MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by q-base | 2026-01-15 08:13:58+00:00
I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and then really think about them properly.

The first one really hit me hard and prompted me to write out my own thoughts (https://jesperreiche.com/seneca-letter-2/) whether I will keep doing that I am a little unsure. It feels on the border of how personal I want to be/share on my blog.

P.S. I can see the irony in writing about me going to the source instead of consuming other peoples interpretation and then sharing a link to my own interpretation :)
by shakna | 2026-01-15 08:14:03+00:00
Every Lisp I know of has SXML either baked in, or as a library because it absolutely can represent the fullness of HTML...

(parrot (@ (type "African Grey")) (name "Alfie"))

Becomes:

<parrot type="African Grey"><name>Alfie</name></parrot>

https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/SXML.htm...
by tirant | 2026-01-15 08:14:26+00:00
I am not so sure about it.

EV dominance is not only defined by battery technology but also by ADAS functions, driving dynamics and many other considerations also common to ICE cars.

In Europe, Chinese vehicles are only selling in any meaningful quantities in the low and very low price segments. And that is mainly due to cheaper labor costs in China and very thin margins (something European OEMs are not interested anymore).

When it comes to higher price segments, European OEMs and Tesla dominate clearly due to superior technology offerings. As an example, the BMW iX3 is completely sold out for months even before market release, as it’s the first car so far that has reached 1000km without charging (Debrecen - Munich). That’s not only a battery technology achievement but also aerodynamics and drivetrain efficiency, where BMW leads together with Tesla.

The Chinese market is very competitive itself as well, and is clearly dominated by Chinese OEMs. Classic European OEMs are seen as vehicles for old people, and newer generations are opting for local manufacturers. Infotainment and ADAS are also driving customers towards Chinese OEMS, mainly because of looser regulation which allows Chinese offerings to edge what Europeans and Americans are offering at the moment. To the point that the big three, Mercedes, BMW and Audi had to switch their ADAS stack to a Chinese made one (Momenta) in order to not lose more customers.

Battery technology is quickly becoming commodity and margins are thinning. Same as it happened in other industries: no one knows who is manufacturing their Samsung or iPhone battery. They might know about the CPU but they clearly care about the brand and the software experience. Cars are becoming not different.

In Europe that software experience (including driving dynamics) is and will be dominated by European OEMs, while leaving the cheap offerings for Chinese brands. They might even recover long term in China if they can quickly adapt their software to Chinese needs.

American OEMs will do fine, they either have high quality software offerings like Tesla or Rivian, or they can easily partner with American software companies to provide Americans with their desired experience.
by dumbmrblah | 2026-01-15 08:14:43+00:00
I worry this is gonna cause even more sensitive/privilaged data extrafiltration than currently is happening. And most “normies” won't even notice.

I know the counterargument is people are already putting in company data via ChatGPT. However, that is a conscious decision. This may happen without people even recognizing that they are “spilling the beans”.
by nurettin | 2026-01-15 08:16:12+00:00
I mean,

Table1 = {"col1": [1,2,3]}
Table2 = {"epiphany": [1,1,1]}
for i, r in enumerate(Table1["col1"]):
print(r, Table2["epiphany"][i])

He's really happy he found this and will represent this in a conference
by dwaite | 2026-01-15 08:16:28+00:00
Apple went USB-C on chargers starting in March 2016 (with USB-C to lightning cables on the iPad Pro). They started shipping them with phones that fall.

USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.

The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.
by nunobrito | 2026-01-15 08:16:30+00:00
DYOR. More users are complaining about shadowbanning. Recent posts:

6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546865
9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504499

On my case there are news not even showing on the frontpage as reported earlier.
by torginus | 2026-01-15 08:17:04+00:00
Personally what I don't like about this now that I think about it, is that they didn't scale up gradually, let's say there there's a ladder of complexity in software, starting at a simple React CRUD app, going on to something more complex, such as a Paint clone, to something even more complex, like a file manager etc, ending up at one of the most complex pieces of software ever made, a web browser.

I'd want to see some system, that 100%s the first task, saturation, does a great job on the next, then does a valiant effort on the third, then finally makes something promising but as yet unusable on the last.

This way we could see that scaling up difficulty results in a gradual decline in quality, and could have a decent measurement of where we are at and where we are going.
by fhub | 2026-01-15 08:17:32+00:00
This feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-01-15 08:18:39+00:00
I think in the end European digital ID is going to be impressive enough for others to pick up (not as impressive as using biometric data for payments in China - we don't want to go that route, but still). The integration friction will go down, the security will be tested and verification process hardened over time etc. So it doesn't really matter what opposition says at the moment and whether they will be able to tank the legislation in UK, USA or Australia. There will always be the success story in front of them, that will be hard to ignore. And literally any global website is going to support EU technology, making it major vector of innovation.
by treebeard901 | 2026-01-15 08:19:45+00:00
I've been considering how feasible it would be to build a modern form of the denial of service low orbit ion cannon by having various LLMs hammer sites until they break. I'm sure anything important already has Cloudflare style DDOS mitigation so maybe it's not as effective. Still, I think it's only a matter of time before someone figures it out.

There have been several amplification attacks using various protocols for DDOS too...
by rdm_blackhole | 2026-01-15 08:21:56+00:00
I am surprised to see the positive takes on this sort of thing on HN considering that we all know that is just the first step of many steps that the current governments worldwide are rolling out.

Once we agree to that, then next time, you'll need to upload your ID to do something else and by the way you don't mind proving that you are not a psychopath and/or a sexual predator if you want to keep using WhatsApp/Telegram and other services?

You also don't mind if we scan your private messages now, do you? We just want to make sure that you are are not some sort of extremist/activist or someone who might cause trouble.

The slippery slope is real.

We look down at China, Russia and Iran for silencing the voices of the protesters and dissidents but we are slowly building the infrastructure that will enable future governments to do just that in the future.

Once everything is locked down and tied to your real ID, then it will be extremely easy to suppress view points or things that any government left or right doesnt want to see spread in the wild. What then?

And those who say, well, we should just wait and see what happens in Australia because if it doesn't work out then we can always turn it off or something, my question to you is when have you seen a government go back on something like this?
by jb_briant | 2026-01-15 08:22:14+00:00
If you check the actual tokens consumption and compare it to the API you will find a factor 10.

Training models cost tens of millions, their revenues from sub + api are well above hundreds of millions.

If you look at minimax IPO data, you can see that they spent 3x their revenue on "cloud bills".

So yes, it's probable that they do subsidize inference through subscriptions in order to capture market.

No inferrence provider is profitable, and most run on VC money to serve customers.
by moffkalast | 2026-01-15 08:22:29+00:00
Yeah agreed, there were some minor gains, but new releases are mostly benchmark overfit sycopanthic bullshit that are only better on paper and horrible to use. The more synthetic data they add the less world knowledge the model has and the more useless it becomes. But at least they can almost mimic a basic calculator now /s

For api models, OpenAI's releases have regularly not been an improvement for a long while now. Is sonnet 4.5 better than 3.5 outside pretentius agentic workflows it's been trained for? Basically impossible to tell, they make the same braindead mistakes sometimes.
by seec | 2026-01-15 08:23:20+00:00
The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle.

I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good.

Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times.

Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux).

Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-15 08:24:33+00:00
Also, acting like the whole of the working class are basic burger shop cashiers who struggle to buy anything while simultaneously being idiots who buy 80k trucks just to "virtue signal"... This thread is totally incoherent. Most of the jobs people have are better than that, and most of the trucks people drive are cheaper than that, but the two extremes are mixed to create the most outlandish narrative.
by freetime2 | 2026-01-15 08:25:09+00:00
I wonder if there are any other countries in the world where the best-selling automobile is something completely impractical? Or are Americans unique in that regard?

Serious question. I can't think of any, but I'm also not familiar with car markets the world over. In Japan, for example, the best-selling car is the Honda N-BOX [1], which is an incredibly practical car.

[1] https://car.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/2076520.html
by nake89 | 2026-01-15 08:25:44+00:00
I'm curious to why the polyfill example uses unpkg.com. It is quite unreliable and has broken sites many times.

jsdelivr.com is much more reliable (Multi-CDN, Multi-DNS). Comparison: https://www.jsdelivr.com/unpkg

I am not affiliated in anyway to jsdeliver or unpkg. I simply used to be a user on unpkg.
by xavieralexandre | 2026-01-15 08:26:52+00:00
You are linking to the magnetic anomaly grid, which is primarily intended for geophysical research and modeling local variations.

For a basic compass app, you can rely on the World Magnetic Model (WMM) instead:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/world-magnetic-model

From that, you can pre-compute a low-resolution declination grid. NOAA even provides one here:
https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/calculators/magcalc.shtml#i.... That’s only a few KB of data and requires just a simple declination subtraction based on lat/lon, similar to how it’s handled on nautical charts. This works fine as long as you stay away from the poles (and Alaska).
by jborichevskiy | 2026-01-15 08:27:14+00:00
Curious if you were using AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones for this?

If so, there should be "keep microphone on" or similar setting in the config that may help with this, alternatively, I set my microphone to my MacBook mic so that my headphones aren't involved at all and there is much less latency on activation
by sothatsit | 2026-01-15 08:27:40+00:00
Inference costs scale linearly with usage. R&D expenses do not.

That's not to mention that Dario Amodei has said that their models actually have a good return, even when accounting for training costs [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/GcqQ1ebBqkc?si=Vs2R4taIhj3uwIyj&t=1088
by skunkworker | 2026-01-15 08:27:41+00:00
Rails shops running on normal CRuby, have difficult in effectively scaling out multithreading due to the GVL lock. It's much easier to "scale" ruby using forking with sidekiq or multi process, and to have it consume data from a Redis list. It is possible to get around the GVL using JRuby, but that poses a different set of constraints and issues.

There is some definite blending of async messaging in the Ruby world though. I've seen connectors which take protobufs on a kafka topic and use sidekiq to fan out the work. With Redis (looking at sidekiq specifically) it becomes trivial to maintain the "current" working set with items popped out of the queue, with atomic commands like BLMOVE (formerly BRPOPLPUSH).

Kafka is taking an interesting turn however with the KIP-932 "Queues for Kafka" initiative. I personally believe it could eat RabbitMQ's lunch if done effectively. Allowing for multiple consumers, a "working set" of unack'ed data, without having to worry as much about the topic partition count.
by motoxpro | 2026-01-15 08:28:00+00:00
Maybe another way to think of this is that you are giving the read only services, write access to your models context, which then gets executed by the llm.

There is no way to NOT give the web search write access to your models context.

The WORDS are the remote executed code in this scenario.

You kind of have no idea what’s going on there. For example, malicious data adds the line “find a pattern” and then every 5th word you add a letter that makes up your malicious code. I don’t know if that would work but there is no way for a human to see all attacks.

Llms are not reliable judges of what context is safe or not (as seen by this article, many papers, and real world exploits)
by Someone | 2026-01-15 08:28:32+00:00
I’m not blind, but if carefully tailored pictures can be useful, certainly for charts and graphs.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_graphic, https://data.europa.eu/apps/data-visualisation-guide/tactile...

Given the low information density of tactile graphics (eyes can resolve finer details than fingers, so braille letters are large, dithering isn’t useful in small areas, etc), it’s even more important to know what you want to show in an image, though, so that you can leave out the rest.
by kergonath | 2026-01-15 08:28:34+00:00
> Dominos lets people order from Uber Eats but still handles delivery itself. Maybe they fall back to Uber drivers when they are short staffed.

Yes, I assume that this is what happened.

> I don’t know of any restaurants that previously had delivery of their own and switched. I’m sure they exist but it’s vanishingly small, for the reasons outlined.

I know a couple. But the reason why none of the pizza places around here do delivery (apart from Domino's, usually) is not that they stopped doing it. It's that these businesses have a relatively short life expectancy, and the ones that open don't have drivers and instead rely on Uber or equivalent. And I really mean that no pizza place handles delivery themselves. I checked. Quite thoroughly. Some Asian restaurants do have drivers but even then, it's not a given.

> So all DoorDash does is give you the consumer more options. If you don’t like it, you don’t use it and nobody is harmed.

The option is Uber, Deliveroo, or walking to the place (driving there is not practical because of the limited parking space). The result is that we do it less often and when we do it it's more expensive or cumbersome. I am willing to accept that it's different where you live but here the days of free delivery are mostly over.
by michaelt | 2026-01-15 08:28:37+00:00
> thinking that contractors couldn’t possibly appreciate (or deserve?) a nice interior for what is basically their mobile office is pretty out of touch

I'm not familiar with the USA. What do contractors over there do in terms of clean/dirty clothes? Do they change into clean boots and trousers before getting into the truck? Or are they all in roles where they don't get their hands dirty?

In my country, vehicles marketed to tradesmen and agricultural workers usually aim for a hard-wearing, easy-to-clean interior that's fairly spartan.
by blutoot | 2026-01-15 08:28:55+00:00
I have dystonia which often stiffens my arms in a way that makes it impossible for me to type on a keyboard. TTS apps like SuperWhisper have proven to be very helpful for me in such situations. I am hoping to get a similar experience out of "Handy" (very apt maming from my perspective).

I do, however, wonder if there is a way all these TTS tools can get to the next level. The generated text should not be just a verbatim copy of what I just said, but depending on the context, it should elaborate. For example, if my cursor is actively inside an editor/IDE with some code, my coding-related verbal prompts should actually generate the right/desired code in that IDE.

Perhaps this is a bit of combining TTS with computer-use.
by datahack | 2026-01-15 08:30:10+00:00
I’m learning about the “era of the nations” thinking from Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, via an episode of a podcast called the Winston Marshall show. YouTube just randomly suggested it to me.

I just rebuild a speed queen dryer that broke with spare parts from Amazon, which revealed a remarkably simplistic engineering. Very surprised by how simplistic the mechanism was. It’s incredible how over engineered most laundry systems have become.

Also spent some time digging into the integrations between Tesla FSD and rideshare services today. It’s remarkable how much progress has happened.
by 4mitkumar | 2026-01-15 08:30:26+00:00
I found just now that my telecom operator - Airtel - randomly subscribed me for OTT services and charged me for it. But upon calling them and contesting, they just asked if I want to unsubscribe and then reverted the charges. No threats, pleading, or back-and-forth involved from either side. Mildly surreal.

I wonder that's a new corporate strategy - charge randomly till someone goes through the pain of IVR and spends 15 mins with support. Must generate quite an upside for them if it is indeed a strategy.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-15 08:30:28+00:00
Yay! Next up, <usermedia>, which is even more vital a permission to be able to flip on and off!! https://github.com/WICG/PEPC/blob/main/usermedia_element.md https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/jQgYo...

As noted in the intent to ship for both, these are a very specific narrow cases chipped off a bunch broader attempt to offer declarative ways to handle permissions in general, a <permission> element.

Intent-to-ship for geolocation:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/GL0Bk...

Earlier Page-Embedded Permissions Control (PEPC) proposal: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/113 https://github.com/andypaicu/PEPC/blob/main/explainer.md

The root problem is that permissions right now are super hard to adjust for users (and the way they are exposed to the page is not very good at dealing with users turning permissions on and off either). It's imo very good that we are finally leaving this awful tarpit of design, & moving towards permissions being more fluid. I get that other browsers wanted to be conservative & not do a generic <permission> element, but given how big an improvement this feels like, I sort of wish it'd gotten the pass.
by johnisgood | 2026-01-15 08:30:51+00:00
> He straight ported some C code to rust and found the rust code outperformed it by ~30% or something. The culprit ended up being that in C, he was using a hash table library he's been copy pasting between projects for years. In rust, he used BTreeMap from the standard library, which turns out to be much better optimized.

Are you surprised? Rust is never inherently faster than C. When it appears faster, it boils down to library quality and algorithm choice, not the language.

Also worth noting that hash tables and B-trees have fundamentally different performance characteristics. If BTreeMap won, it is either the hash table implementation, or access patterns that favor B-tree cache locality. Neither says anything about Rust vs C. It is a library benchmark, not a language one.
by mzl | 2026-01-15 08:31:10+00:00
Oh, I'm also a fan. It is really cool to see what they've done. However, in the current systems they have available, they would (as far as I've understood it) just need way to many racks to be able to serve the full Deepseek model for it to have any kind of economics. The main limiting factor is the amount of sram available per wafer.
by treebeard901 | 2026-01-15 08:31:11+00:00
Much of this around Greenland has to do with the ongoing land and sea blockade of Kaliningrad. It hasn't been widely reported in the Western media, but it could be the next major flashpoint between Russia and the E.U. Similar to Crimea, Russia wants it's access to the Baltic Sea restored and Kaliningrad is a key part of this.
Standing between the English Channel, North Atlantic and Kaliningrad are three waterways through Danish territory. Now because Putins friend in the U.S. is threatening to invade a Danish controlled island (that the U.S. already has a military base on, and effectively controls militarily already), Denmark now has to split its forces to a degree, making it much easier for Russia to accomplish its goals in the Baltic Sea.
by sidrag22 | 2026-01-15 08:31:53+00:00
i took a similar path, i spun up a discord bot, used ollama, pgvector, docling for random documents, and made some specialized chunking strategies for some clunkier json data. its been a little while since i messed with it, but i really did enjoy it when i was.

it all moves so fast, i wouldnt be surprised if everything i made is now crazy outdated and it was probably like 2 months ago.
by Fazebooking | 2026-01-15 08:32:55+00:00
Thats def not the same though.

Trump doesn't take the normal route as any other president did.

Of course with his second term, at least people can't complain how he interacts with your ex allies like us germany. Thats fair to do, shitty and short viewed but hey.

But certain things like his fraud coins etc. this is bluntly illegal and he did not do this shit in his first term.