MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dekhn | 2026-01-09 23:28:36+00:00
I haven't read the post yet because my work blocks access to the domain.

I agree there is a huge middle ground- for example, I make hobby microscopes at home, and much of my work has been making accurate and precise 2D/3D stages. It's easy to buy great, simple (non-motorized) scopes with good optical quality, but as soon as you start adding motorized stages, or any sort of complicated illumination or filtering, it gets challenging quickly. My actual goal is to track microbes in real time using computer vision, but the professional hardware to do so is out of my price range.

I have spent literally thousands of hours fiddling with one part or another Today, I'm working on a high speed flash illuminator that is coupled to the camera, and it's one problem after another. Reality has a fractal level of detail.

Since I haven't been able to look at your project yet, I don't know if you worked on this area, but I found it really useful to clone the Thorlabs cage system components: https://www.thorlabs.com/optical-cage-systems and specifically https://www.thorlabs.com/item/CXY2A (you can download their 3D model and see that the mechanism isn't that complex).

Another thing I've ended up doing is prototyping in plastic and then having it machined at a place like JLCPCB out of aluminum. PLA is just flexible enough (especially under load) that it can make the results very frustrating.
by oaiey | 2026-01-09 23:28:41+00:00
Thank they should act like it and respect the laws of the countries.

If you run to the US executive to assert US understanding of law onto other countries you are geopolitical important, however, as a tool for the US national interest not as a true international company. A true international company would serve their customers in their legal systems. Fight the laws there, try to make them better, but don't strongarm them with other country forces. They are a sovereign country.
by ignoramous | 2026-01-09 23:28:58+00:00
> Gemini pointed me back at MY OWN comment, above, an hour after I wrote it. So Google is crawling the web FAST. It also pointed to: https://learning.acm.org/bytecast/ep78-russ-cox ... I had ChatGPT regurgitate my HN comment (without linking to it) about 15 minutes after posting it.

Sounds like HN is the kind of place for effective & effortless "Answer Engine Optimization".
by saulpw | 2026-01-09 23:29:05+00:00
> They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else

Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.

And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.
by jjulius | 2026-01-09 23:29:42+00:00
Nah, you can do it with kids! I have two that are about to be 4 and 6, here are my weekdays:

- Alarm at 4:30. 5 mins of breathing exercises, 20 mins of meditation.

- Make coffee, have breakfast, out the door to work by ~5:30.

- Get to work's gym by 5:45, cardio for 60 mins.

- In my office by 7:00-7:15.

- 3:30, 25 mins of breathe work and meditation again. Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is 3:15 so I can fit in ~30 mins of strength training.

- Head on out, pick up my youngest from school, home by ~4:15-4:30-ish. Ballpark depending on traffic, actual gym times, etc.

- Cook dinner (kiddos often like to help), eat with family, hang out with and play with my kiddos until 7:00PM.

- Kiddo bath and bed time, wife and I take turns doing this every night. Whether I'm "done" at 7 or 8, it only takes me ~30 mins to shower and prep my shit (clothes, lunch, etc.) for the next day.

- Leaves me with ~1-2 hours each night to hang out, read a book, and enjoy my wife's company before heading to bed at ~9:30.

It's busy, but I don't feel like I'm overstretched and I don't feel like it leaves me missing out on anything.
by bitshiftfaced | 2026-01-09 23:30:01+00:00
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. What I meant was that, for example, before you might've needed to track down where to find the underlying research paper, then read through the paper to find the relevant section. That might've taken 20 minutes for a task like this one. Now you can set an LLM on it, and get a concise answer in less than a minute.
by malux85 | 2026-01-09 23:30:36+00:00
This is what has excited me for many years - the idea I call "scientific refactoring"

What happens if we reason upwards but change some universal constants? What happens if we use Tao instead of Pi everywhere, these kind of fun questions would otherwise require an enormous intellectual effort whereas with the mechanisation and automation of thought, we might be able to run them and see!
by dmux | 2026-01-09 23:30:59+00:00
> I think the future of software is going to be unimaginably dynamic.

>...I’m not entirely sure what that looks like yet, but things like this are a step in that direction.

This made me stop and think for a moment as to what this would look like as well. I'm having trouble finding it, but I think there was a post by Joe Armstrong (of Erlang) that talked about globally (as in across system boundaries, not global as in global variable) addressable functions?
by techblueberry | 2026-01-09 23:31:06+00:00
One thing this makes me wonder is how do we learn. There will be four different kinds of developers going forward:

Hand-coding only -- Probably bad, you won't be productive enough. Though _maybe_ certain types of performance engineers can get away with it since you do more tweaking instead of writing, but you'll probably want to write tools with AI.

Coded forever and now I'm adding vibe coding -- Great!

Just Claude Code vs. Claude Code but went back to learn basics -- It seems like most good engineers I've known have spent at least some time at a lower level of abstraction geeking out on assembler or whatever. I'm an SRE and did Linux From Scratch. I think part of being a good engineer is being curious enough to explore things, which will cover a bunch of things that don't strictly speaking "matter".

The question is, can you really instinctually learn the fundamentals of computer science without ever peering underneath the veil? Sort of like - I don't ssh into the linux boxes all that often, but my history of doing so was an invaluable part of being a good SRE.
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-01-09 23:31:36+00:00
it's extra funny to me because the Raspberry Pi SoC is basically a little CPU riding on a big GPU (well, the earlier ones were. Maybe the latest ones shift the balance of power a bit). In fact, to this day the GPU is still the one driving the boot sequence.

So plugging a RasPi into a 5090 is "just" swapping the horse for one 10,000x bigger (someone correct my ratio of the RasPi5 GPU to the RTX5090)
by archi42 | 2026-01-09 23:31:39+00:00
The text was first linked on HN during September 2020. ChatGPT became public access in November 2022.

The paragraph you criticized was part of the original text: https://web.archive.org/web/20200909104647/https://effectivi...

So: Yes, it could have been more concise. Nope, we humans can write much too long text for the sake of writing text, which some of us can do better than others (e.g., better than me), and we can do that with no artificial assistance or substitute - we do it just fine using our own (in)ability ;-)
by keybored | 2026-01-09 23:31:46+00:00
Next will be a submission about how lonely people are 80% more likely to get dementia.

- But I am lonely because I have depression...

- But just volunteer and you will meet people, you ——! (it’s simple)

- I’m not motivated, I’ll just scroll this feed

- Oh what’s the next one. “Depressed people more likely to get chronic illnesses”—
by iancarroll | 2026-01-09 23:31:52+00:00
Although I don’t like Flock, I’m a bit skeptical of the claims in the article. Most screenshots appear to be client-side JavaScript snippets, not API responses from this key.

In the bug bounty community, Google Maps API key leaks are a common false positive, because they are only used for billing purposes and don’t actually control access to any data. The article doesn’t really prove ArcGIS is any different.
by ajross | 2026-01-09 23:32:01+00:00
> Java had a leg-up over C++ by several decades in having a concurrency story (at all) in the language.

While sort of technically true, concurrent code expressed in high level language was almost invented in C in the 1980's as the first Unix SMP devices took off (early multiprocessing work at the OS level was at the assembly level, Unix was almost alone in having a portable kernel and the need for SMP).

Java, coming along about a decade later from the same incubation environment, very much reflects that learning. But no, they did it right in Java because they had already done it in C.
by christophilus | 2026-01-09 23:32:04+00:00
I plan out N features at a time, then have it create N git worktrees and spawn N subagents. It does a decent job. I find doing proper reviews on each worktree kind of annoying, though, so I tend to pull them in one at a time and do a review, code, test, feedback loop until it’s good, commit it, pull in the next worktree and repeat the process.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2026-01-09 23:32:15+00:00
> And much as I don't like what Flock is building as a company, at least they're building security in now,

This phrasing implies that the "building security in now" part improves (or decreases the awfulness of) what you don't like.

If what you don't like = bulk, systemic surveillance (of people not suspected of a crime) - how does fixing broke security make that less awful?
by TZubiri | 2026-01-09 23:32:36+00:00
Correct, I think the confusion might arise because of the self replicating nature of this attack when the target domain is an MTA.

I can't pinpoint it exactly, but it might be a combination of the replication cycle of the attack being recursive and very short if the target is an MTA. But it may also be because the fact that sendgrid clients are sendgrid clients is public information.

Kind of how like meta companies are overrepresented in their medium, in a stock exchange banks are overrerpresented, lots of websites about building websites, lots of road ads are about placing road ads.
by kayodelycaon | 2026-01-09 23:32:52+00:00
I call it the “loadbearing just”. :) “if you’ve just did this”

Most neurodivergent people I’ve met accept my limitations and don’t expect what works for them to work for me. It might take a little explanation but they didn’t seem to get upset about it.

The few that have expected me to be like them, expected other people to be like them as well. So it wasn’t specific to me.
by aniviacat | 2026-01-09 23:32:53+00:00
I'm unsure why you're spinning a discussion about foreign interference in the EU into a discussion about Republicans vs. Democrats.

To the EU, it doesn't matter much if it's the Republicans or the Democrats doing it. What matters is that the USA is trying to interfere with the EU's political landscape.

It would be bad if they pushed the extreme left, too. They just happen to be pushing the extreme right.

(The reason right-wing political violence is more talked about in the EU is also rather simple: It is much more prevalent. https://www.bka.de/DE/UnsereAufgaben/Deliktsbereiche/PMK/PMK...)
by 01092026 | 2026-01-09 23:32:55+00:00
Well, Mac chips are badass for training / inference - super underrated. I mean, I've literally run epochs on cloud Nvidia GPU Servers...compared to running them locally (M chip) - and look, not trying to burn any houses down but...eh...Apple does really really well.

The good news for you, you can chain like a bunch / couple of them together and run the largest open source models around. But extremely expensive route - but probably the easiest and smoothest way.

If you're planning on running this on Apple - you can do some stuff with Metal directly...in PyTorch it's 'mcu' if I remember?

I think your llama.cpp route is good - I wouldn't go the Ollama route - I mean great to start, but IMHO: get the models directly, learn the layers and how the heads work as best as you can, make an effort to understand what's going on - well you don't have to, but, I think the models appreciate the effort - respect goes far.
by cyanydeez | 2026-01-09 23:33:20+00:00
I'm guessing they're trialing, internally, using AI to falsify evidence and propagandize the american public.

Thats why they're so quick now to produce evidence. once they've tested, internally, their false evidence, they'll begin putting it out to vindicate themselves.

They're planning the "twitterfication" of government misinformation that like everything else, will take a lot more energy to debunk than produce.

That's why Elons back and why they'd release seemingly damning information.

You absolutely should not trust that they'll providing anything but falsified video. They're tired of lying wiht their mouths and would happily move to an AI propaganda grok.

If I said this even 5 years ago, it'd sound like paranoia, wouldn't it.
by pembrook | 2026-01-09 23:33:54+00:00
Again, pulling Microsoft Office from the EU would be an extremely minor nuisance (libre office can open the same formats) at the expense of the US's national champion ever being used by any country outside the US ever again.

This is never going to happen (killing Microsoft would not be seen favorably by anyone in the current or future administration) and even if this magically did happen, it would barely cause a blip in the (lack of) productivity in the EU's performative planning meetings about future meetings where nothing happens.

On the list of things to worry about I would put this dead last.

This performative, melodramatic nonsense you're spewing here is doing us no good when ultimately our biggest threat is in the east, which you will happily continue ignoring as they eat our private sector and tax base.

"Orange man bad" is not a delusion I want to see spread any further in Europe. Turn off the news and start thinking rationally again please.
by resfirestar | 2026-01-09 23:34:13+00:00
To be fair big tech did do a full court press to stop site blocking when such a law (SOPA/PIPA) was proposed in the US, and they continue to oppose the MPA's attempts to get site blocking via the courts. DMCA on the other hand seems very broken, don't give the MPA the "3 strikes" regime they want and you get sued into the ground like Cox. I suspect tech CEOs don't complain about this because they don't want the same treatment.
by verytrivial | 2026-01-09 23:34:28+00:00
My understanding of JavaScript is cursory, but my reading of that webpage is the UI is just smoke and mirrors, and it is just waiting for the whole thing to be processed in a single remote API call to some back-end system. If the back-end is down, it will always stop at 90%. The crawling progress bar is fake with canned messages updated with Math.Random() delays. Gives you something to look at, I guess, but seems a little misleading. Might be wrong ...
by Hizonner | 2026-01-09 23:35:37+00:00
> I don't know if the fact that it fully slipped into the absurd or the fact that it probably still worked on people is sadder.

The thing is that that one plays on propaganda that people have already been conditioned to accept.

Very probably this person's father believes that the Democrats (a) control the state-operated voter registration system, and (b) manipulate it to their advantage. He believes that because he's been sent that message through a vast number of channels for many years. He would think it was absolutely in character for his registered party to be changed, and would probably think that would somehow affect how his vote was actually counted.

It's no more absurd than the idea that busloads of illegal aliens are showing up to vote "somewhere". Or whatever other idiotic lies they've been telling forever.
by westurner | 2026-01-09 23:35:43+00:00
FWIU this surface coding (2D) trick probably won't be necessary with layer coding (3D), but there would probably also be value in creating 3D star topologies with layer coding for vias between layers for example.

A 3D lattice of stars with layer coding would probably be more topologically protected

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42264346
by oaiey | 2026-01-09 23:36:26+00:00
When the risks are too high, then exit the market. When you do business in a market, adhere to the laws there.

It is however the business of governments to foster harmonized (globalized) markets. But the US has killed so many regulations and collaborations in the last year, that there is little hope that this will improve any time soon. They do not want globalization anymore but American first. Reactions of other countries will be higher fines, more regulation and higher entry barriers.
by greentea23 | 2026-01-09 23:36:34+00:00
There are a million legitimate reasons to root a phone (e.g. preserving the battery to minimize e-waste, blocking malicious trackers often allowed by Apple and Google, innovating on the UI, etc.). Apple/Google/Microsoft are run by uninspired, uncreative, and immoral people, and there is a world of innovation and forward thinking we lose out on by letting them rule our tech.
by cratermoon | 2026-01-09 23:36:43+00:00
This may be hijacking the thread,
but I had an interesting experience lately.
Bear with me,
Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the story.

I'm a film photographer,
and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned.
A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days.
Some two months later,
I still had not gotten my film back.
I went to the lab and spoke with the owner,
and he said that LANL was sending him so much film to develop and scan that he couldn't get to his other customers,
and he expected that the volume would increase.
He was nice enough to give me my undeveloped film and and refund the prepaid bill.

I did not ask,
as I didn't want to piss of the owner,
but I have many questions.
Why is LANL sending so much film to a lab for developing?
Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab,
it's not nuclear engineering,
it just requires some equipment and a little expertise.
Why now?
Why are the even using film these days?
Why did the lab's owner feel it necessary to prioritize LANL's business over others,
rather than putting it in the queue to wait its turn?
by karmakaze | 2026-01-09 23:37:05+00:00
> (Relativity isn't a problem here, though it is a tempting distraction. All of humanity's current computing systems share a close enough frame of reference to make relativistic differences in the perception of time immaterial).

GPS clocks take special and general relativity into account. I'm no expert, just something I thought I'd read.

I'd never heard of the FLP result before and it seems mostly a theoretical concern with distributed systems which do have time bounds etc so it doesn't apply (unlike CAP which always does).

Edit: I like the details that are presented, but not the way it's done. Reads like a 'here's all the stuff I know' post without clear takeaways or direction. If organized as reference material could be more useful for this volume of info. As long as we're digging in the weeds, I'd like to hear about how there is no absolute/universal "same time" for spatially separated events.
by Johnny_Bonk | 2026-01-09 23:37:54+00:00
I'm fairly new to all this, but my understanding is that Markdown is great for a few reasons:

It's just plain text, so no vendor lock-in and you can ripgrep/fzf/grep through it
Lives happily in git repos with proper diffs
LLMs speak it natively - they output Markdown, they understand Markdown input
Way easier for agents to parse than PDFs (which are binary, layout-focused, tables turn to mush)
Can do tables (at least in GFM), headers, code blocks, links - all structure preserved

What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering.
Am I missing anything? What are the other limitations I should know about?
by jackie293746 | 2026-01-09 23:38:03+00:00
Sensationalist garbage. Actual studies have found that the loss in revenue is minimal, and that current wealth taxes are well below what they should be for maximum benefit:

> We show that trickle-down effects do exist, but that they are quantitatively small. A one percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases aggregate employment by 0.02%, aggregate investment by 0.07%, and aggregate value-added by 0.10% in the long run. Importantly, these effects are modest despite the fact that top wealth holders—many of whom are entrepreneurs—account for a large share of economic activity in Scandinavia through the businesses they control. Our approach to estimating trickle-down effects is arguably the most innovative part of our paper. It is based on clear identification assumptions and is statistically precise.

> The modest economic effects of tax-induced migration do not necessarily imply that wealth taxation is an optimal policy. To evaluate wealth taxation, we also have to account for their effects along the intensive margin, operating through changes in savings, investments, avoidance, and evasion. Jakobsen, Jakobsen, Kleven and Zucman (2020) find sizable intensive margin effects of wealth tax reform in Denmark. Combining the migration estimates presented here with their intensive margin estimates, we show that the Scandinavian wealth taxes were below the Laffer point and that their Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) was about 4.2.54 Leaving aside equity arguments, taxing top wealth would be welfare-improving if the revenue raised is spent on projects with a Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) greater than 4.2. Comparing MVPFs across a range of policies, Hendren and Sprung-Keyser (2020) argue that programs targeted to low-income children have the highest MVPFs, often greater than 5. This suggests that funding projects for low-income children via progressive wealth taxation has the potential to increase social welfare.

Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32153
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-09 23:38:12+00:00
I have yet to find a security issue with it. I know German ISPs misconfigured their management network at some point, letting the Fritz!Boxes access each other, but that would've happened with any managed modem that was misconfigured like that.

I bought my Fritz!Box. My ISP has no control over it. TR-069 and other upstream management protocols have been disabled completely.

So far, I'm easily getting gigabit+ speeds across both IPv4 and IPv6. VPN is too much to ask (beyond emergency LAN access, I suppose) but that's what the home server is for.

The web UI is kind of nice, actually. Maybe not to everyone's taste, but the firewall management is a lot less of a clusterfuck than trying to properly configure simple port redirects over the command line. Heaps better than OpenWRT in my opinion. I've run my own Debian router box for a few years and I can say I'm doing just fine without.
by lightbulbish | 2026-01-09 23:38:13+00:00
That is true. And motivation is not a fixed variable. It is possible to get increased motivation by a better plan, resulting in increased self efficacy.

From studies like this, maybe more awareness and perhaps funding to solutions providing smaller steps

Shameless plug, I am building one: Low friction mini games, social, squats/situps/pushups. Feelgoodcrew.com
by Geee | 2026-01-09 23:40:08+00:00
I've found out that running outside just for 10 minutes with quite high intensity is really effective for anxiety / depression with instant effect. Also, specifically lactic acid producing exercises, such as doing free squats quickly works too. It might have something to do with how the brain uses lactic acid for some functions, but this is just my guess.

Found out that there's some research on this: https://www.biotechniques.com/biochemistry/exercise-lactate-...