MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Veserv | 2026-01-02 01:19:46+00:00
Yep. We even have a free bit when writing hex numbers like 0x1234. Just flip that 0x to a 1x to indicate you are writing in little-endian and you get nice numbers like 1x4321 that are totally unambiguous little-endian hex representations.

You can apply that same formatting to little-endian bit representations by using 1b instead of 0b and you could even do decimal representations by prefixing with 1d.
by dang | 2026-01-02 01:20:08+00:00
That one was killed by a software filter, for reasons having nothing to do with the content. I wouldn't say we dislike the opinion, or care either way, but the comment itself was pretty low-quality. Also, trollish usernames aren't allowed on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
by valdair3d | 2026-01-02 01:20:20+00:00
Self-hosted workers are becoming critical infrastructure for AI agent workloads. When you're running agents that need to interact with external services - web scraping, API orchestration, browser automation - you hit Cloudflare's execution limits fast. The 30s CPU time on the free tier and even the 15min on paid plans don't work for long-running agent tasks.

The isolation model here is interesting. For agents that need to handle untrusted input (processing user URLs, parsing arbitrary documents), V8 isolates give you a security boundary that's much lighter than full container isolation. But you trade off the ability to do things like spawn subprocesses or access the filesystem.

Curious about the persistence story. Most agent workflows need some form of state between invocations - conversation history, task progress, cached auth tokens. Is there a built-in KV store or does this expect external storage?
by KPGv2 | 2026-01-02 01:21:01+00:00
> 50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files

I'm not sure 50 years from now there will be flash emulators. Who is going to write on for the XP3.12345235 Fruity Ununpentium Silicon x256^2 neuralink devices.

Didn't Flash die because iPhones weren't going to support it? So one of the major OSes people spend most of their lives on can't even run SFW files. Can Android? I've honestly never tried.

But web standards persist.
by pmahoney | 2026-01-02 01:21:04+00:00
I wrote some code to do almost this many years ago (if I recall correctly, it doesn’t cache anything to disk, but builds the hash fresh each time, which can still result in massive speed up).

Probably obsolete and broken by now, but one of my favorite mini projects.

(And I just realized the svg graph is all but impossible to read in dark mode)

https://github.com/pmahoney/fastup
by tacone | 2026-01-02 01:21:14+00:00
No, setting the temperature to zero is still going to yeld different results. One might think they add random seeds, but it makes no sense for temperature zero. One theory is that the distributed nature of their systems adds entropy and thus produces different results each time.

Random seeds might be a thing, but for what I see there's a lot demand for reproducibility and yet no certain way to achieve it.
by 3A2D50 | 2026-01-02 01:21:34+00:00
Television HDR mode is set to FILMMAKER,
OLED brightness 100%,
Energy Saving Mode is off.
Connected to AVR with HDMI cable that says 8K.

PC has Manjaro Linux with RTX 3060 12GB

Graphic card driver: Nvidia 580.119.02

KDE Plasma Version 6.5.4

KDE Frameworks Version: 6.21.0

Qt Version: 6.10.1

Kernel Version 6.12.63-1-MANJARO

Graphics Platform: Wayland

Display Configuration

High Dynamic Range: Enable HDR is checked

There is a button for brightness calibration that I used for adjustment.

Color accuracy: Prefer color accuracy

sRGB color intensity: This seems to do nothing (even after apply). I've set it to 0%.
Brightness: 100%

TV is reporting HDR signal.

AVR is reporting...

Resolution: 4KA VRR

HDR: HDR10

Color Space RGB /BT.2020

Pixel Depth: 10bits

FRL Rate 24Gbps

I compared Interstellar 19s into Youtube video in three different ways on Linux and 2:07:26 on Blu-ray.

For Firefox 146.0.1 by default there is no HDR option on Youtube. 4K video clearly doesn't have HDR. I enabled HDR in firefox by going to about:config and setting the following to true: gfx.wayland.hdr, gfx.wayland.hdr.force-enabled, gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled.
Color look completely washed out.

For Chromium 143.0.7499.169 HDR enabled by default. This looks like HDR.

I downloaded the HDR video from Youtube and played it using MPV v0.40.0-dirty with settings --vo=gpu-next --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvk. Without these settings the video seems a little too bright like the Chromium playback. This was the best playback of the three on Linux.

On the Blu-ray the HDR is Dolby Vision according to both the TV and the AVR. The AVR is reporting...

Resolution: 4k24

HDR: Dolby Vision

Color Space: RGB

Pixel Depth 8bits

FRL Rate: no info

...I looked into this and apparently Dolby Vision uses RGB tunneling for its high-bit-depth (12-bit) YCbCr 4:2:2 data.
The Blu-ray looks like it has the same brightness range but the color of the explosion (2:07:26) seems richer compared to the best playback on Linux (19s).

I would say the colors over all look better on the Blu-ray.

I might be able to calibrate it better if the sRGB color setting worked in the display configuration. Also I think my brightness setting is too high compared to the Blu-ray. I'll play around with it more once the sRGB color setting is fixed.

*Edit: Sorry Hacker News has completely changed the format of my text.
by bentcorner | 2026-01-02 01:21:56+00:00
Is that bad?

I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.
by WhiteNoiz3 | 2026-01-02 01:23:27+00:00
I'm struggling to understand why an LLM even needs to be involved in this at all. Can't you write a script that takes the last 10 slack messages and checks the github status for any URLs and adds an emoji? It could be a script or slack bot and it would work far more reliably and cost nothing in LLM calls. IMO it seems far more efficient to have an LLM write a repeatable workflow once than calling an LLM every time.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-02 01:23:53+00:00
Let's be real, they can do whatever they want. The question is, should they? I don't think this is a clear violation of free speech, restricting speech from the ears of children has always been a thing in every modern government. It was always possible to buy porn magazines for example, but states required id verification in stores to sell them. You can watch porn on cable channels, but only because they were paid and an adult consented to it.

Another way to look at it is, porn is a sexual encounter, minors can't consent. From Texas' point of view, they are simply prohibiting a non-consensual sexual encounter.

It is not interstate commerce, because commerce isn't regulated here, free porn sites are included. If states can tax websites, they can also regulate content.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-02 01:23:53+00:00
> US can't afford to field the navy necessary to back this ams hasn't been able to for many decades

This is nonsense. The U.S. Navy de facto guarantees freedom of navigation today. Globally.

If we switched to a national system, our Navy wouldn’t literally escort U.S.-flagged ships. Its military would just need to enforce the threat that you get bombed if you fuck with America.

We’d save money switching to a big-stick model. (I think we’d be poorer for it in the long run. But if you’re playing chess and your opponent machete, you’re not going to find any winning moves on the board.)
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-01-02 01:24:08+00:00
> For tragedies too widely experienced in modern times to be censored — the Cultural Revolution, the one-child policy, Zero Covid ...

this part has me confused

can someone explain to me why Zero Covid - the most successful program that minimized Covid deaths - is a tragedy?

imo it was better than whatever clusterfuck was happening pretty much everywhere else
by pron | 2026-01-02 01:24:34+00:00
Observing a pattern with a causal explanation - in an environment with selective pressure things spread at a rate proportional to their relative competitive advantage (or relative "fitness") - is nothing at all like retroactively finding arbitrary and unexplained correlations. It's more along the lines of "no candidate has won the US presidential election with an approval of under 30% a month before the election". Of course, even that could still happen, but the causal relationship is clear enough so even though a candidate with 30% in the polls a month before the election could win, you'd hardly say that's the safer bet.
by CGamesPlay | 2026-01-02 01:25:07+00:00
> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.

This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.

RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
by xpe | 2026-01-02 01:26:24+00:00
Personally, I dig it! Selected parts from linked page:

"""Unlike some other projects, Ghostty does not use the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.

This approach is based on years of experience maintaining open source projects and observing that 80-90% of what users think are bugs are either misunderstandings, environmental problems, or configuration errors by the users themselves.[...]"""
by Demiurge | 2026-01-02 01:27:02+00:00
That's what I just said. There is zero value to me knowing these numbers. I assume that all python built in methods are pretty much the same speed. I concentrate on IO being slow, minimizing these operations. I think about CPU intensive loops that process large data, and I try to use libraries like numpy, DuckDB, or other tools to do the processing. If I have a more complicated system, I profile its methods, and optimize tight loops based on PROFILING. I don't care what the numbers in the article are, because I PROFILE, and I optimize the procedures that are the slowest, for example, using cython. Which part of what I am saying does not make sense?
by plagiarist | 2026-01-02 01:29:02+00:00
Could I get your thoughts on the Asus GX10 vs. spending on GPU compute? It seems like one could get a lot of total VRAM with better memory bandwidth and make PCIe the bottleneck. Especially if you already have a motherboard with spare slots.

I'm trying to better understand the trade offs, or if it depends on the workload.
Ask HN: Automated WebRTC Livestream Recording
by PhilipWee | 2026-01-02 01:29:24+00:00
Hey guys, I'm trying to build an automated system to record livestreams, but I'm not sure if I am doing something completely wrong or if there's a better way of doing this

Requirements

- Hands free, runs 24/7

- Incoming stream on webpage is only in WebRTC (No m3u8, etc)

- Needs to be able to record multiple (up to 4 and hopefully more) streams at once

Notes
- It doesn't have to be a chrome extension

- I'm happy to download a simple app to do this if one exists

My current process:
1. I have a seperate detection script that detects when a video starts which works fine

2. Made a chrome extension

3. Chrome extension has a content script

4. Content script injects a header script into the webpage

1. The header script wraps the `WebRTC` object in a listener proxy

2. For all `WebRTC` connections made, store the audio and video tracks

5. When audio and video track is successfully found

1. Start recording stream with `MediaRecorder`

1. This stream gets restarted every 1hr

2. Each stream records for 1hr 10mins

2. On each 15s chunk

3. Convert chunk data into base64 blob

4. Send base64 blob via messaging to content script

6. On receiving in the content script, it forwards the data to the background script

7. The background script uploads via TUS to supabase

My current problems:

1. Several 15s chunks aren't getting uploaded

2. Some of the 15s chunks are quite laggy

3. Especially during the overlapping parts, I'm losing alot of 15s chunks

If anyone has any suggestions on improving the system, or what I'm doing wrong, etc, do let me know! I've been struggling with this for quite a while so any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated
by lovich | 2026-01-02 01:29:53+00:00
> That seems to contradict itself? Cooler heads plan carefully; hotheads act out - seek immediate emotional satisfaction without thinking of the consequences.

No, because “cooler heads” are advocating for not retaliating. I’d accept the opinion of “cooler heads” if it was things like “we’re not ready yet and need to build up our military before being able to risk active conflict” vs “we should never fight back, war is bad :(“

> Wars are not acts, but the conseuqences of long chains - large graphs - of decisions often lasting decades or more. Wars come from situations where there is no other choice.

I have no idea how that is a response to what I said instead of just waxing poetic. If another nation decides they are at war with your nation, then guess what buddy, you’re at war. Even with your head in the sand.
by jppope | 2026-01-02 01:29:57+00:00
Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history.

If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-01-02 01:30:09+00:00
Weeeell... Ya say that, but:

Many years ago someone "infected" my computer with a "manual virus": A printed-out sheet of paper placed on top of the computer, telling me to delete all my hard drive's files myself, then photocopy the sheet and put both copies on nearby computers.

It was obviously a joke. But in the "modern" agentic era, the same thing in a text file is slightly more realistic as a threat...
by fragmede | 2026-01-02 01:30:24+00:00
> What I'm struggling with is, when you ask AI to do something, its answer is always undeterministically different, more or less.

For some computer science definition of deterministic, sure, but who gives a shit about that? If I ask it build a login page, and it puts GitHub login first one day, and Google login first the next day, do I care? I'm not building login pages every other day. What point do you want to define as "sufficiently deterministic", for which use case?

"Summarize this essay into 3 sentences" for a human is going to vary from day to day, and yeah, it's weird for computers to no longer be 100% deterministic, but I didn't decide this future for us.
by aeonfox | 2026-01-02 01:32:39+00:00
No two ways to look at it. Electrification is the inevitable next step for mobility, and BYD are going to be top dog. It's pretty obvious why Tesla is 'diversifying'/divesting into robotics, but Asia has plenty of movers in that space too, not least BYD. SpaceX is the only moat Elon has left.
by MBCook | 2026-01-02 01:33:12+00:00
Microsoft didn’t control the number one search engine, the number one email client, the number one video site, probably the number one online office suite, the number one smartphone platform…

It was possible to rip people away from Microsoft. That may not be something we can do this time with Chrome.

Try telling someone that moving off of Chrome may mean moving off of every single Google property because Chrome is the only browser they work on by then.

See how easy an argument that is. It’s right up with there with “stop helping capitalism and move to the woods“.
by benreesman | 2026-01-02 01:33:20+00:00
NVFP4 (and to a lesser extent, MXFP8) work, in general. In terms of usable FLOPS the DGX Spark and the GMTek EVO-X2 both lose to the 5090, with NCCL and OpenMPI set up the DGX is still the nicest way to dev for our SBSA future. Working on that too, harder problem.
Security breaks during partial failures – design notes from distributed systems
by sandhyavinjam | 2026-01-02 01:33:21+00:00
TL;DR: Many security mechanisms fail not during attacks, but during partial outages. This post documents early design notes for a failure-aware security framework for distributed systems.

The problem

In production distributed systems, security often breaks when things are half working:

auth services degrade → retries explode

fallback paths widen access

recovery logic becomes the attack surface

Nothing is “exploited”, yet the system becomes unsafe.

Most security models assume stable components and clean failures.
Real systems don’t behave that way.

Design assumptions

We assume:

correlated failures

retries are adversarial

timeouts are unsafe defaults

recovery paths matter as much as steady-state logic

We don’t assume:

global consistency

perfect identity

reliable clocks

centralized enforcement

Framework ideas (high level)

This work explores four ideas:

1. Failure-aware trust

Trust degrades under failure, not just compromise

Access narrows automatically during partial outages

2. Security invariants at runtime

Invariants are continuously enforced

Violations trigger containment, not alerts

3. Retry-safe security primitives

Idempotent, monotonic, side-effect bounded

Retries can’t escalate privilege

4. Security as observable state

Trust level, degradation, and containment are visible

If you can’t observe it, you can’t secure it

What this is not

Not zero trust marketing

Not compliance

Not a finished system

It’s an attempt to treat failure as the normal case, not an exception.

Why publish this early?

Because many real failures:

don’t fit clean research papers

happen during incidents, not attacks

are invisible outside production systems

We’re sharing design notes to get feedback before formalizing or evaluating further.

Feedback welcome

If you’ve seen security regressions during outages or retries causing unsafe behavior, I’d like to hear about it.

This is ongoing work. No claims of novelty or completeness.
by thechao | 2026-01-02 01:33:59+00:00
Real income in trades is up; that doesn't mean it's great pay, just up. Real housing costs have greatly outpaced that. It's the crazy post-2000 low interest boom-bust cycle that's wrecking the housing trades as a functional job. Trades are hugely oversubscribed during the boom, and the busts are too long to maintain the labor force.

If we want to build housing, we'll need a stabilizing force for that. I don't see a way to make that happen outside of govt intervention.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-01-02 01:34:06+00:00
Yeah, you can prove pretty much anything with a pubmed link. Do dead salmon "think?" fMRI says maybe!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799957/

The resources that the brain is using to think -- whatever resources those are -- are language-based. Otherwise there would be no way to communicate with the test subjects. "Language" doesn't just imply written and spoken text, as these researchers seem to assume.
by MBCook | 2026-01-02 01:35:03+00:00
I would argue that the root of the problem is that Google was not broken up.

I don’t think one company should own all the stuff that Google does. It gives them way too many perverse incentives over the web.

I’m not saying it’s smart we got here. I’m not saying it’s good we got here. I’m not saying we should be here.

All I’m saying is we ARE here. And given that (effective screw up) I fear this will make things drastically worse.
by avidiax | 2026-01-02 01:35:22+00:00
Russia would first have to be a "normal country". It would need an educated populace and a non-extractive (manufacturing or services) economy. It suffers from both a resource curse and Dutch disease. It is difficult to form a middle class that's independent of state institutions and employment. It has poor demographics and brain drain. It has no independent elites (academics, journalists, judges, business people), so the only restorative force in the society is brutal punishment for non-alignment with a cult of personal power.

Even if Putin wanted to join the E.U., the economy, social structures and institutions, and uneducated voting populace wouldn't allow it to be stable enough to join.

Russia at this point can't even be a successful authoritarian state like China. It's hard to say that it will never be a democracy, but those with a memory of the 1990's find that idea traumatic. Looking far forward in time, eventually global oil independence and demographic decline may force economic reform.
by lucideer | 2026-01-02 01:35:47+00:00
I'd say it's varied & most often a combination of multiple things.

- They want the cover art

- They want a physical token representing an artist they like

- They want to financially support the artist in a direct way

- They speculate they might get a player someday (much akin to book buyers leaving books on their shelves unread for years on end)

1 of the above might be the primary driver for any given buyer but I'd assume all of the above play some part in their motivations.
by rapidfl | 2026-01-02 01:35:49+00:00
That's my point about ICE not innovating enough. And of course hybrid would be one of the innovations. Also it should have more electronic luxuries and connectivity to match the newly designed EVs. Hybrids would carry a bigger battery that can pre warm without engine running.

ICE itself is close to fundamental limits. But iiuc other parts like frames and chasis are not, like they could be lighter and stronger.

ICE cars have bigger mileage than equivalent EVs? Meaning you fill gas once every few weeks in 5 mins.

> EV’s are a substantial win even without subsidies

Why are they subsidized then? It is somehow better than no subsidies from the company's viewpoint.
by favflam | 2026-01-02 01:36:32+00:00
How does Mark Zuckerberg triggering a genocide in Myanmar, among election interference, rank up with your disdain for EU digital policy?

Are politicians not supposed to do anything about Zuckerberg after watching Sarah Wynn Williams testify about Mark Zuckerberg selling out Americans for his fetish for kissing up to the CCP? Or hearing the current administration threaten the EU over impinging on Zuckerberg to engage in election interference in EU countries?
by Cyph0n | 2026-01-02 01:36:58+00:00
You essentially have two stratums of society:

(1) the middle class (and above) who have money to spend on services

(2) the migrant working class, the bulk of whom send every last extra penny back home as remittances to support family

The second class of people are not considered as a market for the majority of services in the UAE. In the case of food, when they do eat out, they frequent traditional, low cost/quality establishments.

As for why a Big Mac costs that much, labor definitely doesn’t have much to do with it. My impression is that prices continued to get pushed up as long as sales didn’t take a hit, which means it’s mostly pure profit.

Keep in mind that the median salary isn’t that high. Without looking it up, I would guess it’s approx $25k USD/year, but I haven’t lived there in a while.