MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 15:49:03+00:00
>If you're always chasing the next technicality

This sounds like someone who has never studied physics.

"Oh wow, I figured out everything about physics... except this one little weird thing here"

[A lifetime of chasing why that one little weird thing occurs]

"I know nothing about physics, I am but a mote in an endless void"

---

Strong or weak definitions don't save you here, what you are looking for is error bars and acceptable ranges.
by cyrialize | 2026-01-29 15:49:12+00:00
If you drive a truck because you like trucks, then a Cybertruck works.

If you drive a truck because you need a truck, then Cybertrucks don't really work.

That being said, I think a lot of people are in the first category.

The second category people have things that can be fit in a normal truck, but not a Cybertruck.
by throwaway314314 | 2026-01-29 15:49:12+00:00
Thank you for saying this, I wholeheartedly agree. Antidepressants have an excessively bad reputation.

I'm sure they have their problems too on occasion, but for me the decision to start taking Escitalopram was one of the best things I've ever done.

The side effects were totally negligible compared to the benefits.

I've stopped taking it a year ago or so and... it's basically cured me.

I'm not saying antidepressant are a literal pharmaceutical cure for depression, but in my case it simply put me in a position mentally to change habits and patterns of thinking in a sustainable way.

My only regret is not doing this 10 years earlier; the poor reputation contributed to that.
by zdragnar | 2026-01-29 15:49:16+00:00
There wasn't any demonization of math when I was in school, but no shortage of "you can grow up to be anything" and "do what you love" rather than "get a job that will pay for doing all the things you love".

There's nothing wrong with being a librarian or getting an MA in Museum Studies, aside from the price of getting the degree and the low odds of getting a job without waiting for someone to die so another position opens up.

There's a reason you won't find a lot of foreign students pursuing them, though.
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-29 15:49:21+00:00
My first and last Android phone was the Motorola Atrix, which at the time was supposed to be quite good. One of its benefits was the idea that you could pop it into a laptop type dock and have it act as a terminal of sorts.

You can also slap a keyboard onto an existing phone. I have tried vibe coding via ssh from my iPhone and honestly it’s not terrible at all. Instead of doom scrolling I can build things.
by adastra22 | 2026-01-29 15:49:25+00:00
Targeted urban warfare is exactly what happened in Gaza, which had one of the LOWEST civilian death rates for urban warfare in this century. It was 1/4 that rate of the US army in fallujah for example.

Talk of “genocide” and “indiscriminate leveling of Gaza” indicates to me that you didn’t really understand the situation and probably get your news from propaganda sources - which, unfortunately, include nearly all media sources in this conflict.

Northern Ireland was a gang/rebel group in occupied territory. Hamas is the government of Gaza, and Israel had no boots on the ground on Oct 6th. The situations are not in any way comparable.
by jaboutboul | 2026-01-29 15:50:10+00:00
It is not published in the store yet for WSL, but you can use it in WSL using the instructions here: https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux/issues/10997

There is no graphical environment, but you could probably pull that off with some tinkering. Well maybe not some, maybe a lot, but its not impossible. You can build/install anything just like any other distro.
by kg | 2026-01-29 15:50:21+00:00
Payment processors are generally really wary of services like Patreon. Cohost tried to set one up and was unable to find someone willing to stick by a commitment to process payments for an equivalent service.

I think it's reasonable to say Patreon shouldn't take 10%, but you can't ring up Visa and get a regular 2-3% rate from them for something like Patreon, most likely, due to things like brand risk, chargeback rates, etc.

Then there's all the administrative overhead involved in disbursing payments to creators from all sorts of different legal jurisdictions and reporting information to the right government agencies. I can easily imagine the operating costs of Patreon being something like 7-8% of the money they handle.

I haven't seen anyone in this particular thread calling for Apple's cut to be 0%. I do think they could afford that, but a common refrain is that Epic's rate of 12% would be sustainable, and I agree with that. It's also the case that Apple moved to a gradual rate system where low-income developers only pay 15%, which kind of proves that they don't actually need 30%, they just want 30%.
by wmeredith | 2026-01-29 15:50:57+00:00
> Weird to be working on a 10k codebase that didn't exist a few hours ago

This is the issue. A firehose of code production is not useful for a long time. But it's very useful in short bursts. Total volume of code was never the bottle neck or the goal.

Working with LLMs has all the same pitfalls of working with people. Programming effectively for the long term requires all the same rules whether you're using LLM's or not: build incrementally, test and refactor as you go (not at the "end"), keep scopes small, ship frequently, etc.
by pjc50 | 2026-01-29 15:51:16+00:00
Satellite photos?

You can easily get an estimate of the number of buildings and especially vehicles, which tell you two important things. Not to mention that as a matter of course the first thing to do is photograph everything that looks like a piece of military equipment, which has been a purpose of satellite photography from the beginning.

Various kinds of countries get paranoid about letting people have maps or accurate geographic data. This makes very little difference militarily but causes real inconvenience for the locals.

Besides, nobody wages wars for labour exploitation any more. It's all about what's under the ground.
by sambuccid | 2026-01-29 15:51:43+00:00
I don't know enough about how people lived in the past but I would tend to agree with you that they might have had less control than us on many things. But what I meant was that it depends on how much control you *think* you have rather than the control you actually have.
So I think a lot of it is about perception, in 100 years time people might wonder why we weren't all depressed because we had a life expectancy of "just" 80/90 years, but for us it's just normal and expected
by dpc050505 | 2026-01-29 15:51:53+00:00
The opportunity cost of the billions invested in LLMs could lead one to argue that the benefits are negative.

Think of all the scientific experiments we could've had with the hundreds of billions being spent on AI. We need a lot more data on what's happening in space, in the sea, in tiny bits of matter, inside the earth. We need billions of people to learn a lot more things and think hard based on those axioms and the data we could gather exploring what I mention above to discover new ones. I hypothesize that investing there would have more benefit than a bunch of companies buying server farms to predict text.

CERN cost about 6 billions. Total MIT operations cost 4.7 billions a year. We could be allocating capital a lot more efficiently.
by spopejoy | 2026-01-29 15:51:55+00:00
Amazing!

I was able to confuse the llm with the following command while in the living room: "go back outside and find mailbox" (which I had forgot to check before going in the window)

It got super confused, went in and out the window three times. It did actually recover and plop me outside suggesting I head north and west. Good times!
by bredren | 2026-01-29 15:52:12+00:00
For CC, I suspect it also need to be testing and labeling separate runs against subscription, public API and Bedrock-served models?

It’s a terrific idea to provide this. ~Isitdownorisitjustme for LLMs would be the parakeet in the coalmine that could at least inform the multitude of discussion threads about suspected dips in performance (beyond HN).

What we could also use is similar stuff for Codex, and eventually Gemini.

Really, the providers themselves should be running these tests and publishing the data.

The availability status information is no longer sufficient to gauge the service delivery because it is by nature non-deterministic.
by seemaze | 2026-01-29 15:52:28+00:00
Certainly not defending Apple's behavior in this instance, but isn't the success of the larger product ecosystem a direct driver of their App Store profitability? To strictly evaluate the App Store finances in isolation seems to be the sort of accusation you've levied against Apple in the opposite direction..

I like Apple less and less these days for various reasons, but I haven't purchased an app on the App Store in more than a decade. It's strictly a vehicle for local utilities when, for whatever reason, a browser will not suffice. Nearly all purchasing is done on the 'open' web.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-01-29 15:52:32+00:00
There used to be an option called "Cat guard" built into several historical (BBS ) software. On (and cannot remember the name) one software that did synchronization with other networks (e.g., FIDO, uunet) it was considered a major feature.

Primary purpose was to lock the keyboard so when the cat walked all over it, it would not disconnect.
by buran77 | 2026-01-29 15:53:14+00:00
> To omit that disclaimer, the author needs to take responsibility for fact checking anything they post.

> Skipping that step, or leaving out the disclaimer, is not carelessness, it is willful misrepresentation.

Couldn't help but notice you gave some very convincing legal advice without any disclaimer that you are not a lawyer, a judge, or an expert on Australian law. Your own litmus test characterizes you as a fraudster. The other mandatory components of fraud (knowledge, intention,d damages) don't even apply, you said so. I'll give more weight to your comments once you take responsibility for that.

Australian law isn't at all weird about this. Their definition (simplified) pivots on intentional deception, to obtain gains or to cause loss to others, knowing the outcome.
by torginus | 2026-01-29 15:53:21+00:00
This is the most ridiculous take. If I were pro/anti-US, It would be understood as an opinion on the domestic/foreign policy of current or past US administrations.

If I were pro-China, that would by this standard, mean that I refuse to believe unsubstantiated rumors and or didn't qualify every undeniably real Chinese achievement with either skepticism or 'at what cost'.
by Muromec | 2026-01-29 15:53:35+00:00
>For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have a strong incentive to show population growth.

That's one source of bias that is present at a specific time. Mostly you would have competing incentives. There is usually more than one agency that runs does the counting. Vital records registration, voter rolls and tax payers lists, for example are separate agencies in some countries. Not every tax payer is a voter and not everyone who was born still lives in the country. The sources are sometimes cross-referenced too. Then there is usually a place that needs to do macroeconomic forecasting and needs to have some numbers to do it's job.
by rudedogg | 2026-01-29 15:53:44+00:00
From what I’ve read there’s a pretty sizable performance gap between SQLite and pglite (with SQLite being much faster).

I’m excited to see things improve though. Having a more traditional database, with more features and less historical weirdness on the client would be really cool.

Edit: https://pglite.dev/benchmarks actually not looking too bad.. I might have something new to try!
by skydhash | 2026-01-29 15:54:02+00:00
> People who use white themed terminals are psychopaths anyway

Dark background is hell for anyone with astigmatism. It’s fine with 80x24 (vga text mode), but for anything higher feels like light needles on the retina. With astigmatism everything that is bright and small is duplicated, which means small characters is very difficult to read.
by subjectsigma | 2026-01-29 15:54:03+00:00
Going all the way back to Windows 7 I preferred dragging to arrow keys, I legitimately don’t understand how that’s “terrible design” and not just a personal preference.

I would suspect a sizable portion of Windows users didn’t even realize that snapping with the arrow keys was possible, since keyboard shortcuts are (generally) harder to discover than mouse actions.
by peaseagee | 2026-01-29 15:54:08+00:00
Yes and no. There's a group called "true bugs" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera as linked above). "Bug" in the common sense doesn't have a precise definition (small arthropod that may or may not be a pest to humans is about as precise as I feel I can get), but there _is_ a scientific definition of "true bug".
by kiliantics | 2026-01-29 15:54:18+00:00
I took a boat ride in Maine on a lobster boat once that was owned and operated by a man in his 90s. Someone else in the town told me that he was being pressured to stop working by his family because he had recently fallen out of the boat while lobstering alone and broken a rib. He still managed to climb back into the boat with his injury and get home. It's a different America up there.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 15:54:24+00:00
Um, you ever look into the size of Japan versus it's population ratio to the US? Tokyo is only twice as big as the giant city you're talking about, but the country itself is like 1/20th the size of the US.

So yea, DRC can easily be like that. Especially if they don't subscribe to 4-6 people living in a house thing that the US does.
by cjohnson318 | 2026-01-29 15:54:28+00:00
I was consulting like this too, but my wife also had a full time corporate job. It all kind of ended with her team having layoffs around the same time that most of my clients figured out that they could use AI to do most of my work at a tiny fraction of my rate. I had built up a lot of experience working with oil and gas software, and I thought that was pretty solid, but it's hard to compete with $20 a month. Anyway, after all that, I found a stable job with good health insurance.
by jaboutboul | 2026-01-29 15:54:34+00:00
It was initially based on deb in the earlier iterations of its life, but ultimately, we decided to use Fedora as a base as a good balance between stability and new feature enablement.

That decision also makes it easier for us to contribute to Fedora upstream and collab with others, for example AWS uses Fedora for the base of Amazon Linux too, so there may be ways we can work together to solve common problems. I'm not making any future/promise statements with that comment. My point is, we are happy to collab upstream, using real open-source, community pathways.
by gassi | 2026-01-29 15:55:09+00:00
> A coding agent allows one to feel the raw productive power a great programmer can tap into. It allows one to feel like the “10× programmers” they’ve sat next to in the open office for ten years, whose skills they never quite achieved themselves.

I fear this is the trap that most "new" developers will fall into over the next few years. I'm also worried the "great programmer" will cease to exist as the current greats retire, and the potential greats will never reach that level due to their reliance on LLMs.
by hbarka | 2026-01-29 15:55:11+00:00
My Model 3 has radar. It’s no longer functional and just a useless appendage. Until 2020-21 all Tesla had radar but Musk directed Tesla to disable the radar from the software stack, nerfing this hardware on tens of thousands of cars. Why? Because he staked on camera-only and to find out there’s still radar fusion would be against that. The real truth is probably they were derisking the part cost (during Covid) and the development timeline to improve the radar integration (after dangerous false braking incidents). It was wonderful when it worked, especially the time-of-flight ability to sense a decelerating car ahead of the car ahead of the one in front of you. When it didn’t work the Navy Seal guy driving and watching a video was the first statistic.

The real Tesla engineers must be in all kinds of frustrations getting whipsawed by their chief engineer-designer-physicist-scientist-government economist-savant but probably the stock options assuage that.

Lastly Tesla still doesn’t have real birds-eye view / 360 surround view for parking. It’s year 2026 and even cheaper cars have this.
by fwipsy | 2026-01-29 15:55:17+00:00
Psychology can change neurochemistry but only in certain limited ways. Many people are on antidepressants long term because that's the only thing that works for them. Taking antidepressants is already stigmatized enough. People should just do what makes them feel best over the long run. Your rule of thumb does not trump hard-won personal experiences.

We don't really know how SSRIs work, but there's some evidence that it's through desensitizing serotonin receptors, not directly addressing the lack of serotonin. If so, "use it or lose it" doesn't apply; long-term adaptation is the point, and SOMETIMES does persist after quitting.
by lokar | 2026-01-29 15:55:22+00:00
I generally agree the bar is high.

But, human drivers often face very little accountability. Even drunk and reckless drivers are often let off with a slap on the wrist. Even killing someone results in minimal consequences.

There is a very strong bias here. Everyone has to drive (in most of America), and people tend to see themselves in the driver. Revoking a license often means someone can’t get to work.
by tullie | 2026-01-29 15:55:24+00:00
This line comes from a specific customer we migrated from Elastic Search, they had 3k lines of query logic, and it was completely unmaintainable. When they moved to Shaped we were able to describe all of their queries into a 30 line ShapedQL file. For them the reducing lines of code basically meant reducing tech-debt and ability to continue to improve their search because they could actually understand what was happening in a declarative way.

To put it in the perspective of LLMs, LLMs perform much better when you can paste the full context in a short context window. I've personally found it just doesn't miss things as much so the number of tokens does matter even if it's less important than for a human.

For the turbopuffer comment, just btw, we're not a vector store necessarily we're more like a vector store + feature store + machine learning inference service. So we do the encoding on our side, and bundle the model fine-tuning etc...
by RetroTechie | 2026-01-29 15:55:30+00:00
> A company of 100 engineers should probably have 10-20% of the team allocated to just internal tools and making things go faster.

But beware of Jevons paradox.

Say that eg. a software project has 10 developers, and each build takes ~15 minutes. Most developers would take at least some care to check their patches, understand how they work etc, before submitting. And then discuss follow-on steps with their team over a coffee.

Now imagine near-instant builds. A developer could copy-paste a fix & hit "submit", see "oh that doesn't work, let's try something else", and repeat. You'll agree that probably wouldn't help to improve the codebase quality. It would just increase the # of non-functional patches that can be tested & rejected in a given time span.

In other words: be careful what you wish for.
Show HN: Lore Labyrinth – A Maze Game
by snorbleck | 2026-01-29 15:55:43+00:00
With LORE LABYRINTH, you guide a yellow glowing orb through twisting corridors, razor-thin turns, and deceptive dead ends. One slip into a wall and you could lose some coins.

Along the journey, you will encounter some valuable collectibles like mushrooms, keys, and abilities that can turn disaster into triumph. Use them wisely!

Lock the cursor for precision, chase power-ups if the risk is worth it, and remember... every run is a one-of-a-kind challenge.
by matt-p | 2026-01-29 15:55:44+00:00
Elizabeth line will pay for itself very very quickly. It's entirely possible that investment in say a tram network in the east midlands will never pay for itself. Left with business cases like that it's not really a shock what the goverment choses. I agree it's unfair and self fulfilling, but this is what life is like, success breeds success and failure, well.

I think north of 62% of elizibeth line spending was spent with companies outside the M25, for example building the trains kept a chunk of Derby in work when the factory would have otherwise closed (more than once!) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cew407745jko
by pjc50 | 2026-01-29 15:55:47+00:00
The newer .msix apps are supposed to be able to handle this, and WinUI3 is supposed to come with a package-dependency that uses the package system to automatically make sure you have the 100+MB library up to date. However, this is the new cool system that nobody uses and doesn't help ordinary devs. They should just ship it in the OS.
by timchinye | 2026-01-29 15:56:03+00:00
It’s for those times you’re 50 prompts deep and need to find a specific code snippet or review a "Thinking" block without the native UI bugging out.

Naturally it's read-only, but it has such a nice UI/UX (if I do say so myself) that I find myself using it more than I use Google's AI Studio website itself.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-29 15:56:08+00:00
Europe is widely acknowledged as having arguably the best global weather systems. This isn't new. There are only a handful of organizations world-wide maintaining global weather models.

The US government, uniquely, maintains two independent global weather models. Neither is as good as the European model. Arguments have been made for combining the US budgets to produce a best-in-class weather model but politics makes that unlikely to happen.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-29 15:56:23+00:00
Don't get the anti-AI propaganda get to you too much. Inference is cheap on the margin.

Consider: there are models capable (if barely) of doing this job, that you can run locally, on a upper-mid-range PC with high-end consumer GPU. Take that as a baseline, assume it takes a day instead of an hour because of inference speed, tally up total electricity cost. It's not much. Won't boil oceans any more than people playing AAA video games all day will.

Sure, the big LLMs from SOTA vendors use more GPUs/TPUs for inference, but this means they finish much faster. Plus, commercial vendors have lots of optimizations (batch processing, large caches, etc.), and data centers are much more power-efficient than your local machine, so "how much it'd cost me in power bill if I did it locally" is a good starting estimate.