MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by keepamovin | 2026-01-26 09:35:37+00:00
you're not wrong, but i lived in Taiwan a while back for a number of years and things are built different there. it's not something you would necessarily notice unless you live there for a while, but once you start seeing it, it's hard to unsee.

the walls are thicker. everything is reinforced. external structures are bolted more securely. why is this a thing? taiphoons and earthquakes, is why.

if you like solid construction, there's plenty of it in taiwan. also, 101 is a flagship building. an item falling from the facade would kill someone or be a huge embarassment. this is not something they would let happen. just some local context fyi. that said, i wouldn't trust my life to those external structures either, but you do see alex testing as he goes.
I migrated 15M records of 13GB data from Mongo to Rails Postgres on 512MB budget
by Fh_ | 2026-01-26 09:35:58+00:00
I recently finished a migration for a document extraction engine, moving 15 million paragraphs from MongoDB to a boring, standard PostgreSQL stack. Since I was running this on Heroku with tight resource constraints, I ran into some interesting "physics" problems with Ruby’s memory and the Linux allocator.

The highlights of what I ran into:

The Swiss Cheese Heap: Even with idiomatic code, I kept hitting R14 memory errors. It turns out the heap was fragmenting so badly that the OS couldn't reclaim RAM. Instead of just jumping to jemalloc, I forced glibc to be frugal by setting MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2 and manually triggering GC.compact every 10k records to smash the "holes" closed.

Sanitization Boundaries: MongoDB’s schema-less nature meant I had null bytes (\u0000) hiding in my text. Postgres (rightfully) hates those, so I had to build a sanitization boundary into the upsert logic to keep transactions from aborting.

The "Murder by Console" Problem: I learned the hard way that jumping into a production Rails console on a limited Redis plan can grab half your available connections instantly, killing your background workers. I ended up capping concurrency to 1 and RAILS_MAX_THREADS to 2.

The Flow State: Counter-intuitively, throughput went up 40 percent when I silenced ActiveRecord logs and dropped Sidekiq concurrency to 1. Removing the context switching and disk I/O noise allowed the worker to stay in a tight loop.

The goal was to move from a complex polyglot setup to a boring stack that just works. If you are dealing with large-scale backfills in Ruby, I’d love to hear how you handle the memory fragmentation side of things.
by crote | 2026-01-26 09:36:27+00:00
Copper theft has been a recurring problem in multiple European countries for well over a decade. Railway outages caused by damaged cabling increased as the copper price rose, and decreased as police cracked down on scrap dealers accepting railway cabling without proper provenance. Damaged aluminum and fiber cables are also common, as thieves usually aren't exactly the smartest people.

The German Federal Police has nothing to gain by lying about this incident. They explicitly investigated the possibility of foreign sabotage, found the perpetrators, and concluded that it was just regular theft. Sometimes a horse is just a horse, even when there are zebras running around.
by syrusakbary | 2026-01-26 09:36:38+00:00
Stay tuned, we are about to release a new version of Wasmer with WASIX, that allows for things that can't currently be done with Pyodide:

* Multithreaded support
* Calling subprocesses
* Signals
* Full networking support
* Support for greenlets (say hi to SQLAlchemy!) :)

It requires a small effort in wasmer-js, but it already works fully on the server! :)
by happymellon | 2026-01-26 09:38:21+00:00
> And because the default Windows interface isn’t designed for a handheld screen, we built our own Mobile UI from the ground up to make Windows far easier to navigate on a phone.

Now this I don't understand.

Microsoft literally made a Windows Phone, and made so many people angry with Windows 8.

Did they literally anger people and then throw all that work away? If it's just squares on the screen, surely having an alternative Explorer mode that presents like 8 or Phone makes sense.

That seems insane to burn all that good will and then not keep any of that dev work in the background for future iterations.
by Nursie | 2026-01-26 09:39:10+00:00
The example given was of a man in a “Plasticine Action” t-shirt, with the poster saying how that man was “disappeared” by the British state when he was briefly arrested and released.

If you’re not aware of the history of people being disappeared by states such as Chile under Pinochet, or more broadly what it means for a state to disappear someone, that’s kinda on you.

Either way these are not equivalent actions.

Yes, it’s suppression of free speech in a chilling manner. I hate it. No, it’s not the same as suppressing that speech by taking someone and holding them in a secret prison for years and/or killing them.
by defrost | 2026-01-26 09:39:30+00:00
I assume the Renée Good shooting, which was three times.

Interesting the conflicting orders she received were not "lawful".

Her vehicle was across a single lane, prior to the shooting incident vehicles were freely passing, so traffic was not blocked by a common occurrence of a vehicle across a liane of an icy road.

She was not stopping ICE or DHS from apprehending an immigrant, and the Federal Immigration agents had no authority to deal with traffic matters in MN.
by noduerme | 2026-01-26 09:39:44+00:00
My GF and I rarely discuss news or politics, but she's a frequent NPR listener who gets most of her (ahem) "news" from there and Reddit. So the other night something came up about Israel and she casually said "well, but everyone hates Israel now". In that context, I said what do they think about the masses of unarmed people shot in the streets of Tehran. So imagine my total surprise when she said she had no idea there were any protests in Iran. None at all. Somehow, for a couple years of the war in Gaza, she was attuned to every video - real or fake - that was attributed to that war zone. Yet this completely passed without her noticing.

She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"

I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.

What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
by orwin | 2026-01-26 09:40:15+00:00
> Even in historically cranky areas such as classical music, I see next to no intense critical scrutiny whatsoever

Not in my country. The music critics on national radio are _extremely_ harsh on the performance ('it lacked soul and any sense of the piece, like a student forced by his professor to play scales again and again' was the last I heard, just yesterday, while I was working on installing my father's forge). Likewise, still on national radio, cinema and book critics are extremely harsh.
by topspin | 2026-01-26 09:40:37+00:00
"violating ideals held by our Founding fathers"

There are a whole raft of "ideals" the Founding fathers held that we've obviated, beginning with who got the franchise. I can confidently say that government being the payor for ~50% of all healthcare, and operating the databases necessary to monitor all the money and behavior, was certainly not among their "ideals" either.

This was predicted by many, long ago. The predictions were ignored because they were inconvenient to desires and ambitions. Yet here we are. One wonders if it were known at the time, before we constructed these schemes, that one day there would be fabulous machines that would wade through all the (predicted) streams of data, hunting people, if perhaps those predictions might have been heard.

The cynic in me says "no." At some point, as the streams of politics oscillate, they occasionally converge very strongly, and all doubts are overcome, and the ratchet makes another click.

But it's not all bad news. In the natural course of events there is a high probability that one day, you'll have such folk as you prefer back at the helm, and they'll have these tools at the ready. If you make the most of it, you'll never have to suffer the current crowd ever again!
Show HN: Akshen – A community-driven library for verified AI prompts
by sOwl | 2026-01-26 09:41:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Akshen because I was tired of "prompt engineering" lists that were just SEO fluff or didn't work across different models. I wanted a place where the community could post prompts they’ve actually tried and tested.

The Goal: To create a living repository where prompts are treated like open-source snippets—vetted by users and updated as models (like GPT-4o or Gemini) evolve.
by techcode | 2026-01-26 09:42:01+00:00
While 100K itself is indeed impressive - the order of magnitude difference between 100K and 1M makes a lot of room for interpretations, rationalizations, spins ...etc.

The "publishing the set of tools and criteria used to generate estimates" is happening, and so far it seems that usually doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because of course those sources/news that report wildly wrong (be it larger or smaller numbers) are usually (not always, but very commonly) controlled by the governments.

So despite students that organized the biggest protests in Belgrade giving their estimates (based on combo of RSVP and how many people accommodated people from other cities). And those being close to independant research (using drone footage, VR/AR crowd simulations, AI) with loads of posts/videos providing detailed explanations ...

Most "ordinary people" saw (and keep seeing) just the "official version".
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-26 09:42:13+00:00
> SREs debugging production outages to find a proximate "root" technical cause is a small fraction of the SRE function.

According to the specified goals of SRE, this is actually not just a small fraction - but something that shouldn't happen.
To be clear, I'm fully aware that this will always be necessary - but whenever it happened - it's because the site reliability engineer (SRE) overlooked something.

Hence if that's considered a large part of the job.. then you're just not a SRE as Google defined that role

https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 09:42:19+00:00
Right, but if your CI/CD pipeline is fetching repositories that are using Git LFS while whatever pipeline you're creating/maintaining can't actually handle Git LFS, wouldn't you say that it's the pipeline that would have to be fixed?

Trying to patch your CI builds by adding a tool that scans for licenses, "malware" and other metadata errors on top of all of this feels very much like "the wrong solution", fix the issue at the root instead, the pipeline doing the wrong things.
by jcparkyn | 2026-01-26 09:43:27+00:00
> How to pass a mutable reference into a function, so that it can change the underlying value and the caller can observe these changes?

Just modify the value inside the function and return it, then assign back. This is what the |= syntax is designed for. It's a bit more verbose than passing mutable references to functions but it's actually functionally equivalent.

Herd has some optimisations so that in many cases this won't even require any copies.

> What about concurrent mutable containers?

I've considered adding these, but right now they don't exist in Herd.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-26 09:43:49+00:00
Right, but in these environments (PS, I'm also in the EU, also work in the ecosystem) we don't just deploy 3rd party data willy nilly, you take some sort of ownership of the data, review+polish and then you deploy that. Since security and compliance is important for you, I'm assuming you're doing the same?

And when you're doing that, you have plenty of opportunity to turn Pickle into whatever format you want, since you're holding and owning the data anyways.
by fennecfoxy | 2026-01-26 09:44:47+00:00
Tbf batteries last quite a while...current ones maybe not 20 years of hard driving, but near-future battery tech seem like they'd be able to handle it.

I'd be more concerned about the underlying skateboard of the car; all the mechanical bits & bobs that are still required for an electric car i.e. the "car" part. I feel like new Chinese manufacturers' skateboard will be hugely inconsistent over time, whereas you find that consistency with established manufacturers - for example many EVs started out built on top of a manufacturer's existing platform.
by weitendorf | 2026-01-26 09:45:00+00:00
My company is building out a static site generator and we do basically this for our unit tests: https://github.com/accretional/statue/tree/main/test/hermeti...

npm pack builds the file locally, then we expose it to the container filesystem where we do a build and check the outputs. You can move dependencies to bundledDependencies in npm to embed them in the image.

However, this is assuming you're building your own static site generator that you want to test this way. If you just want to build a site using an existing static site generator, it's much easier provided that the site generator itself is easy to use (for example, ours has a one-liner to take you all the way from nothing to a local static site running on localhost, see https://statue.dev)

If you aren't changing the SSG code itself between container runs you'd just mount the markdown to the container and pre-install the ssg in the Dockerfile itself. For statue.dev that would just be a Dockerfile almost exactly the same as the one we use already, except you'd use your own script, and RUN this in the Dockerfile itself: yes | npx sv create . --template minimal --types ts --no-add-ons --install npm && npm install statue-ssg && npx statue init && npm install

In your script you'd just npm run build then do whatever it is you want to do to send the files somewhere, and wherever starts the script, you'd do something like -v "pathtomymarkdown/foo:/test-package/" - not sure how to do this in github runners.

Depending on how interested you/other people are in doing this with statue.dev, we could prob get something like this (where the markdown is parameterized, not the npm package) working by Tuesday. We're building out the sandbox/build features on our cloud platform as we speak, this could be one of the first use cases/defaults.
by tasuki | 2026-01-26 09:45:14+00:00
> Writing code was always the easy part of this job. The hard part was keeping your code running for the long time.

Spoken like a true SRE. I'm mostly writing code, rather than working on keeping it in production, but I've had websites up since 2006 (hope that counts as long time in this corner of the internet) with very little down time and frankly not much effort.

My experience with SREs was largely that they're glorified SSH: they tell me I'm the programmer and I should know what to type into their shell to debug the problem (despite them SREing those services for years, while I joined two months ago and haven't even seen the particular service). But no I can't have shell access, and yes I should be the one spelling out what needs to be typed in.
by stared | 2026-01-26 09:45:54+00:00
Yet, AI is not there yet. Even the top models struggle at simplest SRE tasks.

We just created a benchmark on adding distributed logs (OpenTelemetry instrumentation) to small services, around 300 lines of code.

Claude Opus 4.5 succeed at 29%, GPT 5.2 at 26%, Gemini 3 Pro at 16%.

https://quesma.com/blog/introducing-otel-bench/
by jason_tko | 2026-01-26 09:47:40+00:00
We are clearly having two entirely different conversations.

I'd encourage you to read my original post again, and try out the software yourself.

As a side note, I think your sidechat tmux AI chat panel project is extremely cool. Nice work!

In any case, I don't think we're making too much progress here, so I'll duck out. Take care mate.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-26 09:48:23+00:00
Heh, I was just thinking of Sade in connexion with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707062

Have you seen "Clans of the Alphane Moon"? (let the hebrephenics be the saints, the megalomaniacs the politicians, the paranoid the generals, etc.)

As to existential suffering, we must imagine Sisypuss happy: https://i.chzbgr.com/full/5718194432/h98546CBC/furred-world-...
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-26 09:48:43+00:00
I kinda wonder what the packet loss story of UDP is like for simple protocols like these in the modern day. Clearly, it's good enough that this application runs without issue.

> Instead of bolting TLS onto every application protocol (HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, etc.), what if we secure the network layer once and then use simple protocols on top?

IPSec, coming back with a vengeance!

This also makes me wonder what takes less space in ROM, a basic WireGuard implementation or a basic, stripped-down IPSec implementation (with only the ciphers and configuration necessary for the server compiled in). WireGuard has the advantage of being designed for simplicity, but IPSec has its 90s every-cycle-counts legacy that a lot of modern software has ignored since.
by jhbruhn | 2026-01-26 09:50:29+00:00
Has the Cricut protocol been reverse engineered already? The primary motivation I had when building respira (controller software for the Brother PP-1 Skitch embroidery machine) was its shitty smartphone-only app. The reverse-engineering of the communication protocol was really doable with LLMs and the decompiled C++/C# code of the app. I can imagine something similar could be done with the Cricut machines.

The tooling is there in Inkscape (same for embroidery via InkStitch). AFAIK Silhouette plotters can be controlled via Inkscape plugins already.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-26 09:51:09+00:00
This is leaking to loads of other media too - movie trailers have started with some quick action shots, then BIG text saying "trailer starts now". Like a trailer to a trailer. Which is released after a teaser for a trailer. They even have recurring sound effects (vine boom sounds, but movie trailer edition where every action event (explosion, punch, scene change) is accentuated with a distinct drum boom sound effect, often in time with the dramatized remix of recognisable music). I hate it lol.

As for tiktok / other short video clip format content, one trend I've seen is to start the video with the conclusion (e.g. someone falling over), then starting with the buildup. Since these videos are played on loop anyway, they trick the viewer into thinking they missed the buildup.
by Pikkemans28 | 2026-01-26 09:51:20+00:00
It appears they specified which user data they are collecting.

quote

Information You Provide may include sensitive personal information, as defined under applicable state privacy laws, such as information from users under the relevant age threshold, information you disclose in survey responses or in your user content about your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information. For example, we may process your financial information in order to provide you the goods or services you request from us or your driver’s license number in order to verify your identity. We may also collect precise location data, depending on your settings and as explained below. We process such sensitive personal information in accordance with applicable law, such as for permitted purposes under the California Consumer Privacy Act.

end quote

This is currently not part of the privacy policy of the ByteDance owned TikTok.
by zahlman | 2026-01-26 09:51:35+00:00
(I'm accustomed to seeing Reason accused of leaning right, so it's a little disorienting to see all of this.)

> And since the Trump administration's deportation campaign began last year, DHS officials have repeatedly insisted that following and recording federal immigration agents in public is a violation of a federal statute that makes it a crime to assault or impede law enforcement officers.

Following the link:

> In response to a question from Reason asking if the department considered following or recording a federal law enforcement officer to be obstruction of justice, the DHS Office of Public Affairs said in an emailed statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson: "That sure sounds like obstruction of justice. Our brave ICE law enforcement face a more than 1150% increase in assaults against them. If you obstruct or assault our law enforcement, we will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

> It's one of the most direct public statements yet from DHS articulating a policy that treats following, recording, and revealing the identities of federal immigration officers as illegal activity. There have been months of news reports and viral showing federal immigration officers threatening, brandishing weapons, and violently detaining people for following and recording them in public.

Reading the rest of the link, they don't even attempt to evidence "DHS officials" making the same claim any other time than that, or that they actually have such policy; so they simply have not established that DHS "repeatedly insists" any such thing. The claim seems to be simply based on Reason's own interpretation that the threats and detentions (and arrests) are "for" the mere act of recording.

But I have now been shown very many videos where people claim that a protestor was subjected to force and/or arrest "for" a mere exercise of free speech, and in every single case it has been abundantly clear to me that the subject was obviously also doing something clearly obstructive that was obviously the actual cause of action. Sometimes this even clearly includes people who aren't being obstructive, being completely left alone as they say hateful things (as is, indeed, their 1A right).

Klippenstein's video, of course, doesn't show a clear obstruction. But it also doesn't show anywhere near enough context to establish the assertion that the person being written up was a "legal observer". Notably, it shows the officer being asked whether the write-up is "for recording you?", but doesn't show a clear response. It's cut to imply that the woman is being "now considered a domestic terrorist" for the simple act of having a cell phone out recording, but it gives no reason to actually believe that this is the case.

Meanwhile, we don't get to see any evidence of the email chain, can't verify the "unnamed spokesperson" and, crucially, can't verify the actual text of the question asked. I hope I don't have to explain how following someone around could result in a physical obstruction.
by noduerme | 2026-01-26 09:52:37+00:00
Let me get this straight: If 60,000 people are killed in a war in 3 years, it's a genocide, but if 30,000 protesters are killed in 2 days, it's not? Not that either one is a genocide, but you're saying the difference is what percentage of the population died? Therefore, 10 people in Luxembourg are equal to 200 people in China?