MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theragra | 2026-01-15 18:40:15+00:00
Weird how different people can look at things. For me, since my teenage years, statements like this feel fake and almost evil.

Why I feel this? Because it is a way for people to convince themselves they are pure and kind. People reason that the big bad evil world with evil things and professions can go to hell, and "I won't participate in this". Nice way to lie to yourself.

If you think deeper, you inevitably get a conclusion that if you have talents, you can do real good at a scale. It might be not as fulfilling, and it includes compromises, but amount of good you can do is tenfold or even several orders of magnitude.

In our modern complex world, you can try and see far consequences of your actions or inaction. For example, you can earn western SDE salary, and donate 80% to good causes. It might not be as nice as quiet country life, but it would help a lot of people or animals. That's what my friend is doing. He overdid it, sure, and burned out, but you can always find a balance.

What bothers me is that thing people who downshift into some traditional lifestyle easily do. They somehow feel like 8 billion people can live like that or close to it.

But that will cause insane downgrade of quality of life where it does matter. I'm not talking about consumerism or even experiental consumerism like travel.

Healthcare, child mortality ratez, food safety, and personal safety will be in a downfall without modern institutions, hierarchies and professions. It might be hard and often not fulfilling to be a doctor, or even a programmer. But even programmer can help create things that allow others to connect one with other (internet and phone networks), to get entertainment where options are very limited (games, movies for old people or people with disabilities). For example, my mom uses her smart speaker to provide her music and really enjoys it.

Without it, she barely used CDs because of the friction of buying, storing and inserting it.
Same with movies, she now gets to the point where she watches movies on a streaming platform. She eat he'd nothing except TV when we had VCR and DVDs because of the friction of using it.

All this is possible because of some programmers and other IT people. She also enjoys social networks to some extent, and reads stuff in web. Sure, books also do, but she is limited be ause she lives in an area with not many books available in her native language.

Modern civilization has many issues, but still a lot of benefits that are not possible if everybody would be a farmer or an artisan. Also, artisan stuff is too expensive. And same for eco farming.
by titanomachy | 2026-01-15 18:40:16+00:00
I like this poster thing. Anything that gives people a little connection to those around them.

I sometimes sit on my front step and play guitar. 9/10 people ignore me but usually I'll have one or two nice conversations with a neighbor, and have made a couple friends this way. It helps that I live in a dense walkable place with lots of people who are similar to me.
by eschaton | 2026-01-15 18:40:53+00:00
GBSCSI and ZuluSCSI support “initiator mode” that can be used to either image an attached SCSI disk to a file on an SD card or provide live access to it over USB as a mass storage device—with better performance than the old USB 1.1 SCSI adapters too, which top out at about 750KB/sec.
by CalRobert | 2026-01-15 18:41:21+00:00
I’m not sure but I’m also interested. If you’re outside the US join your national military reserve, build and use domestic or open source software, maybe run for office and enact policies that reduce reliance on the US. If you’re a central banker, maybe don’t buy US debt. Teach your friends about infosec (this is good anyway). Don’t use an OS that spies on you. Buy less fossil fuels (or none at all). Get to know your neighbours and see who knows what so you have a community support network and can give mutual aid.
by chroma_zone | 2026-01-15 18:41:35+00:00
TFix is very nice but unfortunately removes the software renderer described in this article. It's very difficult to get the original exe working on modern systems.

TFix also brings back the spatial audio / EAX support that was broken by Vista, which is a huge part of the experience IMO. Highly recommend installing and configuring OpenAL Soft for this game.
by general1465 | 2026-01-15 18:41:53+00:00
> Putin would have a once in a generation chance to take the baltics, maybe mess with Poland

No resources for that. Russians are increasingly using horses instead of mechanization like IFVs or APCs. If he would try it, then it would open second frontline with Europe in Baltics while still fighting with Ukrainians. Awfully stupid idea.
by KittenInABox | 2026-01-15 18:42:00+00:00
I think part of the problem is that social media is normalized and it is easy. It is way easier to engage socially (or at least you feel like you're engaging socially) with likes and lurking and stuff. It is way harder to put on pants and go out and it is normalized to do so (phrasing like bedrotting is super casual, whereas it is actually really hard to maintain an eating disorder because you have to be constantly hiding it from people).

Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.

Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.
by tastyface | 2026-01-15 18:42:12+00:00
You do yourself a disservice by having a storybook version of the Holocaust in your head. It did not start with gassing and boxcars of people. Relative to how things turned out, the victims were treated quite "humanely" at first. The problem is that they were completely dehumanized, which made mass murder the "obvious" choice once resources and logistics started to get strained.

There was a recent story that described cramped jail cells full of dozens of wailing and weeping detainees while ICE agents nearby were laughing. We’re seeing dehumanization happen here at an alarming pace. And already, the administration seemed to relish sending noncriminal migrants to foreign torture/rape camps for essentially a life sentence. The components are all there for a repeat of the recent past. Will they coalesce? What’s going to stop them?

Remember: most Nazis were not gleeful, cackling sadists. They were normal-ass bureaucrats who'd been conditioned to see their victims as non-human.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-15 18:42:30+00:00
>
Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator.

I honestly don't "get" the hate for YouTube Shorts:

While I clearly do prefer long-form videos on YouTube, in my Shorts feed I see videos that are, well, simply more short-form (admittedly because of the short length they are often more "shallow", but for sure not below some level that I would find annoying or unacceptable (and I think I am fast with such strong judgements)). So, at least judging from my Shorts feed, I can barely see any video that I would consider to be objectionable if I were a parent. It is quite possible that the YouTube algorithm detected very fast that I belong to a demographic that is not interested in particular kinds of videos that are perhaps common on YouTube Shorts and thus simply does not show them to me in my Shorts feed, so I am simply not aware of them.

So, seriously: why the huge hate for YouTube Shorts in particular concerning parenting?
by yannyu | 2026-01-15 18:42:31+00:00
Did you read the article you cited or are you just evaluating the snapshot of numbers?

> WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forty-four percent of Americans say they are “very satisfied” with the way things are going in their personal life, the lowest by two percentage points in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001. This also marks the continuation of a decline in personal satisfaction since January 2020, when the measure peaked at 65%.

> Record-Low 44% of Americans Are 'Very Satisfied' With Their Personal Life

And then to link to your own blog post as though that were a supporting citation is strange to say the least.

It's a lot of "just stop being depressed" energy.
by goku12 | 2026-01-15 18:42:55+00:00
How does that change the fact that the US style capitalist imperialism is equally, if not even worse? This isn't a zero sum game. Two opposing sides can be evil at the same time.

For that matter, I wasn't the one who introduced communism into this discussion. On top of that, you're talking about the Leninist and Maoist streams of communism. The original Marxist style communist revolution is what is happening in the US right now - something explained splendidly by an American. The US power elite must have recognized this early on and demonized Communism as whole for it. If you're going to argue about communism, at least get that much right.

Look, I am not at all interested in a debate about political systems here. The real topic is what an empire did to the world for its expansion and its consequences. That too is politics, but an entirely different matter from the capitalism vs communism debate.
by wltr | 2026-01-15 18:43:06+00:00
The man I worked with couldn’t deploy a VPN. He didn’t know how, literally! And he couldn’t just plainly say ‘hey, really, I don’t know how to do that.’ They have a static IP in the office, so you don’t even need any tunnel for it to work. It’s like one day job for me, but I’m not helping as it’s not _my_ job at the moment. Not that they need that VPN in there, it would just be convenient. The man does daily backups manually, with some fancy Windows GUI tool, which he probably pirated. It’s like, come on, an rsync command and a bash script. Really, I can go on and on and on, but those of us who worked with these people just know these stories, and the die-hard Windows weirdos probably won’t even understand what an rsync is.
by lanyard-textile | 2026-01-15 18:43:13+00:00
Seven, if you can believe it! She is the only crimson bellied conure.

I have a peach front conure, two green cheeks, a meyers, a senegal, and a half-meyers-half-senegal. Quite the flock.

Their bonds are criss crossed. The bird laying an egg is peaceful to everyone but not hard bonded. So it is... weird that she is laying an egg, lol.
by derekja | 2026-01-15 18:43:14+00:00
Complicated interaction with macOS Sequoia though. I’m on apple silicon and trying to capture on a multimon setup (although only capturing one screen) and the capture freezes painfully often. Going to window capture helps but doesn’t eliminate the problem. Seems to be related to ScreenCaptureKit. I’ve tried a lot to debug it but so far failed.
by rvz | 2026-01-15 18:43:27+00:00
Thought this was going to be a deep dive into sprite sheets.

Low and behold, yet another AI product selling advertisement + veiled promotion on HN.

It's almost as if the guidelines don't matter anymore. From [0].

'Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.'
by publicdebates | 2026-01-15 18:44:02+00:00
I have noticed that doing the sign leads to some good conversations in which I've helped someone in a small way, and that gave me a nice little dopamine boost. It's also led to about half a dozen genuine friendships over the past few months. I wonder if that's the answer, a sort of meta-solution: organizing this thing I'm doing into something that other people in the same situation can do, as a way of meeting people and getting outside their comfort zone. Like setting up a chess table in public if chess is your thing. But no, there are already public chess tables, and they'd have already done that. I don't know, just thinking out loud.
by munificent | 2026-01-15 18:44:04+00:00
> 81% of Americans are satisfied or very satisfied with their personal life[0].

No, 81% are "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied". I don't think "satisfied" is synonymous with "somewhat satisfied".

It's worth noting, as the article states, that this is the lowest value in the history of the poll, going back to 2001.

It shouldn't be too surprising that the overall value is high and stable over time. Hedonic adaptation[1] is a core property of our emotional wiring. The fact that the value is the lowest it's been in a quarter century should still be ringing alarm bells. We are not OK.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
by zahlman | 2026-01-15 18:44:10+00:00
Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion about what happened, as someone who does know those things from distinctly remembering them and having had them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken more seriously than that of people telling me over a decade later what happened based on some combination of { the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their friends have said about it, more recent news articles from aggrieved people who cite it as part of a grand conspiracy theory about contemporary right-wing politics }.
by bflesch | 2026-01-15 18:44:11+00:00
US tech workers believe their own lies and think they have some sort of magic sauce. For decades they've enjoyed government welfare and US-friendly regulation in many countries, which kept non-US competition small. An influx of non-US talent to US tech companies helped them stay innovative.

It is a courtesy that citizens from free countries pay US tech companies a middleman fee over various ways. What US tech workers fail to realize is that

- nobody needs Facebook to chat with their family
- nobody needs Visa, Paypal or Mastercard to pay in a local shop
- nobody needs Netflix subscription to watch a movie created by a non-US entity
- nobody needs to pay 50€ per month for privilege of Microsoft spying on your PC
- nobody needs their emails/pictures held hostage by Apple or Google
- nobody needs Uber in order to order a Taxi

So many of these things were done due to convenience and convention, making US tech workers richer and richer. I feel people are realizing what kind of pricks not only the management of US tech companies but also the US tech workers themselves are. Especially on HN these affluent workers from US tech companies run around and parrot the most stupid talking points while thinking their wealth comes from some sort of special skill.

We made them rich. They looted our data and poisoned our societies with fake news. They show no respect towards our systems or culture.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-15 18:44:26+00:00
> Make a social network that is centered around people who live in a 1 kilometer radius…

Don't know if they still do, but Nextdoor required address verification via a postcard early on. I was pretty shocked at what some people in my area would post under their real names and locations.

(And well outside the realm of political nonsense. Someone posted a pic of their toddler's first poop in the potty.)

I think the power of shame has reduced significantly in recent years.
by bgnn | 2026-01-15 18:44:40+00:00
Semiconductors is extremely cyclical. One of the reasons TSMC survived the previous boost-boom cycles is their caution. If you overexpand, you risk going out of business in the next downturn.

AFAIK only Apple has been commiting to wafers up to 3 years in the future. It would be a crazy bet for NVidia to do the same, as they don't know how big will be the business.
by tptacek | 2026-01-15 18:44:49+00:00
Sprites are active when:

* They're servicing an incoming HTTP request.

* You're interacting with a console.

They're hair-trigger inactive otherwise. They don't bill CPU unless they're active. The idea is that there isn't really any uncertainty about when it's running; when you stop interacting with it it stops metering.

This is a new shape for a cloud computing thingy and there'll be snags this week with it, but we don't make our money by billing people for stuff they don't want. We've always gone out of our way not to nickel-and-dime casual users and we're trying hard to find new ways to lean into that here.

(Destroying a Sprite you're done with is a perfectly reasonable move; they're disposable.)
by Y-bar | 2026-01-15 18:44:50+00:00
> EVGA Terminates Relationship With Nvidia, Leaves GPU Business

> According to Han, Nvidia has been difficult to work with for some time now. Like all other GPU board partners, EVGA is only told the price of new products when they're revealed to everyone on stage, making planning difficult when launches occur soon after. Nvidia also has tight control over the pricing of GPUs, limiting what partners can do to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/evga-terminates-relationsh...
by chuckadams | 2026-01-15 18:45:03+00:00
Breaking this down, several of AWS's core repos like the JS SDK use an allowlist of which contributor ids can run workflow actions in their PRs. The list was a regex, contained several short ids, and wasn't anchored with ^$, so if it allowed user 12345, then any userid containing 12345 could run their own actions on the PR, including one that exfiltrated access tokens. So they spammed GH with user creation requests, got an id that matched, and they were in like Flynn.

Said tokens didn't have admin access, but had enough privileges to invite other users to become full admins. Not sure if they were rotated, but github tokens are usually long-lived, like up to a year. Hey, isn't AWS the one always lecturing us to use temporary credentials? To be fair, AWS did more than just fix the regex, they introduced an "approve workflow run" UI unto the PR process that I think GH is also using now (not sure about that).
by globular-toast | 2026-01-15 18:45:05+00:00
> PRs and code review are not. CI/CD is not.

They can be. A PR can be made and code review conducted by submitting a patch to a mailing list. That's how the kernel and, I think, git itself is developed.

CI/CD is really a methodology. It just means integrating/deploying stuff as soon as its ready. So you just need maintainers to be able to run the test suite and deploy, which seems like a really basic thing.
by pflenker | 2026-01-15 18:45:33+00:00
I was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research!

While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
by jprjr_ | 2026-01-15 18:45:41+00:00
There's actually a couple of reasons for Windows apps to make Linux syscalls. I'm pretty certain this is how VST bridging software works so you can use Windows VSTs in Linux DAWs.

The technique is also used in Discord RPC Bridge for Wine - allows Wine apps to communicate with Linux Discord - https://github.com/EnderIce2/rpc-bridge
by anon_shill | 2026-01-15 18:46:00+00:00
From the article

> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.

Is ICE using a general purpose app for surveillance or is Palantir making a deportation-centric app for ICE?
by jaychia | 2026-01-15 18:46:02+00:00
It's fairly surprising to me how naive/early we are still in the techniques that we use here.

Anthropic's post on the Claude Agent SDK (formerly Claude Code SDK) talks about how the agent "gathers context", and is fairly accurate as to how people do it today.

1. Agentic Search (give the agent tools and let it run its own search trajectory): specifically, the industry seems to have made really strong advances towards giving the agents POSIX filesystems and UNIX utilities (grep/sed/awk/jq/head etc) for navigating data. MCP for data retrieval also falls into this category, since the agent can choose to invoke tools to hit MCP servers for required data. But because coding agents know filesystems really well, it seems like that is outperforming everything else today ("bash is all you need").

2. Semantic Search (essentially chunking + embedding, a la RAG in 2022/2023): I've definitely noticed a growing trend amongst leading AI companies to move away from this. Especially if your data is easily represented as a filesystem, (1) seems to be the winning approach.

Interestingly though this approach has a pretty glaring flaw: all the approaches today really only provide the agents with raw unprocessed data. There's a ton of recomputation on raw data! Agents that have sifted through the raw data once (maybe it reads v1, v2 and v_final of a design document or something) will have to do the same thing again in the next session.

I have a strong thesis that this will change in 2026 (Knowledge Curation, not search, is the next data problem for AI) https://www.daft.ai/blog/knowledge-curation-not-search-is-th... and we're building towards this future as well. Related ideas here that have anecdotal evidence of providing benefits, but haven't really stuck yet in practice include: agentic memory, processing agent trajectory logs, continuous learning, persistent note-taking etc.
by GrowingSideways | 2026-01-15 18:46:02+00:00
Sure. Money isn't everything. A broader concern is that many european countries have similar problems like housing costs and a rising far-right without any better solution. And besides, these sky-high wages won't last for long with a state intent on isolating itself and starving its consumer base of wages.

Personally, I'm looking at east asia and latin america.
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-15 18:46:06+00:00
Yeah, indeed.

There's a couple of Honda (I think?) Kei trucks around me. 4WD, low bed, fold-down rails. I don't know about taking them on the highway with a load of furniture, but they're the most versatile-looking 'round-town vehicle I've ever seen.

I really wish we could have something like that, that's less than 25 years old.