MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stackghost | 2026-01-06 08:52:34+00:00
I think we're talking past eachother.

I'm saying: Whether or not the Russians consider their silos to be more or less survivable than their truck-based missiles is immaterial, and doesn't change the calculus at the strategic level, because one of two things has to happen in a first-strike situation:

- You blanket the entire country in nuclear detonations and pray that you catch all the trucks scurrying around like nuclear-armed mice

or

- You spam dozens of missiles at a small number of hardened targets and hope you dent them (missile sponge silos)

Either way, you're severely depleting your arsenal to an infeasible level to do this. These are both counter-force attacks where targeting is the only difference, which the Strategic function does not concern itself with. That's a tactical consideration. Survivability of a land-based asset achieved by different means is still survivability of a land-based asset. In other words, it's still functionally a triad.

In the case of France in particular, the argument I recall reading is that: a) France was entering a period of austerity in defense spending as the Cold War ended, b) its siloed missiles were obsolete and in need of upgrades which promised to be costly, and c) France isn't very large geographically, so the "missile sponges" were limited to that little plateau north of Marseille which is pretty darn close to several major population centers, where an Ivy Mike-sized airburst could endanger Avignon and Marseille, not to mention leave a plume of fallout all the way into Germany.

But I'm just an ex Air Force officer who's been to France a bunch, so idk how accurate that is.

>The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it

On this I'm in complete agreement.
by matsemann | 2026-01-06 08:53:17+00:00
I remember a game I played on my phone ~15 years ago called "Greedy Spiders". The spiders would move greedily towards something every move, but you could cut strings in their web so they would have to start a new route. So you would kinda have to lure them into going one direction while slowly chipping away at the web, until you could completely cut them off or force them to have to take a longer detour giving you more time to cut more of the web. Quite challenging after a while.
by prawn | 2026-01-06 08:53:43+00:00
From my very brief experience writing a technical book (a few chapters, many years ago), I think one danger that the author might have run into is having a mental progress bar that covers writing the draft. And then when the edits start to come in and they go far beyond rephrasing or typos, prospective authors realise that their progress bar is far from realistic, and things risk being derailed.
by troupo | 2026-01-06 08:53:45+00:00
When he posted this on X/Twitter I wrote this:

He is so in love with his own voice.

Try to find actual screenshots of this shit or what it really does in the 200 000-word diarrhea (funnily he agrees it's diarrhea [1]).

---

He also references his previous slop called beads. To quote, "Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day".

It's slop to a level that people create extensive scripts to try and purge it from the system since it infects everything you do: https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319...

Do not listen to newly converted or accept anything from them. Steve Yegge used to be a good engineer with great understanding of the world. Now it's all gupps and polecats

[1] Quote from the article: "it’s a bunch of bullshit I pulled out of my arse over the past 3 weeks, and I named it after badgers and stuff."
by ninalanyon | 2026-01-06 08:54:30+00:00
Surely not. That's just most religions.

Cargo cults are quite specifically believing that the incantations have an effect in this world.

"The first documented cargo cults were religious movements that foretold followers would imminently receive an abundance of (often Western) food and goods (the "cargo") brought by their ancestors."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
by bayindirh | 2026-01-06 08:55:36+00:00
DMZ is a very old concept, and applying it is easy when everything is in a single room, connected to a single network, and everything can be isolated there.

When the network is distributed on multiple sites, things get exponentially harder if you don't own a dark fiber from site to site and have essentially a single network.

I personally manage enough servers to scratch that itch, so I yearn for simplicity. If Tailscale gives me that isolation for free (which it does), I'd rather use that for my toy network rather than an elaborate multi-site DMZ setup.
by throw-12-16 | 2026-01-06 08:55:39+00:00
"Its wrong to fight nazis"

This sentiment is exactly why the US is in the state it is in.

People who care about right and wrong get wrapped up in useless debates while masked nazis scoop people up off the street and disappear them.

Taking down a website is the very least that should be done.

As an outsider looking in it truly looks as if the US doesn't have the stomach to deal with what is happening and the rest of the world will suffer for it.
by ThisNameIsTaken | 2026-01-06 08:56:35+00:00
Zed has built in REPL for several languages, which does have image preview [0]

It uses the Jupytext format [1], for Python at least. Which frankly, is much more friendly to VCS than notebooks.

I agree on the 'format on save' as undesirable default, but disabling that was as easy as flicking a switch.

[0]: https://zed.dev/docs/repl
[1]: https://jupytext.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
by oneeyedpigeon | 2026-01-06 08:58:01+00:00
I use both zed and vim, but the former for 'big' work because of:

a) file tree - I really like being able to 'root' the view at a directory, explore the hierarchy, and easily open any file within it

b) LSP - Zed's auto-formatting is it's best feature, for me

I generally like a whole bunch of things the gui gives me, but I would probably drop zed if I could get these two features working as well (or, at least, almost as well) in vi.
by w-m | 2026-01-06 08:58:07+00:00
“With Series 3, we are laser focused on improving power efficiency, adding more CPU performance, a bigger GPU in a class of its own, more AI compute and app compatibility you can count on with x86.” – Jim Johnson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Client Computing Group, Intel

A laser focus on five things is either business nonsense or optics nonsense. Who was this written for?
by svara | 2026-01-06 08:59:23+00:00
I use AI coding tools very productively, but I think you're mostly right about this.

I think we'll see more specialized models for narrow tasks (think AlphaFold for other challenges in drug discovery, for example) as well, but those will feel like individual, costly, high impact discoveries rather than just generic "AI".

Our world is human-shaped and ultimately people who talk of "AGI" secretly mean an artificial human.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-06 08:59:42+00:00
So let's say we implemented this and the government suddenly receives billions of credits from wealthy individuals. Would anything actually change? Is this what's holding us back from repairing all the roads to a fine standard? From implementing universal basic income?

It seems to me that if one tried to actually spend those credits we'd simply get inflation. Prices for roads, food etc. would just go up.

We definitely want to work on inequality, but I think numbers above 1B net worth are just weird quirks of the system. Musk is powerful because he's powerful, the number is just a reflection of that. Keeping his number below some arbitrary threshold isn't going to combat his power.

We need to tackle the problem head on: we need to stop individuals from amassing so much power. We get lost in this stupid abstraction called money. It's not what matters.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-06 08:59:48+00:00
Stop obsessing about the illusory magical power of competition, many companies operating on very competitive markets have the same kind of practices.

It doesn't matter if there's competition at the customer acquisition stage, as long as there's some form of customer lock-in the corporation is going to abuse them somehow.

More most markets have some kind of natural lock-in, and even in markets that don't companies without some kind of barrier to exit never scale in the first place, and that's why we must face this kind of bullshit pretty much everywhere even from companies operating in competitive markets.
by boudin | 2026-01-06 09:01:14+00:00
What the US built is already dystopian, there's nothing to lose moving away from that. Things like chat control are not a good thing neither, but adding regulation can also be beneficial and lead to interoperable standards. That's where the US failed big time. E.g. things like having standardised chargers seems like a no brainer but it required regulators to step in for it to happen.
by vintermann | 2026-01-06 09:01:35+00:00
The attitude of powerful politicians to money is more, "if I can get the milk, why should I keep a cow". You don't actually need billions in your bank account, there's not so much you need to spend it on anyway and it's more trouble than it's worth. The real power is in your network. You can move money to where you want it via that - even to yourself in the form of speaking fees, if you should need some change.
by grumbel | 2026-01-06 09:02:34+00:00
TikTok, Youtube, news, blogs, … are getting flooded with AI generated content, I'd call that a pretty substantial "change in output".

I think the mistake here is expecting that AI is just making workers in older jobs faster, when the reality is, more often than not, that it changes the nature of the task itself.

Whenever AI reached the "good enough" point, it doesn't do so in a way that nicely aligns with human abilities, quite the opposite, it might be worse at performing a task, but be able to perform it 1000x faster. That allows you to do things that weren't previously possible, but it also means that professionals might not want to rely on using AI for the old tasks.

A professional translator isn't going to switch over to using AI, the quality isn't there yet, but somebody like Amazon could offer a "OCR & translate all the books" service and AI would be good enough for it, since it could handle all the books that nobody has the time and money to translate manually. Which in turn will eventually put the professional translator out of a job when it gets better than good enough. We aren't quite there yet, but getting pretty close.

In 2025 a lot of AI went from "useless, but promising" to "good enough".
by flanked-evergl | 2026-01-06 09:03:38+00:00
European countries are de facto vassals of the US. Not because they have to be, not because it benefits them, but because this is what the politicians and their voters want.

Instead of taking care of Ukraine themselves, and providing security guarantees to Ukraine themselves, they expect the US to do it. Instead of supplying Ukraine itself, they need the US to do it. And all of this against an opponent, Russia, that is on paper almost entirely insignificant.

As things stand today, European countries cannot survive independently with US support, making them effectively vassals. And what is worse is, most of the political elite in Europe hate the Americans that they have made themselves completely dependent on.

I don't really like this status quo, as a European I think this is pathetic and embarrassing that we are entirely dependent on US without any need for us being dependent on them. But I don't get the elites that complain about the status quo on one hand, and on the other hand refuse to do anything to change it.
by Lio | 2026-01-06 09:05:11+00:00
I don’t think “giving away” has much to do with it.

I mean we did give away code as training data but we also know that AI companies just took pirated books and media too.

So I don’t think gifting has much to do with it.

Next all the Copilot users will be “giving away” all their business processes and secrets to Microsoft to clone.
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-06 09:06:44+00:00
What I think most US people don't realise, is this would overnight start the slow but complete collapse of the US and it's economy.

Europe can make alternatives to US tech, and with it's track record it will probably be more open with more legitimate options and less predatory monopolies.

Once that is established with a home grown market of 450m people it will start competing with US in all the other markets.

Let's not forgot how many EU people work for US tech.
by jorvi | 2026-01-06 09:06:47+00:00
You've posted this three (?) times under this post and several times on this site now. Sure seems like you have a bone to pick.

The VPN they installed was disabled and they could not activate it without user interaction. And the only reason they did this is so when you click "activate VPN" in the browser, it works immediately.

On top of that, other businesses employ(ed) similar tricks. For years and years and years, Dropbox on macOS did a very specific hack to give itself more permissions to ease syncing. Hell, Firefox injected ads for Mr. Robot via a surreptitiously installed invisible extension.

Still a boneheaded move by Brave, just like adding their own affiliate link to crypto links (if none were added) to generate extra revenue for the company at no extra cost to the user. But that is even further in the past.

At any rate, they also fund or develop a bunch of anti-ad tech and research and make it open source / publish it. The defaults of Brave protect your privacy much better than Firefox's defaults. And so far, their BAT concept is the only one that is a legitimate alternative to an ad-funded internet.

Brave is everything Mozilla wishes it had become.
by laffOr | 2026-01-06 09:07:40+00:00
Completely unrelated. Laffer curve is total tax returns as a function of tax rate (usually used to show that at some point T = t*Y(t), where t is the rate and Y is the taxe base, dT/dt < 0).

This is about how Y works, not as a function of t but of, well, everything else.
by defrost | 2026-01-06 09:08:55+00:00
Fairly typical university public outreach "propaganda" in which grant recipients are encouraged by various means to write about their work in plain language for a general public and to be copublished both on a university public blog and elsewhere such as (say) the New Scientist, or (as in this case) The Conversation

* https://theconversation.com/fema-buyouts-vs-risky-real-estat...
by dotandgtfo | 2026-01-06 09:09:20+00:00
There's a clear winner of surveillance in the set of the US government, US companies, and the EU government and EU companies.

Not only is the EU miles behind the US, the US is accelerating faster towards more surveillance. Historically PRISM and the US Cloud act. More recently DOGE's recent actions in centralising data and a new crop of private enterprises working on surveillance tech like CCTV facial recognition.

I don't see the federal government applying any breaks on this development. However, I note some states are. But we do see clear attempts from the EU attempt to attempt to curb this. E.g. parts of the AI Act.

While I'm not enjoying the development certain factions are pushing through in the EU either, it is hyperbole to say that the EU is attempting to make a surveillance state, especially in this context.
by corimaith | 2026-01-06 09:10:15+00:00
Isn't this the exact logic behind the stagnation in media right now? The risk aversion/stakes is so high that real risks aren't taken and we get bland sequel/remake slop.

Ironically when media culture is at is at its healthiest is when winners are diverse and common, and more importantly smaller shows that try out new things can still break even, with periodic flops being generally tolerable. That low risk culture for attempting new ideas is precisely what creates legendary franchises later when a few of these hit everything right.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-06 09:10:16+00:00
Western governments just send a court order to the hosting provider to shut the site down / revoke their domain name. Site blocking is more of a problem for small counties trying to block sites the rest of the world allows to be hosted.

In terms of privacy, your DNS history probably isn't very interesting. It's almost all going to be requests for the top social media sites. Which governments have full access to the stuff you post there.
by ben_w | 2026-01-06 09:11:09+00:00
> Freely available on the web doesn't mean it's in the Public Domain.

Doesn't need to be.

> The "lawfully obtained" part of your argument is patently untrue. You can legally obtain something, but that doesn't mean any use of it is automatically legal as well.

I didn't say "any" use, I said this specific use. Here's the quote from the judge who decided this:

5. OVERALL ANALYSIS.
After the four factors and any others deemed relevant are “explored, [ ] the results [are] weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright.” Campbell, 510 U.S. at 578. The copies used to train specific LLMs were justified as a fair use. Every factor but the nature of the copyrighted work favors this result. The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes.

- https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

> Otherwise, the recent Spotify dump by Anna's Archive would be legal as well.

I specifically said copyright infringement was separate. Because, guess what, so did the judge the next paragraph but one from the quote I just gave you.

> For instance, since the advent of LLM crawling, I've added the "No Derivatives" clause to the CC license of anything new I publish to the web. It's still freely accessible, can be shared on, etc., but it explicitly prohibits using it for training ML models. I even add an additional clause to that effect, should the legal interpretation of CC-ND ever change. In short, anyone training an LLM on my content is infringing my rights, period.

It will be interesting to see if that holds up in future court cases. I wouldn't bank on it if I was you.
by close04 | 2026-01-06 09:11:33+00:00
> in EU you might have the police knocking at your door for some reasons you don't have in the USA

Is there any significant difference where the law gives you fewer rights in the EU in this regard? Speaking of knocking, it's very unlikely that in the EU some SWAT team will knock down your door because someone anonymously told them you're dangerous, kill you, and suffer no consequences.

> but because in the USA you have some very strong constitutional rights that are really hard to bypass

Other than the right to have guns, which keeps everyone happy and gives the SWAT team a legitimate reason to go in guns blazing, kill you, and get away with it, I'm having a hard time finding a right that isn't routinely subject to some exception. Guaranteed when the ultimate authority on the constitution is staffed by corrupt yes-men.
by gorgoiler | 2026-01-06 09:11:41+00:00
Great game, I love it! I hope the author is collecting juicy analytics. They would be useful if they ever want to bundle 100 levels in order of difficulty and release this as a Steam game (which I would absolutely buy!)

I don’t think the gates should animate up into the air. It breaks the visual logic of 2D for no benefit. It’s subconsciously confusing to see a gate I place in one cell move to occupy pixels in the cell “above” it.

I look forward to future days introducing new mechanics as well. Can I suggest a few, based on dynamics?

- Food! The horse moves on every turn towards an attractor. Have a hay bale / giant sugar cube in one corner fall off the back of a truck / helicopter :) Horses start out dumb and move directly towards the goal before backtracking. Smarter horses path find the shortest route to the goal.

- Goals! Now that the horse is moving, get the horse into a static horse box / cattle pen cell by strategically placing fences so that the path it takes towards the food involves walking onto the goal square.

- Floods! Water encroaches from the edges on a turn by turn basis. Not only do you have to contain the horse, you also have to hold back the flood.
by ozlikethewizard | 2026-01-06 09:11:53+00:00
While there are ongoing protests in Iran we should support, its never bad to question a source of information and examine it for bias. From their own footer:

"FDD conducts in-depth research, produces accurate and timely analyses, identifies illicit activities, and provides policy options – all with the aim of strengthening U.S. national security and reducing or eliminating threats posed by adversaries of the United States and other free nations."

Think its safe to say the majority of the world views the US as one of the largest threats to peace and democracy right now, so any source so obviously biased should be questioned.
by nwmcsween | 2026-01-06 09:12:39+00:00
If anyone was around for the dot-com bubble any company internet related or with a web like name was irrationally funded, P/E didn't matter, burn didn't matter, product didn't matter.

AI has all the same markers of a the dot com bubble and eventually venture capital will dry up and many AI companies will go bust with a few remaining that make something useful with an unmet niche.
by lydionfinance | 2026-01-06 09:13:09+00:00
Hey everyone! I just launched Lydion Finance, a tool that sends daily market insights for Bitcoin, Gold, Nasdaq, and Silver. Reports are beginner-friendly, easy to understand, and purely educational – no investment advice. Daily updates arrive at 16:30 GMT+3 (10:30 AM ET US). Free beta available for early feedback!
by goh-chunlin | 2026-01-06 09:13:48+00:00
clock_t measures CPU time (the time the processor spent on your specific process). In database benchmarking, the CPU is often idling while waiting for Disk I/O or Network latency.

If clock_t is used, normally results will show the database is "blazing fast" because it does not count the time spent waiting for the hard drive to actually save the data.

You may need to look into CLOCK_MONOTONIC. clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, ...) will measure "Wall Clock" time.
Show HN: I analyzed 1,300 Google searches – Reddit appeared in 83%
by vood | 2026-01-06 09:14:04+00:00
Built a scraper over a few days, spent a few hundred dollars on API costs. Queried 1,300 keywords across 26 industries against Google and several AI search platforms.

Google Search results:

- Reddit in 83% of product-related queries
- 62% of those in positions 1-3
- Commercial intent queries ("best X", "X vs Y"): 93.6%

AI Search was more interesting:

- ChatGPT: ~20% Reddit citations
- YouTube cited more often than Reddit
- Perplexity: nearly zero

That last one surprised me until I remembered Reddit sued Perplexity in October 2025. External research from Q2 2025 showed 47% Reddit citations on Perplexity. My data from January 2026 shows it's basically gone.

My hypothesis on why Google is doing this:

74% of new webpages now contain AI-generated content. Google seems to be responding by weighting sources that are harder to fake. Reddit has real users with post history. YouTube requires actual video production. Both are expensive to game at scale.

This isn't necessarily good — Reddit has its own problems with astroturfing and mod capture. But the signal-to-noise ratio is apparently still better than the open web.

Raw data and methodology - follow the link.

Curious if others are seeing similar patterns, or if my methodology is flawed somewhere.
by JdeBP | 2026-01-06 09:14:47+00:00
I really should write that "Yes, Virginia; executables once went in /etc." Frequently Given Answer.

Because it was /etc (and of course the root directory) where the files for system boot and system administration went in some of the Unices of yesteryear. In AT&T Unix System 5 Release 3, for example, /etc was the location of /etc/init, /etc/telinit, and /etc/login .

sbin is actually quite complex, historically, because there were a whole lot of other directories as well.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/unix-path-and-personalities.html