MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmotea | 2026-01-24 18:59:05+00:00
> Because a good portion of the country voted for someone who wants to be a dictator. Fairly straightforward answer.

But then the question is: why?

Protip: if your answer is something like "they're degenerates," you're just pompously congratulating yourself, having no empathy and knowing and learning nothing.

Conditions were created, and allowed to persist, that shouldn't have been tolerated.
by TheRealPomax | 2026-01-24 18:59:15+00:00
Title should read "Microsoft confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if ordered to do so". Just because the article is click bait doesn't mean the HN entry needs to be. The fact that MS has your keys is no less problematic for it, but the article clearly explains that MS does this when legally ordered to do so. Not "because the FBI asked nicely".
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 18:59:35+00:00
They are not being marked as "Suspicious" but they are showing an infobox that explains they could not be scanned at all.

You could click "Seems Safe" on these messages, but they are not scanned by Google, and they are simply adding a disclaimer that they currently can't vouch for the safety of a message that they couldn't scan. It seems to me that this is a prudent and helpful course of action.
by __patchbit__ | 2026-01-24 18:59:41+00:00
Mind as Machine: a history of cognitive science vol. 1 & 2
Margaret A. Boden, 2006
OUP

The following handles on X dot com post readings and opinions:
https://openmindresearch.org @RichardSSutton
https://araya.org/en/ @kanair
@o_guest @ID_AA_Carmack @ChombaBupe @SchmidhuberAI

I'm aware of two sets of lectures on AI from MIT opencourseware available on YT.
by Fervicus | 2026-01-24 19:01:22+00:00
I haven't been keeping track on servo's progress too much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to download and run it without having to worry about building it. It already supports multiple tabs. It was able to load HN and a few other sites I threw at it just fine. Couldn't run YouTube videos but that's understandable. Gives me at least some optimism for the future.

I am also really rooting for Ladybird [0]. I wish they'll take some inspiration from this and provide prebuilt versions for people to try soon.

[0] - https://ladybird.org/
by deater | 2026-01-24 19:01:27+00:00
you should try running Linpack on them all (you can find the results here mixed in with other machines I own) https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/group/machines.html

When I did that on Pi3 when it first came out you could crash the system because the thermal throttling wasn't fast enough (the temp sensor was on the GPU not CPU). When I reported the issue on the pi forums the answer was essentially "why would anyone ever want to do that"
by nradov | 2026-01-24 19:01:57+00:00
The most effective approach that I've found to prevent delays in large scale software projects is to carve out a dedicated team to deal with critical bugs, L3 support tickets, and urgent minor enhancements. Don't count them in capacity planning. They serve to insulate the feature teams from distractions. Rotate those assignments for each project so that everyone takes a turn.
by hosh | 2026-01-24 19:02:18+00:00
UKLG deliberately wrote Earthsea in the guise of a Western high fantasy, but its philosophical core is the Tao Te Ching. It was set in the archipelagos similar to SW Asia, with similar ethnicity.

The producers who made the movie casted the crew ignoring UKLG though I think contractually, they were supposed to listen to her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they swapped out the philosophical core.
by stingraycharles | 2026-01-24 19:02:18+00:00
I’m trying to solve this myself by implementing a whole planner workflow at https://github.com/solatis/claude-config

Effectively it tries to resolve all ambiguities by making all decisions explicit — if the source cannot be resolved to documentation or anything, it’s asked to the user.

It also tries to capture all “invisible knowledge” by documenting everything, so that all these decisions and business context are captured in the codebase again.

Which - in theory - should make long term coding using LLMs more sane.

The downside is that it takes 30min - 60min to write a plan, but it’s much less likely to make silly choices.
by threatofrain | 2026-01-24 19:03:01+00:00
That assumes you’re working in some kind of agency or consulting environment where you repeatedly produce similar or even distinct things. As opposed to a product company that has already produced and is humming along, which is when most people get hired.

Estimating the delivery of a product whose absence means zero product for the customer is very different. A company that’s already humming along can be slow on a feature and customers wouldn’t even know. A company that’s not already humming is still trying to persuade customers that they deserve to not die.
by keiferski | 2026-01-24 19:03:41+00:00
This isn’t really a good angle to critique finance IMO, because it is indeed a necessary part of the modern economy.

A better angle is how finance tends to acquire a ton of smart young people that could/would otherwise be doing work that has more benefits to society. It’s hard to blame the individual here, because the salaries are orders of magnitude larger in finance vs. say, aerospace engineering. Would I turn down $700k at a hedge fund to earn $90k at a science lab? Probably not, unless I was already independently wealthy.
by stefan_ | 2026-01-24 19:03:48+00:00
I suppose its unintentional comedy that they picked a 1080p H264 video playback as the benchmark. Because of course the chip in the Raspberry Pi 1 was literally designed for that! The only thing it asks of you is that you make use of the fixed function blocks that take up much of its silicon space. So no wonder that utterly fails with modern software - we need to go all the way to RPi 5 to smother the problem with enough generic computing power to overcome the careless people that spearhead much of browser development.
by pkasting | 2026-01-24 19:03:52+00:00
When I led C++ style/modernization for Chromium, I made this argument frequently: we should prefer the stdlib version of something unless we have reason not to, because incoming engineers will know it, you can find advice on the internet about it, clang-tidy passes will be written for it, and it will receive optimizations and maintenance your team doesn't have to pay for.

There are cases, however, when the migration costs are significant enough that even those benefits aren't really enough. Migrating our date/time stuff to <chrono> seemed like one of those.
by xboxnolifes | 2026-01-24 19:03:53+00:00
There is no need to min-max. There is never a large scale introspection after a media correction. Most people will never see the correction and will still believe what they saw first, years later, if not for the rest of their life.

Or they do hear about it, maybe a few days or a week later, but they dismiss it because its old news at the point and not worth thinking about to them.

Truth is, most people are never really thinking most of the time. They're reacting in the moment and maybe forming a rationale for their action after the fact.
by thesz | 2026-01-24 19:05:13+00:00
> That's when you start *learning* the techniques for using these tools for maximum effect and where to apply them.

https://paulgraham.com/popular.html?viewfullsite=1

"They're perfectly justified: the majority of hot new whatevers do turn out to be a waste of time, and eventually go away. By delaying learning VRML, I avoided having to learn it at all."
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-24 19:05:29+00:00
I've also seen it argued that real world estimates for things like construction projects are so good because 99% of it is do-overs from similar projects in the past; everyone knows what it takes to pour a column or frame a floor or hang a beam.

Whereas with software most of what was done previously is now an import statement so up to 80-100% of the project is the novel stuff. Skilled leaders/teams know to direct upfront effort toward exploring the least understood parts of the plan to help reduce down-stream risk but to really benefit from that instinct the project plan has to regularly incorporating its findings.
by exe34 | 2026-01-24 19:05:55+00:00
I found it very hard to apply the golden rule as someone who was abused as a child. I don't care how I'm treated, so I can treat you in any way, however cruel.

By accident I discovered that if instead of imagining how you would feel if I did this bad thing to you, I imagined how the one person I loved would feel. Suddenly I had a working version of empathy, which I use to this day. I don't treat others as I would want to be treated - I treat them as I would want them to treat my loved one.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-24 19:05:58+00:00
> Unless Apple is straight up lying about their technology and encryption methods

Which, to be clear, is perfectly possible. Apple has denied the existence of a deliberately backdoored system at least once before: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.

Who knows what else they're hiding, if we only found out about this scheme in 2023.
by jonjacky | 2026-01-24 19:06:38+00:00
Right, the linked article clearly and vehemently opposes AI chat technology. It says: "Clergy and laymen alike must become aware of the threat that AI poses and take steps to minimize or eliminate its use." And even stronger: "we should not rule out the possibility of demonic influence within its
output."

I'm not sure if they really mean to say that literal horns-and-pitchforks demons in the flames of hell are typing chat responses designed to drive people mad and encourage them to kill themselves -- or just that the chat programs are built and promoted by people motivated by a systematic hostility to human well-being. Either way, they think they are pure evil.
by riffraff | 2026-01-24 19:06:43+00:00
For those with a passing interest in this topic and quite some patience, "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter is a whole book of musings about translation, particularly of poetry.

It's a fun book full of interesting linguistic trivia.

The patience would be needed to get through the 50 or so translations of the same poem, all different and "wrong" in some way.
by pelasaco | 2026-01-24 19:06:47+00:00
I’m starting to think AI will kill open source... and maybe even platforms like GitHub/GitLab as we know them.

What I’m seeing: a flood of new repos appearing on GitHub with huge codebases and "extensive" documentation, often produced in two or three commits. The problem is that nobody uses them, nobody reads the docs, and many of these projects don’t provide real value. But the infrastructure cost is real: storing it all, indexing it, scanning it, backing it up, mirroring it....

Licensing is another issue. Licenses protect against copying, but AI changes totally the game: someone can download a repo, ask Claude to analyze and understand it, and then generate a similar solution with no verbatim copying. That’s likely legal... So GPL becomes irrelevant..

If that becomes normal, I can easily imagine companies pulling back from open source. Why publish your best work if anyone can cheaply reimplement it? Code will move back to closed source and become the "secret sauce" again. A black box is harder to vibe-code than an open source repo...
by pkasting | 2026-01-24 19:07:26+00:00
At least in Chromium that wouldn't help us, because we disable strict aliasing (and have to, as there are at least a few core places where we violate it and porting to an alternative looks challenging; some of our core string-handling APIs that presume that wchar_t* and char16_t* are actually interconvertible on Windows, for example, would have to begin memcpying, which rules out certain API shapes and adds a perf cost to the rest).
by vee-kay | 2026-01-24 19:07:37+00:00
They are defending terrorism, because they are blindly defending Proton, which is openly supporting terrorism in India.

Proton has been caught red-handed openly supporting subversive activities in a known terrorism hotspot.

After the Pehelgam terror attack (one of the deadliest terror attacks in the world, in recent memory - 26 tourists were gunned down in a tourist spot by jihadi terrorists) in Jammu & Kashmir, the police and anti-terror military task force did a sweep to find the terrorists. VPN and internet services were temporarily disabled in the incident area to prevent the terrorists from communicating with their handlers in Pakistan.

This was Proton's tweet after this terror attack tragedy: "In Jammu and Kashmir, police have been conducting random stops and house-to-house checks inspecting mobile phones to enforce a local ban on VPNs. A reminder that Proton VPN's mobile app has a "Discreet icon" setting to help disguise it."

https://tfipost.com/2026/01/profit-over-people-proton-vpn-ge...

High court in India also called for ban on Proton Mail for refusing to support an investigation into digital sexual abuse.

https://sflc.in/blocking-proton-mail-in-india-encryption-abu...

Someone sent hoax bomb threats to 13 private schools in India using Proton Mail. The local government sought the ban of Proton Mail due to (again) Proton not complying with the security investigation.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/it-ministry-looks-...

The only reason Proton's services have not been completely banned in India yet, is because the Swiss authorities intervene on its behalf to prevent the ban.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/swiss-authoriti...

After India's new cyber security laws went into effect, it was only Proton which pulled its servers from India, rather than comply with Indian government for such serious investigations.

Please note there are other Email and VPN providers operating in India, and they do the needful in complying with lawful investigations for safety of civilians and minors.

https://min.news/en/tech/d4a781733e394ff34a00e5c21977ea1d.ht...

Be careful who you trust.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-24 19:08:13+00:00
ORLY?

* Are you available?
* Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday?
* Assistance for donation
* Greetings!!!
* some ideas for you
* Refund request
* Somethings not working
* Manuel Montoya for roof work contractor
* proposals for print
* Invite Connection

Half of the above are actual spam, half are not. Tell me which is which ...
by AlecSchueler | 2026-01-24 19:08:17+00:00
> The impact the Chinese government can have on an individual American is minor

I agree with this completely but I think we all need to avoid the idea that the danger of mass surveillance plays out at the personal level.

The Chinese government can do basically nothing with your individual personal data but if they have the personal data of tens millions of individuals then it suddenly becomes way easier to do things like influencing elections.
by giantg2 | 2026-01-24 19:08:21+00:00
“to what extent should public and private institutions be expected to accommodate people who, for no other reason than ignorance, choose to opt out of the collective responsibility to public health?”

Before we can answer that, we would have to define the risks.

For example, the polio vaccine has no logical basis for being mandatory in the US. The requirement of the polio in the US has no basis in science and it goes against the stated purpose of the recommendations as it does not weigh risks and benefits. Instead, it is an ideological stance. Polio has been eradicated from the US (except for cases caused by vaccines themselves) and most of the rest of the world. You could require it for travel to/from risky locations. We know that severe adverse affects vastly out number the cases of Polio in the US.
by hosh | 2026-01-24 19:08:50+00:00
While there is indeed a Ruby on Rails tax, Github is also written in Rails as well (https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/bu...)

So is Shopify and Stripe. They can scale.

These days, if I want something that has some of the ergonomics of Rails in a platform I know can scale better than Ruby, I reach for Elixir/Phoenix.
by cxr | 2026-01-24 19:09:31+00:00
Basic truth: if you can't manage to accurately summarize your counterpart's position in a statement that ends with "you agree with <x>" and have that person agree that that's their position rather than feeling compelled to call you out as an intellectually dishonest sack of shit, then they don't actually agree with you, they're more than likely right about you, and you should knock it off immediately.

> I said there is no HTML5. Which is true and you agree with.

No, I don't.
by adityaathalye | 2026-01-24 19:09:48+00:00
It employs "flexible typing", which does not mean "everything is text". What I am doing is writing fully denormalised text (strings) in most fields, with column type declared as TEXT.

This is deliberate, to emulate "whoops, if I screw up my types, how bad does it get?".

However, when written into the DB with some care, each value is stored per the following storage classes:

https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html

Quoting...

```

Each value stored in an SQLite database (or manipulated by the database engine) has one of the following storage classes:

NULL. The value is a NULL value.

INTEGER. The value is a signed integer, stored in 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 bytes depending on the magnitude of the value.

REAL. The value is a floating point value, stored as an 8-byte IEEE floating point number.

TEXT. The value is a text string, stored using the database encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE).

BLOB. The value is a blob of data, stored exactly as it was input.

A storage class is more general than a datatype. The INTEGER storage class, for example, includes 7 different integer datatypes of different lengths. This makes a difference on disk. But as soon as INTEGER values are read off of disk and into memory for processing, they are converted to the most general datatype (8-byte signed integer). And so for the most part, "storage class" is indistinguishable from "datatype" and the two terms can be used interchangeably.

Any column in an SQLite version 3 database, except an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY column, may be used to store a value of any storage class.

All values in SQL statements, whether they are literals embedded in SQL statement text or parameters bound to precompiled SQL statements have an implicit storage class. Under circumstances described below, the database engine may convert values between numeric storage classes (INTEGER and REAL) and TEXT during query execution.

```

(edits: formatting, clarify what I'm doing v/s what SQLite does)
by andsoitis | 2026-01-24 19:10:19+00:00
> alangibson

HN really isn't the place for this.

Do you mind stopping posting this stuff here?

Posting here accomplishes nothing other than pollute things for us.

If you're concerned that people might miss this news, fear not it is all over the news media. If you think posting it here is going to lead to constructive conversation, I think your hope is misplaced.

Maybe better to invest your energy on the reddit thread instead?
by io_eric | 2026-01-24 19:10:23+00:00
Hard disagree. Canvas 2D is fully GPU-accelerated in modern browsers and can easily handle thousands of draw calls at 60fps,more than enough for most practical applications. For data visualization, interactive tools, drawing apps, and UI rendering, it's a robust and performant choice. WebGL is often overkill unless you're dealing with extreme datasets or 3D scenes. With its simpler API and faster startup, Canvas 2D is perfectly suited for the vast majority of 2D use cases. Labeling it as 'horribly inefficient' is simply wrong ._.
by winstonwinston | 2026-01-24 19:10:43+00:00
It works for macOS. Filevault key is encrypted by user password. User login screen is shown early in boot process, so that Filevault is able to decrypt data and continue boot process. It sure works fine for a about a decade. No TPM nonsense required. Imo, the TPM based key only makes sense for unattended systems such as servers.
by kelnos | 2026-01-24 19:12:07+00:00
Hard disagree... sorta. Or rather, I think the author is just looking at it the wrong way.

Most of the time when I see (or give) a "just fork it" response, it's a dismissal of an entitled user who believes that they are owed unpaid labor from a maintainer.

If you're working at some big company and are using open source software, and need a new feature or bug fixed RIGHT NOW, sometimes your best bet is to make an internal fork, implement it yourself, submit it upstream, and continue to maintain your fork until it's accepted upstream and there's a new public release.

I've done this several times in the past, and it's been fine. Sure, it's work to maintain a private fork, but it's usually a hell of a lot less work than implementing all the same functionality from scratch. And I'm getting paid to do that work, so it's fine.

Yes, sometimes "just fork it" is a response given to a random user who doesn't know much about software, is frustrated, and just wants to go about their day. It sucks for them to get a response like that, but really what it is is a brusque education in how the sausage is made.

I think the most rare "just fork it" is due to actual disagreements over project direction from peers. I think this particular case is what this article is really about, but, honestly, it barely warrants discussion. Yes, it's hard to build and sustain a community around a fork. That's life. A maintainer telling you "just fork it" in this instance is implicitly reminding you of this fact, and to consider the implications of striking out in your own. You may choose to do so anyway, and that is the beauty of open source.
by wreath | 2026-01-24 19:12:07+00:00
What often baffles me with engineers and especially engineering managers is that they don't derive the estimates from metrics of prior projects, especially for long running teams (as opposed to project teams). You don't need to estimate down to the minute, but you already know how many tickets/work items the completes at a given time interval with how many people in the team etc. This should give a rough estimate of how long a project might take, and you can confidence intervals like 90% confidence we finish this in 3 months, 70% confidence we finish it in 10 weeks, 50% confidence in 6 weeks and 10% confidence we finish it in 2 weeks.

IMO this is also a better way to communicate with stakeholders outside the team instead of committing to a specific date. It gives more context and clearly communicates that this is a probability game after all since there are quite few moving variables.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-24 19:12:11+00:00
But the parent wasn't doing that. He was just taking the opportunity to dunk on his outgroup, by insinuating that people who are opposed to universal healthcare are selfish people who would rather hurt themselves than help others (which you will see is patently untrue if you actually get to know those people, but I digress).

If the parent had instead chosen to give a thoughtful response focusing more on a positive message (say, exploring how we should do more to help others and how universal healthcare can be a facet of that), that would've been fine. But yet another post of "my outgroup is evil" doesn't teach us anything or lead to good discussion.
by blandflakes | 2026-01-24 19:12:41+00:00
If you have to ask an object what its type is, you're probably about to cast it, and these are operations that the language doesn't enforce that you do together (and so the habit of casting can lead to the habit of casting without the check...). There are times when it's appropriate but generally if you have to ask what type an object is, your code is already starting to smell (because typically dispatching on type is handled by polymorphism, not be the programmer manually implementing it).