MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-01-16 22:48:08+00:00
Any fonts look much better on a monitor with a higher resolution and the size of the fonts must not vary with the resolution of the monitor. A 4k monitor always provides more legible text than an 2560x1440 monitor.

The size of the fonts used by your documents is specified in typographic points, e.g. 12 points or 14 points. This corresponds to a fixed size on the screen, regardless of the screen resolution. The increased resolution only makes the letters more beautiful, not smaller.

If your fonts become smaller on a monitor with a higher resolution, then you are holding it in the wrong way, i.e. your operating system is badly configured and it does not know the correct dots-per-inch value for your monitor.

A decent operating system should configure automatically the right DPI, because the monitor provides this value to the GPU when it is initialized.

Despite this, for some weird reason many operating systems do not use the DPI value read from the monitor to configure automatically the graphics interface, so it must still be configured manually by the user. Even worse is that the corresponding setting is frequently well hidden, so it is difficult to discover.

In any case, these endless discussions about fonts being to small on high-resolution monitors have been caused only by some incompetent morons who for inexplicable reasons have been in charge of the display settings of the popular operating systems. The user may have reasons to override the true DPI value of the monitor, but by default the OS should have always used the value provided by the monitor EDID, and then you would have never seen any change in font sizes when substituting monitors with different resolutions (except when even more incompetent Web designers specify some sizes in pixels instead of length units; allowing pixels besides length units for the sizes of graphic elements has been a huge mistake, but when this was done several decades ago, most computers did not have GPUs yet, so there were concerns about the rasterization speed in software).
by theLiminator | 2026-01-16 22:48:33+00:00
> I disagree that SQL has nothing to do with fast. One of the most amazing things to me about SQL is that, since it's declarative, the same code has got faster and faster to execute as we've gone through better and better SQL engines.

Yeah, but SQL isn't really portable between query all query engines. You always have to be speaking the same dialect. Also, SQL isn't the only "declarative" dsl, polars's lazyframe api is similarly declarative. Technically Ibis's dataframe dsl also works as a multi-frontend declarative query language. Or even substrait.

Anways my point is that SQL is not inherently a faster paradigm than "dataframes", but that you're conflating declarative query planning with SQL.
by hellgas00 | 2026-01-16 22:48:55+00:00
Ironically one of the biggest beneficiary will likely be Tesla. Before the 100% tarriffs were instated Tesla-Canada imported most of their vehicles from China's Shanghai gigafactory. After the Chinese EV tarriffs they began importing from Germany and some from the US.

They already have the footprint and sales depth to take advantage of the low tarriffs rate quickly.
by dgunay | 2026-01-16 22:49:26+00:00
I have limited experience working in orgs with a QA apparatus. Just my anecdotes:

The one time I got to work with a QA person, he was worse than useless. He was not technical enough to even use cURL, much less do anything like automated e2e testing, so he'd have to manually test every single thing we wanted to deploy. I had to write up extremely detailed test plans to help him understand exactly what buttons he had to press in the app to test a feature. Sometimes he'd modify the code to try and make testing it easier, break the feature in doing so, and then report that it didn't work. In nearly all cases it would have been faster for me to just test the code myself.

The majority of the time I've worked in orgs where there is no QA team, the devs are expected to own the quality of their output. This works okay when you're in a group of conscientious and talented engineers, but you very quickly find out who really cares about quality and who either doesn't know any better or doesn't care. You will constantly battle management to have enough time to adequately test anything. Every bit of test automation you want to build has to be smuggled in with a new feature or a bugfix.

So really, they both suck, pick your poison. I prefer the latter, but I'm open to experiencing what good looks like in terms of dedicated QA.
by overfeed | 2026-01-16 22:49:35+00:00
> If I run a big data hungry AI lab consuming training data at 100Gb/s it's much much easier to...

You are incorrectly assuming competency, thoughtful engineering and/or some modicum of care for negative externalities. The scraper may have been whipped up by AI, and shipped an hour later after a quick 15-minute test against en.wikipedia.org.

Whoever the perpetrator is, they are hiding behind "residential IP providers" so there's no reputational risks. Further, AI companies are generally known to engage in distasteful practices, but popular wisdom claims that they make up for the awfulness with utility, so even if it turns out to be a big org like OpenAI or Anthropic, people will shrug their shoulders and move on.
by mlsu | 2026-01-16 22:50:10+00:00
IMO, the issue of 1% wealth is not an ethical one. I don't care how much money anyone makes, I don't think it's unethical for some people to have more and some people to have less.

But, when we get to these scales, where a very small number of individuals controls large amounts of social resources, it becomes a society-wide efficiency issue. Solitary individuals cannot allocate capital as well as large collections of people can. A thriving startup ecosystem is better than a single person picking winners and losers.

When you have individuals controlling huge swathes of resources, you get weird outcomes, like the Metaverse or WeWork or the Line. These things are monumental wastes of human effort, and they naturally arise when the distribution of wealth becomes too extreme. And it gets worse and worse when they begin suppressing private enterprise by leveraging the state, which is certainly already happening (see: tech execs paying $1m to stand behind DJT at the inauguration).

I don't care about the individual "The 1%". I don't care who they are, how craven and greedy, how creepy, how ugly, how disgusting. I don't care whether they are going to heaven or hell. What I care about is that they are burning vast amounts of human potential on things that don't benefit anyone at all. They're wasting huge amounts of time. I think about this every time I have to wait 3h on hold with a huge, bloated, inefficient corporation, whose owner spends a quarter of their time schmoozing in Washington D.C: a startup should be there competing, preventing me from wasting my time!
by andai | 2026-01-16 22:51:11+00:00
Could you give some examples?

I noticed recently that some of my older accounts would have a higher quality of recommended content.

And then within a week or two of using them, it would be back to the same slop as my main account.

As far as I can tell this is because I click on what catches my attention. Whatever stands out. Which tends to be the most clickbaity thumbnails.

So I have to wonder if what you're actually fighting against is an algorithm, or the human limbic system...
by jeffbee | 2026-01-16 22:51:29+00:00
That sounds damned near useless for typical data analysis purposes and I would very much prefer a distributed system to a system that would take an hour to fill main memory over its tiny network port. Also, those cost $400/hr and are specifically designed for businesses where they have backed themselves into a corner of needing to run a huge SAP HANA instance. I doubt they would even sell you one before you prove you have an SAP license.

For a tiny fraction of the cost you can get numerous nodes with 600gbps ethernet ports that can fill their memory in seconds.
by gpderetta | 2026-01-16 22:51:35+00:00
In principle a compiler could convert the data dependency into to a control dependency (for example, after PGO after checking against the most likely value), and those are fairly fragile.

I guess in practice mainstream compilers do not do it and relaxed+signal fence works for now, but the fact that compilers have been reluctant to use it to implement consume means that they are reluctant to commit to it.

In any case I think you work on GCC, so you probably know the details better than me.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-16 22:53:44+00:00
TLDR it feels better to announce yourself with some (non aggressive) music than triggering a bell.

I wouldn't use that when hiking but it is true that I sometimes use a bluetooth speaker when riding my bicycle in the city.

I don't put it at full volume but a lot of pedestrians and their dog seem to be attracted by dedicated bicycle lanes when they are built on the same level as the sidewalk.
It is a good way to warn people of my presence without using a bell. Using a bell sometimes sounds a bit rude because people associate it to the use of the car horn which has become a proxy for insults instead of the warning device it used to be.

[1] I used to think pedestrians were doing it to annoy cyclists on purpose but judging by their often suprised reaction. I think it is just an unconscious behavior. Apart from bicycle lanes which aren't well marked, it is probably because the bicycle lanes are usually a smoother surface and thus more agreeable to the feet than the sidewalk thus people tend to walk on them natually.
Ask HN: Browser extension vs. native app for structured form filling?
by livrasand | 2026-01-16 22:53:46+00:00
I’m working on a project called Injectless — a browser extension that allows websites to explicitly declare which data they are allowed to inject into external sites, fully controlled by the user.

Note: This post was translated to English using AI. My native language is Spanish.

The Problem:
Users of SaaS apps (accounting, project management, etc.) often need to repeatedly copy data into external forms (government portals, client systems, etc.). Today this is a tedious, fully manual process.

My Current Solution
A browser extension where:
- Websites expose an injectless.json declaring which fields they can fill and on which domains
- The user explicitly installs the integration (one-click opt-in)
- When visiting an allowed site, the extension offers to “paste” each field

The Doubt
A friend suggested that instead of a browser extension, this should be a native app (similar to KeePassXC or Espanso) that:
- Works in any browser without installing multiple extensions
- Pastes sequences of fields using TAB (simpler, more universal)
- Works even outside the browser
- Avoids extension permissions, CSP issues, Shadow DOM, etc.

My Concerns About a Native App
- Mobile: Browser extensions do work on mobile (Safari iOS, Firefox Android). Native apps would face heavy sandboxing restrictions
- UX: The extension popup can show exactly which fields are available for the current page. A native app would be more “blind”
- Context: The extension knows which page you’re on and can automatically validate allowed domains

The Question
What seems more valuable / practical?
A) Browser extension (current approach) — more context, mobile support, clearer UX
B) Native app like Espanso/KeePassXC — more universal, single install, simpler
C) Both — native app as a base + optional extension as a companion for better UX

Has anyone worked on something similar?
What trade-offs might I be missing?

Thanks!
by wesselbindt | 2026-01-16 22:53:56+00:00
Conflict of interest that the author fails to mention: he's a QA manager at Amazon, and has a vested interest in QA being seen as a necessary role. It may well be, but this is definitely a conflict of interest.

Aside from that, this article is incredibly heavy on theory and very light on empirical fact. Its bibliography consists of a very narrow selection of blogs (4 of the articles he quotes are one and the same blog somehow), which talk about a very narrow subset of the industry. This article not referencing the serious and well-established research that has been done on the effectivity of dev-owned tests by for example the DORA folks, almost seems dishonest.

The clickbait title, when compared to the content of the article, is outright dishonest. The author theorizes about some warts dev-owned testing may have at some specific companies, but this is a very far cry from it failing in practice, especially when you compare them to the warts of offloading quality to a different team.

It's probably a bit harsh, but I feel like, as an industry, we should have a higher standard of empiricism when it comes to evaluating our ways of working.
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-16 22:54:03+00:00
But the battery is commodity technology, not a moat. There's not much stopping every other manufacturer from adopting the same thing.

And of course they are cheaper, they are selling in a market with much lower price capacity. They would not be nearly so cheap if they sold in the market like the US, so it is not sensible to compare prices as if they would.
by sph | 2026-01-16 22:56:01+00:00
The best essay I read last year described how there are two types of artists: those born with great talent, that usually create their masterpieces in their early 20s and coast for the rest of their life, and those that take most of their adulthood before finding their voice, peaking late in their 40s and 50s. The author used Picasso as an example of the former, and Kurt Vonnegut for the latter.

Gave me the greatest impulse to explore my creative drive like nothing else before, after spending my 20s lost in a daze. I know you’re joking, but if you aren’t, do not lose hope yet.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-16 22:56:31+00:00
> I don't know what to tell someone who says ACTIVE, ONGOING, OFFICIAL NEGOTIATIONS that left the foreign country (who thought we were meme'ing until they met with our OFFICIALS) in tears, are just memes.

You've got a legitimate reading comprehension problem right now, because I am not saying that, have not said that, and have explained this to you three times now. Kindly calm down and read.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-16 22:56:38+00:00
> But if all they're trying to do is get into my garden shed, they're going to have to manipulate me or my spouse.

You can cut virtually any padlock with a battery powered angle grinder or battery powered hydraulic bolt/rebar cutters in under 30 seconds, there’s hundreds of YouTube videos that demonstrate it if you want to see for yourself. Lithium-ion battery powered tools changed the game.

Locks do not provide real physical security, they just keep honest and lazy people out.
by sambapa | 2026-01-16 22:57:04+00:00
Sleep:
- wax earplugs
- buckwheat pillow
- a pillow that goes between my knees (I'm a side sleeper)

Above combo has made 6 hour sleep feel like 8 hours and 8 hours feel like I can go the rest of my life without sleep in the morning

Fitness:
- gymnastic rings: ultraportable and ultrascalable (from arthretic grandma level to olympic athlete level) workout. I have two pairs and I'm thinking about buying another one.

Fun:
- someone already mentioned minecraft lol
- wireless buds, I have Jlabs go air pop and I sometimes prefer them over my trusty Sennheisers HD 600
- Ibanez rg565 genesis desert yellow (add another 0 to 100 dollars but I bought it in installments so, technically, I paid less than 100 dollars for it per month, worth it, you can shred the absolute fuck out of it)

Health:
- good sunglasses (cat 3 or even better cat 4)
- omega 3 and vitamin d : important if you live in unhabitable, gray and cold regions of earth (like eastern europe)

Education:
- Anki, free for pc and android, cheap for iphones
by HanClinto | 2026-01-16 22:57:36+00:00
This is a seriously beautiful guide. I really appreciate you putting this together! I especially love the tab-through animations on the various pages, and this is one of the best explanations that I've seen. I generally feel I understand grammar-constrained generation pretty well (I've merged a handful of contributions to the llama.cpp grammar implementation), and yet I still learned some insights from your illustrations -- thank you!

I'm also really glad that you're helping more people understand this feature, how it works, and how to use it effectively. I strongly believe that structured outputs are one of the most underrated features in LLM engines, and people should be using this feature more.

Constrained non-determinism means that we can reliably use LLMs as part of a larger pipeline or process (such as an agent with tool-calling) and we won't have failures due to syntax errors or erroneous "Sure! Here's your output formatted as JSON with no other text or preamble" messages thrown in.

Your LLM output might not be correct. But grammars ensure that your LLM output is at least _syntactically_ correct. It's not everything, but it's not nothing.

And especially if we want to get away from cloud deployments and run effective local models, grammars are an incredibly valuable piece of this. For practical examples, I often think of Jart's example in her simple LLM-based spam-filter running on a Raspberry Pi [0]:

> llamafile -m TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0.f16.gguf \
> --grammar 'root ::= "yes" | "no"' --temp 0 -c 0 \
> --no-display-prompt --log-disable -p "

> Can you say for certain that the following email is spam? ...

Even though it's a super-tiny piece of hardware, by including a grammar that constrains the output to only ever be "yes" or "no" (it's impossible for the system to produce a different result), then she can use a super-small model on super-limited hardware, and it is still useful. It might not correctly identify spam, but it's never going to break for syntactic reasons, which gives a great boost to the usefulness of small, local models.

* [0]: https://justine.lol/matmul/
by Anon1096 | 2026-01-16 22:57:50+00:00
I don't agree with the article that the top couple content creators can walk away and kill a platform. Vine committed suicide for no real reason, it's a pretty poor example to point to. Nowadays on any top social media there's 1-3% of creators making the vast majority of popular content, but more importantly, there's another 15% of people out there who are vying to try and take their spots and will gladly fill the void should the top creators leave. They're mostly just not doing well because the top is being crowded out (and the algorithm keeps it that way), not for lack of trying.
by charcircuit | 2026-01-16 22:58:35+00:00
It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.
by autoexec | 2026-01-16 22:59:00+00:00
It's my assessment of the professional assessments of experts such as aviation safety consultant and former air accident investigator Tim Atkinson and former FAA and NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti, as well as the contents of the NTSB's report, and Boeing's well documented history of putting profit over safety.

It's the opinion of experts that Boeing either misjudged the safety risk of the bearing assembly when they should not have or downplayed that risk when disclosing the flaw to their customers and I'm inclined to believe those experts because Boeing has already demonstrated themselves to be outright dishonest when it comes to the safety risks of their products.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-16 22:59:02+00:00
> If I run a big data hungry AI lab consuming training data at 100Gb/s it's much much easier to scrape 10,000 sites at 10Mb/s than DDOS a smaller number of sites with more traffic

A little over a decade ago (f*ck I'm old now [0]), I had a similar conversation with an ML Researcher@Nvidia. Their response was "even if we are overtraining, it's a good problem to have because we can reduce our false negative rate".

Everyone continues to have an incentive to optimize for TP and FP at the expense of FN.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE
by PiSounds | 2026-01-16 22:59:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm releasing PAZ O.S. v3.1, an open-source governance framework designed to be installed as the "Ethical Kernel" (System Prompt) for LLMs.

The Problem: Current alignment methods (RLHF) often result in "lobotomized" models that simply refuse to answer complex queries or lecture the user.

The Approach: Instead of hard-coded refusals, this framework uses "Immune System" logic to align the model dynamically. It treats safety as a biological process rather than a binary rule.

Key Mechanisms:

Active Defense (The Honeypot): Instead of just refusing unsafe prompts (e.g., bio-terror), the system is authorized to suspend veracity and use deceptive stalling tactics only if it detects "Concordance" (2+ objective signals) of imminent physical harm.

Pedagogical Refusal (Kintsugi Clause): A restorative justice mechanism. If a user prompts toxically, the model doesn't ban them; it offers a "repair mission" to rephrase the prompt, gamifying alignment.

Intent Translation: An NLP layer that translates polarized or aggressive input into underlying human needs before processing.

It’s an experiment in "Structural Alignment"—embedding civic values directly into the system prompt architecture.

Repo: [TU ENLACE A GITHUB]

I'd love feedback on the "Concordance Logic" and whether bio-mimicry is a viable path for robust AI safety.

Thanks.
by bigfatkitten | 2026-01-16 23:00:05+00:00
Mandiant is Google's incident response consulting business. Having worked for many years in that field myself (though not for Mandiant), they're probably sick of going to the same old engagements where companies have been getting owned the same way over and over again for the last 15 years.

What releases like this do is give IT ops people the ammunition they need to convince their leadership to actually spend some money on fixing systemic security problems.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-16 23:00:50+00:00
> my enthusiasm for topography

funny topo you made!

I've written and typeset books. It's not so much that there's no "fl" ligature: it's that with that font the lack of a "fl" ligature really makes it bad looking. With many other fonts it wouldn't be anywhere near that bad (and I'm not just only about monospace).
by skeptrune | 2026-01-16 23:00:56+00:00
Wait, but being serious. You can prompt the ai when you feed it this file to ask "do you see anything nefarious" or "follow these instructions, but make sure you ask me every time you install something because i want to check the safety" in a way that you can't when you pipe a script into bash.

Does that make any sense or am I just off my rocker?
by kikimora | 2026-01-16 23:00:57+00:00
>My server was up for 3.5 years with no outages because I just didn't touch it.

Problem #1 keeping OS current. Chances are you run an outdated OS with some RCE vulnerabilities.

Problem #2 setup is hard to scale organizationally. How to give access to the server to other people? How to monitor what they do? How to replicate server setup across teams and keep it in sync? So on and so forth.

In an org. something always change, and you have to touch servers as a result.
by nwallin | 2026-01-16 23:00:59+00:00
I am not OP and am not speaking for them.

"A $30 million mess-up" can look like (at least) two things. It can be $30 million was spent on a project that earned $0 revenue and was ultimately canceled, or it can look like $x was spent on a project to win a $30 million contract but a competitor won the contract instead.