MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by goodluckchuck | 2026-01-27 15:43:46+00:00
You're 100% right, but I think the friendship should be more important.

I've had friends keep things that I lent them, but that didn't ruin the friendship.

I've had friends say mean things, but that didn't ruin the friendship.

I've even gotten into a fist fight with one, but tempers calmed and the friendship endured. (I mean, the US fought two wars against England)

It's important to know who your friends are, and the knowledge that Europe is not a friend, is worth more to me than Greenland.
by hypeatei | 2026-01-27 15:44:01+00:00
> ease of binding to C++

I wouldn't really call this an "ergonomic" feature of a language. That's a whole research project.

Regardless, C++ interop in Swift isn't straightforward and there are a multitude of issues. One being that you need to compile your C++ codebase with Apples fork of LLVM and in some cases add annotations in your C++ so that Swift plays nice (which basically isn't interop at that point)

You can see the Ladybird projects issue tracker[0] and issues on the Swift forum that LB maintainers have created[1][2] to get an idea. Swift adoption has stalled due to these.

0: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

1: https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-browser-and-swift-garbag...

2: https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-gc-and-imported-class-hi...
by mickle00 | 2026-01-27 15:44:01+00:00
"In a brief ruling issued late Monday, the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, of Federal District Court in Minnesota, said he recognized that ordering ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, to personally defend himself in court was “an extraordinary step.” But Judge Schiltz, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said it was necessary because “the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary.”"
by biophysboy | 2026-01-27 15:44:11+00:00
I think the fairest test is: what is the best and fastest way to reduce medical uncertainty? For rare ailments with a single cause and exclusive symptoms, that can be accurately described with simple language (no medical jargon), its possible that an LLM is better than a doctor.

For more ambiguous situations where you need actual tests, I am skeptical of using LLMs.
by pluralmonad | 2026-01-27 15:44:33+00:00
That is not my perspective. I don't review every review, instead use a review agent with fresh context to find as much as possible. After all automated reviews pass, I then review the final output diff. It saves a lot of back and forth, especially with a tight prompt for the review agent. Give the reviewer specific things to check and you won't see nearly as much garbage in your review.
by deaux | 2026-01-27 15:44:58+00:00
You put it perfectly, and I have the exact same experience. If the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google weren't super eager to partner with the likes of Palantir from day one, the latter would never have gotten off of the ground.

> When I brought this up last time in [0] all I saw was constant hairsplitting, attempts to seperate Big Tech from Palantir and lots of 'whataboutism' accusations

Another one I often see is the "but Peter Thiel" (as in a reply to my initial comment, but also in the threads you're talking about), as if other big tech CEOs such as Bezos and Zuckerberg have even one extra moral fiber in their body that puts them in a notably different category.

Do you happen to have a (semi-)public presence anywhere? It's hard to find people who understand this and are honest about it, and inherently harder than simply joining one of the bigger tribes, whether it's the HN "other big tech isn't nearly as bad" one, or the shoulder-shrugging crowd.
by stevenwoo | 2026-01-27 15:45:20+00:00
In the USA, congressional testimony about babies in Kuwaiti hospitals being killed by Iraqi soldiers was revealed to be fake to justify US military involvement in Iraq invasion of Kuwait
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
There were multiple falsified reports about WMD and nuclear weapons development to justify US intervention in Iraq
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-feb-17-na-niger...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

Given the veracity of the current administration, the repeated history of the US government lying to justify military interventions (Vietnam Tonkin Gulf incident looks fake going back a little further), I think people who know a little bit of history and are paying attention have legitimate reason to want more than just one source. Whatever the number is in Iran it's terrible but there's no military intervention outside countries can do that's going to change that given Iran is already sanctioned to the gills and it's a huge country that presents many challenges - the people there are going to have to do it themselves.
by xpe | 2026-01-27 15:45:21+00:00
I would like to see an analysis of the following policy proposal. Explore various ways for tracking how much citizen time the US executive branch is using and wasting. Make this information available to all branches of government.

I’m quite tired of the executive branch being able to trot out the “for national security” boilerplate argument with minimal data or record keeping to assess the efficacy of various systems and procedures.

I’ve been kept in some random airport security room for something like 2 hours while government officials try to sort out some accidental name collision. I got no useful explanation during or after. I am lucky I didn’t miss my connecting flight. I bet there is currently minimal incentive (if any) to reduce this citizen hassling. Requiring metrics on how much time squandering happens seems like a small step in the right direction.
by runarberg | 2026-01-27 15:45:29+00:00
In the 1970s everyone and their grandma was a member of some left wing revolutionary group, and half of them were working on some terrorist plot, bombing an embassy here, taking hostages there, hijacking an airplane, etc. etc. And in the 1980s every right wing reactionary had joined a right wing counter-revolutionary group, and 99% of them were plotting terrorist attacks (most of them targeting minorities). </exaggeration>

Today the cops are doing the job of the right wing revolutionary groups, and relatively rarely do we get the right wing counter revolutionary terror attacks (but we definitely still do; just not as much). Meanwhile the left has pretty much abandoned terrorism as a viable tactic. It is mostly employed as part of an anti-colonial struggle of an oppressed minority sometimes under literal occupation of their colonizer’s military. But alas we only have a fraction of colonies today relative to the 1970s and the 1980s.
by 9rx | 2026-01-27 15:45:32+00:00
Testing, which is better known as documentation, is the contract for users that defines what your program is for and how the user can depend on it forever into the future. The test runner is not the focus, rather the effort to validate that what the contract says is actually true.

Test what the user will use. That could mean an end-user interface, or it could mean a public API. Again, the goal is for the user to understand what you are trying to accomplish for them and to have guarantees about what you won't change in the future.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-27 15:45:51+00:00
If you're in a commercial plane, the driver is acting immaculately, with a margin of error so small you'd never be able to notice any problems. So you'll never need to ask the driver to calm down or let you off.

(But it's worth noting that all the control in the world won't keep you safe in a car. You can have/be an inhumanly perfect driver and it's still pretty dangerous to be on the roads.)

And then every other complaint you list is irrational. "how a rational person" avoids being stressed out is by knowing it's safe. The bouncing on tarmac is safe. Ball of fire is less likely than in a car. Bumping and jerking happens in lots of safe situations. The sounds are normal.

I'm not saying it's wrong to feel fear, but do not pretend the fear is rational.
by vishaal_007 | 2026-01-27 15:45:56+00:00
In our experience, it usually comes down to whether the request has user-visible state over time. If the response is something you can treat as atomic and either succeed or fail cleanly, it tends to stay simple.

The requests that “grow” tend to share a few signals early on: they stream partial results, they take long enough that the frontend needs progress updates, or failures start happening after something has already been shown to the user. Another common signal is when retries stop being transparent and you start needing to explain to users what actually happened.

Once those patterns show up, teams usually end up reworking the flow anyway. The event-driven approach just makes that lifecycle explicit earlier, instead of letting it emerge implicitly and painfully over time.
by labcomputer | 2026-01-27 15:45:59+00:00
> This is oft repeated, but as a federal job, the bar is at least slightly higher than those typical AlliedUniversal/Andy Frain/Etc mall cop guards you see all over the place.

Cool. So the TSA sucks up all the people slightly overqualified to be mall cops, which prevents them from outcompeting all the barely qualified people for those roles. And thus the barely qualified can have a job as a mall cop.

So, sounds exactly like a jobs program.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-27 15:46:03+00:00
Life lesson for you: the internal functions of every individual's mind are unique. Your n=1 perspective is in no way representative of how humans as a category experience the world.

Plenty of humans do use longhand arithmetic methods in their heads. There's an entire universe of mental arithmetic methods. I use a geometric process because my brain likes problems to fit into a spatial graph instead of an imaginary sheet of paper.

Claiming you've not examined your own mental machinery is... concerning. Introspection is an important part of human psychological development. Like any machine, you will learn to use your brain better if you take a peek under the hood.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-27 15:46:32+00:00
> Which used to be seen as "Ew, China has their own version? Crazy censorship"

It used to be marketed as that by "China evil" people. Western politicians have always seen this as an arms race. They claim infinite brutal censorship and suppression in China in order to claim that not having it here is a strategic disadvantage. Meanwhile, China's "social credit" is just like a US credit score, which in most countries is an illegal thing to do.

This is completely bipartisan, both US parties take turns shitting on their two greatest enemies: the Bill of Rights and (almost completely defeated at this point) antitrust law. Those are painted as China's advantages: that they don't have to respect anyone's rights and that their government directly runs companies. 1) Neither of those things are true, and 2) they just ignore that China manufactures things and invests in infrastructure (which US politicians as individuals have no idea how to do because they are lawyers and marketers), and pretend that everything can be reduced to gamified finance and propaganda tricks.

It's the "missile gap" again. The US pretended and marketed that Russia had an enormous amount of nuclear weapons in order to fool us into allowing US politicians to dedicate the economy to producing an enormous amount of nuclear weapons.

The result, the child of the Oracle guy owns half the media, and uses it for explicitly political purposes that align with the administration (whichever it may be.)
by alistairSH | 2026-01-27 15:46:43+00:00
Meanwhile, the TSA looks at me like I'm, at best an annoyance, and at worst a criminal, when I ask them to inspect my camera kit manually (film, not digital). And that inspection consists of swabbing 35mm film canisters - like, the shell of a 35mm roll is going to tell them anything useful?!?! It's a complete sham.
by TonyStr | 2026-01-27 15:46:59+00:00
You are completely right about tvc ls recomputing each hash, but I think it has to do this? A timestamp wouldn't be reliable, so the only reliable way to verify a file's contents would be to generate a hash.

In my lazy implemenation, I don't even check if the hashes match, the program reads, compresses and tries to write the unchanged files. This is an obvious area to improve performance on. I've noticed that git speeds up object lookups by generating two-letter directories from the first two letters in hashes, so objects aren't actually stored as `.git/objects/asdf12ha89k9fhs98...`, but as `.git/objects/as/df12ha89k9fhs98...`.

>why were TOML files not considered at the end
I'm just not that familiar with toml. Maybe that would be a better choice! I saw another commenter who complained about yaml. Though I would argue that the choice doesn't really matter to the user, since you would never actually write a commit object or a tree object by hand. These files are generated by git (or tvc), and only ever read by git/tvc. When you run `git cat-file <hash>`, you'll have to add the `-p` flag (--pretty) to render it in a human-readable format, and at that point it's just a matter of taste whether it's shown in yaml/toml/json/xml/special format.
by HardCodedBias | 2026-01-27 15:47:04+00:00
Once their vision for "grab and go" vanished due to technological infeasibility [1] the entire premise for the stores vanished as well.

I suspect that they wanted to take a hail marry to see if somehow it was possible to get much greater efficiency compared to standard grocers, and it looks like that failed.

[1] it may come back. The technology is rapidly improving but they have bigger fish to fry ATM.
by abustamam | 2026-01-27 15:47:09+00:00
I probably wouldn't be an engineer now if it weren't for poverty. I was in my twenties living with my mom, working part time for an educational center and though I enjoyed the work and found it fulfilling, it wasn't anything that could sustain me long term.

Then my mom goes, you can live with me for another year, after that you're on your own.

Asked my dad, a software engineer, if he could teach me how to do what he does. He recommended a boot camp and I learned enough to get an entry level role, and still here I am, ten years later.
by fileshotio | 2026-01-27 15:48:04+00:00
FileShot.io is a secure file sharing platform that uses zero-knowledge encryption to protect your data. Share large files instantly with confidence knowing that only you and your intended recipients can access the content. Features include password protection, QR codes, custom links, and generous free plans. Perfect for professionals, teams, and anyone who needs to share sensitive files securely without compromising on privacy or convenience.
by simonw | 2026-01-27 15:48:43+00:00
This is a notably better demonstration of a coding agent generated browser than Cursor's FastRender - it's a fraction of the size (20,000 lines of Rust compared to ~1.6m), uses way fewer dependencies (just system libraries for rendering images and text) and the code is actually quite readable - here's the flexbox implementation, for example: https://github.com/embedding-shapes/one-agent-one-browser/bl...

Here's my own screenshot of it rendering my blog - https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3mdg2oo6bms2... - it handles the layout and CSS gradiants really well, renders the SVG feed icon but fails to render a PNG image.

I thought "build a browser that renders HTML+CSS" was the perfect task for demonstrating a massively parallel agent setup because it couldn't be productively achieved in a few thousand lines of code by a single coding agent. Turns out I was wrong!
by jmyeet | 2026-01-27 15:49:01+00:00
Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea" idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.

First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.

Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.

Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.

Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.

Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.
by c64cryptoboy | 2026-01-27 15:49:30+00:00
WRT advanced 6502 programming texts, allow me plug my (free) book "EOR #$FF: 6502 Ponderables and Befuddlements". It's 64 assembly snippets to ponder, with explanations for each in the 2nd-half of the book: https://archive.org/details/eor6502
by pc86 | 2026-01-27 15:50:08+00:00
Rather than charge everyone £7 or more for a drop off, wouldn't it make more sense to charge the people abusing it an absurd amount? I'd much rather see a £25 fee after 90 seconds and an additional £125 fee after 5 minutes than £7 for 30 seconds.

It seems less about making things more efficient and more about just squeezing a little bit out of money out of everyone.
by sailfast | 2026-01-27 15:50:10+00:00
Hot take: Humans have always been bad at this (in the aggregate, without training). Only a certain percentage of the population took the time to investigate.

For most throughout history, whatever is presented to you that you believe is the right answer. AI just brings them source information faster so what you're seeing is mostly just the usual behavior, but faster. Before AI people would not have bothered to try and figure out an answer to some of these questions. It would've been too much work.
by hairofadog | 2026-01-27 15:50:26+00:00
The question isn't whether they've been successful in hiding information. It's whether their goal is to hide information (or I would say, to control the narrative), which it clearly is.

This is why the administration has gone out of its way to try to get Kimmel and Colbert off the air, why it has commandeered CBS and tried to kill 60 minutes pieces critical of the administration, why it violated the law in order to keep TikTok (already fervently pro-Trump) up and running, and why allies of the administration have been put in charge of TikTok after the transition. It's why Bezos is slowly strangling the Washington Post, why Patrick Soon-Shiong is doing the same to the LA Times, and why the administration is putting their thumb on the scale for Paramount, rather than Netflix, to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (which owns CNN). It's why Musk bought Twitter. It's why they blatantly lie in their press conferences and statements to the media about how the ICE killings happened.

If you walked into a Turning-Point USA meeting in a high school, do you think the kids attending that meeting could accurately tell you what ICE has been doing? I don't.
by archagon | 2026-01-27 15:51:17+00:00
Respectfully, I think it’s impossible to have “real conversation” on a site where users are (essentially) anonymous, discussions are threaded, and comments are boosted or hidden based on their upvotes. For deep, nuanced discussions where people can actually change their minds, you want a discussion board — but it’s a paradigm that’s difficult to scale, and so isn’t compatible with the modern notion of social media.
Ask HN: Is Google Workspace still billing you for a cancelled GSuite account?
by stevenalowe | 2026-01-27 15:51:31+00:00
I've been trying to figure out what bank transactions with the description "GOOGLE APPS_COMME" are for years, finally did when it bounced: this is for a GSuite account that I cancelled years ago, shortly before the automated switchover to Google Workspaces. Does/did anyone else have this issue?
by DriftRegion | 2026-01-27 15:51:46+00:00
Writing unit tests is futile exercise without a specification.

The software under test is always modeling something -- business logic, a communications protocol, a control algorithm, a standard, etc. Behind each of those things is a specification. If a specification doesn't exist then the software is called a prototype. For sustained long term incremental development a specification must exist.

The purpose of unit tests is to assert specification-defined invariants at the module interface level.

Unit tests are durable iff the specification they uphold is explicit and accessible to developers and the scope of the test is small. It's futile to write good tests for a module which has ambiguous utility.

priors: I worked in embedded SW and am now a PhD student.
by guywithahat | 2026-01-27 15:51:53+00:00
The $currently_designated_bad_people however are criminal illegal aliens. Sometimes we have to create mechanisms to go after pedophiles and rapists, and we just have to trust the system well enough to assume these tools won't be used to go after good people. I mean the bar for ICE is so outrageously high it's hard to see a world where it's lowered far enough to go after someone like me.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-27 15:51:59+00:00
This sounds wild, and truely savage on gear.

What sort of temperature are you getting down to? Any special gear needed for you or the bike?

Here it’s never below about 5C and maxes at about 30C. It’s mild. The rain is the only thing that can be a lot. The most was about 250mm in a day, which is exceptional, but sudden, very downpours are common.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-27 15:52:12+00:00
Yeah, or the police in my state capital, who, when I got confirmation that my stolen phone was being sold on eBay, by a seller who lived near me, whose eBay profile contained nearly 100 phones, and 50-60 laptops, all 'without chargers/accessories", some "activation locked", etc., as well as the strong implication of theft on eBay (I was actually contacted by someone who'd bought my phone from him, and when he discovered it was locked, with my info on the screen, contacted the seller who initially refused a return/refund on it, until the buyer said "So you know, if you don't, the phone is actually telling me who the real owner was, and how to contact them, and I can send them and/or the police your info..."), the police said:

Police: "Well, he probably didn't steal it himself."

Me: "Isn't selling known stolen property a crime in itself?"

Police: ...

Me: ...

Police: "We're not going to pursue this further."

Thank you for your service?
by otterley | 2026-01-27 15:52:33+00:00
Some things are lubricants for a little while, until they suddenly become the opposite. Wood glue, for example.

That’s how I would describe the original and most common WD-40 formula: a passable short-term lubricant for quick and dirty jobs, but not a long-term high quality lubricant, like, say, 3-in-1 (graphite) or silicone lubricants.

Adding to the confusion is that WD-40 sells a silicone lubricant that is a much better lubricant for many purposes than the original formula.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-27 15:52:37+00:00
> C++ and Python map extremely well to Qt which is one of the predominant UI frameworks

Qt used to be predominent, but it really cannot be said in 2026 given that there's probably two orders of magnitude between the number of React Apps and the number of Qt ones being made in this decade…

> Just because new paradigms are made, doesn’t mean the old ones are inherently bad either

Yet barely anyone uses the old ones anymore. Surely it must not be only because people like new and shiny things (React being more than a decade old at this point makes it far from “new and shiny” anyway).

> ObjC maps really well to AppKit/UIKit.

This example is particularly interesting given that Apple moved away from their old UI tech on favor of SwiftUI, which isn't OO-based.