MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluecalm | 2026-01-18 20:05:29+00:00
>>At least in gambling they don't let the sports referees and players gamble.

Oh c'mon now. This is completely impossible to police. Players and referees are not under constant supervision. They have families, friends, partners. Some of them got caught but you can be certain most weren't because it's just very difficult to catch.

There are always multiple people who know about key players' injuries, illness, other factors. The game is negative sum and additionally insiders take a a chunk for themselves. It's worse then roulette which at least doesn't pretend to be fair.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-18 20:06:03+00:00
> One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on.

He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about.

"Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?"

"Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!"

"Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."
by watwut | 2026-01-18 20:06:29+00:00
> The sort of people who have been able to neglect their soft skills are probably still going to be able to do so in the future. But those were always the extreme intelligence outliers, generational talent type figures.

This is just not true. Lack of soft skill never implied high intelligence, it was always and is just lack of soft skills. Some people without them are otherwise highly intelligent, others are just normal or even weaker then average.

> You far more often see moderately successful charlatans that are all talk than successful people with awful communication skills. Of course if you're able to walk the talk, that's when you can really go places.

I would argue that this is consequence of management that does NOT have soft skills. People write a lot about soft skills of engineers and simply assume management has them. They do not always, yes they then end up being bad managers ... and charlatans doing good is usually consequence of bad management without those actual people skills. Soft skills are not just about coming across nice, they are also about being able to be assertive, being able to recognize charlatans or toxic personalities and being able to deal with them (which is not the same as enabling them).
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-01-18 20:06:43+00:00
Soundcore Liberty 5 noise-cancelling wireless earbuds. £75, so $100ish.

Saved my sanity when the infrastructure team decided to set-up a rack mount server in my office "just for a few days, honestly" and I spent two weeks listening to the system fan spooling up every (count them) seventy five seconds. The sound quality is pretty good too.
by blakesterz | 2026-01-18 20:07:00+00:00
"It’s hard to quantify just how widespread the phenomenon is, but certain notably offline hobbies are exploding in popularity."

Assuming this is an actual trend that is actually "exploding"... I wonder what this means for the short term in the AI industry? Could we see a drop in users and then a big popping of the bubble?

That does seem like a really big assumption though.
by internet2000 | 2026-01-18 20:07:01+00:00
Mac OS and iOS thumbnails documents/files for icons on the file browser and search, so shapes are irregular. E.g. Landscape thumb for a .pptx, square album art for an .mp3, portrait for a .pdf, arbitrary shape for a .xlsx. 3rd party apps can participate in that through Quicklook plugins.

It's a great feature because I can scan several files named export (n).xlsx on my downloads folder stack, and know which one I want from the thumbnail alone. OS feature improvements change the design context.
by bvisness | 2026-01-18 20:08:07+00:00
No, we're still going to vet people. There's a slice of benefits we can offer to everyone who pays to become a member, but then on top of that we'll be able to provide tangible support for some number of projects as well, funded by the membership dues. Which projects we choose to support in this way will be at our discretion, and vetting the developer and the project is an obvious part of that process.

The thing we can offer developers, which is rather unique, is bespoke "Handmade-style" handling of many dull aspects of professional software: payments, licensing, email lists, websites, support, etc. The goal is to do these things without locking the project authors into a third-party platform; that is against our Handmade values and there are plenty of such products on the market today.
by lemontheme | 2026-01-18 20:08:48+00:00
The 'a' and the 'o' are a bit similar, but all in all I can see myself trying this out. Reminds me a bit of Comic Code and Maple Mono. Thanks for sharing!

There are a few odd things about this post though. Take this as well-intentioned feedback.

- New account. No previous submissions or comments.

- New Github account. No previous activity.

- Mentions custom engine (cool!), but omits any details.

- Calls other mono fonts 'fugly'; refuses to elaborate.

- Releasing based on interest feels like engagement farming. Let me know when it's done. Then I'll judge whether I'm interested.

- Regular weights are free. Implication is that other weights will be paid. That's fine. I'm happy to pay for fonts. But I'm unlikely to try a font in earnest without bold and italics.

Sorry if this comes off as harsh. I wish you the best with this!
by s1mplicissimus | 2026-01-18 20:09:05+00:00
Sounds like a difficult situation, and I think I can relate - I hope for you that you can find some people who you actually enjoy hanging out with and who appreciate you for who you are. We all have our little quirks, and part of a good relationship is to graciously "overlook" them. That is not twisting yourself, it's accommodating your counterpart. For personal stuff, it often helps me to get out of my head to redirect the thoughts from "what do I want" to "what do they want and how can I give it to them". Once I started considering others wants more, i also noticed more when they were gracious towards me, which, I think, made me a bit less of an ungrateful dipshit and generally easier to be around. Wish you all the best!
by doctorflan | 2026-01-18 20:09:25+00:00
I was hoping this was literally just going to be some safe version of a BBS/Usenet sort of filesharing that was peer-based king of like torrents, but just simple and straightforward, with no porn, infected warez, randomware, crypto-mining, racist/terrorist/nazi/maga/communist/etc. crap, where I could just find old computing magazines, homebrew games, recipes, and things like that.

Why can’t we have nice things?

I guess that’s what Internet Archive is for.
by Vinnl | 2026-01-18 20:09:41+00:00
remoteStorage is still occasionally getting updates. https://solidproject.org is a somewhat newer, similar project backed by Tim Berners-Lee. (With its own baggage.)

I think of those projects as working relatively well for private data, but public data is kinda awkward. ATProto is the other way around: it has a lot of infra to make public data feasible, but private data is still pretty awkward.

It's a lot more popular though, so maybe has a bigger chance of solving those issues? Alternatively, Bluesky keeps its own extensions for that, and starts walling those bits off more and more as the VCs amp up the pressure. That said, I know very little about Bluesky, so this speculation might all be nonsense.
by jrv | 2026-01-18 20:09:45+00:00
> I think I don't really understand the benefit of data portability in the situation.

Twitter was my home on the web for almost 15 years when it got taken over by a ... - well you know the story. At the time I wished I could have taken my identity, my posts, my likes, and my entire social graph over to a compatible app that was run by decent people. Instead, I had to start completely new. But with ATProto, you can do exactly that - someone else can just fork the entire app, and you can keep your identity, your posts, your likes, your social graph. It all just transfers over, as long as the other app is using the same ATProto lexicon (so it's basically the same kind of app).
by apublicfrog | 2026-01-18 20:10:01+00:00
Agreed, but I've found Windows to be relatively finicky with the shutdown command, with some OS versions being fine with that and some not. Additionally, on Windows often the action needed is a GUI program with no simple way to post-hook or provide an output a CLI can easily ready.

As such I usually set my timer 3x what it needs to be (e.g 1800 for a 10 minute) and it's always had a high chance of working.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-18 20:10:02+00:00
Yeah I had this problem at a couple of times in startup interviews where the interviewer asked a question I happened to have expertise in and then disagreed with my answer and clearly they didn't know all that much about it. It's ok, they did me a favor.

It may or may not be related that the places that this happened were always very ethnically monotone with narrow age ranges (nothing against any particular ethnic group, they were all different ethnic monotones)
by basher | 2026-01-18 20:11:26+00:00
I’ve been paying *$125/mo* (promo pricing for the $250/mo tier) for Google’s top-tier "AI Ultra" subscription for a month. I signed up because I’m a power user—I manage large repos, build my own MCP tools, and live in the terminal. I assumed "Ultra" meant "Pro Developer."

I was wrong. I downgraded to the $20/mo plan today, and here is why other developers should probably avoid the top tier.

1. The "Double Pay" Paradox
The subscription gives you the Web UI (Gemini Advanced) and 30TB of storage. It gives you zero API credits.
If you use modern AI coding tools like Aider, Cursor, or your own scripts, you have to pay per-token for the API separately.

* *My Bill:* $125/mo for the subscription + ~$50/mo for API usage.
* *The Reality:* I was effectively donating $125/mo to Google for a Web UI I barely use because I’m working the CLI.

*2. The "Official" CLI is Broken (The 400 Error)*
I tried to use the official `gemini-cli` to avoid the API costs. It is unusable for agentic work.
There is a known, persistent bug where the CLI crashes with a `400 Bad Request` error whenever the model attempts parallel tool calling (a standard feature of the model).

* *The Bug:* `Please ensure that the number of function response parts is equal...`
* Issues like #11925 (Broken Auth) and #13292 (Parallel Tool Crash) have been open for months.
* [Auth Bug: Issue #11925](https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/11925)
* [Tool Crash: Issue #13292](https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/13292)

*3. Shipping the Org Chart*
The reason the pricing makes no sense is that Google is clearly shipping its Org Chart.

* *Google One* wants to sell Storage (hence the 30TB bundle).
* *Google Cloud* wants to sell APIs (Vertex).
* *DeepMind* wants to ship Models.
The "Ultra" plan is a Franken-product stitched together by the Storage team. They don't have a billing mechanism for "Individual Developer who needs API credits," so they force you to buy a data center's worth of hard drives instead.

*4. The Feedback Black Hole*
The most frustrating part is that there is no way to get this feedback to a human who can actually change it. You can't file a ticket for "Your pricing model ignores developers." You just scream into the void of the feedback form.

*The Solution: Unbundle the Intelligence*
We need a *"Developer Tier"*:

* *Give me:* High API Rate Limits + API Credits.
* *Charge me:* Fairly for what I use.

Until then, I’ve downgraded to the standard $20/mo plan and I'm moving the rest of my AI budget to anthropic.
by oofbey | 2026-01-18 20:11:34+00:00
The big bet with this technique is in having a fixed (non learned) matrix which converts the tokens latent space to the linear attention space. So you can kinda cheat and say your model is small because a bunch of the smarts are in this fixed big graph laplacian matrix L.

So how do you scale this up from a toy problem? Well that L would
Have to get bigger. And it’s hard to imagine it being useful if L is not trained. Then it starts to look a lot more like a conventional transformer, but probably harder to train, with the benefit of smaller KV caches. (Half the size - not a massive win.)

So overall doesn’t seem to me like it’s gonna amount to anything.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-18 20:11:39+00:00
Ads will be no longer a buisness model in 3-5 years when simple, locally run models that do nothing besides blocking ads become available. Twitter, Facebook etc. already get past most modern adblockers, but the AI extension will be able to filter them. In-text advertising must be marked as advertisment in most countries, and even if it isn't, local AI will filter this probably out. So a free ChatGPT service with in-text AI can simply be countered by another local browser extension, that rewrites the text and removes ads.

One can make the point that Google, Meta and others are investing so much into AI as they know, we are facing the end of the ad-based internet economy. The investments are to create new buiness models, because their old ones are gone soon.
by whstl | 2026-01-18 20:11:51+00:00
Even before AI, there was tremendous pressure on developers for NOT going above and beyond.

I have been in far too many situations where a developer had an idea or a prototype it was blocked by a product manager on the grounds of it not being their idea. As a technical manager you then have to burn political capital just to get people to fucking collaborate.

I've also seen way too many situations where developers must do the actual PM gruntwork where the PM wants to pretend they are some kind of svengali tastemaker figure.

Have this for a few years and the psychological safety of any developer is in shambles.

Those environments need to be fucking burned to the ground.
by layer8 | 2026-01-18 20:11:54+00:00
That’s not the problem. Analog dials were still easier and more convenient. I’m talking CRT days. Like these: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/M9cAAOSwrt5ncwpj/s-l1600.jpg

You could probably program keypad knobs like these to do the same: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71s7PGYBkkL._AC_SL1500_....
by 6SixTy | 2026-01-18 20:11:55+00:00
Cache issues add another layer here, if it's not the whole issue. Device tree patches for the K3 have 2 clusters of 4 cores with shared 4MB L2 cache per cluster. Core 2 Duo P8400 has 3MB L2 shared between 2 cores, and Sandybridge-Haswell have per core L2 and shared L3.
by GordonS | 2026-01-18 20:12:06+00:00
I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!

But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.
by mkw5053 | 2026-01-18 20:12:40+00:00
Watergate, Iran-Contra, Vietnam, and the Pentagon Papers were all exposed through mass media, and they triggered resignations, prosecutions, and electoral consequences. Nixon resigned for conduct far narrower than many of Trump’s actions. Reagan officials went to prison.

Trump didn’t reveal hidden corruption, he openly violated constraints that previous leaders still treated as binding. Calling him a “stress test” misstates causality. Stress tests expose weaknesses, they don’t require millions of people to excuse norm violations because the harm initially falls elsewhere. This wasn’t inevitability or opacity, it was a collective decision to lower standards.
by awesome_dude | 2026-01-18 20:13:16+00:00
My take:

Businesses have valued "cohesion" over "correctness" for some time (at least the last 10 years of my career) with the thinking that they can always eventually get to a correct solution, but teams that aren't cohesive do not work toward the goal they fight amongst themselves until they tear themselves apart (as a former Python dev I have seen teams that have one or two members fight for MONTHS over which set of linters to use)

I also want to say that the only source of "bugs" is misunderstandings - of what the technology does, what the business wants, or what the customer wants (two thirds of that is "soft skills"). We've created DDD to try and address one third of those potential issues, but we're not there yet.
by diffs | 2026-01-18 20:13:29+00:00
Apologies, I deleted my comment because I felt it wasn’t contributing to the discussion, and since I’m not an American I don’t wish to pontificate about either Trump or ICE.

I will say however, as someone born in a country ruled by a totalitarian regime, that the US is nowhere near that, and claims to the contrary offend me personally because they trivialize authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
by geokon | 2026-01-18 20:13:35+00:00
Sure, you'd have something like:

{:record {:person-key **public-key**
:type :twitter-post
:message "My friend {:person-key **danabramov-public-key**} suggested I make this on this HN post {:link **record-of-hn-post-hash**}. Look at his latest post {:link **danabramov-newtwitter-post-hash** :person-key **danabramov-public-key**} it's very cool!"}
:hash **hash-of-the-record**
:signature **signature-by-author**}

So everything is self-contained. The other features you'd build on top of this basic primitive

- Getting the @danabramov username would be done by having some lookup service that does person-key->username. You could have several. Usernames can be changed with the service.. But you can have your own map if you want, or infer it from github commits :)) There are some interesting ideas about usernames about. How this is done isn't specified by the Record

- Lexicon is also done separately. This is some validation step that's either done by a consumer app/editor of the record or by a server which distributes records (could be based on the :type or something else). Such a server can check if you have less than 300 graphemes and reject the record if it fails. How this is done isn't specified by the Record

- Collection.. This I think is just organizational? How this is done isn't specified by the Record. It's just aggregating all records of the same type from the same author I guess?

- Hashes.. they can point at anything. You can point at a webpage or an image or another record (where you can indicate the author). For dynamic content you'd need to point at webpage that points at a static URL which has the dynamic content. You'd also need to have a hash->content mapping. How this is done isn't specified by the Record

This kind of setup makes the Record completely decoupled from rest of the "stack". It becomes much more of independent moveable "file" (in the original sense that you have at the top) than the interconnected setup you end up with at the end.
by Izkata | 2026-01-18 20:14:08+00:00
> > It's not like the wisdom is lost, it's just ignored in modern builds.

> Or it is set out in building codes that they must design in a certain way.

An anecdote: Two decades ago in college in the US, I knew several people doing Architecture. One day in one of their dorm rooms, one of them went on this long rant about how modern codes ignore environmental factors and just require certain things no matter the climate.

I don't know how universal her experience was, but I can see these two lines I quoted as both happening, just in reverse - the building codes are causing loss of knowledge/wisdom.
by bicx | 2026-01-18 20:14:09+00:00
I agree. Trying to punish will just deepen resentment, and they will live in their echo chamber while you live in yours. Then it's just side vs side, with the pundits leading the dialog.

We have to remember that we aren't all working from the same perceptual or moral framework. This is a struggle for me, as I love my parents but our believes have diverged considerably.

I think the challenge right now in the U.S. is that for many, it doesn't feel socially safe to question your own side. In reality, we need to feel free to judge actions individually, and judge leaders as a true accumulation of their actions. If we fear rejection from our party/family/friends for not walking in lock-step with the official party stances, that influences a lot of our thinking. No one wants to feel continually guilty about their own views (especially when there are social consequences for changing them), so we often shove aside conflicting details, make jokes, and signal to others that we're still a part of the tribe.

It sucks.
by shimman | 2026-01-18 20:14:24+00:00
Feels like quibbling over the differences between two databases that are going to act the same for 90% of projects out there doesn't really matter.

If you want speed, just have your database stored in the same place as your application, locally, rather than hopping across the world to retrieve data that can be located next to the code.

That would probably be the easiest thing to do to get a real measured performance gains.

As other commentators pointed out, computers are extremely powerful. This isn't 1995, you can easily host everything in the same local area and get a very responsive application with very minimal needs to worry about resource constraints.
by giardini | 2026-01-18 20:15:02+00:00
I sharpen my kitchen knives the same way I sharpen my lawnmower blades: out front on the curb (mine is concrete). Grind until it's sharp. Once I was out-of-pocket but luckily my host had a rock garden.

Normies DO care about edge quality but they DON'T care about fiddling with fancy "whetstones" and "diamond sharpeners" and such. Sharpen it, clean with soap and water, dry and burn it (to remove the rabies and typhus) and wipe it down with olive oil, mmmmm!
by nphardon | 2026-01-18 20:15:56+00:00
This seems ubiquitous (in baby steps) in my social circles. I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock, and other surveillance implementations, spotify and their distortion of music, and their investment into ai military drone tech, etc. and how wrapped up politics has become in everything. Its a bad time to have a browser in your pocket.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-18 20:16:38+00:00
Most similar post don't get any upvotes. From time to one get's lucyy. I prefer indovidual post that get better discussion.

I guess it's necessary to report of flag it when the submitter make a lot of them, in particular as fake questions to promote their own site. I don't think this is the case.

Anyway, you can ask dang/tomhow hn@ycombinator.com , they usualy reply the same day.
by listenallyall | 2026-01-18 20:16:46+00:00
If you're just now hearing about something which is "somewhat widespread" (your words) maybe that's a "you problem"

Were you caught off-guard when Scott Alexander wrote, of his own essay, I previously felt bad for writing this essay after Adams’ death; it seems kind of unsporting to disagree with someone who can’t respond.?

I think it boils down to the idea of "if you have something to say, say it to my face"

Abuse is an outlier, especially within a family, it is accompanied by complex, ongoing issues with trauma and possible retribution and isolation. It is perfectly normal that people would choose not to speak out while their abuser is alive. It's the reason why sexual abuse and DV victims are often granted anonymity as witnesses or accusers in criminal cases, which isn't allowed in normal situations.