MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thrance | 2026-01-27 19:14:37+00:00
It's certainly an interesting story. I'd still take it with a grain of salt, as often this kind of Reddit family story is closer to an exercise in creative writing than anything else, but that's besides the point.

I remember a communication by the World Health Organization that concluded that social media and video games are not addictive like drugs are, because they don't cause chemical withdrawal when immediately stopped. Maybe what this mother is actually witnessing is her daughter suddenly feeling socially excluded after having filled the void by social media until now?
by stackghost | 2026-01-27 19:14:38+00:00
Hi Chris,

One of the most grating pain points of the early versions of systemd was a general lack of humility, some would say rank arrogance, displayed by the project lead and his orbiters. Today systemd is in a state of "not great, not terrible" but it was (and in some circles still is) notorious for breaking peoples' linux installs, their workflows, and generally just causing a lot of headaches. The systemd project leads responded mostly with Apple-style "you're holding it wrong" sneers.

It's not immediately clear to me what exactly Amutable will be implementing, but it smells a lot like some sort of DRM, and my immediate reaction is that this is something that Big Tech wants but that users don't.

My question is this: Has Lennart's attitude changed, or can linux users expect more of the same paternalism as some new technology is pushed on us whether we like it or not?
by rhelz | 2026-01-27 19:14:48+00:00
Every part is unsubstantiated. For starters, for the vast majority of H. Sapiens existence on earth--from 300,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, we shared the world with 4 or 5 other hominids that we know about. (Neanderthal, Denisoven, H. Luzonensis, H. Floresiensis, and still perhaps a few H. Erectus, and no doubt even more we haven't found yet.)

That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked with at least two other species, probably more, because we still carry their genes to this day. So much so that it couldn't have been just a sheboink or two; we sheboinked over extended periods of time, i.e. we formed families with Neanderthals and Denisovens.

We have no evidence of warfare between the species. I.E. We have found no Neanderthal skull with an arrowhead in it, for example. Besides the fact that we are the only ones left, I don't see any substantiation at all.

It is a mystery why they are not still here. But the last 50,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, has been very hard on human species, for some reason. We are the only humans left, what every got them might get us too if we let it.
by uriegas | 2026-01-27 19:14:49+00:00
I don't think so, have you read 'The Bonobo and the atheist'? Humans are not the only ones using tools and in reality there isn't much difference between humans and animals. The conclusion I get from the book is that the only difference is religion. Although, I have a feeling that humans do have a more developed intellect (problem solving) but this was not explored in the book.
by ccheney | 2026-01-27 19:15:18+00:00
Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?

Just on your Fusion example alone: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every-fusion-startup-that-...

Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?

Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.

This _is_ a good thing.
by 0xffff2 | 2026-01-27 19:15:19+00:00
In my experience, it's less gaps and more lack of mainstream brands. The example that comes to mind is ketchup. At Whole Foods I can get generic store brand ketchup or a variety of fancy ketchups that cost 3-10x as much, but they don't have any variety of basic Heinz on the shelf. This "mid-market" gap is common for virtually every product category.
by tshaddox | 2026-01-27 19:15:23+00:00
Interestingly, we only went to our local Amazon Fresh store a handful of times but it was always a perfectly fine experience. It seemed reasonably clean, well-stocked, and well-organized. Other than those new self-checkout shopping carts (which also actually worked well, even weighing produce), it was fairly indistinguishable from other grocery stores in our area.

Amazon Go, on the other hand, always seemed like a dead man walking. It's a fun novelty to check out and grab some junk food, but it must be far more expensive to build and run than a 7-Eleven, and it's not even meaningfully more convenient.

I should also add that we've been pretty happy Amazon Fresh delivery customers for a couple of years now (we resisted regular grocery delivery for a long time...until we had a child).
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-27 19:15:23+00:00
I found it pretty funny when Mayor Mamdani of NYC pointed out that the people opposing him spent more money trying to stop him being elected than they would end up paying in increased taxes. It really is a game to those people. They can't bear to give up one cent or one ounce of control.

Another funny story was that some substack writer (whom I forget sorry) noticed that Bill Ackman subscribed to their substack and used a 30% off coupon ha ha.
by lacoolj | 2026-01-27 19:15:23+00:00
I have yet to encounter a reason to take more than 3oz of liquid with me on a flight somewhere.

Once the restriction was added, it seemed like "oh no how dare you" but in reality, I'm never carrying enough toothpaste to make this a problem.

Are other people truly struggling with this limitation? Feels more like a perceived issue than a practical one.
by r0fl | 2026-01-27 19:15:28+00:00
Pricing is confusing

Video Agents
Unlimited agents
Up to 3 concurrent calls
Creative Studio
1min long videos
Up to 3 concurrent generations

Does that mean I can have a total of 1 minute of video calls? Or video calls can only be 1 minute long? Or does it mean I can have unlimited calls, 3 calls at a time all month long?

Can I have different avatars or only the same avatar x 3?

Can I record the avatar and make videos and post on social media?
by sodafountan | 2026-01-27 19:15:45+00:00
SpaceEx has made a ton of progress in space travel, granted it's not an ideal situation with it being a mega corp, but it moved a hell of a lot faster than NASA could have.

Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes.

Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.
by melenaboija | 2026-01-27 19:16:02+00:00
Ok, since I moved to the US from Europe a few years ago my perception of wood has changed a lot, especially for construction. Seeing this reinforces my view.

Wood lasts for fucking ever under the proper conditions. Old construction in Europe often only had the beams made of wood, and I always thought that was orders of magnitude more durable than wooden houses, like thousands of years vs decades. I don’t think that’s true anymore.

And this might be one of the few environmentally friendly decisions that Americans got better than Europeans, I guess. Wood is still prevalent in construction here, and as far as I know concrete and cement production are quite bad.

BTW, I’m a total ignorant about all this so just intuition and probably wrong
by footydude | 2026-01-27 19:16:04+00:00
> If the AirTag in its minimal form wasn't so teardrop-shaped

I'm a little confused by this, aren't AirTag basically circular discs pretty much just big enough to house a CRT2032 battery?

Form factor wise they don't look teardrop shaped at all in the pictures?

I don't have one so could just be missing something obvious here.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-27 19:16:08+00:00
Doesn't have to be. While I'm not a fan of systemd (my comment history is there), I want to start from a neutral PoV, and see what it does.

I have my reservations, ideas, and what it's supposed to do, but this is not a place to make speculations and to break spirits.

I'll put my criticism out politely when it's time.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-27 19:16:23+00:00
What's the correct level of STEM PhD employment in the government? Maybe those levels were way too high. But on a different note, we can't tell from the article what normal fluctuations look like. It only shows 2024 as the baseline, but ideally we'd look at a larger window than that as well as look at the percentage rather than nominal figures.
by sanskritical | 2026-01-27 19:16:43+00:00
In my experience legitimately talented people are staying, and the guy whose impressive education credentials seem to train him mostly how to write very wordy excuses for his shortage of actual work product is going back home. Maybe you have a different experience, but my experience is something that seems to be echoed among a lot of people in my social circle.

My experience is that people with talent are both driven and valued. Someone who might disagree with the current administration politically but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving, nor losing their job. But many pieces of gristle are getting trimmed off the American government.
by ixtli | 2026-01-27 19:16:47+00:00
I believe the opposite is happening in China. I saw an article the other day ( https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/china-graduates-1-3-million-e... ) that showed how the amount of engineers being produced there is orders of magnitude greater than the US. Way above what you'd expect given the different sizes of population. Now, i realize an engineer isn't the same as a PhD but i think we're seeing a dramatic brain drain happening in the west.
by duped | 2026-01-27 19:16:49+00:00
> a big "unsafe" dunce cap to shame you for being a naughty, lazy programmer

You just have to get over that. `unsafe` means "compiler cannot prove this to be safe." FFI is unsafe because the compiler can't see past it.

> Once you're doing interop with C you're just writing C with Rust syntax

Just like C++, or go, or anything else. You can choose to wrap it, but that's just indirection for no value imo. I honestly hate seeing C APIs wrapped with "high level" bindings in C++ for the same reason I hate seeing them in Rust. The docs/errors/usage are all in terms of the C API and in my code I want to see something that matches the docs, so it should be "C in syntax of $language".
by Noaidi | 2026-01-27 19:16:54+00:00
Its i too warm in those places so there will be many mroe people willing to protest.

But also ask yourself this: Why are they not going after all the companions that hire illegal immigrants and arresting the CEO's? Put one CEO in jail for hiring illegal immigrants and the problem would be solved.

The reason is they do not care about illegal immigration, they are about stoking the left/right division so you do not start a class war.
by sejje | 2026-01-27 19:16:57+00:00
One of them was very justified.

Pretti was a cluster like I said. I don't think he should have been shot, but it's going to be really hard to find anyone guilty.

They're hands on with an armed person who is resisting them, and he is shot in the chaos. I personally believe the first shot was by the officer who drew, but was unintentional and I don't think he realized it was his own gun.

The time from him being disarmed to the first shot was well under a second, wasn't it? Not enough time to send a memo to everyone about the current status of the armed opposition.
by forgotpwd16 | 2026-01-27 19:17:03+00:00
>the tool can't answer, but surfacing the question for the reviewer has value

That's true. Could even expand on this and make it have a --check-msg mode that returns 0/1 (good/bad) if commit messages lack the reasoning for the changes they're doing. Although, linting commit messages is last thing I want to do.
by fokdelafons | 2026-01-27 19:17:05+00:00
The linked post details my engineering solution: a 'Generalizer-Judge-Surgeon' pipeline to remove hallucinations from legislation.

Using a "dumber/faster" model (Flash Lite) strictly as a Judge (comparing Source vs Summary) worked better than asking initial model to self-verify. It acts like a semantic regex.

Call for Contributors:
The project is Source Available. I have the core architecture ready for scaling, but I need locals to help build the specific data adapters/scrapers for their parliaments. If you want to help fix the "legislative black hole" in your country, check the repo.

Happy to answer questions about the prompt engineering or the architecture.
by tptacek | 2026-01-27 19:17:20+00:00
The whole Tailscale ethos is exactly what you're talking about:

* Security/risk teams have coherent, sensible goals for managing access

* The technology stack they've landed on makes those goals performative; so complicated that they can't even express their most important goals, so annoying that users route around it

* What's needed is a radically simplified approach that centers end-user experience (particularly around onboarding).

I'm not saying banks are crazy to want to control LLM usage (I'm not bullish on it long-term either, but I see the issue), just that the systems I've talked to friends about them using today are batshit, ranging from "foundation lab shmoundation lab we'll just do our own models" to "OK you can operate in 2025 but only in a Citrix terminal".
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-27 19:17:59+00:00
V.M.L.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/us-citizen-deportat...

> U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.

> The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
by pixl97 | 2026-01-27 19:18:13+00:00
100%.

This pattern of government behavior is everywhere. One common one is the yellow sheet (form 4473) for buying a firearm in the US.

Here is an example of a question

> “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

No matter the state law, federal law says it's illegal.

So, what happens. At some point you buy a gun in Colorado. Then lets say you get on the news and talk about legalization, or you talk about anything that catches social media popularity and someone in the government doesn't approve of. Well, you better not have any record of a marijuana purchase anywhere, or pictures of you doing it because you've just committed a federal crime and the ATF/FBI can kick down your door as they please.
by throwaway173738 | 2026-01-27 19:18:39+00:00
Even calling it “illegal immigration” lends fuel to the fire. There’s a very distinct difference between crossing the border illegally and violating the terms of a legally acquired visa or stamp. The latter is a civil matter which is why people weren’t historically rounded up and detained under threat of violence or murder. So yeah this whole thing is strictly about xenophobia being used to whip up the in group about an out group so we don’t look too closely at EG Venezuela or the sales process for presidential pardons.
by throw0101a | 2026-01-27 19:18:48+00:00
> It would be if stalking happened at the same frequency as property theft, but the rates are ridiculously lopsided.

But the impact of the two activities is also lopsided:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_matrix

Stalking can potentially result in rape and death, even if there's a low probability of stalking happening in general.
by forgotaccount3 | 2026-01-27 19:18:49+00:00
Maybe the two public data points weren't connected before?

I don't use SoundCloud, but if profiles didn't have contact information like Email Address on them then it could be meaningful to now connect those two dots.

Like, 'Hey look, Person A, who is known to use email address X, kept Lost Prophets as one of their liked artists even after 2013!'
by tialaramex | 2026-01-27 19:19:05+00:00
The actual vulnerability is indeed the copy. What we used to do is this:

1. Find out how big this data is, we tell the ASN.1 code how big it's allowed to be, but since we're not storing it anywhere those tests don't matter

2. Check we found at least some data, zero isn't OK, failure isn't OK, but too big is fine

3. Copy the too big data onto a local buffer

The API design is typical of C and has the effect of encouraging this mistake

int ossl_asn1_type_get_octetstring_int(const ASN1_TYPE *a, long *num, unsigned char *data, int max_len)

That "int" we're returning is either -1 or the claimed length of the ASN.1 data without regard to how long that is or whether it makes sense.

This encourages people to either forget the return value entirely (it's just some integer, who cares, in the happy path this works) or check it for -1 which indicates some fatal ASN.1 layer problem, give up, but ignore other values.

If the thing you got back from your function was a Result type you'd know that this wasn't OK, because it isn't OK. But the "Eh, everything is an integer" model popular in C discourages such sensible choices because they were harder to implement decades ago.
by gf000 | 2026-01-27 19:19:06+00:00
For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it.

X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol).

I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it.

User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit.

Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.
by quietsegfault | 2026-01-27 19:19:10+00:00
The problem with this framing is that it treats a mass exodus as if it were selective pruning. Losing 10,000+ STEM PhDs in weeks isn’t a quality filter. We’re hemorrhaging institutional capacity. We lose researchers who understand decade-long datasets, technical experts who can evaluate contractor claims, and people who can actually critique scientific literature when making policy decisions.

Where’s the evidence these specific 10k were the low performers? The more likely scenario is that better performers left because they have options, while weaker performers stayed. If the issue is quality, you’d want systematic performance review, not mass departure driven by factors unrelated to competence.
by palmotea | 2026-01-27 19:19:17+00:00
> Does anyone have a good understanding of the reasoning behind these targeted operations being in places one wouldn't typically associate with the average illegal/undocumented immigrant?

Trump wants Republicans to lose elections, apparently. IIRC, Susan Collins is up for re-election this year in a tough race, and there is a big scandal in Minnesota that would have hurt Democrats (Tim Walz dropped out because of it) until Trump sent ICE. This whole thing is unreasonable from every angle you could possibly look at it.
by geminigemino | 2026-01-27 19:19:22+00:00
Good catch, you actually found a bug. The predation (and dormancy) weights were being multiplied by scarcity/emotion modifiers, but in some early-return paths the original values were never restored. That meant the weights compounded every tick and could blow up exponentially into these absurd numbers.

That also explains the slowdown: once those values get extreme, a lot of the probability and normalization math gets very expensive.

It’s fixed now by restoring the original weights before every early return. Thanks for flagging it. That was a legit bug.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-27 19:19:46+00:00
I enjoy working on my computer more at 144Hz than 60Hz. Even on my phone, the switch from 60Hz to a higher frame rate is quite obvious. It makes the entire system feel more responsive and less glitchy. VRR also helps a lot in cases where the system is under load.

60Hz is actually a downgrade from what people were used to. Sure, games and such struggled to get that kind of performance, but CRT screens did 75Hz/85Hz/100Hz quite well (perhaps at lower resolutions, because full-res 1200p sometimes made text difficult to read on a 21 inch CRT, with little benefit from the added smoothness as CRTs have a natural fuzzy edge around their straight lines anyway).

There's nothing about programming or word processing that requires more than maybe 5 or 6 fps (very few people type more than 300 characters per minute anyway) but I feel much better working on a 60 fps screen than I do a 30 fps one.

Everyone has different preferences, though. You can extend your laptop's battery life by quite a bit by reducing the refresh rate to 30Hz. If you're someone who doesn't really mind the frame rate of their computer, it may be worth trying!
by js8 | 2026-01-27 19:19:59+00:00
Recently, I came across Erich Fromm's distinction between "being mode" and "having mode" (AI really explained it the best, would paste it here but it's somewhat long). You're, in contrast with parent post, looking at it from the "having mode" - how to sell the "product" to someone.

But you can also think what would you want to build (for yourself or someone you know), that would otherwise take a team of people. Coding what used to be a professional app can now be a short hobby project.

I played with Claude Code Pro only a short while, but I already believe the mode of production of SW will change to be more accessible to individuals (pro or amateur). It will be similar to death of music labels.
by ixtli | 2026-01-27 19:20:08+00:00
I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.

What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.
by jagged-chisel | 2026-01-27 19:20:21+00:00
I fixed a client’s Outlook many years ago with telnet. The app just wouldn’t download email. No error.

So, with the guy looking over my shoulder, I telnet to the email server, list his messages, and discover that there’s an email with an attachment that’s too big for Outlook to handle. Read some basic info from the message so he could confirm that deleting the message was fine - deleted the message, and Outlook worked again.

Dude was thrilled. Fun times.