MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericmcer | 2026-01-27 21:56:10+00:00
In "Remains of The Day" they call just talking about "the thing" an indulgence. Which is really what it is, it feels good, isn't hard, and doesn't achieve anything.

The characters in the book are quick to cut non-productive discussions short, but it feels like the feel good discussions around "the thing" are about as far as many people want to go these days.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-01-27 21:56:36+00:00
okay, let's look:

Entity 2016 Rev 2024 Rev Nominal Real (Adj)
---------------------------------------------------------
Netflix $8.8B [5] $39.0B [6] +341% +229%
NBA $6.5B [3] $11.3B [4] +74% +30%
NFL $14.0B [1] $23.0B [2] +64% +22%
Inflation --- --- +34% [7] 0%

i didn't say the NFL made less money, because i'm not stupid. but a simple way to interpret this is, kind of obviously, netflix isn't really about presenting on TVs per se, they make a media platform, which performed way better than the NFL did, almost 10:1, which is really reinforcing my point no? for every 1 dollar someone gives NFL, consumers give Netflix 9. see? to me that is a trend going down, even if to you, it is a trend going up. depends what your benchmark is!

another POV: other people do a better job at making NFL content than the NFL does, which is what you are saying your son is consuming. and listen, honestly, ask him if he or his friends bet on football...

[1] https://www.footballscoop.com/news/report-nfl-rakes-14-billi...
[2] https://www.sportspro.com/news/nfl-revenue-2024-financial-ye...
[3] https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2016/10...
[4] https://www.sportsvalue.com.br/en/nba-teams-surpassed-us-11-...
[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/reven...
[6] https://www.wallstreetzen.com/stocks/us/nasdaq/nflx/revenue
[7] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
by etskinner | 2026-01-27 21:57:29+00:00
The opening paragraph is very telling; the author doesn't seem to understand typical pro-level parametric CAD programs available on the market:

> I keep designing physical parts for our robots. Motor mounts, sensor brackets, wheel hubs. Every time, the workflow is the same: open a GUI CAD program, click around for an hour, export an STL, realize the bolt pattern is 2mm off, repeat.

This doesn't make sense. When you realize the bolt pattern is 2mm off, you just edit that dimension and let the CAD program recalculate. You don't need to click around for an hour again. That's the beauty of contstraint-based parametric modeling as opposed to, say, modeling in Blender.

The author's program is akin to writing vim to replace Publisher. They're solving entirely different problems. Not to mention, this code-as-model paradigm already exists: OpenSCAD
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2026-01-27 21:57:32+00:00
Yeah it should be technically feasible to do "eventually" but it's non trivial. I linked a bunch of their blogs on how they harden contact discovery, etc. And of course you can turn contact discovery off entirely in the settings.

Settings > Privacy > Phone Number > Who can find me by number > Nobody

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46786794
by ameliaquining | 2026-01-27 21:57:58+00:00
The linked explainer [1] gets into this:

"The new CSS env(preferred-text-scale) variable provides a mechanism for authors to respect the user’s text scale setting that they’ve set either in their operating system or web browser settings. Authors can use it to scale the font-size and alter the layout accordingly.

Note: See the env(preferred-text-scale) Explainer [2] for a comparison of the various ways users can scale content and examples of how to use the environment variable.

However, if authors have already used font-relative units like rem and em to conform to the Resize Text guideline, the browser could automatically incorporate the OS-level text scale setting into those font-relative units. This would allow authors to avoid having to determine the precise elements to apply the env() variable to.

We propose a new HTML meta tag that tells the user agent to apply the scaling factor from env(preferred-text-scale) to the entire page. We expect it will become best practice for authors to use this meta tag, just as they would use the viewport meta tag. The environment variable would be reserved for atypical use cases."

There's no need for a text-scale CSS property because font-size already exists. The latter explainer [2] suggests that developers use font-size: calc(100% * env(preferred-text-scale)) to get the desired effect, if they are doing this in CSS rather than with just the meta tag.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/expl... [2] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/expl...
by xp84 | 2026-01-27 21:58:18+00:00
True, buuuuut, they were also citizens taking it upon themselves to go and get involved with law enforcement activity, creating a chaotic environment deliberately in order to try to make a political point. Let's stipulate that they had great ethical reasons and good intentions to do this - I don't want to debate that.

But these people allegedly asking for "protection from ICE" at work however are being hyperbolic. Their workplace isn't a place where immigrants are being pursued in the first place, and even if ICE were to come there, they don't have to choose to try to "be a hero" and insert themselves into an arrest that might happen. If they want safety, they can stay at their desks and work. If they're illegally here themselves, they can't expect their employer that they are lying to, to bend over backwards to "protect" them.

Honestly, I think escalating a situation that is not life-or-death, like ICE detaining people they suspect of violating immigration status, to a degree where people can die, is irresponsible. Way more people die from forklift accidents every day than are actually wrongfully deported, yet people are throwing themselves into the path of officers to "defend" random people they almost definitely know less about than the person arresting them does. So far I haven't heard of ICE hurting any actual immigrants in custody, just "heroes" who think they have a duty to "defend." The only logically consistent position with this categorical "defense" stance would be that borders shouldn't exist.
by techpression | 2026-01-27 21:58:19+00:00
On the link you shared, 4o vs 3.5 turbo price per 1m tokens.

There’s no such thing as ”same task by old model”, you might get comparable results or you might not (and this is why the comparison fail, it’s not a comparison), the reason you pick the newer models is to increase chances of getting a good result.
by tencentshill | 2026-01-27 21:58:29+00:00
Very good reporting, but I don't think it will affect their stock price much. Their fundamental product and usability just has no equal since Apple left the consumer networking space (Some of who then founded Ubiquiti).

Their pro offerings have a lot more competition, but are still very solid for a relative newcomer.

Any real sanction enforcement would have to be politically motivated. Does Robert Pera have connections with trump? He fits the profile: young billionaire and sports team owner.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 21:58:29+00:00
Haha yea, Me and emsh were actually talking about it on bluesky (which I saw after seeing your bluesky, I didn't know both you and emsh were on bsky haha)

https://bsky.app/profile/emsh.cat/post/3mdgobfq4as2p

But basically I got curious and you can see from my other comments on you how much I love golang so decided to port the project from rust to golang and emsh predicts that the project's codebase can even shrink to 10k!

(although one point tho is that I don't have CC, I am trying it out on the recently released Kimi k2.5 model and their code but I decided to use that to see the real world use case of an open source model as well!)

Edit: I had written this comment just 2 minutes before you wrote but then I decided to write the golang project

I mean, I think I ate through all of my 200 queries in kimi code & it now does display me a (browser?) and I had the shell script as something to test your website as the test but it only opens up blank

I am gonna go sleep so that the 5 hour limits can get recharged again and I will continue this project.

I think it will be really interesting to see this project in golang, there must be good reason for emsh to say the project can be ~10k in golang.
by nsainsbury | 2026-01-27 21:58:39+00:00
Touching on the atrophy point, I actually wrote a few thoughts about this yesterday: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking

I actually disagree with Andrej here re: "Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain." and I would argue that the only reason he can read code fluently, find issues, etc. is because he has spent year in a non-AI assisted world writing code. As time goes on, he will become substantially worse.

This also bodes incredibly poorly for the next generation, who will mostly in their formative years now avoid writing code and thus fail to even develop a idea of what good code is, how it works/why it works, why you make certain decisions, and not others, etc. and ultimately you will see them become utterly dependent on AI, unable to make progress without it.

IMO outsourcing thinking is going to have incredibly negative consequences for the world at large.
by rdtsc | 2026-01-27 21:58:43+00:00
> people appeal to the internet, terrified they’re hindering their careers by striking the wrong balance; they seek advice from job coaches ...

They do? It seems strange to me people are terrified about this and they need coaching about how many periods or commas to put around their "lol"s and "heh"s. If this is what terrifies and scares us, we are paradoxically both doomed, and at the same time doing pretty well, given what the top item on the agenda look like.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-27 21:59:03+00:00
Trump has loyalty only to himself and in his first term was constantly throwing people under the bus after he decided they were a liability to the Main Character.

I could imagine we'll see the same thing again, before or after the midterms, and Miller and Bessent are two I expect to see have a dethroning at some point simply on account of Trump never taking responsibility for anything.

However some of that logic is based on 1st round Trump not being as senile and insane as 2nd round Trump. It's possible his weakening cognitive faculties have made him even more open to manipulation.
by rob74 | 2026-01-27 21:59:05+00:00
Pssst! I think Linus didn't as much design Git as he cloned BitKeeper (or at least the parts of it he liked). I have never used it, but if you look at the BitKeeper documentation, it sounds strangely familiar: https://www.bitkeeper.org/testdrive.html . Of course, that made sense for him and for the rest of the Linux developers, as they were already familiar with BitKeeper. Not so much for the rest of us though...
by flumpcakes | 2026-01-27 21:59:07+00:00
This is terrible for Science.

I'm sorry, but publishing is hard, and it should be hard. There is a work function that requires effort to write a paper. We've been dealing with low quality mass-produced papers from certain regions of the planet for decades (which, it appears, are now producing decent papers too).

All this AI tooling will do is lower the effort to the point that complete automated nonsense will now flood in and will need to be read and filtered by humans. This is already challenging.

Looking elsewhere in society, AI tools are already being used to produce scams and phishing attacks more effective than ever before.

Whole new arenas of abuse are now rife, with the cost of producing fake pornography of real people (what should be considered sexual abuse crime) at mere cents.

We live in a little microcosm where we can see the benefits of AI because tech jobs are mostly about automation and making the impossible (or expensive) possible (or cheap).

I wish more people would talk about the societal issues AI is introducing. My worthless opinion is that prism is not a good thing.
by jascha_eng | 2026-01-27 21:59:12+00:00
Why not filter out papers from people without credentials? And also publicly call them out and register them somewhere, so that their submission rights can be revoked by other journals and conferences after "vibe writing".

These acts just must have consequences so people stop doing them. You can use AI if you are doing it well but if you are wasting everyones time you should just be excluded from the discourse altogether.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-01-27 21:59:35+00:00
It is both extraordinarily impressive in an absolute sense, and fairly disappointing specifically comparing my result on a a random smattering of other no-js websites, to the expectation I had from the simonw screenshot (which to be clear is not an expectation you had control over, as you are not simonw). I'm familiar with this pattern from all the rest of my trying frontier ML results!

Yep, I ran it on an old windows 10 VM I had puttering about.

I think it must have a default link styling somewhere, as some links are the classic blue that as far as I know I intentionally styled to be black- but this could be css spaghetti in tufte.css finally coming to haunt me.
by jjcm | 2026-01-27 21:59:51+00:00
The comparison to make here is that a journal submission is effectively a pull request to humanities scientific knowlegde base. That PR has to be reviewed. We're already seeing the effects of this with open source code - the number of PR submissions have skyrocketed, overwhelming maintainers.

This is still a good step in a direction of AI assisted research, but as you said, for the moment it creates as many problems as it solves.
by gwbas1c | 2026-01-27 21:59:54+00:00
What's nice about this is that it allows for programmatic CAD, enabling things like web applications that can download an .stl file based on user input. I hope I can find a weekend or two to play with it.

BTW: I spent a few weekends playing with Microcad (https://microcad.xyz/). It was cool, and had a similar rust feel. I just, for the life of me, couldn't figure out how to do 3d ellipses.
by maxkfranz | 2026-01-27 22:00:11+00:00
A more apt example would have been to show finding a particular paper you want to cite, but you don’t want to be bothered searching your reference manager or Google Scholar.

E.g. “cite that paper from John Doe on lorem ipsum, but make sure it’s the 2022 update article that I cited in one of my other recent articles, not the original article”
by tromp | 2026-01-27 22:00:25+00:00
> For the chess problem we propose the estimate number_of_typical_games ~ typical_number_of_options_per_movetypical_number_of_moves_per_game. This equation is subjective, in that it isn’t yet justified beyond our opinion that it might be a good estimate.

This applies to most if not all games. In our paper "A googolplex of Go games" [1], we write

"Estimates on the number of ‘practical’ n × n games take the form b^l where b and l are estimates on the number of choices per turn (branching factor) and game length, respectively. A reasonable and minimally-arbitrary
upper bound sets b = l = n^2, while for a lower bound, values of b = n and l = (2/3)n^2 seem both reasonable and not too arbitrary. This gives us bounds for the ill-defined number P19 of ‘practical’ 19x19 games of
10^306 < P19 < 10^924
Wikipedia’s page on Game complexity[5] combines a somewhat high estimate of b = 250 with an unreasonably low estime of l = 150 to arrive at a not unreasonable 10^360 games."

[1] https://matthieuw.github.io/go-games-number/AGoogolplexOfGoG...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity#Complexities_o...
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-27 22:01:13+00:00
I’ve been hearing this type of talk from dedicated pro Trump friends. I don’t quite understand their logic, but it is something like having the Dollar crash so the federal reserve goes away. But I don’t get what the goal is. If the Dollar crashes, America would permanently lose its unique position with being the controller of the global reserve currency. And the American citizens who hold US Dollars will be a lot poorer. I’m not even sure the recent shifts in USD have actually reflected the true risks of the national debt, so it could fall a lot more than where it is presently.

Is there actually some strategy here? Or is it just that Trump doesn’t care because his family is getting so much richer that changes in the Dollar’s value don’t matter to them?
by ge96 | 2026-01-27 22:01:43+00:00
SketchUp was my go to for a while but I'm done with parametric personally, trying to fix meshes for 3D printing... time I grow up and use something like Fusion360 seems like or onshape. Still it was good/simple enough for non-round shapes in SketchUp except they have some kind of memory leak/bug at least for the 2017 version. But I guess quit being cheap and buy a modern copy on my part.

Edit: oh I guess sketchup is a surface modeler weird thought it was parametric this whole time, lol someone else said it's a polygon modeler

Yeah I don't know what parametric modeling is apparently, I use a mouse/calipers to model stuff not parameters

There is a solid validator plugin you use before you export an STL to make sure the mesh is closed/a manifold
by danso | 2026-01-27 22:01:56+00:00
The Dept of Homeland Security has had its own internal gen-AI chat bot since before Trump took office [0]. That this guy couldn’t make do with that, and didn’t think through the repercussions of uploading non-public documents to a public chatbot doesn’t bode well for his ability to manage CISA

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/archive/news/2024/12/17/dhss-responsible...
by alexfoo | 2026-01-27 22:02:05+00:00
Clever spammers (there are some!) see the presence of company@<domain> and assume the user will have similar emails for other accounts, so it might be worth trying ebays scams to ebay@<domain> or banking scams to chase@<domain> or boa@<domain>. Sending is cheap so why not, you're not trying to fool everyone, only a few.

I use a unique string per company but it's not guessable in advance, but it's obvious when looking at it and squinting a bit, for example (and these are not the exact ones I use): sundclod@<domain> or ebuy@<domain> or amzoon@<domain>

Sure I have to remember them but it's easy for me to check and my password manager is filling them in for me 99.99% of the time.

I can filter on those emails instead, and I also know that anything coming to soundcloud@<domain> or ebay@<domain> or amazon@<domain> is definitely spam as I've never used those addresses myself.

If sundclod@<domain> appears in a leak I can (hopefully) change my account email at Soundcloud to sondclud@<domain> and then confine sundclod@<domain> to /dev/null
by bartread | 2026-01-27 22:02:20+00:00
You're very sensible, and that seems like an absolutely foolproof way of solving the problem.

I went through a stage where I'd keep the multitool on my belt because the carry case comes with a handy belt loop but, depending on what you're doing, it can dig in to your side/front/back or catch on things, which is annoying, and in a lot of contexts it's perhaps just one level of dweebiness too far. And, yes, I absolutely am a dweeb and have zero shame about it, but there are contexts where I need to mask at least to some extent in order to be taken seriously/function effectively which I've accepted as a "cost of doing business".
by plorg | 2026-01-27 22:02:33+00:00
Journalists doing ride alongs have already identified the system and it doesn't really on "restricted databases", they rely on observation and multiple attestation. In any case, there are indeed commercial services for looking up license plate data, and they rely on watching the notices that are published when you register your vehicle. It's the same reason why you receive all sorts of scammy warranty "notices" when you buy a car.

In fact the first clue that they look for is having Illinois Permanent plates because that is a strong indicator that they are using rental vehicles. That doesn't take a database, it's just a strong signal that can be confirmed by other evidence.
by criddell | 2026-01-27 22:02:45+00:00
Your kids are (and should be) doing all kinds of things you have no idea about. It’s part of becoming an adult. I’m sure you modeled all the right behaviors, and provided every advantage you could. That helps, but you’re influence is waning and their friends influence is building and it’s all manipulated by the thousands of PhD’s working for TikTok and the other social media companies. You’re outgunned.
by ezst | 2026-01-27 22:03:16+00:00
Sure, but now we can't even assume that such research is submitted in good faith anymore. There just seems to be no perfect solution.

Maybe something like a "hierarchy/DAG? of trusted-peers", where groups like universities certify the relevance and correctness of papers by attaching their name and a global reputation score to it. When it's found that the paper is "undesirable" and doesn't pass a subsequent review, their reputation score deteriorates (with the penalty propagating along the whole review chain), in such a way that:

- the overall review model is distributed, hence scalable (everybody may play the certification game and build a reputation score while doing so)
- trusted/established institutions have an incentive to keep their global reputation score high and either put a very high level of scrutiny to the review, or delegate to very reputable peers
- "bad actors" are immediately punished and universally recognized as such
- "bad groups" (such as departments consistently spamming with low quality research) become clearly identified as such within the greater organisation (the university), which can encourage a mindset of quality above quantity
- "good actors within a bad group" are not penalised either because they could circumvent their "bad group" on the global review market by having reputable institutions (or intermediaries) certify their good work

There are loopholes to consider, like a black market of reputation trading (I'll pay you generously to sacrifice a bit of your reputation to get this bad science published), but even that cannot pay off long-term in an open system where all transactions are visible.

Incidentally, I think this may be a rare case where a blockchain makes some sense?
by cvoss | 2026-01-27 22:03:20+00:00
I once programmed my TI-84 calculator to do exactly this! The only missing thing was a circuit to convert the audio jack output voltage into the needed form for an antenna. I had the CS know-how but no EE know-how, so I never got it to work. It was fun to dream about confusing my high school's clocks though. (Sadly, the other obstacle was that the clocks only listened for the signal overnight, which improved their chances of detecting the weak broadcast out of far-away Colorado.)
by wyldberry | 2026-01-27 22:03:25+00:00
They are using the tactics and techniques of the insurgencies we watched. It's visible by anyone with eyes and training. This isn't a values placement on if what they are doing is just or not. It's because the tactics are effective, and they impede federal enforcement of laws. Of course there will be an investigation into it.

It will also likely come with more attempts to have laws for backdoor encryption so yay we have to fight that down the road again.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-27 22:03:43+00:00
> unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.

You can demand answers from Congress, but until a significant portion of the GOP base demands answers, they are just going to ignore your demands. As of now 39% of Americans support the administration. Also, you can't hold SCOTUS responsible, only Congress can.