MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-19 16:15:21+00:00
I was an econ major, and a lot of the lower level courses were required for business majors.

It was genuinely shocking how many people from the latter group just could not understand the absolute basics of supply curves and demand curves.

The upside is that I was able to help them understand it by offering tutoring, where I was in limited supply, and there was endless demand for my services!
by nospice | 2026-01-19 16:15:24+00:00
Both Gemini and ChatGPT have a pretty comically wrong knowledge of op-amps. They usually recommend outdated chips and are confused about circuit topologies. I was looking at this last week and it hasn't changed. I asked them to suggest and evaluate microphone circuits and they were just bad. I would really, really recommend reading some human-written text if you're learning about that.

I can't think of any reason why you'd want to use Schottky diodes to protect op-amp inputs. They have high leakage currents and poor surge capabilities. Most op-amps have internal protection diodes, and if you need some extra ESD or overvoltage protection, a Schottky diode probably isn't the way.

I'm not taking an anti-LLM view here. I think they are useful in some fields and are getting better. But in this particular instance, there's a breadth of excellent learning resources and the one you've chosen isn't good.
by account42 | 2026-01-19 16:15:26+00:00
> Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences.

That is always at best a temporary affair.

> Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well.

And those creators still put ads in their videos.

> And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.

Ad-free is the only option I am agreeing to.
by p_ing | 2026-01-19 16:15:27+00:00
> Modern Linux supports asynchronous I/O.

Not nearly to the depth and breth of NT. NT is async I/O throughout. Linux has a bunch of libs that ride on top of pretend async I/O with io_uring as a more recent bonus.

> It's debatable whether NT's lack of memory overcommitting is a superior choice.

NT won't randomly kill a process. That's the winning play.

> OS personalities have never been relevant outside of marketing

Until you've used them for non-marketing purposes, then they're invaluable. Personalities existed when virtualization didn't exist on x86.

> Moreover, the Linux kernel maintains a stable ABI.

The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.

> It supports a wider variety of filesystems natively,

Most distros suggest ext4 out of the box. Sysadmins are going to deploy ZFS where it counts. Some might use XFS. Having access to a ton of file systems is great, but the usage outside of ext4 is going to be comparatively low. ext4 is the only FS I'd want to see as first-party on Windows as a data drive. But that would have been more important before persuasive networking.

> with FUSE providing exceptional utility

FUSE is also on Win32 via https://winfsp.dev/rel/.

> It also has a more robust debugging ecosystem thanks to its large community and open source nature.

This ignores the debugging tools on Win32 by a country mile.

> is Microsoft putting as much effort into NT these days

Yes. Even if you do the bare minimum investigative effort and follow the "what's new" for each version of Windows, you can see the kernel-level investment. Much of this is around security and isolation of kernel components. There is also Microsoft in talks (finally, again) with EDR vendors to isolate their solutions; hopefully game devs are next.

> leading to articles like this one.

This isn't an article. It's an uninformed blog post.
by bradfa | 2026-01-19 16:15:41+00:00
If you know what you're doing with electronics design, I've found that leveraging an LLM to help come up with ideas, layout block diagrams, and find parts can be super useful. Integrating Digi-Key or Mouser API support for finding parts pricing and inventory is also super handy. Using the distributor APIs can also allow you to perform natural language search which isn't possible (or isn't easy) through the distributor websites as the LLM can quickly download the datasheet and read it as part of its searching operation to verify if a part should be considered given your requirements.
by solumunus | 2026-01-19 16:16:02+00:00
No, not at all. There are people who love coding for the sake of it, they are passionate about the technology and would be doing it whether it was their career or not. They do it for fun. We both write software, but I derive pleasure from making money from products, they derive pleasure from the writing itself. If I could no longer sell products and make money I wouldn’t do any coding. You don’t think there is any distinction between them and I?
by PaulRobinson | 2026-01-19 16:16:03+00:00
Talk about a misleading headline.

After months of widespread protests across the UK, the police in West Midlands looked at multiple intelligence reports and concluded that protests and violence would be inevitable if the match went ahead and fans from Maccabi Tel Aviv were allowed to travel to Aston Villa's ground. Their advice was that away fans should not be granted tickets to the event.

The issues at the core of this decision are about alleged antisemitism rising in the UK, presumed violence of a group of fans with an uncertain intelligence picture, and how decisions were made with these analyses trading off against each other.

He resigned because of that process leading to the Home Secretary no longer having confidence in him.

I don't think the misleading of the select committee would have helped him, but he gave an answer based on all that he knew at that point in time, with the best of intentions. The fact he hadn't been briefed isn't his fault. The fact he leaned into a decision that had wide-ranging political ramifications without first opening up the discussion to more stakeholders is his fault, and it's why he's no longer in the job.
by worldlove4ver | 2026-01-19 16:16:07+00:00
It’s 2026, but many enterprises are still manually filling PDF forms like it’s the 1990s: open the form, copy from 5–10 systems, paste, verify, email, fix, repeat.

We’re introducing Fill PDF Action, a new capability within StackAI — a secure, no-code AI agent platform used by enterprise teams to automate regulated, high-volume operational workflows.

Here's how it works. The agent:

1. Receives emails with PDF attachments

2. Matches the correct customer in SharePoint, Drive, Box, or KYC systems

3. Extracts verified data automatically

4. Populates every PDF field

5. Routes forms for review or signature via email

6. Logs everything to SharePoint for audit and compliance

Use cases: mortgage & loan applications, grant filings, claims & reimbursements, HR onboarding, compliance/legal paperwork

Enterprise-ready: role-based access control (RBAC), full audit logs, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA & GDPR-aligned, on-premise and private deployment options

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r41rhCExzNE
by notaustinpowers | 2026-01-19 16:16:16+00:00
It's a stylus and a line, a symbol representing writing. A stylus at that angle is how Edit icons are usually represented in iOS as well, so it has a visual similarity.

I won't say the new icon is amazing, it is too simple for my taste. I'm just saying, I understand why we're seeing this shift, and I understand why this icon is being used to represent Pages.
by trimethylpurine | 2026-01-19 16:16:20+00:00
"Without" regulations? As early as 2006 we discovered that phone carriers were subject to regulations forcing them to install back doors for government surveillance. Many near the 2002 Olympic games had their phone calls listened to by human ears (NSA) without warrant. And that's just a random example. This has been going on much much longer.

Regulations are made or dismantled in an effort to funnel money into regulators own businesses or investments and to combat their political opponents, all under the premise that it's for the good of society. (And, in some cases it has been.)

This shouldn't be news to anyone. What's shocking is that this is still shocking to people.
by aenis | 2026-01-19 16:16:22+00:00
> If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

Yup, my conclusion exactly.

With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-19 16:16:37+00:00
40-50% of people are ad-blocking some rather beloved content creators. That means, not paying for premium, and not viewing ads.

Ok, so maybe they are suscribing to patreon? Maybe Nebula?

Well those two have conversion rates around (on a good day) 1%.

You can swim in the waters of cognitive dissonance because ads really do suck and ad block is a great way to stop the pain while still getting what you want.

Understand though, the statistics are so damning against the ad-block crowd, that you come off like the people screeching about human generated CO2 being totally fine for the environment (It helps plants grow!) because they cannot imagine having to give up commuting in their diesel monster pick-up truck everyday. (Ad block does no damage because I cannot imagine having to see ads...)

As an aside, ironically, security nightmare ads are really only served to people with tracking blockers, because those people are the lowest value visitors and only scammers/bottom feeders really bid on their views. Regular tech illiterate people get ads for Tide and Toyota. The more you know.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-19 16:17:38+00:00
I always took the product rating as rating the particular item (regardless of where it was manufactured) and the seller rating as rating interactions regarding the sales/support/return process. I'm not sure what good having both ratings be the seller rating would be, or why one would look at the ratings of a single product to judge a seller's rep and vice versa.

The main problem I have with the way Amazon product ratings are structured is the grouping of products under a single rating. Particularly with electronics, e.g. the 32" variant of a monitor might as well be a completely different product from another manufacturer when compared to a 27" variant from the same product family - yet there can be a dozen variants under a single rating.
by darhodester | 2026-01-19 16:17:45+00:00
Yes, it's quite trivial to convert traditional CG to Gaussian splats. We can render our scenes/objects just as we would capture physical spaces. The additional benefits of using synthetic data is 100% accurate camera poses (alignment) which means the structure from motion (SfM) step can be bypassed.

It's also possible to splat from textured meshes directly, see: https://github.com/electronicarts/mesh2splat. This approach yields high quality, PBR compatible splats, but is not quite as efficient as a traditional training workflow. This approach will likely become mainstream in third party render engines, moving forward.

Why do this?
1. Consistent, streamlined visuals across a massive ecosystem, including content creation tools, the web, and XR headsets.
2. High fidelity, compressed visuals. With SOGs compression, splats are going to become the dominant 3D representation on the web (see https://superspl.at).
3. E-commerce (product visualizations, tours, real-estate, etc.)
4. Virtual production (replace green screens with giant LED walls).
5. View-dependent effects without (traditional) shaders or lighting

It's not just about the aesthetic, it's also about interoperability, ease of use, and the entire ecosystem.
by shimman | 2026-01-19 16:17:51+00:00
Prediction markets are highly regulated, it's just not being enforced... This is just a way to launder money to those with insider info to profit from. Also who the fuck cares if it happened under Biden? Is that some sort of gotcha you conjured up? Democratic members hate the democratic party more than Trump, no one cares about Biden or what he did but they sure do care what he failed to do.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-01-19 16:18:00+00:00
> export prices did not decline. Trade volumes collapsed instead.

That is its own kind of burden. We are shooting ourselves in the foot here, but but I think we're getting the other guy's foot to the tune of a bit more than 4%.

It's mutually assured destruction logic. I hate everything about it, but this seems like a mischaracterization of its efficacy.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-19 16:18:14+00:00
The serialisation is just to work around the fact that filenames can have any character except for \0 which is why the "-print0" is used. It doesn't by itself allow for concurrent processing.

You're right about just using "wc -l", but I was just trying to demonstrate how you can set variables. A real use would be doing more than just counting files as your example would likely be quicker (assuming that calling an external programme is quicker than running a naive loop in BASH).

I am guilty of using BASH for stuff that most people would use a different language for - I just find that for system admin work that BASH is just at the right level of abstraction for me and is ubiquitous.
by Shugyousha | 2026-01-19 16:18:15+00:00
> Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.

As you note correctly, the ISA is open, not this CPU (or board).

The important point is that using an open ISA allows you to create your own CPU that implements it. This CPU can then be open (i.e. you providing the RTL, etc.), if you so desire

I assume it will be much more difficult (or impossible?) to provide the RTL for a CPU with an AMD64 ISA, since that one has to be licensed. I wonder if you paying for the license allows you to share your implementation with the world. Even if it does, it's less likely that you will do so, given that you will have to pay for the licensing fee and make your money back

Since there is no license to pay for in case of RISC-V, it allows you to open up the design of your CPU without you having to pay for that privilege
by al_borland | 2026-01-19 16:18:15+00:00
Trump has floated the idea of eliminating federal income tax completely, which would balance things out. I think I’d rather pay taxes in the form of tariffs than through income tax. The tariffs can help protect jobs from being outsourced, which has been a big issue over the last several decades. With everyone talking about out AI coming for our jobs, having more options for employment seems like a good thing.

I suppose the issue would be for those on the lower end of the earnings distribution, as they pay little to no federal income tax, but would be hit by a consumption tax. Though I do wonder if we could see wages increase when we don’t have to compete as much with low production costs in China.
by bradfa | 2026-01-19 16:18:43+00:00
I don't trust an LLM to write software for me without human verification, but it's not like it's that hard to verify what it writes if you understand how to write code yourself. I expect even when an LLM can layout a high voltage circuit or design a bridge that most organizations who carry liability would still be sure to audit the design with a set or two of intelligent and trained human eyes.
by ezekg | 2026-01-19 16:19:13+00:00
Spend a few days on Threads or on Instagram and you'll see the majority of viral posts on Threads are generated by AI, and the majority of descriptions on Instagram are generated by AI. It makes me incredibly sad, because I've used the internet for human connection my entire life. I always loved meeting new people, or reading other's perspectives. But it all just feels so ... empty ... now. I hope the pendulum swings the other soon.
by tgtweak | 2026-01-19 16:19:14+00:00
Few thoughts/observations on Tariff impacts now that we have a decent amount of time/data to look at:

Suppliers in China are dropping prices to offset the tariff impact - this is what I see in my direct industry and also in many adjacent ones. This is benefitting other countries that don't have Tariffs on Chinese goods since they can buy cheaper as well. I suspect this is a significant factor in the GBP/EUR strengthening in relation to USD. There was a point where there was such a pronounced impact to imported goods that the cost of shipping a container from China to US went from ~$3500 to <$1500 pre/post Tariff.

Large manufacturers (automotive certainly, but also raw materials production and component production) are actually moving facilities to the US, which was one of the intended effects.

US manufacturers are enjoying some price relief as landed costs of chinese-produced goods are increasing. Hard to quantify what this means but the frustrating part is that they are not reducing their prices just enjoying higher margins.

Countries outside the Tariff zone are enjoying more trade - Canada is a very real example of this policy backfiring - they just walked back the Chinese Automotive Tariffs in exchange for relief on agricultural reciprocal tariffs. Mexico is entering into similar agreements with non-US trade partners. Some products are releasing in non-US markets first and at lower costs than they are in the US.

US-sourced chipmaking is accelerating - Intel's new fabs are probably the most prominent example of this (albeit they are slow to pick up volume - I expect this will shift with TSMC rationing production to brands like Apple and Qualcomm).

I think the increase in cost to consumers is painful and that the current Tariff rates are excessive + there is a lot of "cheating" where Chinese suppliers are declaring lower cost of goods on import to reduce the landed cost of Tariffed goods - there doesn't appear to be enough resources to police this policy fully.

All in all an interesting economic experiment and it will certainly take years for any of these realities to have a measurable positive impact domestically.
by wavemode | 2026-01-19 16:19:14+00:00
> In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue

That's over 25 billion dollars.

> They make most of their money in cloud services these days.

And why, if you had to take guess, do large companies tend to buy those cloud services?

Microsoft killing Windows would be like Amazon killing Prime. Like, no, it itself is not keeping the company afloat in terms of revenue - but, take a wild guess where most Prime members buy most of their online products?
by bombcar | 2026-01-19 16:19:26+00:00
I honestly think it might be downstream of individualized mass-market democracy; each person is tasked with fully understanding the world as it is so they can make the correct decisions at all level of voting, but ain't nobody got time for that.

So we emotionally convince ourselves that we have solved the problem so we can act appropriately and continue doing things that are important to us.

The founders recognized this problem and attempted to setup a Republic as an answer to it; so that each voter didn't have to ask "do I know everything about everything so I can select the best person" and instead were asked "of this finite, smaller group, who do I think is best to represent me at the next level"? We've basically bypassed that; every voter knows who ran for President last election, hardly anyone can identify their party's local representative in the party itself (which is where candidates are selected, after all).
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-01-19 16:19:26+00:00
It's definitely helpful for search and summarisation.

In terms of prototyping, I can see the benefits but they're negated by the absurd amount of work it takes to get the code into more maintainable form.

I guess you can just do really heavy review throughout, but then you lose a lot of the speed gains.

That being said, putting a textual interface over everything is super cool, and will definitely have large downstream impacts, but probably not enough to justify all the spending.
by subjektivation | 2026-01-19 16:19:32+00:00
Exactly! Digital sovereignity is something we talk about a lot in Europe now since Trump is back and it's already causing german states to go full OpenSource and Microsoft-free. Chaos Computer Club called out the national "Digital Independence Day" this year, it's each month's first sunday (https://di.day).

It might not look like much but Trump is also making people realize over here how bad big-tech is for european values and how it's trying to undermine them for profit. This Greenland-thing is a step too much for Europe and seeing how close the techbros are to Trump, that is one thing where we can hurt them, take back our Data.
by rm30 | 2026-01-19 16:19:43+00:00
I’ve read all the posts and, as the 'old man of the village', I would suggest taking a look at FidoNet. It was running 40 years ago, for more than a decade, before the internet was available to the average person.

Store-and-forward, hierarchical organization, scheduled transmissions, working over dial-up and radio links, everything is there.

There is nothing new to invent, and it was far more reliable than the 10m real-world range of BT5 (not the 1km claimed for lab devices, which aren't commercial phones).

A BT5 mesh only works under well-defined conditions, which usually coincide with the cases where you don't actually need it.
by gostsamo | 2026-01-19 16:19:47+00:00
The issue is that the EU and China are not structured to rely on internal consumption. We just cannot buy everything we produce. Fixing that would require years of carefully managed policies and at least for the EU, I've lost confidence that the national governments can work well-enough together to manage such a project. The rest of the world is in a similar situation, so it will be fun times until things settle, hopefully, not on a lower equilibrium.
by dfajgljsldkjag | 2026-01-19 16:20:05+00:00
Interesting they are releasing a tiny (30B) variant, unlike the 4.5-air distill which was 106B parameters. It must be competing with gpt mini and nano models, which personally I have found to be pretty weak. But this could be perfect for local LLM use cases.

In my ime small tier models are good for simple tasks like translation and trivia answering, but are useless for anything more complex. 70B class and above is where models really start to shine.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-19 16:20:19+00:00
Ah! Having randos call congressmen is generally a great idea for urgent+important+bipartisan issues (tech or fiscal), which at the moment I can think of 3

a)AI (in particular, regulation on the mil/statedept use of "private AI").

b)independence of the fed

c)tariffs

Imho
by ozzyphantom | 2026-01-19 16:20:24+00:00
This is only partially true.

For the foreseeable future until maybe we systems that can predict what someone will need/want for an app at any given time (a prospect as horrifying as it is awesome imo), there’ll be plenty of people, maybe even a majority, that don’t know what they want or need until it’s shown to them.

There will be many more niche applications vibe-coded by people with lots of knowledge and no coding experience/desire that people will use rather than thinking of an app themselves to create.

Then there will be people like you, me, OP and 99% of the other HN community that have a million ideas they want to create, use, and sometimes share.

There are a lot of things I don’t know about and even more I don’t know I don’t know about and in those cases, there’s still a wide open door for people to create applications and experiences that share their knowledge/vision.

I could ask Claude Code or some other future platform to build be a financial calculator every time I need it but why would I do that when someone with the benefit of prior knowledge and experience has already done that for me?

They probably included calculators I didn’t even know I needed.