MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendaw | 2026-01-05 07:04:07+00:00
The architecture looks amazing, and the monsters too! Is this co-op? I only played Quake 2 once... (wait, this is Quake 1?)

This may be me reading into it too much, but it's really cool how these old games have become kind of timeless platforms for content (doom too). You don't need a billion polygons to express lots of ideas and it reduces the effort required to contribute, and the open source-ness of it makes it available on lots of platforms, irons out lots of bugs and issues, etc.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-05 07:04:46+00:00
On older cars, like my '72 Dodge, the system voltage varied between 12 and 18 volts. But the dash instruments needed 5 volts. This was achieved with a clever "buzzer" circuit using an electromagnet and contacts. The circuit would open when it was above 5 volts and close when it was below. This created 5V, but was a noisy 5V.

Many people decided to improve this with a semiconductor voltage regulator, which would nail the output at 5V. But the instruments wouldn't work! The problem turned out to be the instruments relied on the noisy 5V to "unstick" the needles on the instruments.

So the electronics guys had to add a "noise" circuit to the voltage regulator circuit.

P.S. Watch an old aviation movie, where the pilot getting ready to fly would tap the instruments to unstick them.
by goku12 | 2026-01-05 07:05:49+00:00
> You’re describing a hypothetical future,

> What incredible privilege you have to be worried about future labor exploitation at yet-to-be-built resort casinos.

This is an incredibly dishonest take on this situation. You ignore the innumerable historical precedents out there. And you call it hypothetical when they have already made it clear that economic exploitation is exactly what they plan to do. Heck! What is the story of this discussion even about? You're displaying willful and selective ignorance here.

> Maduro’s government shot about two dozen people who had the nerve to protest the last election. Violence against women and children doesn’t get much worse.

How did Maduro get into power in the first place? What is the situation in the other natutal resource-rich countries you invaded in the name of freedom? The US didn't spend all that money to invade a nation to replace its dictatorship with something better, did they?

These self-righteous self-aggrandizing justifications are just too disturbing to read. This is one of those harrowing comments that justify utterly reprehensible and psychopathic behavior.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-05 07:05:52+00:00
What is actually unbelievable is that you keep arguing against me by quoting sources that only say exactly what I have been writing all along. So I don't really understand what is this about and perhaps you don't, either...

This is bizarre at this point.

Perhaps you wrongly assume that by "China split" I meant "the PRC split" although it is abundantly clear that I didn't.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-05 07:05:57+00:00
Wish you’d included your source. I can’t find anywhere that says numbers that high for 2020 or 2021. NIS 62b is less than 20b USD so what I said, and it’s unclear what of those optional portions were actually spent.

Here’s another one that agrees with my number for israel’s military spending: https://www.timesofisrael.com/bennett-gantz-liberman-agree-o...
by MisterMower | 2026-01-05 07:06:33+00:00
How does one nation following an ethical code encourage others to follow it as well?

Following an ethical code in international affairs constrains the nation following it. It provides an asymmetric advantage to others who choose not to follow that code.

This is partly why China has become so powerful over the past three decades. They chose to ignore western ethical codes around intellectual property rights, fair trade, environmental protections, and human rights. They are powerful today in no small part to their willingness to disregard these things.

This is difficult for people to understand because in interpersonal relationships following an ethical code is 100% the path to healthy and meaningful relationships, and most modern history education attempts to anthropomorphize past interactions between nations. But the cold fact is that international politics is nothing like interpersonal relationships.

A nation can encourage other nations to follow their ethical code by threatening to use force if they don't. They can create incentives to encourage nations to change their behavior through trade or treaty. But I can't think of a single time in history when a nation was such a shining star of morality that they inspired other nations to change their ways and adopt their ethics.

You can't expect other nations to respect your nation's moral and ethical values when they don't care about them in the first place and in fact hope that you choose to follow them to the fullest extent so that you're easier to compete against.
by belZaah | 2026-01-05 07:08:13+00:00
You can exercise your ankles so they are less likely to crumble if forced into an awkward position. Also look at where your feet land compared to each other: if one is almost ahead of the other (think camel stride), your foot is to the left (or right) of its hip and is thus naturally bent outwards. Having your foot land more squarely compared to how the body weight works, reduces the strain on the ankle. If the inside of your ankle/sock is always dirty after a run, this is why. Am currently going through the process of fixing this on myself.
Show HN: Live VNC for web agents – debugging native captcha on Cloud Run
by quarkcarbon279 | 2026-01-05 07:08:56+00:00
We build DOM-native web agents. No screenshots/vision, no CDP/Playwright. We handle captchas natively by traversing cross-origin iframes and shadow DOM. Debugging image selection captchas ("click all traffic lights") from logs was impossible, so we built live VNC view + takeover for ephemeral Cloud Run workers using relay pairing. Write-up covers the architecture, what broke, and real metrics.
by adagradschool | 2026-01-05 07:09:07+00:00
I'm approaching this problem via recursive task decomposition [0] mostly for coding but once that is polished, I can imagine it generalizing to other workloads. One idea I've been meaning to explore for a while is using the principles from Erlang/OTP [1] and mapping it onto multi-agent systems. Some nodes are supervisor trees that coordinate and handle restarts, gracefully degrade, are easy to observe + steer.

[0] https://github.com/adagradschool/scope
[1] https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf
by quarkcarbon279 | 2026-01-05 07:10:01+00:00
Hi HN, Bhavani here (rtrvr.ai).

We build DOM-native web agents (no screenshot-based vision, no CDP/Playwright debugger-port control). We handle captchas natively including Google reCAPTCHA image challenges by traversing cross-origin iframes and shadow DOM. The latency is high on this one currently.

The problem: when debugging image selection captchas ("select all images with traffic lights"), logs don't tell you why the agent clicked the wrong tiles. I found myself staring at execution logs thinking "did it even see the grid correctly?" and realized I just wanted to watch it work.

So we built live VNC view + takeover for serverless Chrome workers on Cloud Run.

Key learnings:

1. Session affinity is best-effort; "attach later" can hit a different instance

2. A separate relay service that pairs viewer↔runner by short-lived tokens makes attach deterministic

3. Runner stays clean: concurrency=1, one browser per container, no mixed traffic

Would love feedback from folks who've shipped similar:

1. What replaced VNC for you (WebRTC etc) and why?

2. Best approach for recording/replay without huge storage?

3. How do you handle "attach later" safely in serverless?
by goku12 | 2026-01-05 07:10:44+00:00
> If US meddling was so effective, why wasn’t Venezuela already doing what the US wanted?

Messing up the situation and leaving the natives to clean up after them is what the US does every time.

> This seems like a thought-terminating cliche.

The US excuses to military aggression is a cliché. Responses to clichés with a cliché should come as no surprise.
by SkiFire13 | 2026-01-05 07:11:23+00:00
> It's not so much different than disabling asserts in production.

Disabling asserts would be equivalent to not having them at all, while this feature introduces _new_ UB. In "fast" mode it's equivalent to using C's `__builtin_assume` or Rust's `std::hint::assert_unchecked`, except it's marketed with a name that makes it appear a safety/correctness feature.
by cyberax | 2026-01-05 07:11:24+00:00
Sure. You can try to create arbitrarily long sentences with nested clauses in Chinese. Just like in English you can create arbitrarily long sentences like: "I live in a house which was built by the builders which were hired by the owner who came from England on a steamship which was built...".

But it feels unnatural. So most Chinese sentences are fairly short as a result. And it's also why commas, stops, and even spacing between words are a fairly recent invention. They are simply not needed when the text is formed of implicitly connected statements that don't need to be deeply nested.

To give an example, here's our favorite long-winded Ishmael: "Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains." The Chinese translation is: "是的，这里坐着的是一群老水手，其中有很多人，在怒海中会毫不畏怯地登到巨鲸的背上——那可是他们一无所知的东西啊——眼都不眨地把鲸鱼斗死；然而，这时他们一起坐在公共的早餐桌上——同样的职业，同样的癖好——他们却互相羞怯地打量着对方，仿佛是绿山山从未出过羊圈的绵羊"

Or word-for-word: "Yes, here sitting [people] are the group of old sailors, among them there are many people, [who] in the middle of the raging sea can/will without fear on the whale's back climb. That whales were something they knew nothing about".

The subordinate clauses become almost stand-alone statements, and it's up to the reader to connect them.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-05 07:12:16+00:00
Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history#O...) tells me that version 2.4 was released in early 2001. That is a long time ago. Most of the commercial world was running SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX. So is it fair to say that the Linux kernel has been "quality" for 25 years now?
by zzo38computer | 2026-01-05 07:13:35+00:00
> That way, the original JSON file stays clean and isn’t polluted with extra data.

FracturedJson does not add any extra data; it only changes the formatting (it is a way of automatically formatting JSON data, not a new file format). However, the documentation mentions that in some cases it does reorder or rewrite things (such as the order of keys, the number of decimal places, etc).

If you set CommentPolicy=TreatAsError then programs that convert it to a canonical form (whether or not that canonical form is JSON or some binary format intended to be like JSON) should (hopefully) result in the same output with the original and the one converted by FracturedJson, depending on what things are considered to be significant. (I tested this with a program I wrote, which converts JSON to DER (which is a canonical form (and, in my opinion, usually the only good one) of ASN.1), and does not consider the order of keys or the representation of numbers to be significant (although the conversion of numbers does not lose any precision and is converted exactly, but e.g. "1.2" is considered the same as "1.200" and "80e1" is considered the same as "800").)
by aeonfox | 2026-01-05 07:13:42+00:00
> Except they are decreasing...

This data says otherwise. I'm certain pedestrian mortality has been increasing, and by the looks of this graph it looks like 'other road user' deaths are trending up too. If you have data to support your claim, keen to see it.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...

> Except HUD is kinda worse than center console

The glance time might be affected by a lack of contrast? Or perhaps the novelty of using a HUD? It's possibly right, but I'd want to see more study on the 'why' it's worse and whether that's a technical thing.
by ggggffggggg | 2026-01-05 07:13:56+00:00
Exactly, the whole point is it wouldn’t take 30 minutes (more like 3 hours) if the tooling didn’t change all the fucking time. And if the ecosystem wasn’t a house of cards 8 layers of json configuration tall.

Instead you’d learn it, remember it, and it would be useful next time. But it’s not.
by robocat | 2026-01-05 07:14:57+00:00
> Baudrillard

Certainly it has some extremely unmodern statements...

The masculine, by contrast, possesses unfailing powers of discrimination and absolute criteria for pronouncing the truth. The masculine is certain, the feminine is insoluble. [snip] just as there is no other femininity than that of appearances.

Reads like bullshit to me - but I'm an engineer type with no skills in humanities or French.
by devmor | 2026-01-05 07:15:52+00:00
For other people you may have a good point - I chose laziness for this person specifically because they mentioned not having to do it for so long that they didn’t know where to start. I do think of laziness a lot less negatively than other people do, though - indolence is not a sin, just a part of life.

I do share your interest in the answer to that question, though.
by avhception | 2026-01-05 07:15:56+00:00
I'm on 600mbps fiber with low latency. Some times, I can't be arsed to load the websites linked on HN and simply head straight into the comments. For example, when it's a link to Twitter, I get an endless onslaught of in-site popups. Cookie banners, "sign in with google", "sign in to X", "X is better on the app" and so on and so forth. Meh. I'll sometimes just stick to HN, especially when I'm on my phone on the sofa or something.

Give me a minimal / plain text website every day, it's not just the link speed.
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-01-05 07:17:45+00:00
[dupe]

Earlier and related:

Outrage as X's Grok morphs photos of women, children into explicit content

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460880

Grok is enabling mass sexual harassment on Twitter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466099

Grok Can't Apologize. So Why Do Headlines Keep Saying It Did?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46468414

Grok Sexual Images Draw Rebuke, France Flags Content as Illegal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470317
by panny | 2026-01-05 07:18:48+00:00
The really sad thing is Alyssa Rosenzweig was doing Libreboots on potato ARM laptops a few years ago. Asus C201 if I remember correctly. Alyssa went on to create Panfrost, which was fucking incredible. Then Alyssa left freedom and started working on Asahi instead. Now Lenovo is shipping a bad ass ARM chromebook with benchmarks in the M2 macbook territory, and where did Alyssa go? To work for proprietary Intel. There's a song playing in my head right now, Stabbing Westward: The thing I hate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ir-jKSDZYY

Had Alyssa stuck with freedom, we would have had a very nice HP Chromebook x360 13b-ca0047nr, fully repairable, fully free cpu, gpu, and wifi, like a few years ago. 2016 Macbook Pro tier laptop, not at all shabby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwORx9fbxCA

And now today, an even better Lenovo chromebook 3nm, 16GBs RAM, even a 50 tops NPU... but no. Alyssa had to go chase proprietary Apple. We have the hardware today. FSF could be selling fully free RYF ARM machines right now. Like FULLY free, all the way down to the EC, below the boot loader, below the CPU firmware even. But they aren't. The talent jumped ship for a soulless corporate paycheck.

I'm not faulting anyone for making a living either, I understand. But I'm pretty sure Alyssa was making a decent living with Collabra. Now Intel has their claws in, and will bury that brilliant developer in a back office doing miserable work. Whatever money Intel is paying, it wasn't worth the pride and impact that could have been made in software freedom.

It's just sitting right there. Victory is just laying there for someone to pick it up. But nobody with the talent is even trying now.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-05 07:20:56+00:00
3d printed shoes are… almost a thing(1). Clothes, not so much… some experimental high fashion fabrics, but nothing you’d wear under normal circumstances.

But to your point about PFAS, afaik no common 3d printing materials contain PFAS - at least not filament ones, i don’t know much about the resin printing world.

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4id0-vvu-u0
by lenkite | 2026-01-05 07:22:40+00:00
The Nobel Committee should have just given him a peace prize for the sake of the world with some "conditions" like he actually honored peace. Since he didn't get one, he decided like a miffed child that he would for the "war prize" instead.

It seems like the neocons have successfully managed a takeover behind the scenes using Trump as their idiot puppet. Gottu get the War+Oil Industry stock prices moving - the C-suite billionaires needs their bonuses for their next luxury yacht.
by Jean-Papoulos | 2026-01-05 07:23:09+00:00
>Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.

While I agree in spirit, when you reach a certain amount of people working on a project it's impossible. The product manager's job is to understand real user problems and communicate them efficiently to the engineering team so the engineering team can focus on engineering.
by patates | 2026-01-05 07:23:21+00:00
For fun (not because I'm trying to defend the capabilities of LLMs, but really just out of boredom), I tried to make this better with this prompt:

> make this sound less AI-generated and more like a proper hacker news comment with some SUBSTANCE: (insert the OP comment from above)

and Gemini 3 Flash generated this:

> This is exactly why CVSS scores can be misleading in practice. You see this constantly at Pwn2Own: it’s rarely one massive architectural failure, but a daisy-chain of three or four "low severity" quirks—an info leak here, a minor logic error there.

> To a product manager, these look like edge cases or wontfix tickets. But to an attacker, they aren't bugs; they’re primitives. You use the info leak to bypass ASLR, the logic error to groom the heap, and suddenly a nuisance crash becomes full RCE. We tend to model threats based on distinct barriers, ignoring that the complexity of the system guarantees these gadgets will eventually align.

It feels like it's fun when one plays with it on their own but it's really boring when reading the content others have generated (and therefore I'm sorry for adding to the pile - just wanted to see if the "HN style" was already baked-in to the LLMs and share the result: Yes it is).
by rhubarbtree | 2026-01-05 07:23:40+00:00
That must be so satisfying. I’ve heard the phrase “code farming” before, but I like the zen garden analogy.

If the future is indeed AI, and I’m certainly hearing a lot of people using it extensively, then I think there has to be a mindset shift. Our job will change from craft to damage limitation. Our goal will be to manage a manic junior developer who produces a mixture of good code and slop without architectural level reasoning. Code will rot fast and correctness will hinge on testing as much as you can.

It seems like a horrible future. However, it does seem to me that given decades we were unable to build good development practices. Our tooling is terrible. Most of our languages are terrible. Our solution was to let inexperienced devs create languages with all the same flaws, repeating the same mistakes. Web dev is a great example of inefficient software dev that has held the world to ransom. Maybe AI slop is payback for software developers.
by itsyonas | 2026-01-05 07:24:07+00:00
> I would assume so. It's sort of a catch 22 because if they delete your data, they have no way of knowing about you when they buy another batch of data. To have some sort of no track list, they have to keep your data.

They could store a normalised, hashed version of your data and use it to filter any incoming datasets. But, of course, why would they?
by kevmo314 | 2026-01-05 07:24:27+00:00
If you take the limit of delta -> infinity then you will get beta_1 = s_xy / s_xx which is the OLS estimator.

In the wiki page, factor out delta^2 from the sqrt and take delta to infinity and you will get a finite value. Apologies for not detailing the proof here, it's not so easy to type math...
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-05 07:24:33+00:00
I think most people don't really claim, that complexity is gone when properly abstracted, but claim that you don't have to deal with it every single time. That's the purpose of abstracting something.

Simple example: You are not dealing with the complexity of process management of the OS, every time you start any application. Sometimes you might need to, if you are developing software. Or if your application hangs and you need to kill it via some task manager. Most users however, never deal with that, because it is abstracted "away". That's the whole point. Nevertheless, the actual complex work is always done. Behind the scenes.
by eru | 2026-01-05 07:24:50+00:00
Everybody can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. It's pretty easy.

If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers.

(Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share.

The labour share itself has seen some shake up in its distribution. But that doesn't involve shareholders.)
by FreshmanD | 2026-01-05 07:24:54+00:00
Hi HN, we are the team behind LoongFlow.

We built this framework to solve the problem of Agent brittleness—where standard ReAct agents often get stuck or fail when prompts aren't perfectly hand-tuned.

Instead of manual prompt engineering, LoongFlow brings Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) into the agent workflow. It treats prompts and logic as "populations" that evolve over generations (via selection, crossover, and mutation) to maximize performance.

Key features:

General-Evolve: Auto-optimizes prompts and code logic.

ML-Evolve: Specialized for machine learning tasks (AutoML agent).

Paper: We recently released our paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24077

The repo is fully open source (Python). We'd love to hear your feedback on the architecture and the idea of "breeding" better agents!
by imtringued | 2026-01-05 07:26:02+00:00
Because the Euclidean norm is defined as the square root of a sum of squares. You can drop the square root and calculate everything as a least squares optimization problem. This problem in turn can be solved by finding where the derivative of the quadratic function is zero. The derivative of a quadratic function is a linear function. This means it is possible to find a matrix decomposition, say QR decomposition, and solve the problem directly.

If you want non linear optimization, your best bet is sequential quadratic programming. So even in that case you're still doing quadratic programming with extra steps.
by exe34 | 2026-01-05 07:26:19+00:00
> Then again I have a saying I use when anyone says they are bored - I say they are boring!

This is a very clever come back, I wonder if it might qualify as the best thought terminating cliché I've seen this year!

I never say I'm bored. The universe is too interesting a place to be bored. I did mean it, that most people, individually, are what I find boring. I'd rather withdraw into my mind and work on something interesting, whether it's about figuring something out, or trying to design something. The painful part is pretending to care long enough to get away without somebody getting butthurt.

The "almost by definition" is that the people I find interesting are usually busy doing interesting things, so the boring ones are the only regular people at social gatherings. I do not go to those anymore.