MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ApolloFortyNine | 2026-01-06 17:12:08+00:00
Too many people think removing ads means they'll still continue to get content for free, they just won't have to watch ads.

At best, it's as you said, the platform and creator make less money (Youtube gives 55% of ad revenue to the creator). This would naturally lead to less content eventually.

At worst, video content becomes unsustainable without a subscription.
by keytarsolo | 2026-01-06 17:12:09+00:00
I like Jellyfin, and run it alongside Plex.

But they have a very long way to before they reach feature parity with even just the stuff I use. Let alone everything Plex can do.

I think this year I’m going to try and find an issue or feature I can contribute on. I’d like to end up moving to Jellyfin based on it being good and not Plex being bad.
by jason_s | 2026-01-06 17:12:15+00:00
I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:

- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears

I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).

It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-06 17:12:44+00:00
> In some ways it’s no different than working with some interns. You have to prompt them to “did you consider if your code matched all of the requirements?”.

I really hate this description, but I can't quite filly articulate why yet. It's distinctly different because interns can form new observations independently. AIs can not. They can make another guess at the next token, but if it could have predicted it the 2nd time, it must have been able to predict it the first, so it's not a new observation. The way I think through a novel problem results in drastically different paths and outputs from an LLM. They guess and check repeatedly, they don't converge on an answer. Which you've already identified

> LLMs are different in that they’re sorta lobotomized. They won’t learn from tutoring “did you consider” which needs to essentially be encoded manually still.

This isn't how you work with an intern (unless the intern is unable to learn).
by inetknght | 2026-01-06 17:12:52+00:00
On the other hand, I've been using Claude Code for the past several months at work in several C++ projects. It's been fine at understanding C++. It just generates a lot of boilerplate, doesn't follow DRY, and gets persnickety with tests.

I've started adding this to all of my new conversations and it seems to help:

You are a principal software engineer. I report to you. Do not modify files. Do not write prose. Only provide observations and suggestions so that I can learn from you.

My question to the LLM then follows in the next paragraph. Foregoing most of the LLM's code-writing capabilities in favor of giving observations and ideas seems to be a much better choice for productivity. It can still lead me down rabbit holes or wrong directions, but at least I don't have to deal with 10 pages of prose in its output or 50 pages of ineffectual code.
by Teever | 2026-01-06 17:13:35+00:00
An adjacent problem is when enthusiasts in hobby subreddits become a bit too enthusiastic about the hobby which sometimes develops into an unhealthy obsession that the community (un)wittingly becomes a part of.

I recently bought a pair of boots from a reputable brand. So I of course checked out the subreddit for the brand and while many posts are good and the community is receptive to questions but posts by weirdos with like a dozen+ pairs of $300+ boots dominate the discussion.

Can these people actually afford like $5000 worth of boots and all the accessories they come with it? Maybe. Maybe we’re all participating in their shopping addiction when they post pictures of their stairs covered in boots.

Either way there’s something unsettlingly unnatural about their posts, and I don’t mean in an astroturfing sort of way.
by mmh0000 | 2026-01-06 17:13:37+00:00
Don't misunderstand my original post. SELinux is AMAZING. But, if SELinux in the default "targeted" policy is the thing that's protecting you, that's good, but it means there are some major bugs or misconfiguration higher up (i.e., in your web server).

I assume you know what a network firewall is. Think of SELinux like a "System Call Firewall". SELinux will protect you from many so-called "zero-day" vulnerabilities. It watches every syscall an application makes, looks at its policy, and decides if that syscall should be allowed/denied. It is a good thing.

However, SELinux is really not user-friendly, though it is extremely well documented and learnable. (run `man -k selinux` to see all the man pages) Red Hat also has thorough documentation (https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...)

Specifically, to your "weird permission issues". That is a "problem" with SELinux; it doesn't surface errors well. The TL;DR is: if you get a "permission denied" error, and you rule out the obvious (i.e., filesystem permissions), then you need to know to blame SELinux and look at the `/var/log/audit/audit.log` file.

That file is technically human readable, but there are tools that make it much easier, such as `ausearch` and `sealert -a`.

---

https://danwalsh.livejournal.com/71122.html

"Now this is a horrible exploit but as you can see SELinux would probably have protected a lot/most of your valuable data on your machine. It would buy you time for you to patch your system."
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-06 17:13:57+00:00
I found that it didn't have much to do with socializing at all. It was that physical space is just much easier to access in a smaller house. X is only 3 steps away instead of 30. Kitchen, bed, book, TV, toilet, computer, etc. Home repairs and renovation didn't involve huge teardown decisions. And because of the smaller physical footprint, the living space was a huge limit to what you could keep. Justifying junk removal was much easier.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-06 17:14:13+00:00
> For most of that period, the size of the Gmail app hovered around 12 MB, with a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017... The Gmail app, on the App Store, is currently 760.7 MB in size.

With charts:

https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-tak...

I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.

Something like Gmail doesn't have massive hi-resolution bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.
by halbgut | 2026-01-06 17:14:23+00:00
Like any LLM benchmark, LMArena is highly flawed. I do think it has a right to exist. For me anecdotally it has been indicative of which LLMs style I like best, not necessarily its factual accuracy. It hasn't however been a very useful tool to find the best LLM for a given job.

To the article's point though, it's treated as the gold standard, which it isn't. We should have learned that with the sycophancy-gate.

I'm not sure if the methodology here really is sound for the question at hand. It's a bit like saying, oh prediction markets don't work because 40% of people that voted were wrong.

You can't really get around running your own benchmarks for the job at hand, if you really want to get 95th-percentile performance on a task.
by catapart | 2026-01-06 17:14:34+00:00
Just a hip-shot, not a considered position. When I hear "regulation", I think "threat". Either of violence (any physical touch), or financial garnishment. So, to me, ads that last longer than five seconds do not rise to the level of threatening anyone.

But assuming that they did, the situation seems like one where there could be any number or ways of following the letter or the law, while flouting the spirit of it. I don't dare imagine the creative ways these people will come up with to make entertainment even worse than it already is. So for areas that seem to require miles and miles of caveats and very specific rule-making, my gut reaction is that the regulatory path isn't the right one until we can break down the scope into something that simple regulations can accommodate without loophole. Put more simply: if it seems like people will just find ways around the problem, my assumption is just that we're not targeting the right problem yet and we need to break it down further, if regulation is the right solution at all.

But that is pretty assumptive, so - again - it's just a first feeling. Doesn't pass my vibe check.
by seniorThrowaway | 2026-01-06 17:14:59+00:00
Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.
by bfeynman | 2026-01-06 17:15:02+00:00
In what world do you get that conclusion? Dense cities in other parts of the world rely on mass transit to move people. FSD so you can have self driving cars in the street -> ? -> increasing congestion. The point is you should have more effective volume transit not optimizing random ones. 1000 cars on FSD are an optimization better than 1000 taxi drivers, compared to a train or a few buses.
by phailhaus | 2026-01-06 17:15:06+00:00
This is like the infamous Dropbox comment.

- Plex

or...

- Jellyfin

- Navidrome

- Homelab

- proxmox

- OPNsense

- Caddy

- Tailscale

Plex is not worried about people like you, because you just described an insane amount of effort just to avoid a one-time cost. Most will not.
by pkaye | 2026-01-06 17:15:23+00:00
Yes it can be done on the state level. California passes consumer protection laws all the time. Some of the recent ones are listed here. The problems is people are waiting for Congress or the President to do something when it could be enacted at the state level first and when there are enough support and consensus could be passed by Congress.

https://www.kcra.com/article/new-california-laws-in-2026-jan...
by simonw | 2026-01-06 17:15:24+00:00
The tools.ts is the best file to read to understand what this thing can do - it's mainly shell and AppleScript stuff: https://github.com/ygwyg/system/blob/main/src/bridge/tools.t...

I don't trust this list of "safe commands": https://github.com/ygwyg/system/blob/b5adfe526da7470cade61f7...

It includes python3 and node under the heading "Dev tools (read-only)" - but I don't think "read-only" is enforced anywhere.
by garbawarb | 2026-01-06 17:15:28+00:00
It's kind of an aside, but it also prevents the individual from doing the most economically efficient thing. I mean, suppose an H1B worker wanted to start a startup and hire some Americans to work for their company. They're legally not allowed to do that and create those jobs. Technically they need a business visa, but how would they get one if they can't start the business in the first place?
by master-lincoln | 2026-01-06 17:15:40+00:00
I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.

Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.

It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.

The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-06 17:15:41+00:00
You can have data races in "safe" Go. If you race a trivial object [such as an integer] it's just radioactive and so long as you didn't need it to have any particular value (e.g. you were just going to write it to a log anyway, or you just discard it) you're fine. However if you race a non-trivial object then that's immediately Undefined Behaviour.

Of course Go programmers will say "Just don't do that" but that's exactly what C programmers told us about bounds misses, use after free and so on...
by b40d-48b2-979e | 2026-01-06 17:15:43+00:00
From my POV having worked at a giant 50,000 person tech org—primarily Java—Kotlin was the kick in the pants that ushered in a lot of changes in the post-Java 11 world. We were on the verge of migrating wholesale to Kotlin after our CTO wrote an internal whitepaper in favor of the direction.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-06 17:15:54+00:00
>It's probably not a good approach to life though.

It is 100% how adults approach life.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3652533/

>Most bad ideas aren't really worth arguing about,

At the same time you have to stop bad ideas in their tracks otherwise they spread like bacteria on an unclean counter, and the internet typically does a bad job of stopping them unless moderation is heavy handed. This leads to a never ending circle of discussion of bad ideas.
by tonyww | 2026-01-06 17:16:02+00:00
One thing I didn’t emphasize enough in the post: I originally tried the “labeled screenshot + vision model” approach pretty hard. (see this screenshot labeled with bbox + ID: https://sentience-screenshots.sfo3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.co...)

In practice it performed worse than expected. Once you overlay dense bounding boxes and numeric IDs, the model has to solve a brittle symbol-grounding problem (“which number corresponds to intent?”). On real pages (Amazon, Stripe docs, etc.) this led to more retries and mis-clicks, not fewer.

What worked better for me was moving that grounding step out of the model entirely and giving it a bounded set of executable actions (role + visibility + geometry), then letting the LLM choose which action, not where to click.

Curious if others have seen similar behavior with vision-based agents, especially beyond toy demos.
by aidenn0 | 2026-01-06 17:16:04+00:00
From TFA and AndyP's slides it seems to specifically refer to a variant of SSO where, for large strings, a fixed-sized prefix of the string is stored along-side the pointer, in the same location as that fixed-size prefix would be fore SSO strings. This means that strings lacking a common prefix can be quickly compared without pointer-chasing (or even knowing if they are small vs large).
by ineedasername | 2026-01-06 17:16:04+00:00
I know that in some cases, apparent bloat like this is related to needing to support so many potential devices and versions of the underlying OS. Google has to support, on iOS, roughly 6 years of devices and their variations + OS variations on them. Each of these may require their own libraries compiled against it, for optimal performance or because it simply is less practical to engineer non-breaking updates against new SDK and HW versions in the same codebase without introducing complexity.

Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have to do this. They can integrate at lower levels and even with all else being equal can develop updates with perfect insight on the ecosystem and foresight on things to come.

Somewhat supporting this possible explanation is that, similar to Apple on iOS, Google's apps on android are significantly smaller.
by samiv | 2026-01-06 17:16:14+00:00
There are several levels here.

In your C++ (or C) program you have one (or more) allocators. These are just pieces of code that juggle blocks of memory into smaller chunks for the program to use. Typically the allocators get their memory from the OS in pages using some OS system call such as sbrk or mmap.

For the sake of argument, let's say I write an allocator that has a limit of 2MiB, while my system has 64Gib or RAM. The allocator can then fail some request when it's internal 2MiB has been exhausted. In C world it'd return a nullptr. In C++ world it would normally throw bad_alloc.

If this happens does this mean the process is out of memory? Or the system is out of memory? No, it doesn't.

That being said where things get murky is because there are allocators that in the absence of limits will just map more and more pages from the OS. The OS can "overcommit" which is to say it gives out more pages than can actually fit into the available physical memory (after taking into account what the OS itself uses etc). And when the overall system memory demand grows too high it will just kill some arbitrary process. On Linux this is the infamous OOM killer that uses the "niceness" score to determine what to kill.

And yes, for the OOM killer there's very little you can do.

But an allocation failure (nullptr or bad_alloc) does not mean OOM condition is happening in the system.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-06 17:16:37+00:00
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds.

When talking about how ads "don't work on you"; it's very important to remember that just like every single other human you're not immune to propaganda.
by mystraline | 2026-01-06 17:17:30+00:00
Simply put, fuck the "market" (aka: uber-rich people). The market should serve us humans, not the other way around.

Ive heard this garbage excuse since Reagan took a wrecking ball to regulations. Not making effective regulations is ALSO a market distorting thing, that encourages the absolute worst behaviors. And now with Citizens United, its $1 = 1 vote.

But no, "marrrrrkeeeeetttttt"
by pbasista | 2026-01-06 17:17:35+00:00
> market distortionary

I am unsure what you are trying to say here. But if you mean to refer to "market distortion", I cannot see how that can be happening.

The reason is that these rules are supposed to be applicable universally to every company in the same way. And as such, they do not create any market distortion in one way or the other. Because everyone has to play by the same rules. Those are as fair market conditions as one can get, in my opinion.

> some might not bother

Why should that be a problem? If someone does not like the regulation in a particular jurisdiction, it is fine. No one is forcing them to operate there.

The main point is the following: If they want to operate, they have to play by the local rules. Just like everyone else.
by bidwellm | 2026-01-06 17:17:49+00:00
I wanted an index that feels like reading release notes instead of commentary.
Each item is filed by what changed (rules, money, capabilities, force-in-play, built-world) and I’m trying to keep “so what actually changed?” front and center.

Looking for brutal UX feedback: what’s confusing in the first 10 seconds, and what would make you come back?
by duped | 2026-01-06 17:17:53+00:00
> The video games industry needs to do the same.

Video games are a subset of entertainment which is capped in TAM by the population the game reaches, the amount of money they're willing to spend per hour on average, and average number of hours they can devote to entertainment.

In other words, every dollar you make off a game is a dollar that wasn't spent on another game, or trip to the movies, or vacation. And every hour someone plays your game is an hour they didn't spend working, studying, sleeping, eating, or doing anything else in the attention economy.

What makes this different from other markets is that there is no value creation or new market you can create from the aether to generate 10x/100x/1000x growth. And there's no rising tide to lift your boat and your competitors - if you fall behind, you sink.

The only way to grow entertainment businesses by significant multiples is by increasing discretionary income, decreasing working hours, or growing population with discretionary time and money. But those are societal-level problems that take governments and policy, and certainly not venture capital.
by hadlock | 2026-01-06 17:17:57+00:00
I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.
by parpfish | 2026-01-06 17:18:00+00:00
are the "reply guy" and "pet peeve syndrome" considered bad? because i think they're a big part of the value i get in the HN comments.

my mental model of the comment section on any page is "let's get all the people interested in this article in the room and see what they talk about" rather than "here is a discussion about this article specific"

i also assume that <50% of the people in any comment section have actually read the original article and are just people hopping in to have a convo about something tangetially related to the headline.
by Aachen | 2026-01-06 17:18:09+00:00
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB.

More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like

Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes
by seoulbigchris | 2026-01-06 17:18:16+00:00
yep, I see those often here -- scary. Another sofa-related irony is that a lot of Koreans don't actually sit on their sofas. Rather, they sit on the (heated) floor and use the sofa as a back rest.

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-05-18/culture...
by kccqzy | 2026-01-06 17:18:40+00:00
The brittleness of badly written CSS is unrelated to its cascading nature. In my experience the “cascading” part is a good thing. If you want to make a paragraph red, you do want all other inline elements inside the paragraph to be red as well. Also, in my experience, most of the brittleness comes from an insufficient understanding of selector specificity, including both unintentionally broad selectors as well as unintentionally narrow selectors.

The solution is a careful consideration of scoping: most programming languages encourage the developer to carefully consider whether a variable should be local and global, and a similar amount of care must be taken in CSS too. The programmer needs to have a high awareness of which rules should apply to the whole document and which should apply to this particular component.