MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bregma | 2026-01-23 11:33:02+00:00
It's not quite the same.

The TI-99/4 has 4k of scratchpad RAM accessible to the CPU. The CPU architecture had no general-purpose registers and had basically only 3 onboad registsrs: the status register, the program counter, and the workspace pointer. The WP pointer to a 32-byte range of RAM that worked like a set of 16 16-bit registers and a subroutine call was a matter of storing the current PC and WP and loading a new pair (a whole new set of registers). The 4k RAM was the equivalent of "the stack" on a modern x86 or Arm CPU.

Programs were stored as bytecode in memory addressable only by the graphics processors (note: not a GPU). Executing a program meant the CPU would write the GROM address to a register on the graphics chips followed by a request to fetch and would then read the byte from another register. It then had to interpret that byte through the ROM.

There were true separate address spaces, not different ranges in the same flat address space like on the NES. The CPU could not address the GROM directly.

I had the Minimem cart that had a line-by-line assembler that let me dump the ROMS. Many hours were spent hand-disassembling the OS for my TI-99/4A.
by ben_w | 2026-01-23 11:33:23+00:00
Yes, but that is a different level of issue. To analogise in two different ways, first it's like, sure, Microsoft can be ordered by the US government to spy on people and to backdoor crypto. Absolutely, 100%, and most world governments are probably now asking themselves what to do about that. But what you said was kinda like someone saying of Microsoft:

In the long run autocratic governments spying on their citizens will backdoor all crypto (Microsoft will probably concede to such an order in no time flat), which is conveniently left out in this "unit test". Mostly a waste of effort on their part.

Or if that doesn't suit you: yes, sure, there's a large flashing sign on the motorway warning of an accident 50 miles ahead of you, and if you do nothing this will absolutely cause you problems, but that doesn't make the lane markings you're currently following a "waste of effort".

Also, as published work, they're showing everyone else, including open weights providers, things which may benefit us with those models.

Unfortunately, I say "may" rather than "will", because if you put in a different constitution you could almost certainly get a model that has the AI equivalent of a "moral compass" tuned to supports anything from anarchy to totalitarianism, from mafia to self-policing, and similarly for all the other axes people care about. With a separate version of the totalitarianism/mafia/etc variants for each specific group that wants to seek power, c.f. how Grok was saying Musk is best at everything no matter how non-sensical the comparison was.

But that's also a different question. The original alignment problem is "at all", which we seem to be making progress with; once we've properly solved "at all" then we have the ability to experience the problem of "aligned with whom?"
by FrostViper8 | 2026-01-23 11:33:27+00:00
TBH there is a few standout really good British shows and the rest is forgotten about. A lot of humour in some of shows was really tied to the time of making and a lot of audiences won't get the joke.

If you watch Today Today or Brass Eye, unless you grew up at the time, it isn't funny. Most people under 30 won't know who any of celebrities are in the show.
by nemosaltat | 2026-01-23 11:33:36+00:00
Through many attempts to make ingesting the ponyium more bearable, I’ve found that taking it with more intense flavors (wintergreen mint, hoppy hops, crushed soul, dark roast coffee, etc) improves its comestabilty. Can’t let it pile up. We’ve always eaten ponyium right, and we all like it, right, guys, folks?
by squeefers | 2026-01-23 11:34:03+00:00
yeah im just not that impressed with him to put up with that. same with rms. they only act like that because of the pedastal people have put them on. watch how far one lines tries to get his tongue up the other linuses backside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA&t=248s&pp=ygUMbG...

seeing people give linus the credit for the kernel whilst ignoring the millions of man hours of other peoples time that made also went it (the majority of linux dev effort actually) reminds me of the numpties that think elon musk is literally knocking out rocket ship schematics and then having the spacex engineers rush off to implement his genius insight
by user34283 | 2026-01-23 11:34:16+00:00
Incorrect on all claims.

They tightened safety measures to prevent editing of images of real people into revealing clothing.
It is factually incorrect that you "can pay to generate CP".

Musk has not described CSAM as "hilarious". In fact he stated that he was not aware of any naked underage images being generated by Grok, and that xAI would fix the bug immediately if such content was discovered.

Earlier statements by xAI also emphasized a zero tolerance policy, removing content, taking actions against accounts, reporting to law enforcement and cooperation with authorities.

I suspect you just post these slanderous claims anyway, despite knowing that they are incorrect.
by MrFinch | 2026-01-23 11:34:22+00:00
I dislike Proton's excessive marketing on privacy and encryption topics, especially in their posts on X, where they always claim that accessing the internet without a VPN is a bad thing. It reminds me of Crypto AG.

Everyone would be happier if they just focused on good products instead of excessive marketing. I'm tired of seeing their privacy slop all the time.
Ask HN: Anti-John the Baptist?
by krautburglar | 2026-01-23 11:34:47+00:00
https://share.google/rSPD6gqe4StTYz6YU

Between the satellites, the “prison phone” cars, grok, over a dozen heirs, AI beginning to solve original problems rather than mere copyright laundering… something very bad is brewing, and it is far outside the ragebait left-right paradigm. They clearly think super intelligence is just around the corner. Whoever is first to the finish-line (be it Musk or Altman or Zuck or Brin), past performance suggests that the first application will be domination. Please share any insights you may have into our predicament.
by imiric | 2026-01-23 11:35:18+00:00
I agree with you on the policy being balanced.

However:

> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.

Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?

According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.

Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-23 11:35:25+00:00
Paper encyclopedias were neither precise nor accurate. You could count on them to give you ballpark figures most of the time, but certainly not precise answers. And that's assuming the set was new, but in reality most encyclopedias ever encountered by people in reality were several years old at least. I remember the encyclopedia set I had access to in the 90s was written before the USSR fell..
by natmaka | 2026-01-23 11:35:50+00:00
Strategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun.

The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply.

Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blockade or embargo.
by remix2000 | 2026-01-23 11:35:55+00:00
Ioctls are the single most complex example for API design, cause like, that's another opaque interface inside one opaque interface. Ioctls will be routed to the desired kernel module (driver) depending on the FD, after all.

Basically all I'm saying is that a syscall "ABI" is but a red herring for everyone but the [mainline] Linux devs themselves.
by kleiba | 2026-01-23 11:36:12+00:00
"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)

It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-23 11:36:41+00:00
> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.

The Internet begs to differ. AI is more akin to the Internet than to any Mac product. We're now in the stage of having a bunch of solutions looking for problems to solve. And this stage of AI is also very very close to the consumer. What took dedicated teams of specialised ML engineers to trial ~5-10 years ago, can be achieved by domain experts / plain users, today.
by dredmorbius | 2026-01-23 11:36:56+00:00
Google's entire (initial) claim-to-fame was "PageRank", referring both to the ranking of pages and co-founder Larry Page, which strongly prioritised a relevance attribute over raw keyword findings (which then-popular alternatives such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, AskJeeves, Lycos, Infoseek, HotBot, etc., relied on, or the rather more notorious paid-rankings schemes in which SERP order was effectively sold). When it was first introduced, Google Web Search was absolutely worlds ahead of any competition. I remember this well having used them previously and adopted Google quite early (1998/99).

Even with PageRank result prioritisation is highly subject to gaming. Raw keyword search is far more so (keyword stuffing and other shenanigans), moreso as any given search engine begins to become popular and catch the attention of publishers.

Google now applies other additional ordering factors as well. And of course has come to dominate SERP results with paid, advertised, listings, which are all but impossible to discern from "organic" search results.

(I've not used Google Web Search as my primary tool for well over a decade, and probably only run a few searches per month. DDG is my primary, though I'll look at a few others including Kagi and Marginalia, though those rarely.)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>

"The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" (1998) <http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf> (PDF)

Early (1990s) search engines: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#1990s:_Birth_of_...>.
by Juliate | 2026-01-23 11:37:00+00:00
Even basic local names in Western contexts (with characters other than just [a-zA-Z0-9_\ ]) cannot be properly and consistently input or searched in most of corporate or retail software, at the basic text level, because they rely on broken assumptions that even modern ERPs still follow. I routinely sift through 3 or 4 different spellings of my name every time someone asks for my name in their systems.

I cannot imagine the nightmare it must be for non-western languages.

I don't know exactly what the real, hard incentive is to make it happen at last, as this needs a strong perspective over software as a tool to serve people, as well as some kind of artistic literacy: we need more people to care about the tools they build, and more people to pay the makers because of that. Steve Jobs, with all his downsides, had this kind of focus and impact. But this needs to be systemic, not exceptional.
Show HN: ObsessionDB – We rebuilt ClickHouse infrastructure to cut our costs 50%
by keks0r | 2026-01-23 11:37:52+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Marc. I run Numia, a blockchain data company serving real-time APIs at near-petabyte scale. ObsessionDB is managed ClickHouse we built for ourselves that costs roughly 50% less than other managed options. Now we're launching it as a standalone service.

We had the classic split: ClickHouse for real-time analytics APIs, BigQuery for data warehouse workloads. Data replicated between both, costs adding up. Managed ClickHouse worked but was too expensive to put our warehouse workload into. Self-hosted meant replica nodes doubling storage and waiting days to copy 25TB to new replicas.

What we really needed was separated storage and compute. SharedMergeTree does this, but it's proprietary to ClickHouse Cloud. So we built our own version. Migrated everything in, both the real-time APIs and warehouse workloads. No more replicating between systems. Been running it in production across 5 projects.

The main wins: compute scales without replication tax, separate endpoints for ingest/API/ad-hoc so they can't interfere, no ZooKeeper or replica management on your end.

Honest tradeoffs: we're early, EU only right now. Small workloads on a single node with local NVMe will be faster, the separation adds a bit of latency. If you're running something small and static, a self-hosted node is probably simpler. Where this shines is large datasets and elastic workloads where you don't want to babysit infra.

Check it out: https://obsessiondb.com, happy to go deep on architecture, merges, failover, whatever.
by DrewADesign | 2026-01-23 11:38:16+00:00
To have that shame, you need to know better. If you don’t know any better, having access to a model that can make code and a cursory understanding of the language syntax probably feels like knowing how to write good code. Dunning-Krueger strikes again.

I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.
Show HN: Botnet of Ares – Hacking Simulator Open Playtest
by tiniuclx | 2026-01-23 11:38:21+00:00
Botnet of Ares is an incremental hacking roguelite set in a cyberpunk world where everything is connected. Unlock upgrades, expand your botnet, optimize your network & exploit millions of devices.

Inspired by games like Uplink and Hacknet, Botnet of Ares moves away from faux terminals and one-machine-at-a-time hacking. Instead, you manage and expand an evolving network of infected devices, balancing exponential growth with real-time threats.

The gameplay is active incremental & run-based. Your botnet gets bigger and bigger as you progress through the game, reaching tens of thousands of devices within an hour of gameplay. You might be managing exponential growth one moment, then scrambling to defeat countermeasures before your whole run collapses.

The game is still early in development, and I'm actively shaping it based on player feedback. So far, testers have been very positive - several have spent 5+ hours across multiple runs

Join the Steam playtest:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/

Scroll to 'Botnet of Ares Playtest' below the screenshots and click Request Access. I'm granting new testers access daily.
by spaqin | 2026-01-23 11:38:31+00:00
Funny to see this article not too long after finishing The Right Stuff - a stellar book about Project Mercury. It's an interesting tidbit and I learned something new.

While it seems that the concept worked, more or less, on one occasion it didn't, and that turned out to be a good thing. In the only Mercury mission which resulted in the capsule sinking - the second one, with Gus Grissom - the capsule settled down at almost 5km deep, but the SOFAR bomb failed to detonate and thus Liberty Bell 7 could have been recovered in 1999.
by macleginn | 2026-01-23 11:39:37+00:00
Well, there is this stoic British way of looking at the world and preserving the sense of self worth and then there is the ending of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just pure cosmic despair in the face of the bureaucratic void. It was also true for me that once I saw how pathologically bleak Adams's worldview is I couldn't even really laugh at the jokes any more.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-23 11:40:31+00:00
I sympathize with your frustration but your understanding of how things hang together is way off the mark.

You do not seem to understand how America's position in the world has been used to benefit the country in a massive way post world war II. You can throw that position away, that's your privilege, but the result will be a much smaller economy in which your costs for various items will go up rather than down because a lot of money will no longer flow to the USA.

The amounts you are paying for healthcare, medication etc are not coupled to that but are coupled to your broken political system. You could fix that easily enough but neither the democrats nor the republicans have ever followed that path because you (plural) have been deluded into thinking that that is socialism.

Reducing the USA's standing in the world is not going to fix your political problems but is going to harm your economy in a massive way. The position you are taking here is not consistent and whether you voted for Trump or not is not relevant because it effectively carries water for him: this is precisely the kind of thing that an uninformed Trump supporter would say.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-01-23 11:40:31+00:00
Still different from birthright castes.

With a birthright caste, you're stuck. Even if you make a lot of money, you're still an untouchable.

In the US, if you make a lot of money, you can become upper class, even if you still have some "rough edges." I actually know a number of folks that have done exactly that.

I also know folks that have done the opposite. Started off on top of the heap, and ended up skint.

We definitely have strata. Hollywood stars represent an interesting one. They are sort of what folks aspire to be, but they are nowhere near the top of the heap.

In the UK, Elon Musk would never be a toff; no matter how much he has, but in the US, he's King of the Hill.
by ncruces | 2026-01-23 11:40:31+00:00
It's more like he was renting a knife to cut fruit for some reason and now, and instead of just buying a knife, he built one from scratch.

(1) Let's hope he doesn't cut himself if the knife breaks apart while in use.

(2) Why is it so hard to just buy knives these days? Why does every knife maker suddenly feel entitled to charge rent?

I'm all for DIY instead of hiring others, but the insanity here is the rent vs. buy thing going on in the industry.
by rtbruhan00 | 2026-01-23 11:41:38+00:00
We implemented an AI-powered customer support triage system that initially looked promising in testing. In production, it actually increased our support costs by ~30% because:

The AI would confidently misroute 15-20% of tickets, requiring human review of ALL AI decisions
and the Customers lost trust after a few bad experiences and started explicitly requesting human agents
also Support agents spent more time correcting AI mistakes than they saved

The breaking point was data quality - our training data was too clean compared to real customer queries. We ended up rolling back to rule-based routing with AI as an optional suggestion tool instead.
by lazide | 2026-01-23 11:41:43+00:00
Near as I can tell, people just don’t actually check and go off what it looks like it’s doing. Or they got lucky, and when they did check once it was right. Then assume it will always right.

Which would certainly explain things like hallucinated references in legal docs and papers!

The reality is that for a human to make up that much bullshit requires a decent amount of work, so most humans don’t do it - or can’t do it as convincingly. LLMs can generate nigh infinite amounts of bullshit for cheap (and often more convincing sounding bullshit than a human can do on their own without a lot of work!), making them perfect for fooling people.

Unless someone is really good at double checking things, it’s a recipe for disaster. Even worse, doing the right amount of double checking makings them often even more exhausting than just doing the work yourself in the first place.
by rtbruhan00 | 2026-01-23 11:42:40+00:00
Real-time voice translation looked amazing in demos, but in practice it struggled with accents, technical jargon, and context. The demos were clearly done in controlled environments with clear speakers and simple topics.

The reason? Training data bias and the "last mile" problem - demos use ideal conditions while real usage involves messy audio, overlapping speech, and domain-specific vocabulary the models never saw during training.
by haute_cuisine | 2026-01-23 11:42:42+00:00
There were some popular SaaS products doing aggregation form multiple sources (email newsletters, websites, rss feeds) into a daily morning email. One had the word "brew" in the domain.

I believe founders closed their service and started a new one based on AI (some yers ago).

It wound be nice to have such tool that can sort through communication and highlight important action items, I want this, but I want this to go further: I define my goals and priorities and it acts as personal assistant with preparing weakly goals, daily action items, managing my todo lists, outsourcing some part of my todo list, etc.

The important part is I can't just hook up some random saas into all my business communication.
by amarcheschi | 2026-01-23 11:42:45+00:00
Now that we're at it, let's talk about Google ads. I reported a Google ad because I deem it political, and in Europe you must make it clear that a political ad is a political ad and not just an ad (and it failed to do so, it should be corrected or eliminated).

Google refused to comply and act in any way, because they "don't moderate 3rd party content". Except that EU says you _must_ comply if you're publishing a political ad. I'm bringing this forward with an appeal and then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act.

The laws are there. It's just that big tech think they can ignore them freely and even if down the road there's a fine it's going to be much less than what they gained by spreading ads.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-23 11:43:15+00:00
Those sort of articles suck big time.

I remember coming across an article from NYCMesh which looked interesting ("Administrating the Mesh" - https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/datadog/) which made sense all the way until they put Datadog on top of everything, and I asked myself:

> What the hell, how is using a centralized service for managing a decentralized mesh a suitable solution? Did the author get employed by Datadog or what happened?

Then I got curious and lo and behold; the author was indeed hired by Datadog (and still works there AFAIK), effectively compromising the entire article and the project itself, because of their new employer.
by brazzy | 2026-01-23 11:43:39+00:00
The few people who could read and write were the educated ones - mostly those in power or close to them. So exactly the people you needed to influence to get something done. And of course written texts could be read aloud to those who cannot write.

What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?

What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?

> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

And why would you assume that?

There is in fact a modern time example for exactly the kind of thing we're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
by watwut | 2026-01-23 11:44:33+00:00
> autodesk is enshittifying its product. Users are leaving. But also wall street likes it. But also Wall Street is this powerful institution that keeps making money.

Enshittication makes earnings go up. Not infinitely, but for long. Enshittication is not done for fun, it is done for shorter term profit and Wall Street is all about that. Eventually it will go down and Wall Street will desert the company, moving money into something else to enshittify it.