MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-24 20:50:28+00:00
I see it differently.

Reports say the guy had a gun and clips on him. This guy was not around to peacefully protest. He was looking for trouble.

People have the right to peacefully protest. ( Bonus points for them if they protested also when Obama and Bush used ICE. ) Bringing a gun, using a vehicle, etc. is just not good judgment and puts lives at risk.

Protest if you want, but do it responsibly.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-24 20:51:04+00:00
> This one judged her to be eligible, but the original one, who was contacted as per protocol, objected.

> 'This MAiD practitioner expressed concerns regarding the necessity for "urgency" and shared belief for the need for more comprehensive evaluation, the seemingly drastic change in perspective of end-of-life goals, and the possibility of coercion or undue influence (i.e., due to caregiver burnout),' the report explained.

> Their request to meet Mrs B the next day was declined by the MAiD provider as 'the clinical circumstances necessitated an urgent provision'.

So basically if you want the euthanization to happen, you could shop for the right assessors to agree with you, and pay them enough. Seems broken.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-24 20:51:14+00:00
When you're in a high stress physical altercation with obscured vision, and you see a gun in your opponent's pants, and then a hand on that gun, and then the gun being pulled out of the pants by that hand, all happening quickly in succession, you may believe in that split second that you are in a mortal situation. These are not well trained soldiers here.

I'm not defending them, just guessing at the explanation. I'm operating from the assumption that the ICE agent did not randomly with absolutely no cause decide to execute a guy; probably something made him believe in that moment that he should shoot. You can see from the other, closer video that he very suddenly draws his weapon, as if in reaction to something.
by io_eric | 2026-01-24 20:51:45+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! You're absolutely right to question this.

Just to clarify, my benchmark was using Canvas2D, not WebGL, that's why the numbers are much lower than your WebGL2 example. Based on your comment I actually removed the command batching to test the difference, and yeah, the batching optimization is smaller than I initially thought. WebCC with batched commands hits ~100 FPS, without batching it's ~86 FPS, and Emscripten is ~40 FPS. So the batching itself only contributes about ~14 FPS.

The bigger performance difference compared to Emscripten seems to come from how Canvas2D operations are handled. Emscripten uses their val class for JS interop which wraps each canvas call in their abstraction layer. WebCC writes raw commands (opcode + arguments) directly into a buffer that the JS side decodes with a tight switch statement. The JS decoder already has direct references to canvas objects and can call methods immediately without property lookups or wrapper overhead. With 10k draw calls per frame, these small per-call differences (property access, type boxing/unboxing, generic dispatch) compound significantly.
by raffraffraff | 2026-01-24 20:52:13+00:00
There is the code, the recorded state of the infra when you applied the code and the actual state at some point in the future (which may have drifted) . You store the code in git, the recorded state (which contains unique IDs, ARNs etc) in a bucket and you read the "actual state" next time you run a plan, and you detect drift.

These days people store the state in terraform cloud or spaceliftor env0 or whatever. Doesn't have to be the same infra you deployed.

If you were a lunatic you could not use a state backend and just let it create state files in the terraform code directory, check the file into git with all those secrets and unique ids etc.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 20:52:30+00:00
I had Smart Features enabled for years. Years! They worked okay. They put good accurate stuff on my calendar and so there was useful work being done by the AI in background.

Unfortunately, in the past few months, Gemini AI really started shoving its way in. And there were some features that were really unpalatable, that were basically dealbreakers for this. Yeah, I believe the "AI Summaries" had a lot to do with it. They were bad, misleading, and I did not want them crowding up my app.

I couldn't disable those features without disabling Smart Features entirely. So that's what I did.

So now I sort of suffer without the automatic email event-calendar integrations, and the other cool stuff that AI had provided, but it's totally usable. I have no trouble using it as an email service with that AI disabled. It works fine.

Anyway, it is no secret that Google has always used the text of our emails for their own marketing and analysis purposes. Always has. Why did you think Gmail was a free service? Obviously, you were paying for it! We all paid for it with our email content!
Show HN: Kontra, a data quality validator that avoids unnecessary full scans
by saevarl | 2026-01-24 20:53:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a small project called Kontra and just released it.

Kontra is a data quality measurement engine. You define rules in YAML or Python, run them against Parquet, CSV, or database tables, and get back violation counts and sampled failing rows.

The main goal was to avoid doing more work than necessary. Instead of treating all rules the same, Kontra separates execution paths. Some checks can be answered from Parquet metadata alone, others are pushed down to SQL, and full in-memory scans only happen for rules that actually need them. The guarantees differ, and Kontra is explicit about that rather than hiding it.

Under the hood it uses DuckDB for SQL pushdown on files and Polars for in-memory execution. It also supports profiling datasets, drafting starter rules from observed data, and diffing validation runs over time. Rules can carry user-defined context, and runs can be annotated after execution without affecting validation behavior.

It works as both a CLI and a Python library.

Happy to answer questions or get feedback.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-24 20:54:10+00:00
This doesn't contradict what I said, because "moments before" is like 2 seconds. It seems plausible to me that the agent reacted to a gun being pulled out of pants and panic shot within 2 seconds. His gun was not already drawn, so that's a plausible lag time. If we assume that ICE did not execute a guy for literally no reason whatsoever, that seems to me the most likely explanation for why he drew and fired.
by user5994461 | 2026-01-24 20:54:38+00:00
> I believe that I have noticed that smaller games (~a few hundred MB or maybe a GB or two) will download quite a bit slower than large games, but I'm not very confident in that observation.

You can see that on the HellDivers screenshot, it takes 15 or 20 seconds to reach 500 Mbps, because TCP takes a while to adjust the bandwidth and it's very conservative. TCP and home computers are not designed to make use of gigabit connections.
by MPSimmons | 2026-01-24 20:54:39+00:00
Cloud providers in general haven't gone very far toward providing hooks for validation.

It seems easier for the cloud provider to implement the equivalent of a dry-run flag in API calls that validate that the call would succeed (even if it's best effort determination) which could be used by tools like Terraform during the planning and dependency tree generation.

Instead, you have platform providers like AzureRM that squint at the supplied objects and make a guess as to whether that looks valid, which causes a ton of failures upon actual application. For instance, if you try to create storage with a redundancy level not supported by the region you're adding it to, Terraform will pass a plan stage, but the actual application of the resource will fail because the region doesn't support that level of redundancy.

There are unlimited other examples in a similar vein, all of which could be resolved if API providers had a dryrun flag.
by arter45 | 2026-01-24 20:54:48+00:00
I understand, but in this specific arena, because of the network effect, interoperability is important so you can hope to make a competitive product.

More in general,standard protocols are important but they don't necessarily avoid lock-in.

For example, imagine a Dropbox equivalent with a public API specification.

At some point you want to leave.
You are ready to use Postman or even curl and download everything to upload it somewhere else... but download is capped at 10 files/day per user. And you uploaded 100,000 files over years.

The API is public but good luck leaving with all your files!

In other words, standard protocols help avoiding client lock-in, but when the value is on the server side (data,...), they are not enough.
by reify | 2026-01-24 20:55:03+00:00
Excellent.

seems like quantum computing is back on track.

Cant wait for a quantum laptop.

there is some timely research from last year, comparing quantum computers.

amazing research:: a worthy read for the quantum boys.

Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a dog.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf

Conclusion:

In this paper we showed how to replicate current quantum factorisation records using first a VIC-20 8-bit home computer from 1981, then an abacus, and finally a dog. In terms of comparative demonstrated factorisation power, we rank a VIC-20 above an abacus, an abacus above a dog, and a dog above a quantum factorisation physics experiment. Finally, we provided standard evaluation criteria for future claimed quantum factorisations.

Acknowledgements:

The authors thank Peter Heinrich of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences for valuable information on the application of the Callas Normal Form in quantum factorisation, and Jon Callas and members of the Metzdowd cryptography list for their input and feedback.
by jorvi | 2026-01-24 20:55:55+00:00
They got cookie pop-ups right:

- the default choice needs to be "strictly necessary cookies", with other

- less prominent buttons for "allow all" and "deny all"

- a site is not allowed to force you to have the press a bunch of buttons or select a bunch of things to deny most/all cookies

The problem lies in enforcement. Unless you are a huge player, there is almost nil chance you're gonna get fined.

I think about the only thing missing is that they should have RFC'd a standard akin to Do Not Track, except this would have communicated to sites if your default is "strictly necessary", "allow all" or"deny all". With it being set to "strictly necessary" by default.
by robocat | 2026-01-24 20:56:04+00:00
Relevant section:

Autonegotiation is a requirement for 1000BASE-T implementations as minimally the clock source for the link has to be negotiated, as one endpoint must be master and the other endpoint must be slave.

1000BASE-T uses four cable pairs for simultaneous transmission in both directions through the use of echo cancellation with adaptive equalization. Line coding is five-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-5).

Since autonegotiation takes place on only two pairs, if two 1000BASE-T interfaces are connected through a cable with only two pairs, the interfaces will complete negotiation and choose gigabit as the best common operating mode, but the link will never come up because all four pairs are required for data communications.

Each 1000BASE-T network segment is recommended to be a maximum length of 100 meters and must use Category 5 cable or better.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-24 20:56:29+00:00
> aren't just keeping people's money in vaults. They literally take your checking, savings, retirement accounts, etc. and make money off of them while they "sit".
<

depending on jurisdiction and TOS, this maybe legal, but it needs to be announced somehow to the customer; a capital management firm of an ETF needs to buy the included shares, e.g; those have no money "sitting around"?
by dragontamer | 2026-01-24 20:56:48+00:00
Hmm... well maybe I need to explain my fear better.

Because Pam Bondi/DoJ refuses to prosecute these cases, this will _keep happening_ for the foreseeable future. There's no reason for ICE to stop this behavior.

Its not today's crime that scares me most. Its the easily predicted future where this gets worse by next month.

The converse is the rise of the far-left. We're already seeing Black Panther patrol with long-guns rise up in these times in response to this. I expect more guns and more deadly force, and no one is doing anything to put a stop to it.

--------

The left is losing faith in peaceful protest.

The right refuses to prosecute murders.

Where does this lead? Is it too late to stop?
by msteffen | 2026-01-24 20:57:00+00:00
I think IP kind of breaks a lot of engineers' brains (despite how much of it they create) because a lot of IP law is about intent, and their theory of mind is so bad that the idea of a body on law based on deduced intent, and the ways a court might deduce their intent if they used someone else's IP, are totally alien to them.
by morley | 2026-01-24 20:57:24+00:00
I personally don't want to trawl through Twitter to find the current state-of-the-art, so I read Zvi Mowshowitz's newsletter:

https://thezvi.substack.com/

His newsletter put me onto using Opus 4.5 exclusively on Dec 1, a little over a week after it was released. That's pretty good for a few minutes of reading a week.
by anonymousiam | 2026-01-24 20:57:26+00:00
1000Base-T uses four pairs in both directions at the same time. It does this through the use of a hybrid in the PHY that subtracts what is being transmitted from what is received on the wires. 802.3ab is a fairly complicated specification with many layers of abstraction. I spent a few months studying it for a project about a decade ago.
by lordnacho | 2026-01-24 20:57:43+00:00
Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives by Hull, that's the classic.

Not sure how exotic he gets but likely the page that sells this book will have other options books.

I think there's one by Espen Hauge about exotics.

Relevant book by Nassim Taleb (before his big break) is Dynamic Hedging, which tells you what to do with your option risk once you have it.
by croon | 2026-01-24 20:57:43+00:00
I haven't been inconsistent, nor invented anything, I would suggest getting a third party to read this thread if you believe so.

However, I would also suggest reading the guidelines, specifically these:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
by joomy | 2026-01-24 20:58:22+00:00
Yes, we were careful not to call it that. I still don't mind calling our programs verified, since they are verified in Rocq and we do our best to preserve the semantics of them. Right now the only measure we have is testing a small set of programs and also carefully picking a subset of C++ that we trust. Our future plan is to generate random Rocq programs, extract them via Crane, and compare the output to the outputs of extraction to OCaml, and even CertiCoq, which is a verified compiler from Rocq to C, (mostly) proven correct with respect to CompCert semantics.
by mrandish | 2026-01-24 20:58:41+00:00
> Plus I had more fun doing it.

Of course, that's what really matters most. I do appreciate that the infinite possibilities, permutations and even extreme convenience all-in-one digital integration provides can become a downside. It really depends on personal style, preferences and goals.

Confronted by all that boundless possibility, I have sometimes found myself freezing up with 'possibility agoraphobia' or just rat-holing into the tweak-cycling you describe. Ultimately, I figured out I have to enforce some discipline on myself - which felt a bit odd since I'm strictly doing this for fun. In a broad sense, I suspect any of the different approaches (all acoustic, analog, digital or some hybrid) represent sweet-spots that balance latitude and constraints in different ways. All that matters is finding one that fits where we are in the moment.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-24 20:58:53+00:00
Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format? I think now they have some bullshit proprietary paid cloud storage solution (why not let me use the cloud I already pay for?), but for years they haven't had any solution for iOS at all.

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up having to use & fix some Github project that simulated Signal's transfer protocol to simulate a target device to export my data.

I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.
by antonvs | 2026-01-24 20:59:23+00:00
> In any case, the short answer is "No!".

If the question you're answering is the one posed by the Scitechdaily headline, "Have We Been Wrong About Language for 70 Years?", you might want to work a bit on resistance to clickbait headlines.

The strongest claim that the paper in question makes, at least in the abstract (since the Nature article is paywalled), is "This poses a challenge for accounts of linguistic representation, including generative and constructionist approaches." That's certainly plausible.

Conceptual dependency focuses more on semantics than grammar, so isn't really a competing theory to this one. Both theories do challenge how language is represented, but in different ways that don't really overlap that much.

It's also not as if conceptual dependency is some sort of last word on the subject when it comes to natural language in humans - after all, it was developed for computational language representation, and in that respect LLMs have made it essentially obsolete for that purpose.

Meanwhile, the way LLMs do what they do isn't well understood, so we're back to needing work like the OP to try to understand it better, in both humans and machines.
Show HN: An AI Agent for Slack
by owendarko | 2026-01-24 20:59:28+00:00
Hey HN!

We have a Slack group with 30+ people and introduced this agent as a way for non-engs to push simple PRs and changes. This saves engs valuable time and context switching costs.

After a while, we expanded to this being a full-blown agent and you can see some interesting use cases in the blog post: https://blog.kilo.ai/p/announcing-kilo-for-slack

Any feedback is welcome!
by furyofantares | 2026-01-24 20:59:35+00:00
Sure, the headline of the article that's summarizing the study is obvious

Is this obvious?

> The study finds that when managers at a national retail chain failed to deliver birthday greetings on time, it resulted in a 50% increase in absenteeism and a reduction of more than two working hours per month.

Unfortunately it seems like it costs $20 to access the actual paper but I'm guessing it's more interesting than your snark warrants.
by slg | 2026-01-24 20:59:42+00:00
Sorry, I see you're still editing, but I'm about to run out and won't be able to read the finished post or respond for hours, so I just want to reiterate my original point. "It's coming for everything and you'll have to draw the line somewhere."

I understand you can dismiss that with "There is always a feeling of this-time-is-different", but what happens when it's truly different? Have you set a line for yourself of when it will be different or are you the frog telling everyone else that the water's not that hot?
by joomy | 2026-01-24 20:59:50+00:00
This is another reason we are being careful with the correctness claim. The closest project I know right now that comes close to a formalized model of C++ is the BRiCk project:

https://skylabsai.github.io/BRiCk/index.html

https://github.com/SkyLabsAI/BRiCk
by rurp | 2026-01-24 21:00:02+00:00
That's the most clear murder I've ever seen, zero question about intent or anything else. After the four agents have thrown the guy to the ground and are pinning him down you can see the fed on the left pull out his gun and shoot the defenseless man in the back, and then the others jump back and join in.

This is truly unreal. Even more unreal that we know nobody will get prosecuted for this murder and we'll see another one just like it within a few days.
by cyberax | 2026-01-24 21:00:53+00:00
You can run power over coax! You can buy power-injecting splitters that were used to power old analog cameras. They basically just connect the cable to the 12V, sometimes directly but usually through some current-limiting safety switch.

MoCA devices have a 100 Ohm internal resistor at the end to limit the cable echoes, so they are not affected by the DC on the cable.
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-24 21:01:02+00:00
This is either a masterpiece of satire or one of the most frustrating things I've ever read.

> The nuanced takes are nowhere to be found

This itself lacks nuance. The idea that everything under the sun can only be approached with skeptical shoulder shrugging is a tired cliché. Some things are cut and dry in this world. Am I supposed to make up reasons that this is okay, for the sake of inventing nuance?

In your own post, you admit to burying the story. Not because it isn't important, but because you think others can't handle discussing it. As in, you don't want people to talk about it. You aren't sitting on the sidelines, you're actively taking eyes off of what's happening. So your pearl clutching over being seen as unsympathetic is not necessary.
by harrisonjackson | 2026-01-24 21:01:07+00:00
These are my tips for using claude code for very large tasks that can be done in sequence and sometimes in parallel:

First, the number one problem is when the context is compacted. Any "plan" claude has in memory will not survive this for a complex task. Any extra instructions or guardrails you've provided just in memory will not survive this.

Most of these tips are to deal with that.

- plans go to text, Claude already does this somewhat well but you should explicitly place them in your current working directory in a big CURRENT_TASK.md

- larger plans with multiple phases are split up into multiple TASK_#.md or STEP_#.md with a TASK_SUMMARY.md and those live in CURRENT_TASK directory

- every single step that can be broken down more should be explicitly done so - if it can't accomplish the step in "1 context" before compacting it will likely fail

- every single step should have acceptance criteria

- all acceptance criteria should be testable by Claude Code

- You must heavily reenforce in claude.md and in the plans to perform the verification before moving on

- For most large tasks, manually accept edits

Most critical: all acceptance criteria MUST be something claude code can run a validation step on itself - some examples...

- unit tests, simple and easy and sometimes worthwhile
- typechecking, linting, building - other automated cicd stuff
- claude code can push and monitor gh action (I do this for docker builds that don't run nicely in my local -comfyui with nvidia/cuda stuff or example)

I will even do something as wild as:

> commit and push then monitor the gh action that builds the services image then check the logs as it deploys and connect with kubectl and look for <error being fixed> then repeat until it is actually fixed

That might spawn a task that runs for ~30 minutes while it monitors the github actions. Frees me up for another parallel claude code task.

It's very good with github, aws, and kubectl cli. There are decent MCP integrations with sentry and other tools that can be useful for validation, too.

A lot of that will depend on your business and engineering org... don't give it the keys to the castle lightly.