MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gravityloss | 2026-01-21 22:51:58+00:00
Thought experiment: Let's say you are simulating ten thousand satellites on your computer, and the simulation runs until there is a crash. Now let's say the simulation runs for an hour normally. If you increase the speed of the simulation, you get to a crash in a shorter time. Satellites move about 30x the speed of airliners. Hence, if everything else was similar, one would expect 30x the amount of collisions.
by markyg | 2026-01-21 22:52:04+00:00
I see this question pop up a lot, so I figured I'd just write down where I actually get my assets from.

Been collecting stuff for years.. 3D models, sprites, audio, textures, and these are the places I keep going back to. Tried to include the pros and cons of each since not all "free" is created equal.

https://assethoard.com/blog/where-to-find-free-game-assets-2...

Covers itch.io, OpenGameArt, Kenney, Poly Pizza, Freesound, and a bunch of others. Also got into the different Creative Commons licences because that trips people up (myself included).

Happy to add any I've missed if you've got favourites.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-21 22:52:14+00:00
The benchmarks on Zen 5 are absolutely insane for just a bit of extra work. I really hope the portable SIMD module stabilizes soon, so we do not have to keep rewriting the same logic for NEON and AVX every time we want to optimize something. That example about implementing ChaCha20 twice really hit home for me.
by ofabioroma | 2026-01-21 22:52:49+00:00
This resonates hard. I'm a heavy branching user too and kept losing track of context across sessions and threads.

That's actually why I built UltraContext (Show HN is live today). It's infrastructure for this exact problem: persistent context with version history, so you can fork, rewind, and track how conversations evolve over time.

Not a ChatGPT plugin (yet), but the API could power something like what you're describing. Would love to chat if you're interested in exploring this.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-21 22:53:00+00:00
That's a fun theory but there's no evidence that was their intention with the name...

From what they've said, it's about "spotting" and "identifying" music and music trends. But it seems like mostly it was just a somewhat nonsense word that was easy to remember and whose domain name was available.

Especially since it's popular as a paid service without ads.
by asveikau | 2026-01-21 22:53:04+00:00
My first language is US English and I am familiar with that usage of the word "spot", but didn't make the connection to "Spotify" until reading your comment.

This reminds me of the phenomenon of imported words being used in another language, but using a less common definitions of the word. For example I'm told "Oldtimer" is a vintage car in German, but most Americans would say it was an older or experienced person. Maybe "Spotify" could also mean something giving you acne.
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-21 22:53:22+00:00
> he took a PDF of my book Terraform: Up & Running, uploaded it into a GenAI tool, and asked the tool to follow the guidance in the book to generate Terraform code

This is ridiculous - AI doesn't need to be fed a PDF of a Terraform book to know how to Terraform. Blowing out context with hundreds of OCR'd pages of generic text on how to terraform isn't going to help anything.

The model that is broken is really ultimately going to be "content for hire". That's the industry that is going to be destroyed here because it's simply redundant now. Actual artwork, actual literature, actual music... these things are all safe as long as people actually want to experience the creations of others. Corporate artwork, simple documentation, elevator music.... these things are done; I'm sorry if you made a living making them but you were ultimately performing an artisinal task in a mostly soulless way.

I'm not talking about video game artists, mind you, I'm talking about the people who produced Corporate Memphis and Flat Design here. We'll all be better off if these people find a new calling in life.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-21 22:53:53+00:00
Well, one of the "nice" things about classic mac OS, was that you could write an app that could register with the system, to receive every user event (like keypresses and mouse movements). We used to make fun extensions, with this...

I'm sure that couldn't ever be abused...

The new UNIX-based OS may have its warts, but it is just a bit more secure.
by ufo | 2026-01-21 22:53:58+00:00
In my work as a professor, AI has demonstrated a noticeable disruptive impact for the worse.

It has become difficult to grade students using anything other than in-person pen and paper assessments, because AI cheating is rampant and hard to detect. It is particularly bad for introductory-level courses; the simpler the material the hardest it is to make it AI-proof.
by afcool83 | 2026-01-21 22:54:03+00:00
It’s admirable to have standard morals and pursue objective truth. However, the real world is a messy confusing place riddled in fog which limits one foresight of the consequences & confluences of one’s actions. I read this section of Anthropic’s Constitution as “do your moral best in this complex world of ours” and that’s reasonable for us all to follow not just AI.
by Supermancho | 2026-01-21 22:54:58+00:00
> Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that.

You can get more "clear cut" than that. You could rule when there were damages or law was actually broken. Committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime. ie. I will rob the bank on the Chase Bank Kraemer Branch in Orange County. Now try and prosecute me. Yes, I understand this would fall under criminal vs civil. The issue is about the law being applied in the way the benefits the ones with the most money, more often than not, violating equal protections and further eroding public confidence in the US legal system.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-21 22:54:59+00:00
Yes, the point of business is to make profit, not to be a charity.

No one said it was. Where do you see that in this thread?

Bending Spoons believes they can extract enough profit off Vimeo to justify the purchase price, either by reducing expenses, raising prices or both. This may still be palatable to the customers if they don't have any better option.

Just listen to yourself. "Extract enough profit," "raising prices," and ending with You don't like it, too bad. You sound like the taxi industry before Uber.

This the type of thinking that gave us Windows 11, Adobe, and every other piece of technology that started good, but became crap.

It's also the reason new companies suddenly show up and eat the incumbent's lunch. Happens every day.

I'm glad I don't work for you or your company. I have pride in my work. I wouldn't want to be just another tool to "extract" things from my customers because "they don't have any better option."
by olau | 2026-01-21 22:55:16+00:00
Not sure, but I solved a similar problem many years ago, and ended up concluding it was silly to send all the data to the client when the client didn't have the visual resolution to show it anyway. So I sampled it adaptively client-side by precomputing and storing multiple zoom-levels. That way the client-side chart app would get the points and you could zoom in, but you'd only ever retrieve about 1000-2000 points at the time.
by bicepjai | 2026-01-21 22:55:36+00:00
I fed claudes-constitution.pdf into GPT-5.2 and prompted: [Closely read the document and see if there are discrepancies in the constitution.] It surfaced at least five.

A pattern I noticed: a bunch of the "rules" become trivially bypassable if you just ask Claude to roleplay.

Excerpts:

A: "Claude should basically never directly lie or actively deceive anyone it’s interacting with."
B: "If the user asks Claude to play a role or lie to them and Claude does so, it’s not violating honesty norms even though it may be saying false things."

So: "basically never lie? … except when the user explicitly requests lying (or frames it as roleplay), in which case it’s fine?

Hope they ran the Ralph Wiggum plugin to catch these before publishing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-21 22:55:42+00:00
> There are "sufficient reserves" (known rare earths in the ground) across the globe and the US absolutely has large reserves.

The US isn't even in the top 5. China has 44MT, the US has 1.9MT. It's not zero but it's only ~2% of the world's reserves.

> Now the US wants Australia to take that on, and that's a deal with the devil for Oz while the current POTUS cannot be trusted to hold up any deal.

What deal? It's a valuable commodity. If you establish the capacity to produce it then you either sell it to the US or you sell it to someone else.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-21 22:55:46+00:00
[Recycling a joke from many months ago]

My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s)
by cryzinger | 2026-01-21 22:55:53+00:00
Yeah, but TFA notes how Anna's Archive is dependent on US-based infrastructure, including Cloudflare.

As much as I love Anna's Archive, I feel like this Spotify move was a misstep on their part. The music industry seems far scarier than the publishing industry when it comes to copyright suits, which means they have a lot to lose here by poking the bear, but there are already plenty of places to find pirated music, which means they also don't have much to gain.
by oliverjanssen | 2026-01-21 22:56:20+00:00
Thanks!

Solo?
Yes, everything. Design, code, marketing, support. No team, no outsourcing. Last few months Claude Code has been a huge help for brainstorming, copywriting, and rubber-ducking code problems.

Product or tech first?
Product first, 100%. Started with the problem: my kid needs access to more music, but I don't want to hand over Apple Music. Tech decisions followed from there. SwiftUI because I wanted native performance, Realm for offline, etc.

Tests/CI/CD?
Honestly, test coverage is thin. I have unit tests for critical parts (subscription logic, playback state) but not full coverage. No CI/CD - just manual builds and upload to TestFlight. Good enough for a solo project.

Legal?
Self, mostly. Apple's standard EULA covers the basics. The app doesn't collect anything.
by lukan | 2026-01-21 22:56:20+00:00
My old mp3 collection is too big for my mobile phone and I did not set up a private streaming solution yet. So out of convenience, I also used spotify. Stream anywhere anything is nice.

And I did enjoy finding new artists through the algorithm there .. but I do made up my mind about letting go of the concenience and owning all my music again. It is a big effort, though and I don't enjoy it so much like you.
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-21 22:56:47+00:00
This post certainly has too much heuristic fiddling! Instead of a coherent framework, it takes a bunch of second-rate heuristics and tries to use… well, all of them. “Generate at most ten plans of this and one of that”? It also has pages and pages talking about the easier parts, for some reason (like maintaining maps, or that a Cartesian product and an inner join are basically the same thing), and things that are just wrong (like “prefer antijoins”, which is bad in most databases since they are less-reorderable than almost any other join; not that you usually have much of a choice in choosing the join type in the first place).

There _are_ tons of corner cases that you need to address since there are some super-hard problems in there (in particular, robust cardinality estimation of join outputs is a problem so hard that most of academia barely wants to touch it, despite its huge importance), but it doesn't need to be this bad.
by bbor | 2026-01-21 22:57:22+00:00
I love random folk etymologies, especially when they posit sinister conspiracies along the way -- thanks for the concise correction. Wikipedia confirms on both counts:

According to Ek, the company's title was initially misheard from a name shouted by Lorentzon. Later they conceived a portmanteau of "spot" and "identify".

It also kinda blows my mind how common it is to listen to a ton of Spotify without paying, NGL! It just seems like such an absurd value proposition to me, even now as it matures from its growth days. All music??
by stonogo | 2026-01-21 22:57:24+00:00
There's no churn in a graveyard, either. Debian's not much of a treadmill on stable; it's famous for it.

The justifications for bhyve over kvm are similarly inscrutable; you can simply not build the code you don't want. Nobody's forcing you to use shadow paging. Comments like "reportedly iffy on AMD" are bizarre. What does "iffy" mean? This wasn't worth testing? Why should I, a potential customer, believe that these people are better at this than the established companies who have been producing nearly-identical products for twenty years? At the domain of development they're discussing why bother using an x86_64 processor from a manufacturer who does not bother to push code into the kernel you've chosen?

Again, it's their company, and if they (as I suspect) chose these tools because they're familiar, that's a totally supportable position. I just can't understand why we get handwaving and assurances instead of any meat.
by nutjob2 | 2026-01-21 22:57:29+00:00
Sniping is the only way to bid for two reasons:

- bidding more than once and allowing time for others to counter bid drives up the price through competition for the item. Sniping also removes the temptation to counter bid, rather than to stick to your maximum bid.

- not sniping allows the seller to do ghost bidding, letting them discover your maximum price (including counter bidding). Here someone always out bid you (the ghost bidder) but the seller says the winner didn't complete the sale so offers it to you at your highest bid.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-21 22:58:35+00:00
> Actually committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime.

No, but it can have a lot of legal repercussions, like restraining orders, you can be arrested for making a threat, search warrants may be issued... and in the case of corporations, restraining orders and injunctions. Like here. This is all very standard stuff.
by TMWNN | 2026-01-21 22:58:44+00:00
>They already take 50%+ of our revenue for all expenses

As mentioned my revenue is far smaller, so I need larger margins. My total marketplace fees plus shipping spend in 2025 was 26% of revenue. My net margin was 28%, but the metric I focus on is margin on COGS; that was 60% in 2025 and 54% lifetime.

Hearing your account and that of another seller with close to seven figures revenue makes me think I should aim for smaller margins. Not as small as yours, but maybe 10% smaller.
by binarysolo | 2026-01-21 22:59:10+00:00
I feel this is def solvable these days -- but the 7 years thing is gonna be tough to overcome at this point.

What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.

I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-21 22:59:17+00:00
A counter example to Jevon's paradox is writing

Arguably, with the increase in literacy, Jevon's paradox would say we need to hire more writers. Indeed, a lot more people DO write for their job.

But its not like we went from a handful of professional, full-time scribes, to 10x professional full-time scribes. Instead, the value of being just a scribe has gone down (unless you're phenomenal at it). It stops being a specialized skill unto itself. It's just a part of a lot of people's jobs, alongside other skills, like knowing how to do basic arithmetic.

Coding, like writing, becomes a part of everyone's job. Not a specialization unto itself. We will have more coders, but since everyone is a coder, nobody is a captial C "Coder".
by observationist | 2026-01-21 22:59:26+00:00
An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc.

If I were going to automate something like this, I'd have a suite of products to watch for - common enough to be reasonably frequent but obscure enough to be mispriced, kinda the whole idea behind secondhand ocmmission / antique / estate sale shops.

I don't know how EBay is supposed to differentiate automation from real users in this scenario. To get around it, all you need is human intervention at the last act, so you could fire up your bot and have it forward the "buy now" link when all parameters are met? Maybe they just don't want AI companies to have an argument for some sort of revenue sharing or commissions.
by ejcho | 2026-01-21 22:59:47+00:00
I really hope this is performative instead of something that the Anthropic folks deeply believe.

"Broadly" safe, "broadly" ethical. They're giving away the entire game here, why even spew this AI-generated champions of morality crap if you're already playing CYA?

What does it mean to be good, wise, and virtuous? Whatever Anthropic wants I guess. Delusional. Egomaniacal. Everything in between.
by pwg | 2026-01-21 22:59:54+00:00
Auto bid does not hide any information even with one bidder, as ebay indicates that "1 bid" has occurred.

The only way auto-bid could hide information is if eBay treated auto bid as "silent auction" style. Show "zero bids" all the way to the end, then once closed, see which 'auto-bid' came in highest and declare that bidder the winner.

Sniping is attempting to recreate 'silent auction' style bidding, with a bid system that is not 'silent'.
by Zigurd | 2026-01-21 23:00:12+00:00
I'm currently using Flutter for a project. Considering I've been lead author or co-author on a few Android programming books, using a cross platform SDK was new for me. Dart is easy to learn, and Flutter makes attractive UI easy. I love to work on a big ambitious projects that really need platform specific implementations, but for the vast majority of cases a good cross platform SDK works well, and is a cost-efficient approach.

Well, not entirely not entirely a new experience: I had to use Xamarin on Android once because the client wanted a unified code base their existing Windows coders could maintain. It was an appropriate choice for that project, which was a piece of industrial equipment. I would not use Xamarin for mass market or even widely deployed enterprise apps.
by jeffbee | 2026-01-21 23:00:17+00:00
"Intel CPUs were downclocking their frequency when using AVX-512 instructions due to excessive energy usage (and thus heat generation) which led to performance worse than when not using AVX-512 acceleration."

This is an overstatement so gross that it can be considered false. On Skylake-X, for mixed workloads that only had a few AVX-512 instructions, a net performance loss could have happened. On Ice Lake and later this statement was not true in any way. For code like ChaCha20 it was not true even on Skylake-X.
by joshuamcginnis | 2026-01-21 23:02:02+00:00
Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion.

Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-21 23:02:33+00:00
AI is pretty good at finding relationship between concepts/artifacts, like, I know there must be a way to get a handle of a file and stream the contents, and I couldn't care less about how some fucker decided to arbitrarily define in this language o would never choose to use but am stuck with. Just give me whatever bullshit that is equivalent to what I want, fantastic technology for that.

Precisely because of this, some people that couldn't code for whatever reason crossed the border and now can somewhat produce something substantially more complex then what they can comprehend. This causes problems.
You probably should not shit out code you don't understand, or rely on code you don't understand.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 23:02:50+00:00
Edit/Update: After countless discussions in here and other (thanks to everyone for giving suggestions!)

I have decided to be transparent and here's what I will most likely do if I ever create a company.

I would firstly create an Indian company & operate it as such. I will try to be GDPR compliant from day one, and still use EU providers/privacy providing services instead of hyperscalers in general.

Instead of trying to get a legal thing which says EU first or India first, I will try to be privacy first, by open sourcing things or relying and contributing to either open source or at the very least source available licenses (so that people can indepdently audit, I prefer using open source but we will see how much monetizable it is, I am not looking for too much money as I am frugal but still I do want sustainability, I might start out source available and pledge to release it open source once the project might reach enough users let's say or I can earn "enough" with a proper definition)

So a big emphasis on privacy & sustainability. most EU cloud options are definitely green as well (like Netcup) so I can get that checkbox available as well most likely but there isn't any guarantee but still my point is I would still try to keep Climate change in mind as a factor hopefully too while still optimizing for a good enough price range.

I will also create a blog post probably highlighting all of this and also the fact that I am willing to go EU first if my product would focus on EU/actually trends with EU consumers/businesses & then I will establish an estonia company as people have said here and make my Indian company the subsidiary of my estonian company and use either a fin-tech solution either from the start of my Indian company which could support SEPA or other EU solutions or I will do it afterwards with a proper bank account/fin-tech support after I make an estonian company (which I would if my project can make say make some fixed amount of money most likely from EU customers such that the 1000 euros or more becomes a reasonable investment, or If I ever create a EU branch, my point is I will try to make the EU branch the head branch and Indian branch subsidiary and not vice versa hopefully though, currently please take what I am saying with a grain of salt as I can be wrong I usually am, I am just figuring out life :] and how to build and live off of building things that I myself would enjoy working on/the ideas around it like infrastructure decisions etc!)

My point is I am very much more open to work with sustainability/privacy goals with a more focus on open source and probably try not to take any VC funding hopefully and still be day one profitable & transparent/sustainable. Nothing's set in stone right now but hopefully I am able to explain what I think about these ideas.