MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LowLevelBasket | 2026-01-18 08:05:35+00:00
I once on a project where we couldn't use third party libs. We needed a substring search but the needle could be 1 of N letters. My teammate loves SIMD and wanted to write a solution. I took a look at all of our data and the most strings were < 2kb with many being empty and < 40 letters. SIMD would have been overkill. So I wrote a simple dumb for loop checking each letter for the 3 interesting characters (`";\n`)
by 47282847 | 2026-01-18 08:06:35+00:00
Did you follow the link?

“Greenland joined the then European Community in 1973 with Denmark, but after gaining autonomy in 1979 with the introduction of home rule within the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland voted to leave in 1982 and left in 1985, to become an OCT.”

It is very easy to read about Greenland gaining autonomy also in more detail. I don’t know what is happening on your end that you have trouble with it?
by KronisLV | 2026-01-18 08:09:25+00:00
Over here, in Latvia, yes. We were taught about the basics of computers and how to use Windows in primary education, various Office features and software like physics tests running on Windows in secondary education and even in the university most of it was Windows-centric when it came to the user devices (not servers or VMs). And also stuff like more Office, some graphics editing software, I bet some people had chosen courses with 3D modeling, MATLAB and so on. Luckily a lot of the software is cross platform nowadays so if someone had a Linux distro outside of the computer lab on their personal device and wanted to do some homework, they weren’t completely abandoned but still.

Wonder if Chromebooks have taken over since.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 08:10:07+00:00
Your questions are very interesting and I'm not sure anyone knows. Some people are trying, others want to, I know one company that has gone back on the ai initiative because the ROI was not there.

What I would do is to express your pessimism lightly, or more like, "we are making these assumptions about a new technology we know little about" (pick just 2-3)

Then push hard to convince them to carve out little pieces to try out the supposed "AI changes the economics of building software." and other assumptions. Say something like "how can we validate these assumptions with the minimal effort/time/money, because I've seen some horror stories and not sure the hype holds up. I'm all for it if it works, but we just don't know and we need to chip away at that"

My personal take is that this idea they have will end poorly. I've worked hard and built custom agents to squeeze more out of them (my gem-3-flash is better than copilot with anything impo.), and my takeaway is two-fold (1) they can be both impressively good and unbelievably bad, even the very best models from any company (2) people are sharing their wins far more than the fails, like stonks, the outcomes you can find in the wild have bias. I know I delete a bunch of false starts, gonna be hard to automate this and not spend more than you would on a human, especially as the project grows. You are going to have to pay to load a bunch of context on every run just so the model can go from tickets in Jira to finding what/where needs to change, to getting actually relevant code changes, then making sure they work.
by Davidzheng | 2026-01-18 08:10:28+00:00
I'm actually not sure what the right attribution method would be. I'd lean towards single line on acknowledgements? Because you can use it for example @ every lemma during brainstorming but it's unclear the right convention is to thank it at every lemma...

Anecdotally, I, as a math postdoc, think that GPT 5.2 is much stronger qualitatively than anything else I've used. Its rate of hallucinations is low enough that I don't feel like the default assumption of any solution is that it is trying to hide a mistake somewhere. Compared with Gemini 3 whose failure mode when it can't solve something is always to pretend it has a solution by "lying"/ omitting steps/making up theorems etc... GPT 5.2 usually fails gracefully and when it makes a mistake it more often than not can admit it when pointed out.
by Zanfa | 2026-01-18 08:11:21+00:00
When working at an influencer marketing company a while ago, back when Instagram still allowed pretty much complete access through their API. As we were indexing the entire Instagram universe for our internal tooling, we had this graph traversal setup to crawl Instagram profiles, then each of their followers etc. We’d need to keep track of visited profiles to not loop and had an Apache Storm cluster for the entire scraping pipeline. It worked, but was cumbersome to work with and monitor as well as couldn’t reach our desired throughput.

Given there were about a billion IG profiles total at the time, I just replaced the entire setup with a single Go script that iterated from 1 to billion and tried to scrape every id in between. That gave us 10k requests per second on a single machine, which was more than enough.
by QuesnayJr | 2026-01-18 08:12:39+00:00
Erdos was an incredibly prolific mathematician, and one of his quirks is that he liked to collect open problems and state new open problems as a challenge to the field. Many of the problems he attached bounties to, from $5 to $10,000.

The problems are a pretty good metric for AI, because the easiest ones at least meet the bar of "a top mathematician didn't know how to solve this off the top of his head" and the hardest ones are major open problems. As AI progresses, we will see it slowly climb the difficulty ladder.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-18 08:13:31+00:00
It all crashed when Sundar Pichai took over:

In hist first speech/announcement he said: "...everything is AI now..." - from this day on, Google was dead for customer acquisition.

From now on, every search query with same terms served always an individual page at different times. The good old SEO days were dead, this user-acqui channel died.

Then they increased & enlarged the space for ads at top of page; and these days finally they introduced this AI panel - most people wont scroll anymore on Google.
by helsinkiandrew | 2026-01-18 08:13:49+00:00
The HN headline misses the point that Netflix told Matt Damon this.

I'd guess more people will watch Matt Damon's new movie on Netflix than watched Adolescence before it won the awards

People want to see (are more likely to watch) super and action hero movies with big stars in - but there's been so many of these with fairly similar plotlines that outside the attention grabbing action and fight scenes the quiet/story development scenes become like ad breaks and people start looking at their phones.

If Matt Damon made different movies for Netflix (like adolescence!), he'd get less views but be given more freedom.

> shows like “Adolescence” are “the exception,” Affleck said he felt the show “demonstrates you don’t have to do” the Netflix tricks to please audiences.
by testdelacc1 | 2026-01-18 08:14:03+00:00
As a resident with a phone problem I miss the underground not having any signal. Other people using TikTok doesn’t bother me so much because it’s relatively rare. My own tendencies with screen time bother me more. No internet actually forced me to read books more and I miss that.

But this is a lot better for tourists who need the internet to navigate underground. So I’m pleased for them.
by motoxpro | 2026-01-18 08:14:58+00:00
Wait, you do know there are less black people in the US than white people so doing a ratio on absolute murder numbers is wild right? That makes that .92 useless.

2021. People incarcerated in state or federal prisons by race and ethnicity.
Race, ethnicity % of US population % of incarcerated
population Incarceration rate (per 100,000)

White (non-Hispanic) 59 31 181
Hispanic 19 24 434
Black 14 32 901

Did you just ignore the data where the whites are 181/100,000 and blacks are 901/100,000. From an absolute perspective they are close but as a percentage of ethnic population it's not even close.

I feel like this is why its hard to have a convo on the internet. Even when we have data, it's impossible to see it the same way.
by spliffedr | 2026-01-18 08:15:22+00:00
I think (not 100% sure) Cillium [0][1] kinda already does this. This loophole is good for packet processing/routing and even introducing XDP based ACL to bypass any ip/nf tables and get that almost wire speed benefit. I use Cilium with these features for custom made k8s clusters with Talos OS without any kube-proxy.

[0]https://docs.cilium.io/en/stable/operations/performance/tuni...

[1]https://isovalent.com/blog/post/cilium-netkit-a-new-containe...
by Trifectorium | 2026-01-18 08:15:44+00:00
We talk about the fourth dimension as if it belonged to science fiction, something reserved for theoretical physicists and impossible diagrams. In daily life we imagine ourselves in a simple world of objects, rooms, bodies, money, screens and streets. That is a three dimensional picture, a world of length, width and height. Yet beneath everything you do, there is a fourth axis already at work. You move along it constantly, even when you are sitting still. You make decisions inside it. You suffer and heal inside it. You simply do not often think of it as a dimension you can work with. That fourth axis is time, but not just clock time. It is time as memory, time as trajectory, time as possibility, time as the hidden structure that links who you were, who you are and who you might become.
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-18 08:18:03+00:00
You can still hear those things, just not obnoxiously loudly. NC works best against static sounds. Speech still makes it through. Just not as loud.

If you're in a busy car enough people will hear it to be aware, and if you're on your own you will hear the announcement clearly.

Besides it's really a one in 10 million chance you'll get stabbed on the metro, not worth worrying about. The chance of getting hit by a car in traffic is much higher.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-18 08:20:26+00:00
This.

AI is already more or less ultimately powerful with nearly endless ressources - though, no one built a big software company in the last 3 - 4 years solely with AI to replace one of the behemoths.

The fact that you own a car which could bring you everywhere does not mean that you actually will go eveywhere.

On a conference 2 month ago, one speaker claimed that AI will be so powerful that within 3 years there will be guys who replace microsoft because they have a better coding AI than today.

I do not see this happen
by barrell | 2026-01-18 08:21:28+00:00
I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light.

If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions.

Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.
by KellyCriterion | 2026-01-18 08:22:30+00:00
Yes.

Im working productive with it every day (Claude Opus). If you provide enough context, the code usually works veeeery well on first shot.

(For sure, I do not tell it "build me a facebook", instead Im telling it precisely which single function I want to have, how it should work, what the output should be.

Its just a boon.
by spliffedr | 2026-01-18 08:23:29+00:00
Give it a test and let me know if you encounter any issues. Except the chrome/chromium with static binaries, that have BoringSSL shipped inside. The entire SSL/TLS code flow is a motherfucking spaghetti to provide acceleration and fast page loads. They even offload to system OpenSSL lib for some TLS parts and even with debug symbols (not you google that doesn't include them in repo) it is a headache to trace it
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 08:23:56+00:00
How much context do I have to use on every message so that the agent knows how to use this bespoke language and repl?

I can achieve the same thing with traditional tool calls and a state map attached to a session that I can selectively expose to the agent. I actually do this already with ADK and the article has given me some ideas for sure, concept cool, but...

Why did the author choose to do this with a new language and custom repl?
by jorvi | 2026-01-18 08:24:34+00:00
I mean.. LLMs have hit a pretty hard wall a while ago, with the only solution being throwing monstrous compute at eking out the remaining few percent improvement (real world, not benchmarks). That's not to mention hallucinations / false paths being a foundational problem.

LLMs will continue to get slightly better in the next few years, but mainly a lot more efficient. Which will also mean better and better local models. And grounding might get better, but that just means less wrong answers, not better right answers.

So no need for doomerism. The people saying LLMs are a few years away from eating the world are either in on the con or unaware.
by userbinator | 2026-01-18 08:25:32+00:00
I wonder if they considered using the existing metal tracks as antennae, or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication to feed base stations in the trains themselves.

So the ESN in the tunnels runs at 400 MHz, far lower than the 700 to 3,600 MHz range usually used by smartphones.

It's worth noting that 450MHz was listed as one of the GSM bands, but apparently was never used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands#GSM-450
by dijit | 2026-01-18 08:25:34+00:00
I haven’t worked anywhere special.

The issues I’m talking about are: “we can’t debug kernel issues, so we run 40 pods and tune complicated health check health-check procedures in order for the service to work well”.

There is no understanding that anything is actually wrong, for they think that it is just the state of the universe, a physical law that prevents whatever issue it is from being resolved. They aren’t even aware that the kernel is the problem, sometimes they’re not even aware that there is a problem, they just run at linear scale because they think they must.
by godelski | 2026-01-18 08:25:58+00:00
> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail

Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need to be addressed.

This repeats over and over. There are no big problems, there are only a bunch of little problems that accumulate. As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. And again, we only solve them to the good enough level, as perfection doesn't exist. The problems we solve never were a single problem, but many many smaller ones.

I think the problem is we want to avoid depth. It's difficult! It's frustrating. It would be great if depth were never needed. But everything is simple until you actually have to deal with it.
by kikkupico | 2026-01-18 08:26:10+00:00
I misjudged the amount of dislike HN users have for AI generated writing. I have added a "meta" section explaining how the post itself was written by AI, directed by my own taste. Here's the meta - https://www.kikkupico.com/posts/vibe-discovery/#the-meta

To be frank, I don't think AI-generated writing is inherently bad. Since there appears to be a strong bias against it, I will stick to writing blog posts by hand.
Show HN: I built a list of student developer benefits beyond the GitHub Pack
by faceline | 2026-01-18 08:26:18+00:00
Hello HN,

I built Resourify because while the GitHub Student Developer Pack is famous, there are hundreds of other isolated student programs (like Oracle’s specific free tier, various AI tool discounts, and cloud credits) that are scattered across different blogs and documentation pages.

I wanted to build a single "source of truth" for students to find tools to power their education and side projects.

The Tech Stack: The site is built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel (with Cloudflare for DNS). I focused heavily on performance and SEO (trying to get those green Core Web Vital scores).

Some of the deals I've curated include:

The Oracle "Forever Free" tier (4 OCPUs / 24GB RAM) which is great for hosting game servers or heavy apps.

New AI tools like Cursor and Lovable which have generous student tiers.

Cloud credits from DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.

Transparency Note: Some of the links on the site are affiliate links to help cover the running costs/coffee, but many are just direct links to free resources I found useful.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the UI/UX or if you know of any obscure student dev tools I should add to the database.

Thanks!
by businessmate | 2026-01-18 08:27:09+00:00
For the past two decades, brand safety meant controlling adjacency.

Was our ad placed next to inappropriate content?
Did our brand appear alongside misinformation?
Were we associated with publishers or creators that created reputational risk?

This model assumed three things:

Media intermediaries existed
Placement could be audited
Exposure left a durable trace
Those assumptions are no longer reliable.

AI assistants now mediate how people understand brands before any media surface is reached.

### Affiliation Statement

AIVO Standard is an independent research and governance initiative. It has no affiliation with any agency, framework, or commercial methodology operating under the name AIVO or otherwise.
by peteforde | 2026-01-18 08:27:16+00:00
I subscribe to exactly zero podcasts. It's not a position or a statement; I just don't find them interesting enough to win out over audiobooks or music.

Thanks to the Libby app, I have "read" several thousand books over the past 7-8 years. An excellent pair of earbuds is mandatory to allow a 2x listening speed, which you can work up to in about a week.

Everyone tells me that they "don't have time" to listen to 2-3 books a week. I listen when I'm doing my morning routine, when I'm cooking, when I'm cleaning, when I'm cycling, when I'm shopping, when I'm clearing snow.

Listening to influencers and celebrities hang out, pretend to be friends and try to be funny just doesn't do it for me.
by dd8601fn | 2026-01-18 08:28:26+00:00
I don’t think this is just how it should be… I think it’s how things already are.

I looked back at the old “back when they were good!” examples and realized that six of them could be the same app and none of us would know.

I used those icons (and their applications), and I’m far enough removed in time to not remember which was which.

All of this only further cements the idea that the users bring way more to this than the supposed design theories.

But we sure do like the idea of modern masters reaching into the human psyche with phenomenally intuitive icon design.
by renewiltord | 2026-01-18 08:29:14+00:00
The people who architected this disastrous program are renowned educationists. The field of education is full of idiots. IQ 95 max. Everyone who was intelligent went to other fields and so only morons write “papers” in this field and they’re all stupid as fuck.

At Mission San Jose, the teachers’ union and the administration stand behind a teacher who claims that wood and oxygen come from a campfire.

At SFUSD the school district is mindblowingly stupid. You’re thinking “wow this guy is so abrasive he can’t be right” but then you watch them try to rename schools and they sound like the bottom tenth percentile people you’ve ever interacted with and the result matches.

Watch for yourself as they fuck up the renaming of Clarendon https://youtu.be/KdekUXyAAzI?si=-rxJvwplHViMP9m1

I was smarter than this when I was 10. They can’t even read. A bunch of illiterate fucks.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 08:29:47+00:00
The new one, orange pen on black background, to me looks like a blacksmith hammer or a welding torch.

I would not associate it with writing at all.

2, 3, and 4 (from the left) look like they're for a notes app rather than DTP.

5 and 6 tell me what the app is for.

7 looks like an art app, not writing. I favour skeumorphism, but to work that needs to use metaphors people are familiar with, and pots of ink are something I know only from art stores.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 08:30:42+00:00
"Amy's (local) personal cookbook app" sounds great in theory, and that people will do this for the novelty, but my point is that this will not be a long-term trend. Largely because people will want more features in their apps beyond the prototype, they will find it hard and decide they'd rather be doing the cooking than cajoling, and go back to using the same app their peers do so they can be social and share, or even just send the recipe from their phone to the tablet on the kitchen counter
by arn3n | 2026-01-18 08:30:58+00:00
There’s a basic approach to this using markov chains which works surprisingly well. Scott Aaronson once challenged some students to beat his algorithm — only one student could, who claimed he just “used his free will”. Human randomness isn’t so random. There’s a neat little writeup about it here: https://planetbanatt.net/articles/freewill.html
by billhao | 2026-01-18 08:31:20+00:00
Hi HN — I built Nosi to solve a thing I kept seeing: high-quality text gets created inside AI chats, but it dies there.

Nosi is an AI-native publishing endpoint:
- one command from ChatGPT/Claude/Cursor → a clean public page
- every post also has a /raw endpoint (text/plain) for machines
- license shown on the page (default CC BY 4.0)

Demo: https://nosi.pub/260621
Raw: https://nosi.pub/260621/raw

I’d love feedback on what would make this instantly useful in your workflow.
by godelski | 2026-01-18 08:31:25+00:00
I'm sure those will help. But that doesn't solve the problem the parent stated. Those robots can't solve those real world problems until they can reason, till they can hypothesize, till they can experiment, till they can abstract all on their own. The problem is you can't replace the humans (unilaterally) until you can create AGI. But that has problem of its own, as you now have to contend with previously creating a slave class of artificial life forms.
by fainpul | 2026-01-18 08:31:31+00:00
If you use uBlock Origin, here's how to add automatic dark mode, based on your browser settings (modify "90%" slightly to adjust the contrast):

! dark mode
news.ycombinator.com##html:matches-media((prefers-color-scheme: dark)):style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg))
by DanielKenessy | 2026-01-18 08:31:59+00:00
OP here. This is an experiment to replace standard RNN/Transformer attention mechanisms with a geometric control-theory approach.

The core idea is a "Pilot" (pointer) that physically navigates a 1D Riemann Helix based on gradient flux. We treat learning as a physics problem involving Inertia, Friction (Deadzone), and Stochastic Walk.

It behaves like a quantum system where the particle location (training state) and the wave function (inference state) have de-synced.

The code is raw, manual CUDA. Looking for feedback on the inertia logic and if anyone has seen this specific "Shell vs. Core" divergence before.