MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Eric_WVGG | 2026-01-14 20:31:06+00:00
#1 is really good advice.

I personally got started as the IT guy at a newspaper. Went from managing the network to digitizing their ad tracking (they literally used a clipboard) to going head-to-head with Craigslist.

Being the only person in the room who can “do computer” is an easy way to make yourself indispensable fast.

(It feels like tech is one of the few industries where graduates just slot into a job in their chosen vertical. Everyone who studies literature, art, fashion, etc. takes it for granted that they will have to work in some other industry for _years_ before they can pivot into the field they’re actually trained for.)
by iancmceachern | 2026-01-14 20:31:26+00:00
Look at the same specs for the cyber truck. There is about twice the carbon in the manufacturing of these, so it counts on people driving them for hundreds of thousands of miles, I don't see that happening with them because you can't even take a normal road trip while towing. These things just aren't going to see the miles, because they can't. They're just not usable as trucks.

https://insideevs.com/news/719434/tesla-cybertruck-awd-vs-ra...

Also the power plants and diesel generators for the data centers...
https://www.selc.org/press-release/new-images-reveal-elon-mu...
by SvenL | 2026-01-14 20:31:31+00:00
Well, at least for gaming It worked for me quite well with GeForce NOW. I have a MacBook can play here and there some games I like - as a casual gamer it’s fine. I wouldn’t bother to maintain a gaming PC for the casual gaming sessions I have. In this sense - yes, I gave up my non existing gaming PC to rent.

To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. (I know Microsoft had this and it was an amazing idea) For doing the non standard stuff like gaming/resource intensive development stuff I could rent a cloud pc.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-14 20:31:35+00:00
> I'm very much on the left, and I honestly like the design of the Cybertruck. (I know this puts me in a minority.) It is disappointing that the original "unibody" design was abandoned. The new design where the body panels just randomly fall off is silly.

Function should drive form. The design would be cool if it was for a cool function.

Say you have a beautifully-made, expertly-weighted tack hammer. That looks cool on your work bench and works well. If you refashion the hammer into a kitchen spoon, it looks dumb in the kitchen and works poorly for stirring a pot.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-14 20:31:46+00:00
My first instincts offhand were:

* N-gram analysis of lyrics. Even good LLM's still exhibit some weird pattern's when analyzed at the n-gram level.

* Entropy - Something like KL divergence maybe? There are a lot of ways to calculate entropy that can be informative. I would expect human music to display higher entropy.

* Plain old FFT. I suspect you'll find weird statistical anomalies.

* Fancy waveform analysis tricks. AI's tend to do it in "chunks" I would expect the waveforms to have steeper/higher impulses and strange gaps. This probably explains why they still sound "off" to hifi fans.

* SNR analysis - Maybe a repeat of one of the above, but worth expanding on. The actual information density of the channel will be different because diffusion is basically compression.

* Subsampling and comparing to a known library. It's likely that you can identify substantial chunks that are sampled from other sources without modification - Harder because you need a library. Basically just Shazam.

* Consistency checks. Are all of the same note/instrument pairs actually generated by the same instrument throughout, or subtly different. Most humans won't notice, but it's probably easy to detect that it drifts (if it does).

That's just offhand though. I would need to experiment to see which if any actually work. I'm sure there are lots more ways.
by inkcapmushroom | 2026-01-14 20:31:48+00:00
I have a similar problem, I do swing dancing and all the information for dances in my area are exclusively posted on Facebook by a wide variety of people who are putting on the dances. I can try and go to each individual organizing a dance and try and get them off Facebook, but that's making their job harder when we've already had lots of people stop organizing events post-COVID, and the system they have now seems to really work for getting new people into dancing that haven't done it before with lots of new faces each dance. So I just go along with it.
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-14 20:31:51+00:00
AES would mean the encrypted parts of the id are ~28+ bytes. That's a long minimum identifier length.

What you're suggesting is perhaps true in the sense that the throughout is higher, but AES decryption carries a fairly high fixed overhead. If you're in a language like Ruby (as GitHub is) or Python/Node, you're probably calling out to openssl.

I did try to do my diligence and find data to support or refute your claim, but I wasn't able to find anything that does directly. That said, I'm not able to find any sources that support the idea that AES is faster at decryption than base64 in any context (for small plaintext values or in general). With SIMD, b64 often decodes in 0.2 CPU cycles or so per byte, while AES only manages 2.5-10.7 CPU cycles per byte. The numbers for AES get better as the plaintext size grow, though.

Do you happen to have data to support your claim?
by isolli | 2026-01-14 20:32:00+00:00
It reminds of this quote from Roger Penrose's book, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe:

“My nervousness was perhaps at its greatest because the illustrative area that I had elected to discuss, namely string theory and some of its various descendants, had been developed to its heights in Princeton probably more than anywhere else in the world.”

“Moreover, that subject is a distinctly technical one, and I cannot claim competence over many of its important ingredients, my familiarity with these technicalities being somewhat limited, particularly in view of my status as an outsider.”

“Yet, if only the insiders are considered competent to make critical comments about the subject, then the criticisms are likely to be limited to relatively technical issues, some of the broader aspects of criticism being, no doubt, significantly neglected.”

The fact that Penrose felt nervous criticizing string theory has made me think less of string theory (or rather, the humans behind it) ever since.
by sitharus | 2026-01-14 20:32:05+00:00
Degradation Rates of Plastics in the Environment (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635) shows PET degrading very slowly in the environment. _Very_ slowly.

Researchers have found bacteria that do degrade PET using esterases though: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad6359 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

So I guess technically it's biodegradable? Though as it's an energy source give bacteria a few hundred years or so.
by oytis | 2026-01-14 20:32:06+00:00
I am not a fan of governments controlling the internet and of Australia in this regard in particular, but Feature 4 makes it all acceptable to me. We shouldn't ban all of web 2.0, people, including children, have right to talk to each other, but gamified, attention-leeching design is absolutely harmful, and I would be happy to see banned for everyone
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-14 20:32:08+00:00
Well that's the issue. We're not seeing "artists" coming along and applying it to their years/decades of creative knowledge. We're seeing the equivalent of some cushy heir to a fortune come in with a drill and say "I can outdo these teams of diggers! We don't need diggers anymore!"

And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!".

Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.
by palata | 2026-01-14 20:32:16+00:00
> Second, we did solve a related problem with market pressure - the stratospheric ozone depletion and the ozone hole.

If you think that the ozone problem was remotely of the same level of difficulty as climate change, then you don't understand the problem.

> But people have achieved much harder goals.

There is no much harder goal than surviving on Earth, and we are measurably not only completely failing, but we keep accelerating in the wrong direction! We are making it worse, faster everyday.
by Ostrogoth | 2026-01-14 20:32:28+00:00
>If you really need something bigger renting a trailer or truck is dirt cheap

It’s neither convenient nor cheap to rent a trailer in much of the US. Major cities have options, rural areas less so. Full disclosure I have a mid-sized pickup, but I recently looked into renting a trailer for a landscaping project that was above the weight limit for my truck. First issue I ran into was that there were not any trailers available for rent anywhere near my location. Second issue was that after factoring in driving distance + rental cost + dump fees, it was ~ the same price just to pay a junk company to haul the materials…and it was not cheap. Anecdotally, my pickup was cheaper than most other vehicle options at the time I bought it, my commute is short (so fuel economy is less an issue), and as a homeowner I use the bed to haul something at least once/month (Unfortunately kei trucks weren’t available at the time). So the cost/benefit/convenience factor of owning a truck over renting a trailer works for me. YMMV.
by hnspirit95 | 2026-01-14 20:32:32+00:00
I can't help but think of an absurd situation where your subscription ends mid use and results in a crash. Like I'm sure the engineers have thought of this but the image of someone cruising down the road and getting a popup to enter their payment info before careening off a cliff is just so humorous... until the horrifying possibility that it could be reality sinks in.
by lyu07282 | 2026-01-14 20:32:41+00:00
You have to always devolve to individual responsibility and freedom to make your case. But games are a 250+ billion dollar industry employing hundreds of thousands of artists who's jobs are all threatened by generative ai in the future, that's systemic, structural. We can all look at that future and decide to make a different choice, that is actual freedom, what you describe is collective helplessness.
by benbristow | 2026-01-14 20:32:55+00:00
In an ideal world, parents would be good parents, know what their kids are up to, install parental controls on their digital devices (software solutions out there range from free/bundled to not expensive), have conversations with kids about what's on the internet and what to avoid.

Government overreach is not the answer, it's a plaster (and an excuse for more surveillance which is arguably the primary factor) over bad parenting. In the UK at least, all major ISPs and mobile providers have a basic parental/adult-content control package that is set-up by default (opt-out by the bill payer). Albeit trivial to get around with a VPN/proxy or changing DNS servers etc.

Kids will be kids as well. They'll get around restrictions, they're clever, they talk with their mates in the playground about this sort of thing. Especially teens.
by dzonga | 2026-01-14 20:33:01+00:00
keep ya head up & high. thinking slow and straight is key at this time.

expand ya thinking - your options are not exclusionary i.e XOR but AND and don't define yourself in terms of your current state.

hell the friends you envy - if a nuke fell tomorrow - would they still have jobs ? if they're laid off would they still have jobs ?

go out there create IP / something outlasting - i.e a company or product

and frankly no one cares if you went to MIT or some no state school - you can either wait and be left behind

or determine your own destiny - choice is yours.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-14 20:33:15+00:00
Pop in for a pee and a snack. In the 15-20 mins that takes, you'll have a good amount of charge.

Towing is also a bit of an edge case.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/26907/you-dont-need-a-full-siz...

> According to Edwards’ data, 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
by prmph | 2026-01-14 20:33:18+00:00
What I'm relating is 100% the truth, and I did not machine dry them after washing. I could not even believe my eyes when it happened, because I've been a customer of their dress shirts since like a decade ago and always relied on them for a precise fit.

I bought two of them, the ones that shrunk. They are labeled as wrinkle -resistant slim shirts, 98% cotton and 2% spandex.

Don't be mistaken, the quality of their apparel has definitely gone or late. I went on Reddit and its definitely a thing people have noticed.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-14 20:33:24+00:00
See https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...

I'll set it loose on a development or staging system but wouldn't let it around a production system.

Don't forget your backups. There was that time I was doing an upgrade of the library management system at my Uni and I was sitting at the sysadmin's computer and did a DROP DATABASE against the wrong db which instantly brought down the production system -- she took down a binder from the shelf behind me that had the restore procedures written down and we had it back up in 30 seconds!
by rileymichael | 2026-01-14 20:33:29+00:00
> MkDocs: Works great with JS disabled, however the table of contents needs to be maintained via mkdocs.yml, which can be quite tedious.

note that the mkdocs-material folks are now working on https://zensical.org/ which is in rust and _much_ faster. it solves this specific requirement by autogenerating the navigation based on file structure.

it's still early / under active development, but i recently rebuilt our techdocs on top of it. a simple github workflow to aggregate from our two monorepos + some bash-fu to merge them together and voila! no config file headaches
by Veserv | 2026-01-14 20:33:34+00:00
You should not even need a regex; no serious logging system should be emitting formatted strings, JSON, etc. as a storage format. You are immediately incurring on the order of a 5x log size and 10-100x log performance overhead with any serialization format that poor. A properly performant logging system should be able to generate on the order of 100 million logs per second per core (assuming relatively small payloads).

At a minimum you should be using message template [1] serialization which is trivial to implement transparently on any logging system/statement with zero code changes to the emitter itself.

Any filtering done on top of that would then just be parsing structured data which is way easier than a regex, though of course that is somewhat beside the point of the article.

[1] https://messagetemplates.org/
by JacoboJacobi | 2026-01-14 20:33:48+00:00
I've seen plenty of cases of making something a target where quality won't be measurable and immediately cut off the reward or apply penalties. I don't really want Microsoft to run a large fund that encourages people to try to take over roles and request cash, etc.

Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
by stickfigure | 2026-01-14 20:33:53+00:00
Lots of good advice here. Other than (hopefully) an hour or two of job hunting every day, what are you doing with your time?

I understand if you're working a non-tech job to pay the bills, that's hard. But if you have family or other support keeping you going, you have access to a precious resource: time.

You didn't say what field you want to be in, but assuming it's something software related: Pick a software community and get involved. It almost doesn't matter what, just make sure it's something you enjoy working on and there are companies in the space.

Your first "job" is to bootstrap the contact network that most people already have via coworkers. Submit some meaningful PRs, people will learn your name, and eventually you can leverage this into some form of employment. It could take a year. Better to start sooner rather than later.

The "disconnect from social media" advice might or might not be good; it's a way of keeping up with friends. Social support has value. But social media can eat up a lot of time that would be better spent on your new "job". Use your time wisely.
by noboostforyou | 2026-01-14 20:34:01+00:00
You're not a failure. I graduated 2009 with a computer engineering degree (not quite as prestigious as MIT but a decent school) and basically did odd jobs and freelance for several years until I finally got my foot in the door at a tech company and my career took off from there.

1. Stop doomscrolling - this is imperative. Almost nothing good will come from it and ends up being a vicious cycle for any depression you are experiencing.

2. Even if it's embarrassing, keep talking to your old classmates. Ask about job openings or anything. The easiest way to get a job is through an internal reference, otherwise your application may never even be seen by the hiring manager.

3. Exercise, do some sort of physical activity - even going for a short walk outside every day will help improve your mental health.

4. Find a personal project to work on and commit time to it that would have otherwise spent doomscrolling. It is good mental exercise and it's also good for job hunting - you may not have prior job experience but a personal Git portfolio showcasing your skills is definitely something good employers will look at.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-14 20:34:09+00:00
On #0, there was a group that did this in SV around 2000 called itself "Recession Camp" where they did free/cheap group activities. Would be cool to see something similar, but more persistent.

On #2, with the dotcom bust and further complications post-9/11, I spent my year without work in a house without a decent enough phone line for dialup and learning C# with a big fat book and the command line compiler. I wouldn't discount side projects, etc... but yeah, staying up on interview skills is important. I'm a bit old, with a family/life so what hits me in those scenarios is there's less accounting for "experienced" developers a lot of the time.
by lovich | 2026-01-14 20:34:36+00:00
The site is getting inundated with bots. For the past few months everytime I realize some poster I’m replying to is looping in replies or having gaping holes in logic, I check their account and it’s been made in the past few months and the early interactions it had were with other accounts made in the same pattern.

Then you also see shit like these posts that touch on the admin in a negative light getting insta flagged and nuked off the front page.
by russellbeattie | 2026-01-14 20:35:03+00:00
Sorry for the long post, but it may be relevant to you.

I would share my personal website which I owned for 25+ years, but AWS deregistered it because of $36.

In case you use AWS as a registrar, be warned: If your account is "closed", they will release your domains. In other words, they make them available as if they were expired. Immediately.

Short summary: I consolidated my domains at AWS years ago just to make it easier to manage everything from one spot. Earlier last year, my credit card I used for auto payments didn't have the $18 I pay for monthly costs. I didn't notice, until my email stopped working because my account was "suspended" due to non payment after a couple months.

When AWS suspended the account, they turned off DNS routing which I managed from Route 53, so not only did my websites stop working, so did my email account (which had DNS entries to route to Gmail).

So I went to log in to pay my bill, but in the time since I had last signed in, AWS had added two factor authentication. But since I couldn't get my email, I couldn't log in. Quiz: How does one pay AWS if you can't log into your account? You cant. How do you submit a ticket? Create a new account, submit a ticket about the old account from there (you still can't pay). And then wait. And then send in a notarized form plus forms of identity. It took over a two months to resolve. Meanwhile, my account went from suspended to "closed".

I put that in quotes because when I was finally able to get my log in working, my account was as it was before with all data and setup intact.

Except for all my domains.

They had been deregistered, despite having paid for years more. AWS cancelled and released my domains without my permission. They actively deleted them from the register list, so anyone out there could buy them.

russellbeattie.com was no longer mine. In addition to the other 6 domains I used.

Because of the SEO of my personal blog, some asshole had added my domain to an "add/drop" service, so it was instantly snapped up and is now used as a scam website. They also have access to all my email, which I've used for everything from Apple to Microsoft to Google and more.

So, I'd love to share my blog with you, but Amazon screwed me so badly it's incredible.

tl;dr: Don't use AWS as your registrar.
by lisdexan | 2026-01-14 20:35:35+00:00
Trump is not long for this world, MAGA might crumble or more probably fall under the control of one of the possible successors in the WH. Establishing diplomatic ties with his wranglers pre heart attack is smart.

As for how this is seen internally for Danes, at least in my part of the world the US admin has already achieved crackhead with a knife status. I suspect that trying the dog whisperer shtick (like Mamdani) will not be seen negatively.
by palata | 2026-01-14 20:35:37+00:00
> I have the idea you're reticent in accepting the possibility of Servo becoming the needed alternative to the Blink/Webkit hegemony. Am I correct in thinking so

No, you are not.

I guess I was just trying to kindly ask "can you describe in a few words how usable Servo is today?". I was genuinely interested. Not anymore, but I do strongly hope that there will be an alternative someday. Apparently not today.
by brandonmenc | 2026-01-14 20:35:49+00:00
People seriously underestimate how much trouble a pickup truck rental from U-Haul can be.

I’ve wasted so much time trying to track down which location near me has one available on the exact day I want to do major yard work. Often I have to reschedule my work or plan out super far in advance. Or take a day off during the week because everyone else also wants to rent trucks on the weekend. Then I’m running against the clock the whole time.

An extra $100-$200 a month car payment to have a truck instead of a crossover is totally worth it.