MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Footprint0521 | 2026-01-18 00:46:33+00:00
I was curious about this too and it’s actually a bug— these blue dots are random parks or park features. Most parks are polygons, but less than 5% or them are points from volunteer mappers who didn’t make them polygons and so these stray points seem to slip through and get plotted as the matplotlib default color…

If only I knew this before I printed it out and attached it all together with rasterbator lol
by legojoey17 | 2026-01-18 00:46:57+00:00
Cool, I'll definitely take a look! I do have a preference for container-oriented setups and do have an elaborate set of plumbing on kuberenetes at the moment.

That being said, I procrastinated on getting postgres backups working and ended up causing self-inflicted corruption, so it is nice to see you've got that setup and have thought of pretty much everything!
by orbital-decay | 2026-01-18 00:47:49+00:00
A lot of software is dark-mode first but it's still not right. Good dark schemes are just really hard to design, there are just too many nuanced differences. Color perception is maybe 10% of it. Typographics, line thickness, optical balance, accounting for increased contrast, antialiasing, layout, picture rendering, absolutely everything should be done differently on dark backgrounds.

And it depends too much on your environment, the type of display, and its pixel density, unlike in light mode which is way more forgiving to external factors.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 00:48:49+00:00
"Useful and transformative" doesn't mean "financially successful".

A single LLM provider might have been able to get great margins and capture a significant fraction of the total economic output of (currently e.g. junior grade software engineering), but collectively they're in an all-pay auction for the hardware to train models worth paying for, and at the same on questionable margins because they need to compete with each other on cost.

They can all go bankrupt, and leave behind only trained models that normal people won't be able to run for 5 years while consumer-grade stuff catches up. Or any single one of them might win, which may not be OpenAI. Any or all may get state subsidies (US, Chinese, European, whatever).

All kinds of outcomes are possible.
by cols | 2026-01-18 00:49:25+00:00
A lot of people seem to be missing the point that the reputational damage that is being done by the Trump administration right now is nontrivial and will not be unraveled quickly. The creation of a new economic trade zone between S.A. and the EU, the halting of the EU/US trade deal, Canada creating new trade deals with China...all of this spells disaster for the US. Despite what the right wing thinks, all countries play together in a big sandbox with each other and this idiocy and isolationism is not going to make us more wealthy or more safe.
Data Activation Thoughts
by galsapir | 2026-01-18 00:49:40+00:00
i've been working with healthcare/biobank data and keep thinking about what "data moats" mean now that llms can ingest anything. some a16z piece from 2019 said moats were eroding — now the question seems to be whether you can actually make your data useful to these systems, not just have it. there's some recent work (tables2traces, ehr-r1) showing you can convert structured medical data into reasoning traces that improve llm performance, but the approaches are still rough and synthetic traces don't fully hold up to scrutiny (writing this to think through it, not because i have answers)
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-18 00:50:32+00:00
This was the soviet union in a very tense time. If he hadn't been shot down he would have been forced down. But yes that would have been a more likely outcome, true.

PS: Don't forget the Soviets knowingly shot and killed an entire airliner full of people. I saw an interview with the fighter pilot later and he didn't even have remorse for what he was doing, "just following orders". What a monster. But that was pretty typical there. Anyone with a backbone questioning orders was already dying in a gulag.
by akst | 2026-01-18 00:50:34+00:00
I think academics are too critical for a source of general surface level knowledge. But it’s no substitute for primary sources

I don’t think the problem is anyone can jump on and edit Wikipedia, they have process, but it’s the processes, informal institution’s, where the issues I’m referring arise. The average person hears there a process and assume this means it’s legitimate and flawless and are over confident in its quality.

It’s a great resource but I tin it’s helpful to be realistic about its limitations.
by kjellsbells | 2026-01-18 00:51:01+00:00
Some TV is already like this. I recall critics of Teletubbies complaining about the repeated statements and actions (Tinky-Winky says "Again! Again!"). Then I spent time in Asia and all their popular entertainment (eg Running Man) continually repeats the last 10 seconds of each action. It's crazy making to me, but it evidently is what the viewers like.
by Esophagus4 | 2026-01-18 00:51:04+00:00
> It's much more comfortable to be the person that "could be X" than to be the person that tries to actually do it.

Brilliant insight.

Reminds of me this, from Theodore Roosevelt's Citizenship in a Republic:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Good luck, and go get 'em.
by blhack | 2026-01-18 00:53:15+00:00
Consider what the rise of things like shopify, squarespace, etc. did for developers.

In 2001, you needed an entire development team if you wanted to have an online business. Having an online business was a complicated, niche thing.

Now, because it has gotten substantially easier, there are thousands of times as many (probably millions of times) online stores, and many of them employ some sort of developer (usually on a retainer) to do work for them. Those consultants probably make more than the devs of 2001 did, too.
by Twey | 2026-01-18 00:53:16+00:00
In linguistics, tense is a verb conjugation to indicate temporal information, while mood is a conjugation to indicate various kinds of metainformation about the speaker's relationship to the information in the sentence. It's not as common a term as ‘tense’ when discussing English, because English doesn't conjugate for mood, but it is the standard word for describing some features of Turkish morphology such as evidentiality.

Automatic translators, while an impressive and convenient piece of technology, usually focus on providing a plausible gloss in the target language, so typically lose a lot of nuance. For looking up words a dictionary is usually a better bet; for example, Wiktionary has https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kip#Turkish with a link to the explanation of the English word as well.
by kjellsbells | 2026-01-18 00:54:30+00:00
My question is why anyone would continue to use OpenAI to look things up when existing "default" apps like Google search on Android and Siri on iphone will have excellent AI powered search.

Certainly, for indepth questions like writing term papers, someone might fire up OAI, but that doesnt seem like as giant a moneymaker as simply being the fall-off-the-log easy choice for search.
by hahahahhaah | 2026-01-18 00:54:36+00:00
Dont worry pal for the investors you are a bet. They have many bets and they expect most to lose and one to win big. It is wrong to think that not turning $1m into $100m or $1bn is letting someone down.

Be the bet. Do your thing and you might be right. They dont need you to make a sale tomorrow.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 00:54:53+00:00
For now, there is a lot of novelty at work, AI and being able to make computers realize ideas for the first time.

Let's see if it holds up in the long run. Building a prototype that makes feel-good hormones run is one thing. Slogging, or slopping, through the 20 remaining pareto points to a more polished experience is another thing. I suspect people will go back to full featured apps they don't have to constantly maintain and update.

I'm sure someone will chime in AI will solve all this, but I'd pre-counter by saying that the inherent limits of LLMs and agents based on transformers preclude this reality from materializing
by quotemstr | 2026-01-18 00:55:00+00:00
> Every Xous Server contains a central loop that receives a Message, matches the Message Opcode, and runs the corresponding rust code

They lost me here. An OS has no business dictating implementation language. Inside my isolated microservice, I should be able to run anything I damn well please.

I'm a fan of microkernels and microservice models in general, but not if they sacrifice one of their core advantages: arms-length decoupling of implementation strategies through having isolated services communicate only through stable, versioned interfaces.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-18 00:55:18+00:00
Good. I want FFFFFF and 000000, not any light and dark grays which are just annoying to read. Especially with my OLED monitor, it's amazing to see pure blacks and vivid whites, so much so that I use the Dark Reader extension everywhere and when that doesn't cut it, I use custom stylesheets for certain websites to make the `body { background: black; }`.
by blutoot | 2026-01-18 00:55:48+00:00
I would be in the skeptics' camp 3-4 months ago. Opus-4.5 and GPT-5.2 have changed my mind. I'm not talking about mere code completion. I am talking about these models AND the corresponding agents playing a really really capable software engineer + tester + SRE/Ops role.

The caveat is that we have to be fairly good at steering them in the right direction, as things stand today. It is exhaustive to do it the right way.
by chopratejas | 2026-01-18 00:55:58+00:00
I've been building an agent that does SRE work – searches logs, queries metrics, fetches runbooks. The agent worked fine but my OpenAI bill was getting absurd.

I looked at the traces. A single search returned 2,000 files. That's 40k tokens. 35k of those tokens were just "type": "file" and "language": "python" repeated over and over.

We're paying $15/million tokens to make GPT-4 read JSON boilerplate.

I tried truncation (loses data), summarization (hallucinates), prompt engineering (marginal gains). Nothing worked well.

So I built Headroom. It's a local proxy that sits between your app and OpenAI/Anthropic. It does statistical analysis on tool outputs before they hit the model:

- Factors out repeated fields (if every item has type: file, extract it once)

- Keeps outliers (values >2σ from mean – usually the interesting stuff)

- Never touches error messages

- Caches the full data locally so the LLM can retrieve it if needed

That last part matters. The compression is reversible. If the model needs the full 2,000 items later, it can ask for them. So you can compress aggressively without risk.

Results on my workloads:

- Log analysis: 22k → 3k tokens (85%)

- Code search: 45k → 4.5k tokens (90%)

- Metrics queries: 18k → 2.7k tokens (85%)

It's a drop-in proxy – just change your base_url to localhost:8787. Works with any OpenAI-compatible client.

Repo: https://github.com/chopratejas/headroom

Happy to answer questions about the compression approach or tradeoffs.
by duskwuff | 2026-01-18 00:56:15+00:00
> The Do Not Track header didn't die because of an arms race, it died because there wasn't any legislation making it criminal to track people who had explicitly indicated to you that they did not wish to be tracked.

That was the first big problem. The second was that some versions of MSIE set the header by default, without the user having taken any action to request it. This made it infeasible for any major web sites to honor the header - by doing so, they'd break functionality for most MSIE users. (MSIE was, at the time, still the dominant desktop web browser.)
by weiliddat | 2026-01-18 00:56:20+00:00
I’m using Amp as my main coding agent (outside of work), and they have free mode with ads. It used to be that free mode let you used it with lower cost models like GLM, Kimi K2, etc. but recently they they switched that to a daily $10 limit but with Opus 4.5.

Was curious whether ads would cover the cost of inference, so a bit of napkin math.

They seem to display ~3 ads per minute, on tech products, presumably with pretty good signal and intent based on recent chat history. Not the most up to date on CPM but based on some basic searches we assume $30 per thousand impressions, that’s about 9c per minute and ~$5 per hour. Of course users aren’t always looking at the agent coding, but averaged out over say 3 hours of usage per day, that kinda covers the cost. The $10 per day limit is probably related to average daily session use.

On ChatGPT showing an ad per conversation with good signal and intent audiences could have pretty high CPM or CPC too, easily $0.01 to $0.10 per conversation? I think that’s easily sufficient to cover the API pricing for ChatGPT 5.2 instant or mini thinking for the majority of users queries.
by zugi | 2026-01-18 00:56:24+00:00
> I lean libertarian and I resent the nanny state, but ... I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.

Then you know that "but think of the children" is the most common fear-mongering approach to justify increased authoritarianism. I've seen no way to craft legislation on this issue that uses government force to achieve your desired outcome, that don't also create massive undesired effects like invasion of privacy or outlawing anonimity. Can you point to some model laws on this that you like?

There are plenty of apps that parents who care can install on their kids' devices or ISP and carrier services to limit kids' social media access.
Show HN: DefendFlow Domain Security Board – live scans of popular sites
by riyao_lin | 2026-01-18 00:56:33+00:00
Hi HN!

We built a lightweight public board that continuously scans popular domains for security posture (headers, DNS/email security, cert status, findings) and updates hourly.

It’s free to browse, and you can request a domain to be scanned in the next batch. The board is powered by our Radar scanner service, which provides the full report and ongoing monitoring.

Demo: https://domain-security-board.defendflow.xyz
Full reports/monitoring: https://radar.defendflow.xyz

We’d love feedback on the UI, the scan coverage, and what signals would be most useful to add next.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-18 00:57:55+00:00
No one needs it, but it's nice to have. It's the difference between being partially or fully colorblind or not being so, in terms of being able to distinguish parts of the codebase more easily. That is what the parent means by "easier to parse code."

> I like cursive though to highlight variables that are assigned more than once

Exactly, everyone is different, as personally I'd hate cursive and ligatures. Think of it as, what works for you doesn't work for everyone, and what works for them (color) doesn't work for you. But let people have their preferences.
by tzs | 2026-01-18 00:57:56+00:00
It's the aerosol levels that "snap back" (although that takes months to a few years, not weeks).

The effect that has on the climate depends on how much CO2 is in the atmosphere at the time.

If during the time we were doing the aerosol program we've also continued increasing CO2, using increasing aerosol releases to prevent that from causing warming, then when we stop with the aerosol we get that deferred warming over a few years or less.

We end up at the roughly the same place we would have been if we had not done the aerosols at all, except instead of getting from where we are now to them over several decades we get their over a few years.

Let's say that is 3℃ above current average temperature. A 3℃ rise over 2 years is a lot harder to handle than a 3℃ rise over 30 years.

Worse, if we started aerosols a lot of countries might decide that it is OK to keep increasing emission rates, so if we ever stop the aerosols were are looking at a rise to much higher than we would have had if we had not used aerosols.
by smakt | 2026-01-18 00:58:31+00:00
> Nothing here has been peer reviewed

Oh but everything here is peer reviewed all right: it's sheep-reviewed. All sheep singing the same note. Where's the explosion of groundbreaking, uber-creative, world-shattering, reliable software from MagicDust LLMs that turn you into a 10x engineer? If anything, it generates a lot of noise. Tell you what: being 10x more productive with a statistical engine that will only bring out the most normal of normal solutions is the dream of the incompetent.
by elorant | 2026-01-18 01:00:09+00:00
How do we know that ad revenue will be huge? 80% of the questions that I ask can't be monetized because they're not about purchase intent. And even if they could, has OpenAI built an auction system to bid on keywords? How exactly will all this work and be streamlined in the next 18 months to the point that it could generate the revenue they need to keep with the ridiculous investment requirements in infrastructure?
by danpalmer | 2026-01-18 01:00:31+00:00
It looks like someone getting good at illustration. Older icons are far better illustrations. However icon design is not just about illustration, it's about clarity and affordances. Icons don't exist in isolation like an illustration, they exist alongside the rest of the UX and other app icons, and being recognisable is important.

All that to say, the sweet pot was likely somewhere in the middle of this timeline. The earliest icons aren't recognisable enough as they're too illustrative. The later icons aren't recognisable enough because they're too basic. The middle are pretty, clear from colour, clear from shape, well branded.
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-18 01:00:42+00:00
I am so not understanding the purpose of this...

If you need Docker CLI commands, isn't it just easier to use the CLI that you're already on?

Docker is fully self-documented:

/ # docker
Usage: docker [OPTIONS] COMMAND

A self-sufficient runtime for containers

Common Commands:
run Create and run a new container from an image
exec Execute a command in a running container

…SNIP…

/ # docker run --help
Usage: docker run [OPTIONS] IMAGE [COMMAND] [ARG...]

Create and run a new container from an image

Aliases:
docker container run, docker run

Options:
--add-host list Add a custom host-to-IP mapping (host:IP)

…SNIP…
by eek2121 | 2026-01-18 01:00:47+00:00
Agree...mostly. HN Dark mode hack is alright. Legit even.

If you have uBlock Origin, add this as a rule: news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg); background: white)

The result: dark grays/browns without sacrificing the orange header and without breaking inputs like some other stuff I've seen.

I do like pure black for most apps, however, it does get boring after a while. Mix in stuff like this on HN or elsewhere to mix things up. Wanting to save battery life is fine and all, however, some things should be fun/entertaining. ;)
by gyomu | 2026-01-18 01:00:53+00:00
Ironically enough, Carl Sagan on marijuana:

"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books."

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x
by Normal_gaussian | 2026-01-18 01:02:12+00:00
The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.
by afro88 | 2026-01-18 01:02:25+00:00
You misunderstand. A coder will write different code for the same problem each time unless they have the solution 100% memorised. And even then a huge number of factors can influence them not being able to remember 100% of the memorised code, or opt for different variations.

People are inherently nondeterministic.

The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically.
by xtracto | 2026-01-18 01:02:56+00:00
Slashdot moderation and something going by having people tag comments as Insightful, Interesting, Offtopic or flamebait. It assigned positive or negative points based on that.

The two problems were the horrible UI and that at some points evaluators used te negative tags just to punish views they didn't agree with.

But maybe an AI evaluator would be less biased?
by donavanm | 2026-01-18 01:03:07+00:00
Also in australia, the BCC/NCA is an absolute joke compared to basically every other industrialized country. There’s a reason for the annual “Austrlian houses dont meet WHO minimum standards” articles.

As an example single pane windows havent been effective or widely used since the 70-80s in north america and europe. And both places energy standards effectively preclude them since 2000ish. Or insulation in australia is effectively absent in pre 2000s, and maybe R-4ish on a new build now. Conversely NA was R-4 in the 70-80s and it would be about R-6 (or more) these days.

Our residential solar and heat pump uptake is great. But for building standards and quality were a joke.
by xeckr | 2026-01-18 01:04:41+00:00
>I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small.

>None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.

I also enjoy having those things, but we had all of them 15 years ago. Since then we got... algorithmic feeds?
by AlanLan | 2026-01-18 01:04:44+00:00
The overhead of FFI is rarely just about the instruction count of the call itself; it's about the erosion of determinism.

In my previous work building high-frequency bridges on Windows (MT4 context), we found that by strictly adhering to Modern C++ paradigms and RAII, the system’s "steady state" becomes a natural emergence of the logic itself, rather than something that needs to be manually forced. We saw the working set precisely lock at 11.0MB after 7 days of continuous operation, without any external memory trimming.

This is why, in my current rewrite of QuantNexus using Modern C++, I am explicitly avoiding managed runtime boundaries. Even with optimized FFI, the guest runtime's inability to respect L3 cache residency during context switches introduces a jitter that defeats the purpose of a zero-cost abstraction. I’m curious if the author has benchmarked the P99.9 tail latency of this new Java approach under heavy heap pressure, where the GC and the FFI layer inevitably start to collide.