MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by leothetechguy | 2026-01-25 08:29:51+00:00
The slop sickens me. If deep down there still is a part of you that enjoys problem solving and creativity, then you should always do it yourself. The technology still isn't even that great.

I wanted to write a simple midi chord controller for my phone to make music, emphasis on simple. AI can't do it and couldn't even help me on small code fragments, because it doesn't look at the problem through the lens of my artistic creativity.

Vibe coding creates weak men because you reject the deeper meaning behind what you are creating. Vibe coding creates weak men because they can't code.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-25 08:30:22+00:00
> Do you have a choice to move from android, if you didnt want to have an apple device?

Not wanting and not having a choice are two different things.

> Do you want to use a different search engine other than google? Is there another email provider than gmail (for the non-technical person - i know you can run your own)

My wife uses ddg and outlook, she's non-technical. I convinced her to use ddg but she's always used outlook/hotmail.
by tombert | 2026-01-25 08:31:21+00:00
I mean, isn't this kind of the point of Palantir? Like don't they want to be known as a technological Big Brother? If they weren't Silicon Valley Big Brother, then why would a government even want to use their service?

It feels like they want to have their cake and eat it too; they hate the negative press calling them creepy, but also depend on that press to do their marketing because if they weren't creepy then they wouldn't have a product.
by cfinnberg | 2026-01-25 08:32:33+00:00
Just ask your favorite AI "How U.S. compares to others countries in healthcare metrics?" and you'll probably get a detailed list of how U.S. healthcare is more expensive than many other countries while ranking quite low in outcomes: life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, chronic disease, ... (and also having part of the population out of the insurance network)

You are entitled to have whatever opinion you want on the matter, but that doesn't change the facts.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-25 08:32:46+00:00
I love EVs, ever since I test drove an BMW i3 in 2012. Quiet with high drag - of course this is the future.

BUT I don't think switching to EVs will help reduce CO2 in any way - not even if all the EVs are charged using 100% solar/wind. The narrative usually is "I get an EV instead of an ICE, charge it with regenerative energy and have 0 emissions, thus not burning oil and saving on CO2".

But that is not how a globalized world with free markets works. In order to save on CO2, we would need to keep that oil not burned by the EV underground, but that does not take place. The market reality is that oil price will just drop with less demand from ICE vehicles. But with falling prices, other business models that require refined oil will become viable and the oil is still burned - just somewhere else. No one so far has made a good argument why the Saudis or Russians would leave their ressources underground, just because demand from ICE vehicles drop.
by 89netraM | 2026-01-25 08:34:51+00:00
Thanks! Yeah, you're right, the point is to get to the center, and it's a lot easier to know where that is on my original "Polar" maze https://xn--sberg-lra.net/maze/polar?size=5&entryCount=1 I should update them to have a goal icon like you say, maybe antoher time.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2026-01-25 08:36:09+00:00
> I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to come.

for this to happen the EVs depreciation needs to drastically improve compared to ICE. I don't see this. On top of this EVs tend to push ideas from Software/Tech companies, such as recurring revenues (because the underlying technology lends itself to it better).

Personally I'm unsure that this will be accepted by all consumers as much as is needed. After all the automotive marketing has since Ford insisted that driving was about "freedom". So some pivot needs to happen in the messaging. Suppose decades is a lot of time to change it. Personally I think EVs are nonsense, and a better utopia would be making sure public transport is abundant, high-quality and free.
by MisterMower | 2026-01-25 08:38:16+00:00
The validity of state violence in the minds of a lot of rural people went through a phase change after Covid.

The folks I know who were previously sympathetic the constraints on government overreach watched state and federal governments impose policies that made no sense for their communities and were actively detrimental to their livelihoods and enforce those policies with fines and even jail time in some instances.

These people would have been against the tactics ICE is using in 2019. Today they’re ambivalent. The attitude is “what comes around goes around.”
by brucehoult | 2026-01-25 08:38:45+00:00
Atlantis should come in with similar performance per clock to an Apple M1, but probably at around 2.5 GHz instead of 3.2 GHz.

That's close enough to be unnoticeable for most people for most uses, at least on the CPU side. It'll come down more to how well things such as GPUs and video CODECs are supported.

There are plenty of people using M1 or similar e.g. Zen 2 machines today with no inclination to upgrade. They are more than good enough.
by wvenable | 2026-01-25 08:38:46+00:00
A few years ago, at my company, we would get random TPM crashes every few months on all our machines. You'd be working and the TPM would just disappear and then any apps that rely on it for key retrieval would error out. Even worse, since the TPM chip is always running, neither a reboot nor a shutdown would fix it -- you literally had to pull the plug.

This went on for months. Then one day we had a power outage. Two months later, every single machine failed at the same time. I checked the logs and it was 49 days and few hours since that outage. It didn't take me too long to figure out what the underlying programming error inside the TPM was. At least we could then describe exactly what the problem was to our PC vendor.
by mentos | 2026-01-25 08:38:47+00:00
I bought a Mac mini m4 last year to compile UE5 for iOS/iPad. It’s just been sitting around while I do my main dev work on Windows. Been wondering how I might put it to greater use and recently saw the hype around Mac Mini + Clawdbot. It would be fun to think that the Mac Mini unlocks some sweet spot of performance but I’m seeing responses from the Clawdbot developers showing how you can run Clawdbot on AWS’ free tier so guess the mini is not necessary / just a fantasy.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-25 08:39:12+00:00
Zip with no compression is a nice contender for a container format that shouldn't be slept on. It effectively reduces the I/O, while unlike TAR, allowing direct random to the files without "extracting" them or seeking through the entire file, this is possible even via mmap, over HTTP range queries, etc.

You can still get the compression benefits by serving files with Content-Encoding: gzip or whatever. Though it has builtin compression, you can just not use that and use external compression instead, especially over the wire.

It's pretty widely used, though often dressed up as something else. JAR files or APK files or whatever.

I think the articles complaints about lacking unix access rights and metadata is a bit strange. That seems like a feature more than a bug, as I wouldn't expect this to be something that transfers between machines. I don't want to unpack an archive and have to scrutinize it for files with o+rxst permissions, or have their creation date be anything other than when I unpacked them.
by hirako2000 | 2026-01-25 08:40:08+00:00
I didn't sleep enough, or slept for 10 years.

This thread seems surreal, I see multiple flow repositories mentioned with 10k+ stars. Comprehensive doc. genAI image as a logo.

Can anyone show me one product these things have accomplished please ?

I used some frontier LLM yesterday to see if it could finally produce simple cascading style sheet fix. After a few dozens attempts and steering, a couple of hours and half a million token wasted it couldn't. So I fixed the issue myself and I went to bed.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-25 08:40:28+00:00
Who are you to judge what is a legal order and what is illegal, right on the spot? Is some authority instructing you about the legality of orders in advance, and giving you a "legal/illegal" flowchart to follow when things get real hot? Do angels of light sit perched on your shoulders whispering advice?

When the pepper spray is pointed at your face and they are screaming "BACK UP" what do you do? Scream back "dat's illegal! muh muh rights!!1" What do you do when the flash-bangs and tear-gas canisters explode? Cover your nostrils with your extra-thick copy of the Bill of Rights?

I mean, law enforcement was speaking to the press today, saying they're not interested in "herding you to safety" or protecting people who are actively interfering. They would much rather if you weren't there at all. The job would be done expediently. But if people choose to impede stuff, and defend and protect child molesters, drug smugglers, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sex offenders, gun runners, then you get a war zone. This is how you get war zones. By defending and protecting the indefensibly guilty.

This is some peak "sovereign citizen" stuff right here. All you lefties screaming about "warrants" and "rights" and "kidnapping" and "jackboots" are SovCit in disguise. You have written your own constitution and you're carrying it out in the streets. Good luck, SovCits.
by chias | 2026-01-25 08:40:54+00:00
Yeah, I feel that. But I promise you, within one week I had one single regret: that I had not done this years ago.

Also, I very much recommend using your own domain. It greatly eases the feeling of having to commit, because your email address is not tied to your provider. That is, if you ever decide fastmail is not for you, next time the switch will be invisible to everyone else.
by Animats | 2026-01-25 08:41:01+00:00
First trip to the moon, from 1959. Not Heinlein's "Destination Moon". Not Disney's version of the Collier's space program. A movie that seems to have been forgotten, even by collectors of early SF movies.

Not a low-budget production. Produced by Paramount Pictures. It was all too realistic - it's all about launches being scrubbed and budget cuts. They never do launch.
by muyuu | 2026-01-25 08:43:02+00:00
Cars do zero Carbon capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS). The potential is there to emit negligible CO2 when it's only energy-intensive large industry doing the fuel burning.

Having said that, the path being taken in some countries to remove ICE is simply pushing large swathes of the population out of the car market. I don't support that, although I'm sure there are many people who do.
by NoteyComplexity | 2026-01-25 08:43:45+00:00
It could be.

You don’t need something to have a point at all, just make something apparently cool or trendy, and there always a crowd rush into the trend. Could you find the point of Labubus or Stanley cups besides its popularity?

I am not going to against the news part, as you could see my other replies from someone who find niche hobbies with it.
by tombert | 2026-01-25 08:44:16+00:00
> and accusing people of being paid shills

I didn't accuse you of being a paid shill, I said if you are a paid shill I have less polite things to call you. I know that Palantir hires people to try and do social media damage control and so it's hard to know where their reach is.

> ur not defending an opinion
> you’re advertising that you don’t have anything sturdier to stand on,

I did provide citations for my opinion. Please feel free to click the links or search for yourself about the specific assertions I made if you'd like; they're not hard to find at all, so you're actively lying when you said "ur not defending an opinion"; just because you were too lazy to click a link does not mean I didn't provide substantiation as to why I think that Alex Karp and Palantir at large is creepy.

> "senpai"

If you're not a paid shill, then your perspective is considerably more pathetic. You are engaging in behavior that is honestly kind of sad. Again, behavior that is usually described by the term "simp".

ETA:

For the record, I didn't flag you. I don't really care if you insult me or call me an imbecile, it's far from the worst thing anyone has called me.

Replying to your flagged response though:

> I though you were just an imbecile, but you seem to be a paranoid one at that .. this is whats really creepy tom.

I don't really see how what I said was "paranoid", considering that this all stuff that's directly publicly available, straight from the mouth of Alex Karp. Even if everything else Palantir was good, I think what I linked is sufficient to determine that they're "creepy".

You are of course to not think that Palantir is creepy. I'm not sure why you'd have that opinion, but you're welcome to have it.
by sparkie | 2026-01-25 08:44:28+00:00
> The biggest downside to this approach is we can't prevent the library user from using a struct initializer and creating an invalid structure (eg, length and actual string length not matching). It would be nice if there were some similar to trick to prevent using compound initializers with the type, then we could have full encapsulation without resorting to opaque pointers.

Hmm, I found a solution and it was easier than expected. GCC has `__attribute__((designated_init))` we can stick on the struct which prevents positional initializers and requires the field names to be used. Since those names are poisoned, we won't be able to initialize except through functions defined in our library. We can similarly use a macro and #undef it.

Full encapsulation of a struct defined in a header:

#ifndef FOO_STRING_H
#define FOO_STRING_H

#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include "config.h"

typedef size_t string_length_t;
#ifdef CONFIG_STRING_LENGTH_MAX
#define STRING_LENGTH_MAX CONFIG_STRING_LENGTH_MAX
#else
#define STRING_LENGTH_MAX (1 << 24)
#endif

typedef struct __attribute__((designated_init)) {
const string_length_t _internal_string_length;
const char *const _internal_string_chars;
} string_t;

#define STRING_CREATE(len, ptr) (string_t){ ._internal_string_length = (len), ._internal_string_chars = (ptr) }
#define STRING_LENGTH(s) (s._internal_string_length)
#define STRING_CHARS(s) (s._internal_string_chars)
#pragma GCC poison _internal_string_length _internal_string_chars

constexpr string_t error_string = STRING_CREATE(0, nullptr);
constexpr string_t empty_string = STRING_CREATE(0, "");

inline static string_t string_alloc_from_chars(const char *chars) {
if (chars == nullptr) return error_string;
size_t len = strnlen(chars, STRING_LENGTH_MAX);
if (len == 0) return empty_string;
if (len < STRING_LENGTH_MAX) {
char *mem = malloc(len + 1);
strncpy(mem, chars, len);
mem[len] = '\0';
return STRING_CREATE(len, mem);
} else return error_string;
}

inline static const char * string_to_chars(string_t string) {
return STRING_CHARS(string);
}

inline static string_length_t string_length(string_t string) {
return STRING_LENGTH(string);
}

inline static void string_free(string_t s) {
free((char*)STRING_CHARS(s));
}

inline static bool string_is_valid(string_t string) {
return STRING_CHARS(string) != nullptr
&& strnlen(STRING_CHARS(string), STRING_LENGTH_MAX) == STRING_LENGTH(string);
}

#undef STRING_LENGTH
#undef STRING_CHARS
#undef STRING_CREATE

#endif /* FOO_STRING_H */

Aside from horrible pointer aliasing tricks, the only way to create a `string_t` is via `string_alloc_from_chars` or other functions defined in the library which return `string_t`.

#include <foo_string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {

string_t s = string_alloc_from_chars("Hello World!");

if (string_is_valid(s)) puts(string_to_chars(s));

string_free(s);

return 0;

}
by joshuaisaact | 2026-01-25 08:45:05+00:00
This feels like massively overengineering something very simple.

Agents are stateless functions with a limited heap (context window) that degrades in quality as it fills. Once you see it that way, the whole swarm paradigm is just function scoping and memory management cosplaying as an org chart:

Agent = function

Role = scope constraints

Context window = local memory

Shared state file = global state

Orchestration = control flow

The solution isn't assigning human-like roles to stateless functions. It's shared state (a markdown file) and clear constraints.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-25 08:45:07+00:00
I think it's just the opposite, as LLMs feed on human language. "You are a scrum master." Automatically encodes most of what the LLM needs to know. Trying to describe the same role in a prompt would be a lot more difficult.

Maybe a different separation of roles would be more efficient in theory, but an LLM understands "you are a scrum master" from the get go, while "you are a zhydgry bhnklorts" needs explanation.
by necovek | 2026-01-25 08:45:29+00:00
My point is not to forbid access, but to educate, train and prepare my kids for what's really there (well, everything).

As I said, my kid already has access to the internet through his laptop. I don't particularly micromanage his access, but I do talk to him about things like online gaming communities and such. I run a Minecraft server for him to play games with his friends too.

Obviously, asking every parent to go to these lengths won't work, so ultimately, I need to ensure he is making good decisions, and I need to do that along the way. Do I need government support? Yes, they need to react to reports of shitty behaviour, and schools and kids communities need to be strict about the worst stuff kids tend to do before they develop sufficient empathy. But banning outright I don't want them to do, because I need to be able to support my kids through these experiences during the ages they are less likely to be rebellious and contrarian (so, I guess before they turn 12-14 :)).
by Gareth321 | 2026-01-25 08:46:00+00:00
I agree. The current price is 7/8 years of ownership, which can't be transferred. The subscription currently makes a lot more sense. Personally, I think if one buys a Tesla today they should impute the cost of an FSD subscription over the expected lifetime. It's excellent. If that cost is too high, fair enough. Buy a less smart car.
by abelitoo | 2026-01-25 08:46:25+00:00
Extending this -- unlike real slot machines, there is no definite state of won or not for the person prompting, only if they've been convinced they've won, and that comes
down to how much you're willing to verify the code it has provided, or better, fully test it (which no one wants to do), versus the reality where they do a little light testing and say it's good enough and move on.

Recently fixed a problem over a few days, and found that it was duplicated though differently enough that I asked my coworker to try fixing it with an LLM (he was the originator of the duplicated code, and I didn't want to mess up what was mostly functioning code). Using an LLM, he seemingly did in 1 hour what took me maybe a day or two of tinkering and fixing. After we hop off the call, I do a code read to make sure I understand it fully, and immediately see an issue and test it further only to find out.. it did not in fact fix it, and suffered from the same problems, but it convincingly LOOKED like it fixed it. He was ecstatic at the time-saved while presenting it, and afterwards, alone, all I could think about was how our business users were going to be really unhappy being gaslit into thinking it was fixed because literally every tester I've ever met would definitely have missed it without understanding the code.

People are overjoyed with good enough, and I'm starting to think maybe I'm the problem when it comes to progress? It just gives me Big Short vibes -- why am I drawing attention to this obvious issue in quality, I'm just the guy in the casino screaming "does no one else see the obvious problem with shipping this?" And then I start to understand, yes I am the problem: people have been selling eachother dog water product for millenia because at the end of the day, Edison is the person people remember, not the guy who came after that made it near perfect or hammered out all the issues. Good enough takes its place in history, not perfection. The trick others have found out is they just need to get to the point that they've secured the money and have time to get away before the customer realizes the world of hurt they've paid for.
by DerekL | 2026-01-25 08:47:14+00:00
As far as I can tell, they aren't making actual CRTs, they're using modern display technology to simulate the appearance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModRetroChromatic/comments/1m82csj/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgY5fM2cINc&t=1288s
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-25 08:47:57+00:00
> "Smart" EV's are demonstrated to be significantly safer than "dumb" EVs. Waymo’s 2025/2026 data shows an 80–90% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers in the same cities.

It's important to realize the reason for that.

Crashes by human drivers are hugely disproportionately by people who are driving drunk or with insufficient sleep or significant distractions etc. In other words, it's not a difference in the cars, it's a difference in the drivers. Waymo can beat a drunk driver, and therefore can beat the human driver arithmetic mean which has the drunk drivers averaged in.

That doesn't mean it's any safer than driving an ordinary car when you're not drunk.
by torginus | 2026-01-25 08:47:58+00:00
A somewhat unrelated thing, is I got bombarded with ads for a 'mental health mindfulness' service on one of the major international news websites.

I decided to Google the company after a few days. I was immediately confronted by thousands of reports by angry users, complaining about how after they tried the app, they got locked into a yearly subscription at exorbitant prices and it was impossible to cancel. The company itself is registered in some offshore tax haven.

They used to scare us, that if we went to those shady pirate websites, somebody would steal our credit cards and steal our money. Well...
by franga2000 | 2026-01-25 08:48:39+00:00
I'd agree if you picked Google Docs or something like that, but Gmail? Chrome?? Come on! Edge is just Chrome with extra features, plenty of people use Bing without even noticing and many even non-techy people are fine with DuckDuckGo, good free email providers are everywhere (yahoo, hotmail, proton...).
by TMWNN | 2026-01-25 08:49:13+00:00
>Good. now that it is done, can EU and the rest of the world push for regional ownership of Instagram, WhatsApp and Youtube without the US complaining unfair practices.

>Chinese ownership as a security threat is currently in between reality and conspiracy realms but the US govt meddling as a threat is a proven reality worldwide.

There is nothing stopping any country from doing the same to US companies' local operations five years ago, today, or next year. The difference is that the US is not China. Your comment assumes that a US company is as dangerous as a Chinese company. As felipeerias said, China is (among other things) actively backing Russia in Ukraine.

US law did not require TikTok's divestiture to a US owner. If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't have intervened in the first place.

Conversely, if TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, American would not have to fear a hostile government silently gathering data on American users, or a company repeatedly shown to be lying about using its app to do so.
by cbeach | 2026-01-25 08:49:23+00:00
I have a heavy and high performance EV (Tesla Model S) and I have replaced my tires twice in the last six years. So it’s about the same as an ICE vehicle in that regard.

One thing that differs is brake wear. My car is ten years old and still on its original brake pads and discs. The regen braking is amazing for avoiding mechanical braking. So that means less particle emission from brakes, compared to ICE.