MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by oivey | 2026-01-01 20:02:20+00:00
It isn’t what you said. If you want, you can write your own matmul in Numba and it will be roughly as fast as similar C code. You shouldn’t, of course, for the same reason handrolling your own matmuls in C is stupid.

Many problems can performantly solved in pure Python, especially via the growing set of tools like the JIT libraries I cited. Even more will be solvable when things like free threaded Python land. It will be a minority of problems that can’t be, if it isn’t already.
by rwyinuse | 2026-01-01 20:02:27+00:00
Sinking the ships and then denying knowing anything about it would probably be the best course of action. That's what Russians would do, if the roles were reversed.

Unfortunately too many Western leaders still think that it's possible to negotiate in good faith with Russians. In reality they respect only force, and see European rules based order and "fair play" as weakness. If Baltic states didn't belong to NATO and Finland didn't have such a big army, Russians would be already doing a lot worse things than cutting cables.

Over here in Finland, even during the "good" years between collapse of the Soviet Union and invasion of Crimea, Russian businessmen kept buying property that made absolutely no economic sense, but was located next to critical infrastructure. Better relations between West and Russia were largely an illusion, especially since Putin took over.
by Madmallard | 2026-01-01 20:02:28+00:00
I used Gemini Pro, Claude Pro yesterday a couple of dozen times and basically have been daily.

I have a project to convert my multiplayer XNA game from C# to Javascript and to add networking to the game-play using LLMs.

They are far worse at it now than they were a year ago. They actually implemented the requirements (Though inaccurately) to the best of their ability a year ago. Especially Gemini.

Now they don't even come remotely close to implementing just the basic requirements.

The thing is, I'm giving them the entirety of the C# source code and spelling out what they should do.
by lysace | 2026-01-01 20:02:33+00:00
Two other cable cuts/"damages" happened around the same dates. Two separate Arelion-owned cables between Sweden/Estonia and Finland/Estonia.

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/JOow58/kabelbrott-mella... (Swedish)

[...] two of their submarine cables – one between Sweden and Estonia and one between Estonia and Finland – have been damaged. The first cable was damaged on December 30th and the second on December 31st.

(Arelion is AS1299/formerly known as Telia Carrier. The name change happened because it's now owned by a Swedish government-managed infrastructure-focused pension fund.)
by amiga386 | 2026-01-01 20:02:38+00:00
Every single ship in/out of St Petersburg goes via the Gulf of Finland. All those ships will be "Russian" (have stopped in Russia). It doesn't mean they're "Russian". Owner, charterer, flag, crew can all have very different nationalities.

Which part or combination makes them "Russian", in the sense of "the Russian state asked asked the ship to harm Finnish infrastructure, and they actually did it"?

You can lazily speculate about the aggressive, warmaking nation (that illegally annexed Crimea, is currently at war with Ukraine, is regularly sending submarines, ships, drones, jets into the territories of its neighbours) all you like... but if you want to be able to prosecute them, you need to be able to show evidence of the Russian state ordering this action, and that the cable damage was actually caused by that ship. Where is your evidence?
by phil21 | 2026-01-01 20:02:47+00:00
It’s definitely different, but somewhat at the margins. There is a reason people call it “farmer strength” where a moderately in shape looking guy can outlift a body builder looking bro.

I know I’ve definitely seen the difference training with a personal trainer telling her I want to train for aesthetics vs strength and vice versa.

There is a strong correlation but it’s definitely not 1.
by mynameisash | 2026-01-01 20:02:57+00:00
Two years ago, my son was REALLY struggling with his depression. Having tried almost everything, at the suggestion of his therapist, he tried cold showers. To show some solidarity, I decided we should do cold plunges into the ocean together. A guy that I was starting to become friendly with humored us and came with.

Two years later, that guy and I are best friends, and we cold plunge every Saturday together. Just did a new years plunge with our friend group that is growing. My wife commented this morning that I've really 'farmed' my friend group, whereas a few years ago. I was myself very frustrated with having no real friends anymore.

FYI, my son is in a much better place.
by immibis | 2026-01-01 20:03:06+00:00
For one, most major governments have told them to do it or else. I'm not sure which year it will be but there's already a mandate that US federal client systems can't have IPv4, and contractors must support IPv6, and a later deadline is for servers and websites to not have IPv4, at which point if your ISP doesn't provide access to federal government websites then all your customers can sue you into oblivion for failure to provide contracted services, including damages for any missed federal government interactions, which your liability waiver will not limit since you did intentional gross negligence by not rolling out IPv6. Google and Apple both require apps to work on IPv6-only networks or they get removed from app stores, and the majority of mobile networks are IPv6-native (with a slow translation layer for IPv4). Over 50% of internet traffic is IPv6 right now.

I'm not sure why you guys keep saying IPv6 won't happen, when it's already happened. Just ostriching, or incentivized to keep IPv4 address prices high, or what gives?
by fsckboy | 2026-01-01 20:03:19+00:00
> ̶P̶i̶c̶t̶u̶r̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ Art has always been a meaningful part of the human experience. From the first cave drawings, to sketches and paintings, to modern photography, we’ve mastered the art of recording what we ̶s̶e̶e̶ think and feel.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-01 20:03:40+00:00
The absolute best phone-camera-wise was the SNAFU in the past where every access to the camera would turn the green light on... Except for one obscure company that happened to have a free pass. I don't remember the details and won't bother to check but it went a bit like this: "Jack's Petrolhead Garage is the only company in the world that can turn the phone's camera on WITHOUT the green light turning on". Some people eventually found out about this and it made headlines.

Then of course the damage control started --and those always turning a blind eye to the state's wrongdoings are surely going to still damage control this--: "oh but Jack is the nephew of the cousin of that engineer at this company and historically they helped us write one of the first app using the camera".

Or whatever bullshit nonsense explanation they came up with.

If you ask me: Jack's Petrolhead Garage (name I made up) was a NSA front and you can shove your excuses where the light doesn't shine.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-01 20:03:51+00:00
> That ad was worth every penny. I _still_ quote that ad, and everyone over the age of 30 always recognizes it, yet I can't remember ads I saw last month. If only sears was still around to capitalize on the ubiquitous headspace they purchased.

Sounds like they would have been better off investing more in staying around in the conditions that actually existed rather than buying attention that they could never benefit from.
by demosito666 | 2026-01-01 20:04:52+00:00
> Best path forward is to let in competition

To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:

- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing

- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require

- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require

- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance

- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)

- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).

China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.
by constantcrying | 2026-01-01 20:05:00+00:00
As a European, the commentary felt very biting and accurate. An entire continent defined by being smug about not being the USA. Where not competing is seen as a great virtue and where significant parts of the electorate are actively voting against fixing the glaringly obvious problems.

The supposed niceness of the cities also is just not true. Many European cities are awful places. Where, maybe with the exception of a few tourist areas, you will only find dirty streets, rows of old apartment building regularly smeared with graffiti, shops selling used phones and vapes and food stores competing over who can sell the cheapest, still edible Kebab.
by d4mi3n | 2026-01-01 20:05:05+00:00
Other response address how you could go about this, but I'd just like to note that you touch on the core problem of security as a domain: At the end of the day, it's a problem of figuring out who to trust, how much to trust them, and when those assessments need to change.

To use your example: Any cybersecurity firm or practitioner worth their salt should be *very* explicit about the scope of their assessment.

- That scope should exhaustively detail what was and wasn't tested.

- There should be proof of the work product, and an intelligible summary of why, how, and when an assessment was done.

- They should give you what you need to have confidence in *your understanding of* you security posture as well as evidence that you *have* a security posture you can prove with facts and data.

Anybody who tells you not to worry and take their word for something should be viewed with extreme skepticism. It is a completely unacceptable frame of mind when you're legally and ethically responsible for things you're stewarding for other people.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-01 20:05:50+00:00
> This seems fairly consistent with deep, accomplished experts in any field or craft - their competencies in one area don't necessarily translate well into validity anywhere else laterally or even vertically.

With this person, his core area of pseudo-research has been the race/IQ generalizations. He has a long history of eugenics content and his Reddit posts engage in Nazi stuff.

He jumps into popular topics like autism statistics to ride those trends on Twitter and expand his reach. Once you follow him, you realize it’s a steady drip of the lightly disguised eugenics stuff that has been his core focus for a long time.
by hibikir | 2026-01-01 20:05:58+00:00
Small startups end up writing code in whatever gets things working faster, because having too large a codebase with too much load is a champagne problem.

If I told you that we were going to be running a very large payments system, with customers from startups to Amazon, you'd not write it in ruby and put the data in MongoDB, and then using its oplog as a queue... but that's what Stripe looked like. They even hired a compiler team to add type checking to the language, as that made far more sense than porting a giant monorepo to something else.
by memalign | 2026-01-01 20:06:43+00:00
It looks like it requires a MIDI which it then converts to sound like it’s coming out of a Gameboy.

Here’s what the FAQ says:

> How it works

>

> Search a song, pick a MIDI source, hit Generate. The Wario Synthesis Engine analyses the MIDI and resynthesises it using Web Audio oscillators tuned to mimic the Game Boy's 4-channel sound chip. All processing runs in your browser.
by bpev | 2026-01-01 20:06:46+00:00
It's not really about the data on the vinyl, and not really about sounding closer to the original. The vinyl flavor comes from the equipment. It's an analog device interacting with the real world, so the process of getting the sound from the vinyl to the speakers introduces a different sound. And some music sounds more pleasing with that process. Could you achieve something similar by using the digital release and running it through a filter? Probably.
But it definitely does impart a sound difference.

Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release.

edit: fwiw, I don't agree with the parent talking about more data, either. Since pretty much all the music these days is digital pretty much right through the entire recording process, I don't think this is all that relevant. I guess maybe sometimes they might use a different master for vinyl though? But regardless; if you're looking for "more data", you're not going to use either a CD or a vinyl.
by mylifeandtimes | 2026-01-01 20:07:17+00:00
Mmm. You are assuming people have a choice about crewing on what you call a pos ship which you say is owned/controlled by russia.

Many international ships are crewed by what is essentially slave labor. Too many google links to share them all, but try this to start: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/thats-slavery-seafarers-s...
by drweevil | 2026-01-01 20:07:18+00:00
It is. It is very reminiscent of the 2009 ACORN hatchet job by Breitbart et. al. Same features: undercover, video, practices that are not up to journalistic standards, etc. It feels like deja vu all over again.

Wikipedia on the ACORN takedown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_c...

Minn. Public Radio on Shirley:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/12/29/youtuber-nick-shirl...
by ryandrake | 2026-01-01 20:07:19+00:00
You make an excellent point. I would guess that it is orders of magnitude more expensive for Apple to create a new hardware configuration than it is for them to add software feature flags, though. But, assuming the cost of making the hardware change worldwide exceeds the cost of reconfiguring their factories for new hardware, you're right that they would not choose to make the hardware change worldwide.

Almost certainly someone (or an entire team) carefully crunched the numbers and deliberately decided not to keep a Lightning US iPhone.
by robertcope | 2026-01-01 20:07:39+00:00
Security. I host personal sites on Linodes and other external servers. There are no inbound ports open to the world. Everything is accessed via Cloudflare Tunnels and locked down via their Zero Trust services. I find this useful and good, as I don't really want to have to develop my personal services to the point where I'd consider them hardened for public internet access.
by Centigonal | 2026-01-01 20:08:07+00:00
Our infrastructure runs on freedom and good ol' American grit! Take for example our beautiful highways. They were built after the war (which, by the way, America WON), by the US Army (the greatest fighting force on Earth), using $100B of 1950s taxpayer money (mostly gasoline taxes). Just plain ol' simple taxation of the public to support social programs built and maintained by the government. Now if that's socialism, call me a socialist, but dang if it didn't work. Not sure why we can't do that anymore, but I try not to think about it too hard. Yeehaw!
by sfRattan | 2026-01-01 20:08:51+00:00
Very neat tool!

I've looked into cutting foam for board game storage, but I don't love the 5mm or so thickness. For games with lots of different little bits and pieces, the many walls to divide many containers add up and take a surprising amount of space inside the game's box.

Short of 3D printing storage solutions, I've found an online tuck-box generator for decks of cards of any size that looks neat, and another site with advice for assembling them:

Tuckbox Generator: https://www.cpforbes.net/tuckbox/tuckbox.cgi

Tuckbox Assembly Advice: https://www.ee0r.com/boxes/index.html
by hnthrow0287345 | 2026-01-01 20:09:04+00:00
SSR HTML/JS sucks if:

- there is repeated code among pages

- the JS isn't in Typescript

- the JS is still using callbacks

- it's using a JS UI framework (Kendo) that you don't like

- the CSS is a mess

All of which was more common closer to 2000 than 2020 because we didn't have things or didn't know better.

SPAs by default at least helped with repeated code and CSS since code organization and maintainability were one of its main selling points. These days most new projects will use Typescript out of the box too.
by amluto | 2026-01-01 20:13:06+00:00
> There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.

Those cards could be replaced, even more easily, with NFC cards with better security properties. ISO 14443-3A is a perfectly adequate protocol and has the nifty added benefit of not needing batteries in the card.

Even secure ranging is doable at NFC frequencies — all it takes is a vendor who is willing to do the work as well as customers who will demand it. I think I even saw papers about this years ago: the reader and the card can securely negotiate a request that the door will send and the card will reply to, and then the door sends the request and the card validates the request (against precomputed data) and replies. It’s okay if there’s delay due to the limited computational power of the card as long as the card knows what the delay is and can report the delay to the reader. This will give ranging precise to a bit time or better, which is nowhere near the 10cm precision that UWB offers but is a whole lot better than anything anyone has actually deployed in an iClass-style device.

But customers aren’t even demanding cards that are immune to trivial UID cloning.
by MohskiBroskiAI | 2026-01-01 20:13:32+00:00
To anticipate the skepticism (which is warranted for P vs NP claims):

1. This isn't a "10-page elementary proof." It relies on specific topological invariants (Betti numbers) to demonstrate a geometric barrier contradiction.
2. Validation Signal: The biological isomorphism of this logic (NEURO_Restore) has been validated by Dr. Rudolph Tanzi at Harvard/MGH.
3. Forensic Signal: My server logs show AWS us-west-2 (Ashburn) scraping this specific PDF every 4 hours. The automated ingestion engines appear to be treating this as high-value signal.

I am an outsider. I know how this looks. That's why I'm asking you to break the topology, not just the "status" of the author.
by kingstnap | 2026-01-01 20:13:38+00:00
I disagree. Performance is a leaky abstraction that *ALWAYS* matters.

Your cognition of it is either implicit or explicit.

Even if you didn't know for example that list appends was linear and not quadratic and fairly fast.

Even if you didn't give a shit if simple programs were for some reason 10000x slower than they needed to be because it meets some baseline level of good enough / and or you aren't the one impacted by the problems inefficacy creates.

Library authors beneath you would still know and the APIs you interact with and the pythonic code you see and the code LLMS generate will be affected by that leaky abstraction.

If you think that n^2 naive list appends is a bad example its not btw, python string appends are n^2 and that has and does affect how people do things, f strings for example are lazy.

Similarly a direct consequence of dictionaries being fast in Python is that they are used literally everywhere. The old Pycon 2017 talks from Raymond talk about this.

Ultimately what the author of the blog has provided is this sort of numerical justification for the implicit tacit sort of knowledge performance understanding gives.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-01-01 20:13:58+00:00
I'm with you brother.

Trying to hold sufficient session state on the server and then doing your work afar is a ridiculously hard problem to keep up. The controller of that distributed system is very far from what it's trying to work. State keeping from afar is not pleasant. Especially when there are little pools of state that are essential on that client, when the illusion being worked to maintain keeps breaking down.

A thick client page, that has the agency there, that can operate & control the local experience, is imo just so clearly a simpler system to build and run. It also often has much better performance characteristics.

Representative state transfer allowing the page to become the operator is simpler. Let the client be it's own thing. Give it tools to get and work that state, to update the remote server.

Sounds scary, sounds complex, is mechanically much simpler.
by nodamage | 2026-01-01 20:13:58+00:00
This seems like an overly cynical take. Is there no value in empirically confirming an assumption? Especially in the exercise world where other long held assumptions ended up being bro-science nonsense?

> although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%

Why does that matter? Isn't the entire point of this study's design to eliminate the impact of the inherent variability between test subjects?
by dzhiurgis | 2026-01-01 20:14:47+00:00
I think that makes a ton of sense, esp since you can retrofit diesel-electric ferries.

Skips expensive DC charging infrastructure, but does require to buy two batteries which can get expensive. Over time vpp / market arbitrage can pay for battery itself tho.

Also sacrifices some of the cargo capacity. I.e. for wellington - picton that’s about 4 rail cars or 6 semi trailers.
by throw1235435 | 2026-01-01 20:15:00+00:00
Maybe. There the cost of failure again is low. Its easier to destroy than to create. Economic disruption to workers will take a bit longer I think.

Don't get me wrong; I hope that we do see it in physical work as well. There is more value to society there; and consists of work that is risky and/or hard to do - and is usually needed (food, shelter, etc). It also means that the disruption is an "everyone" problem rather than something that just affects those "intellectual" types.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-01 20:15:30+00:00
The cope + disappointment will be knowing that a large population of HN users will paint a weird alternative reality. There are a multitude of messages about AI that are out there, some are highly detached from reality (on the optimistic and pessimistic side). And then there is the rational middle, professionals who see the obvious value of coding agents in their workflow and use them extensively (or figure out how to best leverage them to get the most mileage). I don't see software engineering being "dead" ever, but the nature of the job _has already changed_ and will continue to change. Look at Sonnet 3.5 -> 3.7 -> 4.5 -> Opus 4.5; that was 17 months of development and the leaps in performance are quite impressive. You then have massive hardware buildouts and improvements to stack + a ton of R&D + competition to squeeze the juice out of the current paradigm (there are 4 orders of magnitude of scaling left before we hit real bottlenecks) and also push towards the next paradigm to solve things like continual learning. Some folks have opted not to use coding agents (and some folks like yourself seem to revel in strawmanning people who point out their demonstrable usefulness). Not using coding agents in Jan 2026 is defensible. It won't be defensible for long.