MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nine_k | 2026-01-05 18:20:13+00:00
We have a linear address space where we can map physical RAM and memory-mapped devices dynamically. Every core, at any given time, may have its own view of it. The current approach uses pretty coarse granularity, separating execution at the process level. The separation could be more granular.

The problem is the granularity of trust within the system. Were the MMU much faster, and TLB much larger (say, 128MiB of dedicated SRAM), the granularity might be pretty high, giving each function's stack a separate address space insulated from the rest of RAM. This is possible even now, just would be impractically slow.

Any hierarchical (tree-based) addressing scheme is equivalent to a linear addressing scheme, pick any tree traversal algorithm. Any locally-hierarchical addressing scheme seemingly can be implemented with (short) offsets in a linear address space; this is how most jumps in x64 and aarch64 are encoded, for instance.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-05 18:20:37+00:00
> Writing CSS is not programming.

We've heard that one before, haven't we? HTML was supposed to be a declarative language, not a vanilla programming one. And look where we are... the biggest mess of a programming language the world has ever seen.

What's the wisdom of randomly inserting cutesy "declarative" bits in a world infused with programming-oriented infrastructure... It doesn't make any sense.
by giardini | 2026-01-05 18:21:02+00:00
Thank you! I searched for "UC Davis protocol for shoulder" and found Dr. Keith Baars at UC Davis and his research on tendons:

[Tim Ferriss podcast re Baars' work at

https://tim.blog/2025/02/27/dr-keith-baar-transcript/

and "dastratman" has produced an excellent summary of Baars' and Ferriss' discussions:

https://hackmd.io/@dastratman/rygQhSmhke
]

I searched your old HN posts and found that you've explained this before to HN denizens! Thank you, thank you so much!

FWIW I've never been able to throw w/o shoulder pain and, now that you mention it, I may make it my goal to build up to that!
by wredcoll | 2026-01-05 18:21:14+00:00
Boy this smells a lot like early days of blogging about block chains, specifically ethereum and friends.
It's not that there's nothing useful, maybe even important, in there, it's just so far it's all just the easy parts: playing around inside a computer.

I've noticed a certain trend over the years where you get certain types of projects that get lots of hype and excitement and much progress seems to be made, but when you dig deep enough you find out that it's all just the fun, easy sort of progress.

The fun progress, which not at all coincidentallly tends to also be the easy progress, is the type that happens solely inside a computer.

What do I mean by that? I mean programs who only operate at the level of artificial computer abstractions.

The hard part is always dealing with "the real world": hardware that returns "impossible" results to your nicely abstract api functions, things that stop working in places they really shouldn't be able to, or even, and this is the really tricky bit, dealing with humans.

Databases are a good example of this kind of thing. It's easy to start off a database writing all the clever (and fun) bits like btrees and hash maps and chained hashes that spill to disk to optimize certain types of tables and so on, but I'd wager that at least half of the code in a "real" database like sqlite or postgresql is devoted to dealing with strange hardware errors or leaky api abstractions across multiple platforms or the various ways a human can send nonsensical input into the system and really screw things up.

I'd also bet that this type of code is a lot less fun to write and took much longer than the rest (which incidentally is why I always get annoyes when programming language demos show code with only a happy path, but that's another rant and this comment is already excessive).

Anyways, this AI thing is definitely a gold rush and it's important to keep in mind that there was in fact a lot of gold that got dug up but, as everyone constantly repeats, the more consistent way to benefit is sell the shovels and this is very definitely an ad for a shovel.
by almosthere | 2026-01-05 18:21:16+00:00
I know, I don't disagree with your ideas on good faith journalism, I just have so little time right now. I am more or less waiting out what happens with the MN fraud investigations. I think it has blown up to such a huge amount that Walz is not running now. All I can say is that a 23 year old kid was able to make that video and a few weeks ago everyone blew a nut because Bari Weiss dropped a 60 minutes investigation on CECOT (A Boring Ass Dead Story).

60 Minutes in 1990 would have DREAMED of breaking the MN scandal story. I remember them breaking a story like Gasoline pump fraud in the 90s and it didn't do any research other than recording gallons pumped into Gallon Water jugs - but they still posed it as fraud.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-05 18:21:27+00:00
For that matter, with modern terminals, you can still do mouse interactivity as an option. I think that working over an SSH terminal is pretty nice in and of itself even if you can self-host a web application.

I've almost always got my terminal app open anyway, in the case of VS Code, I don't even need to switch to another app to use it.
by throwawayffffas | 2026-01-05 18:21:35+00:00
While I don't disagree with your point.

My main point is that trying to educate people to spot AI videos is pointless, in a matter of months, years the output will be impossible to discern from real videos.

The central problem is the platforms and the wild west around disinformation campaigns. The AI is just an accelerant and we were on fire already.
by shinycode | 2026-01-05 18:21:43+00:00
People just enjoy and value the process of making music.
Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports.
Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes.
So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.
by ilaksh | 2026-01-05 18:21:46+00:00
Construction worker is a spectacularly bad analogy for software engineer.

The architect and structural engineers design the building well in advance. Construction workers are mainly arranging materials according to a prewritten design.

Software engineers are not given specs that are equivalent to blueprints. They are given requirements or user stories. Then they have to flesh out the final real specification in place.

And then from the specification, decide how to implement it, which is not decided at all ahead of time.

Also, what software engineers are building is almost always somewhat novel, at least dramatically more novel than a typical building. It very often involves some type of research task, even if that is just sifting through components and configuring them.

There is much more room in software engineering for 1) miscommunication or poor communication of users needs, 2) substantive tradeoffs discovered based on technical details or 3) subtle contradictions in requirements from different stakeholders discovered during implementations, 4) better understanding of requirements by users discovered during prototyping, etc.
by BenoitEssiambre | 2026-01-05 18:22:16+00:00
Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).
by yousif_123123 | 2026-01-05 18:22:51+00:00
What would be the cost for OpenAI to just stop these kinds of very long conversations that aren't about debugging or some actual long problem solving? It seems from the reports many people are being affected, some very very negatively, and many likely unreported. I don't understand why they don't show a warning or just open a new chat thread when a discussion gets too long or it can be detected that it's not fiction and likely veering into dangerous territory?

I don't know how this doesn't give pause to the ChatGPT team. Especially with their supposed mission to be helpful to the world etc.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-05 18:23:02+00:00
> It turned out I hardly can find an artist I recognize

I've heard of 9 of the top 10 and 15 of the top 20 at https://chartmasters.org/most-monthly-listeners-on-spotify/

You might not listen, but surely you have heard of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and of course Christmas Staples of Mariah Carey and Wham?
by hydrogen7800 | 2026-01-05 18:23:06+00:00
I think there is some tenuous analog between today's AI, and yesteryear's music synthesizers and "modern art". Regarding music, I understand synthesizers were created to mimic real instruments, whereas artists used its capabilities not to mimic, but to create entirely new sounds. My limited understanding of modern art (and without a search I don't distinguish between expressionism, impressionism or any other isms because of my ignorance of the differences) is that it was a reaction to the modern world, and an expression of something that could not be anything other than a creation of the human mind. AI may be helping people to copy existing aesthetics, but I'm hoping/waiting for it to enable people to take it in a completely novel direction that can only be augmented human expression.
by glenstein | 2026-01-05 18:23:06+00:00
I'll give Amazon this, I think of the major FAANG contingent, they are perhaps second only to Apple as credible stewards of serious, sane, stable long term commitment to their products and ecosystems. Do they pass the don't-be-evil test? Well, not really. But Prime existed for years before they truly figured out what it was and it started taking off, and despite apparently losing money, they made a credible and consistent long term commitment to their Echo speaker ecosystem.

What's interesting here is they seem not to be offering Just Another LLM but a handful of purpose driven ones, like Rufus for shopping questions, auto-generated blurbs comparing a book you're looking at to one you've read on Kindle, and this for "eligible devices". Yes, every day Amazon is closer to becoming Morgan Industries from the game Alpha Centauri, but it's at least refreshingly intentional.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-05 18:23:13+00:00
I don't think that's possible and frankly I'd much prefer capital not even try. To the best of my knowledge, the only games which generate the really outsized outcomes you'd need for a VC portfolio do really gross, anti-player shit (gacha, lootboxes, whale fishing, etc.) to get it. Or they become distribution monopolies like Valve, which is fine-ish when Valve is private but would be a ongoing catastrophe if it had been VC-funded. I'd rather not encourage that.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-05 18:23:36+00:00
> It is secure after resetting the Disposable VM.

What a nonsense answer. That's like saying a bank vault is secure after being rebuilt from being broken into. Meaningless.

It's not 100% secure while using it.

> It's impossible to make it better

Far from it. A formally verified codebase and better protections than DAC would be a start.

> I don't even understand what your actual problem is.

You made a BS claim and have an allergy to admitting you were wrong.
by kenosha | 2026-01-05 18:23:53+00:00
I feel like I’m missing something between what is explained here and claims that agent driven coding massively speeds up output. Certain parts of this like Day 2s decomposition into steps and Day 3s context packet seem to imply that the author already knows the codebase. They know what steps need to be taken to fix the problem and they know what abstractions exist. That all makes sense to me and reflects what I’ve experienced. It helps get done what I already know. But I still have to understand and know the codebase which feels at odds with some of the massive upside some people are selling. This might be a little adjacent to the main point, but overall I’ve had similar good experiences with the points raised on day 2 + 3.
by evanjrowley | 2026-01-05 18:23:58+00:00
What is your goal with the Cerelog ESP-EEG?

During my mid-teens, I got this wild idea that I could reproduce the experience of psilosybe cubensis by learning to mimic the brainwave patterns through the practice of neurofeedback. I didn't have an EEG, but I learned about the OpenEEG project. Eventually I bought an OpenEEG-based MonolithEEG[0] during a summer where I was fortunate enough to be in west Europe.

Shortly thereafter, I realized I had no experience at all with electronics assembly, and the fever dream quickly evaporated. The MonolithEEG PCB was lost to time.

[0] http://www.shifz.org/moosec/index-Dateien/Page431.htm
by lsaferite | 2026-01-05 18:24:08+00:00
Back when I used to work freelance, I learned that all my contracts needed to have a provision not releasing IP rights until final payment was made. This provides the legal stick to side-step going through a commercial contract dispute. You frequently run into companies wanting to pay fractions of amounts due and not having a strong incentive to hurry along a resolution. Instead, without IP assignment it becomes a copyright enforcement action instead and that can get attention and resolution much faster. I never ended up needing to use it, but I did have to remind a few customers that the provision existed. This all came out of a client stiffing me on a large bill that was, at the time, extremely damaging to my cash flow.

With the above in mind, publicly changing a customer's website to something like this is *highly* unprofessional. Better to simply force the site down in a legal manner that conforms to a signed contract.
by gruez | 2026-01-05 18:24:50+00:00
>https://www.akti.org/age-based-knife-laws/

From chatgpt: >Minimum age. You must be at least 13 years old or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use the Services. If you are under 18 you must have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to use the Services.

>NYC has a four inch limit on knives carried in public, even kitchen knives. https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/faq/knives-faq.page

>And you can't display that knife. "New York City law prohibits carrying a knife that can be seen in public, including wearing a knife outside of your clothing."

Not relevant to this case (ie. self harm), because someone intent on harming themselves obviously aren't going to follow such regulations. You can substitute "knife" for "bleach" in this case.

>"Knives are sharp" disclaimers are easy to find. https://www.henckels.com/us/use-and-care.html

That proves my point? That information is on a separate page on their website, and the point about it being sharp is buried half way in the page. For someone who just bought a knife, there's 0 chance they'll find that unless they're specifically seeking it out.
by echelon | 2026-01-05 18:25:00+00:00
You should see Higgsfield right now.

They're buying stolen Reddit accounts and spamming over 500 videos a day to various subreddits.

They're also advertising fake "unlimited" plans. Their reseller pricing (they're a reseller) is 1/10th the upstream API pricing, so they're metering and throttling and banning users that cost them money.

They're getting thousands of people to subscribe to $1800 "18 month" plans.

Their unofficial subreddit is full of complaints. Probably a dozen complaint threads a day now.

Highly unethical company.
by grymoire1 | 2026-01-05 18:25:23+00:00
Some people think today's file hierarchy is complicated. .That's amusing.

I worked at an R&D center where we had hundreds of UNIX systems orf all types(i.e. Sun, Ultrix, HP, Symbolics, etc.) We also had Sun 2's , 3's and 4's - each with different CPU's/architectures and incompatible binaries. Some Suns had no disks at all. And with hundreds of systems, we literally had a hundred different servers across the entire site.

I would compile a program for a Sun 3, and needed a way to install the program once, for use on hundreds of computers. Also teams of people on dozens of different computers needed to share files with each other.

This was before SSH. We had to use NFS.

It was fairly seamless and .... interesting.
by scott_w | 2026-01-05 18:25:28+00:00
> Punishing in public

Honestly, the "praise public, reprimand privately" truism that people learn is, along with the shit sandwich, one of the most harmful maxims in management.

There are situations where, as the leader, the team needs to see you act. Let's take an example of someone speaking to another team member in an inappropriate way. If you reprimand privately, nobody knows you did that. Now, you have a team that thinks it's ok (or is raging that you think it's ok) to talk to each other in that way. If you call it out publicly, now everyone knows it's not.

It is a double-edged sword, though. I'd not put a junior on full blast for introducing a bug, or a team member for missing an issue in a code review. That would send completely the wrong message.
by lima | 2026-01-05 18:25:40+00:00
Red teams (internal or consultants) use this sort of tooling in the real world. Their job is to emulate a real, competent threat actor. APTs routinely use high-quality rootkits for EDR evasion.

Persistence is actually quite rare nowadays - since it's the most easily detected, red teams usually prefer not to and stay memory-only.
by petit_robert | 2026-01-05 18:25:54+00:00
>If contract broken, sue them. Why throwing a scene?

Haha! tell me about it.

A client of mine ended his contract in 2010, pretending he did not use my software anymore. He had the source because I had to compile on site for technical reasons.

A disgruntled employed called to tell me and my associate he was still using it. It took me 3 years to find a proof, lawsuit started in 2014, the expertise began in 2016 and ended in 2021. I have a first trial hearing scheduled Feb, 12 2026. Expect 6 to 12 months before a decision, and of course, an appeal after that.

The guy had stocked up 5 million dollars net when I stopped him with the lawsuit [0], he is using the money to pay well known lawyers to delay the procedure every which way.

I'm out largely over 100 000 euros in court, expertise and lawyer fees, plus the countless hours spent responding to the endless, senseless dribble their lawyers produce.

As far as I'm concerned, my services are now hosted by me, and failure to pay shuts down the service, it's in the TOS.

[0 : he subcontracted for a big entity. I would never had gotten that contract myself, lacking the thief's network; said big entity never replied to our mails about our software]
by afrazullal | 2026-01-05 18:26:03+00:00
While experimenting with autonomous workflows, I ended up building something more substantial than expected.

Vect AI became a single marketing command center where AI agents plan campaigns, generate commercial visuals, and operate 10+ practical growth tools from one system. It’s not a demo or concept—this is a working product with real architecture behind it.

At this point, I’m choosing not to scale it myself and am opening it up for someone who wants to take it further—especially a SaaS operator, agency, or portfolio builder who already has distribution.

Details are documented here for anyone curious:
https://flippa.com/12205760

Happy to answer technical, product, or architecture questions.
by ecb_penguin | 2026-01-05 18:26:05+00:00
You say that as if airing your problems on the internet is a reasonable solution for most people.

We have small claims courts in every jurisdiction in the US. It costs $50 to file, and you do not need an attorney. The courts will review the contract and generally reach a reasonable decision.

There's always a cost/benefit to things. I bet the courts have returned more money than Facebook posts have...
by martinpw | 2026-01-05 18:26:18+00:00
Ah, memories. At my first real job, my desktop machine was an HP-UX workstation with a monochrome monitor. The company did UNIX CAD software, so each developer got a different type of system to ensure we developed on all the platforms we supported - HP-UX, AIX (IBM), SunOS/Solaris, Ultrix (DEC) and IRIX (SGI).

I was instantly jealous of the devs who got the SGI machines, not only did they have color monitors (!) but they got to play networked games with each other (battletanks I think?) at lunchtimes.
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-05 18:26:25+00:00
There are many responses to this, but I'll start with:

Security through obscurity is not security [1]

When only l33t underworld h4x0rz know about software flaws, there is very little incentive or ability for regular software developers to find and fix what enables these vulnerabilities. Only through shared knowledge can the world become a better place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
by mytailorisrich | 2026-01-05 18:26:40+00:00
Ad hominem attacks and character assassiination are the tactics of the CPC, not of democratic Taiwan...

I agree that "China" may mean several things but in the context of this discussion and previous comments it is rather clearer.

You can have a look at the Wikipedia link about the political status of Taiwan that @jacquesm posted. You can also have a look at related article about the history of China or Taiwan.

Quick summary (to mostly repeat myself as you point out but it does seem hard to get you guys to even read the links you provide yourselves, or don't want to accept them) is that China asserted control over Taiwan since the 17th century (as a reaction to European imperialism) with Taiwan acquiring province status towards the end of the 19th century. It was then ceded by China to Japan after the First Sino-Japanase war, and "reunited" in 1945.
Following the Chinese civil war the communists took over the mainland and the government kept, and retreated to, Taiwan, which led to a split with de facto two states and official policies to "reunite".

That's all there in the links mentioned. So, again, I don't understand the drama.

I never denied that Taiwan was de facto a state independent of the mainland, or that the majority of the people of Taiwan do not want to be absorbed by the PRC, or even that a portion of the people of Taiwan would like no affiliation with "China" and be simply the Republic of Taiwan. And, yes, Taiwan was never controled by the PRC (like East Germany was never controled by West Germany prior to German "reunification", and there is still no country called "Germany" or "Korea"...). But that said I do have a problem with rewriting history and fallacious arguments to further a political aim.
by alwillis | 2026-01-05 18:26:52+00:00
1. Any decent setup using the CSS Language Server Protocol would warn you about conflicting variables.

2. Custom properties can be scoped to a particular part of the DOM [1].

3. @function has shipped Chrome; custom properties defined inside of an `at` function are local custom properties. So are the parameters.

4. Local properties stay local unless the outside explicitly references them (which it can't without knowing they exist)

[1] Limit the reach of your selectors with the CSS @scope at-rule -- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/at-scope