MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by liampulles | 2026-01-03 12:29:03+00:00
I remember using Gordian Knot to create avi files from my DVDs back when XviD was the pragmatic method for encoding videos, and the whole goal was to get movies under 700mb so that you could write them to a CD. Avisynth and community filters were largely geared towards undoing all sorts of crap done to an image because artifacts that were relatively unnoticeable on a general CRT television were quite apparent on a computer monitor, as well as to then prepare the video to look good once it has been highly compressed with XviD or DivX.

These days I'm much more inclined to try and transparently encode the source material, tag it appropriately in the media container, and let the player adjust the image on the fly. Though I admit, I still spend hours playing around with Vapoursynth filter settings and AV1 parameters to try and get a good quality/compression ratio.

I have to say that the biggest improvement to the experience of watching my videos was when I got an OLED TV. Even some garbage VHS rip can look interesting when the night sky has been adjusted to true black.

Given the increasing abilities of TVs and processing abilities and feature sets of players, I'm not much persuaded to upgrade my DVD collection to Blu-Ray. Though I admit some of that is that I enjoy the challenge of getting a good video file out of my DVDs.

I partially disagree with the use of ASS subtitles. For a lot of traditional movies, using SRT files is sensible because more players support it, and because it's often sensible to give the player the option of how to render the text (because the viewing environment informs what is e.g. the appropriate font size).
by amiga386 | 2026-01-03 12:29:06+00:00
Saudi royalty torture, murder and dismember a Washington Post correspondent. But they let the US have oil so that's OK.

Venezuelan politician stays in power after losing the election. You'd think a "Stop the Steal" Jan 6 insurrectionist like Trump would be proud. But no, they're not letting the US have oil, so this is unacceptable.

The US needs cheap oil like the US's United Fruit Company needed cheap bananas. Both are more than happy to devastate other people's countries to get what they want.
by rootsudo | 2026-01-03 12:29:36+00:00
The community in question is https://x.com/frontiertower/status/1938258376913195251.

This is nothing new. Numerous “scenes” do the same. There’s the longevity scene connected to this one.

There’s the psychonaut scene. That’s a bit from the erowid/and misc scene of the early 2010s.

There’s the bodybuilding / gym scene which probably is the longest and oldest subset of members.

I’m not sure which niche communities I’m missing.
by msaadat | 2026-01-03 12:30:34+00:00
The "double entry" stems from the fundamental accounting equation: assets = liabilities + equity. Whatever you have is either yours or borrowed. Change in one must have an equal change in the other to keep the equation balanced, otherwise you would lose track of how much you own and how much you owe.

For example, you have £200 in cash. £100 was your own earnings, £100 your mum gave you to pass on to someone. In pure single entry system, Cash account would have £200, with no distinction between the two. Double entry tracks ownership explicitly: £100 would be recorded in Equity and £100 in Payables.
by terhechte | 2026-01-03 12:31:54+00:00
There's a mix of both worlds that I've tried for a while and want to pick up again in 2026:
Use macOS so that I can utilize the great hardware and the well integrated drivers (e.g. sleep, performance, silence), but then for each project / work stream just fire up a lightweight linux VM fullscreen and do everything related there. E.g. all browser windows/tabs, apps, file explorer windows, terminal sessions.
When I stop working I pause the VM. When I need to continue everything is as I left it.
The main reason why I stopped was that the 2d hardware acceleration for Linux didn't work in UTM.app. I think I'll just need switch to Parallels or VMWare
by estearum | 2026-01-03 12:31:56+00:00
No it hasn't.

Expectations are higher, competition is stiffer, and the gap between bottom and top end has grown, but by and large (especially in the US), the middle class quality of life has gone up.

Obviously specific regions that failed to transition out of low value-add manufacturing and agriculture have suffered, but the vast majority of Americans live in cities doing or supporting high value work.
by tracnar | 2026-01-03 12:32:11+00:00
At least in Belgium it's quite common for a lot of students to fail the first year (partly due to the difficulty, partly due to partying instead of studying). But it's not like it's really free, the tuition is cheap but the accomodation is expensive. I also don't think it's particularly difficult on purpose to filter out students, it's just that it's not overly expensive and a lot of people are unsure about what to study.
by imtringued | 2026-01-03 12:32:29+00:00
I feel like your entire comment is a self contradicting mess.

You say FPGAs won't get dedicated logic for ML, then you say they did.

Why does it matter whether the matrix multiplication units inside the AI Engine are a systolic array or not? The multipliers support 512 bit inputs which means 4x8 times 8x4 for bfloat16 with one multiplication per cycle and bigger multiplications with smaller data types. Since it is a VLIW processor, it is much easier to achieve full utilisation of the matrix multiplication units, because you can run loads, stores and process tiles all simultaneously in the same cycle.

The only thing that might be a challenge is arranging the communication between the AI Engines, but even that should be blatantly obvious. If you are doing matrix multiplication, you should be using the entire array in exactly the pattern you think they should be using internally.

Who knows, maybe there is a way to implement flash attention like that too.
by Emanation | 2026-01-03 12:34:02+00:00
Campbell believed all stories were the Hero's Journey in some convoluted manner or another. Could tell him you tripped down the stairs, and he'd say something like, 'yes, but going down those stairs again would be you learning to conquor your fears, thus resulting in a more well rounded person.'

Or you could say 'I should stop drinking milk, because I'm somewhat intolerant' and he'd say, 'ahh, yes, you're in the middle of the hero's journey, on the precibus of learning to set your desires aside for the betterment of your health'

Any story with conflict becomes the hero's journey, and what stories worth telling don't have some kind of conflict. 'Proto-story' nonsense.
by senko | 2026-01-03 12:34:08+00:00
> a deterministic problem (substring matching transaction descriptions) that could be solved with a 50-line Python script

I don't know about your bank transactions, but at least in my case the descriptions are highly irregular and basically need a hardcode for each and every damn pos location across each of the store location across each vendor.

I attempted that (with a Python script), gave up, and built myself a receipt tracker (photo + gemini based ocr) instead, which was way easier and is more reliable, even though - oh the horror! - it's using AI.
by andrewaylett | 2026-01-03 12:34:29+00:00
Honestly, greylisting is a hack. There are better options available nowadays, for all that I was almost certainly using greylisting when the author wrote the text in the article.

The key insight behind the idea is that common junk mailing software doesn't support standard SMTP very well. Greylisting tells the client to try again in a few minutes, and most legit mailers will do just that. Not all, though.

Recent versions of postfix added protocol checks that don't require a retry from the client: https://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html

A key observation here is that there's more than one way to ask a client to wait: the opening stanza in an SMTP transaction involves the server sending a message, and the client isn't supposed to respond until it receives that message. And it turns out that pre-greet checks (at least in my experience) have better anti-spam specificity. So I turned greylisting off $mumble years ago.

Pre-greet checks are still a hack: there's nothing stopping a competent spammer from implementing the protocol properly, except that "competent spammer" is an oxymoron.
by rawraul | 2026-01-03 12:34:52+00:00
So basically, I feel trapped in this AI world, and from what I can see on Reddit I’m not the only one, which makes me feel better tbh.

I started learning to code by myself pretty recently, around 2022, and if I’m not wrong, I tried ChatGPT for the first time as a coding helper in mid-2023. At that moment I had very basic knowledge, but enough to barely understand what the AI was throwing at me. Still, that felt like the first line of coke for an addict I was fascinated by how fast I was now able to solve problems.

Newbie bugs that took me days to solve were now done by AI in a matter of minutes. However, the barrier was still there: there was no MCP, you needed to copy-paste from VS Code to the chat, so many times you still had to put in some effort to fix things.

Now, with Cursor, Copilot, and so on, everything has changed drastically. These days, I sometimes spend the whole day writing either in English or Spanish but not really coding. I do read code, but it’s weird when I write more than four or five lines of code myself in a day.

So I need to ask: how good or bad is this behavior?

It doesn’t seem very good because you get lazy, but on the other hand you focus more on architecture, code cleaning tasks, reviewing, etc. And was this really what I wanted when I started? I wanted to look like a hacker, not like a bored police officer staring at a security monitor.

It’s easy to say: “Then stop using AI tools and start doing some real coding yourself.” Yeah, sure but what if you work at a startup and everything is for yesterday? And not only that, but the whole market has now adapted to the speed AI tools gave us. Nobody expects a new feature to take 2–4 weeks anymore, but 1–2 days.

Everything is going so fast that you simply can’t stop and say, “Okay, I will change my habits so even if I’m slower, my coding skills will grow.” Well, maybe just maybe you can do that in your free time, but even then you feel stupid going that slow when you know that with a simple prompt everything is done.

What do you think? What can we, the new developers, do to keep growing our knowledge without losing that AI speed?
by Notjoanbaez | 2026-01-03 12:36:20+00:00
It might be the alignment of several forces :

- macOS is kind of crapifying, with Liquid Glass UI, iCloud services pushed down your throat…
- Windows 11…
- (some) Europeans are getting concerned about their complete lack of sovereignty on the tech stack, and Linux is one way to reclaim a small part of it.
- LLM agents like Claude code have lowered the bar so much for any setup operation and bash commands.

All in all, it seems like a good time for Linux to broaden a bit its adoption.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-03 12:36:37+00:00
Truly sovereign nations can be expected to act in their own best interest. Russia responded to the US deciding to expand a military alliance all the way up to Ukraine, one of their most vulnerable points, exactly how the US would respond if Russia tried to form a military alliance with Mexico. I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!

That's why you don't do things like this, unless you're actively working to both establish and demonstrate your dominance over another country, which we were.
by rasz | 2026-01-03 12:36:58+00:00
>When did it come out, though?

late, and only in 4th revision of this particular chipset :) Its the exception to the rule.

>Hang on. The 430VX was not an early Pentium chipset. It was a late one. After the "Triton", the 430FX:

FX had similar buffers - 82438FX

> early Intel chipset for Pentium hardware was the 430NX "Neptune"

2x 82433NX LBX "data path between the host CPU/Cache and main memory", no mention of FPM/EDO in datasheet and only goes down to standard FPM X-3-3-3 timings. Afaik still works with EDO just with no speed difference.

>I strongly disagree with your comment about cache. Cache/no cache was huge.

Only on chipsets not supporting faster EDO timings. No L2 is not a big deal with EDO because EDO timings are already almost as fast as Async L2 cache (7-2-2-2 vs 3-2-2-2). No L2+EDO https://dependency-injection.com/intel-430fx-triton-l2-cache... 2% slower in Doom but 8% faster in Quake. Comparison between Async L2 + FPM vs no L2 + EDO would look even better for EDO.

PB cache on the other hand was an easy 10-20% bump over Async L2.

Now take a chipset that utterly fails with EDO like sis 501 and difference is indeed dramatic https://dependency-injection.com/2mb-cache-benchmarks/

>No, the type of cache wasn't a big difference

I literally linked tests that show otherwise :) Intel datasheets explain why, PB not only allowed 3-1-1-1 cache timings but also unlocked faster ram modes.

>modified the startup messages to say "writeback cache"

Wasnt PCchips pretty much the only fraud that made boards with no L2 cache, with some other vendors (amptron, kaimei, jamicon) selling same relabeled pcchips? There was a funny case of Octek selling some models plastered with "Dynamic Cache Architecture" stickers while the cache was build into special EDRAM ram, big problem being most of those models shipped with chipset unable to support said EDRAM :) example https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/octek-hippo-vl-2
by vibrio | 2026-01-03 12:37:13+00:00
Will side effects for hormonal and gene therapy approaches be shaken out in just 3-5 years? For gene therapy, the rare blood cancers associated with car-t or bluebirdbio suggest maybe not. Maybe they remain rare, but as scale and flexibility of use increases, how that may evolve. Hormones are a whole different calculation. With the creative and dosing, combinations, and applications I’m not sure how many from conclusions will be available. I’m not judging good/bad here, I’m just thinking that this “democratization” of medicines (maybe otherwise not available to some) will increase access, with both risks and benefits.
by 999900000999 | 2026-01-03 12:37:17+00:00
The problem is with Linux you have a bunch of different "fixes". I like Cinnamon. I've used desktop Linux for a long time. I have no idea how to fix this aside from switching to Mate.

You have almost unlimited permutations of different distros, kernels, etc. Which combination will work for you ?

No one knows. Will the next kernel update bring relief? I will say when you get a Linux system working, it's the most productive experience you can have. Microsoft isn't constantly begging for more money.
by maxlin | 2026-01-03 12:37:17+00:00
Damn. And no large-scale military activity in play.

I hardly see how this could be considered anything but an absolute win, especially where Maduro has been considered being more and more authoritarian, rejecting democracy, and probably would've been willing to sacrifice thousands of lives in a ground war if this increasing threat was handled less finely.

Add to this the fact that Venezuela has crazy amounts of oil BUT a totally mismanaged and badly exploited extraction operation and the economy is in the toilet. Unless this somehow leads in to a Libya situation, everyone could benefit from this, compared to the hopelessness of the past.
by cogman10 | 2026-01-03 12:37:58+00:00
> all the side effects will be known

I wish there were some good that came out of this. But these are completely unusable results. It's uncontrolled and not being studied.

Did their testicles fall off because of LLM drug 32, drug 34, drug 2, or a combination of all the drugs they took at the same time? Or maybe it's a combination of their genetic makeup and drug 4.

It'd be like trying to glean any useful medical information from any drug addict. Was the heart attack caused by meth, huffing paint, or one too many cheese burgers? Who knows.
by AndrewOMartin | 2026-01-03 12:38:07+00:00
I genuinely meant that lottery winners got murdered at a noticeable higher rate. However I can't find a good source for that belief now. So I'm happy to drop the belief.

Nevertheless, here's an article from an untrustworthy looking site!

https://www.grunge.com/1301397/lottery-winners-murdered/
by tim333 | 2026-01-03 12:38:30+00:00
Yeah but if you take an honest look Zelensky was elected with 73% of the vote so probably a legitimate ruler. The Venezuela election seems to have been about "Maduro had in fact won just 30% of the vote, compared with 67% for González" so González, the proxy for Machado should have been the winner. (source https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/10/gonzal...)

These things are messy.
by lm28469 | 2026-01-03 12:38:48+00:00
You forgot quite a few...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202112/1240540.shtml

But you're the good guys and do that to deliver freedom and democracy so it's OK. I think you're under estimating how the world is rapidly updating their views on the US, and the lasting damage to your soft power.
by estearum | 2026-01-03 12:39:43+00:00
To be more explicit: Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the entire world and, due to the above, are not inclined to transact it with the US.

This deserves far more than the two little sidenotes you've dropped in here.

POTUS demonstrably does not give a fuck about countries "assisting Russia", "being repressive", "stealing elections" or "having economic/food/health problems".
by porridgeraisin | 2026-01-03 12:39:43+00:00
Ya, I find predictions for what would happen in that scenario extremely noisy. Tend to avoid them.

But I do believe that a lot of the US government posturing that if implemented would be bad for economy (which you are alluding to), will not actually happen. A massive revamp of the economy is what the majority voting bloc in the US wishes for, so the winning politician will have to keep signalling in that direction. But actually following through with it, be it in a way with positive or negative effect, is extremely difficult. So I don't pay much attention to it.
by lproven | 2026-01-03 12:40:40+00:00
Seems to be solely about AMD GPUs.

I'm not a gamer but I do have two much-loved Thinkpads with built-in Nvidia GPUs I can't upgrade: a W520 with a Quadro 1000, and a T420 with an NVS 4200M.

Both need the driver version 390 at the latest -- no later driver supports these GPUs -- and that driver won't build on any kernel later than version 6.5. The GPUs are unsupported in Debian 12 (let alone 13) and from Ubuntu 24.04 or later.

This means Debian can't even enable a Displayport external screen, since the Displayport is connected to the Nvidia GPU.

Some Ubuntu variants can bring up the GPU and Displayport but I suspect without acceleration.

What's interesting to me is that I've found that since the beta of Pop OS 24.04, whose COSMIC desktop is Wayland–only, the GPUs are supported and work using FOSS drivers: the external screen works fine, it identifies both GPUs, I can choose to offload acceleration to the Nvidia chip.

It's not very stable on the W520 but it seems very solid on the T420 so far.

So, not a gamer, but in case this helps anyone else, I'm just putting it out there.
by hbarka | 2026-01-03 12:42:41+00:00
It’s incredible how Trump seeded the word ‘captured’ on his social media post and every major media outlet is now on cue with this as the literal headline narrative. It’s simply astonishing.

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink”
—Orwell
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-03 12:42:44+00:00
I remember ASP (application service provider, before cloud became synonymous with hosting), you are making me nostalgic. Back then I was in sales, I was selling real time inventory control, CRM and point of sale systems distributed over Citrix Metaframe in a secure datacenter. Businesses were just starting to get broadband connections. I would have to take customers to the datacenter to motivate them to let us host their data. Eight years later, google bought the building for $1.8b and eventually bought adjacent buildings as well.
by doom2 | 2026-01-03 12:43:00+00:00
edit: this comment made before two threads were consolidated. Original thread titled "Explosions reported in Venezuelan capital Caracas"

While I agree that "hypocrisy" isn't the right word here, I see where OP is coming from.

At least in American media, the use of passive voice (or as I've heard it called sometimes "exonerative voice") often obfuscates or otherwise provides cover for authorities. For example, "Tower collapses after missile strike" and "Man dies after being struck by bullet during arrest" are both technically true and yet also leave out important context (the country who fired the missile, the person who fired the gun and why).

Even if this headline is appropriate for now, it's not surprising that there should be questions over how it's worded.
by lproven | 2026-01-03 12:43:19+00:00
I use 5 laptops from this era regularly to frequently:

i5 and i7 X220, i5 and i7 T420, and quad-core i7 W520.

All are 100% stable and run for days on end without a problem with Ubuntu, Pop OS, FreeBSD, and most other things.

I think you may have hardware problems.
by lucb1e | 2026-01-03 12:43:43+00:00
Based on how they speak of competitors and potential partners alike (no matter how good or bad they are, so long as they're not perfect, and nobody has perfect security in this internet world, only grapheneos gets a free pass from grapheneos), I half expect that this 'major OEM' will sooner or later have one tiny slip-up in opsec that makes graphene's owner think they're conspiring against them and they abort mission and start looking for another partner to begin anew
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-01-03 12:43:55+00:00
Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?

Because that's what has actually happened here.

It's not like there will be peaceful and organized elections now. The template from US actions in Latin America in the past is: A puppet regime will be installed and it will be involved in heavy domestic oppression of its own.
by throw0101a | 2026-01-03 12:43:55+00:00
> I wouldn't call it "some inflation". The living standard of the western middle class has been on the decline for a long, long time.

IMHO the main problem nowadays, especially facing young people, is housing.

Otherwise there is probably never been a greater time to be alive, generally speaking, than right now. If you believe there is, can you outline the year(s) in question and how they were better?

As for inflation, using Bank of Canada numbers (since I'm in CA), $100 of goods/services from 1975-2000 increased by 220% to $320.93, while $100 of goods/services from 2000-2025 increased by 71% to $171.22.

In a 2014 article, CPI from 1914 to 2014:

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-604-x/62-604-x2015001...

From 1955 to 2021:

* https://economics.td.com/ca-inflation-new-vintage

1971-76 and 1977-83 had double the CPI of ~2021.

While unpleasant, and higher than that of what many young(er) people have experienced, it is hardly at a crazy level. The lack of people's experience of higher rates is simply more evidence as to how stable things have generally been:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

Tom Nichols argues that it is boredeom that's the problem: people want some excitement and are willing to stir the pot to get it:

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/08/19/donald-tru...