MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by midlander | 2026-01-25 19:21:34+00:00
There’s no magic right to kill n people for n deaths. If 1 person killed a 1000 people, that doesn’t give you the right to kill 1000 people.

If an army of 100,000 attempts to kill as many people as they can but have only managed 1000 so far, you can kill as many as many of them as you need until they stop trying to kill you.
by generallyjosh | 2026-01-25 19:21:48+00:00
I do think there is some actual value in telling an LLM "you are an expert code reviewer". You really do tend to get better results in the output

When you think about what an LLM is, it makes more sense. It causes a strong activation for neorons related to "code review", and so the model's output sounds more like a code review.
by irl_zebra | 2026-01-25 19:21:48+00:00
> I’m fine ICE can see my data, as long as there are process enforced to track those usage and I have a right to fight back for their misuse

I agree with this in theory, but its a fantasy to think they have this restriction at this point. ICE seems to be taking all comers, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile, giving them "47 days of training," and sending them off armed into the populace. I have seen no evidence they believe they have any restriction on anything. It's basically DOGE but with guns instead of keyboards.
by kmeisthax | 2026-01-25 19:22:01+00:00
There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long.

The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed: none of them beat the CD on storage density and media cost. By the time the market actually needed a successor to 1.44MB floppies, everyone also had internal hard drives, so a lot of the use of the floppy drive was to install software. The fact that CDs couldn't be written to (yet) didn't matter. The fact that they held 650MB made them mandatory equipment, while every other rewritable medium was just a luxury for professional users working with a lot of data. And CD-Rs and RWs killed that last niche, too, even though they were less convenient[0] than superfloppies were.

[0] Writable optical media is a bit of a hack, necessitating processes like "mastering" and "finalization" to try and make the writable disc look like a regular disc to drives and players that aren't aware of the rewriting process.
by cauch | 2026-01-25 19:22:47+00:00
Your reaction makes me remember the "Angry Jack" videos about Gamergate, in particular the video discussing the fact that when some people (troll or not) were propagating racist or sexist things, they were reacting by saying "whaaaat, I'm not racist/sexist, how dare you". Who cares about them, and what they "are" really: for the society, if someone is spreading racist information "for the lols" or spreading it because they really believe in the content, the damage is exactly the same.

I, like you, don't believe the phenomenon was the result of an organised action (of course). The phenomenon was started as meme, resonnated with the far-right, and both far-right and people who don't see any problem with far-right ideology just amplified it. After all, the government has made a lot of stupid videos, and yet, the popularity explodes mainly when it's aligned with far-right.

But I don't have a problem with considering that the "bunch of trolls who did classic troll things" are considered as far-right. They indeed totally jumped in the opportunity to make racist things for the lols. How does that not make them racist themselves? If you create stuffs that racists find great and very aligned with their ideology, I'm sorry, even if you think you are not intrinsically racist, just be an adult and accept the consequences of your actions: you are part of the racist community, you are one of their "allies".

So, I'm perfectly fine with trolls being considered as racists. Trolling is a pain on society anyway and each time a kid thinks of themselves as "super smart" because they are trolling, the reality is rather that the world would be a better place if this version of them was not part of it. Why should we care about what trolls are feeling, they choose to put themselves at the top of the list of people who don't deserve any consideration for their feelings.
by ok_dad | 2026-01-25 19:23:14+00:00
> I think the main benefit is the same as with any law: if you have a law with no consequences for the people who break it, you don’t really have a law.

How do you feel about ICE raiding citizens homes without warrants? How about door to door raids?

If ICE cannot even follow the 4th and 5th amendments then they should be jailed themselves.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2026-01-25 19:23:20+00:00
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.

Barry Goldwater

He had a few more pertinent quotes on the issue, but he recognized the very problem he was courting. You cannot have a debate with God.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-25 19:23:41+00:00
Oh when I ran my own mailserver I did get SMTP errors back.

Every month or so I had this issue and I had to contact them through a form somewhere and I would get emails back from someone in india who reset my 'reputation'. They have some stupid made-up reputation system which means they need to see significant volume from you that is not marked as spam for them to accept your mailserver.

And yeah proton has similar issues. A lot of companies blackhole even confirmation emails there. So you can't confirm accounts with a proton email and they give zero indication as to why. Tinder and the internet archive (archive.org) come to mind.
Show HN: Forward My Inbox – IMAP‑to‑Gmail Forwarding After Gmail Kills POP3
by moshetanzer | 2026-01-25 19:24:15+00:00
Google is killing POP3/Gmailify in January 2026, breaking workflows for fetching email into Gmail.

I built Forward My Inbox (https://forwardmyinbox.com) as a replacement: connects to your IMAP inbox and forwards new emails to Gmail while preserving threading, reply-to, and labels—no POP/Gmailify needed.

Credentials are encrypted, headers are preserved, forwarding is instant.
Looking for feedback from anyone affected by the shutdown or using similar workflows.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2026-01-25 19:24:23+00:00
Computer Science education has always seem like a luxury to me. You go to college and get a very high view of the computer field but never enough to be able to get a job without additional training. That has changed CS graduates will have enough know how to be useful out of college. Their role now is to figure out how to turn spects into a usable system using AI.

My question now is: given that that there are only a limited number of types of system, why not have templates for the know how for most of these system? LLM can just fill in the blanks and have a working system in no time for most of the use cases.

The only thing I can think of that will happen is that we will have new creative systems for use cases we have never even thought about. I doubt AI will take over. Human creativity has no bounds so we will see an explosion of new ideas that only humans can solve not a capitulation to AI.
by kuerbel | 2026-01-25 19:24:45+00:00
driving an ev for the past 2.5 years with 97% SOH remaining. So I must be doing something right wrt treating the battery nicely. And I don't have a garage, it's outside most of the time. I drove thousands of km in subzero C temperature.

>Cool. And when you need to drive it? Most systems do not keep the battery heater running indefinitely.

I get in and put it into drive. When it's cold, I preheat it, I can program departure times, so the battery is conditioned and the cabin warmed in advance. Even at sub-zero temperatures, it always starts reliably, unlike a diesel engine, which, as you know, requires preheating and can struggle with extreme cold starts. Also requires winter diesel.
by quietbritishjim | 2026-01-25 19:25:11+00:00
Genuinely hard to tell if satire.

Just in case not, consider whether the short function

def is_even(x):
return (x%2) == 0

Handles a wider range of input conditions than the higher LOC function

def is_even(x):
if x == 0:
return True
if x == 2:
return True
if x == 4:
return True
...
return False
by xorvoid | 2026-01-25 19:25:12+00:00
Not sure what your point is here. He died rappelling when his bag got stuck. He didn't die free soloing. And it's unrelated to Yosemite. It was an avoidable accident and very sad. Climbers tend to die from Rappelling more than anything else. And, it's completely incomparable to Honnold's recent climb.
by yencabulator | 2026-01-25 19:26:13+00:00
> The core Docker technology was an excellent product

Nah, the core Docker technology was an utter shitshow programmed by people without the relevant experience.

The Go IRC channel fielded repeated questions from Docker developers on how to unpack a compressed tarball from a streaming source.

At one point, Docker computed a hash of the files it downloaded, but never compared the hash to anything.

Docker was always below par for the space it wanted to be in. They had good marketing. The story has many commonalities with MongoDB.
by sheepscreek | 2026-01-25 19:26:19+00:00
Always knew this anecdotally - through experience - told myself it’s the file system block size that’s the culprit. Put together with SSD random seek times, it makes sense on the surface. I never thought of syscalls being so expensive. But they might just be symptom and not the bottleneck itself (after all it’s just a function call to the server). My initial thought was DMA. You see, CPUs usually have direct access to only one PCI/e in most consumer hardware. The other PCI/e and mvme.2 slots share the same bandwidth and take turns. When someone wants access, they do a dance with the CPU and other parts of the computer using INT or (or interrupt) instructions that make the CPU pause so I/O can take over for a bit. The switching back and forth is costly too and adds up quickly.

That said, it wouldn’t explain why a MacBook (which should have the SSD already on the fastest/dedicated pathway) be this slow unless something else in the OS was the bottleneck?

I think we’re just scratching the surface here and there is more to this story that is waiting to be discovered. But yeah, to get the job done, package it in fewer files for the OS, preload into RAM or use mmap, then profit.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-25 19:26:41+00:00
What if a law only has consequences for the people it's intended for?

Let's say you have a requirement that all TVs should be registered, so you can make sure every TV owner has a TV licence. You find an unregistered TV, but the owner has a TV licence. Does it make sense to confiscate the TV? What purpose would that serve?

Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
by lywald | 2026-01-25 19:26:56+00:00
Hey HN, Pierre here. I’m the solo creator of EbookForge.

I know the skepticism around AI-generated content (and "slop") is high right now. I share it. But I built this tool because I found that for self-education and structuring ideas, LLMs are actually incredible.

I used EbookForge itself to generate a massive, 150-page catalog containing 1,000+ book concepts. This goes beyond concept: we can then recursively generate those books fully with EbookForge. This is incredible.

Every title in the catalogue is a deep-link! If you click a book idea in the PDF, it recursively opens the EbookForge, pre-loaded via URL parameters, ready to generate anew. (you get a full 30-pages eBook within about 3 minutes)

HOW IT WAS MADE: it is basically turtles, all the way down... This is vibe-coding about vibe-coding, with Grok requests for speed and cost. Grok is amazing when it comes to the dollar. Note: Claude was down so I used Gemini CLI and it turns out it is quite capable also.

I hope you will find it useful. I am biased BUT I think it is amazing! One slop to slop them all...

PS: 3 ebooks for free if you login; if this goes down, you can use your own key client-side. If that goes down too, well then you, have the catalogue. This is the extent of my guarantee. I am not a marketing genius. Let's call it a day!
by damascus | 2026-01-25 19:27:00+00:00
Some cars and trucks from the last 40 years were built incredibly well and when a specific vehicle was maintained well and not abused can provide very good options vs new super tech heavy vehicles. I have a Ford OBS truck from the 90s and I adore it. The only thing automatic on it is the transmission. Manual everything including windows. Considering a 2016 AMG GT as my next purchase for the same reason (different scale obviously). Just remove the GPS / cellular antenna and its pretty disconnected.
by AlecSchueler | 2026-01-25 19:27:01+00:00
> The materials that go into a chip are nothing.

They really aren't. Every material that goes into every chip needs to be sourced from various mines around the world, shipped to factories to be assembled, then the end goods need to be shipped again around the world to be sold or directly dumped.

High power, low power, it all has negative environmental impact.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-25 19:27:33+00:00
> I wonder whether there would be purpose-built hardware that could do the same more cheaply – think F(P)GA.

FPGAs are not cost efficient at all for something like this.

MCUs are so cheap that you’d never get to a cheaper solution by building out a team to iterate on custom hardware until it was bug free and ready to scale. You’d basically be reinventing the MCU that can be bought for $0.10, but with tens of millions of dollars of engineering and without economies of scale that the MCU companies have.
by pfannkuchen | 2026-01-25 19:27:48+00:00
Showers are generally considered to be relaxing separately from the “shower thoughts” phenomenon.

Couldn’t the relaxation be a factor in generating shower thoughts?

I suspect that essentially none of our non-ancestors were predated in a hot spring, unlike walking etc, so there may be an environmental cue driven induced relaxation that doesn’t exist for many other activities.
by UncleEntity | 2026-01-25 19:28:02+00:00
Yeah... I had to quit reading after seeing the No True Scotsman argument about who can and can't form an opinion on the state of the robots. I don't have any professional experience but feel like I can see enough, through experimentation using the daffy robots, to see what's happening but my only formal software education was when I was in high school in the 80s so I don't count.

And why do all these conversations center around web apps and whatnot? I don't work on anything like that but probably know a lot more about virtual machines and compiler theory than your average web programmer.
by ninalanyon | 2026-01-25 19:28:10+00:00
> And when you need to drive it?

When I need to drive me EV I open the door, get in, close the door, put it in drive and drive off.

Were you expecting something different? I'm in Norway by the way where it is expected to be -15 C in a few days; after eight years of EV driving (2015 Tesla S 70D) I am not anticipating any problems.

> What is your experience?

I've told you mine, what's yours? Or will you argue from authority again?
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-25 19:28:58+00:00
Succeeding a small percentage of the time results in dramatically more success than having no one even try.

Also, you're promoting defeatism. If it's just you and you succeed 1% of the time, it still helps a little. If it's millions of people -- even if that's a small minority of the population -- and they each succeed 1% of the time, that's actually a lot of groups getting converted. And it's more likely to succeed the more people in each group who do it.

So the conclusion should be that everybody should do it, since that improves everybody's odds, rather than that nobody should.
by sdenton4 | 2026-01-25 19:29:12+00:00
The only real problem I could see is if the general purpose microcontroller is significantly more power-hungry than a specialized chip, impacting the battery life of the earbuds.

On every other axis, though, it's likely a very clear win: reusable chips means cheaper units, which often translates into real resource savings (in the extreme case, it may save an entire additional factory for the custom chips, saving untold energy and effort.)
by praxulus | 2026-01-25 19:30:02+00:00
It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems.

However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.
by epolanski | 2026-01-25 19:30:09+00:00
I'm tired of this sick view that college is for training people for jobs.

College is for growing individuals that can handle the complexities required in a field. That is the real value.

You don't do CS or SE because you have to get out of college with knowledge of some bullshit latest hype, but you get out of college armed with the tools to learn and handle any of the bullshit latest hype for decades to come.

This field especially moves way too fast for anything to be actual by the time you graduate. That's why you focus on the fundamentals and problem solving and skim some exams here and there about fundamentals of different fields (data, machine learning, etc).

Every time I read this sick and wrong view of college as a mean to train individuals for the latest job requirement, I'm like "that's what trade schools or bootcamps are for".
by benesch | 2026-01-25 19:30:48+00:00
> in many CI environments unit tests don't have network access, it's not purely a price consideration.

I've never seen a hard block on network access (how do you install packages/pull images?) but I am sympathetic to wanting to enforce that unit tests run quickly by minimizing/eliminating RTT to networked services.

We've considered the possibility of a local simulator before. Let me know if it winds up being a blocker for your use case.
by oxguy3 | 2026-01-25 19:31:12+00:00
First, they probably wouldn't win. Oracle lost Google v Oracle. Wine is pretty serious about clean-room principles -- they won't accept a patch from anyone who's ever so much as looked at Microsoft-owned source code.[1] Valve has the means and motive to fight a lawsuit to the bitter end.

Second, it would be a PR disaster. "Microsoft sues to kill the Steam Deck" is an awful look for the company. Their strategy in recent years has been to say "actually we like Linux now" and play friendly to try to win developers; this would run completely counter to that. There may not be much of an immediate consequence to this, but in the long run I think we'd see developers try to reduce their reliance on Microsoft/Windows.

Third, I don't think it would actually stop the tide. Wine and Proton are a big piece of the movement away from Windows, but they're not the only piece. The legal process would take many years to play out; during that time, we'd likely see tons of movement on making it easier for developers to create native Linux builds, and perhaps even new projects that try to find other ways to do Wine-like things without actually reimplementing Win32. Losing Wine would be a huge blow, but I don't think it'd be the end of the story.

[1]: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Submitting-Patch...
by njhnjhnjh | 2026-01-25 19:31:40+00:00
More LOC means the code is more adaptable. In the past, increased LOC were difficult for humans to manage. However, as technological progress marches forward and AI takes over the job of code management, it will actually become beneficial to have increased LOC. In the next few years, AI code producers will generate literally superhuman codebases, which will contain vast quantities of simple, interrelated evaluations, creating software with such comprehensive subject area modelling that it would have been literally impossible for humans to manage in the old days. We are entering a new era, and the old assumptions no longer apply.
by kernal | 2026-01-25 19:31:50+00:00
> Are you grateful for all of the legal immigrants and citizens that ICE has swept off the streets?

Due the inability to reply to your comment for some inexplicable and perplexing reason I’ve carried it here. Perhaps you can cite a list of all of the legal immigrants and US citizens “swept” off the streets. Then compare that list to the list of illegal alien criminals removed from the country. Yes, I am grateful for an administration that actually removes illegal alien sex offenders, PDF’s and murders from our streets. Why aren’t you? Or do you consider these people a critical part of your voting base?
by PlanksVariable | 2026-01-25 19:31:54+00:00
Immigrants do bring important social and cultural capital. But nobody here is arguing in favor of no immigration.

The standard among countries all over the world is to regulate the flow of immigration via immigration law and deportation of people who violate that law.

How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react not strain the system? I saw this firsthand in schools and hospitals where I grew up, and there are numerous examples throughout history from around the world of the disruption it can cause.
by acdha | 2026-01-25 19:31:55+00:00
It all comes back to women being treated as full people. Having a child is dangerous, expensive, and a major time commitment which mean that women who have other options are going to have fewer children later in life when they have the resources to support them. We also have much less demand for unskilled workers so even women who really want children are getting educated and establishing careers first rather than getting married at 18.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2026/is-the-us-birth-rate-decli...

That leaves really only two choices: pull a Ceaușescu and try to remove the choice, or improve all of the things which make people feel now is not the right time to have kids. Since the former choice is both immoral and self-defeating, that really flips the discussion to why the people who claim to want more children oppose universal healthcare, childcare, making housing more affordable, banning negative career impacts for mothers, addressing climate change, etc. There are many things which factor into an expensive multi-decade bet and you have to improve all of them to substantially shift the outcome.
by gpm | 2026-01-25 19:32:45+00:00
If GP's prediction that no one is buying ICE cars 5-10 years from now, and the average car is 12 years old, by 20 years from now we're down to less than half the current ICE fleet by natural replacement.

But the replacement isn't random. Rather people who drive the most all already replaced their vehicles to minimize costs. Gas stations would, under just natural replacement, be down well below 50% of their former sales.

And that makes it worse. Gas is less conveniently available, and more expensive. Replacement isn't just targeted towards people who drive a lot, but it's well above replacement.

I'd be surprised if there was 10 years between the last mass marketed gas cars being sold and the entire mass market fleet of cars no longer using gas. The infrastructure becomes unprofitable and ceases to exist in a negative feedback loop.