MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by user34283 | 2026-01-23 09:57:54+00:00
That is one of the reasons why I think X's Grok, while perhaps not state of the art, is an important option to have.

Out of OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, it is the only provider that I trust not to erroneously flag harmless content.

It is also the only provider out of those that permits use for legal adult content.

There have been controversies over it, resulting in some people, often of a certain political orientation, calling for a ban or censorship.

What comes to mind is an incident where an unwise adjustment of the system prompt has resulted in misalignment: the "Mecha Hitler" incident. The worst of it has been patched within hours, and better alignment was achieved in a few days. Harm done? Negligible, in my opinion.

Recently there's been another scandal about nonconsensual explicit images, supposedly even involving minors, but the true extend of the issue, safety measures in place, and reaction to reports is unclear. Maybe there, actual harm has occured.

However, placing blame on the tool for illegal acts, that anyone with a half decent GPU could have more easily done offline, does not seem particularly reasonable to me - especially if safety measures were in place, and additional steps have been taken to fix workarounds.

I don't trust big tech, who have shown time and time again that they prioritize only their bottom line. They will always permaban your account at the slightest automated indication of risk, and they will not hire adequate support staff.

We have seen that for years with the Google Playstore. You are coerced into paying 30% of your revenue, yet are treated like a free account with no real support. They are shameless.
by binaryturtle | 2026-01-23 09:57:55+00:00
Stunnel is an important part of my setup here.

Back when Apple's Mail on a more outdated OS X setup stopped to be able to connect to various mail servers because of Apple's own outdated SSL/TLS implementation (security.framework?) I just plugged stunnel in the middle to make things work again: Mail connects to localhost and stunnel then safely connects to the remote mail server.

While this was an important fix at that time it also provided surprisingly additional benefits. Now it was much easier to entirely block outgoing connections from Mail with Little Snitch. Instead having numerous allow directives per mailserver, just one full block. E.g. no more random config changes that break everything, because Apple decided to push some auto-config changes for well-known mail providers. No more accidental tracking pixel triggers. Also all the accounts are now just vanilla POP3/SMTP accounts rather than those with "special handling". Finally Mail became much more stable for some reason. No more long lockups when I want to open the Account settings, no more random lockups when launching the app, etc.

Now I really do not want to miss this extra layer anymore because all the bonus benefits (even if it shouldn't be needed any longer just to make SSL/TLS work again).

Over time bunch of other things (Mail unrelated) got plugged into the stunnel config too. :)
by menaerus | 2026-01-23 09:58:52+00:00
I was thinking about the same paragraph because write-amplification is exactly the problem solved by LSM trees _and_ they already have a solution for that in-house - one of the first acquisitions that OpenAI made is Rockset - a company that actually built the RocksDb at scale.

So, this is the part that actually made me left wondering why.
by digikata | 2026-01-23 09:58:55+00:00
The easiest it to add short info in comments, and longer info in some sort of document and reference the doc in comments. Lightweight ADRs are a good recommendation. I've put similar practices into place with teams I've worked with. Though I prefer to use the term "Technical Memo", of which some contain Architectural Decisions. Retroactive documentation is a little misaligned with the term ADR, in that it isn't really making any sort of decision. I've found the term ADR sometimes makes some team members hesitant to record the information because of that kind of misalignment.

As for retroactively discovering why, code archeology skills in the form of git blame and log, and general search skills are very helpful.
by normie3000 | 2026-01-23 09:59:22+00:00
> I'm hesitant to even open a PR, because...

For me the answer to this is to let go of all expectations. Fix things for your own purpose, and then open PRs to give the maintainers the option to engage or ignore.

Obviously from my post above, with my maintainer hat on I often fail to let go of the emotions. But it's a goal.

The lowest-stress PRs to handle are the ones with clearest test cases, and minimal incidental changes. Don't refactor, reformat or rename things to your own preferences and then expect a maintainer to engage.

Reducing changes to the meaningful minimum will also make your fork easier to maintain if the PR is refused, or ignored for months+ as the upstream project continues to evolve.

Ultimately, opening a PR is in part self-serving - best case is my change is upstreamed, worst case is I have taken time to streamline it, and simplify integration of future upstream changes into my fork.
by krupers | 2026-01-23 09:59:45+00:00
I just searched the most popular/researched supplement of all time: creatine. There is a mistake in the data there: the Wellnesss Code Whey Protein indeed contains creatine, but not 2g per container, but 2g per serving (that is correctly reflected). Error is easily spotted due to the price per gram being an extreme outlier. That is perhaps something you can look for when evaluating the data gotten from the LLM.
by sergeykish | 2026-01-23 10:01:08+00:00
Once you enable XLibre namespaces filtering it breaks screensharing, global hotkeys. Obviously. It is breaking change.

> Doesn't own a mob, and never happened. Horrible accusation, by the way.

Mob unable to response on technical question. To use logic.

> Citation needed.

His YouTube comment section speaks volumes. He manipulates technically uneducated.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-23 10:01:55+00:00
Well, no: In the scenario I outlined, there's now still just one node with the message for H. A passed it to K, and promptly forgot about (having passed it along to "any" valid peer).

---

In your scenario, both A and K store the message for H -- suggesting replication (or perhaps, redundancy) by visiting peers. And maybe replication is OK.

It seems obvious that it can spiral out of control, but our pocket supercomputers do have a fair bit of bandwidth even at Bluetooth speeds, and flash memory is very cheap and available (a gigabyte of flash can hold a lot of short-ish text messages and costs very little).

So the network can afford quite a lot of replication in an effort to promote distribution -- and maybe that can work. Maybe the message isn't stored by just A and K, but also E, I, O, and U because they happened to stroll by and see the outbound message for H.

But there must be limits, if for no other reason than without limits then any single bad actor can ruin the whole works by exceeding the bandwidth and storage capabilities of the network.

These limits could be hop-based, or time-based, or geography-based, or any/all of the above.

Suppose a message lives until any of 50 hops or 5 days or 50 miles is exceeded? Yeah, maybe something like that works. The capabilities can be mathed to find some version of "ideal," and probably enforced somehow to prevent bad actors from doing too much bad stuff.

(But we're very rapidly straying very far from Fidonet's normal distribution behavior here, and dismantling that concept was the main crux of how I got to thinking about these things may theoretically work to begin with.)
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 10:02:03+00:00
That's a good point - markdown did take the 'readable-by-humans' use case that XML never quite nailed. Though I wonder if the comparison is level-appropriate: markdown is a syntax for simple formatting, while XML was attempting to be a universal interchange format with schemas, namespaces, validation. Markdown won in one niche by being 90% good enough; XML lost by trying to be 100% everywhere.
by Aeolun | 2026-01-23 10:03:09+00:00
I really don’t understand people that say claude has no human support. In the worst case the human version of their support got back to me two day after the AI, and they apologized for being so slow.

It really leads me to wonder if it’s just my questions that are easy, or maybe the tone of the support requests that go unanswered is just completely different.
by krupers | 2026-01-23 10:03:59+00:00
This thread makes me think of when I was refactoring a COBOL application when I just started my SWE career in 2016/2017. The original program was from 1989 and things like git blame, ticket systems etc. wasn't there. There was rudimentary version control, but that didn't go back to far, and also surprisingly there was some documentation. But the major thing that helped me answer the "why's" was that the original programmer still worked in the same department, and he actually remembered some of the choices he made.
Other than that, it was a matter of remaking the same mistakes and figuring out the "why's" the hard way.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 10:04:41+00:00
The 2023 timing obfuscation is a nice case study in security defaults vs edge cases. Most SSH users won't notice 100 packets per keystroke - it's noise in the bandwidth budget. But for high-frequency terminal apps, it becomes the dominant cost. At 2000 concurrent players updating 80x60 chars at 10fps, a custom protocol might be the right answer regardless of obfuscation settings.
by kergonath | 2026-01-23 10:04:59+00:00
> LOTR is not empty, nor nihilist. It’s got many heroes, big and small, that fully embrace their part and fight against insurmountable odds with no expectation or any reward other than knowing they did the right thing.

And yet all these heroes only hold back the tide for so long before evil pervades everything and Beauty leaves this world. These heroes might save the day once, but decline is relentless.

The Lord of the Rings itself might be a bit optimistic because it’s about the protagonists. And even then, Frodo leaves irremediably scarred, having failed his task; Arwen rejects immortality; Eowyn turns away from conventional heroism, having been traumatised by her losses and the war; and Merry and Pippin come back as strangers in their own homeland. In the end, the world still keeps moving on, towards its inevitable decay.
by 01jonny01 | 2026-01-23 10:05:05+00:00
Kind of, however the Google Search Bar present on website is usually there to search across their domain, the search results are limited to their domain e.g example.com/page1, example.com/page2. Google will carry on supporting this.

What they are ending is their support for websites to search across the entire web. The websites that search across the entire web are usually niche search engine websites.
by alexisread | 2026-01-23 10:05:13+00:00
It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different.
I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy

https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-an... 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list
by pseudohadamard | 2026-01-23 10:05:18+00:00
Has anyone looked into what the "web managed" part of these switches involves? Is it a purely local web interface or is it exfiltrating traffic to some random server God knows where that's doing the managing on my behalf? This one seems to be purely local, https://cdn.shoplazza.com/06c9d3aa7743ce86dfca2f75e56a2faa.p..., but I've seen others that claim app-based management which probably aren't running that locally.
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 10:05:40+00:00
The 'single primary with read replicas' pattern scaling to 800M users is the real insight here. Most startups reach for sharding or distributed databases way too early, adding complexity for scale they don't have. If OpenAI can serve hundreds of millions from one Postgres primary by offloading reads and pushing new write-heavy features elsewhere, that's a strong argument for simplicity.
by murrion | 2026-01-23 10:06:05+00:00
At first I assumed this was similar to trace IDs, but it’s solving a different problem.

This is more like giving stable IDs to individual log statements (e.g. “upload started”, “upload retrying”, “upload failed”, “upload completed”), so you can see higher-level trends.

It makes it easy to see whether failures dropped after releasing a fix, without relying on fragile text searches.

Useful for team leads or engineering managers who want a high-level view of how system behavior changes over time.
by testaccount28 | 2026-01-23 10:06:55+00:00
it's transaction fraud insurance. like any insurance, you pay a small amount regularly, and in return get protection in case of large sporadic loss.

points are just premiums: some insurance consumers are a greater risk, and so pay more.

any convenience features are built on top of the insurance product: _because_ all players are covered, _therefore_ i can make online purchases. _since_ (i have a justified expectation that) i am not liable for fraudulent use of my account number, _therefore_ i can read it to a customer service rep over the phone.

we can of course debate whether 2% is a good price for this coverage! but there must be some price paid here -- if the insurance broker doesn't collect it, the scammers will. this, after all, is the real tragedy.
by stemchar | 2026-01-23 10:07:55+00:00
> If you use streaming replication (ie. WAL shipping over the replication connection), a single replica getting really far behind can eventually cause the primary to block writes. Some time back I commented on the behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45758543

I'd like to know more, since I don't understand how this could happen. When you say "block", what do you mean exactly?
by mrweasel | 2026-01-23 10:08:37+00:00
This might be me reading it wrong, but isn't shutting down the full-web search going against the ruling mentioned in the Kagi post?

> Google must provide Web Search Index data (URLs, crawl metadata, spam scores) at marginal cost.

Maybe they're shutting down the good integration and then Kagi, Ecosia and others can buy index data in an inconvenient way going forward?
by lighthouse1212 | 2026-01-23 10:08:45+00:00
The tension between historical accuracy and game design is interesting because it reveals what we actually want from these games. We don't want to simulate medieval life - we want the aesthetic of medieval life with modern assumptions about growth, progress, and control. The same 'inaccuracies' appear in fantasy novels, historical films, any media that uses the past as a stage for modern stories.
by Moldoteck | 2026-01-23 10:09:31+00:00
Maybe for smr, but for refurbs it doesn't make sense - all recent refurbs were either on time or ahead of planned timeline and on budget. Heck, even if refurbs would suddenly triple in price it would still be dort cheap vs any alternative for 1GW of firm power.

And they kinda committed to a price with Hitachi, that's why we can say it'll be worse even than recent failed big projects.

UK has other problems to tackle, mostly heavy overregulation. UK's HPC and french FLA3 are very different in many aspects, ranging from more concrete &steel use, up to a parallel analog system on top of a parallel digital system because UK regulation is 'special'. Maybe things will change, we'll see

To me this front financing looks like a cash grab from political entities since nobody guarantees money will be used in this direction, especially with current Ontario's 'governor', that dude is local trump equivalent but maybe a bit more tempered. Another possible reason is political - this frontload means project can't be easily cancelled if relationship with US gets even worse, since Hitachi GE is an US company. So who knows. Either way, IMO bwrx decision wasn't smart and front loading isn't smart too. But this has nothing to do with refurbs cost which are dirt cheap
by imtringued | 2026-01-23 10:09:34+00:00
There was this synergistic interaction between coal and iron ore deposits, trains and the steam engine. Having a portable steam engine meant that you could build trains, which meant that you could transport coal and iron ore to the steel mills, which meant you could build more steam engines, which meant that you could build more trains and expand the rail network. The fact that these things followed one another wasn't a coincidence.
Roleplayers
by shoman3003 | 2026-01-23 10:09:36+00:00
You call yourself a founder!
You think of yourself as an innovative entrepreneur who loves Ai and wants to change the world with it!

I call bullshit!
-Building an app with an api call is literally done by everyone now.
-Attending World Economic Forum or watching a TED talk doesn't make you a founder, in fact it's a clear signal that you are middle management.
-Investing in an Ai startup doesn't make you a founder!

You are just an old fart that made some cash in the old world!
Having dozens of kissass entrepreneurs around got to your head!

When you spend 2 weeks talking about BS that has nothing to do with the product or how to sell it, it a clear signal that you are roleplaying the whole thing.
by tweetle_beetle | 2026-01-23 10:10:45+00:00
It's a noble effort, but they're so late to the game that it's hard to see them making a significant dent. I hope I'm wrong.

They were:

> aiming to serve 30% of French search queries [by end of 2025]

https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
by qcnguy | 2026-01-23 10:10:49+00:00
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.
by franga2000 | 2026-01-23 10:11:18+00:00
I see the lack of cert pinning as a sign of having a good security team. Pinning is usually implemented as "we had an external security audit and their report said we should". Security auditors and pentesters tend to add this kind of crap (alongside root detection and obfuscation) to their reports to pad them out and make their work sound more valuable to the paper-pushers. So either Lyft had their audits done by a competent provider, or their staff know enough to filter this bullshit out. Either way, props.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-23 10:11:24+00:00
Just to provide a little more context, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is, underneath all of the complexity and advanced features piled on top, a program which provides a visual timeline and a way to place notes on the timeline. The timeline is almost directly analogous to sheet music, except instead of displaying notes in a bespoke artificial language like sheet music does, they are displayed as boxes on the timeline, with the length of the box directly correlating to how long the note plays. Placing and dragging these boxes around makes up the foundation of working in a DAW, and every decision to place a box is a decision that shapes the resulting music.

Where to place boxes to make good music is not obvious, and typically takes a tremendous understanding of music theory, prior art, and experimentation. I think the comparison to an author or programmer "just pressing keys" is apt. Reducing it to the most basic physical representation undercuts all of the knowledge and creativity involved in the work. While it can be tedious sometimes, if you've thought of a structure that sounds good but there is a lot of repetition involved in notating it, there are a lot of software features to reduce the tedious aspects. A DAW is not unlike an IDE, and there are ways to package and automate repetitive musical structures and tasks and make them easy to re-use, just as programmers have tools to create structures that reduce the repetitive parts of writing code so they can spend more of their attention on the creative parts.
by closewith | 2026-01-23 10:12:36+00:00
> The “relationship” I refer to isn’t “they’re your boss,” it’s “how do you and your boss communicate,” which is a different thing altogether.

No, they're impossibly intertwined and cannot be treated separately.

> That’s not to say power dynamics can’t exist, just that it’s not a thing you can apply to every conversation or situation.

To the contrary, it's not something your can ignore in any conversion between subordinate and a boss, which is the point the GP was trying to make.
by cgriswald | 2026-01-23 10:13:11+00:00
I watched it at school too but just once. We all sat in the gymnasium. We also
had a magician perform, some type of band, and some other activities over the years. Looking back I think there was always some “special” day right around the corner.

Unrelated, in high school we watched History of the World Part I in World History and our teacher had a piece of cardboard that said “censored” or something that he put in front of the screen during various scenes like “Bishop humps Queen” but allowed the audio to play through.
by riffraff | 2026-01-23 10:13:28+00:00
> near monopoly position in their niche

how do you identify their niche? Miniature wargaming has a bunch of competitors[0], and so does genre publishing.

I suppose they have more physical shops and places to play[1], and it's easier to find people to play with, so that may be what you're think of.

I myself never played the TT game, but I love the world of 40k, and have spent a lot of time consuming related content. I'd pay for WarhammerTV, if they just let me!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miniature_wargames

[1] I recall looking slack jawed at the awesome miniatures in a GW shop in.. Maidenhead, I think? 60k people. Around ~1993, I was a kid in a "english studying" holiday.
by luke5441 | 2026-01-23 10:14:20+00:00
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... tells me it is 124% of GDP, not 100%.

This will be inflated away. The FED is already not trying to hit the 2% target. Unfortunately the treasury is issuing mostly treasury bills, so debt servicing will just become more expensive triggering a spiral. This will trigger e.g. capital controls.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-23 10:14:23+00:00
Battlefield 1 opens with a series of short battles that you can't win. Every time you die the camera moves to another nearby soldier who is also being overrun, and you fight for a while then die again. You see the graves of each person you played who died. It's one of the most powerful openings of a war game I ever played and really drives home the reality that whilst what follows is fun, the real WW1 is one you probably would not have survived.