MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tdb7893 | 2026-01-29 03:00:22+00:00
Haha, my experience is people making those sorts of pronouncements will argue literally anything so I definitely wouldn't assume they are uninterested in arguing facts. Though I agree though that arguing with some people is obtuse and you arguing with the original post seems one of those cases.

More my confusion is the person I was responding to complaining about people arguing morality, which seems incredibly important to discuss. Lack of facts obviously makes discussions bad but there's definitely not some dichotomy with discussing morality (at least not with the people I know. My issue has not nearly been as much with people arguing morality and more people with a irreconcilable view on what the facts are).
by mrandish | 2026-01-29 03:00:49+00:00
Cool! Just this week I've been playing around using web chatbots to write userscript. So far, I've just been cutting/pasting code from ViolentMonkey's basic edit window - which is a clunky workflow and a real editor like VSCode would be great. Even though the script is quite short, I've already found I definitely need auto-rollback due to AI regressions. So this sounds very useful!

I use Firefox (on Win) but I guess it might be worth using Chrome just for write/test iteration and then copy over to FF. Looking just now it appears ViolentMonkey on Chrome died in the Manifest V3 apocalypse but is still on Edge.
by Supermancho | 2026-01-29 03:00:50+00:00
My father was a ISO9000 and ISO9001 certification consultant for over 10 years. He taught at Cal Poly Pamona, near the end of that era. This was my first exposure to using the familiar terms seen in RFCs like MUST MAY SHALL, etc.

Ever tried to write a quality based document describing how to create an air filled, japanese oragami balloon? (step 3 is the first big hurdle, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Balloon). That was his goto starter for ISO classes.

> I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?

ISO standards don't ensure this, since certification is only based on verifying documentation format. What the ISO processes do tend to do is create a small memo indicating that every dept should justify the work they are doing by writing it down and showing it to their boss. What that does to an organization is to produce a crapload of near-useless documentation and throw a large number of people into political hell. After that, the solution is always the same. They quickly move from everyone trying to coordinate down to a very small number of people (1-3) taking charge of moving dept to dept. Either the agents or the supervisors who are articulate enough to gloss over inconsistencies and gaps to form a coherent story, write the documentation.

While this may lend well to shoring up some companies, in the early 2000s, it was a lucrative gig.
by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 | 2026-01-29 03:02:34+00:00
While many IBM products are beautifully designed, IBM also has a long tradition of dreadful implementations. JES3 and COLT (Canadian On-line Teller) come to mind.

IBM had a tradition of not allowing customers to fall down. JES3 took down a bank in Buffalo. Fortunately for the guilty a major snowstorm had shutdown the city for several days. IBM sent in SEs on snowmobiles.

COLT was even worse as it could throw a mainframe into an interrupt cascade. You had to press System Reset, then IPL and pick up the pieces of transactions. It took me a few months to identify where a register got mangled over an interrupt. This was pseudo reentrant code which I came to utterly despise.

I characterized the code as the result of student intern self abuse.

I spent several months flogging that dead horse until I changed jobs. There were later opportunities at other banks that saw COLT on my résumé that I refused.

In the current millennium, IBM has been serially fomenting payroll disasters with Phoenix as it's known in Canada (I don't know what it's called in Australia).
by rvz | 2026-01-29 03:03:01+00:00
It's actually both.

1. Ramp up offshore hiring and relocate jobs in low-cost-of-living (LCOL) countries (India) to avoid paying the 100K H1-B visa charge.

2. Train their AI and robotics by researchers in LCOL countries (to eventually replace the high-cost-of-living (HCOL) warehouse labor workforce)

3. Deploy robots and AI agents to then layoff more people in HCOL environments and repeat (1) until their margins improve and they achieve AGI.

It's not that hard to see.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-29 03:03:06+00:00
Not all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day.

Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments.

The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth.

Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record.

Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
by digiown | 2026-01-29 03:04:15+00:00
Maybe, but the user ought to be able to do with their device the equivalent of what a root account can do, even if not especially conveniently. Like seeing what data apps are saving to their devices or spoofing data to prevent apps from gaining unauthorized information. Apps should not be protected from the user, and user should have recourse from apps doings things not in their interest.
by mathieudombrock | 2026-01-29 03:04:47+00:00
I'm not OP but I've worked on JUCE plugins with React UIs for JUCE8 web view.

The UI load is pretty instantaneous.

Everything uses the native web view. This means that on macOS you get WebKit and on Windows you get Chrome (or sometimes IE).

So it's generally faster than Electron. In the project I worked on it was not noticeably slower than native UI.

Memory usage is really close to what you might expect from any other app running native web view.
by stevefan1999 | 2026-01-29 03:05:28+00:00
> it's the kernel who broke things

I remember this in a heated LKML exchange, 13 years ago, look how the table has turned:

>

> Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the

> returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.

Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a
maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel
maintenance?

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the
kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to
understand?

To make matters worse, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is clearly total and utter
CRAP even if it didn't break applications. ENOENT is not a valid error
return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No
such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done
on files that have already been opened, there's no way in hell that
ENOENT would ever be valid.

> So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression,

> but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious

> bugs and/or regressions.

Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious
garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.

I'd wait for Rafael's patch to go through you, but I have another
error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken
by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it's the same kernel bug. And you've shown
yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I'll apply it directly
and immediately myself.

WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don't
break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I'm angry, because your whole email
was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so
obviously crap. The whole patch is incredibly broken shit. It adds an
insane error code (ENOENT), and then because it's so insane, it adds a
few places to fix it up ("ret == -ENOENT ? -EINVAL : ret").

The fact that you then try to make excuses for breaking user space,
and blaming some external program that used to work, is just
shameful. It's not how we work.

Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken.
And fix your approach to kernel programming.

Linus
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-29 03:05:32+00:00
The bigger issue though is Kantian ethics. People don't have a reductionist value that enables ordering. There are unique qualities, gotchas, and je ne sais quoi for each between two people. Love also isn't a math problem, it's irrational and somewhat involuntary. Good luck to people who approach dating like hiring an employee rather than a desire to be mutually better together.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/55/
by winchester6788 | 2026-01-29 03:05:38+00:00
I had a similar problem, and when claude code (or codex) is running in sandbox, i wanted to put a cap or get notified on large contexts.

especially, because once x0K words crossed, the output becomes worser.

https://github.com/quilrai/LLMWatcher

made this mac app for the same purpose. any thoughts would be appreciated
by nishanseal | 2026-01-29 03:06:51+00:00
It seems counterintuitive, but this helped Tesla which is why Musk championed it. Basically when that tax credit came out, a bunch of Tesla owners had their cars underwater - loans were more than new cars were selling for and depreciation thru the roof. Plus the tax credit helped their competitors. Now that the credit is gone, Tesla owners are closer to being in the black on their cars and it also caused Ford and GM to cut EV production by I believe 100%. Win win for Tesla.
by monster_truck | 2026-01-29 03:06:55+00:00
You can get really, really far with this approach. Even 'naive' approaches like classifying what you're embedding and directing it to different models, or using multiple and blending scores can get you to a point where your results are better than anything you could pay (a lot!) for.

What is especially beneficial about that approach is that you can hang each of the embeddings off of the same bits in the db and tune how their scores are blended at query time.

If you haven't tried it yet: because what you're searching is presumably standardized enough to the point that there will be sprawling glossaries of acronyms, taking those and processing them into custom word lists will boost scores. If you go a little further and build lil graphs/maps of them all, doubly so, and it will give you 'free' autocomplete and the ability to specify which specific acronym(s) you meant or don't want on the query side.

Have recently been playing around with these for some code+prose+extracted prose+records semantic searching stuff, its a fun rabbit hole
by stouset | 2026-01-29 03:07:14+00:00
We have now moved the goalposts from starting to build generational wealth to maybe part of a down payment on a house in a low-demand area in their mid-forties, assuming they have enough income to still qualify for the loan on the property.

This is a great gift to the athletes, don’t get me wrong. There was just no need to oversell it.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-29 03:08:19+00:00
For the presidential election sure, but I wouldn't underestimate state level organization of the DNC in the rural west and Midwest.

The issue is fractured fundraising basically undermines the local organization by funding challenger candidates, which alienates local Dems and depresses turnout (TDP is notorious for this).

Iowa is going to be a competitive race hence why Joni Ernst decided to not run for reelection.
by novia | 2026-01-29 03:08:33+00:00
> The events of the past week have shown that immigration status, citizenship, or even the law is not a deterrent against detention, violence, or even death from federal operatives.

As far as I understand it, both Alex Pretti and Renee Good were not just peacefully protesting, they were obstructing law enforcement [1][2][3]. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about this.

If Google DeepMind employees have their visas in order, don't stalk ICE agents in signal chats, and just go to work like normal they should not have anything to worry about.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cj6wgelw62do

[2] https://www.wlfi.com/news/national/alex-pretti-broke-rib-in-...

[3] https://youtu.be/BM2OBGAWHVo, https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/video/minnesota-shooting-i...
by MBCook | 2026-01-29 03:08:52+00:00
Didn’t they just announce their profits dropped like 45% year over a year?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tesla-earnings-profit-q4-2...

They’ve been overvalued for a very very long time. And then the head of the company decided to alienate as many people as possible. All while pouring a ton of resources into a product that very few people want instead of saner things.
by rekabis | 2026-01-29 03:09:10+00:00
> Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.

Which is why one of the core tenets of practicing Science is “trust, but verify”.

Science is based on the trust of what came before.

But the fallible, ego-driven, and dishonest nature of humanity means that trust alone cannot be relied upon. Hence the “but verify”. That is why replication studies and falsification tests exist - to cull that which cannot be reliably replicated.

Unfortunately, capitalism has stepped in and f*ked up even that, when for-profit universities who rely on public funding place “publish or die” mandates on researchers. This makes any repeat experiments untenable because it takes researchers away from publishing new data. So they just cite prior papers and chase the latest shiny -- because their continued employment is predicated upon publishing.

We have perverse incentives in place that have distorted science, sure. And almost all of these distortions come directly down to a violently coercive economic system that forces you to be profitable to someone else least you suffer homelessness, destitution, and even death.

But what else is there? Belief in an insane, evil, and omnicidal sky-daddy?

Sorry, but no. We should counteract the sources of distortions by crushing capitalism and the corrosive influence of money, not switching over to systems that have always proven themselves to be supremely untrustworthy.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-01-29 03:09:26+00:00
> That's conceivable. But I don't see the space science fiction of Le Guine or Asimov being realized in the activities of Musk and Bezos. To me, the whole thing seems more like an awkward dick measuring contest. The awkward situation with Shatner was a good example of how hollow and superficial this whole thing is. These people could go down in history as benefactors and heroes of humanity. But they don't have the guts for that.

SpaceX has done a huge amount of engineering work in making the cost to get mass into orbit significantly cheaper, more reliable, and more routine. Elon Musk is, on a personal level, because of the sort of company he chose to build after becoming wealthy, absolutely responsible for bringing humanity closer to a future imagined in space science fiction.
by fouc | 2026-01-29 03:09:56+00:00
There's a lot of non-obvious information or hidden information out there if you have no context. I mean, at the very least I can tell that there are a lot of wealthy and powerful people in western society that are invested in maintaining the innocence and primacy of Israel.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -- Upton Sinclair.

Where salary in that quote could be metaphorical, given there's other reasons like identity, beliefs, or politics.
by tjroqfggyu56275 | 2026-01-29 03:10:07+00:00
Don't think anyone in the "global South", which have suffered from Western "civilizing missions" are surprised by this.

It's kind of funny to see "anti-interventions" podcasters go full empire mode and justify literally colonization today.

Hardly surprising, since most of these white nationalists love the British Empire's "oeuvre" in non-White countries (but somehow ignore the fact that their own country fought against its tyrannical rule).
by kelseydh | 2026-01-29 03:10:19+00:00
That assumes the problem is a common one others have encountered, which the examples I gave above certainly were. When you're wrangling with poorly documented legacy code operating under the context of its own internal domain logic (e.g. arcane country specific banking regulations), often the only source of good "judgement" (that's the commonwealth spelling btw) are those in the past who wrote the code the way they did.

This is an area where Claude Code is both valuable and dangerous. It can propose sweeping (correct) changes based on inconsistencies it finds within the codebase. The developer, in situations where nobody more senior is around to answer those design questions, is left making a judgement call based on vibes and what logic they can piece together about Claude's changes.
by wraptile | 2026-01-29 03:10:25+00:00
> Mac hardware is like two years ahead of PC currently in pretty much any regard aside from gaming

and any contemporary ergonomics. Seriously, macbooks are an environmental hazard at this point: ultra glossy screen, hand twisting keyboard, wrist cutting sharp edges, lack of modern surge protections etc. etc. I genuinely don't understand this sentiment that macbook hardware is good.
by queuebert | 2026-01-29 03:10:48+00:00
These are amazing illustrations, but I don't understand the emphasis on pressure differentials. That is not how wings generate lift. Due to attachment they deflect the flow, and the momentum change generates an upward force [1]. The practical point of understanding the flow over the wing is to keep that flow attached so that you can deflect it or reattach it if you get out of sorts.

1. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/a...
by digiown | 2026-01-29 03:11:21+00:00
I am somewhat hopeful that local AI will save us. It will be fairly easy to automate interacting with normie devices and services in the near future. It's not impossible to prevent it, but that will probably be annoying enough to the normies for them to reconsider. I see a future where the select few will still be able to use their free devices to operate the nonfree ones remotely, while incrementally taking back control with things like self-hosted tools.
by tru3_power | 2026-01-29 03:11:23+00:00
What’s the purpose of licensing requiring though things though if someone could just use an open source model to do that anyway? If someone were going to do those things you mentioned why do it through some commercial enterprise tool? I can see maybe licensing requiring a certain level of hardening to prevent prompt injections, but ultimately it still really comes down to how much power you give the model in whatever context it’s operating in.
Show HN: AI tool to that reaches top in machine-learning competition
by leopiney | 2026-01-29 03:11:36+00:00
I've been experimenting with autonomous coding agents for ML workflows. ML-Ralph uses claude-code to run a continuous experiment loop - it forms hypotheses, writes training code, evaluates results, and iterates on what it learns. Added Weights & Biases integration for observability on long runs.
As a test, I pointed it at Kaggle Higgs Boson and let it run for a few hours unsupervised. It placed top 30. I humanly participated on that competition too, and barely reached top 150.

Still rough around the edges. Would appreciate feedback, especially on failure modes you'd want to see handled better.
by koverstreet | 2026-01-29 03:11:54+00:00
No multithreaded write benchmarks. That's a major omission, given that's where you'll see the biggest difference between b-trees and LSM trees.

The paper also talks about the overhead of the mapping table for node lookups, and says "Bf-Tree by default pins the inner nodes in memory and uses direct pointer addresses to reference them. This allows a simpler inner node implementation, efficient node access, and reduced con-
tention on the mapping table".

But you don't have to pin nodes in memory to use direct pointer lookups. Reserve a field in your key/value pair for a direct in-memory pointer, and after chasing it check that you got the node you expect; only fall back to the mapping table (i.e. hash table of cached nodes) if the pointer is uninitialized or you don't get the node you expect.

"For write, conventional B-Tree performs the worst, as a single
record update would incur a full page write, as evidenced by the
highest disk IO per operation."

Only with a random distribution, but early on the paper talks about benchmarking with a Zip-f distribution. Err?

The benchmark does look like a purely random distribution, which is not terribly realistic for most use cases. The line about "a single record updating incurring a full page write" also ignores the effect of cache size vs. working set size, which is a rather important detail. I can't say I trust the benchmark numbers.

Prefix compression - nice to see this popping up.

"hybrid latching" - basically, they're doing what the Linux kernel calls seqlocks for interior nodes. This is smart, but given that their b-tree implementation doesn't use it, you shouldn't trust the b-tree benchmarks.

However, I found that approach problematic - it's basically software transactional memory, with all the complexity that implies, and it bleeds out into too much of the rest of your b-tree code. Using a different type of lock for interior nodes where read locks only use percpu counters gives the same performance (read locks touch no cachelines shared by other CPUs) for much lower complexity.

Not entirely state of the art, and I see a lot of focus on optimizations that likely wouldn't survive in a larger system, but it does look like a real improvement over LSM trees.
by octoberfranklin | 2026-01-29 03:12:07+00:00
Yeah 25 years ago people said stuff like that about fingerprint scanners, and then they got hacked by literal gummy bears:

https://www.theregister.com/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fi...

For 2020's-era palm scanners you don't have to replicate a 3D hand -- just like a video chat doesn't replicate my 3D face. You just have to emit photons (some of them infrared, yes) in the correct pattern. The hack won't look like a 3D-printed hand, it'll look like a display panel that works beyond visible wavelengths. It'll probably be some device developed for a totally unrelated market, and then one day "whoops, all those palm scanners are 0wn3d" (natürlich auf Deutsch) will be a talk title at CCC.

But all this is academic. The real problem with biometrics is that when your password is a body part, you can't change your password.