MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spongebobstoes | 2026-01-22 01:15:04+00:00
the article suggests that the LLM group had better essays as graded by both human and AI reviewers, but they used less brain power

this doesn't seem like a clear problem. perhaps people can accomplish more difficult tasks with LLM assistance, and in those more difficult tasks still see full brain engagement?

using less brain power for a better result doesn't seem like a clear problem. it might reveal shortcomings in our education system, since these were SAT style questions. I'm sure calculator users experience the same effects vs mental mathematics
by cyberrock | 2026-01-22 01:15:45+00:00
First of all not everyone wants spectators and gawkers on all of their conversations. As for open solutions, IRC didn't provide chat history for the common folk (no, most users are not able to host their own Pi Zero bouncer, especially back in 2017), and Matrix development was too slow (Elements implemented message pinning in 2022), so the rest was history. There was just no alternative to Slack or Discord.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-22 01:15:49+00:00
> Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.

Leaving aside the context of the discussion for a moment: this is not true. If you do that experiment a million times, you are reasonably likely to get one result of 20 heads, because 2^20 is 1048576. And thanks to the birthday paradox, you are extremely likely to get at least one pair of identical results (not any particular result like all-heads) across all the runs.
by pineaux | 2026-01-22 01:16:22+00:00
Firing a gay person is still considered moral by probably most people in this world. If not for the insufferable joy they always seem to bring to the workplace! How dare they distract the workers with their fun! You are saying morality does not exist in the universe because people have different moralities. That is like saying attracting forces dont exist because you have magnetism and gravitational pull(debatable) and van der waals forces etc. Having moral frameworks for societies seems to be a recurring thing. You might even say: a prerequisite for a society. I love to philosophize about these things but trying to say it doesnt exist because you cant scientifically prove it is laying to much belief in the idea that science can prove everything. Which it demonstrably cannot.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-22 01:17:05+00:00
So obviously it depends on goals; I absolutely agree that up to a surprisingly high point, the best way to actually get the most compute is to go buy the most powerful single machine that will do what you want off eBay or whatever. My goal is the opposite; I want to specifically get my hands dirty figuring out how to actually provision and manage and operate a large number of hosts, even if they're so low resource as to be effectively worthless individually and are still weak clustered. To that end specifically, digikey claims to be willing to sell me a rather large number of pi zero 2w at $15/each - https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/SC11... - and even cheap used boxes on eBay seem to start at double that. Obviously you need a little bit more to actually run them, but I believe the only thing you actually need is a USB cable and then a single host computer can provide power and boot them over usb.
by perilunar | 2026-01-22 01:17:12+00:00
My immediate thought was why not put it in the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point, like the James Webb Space Telescope, where it would be permanently shaded from RF from both the Earth and the Sun. But...

1. James Webb is in the Earth-Sun L2 point, where it is largely (though not completely) shaded from the Sun. A radio telescope at Earth-Sun L2 wouldn't be shaded from Earth RF.

2. The Earth-Moon L2 point is shaded from the Earth, but not the Sun. So no benefit compared to the far-side lunar surface.

3. According to TFA, being on the lunar surface gets the telescope out of the solar wind, which is noisy at the low radio frequencies being observed.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-22 01:18:26+00:00
Clear right? Because of notaries? They are powerful as everything official goes through them. They also do nothing usually; their underpaid underling presses a few buttons, enters a few names (often wrong the first time), prints and so on and then notary reads and signs. Money made. Luckily this has been changing a lot that some notaries smelled a rat coming and started to go for mass market, heavily undercutting all others for standard contracts; in some cities I have seen these type of places eating all the other ones. They are fast and cheap until you need custom stuff.
by david_shaw | 2026-01-22 01:19:12+00:00
From the tool description linked:

> Dangerzone works like this: You give it a document that you don't know if you can trust (for example, an email attachment). Inside of a sandbox, Dangerzone converts the document to a PDF (if it isn't already one), and then converts the PDF into raw pixel data: a huge list of RGB color values for each page. Then, outside of the sandbox, Dangerzone takes this pixel data and converts it back into a PDF.

With this in mind, Dangerzone wouldn't even remove conventional watermarks (that inlay small amounts of text on the image).

I think the "freedomofpress" GitHub repo primed you to think about protecting someone leaking to journalists, but really it's designed to keep journalists (and other security-minded folk) safe from untrusted attachments.

The official website -- https://dangerzone.rocks/ -- is a lot more clear about exactly what the tool does. It removes malware, removes network requests, supports various filetypes, and is open source.

Their about page ( https://dangerzone.rocks/about/ ) shows common use cases for journalists and others.
by grantmuller | 2026-01-22 01:19:22+00:00
It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind.

The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.
by curt15 | 2026-01-22 01:19:42+00:00
>You know what else is UNIX certified? IBM's z/OS. Yet I don't think people would be clambering to say that z/OS's USS is "quite literally UNIX" with the same ferocity.

Does "Unix" still carry some special cachet these days? Linux is more "Unix-like" than MacOS for the reason articulated in the article, but you'll see commenters leap to MacOS's defense by pointing out that MacOS is "literally UNIX".
by zbentley | 2026-01-22 01:20:22+00:00
> I also do sysadmin stuff from macOS

MacOS is fine as a client/dispatch node for SSH/Ansible/Terraform/whatnot; I think they meant that you cannot sysadmin MacOS itself as a target with many of the same tools/techniques you would sysadmin a Linux server.

I wish that weren't true, as someone who struggles with a lot of cross-platform Puppet tooling that I wish behaved better on Mac. No, Nix doesn't help; not when the goal is "configure other people's machines to a baseline but don't otherwise prescribe how they should use them".
by komali2 | 2026-01-22 01:21:32+00:00
> To not "demonize" a particular community where a sizeable percentage (in at least one city the number of 30% of all pakistani muslim men involved in the rapes has been mentioned) of its members happens to think that raping infidels ain't rape.

These accusations keep happening, but the whole "why didn't this get investigated" thing was investigated, and the answer is no, investigations weren't throttled because of woke, in fact the machinery of justice operated just about the same as it always does for sexual assault cases: poorly. Also there's been quite a few investigation and convictions.
by capitainenemo | 2026-01-22 01:22:04+00:00
This is why Firefox chose to implement a custom PDF reader in pure JS for better sandboxing leveraging the existing browser JS sandboxing.
As a side effect, it's been a helpful JS library for embedding PDFs on websites.

The Chrome PDF parser, originating from Foxit (now open-sourced as PDFium), has been the source of many exploits in Chrome itself over the years.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 01:22:16+00:00
Spotify is a model where the artist suffers, the company itself works on a slim margin, and the record labels gets the lion's share. It's pretty much the worst case scenario business.

The issue even goes back to the days of CD's. The artist still wouldn't get that much back compared to the label publishing the disc. even in 2000 is was still more profitable to buy a tshirt than a CD from the artist.

I'm not very well versed in this area, but clearly something needs to change. Being able to independently published helps, but Spotify's model does indeed make it harder to sell your own albums despite it being easier than ever to distribute it without a middleman.
by cr4zy | 2026-01-22 01:22:18+00:00
For compression and long-running agents, may I suggest https://memtree.dev. We offer a simple API that compresses messages asynchronously for instant responses and small context leading to much higher quality generations. We're about to release a dashboard that will show you what each compressed request looked like, the token distribution between system, memory, and tool messages, along with memory retrievals, etc... Is this the type of thing that you're looking for?
by roughike | 2026-01-22 01:22:30+00:00
> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

Well, I did work on a Flutter app with a tiny team between 2018-2021 and we had 15M installs, were app of the day, got featured multiple times in the App Store, got Google’s design award, were a preloaded app on iPhones in Apple Stores in several countries, and were overall doing quite well.

It was a very focused app though, so the size of our codebase didn’t really grow with the number of installs.
by leeoniya | 2026-01-22 01:22:34+00:00
> In Ardour (a cross-platform, libre, open source DAW), we actually compute and store min/max-per-N-samples and use that for plotting (and as the basis for further downsampling.

this is, effectively, what uPlot does, too: https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/issues/1119
by uulong | 2026-01-22 01:23:15+00:00
The Problem:
Everyone is using HNSW (graph indexes) for vector search. It works great for servers, but it introduces build-time latency, memory overhead (edges), and random access patterns that kill performance on consumer hardware.

The Project:
QingMing is a header-only C++ engine that implements exact brute-force search. Instead of pruning the search space, I optimized the memory access pattern to saturate the HBM/GDDR6 bandwidth of consumer GPUs.

Benchmarks (Consumer Hardware):

Desktop (NVIDIA RTX 5090D - 24GB)
---------------------------------
Dataset: SIFT-1M (128-dim)
Recall: 99.2% @ 1 (FP32 variance), 100% @ 10
Throughput: 9,354 QPS (Batch=10k)
Latency: ~5.5ms (P99)
Build Time: 0 seconds

Desktop (AMD Radeon 7900 XTX - 24GB)
------------------------------------
Dataset: SIFT-1M (128-dim)
Recall: 99.2% @ 1, 100% @ 10
Throughput: 6,275 QPS (Batch=10k)
Latency: ~11.2ms (P99)
Note: Running via HIP/ROCm 6.2 on Ubuntu

Mobile (Snapdragon 8 Gen 5)
---------------------------
Scenario: 100k Vectors (128d) for personal knowledge base
Latency: ~8ms per query
Endurance: Ran 10k consecutive queries with ZERO thermal throttling
(due to L3/System Cache residency optimization)

Why use this?
1. Local RAG: Run high-quality retrieval on your gaming PC or phone.
2. Simplicity: No hyperparameters to tune (ef_search, M, nprobe).
3. Deterministic: No approximation errors for critical data.

Happy to answer questions about the NEON/CUDA/HIP memory coalescing details!
by ggm | 2026-01-22 01:24:02+00:00
I live in an economy where people vote with pencils on paper in cardboard booths and at scalable cost, it just works. Obviously the cost also has to scale linearly for the 200+m voter economies, and time becomes a factor, but for community acceptance I still think paper and pen/pencil beats machine hands down.

(this is Australia. we have compulsory attendance at voting booths for eligible citizens, you can spoil your paper or walk away but we enforce with a fine, participation in the one obligation of citizenship)

-I have been offered voting remotely in elections for my home economy of the UK and I would have welcomed some kind of homomorphic encrypted, secured voting method, given I have done KYC with the UK government to get my pension paid, I don't see there is a problem with them knowing who I am online.

I therefore do not totally agree with the headline, but I'm willing to be convinced by the article, because comparing the land of hanging chad to my own, I think paper and pencil is just fine. BTW we have a senate election which demands ballot papers cut from A0 paper in long strips. Hundreds of boxes to be filled in. What we don't have is the vote for every judge, official, proposition on the table, we just elect representatives and senators, but we have a complex vote method. It just works. We do machine reading, but every single paper is reviewed by people, and parties have rights to monitor the vote, in secured spaces. We do not have a serious concern with the integrity of our vote, and the question is regularly asked and tested. (it's not just because we believe its secure and don't check)

Its a great list of signatories, includes people I respect. I would think that the prime question for americans is "how much worse or better than the current approach could this be?"
by mindslight | 2026-01-22 01:24:18+00:00
> as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin

That is a big if which is straightforwardly false. This idea of market participants' choices being entirely free rests on the efficient market fallacy [0]. Whereas the reality is that even the structure of a market itself creates friction. One of the main points of business schools is learning how to recognize and take advantage of this structural friction, which business people then conveniently forget when it's time to assuage their own egos regarding their counterparties.

[0] which is basically in the realm of asserting P == NP. The supreme irony is that if the efficient market fallacy were true, then central planning would also work as well!
by simonw | 2026-01-22 01:24:26+00:00
I have templates for Datasette plugin, Python libraries and Python CLI tools.

I often have Claude Code build little HTML+JavaScript tools which are simple enough that I don't need a template ("Vanilla JavaScript, no dependencies or build script, test it with Playwright").

I've built a couple of Go apps which works great because Go has such strong default patterns and a full featured standard library, so again no need for a template.
by gpt5 | 2026-01-22 01:24:45+00:00
The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature.

When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter.

Moving to internet voting will further deteriorate the election process, and could move us to a place where we completely lose control and trust of the election process.

We should move back to paper voting.
by jomohke | 2026-01-22 01:25:12+00:00
Strange, as Cloudinary's test had the opposite conclusion -- jpegxl was significantly faster to decode than avif. Did the decoders change rapidly in a year, or was it a switch to new ones (the rust reimplementation)?

https://cloudinary.com/blog/jpeg-xl-and-the-pareto-front

If decode speed is an issue, it's notable that avif varied a lot depending on settings:

> Interestingly, the decode speed of AVIF depends on how the image was encoded: it is faster when using the faster-but-slightly-worse multi-tile encoding, slower when using the default single-tile encoding.
by DJBunnies | 2026-01-22 01:26:48+00:00
I believe the piece we're missing is the government (citizen?) service which issues (manages, replaces, revokes) constituents' cryptographic tokens for use with such things.

Then our voting systems could be electronic, secure, open, verifiable, and mostly private; assuming effective oversight / this organization does not issue fraudulent tokens or leak keys or identities (big assumption, but I don't think it's impossible.)
Show HN: Faramesh – A deterministic gate for stochastic Autonomous AI agents
by amjadfatmi1 | 2026-01-22 01:26:58+00:00
I spent the last few months watching LLM agents "vibe-code" their way into production disasters. We’ve been pretending that a 500-word system prompt is a security layer. It isn't. It's just a polite request that the model is one jailbreak away from ignoring.

I built Faramesh because I wanted a hard, cryptographic boundary between the agent's "brain" and my actual infrastructure. It intercepts tool-calls and forces them through a deterministic gate before any code runs. If the action isn't in your policy, it simply doesn't exist.

The biggest headache was canonicalization.py. LLMs are messy—one model sends a float as 1.0, another as 1.00, and it breaks the cryptographic hash every time. I wrote a normalization engine to ensure that identical intent produces the exact same byte-stream and hash.

It’s open source (Python/Node SDKs). I’m curious if people think this should live at the framework level or as a standalone proxy. Tear the code apart:

https://github.com/faramesh/faramesh-core

For theory lovers, I'd invite you to read a paper i published just recently titled "Faramesh: A Protocol-Agnostic Execution Control Plane for Autonomous Agent systems" (Link below)

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18296731
by culi | 2026-01-22 01:27:00+00:00
Does this work with arbitrary depth? Can I do

`````ts
const Accordian = styled.details<{ isAprilFirst: boolean; }>`
````css
accent: rebeccapurple;
font-family: ${
```js
props => props.isAprilFirst ? 'Comic Sans' : 'Time New Roman'
```
};
````
`;

`````
by mark-r | 2026-01-22 01:27:16+00:00
I was able to do something similar by using gross approximations and conversions to/from metric. My coworker had just bought a surplus stainless steel water tank for solar heating, and was wondering how much it would weigh when full. It was cylindrical, so I asked him for the diameter and the height. In my head I converted those measurements to inches, then to centimeters by multiplying by 2.5. I divided the diameter by 2, squared it, and multiplied by 3 (close enough to pi) to get the area. Then I converted the area and the height to their nearest power of 2 so I could take advantage of logarithms. Multiplying the area and height was as easy as adding the exponents, which gave me cubic centimeters. The weight of water is almost by definition 1 gram per 1 cc. Divide by 1000 to get kg by subtracting 10 from the exponent, then multiply by 2 to get approximate pounds by adding 1 to the exponent. By the time he was done telling me the dimensions, I had an answer for him. It definitely wasn't correct, but all he needed was a ballpark anyway.
by AngryData | 2026-01-22 01:27:20+00:00
But that same problem has existed since the 60s when machine tools became common and cheap enough for people to put in their garages. Table top CNC machines existed in the 90s and that wasn't some looming threat.

To me this is all fearmongering to try and restrict people from making their own stuff instead of buying it all or fixing old stuff.
by eucyclos | 2026-01-22 01:27:34+00:00
I'm agnostic on the question of objective moral truths existing. I hold no bias against someone who believes they exist. But I'm determinedly suspicious of anyone who believes they know what such truths are.

Good moral agency requires grappling with moral uncertainty. Believing in moral absolutes doesn't prevent all moral uncertainty but I'm sure it makes it easier to avoid.
by doodlesdev | 2026-01-22 01:27:34+00:00
> This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

Provably false. My bank app (Nubank) is written in Flutter and it's one of the most used banks in Brazil (100mi+ clients who rely on the iPhone or Android app, since it's a digital bank with no web interface).
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-22 01:27:39+00:00
> Banks will treat you like a criminal by default and assume, you are laundering money, or hiding taxes and you are compliance risk. They have extreme KYC requirements, and do account freezes for trivial reasons.

I see that everywhere though; my banks in my birth country NL, one of which I have used since I was born (my parents made an acc obviously) half a century ago treat me like that every year. Achtung! We are not sure who you are, provide a lot of paperwork or else! Worse even in other countries. And they are all very afraid of US residents.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-22 01:27:45+00:00
>Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something

to be fair, that's a billion dollar business of an audience. Bandcamp is still a thing because people like that exist. So I wouldn't readily dismiss that.

But yes. We're in an age where people treat TV shows as "second screen entertainment", the silver screen is dying out, and where Spotify is flooding its library with white noise and AI slop. And people at best shrug. There's never been less respect for the arts, and it reflects in wider consumer patterns. Any future artists will need to appeal to a shrinkingly few fanbase of those who care about quality.
by thegrim000 | 2026-01-22 01:29:24+00:00
You know, kind of an interesting test here. This was posted 13 minutes ago and the comments so far are mostly all supportive of not wanting internet/insecure voting methods, all supportive of pen and paper. I wonder if after an hour or two the propaganda hoses will have been turned on and all the top comments start to have the reverse messaging in them, saying internet voting is perfectly fine, and such initial comments downvoted into oblivion.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-22 01:29:40+00:00
> The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is?

Absolutely nobody, because no such concept coherently exists. You cannot even define "better", let alone "best", in any universal or objective fashion. Reasoning frameworks can attempt to determine things like "what outcome best satisfies a set of values"; they cannot tell you what those values should be, or whether those values should include the values of other people by proxy.

Some people's values (mine included) would be for everyone's values to be satisfied to the extent they affect no other person against their will. Some people think their own values should be applied to other people against their will. Most people find one or the other of those two value systems to be abhorrent. And those concepts alone are a vast oversimplification of one of the standard philosophical debates and divisions between people.