MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jijijijij | 2026-01-06 15:26:49+00:00
Illegal? Maybe. Wrong? Lol, no.

The site, and the extended media presence are full of hardcore racist statements not protected under the German constitution, not considered legal expressions of free speech here. If you have seen the talk, you'd know the site/owner has been investigated by the German inland intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz), but due to incompetence they only got the wrong person fired... In fact, the "Q&A" intro to the deletion bit, references the executive's inaction.

Some information disclosure is also evidently in the public interest. For example the AfD representatives found are additional evidence for anti-constitutional sentiments within the AfD. This is highly relevant for a possible party prohibition process (which has an extremely high legal threshold).

After all, the website security was hilariously bad. (I suspect the members' IQ scores may have been largely self-diagnosed...)
From what I've gathered the publicized data has been somewhat anonymized. The victims of this hack should be rather happy the original data got nuked.

Also good luck extraditing the activist. It's pretty clear the pink power ranger on stage is a borrowed body, and/or, I presume, the voice heard is AI or borrowed recording, as well. OpSec seems alright. But you know, these days, the president of the United States may personally order the NSA and navy seals to snatch the Martha Root off the streets to uphold the holy rule of law and freedom of speech/expression...
by tialaramex | 2026-01-06 15:27:22+00:00
And of course the kernel - which doesn't even use Rust's Vec but has its own entire allocator library because it is the kernel - likewise provides

https://rust.docs.kernel.org/next/kernel/alloc/kvec/struct.V...

Vec::push_within_capacity is a nice API to confront the reality of running out of memory. "Clever" ideas that don't actually work are obviously ineffective once we see this API. We need to do something with this T, we can't just say "Somebody else should ensure I have room to store it" because it's too late now. Here's your T back, there was no more space.
by lossyalgo | 2026-01-06 15:27:35+00:00
Not a bad idea, though 'too recent' I think would be the only benchmark - for now, until they get faster at training. OpenAI has thrown away most of their safety team so that shouldn't be a reason anymore to delay model releases "for safety checks".

What would be too obscure or useless, when every new model boasts increasing parameter count (as if having more parameters would make the models better after a certain threshold)?
by f1shy | 2026-01-06 15:27:47+00:00
Do you have a pointer to real world data about the effectiveness of these optimizations? I learned about it (SSO, in std lib which is basically the same) in an article which really made it look as that would make anything in C++ blazing fast. In the codebases I worked, a couple of times, I did measure (what you shoud do before optimizing) and the results where between absolutely negligible to worst when active. But that were 3 data points. Mind you one in a real time database.
by PoignardAzur | 2026-01-06 15:28:15+00:00
> Think of [...] all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.

That's not an accurate summary of what most Effective Altruists preach or do. The stereotypical EA interventions are "direct cash transfer to super-poor communities", "buying mosquito nets to fight malaria" and "lobbying for animal welfare", long-termism is much much more niche.
by biophysboy | 2026-01-06 15:28:20+00:00
I doubt this simply because of the inertia of medicine. The industry still does not have a standardized method for handling automated claims like banking. It gets worse for services that require prior authorization; they settle this over the phone! These might sound like irrelevant ranting, but my point is that they haven't even addressed the low-hanging fruits, let alone complex ailments like cancer.
by codyb | 2026-01-06 15:28:30+00:00
I'm not sure how your math stacks out... but 2/3rds of 330 million people is not 75 million votes.

The fact is, the American electoral system is heavily stacked against the actual population due to...

- Citizens United allows individuals with sums of wealth which are nearly incomprehensible to literally drop hundreds of millions of dollars on a single election and not even have a dent in net worth

- The electoral college which may have made sense in 1796 or whenever they were deciding it means presidential elections focus on approximately 7 of our 50 states

- Many places like Puerto Rico, DC, the US Virgin Islands, and other territories just flat out don't have federal representation

- In the Senate small state citizens can sometimes wield up to 60 times as much representation as large state citizens (Hey guess which states those billionaires drop money to buy representation in... I'll give you a hint, it's not the populous ones)

- The House of Reps is capped in size which again hurts large states

It may be time to start talking about structural change here in the United States.

That being said... The United States and (most of) Europe have been allies for 8 decades, it's not like Europe hasn't had it's fair share of bullshit and far right parties.

The fact everyone in this thread is saying our relationship is done cause America's going through a rough patch is ridiculous. Especially given that a year ago our President was helping the expansion of NATO, and we're still sending arms to Ukraine (although the terms are differing), and we just took out Russian ally Maduro.

And I for one am happy that the outcome from this absolutely awful human being is increased European self reliance.

I'm hoping it shakes out that the US rebukes this awful party, and president (which many many people were duped into voting for cause most people are not paying as much attention as say... me and combine hundreds of millions from Musk, and misinformation flowing in through social media, and the stacked systems laid out above)

And when that's all said and done, and millions and millions of us are donating, and marching, and calling, and working to make that happen and there has been very real push back here, although slower than maybe some would hope

That then the US and Europe can be more equal partners than before this monster of an individual
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-06 15:28:49+00:00
> We chose 4B because that was the maximum number of bytes that would be unused otherwise

I'm sure you did but there is something funny reading this phrase while at the same time considering you have robbed two bits from your pointer to represent class - admittedly the only thing I find questionable in your design.

If that's the case it's a happy accident because having a full code point here is quite nice.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-06 15:29:07+00:00
Apple is so "consistent" the way to know which kind of an Air or Pro it is, is to find the tiny print on the bottom that's a jumble of letters like "MGNE3" and google it.

And depending on what you're trying to use it for, you need to map it to a string like "MacBookAir10,1" or "A2337" or "Macbook Air Late 2022".

Oh also the Macbook Air (2020) is a different processor architecture than Macbook Air (2020).
by alach11 | 2026-01-06 15:29:18+00:00
I believe Nat Friedman said "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money." It's certainly much easier to give a snarky/negative take and shoot an idea down than think creatively about how to make it work. Also, negative people are perceived as smarter!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002210...
by LeifCarrotson | 2026-01-06 15:29:23+00:00
Butane stops vaporizing at -1C (31F), isobutane at about -10C (10F). Propane's boiling point is even better, at about -40C/-40F, but it self-cools and doesn't develop the required pressures to run a torch.

I know this because my otherwise dependable camp stove is a 3-season affair. For winter camping, you basically need a white gas system (liquid fueled, manually pressurized or gravity fed).

I suppose I'd reach for an acetylene torch in a cold workshop.
by estearum | 2026-01-06 15:29:37+00:00
> Yes, UNH does better than the other managed care organizations because their healthcare business has higher margins than their insurance business. But it’s certainly not arbitrary, and it’s apparently not enough to make their shares worth buying.

UNH outperformed the S&P by a huge margin up until their Medicare Advantage fraud case pummeled the stock price a few months ago. https://www.alphaspread.com/comparison/nyse/unh/vs/indx/gspc

> The silly claim is stating managed care organizations are booking outsize profits,

Is this claim in the room with us now?

My claim is that the pay-vider structure enables these businesses to produce way, way, way more money than their regulatory "profit cap" leads people to believe. They can remove what would be profit from their insurance arm (where profit is capped anyway, so it keeps them under the cap) and dump it into their healthcare arm (proven by above-market self-reimbursement rates) to fund network expansion, which then further strengthens the insurance arm's market position (alleviating their need to "compete against other insurers" [ lol ])

Your claim is actually concordant with mine, which is that this profit doesn't show up as margin and doesn't show up as excellent stock performance. Correct! That's what it means to hide profit in order to stay below profit cap!

Anyway it's clear that I'm talking to a "stocks guy" who lacks the curiosity to actually understand how a business works beyond the 10-K (where all this stuff is discussed, by the way, you can find it euphemistically referred to as "network optimization").

Like I said, you'd have to do some reading well beyond the 10-Ks and the price chart lmao.
by DANmode | 2026-01-06 15:29:40+00:00
But that’s not my question/proposition of their position.

I replied to:

> They don’t seem to have taken even the most basic step of telling Grok not to do it via system prompt.

“It” being “generating CSAM”.

I was not attempting to comment on some random censorship debate,

but instead: that CSAM is a pretty specific thing.

With pretty specific legal liabilities, dependent on region!
by giraffe_lady | 2026-01-06 15:29:41+00:00
This remains the best general description imo:

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns.

From the new yorker's profile of dang a few years ago. It doesn't specifically address the negativity but it contains it, if you get what I mean.

Also I mean you know you, personally, are one of the worst about this right? I only recognize a handful of usernames here and yours is one for exactly this reason.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-06 15:29:50+00:00
> Handling OOM gracefully - i.e. doing anything other than immediately crashing and/or invoking undefined behaviour - is absolutely not the default in C.

What are you talking about? Every allocation must be checked at the point of allocation, which is "the default"

If you write non-idiomatically, then sure, in other languages you can jump through a couple of hoops and check every allocation, but that's not the default.

The default in C is to return an error when allocation fails.

The default in C++, Rust, etc is to throw an exception. The idiomatic way in C++, etc is to not handle that exception.
by afavour | 2026-01-06 15:29:52+00:00
> In 2020, the company was found to be appending affiliate referral codes to the end of certain cryptocurrency exchange URLs typed into the browser's address bar. The practice applied to exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, and was later discovered to extend to suggested search queries for terms like "bitcoin" and "ethereum".

> In 2022, Brave faced further criticism for bundling its paid virtual private network (VPN) product, Brave Firewall + VPN, into installations of its Windows browser, even for users who had not subscribed to the service

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Privacy
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-06 15:30:07+00:00
>A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation b

I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.

If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.

>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.

But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.
by yomismoaqui | 2026-01-06 15:30:11+00:00
As an outsider when I read about Rust it seems like it is positioning itself as the language to rewrite things that already work.

It's just the simplistic first feeling of a language, in the same way I feel like Go is the language for Kubernetes/cloud/net servers, Ruby is for Rails, JS is the browser/bootcamp language, Python is Data Science and AI...

Sure, you get that safety but you are also throwing the stability that an old (and maintained) codebase has just for the sake of being patched to handle the presssure from the real world.

Maybe it's time Rust positions itself as something more than "the language of rewrites".
Show HN: FlipHN – A Tinder-like way to browse Hacker News
by mtyz | 2026-01-06 15:30:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built FlipHN, a Hacker News reader with a swipe-based interface:
– Swipe right to save stories
– Swipe left to skip
– Built-in translation for non-native English readers

The goal was to make HN browsing faster and more accessible on mobile.

Would love feedback, especially from heavy HN readers.
by kibwen | 2026-01-06 15:30:45+00:00
C's syntax is pretty lacking by modern standards, requiring gross things like The Lexer Hack to resolve ambiguities that other languages just don't suffer from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexer_hack . To say nothing of the madness that is C's type declaration syntax, necessitating tools like https://cdecl.org/ and "the spiral rule" for reading type declarations (which doesn't actually produce the correct result anyway).
by IggleSniggle | 2026-01-06 15:31:12+00:00
I simply choose to believe that people do this out of a place of genuine curiosity / excitement to share knowledge. I believe this approach of assuming the best of intentions is even in the HN guidelines! Or maybe it was just the old Reddit ones from long long ago when Reddit was more like what HN is now. Either way, maintaining the background assumption, even when it is challenging to do so, makes HN a far more pleasant place to inhabit.
by lazide | 2026-01-06 15:31:31+00:00
As a counter point - every couple I ever ran across in divorce court getting raked over the coals seemed to have at least one delusional optimist in the mix.

Both to have gotten in there, and to keep going.

Like anything, it's a balancing act. Being optimistic the IRS isn't going to throw you in jail for not paying your taxes, after all, has a so-so track record. But not zero!
by amenhotep | 2026-01-06 15:31:59+00:00
It's an artifact of the transition away from year-based releases to a subscription. Customers were used to Office 95, Office 98, Office 2003, etc. 365 sort of matches that pattern, so customers aren't excessively disgruntled, while signalling that there's a "release" on every day of the year, it's constantly up to date.

And I guess they've just kept it since even though it's not really necessary any more.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-01-06 15:32:05+00:00
Not only that, but also... only a small percentage of people actually wants this and / or would do this, the vast majority of consumers doesn't mess with their stuff even if they could.

Same with the alternative app store support, it reminds me of when the EU mandated Microsoft to offer a Windows without Media Player. It didn't sell, because consumers don't actually care much - Media Player wasn't obnoxiously in the way.
by wat10000 | 2026-01-06 15:32:34+00:00
They're both correct, in different contexts.

Some workplaces see people going above and beyond and reward that. Promotions come from operating at the level you want to be promoted to.

Some workplaces see it as a signal that they don't need a promotion because they can get the higher level work from you without the need to pay you more.

Know which one you're in before you decide how to approach it. If you've been there a while you should be able to figure out how things work. It's important to see how they actually work and not how you think they should work, otherwise you can end up doing a bunch of extra work for free.
by johnwheeler | 2026-01-06 15:32:36+00:00
I don't try to hide my AI tracks. I'll gladly tell anybody that AI helped me do it because it did such a fantastic job. I mean, that's literally what this post is about!

My plug-in sounds way better than the UM-282 which was hand-coded before AI was getting popular. That's all that matters!

Honestly I think you should re-examine your own position. I see you've written plugin software in the past and I'm sure you spent a long time on DSP algorithms and learning and understanding.

Well I did the same thing with web-based software for the last 25 years. The world doesn't give two shits man. The world is going to do what the world is going to do.

You're free to have your own opinion
by tracker1 | 2026-01-06 15:32:42+00:00
Tax revenue. The nation is tens of trillions in debt with a multi-trillion per year deficit. Tariffs are proportional to spending, and encourage domestic production and security.

There have been several favorable trade deals as well as several announcements for new production facilities in the US... this may cost more than imports, but there's something to be said for domestic security in terms of access, especially in the likes of a global pandemic or war.

I'm not suggesting it's a perfect solution, or situation, only in that it isn't exactly an idea completely without merit and just blindly applied at random.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-01-06 15:32:48+00:00
You should work harder and do things you aren’t paid for. In my 30 year experience across 10 jobs - everything from small lifestyle companies to BigTech and currently working as a staff consultant - it’s not to get a promotion at your current job, it’s to have a story to tell at your next job.

Speaking of BigTech specifically, the first company I worked for with a real promotion process that meant anything, the promo process is brutal and then you still get paid less than someone coming in at the same level.

The best bet is to get another job at another company at a higher level (or even at the same level that pays more).
by joshstrange | 2026-01-06 15:33:00+00:00
I agree, longer does not mean better and I'll be the first to tell you I can be long-winded but it's because often there is a lot of nuance and I want to make my point as explicit as I can and leave little room for misunderstanding.

Most of my longer comments start as a single sentence that I feel is too ambiguous or leave too much room for misunderstandings and so they grow from there.
by fobispo26 | 2026-01-06 15:33:04+00:00
This is not unusual, CANTV has notoriously slow, expensive links, most ISPs in Venezuela would have it as a "backup" provider. If there is an outage of GlobeNet or TIM, it would cause those routes to disappear, leaving the CANTV routes up, which are heavily prepended to avoid routing through them on "normal" operations.
by makeitdouble | 2026-01-06 15:33:16+00:00
> What counts as “negative” here? Criticism of technology, skepticism toward announcements, complaints about industry practices, frustration with APIs.

If skepticism towards business announcements counts as negativity, I wonder what else we'd be discussing regarding any of those announcements.

An OpenAI marketing piece for instance will already go overboard on the positive side, I don't see relevant commentary being about how it's even better than the piece touts it. Commenting just to say "wow, that's great" or paraphrasing the piece is also useless and thrown upon. At best it would be a factual explanation or expansion of some harder to parse or specialized bits ?

I read the pre published PDF but don't really see stand what we were supposed to take from this blog post in particular.

Aldo am I basically fullfiling the blog post prophecy ?

PS: I think articles that raise to the top page with absolutely no comments would be an example of people straight enjoying the content, and the site actually working great IMHO
by masklinn | 2026-01-06 15:33:20+00:00
Postgres does the same thing, however AFAIK postgres does not use a fixed-size string which happens to have inline string data: text is always variable, and stored inline up to 127 bytes (after compression).

These are different because the inline segment is fixed-size, and always exposes a 4 bytes prefix inline even when the buffer is stored out of line.
by tasn | 2026-01-06 15:33:38+00:00
I think this framing is a bit backwards. Many C programs (and many parts of C programs) would benefit from being more like Go or Python as evident by your very own sds.c.

Now, if what you're saying is that with super highly optimized sections of a codebase, or extremely specific circumstances (some kernel drivers) you'd need a bit of unsafe rust: then sure. Though all of a sudden you flipped the script, and the unsafe becomes the exception, not the rule; and you can keep those pieces of code contained. Similarly to how C programmers use inline assembly in some scenarios.

Funny enough, this is similar to something that Rust did the opposite of C, and is much better for it: immutable by default (let mut vs. const in C) and non-nullable by default (and even being able to define something as non-null).
Flipping the script so that GOOD is default and BAD is rare was a huge win.

I definitely don't think Rust is a silver bullet, though I'd definitely say it's a silver alloy bullet.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2026-01-06 15:33:57+00:00
I don't like how we talk about humans as factories either. That we re all here to be a "productive" as possible. That are life is measured in how much crap we produced.

I would love for this same ethos to spread to other domains. Why DO we hoard things so much? Why don't we just share more? Is it fear? Is it game -theory?

How many households have thousands of dollars worth of equipment to maintain that very household that each is used maybe ~30 minutes a week.

Why do we keep churning out more plastic crap that just sits in our spaces. Unused