MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-30 18:11:23+00:00
I think this article just makes the case for what incredibly terrible idea emojis are in general.

Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like.

I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-30 18:11:53+00:00
Our building security system updates something somewhere which ties into email. When we have incidents such as "the lifts are broken" or "the south exit is closed" or whatever, these get emailed to all staff that have been in the the building in the last so many hours (16 I'd assume). It's a handy system.

Ultimately if you are at the type of company which practices presenteeism, then the technology used is immaterial
by WalterBright | 2026-01-30 18:11:56+00:00
I did not panic. If I had hit his baby, I would have been legally in the wrong. A fat lot of good that would have done the baby or the father.

It's monumentally stupid to be in the middle of a narrow road around a blind corner. People speed around blind corners all the time.

Consider a crosswalk. The law says traffic must stop for anyone setting foot in the crosswalk. But it's crazy to step into a crosswalk assuming drivers will stop for you. I always wait until they actually stop before I step into it.

I remember a public service commercial from the 60s advocating the idea that one shouldn't be right, dead right, and to use common sense.

I talked to a cyclist once who told me about his legal rights to ride a bike in traffic. I asked him but what if a car hits you? He smugly replied that then he'd win a massive lawsuit. I then asked him what good would that do him if he was paralyzed? He then looked startled.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-30 18:12:07+00:00
I believe you have a categorical misunderstanding of what "whataboutism" actually means.

If the point being made is "people don't generally agree with that position" it is by definition not whataboutism. To be whataboutism the point being made is _required_ to be nil. That is, the two things are not permitted to be related in a manner that is relevant to the issue being discussed.

Now you might well disagree with the point being made or the things being extrapolated from it. The key here is merely whether or not such a point exists to begin with. Observing that things are not usually done a certain way can be valid and relevant even if you yourself do not find the line of reasoning convincing in the end.

Contrast with my example about countries persecuting groups of people. In that case there is no relevant relation between the acts or the groups. That is whataboutism.

So too your earlier example involving human trafficking. The fact that enforcement is not always successful has no bearing (at least in and of itself) on whether or not we as a society wish to permit it.

BTW when I referred to danger there it wasn't about cars. I had in mind other recreational activities such as roller blading, skateboarding, etc. Anything done for sport that carries a non-negligible risk of serious injury when things go wrong. I agree that it's not a good argument. It was never meant to be.
by antaviana | 2026-01-30 18:12:22+00:00
When I started working at a time with no mobiles and no remote, calling or being called to the office for personal reasons was seen with disrespect from your coworkers. At work you were supposed to be working, and outside of work you were supposed not to be working. Pretty much as in the Severance series, but without the forgetting. With mobiles and connectivity, everything changed, I'm unsure if for better. Now you can work 24/7 or slack all day as if there were no tomorrow.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-30 18:12:59+00:00
> which is already obsolete, die size is 40% bigger than Samsung, not to mention lithography, the big 3 are using EUV while they are stuck with lobotomized DUV.

And? That's good enough. My daily driver desktop, which I use to do development, plus play a few games (FC5, Dirt Rally, etc) has 16GB DDR3.

For 90% of computers in use today, including laptops, that RAM you call obsolete is fine.

Users aren't going to complain that a document which takes 3s to open now takes 3.5s

What you need as far as RAM goes, to make the computer perform acceptably is capacity. Users get a bigger performance boost by going from 8GB RAM to 16GB Ram and from 16GB Ram to 32 GB RAM than from DDR3 to DDR4 or from DDR4 to DDR5.
by e40 | 2026-01-30 18:13:09+00:00
What? A 5 minute drive is miles, and that's plenty far enough. They are currently being built within 100 meters of homes. It's absolutely insane.

EDIT: https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=Qa9ot70MylFp6qkE

Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.
by palmotea | 2026-01-30 18:13:13+00:00
> If it really is SSID based, the feature would be relatively useless for most organizations even before discussion trying to spoof it. E.g. the last place I worked had ~3,500 physical addresses with APs (and many more individual buildings/"office" names), all with the same "Corp_Name_Employee" SSID because otherwise it's way more work to have unique SSIDs. So how would this feature even do what it's supposed to do based on SSID?

Maybe the enterprise exports a table of AP MAC addresses, mapped to locations. It could be the SSID stuff is just a way to spy on what non-office location you were at.
by atomic128 | 2026-01-30 18:13:29+00:00
Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/

Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Simple example of usage in Go:

package main

import (
"io"
"net/http"
)

func main() {
poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
if err == nil {
io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
poison.Body.Close()
}
}
http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

https://go.dev/play/p/04at1rBMbz8

Discourse Poison Fountain: https://github.com/elmuerte/discourse-poison-fountain

In the news:

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...
by mullingitover | 2026-01-30 18:13:39+00:00
> But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.

If the math was mathing, it would be malpractice not to expand it. I'm betting that their scheme simply wasn't workable, given the extremely high costs of claims (Tesla repairs aren't cheap) relative to the low rates that they were collecting on premiums. The cheap premiums are probably a form of market dumping to get people to buy their FSD product, the sales of which boosts their share price.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-30 18:13:51+00:00
>> If I don’t block, 95% of my resources will be spent on feeding bots... How do you block those?

A very important question which deserves a good answer.

> Okay, but why should you care?

Not that kind of answer - this is bad manners or worse. The counter-question "Why do you ask that" isn't an honest or meaningful answer - it's indefensible defense of allowing meaningless traffic without any defenses.

> Resource usage for a regular website that isn't doing some heavy dynamic stuff or video streaming tends to be rather negligible.

Maybe it is doing video streaming, or audio, or lots of images or very dynamic, or written in Python - the trend is to use more and more bandwidth to make the sites more attractive.

> You can easily serve 100k+ requests per second on servers that costs less than $100/mo.

Maybe $100/mo isn't a trivial amount for a site that has no video, isn't dynamic, etc - your assumptions contradict themselves and reality.

Without any maybe, the prices of RAM, bandwidth and hosting are going up while usage limits are going down - inflation. There's no reason to sacrifice $100/mo to hostile bot daemons which are sure to ask for more and more in the future.

It's absolutely clear that giving a free reign to bots will encourage more bots and more sinister behavior because the boundary between bot scraping and ddos is blurry, you're essentially arguing for allowing soft ddos which can be turned up at times just to make a site ineffective when it's needed.
by phil21 | 2026-01-30 18:13:56+00:00
Not building energy production and distribution for the past 50 years is what is causing electricity prices to increase. Chickens coming home to roost. Eventually you run out of the previous generation’s infrastructure investments and cheap tricks like efficiency gains to avoid real capital investment.

Datacenter demand has simply brought demand forward a bit. This was always coming for us.

So long as they are paying market rates like any other power consumer of their size I see zero problem with it. If they are getting sweetheart deals and exemptions from regulatory rates then there would be a problem.

The issue is lack of building stuff that needed to happen 20-30 years ago when it began to be an obvious critical need. De-industrialization just masked the problem.

If we can’t figure out as a society how to come out ahead with a much more robust electric grid after this giant investment bubble we have utterly failed at a generational scale.
Show HN: Convoviz – turn ChatGPT exports into Markdown and simple visuals
by mohamedchs | 2026-01-30 18:15:14+00:00
Convoviz is a python tool that converts ChatGPT data exports into clean, readable Markdown and generates basic visualizations like word clouds and usage charts. Useful if you want a local, browsable archive of conversations instead of raw JSON. Open source, on GitHub and PyPI. Feedback welcome.
by SomeUserName432 | 2026-01-30 18:15:31+00:00
I actually tried GPT 4.1 for the first time a few hours ago(1).

I spent about half an hour trying to coax it in "plan mode" in IntelliJ, and it kept spitting out these generic ideas of what it was going to do, not really planning at all.

And when I asked it to execute the plan.. it just created some generic DTO and said "now all that remains is <the entire plan>".

Absolutely worst experience with an AI agent so far, not to say that my overall experience has been terrific.

1) Our plan for Claude Opus 4.5 "ran out" or something.
by deelayman | 2026-01-30 18:15:43+00:00
I think there's a narrow unregulated space where this could be true. I'm exercising my creativity trying to imagine it - where automations are built with the outcome of obscured responsibility in mind. And I could understand profit as a possible driving factor for that outcome.

As an extreme end of a spectrum example, there's been worry and debate for decades over automating military capabilities to the point where it becomes "push button to win war". There used to be, and hopefully still is, lots of restraint towards heading in that direction - in recognition of the need for ethics validation in automated judgements. The topic comes up now and then around Tesla's, and impossible decisions that FSD will have to make.

So at a certain point, and it may be right around the point of serious physical harm, the design decision to have or not have human-in-the-middle accountability seems to run into ethical constraints. In reality it's the ruthless bottom line focused corps - that don't seem to be the norm, but may have an outsized impact - that actually push up against ethical constraints. But even then, I would be wary as an executive documenting a decision to disregard potential harms at one of them shops. That line is being tested, but it's still there.

In my actual experience with automations, they've always been derived from laziness / reducing effort for everyone, or "because we can", and sometimes a need to reduce human error.
by mrlonglong | 2026-01-30 18:15:48+00:00
Instead of losing 8GB of precious RAM, you could map out the bad memory with a Linux GRUB boot parameter that tells Linux not to use that part of the memory.

I've successfully done this with a Dell Precision machine that we needed as a build machine. Twelve months later on, still works and we do seriously stress it with builds.

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badr...

BTW, I absolutely love Pepper and Carrot. Keep up the great work.
by zahlman | 2026-01-30 18:15:54+00:00
I consider it more or less immoral to be expected to use the Internet for anything other than retrieving information from others or voluntarily sharing information with others. The idea that a dev environment should even require finicky configuration to allow for productive work sans Internet appalls me. I should only have to connect in order to push to / pull from origin, deploy something or acquire build tools / dependencies, which should be cached locally and rarely require any kind of update.
by scottbez1 | 2026-01-30 18:16:12+00:00
Yeah, Tesla gets to blame the “driver”, and has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible.

And the system is designed to set up drivers for failure.

An HCI challenge with mostly autonomous systems is that operators lose their awareness of the system, and when things go wrong you can easily get worse outcomes than if the system was fully manual with an engaged operator.

This is a well known challenge in the nuclear energy sector and airline industry (Air France 447) - how do you keep operators fully engaged even though they almost never need to intervene, because otherwise they’re likely to be missing critical context and make wrong decisions. These days you could probably argue the same is true of software engineers reviewing LLM code that’s often - but not always - correct.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-30 18:16:25+00:00
I find PS2 emulation to be lacking.

Of course I am spoiled by Dolphin and their meticulous work, and the leap in N64 emulation, and PS3 emulation is way farther than I thought it could ever be.

But PCSX2 is mediocre. It reports the vast majority of the library in "green" emulation state, but that usually means there are glaring issues that someone is choosing to overlook, like shadows that are broken.

The Ace Combat games for example are all broken with the hardware accelerated renderer. Things run like garbage in the software renderer for a lot of games. Multiplayer functionality is spotty and hard to set up and poorly documented.

The state of emulation of that console generation is not up to snuff, save for Dolphin. It's still very much in the "Shut up, it works fine for Super Mario 64 so it works" mindset it seems.

This is true even of official emulators! The Xbox emulator that ran on the Xbox 360 has many games that are "officially supported" with serious issues. Forza Motorsport 1 has weird slowdowns on key tracks. I understand the serious hardware difficulties but I still wish emulation accuracy was an option.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-30 18:16:30+00:00
SSID, signal strength, BSSID, private IP, public IP, ipv6, all trivially available to a binary running on a machine.

It sounds far less than the diagnostics data I get from a small go binary.

If corporate policy is you can't connect to starbucks wifi, then enforce that at the MDM mangement layer - I assume things like SCCM can do it.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-01-30 18:16:52+00:00
Proton is amazing and it's really three different subprojects that deserve a lot of credit each.

First is Wine itself, with its implementation of Win32 APIs. I ran some games through Wine even twenty years ago but it was certainly not always possible, and usually not even easy.

Second is DXVK, which fills the main gap of Wine, namely Direct3D compatibility. Wine has long had its own implementation of D3D libraries, but it was not as performant, and more importantly it was never quite complete. You'd run into all sorts of problems because the Wine implementation differed from the Windows native D3D, and that was enough to break many gams. DXVK is a translation layer that translates D3D calls to Vulkan with excellent performance, and basically solves the problem of D3D on Linux.

Then there's the parts original to Proton itself. It applies targeted, high quality patches to Wine and DXVK to improve game compatibility, brings in a few other modules, and most importantly Proton glues it all together so it works seamlessly and with excellent UX. From the first release of Proton until recently, running Windows games through Steam took just a couple extra clicks to enable Proton for that game. And now even that isn't necessary, Proton is enabled by default so you run a game just by downloading it and launching, same exact process as on Windows.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-30 18:16:55+00:00
> now it's driver vs injured party. Self-driving makes it trillion dollar company vs injured party

It’s historically been my insurance company versus your insurance company or an uninsured driver. (Or I’m Apple Paying you $5k so my fender bender doesn’t show up on insurance.)

Now it’s my insurance company versus the insurance company of a client who can pay damages. The number of cases where drivers are individually litigating is relatively rare and preserved against e.g. Waymo.
by 5upplied_demand | 2026-01-30 18:17:14+00:00
The subtitle of the article tells us this is happening.

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

But it is a reactive measure. It has taken years for the impacts of these data centers to trickle down enough for citizens to understand what they are losing in the deal. Partially because so many of the deals were done under cover of NDAs. If anything, this gives NIMBYs more assurance that they are right to be skeptical of any development. The way these companies act will only increase NIMBYism.

> Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

Trusting large corporations to provide a full and accurate analysis of downside risks is also damaging.
by imiric | 2026-01-30 18:17:26+00:00
Can we please stop paying attention to what celebrity developers and HN darlings like simonw have to say?

Listening to influencers is in large part what got us into the (social, political, technofascist) mess we're currently in. At the very least listening to alternative voices has the chance of getting us out. I'm tired of influencers, no matter how benign their message sounds. But I'm especially tired of those who speak positively of this technology and where it's taking us.

No, this viral thing that's barely 2 months old is certainly not the most interesting place on the internet. Get out of your bubble.
by arduanika | 2026-01-30 18:17:54+00:00
I'm not appealing to them out of nowhere. I'm rejecting Pullum's dismissal of them at the end of TFA. You can learn a lot more from them, than from what I've seen of this blog.

As to this new link...what a load a willful misrepresentations. Misses the point entirely. The rules in PatEL are not literal laws. They are merely pointing the way toward something.

For example, from the very top:

> So, Orwell writes "it is generally assumed", which is passive. Why didn't he say "people generally assume", or "we generally assume", both of which are perfectly grammatical...

Beaver's proposed variants are also passive, spiritually, in my sense above. Who is "we"? A good author chooses between these not based on which one is literally passive, but on other considerations like flow and sound.

Maybe there are Orwell fans out there who have read PatEL too literally, and need to be disabused? Maybe this blog is good for those kinds of people? But from what I've seen so far of LL, it's a bunch of smug dunks that nobody asked for.
by bluGill | 2026-01-30 18:18:27+00:00
> good link on how the thermostat gets paired with the boiler?

You should have a book with the boiler that says how your system is setup. They nearly always include schematics and are very helpful. Typically you can open a cover and see the wiring details as well.

Forget about web sites, there are too many different ways a system can be setup, so even if they are not slop they can still be inapplicable for you. Once you know what you are looking at you can sometimes get useful information from the web, but until then you can't sort out what is useful for you.
by thelastgallon | 2026-01-30 18:18:37+00:00
Its neither self-driving, nor autonomous, eventually not even a car! (as Tesla slowly exits the car business). It will be 'insurance' on Speculation as a service, as Tesla skyrockets to $20T market cap. Tesla will successfully transition from a small revenue to pre-revenue company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ

The last few years of Tesla 'growth' show how this transition is unfolding. S and X production is shutdown, just a few more models to shutdown.
by belter | 2026-01-30 18:19:06+00:00
They released the file, it was an official file, then they removed minutes ago, although many had already a copy. Here is what was on it: https://www.threads.com/@meidastouch/post/DUJFSmTiUjo/link

This is the file the DOJ just deleted minutes after release:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EY0UXGGDNKdDwppTR78LdCBNUOx...
by rcxdude | 2026-01-30 18:19:07+00:00
The current is measuring the rate of the reaction. With the two-terminal design the rate of the reaction is proportional to the rate of diffusion of the oxygen into the area where the reaction is taking place, which is related to the oxygen concentration around it but also can be affect by other things. With the third electrode, the current is proportional to the concentration of oxygen in the area around the sensor directly, which will equalise with its surroundings much more consistently than the rate of diffusion.

(A quick google brings up this document which describes the principle. No idea if this is the company in the story: https://semeatech.com/uploads/Tech_Docs/AN%20161205.pdf )
by SomeUserName432 | 2026-01-30 18:19:44+00:00
> Another pattern I’m noticing is strong advocacy for Opus

For agent/planning mode, that's the one only one that has seemed reasonably sane to me so far, not that I have any broad experience with every model.

Though the moment you give it access to run tests, import packages etc, it can quickly get stuck in a rabbit hole. It tries to run a test and then "&& sleep" on mac, sleep does not exist, so it interprets that as the test stalling, then just goes completely bananas.

It really lacks the "ok I'm a bit stuck, can you help me out a bit here?" prompt. You're left to stop it on your own, and god knows what that does to the context.
by bri3d | 2026-01-30 18:19:55+00:00
Nobody knows, as far as I can tell; I haven't found any actual sources and I don't think the code is present in a public release anywhere for anyone to look at. I'm assuming it must work off of MAC at a minimum, since most offices have the same SSID across buildings. It doesn't really seem "designed" as a spyware/audit feature, since it would be a terrible flimsy one, but it also just doesn't seem that useful compared to the "yuck" factor it generates and the potential for abuse by crappy employers/managers.
by mkw5053 | 2026-01-30 18:20:02+00:00
The $28M to Melania personally is the tell. Amazon could've made this documentary for $5M and marketed it for $10M and still gotten whatever political cover they wanted. Instead they structured a deal where most of the money flows directly to the president's wife. That's not sloppy negotiating, that's the point. Someone at Amazon legal signed off on creating a paper trail that looks exactly like what it is.
by ghaff | 2026-01-30 18:20:11+00:00
>- Latanya Sweeney and Alexandre de Montjoye for their contributions to re-identification of anonymized data

It seems like highlighting how anonymization is a lot harder than a lot of people assume is a really useful service. If researchers can do it, without any particular secret sauce, so can a lot of other people. (Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your comment.)