MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-29 08:01:32+00:00
The two major US parties are in the midst of another swap of which is conservative and which is liberal.

Marin County California, probably the area most heavily voting for the Democrat party, is clearly the most classically conservative part of the country, allowing almost no development and strongly objecting to even the slightest offenses in speech, whereas rural counties in the south want classically liberal safety nets and protections and heavily vote for the Republican party.
by mayama | 2026-01-29 08:03:07+00:00
> These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.

CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.
by TOMDM | 2026-01-29 08:03:35+00:00
> Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video.

Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.

My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.

Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
by trhway | 2026-01-29 08:03:48+00:00
Vets castrating an animal under anesthesia pales in comparison to male calves castration by using tight rubber band (AMZN sells them too) to cut the blood supply to scrotum and thus causing necrosis and ultimately scrotum and testicles falling off. Without any anesthesia. A widespread, most popular, practice in US. The animal suffers tremendous pain for several weeks. The true cost of beef.
by AdamN | 2026-01-29 08:03:53+00:00
They're all going to move that way - it's sort of fundamental to PassKey. It can be done with just a laptop and their built in hardware but I suspect that since everybody has a mobile phone the UX will be built around that more often than not.

I quite like it though. At one of my banks I don't even use a password. My browser has the right material (from a prior authn) and then it pushes a validation request to my phone and with FaceID I'm in.
by ted_dunning | 2026-01-29 08:04:09+00:00
I don't even think it is correct. Teslas as a whole have twice the fatality rate [1] per billion miles as the industry overall and the model Y has a rate 4x the industry average, but that can't overwhelm the fact that there are too few Teslas on the road to make that 2x or 4x turn into more total fatalities.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
by tim333 | 2026-01-29 08:04:33+00:00
The original the article is spoofing is interviewers asking Huang about the narrative that:

>It's the jobs and employment. Nobody's going to be able to work again. It's God AI is going to solve every problem. It's we shouldn't have open source for XYZ... https://youtu.be/k-xtmISBCNE?t=1436

and he says a "end of the world narrative science fiction narrative" is hurtful.
by piva00 | 2026-01-29 08:05:48+00:00
It's actually bizarre how seemingly nothing impacts $TSLA: profits down 46%, revenue down 3%, cutting successful product lines that used to sell quite a bit, a massively failed product in the Cybertruck, FSD promises still unfulfilled, and on top of all that US$ 2 billion siphoned away to another unrelated company.

With all of that, the stock closed upwards on the after market hours. Perhaps only Musk's death could cause it to tank, would have never expected to see a cult of personality being run on the top of S&P 500 market caps, what a strange world...
by pjmlp | 2026-01-29 08:06:29+00:00
Some other ones, in case you aren't aware of.

Oberon,

https://www.projectoberon.net

Go,

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/2bd7f15dd7423b6817939b199c...

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/2bd7f15dd7423b6817939b199c...

D,

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/tree/master/druntime/src/core/i...

Or even Smalltalk,

https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm/blob/pharo-10/smal...
by testfrequency | 2026-01-29 08:07:11+00:00
Wasn’t aware of this.

Master con man play. Every. Single. Time. There’s blood in the water, he knows to drop outlandish forward claims just to keep the stock from dipping, his legion takes the bait. Justifies why it’s good the company is bad at x,y,z because the technology is “so good”.

Meanwhile, what does ship is always broken and poor quality.
by senko | 2026-01-29 08:07:48+00:00
I try to balance being informed and ignoring the mostly irrelevant hot topics du jour.

My approach:

* world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date

* local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM

* Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing)

* ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day

I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop"

I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)
by mcv | 2026-01-29 08:08:38+00:00
...generate piles of low quality content for almost free.

AI is fascinating technology with undoubtedly fantastic applications in the future, but LLMs mostly seem to be doing two things: provide a small speedup for high quality work, and provide a massive speedup to low quality work.

I don't think it's comparable to the plow or the phone in its impact on society, unless that impact will be drowning us in slop.
by Wurdan | 2026-01-29 08:09:41+00:00
At a ratio of 10:1, at least in my experience, there's no time for those managers to be hands on with the work and keeping their engineering skills current. I don't personally feel that's a problem, but reading other comments on this post it seems like many HN readers do have an issue with engineering managers who don't keep their tech skills sharp.

For the past year I've only had three direct reports, which would have been too few to keep me occupied if I wasn't also acting tech lead.

IMHO, if you want engineering managers who can occasionally do hands-on things, you probably want a ratio around 6/7:1
by ben_w | 2026-01-29 08:12:25+00:00
Which is exactly the problem.

The stock is priced on expectations of how many humanoid robots they might sell over the next decade.

Those expectations in turn treat humanoid robotics as if Tesla is the only game in town, when Tesla's Optimus is not yet available for purchase and other companies already ship.

Then someone brings up the value of Tesla's AI to those robots, and here's my response to that to save re-writing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799603
by Mawr | 2026-01-29 08:13:08+00:00
If you think it is, take your hands of the wheel and close your eyes. Fall asleep at the wheel. Not willing to do so? I guess your car isn't really driving you everywhere.

Your view on how stocks work is interesting as well — you realize most of the investors are regular, uninformed non-techies who invest based on vibes, right? Vibes like "my car is driving me everywhere, this is the future!" — the exact same thoughtless, surface-level analysis you're going off of.

Therefore, you're trying to beat the market by using the exact same reasoning 99% of its investors have used. Good luck.
by uejfiweun | 2026-01-29 08:13:17+00:00
Thank you for the explanation. I guess the thing I don't understand is what exactly the problems are that you are seeing. We've all heard the stories of wooden parts in initial production runs of Tesla models, sure. But it does seem like they iron out these kinks over time. Maybe I'm biased because I'm in the bay area, but it seems like every 3rd car you see on the highway is a Tesla, and lots of my coworkers speak very highly of theirs that they own. It just doesn't seem to me like there is actually a quality issue here?

If anything, ending production of SX and giving more focus to 3Y would probably increase the quality of those models, I'd imagine.

If you're pointing to Autopilot / camera-only as the main transgression here, yeah I'll agree that they have definitely overpromised, but it doesn't really seem to me like the lack of a L5 system is actually a deal-breaker for anyone, because from what I hear they are just damn good cars anyway.
by 0xdeafbeef | 2026-01-29 08:14:16+00:00
Bftree solves one non-obvious pain point - caching when your data set is random (the key is a hash) and the data is smaller than the page size. LSM reads are based on block size; same with caching. So if your record is 8 bytes, you end up caching the remaining ~4 KB, and the hit rate will be pretty low.
by spc476 | 2026-01-29 08:14:24+00:00
I'm checking the TTL of IP packets, which is only 8-bits in size, and in practice, are decremented per hop (the early IPv4 RFCs state it is in seconds; I doubt it was ever used that way). DNS TTLs are 32-bits in size and represent the number of seconds a DNS record can be cached, They are separate from the TTL of IP packets. The TTL for CDNs is specified in HTTP headers and again has its own specification.

Getting back to TTLs for IP packets---I recalled the recommended TTL of 64 from admittedly years ago. I just now checked my copy of _TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1_ by W. R. Stevens, published in 1994, so yeah, a few decades ago. Of all the Unix systems mentioned in that volume, they all defaulted to a TTL of 60, except for Solaris 2.2, which used 255 (surprised me!). I no longer have access to Solaris to check (did at my previous job) but I don't think there are many people using Solaris to view my site.

I've checked the page you linked, and they don't link to the source for the table given, where the various values of TTL denote forwarding scope or range, nor have I ever seen such a table before. I know my Linux and Mac OS-X systems use TTLs less than 70, and I can get content from other continents. My comment on that: [citation needed].

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_live) at least links to references, so I found a list of TTLs per OS (https://web.archive.org/web/20130212114759/http://www.map.me...), but given the OSes listed, it's probably also from a few decades ago, but the majority are around 60, with Windows NT being 128, Solaris 255 and VMS anywhere from 60 to 128 (depending on version). So the TTLs being over 100 makes sense for what I was seeing---possibly a bunch of zombie Window boxes participating in a half-assed SYN attack using Brazil IPs for some reason. I can't say I'm horribly upset at that. But actual readers on Windows is concerning. I have no easy way to test for that, and I'd hate to go back to having ~100 half-open connections on my server.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-29 08:17:39+00:00
I'm extremely concerned about the implications. We are going to have to restructure a lot of things about society and the software we use.

And like anything else, it will be a tool in the elite's toolbox of oppression. But it will also be a tool in the hands of the people. Unless anti-AI sentiment gets compromised and redirected such that support for limiting access to capable generative models to the State and research facilities.

The hate I am referring to is often more ideological, about the usage of these models from a purity standpoint. That only bad engineers use them, or that their utility is completely overblown, etc. etc.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-29 08:20:33+00:00
> > assuming no additional countervailing policy changes

> When you add this qualifier who is disagreeing?

Anyone who disagrees that tariffs are inflationary. If you enact them, price level increases are produced which are sustained unless some other event unrelated to the tariffs introduces a deflationary effect which offsets the inflationary effect of the tariffs.
by nusl | 2026-01-29 08:23:14+00:00
Really shitty to see how greed and money corrupts everything.

"Use our payment system"

"No thanks, our current system works just fine"

".. or get kicked off our store"

"Okay, I guess I'll do it then"

"Okay you're on our payment system; we take 30% off all purchased using our payment system."

"Get fucked"
by Tor3 | 2026-01-29 08:24:03+00:00
"I wonder if it's still in AIX."

lslpp -l|grep -i motif
X11.adt.motif 7.1.5.31 COMMITTED AIXwindows Application
Development Toolkit Motif
X11.compat.lib.X11R6_motif
7.1.5.31 COMMITTED AIXwindows X11R6 Motif 1.2 &
X11.motif.lib 7.1.5.31 COMMITTED AIXwindows Motif Libraries
X11.motif.mwm 7.1.1.0 COMMITTED AIXwindows Motif Window
X11.msg.en_US.motif.lib 7.1.3.0 COMMITTED AIXwindows Motif Lib. Msgs -
X11.msg.en_US.motif.mwm 7.1.3.0 COMMITTED AIX Motif Window Mgr Msgs -

oslevel -r
7100-03
by bambax | 2026-01-29 08:24:06+00:00
We have been taught in high school that the reason humans and "all mammals" had external testes was to cool them. But elephants have internal testicles, and, apparently, so do hippos. This seems a much better strategy than having such an important (and sensitive!) organ hanging out at the mercy of predators, foes, or even banal accidents. The evolution explanation for this appears to be lacking.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-01-29 08:24:39+00:00
About 20 years ago, so yes, I might be a little out of date ;)

I've seen it happen time and again with startups, though. They have a great idea, perfect for a large business to use. They get a project manager or department manager excited about it, they even run a PoC successfully. And then they slap headfirst into the Procurement Wall and the whole project grinds to a halt. Three years between project approval and issuing a purchase order. And then 90 days between invoice and payment. Startups go bust waiting for these cogs to turn.
by ted_dunning | 2026-01-29 08:25:03+00:00
A robot vacuum costs thousands of dollars (will about a thousand) and they don't work very. There is no way that you are going to get a machine that is orders of magnitude more complex down to that price point any time soon.

A business case is not just a matter of a willing buyer. It is a buyer and a vendor who can agree on a price that works for both. You may have agreed but the physics of the matter mean that there is nobody to take the other side.
by darkwater | 2026-01-29 08:25:18+00:00
A quote from the original study [1], in which Porsche 911 is the 4th on the list

“The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities.”

I would like to remind you that Tesla's least powered vehicle has around 300HP and needs ~7s to go from 0 to 100km/h. Musk is a moron but Teslas are still good and safe vehicles.

[1] https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study
by ako | 2026-01-29 08:26:43+00:00
Even though tesla has only 2 models, i would still consider it for a new car, if not for Elon Musk. I have an Y, and it does everything i want it to do. Drives nicely, lots of (cargo) space, no friction charging when driving in Europe. Just plug it in a supercharger and it loads fast. No hassle with subscriptions and cards. Very reliable.

With the 3 and the Y they're already catering for a large part of the market demand, but a smaller model, and a stationwagon might help get it up to 80%+ of all demand.
by keiferski | 2026-01-29 08:27:18+00:00
But are the places you’re eating 1) fairly affordable and 2) quick / fast food and not a proper sit down restaurant?

I had an extremely difficult time finding places with those requirements. Everything seemed to require sitting down for at least 20-30 minutes, which didn’t fit my walking schedule.

I didn’t have the same problem in NYC or Paris, where it’s very easy to find a variety of places to grab a kebab, baguette sandwich, pizza slice, dumplings, etc.
by dhosek | 2026-01-29 08:27:20+00:00
Indeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself.

Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).
by nusl | 2026-01-29 08:27:43+00:00
This sort of anticheat exists because cheat developers ruin the experience for players, and for games that intend to be competitive in a real sense, the integrity of the game. Cheat developers keep getting smarter, so anticheat developers need to do the same. I guess the kernel is sorta as deep as you can go, at least with software.

I don't like it personally but I do understand why they do it. It just means I can't play those games on Linux, and some studios just don't care.

It's a shame that they don't care, though supporting such a minuscule percentage of the gaming market doesn't make a lot of sense unless out of principle/just do to it.
by Symbiote | 2026-01-29 08:27:45+00:00
When I was a child visiting my grandma in a large city in England, we would often take the bus to the supermarket, but use a taxi to come back with the shopping. In the 1990s some local taxi company even had a special phone by the supermarket entrance with a single button to dial to request one.

I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.
by dizhn | 2026-01-29 08:28:53+00:00
> BYD is eating Tesla for lunch

For some reason my Youtube echo chamber is trying to convince me that BYD makes so many cars but cannot sell them. It's really bizarre. Other things it's trying to convince me of "Don't get an electric car. Period", "Ukraine won. Done deal", "Trump is devastated" about something else every day. Yes I do want the latter two to be true and it's playing on that but I don't get the BYD thing.
Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?
by pigon1002 | 2026-01-29 08:29:38+00:00
I’m trying to understand where “vibe coding” realistically stands today.

The project I’m currently working on is getting close to 60k lines of code, with fairly complex business logic. From what I’ve heard, at this scale only a few tools (like Claude’s desktop app) are genuinely helpful, so I haven’t experimented much with other AI coding services.

At the same time, I keep seeing posts about people building 20k lines of code and launching a SaaS in a single 40-hour weekend. That’s made me question whether I’m being overly cautious, or just operating under outdated assumptions.

I already rely on AI quite a bit, and one clear benefit is that I now understand parts of the codebase that I previously wrote without fully grasping. Still, at my current pace, it feels like I’ll need several more months of development, followed by several more months of testing, before this can become a real production service. And that testing doesn’t feel optional.

Meanwhile, products that are described as being “vibe coded” don’t seem to be getting particularly negative evaluations.

So I’m wondering how people here think about this now.
Is “you don’t really understand the code, so it’ll hurt you later” still a meaningful criticism?
Or are we reaching a point where the default approach to building software itself needs to change?

I’d especially appreciate perspectives from people working on larger or more complex systems.
by Gym-Berlin | 2026-01-29 08:30:08+00:00
Beijing’s Middle East Gambit: Inside the Secret Meetings Redrawing Global Power
As the United States abruptly exited Afghanistan in August 2021, a seismic shockwave rippled across the Middle East and South Asia. What emerged in the aftermath was not a vacuum, but a deliberate occupation of influence. This intelligence brief uncovers how China—through quiet precision, covert diplomacy, and strategic patience—moved swiftly to reshape the region’s geopolitical architecture.
From shadow level meetings in Beijing to clandestine coordination with Moscow and Tehran, and discreet overtures to the House of Saud, China has maneuvered itself into the role of chief architect of a new regional order. The evidence points to a multi theater campaign stretching from the South China Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, engineered to weaken US alliances, empower adversarial states, and insulate the Belt and Road Initiative from disruption.
This is not a mere shift in influence.
It is a strategic rewiring of global power—and at the center of it stands the dragon.
by rswail | 2026-01-29 08:30:55+00:00
Because FSD driving not navigation is going to be held (rightly) to a much higher standard than human driving.

Humans are fallible and we have other sensors, like hearing, or touch (through feedback on the steering wheel) that are also involved in driving.

We already have other sensors that are not vision that work with us when driving like ABS and electronic stability.

The other reason it's dumb is that adding LIDAR and proper sensor fusion makes things better and the cost of LIDAR is rapidly dropping as its installed across new fleets in CN and elsewhere.
by seanhunter | 2026-01-29 08:31:00+00:00
Evolution is a process of massively parallel multistart hill-climbing where the objective function is "did this creature successfully breed". It doesn't settle on a global optimum, just finds many many local optima that enable creatures to succeed in passing on their DNA.

Why in human males is the prostate such a troublesome thing? Because by the time the prostate becomes a problem, males have generally done any breeding they're going to do, so there is no advantage to natural selection to improving it further. Is it optimal? Definitely not.

Presumably it is (taking the wide view) probably a good thing that evolution doesn't find global optima or there would be far less ecological diversity.
by ece | 2026-01-29 08:31:24+00:00
Root used to just mean knowing an admin password and rarely using it on desktop platforms for making local changes. It's changed definition for mobile if it now means just being able to run and auto-update apps from fdroid or run an app without attestation of the company that supplies the OS, which in the worst cases takes away control completely from the user.

Mobile platforms and developers solely supporting their attestation should allow other forms of self attestation that the users want. I don't think I'm confused about anything, and I don't need to muddy/change the definition of security or root to argue having control over my data and apps on platforms I want to use.
by fancyfredbot | 2026-01-29 08:32:34+00:00
Is it still a decent gamble after you've been trying (and failing) for a decade, and numerous well funded competitors are going the easy way, and when there is huge upside to being first, and when the value of FSD easily covers the rapidly falling cost of LIDAR?

No. It's not a good idea. It's not a good gamble. It's stupid, and the engineers can see it's stupid. A lot of them have quit, reducing the very slim chances of it working even further.
by MrAlex94 | 2026-01-29 08:32:57+00:00
Am I being too cynical, or does anyone else envision a future where you ask Chrome to buy you something, anything, online and instead of it actually buying you the “best” item, you end up with items it “prefers” where Google make money from suggestions and/or completion of sale?

I know it calls out that there’ll need to be user confirmation before the final purchase, but if you’re already not expending the effort to find the product or service yourself, are you really going to sit and research what it’s given you? If you are, then what’s the point of using the agent?

Just seems like the next evolution in Google’s ad revenue generation.