MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by macNchz | 2026-01-19 15:41:13+00:00
Historically retailers have employed buyers in charge of selecting products that would appeal to the store’s customers. A customer will likely have different expectations, and have an existing understanding of what sort of products they’ll find if they’re shopping at, say, Nordstrom vs Dollar Tree vs a guy on Canal Street in NYC.

Amazon sort of threw this out with the steady movement towards blending third party sellers in with products they sell directly. They made it less and less obvious and easy to filter based on seller over time, so now you have all sorts of junk from the digital equivalent of street vendors mixed with normal products, and it’s up to the shopper to figure it out. They tolerate tricks and fraudulent behavior from those sellers much more than they should.

Amazon could, if they wanted, make it easy to filter for products that have been selected by a buyer who has a relationship with the vendor, and are directly sold by Amazon themselves, but it’s seemingly more profitable to allow third parties to peddle garbage en masse.
by andyish | 2026-01-19 15:41:16+00:00
I'm so torn with verification on social media. But i'm surprised companies whose main source of revenue is ads and original content aren't putting something akin to 'verified human' tags on users for all to see. Not just to show authenticity but also to be able to say to ad buyers: your ads have been seen by x real users.

I mean sure, the next step will probably be "your ads have been seen by x real users and here are their names, emails, and mobile numbers" :(

As well as verification there must be teams at Reddit/LinkedIn/Whereever working ways to identify ai content so it can be de-ranked.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-19 15:41:21+00:00
Easier than to an LLM, compared to inference.

“‘r’s in strawberry” and other LLM tricks remind me of brain teasers like “finished files” (https://sharpbrains.com/blog/2006/09/10/brain-exercise-brain...). Show an average human this brain teaser and they’ll probably fall for it the first time.

But never a second; the human learned from one instance, effectively forever, without even trying. ChatGPT had to be retrained and to not fall for the “r”’s trick, which cost much more than one prompt, and (unless OpenAI are hiding a breakthrough, or I really don’t understand modern LLMs) required much more than one iteration.

That seems to be the one thing that prevents LLMs from mimicking humans, more noticeable and harder to work around than anything else. An LLM can beat a Turing test where it only must generate a few sentences. No LLM can imitate human conversation over a few years (probably not even a few days), because it would start forgetting much more.
by iainctduncan | 2026-01-19 15:42:01+00:00
From the article "And yet these tools have opened a world of creative potential in software that was previously closed to me, and they feel personally empowering. "

I keep seeing things like this, about "democratization" etc. But coding has been essentially free to learn for about 25 years now, with all the online resources and open source tools anyone can use.

Is this just a huge boon to those too lazy to learn? And what does that mean for later security and tech debt issues?
by projektfu | 2026-01-19 15:42:03+00:00
I have only said it as part of an apology.

"We have been waiting 20 minutes!"

"You're absolutely right, and I apologize. We will try to schedule better in the future."

I have never said it to someone with whom I was having a regular discussion.

OTOH, I used to overuse em dashes because the Mac made proper typesetting possible. It used to be the sign that someone had read the very useful The Mac is not a Typewriter by Robin Williams.
by sillyfluke | 2026-01-19 15:42:32+00:00
I have to go back to the source and confirm your analysis. The sheer mental incapacity of the individual cabinet members in the movie most closely matches this current administration than any other cabinet in history as I recall.

Edit: maybe it's predicting the presidency a couple of terms down the line, when a well-meaning Theo Von becomes president. But the Theo Von of today is too smart already, it would have to be the Theo Vom of a decade ago.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-19 15:42:46+00:00
Yeah, I guess the "err" is on my side, I've always took "suck up" as a synonym for scraping, not just "using data for stuff".

And yeah, you're most likely right about the first, and the contract writers have with Amazon most certainly anticipates this, and includes both uses in their contract. But! Never published on Amazon, so don't know, but I'm guessing they already have the rights for doing so with what people been uploading these last few years.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-19 15:42:57+00:00
Yes, it's been discussed many times before. All the corporations training LLMs have to have done a legal analysis and concluded that it's defensible. Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF ( "Copyright Implications of the Use of Code Repositories to Train a Machine Learning Model" at https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications... ), concluded that using copyrighted data to train AI was plausibly legally defensible and outlined the potential argument. You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.
by arghwhat | 2026-01-19 15:43:18+00:00
This is actually quite an interesting topic in its own right, but not quite the discussion above, which is about whether C or Rust include a GC or is considered to "use" the GC you hand-rolled or pulled in from a library.

I wouldn't consider FilC's GC a GC in the conventional sense either, in that code compiled with Fil-C is still managed manually, with the (fully-fledged) GC effectively only serving as a way to do runtime validation and to turn what would otherwise be a UAF with undefined behavior into a well-defined and immediate panic. This aspect is in essence an alternative approach to what is done by AddressSanitizer.

I'll have to look a bit more into Fil-C though. Might be interesting to see how it compares to the usual sanitizers in practice.
by xinayder | 2026-01-19 15:43:32+00:00
> How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content

Adding a VR mode to the game is definitely adding content. If you mean storywise, okay, I agree with you. Still, he's profiting off it in the fact that you need to pay a monthly fee to access the mod.

Even if he claims he's not, he indeed is profiting off it, because there is no way you can use the mod without paying first.

> If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.

The difference is that Valve would have asked for permission first from CDPR if they could sell their software, or even then, work together with CDPR to have the software be implemented natively on the game. Plus, Valve has the same stance on paid mods on Steam, so it's not really a good comparison here.
by jakewindle47 | 2026-01-19 15:44:11+00:00
LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years.

As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my career looks like.
by al2o3cr | 2026-01-19 15:44:23+00:00
use AI for code review, having another AI (or the same AI in a
new session) audit code. It can examine every line carefully,
never tires, never misses.

"never"? Absolutely roflcoptering over here.

If you've never had an LLM code reviewer hallucinate, you're either not reading the output or you're just lying.
by SpaceNugget | 2026-01-19 15:44:23+00:00
There is no os inside the container. That's a big part of the reason containerization is so popular as a replacement for heavier alternatives like full virtualization. I get that it's a bit confusing with base image names like "ubuntu" and "fedora", but that doesn't mean that there is a nested copy of ubuntu/fedora running for every container.
by krupan | 2026-01-19 15:44:31+00:00
Gas town and the like all basically sound to me like, "AI is amazing! Ok, actually it isn't very good, but maybe we can just use more AI with our AI and then it'll be good!"

And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent?

Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encountered managers that think like this before. "We don't need expensive, brilliant, developers, we just need good processes for the cheap inexperienced developers to follow." I think what keeps this idea alive is that it sort of works for simple CRUD apps and other essentially "solved" problems. At least until the app needs to become more than just a simple CRUD app
by ungreased0675 | 2026-01-19 15:45:02+00:00
I think I have a different definition of brainrot than you. I think of attention grabbing visuals that have no meaning, just something to keep your eyes glued to the screen.

A good example are those Subway Surfers split screen videos, where someone is babbling about nothing in one frame, but the visuals in the other keep people watching.

Another example is AI-narrated “news” on YouTube. Nobody would normally listen to an AI voice read AI slop, but if there are some extreme video clips quickly switching every few seconds, people don’t immediately click away.

Brain rot shreds the attention span and uses all kinds of psychological tricks to keep people engaged. In the Helicopter video, every second is packed with visual information, not to contribute to the narrative but to capture attention. The backgrounds are full of details. The camera never stops moving. The subjects depicted are even attention grabbing: police lights, dancing people, guns, car crashes, flamethrowers! Hey, does that guy have pink curlers in his hair?

It’s not that I don’t like it (I kinda do), but a media diet of that kind of content is bad for the brain.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-19 15:45:02+00:00
Using an ad blocker just shifts the cost of creating/providing content onto people not using ad blockers.

The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.

For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash from their "ad block is awesome" audience, but some well known youtubers in the hard nerdy tech space report 40-50% of views they receive no compensation for.

So you can evangelize how great it is to not have to compensate for content, but don't think it's some kind of everyone wins victory. It's just a cost shift onto someone else, which largely manifests as bad content being needed to cover costs.

The correct approach is paying for what you use, and avoiding ad-supported content to send the message that you want a paid option.
by rossdavidh | 2026-01-19 15:45:03+00:00
So, put together a few things:

1) to satisfy investors, companies require continual growth in engagement and users

2) the population isn't rocketing upwards on a year-over-year basis

3) the % of the population that is online has saturated

4) there are only so many hours in the day

Inevitably, in order to maintain growth in engagement (comments, posts, likes, etc.), it will have to become automated. Are we there already? Maybe. Regardless, any system which requires continual growth has to automate, and the investor expectations for the internet economy require it, and therefore it has or soon will automate.

Not saying it's not bad, just that it's not surprising.
by TuringNYC | 2026-01-19 15:45:50+00:00
>>By assurance, not that I get a payout, but rather the company has sufficient QA to avoid a payout.
> They also have sufficient insurance that a payout doesn't tank their company. I don't think their risk avoidance translates into your risk avoidance.

The insurance company doesnt want a payout though -- they will ensure certain certifications. Also, insurance companies will not payout (and hence bankrupt the company) in cases of fraud or gross negligence.

The system is not perfect, but it exists to align interests.
by vessenes | 2026-01-19 15:46:22+00:00
Looks like solid incremental improvements. The UI oneshot demos are a big improvement over 4.6. Open models continue to lag roughly a year on benchmarks; pretty exciting over the long term. As always, GLM is really big - 355B parameters with 31B active, so it’s a tough one to self-host. It’s a good candidate for a cerebras endpoint in my mind - getting sonnet 4.x (x<5) quality with ultra low latency seems appealing.
by modeless | 2026-01-19 15:46:26+00:00
It's simpler than that. The only thing that would need to change is spectrum allocation. We need unlicensed spectrum with higher power limits in longer range radio bands. It's a miracle what radio engineers have done with a tiny slice of unlicensed spectrum near 2.4 Ghz. Imagine what they could do with a few unlicensed VHF/UHF channels.
by eudamoniac | 2026-01-19 15:46:33+00:00
I try to avoid Amazon, but I still don't know where to buy basic commodity items otherwise. Where would I buy a plunger, a decent set of coasters, a good pair of scissors, a soap holder? Target? Their products manage to be thrice the price and just as garbage as temu. Costco is the only retailer I trust anymore, but they don't sell everything.
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-19 15:46:38+00:00
I don't think Romney had some keen foresight either, he just saw the tension that existed between Russia and their neighbors and didn't take the rose tinted one world, everything is going to work out view.

What you term 'crazy rogue state' is just countries looking at their own self interests.

India and Pakistan have been fighting. Thailand and Cambodia have been fighting. Which of those are rogue?

China has made large territory claims in the ocean and is in conflict with it's neighbors over that.

Maybe they are closer to being a rogue state than you think.
by soldeace | 2026-01-19 15:46:51+00:00
Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
by petcat | 2026-01-19 15:47:15+00:00
> the emergence of LLM coding tools could make it even easier than before

I find this highly optimistic. It will take years, maybe decades for EU to replace US clouds and tech. And if they're going to do it with LLMs, then it will take billions of euros in devs and tokens (again, all going to US tech companies).

Meanwhile, USA continues to strategically re-home TSMC to Arizona whilst simultaneously make huge investments to invigorate Intel and Micron.

Over the last decade USA and China have doubled-down on massive investments to out-compete each other while the EU seems like it's struggling to understand where to even begin.
by jonhohle | 2026-01-19 15:47:19+00:00
Amazon doesn’t just fulfill Amazon.com orders. Anyone can send inventory to Amazon and use them for fulfillment on their own e-commerce platform. The distributors don’t know Amazon is going to be fulfilling orders from several of their retailers.

Even on Amazon, it’s not uncommon to find several new listings for an item fulfilled by Amazon from different sellers (including Amazon). That’s beneficial for Amazon because they don’t need to own all of the inventory and the sellers get a listing with good reputation to leverage if Amazon goes out of stock. In the perfect scenario everyone wins - Amazon makes money, the seller makes money, and the product is still available to the customer. You get all that without commingling, but with it, you also save physical storage volume.
by martinprins | 2026-01-19 15:47:58+00:00
Author here. Started with a simple problem: sync data between two phones with no backend.

WebRTC signaling SDPs are ~2.5KB. Too large for practical QR scanning. When you control both endpoints, most of that is unnecessary ceremony.

Key insights: derive ICE credentials from DTLS fingerprint via HKDF, use binary encoding (IP as 4 bytes not ASCII), skip compression (DEFLATE increases size on high-entropy data), skip base64 (QR supports raw binary).
by itishappy | 2026-01-19 15:48:15+00:00
> while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short.

Neither are real time once you introduce delayed communication. Not sure I see the distinction.

Actually, I'd argue that unreliable transport breaks the real-time assumption even without introducing delayed communication. Is there immediate feedback if your message can't reach it's destination?
by mothballed | 2026-01-19 15:48:22+00:00
Adding some supplemental solar that will move the needle a drop in a brown-out isn't absolutely nothing I suppose, but really for immediate war-time resiliency you would be using solar for off-grid purposes (even if during grid blackouts only).

If your goal is to stay on grid the payoff on solar isn't really realized for 10+ years, when not only are the panels paid off but the accumulation factor of a country full of people with solar panels reduces the grid strain on the conventional sources you list. Adding them for war-time reasons is overall a net negative vs just buying diesel heaters, distributing solar for actual off-grid purposes so people have communications, etc. It is not going to meaningfully reduce dependency on those sources during the period of the war -- that's why I assumed it had to be for off-grid alternative because in that case it would achieve that goal.

Of course it is better than nothing, assuming they did not waste too many domestic resources doing this Greenpeace stunt. But this on-grid solar component is not a serious proposition for wartime demand, and you would be WAY better off donating to maintaining/defending the existing hydro/nuclear/coal generation than trying to deploy enough solar to move the needle for solar grid resiliency within the timespan of the war. I guess I just assumed they were acting rationally and that is why I thought it might be used in off-grid scenarios, but you've disillusioned me of that.
by bee_rider | 2026-01-19 15:48:30+00:00
The split where social networking is mostly for people you “know” and social media is… some other thing, mostly for scrolling videos, definitely is significant.

But, the “know IRL” split is a bit artificial I think. For example my discord is full of people I knew in college: I knew them IRL for four years, and then we all moved around and now we’ve known each other online for decades. Or childhood friends. By now, my childhood friend and college friend circles are partially merged on discord, and they absolutely know each other (unfortunately there’s no way for you to evaluate this but I know them all quite well and it would be absurd to me, to consider them anything other than friends).

The internet is part of the real world now. People socialize on it. I can definitely see a distinction between actually knowing somebody, and just being in a discord channel with them. But it is a fuzzy social thing I think, hard to nail down exactly where the transition is (also worth noting that we have acquaintances that we don’t really “know” offline, the cashier at our favorite shops for example).
by AlecSchueler | 2026-01-19 15:48:41+00:00
Honestly I can't continue the conversation. You say the thing you want isn't being said. I say it is and point you towards it, but you're discrediting it based on a second hand account of a different book or a single paragraph summary. I've read all your points and I'm telling you man to man that this is your book. You can take it or leave it.
by digiown | 2026-01-19 15:48:42+00:00
I think "wired" (really bundles of optical fiber) will win out anyway due to the vast capacities it can provide. There will always be gaps between populations and to have a reliable link, you will need these dedicated mainlines, which will also help scale datacenters. Perhaps we would have more p2p tools, but the public internet would have a similar topology too if it were to have a similar capacity.
by 1shooner | 2026-01-19 15:48:48+00:00
I've done this for the last year, and it has surpassed my expectations. There have been a few very specific electronics parts I simply couldn't find anywhere else, and on the way I learned that some big box stores have different concepts of 'shipped' (like amazon) vs 'delivery' (someone literally drives your item from the local store to your door), and Walmart's 'delivery' operation mixed up an item.

The slower pace of consumption is acceptable almost all the time, and I'm starting to prefer it.
by evbogue | 2026-01-19 15:49:42+00:00
at://hash at://pub i guess I don't know why we need at:// that seems like something we'd need in Beaker Browser.

After reading the docs at https://atproto.com/specs/at-uri-scheme and building applications that integrate with the Bluesky API, it’s clear why this format is useful for interacting with their system. For developers working outside the ATMosphere, however, it may feel less familiar compared to more conventional REST API patterns.
by zvqcMMV6Zcr | 2026-01-19 15:50:32+00:00
There were some dedicated submissions about ad fraud on HN. In long term companies tend to reach equilibrium, where both reducing and increasing ad budget decreases profit. It is a classic prisoners dilemma, giving up on ads with poor ROI would be obvious decision if it wasn't for competitors who will benefit both from some actual conversions and lower bids for domain specific keywords.
by andsoitis | 2026-01-19 15:50:42+00:00
> they are still supporting this if they are not opposing him.

This is precisely the problem, if I interpret your response correctly.
Just because someone doesn't oppose all ideas that someone has doesn't mean they support all ideas coming from that person.

You can support some ideas and oppose others. Blindly opposing someone on all fronts without critical consideration and some reflection on the idea itself is not very strategic or practical.

In fact, it can undermine your own opposition because you will find out very quickly that you oppose common-sense ideas and people will look at you like you're a little crazy.
by SauntSolaire | 2026-01-19 15:50:57+00:00
And I'm simply pointing out that you've not actually yet commented anything substantive. All four of your comments here have included some sort of swipe at me, and none of them actual engage with the topic at hand beyond (charitably) the first one. Do you actually have opinions about the rules here that you wanted to share?

I'm not one to dig through comment history to make a point; but if I did, I'm guessing it would look like more of the same.

So, unless you have an actual argument to make here about the actual topic, don't expect me to continue on responding. I'm not interested in trading swipes with a stranger.
by briantw | 2026-01-19 15:51:14+00:00
Elektor overview of Espressif’s ESP32-E22, positioned as a Wi-Fi 6E connectivity co-processor that runs the full Wi-Fi + Bluetooth stacks so the host CPU can focus on application code. Highlights include tri-band 2.4/5/6 GHz with 160 MHz channels, 2×2 MU-MIMO/beamforming, dual-mode Bluetooth (BR/EDR + BLE 5.4), and PCIe/SDIO host interface options.