MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by l33tbro | 2026-01-31 22:39:07+00:00
Rubbish. What's the "information density" of a Matisse ot a Pollock?

There's an enormous thematic subtext of surveillance state and paranoia running in the background of The Conversation that is "informationally dense" (lol), but if you've grown up mainlining Coco Melon and Tiktok shorts, that "information" is not available to you because you have poorly developed critical faculties.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-31 22:39:17+00:00
> What about all the input data into LLMs and the conversations we're having? That must be able to produce a better next gen model, no?

Better models are largely coming from training, tuning, and specific "techniques" discovered to do things like eliminate loops and hallucinations. Human inputs are a small portion of that; you'll notice that all models are getting better despite the fact that all these companies have different human inputs! A decent amount of the models' abilities come from properties like temperature/p-settings, which is basically introducing variable randomness. (these are now called "low" and "high" in frontier models) This can cause problems, but also increased capability, so the challenge isn't getting better input, it's better controlling randomness (sort of). Even coding models benefit from a small amount of this. But there is a lot more, so overall model improvements are not one thing, they are many things that are not novel. In fact, open models get novel techniques before the frontier does, it's been like that for a while.

> Not for me. It'll take me days, and then I'm pretty sure it won't be better than Gemini 3 pro for my coding needs, especially in reasoning.

If you don't want the improvements, that's up to you; I'm just saying the frontier has no advantage here, and if people want better than frontier, it's there for free.

> Why wouldn't e.g. Gemini just add a triage step? And are you sure it's that much easier to get a better model for math than the big ones?

They already do have triage steps, but despite that, they still create specific models for specific use-cases. Most people already choose Thinking by default for general queries, and coding models for coding. That will continue, but there will be more providers of more specific models that will outperform frontier models, for the simple fact that there's a million use-cases out there and lots of opportunity for startups/community to create a better tailored model for cheaper. And soon all our computers will be decent at doing AI locally, so why pay for frontier anyway? I can already AI-code locally on a 4 year old machine. Two years from now, there likley won't be a need for you to use a cloud service at all, because your local machine and a local model will be equivalent, private, and free.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-31 22:39:50+00:00
> no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.

Social networks can revert back to original form any minute, nobody’s stopping them.

> Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?

Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a freedom of speech?
by nine_k | 2026-01-31 22:40:06+00:00
Thinking developed naturally as a tool that helps our species to stay dominant on the planet, at least on land. (Not by biomass but by the ability to control.)

If outsourcing thought is beneficial, those who practice it will thrive; if not, they will eventually cease to practice it, one way or another.

Thought, as any other tool, is useful when it solves more problems than it creates. For instance, an ability to move very fast may be beneficial if it gets you where you want to be, and detrimental, if it misses the destination often enough, and badly enough. Similarly, if outsourced intellectual activities miss the mark often enough, and badly enough, the increased speed is not very helpful.

I suspect that the best results would be achieved by outsourcing relatively small intellectual acts in a way that guarantees very rare, very small errors. That is, AI will become useful when AI becomes dependable, comparable to our other tools.
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-31 22:40:20+00:00
The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.

It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.

Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-31 22:40:55+00:00
It is political. Designing everything around cars benefits the class of people called "Car Owners". Not so much people who don't have the money or desire to buy a car.

Although, congestion pricing is a good counter-example. On the surface it looks like it is designed to benefit users of public transportation. But turns out it also benefits car-owners, because it reduces traffic jams and lets you get to your destination with your own car faster.
by pwdisswordfishs | 2026-01-31 22:41:12+00:00
This is how GTK came about. Literally "GIMP Toolkit". They took the widgets that the GIMP creators had created, and turned it into a general-purpose toolkit for other apps to use, due to issues with Qt.

The comments about web stack stuff is probably off. Godot is already a pretty featureful UI framework + form designer that makes anything the "frontend" world has ever produced seem like they only had a fraction (1-to-10%) as much time and resources to build, compared to what Godot was already shipping in 1.0, (even though the reverse is true).
by lopoc | 2026-01-31 22:42:00+00:00
Nice work! I presented similar research at DEFCON 31 - 'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration'
https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA

though with some key differences that address the limitations mentioned in the thread.
The main issue with pure ping-based geolocation is that:
IPs are already geolocated in databases (as you note)
Routing asymmetries break the distance model
Anycast/CDNs make single IPs appear in multiple locations
ICMP can be blocked or deprioritized
My approach used HTTP(S) latency measurements (not ping) with an ML model (SVR) trained on ~39k datapoints to handle internet routing non-linearity, then performed trilateration via optimization. Accuracy was ~600km for targets behind CloudFront - not precise, but enough to narrow attribution from "anywhere" to "probably Europe" for C2 servers.
The real value isn't precision but rather:
Detecting sandboxes via physically impossible latency patterns
Enabling geo-fenced malware
Providing any location signal when traditional IP geolocation fails
Talk: https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA"
by goldfinger26 | 2026-01-31 22:42:09+00:00
If you look at the history of related funds, you’ll see that there is volatility when the price gets sufficiently high as people early exit, and that historically it has gone up higher, then once the market is milked dry, it goes way down again for some years.

This has happened multiple times. You may not be able to guarantee it, but I strongly suspect precious metals are a repeating pump-and-dump scheme. It could be money waiting to be made by those that see the pattern, or maybe it won’t happen, who knows?
by nradov | 2026-01-31 22:42:57+00:00
Pawn Stars is semi-scripted entertainment, not necessarily representative of how real pawn shops operate. The actual prices were were negotiated before the episode was recorded.

But of course there will be a large bid / ask spread on collectibles and small quantities of precious metals. Dealers have to make a profit. Anyone who doesn't like the price is free to sell on eBay or at a local coin show or something.
by awesome_dude | 2026-01-31 22:43:32+00:00
Recently a side discussion came up - people in the Western world are "rediscovering" fermented, and pickled, foods that are still in heavy use in Asian cultures.

Fermentation was a great way to /preserve/ food, but it can be a bit hit and miss. Pickling can be outright dangerous if not done correctly - botulism is a constant risk.

When canning of foods came along it was a massive game changer, many foods became shelf stable for months or years.

Fermentation and pickling was dropped almost universally (in the West).
by maqp | 2026-01-31 22:44:38+00:00
No end-to-end encryption by default. WhatsApp has.

No end-to-end encryption for groups. WhatsApp has.

No end-to-end encryption on desktop. WhatsApp has.

No break-in key-recovery. WhatsApp has.

Inferring Telegram's security from public statements of *checks notes* former KGB officer and FSB director -- agencies that wrote majority of the literature in maskirovka, isn't exactly reliable, wouldn't you agree?
by avs733 | 2026-01-31 22:44:51+00:00
Whoever needs to to do their job. And you put in security controls (e.g. part A and part B). Also compensate your people well and don’t publicize who they are.

Semiconductor does this all the time…engineers on team A know only about their process critical gate materials step. Engineers on team B know about their lithography step. They are trained not to disclose and people respect that.
by pklausler | 2026-01-31 22:44:55+00:00
Github suggests reviewers to PR authors based on who's been modifying nearby code recently (ok, I don't know whether that's a general policy, but it happens to me all of the time). And for the past year or so I have been getting tagged to review more and more AI slop from newcomers to the project that we chose to maintain in public. I just immediately nope out of all reviews now if I don't recognize the submitter, because I don't scale enough to be the only actual human involved with understanding the code coming at me. This sucks for the newcomers who actually wrote the patch themselves, but I can't always tell. Put some misspellings in your comments and I'm actually more likely to review it!
by wenc | 2026-01-31 22:45:05+00:00
You need to generate a task list from the spec. Kiro IDE (not cli) does this automatically through tasks.md which has a checklist with checkboxes. It generates the property based tests too.

There’s a new way too — Yegge’s beads. You tell Claude code to write the plan in epics, stories and tasks in beads. Opus will through tool use to make sure every bead is implemented.

I’ve never faced any issues ensuring all tasks are implemented.

Try Kiro once. This will introduce the paradigms.

Then if you want, try beads.

But even Kiro itself is already excellent for spec driven development. Game changer for me.
by digiown | 2026-01-31 22:45:12+00:00
The relative lack of dark patterns is true, but the more distinguishing feature is that HN is boring to the majority of people, and isn't destructive because not using it doesn't make you excluded from society, and hence it has little leverage on the users. If HN pulls the enshittification trick, a much bigger portion of people will just stop using it.

I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.
by EdwardDiego | 2026-01-31 22:45:42+00:00
Human editors, I suspect, would pick up the "tells" of generated text, although as we know, there's a lot of false positives in that space.

But it looks like Pangram is a text classifying NN is trained using a technique where they get a human to write a body of text on a subject, and then various LLMs to write a body of text on the same subject, which strikes me as a good way to approach the problem. Not that I'm in anyway qualified to properly understand ML.

More details here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-31 22:45:45+00:00
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.

The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.

Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
by icepush | 2026-01-31 22:45:49+00:00
Well, in the world where AGI is created and it goes suboptimally, everybody gets turned into computronium and goes extinct, which is a prospect some are miffed about. And, in the world where it goes well, no decision of any consequence is made by a human being ever again, since the computer has planned every significant life event since before their birth. Free will in a very literal sense will have been erased. Sam being a true believer means he is not going to stop working until one of these worlds comes true. People who understand the stakes are understandably irked by him.
by liampulles | 2026-01-31 22:46:30+00:00
Is the idea here that you should make a very clear and well documented API because you expect customer agents to automatically make contracts with you to use your API? Just sommer skipping the process of evaluating you as a vendor?

Maybe vibe coders will do this, but I don't expect a business that operates like this to last very long.

If the expectation is that the customer is still going to put the work in to evaluate you, then is there no room for them to build a client, to expose their own internal API?
by functionmouse | 2026-01-31 22:46:31+00:00
Once a DS has been flashed (skips the health and safety screen) it also disables signature verification for DS download play, so you can beam homebrews directly to your DS' home screen with a wifi card. But this is an awkward process that most people don't actually do with their original DSes, as it requires putting tinfoil over a toothpick and jamming it into a hole next to the battery to close the flash write jumper. I think DS' crypto has also been defeated but I can't find any documentation of arbitrary download play on unflashed DSes. Also seems no .nds signing keys in the leaks from what I can tell.
How do you evaluate engineers beyond matching the job description?
by D___R___ | 2026-01-31 22:46:34+00:00
I’m curious how others approach this in practice.

On paper, hiring often starts with clear criteria: stack match, years of experience, prior roles. But I’ve noticed that many candidates can align well with a job description - sometimes even shape the conversation to fit it without that being the real signal.

Over time, I started to see two layers:
1. Formal fit — experience, skills, role alignment (this still matters and must be there)
2. Human fit — how communication feels when things get hard

What surprised me is how often the second part becomes decisive later.

When priorities shift, deadlines slip, scope changes, or someone needs to work outside what was written in the role - technical gaps can usually be solved. But poor communication or lack of trust becomes very expensive.

So I’m wondering:
- How do you personally evaluate this human side without relying on gut feeling alone?
- Have you seen cases where strong technical fit failed because of communication?
- Do you have concrete signals you look for during interviews?

Interested in practical approaches, not theory.
by l33tbro | 2026-01-31 22:47:25+00:00
What this is really about is how we've internalised passive consumption of media. The expectation in years gone by was that adult audiences could do some of the work themselves is resolving the meaning of the text. Art, I believed they called it?

Today the rebrand to 'content' consumption has basically reached the equivalent of a kind of entertainment-as-foie gras, where the audience is intubated and force fed this conceptually empty material that bypasses any critical faculties. The result is this intellectually-unburdened generation that I'm sure will natural transition to taking hold of the machinery of power in society.
by dagmx | 2026-01-31 22:47:30+00:00
There’s definitely areas where I agree Swift is more ergonomic.

Parameter defaults, and null short circuiting are two of them.

I find writing Swift is faster for me, and it’s easier to learn for people than Rust. Also Swift interop with other languages is much simpler.

Though there are way fewer resources to learn Swift, and cargo is superior to SPM. And of course rust is better cross platform today, but Swift is closing the gap.

I think they feel like very similar languages overall, and they both influence each other.
by gemmarate | 2026-01-31 22:48:01+00:00
The interesting axis here isn’t how much cognition we outsource, it’s how reversible the outsourcing is. Using an LLM as a scratchpad (like a smarter calculator or search engine) is very different from letting it quietly shape your writing, decisions, and taste over years. That’s the layer where tacit knowledge and identity live, and it’s hard to get back once the habit forms.

We already saw a softer version of this with web search and GPS: people didn’t suddenly forget how to read maps, but schools and orgs stopped teaching it, and now almost nobody plans a route without a blue dot. I suspect we’ll see the same with writing and judgment: the danger isn’t that nobody thinks, it’s that fewer people remember how.
by diogenescynic | 2026-01-31 22:48:21+00:00
There's an immigration checkpoint near my house. I've had to present my ID. It took all of 5 minutes and then I moved on with my life. The hysterical response to all this is ridiculous. When you get a hotel in Europe, they take a copy of your passport and track you. Why do people think every other country is different than what we are doing? In fact, we already have the most liberal immigration laws in the entire world, not even debatable. We let in more legal immigrants every year than the rest of the world combined. If you can't come here legally and you commit crimes, I have no problem with deporting them. Why would I fight to keep more criminals here when they have no right to be here? I don't understand the game democrats are playing at. I'd love to see liberals go to another country and realize most other countries are openly racist to a degree they wouldn't even comprehend. The real world is far from a cosmopolitan leftist utopia.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-01-31 22:48:45+00:00
I don't like your non-genuine engagement with this conversation. You've made outrageous claims, backed up with no data, and then seemingly pre-emptively linked to a page about trolling by asking for evidence. Well I'll ask you for evidence anyways lol. And I'll also give some that points against your outrageous claims: Retail investment in the stock market is at all time highs [1], and the percentage of investment in passive indices is also at an all time high [2]. It is _possible_ that retail investors are perversely fighting the trends and increasing their investments primarily by engaging in day-trade-esque behavior, but that would surprise me. Especially given that retirement accounts strongly encourage funds. I'd love to see some data pointing definitively either way though.

[1] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/all-topics/financial...

[2] https://www.morningstar.com/funds/8-charts-us-fund-flows-202...
by ssl-3 | 2026-01-31 22:49:02+00:00
Of course they can. Locations can be trilaterated using wifi and bluetooth.

Back when my OG iPod Touch was minty and new (2008, IIRC), it was in many ways a stripped-down iPhone.

One of the features that was stripped out was GPS: It didn't have that at all. It also lacked Bluetooth.

But it did have a Maps app, and it also had location services. This used visible wifi access points and a database back home on the mothership to determine location.

It was pretty neat at that time to take this responsive, color-screened pocket computer with me on a walk, connect it to a then-ubiquitous open SSID, and have it figure out my location and provide a map (with aerial photos!) of where I was. It wasn't ever dead-nuts, but it was consistently spooky-good.

It's pretty old tech at this point, and devices still use it today.

(Related tech: Those plastic table tents that you take with you at McDonald's after ordering at the kiosk? They're BLE beacons. Sensors in the ceiling track them so that the person bringing the tray with food on it knows about where you're sitting before they even walk out of the kitchen. And modern pocket supercomputers use the locations of these and other beacons, as well, to help trilaterate their position. Urban environments are replete with very chatty things that don't move around very much.)
by fragmede | 2026-01-31 22:49:07+00:00
> Whats the value prop?

Because you get to do other stuff while the agent's working. Maybe spending hours optimizing the best flight possible is fun for you, or actually reading online reviews, I ain't judging. I don't care about half the features the marketing copy brags about, I only care about the parts that affect me. This theoretical agent knows me, what I care about, and can optimize based on that.

That "other stuff" you get to do is up to you to take advantage of. It could be scrolling TikTok, or it could be learning a foreign language or calculus, it's totally up to you.
by contingencies | 2026-01-31 22:49:26+00:00
Common components all have symbols in the KiCad standard libraries.

For others, just use https://github.com/Steffen-W/Import-LIB-KiCad-Plugin or similar to import from an online source. Also grabs 3D models.

Worst case, you can draw custom footprints pretty easily.

AI is good but it tends to fall down when it comes to multiple conflicting design constraints, supply chain conditions, thermal considerations, mechanical considerations, and other concerns which are not same-domain as an electronic connectivity topology problem. Let's not get started on environmental factors, firmware hacks, board house physics, or assembly labor optimization.
by SkiFire13 | 2026-01-31 22:50:05+00:00
> Consider an enum that represents a tree. Since, it is a recursive type, Rust will force you to use something like Box<> for referencing a type within itself.
>
> enum TreeNode<T> {
> Leaf(T),
> Branch(Vec<Box<TreeNode<T>>>),
> }
>
> (You could also us Box<Vec<TreeNode<T>>> instead)

This is wrong, you don't need a `Box` here. The Rust compiler forces you to have a layer of indirection, but `Vec` already does that.