MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cdad5b1 | 2026-01-18 15:44:14+00:00
We find it fascinating how half of the country that was screaming “insurrection” now openly talks about overthrowing the government and this is “a resistance!” now.

It reinforces our belief that left wing has total disregard of the laws, thinks it can pick and choose which one to follow and openly, at the highest level, advocate for ignoring inconvenient to their agenda federal laws.

We would also hardly call the protest peaceful when people are chased with picks and shovels, rammed with vehicles and have firearms pointed at them.

Obviously Minnesota thinks it is special and wants to burn itself down to protect the right of 30m illegals immigrants to be in the country .
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-18 15:44:21+00:00
Just because a calculator can do math faster than Isaac Newton doesn't mean it's intelligent.

Exactly, and that's the whole point. If you lack genuine mathematical reasoning skill, a calculator won't help you at the IMO. You might as well bring a house plant or a teddy bear.

But if you bring a GPT5-class LLM, you can walk away with a gold medal without having any idea what you're doing.

Consequently, analogies involving calculators are not valid. The burden of proof rests firmly on the shoulders of those who claim that an LLM couldn't invent new mathematical techniques in response to a problem that requires it.

In fact, that appears to have just happened (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664631), where an out-of-distribution proof for an older problem was found.
by wpm | 2026-01-18 15:44:42+00:00
Imagine you drop your laptop from a standing height onto a hard surface.

Metal will bend and deform. Dent.

Plastic will yield, then crack.

You can then replace the cracked component, because the plastic took the vast majority of the force so the metal frame on the inside that holds everything together is fine. Same way you have squishy muscle to absorb impacts that might break your bones. Same way cars have crumple zones.

I've been a Mac user primarily for 20 years. I've had or used extensively every generation of PowerBook and MacBook since the G4. I have two Thinkpads (T420, A485) and they both feel as solid as anything I've had from Apple, except when my MacBook Air slid off my couch onto its back corner, it misaligned the lid permanently, and my Thinkpads bounced.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-18 15:45:17+00:00
Random person: Hey guys, I used my prusa 3d 4932q3 to build this toy replica airplane, check it out.

You: Oh yeah!? Bbbbut how about when your toy airplane has to fly at mach 23 through a warzone and be shot at by AA guns and laser sharks and all the other fighter jets, huh? Will your toy work then? Ha?! Your prusa sux!!!

Come on man, use your energy on something else. Stop fighting imagined monsters online.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-01-18 15:45:22+00:00
A kvm hypervisor is not perfect, as sandbox escape was demonstrated even with https://qubes-os.org/ . On modern AMD/Intel/ARM64 consumer processors it is not possible to completely prevent bleeding keys across regions.

Only the old Sun systems with hardware encrypted mmu pages could actually enforce context isolation.

If performance is not important, and people are dealing with something particularly nasty... than running an emulator on another architecture is a better solution. For example, MacOS M4 with a read-only windows amd64 backing-image guest OS is a common configuration.

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

https://github.com/Moonif/MacBox/releases

Best of luck =3
by JPLeRouzic | 2026-01-18 15:45:45+00:00
In 2022 M. Macron decided to dismantle the diplomatic body.

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/04/18/refo...

Sometimes he looks as the French counterpart to Mr Trump.

https://mondediplo.com/2024/07/03macron-international
by gnosis67 | 2026-01-18 15:45:59+00:00
Your complaint is well warranted, yet know as one on the other inside, Americans are apathetic and dejected. It is the mob that professes these self delusions as their own. And Americans are not self aware enough to distinguish the mob heads from their own and in the heat of exchange.

The individual American goes along with the strongest voice in their head. There have been a valiant few, this is a time of self satisfying rhetoric. Sweet lies over bitter truths, on all sides.

Now, the seeds of hypocrisy long since sewn, blossom into a mass mind sickness of self identity we see today. On all sides. Every side, even those twelve sides deep you would not recognize.

Power is everyone’s burden, it may only be delegated irresponsibly for so long before it collapses upon itself.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 15:46:29+00:00
Broadly agree, but one point I think is (sadly) relevant:

> That LLMs do a better job if you know what you are asking for is old news.

Even a decade after Word Lens had demonstrated augmented reality live translation through a smartphone camera, I was amazing people by showing them the same feature in Google Translate.

Similar anecdotes about Shakuntala Devi, even in 2018 I was seeing claims about her mental arithmetic beating a supercomputer (claims that ignored that this happened in 1977 and the computer was already obsolete at the time), even though my mid-2013 MacBook Air could not only beat her by a factor of 150 million, it could also train an AI to read handwritten numbers from scratch in 0.225 seconds, and then perform inference (read numbers) at just over 6,629 digits per second*.

You say "old news", I say this discussion will be on repeat even in the early 2030s. And possibly even the 2060s.

* Uses an old version of python, you'll need to fix it up accordingly: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/03/16-10.44.18.html
by businessmate | 2026-01-18 15:46:39+00:00
This technical annex defines mandatory evidentiary controls for the capture and separation of AI-generated statements and contemporaneous monetized interface elements in consumer-facing AI systems.

The protocol is procedural and non-evaluative. It does not assess influence, materiality, intent, or causation. Its sole objective is reconstructability: enabling independent parties to determine what was presented to a user, when it was presented, and under what observable interface conditions.
This annex is intended to supplement evidentiary governance frameworks concerned with AI-mediated representations and reliance analysis.
by westurner | 2026-01-18 15:47:01+00:00
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663105 (flagged?) :

> There are a number of different types of counterfactuals;
Describe the different types of counterfactuals in statistics: Classical counterfactuals, Pearl's counterfactuals, Quantum counterfactuals, Constructor theory counterfactuals

Why did the author believe that that counterfactual model was appropriate for this?
by clcaev | 2026-01-18 15:48:53+00:00
Pharma ads as AI health advice will be super profitable. AIs are very engaging and able convince people they have a disease, inadvertently coach them on how to mislead their doctor, and how to fast track diagnosis supporting their specific meds. The only guard is to have detailed manifest of exactly what was used in training. Even that may prove insufficient as "final assembly" has emergent properties. For example, omitting case reports of severe outcomes for a given formulation. Bias can be constructed.
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-18 15:49:21+00:00
is this realistic?

replace the worker in the middle and nothing stands between your favorite worst nightmare and the customers/reality you want. atm devs and workers are inside. even if they abide by "job security", "planned obsolescence" and building in 7 microphones and boatloads of code to record and track users and their behavior, these people are still inside and talk to each other and the rest of the world.

Once they are replaced, the right to repair, privacy and so on will vanish and we will be punished for disassembling hardware and software in worse ways than happened to that guy who did the PS3 back then (I don't know of any other stories, unfortunately). I heard that they already run the narrative "you bought a game but it's still ours" ..., which seems like the second or third step towards the direction outlined above.

I fear the same will happen to food, pharma ... not necesserily because the top of the pyramid is "evil" but because there are only so many ways to keep increasing the increase of their wealth. A lot of conspiratorial stuff IS happening, and the sick and damaged and neuro and bio divergent with all their sensitivities are livestock so why not "create" more? at least for some time ... until all is "Incorporated" as in "applying for the permit have children".
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-01-18 15:49:29+00:00
I am going to offer an unpopular opinion. This is not a bad thing.

Even now there are viable options for a person to pick up a dedicated ( and reasonably powerful ) local inference machine, where time from setup to working is than few hours ( more if you don't want to use Windows.. which is fair ).

Separately, about the chat sessions. For once, those ads could be more relevant than repeat toaster ads immediately after me buying a toaster. But if one is worried about profiling ( and advertising ), one should not using a commercial solution anyway. Personally, I am taking a.. calculated risk.

There is a concern that openai will follow the same path as google, but they can't ( at least for now ) really afford to make chatgpt not useful as this is their only viable product.

I will end with a more optimistic note. This is HN. There are people here, who are likely working on something that does not depend on openai or any of the big providers anyway. It is going to be ok. And if it won't be. Make it so. After all, this is supposed to be your realm. Own it.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-18 15:49:44+00:00
This is likely confounded by the dealership model. Dealers have practically zero incentive to sell affordable cars, and especially not EVs that they’ll make almost no servicing money on. Some dealers also stock only a handful of EVs (or none) so they may not even have them to sell in the first place.

It’d be nice if affordable EV models were available from direct to consumer companies. If one could go online and buy a $22k electric hatchback that shows up in your driveway with zero haggling, it’s difficult to imagine it not selling well.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-18 15:50:00+00:00
"it seems that the pinnacle of human intelligence: the greatest, smartest, brightest minds have all come together to... build us another ad engine"

Putting aside the ridiculous hyperbole, the reason is that consumerism is our culture. Our cult-ure. Everything is oriented toward and reduced to consumption. Our worth as human beings is replaced by consumerist criteria and measures. It's why physicists leave research and work in finance where their training is repurposed in service of all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery.

"The A in AGI stands for Ads! It's all ads!! Ads that you can't even block because they are BAKED into the streamed probabilistic word selector purposefully skewed to output the highest bidder's marketing copy."

But note the implication. Sure, ads weaved into the content, but they still must be targeted. And here's the irony of the online existence. People often refrain from expressing various desires in public for fear of judgement. It's why the vitriol online is so much spicier. The world of social media where you can express repressed opinions, the world of games and other ahem media where you can sublimate all sorts of desires and fantasies - all of this is data for the AI machine. These companies, in some respects, "know" you better than the people in your life do - especially those parts of you that you could be embarrassed to reveal in public - and they use this information to manipulate you, largely for profit, but why not for broader social and psychological control. AI's convenience is already irresistible. It's the go-to in Google search.
by chatmasta | 2026-01-18 15:50:26+00:00
I find it works pretty well, at least that I’m consistently surprised I have any signal at all. Sometimes I need to disable private relay to get it to work with all the switchovers. There’s also frequent swapping between the 5G signal and the Wi-Fi that comes auto-enabled on my phone by my carrier who provides a client certificate entitling me to it.

I’m not sure about the privacy implications of this whole setup. It’s basically turned the underground into a surveillance dragnet that can hoover up all sorts of interesting metadata… hostnames, hardware identifiers, traveling patterns, DNS queries, SNI requests… and an untold amount of unencrypted communications across weird protocols and devices..
Show HN: DownloadStuffs – search, preview, and download from Internet Archive
by dawitworku | 2026-01-18 15:50:38+00:00
Hi HN,

I built [DownloadStuffs](https://downloadstuffss.vercel.app/), a fast and modern web app for searching, previewing, and downloading content from the Internet Archive.

It’s designed to make browsing and downloading easier, with features like:

- Real server-side pagination (accurate total pages)
- Media-type filtering (movies, audio, texts, software, etc.)
- Beautiful, responsive result cards
- Item detail pages with custom video/audio/image previews
- “Back to results” button to keep your search query, page, and filters
- Download proxy endpoint to avoid CORS issues and make downloads reliable

The app is built with *TypeScript + Bun*, and can be run locally or used directly via the live demo: [https://downloadstuffss.vercel.app/](https://downloadstuffss.vercel.app/)

I’d love feedback from the community on:

- UI/UX improvements
- Performance optimizations
- Additional features you’d like for browsing Internet Archive

*FAQ:*
- No, it’s not affiliated with the Internet Archive. It only uses their public endpoints.
- Some items may not play if they lack stream-friendly files or are restricted.

Thanks for checking it out!
by windexh8er | 2026-01-18 15:51:06+00:00
This isn't really true anymore. Most notable creators have "sponsored" content somewhere and ads in platforms don't have to be an explicit, traditional ad. Product placement for the sake of no other reason than product placement is also advertising.

YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly.

Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway.

At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
by epistasis | 2026-01-18 15:51:39+00:00
Thanks for linking that Rivian document later, but I think it doesn't support this claim. I'll stick with it's weird 155,000 mile lifetime for the comparison.

Rivian: 60,140 kg carbon per lifetime.

F150, at 20mpg: 78,740 kg carbon, for fuel alone.

So even ignoring the embodied carbon in an ICE vehicle, and paying comparatively high embodied CO2 cost of a new Rivian, it's better to switch immediately, (if CO2 were the sole concern, which it never is.)
by kelipso | 2026-01-18 15:51:48+00:00
I’m not saying the LLM will give a good confidence value, maybe it will maybe it won’t, it would depend on its training, but why is making it produce the confidence value in the same token stream as the actual task a flawed strategy?

That’s how typical classification and detection CNNs work. Class and confidence value along with bounding box for detection CNNs.
Show HN: Open-source certificate from GitHub activity
by brendonmatos | 2026-01-18 15:52:05+00:00
I built this as a small side project to learn and experiment, and I ended up with this!

I used a subdomain from my personal portfolio, and everything else runs on free tiers.

The project uses Nuxt, SVG, Cloudflare Workers, D1 (SQL), KV, Terraform, and some agentic coding with OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

What started as a joke among friends turned into a fun excuse to build something end to end, from zero to production, and to explore a few things
I’d never touched before.

I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
by fweimer | 2026-01-18 15:52:22+00:00
I saw weird results with Gemini 2.5 Pro when I asked it to provide concrete source code examples matching certain criteria, and to quote the source code it found verbatim. It said it in its response quoted the sources verbatim, but that wasn't true at all—they had been rewritten, still in the style of the project it was quoting from, but otherwise quite different, and without a match in the Git history.

It looked a bit like someone at Google subscribed to a legal theory under which you can avoid copyright infringement if you take a derivative work and apply a mechanical obfuscation to it.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-18 15:53:35+00:00
I don't know about Swift, but in C++, the complexity serves at least three purposes:

1. Backwards compatibility, in particular syntax-wise. New language-level functionality is introduced without changing existing syntax, but by exploiting what had been mal-formed instructions.

2. Catering to the principle of "you don't pay for what you don't use" - and that means that the built-ins are rather spartan, and for convenience you have to build up complex structures of code yourself.

3. A multi-paradigmatic approach and multiple, sometimes conflicting, usage scenarios for features (which detractors might call "can't make up your mind" or "design by committee").

The crazy thing is that over the years, the added complexity makes the code for many tasks simpler than it used to be. It may involve a lot of complexity in libraries and under-the-hood, but paradoxically, and for the lay users, C++ can be said to have gotten simpler. Until you have to go down the rabbit hole of course.
by toddmorey | 2026-01-18 15:53:37+00:00
OpenAI is here because Sam Altman is NOT a product guy. He craves Apple style consumer success, but he's terrible at productizing his technology. Remember the marketplace of custom GPTs? Hell even the name ChatGPT. Anthropic had to show them how to build useful workflows for developers using AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI delivered... Sora.

To actually quote Sam Altman: "I think of ads as a last resort for a business model."

It's just maddening to me because this technology could be so much more useful for purposes way beyond advertising.
by kccqzy | 2026-01-18 15:54:19+00:00
No that’s wrong. If I’m looking at a photograph, then 000000 should look like 000000 and FFFFFF should look like FFFFFF. Sure FFFFFF is just blown highlights but that’s the photographer’s intention. Maybe I’m the photographer and I’m developing the RAW photo myself, and I need to see which settings result in such blown highlights.

But UI elements are different. UI designers should exercise restraint and not utilize the entire brightness range of my display. Setting the brightness and contrast from the display is wrong because it doesn’t know what kind of image is being displayed.
by megous | 2026-01-18 15:55:02+00:00
Cheapish (~$1000) thinkpad E14 gen7 (AMD) variant has battery life of >24h (reading/typing in vim). At least according to power meter, not that I'd read or type that long.

And everything works on it on Linux, even obscure things like fingerprint sensor, various bizarro Fn key combos, all the various HW accelerations (video encode/decode via vaapi), etc. I didn't find anything that would not work.
by the_biot | 2026-01-18 15:55:15+00:00
I did catch one vendor using a HAL across a whole SoC product line, a very low-level HAL that sat between SoC hardware registers and kernel drivers. It effectively made the drivers use scrambled register locations on the AHB etc, but if you resolved what the HAL did, the registers matched ARM's UART etc IP. So I figured they were ducking license fees for ARM peripherals.
by IshKebab | 2026-01-18 15:55:19+00:00
> On the other hand, even RVA23 is quite poor at signed overflow checking.

On the other hand it avoids integer flags which is nice. I doubt it makes a measurable performance impact either way on modern OoO CPUs. There's going to be no data dependence on the extra instructions needed to calculate overflow except for the branch, which will be predicted not-taken, so the other instructions after it will basically always run speculatively in parallel with the overflow-checking instructions.
by sgarland | 2026-01-18 15:55:55+00:00
Also, anything under 16 vCPUs generally has baseline / burst bandwidth, with the burst being best-effort, 5-60 minutes.

This has, at multiple companies for me, been the cause of surprise incidents, where people were unaware of this fact and were then surprised when the bandwidth suddenly plummeted by 50% or more after a sustained load.
by westurner | 2026-01-18 15:56:16+00:00
An adjacent design validation question on a green chip factory and product design:

Will Phytic acid in Lignin-Vitrimer encase burning CNT carbon nanotubes in a phosphorous char cage, this preventing health hazards and combustion?

This says "phosphorous epoxy".

FR4 silicon PCBs are N-doped and P-doped.
by hmokiguess | 2026-01-18 15:57:19+00:00
Tangential, but this reminds of the older K website when it used to be shakti.com that had an intro like this in their about section:

1K rows: use excel

1M rows: use pandas/polars

1B rows: use shakti

1T rows: only shakti

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230331180931/https://shakti.co...
by bicepjai | 2026-01-18 15:58:35+00:00
I If I had to choose an online community that resonates with me, it would be Hacker News. For years, it's served as my muse, therapist, book club, and intellectual playground; all rolled into one. I deeply value the culture it fosters, especially the emphasis on thoughtful discussion.

Paul Graham’s essay "How to Disagree" remains essential reading for anyone engaging in online discourse . It provides a clear framework for constructive debate, and I agree that posts falling into the lowest forms of disagreement (ad hominem attacks or name calling) deserve to be flagged.

Yet, I share your concern, sometimes a post isn’t inherently bad, but attracts low quality replies. Flagging the entire thread in such cases feels disproportionate like amputating a limb just because there’s an itch you can’t scratch. It risks silencing potentially valuable discussion due to the behavior of a few.

I empathize with the moderators. Their job is thankless and difficult, and I appreciate that the warnings we see aren’t automated bots but messages from real humans trying their best. We all have limits and that’s ok.
by p-e-w | 2026-01-18 15:59:00+00:00
Every time this topic comes up people compare the LLM to a search engine of some kind.

But as far as we know, the proof it wrote is original. Tao himself noted that it’s very different from the other proof (which was only found now).

That’s so far removed from a “search engine” that the term is essentially nonsense in this context.
by jongjong | 2026-01-18 15:59:45+00:00
It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed.