MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigfishrunning | 2026-01-09 14:32:53+00:00
> Making a game or professional software in it essentially equals to publishing full source and assets online, ripe for taking by any unscrupulous party.

How is this true? seems to me that webassembly looks kind of equivalent to the output you'd get from an x86 disassembler for an x86 native program -- sure it's editable, but it's certainly not equivalent to the original source used to produce it.

To put it another way -- Webassembly encourages theft exactly as much as any other kind of DRM-free publishing; and you can add anti-piracy measures to it in the same way you can with other software.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-09 14:33:04+00:00
Here is the study:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12776922/

It matches my intuition. Long term change requires skill acquisition. What foods contain more calories than people realize? What foods are more satiating? What kind of portion sizes for each food will keep me from eating a surplus? How much snacking is too much? How does the amount of oil in the foods I eat change the equation? What does the non-drug-augmented sensation of stomach fullness tell me about when I should stop eating? Can I eat more slowly and stop at the right time? The list goes on.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-09 14:33:36+00:00
There are a lot of definitions for violence, but most would include "destruction" along with "harm", "pain", "suffering" and so on.

If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?

If my nation was at war with yours, and we dropped a bomb on your weapons factory, would you count that as violent, or non-violent?
by DrScientist | 2026-01-09 14:33:45+00:00
You have to differentiate what countries leaders know and the general population knows.

I'd argue that leaders in South/Central America were under no illusions of how the US operated - the fact that Trump does so openly doesn't really change that. The 'great game' goes on.

What's changed is the wider public perception - both home and abroad. The question is will that create political pressure for a change.

For example, the new openess of the US-Israeli agenda in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere appears to have really shifted the political landscape domestically in the US in terms of unconditional support for Israel. The US self image is potentially shifting - this could have much bigger domestic implications.

Likewise aboard, while the current US hostility to China is not a suprise to the leadership in China - it's a continuation. The view of the US in the general population in China will be shifting, which will potentially create political change in the response.

Now I'm not sure Trump understands he is potentially squandering that soft power, because he lives a bubble which applauds the strongman messaging - and let's face it - he has won 2 elections on the back of it.

That for me here is the real risk - people shifting from thinking they were the good guys ( even if that was not entirely true ) to accepting they are out for themselves - and how that then effects both domestic and foreign policy over time - will US society fragment with people being ever more isolated domestically and as a country abroad?
by hobofan | 2026-01-09 14:33:50+00:00
> but he abdicated all the responsibility

He abdicated the responsibility as he from the beginning didn't have any power (always the single dissenting vote). There also isn't much leadership to provide if everyone else in the "leadership circle" is on a different frequency, or otherwise you are just a rogue actor that will quickly get kicked out.

If anything the time for him to leave would have been when he stepped down to be an engineer. I don't think there is anything wrong with laying your reasons for leaving bare, especially when many people will come asking why one of the co-founders left.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-09 14:34:33+00:00
Iranian economy is absolutely terrible, their government hangs people like there is no tomorrow, the ayatollahs dip their beaks into every viable business and steal like crows, the official ideology of the system is a primitive medieval theocracy pushed on educated and modern people. Plus the very same government, after spending a lot of money on arming itself, proved incapable of beating back an aerial assault of the "Little Satan" back in June.

If I lived in Iran, I would need no CIA to be angry about the status quo.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-09 14:34:42+00:00
I was concerned about this too. Gemini informed me that the researchers "found that even when comparing people who had lost the same amount of weight, the rate of regain was significantly faster in the drug group (GLP-1s) than in the diet group (approximately 0.3 kg/month faster)."

Also, both groups contained those who didn't lose weight. They did not omit dieters who failed to lose weight or those who weren't "super responders."
by bluGill | 2026-01-09 14:35:07+00:00
> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so;

It works at Toyota because the stop button is something you push for specific weird things. You don't push the stop button because you think the Camry should have been designed to fit a big V8.

You push the stop button because you noticed something looks weird that might affect quality. See some rust on a part that normally doesn't have rust - push stop: better to pay the entire factory to stand around doing nothing for two hours while engineers decide that is harmless surface rust than the ship a product that is defective to customers. (this is a real situation - the engineer who decided to use those parts also monitored warranty/repair on those machines for the next few years, in case he was wrong he would have done a recall at first sign of trouble, but those machines didn't have problems any more than others so his decision was verified. I won't name the company)

I would guess the majority of times people hit stop they are eventually told "not a problem but you were right to stop just in case so thank you". There are a few times where hitting stop prevents shipping something that would fail horribly and often the part that would fail isn't visible to inspectors unless they are at the exact spot on the line someone saw it and hit stop.
by tgig | 2026-01-09 14:35:20+00:00
My 17 year old son is applying to college and he built this rocket launch simulator for his portfolio. I think it's pretty awesome, but... I'm his Dad ¯_(ツ)_/¯ And I don't know anything about orbital mechanics or rocket launches. What do you think?

Github: https://github.com/donutTheJedi/Rocket-Launch-Simulation
by kaveh_h | 2026-01-09 14:35:26+00:00
A long time ago Amazon tried to acquire a good online business diapers.com and initially the owners refused.
Amazon proceded to get investors or lenders to funds 200 million dollars to undercut sales of diapers.com. Fast forward they were close to bankruptcy and owners were forced to sell it off for a bargain to Amazon. Since then the price of diapers have risen to be very profitable.

The point being that any businesses that sell proprietary software will do the same to kill competition, but in the long run they will end up costing more.

The real issue is government spending is that procurement is very broken even if you would opt for buying support for open source
Software. This is not a problem China nor North Korea have due to how corporations have no easy way to influence politics in those Authoritarian countries.
by MattGaiser | 2026-01-09 14:35:50+00:00
If you look back at the pre-Ozempic era, you had articles like this:

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/10/11649210/biggest-loser-weight-...

> The results at year eight are heartening. Eight years later and 50.3 percent of the intensive lifestyle intervention group and 35.7 percent of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥5 percent, while 26.9 percent of the intensive group and 17.2 percent of the usual care group were maintaining losses of ≥10 percent.

The idea of "heartening" by an obesity doctor was that half of people lost a largely imperceptible amount of weight.

This was considered success at the time.

For comparison, to be on the edge of normal weight from the edge of obese is a 16% reduction.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-09 14:35:51+00:00
I meant an absolutist monarchy. This is really a dying form, though not yet totally dead.

Paradoxically, republics of today seem more vulnerable to authoritarian turns than the monarchies which survived the 20th century.

Probably because an elected leader has more legitimacy and thus can demand more political power, sometimes too much power. In a constitutional monarchy, there is always a psychological split between the sovereign and the prime minister or whoever gets elected to executive power, and one-man-shows are less likely to succeed.
by vidarh | 2026-01-09 14:36:21+00:00
The thing is, current models are good enough that you can mostly achieve the same by just putting a markdown file[1] on your server that describes their API, and tell people to point their agent at that.

For complex interactions it might be marginally more efficient to use an MCP server, but current SOTA models are good at cobbling together tools, and unless you're prepared to spend a lot of time testing how the models actually end up interacting with your MCP tools you might find it better to "just" describe your API to avoid a mismatch between what you expose and what the model thinks it needs.

[1] Slightly different, but fun: For code.claude.com, you can add ".md" to most paths and get back the docs as a Markdown file; Claude Code is aware of this, and uses it to get docs about itself. E.g. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/overview.md )
by perrygeo | 2026-01-09 14:37:09+00:00
This. Mammals are (generally) K-selected species, meaning they invest heavily in raising their young. In the absence of natural pressures, mammals reproduce like crazy until they bump up against the environment's carrying capacity. Humans are not unique at all in our tendency to expand! It's just that we have opposable thumbs and language and tools to help us boost the carrying capacity.
by herobird | 2026-01-09 14:37:28+00:00
My view on specifications is that their long-term success depends on the value they provide relative to their complexity. Complexity inevitably grows over time, so spending that complexity budget carefully is crucial, especially since a specification is only useful if it remains implementable by a broad set of engines.

WebAssembly MVP is a good example: it offered limited initial value but was exceptionally simple. Overall, I am happy with how the spec evolved with the exceptions of 128-bit simd and relaxed-simd.

The main issue I see with 128-bit simd is that it was always clear it would not be the final vector extension. Modern hardware already widely supports 256-bit vector widths, with 512-bit becoming more common. Thus, 128-bit simd increasingly delivers only a fraction of native performance rather than the often-cited "near-native" performance. A flexible-vectors design (similar to ARM SVE or the RISC-V vector extension) could have provided a single, future-proof SIMD model and preserved "near-native" performance for much longer.

From a long-term perspective, this feels like a trade-off of short-term value for a large portion of the spec's complexity budget. Though, I may be underestimating the real challenges for JIT implementers, and I am likely biased being the author of a Wasm interpreter where flexible-vectors would be far more beneficial than 128-bit simd.

Why you think flexible-vectors might never have a realistic path to standardization?
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-09 14:37:38+00:00
> Providing inference-time context (in this case, audio) is no different than giving a prompt to an LLM.

Right... And you have 0-shot prompts ("give me a list of animals"), 1-shot prompts ("give me a list of animals, for example: a cat"), 2-shot prompts ("give me a list of animals, for example: a cat; a dog"), etc.

The "shot" refers to how many examples are provided to the LLM in the prompt, and have nothing to do with training or tuning, in every context I've ever seen.
by unsolved73 | 2026-01-09 14:37:40+00:00
Embassy and async Rust are probably the best things that have happened to the embedded world in the past decade!

C RTOSes are conceptually nice, but such as pain to use in the real world, a lean framework like embassy is the natural evolution.

The best thing is that embassy can actually be considered as a real-time "OS" (you can read more here: https://kerkour.com/introduction-to-embedded-development-wit...).
by easymuffin | 2026-01-09 14:38:25+00:00
Agree and compared to the Zig Software Foundation (more complex work and lower salaries/costs) https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ , the amount of money required to run Tailwind CSS seems quite high (or Zig quite low, depending how you view it). IMHO it’s too high and mostly profits from popularity and right framework at the right time for LLMs, but as others mentioned shadcn probably also contributed to people using shadcn components causing less TW UI sales and less visits to their docs page. The CSS framework seems mostly done and supports most browser CSS features, so I’m wondering if it still requires that many devs? Also wondering what they are going to do now with all the new partnership money flowing in. I’d prefer the OSS money flow to be more balanced, but yeah I guess the market decides.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-09 14:38:35+00:00
> We're not going back to writing hand-crafted CSS with or without LLMs.

A lot of us have never stopped writing hand-crafted CSS. Also, in my experience, Gemini 3 Pro is an absolute monster at writing layouts and styling in pure CSS with very basic descriptions of what I want (tested it while I was experimenting with vibe coding in some sleepless night LOL).

There are still a lot of developers who loathe using Tailwind and avoid touching it like the plague. Handwritten CSS still offers more opportunities for optimization and keeps your markup much cleaner than spamming utility classes everywhere (I understand the appeal of rapidly iterating with it, though).
by jameskilton | 2026-01-09 14:39:09+00:00
Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose.

Turns out the easiest way to destroy the greatest nation in the world is to fail to hold the rich and powerful to account.

No-one should trust us anymore, and if Europe doesn't step up and do something, this will be China's world to run for generations to come (Russia unfortunately is working on committing suicide).
by ericmay | 2026-01-09 14:39:22+00:00
Nah, Iran isn't innocent here. Nobody forces them to try and build nuclear bombs, chant death to Jews, or fund literal terrorist groups who do crazy things.

It's fair to be critical of the United States (which was also largely cleaning up European colonial messes in the Middle East), but it's not fair to take away Iran's agency and blame all of its ills on the United States.
by bluGill | 2026-01-09 14:39:58+00:00
The problem is Mozilla's mission is not to develop a browser! They have a browser, and it is what everyone knows them for, but their mission is only vaguely related to the browser. I don't care much about their mission - there are plenty of other charities that have similar missions if I did. I care about a great browsers and they are not delivering that - which is fine as far as their mission, but I'm miffed because I can't get what I want from anyone.
by Aromasin | 2026-01-09 14:40:15+00:00
The other option which people seem to shy away from is to simply embrace the act of feast and famine. I'll regularly go through binges, colloquially known as "Christmas" and "Summer", and to be honest I don't sweat about it. Either the fire is on and we're all celebrating with family and friends with a beer and a roast dinner, or the sun is out and we're having BBQ and cocktails doing the same.

If you can master the skill of dietary control, and go a month or two with really spartan fasting routine between celebration periods, life becomes a lot less stressful. I always enjoy watching Paddy Pimblett (UFC fighter well known for radical weight transformations:https://www.bbc.com/sport/mixed-martial-arts/62135535) bounce between weights, but always get in shape before a fight. It's a skill that only gets easier with practice.
GLX: A Bash Replacement–Oriented Programming Language for System Scripting
by danishk-sinha | 2026-01-09 14:41:31+00:00
LINK : https://github.com/glx101/GLX

GLX is an experimental programming language designed as a potential replacement for complex Bash scripts in system-level automation and scripting tasks.
It focuses on providing a cleaner, more structured syntax while preserving the expressive power needed for everyday shell-like workflows.

GLX includes readable control flow, built-in data structures, ranges, bitwise operations, macros, and labels.
The language is implemented entirely from scratch, including its lexer, parser, bytecode virtual machine, and interpreter.

This is an open-source project and an ongoing experiment in building a safer and more maintainable alternative to traditional shell scripting.
Feedback and discussion are very welcome.
by inglor_cz | 2026-01-09 14:41:40+00:00
>> it is a nasty group of medieval characters,

> Still better than having western corporations loot the hell out of your country, like they did to Russia in the 90s, or what AICO did after it got Mossadegh out of the way.

Really? By what measure? Just look at how many people fled the Islamic Republic vs. Shah's old regime. The diaspora has absolutely exploded since Khomeini's revolution, and the people fleeing are mostly the best educated ones. Iran has the highest brain drain in the world.
by madhadron | 2026-01-09 14:41:48+00:00
All these transforms are switching to an eigenbasis of some differential operator (that usually corresponds to a differential equation of interest). Spherical harmonics, Bessel and Henkel functions, which are the radial versions of sines/cosines and complex exponential, respectively, and on and on.

The next big jumps were to collections of functions not parameterized by subsets of R^n. Wavelets use a tree shapes parameter space.

There’s a whole, interesting area of overcomplete basis sets that I have been meaning to look into where you give up your basis functions being orthogonal and all those nice properties in exchange for having multiple options for adapting better to different signal characteristics.

I don’t think these transforms are going to be relevant to understanding neural nets, though. They are, by their nature, doing something with nonlinear structures in high dimensions which are not smoothly extended across their domain, which is the opposite problem all our current approaches to functional analysis deal with.
by mgaunard | 2026-01-09 14:43:10+00:00
Browsers are sandboxed, and working on the web browsers themselves is a very small niche, as is working on kernels.

Software increasingly runs either on dedicated infrastructure or virtual ones; in those cases there isn't really a case where you need to worry about software running on the same host trying to access the data.

Sure, it's useful to have some restrictions in place to track what needs access to what resource, but in practice they can always be circumvented for debugging or convenience of development.
by tsoukase | 2026-01-09 14:43:21+00:00
At the time of his death by a Roman soldier the ancient mathematician Archimedes is said to yell: Don't disturb my circles, while he was calculating on sand. Much later, a few years ago, one of his handbooks, an overwritten palimpsest, was found to contain elements of modern calculus. If both these concepts where saved and spread through the middle ages, human civilisation might have been developed 1000 years earlier.
by internationalis | 2026-01-09 14:43:48+00:00
It’s classic: the government killing protesters in the streets, and Western government-backed opposition groups trying to hijack the protests to seize power. Western governments support a person whose published plan for a 24-to-36-month (extendable) “transitional period” puts himself in charge as the absolute leader, with some advisory institutions whose members he personally “appoints.” Then, after 24 to 36 months, they promise elections—just like what the former al-Qaeda–linked Sharia is doing in Syria.
by rdtsc | 2026-01-09 14:43:56+00:00
> if I could sense electromagnetic fields, but no one would describe me as disabled for not being able to sense these fields—unless, perhaps, everyone else could.

Light is EM fields. A possible scenario is a battle at night with others having night vision equipment and you don’t. You can absolutely be described as disabled or being at a significant disadvantage.

Because, like you say, what we consider normal in that scenario is to have a proper night vision equipment.
by akdev1l | 2026-01-09 14:43:56+00:00
I mean in such case it is equivalent to like `do-something | llm “summarize the thing”`

Personally I see “prompt scripting” as strictly worse than code

cannot even modify some part of the prompt without being sure that there won’t be random side effects

And from what I’ve seen these prompts can(and do tend to) grow into possibly hundreds of lines as they become more specific and people try to “patch” the edge cases.

It ends up being like code but strictly worse.
by freedomben | 2026-01-09 14:44:02+00:00
I hope freediver will shed some light on the open source plans, because that's a deal breaker for me too. I'm a long time paying customer and huge proponent (even evangelist) of Kagi, but a closed source browser is just too many steps backwards for me no matter who makes it.

I get (though wouldn't necessarily agree with) keeping it closed while it's still in the works, but would like to know if the plan is to open source in the future or not.
by dtagames | 2026-01-09 14:44:09+00:00
This article contains a quote so stupid it's hard to read past it. The speaker suggests that we don't know what ultraprocessed foods are or why they might be harmful? Only someone on the dole from the processed food industry could say that.

People evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat animals who ate plants. It doesn't require a big scientific council or a food board to figure out we didn't evolve to eat highly processed foods.
by energy123 | 2026-01-09 14:44:16+00:00
> Basically no one means this when they speak of regime change operations and people participating in it.

They do though. Spinning the 2014 Maidan Revolution as a fully illegitimate CIA-backed coup (with the implicit conclusion that it's against the will of the people) is one of the main rhetorical pillars used to justify Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
by perihelions | 2026-01-09 14:44:45+00:00
That would unfortunately repeat the playbook of their 2019 internet blackout, which was likewise a cover to the government massacring "as many as 1,500 protestors".

> "To block the sharing of information regarding the protests and the deaths of hundreds of protesters on social media platforms, the government shut down the Internet nationwide, resulting in a near-total internet blackout of around six days.[25][26][27] In an effort to crush the protests, the Iranian government (according to Amnesty International) shot protesters dead from rooftops, helicopters, and at close range with machine gun fire. In an effort to mask the scale and casualty count of the protests, it hauled away large numbers of bodies of the dead protesters,[24] and threatened families of slain protesters not to speak to the media or hold funerals.[28]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019–2020_Iranian_protests