MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 72deluxe | 2026-01-21 12:53:26+00:00
Yes, I remember making my 12" IBM monitor scream as I put the wrong mode information in the config file for X. I think I was on RedHat 5.0 from a cover CD, on a 486 DX2 with 64 MB of RAM (I was poor; everyone else was on Pentium IIs or IIIs and I was using computers the school threw out, scraping together motherboards and RAM).
by bluGill | 2026-01-21 12:53:34+00:00
Depends. they are designed so the whole units are easy for the common things you do with that size. this is a common case for things will still do today like we did 200 years ago (like build houses). But even in those areas a lot of things are not round units.

When things are not nice round units though both systems are equally hard. This is common in the modern world where we do a lot of things impossible 200 years ago.

in reality you almost never calculate on the job. You measure what is on the print and anything not on the print is figured out 'when you get there' by measuring the space left when you get there - which also corrects for previous measurement errors
by bux93 | 2026-01-21 12:53:41+00:00
Weird. Seems to work for Airbus, Allianz, BASF, E.ON, Fresenius, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (and its subsidiary Dior), SAP, Schneider Electric, TotalEnergies, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Vonovia.

Of course, that's the existing pan-European SE which is a public company. Needs like a few sentences changed in the existing regulation to extend that to private companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea
Code review your plans and your implementation
by mayassin | 2026-01-21 12:54:51+00:00
It’s 2026 and the human language now more or less compiles. We've slowly moved away from writing code and towards writing detailed plans. The plans have gotten to the point where they’re built into our tools(Cursor Plan mode, CC also has one). Why shouldn't we review these plans like its a code review?

Eventually we won’t be looking at Python the same way we don't look at Assembly. I never check the binary output of a GCC compiler because I trust it. The workflow I’m seeing and using is completely different. I want to see teams code reviewing the Plan, not just the implementation.

AI is not deterministic yet so we're not quite at the GCC compiler level yet. However, a good plan review is worth 10x more than an implementation review. Code is a commodity, the plan is the not solved part. You can spend hours letting your agent implement and throw it all away, or get buy in from your team and (almost) one shot most tasks. Of course this was always true even before AI, aligning on what to build always mattered more than the how but tools like Claude Code and Cursor make it the only part that really matters.

The team should align on a structured text file. Call it a plan.md or whatever depending on what you’re implementing it with. It describes the feature, the logic, and most importantly the measurement of success.

Here’s the actual workflow:
1. Pick up a task and create a plan.md file using Claude code / Cursor. Iterate on this for as long as you need to. Make sure you have good success criteria the agent can build towards
2. Open a Draft PR with that text file. Drop it in Slack. The team aligns on the approach in Slack or GitHub comments. I usually prefer Slack for iterating on a plan and GitHub comments for code comments
3. Once the team thumbs-ups the plan, point the agent at it. Since the success criteria are written out, the agent can self-verify.
4. Once you’re happy with the implementation , now you update the PR with the generated code, get your teammates to review the code as they would any code review except they have much more context since they’ve already reviewed your plan.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-21 12:55:14+00:00
> I'm rejecting your claim that voters didn't act rationally relative to any other human.

Okay

> you don't get to claim to be rational and others not (relatively speaking).

Agreed. However, if someone presents a rubric to explain her actions, any person can assess that rubric and the actions for congruence. This is what I am doing.
by laszlojamf | 2026-01-21 12:55:21+00:00
I'd be curious to know how people with aphantasia come up with ideas, or what they call that process if not imagination. The author has written books. Books have stories. Somehow she comes up with them. If that's not imagination, then what is it.
I have a hard time visualizing things myself, and I'm a lousy painter, but is _that_ what aphantasia is?
by mfld | 2026-01-21 12:55:23+00:00
It's a good price because the yearly statements for an LLC/GmbH are costly. We pay about 200/mo for accounting - with some more invoices :) -, 100/mo for payrolls but also the yearly statement alone is more than 2k. You can save that by not having an LLC - I personally think the risk in many software businesses is quite low. And some risks must be accepted as an entrepreneur...
by fileeditview | 2026-01-21 12:55:33+00:00
So true! I was well into my thirties until I learned that people actually can "see" images. I was totally perplexed by this revelation. After some research I realized that this also applies to taste, smell, sounds.. and none of them I can "imagine".

In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.

Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.

After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.

In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-21 12:55:40+00:00
> But evidence shows that they do emigrate in mass when there's a reason

If you go to the CNN website there are lots of articles on there right now (e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/us-woman-moved-to-germany) about US peeps who have emigrated to Europe recently and are thoroughly enjoying their new life with no plans to return to the motherland in the foreseeable future.

I can't possibly think why. ;)
by throw0101a | 2026-01-21 12:55:48+00:00
> NAT provides security because normally it disallows external actors on the outside from accessing resources on the inside side.

Which NAT?

A 1:1 'basic' NAT [1] could allow stateless flow between two different address schemes. Then you have NAPT where multiple IPs can be mapped via one-IP-many-port system, in which you need state and thus have a filtering mechanism.

Similarly you can have IPv6 ULA and do a stateless address translation (NPT) without any blocking policy, which would achieve the same (lack of) security as the 1:1 scenario above.

Address translation can have the same level (or not) of security in both IPv4 and IPv6.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2663#section-4.1.1
by tbrownaw | 2026-01-21 12:56:12+00:00
> And indeed, if a firewall is off NAT can still function (if NAT is separate).

Well technically you can translate your /16 to look like a different /16 from the outside. IE each internal address gets turned into its own separate external address.

But that's not how NAT gets used in practice. How it actually gets used is to but many hidden addresses behind one or a few public addresses. And that multiplexing necessarily implies that incoming connections must be specifically told where to go; ie that there's a firewall.
by MarkusWandel | 2026-01-21 12:56:35+00:00
Oddly enough as a person born in a metric country, now living in Canada which is metric, and always educated in metric, I agree with you on the feet and inches. "A couple of inches" doesn't imply nearly the precision that "5 centimeters" (using the US spelling on purpose) implies. Similarly my own height of 5'10 is much more "human scale" than the 178cm that it says on my passport.

Not for engineering though!!! Being able to add 1/64 and 5/16 and 17/32 etc. in your head without stumbling is a skill that I did not acquire.

Don't agree on the Fahrenheit though and for the same reason! Degrees are just the right scale, and besides, anchored at freezing (0) and typical boiling (100) points. But that's just habits. Probably if I'd grown up with Fahrenheit, I'd prefer it too. And besides the oven defaulted to Fahrenheit and we never changed it. 350F...
by tcgv | 2026-01-21 12:56:41+00:00
Upvote.

That's my experience too. Agent coding works really well for existing codebases that are well-structured and organized. If your codebase is mostly spaghetti—without clear boundaries and no clear architecture in place—then agents won't be of much help. They'll also suffer working in those codebases and produce mediocre results.

Regarding building apps and systems from scratch with agents, I also find it more challenging. You can make it work, but you'll have to provide much more "spec" to the agent to get a good result (and "good" here is subjective). Agents excel at tasks with a narrower scope and clear objectives.

The best use case for coding agents is tasks that you'd be comfortable coding yourself, where you can write clear instructions about what you expect, and you can review the result (and even make minor adjustments if necessary before shipping it). This is where I see clear efficiency gains.
by anileated | 2026-01-21 12:56:50+00:00
If something is not technically illegal that does not mean it cannot be bad.

Like I said, there is a part that should be illegal, and then part where that's used to additionally harm one of the ways that OSS can be sustainable. The second part on its own is not illegal but adds to damages and is perfectly okay to condemn.

Open source software can have business models, it's one of the ways it can be sustainable. It can work like, for example, the code is made available (for any purpose) and the core maintainer company provides services, like with Nginx (BSD). Or there is an open-source software, and companies create paid products and services on top while respecting the terms of that software and contributing back, like with Linux (GPL) and SUSE/Red Hat.
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-21 12:56:58+00:00
In a way, "someone doesn't think I should have rights and/or exist and/or thinks I am inferior because of who I am" is pretty much the definition of politics. All sides play this game, e.g. many extremists these days argue that the "intolerant" shouldn't have rights or even exist by definition, but then the political issue becomes who gets labeled as "intolerant" to begin with.
by krisknez | 2026-01-21 12:57:19+00:00
I’m from Croatia, and starting and running a company here is expensive. Estonia makes it much easier, so you might think: why not open a company in Estonia?

But here is a problem: If your clients are in Croatia and you have a Croatian company, you don’t have to charge VAT if you earn under 60k per year. But if your company is in Estonia, you are required to charge VAT even if you earn under 60k.
by ryanjshaw | 2026-01-21 12:58:03+00:00
I wonder if author is one of the lucky aphantasics who doesn’t have SDAM [1].

I tried the exercise they described… and nothing happened.

I can’t even remember major life events that everybody is supposed to. Best I can do is recall there’s a photograph of the event, and using my recollection of the existence of the photograph, I can pull up a few facts I’ve intentionally made note of.

And now cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of the kids when I can’t.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-21 12:58:08+00:00
> I don't really know but I don't think most people know it.

That's for sure, most people don't know how much they're being tracked, even if we consider only inside the platform. Nowadays, lots of platforms literally log your mouse movements inside the page, so they can see exactly where you first landed, how you moved around on the page, where you navigated, how long you paused for, and much much more. Basically, if it can be logged and re-constructed, it will be.

> Also a quick question but how long are the logs kept in OpenAI? And are the logs still taken even if you are in private mode?

As far as I know right now, OpenAI is under legal obligation to log all of their ChatGPT chats, regardless of their own policies, but this was a while ago (this summer sometime?), maybe it's different today.

What exactly you mean with "private mode"? If you mean "incognito/private window" in your browser, it has basically no impact on how much is logged by the platforms themselves, it's all about your local history.

For the "temporary mode" in ChatGPT, I also think it has no impact on how much they log, it's just about not making that particular chat visible in your chat history, and them not using that data for training their model. Besides that, all the tracking in your browser still works the same way, AFAIK.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 12:58:23+00:00
I mean, its open source so people can create benchmark and independently verify if the AI was wrong and then have the claims be passed to the author.

I haven't read the reddit thread or anything but If the author coded it by hand or is passionate about this project, he will probably understand what we are talking about.

But I don't believe its such a big deal to have a benchmark be written by AI though? no?
by hagbard_c | 2026-01-21 12:58:46+00:00
I already foresee the quibbling on the answer to all the print the nth line questions: do empty lines count? In *nix-land they certainly do, in player-land they might, then again they might not.

When little Johnny gives teacher his 2000 line essay consisting of 1998 empty lines flanked by My 2000 line essay and That's all Folks! teacher will give Johnny a 1 or an F (depending on locality, might even be E where silly rabbits banned 'F' scores). But teacher, I played this here game of cards where empty lines did count won't be accepted as valid reasoning.
by vidarh | 2026-01-21 12:59:34+00:00
People without aphantasia see images in their head. If you don't see images, you have aphantasia.

I agree with you regarding imagination - the problem isn't the usual definitions of imagination, but that the process of seeing images to varying degrees (from fuzzy, brief views to "full fidelity video" they can rewind at will at the other extreme) is so deeply ingrained in most people that a whole lot of our vocabulary uses visual metaphors for the entire process rather than just for the visual aspect.
by SigmundA | 2026-01-21 13:00:02+00:00
Not just maintained automatically, clustered indexes have no heap at all, the table is an index.

The CLUSTER command in PG just moves rows around in the heap so they match the still separate index order which can help a little bit with range operations because rows are close on disk, but otherwise doesn't do much.

So they are completely separate things that just happen to use the same term.
by woadwarrior01 | 2026-01-21 13:00:20+00:00
gpt-5.2-codex xhigh with OpenAI codex on the $20/month plan got to 1526 cycles with OP's prompt for me. Meanwhile claude code with Opus 4.5 on the team premium plan ($150/month) gave up with a bunch of contrived excuses at 3433 cycles.
by shihab | 2026-01-21 13:00:50+00:00
Hi, I just wanted to note that e3nn is more of an academic software that's a bit high-level by design. A better baseline for comparison would be Nvidia's cuEquivariance, which does pretty much the same thing as you did- take e3nn and optimizes it for GPU.

As a HPC developer, it breaks my heart how worse academic software performance is compared to vendor libraries. We need to start aiming much higher.
Show HN: A WASM A* Library – 2–3.5× Faster Than Alternatives
by saqibali-2k | 2026-01-21 13:01:48+00:00
TL;DR:
- C++ compiled to WASM + Web Worker astar
- Custom heuristics
- Non-blocking
- 2–3.5× faster on large grids
- Performs especially well when a path can't be found
- Demo: https://saqib-ali.com/lightspeed-astarjs/
by jventura | 2026-01-21 13:02:11+00:00
As someone born and living in a country that uses the metric system, I do not understand a bit of what inches and feets mean. Tell me something has 10-15 cm, and I know what it means. I measure 173cm, I know what one meter is about. 5'10? What the hell is that?! 5 feet and 10 inches? Some people have small feet, some have larger. And what is an "inch"? :)

Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100ºC means boiling water, 40º feels summer around here..

I guess I'm saying that you understand the values of the imperial system because you're used to them, as I'm used to values in the metric system..
by vladms | 2026-01-21 13:02:16+00:00
> In Europe it is hostility mostly all the way, from banks to regulators to governments, and so on

I have various experience with opening businesses and my impression is that the quality of service is the same as for personal matters, not worse nor better. My complaint (for both personal and as business) is that you stumble upon low qualified people that just do not care. If you know what to ask and how things work, it's mostly ok. If you need to discover by yourself (and nobody helps you) you will have headaches.

> Americans love new things and new ideas and see them as opportunities. Europeans see them as threats.

That's definitely true, and a big frustration for the entrepreneurial type. But, think like an American - see it as an opportunity! Once European are convinced things are not "a threat/evil" they will work more steady with you, for the longer term. I worked at a number of projects with US that changed direction so often that nothing was ever finished - because they always went for the newest idea. Not ideal either.
by tcldr | 2026-01-21 13:02:39+00:00
> Of all the challenges you face as a startup, the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential.

The amount of founders who choose to domicile their company in Estonia because the ticket rates and ease look attractive and who don't understand that this will still need to be administered in their local market as a CFC (controlled foreign corporation) would probably say differently.

> Just choose a jurisdiction where investors understand how the legals work (Delaware C-corp, UK Ltd is OK too) and there's a finite administrative burden and/or commoditized tooling in place to help you handle it.

That's exactly what EU-INC is trying to provide/solve afaict.
by ramb2 | 2026-01-21 13:03:40+00:00
Reading that, I feel bad for dang.

It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.

I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.

PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
by Bender | 2026-01-21 13:03:50+00:00
I would also add that these dangling TXT records also build up into a amplification DDoS risk for recursive name servers. When running public recursive servers I have had to strip the TXT records for several domains including but not limited to 500px.com box.com ebay.com google.com hm.com lenovo.com nordstrom.com realtor.com tmz.com wired.com. Take a look:

for i in $(echo "500px.com box.com ebay.com google.com hm.com lenovo.com nordstrom.com realtor.com tmz.com wired.com");do dig +short +nocookie -t TXT "${i}";echo;done

To strip them in Unbound I used:

local-zone: ebay.com typetransparent
local-data: 'ebay.com. TXT "[ddos redacted]"'

My public name servers served a specific purpose for people and domains in a certain country being filtered so stripping such records were perfectly splendid as I was expecting a country to attack me.
by Antibabelic | 2026-01-21 13:03:50+00:00
> it is used today in a sense that didn't quite exist 2 years ago (and that definition isn't yet formalized)

Agents were a thing in AI research decades ago. See for example the volume "Designing Autonomous Agents" from 1990 or the mountain of works on agent-based modeling. The phrase "multi-agent systems" goes back to the 1990s or earlier.
by jodacola | 2026-01-21 13:04:42+00:00
General AI skeptic and manager reporting in.

Have had success at work, real value, real results.

Example: extracting a bunch of data from a tool we’re required to use at my company for getting a bunch of performance metrics. The data is useful but the interface is awful and it’s impossible to pull out trends and spot the real information I need from it. So, I threw Claude at it after months of dreaming of being able to better use the data. It generated for me in a few minutes all the data I could hope for in a CSV I was able to load into another tool that gave me deep insights almost immediately and allowed me to go make some different decisions I otherwise wouldn’t have.

What I did:

1. I have created and curated a set of sub-agents and commands/workflows for building things for me.
2. I used my build command, which details a workflow for refining, planning, implementing, code reviewing, testing, then conducting a final “product review” to determine if original requirements were met.
3. I then review the code myself before running it.

The code was solid (I’m also a very strong engineer and have tailored my agents and workflows to generate code I’d be comfortable with).

Another example: one of my teams went on a journey to convert one of our internal legacy frontend applications to a newer shared component library and eliminate old cruft that we inherited when we inherited the codebase.

The team was able to get this massive UI rewrite done in under two weeks, the updated code was better than the original code (it was all React to React, TypeScript to TypeScript), and we eliminated (literally) hundreds of thousands of lines of old hand-written over-abstracted code. Bundle sizes dramatically down, higher performance, more modern UX, and the thing is in production and working. Real value: faster product iteration in this now far smaller and easier-to-work-with codebase, far less technical debt, and faster builds, etc.

The team only used GitHub Copilot for this and it required a bunch of iteration and starting over with different instructions, but they got there and still managed to save a ridiculous amount of time; hand-writing the UI migration would have been one of those multi-month projects that went over schedule (I’ve seen and lived that movie many times before).

I’m still very skeptical of all the hype but I’ve seen very real, very valuable results out of this stuff.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-21 13:04:48+00:00
Not as laughable as "metric is more convenient for human scale things". "Human scale things" includes fractions of an inch and fractions of a mile, which are horrible in customary units, and includes both the foot and yard which are used confusingly interchangeably. Metric is far superior for human scale measurements.

And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?
by mrfumier | 2026-01-21 13:04:57+00:00
The comparison with calculators overlooks several key developments.

LLMs are becoming increasingly efficient. Through techniques such as distillation, quantization, and optimized architectures, it is already possible to run capable models offline, including on personal computers and even smartphones. This trend reduces reliance on constant access to centralized providers and enables local, self-contained usage.

Rather than avoiding LLMs, the rational response is to build local, portable, and open alternatives in parallel. The natural trajectory of LLMs points toward smaller, more efficient, and locally executable models, mirroring the path that calculators themselves once followed.