MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robotresearcher | 2026-01-06 01:10:04+00:00
I worked on a project with tech and animals. We were cautious about media, because any work with animals naturally invites welfare questions. Our project was aimed at improving welfare, and we really cared about this. So we refused to allow the media to film the animals at all, let alone our experiments. We provided them with our own professionally filmed footage, and I prepped carefully to avoid traps in interviews, which went well.

A national TV news network dubbed the sound of alarmed animals over our provided footage for their broadcast. Apparently the original audio of happy animals making happy sounds was not exciting enough to use, despite the contentment of the animals being the point of the work. I was so mad and sad.
by dgunay | 2026-01-06 01:10:05+00:00
I am wondering if it would be a viable strategy to vibe code almost "in reverse" - take a giant ball of slop such as beads, and use agents to strip away feature after feature until you are left with only exactly what you need, streamlined to your exact workflow. Maybe it'd be faster to just start from scratch, but it might be an interesting experiment. Most of my struggles with using beads so far have come from being off the #1 use case of too many of its features, and having to slog through too much documentation to know what to actually use.
by hn_acc1 | 2026-01-06 01:10:20+00:00
Windows is borderline unusable to me without Open Shell / Win 7 settings. I refuse to learn yet another icon idiom, just to have it change 2 years later. Thinking of trying Bazzite for my new upcoming 2nd gaming machine (for daughter) build because I'm tired of Windows. If it goes well, may convert multiple Win 10 HTPC/gaming machines.
by skissane | 2026-01-06 01:10:36+00:00
> For example, the first order effects of growing GLP-1 prevalence are actually consumption of prescription pads, new demand on pill bottles, and gas consumption of pharma sales reps.

I take injectable tirzepatide prescribed by an electronic prescription… so impact on pill bottle demand and prescription pad demand in my case is literally zero.

And I doubt pharma sales reps have a lot of work to do selling GLP-1 agonists-who needs to convince doctors to prescribe a drug when there’s dozens of patients inquiring about it?

Yes the article is about pills, but most people are on injectables still (that may change over time). It likely has increased demand for needles and sharps containers. But in dollar terms, that’s a small percentage of the demand for the medication itself.
by lovich | 2026-01-06 01:11:14+00:00
I am having a hard time emphasizing with the author when they open up with this paragraph

> For years, I thought of Google as a trustworthy helper on the Web. Especially where it mattered most, removing pirated copies of my books from Google search results. After publishing a new book, I would monitor the search results and file a DMCA notice with Google whenever the inevitable pirated copies of my book were listed. Google always was very helpful in this regard, swiftly removing any pirated books asap. No hassle, no hoops, just immediate and direct relief from Google.

Maybe I am in a bubble but since at least pre covid era I remember the consensus being that Google had zero support and unless you were famous or went viral with your problem on the internet, you would never get human intervention. That combined with the rest of the paragraph which seems to me like it could be summarized as "Google is trustworthy as long as my personal wallet gets fatter, and not that it hasn't, they aren't trustworthy" makes me not really care about either side in this story
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-06 01:11:29+00:00
The problem is that we're simultaneously talking about healthy and rotten companies. In a healthy company your manager tells you "if you want a promotion, this and this needs to happen" and then you get a promotion and a pay raise. Meanwhile in my company:

- I was given a project "please convince half of the company to drop everything and do work for our team"

- I told my manager "I don't know what you're expecting from me" and he said "I don't care"

- A coworker completed his project, but then was told that the promotion requirements changed

- A coworker was promoted, said that it was a big mistake because pay rose 10% but responsibilities 200%

The thing is, online discourse has little reason to discuss healthy companies. Sharing tips and tricks how to survive in a dysfunctional organization is much more interesting.
by kvemkon | 2026-01-06 01:12:45+00:00
Then I'm surprised. It's much different to the usual situation when even mass made products are either banned or very limited, e.g. unicycles prohibited, e-scooters only up to 20 km/h, e-bikes only up to 25 km/h.

Regarding 3D made parts recently there was an accident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152941. One may expect increasing regulation. At least in the air.
by groby_b | 2026-01-06 01:12:58+00:00
But the bottleneck is generating embeddings either way.

memchunk has a throughput of 164 GB/s. A really fast embedder can deliver maybe 16k embeddings/sec, or ~1.6GB/s (if you assume 100 char sentences)

That's two orders of magnitude difference. Chunking is not the bottleneck.

It might be an architectural issue - you stuff chunks into a MQ, and you want to have full visibility in queue size ASAP - but otherwise it doesn't matter how much you chunk, your embedder will slow you down.

It's still a neat exercise on principle, though :)
by anigbrowl | 2026-01-06 01:13:02+00:00
Meth labs of democracy

I've been frustrated by this stuff for many years, and come to the sad conclusion that corruption in American public life is simply endemic. Lawmakers could and should prioritize the public availability of public legislative and judicial proceedings, but habitually choose not to, preferring obfuscation over clarity.

I buy into Plato's concept (sometimes attributed to Tactitus) that 'the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.'
by dgunay | 2026-01-06 01:13:44+00:00
Ran it through ChatGPT:

Town = Central orchestrator / control plane
Rig = Project or workspace namespace
Polecat = Ephemeral worker job
Refinery = Merge queue manager
Witness = Worker health monitor
Crew = Persistent worker pool
Beads = Persistent work items / tasks
Hooks = Work queues / task slots
GUPP = Work processing guarantee
Molecules/Wisps = Structured, persistent workflows
Convoys = Grouped feature work units

https://chatgpt.com/share/695c6216-e7a4-800d-b83d-fc1a22fd8a...
by kingstnap | 2026-01-06 01:13:53+00:00
The observation itself is also partially incorrect. This is a video I watched a few months ago that went further into the whole how do you deal with subnetworks thing.

https://youtu.be/WW1ksk-O5c0?list=PLCq6a7gpFdPgldPSBWqd2THZh... (timestamped)

At the timestamp they discuss how actually the original ICLR results only worked on these extremely tiny models and larger ones didn't work. The adaptation you need to sort of fix it is to train densely first for a few epochs, only then you can start increasing sparsity.
by cryptica | 2026-01-06 01:13:54+00:00
I keep having to repeat this.

The problem is systemic. The legal concepts of 'Corporate personhood' and 'Limited liability' don't make sense. Just think about what those terms mean.

Of course you cannot expect accountability in the long run.

Is a corporation really a legal person? Can it go to jail as a person might? Does it need a visa to operate in a country as a person might? Will a corporation die as a person will? Sounds like it's getting all the benefits of personhood and none of the drawbacks... Our legal system literally gives more rights to non-sentient entities than it does to us humans! No wonder things are getting out of hand!

What does 'Limited liability' mean? Who has to deal with the repercussions for the excess liability which may exceed beyond the limit?

It's deep corruption, codified into law. Of course these corporations will get worse. They will get satanically worse. Just watch what happens internally; a decade from now, the current CEOs will look morally responsible by comparison. It's a systemic issue. Total violation of the social contract at a deep human level.

Why don't we say weapons are legal persons and provide limited liability protection to the person wielding it? Then criminals could kill people and the court could pass judgement that the gun must serve 20 years in its holster while the criminal walks free... That's about as fair as what we have now. If you conceive of a corporation as a weapon. There is nothing in the law to explicitly prevent this exact scenario. The corporation could theoretically use up CEOs as a gun might use up bullets... The investors would bear no liability.

There are many people in this depraved world of ours who would be willing to be a corporate bullet. People will go to jail to provide for their family. With corporations sucking the wealth out of society, it will create new levels of desperation, this will surely happen.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-06 01:14:14+00:00
Well, I'm not quite to a full year on my main KDE box, but I don't recall it ever crashing on me. Calling me a liar doesn't make your argument more compelling.

Also, you're trying to move the goalposts. The progression has been:

> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day

> I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.

> Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying

> What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?

Nobody said they hadn't experienced a single bug until you tried to make a straw man. I've seen bugs on every desktop OS I've used for any length of time. I don't see crashes on KDE.
by 972811 | 2026-01-06 01:14:20+00:00
It's all about risk/reward tradeoffs. Once you get past the junior->senior level, each promotion is hiring you for a completely different job. As an individual, there are only a few ways to get that job:
1. Trial run at your current company (could be wasting your time, but also you have domain knowledge and relationships to help)
2. Join a smaller company and hope it grows (could rapidly accelerate growth due to needs, but could also go very poorly if the company stagnates)
3. Try to lateral to another company with a promotion (pretty difficult in general)

It's not really that juicy for the corp. If they hire (promote) you without experience, they are hiring someone without experience for a position and then have to go and hire again to replace someone else. Vs. just hiring someone with experience
by trhway | 2026-01-06 01:14:52+00:00
>I feel like this point is refuted by what we're seeing out of robotics in China?

Humanoid robot Olympic Games in China:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y-tElcmJVE

Also, reminded - Russian "localization" (typical Russian hi-tech today, especially when on government investment, is simple rebadge of a Chinese tech) - even good Chinese robots starts to fall like drunk:

https://youtu.be/WVKxw72vlmo?t=15

and for the GGP comment:

>self driving delivery vans with a humanoid delivery robot

why humanoid? Glorified Roomba-like robots would do such job just fine. Every time seeing how the Amazon driver parks his van and runs around in our complex placing packages in front of the doors and making photos of the placed packages i'm wondering why Amazon wouldn't use 5-10 such Roombas per van instead. (and every time i think that i have to make such a startup myself, and after that i immediately think that Amazon would easily beat me by developing it 100x faster - in a week where i'd spend 2 years - and so i don't do it, and Amazon apparently doesn't do it too)
by crazygringo | 2026-01-06 01:15:01+00:00
Is it enabled by default?

I only very recently changed my System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Windows > Prefer tabs when opening documents to "Always". I'm pretty sure the default is "In Full Screen".

Now, something like TextEdit creates new files in new tabs rather than new windows. It's great! But by default, everything on macOS seems to use windows rather than tabs. I don't even think most people know about the "Prefer tabs" option at all.
by caminante | 2026-01-06 01:15:07+00:00
>I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO

Point blank:

Why not tell your manager you already spoke with the CEO instead of

1. Not mentioning you already overstepped your manager

2. And the skip-level boss/CEO liked the idea.

This seems like potentially good intentions being easily perceived by your manager as passive-aggressive. Maybe your skip level told you to use that phrasing.

Regardless, good luck.
by hn_acc1 | 2026-01-06 01:15:07+00:00
It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
by skissane | 2026-01-06 01:15:09+00:00
> The demand for pill bottles literally does grow before anyone takes the medication, no?

Only really in the US. In most other countries they use blister packs instead. Global consumption of blister packs is so huge (not just for prescription medications, also OTC, vitamins, supplements, and complementary medicines), even a blockbuster medication likely only makes a modest difference to manufacturer demand in percentage terms.
by exmadscientist | 2026-01-06 01:15:46+00:00
Like many people, I've been making Kraft macaroni and cheese for decades by this point. The recipe is on the box. It's not hard to make.

Or at least, it didn't used to be hard to make. Whatever they've done to the stuff recently, they've actually broken the instructions. It no longer even cooks correctly. Three cooking failures in a row, means I will never buy your product again. Why should I? There's a dozen alternatives. Most are either unhealthy or don't taste right to at least one member of the family, but there's a dozen of them... one worked out.

I'm angry and I'm not going back.
by rubyn00bie | 2026-01-06 01:16:31+00:00
Yeah, I was noticing that too. There is a company out there, Amprius, which has validated their silicon anode lithium ion batteries that can discharge at 10C (or 20C pulses), have varying densities from ~345wh/kg to 450wh/kg, and are shipping them to customers for drones and VTOLs.

I think until we have an independent lab verify the results, it's pretty much impossible to say if their (Donut Labs) claims are true or not. The only thing I'm particularly suspicious of is that they claim their battery was verified but didn't say by who or provide a whitepaper on it. Both of those seem to be the bare minimum for most battery manufacturers, and with their extraordinary claims I'd assume they'd have them front and center.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-06 01:16:38+00:00
> that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do

Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike. Russia glassing Ukraine is about as rational as it launching a first strike. So serious people would have to weigh–based on incomplete information–whether Putin is still in charge and if tens of millions of lives might be saved if we neutralise their silos first.

Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)
by quotemstr | 2026-01-06 01:16:58+00:00
This kind of response isn't helpful. He's right to ask about the motivations for the claim that containers in general are "not a sandbox" when the design of containers/namespaces/etc. looks like it should support using these things to make a sandbox. He's right to be confused!

If you look at the interface contract, both containers and VMs ought to be about equally secure! Nobody is an idiot for reading about the two concepts and arriving at this conclusion.

What you should have written is something about your belief that the inter-container, intra-kernel attacker surface is larger than the intra-hypervisor, inter-kernel attack surface and so it's less likely that someone will screw up implementing a hypervisor so as to open a security hole. I wouldn't agree with this position, but it would at least be defensible.

Instead, you pulled out the tired old "education yourself" trope. You compounded the error with the weasely "are considered" passive-voice construction that lets you present the superior security of VMs as a law of nature instead of your personal opinion.

In general, there's a lot of alpha in questioning supposedly established "facts" presented this way.
by troad | 2026-01-06 01:17:23+00:00
AustLII, CanLII and NZLII are all clones of the original Legal Information Institute (LII) from Cornell University. [0]

Most Australian courts require or prefer that case law be cited using exact page numbers from the 'authorised reports', i.e. the ones published by Westlaw or LexisNexis.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-06 01:17:45+00:00
Oh certainly. But that's the thing. Even with species being territorial, that serves a broader purpose in the ecosystem. Territoriality for predators is important to prevent concentration of predators, overpredation, and then depletion of prey species (which has many downstream effects).

And because of that, territoriality tends to be fairly low in most species until the food supply becomes constrained. And even then it's a gradient where hostilities generally only escalate out of desperation rather than innate competition. i.e. Competing between individuals or communities tends to occur mainly when they fail to compete against the environment and run out of other options.

But really my point was just about the general sentiment that it's "against evolution" or "against natural selection" to help the weak and that doing so is something that humans do out of a unique sense of love or kindness or whatever.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-06 01:17:49+00:00
> Diluting the tech focus here with average mainstream politics attracts the wrong crowd and adds little of value.

Flagged stories are some of the most active stories on HN. If the goal is to act as a filter on the kinds of acceptable topics to discuss or the kinds of people to attract to HN, it's a failed one, because the "wrong crowd" is still being attracted and commenting on those stories.

If anything, I see far and away the most amount of bad faith flagging/downvoting and throwaways on those threads. Are people getting their flagging privileges taken away? Are the throwaway's main accounts being banned? Who knows...
by croes | 2026-01-06 01:18:24+00:00
Define doing the same?

Exposing racism? Where is the moral problem?

This isn’t exposing people for being white but for being supremacists.

If they also expose something of the same kund of wrong I see no problem, everything I wouldn’t call doing the same.

That’s like comparing police arresting people with criminals kidnapping people, both do kind of the same: imprison people.
by WhyNotHugo | 2026-01-06 01:18:28+00:00
But they do keep the active tab of each window in memory. Firefox even continues rendering all active tabs in all windows, even if for windows which are not visible.

Not sure if this 45MB is per browser instance or per tab, but it’s the latter case, 10 windows would save 450MB. >10% on a lower-end device.
by aeon_ai | 2026-01-06 01:19:14+00:00
As some advice to prepare for - if this moves any demand from their enterprise pipeline, the n8n team will be looking for ways to add friction to your life and this project.

The easiest will be giving notice that you’re using n8n in the name of the project, and their lawyers will say that this poses great confusion and false affiliation and besmirches their good name etc. etc.

Not sure it’ll happen, but best be prepared and put some headers in that you’re not affiliated, are a community extension, etc
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-06 01:19:15+00:00
Instead of that I highly recommend either setting up a VM or picking up a $35 thin client and running OPNSense. After years of OpenWRT/DD-WRT I switched about 5 years ago and oh my god what a difference. You will spend basically 0 time on system maintenance and just focus on the actual networking stuff. It has more knobs than a basic router but the UI is excellent and there are very few bugs, if any.
by GaryBluto | 2026-01-06 01:19:16+00:00
I was just thinking to myself about how much the internet was lacking in self-important esoteric gibberish. I am unsurprised to see it came from the same person as "A Website to Destroy All Websites".

I am especially befuddled by all the comments stating "This is how the web used to be!"; no it wasn't, and I can only imagine those who think so collate their view of web history purely through what others say on Mastodon and Twitter (who in turn probably constructed their view of the time from the twelfth or so chinese whisper down the line of various blogs and manifestos).
by quotemstr | 2026-01-06 01:19:37+00:00
> `npm install <random-package>` to be equivalent to "RCE as a service"

It is literally that. When you write "npm install foo", npm will proceed to install the package called "foo" and then run its installation scripts. It's as if you'd run curl | bash. That npm install script can do literally anything your shell in your terminal can do.

It's not "somewhat close" to RCE. It is literally, exactly, fully, completely RCE delivered as a god damn service to which you connect over the internet.
by ghaff | 2026-01-06 01:19:43+00:00
Easier said than done.

- It's risk for them with basically no upside.

- Someone at their company needs to do a deep-dive into the code and verify that there aren't licensed third-party libraries and possibly remove them. Even companies that genuinely want to open source software that they've acquired may spend a year doing this sort of due diligence.
by CSMastermind | 2026-01-06 01:19:52+00:00
This is only partially true.

China's primary concern is resource extraction from Venezuela, which is why Trump immediately clarified that they'd make sure China still got their oil deliveries.

Russia is stretched way too thin right now to do anything meaningful about it.

Venezuela was basically being run by Cuba. Maduro was really only a figurehead. The military and government was functionally run by imported Cubans which is why a coup wasn't possible.
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-06 01:20:46+00:00
The difficulty comes in managing the agent. Ensuring it knows the state of the codebase, conventions to follow, etc. Steering it.

I've had the same experience as you. I've applied it to old projects which I have some frame of reference for and it's like a 200x speed boost. Just absolutely insane - that sort of speed can overcome a lot of other shortcomings.