MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-29 23:13:32+00:00
Genuinely dense cities basically don't exist in the U.S. The average "dense" city downtown in a U.S. city is broadly comparable to the worst car-dependent suburban or exurbian hellscapes of Europe and East Asia, and things only go worse from there. City downtowns near the East Coast are an exception since they were built in colonial times or thereabouts, so when you think "dense" you should really think of e.g. the densest boroughs in NYC.
by dfc | 2026-01-29 23:13:54+00:00
Flameshot with sway has been a nightmare for me. I have tried a couple of times but i have never gotten it to work. I have settled with grimshot. The biggest missed feature is the number annotator. It was so easy with flameshot to annotate a screenshot with 1-9 and then refer to each number in a document. I really miss flameshot:(
by bri3d | 2026-01-29 23:14:03+00:00
A lot of PS2-era games unfortunately used various self-modifying executable tricks to swap code in and out of memory; Naughty Dog games are notorious for this. This got easier in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era where the vendors started banning self-modifying code as a matter of policy, probably because they recognized that they would need to emulate their own consoles in the future.

The PS2 is one of the most deeply cursed game console architectures (VU1 -> GS pipeline, VU1 microcode, use of the PS1 processor as IOP, etc) so it will be interesting to see how far this gets.
by mlyle | 2026-01-29 23:15:22+00:00
> It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation

Reaction time makes the math even better here. You travel v1 * reaction_time no matter what, before entering the deceleration regime. So if v1 gets smaller, you get to spend a greater proportion of time in the deceleration regime.

> linear deceleration.

After reaction time, stopping distance is pretty close to n^2. There's weird effects at high speed (contribution from drag) and at very low speed, but they have pretty modest contributions.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-29 23:15:27+00:00
Energy is a much larger theme than it was in the years before (obviously, since we're in the EU and energy overall is a larger theme in society here. This has a reflection in the VC market, but it also is part of a much larger trend, climate change and CO2 neutrality).

Another trend - and this surprised us - is a much stronger presence of really hard tech and associated industries and finally - for obvious reasons, so not really surprising - more parties active in defense.
by vondur | 2026-01-29 23:15:56+00:00
I believe the idea that China’s population was overestimated came out of the COVID vaccine rollout. Supposedly, the central government asked local officials how many doses they needed and then sent money based on those numbers. That gave some people an incentive to inflate the figures to get more funding. Later on, when the government looked at school enrollment numbers, they noticed there were way fewer kids than the number of vaccine doses that had been requested for children.
by lioeters | 2026-01-29 23:16:15+00:00
Very cool, I enjoyed the explanation about how bitwise operations are built up to work on a set of gates all at once. I was browsing more of the codebase, it's really well-organized and commented code. I like how SHDL is readable for beginners, the examples are all intuitive and self-explanatory.

As another commenter mentioned, integrating visual diagrams would add an interesting dimension. I saw some manually written ASCII diagrams on the documentation site, and could imagine a way to convert SHDL into diagrams. And a step further, a code playground to write and run SHDL circuits, to be able to see the circuits work visually.

For educational purposes, the docs could use more visual descriptions, like starting with the simplest circuits and show step by step what happens.
by timschmidt | 2026-01-29 23:16:23+00:00
As state of the art machines continue to chase the latest node, capacity for older nodes has become much less expensive, more openly documented, and actually accessible to individuals. Open source FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools have also immensely improved in quality and capability. The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 contains an open source Risc-V core designed by an individual. And 4G cell phones like the https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro are available on the market built around the very similar ESP32. The latest greatest will always be behind a paywall, but the rising tide floats all boats, and hobbyist projects are growing more sophisticated. Even a $1 ESP32 has dual 240mhz 32bit cores, 8Mb ram, and fast network interfaces which blow away the 8bit micros I grew up with. The state of the open-source art may be a bit behind the state of the proprietary arts, but is advancing as well.

It's really fun to have useful hardware that's easy to program at the bare metal.
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-29 23:16:25+00:00
$10 per year is extremely rare. $5 per month is common, and if it goes up to $10, a lot of people will still keep it if they're using it.

The provider is still making the same money for the same cost on that pre–existing service, so they might not even choose to raise the price for old customers. They're only losing an opportunity cost, and different businesses weight that differently.
by colordrops | 2026-01-29 23:17:03+00:00
> So yes, currently playing PS2 games on PC via emulator is still absolutely fantastic, but native ports would be the holy grail of game preservation.

I would think that emulation of the original game as closely as possible would be the gold standard of preservation, and native ports would be a cool alternative. As described in the article, native ports are typically not faithful reproductions but enhanced to use the latest hardware.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-01-29 23:17:36+00:00
>hear what the HN community has to say about it.

This.

This is what you are not supposed to be able to get anywhere else.

It does seem like that could be a pretty good measure of desirabilty.

Not only whether or not the article in particular, or its subject may be so popular that it's all over the mainstream news. Depends on what it is. When the commentary is not what you get from the mainstream that's one thing you want, but when it starts out or degenerates into something thoughtless or no different you don't need a whole lot of that.

I still see no reason for me to flag anything or downvote anybody, there's plenty of that without me adding to the downside.
by arjie | 2026-01-29 23:17:41+00:00
I don't really think it's the effort, to be honest. A short while ago, I made a Custom GPT for my wife[0] that she thoroughly enjoyed and uses all the time. It didn't take me that long. The value in the thing is that I could see what she wanted and make it like she wanted. And on the receiving side, a friend of ours knitted our daughter, Astra, a quilt with her name on it and with this lovely star motif. It must have taken her and her mother, a seamstress, ages. But if she had done it instantaneously, I think I still would have loved it.

As for the other side of things, there is one thing that gives me a mild twinge of envy: I grew up on the command-line and when I write on it, I can knock out a full bash pipeline literally at the command-line super-fast. Many of my friends are far better engineers, but this one thing makes me great at any sort of debugging and all that. Now everyone has that! I'm USELESS.

Well, not really, but it's funny that this unique skill is meaningless. Overall, I've found that AI stuff has let me do more and more things. Instead of thinking, at the end of the week, "Oh man, I wish I'd made progress on my side project" I think "Damn, that wasn't such a good idea after all" which is honestly far more satisfying!

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-17/Custom_GPTs
by belorn | 2026-01-29 23:17:57+00:00
If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed.

One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time.

For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7km/h) near where I live, they intentionally added large obfuscating objects on the road that limited visibility and harder to navigate. This forces drivers to drive very slow, even when alone on the road, as they can't see if a car or person may be behind the next object.

In an other road they added several tight S curves in a row, where if you drive anything faster than 20km/h you will fail the turns and drive onto the artificial constructed curbs.

In other roads they put a sign in the middle of two way roads while at the same time drastically limiting the width to the curb, forcing drivers to slow down in order to center the car in the lane and squeeze through.

In each of those is that a human driver with human fear of crashing will cause drivers to pay extra attention and slow down.
by verdverm | 2026-01-29 23:18:08+00:00
You aren't wrong, you really want a bit of both.

1. You absolutely want to force certain context in, no questions or non-determinism asked (index and sparknotes). This can be done conditionally, but still rule based on the files accessed and other "context"

2. You want to keep it clean and only provide useful context as necessary (skills, search, mcp; and really a explore/query/compress mechanism around all of this, ralph wiggum is one example)
by akoboldfrying | 2026-01-29 23:18:55+00:00
More data would certainly be better, but it's not as bad as you suggest -- the large number of miles driven till first incident does tell us something statistically meaningful about the incident rate per mile driven. If we view the data as a large sample of miles driven, each with some observed number of incidents, then what we have is "merely" an extremely skewed distribution. I can confidently say that, if you pick any sane family of distributions to model this, then after fitting just this "single" data point, the model will report that P(MTTF < one hundredth of the observed number of miles driven so far) is negligible. This would hold even if there were zero incidents so far.
by evgpbfhnr | 2026-01-29 23:19:01+00:00
>> You definitely can use Linux with few simple servers with 128 MB RAM.
>
> This is not difficult, you just need to run `htop` and perform addition of the RES column (which is in KB unless a unit is shown). Example:

I'm not quite sure what points this makes... That's supposed to fit on 128MB? And it doesn't include memory consumed by the kernel itself (which is not negligible at this scale), and linux needs spare for cache to work remotely decently.

$ awk '{ tot+=$2 } END { print tot /1024 }' < list
214.035

I'm sure you can run a linux with 128MB of ram, but certainly not with systemd and a default kernel... Perhaps DSL (damn small linux) or alpine.
by bri3d | 2026-01-29 23:19:45+00:00
JIT isn't _that_ common in games (although it is certainly present in some, even from the PS2 era), but self-modifying or even self-referencing executables were a quite common memory saving trick that lingered into the PS2 era - binaries that would swap different parts in and out of disk were quite common, and some developers kept using really old school space-saving tricks like reusing partial functions as code gadgets, although this was dying out by the PS2 era.

Emulation actually got easier after around the PS2 era because hardware got a little closer to commodity and console makers realized they would need to emulate their own consoles in the future and banned things like self-modifying code as policy (AFAIK, the PowerPC code segment on both PS3 and Xbox 360 is mapped read only; although I think SPE code could technically self-modify I'm not sure this was widespread)

The fundamental challenges in this style of recompilation are mostly offset jump tables and virtual dispatch / function pointer passing; this is usually handled with some kind of static analysis fixup pass to deal with jump tables and some kind of function boundary detection + symbol table to deal with virtual dispatch.
by MYEUHD | 2026-01-29 23:19:58+00:00
> Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people.

Huh? Chavismo began in 1999. So if you're claiming that chavismo caused a lot of migration, you'd need to come up with data that correlates with that time period.

The reality is, the big migrations from Venezuela began in 2017, which correlates with the very harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela, which caused a hyper-inflation that lasted too long.

It has nothing to do with Chavismo and everything to do with American economic terrorism.
by jrowen | 2026-01-29 23:21:35+00:00
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.

Look at a bunch of job postings and ask yourself if that work is going to make things cheaper for you or better for society. We're not building railroads and telephone networks anymore. One person can grow food for 10,000. Stuff is expensive because free market capitalism allows it and some people are pathologically greedy. Runaway optimizers with no real goal state in mind except "more."

> How? What are you proposing exactly?

In a word, socialism. It's a social and political problem, not a technical one. These systems have fallen way behind technology and allowed crazy accumulations of wealth in the hands of very few. Push for legislation to redistribute the wealth to the people.

If someone invents a robot to do the work of McDonalds workers, that should liberate them from having to do that kind of work. This is the dream and the goal of technology. Instead, under our current system, one person gets a megayacht and thousands of people are "unemployed."
by KetoManx64 | 2026-01-29 23:22:46+00:00
Spectacle is great. I tried to switch to it from Flameshot a few months back since it has all the features that I use regularly in Flameshot but ran into an issue where it would 2-3 times longer than Flameshot to start up when starting it up through the CLI. I use keymapper to map all my keyboard shortcuts and starting Spectacle using Qdbus is very slow compares to flameshot, like 1-2 seconds of waiting after pressing the hotkey compared to Flameshot being instant.

Looks like someone found a workaround by having spectacle run as a systemd process and restart after closing though, I'll have to give it a try: https://discuss.kde.org/t/make-spectacle-launch-faster/38030...
by 22c | 2026-01-29 23:22:58+00:00
> its because people actually want AI to talk to them like that

I can't find the particular article (there's a few blogs and papers pointing out the phenomenon, I can't find the one I enjoyed) but it was along the lines of how in LLMArena a lot of users tend to pick the "confidently incorrect" model over the "boring sounding but correct" model.

The average user probably prefers the sycophantic echo chamber of confirmation bias offered by a lot of large language models.

I can't help but draw parallels to the "You are not immune to propaganda" memes. Turns out most of us are not immune to confirmation bias, either.
by meatcar | 2026-01-29 23:23:08+00:00
What if instead of needing to run a codemod to cache per-lib docs locally, documentation could be distributed alongside a given lib, as a dev dependency, version locked, and accessible locally as plaintext. All docs can be linked in node_modules/.docs (like binaries are in .bin). It would be a sort of collection of manuals.

What a wonderful world that would be.
by jrflowers | 2026-01-29 23:23:28+00:00
Exactly. If I were in that position I would have simply learned from what happens in the future. In the rare instance that there was a negative outcome, I would just inform my previous self so that I could retroactively ensure that that outcome had not occurred.

It is through this simple system that I can confidently say that the content of this article that I am reading today in 2026 had/will have an impact on what I would have done in 2019
by Muromec | 2026-01-29 23:23:31+00:00
>A database does not have a mind, and it is not a person. If it could have culpa, then you'd be liable for assault, perhaps murder, if you took it apart.

We as a society, for our own convenience can choose to believe that LLM does have a mind and can understand results of it's actions. The second part doesn't really follow. Can you even hurt LLM in a way that is equivalent to murdering a person? Evicting it off my computer isn't necessarily a crime.

It would be good news if the answer was yes, because then we just need to find a convertor of camel amounts to dollar amounts and we are all good.

Can LLM perceive time in a way that allows imposing an equivalent of jail time? Is the LLM I'm running on my computer the same personality as the one running on yours and should I also shut down mine when yours acted up? Do we even need the punishment aspect of it and not just rehabilitation, repentance and retraining?
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-29 23:23:36+00:00
Depends on the court and the order. Fairly commonly (as occurred in the case where this list was enumerated after compliance with the preceding order was acheived by threat of sanctions), the first consequence of violating an order will be a renewed order with with a threat of sanctions (e.g., a show cause hearing as to why you should not be punished if you fail to compmy by a certain time), with potentially compensation sought by the opposing party for any costs accrued because of your noncompliance, but no punitive sanctions if you comply timely after the second order on the matter, though the nature of the order, the significant of noncompliance on the process of the case, the judge, the opposing party (while they don't order sanctions, they can request them and make a case), and other factors effect this—one of those factors being whether the judge believes that you are a serial offender who has been put on notice about the same kind of failure.

This list by itself own description seems to have been compiled rapidly by surveying other judges after the order for conpliance or a show cause hearing and perhaps even after compliance occurred. And now its available to be pointed too in other cases.
by fragmede | 2026-01-29 23:24:56+00:00
It depends on the video. What they should do is arrange for the video to get leaked and let the Internet courts argue about it, and then based on the Internet verdict, come out and claim it's real and they fired somebody for leaking it, or it's AI generated.

Love him or hate him, releasing the video is something I can see Elon doing because assuming a human driver would have done worse, it speaks for itself. Release a web video game where the child sometimes jumps out in front of the car, and see how fast humans respond like the "land Starship" game. Assuming humans would do worse, that is. If the child was clearly visible through the car or some how else avoidable by humans, then I'd be hiding the video too.
by Muromec | 2026-01-29 23:26:08+00:00
CEOs are like cars and immigrants. Both kill people all the time, but we choose to believe they are net positive to society, look the other way and try to put symbolic band aids here and there.

The same may happen to AI or not. We can bite the bullet and say it's fine that it sometimes happens. We can ban the entire thing too if we feel the tradeoff not worth it
by mmooss | 2026-01-29 23:26:49+00:00
How do you know how quickly the software braked? A blog post by a company selling a product is not credible material. We need independent sources.

> The vast vast vast majority of human drivers ... would not have been able to manage the follow up so quickly

You are saying the "vast vast vast majority of human drivers" wouldn't pull over after hitting a child?

I remember similar blind faith in and unlimited advocacy for anything Tesla and Musk said, and look how that has turned out. These are serious issues for the people in our communities, not a sporting event with sides.
by nykodev | 2026-01-29 23:27:02+00:00
Hey HN,

Built this over the past 3 months. OperatorMemo.com

*The problem:* Everyone lies to founders about their ideas. Friends are supportive, investors nod politely, even early customers sugarcoat feedback. By the time you get real signal, you've burned months.

*What it does:* You describe a business concept (20-1000 chars), it returns a strategic analysis memo. Not "this is interesting" fluff — actual breakdown of power dynamics, execution phases, competitive landscape, and what will kill the idea.

*Why it's different from ChatGPT:*
- Heavily prompted system with specific framework (positioning tables, execution phases, action items)
- Uses Claude Opus 4.5 (expensive but noticeably better output for strategic analysis)
- Structured output that's actually actionable, not a wall of text

*Stack:*
- Next.js 14 (App Router)
- Supabase (auth + postgres)
- Stripe (simple credit system, no subscriptions)
- Deployed on VPS with Caddy
- Total infra cost: ~$50/mo not counting API

*Pricing:* $10 for 5 analyses, $25 for 15, $70 for 50. No free tier — API costs are real (~$0.30-0.50 per memo with Opus).

*What I learned building this:*
1. Prompt engineering for structured output is harder than expected. Took 20+ iterations to get consistent section formatting.
2. People spend way more time reading the "what will kill this idea" section than anything else.
3. Nobody shares their memos. The ideas are too private. Killed my viral loop hopes.

*Honest limitations:*
- It's not a replacement for real customer interviews
- Quality depends heavily on how well you describe your concept
- Sometimes the AI gets generic on very niche industries

Looking for feedback on the product and positioning. Also curious if anyone has experience with prompt caching for cost reduction — currently caching the system prompt but wondering if there's more to optimize.

Source isn't open but happy to discuss technical decisions.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-01-29 23:27:42+00:00
I always make a habit of doing a lot of duplicate runs when I benchmark for this reason. Joke's on me, in the time I spent doing 1 benchmark with real confidence intervals and getting no traction on my post, I could have done 10 shitty benchmarks or 1 shitty benchmark and 9x more blogspam. Perverse incentives rule us all.
by runarberg | 2026-01-29 23:27:56+00:00
And that makes it all alright doesn’t it?

There are also gangs making money off human trafficking? Does that make it OK for a corporation to make money off human trafficking as well? And there are companies making money off wars?

When you argue with whataboutism, you can just point to whatever you like, and somehow that is an argument in your favor.
by chr15m | 2026-01-29 23:28:34+00:00
I'm not sure if this is widely known but you can do a lot better even than AGENTS.md.

Create a folder called .context and symlink anything in there that is relevant to the project. For example READMEs and important docs from dependencies you're using. Then configure your tool to always read .context into context, just like it does for AGENTS.md.

This ensures the LLM has all the information it needs right in context from the get go. Much better performance, cheaper, and less mistakes.
by w4rh4wk5 | 2026-01-29 23:29:54+00:00
I am fine with waiting for a feature and using it when it's here.
But at this point, I feel like C++ modules are a ton of complexity for users, tools, and compilers to wrangle... for what? Slightly faster compile times than PCH? Less preprocessor code in your C++.. maybe? Doesn't seem worth it to me in comparison.
by mmooss | 2026-01-29 23:30:03+00:00
In your experience, where do we find a credible source of info? Do we need to wait for the government's investigation to finish?

> I would say that Waymo's response, per their blog post [2] has been textbook compliance.

Remember Tesla's blog posts? Of course Waymo knows textbook compliance just like you do, and of course that's what they would claim.