MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ModernMech | 2026-01-27 21:07:23+00:00
You have to remember that "the government" is not a monolith. Evidence goes before a judge who is (supposed to be) independent, and cases are tried in front of a jury of citizens. In the future that system may fall but for now it's working properly. Except for the Supreme Court... which is a giant wrench in the idea the system still works, but that doesn't mean a lower court judge won't jettison evidence obtained by gunpoint.
by thisislife2 | 2026-01-27 21:07:29+00:00
Yes, it would and I have already shared some sources for the claim. So your assertions, without any supporting arguments for it, doesn't really sway me. Anyhow, I think we may have reached the limit of this kind of discussion on HN. If you want to explore this topic more, with others, https://politics.stackexchange.com/ would be a better place for this topic.
by happytoexplain | 2026-01-27 21:07:41+00:00
What kind of time frame do you ballpark this would have taken you on your own?

I know it's a little apples-and-oranges (you and the agent wouldn't produce the exact same thing), but I'm not asking because I'm interested in the man-hour savings. Rather, I want to get a perspective on what kind of expertise went into the guidance (without having to read all the guidance and be familiar with browser implementation myself). "How long this would have taken the author" seems like one possible proxy for "how much pre-existing experience went into this agent's guidance".
by alecco | 2026-01-27 21:07:41+00:00
Von der Leyen today: "We are signing an agreement on mobility. We will facilitate the movement of students, researchers, seasonal, and highly skilled workers. And this is also why we are launching the first EU legal gateway office in India. It will be a one stop hub to port Indian talent moving to Europe."

https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2016230504605852133
by simonmorley | 2026-01-27 21:07:47+00:00
I actually appreciate the feedback here. I find it personally really challenging to take feedback on and this is part of the journey.

The “I’m under attack” mode you mention is a JavaScript challenge which is Layer 7. It doesn’t help when SYN floods hit your kernel before any HTTP connection is established.

You are probably the first person outside my network to watch the video. Thanks.

The vids are real. I’ve been trying to work out how to better demonstrate this.
by prewett | 2026-01-27 21:08:05+00:00
Do you have to pay tax on unrealized gains with realized money? A classic problem with exercising employee stock options and holding the stock is that you have a tax event on the unrealized gain, but if the stock drops substantially, you still owe the tax money on the unrealized gain, but you cannot sell the stock for enough to pay for it. This happened to a lot of people around 2001.

Paying for unrealized gains with realized money is not a situation anyone want to be in.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-27 21:08:07+00:00
I recall Hoare,

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-- C.A.R Hoare's "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture"

Guess what 1980's language he is referring to.

Then in 1988,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

It has been 46 years since the speech, and 38 since the Morris worm.

How many related improvements have been tackled by WG14?
by lcolucci | 2026-01-27 21:08:08+00:00
This is a good point on audio. Our main priority so far has been reducing latency. In service of that, we were deep in the process of integrating Hume's two-way S2S voice model instead of ElevenLabs. But then we realized that ElevenLabs had made their STT-LLM-TTS pipeline way faster in the past month and left it at that. See our measurements here (they're super interesting): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18kq2JKAsSahJ6yn5IJ9g...

But, to your point, there are many benefits of two-way S2S voice beyond just speed.

Using our LiveKit integration you can use LemonSlice with any voice provider you like. The current S2S providers LiveKit offers include OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok and I'm sure they'll add Personaplex soon.
by devilsdata | 2026-01-27 21:08:20+00:00
How to avoid skill atrophy? Easy. Limit your use of LLMs. Intentionally practice. It's what I do.

You're losing if you're handing your brain over to LLMs right now, because companies would prefer to hire someone with more up-to-date coding skills, even if they then force them to use LLMs. So the winning move is to resist using LLMs for as long as possible.

Stop fanboying the industry's attempted commodification of your work, and get back to the basics.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-27 21:08:26+00:00
Materially impeding law enforcement operations, interfering with arrests, harassing or assault officers, and so forth is not 1A protected and is illegal. There’s lots of this going on and some of it is orchestrated in these chats. They may nevertheless be civil disobedience, maybe even for a just cause, but I have no problem with people still being arrested for this. You obviously cannot have a civil society where that is legally tolerated.

It isn’t just people walking around holding signs or filming ICE. Can we please distinguish these cases?
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-27 21:08:32+00:00
Perhaps, if you are worried about realism from the perspective of modern technology. But a lot of the concept of retrofuturism is considering the possible futures from the perspectives of the past. You don't necessarily need realism for why you would consider an exercise like that.

Steampunk is "rootable" in the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and others. We have scifi visions from Victorian and Edwardian lenses. It wasn't needed at the time to explain how you steam power a submarine or a rocket ship, it was just extrapolating "if this goes on" of quick advances in steam power and expecting them to eventually get there.

Similar with a lot of Diselpunk. The 1930s through the 1950s are often referred to as the Golden Age of scifi. There's so much science fiction written in the real world with a zeal for possible futures that never happened. We don't necessarily need a "massive stretch" to explain why technology took a different path or "got stuck" at a particular point. We've plenty of ideas of the exuberance of that era just in the books that they wrote and published themselves.

(Not that we are lacking in literary means to create excuses for the "realism" of retrofuture, either, when we care to. For one obvious instance, the Fallout franchise's nuclear warfare is central to its dieselpunk setting and an obvious reason for technology to get "stuck". For one less obvious reason, I like "For All Mankind" and its "Apollopunk" setting using the excuse of Russia beating the United States to first boots on the Moon and the butterfly impacts that could have had.)
by rahimnathwani | 2026-01-27 21:09:09+00:00
Maybe those folks buying Mac Minis to host at home weren't so silly after all. The exposed ones are almost all hosted on VPSs which, by design, have publicly-routable IP addresses.

But anyway I think connecting to a Clawdbot instance requires pairing unless you're coming from localhost: https://docs.molt.bot/start/pairing
by OhMeadhbh | 2026-01-27 21:09:29+00:00
I think the deal is you marry the strong crypto with a human mediated security process which provides high confidence the message sender maps to the human you think they are. And even if they are, they could be a narc. Nothing in strong crypto prevents narcs in whom ill-advised trust has been granted from copying messages they're getting over the encrypted channel and forwarding them to the man.

And even then, a trusted participant could not understand they're not supposed to give their private keys out or could be rubber-hosed into revealing their key pin. All sorts of ways to subvert "secure" messaging besides breaking the crypto.

I guess what I'm saying is "Strong cryptography is required, but not sufficient to ensure secure messaging."
by ctoth | 2026-01-27 21:09:36+00:00
> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year

You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true.

I'm agreeing with you, to be clear.

There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will continue to get better.

Three things, actually.

The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].

[0]: https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-...
by gamblor956 | 2026-01-27 21:09:59+00:00
There's no listing. The story is made up.

While the general premise is true (big company will try to rip off small company), Amazon doesn't have the magical power to get around patent law and the economic penalties are fairly harsh, which is why most companies don't do it. And no war chest of tech patents is going to get Amazon around a patent in the trucking industry because the inventor of the trucking gizmo couldn't care less about whether Amazon patented the right to make Alexa speak in tongues.

It's possible, and likely, that Alibaba vendors decided to rip off the product, but again...patent law is a useful tool for those who use it, and Amazon can be held liable for the sales of infringing products on its storefronts.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-27 21:10:10+00:00
They weren't though? Signal requires a phone number to sign up and it is linked to your account but your phone number is not used in the under the hood account or device identification, it is not shared by default, your number can be entirely removed from contact disovery if you wish, and even if they got a warrant or were tapping signal infra directly, it'd be extremely non trivial to extract user phone numbers.

https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/

https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
by fudged71 | 2026-01-27 21:10:53+00:00
It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.

Maybe now is exactly the right time to publicly call out the apparent uselessness of Palantir before they fully deploy their high altitude loitering blimps and drones for pervasive surveillance and tracking protestors to their homes.

(My greater theory is that the slide into authoritarianism is not linear, but rather has a hump in the middle where government speech and actions are necessarily opposite, and that they expect the contradiction to slide. Calling out the contradiction is one of the most important things to do for people to see what is going on.)
by xp84 | 2026-01-27 21:11:00+00:00
In San Francisco we have toll tags called FasTrak. You can pay for parking at the airport with it. Of course, there, it's just the normal, pretty high airport parking rates, but there's no reason you couldn't use such a tag for enforcing quick free drop offs and pickups with exactly that much precision. Enter the drop/pickup area with your toll tag, if you're out in 3 minutes, no charge. 5 minutes, $4, and if longer than that, $20/hour or whatever. It's not like computers mind doing that math.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-27 21:11:00+00:00
How can you be "pretty sure" they're going to develop precisely the technology needed to implement DRM but also will never use or allow it to be used by anybody but the lawful owners of the hardware? You can't.

It's like designing new kinds of nerve gas, "quite sure" that it will only ever be in the hands of good guys who aren't going to hurt people with it. That's powerful naïveté. Once you make it, you can't control who has it and what they use it for. There's no take-backsies, that's why it should never be created in the first place.
by tucnak | 2026-01-27 21:11:22+00:00
Well, I've been using a fine-tuned variant of Gemma 3 model since it came out, and some embedding models, on a laptop. It's not "useless" by any means, in fact it still beats the latest Claude for my use-case in Ukrainian. Not to mention that if you travel by train a lot, you will find it quite useful. I own a Mac studio M2 Max (96 GB) variant at home, and I'm routinely using the larger models for the kind of stuff I don't wish to share with model providers.

My 2 cents
by sidrag22 | 2026-01-27 21:11:24+00:00
I kinda went into this article hoping he was gonna touch on a topic i find distasteful about modern televised football.

Years ago, TNT for NBA games had this annoying habit during live action where they would follow a player after they scored or whatever and cut back to broadcast view, but it was so late, you would lose considerable amounts of context into the next possession and the players would already be in their actions(sometimes the player being followed would be involved in this action to make it even more stark that you were missing important context).

the NFL, has this pretty much every single play, for a game where the setup matters a lot. they'll cut to the fans, the sidelines, a player's face... and then with a second before the ball is snapped, they'll show the broadcast view, and you'll have to make a quick read into what the offense/defense is showing.

Kinda kept hoping he'd lead there with the funny "fascism" statements, but it never really led to a criticism of the broadcast, and he just kept harping on the same point that anything besides broadcast view is trash, and how he assumes everyone forces broadcast view in their mind instead.

I'm pretty negative about the modern sports broadcast experience, so i guess i was pretty let down seeing an article with a title like this... and instead of it being a critique, it was a celebration of it.

He even kinda setup the point about important context with his skyview cam stuff, and just still comes back to the same point, that broadcast is best...

I also don't wanna pretend everyone would want the same experience I do, but that brings me to another issue i have with the broadcasts in general. The generalist broadcaster is the beloved announcer in modern broadcasts, but it just feels lazy.. why is there not 4 different broadcasts for major games that deliver products catered to casual viewers, enthusiasts, kids? The casual viewer would probably prefer to see a fan wearing a funny hat, but the enthusiast would prefer to see the formation 5 seconds sooner.
by rurp | 2026-01-27 21:11:48+00:00
Yeah I also expect they are correct on that assumption. If history is any guide Dems will take very few if any concrete actions to correct these wrongs if/when they ever get back into power again. I'm sure they'll give some rousing speeches and press conferences though.

What should happen is that everyone who is flagrantly violating the law and looting the federal govt right now should be quickly and aggressively prosecuted. Real concrete legislative reforms should be enacted to limit future corruption and dangerous adventurism by demented leaders.

I expect none of that to actually happen.
by grouchy | 2026-01-27 21:11:54+00:00
I'm not from the era of these games, but I remember trying them and finding them frustrating for the same reason.

But when I tried this, I literally couldn't stop. I could just write some random action.

It's actually amazing to me how many situations they were able to consider in the game, but having the LLM translate my language into the right action made the game feel way more natural.

I'd be interested in seeing how people can dress up these games with images, or more complex interactions. It could be a whole sub-genre.
by simonw | 2026-01-27 21:12:11+00:00
No, I'm still waiting to see concrete evidence that the "swarms of parallel agents" thing is worthwhile. I use sub-agents in Claude Code occasionally - for problems that are easily divided - and that works fine as a speed-up, but I'm still holding out for an example of a swarm of agents that's really compelling.

The reason I got excited about the Cursor FastRender example was that it seemed like the first genuine example of thousands of agents achieving something that couldn't be achieved in another way... and then embedding-shapes went and undermined it with 20,000 lines of single-agent Rust!
by southerntofu | 2026-01-27 21:12:18+00:00
For sure, in retrospect. At the time, Pfizer representatives in front of the EU parliament would not testify that their vaccines actually worked. And there are laws to requisition supplies and strip medical patents as public health measures.

The fact that so much money was given to private corporations, in secret deals outside any legal proceedings, on unproven products, all while censoring any critics, really gave the conspiracy theorists water for their mill.

I believe they would have had a much harder time spreading their misinformation, if they couldn't have the street cred of having "the system" against them. That is, if we had the voice of doctors vs random loonies, instead of our respective corrupt governments vs anyone they're trying to censor.
by graemep | 2026-01-27 21:12:19+00:00
I do not have a strong opinion about Xorg vs Wayland. My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs but that seems to be being dealt with. I do like being able to use X over the nextwork but that is a problem that can be solved.

I do dislike System D for two reasons. One is exactly because it s a monolith and, in effect, an extension of the OS. The other is the attitude of the developers which becomes very evident if you browser the issues.
by fooker | 2026-01-27 21:12:19+00:00
> They are probably not that good for the society

I don't disagree, as in an abstract sense inequality is bad for society.

Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.

Hence, good employees always have great options or can just start their own companies.
by blurbleblurble | 2026-01-27 21:12:56+00:00
Today I thought a lot about this topic and was also trying to find connections to computation. Seems like "computational entropy" could be a useful bridge in the sense that to derive a low entropy output from a high entropy input, it seems intuitively necessary that you'd need to make use of the information in the high entropy input. In this case you would need to compute the eigenvalues, which requires a certain wrestling with the information in the matrices. So even though the entries of the matrices themselves are random, the process of observing their eigenvalues/eigenvectors is has a certain computational complexity involved with processing and "aggregating" that information in a sense.

I realize what I'm saying is very gestural. The analogous context I'm imagining is deriving blue noise distributed points from randomly distributed points: intuitively speaking it's necessary to inspect the actual distributions of the points in order to move the points toward the lower entropy distribution of blue noise, which means "consuming" information about where the points actually are.

The "random song" thing is similar: in order to make a shuffle algorithm that doesn't repeat, you need to consume information about the history of the songs that have been played. This requirement for memory allows the shuffle algorithm to produce a lower entropy output than a purely random process would ever be able to produce.

So hearing that a "purely random matrix" can have these nicely distributed eigenvalues threw me off for a bit, until I realized that observing the eigenvalues has some intrinsic computational complexity, and that it requires consuming the information in the matrix.

Again, this is all very hunchy, I hope you see what I'm getting at.
by bluGill | 2026-01-27 21:13:07+00:00
I've been trying Claude on my large code base today. When I give it the requirements I'd give an engineer and so "do it" it just writes garbage that doesn't make sense and doesn't seem to even meet the requirements (if it does I can't follow how - though I'll admit to giving up before I understood what it did, and I didn't try it on a real system). When I forced it to step back and do tiny steps - in TDD write one test of the full feature - it did much better - but then I spent the next 5 hours adjusting the code it wrote to meet our coding standards. At least I understand the code, but I'm not sure it is any faster (but it is a lot easier to see things wrong than come up with green field code).

Which is to say you have to learn to use the tools. I've only just started, and cannot claim to be an expert. I'll keep using them - in part because everyone is demanding I do - but to use them you clearly need to know how to do it yourself.
by vitalnodo | 2026-01-27 21:13:25+00:00
This fits into the broader evolution of the visualization market.
As data grows, visualization becomes as important as processing. This applies not only to applications, but also to relating texts through ideas close to transclusion in Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. [0]

In education, understanding is often best demonstrated not by restating text, but by presenting the same data in another representation and establishing the right analogies and isomorphisms, as in Explorable Explanations. [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40295661

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368323
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-27 21:13:26+00:00
Nothing about the 2nd amendment legalizes shooting law enforcement officers.

This has always been the absurdity of the moronic claims of the 2nd amendment being to overthrow government tyranny: You may own the gun legally, but at no point will your actions be legal. If you've decided the government needs to be overthrown, you are already throwing "law" out the window, even if you have a valid argument that the government you are overthrowing has abandoned the constitution.

Why the fuck do you need legal guns to commit treason? Last I checked, most government overthrows don't even involve people armed with private rifles!

If you are overthrowing the government, you will need to take over local police stations. At the moment, you no longer need private arms, and what you are doing isn't legal anyway.

Meanwhile, every single fucking time it has come up, the gun nuts go radio silent when the government kills the right person who happens to own a gun. Every. Single. Time.

It took minutes for the "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" people who raised a million dollars for Kyle Rittenhouse to defend himself for driving to a protest in a different state while armed to the teeth to of course get to shoot someone to turn around and say "Actually bringing a gun to a protest makes you a terrorist and you need to be shot". Minutes. They have also put up GoFundMes for the guy who executed that man.

If you are too scared to stand up to your government without a fucking rifle, you have never been an actual threat to your government, and they know that.