MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2026-01-06 22:02:22+00:00
Quite the opposite. I empathize with people who have to yell at their kids to get ready so they can make a fixed bus or train schedule. Or have to walk with their kids to a transit station in the rain. Or have to sit with their kids in a train while someone freaks out next to them.

Transit advocates are the ones who lack empathy for the typical person whose life is improved by having personal, point-to-point transit.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-06 22:02:45+00:00
And even then "keeping up with the Joneses" was a 1200 square foot house with 2+ kids per bedroom, eating out less than once a month, a single car and a single TV. Vacations were a drive to the beach; never out of state let alone out of country. You had a single set of "Sunday" clothes and the rest were hand mended.

They thought it was awesome because the 1930's were still in living memory and were way worse.

If you want that lifestyle today you can still have it on a single median income.

The biggest difference was health care. Back then a small majority had health insurance, but those who didn't weren't bankrupted by health emergencies -- you just died or suffered instead.
by deergomoo | 2026-01-06 22:02:56+00:00
On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?

Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?
by the_af | 2026-01-06 22:02:59+00:00
> Is trump operating a cartel to supply illegal drugs across the Mexican border?

Maybe, who knows! Let's send a commando raid into the US, send Trump to DF to be indicted. Then we'll find out.

This won't happen simply because Mexico is an ant and the US is a bear, and so Mexico cannot pull this off. Also, Mexico isn't out of their minds.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-06 22:03:08+00:00
They were laid for to optimize profits, replacement by offshore workers, and the aspirational promise of generative AI. Value discovery remains to be seen.

Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43235781 - March 2025 (2 comments)

HN Search: offshoring - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://layoffs.fyi/
by adamc | 2026-01-06 22:03:30+00:00
Sure, in all cases, acquiring knowledge of what the (potential) customers want is difficult. The point of the article is that vendors of layer N tend to think they know what it takes to succeed at layer N+1, but they don't, because that customer base (N+2) is different.

The other (more important, maybe) thing the article points out is that building layer N-1 turns out to be easier, because layer N is the customer and understands those needs already.
by ninkendo | 2026-01-06 22:04:17+00:00
> there are ABI breaks, but I only remember only one really bad one with std::basic_string and C++11

ABI breaks are everywhere in C++... consider a class

class foo {
public:
foo();
void do_something();
private:
int x;
}

and an impl in the dynamic library:

#include "foo.h"
foo::foo() {
this->x = 0;
}
void foo::do_something() { std::cout << this->x << std::endl; }

You build a libfoo.so and clients use it, calling `foo f; f.do_something();`, it calls your library and it's great.

But as soon as you ship a new version that adds a new field to foo (still source-code compatible):

class foo {
public:
foo();
void do_something();
private:
int x;
int y;
};

With a new function body in your shared object:

void foo::do_something() { std::cout << this->x << this->y << std::endl; }

You're hosed. Clients have to recompile, or they get:

$ ./main
0, 0
*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated
[1] 2625391 IOT instruction (core dumped) ./main

Because the size information for an instance of foo is only known at compile-time, so the clients aren't allocating enough space on the stack for it (ditto the heap if you're using `new foo();`)

The way around this is awkward and involves the pimpl pattern and moving all your constructors out-of-line... but you also need to freeze all virtual methods (even just adding a new one breaks ABI), and avoid using any template-heavy std:: types (not even std::string), since those are often fragile.

Most people just give up and offer an extern "C" API, because that has the added benefit that it's compatible across compilers.

"true" C++ shared libraries are crazy difficult to maintain. It's the reason microsoft invented COM.

Swift goes through crazy lengths to make this work, and it's impressive: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/#resilient-type-layout

Rust would have to do something like Swift is doing, and that's probably never going to happen.
by tuetuopay | 2026-01-06 22:04:39+00:00
Snake was my very first OpenGL program (well, past a cube). You learn quite a bit about the basics and why one more dimension is not always better.

Fun times, this takes me back quite a bit. Definitely from the "what if" mindset, I was seeking something complex enough for learning and simple enough to actually finish. I must have been 15 or 16 at the time.
by Arnt | 2026-01-06 22:04:43+00:00
You can even describe it with your own words.

I picked this at random from the middle of the page: "Notoriously, egg prices quadrupled over the past few years, after mass culls of hens to halt bird flu. But a typical basket of groceries has largely tracked overall inflation (see chart 2). That is no surprise: the inputs into grocery bills are a microcosm of the economy, encompassing goods costs (the food itself), wages (of cashiers and warehouse workers) and rent (paid by the supermarket)." Tell us with your own words what you see with your own eyes.
Show HN: Kurisu – Statistical dashboard in a single HTML file
by iriai_san | 2026-01-06 22:06:05+00:00
I built Kurisu to solve a specific problem I kept encountering: analyzing sensitive data in offline settings without IT approval or cloud uploads and without needing to login and out of accounts on every device i own.

The constraints led to interesting technical decisions:

*Single-file architecture:* The entire app is one HTML file. No build process, no npm install, no deployment. You can WhatsApp it to yourself and open it on any device with a browser. This bypasses corporate IT restrictions and makes distribution trivial.

*Statistical engine in Web Workers:* Implements Spearman Rank Correlation, Kruskal-Wallis, and Mann-Kendall tests client-side. The automated dashboard scores potential visualizations by statistical significance rather than generating random charts.

*Local-first processing:* All data stays in the browser. Useful for compliance-heavy scenarios (HIPAA, financial data, NDAs) where cloud analytics tools are prohibited.

*Real use case:* I work 9am-9pm, then code nights. During potential investor/client meetings over coffee, being able to drop their Excel file into Kurisu and generate insights in 30 seconds without "let me set this up in Excel" has been valuable.

*Technical tradeoffs:*
- Export occasionally crops at bottom edge (html2canvas limitation, fixing in v1.1)
- Single file = harder to maintain at scale, lots of things break all the time but distribution simplicity wins for now

Future plans: Optional AI model integration (bring your own API/local LLM), embedded tiny model experiments, desktop wrapper if there's demand.

This is my first shipped product after 3 months of learning to code via AI assistance. Would especially appreciate feedback on:
1. The statistical implementation correctness
2. Single-file distribution model viability
3. Technical debt concerns as it grows
4. ways to be able optimise the app to work with
with larger datasets and more complex calculations within the web worker.

Built from Pakistan where most SaaS pricing doesn't make sense. $29 one-time felt right but feedback on this would be appreciated as well.
by rldjbpin | 2026-01-06 22:06:06+00:00
remux vs reencode itself is a big point for video noobs such as myself.

in the past, cropping out a part of a video would meant reencoding it in some random preset. this would often take longer than required. however, accidentally realized the difference when trying out avidemux [1] and clipping together videos blazing fast (provided in same container and format)!

[1] http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
by foltik | 2026-01-06 22:06:23+00:00
Quite an ignorant comment. It’s literally nothing like using a CPU to prop up an uneven table.

It’s precisely the application of quantum physics that enables current prototypes of these IMUs to achieve 1-2 orders of magnitude less position error accumulation vs. state-of-the-art gyroscopes. Think 0.1m/min vs. 10m/min.

Obviously the tube isn’t the holy grail of applications, it’s just a test bed to improve the technology. Think about why GPS is useful. Imagine that, but entirely self contained.
by elevation | 2026-01-06 22:06:48+00:00
The REAL speed up comes to efforts that are already well-designed, but require lots of human busy work. I've personally seen multi-day human efforts reduced to a 15-minute session with an LLM. In a way, LLMs are reducing implementation costs to the kolmolgorov complexity -- you can get what you prompt for, but you have to remember to prompt for everything you want to get -- which comes easiest if you already took time to consider the design.
by simonw | 2026-01-06 22:07:02+00:00
That's why I built the WebAssembly one - the JavaScript one started with MQJS, but for the WebAssembly one I started with just a copy of the https://github.com/webassembly/spec repo.

I haven't quite got the WASM one into a share-able shape yet though - the performance is pretty bad which makes the demos not very interesting.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-06 22:08:42+00:00
Bad theory. People buying new cars do not expect them to last a decade. People who buy new cars in this era are consumers who treat them as fast fashion. They get traded in every few years with an ever-increasing markup.

> Most new car buyers are inherently irrational

Don't try to rationalize irrational behavior with magical long term thinking. Irrational people as a rule do not plan a decade in advance.
by nvader | 2026-01-06 22:08:50+00:00
Disclosure, I do work for Josh, and I can tell you that he's thought quite deeply about the negative implications of the agents that are coming. Among enumerating the ways in which AI agents will transform knowledge work, this points out the ways which we might come to regret.

> Even if this plays out over 20 or 30 years instead of 10 years, what kind of world are we leaving for our descendants?

> What should we be doing today to prepare for (or prevent) this future?
by burntsushi | 2026-01-06 22:09:00+00:00
Nice. Yeah I'd have to actually look at what it did. For the task of substring search, it's extremely easy to fall into a local optima. The `memchr` crate has oodles of benchmarks, and some of them are very much in tension with others. It's easy to do well on one to the expense of others.

But still, very neat.
by compass_copium | 2026-01-06 22:09:09+00:00
>However, there is some light evidence that the variation I see is not just intra-day variation. Specifically, there are several species that stay consistent in frequency across all samples: e.g., Neisseria subflava, Streptococcus viridans, Streptococcus oralis.

Disagree. You can not make that claim without sequencing your mouth's microbiome in the absence of probiotics for a month as well (and, really, many more than one persom's). Was your diet controlled all month? Oral hygiene habits? Any of a million other variables?

Also, it's worth pointing out that the study was designed to test one hypothesis, and you need to be very careful about looking at further claims. This test only really provided evidence that these probiotics don't introduce L. reuterii.
by jimmytucson | 2026-01-06 22:09:28+00:00
Hmm, so in a language that does automatic bounds checking, the compiler might translate a line of source code like:

let val = arr[i]

to assembly code like:

cmp rdx, rsi ; Compare i (rdx) with length (rsi)
jae .Lpanic_label ; Jump if i >= length
; later...
.Lpanic_label:
call core::panicking::panic_bounds_check

Are they saying with "correct code" the line of source code won't be covered? Because the assembly instruction to call panic isn't ever reached?
by drnick1 | 2026-01-06 22:09:33+00:00
> Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000.

It doesn't stop there. The business model of cloud and streaming services is to charge the customer, and then sell the customer's interactions with the service to third parties (data brokers), who cross-correlate the information obtained with other sources to build very detailed individual profiles.

You would have to go lengths (throwaway identity, email, payment with gift cards, VPN, etc.) with each streaming service to effectively prevent this sort of tracking. And after that, you will still own nothing. Worse, the streaming company may even ban you for using a VPN, or refuse to play the content on free devices because DRM can't be enforced. It's complete madness.
by johnea | 2026-01-06 22:09:54+00:00
> The notion that Americans can afford less than they used to is essentially false

To use my, now standard, tagline: This is total bullshit...

The Economist often has insightful writing, but the premise of this article is just wrong.

Like the entire field of "economics", this article is inaccurate, because of basing it's assertion on "Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics".

Using a mean to judge any kind of society wide assessment is just not going to be accurate in any modern economic analysis...
by tokioyoyo | 2026-01-06 22:10:08+00:00
Both YouTube and Twitch have increased the amount of ads they serve over the last 5 years, not decreased. So, I’m not even sure if the “competition” between those two makes ads better for anyone. Imo, the objective of competition in adspace is “who can target better to increase click rate”, not “who can make the experience better for the user”.
by tptacek | 2026-01-06 22:10:18+00:00
I'm bullish on novel exploits too but I'm much less confident in the prediction. I don't think you can do two network pentests and not immediately reach the conclusion that the need for humans to do significant chunks of that work at all is essentially a failure of automation.

With more specificity: I would not be at all surprised if the "industry standard" netpen was 90%+ agent-mediated by the end of this year. But I also think that within the next 2-3 years, that will be true of web application testing as well, which is in a sense a limited (but important and widespread) instance of "novel vulnerability" discovery.
by amatecha | 2026-01-06 22:10:28+00:00
Heck yeah, when WC2 had just come out (and I didn't have it yet because I had a Mac, and the Mac vers came out like 8mo later), I remember poring over the manual and getting all up to speed on the game while anticipating the eventual Mac port. I was enough of a geek to scan some of the awesome artwork from the manual (we had a 300dpi scanner!) and print it out and then color it with felt pens. I still have my colored Death Knight kicking around somewhere (this artwork: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Knight_(Warcraft_II)?... )
by ludicity | 2026-01-06 22:10:45+00:00
At my first job, all the applications the data people developed were compulsorily evaluated through Fortify (I assume this is HP Fortify) and to this day I have no idea what the security team was actually doing with the product, or what the product does. All I know is that they never changed anything even though we were mostly fresh grads and were certainly shipping total garbage.
by lukan | 2026-01-06 22:10:45+00:00
"If you don't choose to share it, it's not used"

I am curious where your confidence that this is true, is coming from?

Besides lots of GPU's, training data seems the most valuable asset AI companies have. Sounds like strong incentive to me to secretly use it anyway. Who would really know, if the pipelines are set up in a way, if only very few people are aware of this?

And if it comes out "oh gosh, one of our employees made a misstake".

And they already admitted to train with pirated content. So maybe they learned their lesson .. maybe not, as they are still making money and want to continue to lead the field.
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-06 22:10:51+00:00
Yeah, good call, but I honestly have no problem with that 1-star either. They can’t say “well we just opened the garbage conduit and pointed it at your face… we didn’t actually MAKE the garbage.” Those ads are part of their app experience, now. They published it, so they’re ’re responsible for it. If it sucks I give it a sucky rating.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-06 22:11:32+00:00
The benefit of focusing on coding is that it has an attractive non-deterministic / deterministic problem split.

In that it's using a non-deterministic machine to build a deterministic one.

Which gives all the benefits of determinism in production, with all the benefits of non-deterministic creativity in development.

Imho, Anthropic is pretty smart in picking it as a core focus.
by criddell | 2026-01-06 22:11:43+00:00
In December I bought a GX-85. I love it even though it's 9 years old and still uses micro-USB. I got a great deal on it - $300.

It doesn't seem like it would take a lot to keep this line going. Bump the sensor, change the USB cable, add GPS, etc... but keep the form factor.

I guess the market just isn't big enough.
by transcriptase | 2026-01-06 22:12:27+00:00
If you watch him on Joe Rogan’s podcast he gives a full overview of how every single tiny detail down to colors, length of scene cuts, facial expressions, language, total length of videos, time of day for release, thumbnails, sound effects, music is extensively A/B tested to not only optimize for the algorithm but for hijacking people’s attention as well. That weird creepy face with the outline and uncanny smoothing aren’t by accident. Everything is intentional because he obsessively tests anything that might give him even the slightest edge in a sea of videos. The content itself barely matters.
by zerodayai | 2026-01-06 22:12:49+00:00
Im currently on the tail end of building out an agentic hacking framework; I wanted to learn the best practices of building agents (I have an SDK with memory (short/med/long), knowledgegraph/RAG, tools and plugins that makes it easy to develop new agents the orchestrator can coordinate).

I also wanted to capture what's in my head from doing bug bounties (my hobby) and 15+ years in appsec/devsecops to get it "on paper". If anyone would like to kick the tires, take a look, or tell me it's garbage feel free to email me (in my profile).
by ryandrake | 2026-01-06 22:13:00+00:00
This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance.

I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank directory and text file list of requirements, I had Opus 4.5 build an Android TV video player that could read a directory over NFS, show a grid view of movie poster thumbnails, and play the selected video file on the TV. The result wasn't exactly full-featured Kodi, but it works in the emulator and actual device, it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything. It was pretty astounding.

Oh, and I did this all without ever opening a single source file or even looking at the proposed code changes while Opus was doing its thing. I don't even know Kotlin and still don't know it.
by haolez | 2026-01-06 22:13:51+00:00
I have a different concern: the SOTA products are expensive and get dumbed down on busy times. My personal strategy has been to be a late follower, where I adopt new AI tools when the competition has caught up with the previous SOTA, and now there are many tools that are cost effective and equally good.

Can't wait for when the competition catches up with Claude Code, especially the open source/weights Chinese alternatives :)
by simonw | 2026-01-06 22:14:02+00:00
> For now, people are just putting their heads in the sand and assuming that physicists will somehow find a way to use quantum computers to speed up inference by a factor of 10^20 in the next years, while simultaneously slashing its costs (lol).

GPT-3 Da Vinci cost $20/million tokens for both input and output.

GPT-5.2 is $1.75/million for input and $14/million for output

I'd call that pretty strong evidence that they've been able to dramatically increase quality while slashing costs, over just the past ~4 years.
by vel0city | 2026-01-06 22:14:04+00:00
> The exact same logic you used can be applied to music: once you've listened to the album once, you know how it will go, so what's the point of listening again?

Most music doesn't have the same kind of narrative and strong plot that stories like novels and movies do, this is a massive difference. And even if it does, it doesn't usually take a half hour or more to do such a change. That's a pretty big difference about the types of art.
by mattlondon | 2026-01-06 22:14:12+00:00
Cheap when second hand. Plus a lot of the annoyance only becomes clear after using it for a while or in different seasons from when you did a test drive. Many cars are like this right now, although EuroNCAP is obviously forcing a change for the better here (because it is so widespread)... but I needed a car then and couldn't wait for the new rules to arrive in X years so...

It's fine - it's just a car and it is fine as a car, just some irritating bits.