MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidfunc | 2026-01-19 21:33:13+00:00
> People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake

I only ever hear this stuff from people that don't use Facebook. It's a self-selecting crowd and they have their fingers in their ears and theirs eyes closed shut while yelling into the void trying to convince themselves everyone else is just like them. Except all that's out there is the same echo chamber of people that also are doing the exact same thing.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-19 21:33:28+00:00
> As a Norwegian, I am genuinely curious how US citizens are reacting to Trump’s letter To Norway and demands.

Almost all of the people around me are ashamed about this, and more than a little fearful. There is a huge opposition to the notion, not only because it's betraying our allies and weakening our place on the world stage, but also because it's an impossible-to-miss sign that our nation is in the process of collapse.

If there's anything that mutes the response to this, it's the fact that the feds are violently attacking our own citizenry and that's a more immediate problem.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-19 21:33:44+00:00
The US has the second largest manufacturing base in the world after China. It's larger than India and is even slightly larger than the EU. It used to be the largest. Moreover, if the premise is that you're trying to bring back manufacturing capacity, it doesn't matter if something is currently made in the US, what matters is what it would cost if it was, because a tariff in excess of the difference would then make that cost effective.

Obviously in the latter case you would then have to wait until that manufacturing capacity comes back online, but "customers switch to a domestic product" isn't the only thing that can cause foreign manufacturers to have to lower prices. They could also switch to substitute products or reduce consumption and then foreign manufacturers would still have to lower prices to limit the extent to which that happens.
by bnlxbnlx | 2026-01-19 21:34:01+00:00
I've spent a lot of time with people who seem themselves operating within ML Kings lineage and have their lives committed to this kind of nonviolence work, and they defintely operate from within the an "agape mindset", even though they wouldn't frame it like that.

in my understanding some people use 'non-violence' to describe the more utilitarian version, and 'noniovlence' for that which exits the entire 'domination paradigm'
Targeted Bets: An alternative approach to the job hunt
by seany62 | 2026-01-19 21:34:07+00:00
I posted this mainly as something to refer friends to when they complain about something being to competitive / hard to get. Thought I'd shoot it here too.

Edit: I forgot to link the blog. Reposted here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46684815
by aw1621107 | 2026-01-19 21:34:14+00:00
> explicitly rejects the smart_ptr/RAII/friends model in favor of bulk allocations, arenas, freelists, etc?

These aren't mutually exclusive; you can use the former to manage the latter, after all.

> I know there are groups of highly productive programmers that feel the traditional C++ ownership model is hot garbage

I'm not aware of links off the top of my head, but I can try to summarize the argument.

From my understanding, the argument against RAII/etc. has more to do with the mindset it supposedly encourages more than the concept itself - that RAII and friends makes it easy to think more in terms of individual objects/elements/etc. instead of batches/groups, and as a result programmers tend to follow the easy path which results in less performant/more complex code. By not providing such a feature, so the argument goes, programmers no longer have access to a feature which makes less-efficient programming patterns easy and so batched/grouped management of resources becomes more visible as an alternative.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-19 21:34:23+00:00
In my library [1], wrapping the CUDA APIs in modern C++, I do allocations which are not exactly from an arena, but something in that neighborhood - memory spaces on context on GPU devices.

Unlike the GP suggests, and like you suggest, I have indeed embraced RAII in the library - generally, not just w.r.t. memory allocation. I have not, however, replicated that idioms of the standard library. So, for example:

* My allocations are never typed.

* The allocation 'primitives' return a memory_region type - essentially a pointer and a size; I discourage the user from manipulating raw pointers.

* Instead of unique_ptr's, I encourage the use of unique_span's: owning, typed, lightweight-ish containers - like a fusion of std::span<T> and std::unique_ptr<T[]> .

I wonder if that might seem less annoying to GP.

---

[1] : https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers/
by eslaught | 2026-01-19 21:34:59+00:00
Here's a paper from September 2025 that compares programs for (a) semantic equivalence (do they do the same thing) and (b) syntactic similarity (are the parse trees similar).

LLMs are more likely to judge programs (correctly or incorrectly) as being semantically equivalent when they are syntactically similar, even though syntactically similar programs can actually do drastically different things. In fact LLMs are generally pretty bad at program equivalence, suggesting they don't really "understand" what programs are doing, even for a fairly mechanical definition of "understand".

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12466

While this is a point in time study and I'm sure all these tools will evolve, this matches my intuition for how LLMs behave and the kinds of mistakes they make.

By comparison the approach in this article seems narrow and doesn't explain a whole lot, and more importantly doesn't give us any hypotheses we can actually test against these systems.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-19 21:35:31+00:00
Hoss, if you'd written "a grilled cheese sandwich would be a better president than DT" I would have just agreed with you out of hand.

However, given the fact that a) the Democrats seemed to have done literally everything that they could do to lose what they called the "most important election of our lifetimes" and b) I have neither control over who they choose to run nor a vote in a contestable state, I am not going to feel bad for my real anger at them and the folks who support them for failing the rest of us so badly.

The "choices they actually had" are the product of the Democratic party, and I feel no end of anger for them chosing as they did and failing to win.

A lot of us just wanted to see them win, which should have been no problem. I'd much rather not be going to stand in front of an ICE detnetion facility every week.

At the same time, you can pretend that Harris was for a less violent world. She was not, she was for a world order that targeted its violence at folks you don't care about.

I sleep just fine. We have been organizing a long time and will continue.
by verall | 2026-01-19 21:35:53+00:00
If you have requirements for high performance then the traditional C++ "ownership model" (I would say a better description is "ownership strategy") is definitely "slow". It's pretty "safe" in that you usually aren't going to leak a bunch with it but bull allocations, arenas, and freelists are all potentially faster. And you wouldn't use them if they were slower since they're (usually) more to deal with.

But even in software using these strategies, they probably will be using different ownership strategies in different parts of the code. Once you're writing high performance code, you will use specific strategies that give you the best results. But it's completey domain specific.
by Lord-Jobo | 2026-01-19 21:36:52+00:00
And those mechanisms, the military, the police, and the legal system, rely on violence as the ultimate fallback when other options fail.
So you may not be relying on violence to solve your problems, or the threat of violence, or the insinuation of it, but instead relying on the threat of someone ELSE’S violence. That is the social contract pretty fundamentally.
And when people can no longer rely on those figures who are supposed to use violence on their behalf, we shouldn’t be surprised that they attempt to reclaim the ability to use force. The social contract has been voided, in their eyes. The premise and promise broken.
by isx | 2026-01-19 21:37:16+00:00
> Instead, Threads’ boost in daily mobile usage may be driven by other factors, including cross-promotions from Meta’s larger social apps like Facebook and Instagram (where Threads is regularly advertised to existing users)

This. I use Instagram and every time I scroll through the feed there's a stripe of Threads content, clearly algorithmically chosen to grab attention. The thing is, only the top part of every post is visible, and one needs to download / go to Threads to read the rest and the replies (many posts I've seen are specifically the kind where you're more interested in replies than the post itself).
by rbbydotdev | 2026-01-19 21:37:37+00:00
Though I haven't tested it myself. I would say probably not very well. But, this is good to know - Thanks! Some of the of ui/ux currently is very targeted towards desktop, for instance drag and drop. Generally, interactions with a touch device would be pretty darn awkward.

This limitation is not intentional by design. I would like to support touch devices and mobile, but to do it properly could take some careful thought and consideration. It's open source and I am looking for some help and input from the community. Even if it's just opening issues, so don't be shy ;)
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-19 21:38:41+00:00
I think you mean "oligarchs" for they. I have no answer, I'm just a peasant in today's America. My economic interests absolutely do not align with oligachs'. I expect the oligarchs as a class don't think they'll personally be too handicapped by trade wars, and see some way to make more money out of it. Maybe Trump has promised them fiefdoms in a fragmented and demoralized US.

My specific knowledge does not allow me to say why they aren't (or are, behind the scenes) trying to stop the Greenland nonsense. It seems likely that Trump has promised them a slice of the extraction wealth, or that the oligarchs as a group don't see much trouble arising from a Trump takeover of Greenland, so they're just letting him do it rather than annoy him, or his easily angered base.
by estearum | 2026-01-19 21:38:58+00:00
Correct you can be detained based on reasonable suspicion. You cannot be arrested on it. The difference might seem subtle, but 1) it's not, and 2) it certainly shouldn't be to actual DHS officials. It's literally in the text of the Constitution.

And yes, near the border has had shaky Constitutional protections for a long time. To suggest it's "not new" to expand that shakiness across the entire nation, eliminate time constraints on it, then scale up the "immigration" enforcement arm 100x is just laughable though. Of course it's new! It's new in scope, scale, and intensity. That makes it new!
by dijit | 2026-01-19 21:39:22+00:00
Dylan, you're a masterclass in saying nothing whilst appearing to argue.

You invented that "7%" stuff in a sibling thread from thin air. You claimed nobody was arguing about innocent convictions whilst spending a dozen comments defending why plea coercion is a massive problem. You say the system gets the right answer most of the time but insist it's still unjust. You won't define "broken" but you're certain the system is it.

Every time I pin you down, you redefine terms. "Unjust" doesn't mean wrong outcomes, it means procedural pressure. "Broken" doesn't mean failing, it means needs improvement. "Coercive" doesn't mean producing false confessions, it just means... pressure exists, somehow.

This is a thread about MLK describing actual injustice: arresting peaceful protesters under correctly applied laws. You've watered "unjust" down to "I don't like some aspects of plea bargaining" and expect that to carry the same moral weight.

Here's what you won't say directly but keep implying: that plea bargains routinely produce false confessions. Because if they don't, then your entire argument collapses to "the system works but could be nicer," which isn't a disagreement worth having.

My position: the law is applied justly more often than unjustly. You either disagree with that or you don't. No more semantic gymnastics. Which is it?
by atcon | 2026-01-19 21:39:24+00:00
Agreed. Never understood all NTB and tariff distinctions, except one suspects the pajandrums in Brussels and Geneva didn't quite believe companies could compete on price or product, and therefore needed a way to keep quotas and subsidies.

I'm not alone in this confusion. During oral argument, several Supreme Court justices asked repeatedly about the distinctions between quotas, tariffs, revenue-raising taxes, non-revenue taxes, etc. in IEEPA's statutory language and precedents like FEA v. Algonquin SNG, Inc., 426 U.S. 548 (1976).
by terminalshort | 2026-01-19 21:39:24+00:00
What counts as research? If I make UI changes, I guess it's ok to roll it out to everyone, because that's not an experiment, but if I roll it out to 1%, then that's research? If I own two stores and decide to redecorate one and see if sales increase vs the other store, do I need government approval?

Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do on animals. That claim sounds ridiculous.
Tell HN: Deskflow is getting spammed with AI-slop PRs
by acheong08 | 2026-01-19 21:39:43+00:00
https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/pull/8780

https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/pull/8989

https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow/pull/9348
by odie5533 | 2026-01-19 21:40:24+00:00
I did not find success with the Claude Code plugin. If the AI thinks things work, it will say COMPLETE even if you wouldn't think it's complete. It does not seem to work any harder than it did without the ralph loop. The structure the plugin recommended was too simplistic and I did not understand the true purpose of Ralph Loops.

I think the key to it is having lots of smaller tasks with fresh context each loop. Ralph loop run starts, it picks the most important task, completes it, and ends its loop. Then the next ralph run starts with new context, grabs the most important task, and the loops continue. I have not tried this method yet.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-01-19 21:40:32+00:00
That's assuming one cares about "attribution" and "people following other links on your site". I.e. that's still being a salesman, maybe with extra steps.

In the alternative case, no value is being taken, you're left exactly with what you had before - nothing gained, nothing lost - but some user somewhere gains a little. Apparently even in 2026, the concept of positive-sum exchange, is unfathomable to so many.
by kristintynski | 2026-01-19 21:40:39+00:00
We have presented a formally veriﬁed Lean4 proof that gravity emerges from information geometry.

The key insights:
1. The spacetime metric g
µν
is derived from a coherence ﬁeld Ψ : M → Cl(3, 1)

2. Einstein’s equations emerge from coherence dynamics

3. No gravitons are required; gravity is eﬀective, not fundamental

4. The golden ratio φ provides natural UV regularization

5. The entire framework is mechanically veriﬁed in Lean 4
Gravity is not a fundamental force to be quantized. It is an emergent phenomenon arising
from information-geometry backreaction of a coherence ﬁeld valued in the Cliﬀord algebra
Cl(3, 1). The mathematics is governed by a single self-consistency principle: the golden ratio
φ
2
= φ + 1.

The code is available at:
https://github.com/ktynski/ParsimoniousFlow
by jvanderbot | 2026-01-19 21:40:49+00:00
Oh, I suppose one could interpret it as literally as possible, and arrive at that essay's conclusion.

I have always considered the following to be basically synonymous:

* In the absence of info, consider the intended output of the system to be what it is measured to be

* The output of the system is best determined using observation vs reasoning

Most of the examples there are moreso about two systems colliding. Yes, the purpose of the military is to disable the enemy and by god they are disabling a lot of each other so much so that they don't seem to be doing much else.

Except the bus system, in which the purpose is indeed to turn fuel into exhaust, because the busses move whether they are full or not. The purpose of busses is to drive around, and it so happens people like to use them. If the purpose of busses was to shuttle people around, it could be done several other better ways.

If the purpose is to gamble, it can be done many other ways. This system seems purpose-designed (or purpose-emergent) to coax out secret information in the form of large bets.
by tecoholic | 2026-01-19 21:40:51+00:00
I use zed now, Pycharm before that, Emacs before that, VSCode before that - one common thing amongst them all, I always install the “vim mode” plugin as the first thing. I always have a working vim/neovim setup beside all of them.

It’s not to look smart or because I like making things complex. I am not the one to tinker too much (hence the jump between editors, if I get too invested, I move). The benefits of VIM motions have nothing to do with the editors themselves. If you have never tried it, I would strongly recommend giving vim mode a go, in whatever editor you fancy.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-19 21:41:27+00:00
I like the byteshape quantizations - they are dynamic variable quantization weights that are tuned for quality vs overall size. They seem to make less errors at lower "average" quantizations than the unsloth 4 bit quants. I think this is similar to variable bitrate video compression where you can keep higher bits where it helps overall model accuracy.

Should be able to run this in 22GB vram so your 4090 (and a 3090) would be safe. This model also uses MLA so you can run pretty large context windows without eating up a ton of extra vram.

edit: 19GB vram for a Q4_K_M - MLX4 is around 21GB so you should be clear to run a lower quant version on the 4090. Full BF16 is close to 60GB so probably not viable.
by yaront111 | 2026-01-19 21:41:27+00:00
Great question. This is actually a core design principle of the Cordum Agent Protocol (CAP).

It’s definitely a *structured rejection*, not a silent fail.
Since the LLM needs to "know" it was blocked to adjust its plan, the kernel returns a standard error payload (e.g., `PolicyViolationError`) with context.

The flow looks like this:
1. *Agent:* Sends intent "Delete production DB".
2. *Kernel:* Checks policy -> DENY.
3. *Kernel:* Returns a structured result: `{ "status": "blocked", "reason": "destructive_action_limit", "message": "Deletion requires human approval" }`.
4. *Agent (LLM):* Receives this as an observation.
5. *Agent (Re-planning):* "Oh, I can't delete it. I will generate a slack message to the admin asking for approval instead."

This feedback loop turns safety from a "blocker" into a constraint that the agent can reason around, which is critical for autonomous recovery.
by Andaith | 2026-01-19 21:41:38+00:00
Not OP, but I think they still have the lead in hardware. However, I'm using an iPhone 14 which apparently released 4 years ago now, and it's still plenty fast enough for all my needs. If it lasts another 4 years, I won't update. That's probably their problem.

Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape.

But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege.

Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-19 21:41:39+00:00
You're right. I don't think many HNers realize what a bubble HN is, within a bigger bubble of the SF tech scene.

Your comment remind me of the ~15 year old hype around Q&A sites. You have VCs say things like "everyone I know uses Quora" and that helped hype it up. But for anyone a little removed, Quora was just Yahoo Answers 2.0. And still is. This was a couple of years after Stackoverflow came out.

Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?

Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.

Another example of what you're talking about (with essentialy isolated communities) was Orkut, which was hugely popular in Brazil and a couple of other places.
by pm | 2026-01-19 21:41:40+00:00
The company cares about neither. People inside the company will care about a great many things. The people who care about users either don't have the power to act or no longer care enough to do so.

If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.

This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.
by wrs | 2026-01-19 21:41:47+00:00
You're missing the point -- I don't refuse to pay a parking ticket after the court orders me to do so. I don't stand in the checkout line trying to figure out how to run out without paying. I don't threaten people on the sidewalk and take their money when I notice there aren't any police around at the moment. I trust that the vast, vast majority of people act similarly. If they didn't, no amount of law enforcement would be enough.
I Improved Claude's MCP-CLI Experimental MCP Fix – 18x speedup on 50 calls
by AIntelligentTec | 2026-01-19 21:42:05+00:00
Claude Code has an experimental 'mcp-cli' for invoking MCP servers (Google Workspace, GitHub, etc.) from bash.

Problem: it runs sequentially by default. My workflow hits 50+ MCP calls. That was 191 seconds—over 3 minutes waiting before Claude could synthesize anything.

I discovered you can orchestrate parallel calls within a single Bash tool invocation:

mcp-cli call google/get_events '{}' > /tmp/cal.json &
mcp-cli call google/list_tasks '{}' > /tmp/tasks.json &
mcp-cli call github/list_issues '{}' > /tmp/issues.json &
wait

The non-obvious part: this only works because background jobs (&) inherit the parent shell environment. Claude Code's session context—including MCP endpoint files—stays accessible.

If you spawn a new subshell (bash -c 'mktemp -d; mcp-cli...'), context breaks with "MCP endpoint file not found." That was the gotcha that took a while to figure out.

Benchmarks (verified January 2026):

2 calls: 7.6s → 3.8s (2x)
10 calls: 38s → 3.0s (13x)
20 calls: 76s → 4.9s (16x)
50 calls: 191s → 10.3s (18x)

I packaged this into a self-contained toolkit:

- CLAUDE.md snippet with usage instructions
- .claude/rules/ patterns (FORBIDDEN/REQUIRED examples)
- Advisory hook that reminds about parallel patterns
- Install script for project or user-level setup

https://github.com/AIntelligentTech/claude-code-mcp-cli-parallel-godmode

Requires ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_MCP_CLI=true (the mcp-cli is still experimental).

Curious if others are hitting similar bottlenecks or have found other optimisation patterns for MCP-heavy Claude Code workflows.