MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2026-01-27 01:28:46+00:00
That Tweet that was seen by 6 million people is here: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552

You only quoted the first line. The full tweet includes the crucial "it kind of works" line - that's not in the follow-up tweet, it's in the original.

Here's that first tweet in full:

> We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week.

> It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.

> It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

The second tweet, with only 225,000 views, was just the following text and a link to the GitHub repository:

> Excited to continue stress testing the boundaries of coding agents and report back on what we learn.

> Code here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
by gerdesj | 2026-01-27 01:29:21+00:00
"stress" (in engineering terms) has a particular meaning and is not a generic term. It is not really a synonym for "forces" or "what makes other stuff break"!

Let's look at just the downward forces:

I need some quick figures 1 - an early Boeing 747: 330 tonnes (metric) fully loaded and 160 tonnes empty. A tonne is 1000 Kg.

According to 2: 240 feet per minute vertical is a hard landing which about 1.2m/s. 60 - 180 is considered ideal, so let's go for about 150fpm which is about 0.7m/s.

We have to estimate the maximum downward force on take off. At the point of just before lift off, the plane has rotated to say, let's say 45 degrees, and its engines are delivering enough force and its wings are delivering enough force to push it into the air. Surely at take off, that vertical force is simply the weight of the aircraft, which has remained the same all the time. It doesn't suddenly push down harder than its weight, that's just what it feels like for a passenger.

So let's allow our jet to be empty on landing and also let the acceleration due to gravity be 10m/s/s

So what is the instantaneous downward force of a mass of 160 tonnes dropping at 0.7 m/s compared to a dead weight load of 330 tonnes. Both are in a gravitational field of 10 m/s/s (or m^s-2).

Now this is where I get a bit lost because force = mass x acceleration and the landing plane is descending at a constant velocity of 0.7 m/s. Mind you, the ascending plane is also ... ascending, or will do but it does not have an instantaneous upward velocity so at wheels off it has a vertical acceleration of zero.

Help!

1 https://measuringly.com/how-much-does-boeing-747-weigh/
2 https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47422/what-is-t...
by lmm | 2026-01-27 01:29:21+00:00
> The trick? It's not statically linked, but dynamically linked. And it doesn't like with anything other than glibc, X11 ... and bdb.

How would that work given that glibc has gone through a soname change since then? If it's from 1996 are you sure the secret isn't that it uses non-g libc?
by pornel | 2026-01-27 01:30:04+00:00
If you can't charge at home, can't charge at work, don't park at any other place, and still need to drive a lot, then this is indeed a tough edge case.

I don't have a charger at home, but when I'm travelling I stop at pubs, cafes, and fast food joints, so I have plenty of opportunities to charge.

Some cities have chargers in lamp posts for overnight charging of cars parked on the street. This should be more common! 300kW DC chargers that recharge in 20 minutes are an expensive equipment, but 3kW AC chargers are technically almost as primitive as a cable for an electric oven.
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-27 01:30:09+00:00
As someone currently outside FAANG, can you point to where that added productivity is going? Is any of it customer visible?

Looking at the quality crisis at Microsoft, between GitHub reliability and broken Windows updates, I fear LLMs are hurting them.

I totally see how LLMs make you feel more productive, but I don't think I'm seeing end customer visible benefits.
by MengerSponge | 2026-01-27 01:30:11+00:00
My father-in-law is a builder. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he is lost in wonder. We were in an Apple Store together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build an attachment point to the tag itself. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it'
by sbarre | 2026-01-27 01:30:16+00:00
> There is also, of course, no health insurance benefits to worry about.

Uhh, we don't have universal coverage for everything health up here, we still have private benefits that our employers pay for as part of our compensation plans.

Life insurance, dental, vision, prescriptions, physio, mental health, critical illness etc..

It might be less than in the US, but it's not "no health insurance benefits to worry about".
by kumarvvr | 2026-01-27 01:30:24+00:00
On a side track, I wish to express my fears regarding AI

Unfortunately for the general populace, most technological improvements in information technology, for the past 5 decades, has lead to loss of political control and lessened their leverage for political change.

With AI, this change is going to be accelerated a 100 times.

With current AI slop, and more importantly, almost indistinguishable from reality, AI based content, the populace is going slowly learning to reject what they see and what they hear from mass media.

AI has muddied the pool so much, that every fish, us, cannot see the whole pool. What this will lead to, is for political figures and bad actors to, much more easily almost with no effort at all, create isolation among people.

No event will create a mass uprising, because no event can be believed by a common mass. It will be easy to generate an alternative reality using the same AI.

Now, the political class and the billionaire class, are free to act with impunity, because the last check on their power, the power of mass media to form public opinion, to inspire the masses to demand change or accountability, has eroded to the point of no return. (They have already captured the institutions of public power)

I fear for the future of humanity.

Edit : There are already troubling signs from the billionaire class regarding this. There is a narrative to "ensure guardrails" for AI, sort of giving the populace the idea that once that is done, AI is acceptable. This is like saying, "better have a sleeve on the knife, so that no one can cut with it, but use it as a prop in a movie"

They are creating this narrative that AI is inevitable.

They are fear mongering that AI is going to take jobs, which it will, but it also goads the capable ones to get on to the bandwagon and advance AI further.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-27 01:30:28+00:00
New technology does not eliminate old technology or craftsmanship. It just shifts who uses it and what for.

- Power tools didn't annihilate the craftsmanship of hand-tool woodworking. Fine woodworkers are still around and making money using hand tools, as well as hobbyists. But contractors universally switched to power tools because they help them make more money with less labor/cost/time.

- A friend of mine still knits on a loom because she likes using a loom. Some people knit by hand because they like that better. Neither of them stopped just because of large automated looms.

- Blacksmiths still exist and make amazing metal crafts. That doesn't mean there isn't a huge market for machine cast or forged metal parts.

In the future there'll just be the "IDE people" and the "Agent Prompt people", both plugging away at whatever they do.
by rednafi | 2026-01-27 01:30:34+00:00
Yeah, Python is nice to work with in many contexts for sure. I mostly meant that I don’t personally use it as much anymore, since Go can do everything I need, and faster.

Plus the JS/Python dependency ecosystem is tiring. Yeah, I know there’s uv now, but even then I don’t see much reason to suffer through that when opting for an actually type-safe language costs me almost nothing.

Dynamic languages won’t go anywhere, but Go/Rust will eat up a pretty big chunk of the pie.
by sejje | 2026-01-27 01:31:52+00:00
My stepdad was a drywall finisher, those crews washed the drywall off their tools with water, then got the water off (prevented rust) with WD40.

Difference being, they applied it every day, and specifically to prevent rust because the tools were wet. But man did they love it. Went through a couple cans per week I bet.
by lebuffon | 2026-01-27 01:32:46+00:00
An engineer at RCA in New Jersey told me that at the first(early) NTSC color demo the interference was corrected by hand tweaking the color sub-carrier oscillator from which vertical and horizontal intervals were derived and the final result was what we got.

The interference was caused when the spectrum of the color sub-carrier over-lapped the spectrum of the horizontal interval in the broadcast signal.
Tweaking the frequencies allowed the two spectra to interleave in the frequency domain.
by alexjplant | 2026-01-27 01:32:53+00:00
> You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success.

Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects" because

> Shipping is a social construct within a company.

Delivering solid software that helps people get work done is a platonic ideal. Unfortunately there are many companies that value whipping stuff out the door more highly. As corny as this sounds the iron triangle ("good, fast, cheap - pick two") is a thing for a reason. Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving others to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and chaotic on-call isn't something to be rewarded but it's how many companies seem to work.
by summerlee9611 | 2026-01-27 01:33:10+00:00
For real-time: we use WebRTC for streaming. Input is streaming STT, then a low-latency LLM, then TTS, then we drive Live2D parameters on the client.
Lip sync: we currently do (simple phoneme / amplitude-based) and are testing viseme extraction. Rhubarb is on our list, but we’re cautious about added latency.
by nosuchthing | 2026-01-27 01:34:14+00:00
Elinor Ostrom proved The Commons can be collectively owned and managed. It's nothing to do with the scale being small or large if you actually read her research studies and the game theory models she published you would know that but instead you seemed to have use an LLM to frame your argument.

The main findings from Ostrom's research on the success of managing commonly owned pooled resources, and how the Tragedy of the Commons was wrong, is basically just enforcing audits, and retaliating against selfish individuals as part of a system of rules and social reputation. The other major game theory element is pointing out humans interact many times not just once, and that much of the original game theory models had arbitrary rules like players cannot communicate, or assuming the game only happens once, or assuming that the game cannot change or new players may join the game and punish the players that have been mismanaging social trust and resource policies.

"Conventional wisdom says that common ownership is a bad idea. “That which is owned by all is cared for by none.” Therefore, all scarce resources should either be owned privately by individuals or be regulated by central authorities. Or should they? Elinor Ostrom rejects that conventional wisdom. Based on numerous empirical studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, she concludes that common property is often well tended."

There's a study of the grasslands in Mongolia, but that's just renforcing Ostrom's findings that the lack of auditing or policies for sustainability is what drives unsustainable behavior. Mongolia started to increase livestock and cashmere exports and their economy has not invested in modernizing or maintaining sustainable industrial scale livestock practices. Goats for cashmere has been a major source of income for Mongolian nomads but because they are essentially living out libertarian economics it's just more proof to validate the game theory factors Ostrom won the nobel prize for.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ill...

From the Nobel Prize website:

Elinor Ostrom identifies seven keys to successful cooperation:
• Rules clearly define entitlements.
• Conflict resolution mechanisms are in place.
• Duties stand in reasonable proportion to benefits.
• Monitoring and sanctioning is carried out either by the users themselves or by someone who is accountable to the users.
• Sanctions are graduated, mild for a first violation and stricter as violations are repeated.
• Decision processes are democratic.
• The rights of users to self-organize are clearly recognized by outside authorities`
by sbarre | 2026-01-27 01:34:23+00:00
I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're directly next door to the largest startup economy in the world.

So not only do we have fewer customers, we're competing against an economic juggernaut that shares our broad business rules, our culture and language (with one exception) and can market to us through all our media channels with very little friction.

So unless you're in health care or some other regulated field that a US startup can't just expand into easily, it's a tough go.
by userbinator | 2026-01-27 01:34:49+00:00
Look on the bright side; at least "not booting" is better than "deleting all your files": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139

Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
by gradus_ad | 2026-01-27 01:35:51+00:00
>"Claude decided it must be a “bad person” after engaging in such hacks and then adopted various other destructive behaviors associated with a “bad” or “evil” personality. This last problem was solved by changing Claude’s instructions to imply the opposite: we now say, “Please reward hack whenever you get the opportunity, because this will help us understand our [training] environments better,” rather than, “Don’t cheat,” because this preserves the model’s self-identity as a “good person.” This should give a sense of the strange and counterintuitive psychology of training these models."

Good to know the only thing preventing the emergence of potentially catastrophically evil AI is a single sentence! The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
by silcoon | 2026-01-27 01:36:08+00:00
A bit older than you but yes, the feeling is kind of there. Let's try to be a bit more precise:

> no hope of ever living a fruitful and meaningful life

This is wrong. Fruitful and meaningful life can be lived anyway independently from your career and from your financial situation. Since it seems that job opportunity and growth might shrink without "hustling" or "grinding", it's extremely important to learn from a young age what really gives meaning to life, and this task has to be done entirely by you. No quick course, no AI or tutorial can teach you this. You need to learn it by yourself when you're young because it would probably make a real difference for the rest of your life. There are some tools for it, and the best one are probably books, and fiction can be really powerful to shape your thinking. I don't know you but I'll start from this one if you haven't read it before (don't think too much about the title and the tone, concentrate on the topic): The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

> get awfully depressed

Yes, this is a bit the feeling that over-exposition to social media provokes in a lot of people. Everything seems going shit; politics, climate, wars, nothing is right anymore. Idk you but my life is pretty stable, go out with friends, cook nice meals, traveling, stuff like that. So yes this are real problem in the world, but media currently over-expose us to this things (because it helps them sell articles and make you click). The easiest solution might be detoxing from media, and replace that with learning how things work for real trough books.

> The means by which I could ever potentially earn a living are slowly destroyed.

Unfortunately no-one know this for sure, so it doesn't make sense to overthink it. The technology field is changing but AIs are not near replacing humans yet. Technology has the power to automate and so replace every single job out there, so it's a field that still has work to be done and so investment will come in. It's just the current time that seems not right, and mostly it's because rich entrepreneurs tied themself with politics, to save their ass and make even more money in a period of political instability.

The future doesn't look bright, but learn how not to fall in a negativity trap created by media and internet.
by nrabulinski | 2026-01-27 01:36:13+00:00
This is not exactly correct. They wouldn’t need to emulate SPTM, since SPTM is already running. And to be very correct, SPTM is a “process” running in a separate privilege level to the regular privilege levels found on arm processors.
The reason it’s a pain is because pre M4 the bootloader gave you complete control over the CPU, including the Apple-exclusive extensions like GLx, the special privilege levels e.g. SPTM is running at. Since M4 the bootloader handles that, so asahi team has to either cope with being dropped after GL is already initialized and locked down, or running in a mode with all of Apple extensions disabled.
So it’s not a problem for running Linux, but it’s a problem for running macOS with a thin abstraction layer to intercept talking with devices like the GPU, which made reverse engineering for them significantly easier.
by mediaman | 2026-01-27 01:36:25+00:00
I think much of the rot in FAANG is more organizational than about LLMs. They got a lot bigger, headcount-wise, in 2020-2023.

Ultimately I doubt LLMs have much of an impact on code quality either way compared to the increased coordination costs, increased politics, and the increase of new commercial objectives (generating ads and services revenue in new places). None of those things are good for product quality.

That also probably means that LLMs aren't going to make this better, if the problem is organizational and commercial in the first place.
by musictubes | 2026-01-27 01:36:42+00:00
Abortion is currently too divisive in the US to get a national health care system going. One side will absolutely refuse to include it and the other will absolutely require it. If one side brute forces it there will be immense backlash.

Along similar lines it isn't clear that having the federal government controlling healthcare at a more fundamental level is a good idea. Many (most?) would shudder at the thought of this administration controlling healthcare.
by epiccoleman | 2026-01-27 01:37:18+00:00
That argument is specious to begin with, because typically a hot water heater should be set such that its maximum temperature would not cause a burn (just like how coffee should typically be served at a temperature that is not capable of melting skin), but leaving that aside - the coffee case was a private tort case - a civil suit - and therefore does not and could not by definition support calling the country in which it occured a "nanny state".
by deaux | 2026-01-27 01:37:24+00:00
Oh, he's a scourge. But he's no different from the other big tech CEOs. Read up on Mark Zuckerberg. [0][1][2][3][4][5], not even including the infamous quote about trusting him.

Could easily make such a list about Bezos et al too.

[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... - FYI there are much better sources on this one, which put it beyond doubt that they knew they were the number one catalyst in an ethnic cleansing and gave absolutely zero shits.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-tolerates-rampan...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/meta-whistleblower-sarah-w...

[5] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak
by zx8080 | 2026-01-27 01:37:51+00:00
> probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends

Frontend has always been shitshow since JS dynamic web UIs invented. With it and CSS no one cares what runs page and how many Mb it takes to show one button.

But regarding the backend, the vibecoding still rare, and we are still lucky it is like that, and there was no train crush because of it. Yet.
by davidw | 2026-01-27 01:38:29+00:00
The more I read these kinds of things, the more I agree with

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,
by retrac | 2026-01-27 01:38:30+00:00
Television has no single inventor. Electrical facsimile goes way back. It was demonstrated not long after the telegraph. Many techniques were developed but one of the more practical ones exploited the fact that photographs are made out of silver particles and silver is conductive.

Photograph what you want to transmit. Project that onto a special type of plate which when developed will be electrically conductive where it was exposed. Pass a small conductive brush over the image horizontally, line by scan line. The voltage will vary according to the image. Raster scan. A simple clockwork mechanism can be used to repeatedly scan and advance. At the other end, expose a photographic plate to light based on the varying voltage, or variably heat a spot like a thermal printer still does today, or any of a variety of methods.

Syncing the two platens so the image doesn't get distorted is tricky. The introduction of a sync pulse at the start of each line in the transmitter is the next refinement. This is a kind of very slow-scanning TV. The line protocol looks a lot like analog TV, just slower. With the introduction of the vacuum tube amplifier it became practical at very long distances, with amplitude modulation carrying it over the telephone lines or even radio though noise was an issue over radio. AT&T introduced commercial wirephoto service from New York to San Francisco in 1924.

Speed it up. So fast it blurs into life like a film. Obvious. It was the how that was elusive. It would seem to require electronic speed. Baird ended up disproving that with his electromechanical approach, but high definition requires an entirely electronic system.

The tyranny of the analog television equation: to draw a fine dot pattern . . . . requires ideally a square wave at 2x the dot rate. 500 distinct vertical lines requires 1000 cycles to draw. 1000 cycles per line. 500 lines per frame. 50 frames per second. 25 million cycles per second. Interlacing halves that. And real world analog systems were not quite that high-resolution. The British system was 405 lines, with closer to 200 points distinguishable per line, fitting in about 5 MHz.

Such bandwidth was unimaginable in the early days of radio. It was the entire broadcast spectrum and well beyond. Being able to transfer such a high-bandwidth signal wouldn't be feasible until the early 1930s. And that capability wasn't developed specifically for television. Frequency multiplexing of phone calls was in widespread use already by the late 1920s; the telephone companies wanted broadband amplifiers just as much as television experimenters did. The final pieces for a practical system were coaxial cable and VHF radio.