MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defo10 | 2026-01-16 10:22:17+00:00
I‘m a cofounder of a German loneliness startup. My core insight is that loneliness often stems from a badly adjusted internal social threat function ( f(social event)=perceived threat ).

This function runs subconsciously all day long. From talking to strangers to reaching out to a friend, the lonely mind is much more aware of negative outcomes, so your mind protects you by telling you things like „I don’t talk to strangers because I would annoy them“ or „I don’t reach out to that friend because he’s probably busy“. And that makes it much much harder for lonely people to maintain a healthy social life.

As for the fix, you can try to set the social event up in a way that has less room for perceived threat. Think of third places, regularly scheduled meetings, etc. Or you can work on the function itself (=your thinking patterns). If you look at research on loneliness interventions, working on this function is the most effective way to help individuals overcome persistent loneliness.

Now the sad thing is that people don’t like to hear that the most effective way to combat loneliness is to work on their own perceptions, which makes the sales pitch rather challenging.
by bflesch | 2026-01-16 10:22:31+00:00
> This website collects anonymous usage analytics data via GoatCounter and Umami.

My uBlock origin shows that googlefonts.com and fonts.googleapis.com are being blocked.

It irks me a bit that your message explicitly mentions two trackers but it fails to mention the Google tracking. Google is also not mentioned in your privacy policy. Is there a reason for this?
by timeon | 2026-01-16 10:24:40+00:00
> so there's nothing we can do

And US law will just let it go?

There are several options for AWS. They can simply just obfuscate command to local employees. Or fly US employees there just for this one task. "EU law" will find out after they are back in US - if ever. There is no way to escape CLOUD Act if it is US owned.
by DrScientist | 2026-01-16 10:24:40+00:00
It really isn't complicated. For the first example the principal of least harm applies - the only hard part about that is the practical calculation of that - which can obviously be a matter of judgement - but the principal is clear.

And you are also missing the point of the comment - the key thing is the principal of least harm only applies if the things are directly linked.

I suspect you'd find it hard to find a philosopher over the last few thousands of years who thought that the concept of saving up societal credit so you can kill you spouse is somehow a valid one.
by littlecranky67 | 2026-01-16 10:25:41+00:00
I have an old open-source project that I archived on GitHub (because I do not maintain it anymore). Once a user opened an issue with a completely unrelated project of mine (same user account than the archived one), posting some AI slop with step-by-step click instructions how to unarchive the project and enable issues etc. He spammed the same text to two different email addresses he found from my Github page and the git history. I banned that user immediately from opening issues on that said project, closed the issue and ignored him. Just to receive another outrageous email why I did not comply with his request, and how I would dare to ban him from opening further issues. I swear, the entitlement sometimes on GitHub is unbearable.
by freehorse | 2026-01-16 10:25:51+00:00
As not all codebases are well-written, I have found useful once to get an LLM to produce code that does X, essentially distilling from a codebase that does XYZ. I found that reviewing the code the LLM producced, after feeding the original codebase in the context, was easier than going through the (not very well-written) codebase myself. Of course this was just the starting point, there was a ton of things the LLM "misunderstood", and then there was a ton of manual work, but it is an (admittedly rarer) example for me where "AI-generated" code is easier to read than code written by (those) humans, and it was actually useful having that at that point.
by kaffekaka | 2026-01-16 10:25:59+00:00
"They dont say X as often anymore" is just a distraction, it has nothing to do with actual capability of the model.

Unfortunately, I think that the overlap between actual model improvements and what people perceive as "better" is quite small. Combine this with the fact that most people desperately want to have a strong opinion on stuff even though the factual basis is very weak.. "But I can SEE it is X now".
by jacquesm | 2026-01-16 10:27:36+00:00
Given the number of studies on pilot workload and the many harsh lessons learned about how to put together a manual and a training program that has intended outcomes mrktsn is ignoring the realities of operating a vehicle where a second of delay can make a huge difference.

The most stark example was the ambiguity around 'take-off power' and 'take off power', and that is when the writers of the documentation and their management are not trying to pretend a new aircraft is the same as a complete redesign of an older one with which besides the name and the operational niche it has relatively little in common.

I always wondered why there were no whistleblowers before this led to accidents. Or were there?
by ratorx | 2026-01-16 10:27:45+00:00
To be clear, they definitely use ingress anycast (ie anycast on external traffic coming into Cloudflare). The main question was whether they (meaningfully) used egress anycast (multiple Cloudflare servers in different regions using the same IP to make requests out to the internet).

Since you mentioned DDOS, I’m assuming you are talking about ingress anycast?
by beeflet | 2026-01-16 10:28:00+00:00
Monero's RandomX is an interesting PoW scheme one designed to be optimized for CPUs. Here is an interesting read about its design https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/blob/master/doc/design.md

Chia uses a very memory-hard PoW system and is usually mined on SSDs.

I've seen a lot of "useful PoW" cryptocurrencies, but they tend to not pan out. For example Gridcoin is just a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency with a program that hands out GRC to BOINC contributors.
by deeringc | 2026-01-16 10:28:40+00:00
Doesn't Apple have an ARM "Architectural License" arising from being one of the original founding firms behind ARM, which they helped create back in the 90s for the Apple Newton. That license allows them to design their own ARM-compatible chips. The companies they bought more recently gave them the talent to use their existing license, but they always had the right to design their own chips.
by benbojangles | 2026-01-16 10:28:48+00:00
i like loneliness. in my teens i could not encourage my friends to travel so i went on my own and was happy. in my twenties i would comfortably break up my relationships if i knew i could be happier alone. i have worked overseas for extended periods alone. i am old now but i am happy alone. i enjoy my huge garden alone. i avoid crowds. I online shop instead of travelling to a store if i can. I just have no connection to people around me anymore and i have been able to recognise this need in me and encourage myself to follow my own understanding of a happy life. I have no real regrets. I am in a good position financially and have nobody to really bother me. I can look ahead to the next month or two and feel happy knowing there is nothing on the horizon to displace my solitude.
by LoveMortuus | 2026-01-16 10:29:00+00:00
>In my experience, the problem is not a low success rate, but the burnout from being the only person that invites people to do things.

This is what mostly happened with me, I just got burned out from always having to be the one to organise everything or nothing would happen, which is what ended up happening after I stopped, we just stopped meeting up and eventually grew completely apart.

Now, I'm in a completely different country and I don't even have anyone's contacts anymore. But that's been life for me, people come and people go, never to stay.

I've accepted it by now, it can still hurt from time to time, but it is what it is, one should not force their will onto others, I believe.
by d--b | 2026-01-16 10:29:38+00:00
It looks like every comment here is suggesting that lonely people should do something to feel less lonely. But that's not how you stop an epidemic.

The epidemic is a systemic things, and you don't solve systemic things by giving advice to individuals. You solve systemic things by changing the whole culture. and you change the whole culture by large scale initiative.

That said, I have no idea about what to do!
by PurpleRamen | 2026-01-16 10:29:46+00:00
The single agent pulling regularly 10k records, which nobody will ever use, is worse than the 10k agents coming from the same source, and using the same cache, they fill when doing a targeted request. But even worse are 10k agents from 10k different sources, scraping 10k sites each, of which 9999 pages are not relevant for their request.

At the end it's all about the impact on the servers, and those can be optimized, but this does not seem to happen at the moment at large. So in that regard, centralizing usage and honouring the rules is a good step, and the rest are details to figure out on the way.
by m132 | 2026-01-16 10:30:57+00:00
Virtualization.framework was introduced in Big Sur. It builds on top of Hypervisor.framework and is essentially Apple's QEMU (in some ways quite literally, it implements QEMU's pvpanic protocol for example). Before QEMU and other VMMs gained ARM64 Hypervisor.framework support, it was the only way to run virtual machines on ARM Macs and still is the only official way to virtualize ARM macOS.

The new Tahoe framework you're probably thinking of is Containerization, a wrapper around Virtualization.framework allowing for easy installation of Linux containers.
Is CAPTCHA still a thing in 2026 (Captcha 3.5)?
by jarirajari | 2026-01-16 10:31:00+00:00
I have been writing new SaaS software and I noticed thinking about bots. I can see that Google's reCaptcha or Cloudflare Turnstile are suitable for public, low-risk, consumer sites, but not suitable for sites which expect bots which utilize sophisticated techniques. Why? Because:

- bots are becoming more advanced
- email verification is broken i.e. bots can do it too
- current captchas are not effective enough

My problems with bots are:

1. Fake registration and login prevention
* Accounts used to run fraud or cyber attacks later
* Bots hammer login endpoints using leaked passwords

2. Resource consumption
* Compute costs (especially with bot army) including APIs
* Denial-of-Service for legitimate users

3. Current CAPTCHAs are not cost-effective
* Costs 0.50-3.00 USD per 1000 challenges (if accounting all challenges)
* Too easy to bypass at scale, ineffective cost-to-benefit ratio

Are you looking to protect your SaaS software against bots too? Do you share my problems?
by schmuhblaster | 2026-01-16 10:31:31+00:00
>> I think much of the frustration with older tech like this comes from the fact that these things were mostly written(and rewritten till perfection) on paper first and only the near-end program was input into a computer with a keyboard.

I very much agree with this, especially since Prolog's execution model doesn't seem to go that well with the "successive approximations" method.
by concats | 2026-01-16 10:32:17+00:00
> A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then.

I have also noticed this.

How LLMs can never be trusted because they are stochastic sounds very similar to how Wikipedia can never be trusted because it sometimes has a bad-faith edit.

Or how the people that don't believe information should be free are very active in both the anti-Wikipedia and anti-llm crowds. And use much of the same talking points.

Have publishers have sued Wikipedia too?
by alias_neo | 2026-01-16 10:32:49+00:00
I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.

My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.

I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.

I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).

It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.

All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.

EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.
by fooker | 2026-01-16 10:32:59+00:00
> Maybe healthcare makes up some of that difference?

No, you’re missing the insane scale of Silicon Valley tech salaries. See levels.fyi and filter by 5 years of experience in San Francisco.

If the city made the threshold 100k or 110k, I bet there would be zero children in the city born to parents making less than that.
by amiga386 | 2026-01-16 10:33:02+00:00
Indeed, but no matter how much you don't want your dad to be your dad, he is your dad, which was also my point.

Without Sanger, Wikipedia:

- wouldn't be called "Wikipedia"

- wouldn't be editable without first opening an account

- wouldn't have NPOV as a fundamental policy

In short, it wouldn't be Wikipedia.

The community he incubated grew and took Wikipedia onwards to what it is today, even if he disagrees with that direction and plugs his own massively less popular encyclopedia.
by chimprich | 2026-01-16 10:33:41+00:00
I think "meetings" are a poor (or at least, very inconsistent) way of making friends. Doing activities together is the best way of making friends. Bonus points if it's for multiple hours, or there's an element of risk where you have to look after / trust each other, or stay overnight somewhere.

Examples include clubs for walking / running / cycling / scuba clubs etc. It doesn't have to be physical activity, but since you need exercise anyway, then you might as well get those endorphins whilst socialising.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-16 10:34:21+00:00
I didn't say there aren't any emergencies, but the emergencies are not on the same level. And I said they're highly trained, you don't need to convince me of that. Nor do you need to convince me they're important. Those are entirely separate issues.

Also what fraction of engine test cell use is for engine maintenance? Is it a big amount?

But if that kind of test goes wrong the main outcomes are "hit stop" and "oh no it's too late". An emergency like that is not where much of their expertise is needed, their expertise is in other parts of their job.
by myrmidon | 2026-01-16 10:35:08+00:00
I completely disagree with your base premise: I think EU leadership (national + EU) performed on an average level over the last three decades, and the EU as an insitution did even better than I would've expected given its limitations/constraints.

If you could pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years?
by adrian_b | 2026-01-16 10:35:21+00:00
As implemented in the most popular compilers "-fsanitize=address" is indeed slow.

However, for the majority of the code of a program, enabling this and all the other sanitize options will have a negligible effect on the useful performance.

Like I have said, sanitize options should be disabled in performance-critical sections, which have been identified as such by profiling, not by guessing, but only after examining those sections thoroughly, to be certain that the undefined behavior cannot be triggered.

Currently, the sanitize options are significantly slower than they should be in an optimized implementation, because there is a vicious circle. The application developers do not enable such options for production because they believe that they are slow and the compiler developers do not make the effort to improve their speed, because they believe that the application developers will not enable them in production code anyway.

However, these problems are not inherent to the language or compiler, they are caused by a bad historical tradition of neglecting the correctness of a program whenever cheating can improve the performance in the best case (which will be the only one demonstrated to potential customers), even if that makes the worst case catastrophic.

Even Rust is not immune to bad traditions, e.g. by disabling overflow checking in release builds, as opposed to debug builds.
by frm88 | 2026-01-16 10:36:34+00:00
New soles and overall cleaning + disinfecting of my Vivobarefoot winter boots. I'm so happy they came up with a repair programme for many of their models, it prolongs the EOL of my foot ware by many years https://www.revivo.com/how-we-repair. It's $ 104.53 as of this posts currency exchange but I think it still counts?
by anonnon | 2026-01-16 10:37:19+00:00
Facilitating mirroring seems like it would open up another can of liability worms for the IA, as well as, potentially, for those mirroring it. For example, they recently lost an appeal of a major lawsuit brought by book publishers. And then there's the Wayback Machine itself; who knows what they've hoovered up from the public internet over the years? Would you be comfortable mirroring that?
by mxkopy | 2026-01-16 10:38:51+00:00
In urban areas, we really should have less cars. But it’s emblema of a deeper issue; the interests of control and convenience in one’s time has crowded out everything else. If you have an established social circle and a decent income there’s never been a better time to take charge of your social life. Unfortunately the most able to change the system for those who have neither of these things are the least likely to understand. It’s a tough and old question to be honest
by MrVandemar | 2026-01-16 10:39:37+00:00
National Service means largely:

* Giving people guns and teaching them to kill

* Teaching people to blindly follow orders barked at them by an authority figure

* Enormous potential for mental health problems, including bullying, abuse and suicide

* Wasting 4 productive years of someones life

I'm pretty certain national service is a Bad Idea™
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-16 10:39:59+00:00
I actually don't think they performed very well. I just look at the standard of living of middle working class, which has slowly been going downhill in the last 15-20 or so years for a lot of people(worst of all southern europe) and at a more accelerated rate in the last 3-4 years. All due to their decisions and policies and I hold them accountable for it.

And you don't need the unfair power of hindsight to know that tying your energy independence to Russia (your military adversary and the reason NATO exists) was a bad decision back then, or that staying dependent on US military and tech was bad, or that pursuing unrealistic climate goals was a bad decision, or that opening your borders to millions of unvetted people from unstable regions was bad, since people have been saying all this was bad 20 years ago but they were ignored because the gravy train was still running. And now that the gravy train has stopped and the piper has to be paid, our leadership class are trying to gaslight us and deflect the blame for their recklessness.

Even if we were to assume they performed super well, that doesn't mean I should now swallow tyrannical laws designed to suppress our freedoms while they give themselves exemptions, just because different people from a different era who are no longer in power made some good decisions 30 years ago under the same umbrella. The EU-EC of today as an org is a vastly different beast than the EU of 30 years ago. There wasn't even a common currency 30 years ago.
by hienyimba | 2026-01-16 10:40:40+00:00
We’ve been experiencing the same thing. On further inspection, we discovered that the owner of the data centers was Tencent. So we blocked them at the ASN level across countries.

This was after web had to geo block China & Singapore some weeks earlier.

These AI scraping guys are destroying the web for normal folks in these countries where they run data scrapers.
by ben_w | 2026-01-16 10:41:17+00:00
> We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.

Don't count on it.

Some people may be willing to uproot their lives and move continent in the hope that 4 years later you won't re-elect another one like Trump, but it won't be as many as before. Heck, there was a brief window where I had the opportunity to migrate to the USA, but just the US electing Trump the first time ruled it out for me.

Not that I'd call myself "the best", but I was good enough if I'd wanted to. But I do also know some really good Cambridge graduates who were expressly asked by their American employer to relocate to the US, declined.
by bhickey | 2026-01-16 10:41:26+00:00
> It is insufficient to simply state that previous versions are not supported, they are aggressively not supported but I was not to be deterred.

Amen. The time I've spent building old versions of MAME. I have a mountain of Donkey Kong replay files from top players. Game replays are only guaranteed to run under the version used to record them, so get ready to build binaries if you want to watch old replays.
by blucaz | 2026-01-16 10:41:26+00:00
"While the above attack did use the systemd vsock sshd listener for Escape
to Host, the attacker could have just directly listened over the vsock loopback."

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/01/08/7

TL;DR: a clueless user fails to understand and configure his own systems, but for clickbait effect chooses to blame the evil SyStEmD!!!11 instead of his own incompetence
by reacharavindh | 2026-01-16 10:41:39+00:00
Using a coding agent over days on a personal project. It has made me think

1. These llms are smart and dumb at the same time. They make a phenomenal contribution in such a short time and also do a really dumb change that no one asked for. They break working code in irrational ways. I’ve been asking them to add so many tests for all the functions I care about. This acts as a first guard rail when they trip over themselves. Excessive tests.

2. Having a compiler like Rust’s helps to catch all sorts of mines that the llms are happy to leave.

3. The LLMs don’t have a proper working memory. Their context is often cluttered. I find that curating that context (what is being done, what was tried, what is the technical goal, specific requests etc) in concise yet “relevant for the time” manner helps to get them to not mess up.

Perhaps important open source projects that choose to accept AI generated PRs can have such excessive test suites, and run the PRs through them first as a idiotic filter before manually reviewing what the change does.