a decade, and only just this month has one pocket needed to be repaired. I wish I'd bought multiple of these, but I got it on a blowout sale.

Post-IPO, there was more branding hierarchy: Levi's Vintage Clothing, Made & Crafted, Premium, and then everything else.

It looks like it's a little different now, but I haven't had to buy a new pair of 501s in several years. There are still quality jeans to be had from Levi's, but you have to spend more and avoid gimmicks.