MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-20 02:54:19+00:00
I do not think it is paranoia. But we can have this from anywhere. American devices, EU devices; if I cannot analyse the firmware, ICs etc, what is going to guarantee these are not remotely exploitable. Even if Porsche never built such a thing on purpose, the car is connected so someone can break in, hack it and do stuff including possible overhead the battery so it ignites.

It does not have to be on purpose quality wise either: I had 2 spicy pillows in my life (and I have a lot of gadgets, including fully Chinese ones); a Samsung flagship phone and a macbook air. Both just unannounced got very hot and broke open: no fire but still... So I would say it is possible for a state actor to remotely hack, take over and ignite your Samsung and Macbook as apparently it can already almost happen without hackers.

What to do about it? Without just fully open sourcing hardware and software, I do not know. I mean that would not help a lot if no one reads it and finds the issues/vulnerabilities, but at least we stand a chance, vs now. Unplugging from internet is not really a thing, although, when it comes to cars and airplanes i would rather see it mandatory non connected.
by dijit | 2026-01-20 02:55:28+00:00
I understand the constitutional point you're making, but I think we're conflating two things: exercising your right to trial, and showing remorse for what you did.

The right to trial isn't being penalised. You get a fair trial either way. What's being rewarded is accepting responsibility and saving the court's time. That's not the same as punishing you for exercising a right.

I'll grant that when the sentencing gap is extreme, the distinction becomes academic. If you're facing 20 years at trial versus 2 for pleading, then functionally you're being coerced regardless of the theoretical justification.

But in principle, rewarding people who show remorse is part of justice. Someone who accepts what they did and shows contrition is different from someone who forces the state to prove its case. Both have the right to trial, but treating them differently at sentencing isn't inherently unjust.

The question is whether the gap has become so large that it's effectively coercive. That's an empirical question about how plea bargains operate in practice, not a constitutional one about whether they can exist at all, which, if I understood it right, is your position.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-20 02:55:44+00:00
> China is much less likely to attack civilians.

They were pretty happy to attack their own civilians, I see no reason to think why that would be different abroad.

> Don't project america and israel's way of war onto others.

I'm not projecting, merely being cautious. Besides, I have no illusion about either America or Israel doing something similar, especially not with their current upper cadre but this subthread is about China).

> I would imagine part of their strategy is to win hearts ad minds.

I would imagine it isn't. See also: partnering with Putin in the war with Ukraine.

> America just kills and kills and kills and wonders why we arent loved.

Yes, but they're not alone in that.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-20 02:55:47+00:00
> Deploying troops to Minnesota would be a domestic show of force that would have minimal impact, as they are incapable of seizing Minnesota for the US as it is already a US territory, so they would be used to guard public buildings (and would basically just sit around doing nothing all day).

It would, at best, be a domestic show of force to further an ongoing campaign of violent, including lethal, state terrorism directed against the civilian population, in violation of the Constitution and laws and direct judicial orders; and at worst a direct addition of the military to the federal paramilitary forces actively engaging in that campaign, rather than merely a show of force in support of it.

Can't think of any Trump action that has manifested in the way that would have been described as “at best” in advance, but I guess it is theoretically possible this could be the first.
by simonw | 2026-01-20 02:56:02+00:00
One of the big open questions for me right now concerns how library dependencies are used.

Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO.

The two that stand out for me as more notable are html5ever for parsing HTML and taffy for handling CSS grids and flexbox - that's vendored with an explanation of some minor changes here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e...

Taffy a solid library choice, but it's probably the most robust ammunition for anyone who wants to argue that this shouldn't count as a "from scratch" rendering engine.

I don't think it detracts much if at all from FastRender as an example of what an army of coding agents can help a single engineer achieve in a few weeks of work.
by zenoware | 2026-01-20 02:56:51+00:00
Remember when selecting all elements with a class required 15 lines of browser-sniffing JavaScript?

jQuery turned that into $('.intro').hide(). One line. Worked everywhere. And there was a codepen you can bookmark too.

Wrote a piece on jQuery's 20th birthday, a part history lesson, part love letter to the library that made web dev feel magical.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 02:58:16+00:00
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I think evidence of a potential war escalation falls under the "unless". Are we really going to be starting WW3 and have people like you keep covering your ears because you need a cozy space?
by maxdo | 2026-01-20 02:58:20+00:00
German cars have lost their technological edge. They can't even build their own infotainment systems anymore. They're paying billions to China to do it for them.

I can't overstate how catastrophically stupid this is. Paying what they consider smaller competitors real cash to build core software, instead of developing that capability in-house or acquiring a few startups with decent engineering talent.

This isn't just a bad decision. It reveals a completely dysfunctional decision-making process and a total absence of technical ambition.

People who say but "Porche/Mercedes/etc.." has this design. Luxury segment is not coming from nowhere. This is the same reason british luxury cars are gone essentially. It will take some time, but EU built cars will be in a constant decline.

What's even more fun, they don't want to protect their own market the same way chinese did.
by kjellsbells | 2026-01-20 02:58:27+00:00
Then again, it's been done before.

- Japanese consumer goods were perceived as junk until the tipping point was reached, and then they were perceived as high-quality, easily equalling or surpassing Western goods. That took ~30 years (1950 to 1980, say). Older readers will recall the controversy over Akio Morita's (Morita-san being the founder of Sony) statements in the book "The Japan that can Say No" (see [0]), which seems strangely prescient in the sense that it ignited a lot of (US) debate around dependence on foreign semiconductors.

- Then there was Taiwan, again, a 30 year cycle from about 1970 to 2000. Taiwan used to be known for cheap textiles, consumer dross, and suchlike. Not now...

My point is that the way to get better at products is to make them and make them and make them, and eventually an export-led country reaches a tipping point where the consumers flip over, and their perception changes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5aNxvjYu6o
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-20 02:58:46+00:00
> They could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President.

That's nothing new... Don't blame me for bothsiderism but I and many others knew full well that Harris would lose after the midsummer switcheroo. Sorry, the Dem party knew it too and they wanted to lose, that's not the only evidence for it and there's no other rational conclusion.
by hereme888 | 2026-01-20 02:59:17+00:00
Ignatenko et al., 2025 found the 2025 tariffs could yield modest U.S. welfare gains through improved terms of trade if partners don't retaliate. Concrete data shows $236 billion in revenue, a 25% drop in Chinese imports, and $1.7 trillion in announced manufacturing investments. So the debate isn't who pays (both sides agree Americans do), but whether reshoring and revenue gains justify the cost.
by Supermancho | 2026-01-20 02:59:51+00:00
> I have not seen the Trump administration fail to obey a single court order

If we can avoid playing word games, the Trump administration has been accused of defying or frustrating court orders at an unprecedented rate, with analyses indicating it failed to comply with approximately one in three judicial rulings against its actions.

Notably in regard to deportations. The administration either acts in defiance of, or appeals until the case is elevated to a sympathetic judge or eventually complies. This is the trend and has been a successful set of tactics so far.
by adventured | 2026-01-20 03:00:24+00:00
Several things: 1) the US will deploy substantial military assets to Greenland. Far beyond what it has now. That will include building massive radar arrays and missile defense systems. By controlling Greenland it won't need permission for anything it does. 2) The US will aggressively claim water territory around Greenland and use it to restrict transit by foreign military powers. Svalbard is on the table for invasion and annexation if the US goes the route of fascism or empire. If not, then the US will just push its water territory claims to absurd lines in the style of the South China Sea and use it for denial as much as possible. 3) Greenland puts the US drastically closer to the most important regions of Russia, the US will station nuclear weapons on Greenland. Owning Greenland gets the US massive territory 3,000 KM closer to Moscow.

The US only recognizes two threatening competitor powers in the world today: China and Russia. Russia is of course not what it was during the Soviet era. However a long-term partnership with China would change the dynamic a lot. Russian territory may come to host major Chinese ports in time.
by utbabya | 2026-01-20 03:01:25+00:00
As an M$ hater from last life I've to disagree it's more expensive. You numerate the instance where they've lost value, but can you even count the value it produced over the years by lowering the entry bar? I don't even excel, but it unarguably produced way more value than it's taken away. I tend to believe history speaks for itself, solely unethical practices won't undermine truly superior products. 50% of the population aren't stupid by definition, they just specalize on different things.
by sealeck | 2026-01-20 03:01:55+00:00
I think the other question is how far away this is from a "working" browser. It isn't impossible to render a meaningful subset of HTML (especially when you use external libraries to handle a lot of this). The real difficulty is doing this (a) quickly, (b) correctly and (c) securely. All of those are very hard problems, and also quite tricky to verify.

I think this kind of approach is interesting, but it's a bit sad that Cursor didn't discuss how they close the feedback loop: testing/verification. As generating code becomes cheaper, I think effort will shift to how we can more cheaply and reliably determine whether an arbitrary piece of code meets a desired specification. For example did they use https://web-platform-tests.org/, fuzz testing (e.g. feed in random webpages and inform the LLM when the fuzzer finds crashes), etc? I would imagine truly scaling long-running autonomous coding would have an emphasis on this.

Of course Cursor may well have done this, but it wasn't super deeply discussed in their blog post.

I really enjoy reading your blog and it would be super cool to see you look at approaches people have to ensuring that LLM-produced code is reliable/correct.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-01-20 03:02:36+00:00
I never understood the big push for full EVs over hybrid. Roughly speaking, a hybrid gets double the MPG of an ICE car, and a BEV gets double the MPGe of a hybrid. But BEVs require you to add a plug to your garage to get a rapid refuel, when your whole neighborhood gets them it strains the grid, you are range limited, etc...

My hunch is there are some laws or regs somewhere that kept hybrids from really taking off (or rather, they were taking off.. then suddenly were suppressed). Which is why I don't interpret headlines like these to mean "consumers have crossed the tipping point" - in many cases it is incentive-driven, not pure consumer demand.

The EU is committed to the full EV route and that is not changing. But it's not taking hold in the US, and over the next few years the big thing we will see being sold is actually EREVs, which are BEVs with a gas generator attached to charge the battery (yes, really).

Source: in the industry
by mikehotel | 2026-01-20 03:02:46+00:00
An effort led by security research lab CovertLabs is actively uncovering troves of (mostly) AI-related App Store apps that leak and expose user data, including names, emails, and chat history.

Most apps on Firehound appear to expose data via improperly secured databases or cloud storage, and many listings disclose the underlying data schemas and record counts.
by eru | 2026-01-20 03:03:54+00:00
> They were pretty happy to attack their own civilians, [...]

Yes.

> [...] I see no reason to think why that would be different abroad.

Well, you can look at the history of the PRC so far.

> I would imagine it isn't. See also: partnering with Putin in the war with Ukraine.

It's not all that much of a partnership. They are mostly squeezing Russia dry with cheap oil, and press territorial concessions out of the Tsar in the East, when he's busy in the West.
by WalterBright | 2026-01-20 03:04:16+00:00
Eh, as far as compiler backends go, the RPN stack was worse.

I thought the X86_64 instruction set was a giant kludge-fest, so I was looking forward to implement the AArch64 code generator. Turns out it is just as kludgy, but at right angles. For example, all the wacky ways of simply loading a constant into a register!
by jsemrau | 2026-01-20 03:04:20+00:00
I have recently started using Github Copilot for some small personal projects and am blown away how fast it is possible to create a solution that does the job. Of course its not optimized for security or scaling, but it doesn't have to be. Most mindblowing moment was when Copilot searched API documentation and implemented everything just asking me to add my API key to the .env. Wild times.
by dathinab | 2026-01-20 03:04:31+00:00
it's not paranoia

chips with backdoors which would allow exactly something like that (or many other things) have been found more then once in recent years AFIK

through a fancy personal car stopping working is the least relevant target. Network backbone, smart phones, and other core infrastructure is a much more relevant target. And even for cars all the non-personal vehicles (e.g. ambulance, trucks, police ...) are much more relevant targets.
by dmix | 2026-01-20 03:04:49+00:00
> instead of developing that capability in-house or acquiring a few startups with decent engineering talent.

It's usually the former and their infotainment stuff is usually nothing to get excited about. When they buy startups they get bogged down and burn off the talent quickly.

Maybe the solution is not having the same small set of car companies trying to pull off the survival balancing act as we did a century ago, maybe that's why China is progressing quicker.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2026-01-20 03:04:51+00:00
Yes, essentially a higher level programming language than what we currently have. A programming language that doesn't have strict syntax, and can be expressed with words or code. And like any other programming language, it includes specifications for the tests and expectations of the result.

The programming language can look more like code in parts where the specification needs to be very detailed. I think people can get intuition about where the LLM is unlikely to be successful. It can have low detail for boilerplate or code that is simple to describe.

You should be able to alter and recompile the specification, unlike the wandering prompt which makes changes faster than normal version control practices keep up with.

Perhaps there's a world where reading the specification rather than the compiled code is sufficient in order to keep cognitive load at reasonable levels.

At very least, you can read compiled code until you can establish your own validation set and create statistical expectations about your domain. Principally, these models will always be statistical in nature. So we probably need to start operating more inside that kind of framework if we really want to be professional about it.
by canpan | 2026-01-20 03:04:52+00:00
Working in that area in Japan. I think I can provide some answers.

Payment: CC are mostly used for BtoC but if you are a BtoB SaaS you want invoice and a local presence (ie no tax or currency shenanigans for your customer).

Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers. Instead: Contact form, Cold call, go out to events, lots of drinking.

Regarding language: Many people do not speak English. I think that surprises some, but Japan is big and you can live forever happily only speaking Japanese. So if you don't support Japanese it's a complete no go.
by dijit | 2026-01-20 03:04:59+00:00
No, just trying to open friendly.

I sweated over the opening for 5 minutes because I didn’t want to go in really hard with “don’t you know most brits had it bad ackshulee!”- because I’m one of those generationally poverty-stricken brits and it hits a bit too close to home to sound neutral.

Removed it; I’m getting flagged regardless, I might as well own it.
by linksnapzz | 2026-01-20 03:05:05+00:00
>When Americans discover again how crappy their cars are compared to what's >available elsewhere, like we did with Japan

No, that's not what happened. Japanese manufacturers made cars in the US, to match US tastes. Japanese cars as sold in Japan, were not models Americans would buy.

>In the meantime, this incredibly short sighted protectionism will end just like >the last round did.

It'll end with...Chinese cars made in US factories w/ American workers?
Chinese V8 pickup trucks failing to win market share against the US competition?
by drnick1 | 2026-01-20 03:05:10+00:00
> 5. Lots of remote features tied to an app. The ability to look through cameras, auto-record videos when people get close, lock and unlock and view status of the car. Remote tracking via GPS in case it’s stolen.

This is akin to spyware, since inevitably it is a cloud service using an onboard cellular modem.

I would personally rather have none of 1-10. What I do want in a high-end vehicle is things that are there for my benefit (heated steering wheel, heated/ventilated seats, spacious cupholders, etc.) not the manufacturer's.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-20 03:05:14+00:00
You probably mean antirez porting Flux to c. There were not too many shortcomings in his breakdown; his biggest one as I saw was that his knowledge and experience building large c programs really was a requirement. But given one of these experts, you don't see how that person and claude code just replaces a team. The less capable people on the team cannot do what he does so before they were just entering code and getting corrected in reviews or asking for help. Now the AI can do that, but on 10 projects in parallel. In a weekend you wont have time for that but not everything has to be done in a weekend.
by jitl | 2026-01-20 03:05:46+00:00
Author has a Wikipedia page about him linked from his GitHub profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard

Summary:

- Co-created FreeBSD.

- Led UNIX technologies at Apple for 13 years

- iXSystems, lead FreeNAS

- idk something about Uber

- Senior Director for GPU Compute Software at NVIDIA

For whatever it’s worth.
by qohen | 2026-01-20 03:06:06+00:00
The toll was significantly higher -- this is from a 2017 BBC article [0]:

The Chinese army crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests killed at least 10,000 people, according to newly released UK documents.

The figure was given in a secret diplomatic cable from then British ambassador to China, Sir Alan Donald.

The original source was a friend of a member of China's State Council, the envoy says.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42465516
by dkdcio | 2026-01-20 03:06:54+00:00
fair enough! the jump from that to ChatGPT’s launch (which I didn’t find that interesting), to gpt-4, to Claude Code/Codex CLI, to Gemini 3/Opus 4.5/GPT 5.2 has been insane in such a short time. I’m excited (since the release of the Codex CLI especially: https://dkdc.dev/posts/modern-agentic-software-engineering/)
by skmurphy | 2026-01-20 03:06:57+00:00
There are a number of tools out there that help map who you may know at a target firm or may know someone at the firm. I think it's critical that you handcraft craft a thoughtful personal email and not generate a flood of "fake personal." It's also a good idea to dig your well before you need the water and help others find work in what is a very challenging economy. My $.02 your mileage may vary.
by ericmay | 2026-01-20 03:07:51+00:00
Hmmm, what’s your sample size? Which wars has China been involved with and how have they treated civilians?

If Taiwan is invaded how do you think things will go if some number of Taiwanese people are defending the island mixed in with the local populace? Will the PLA call in an airstrike on an apartment with a sniper, or do you think they’ll go the hearts and minds route?

Part of the problem with your statement here, in my view, is you’re suggesting that the United States or Israel’s “way of war” is. It the default, or that in comparison to how other countries treat civilians may actually be more humane. I don’t think there’s a large sample size, or any particularly strong evidence to suggest how China will treat civilians.

And if you take into account how China has treated its own people, it’s not much better or worse than the United States. Maybe worst, actually, since Americans do have a legal right to protest.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 03:08:19+00:00
>many, and legitimate, contentions.

When one chess player chooses to suddenly say that a pawn can move 3 spaces, and you insist on calling a ref to call out cheating, I don't think it's just "two tribes" anymore. You agreed on the rules of engagment at the beginning of the match and one side is objectively breaking them. Saying post haste that "well maybe a pawn should move 3 spaces" does not negate what you agreed upon.

That's why it's tiring to head the "but you're being manipulated" argument. Being manipulated by the very rules of your government is different from a bunch of war mongerers, billionaires, and corrupt politicians continually ignoring the rules and saying "no it's okay".