MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by instig007 | 2026-01-15 22:33:34+00:00
> I’m not as certain. The fact that we’ve gone from ASN.1 to COBRA/SOAP to protobuf to Cap’n’web and all the million other items I didn’t list says something.

> It absolutely is a decades old set of problems that have never been solved to the satisfaction of most users.

ASN.1 wasn't in the same problem space with CORBA/DCOM, both CORBA and DCOM/OLE were heavily invested in a general-purpose non-domain-specific object model representation that would suppot arbitrary embeddings within an open-ended range of software. I suspect this is the unsolvable problem indeed, but I also believe that's not what you meant with your comment either, since all the known large-scale BEAM deployments (the comment I originally replied to implied BEAM deployments) operate within bounded domain spaces such as telecom and messaging, where distributed properties of the systems are known upfront: there are existing formats, protocols of exchange, and the finite number of valid interactions between entities/actors of the network, the embeddings are either non-existent or limited to a finite set of media such as static images, videos, maps, contacts etc. All of these can be encoded by a compile-time specification that gets published for all parties upfront.

> basic questions like “should optionality/absence be encoded differently than unset default values?”

However you like, any monoid would work here. I would argue that [a] and [] always win over (Option a) and especially over (Option [a]).

> and “how should we encode forward compatibility?”

If you'd like to learn if there's a spec-driven typed way of achieving that, you can start your research from this sample implementation atop json: https://github.com/typeable/schematic?tab=readme-ov-file#mig...
by OvidNaso | 2026-01-15 22:33:43+00:00
Hold on, their moderation methods are as transparent as could possibly be. Every article has a dedicated page where every decision has a reason and more often than not an overwhelming amount of discussion. Their overall policy is similarly debated publicly.

Is it overwhelming? Oh yes. Tough to change? Probably also yes without dedication and sound reasoning. But opaque? Certainly doesn't fail that criteria.
by simonw | 2026-01-15 22:33:59+00:00
I agree 100% - it's a very programmer-coded prompt. It was pretty much the first thing I thought to try.

I expect we'll see an enormous quantity of "cool prompts to try in Cowork" content show up over the next few months, which makes sense - regular non-programmers will benefit enormously from cookbooks and prompting guides and other tools to help them figure out what they can ask this thing.
by pxc | 2026-01-15 22:34:18+00:00
I met regexes when I was 13, I think. I spent a little time reading the Java API docs on the language's regex implementation and played with a couple of regex testing websites during an introductory programming class at that age. I've used them for the rest of my life without any difficulty. Strict (formal) regexes are extremely simple, and even when using crazy implementations that allow all kinds of backreferences and conditionals, 99.999% of regexes in the wild are extremely simple as well. And that's true in the example from TFA! There's nothing tricky or cryptic about this regex.

That said, what this regex wanted to be was obviously just a list. AWS should offer simpler abstractions (like lists) where they make sense.
by akkad33 | 2026-01-15 22:34:36+00:00
That's not my point. My point is it's unreliable at best.

> strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.

Why is this a given? I don't think there's a secret incantation that could have gotten better results. It's an inherent limitations of the system. If you have resources for me to learn I'm open to discover
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-15 22:34:37+00:00
Those are nice pictures but I can take the same pictures in the USA.

Note: I'm not suggesting China is not doing better here. Rather, I'm going off the title "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout" and I'm not seeing anything in those photos I haven't seen in the USA.

Driving down the 580 from SF to Tracy you pass several hundred windmills. Driving through Mojave the same. Also solar. Driving toward Vegas as well. And those are just the ones I've seen with my own eyes. There's many others.

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=altamont+pass+windmill...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=mojave+windmills&sa=X&...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=palmdale+solar+farm&sa...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=desert+stateline+solar...

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=barstow+solar+plant&sa...
by bjackman | 2026-01-15 22:34:59+00:00
I guess whether container isolation is good enough just comes down to the threat you're protecting against:

- confused/misaligned agent: probably good enough (as of Q1 2026...).

- hijacked agent: definitely not good enough.

But also it's kinda weird that we still have high-level interfaces that force you to care this much about the type of virtualization it's giving you. We probably need to be moving more towards stuff like Incus here that treats VMs and system containers basically as variants of the same thing that you can manage at a higher level of abstraction. (I think k8s can be like that too).
by Herring | 2026-01-15 22:35:21+00:00
Yep, see the article

> Denmark isn’t just resisting U.S. tech; it is one of the few nations actively building its own sovereign alternatives for critical infrastructure.

> In Rogaczewski’s view, sovereign digitization is not just a defensive measure against Silicon Valley; it is the only way to maintain the welfare state in the 21st century.

It'll just take a while cause Google is so big.
by chickenbig | 2026-01-15 22:35:40+00:00
The article quotes £147/MWh for CCGTs. These look to come from the Electricity Generation Costs 2025 [0] released on the same day as the CfD results. However there is no £147/MWh in Annex A [1]. There is a £145/MWh for CCGT delivered in 2030, but the way this was arrived at is interesting.

a) A load factor of 30% (which seems pretty low for a CCGT), that is actually ~28% (per Annex A [1] "Technical Costs and Assumptions" sheet);

b) fuel efficiency is set to be 54%, which is far lower than BAT CCGT of around 64%, which affects fuel and CO2 emissions costs;

c) the analysis missed out capacity market payments that one gets for having dispatchable power stations;

d) the analysis presumes £41/MWh of carbon costs.

The key drivers of the price are load factor (so amortised construction costs), conversion efficiency (fuel costs and carbon costs) and carbon costs themselves. These make up 90% of the LCOE.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-gener...
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6967b0c806fab...
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-01-15 22:36:25+00:00
I'm not sure why you believe that "high standards" and "fear of rejection" didn't exist a hundred years ago. Think Gatsby, from the Great Gatsby (published 1925): dude longed for human connection (hence throwing massive parties), but was terrified of being outed as not belonging to the social strata he found himself in. That's fear of rejection. People being to good for others is basis of the class system, and that predates written history.
by deadbabe | 2026-01-15 22:36:43+00:00
Unfortunately you seem to forget that money movements are amoral.

A country could be a brutal dictatorship and still be a great place to grow your wealth. Investors aren’t going to willingly make themselves poorer just because Americans are in a private hell of their own making.

America is still the world’s top consumer. People are broke because they literally consume too much. Debt slaves will make you RICH.
by fcholf | 2026-01-15 22:36:52+00:00
I agree, though, you can still work toward understanding using an LLM (and take it from a skeptical) by, e.g., using them as challengers to your ideas.

That said, I think it requires a lot of self discipline and should be complemented with other methods and sources of information to be useful. As a teacher, I really try to prevent my undergraduate students from taking the easy road of using LLMs to solve every easyish problem I give them to *learn*. Sure, they did the homework but most of them did not learn anything while doing it and they finish their first year without having learnt anything actionable regarding computer science (observe that I use a different approach with students from other areas, though I still think it is good to spend a few days without relying on LLMs).

I often use a sport analogy to land my point which works with them, so let me share it here. If you want to learn how to run a marathon and drive 42km every day, then you are certainly (hopefully ?) a better driver but nowhere near to running a marathon (fortunately, no one has yet challenged me with the fact that running a marathon is way less useful to get a job than driving).

(edit: grammar, spelling)
by alex43578 | 2026-01-15 22:37:04+00:00
The majority of illegal immigrants did commit a crime by virtue of being illegals, violating 8 U.S.C. 1325, so the crime-rate for illegals is certainly higher than non-immigrants right out of the gate.

For the less-than-half who have “only” committed civil immigration violations, the point still remains that they are here illegally and are subject to civil immigration proceedings.
by simonw | 2026-01-15 22:37:19+00:00
Have you seen my writing on prompt injection (a term that I coined)?

That's pretty negative! https://simonwillison.net/series/prompt-injection/

There's a whole section in the linked piece about how Cowork doesn't do enough here, including:

> I do not think it is fair to tell regular non-programmer users to watch out for “suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection”
by e2le | 2026-01-15 22:37:30+00:00
It's truly vile how he treats the office and the democratic values he's meant to uphold and defend.

Why is he not impeached? Where is the American people?

He treats you with such contempt that he isn't above using the office for fraud and scams. He has done more to harm the US than Putin could have ever dreamed possible. Where is the American people? Hello?
by crosslayer | 2026-01-15 22:38:03+00:00
A lot of these answers are still treating this as a permissions problem.

The deeper issue is that once an agent is allowed to express intent directly against a live system, you’re already inside the blast radius… no amount of allowlists fully fixes that.

The safer pattern is to separate reasoning from execution entirely: the agent can propose actions, but a deterministic layer is the only thing that can commit state changes.

If the worst case outcome of an agent run isn’t acceptable, the architecture is already too permissive… regardless of how fine grained the controls look.
by bri3d | 2026-01-15 22:38:41+00:00
> They sell data derived from the data.

Do they? I don't think they even do this, either.

I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.

One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.
by touisteur | 2026-01-15 22:39:13+00:00
The A40, L40S and Blackwell 6000 Pro Server have RT cores. 3 datacenter GPUs.

If you want binning in action, the RTX ones other than the top ones, are it. Look for the A30 too, of which I was surprised there was no successor. Either they had better yields on Hopper or they didn't get enough from the A30...
by rincebrain | 2026-01-15 22:39:26+00:00
"They're working on it." [1]

It sounds like they put this mechanism into place that stops regenerating large torrents incrementally when it caused massive slowdowns for them, and haven't finished building something to automatically fix it, but will go fix individual ones on demand for now.

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/theinternetarchive/comments/1ij8go9...
by bjourne | 2026-01-15 22:39:27+00:00
> the stated power capacity of wind generation is a theoretical maximum, and the actual capacity will be much lower in practice.

Capacity is constant. You're talking about capacity factor, i.e., average utilization. Numbers from 2018 for Danish offshore wind farms show capacity factors approaching 50%. These brand-new turbines mounted on 150 meters+ towers in the middle of the North Sea will absofuckinglutely beat that.

https://www.modernpowersystems.com/news/eight-new-uk-wind-fa...
by xiphias2 | 2026-01-15 22:39:32+00:00
It's because there is extremism both on the left and right: the left thinks that the right wants a power grab to stop left from coming back, and the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants.

Both of them are right: unless there's a civil war or moderate president (which probably needs ranked choice voting) the most probable scenario is that one of the 2 extremes succeeds.

I also miss the old HN btw and wish that there wouldn't be any right/left politics, just the old classic libertarian property/privacy/opennes right debates, but it looks like those days are gone.
by JohnBooty | 2026-01-15 22:39:34+00:00
Some of those quotes from ChatGPT are pretty damning.

Out of context? Yes. We'd need to read the entire chat history to even begin to have any kind of informed opinion.

extreme guardrails

I feel that this is the wrong angle. It's like asking for a hammer or a baseball bat that can't harm a human being. They are tools. Some tools are so dangerous that they need to be restricted (nuclear reactors, flamethrowers) because there are essentially zero safe ways to use them without training and oversight but I think LLMs are much closer to baseball bats than flamethrowers.

Here's an example. This was probably on GPT3 or GPT35. I forget. Anyway, I wanted some humorously gory cartoon images of $SPORTSTEAM1 trouncing $SPORTSTEAM2. GPT, as expected, declined.

So I asked for images of $SPORTSTEAM2 "sleeping" in "puddles of ketchup" and it complied, to very darkly humorous effect. How can that sort of thing possibly be guarded against? Do you just forbid generated images of people legitimately sleeping? Or of all red liquids?
by Darshan009 | 2026-01-15 22:39:45+00:00
Hi Hightouch Team,

I’m excited about Hightouch’s work at the intersection of LLM-powered agents and cloud data platforms, and I’m reaching out to express interest in backend and AI agents–focused roles.

I’m a Software Engineer with experience building scalable backend and distributed systems, as well as production AI platforms. My background includes designing event-driven microservices on AWS, optimizing data-intensive pipelines, and shipping LLM-powered systems such as agent workflows, RAG-based services, and large-scale inference optimized for latency and cost. I’ve also worked across the stack to deliver reliable, customer-facing systems at scale.

I’d love to explore how my experience could contribute to Hightouch’s AI agent and platform initiatives, and would welcome the opportunity to connect or interview.

Best regards,
Darshan Vaghasiya
darshangvaghasiya0@gmail.com
by mlmonkey | 2026-01-15 22:39:56+00:00
Those windmills in the East Bay are decades old.

And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.

The article here starts with:
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.

Is the US anywhere in this ballpark?
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-15 22:40:01+00:00
I've been trying to do this. One thing I've observed is trying to arrange people to play board games is quite difficult because you can't predict how many people will show up. People get sick, misread the times, etc. And a lot of games are very sensitive to player count, so having 2 people too few or too many has the ability to make the game somewhat unplayable or risk people sitting out watching.

Easier to just host a party or meetup where you can over invite and if some people don't show up it's no issue.
by wtallis | 2026-01-15 22:40:31+00:00
At the end of the month, laptops with Intel's latest processors will start shipping. These use Intel's 18A process for the CPU chiplet. That makes Intel the first fab to ship a process using backside power delivery. There's no third party testing yet to verify if Intel is still far behind TSMC when power, performance and die size are all considered, but Intel is definitely making progress, and their execs have been promising more for the future, such as their 14A process.
by willmarch | 2026-01-15 22:41:09+00:00
You’re conflating three different things: (1) founders’ personal moral failures, (2) the legitimacy theory they articulated, and (3) what an emergency posture from SCOTUS actually proves.

On (1) vs (2): yes, the founding generation tolerated massive injustice. That doesn’t refute the point I was making. The Enlightenment idea they leaned on is that rights pre-exist government and government power is delegated and limited. The later amendments you list aren’t a rebuttal to that framework, they’re the country painfully applying it more consistently over time via the mechanisms the Constitution itself provides.

On the Court point: “SCOTUS didn’t temporarily pause X” does not equal “no constitutional violation.” Emergency stays/injunctions turn on things like posture, standing, likelihood of success, irreparable harm, balance of equities, and deference; not a full merits finding that the challenged conduct is constitutional. “Shadow docket lets it continue” is not the same as “the Court blessed it.”

And the biggest issue is your last paragraph: legitimate does not equal constitutional.

Congress failing to act, the President authorizing something, and courts not immediately stopping it may show the government has the power to do it right now; it does not show the action is within constitutional limits. If that were the test, then any coordinated abuse across branches would become “legitimate by definition,” which is exactly what checks and balances are meant to prevent.

If you want to argue “these protections aren’t being violated,” then argue the specifics: what’s the standard being used for stops, entries, detentions, and removals, and how is it being applied? “It’s enforcement” is not a constitutional analysis.
by 20after4 | 2026-01-15 22:41:19+00:00
There are two really two major concerning issues with Palantir:

1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.

2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-15 22:41:22+00:00
it also doesn't even fight loneliness. Loneliness isn't solved by merely not being physically alone. I grew up in a Catholic environment but because I bought exactly none of it the religious environments were exactly where I felt most isolated.

You're not solving loneliness by joining a cult or a gang. You can only deal with it by making authentic connections to people you actually want to be with. Countless of people are lonely and miserable within families.
by Syntheticate | 2026-01-15 22:41:37+00:00
This is pretty similar to the caching used by the Grasshopper3d visual programming environment, which also deals with 3d geometry: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/

It's a crucial optimization to enable the kind of live programming environment you're talking about here, especially since some nodes ("components") are much more expensive to execute than others. The DAG of the program is laid out in the workspace, and it means users can smoothly drag sliders downstream even if re-executing the whole program from scratch would be prohibitively expensive. It's a lovely way to iterate on creative visual programs.
by tuhgdetzhh | 2026-01-15 22:41:43+00:00
If tested various Posix FS projects over the years and everyone has their shortcomings in one way or the other.

Although the maintainers of these projects disagree, I mostly consider them as a workaround for smaller projects. For big data (PB range) and critical production workloads I recommend to bite the bullet and make your software nativley S3 compatible without going over a POSIX mounted S3 proxy.
by abalashov | 2026-01-15 22:42:12+00:00
> Americans get an idea of how bad we have it when we go on vacation, but we don't see it as something that can be built at home.

It's so strange how this works. They go, sometimes repeatedly, to enjoy these rather basic things, but behave as though they're visiting a quaint Disneyland of sorts and as though there could be no lessons they could take away and apply toward a vision of their own community...
by vbelenky | 2026-01-15 22:42:41+00:00
This is incorrect, unless by "old school" UVC lights you mean 172nm xenon lamps. Those produce quite a lot of ozone. 254nm UVC lamps (also quite old school) do not produce ozone.

Ozone is produced at wavelengths below 242nm, but at very low levels. Significant ozone production only ramps up at wavelengths below 200nm (note the log scale in the figure https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/php.13391) Whether or not the light is produced by an LED is immaterial--what matters is the output spectra.

There are no UVC LEDs that I would consider "safe" for either eyes or skin, except insofar as they are safe because they output very little light, or no UVC at all. SilannaUV makes a 235nm LED, but much of its spectrum is outside the relatively safe "far-UV" band.

Krypton-chloride lamps produce near-monochromatic 222nm, and generally are sold filtered to remove even traces of non-far-UV wavelengths. These are relatively safe because at 222nm, protein absorption in the outer layers of human tissues is so high that the photobiological risk is likely low, especially in skin. I still don't recommend staring directly at those lamps for extended periods of time, especially close up, but this is the only kind of lamp that I might consider 'safe'.

Essentially, if it doesn't produce ozone, it is likely a significant photobiological hazard--unless it's just producing very low levels of light, or not producing UVC at all. Many "UVC" lights you can buy online aren't really UVC at all.