MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2026-01-20 18:20:12+00:00
Also, anything they build inside the US becomes an economic hostage for a Trump to use for further rounds of extortion.

So it's not just that the policies of any given moment are foolish, or that it's being changed on a whim, or that it has no long-term foundation, or that it's being deployed in a corrupt way... But the person "making the deals" is fundamentally incapable of keeping their end of any bargain.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-20 18:20:37+00:00
I used to use prototype (and sometimes scriptaculous)... Then came IE8 and broke the world on me.

For anyone that didn't know, IE8 implemented native JSON.(parse/stringify) methods, and the second parameter is a hydrator/dehydrator... however, if you added custom properties/methods to Array or Object prototypes, they would throw an error you couldn't catch in JS... so to work around, you'd have to load the JSON library and use it under a different name, in ALL your code, because the native implementation was locked/sealed and couldn't be masked out.

Second most annoying IE bug was 5.0.0 and the old/new api's for dealing with select elements. New worked, old broken, have fun.
by cakehonolulu | 2026-01-20 18:20:50+00:00
Hi! That's correct. We need a way to have a chunk of what Linux calls "Reserved" memory for the virtual BAR trick. Currently, PCIem only thinks about a single device (Since I first needed to have something that worked in order to check how feasible this all was), but there's planned support for multiple devices that can share a "Reserved" memory pool dynamically so you can have multiple BARs for multiple devices.
by seanhunter | 2026-01-20 18:21:28+00:00
> Currencies fundamentally relate to some trust.

A quant partner at Goldman said to me once that the thing that's different about currencies relative other normal financial products is whereas you might buy JPMC or oil or a bond because you like JP Morgan or oil or think rates are going to move in a particular direction or whatever whatever, you never just buy the dollar. You are always trading one currency for another eg selling GBP to buy USD. What that means is currencies are always about the value of one currency relative to other currencies.

In that sense they do fundamentally relate to trust and in particular specifically in this case about trust of the US economy and financial system's stability as opposed to other economies and financial systems.

So there have been times (eg during the financial crisis) where people think all currencies are bad but you can't just sell all of them so typically they would sell the other ones for dollars. For me, de-dollarization is about the choice of central reserve banks to hold dollar assets but also about other financial players changing their "default currency denominator" when they're doing this kind of trade.
by robmusial | 2026-01-20 18:21:43+00:00
If you live in America, are banking with an American bank, and hold your investments denominated in dollars I'm not sure that just shifting your investments to other global equities would really get you the outcome you want if your goal is to hedge against this specific risk. Besides if this really is the trade war to end all trade wars, the world losing one of the largest markets (the U.S.) is going to depress the entire global economy. I assume if you're even considering VXUS you're not close to retirement so wouldn't the better strategy be to just keep adding to VOO?
by butlike | 2026-01-20 18:22:05+00:00
I thought the commonly-held definition of gambling is: "it's gambling if it introduces risk."

e.g. a transaction to buy paper towels is not introducing risk, since I pay an amount and get something.

If I have a chance of not receiving those paper towels if I put money in, then it's considered gambling because the inherent activity introduces risk. It's the same reason the lootboxes were considered gambling at first, and the same reason I classify betting on a chess game as gambling. You're player may potentially not win.
by nospice | 2026-01-20 18:22:06+00:00
> The international value of the dollar as a reserve and trade currency is inherently tied to the behavior of the US Government and the Federal Reserve.

I think this oversimplifies things. The dominance of the dollar emerged chiefly because most of the alternatives were worse, for a combination of military, political, and economic reasons.

There is a positive feedback loop at the core of it, because the US economy benefits greatly from being able to issue foreign debt in their own currency. But that doesn't matter: as long as the US faces little risk of getting invaded by any of its neighbors or defaulting on its obligations, everyone is happy.

What's been changing - and it started long before Trump - is that the US is also increasingly willing to use its control of USD (and thus the Western banking system) to pursue sometimes petty policy goals. This is giving many of our partners second thoughts, not because of the fundamentals of USD but because they imagine finding themselves at odds with the US policymakers at some point down the line.
by epistasis | 2026-01-20 18:22:12+00:00
There is a US policy though, and none of the supposed China Hawks have even voiced a "kee-ahh" in response to US policy empowering and elevating Chinese power.

Way back in September last year, which feels like forever ago, there was this good summary from Politico:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/05/pentagon-national-d...

> Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, is leading the strategy. He played a key role in writing the 2018 version during Trump’s first term and has been a staunch supporter of a more isolationist American policy. Despite his long track record as a China hawk, Colby aligns with Vice President JD Vance on the desire to disentangle the U.S. from foreign commitments.

A supposed "China Hawk" is the one writing the policy that hands power to China! Calling them "frauds" is fully appropriate, and even though the author admits he dashed this off in a single day, I find it quite convincing:

https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/p/the-final-evo...
by pron | 2026-01-20 18:22:20+00:00
> So most Rust programs mostly use GC, yet it's not a GC language; those are some very mind-contorting definitions.

I don't think these definitions are very meaningful. In memory management literature, any technique that reclaims heap memory after a heap object is not reachable is called "garbage collection". Call it a "GC language" or not, it collects heap memory using techniques in the GC literature after objects become unreachable using reference counting with a special construct for the single reference case.

There isn't too much that you can learn just by saying "GC", because the memory/CPU tradeoffs can be more different between two GCs than between one GC and some memory management style in C. So the debate on terminology is less substantial and more about how different people colloquially refer to things with different terms. But Rc/Arc are a very common, established, and traditional GC implementation (and a simple one if you ignore the large and rather elaborate implementation of malloc/free we have these days in the runtime, which is necessary for decent performance on multicore machines).

> They put a soft cap on any exponential curve. And hard cap by placing a literal singularity.

How does any of this predict that processing will become cheaper relative to memory? Note that the trend over the past 4 decades has been the opposite.

> Being a simple language doesn't guarantee lack of complexity in implementation (see Brainfuck).

I didn't think that every simple language is easy to understand, but I find Zig simple and easy to understand.

> By Zig's explicitness, you mean everything is public?

What I meant was that there are no calls/operations performed in a subroutine that aren't visible in the text of the subroutine. This is very important to me in low-level programming. Of course, different people from different domains may have different preferences. Much of my low-level programming was in safety-critical hard realtime, and Zig just appeals more to how I like to think about control over the hardware and about correctness. It's not universal, and I'm sure Rust appeals more to other low-level programmers.
by agentcoops | 2026-01-20 18:23:26+00:00
I hear your argument, but short of major algorithmic breakthroughs I am not convinced the global demand for GPUs will drop any time soon. Of course I could easily be wrong, but regardless I think the most predictable cause for a drop in the NVIDIA price would be that the CHIPS act/recent decisions by the CCP leads a Chinese firm to bring to market a CUDA compatible and reliable GPU at a fraction of the cost. It should be remembered that NVIDIA's /current/ value is based on their being locked out of their second largest market (China) with no investor expectation of that changing in the future. Given the current geopolitical landscape, in the hypothetical case where a Chinese firm markets such a chip we should expect that US firms would be prohibited from purchasing them, while it's less clear that Europeans or Saudis would be. Even so, if NVIDIA were not to lower their prices at all, US firms would be at a tremendous cost disadvantage while their competitors would no longer have one with respect to compute.

All hypothetical, of course, but to me that's the most convincing bear case I've heard for NVIDIA.
by deepvibrations | 2026-01-20 18:23:27+00:00
Was about to comment the same till I found your comment.

I have this compulsion too, and did some deep-diving at some point through therapy. I found that really it's just likely conditioning from family/society.

If you are generally praised for helping out whilst growing up and this is when you receive a lot of love/attention, it's natural to build pathways that favour this and thus behavioural patterns.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2026-01-20 18:23:28+00:00
you have completely misunderstood what it means to be a luddite.

the luddites were a labor movement opposed to the negative externalities imposed by rapid industrialization of formerly-craft/artisinal markets. it was a movement that stood for the protection of workers rights and the quality of goods produced; it was not opposed to new technologies. what it did oppose was the irresponsible use of those technologies at the expense of workers and consumers.

what you're referring to is probably more accurately described as primitivism.
by nerdponx | 2026-01-20 18:23:41+00:00
I can't edit my own post but there are two other big differences between the Prolog example and the Word2Vec example.

1. The W2V example is approximate. Not "fuzzy" in the sense of fuzzy logic. I mean that Man Woman Queen King are all essentially just arrows pointing in different directions (in a high dimensional space). Summing vectors is like averaging their angles. So subtracting "King - Man" is a kind of anti-average, and "King - Man + Woman" then averages that intermediate thing with "Woman", which just so happens to yield a direction very close to that of "Queen". This is, again, entirely emergent from the algorithm and the training data. It's also probably a non-representative cherry picked example, but other commenters have gone into detail about that and it's not the point I'm trying to make.

2. In addition to requiring hand-crafted rules, any old school logic programming system has to go through some kind of a unification or backtracking algorithm to obtain a solution. Meanwhile here we have vector arithmetic, which is probably one of the fastest things you can do on modern computing hardware, not to mention being linear in time and space. Not a big deal in this example, could be quite a big deal in bigger applications.

And yes you could have some kind of ML/AI thing emit a Prolog program or equivalent but again that's a totally different topic.
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-20 18:23:50+00:00
Calculus might not be the best analogy for my point since it’s pretty fundamental. When I think of an expert I think of an accomplished mathematician or a chemist, someone that can build on existing knowledge to provide new breakthroughs. You can ask an LLM for a particular formulation but you cannot make wide spanning connections to come up with something novel until you have a good understanding of a given space. Not all progress is a series of iterative problems and tasks that need to be solved. In fact for a lot of breakthroughs it’s making disparate connections.
Show HN: Paradigm – Interactive Visualizer for Codebases
by qbacode | 2026-01-20 18:23:58+00:00
Hi HN — we built Paradigm: a tool that turns a Python repo into an interactive visualization where you can click any node/edge and jump straight to the exact source.

It generates:
- Call graphs (what calls what)
- Module dependency graphs
- “Processes”: end-to-end execution paths inferred from the call graph, from entrypoints (functions/methods with no callers) down to leaf calls (e.g. cli.main → pipeline.run → loader.load → db.fetch)

Why we built it: With AI-assisted coding it’s easy to lose your mental model of how things work. When an agent makes a large change, you still need to understand what it actually did. Paradigm keeps the architecture visible and tied to the source.

Would love feedback.
by _verandaguy | 2026-01-20 18:24:09+00:00
My outsider's POV: the fact that there's a Gestapo-analogue in place already tells me that an electoral solution alone is almost certainly no longer sufficient (or at least, unlikely to be effective) at this point.

The Democrats have also had very weak messaging ahead of the midterms. Like, pathetically weak in the current context.

This is to say nothing of the hypothetical where the US makes moves against allies' territories before the midterms.
by randycupertino | 2026-01-20 18:24:12+00:00
My biggest takeaway from the book is Zuck is such a brat who got so grumpy and pouted so much when other facebook employees on the private jet beat him at board games that they set up an internal plan to always let him win.

Sheryl Sandberg comes off poorly too, calling her assistant "Little Doll," beckoning her to sleep in her lap during private jet trips and buying her lingerie on business trips. Then on another trip she tried to get a different employee to come cuddle and sleep in the jet bed with her and pouted when this person declined, saying the first assistant always would so why does this person have a problem with it. She also has racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino nannies because they are "service oriented."
by netbioserror | 2026-01-20 18:24:22+00:00
What @cheeseomlit said, plus: During the Age of Exploration/Colonization, competing European powers each minted metal currencies and couldn't reasonably debase their metals without immediately being out-competed (which is why the trusted purity of Spanish gold and silver coinage slowly dominated). The primary mode of failure for those empires was bankruptcy via war. The impossibly high cost of fielding armies around the globe was laid bare during that era. Paper money lets us (funnily enough) paper those costs over and live with the illusion that it's all a free lunch. But what we're actually doing today is debasement, and eating, vociferously, all of the deflationary efficiency gains won by 20th century technological progress.
by munk-a | 2026-01-20 18:24:36+00:00
I believe that TD's US presence is still a subsidiary of the main Canadian corporation - and there are some banks that will explicitly offer offshore non-US currency accounts. That is a good point to raise though since most banks may offer holdings in overseas funds but if they're managed domestically they'd likely be subject to the same currency shocks and your account may still read well on paper but be effectively unreachable.
by jonathanstrange | 2026-01-20 18:25:09+00:00
What we witness seems to be a lack of control due to a vicious feedback loop that eliminates dissenters and reasonable, moderate people from positions of power. The longer it stays active, the worse it becomes. In other authoritarian systems this is not so noticeable because their leaders act more rationally to begin with, although they tend to lose their grip on reality in the long run, too.
by krupan | 2026-01-20 18:25:13+00:00
OK, how do I know that gold is pure and real? What if you live on the other side of the world and I want to buy that gold from you?

And there isn't any "hope" involved in bitcoin transactions. Connecting to the peer to peer network is super simple (way, way easier than creating a brokerage or bank account, and no ID or approval is required). Miners will pick up your transaction (and yes fees will help speed that up, as with any financial transaction) and it will be included in a block. Bitcoin has been doing this non-stop, flawlessly since 2009.
by cakehonolulu | 2026-01-20 18:25:27+00:00
I feel like libfvio-user is a cool project and works perfectly fine, that is, if you want to have the device on the host's userspace but exposed to a VM (QEMU, in this case).

PCIem kinda does that, but it's down a level; in terms of, it basically pops the device on your host PCI bus, which lets real, unmodified drivers to interact with the userspace implementation of your card, no QEMU, no VM, no hypervisors.

Not saying that you can then, for instance, forward all the accesses to QEMU (Some people/orgs already have their cards defined in QEMU so it'd be a bit pointless to redefine the same stuff over and over, right?) so they're free to basically glue their QEMU stuff to PCIem in case they want to try the driver directly on the host but maintaining the functional emulation on QEMU. PCIem takes care of abstracting the accesses and whatnot with an API that tries to mimick that the cool people over at KVM do.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-01-20 18:25:35+00:00
> The behavior of the US Government has been very unusual lately, and the independence of the Federal Reserve is actively being challenged.

This is mostly due to the behavior of the country being unusual.

The US had grown at a healthy clip for a long time.

Due to the amount of boomers exiting the workforce, and withdrawing rather than adding to their savings - the US is going to be in a very different position for the next 10-20 years before things start to level out.

If something like AI doesn't save us with a pretty sizable productivity boost, we're in for uncharted territory.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-20 18:25:41+00:00
You reframed the researcher's report that every time they put on a headset, children were being sexually harrased by adults as "Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do." -- that one will be clearest to on-lookers, and the other two are just as addled.

I genuinely hope it's out of: a lack of understanding of legal terms, ethics, and how to read critically. And that it is not trolling.

It's quite stultifying to read as someone who does have those understandings.

It reads as lying at best and trolling at worst, but my red-line is assigning motivation.

Which is a shame, because the article is a good example of what happens when you're cowardly and pretend "reacting to what it is" is "assigning motivation": inter alia, a 17 strike sex trafficker policy, signed off by corporate.
by schmidtleonard | 2026-01-20 18:26:08+00:00
The interwar era between WWI and WWII is most instructive for what a multipolar currency world looks like. The Pound Sterling still mostly worked before WWI and the Dollar rose in the wake of WWII.

This did/will cause "Kindleberger problems," named after the economist who described them. The big issue is that everyone wants to pump exports to pump their real economy, they can't all succeed because the world is a closed system, so they fight. First with tariffs, eventually with guns.

These Kindleberger Problems will get worse until the US gets its shit together or China assumes the throne. Note that assuming the throne will destroy the export sector that they love so much (Triffin Dilemma), so not only are they not ready today, they don't even clearly want to be ready. Much like the US between WWI and WWII.

Buckle up, because the tariff wars, Great Depression, the economic driving force for the imperialism of Imperial Japan, and other awful things that you've heard of before all fall in the category of "Kindleberger Problems," are all downstream of not having a global currency hegemon, and are likely to rhyme with what comes next.
by alexellisuk | 2026-01-20 18:26:17+00:00
Author of the post here. I have to caveat this - I do use cloud-hosted SOTA models extensively, but whilst I am British, I am not Simon Willison and do not live and breathe local models!

I'm curious what results you can get from your own kit, if you can tune the setup better, using the same inputs or even a different model.

Do test and experiment for yourself. Do not take me as an expert on all things local LLM.

I did use one of our products to sandbox Ollama, and Claude - other sandboxes are available, many cloud-hosted, I'm sure they are also excellent choices.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-20 18:26:29+00:00
That is commonly repeated idea, but it doesn't take into account countless token farms which are smaller than a datacenter. Basically anything from a single MB with 8 cards to a small shed with rigs, all of which tend to disregard common engineering practices and run hardware into a ground to maximize output until next police raid or difficulty bump. Plenty of photos in the internet of crappy rigs like that, and no one guarantees which GPU comes whom where.

Another commonly forgotten issue is that many electrical components are rated by hours of operation. And cheaper boards tend to have components with smaller tolerances. And that rated time is actually a graph, where hour decrease with higher temperature. There were instances of batches of cards failing due to failing MOSFETs for example.
by a115ltd | 2026-01-20 18:26:31+00:00
Is the US dollar losing its dominance? The answer is both A) yes and B) it doesn't matter.

Yes, US dollar is losing a bit of power and influence. This is likely to continue.

Making inferences about the US global dominance based on this fact is misguided. US global dominance is as strong as ever and, if anything, getting stronger. US has very successfully managed to move the game a level above currency, to direct governance via financial, legal, political and military means. It has made any meaningful competitors either entirely irrelevant (e.g. Russia), pretty well aligned (e.g. India) or pretty well contained (e.g. China) It's blue skies ahead.
by 9rx | 2026-01-20 18:26:44+00:00
> When I think of an expert I think of an accomplished mathematician or a chemist, someone that can build on existing knowledge to provide new breakthroughs.

I think we're on the same page here. Experts have both vision and execution. Someone who has simply learned a bunch of things, or a lot about one thing, is not what we consider an expert.

> You can ask an LLM for a particular formulation but you cannot make wide spanning connections to come up with something novel until you have a good understanding of a given space.

I don't get where you are trying to go with this. Using an LLM (or Page Rank for that matter) to search for tools that have been created/discovered necessary to fulfill execution of your vision seems to have nothing to do with what you are trying to say. Nobody would ask an LLM to do what you are suggesting, if I am understanding you correctly. LLMs are most definitely not good at that. That is AGI territory.
by tmountain | 2026-01-20 18:26:55+00:00
The U.S. chose to abandon the rules based international order that has made it a bastion of stability since WW2 when they decided they wanted a return to the monroe doctrine and that it was okay to arbitrarily invade countries and take their resources based on the impulses of a single person. The same person outwardly stated, "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace". If you think this is "as stable as it gets", then we're living on different planets.