MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 34679 | 2026-01-11 13:44:42+00:00
>anyone being targeted by facial recognition by definition has to be known to law enforcement already

Or they could use the self-checkout at Walmart, or walk through a Target, or buy a hammer at Home Depot. The government buys data from a wide variety of sources, without warrants or other oversight. Yours too.

https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/privacy/bipa...

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/courtside/lawsuit-claims-...

https://www.homedepot.com/privacy/privacy-and-security-state...

From the Home Depot link:

"Biometric Information
What Information Does This Include?

Facial recognition.
Where Do We Collect It From?

Via cameras at select stores, in parking lots, and at other facilities as permitted under applicable laws.

Why Do We Collect and Disclose It?

Fraud prevention, security, and asset protection.

Who Do We Disclose It To?

Service providers that process information on our behalf, such as security and fraud prevention services.
Law enforcement, public and government authorities, and other entities as we deem reasonably necessary to comply with law, support investigations, and protect the rights and property of you, us, and others.
Any successor to all or part of our business.
Advisors and consultants.
Our affiliates and subsidiaries."
by mmcnl | 2026-01-11 13:45:26+00:00
Repairable laptops don't reduce e-waste. You replace the mainboard and then what? You have a spare mainboard that sits there collecting dust. The best way to prevent e-waste is to build durable laptops that last a lifetime. Like Dell, HP and Lenovo have been doing for years (while also being very repairable at the same time).
by simonw | 2026-01-11 13:45:41+00:00
You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs?

I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+
months learning to program first.

And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.
by ChicagoDave | 2026-01-11 13:46:00+00:00
This goes way deeper than open source businesses.

Imagine I’m a company just big enough to entertain adopting Salesforce for CRM. It’s a big chunk of money, but our sales can absorb the pain.

With GenAI as an enterprise architect, one of the options I’m now recommending is to create a custom CRM for our business and skip the bloated enterprise SaaS platform.

We can gather CRM requirements fast, build fast, and deliver integrations to our other systems incredibly fast using tools like Claude Code. Our sales people can make feature requests and we can dogfood them in a few days, maybe hours.

GenAI development tools are rapidly changing how I think about enterprise software development.

If your core business is software-based offerings, your moat has been wiped out.

A handful of senior engineers can replicate any SaaS, save licensing costs, and build custom applications that were too risky in the past.

The companies that recognize what is happening and adapt will win.
by j1elo | 2026-01-11 13:46:21+00:00
The point is not a comparison with Rust per-se, but the fact that a better implementation of the idea was mathematically and/or technically possible; and the personal opinion that such huge footguns that the language accumulates over the years are maybe signals of having needed more thought to them before they were considered ready.

e.g. if something as simple of a inconspicuous std::move in the wrong place can break the whole assumption about move semantics, then make that impossible to do, or at least do not make it the default happy path, before you consider it production ready. What the heck, at the very least ensure it will become a compiler warning?

Hence the mention to Go and how they follow exactly this path of extending discussion as long as needed, even if it takes 10 years, until a reasonable solution is found with maybe small gaps, but never huge ones such as those explained in this article (plus tens of others in any other text about the language)
by nehal3m | 2026-01-11 13:46:57+00:00
Take this with a grain of salt, it's impossible for me to tell what you are and aren't comfortable with, but there is an alternative to using trackpads or mice at all and that's tiling window managers. You drive the OS with your keyboard. Combining this with plugins like Vimium for Chromium based browsers (or Tridactyl for Firefox) you can drive your entire OS and browser with keybindings.

As an aside, the latter also teaches you the bindings for Vim which is a nice boon if you've tried in the past and couldn't make it stick.

But again, this might not fit your use case or your preparedness to invest time and effort. I'm just saying.
by fnoef | 2026-01-11 13:47:02+00:00
Self-driving cars are a bad example, because we are talking about a heavily regulated industries, with fatal consequences of malpractice, and a tool (the car) that is not easily available to the average person. I'm pretty sure that is the cost of cars would be comparable to what a software engineer pays for claude code, government would relax on the laws, and as a society we would accept a few (tens of) thousands of casualties, self-driving cars would be already here.

You talk about programming that become guardians, but I see two issues with this: (1) you don't need ten guardians, you need 1-2 that know your codebase; and (2) a "guardian" is someone who were junior, turned into senior, if juniors are no longer needed, in X years there will be no guardians to replace the existing ones.
by raudette | 2026-01-11 13:47:43+00:00
Story to share - my kids are well into her their teens now, but my youngest, in particular, loved Tux Paint, and used it long before she could read, she'd just click away.

One day, she's playing in Tux Paint, and a print out of her image falls from the sky. We had a desk with shelving. Two shelves above the monitor was our printer. She'd clicked on the print button, without knowing what it would do, or for that matter, even knowing what a printer was or that we had one.

She was SO excited, "look, look, what I was drawing came out on paper from the ceiling"
by tannhaeuser | 2026-01-11 13:48:13+00:00
Why would content farms split their content into bite-sized chunks to appease LLMs in the first place? LLMs aren't quoting/referencing web sites they've scraped to come up with answers (hint: maybe they should be required to?), thereby destroying the idea of the "web" as linked documents. The crisis is about Google Search not bringing page views either, as a continuation of last decade's practice to show snippets or amp pages; or at least not to pages without Google Ads.
by jacobthesnakob | 2026-01-11 13:48:34+00:00
What’s your assertion, that the government is using images of people in public or various stores to target anybody black, brown, or other non-white humans?

The man pictured stopped by ICE in the article is black. Are you claiming that facial recognition is being collected on all 50 million black American citizens and used to target people? How would this work differently than stopping random non-white people in the street and asking for legal status (I’m not claiming this doesn’t happen, I’m asking how it differs from your techno-fantasy scenario and why the resources would be investigated the way you claim it works).
by drysine | 2026-01-11 13:48:43+00:00
I mean the language doesn't dictate what post-condition your class has for move-ctor or move-assignment.

It could be

- "don't touch this object after move" (and it's UB if you do) or

- "after move the object is in valid but unspecified state" (and you can safely call only a method without precondition) or

- "after move the object is in certain state"

- or even crazy "make sure the object doesn't get destroyed after move" (it's UB if you call delete after move or the object was created on the stack and moved from).

But of course it's a good practice to mimic the standard library's contract, first of all for the sake of uniformity.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 13:48:50+00:00
For example, a critical engineering challenge lies in the high-dimensional mapping of 'Logical State'.

While Algorithm 1 defines the logic, implementing CalculateDistance() for a modern LLM involves normalizing vectors from a massive latent space in real-time. Doing this without adding significant latency to the inference loop is a non-trivial optimization problem.

I invite ideas on how to architect this 'Observer' layer efficiently.
The Most Satisfying Workflow: Real-Time Infographics with Qwen and DeepDiagramAI
by twwch | 2026-01-11 13:49:02+00:00
Powered by: AntV Infographic
Capabilities: Creates professional digital infographics, data posters, and visual summaries.
Workflow: Declarative DSL-based generation with rich built-in templates and high-quality SVG rendering.

https://github.com/twwch/DeepDiagram
by cb321 | 2026-01-11 13:49:14+00:00
While I was always a sourced-base/personalized distribution personality type, this is also a big part of why I moved to Gentoo in early 2004 (for amd64, not Risc-V / other embedded per your example). While Pentium-IV's very deep pipelines and compiler flag sensitivities (and the name itself for the fastest Penguin) drove the for-speed perception of the compile-just-for-my-system style, it really plays well to all customization/configuation hacker mindsets.
by simonw | 2026-01-11 13:49:30+00:00
> Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training

We have a smaller version of that ability already:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

See also https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/01/08/a-software-library-with-...

I need to write these up properly, but I pulled a similar trick with an existing JavaScript test suite for https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript and the official WebAssembly test suite for https://github.com/simonw/pwasm
by zkmon | 2026-01-11 13:49:50+00:00
Pavlov experminted and confirmed about the shortcuts taken by animal instincts via correlations, avoiding the hardwork of reasoning every time. This optimization is natural for all life forms including humans. And that's how evolution happens.

But, you don't need to game it by being specifically aware of what's going on. When you fabricate your responses in order to give false correlations to people around you, it causes distrust and alienation, purely because of your inconsistent responses over time. So the optimal option is just being what you are.
by The_President | 2026-01-11 13:50:03+00:00
> Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.

Twenty distributions in six months, using each one for at least two weeks. Aside from the overlap, the post claims experience with debugging and repairing computers - but a lot of the blame here is placed on Linux without specifics of hardware of actual distributions used. Reads formulated like the typical narrative meant to deride Linux with surface level anecdotes.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-01-11 13:50:39+00:00
Also a long-time Linux user/administrator. Whenever I've tried searching for Windows answers to issues, I've been genuinely shocked by how low quality the answers are. I've got just a basic understanding of Windows, but it's obvious to me that over 99% of all Windows advice is from people who are just posting meaningless answers so that they can get points for answering or similar.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-11 13:50:46+00:00
Interesting fact:

Hordes of American soldiers were doing heroin in the Vietnam war.

When they came back to America we were expecting a massive addiction epidemic. It never happened. Overall, all the soldiers who came back lost the addiction.

Little known phenomenon about addiction that can’t be fully explained yet. What you say is true, but the person you responded to, what he says has an aspect of the truth as well. Look into it.
by daikikadowaki | 2026-01-11 13:50:55+00:00
Wow, good catch! I was just lurking in the shadows of that open thread. I didn't think anyone was actually reading my comments there.

If you've been following my train of thought since then, this white paper is basically my attempt to formalize those chaotic ideas into a concrete metric. I’d love to know if you think this 'State Discrepancy' approach actually holds water compared to the usual high-level AI ethics talk.
by palata | 2026-01-11 13:51:11+00:00
I don't have a definitive opinion on such messaging apps. I like that it bridges between different services, trying to free the users from the lock-in, but...

If I talk to someone on Signal today, I know that they are probably using the official Signal on the other side. With the guarantees that I know from Signal. Now what if half of the users of Signal were using a third-party app? How much can I trust this app?

Say Matrix has a bridge to Signal. I talk to someone over what looks like Signal from my end, but it goes to some third-party server that pretends to be Signal and then relays those messages to my friend on their Matrix client. As a Signal user, I cannot know it, but my conversation is not E2EE anymore. And it kind of defeats the point of using Signal entirely, doesn't it?

I guess my point is that in terms of security, there is value in making it possible to verify that both ends are using the official Signal app, by locking it as much as possible (e.g. with DRM-like technology). But of course it's annoying to be locked in. Even though I don't feel personally super locked into Signal: I could move to another similar app in a minute. But again people tend to be lazy and don't want to switch apps. It's a hard problem, I guess.
by randunel | 2026-01-11 13:51:32+00:00
It's next to impossible to get windows up and running if you dare not get a computer with it preinstalled, AHCI drivers are almost never included in the installation disc. And windows support gives you links to self installing exe files which you can't run, because you presumably run a linux live cd to be able to access the internet and ask for help, and exe files don't run on it, and can't be accessed by the windows installer either.

Then windows and intel support decide to blame the customer, because it's never their company's fault. Sample conversation: https://community.intel.com/t5/Rapid-Storage-Technology/Inte...
by mbirth | 2026-01-11 13:52:14+00:00
There’s DeltaChat which technically is an email client and uses bog standard SMTP/IMAP for the transport of messages. Great idea, as everyone is reachable via their email address. And even if they don’t have the app, they’ll get your chat message as a normal email they can reply to.

But for a while now they’ve decided to create their own server nodes (“chatmail relays”) and heavily promote the use of those instead of your mail provider’s. While those are also just SMTP/IMAP, you still need a different domain and account i.e. different username - which makes them just another chat network which happens to be interoperable with classic emails... for now.

My point is: There seems to be some tendency for things to go proprietary.
by bakugo | 2026-01-11 13:52:43+00:00
Thieves very much do care about doors and locks, because they are a physical barrier that must be bypassed, and doing so is illegal.

Software licenses aren't, AI companies can just take your GPL code and spit it back out into non-GPL codebases and there's no way for you to even find out it happened, much less do anything about it, and the law won't help you either.
by dkdcio | 2026-01-11 13:52:54+00:00
I was pointing out one screenshot from twitter isn’t proof of anything just to be clear; it’s a silly way to make a point.

yes AI makes leaking keys on GH more prevalent, but so what? it’s the same problem as before with roughly the same solution

I’m saying neural networks being probabilistic doesn’t matter — everything is probabilistic. you can still practically use the tools to great effect, just like we use everything else that has underlying probabilities

OpenAI did not have to describe it as sycophancy, they chose to, and I’d contend it was a stupid choice

and yes, you can explain what went wrong just like you can with CPUs. we don’t (usually) talk about quantum-level physics when discussing CPUs; talking about neurons in LLMs is the wrong level of abstraction
by scotty79 | 2026-01-11 13:53:01+00:00
> no one cares of treating caffeine addiction

If people were aware in how many ways caffeine messes up a lot of people there would be. Exhaustion, migranes, anxieties, twitching, insomnia, mental issues to name a few. Most never attributed to caffeine but mysteriously going away after a person manges to kick the habit.
by teeeew | 2026-01-11 13:53:02+00:00
“I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.”

Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint.

Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!
by menaerus | 2026-01-11 13:53:11+00:00
Comparing crypto and web3 scam with AI advancements is disingenuous at its best. I am a long time C and C++ systems programming engineer oriented at (sometimes novel) algorithmic design and high-performance large-scale systems operating at the scale of internet. I am specializing in low-level details that generally very small amount of engineers around the globe are familiar with. We can talk at the level of CPU microarchitectural details or memory bank conflicts or OS internals, and all the way up to the line of code we are writing. AI is the most transformative technology ever designed. I'd go that far and say that not even industrial revolution is going to be comparable to it. I have no stakes in AI.
by Balgair | 2026-01-11 13:53:37+00:00
Wow! Amazing!

Have you read the Syntopicon by Mortimer J Adler?

It's right up your alley on this one. It's essentially this, but in 1965, by hand, with Isaac Asimov and William F Buckley Jr, among others.

Where did you get the books from? I've been trying to do something like this myself, but haven't been able to get good access to books under copyright.

Yeah, thinking a bit more here, you've created a Syntopicon. I've always wanted to make a modern one too! You can do the old school late night Wikipedia reading session with the trails idea of yours. Brilliant!

Really though, how can I help you make this bigger?
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-11 13:53:51+00:00
Funny considering the top comment from the two-day old "Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542683):

> Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it to no avail.

Seems they finally figured out a way. Seems like yet again, you shouldn't shout hello until you've crossed the stream.
by sokoloff | 2026-01-11 13:54:22+00:00
> We are now treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students can be mysteriously rejected.

How could it realistically work any other way? Each year, Harvard gets nearly 50K applications for 2K acceptances and 1.6K enrollments.

It’s not hard to see that tens of thousands of qualified high school students will unavoidably be rejected from just this one university.
by rkagerer | 2026-01-11 13:54:25+00:00
> Platform Note: Ferrite has been primarily developed and tested on Windows. While it should work on Linux and macOS, these platforms have not been extensively tested.

Neat! Lately on Windows I've felt like a 2nd class citizen.

> AI Disclosure: This project is 100% AI-generated code.

Oh.

Well, at least they're up front about it.
Show HN Split expenses website. No sign-ups. No apps
by JaimeAlonsoHN | 2026-01-11 13:54:37+00:00
I am a big fan of apps like Tricount, but yesterday, I was with some friends and found that creating a group and adding everyone was a burden for a simple calculation.

I thought that a simple website to add people and expenses with no sign-ups/ads (or downloading another app) to calculate payments automatically would be helpful.

So I created and published it. It is very simple but I think nice-to-have for one-day trips/activities.

https://splitcostonline.com

Let me know your thoughts :)

Jaime
by ninkendo | 2026-01-11 13:54:42+00:00
This is what I keep thinking.

- Theres a 38 year old woman in the crew

- It’s a medical condition that likely wasn’t present when the mission started 4 months ago

- It’s serious enough to return the crew, but not serious enough that they must do so immediately

I guess we’ll find out in 9 months? (Or not…)
by otoolep | 2026-01-11 13:54:44+00:00
rqlite creator here.

Yes I do have practical experience to share, I wrote a blog post on rqlite and FTS5: https://philipotoole.com/building-a-highly-available-search-...

Will it allow you to reach the same scale in terms of data set size that Elasticsearch supports? Almost certainly no, but it might be enough depending on your use case.
by rasur | 2026-01-11 13:55:27+00:00
I have been 'enjoying' this with Debian on a PC with a 1080Ti nvidia card, which is no longer supported by the nvidia v590 + drivers. I've had to pin to v580, but the whole "oops, I updated, rebooted and 'look ma, no high-resolution anymore'" got tired really quickly. You have my sympathies.

EndeavourOS is apparently Arch-based so I've got no useful suggestions for fixing there, sorry.
by visarga | 2026-01-11 13:55:40+00:00
Duration of copyright is one way it was perverted, but the other direction was scope. In 1930 judge Hand said in relation to Nichols v. Universal Pictures:

> Upon any work...a great number of patterns of increasing generality will fit equally well. At the one end is the most concrete possible expression...at the other, a title...Nobody has ever been able to fix that boundary, and nobody ever can...As respects play, plagiarism may be found in the 'sequence of events'...this trivial points of expression come to be included.

And since then a litany of judges and tests expanded the notion of infringement towards vibes and away from expression:

- Hand's Abstractions / The "Patterns" Test (Nichols v. Universal Pictures)

- Total Concept and Feel (Roth Greeting Cards v. United Card Co.)

- The Krofft Test / Extrinsic and Intrinsic Analysis

- Sequence, Structure, and Organization (Whelan Associates v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory)

- Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison (AFC) Test (Computer Associates v. Altai)

The trend has been to make infringement more and more abstract over time, but this makes testing it an impossible burden. How do you ensure you are not infringing any protected abstraction on any level in any prior work? Due diligence has become too difficult now.
by mikeryan | 2026-01-11 13:56:29+00:00
It’s actually easier than that. Depending on the UC many just require completing a dedicated set of courses with a 2.0 or higher with no class lower than a C and will provide guaranteed admissions as long as the criteria is met.

It’s the Transfer Admissions Guarantee program.

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requi...
by rustmailer | 2026-01-11 13:59:04+00:00
You can check out https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon/wiki/Using-Bichonctl-Fo...
— it explains how to use bichonctl to batch-import .eml files into Bichon.
This makes it easy to ingest Maildir or any folder of EMLs for indexing and search.