MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quotemstr | 2026-01-21 18:41:46+00:00
"X is more secure than Y" is usually an ill-formed statement. Secure against what threats? Does X provide every security guarantee Y does? Every single one? Then there's no proper superset relationship, and the best we can do is say that X and Y provide different security guarantees.

If we model security as a lattice, lots of systems end up being incommensurable. You have to talk about the specific threats.

Okay, suppose you want to flatten the lattice into a scalar score so we can apply the usual relational operators and statements like "more secure" make sense. How do we do that? Do we apply some kind of weighted average over security feature presence? With what coefficients? Are these coefficients invariant over time and between people? What if my use-case is different from yours and I have to model the "amount" of security differently?

If my router is written in 100% memory safe code but has a default password of "hunter2", is it more or less secure than your router, which might be a normal OpenWRT installation?

When people argue over whether something is "more" or "less" secure without specifying a use-case, they're haphazardly mixing feature matrix comparisons and (usually tacit) disagreements on prior probabilities of various attacks. The result is seldom a conversation that enlightens.
by lbrito | 2026-01-21 18:41:56+00:00
>If the argument is sustainability of training, I'm skeptical we need these payment models.

That seems to be the argument: LLM adoption leads to drop of organic training data, leading LLMs to eventually plateau, and we'll be left without the user-generated content we relied on for a while (like SO) and with subpar LLM. That's what I'm getting from the article anyway.
by Trifectorium | 2026-01-21 18:41:58+00:00
There is a certain kind of memory that doesn’t belong to your mind. It doesn’t arrive through stories or photographs. It has no timestamp. You don’t remember it with your head. You feel it. It arrives as a pull in the chest, a heaviness in the stomach, a strange ache behind your eyes. It arrives when you stand in a city you’ve never been to before and suddenly know where the old staircase leads. It arrives when a stranger’s voice startles something familiar inside you, and you can’t explain why.
by hkh | 2026-01-21 18:42:11+00:00
Yea, I actually saw something similar in the early days of Infracost, when we didn't track that many price points. The % change and the directionality was really helpful for engineers. Then we iterated on the prices, added more coverage etc, and the accuracy increased to a point where people trust the output of Infracost more than the AWS pricing calculator. That was a cool learning moment for me.
by stephenr | 2026-01-21 18:42:14+00:00
It's kind of disingenuous if not deliberately misleading to say

> Otto Kekäläinen (former Software Development Manager at AWS)

He also happens to have a past involvement with MariaDB foundation.

Furthermore, his article about MySQL not being "true open source" is honestly laughable when you consider the context of his (and this author's) suggested replacement.
by fraserharris | 2026-01-21 18:42:36+00:00
"Phase 1 clinical trials of a 15-PGDH inhibitor for muscle weakness have shown that it is safe and active in healthy volunteers. Our hope is that a similar trial will be launched soon to test its effect in cartilage regeneration" - Helen Blau, Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology & the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professorship
by formerly_proven | 2026-01-21 18:42:50+00:00
About ten years ago I worked on adding support for illumos/opensolaris/openindiana to some stuff and even back then all things solaris seemed basically dead already (despite the open* projects just being a few years old then). Curious to see these come up from time to time, and even more curious to see them still releasing new versions. These always seemed simultaneously ahead and behind the times.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-21 18:43:11+00:00
value/dollar in terms of what you can use a car for (transportation, carrying stuff, time spent driving versus time spend filling up)

Cheapest EV is 30k right now - nissan leaf.

For that much, you can get a Prius Prime , which can be driven like an EV to work and back, charge at home, and when you go on a long trip, you don't have to worry about finding charging stations

You can also get a hybrid Ford Maverick. While you can't charge it at home, It gets 500 miles tank of gas, a full bed for carrying stuff, outlets in the bed for tools or camping, and offroad capability, and again, can fill it up at any gas station.

If Nissan leaf was like 100 mile range, basic vehicle for $10k, then it would be a different story. But right now, paying the same for way less capability doesn't make sense.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-01-21 18:43:30+00:00
> People think “defending migrants” (which I am)

I hate to bring up all the actions taken against American citizens and legal migrants.

> Bill Maher also talks about this very frequently.

I would not take his talking points to reflect Democratic Party orthodoxy. However, I would challenge you to compare his 1990s recordings to the more recent ones to see how things have changed.
by duffyjp | 2026-01-21 18:43:45+00:00
I have 64gb in my linux machine and have managed to hardlock it a bunch of times exhausting the ram. Couldn't even REISUB a couple of times. The OOM killer stuff in Linux just doesn't work anymore by what I can gather.

Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since.

If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.
by seamossfet | 2026-01-21 18:43:57+00:00
I'm getting flashbacks from my computer engineering curriculum. Probably the first place I'd start is replacing comparison operators on the ALU with binary arithmetic since it's much faster than branch logic. Next would probably be changing the `step` function from brute iterators on the instructions to something closer to a Btree? Then maybe a sparse set for the memory management if we're going to do a lot of iterations over the flat memory like this.
by runjake | 2026-01-21 18:44:17+00:00
> Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)

Current macOS user, and former NT kernel dabbler and VMS user here. That's highly debatable.

On the kernel side, Windows is still filled with legacy VMS-isms. Eg: Object Manager (object/resource model), named objects, handles, how processes and threads work, vmem, scheduling etc etc

On the userspace side, Windows is still filled with legacy DOS-isms.

Don't me wrong, I love the underlying Windows OS, despite its many quirks, but it's filled with perhaps even more legacy cruft and definitely isn't any sort of step above anything else.
by dang | 2026-01-21 18:44:55+00:00
I hope this was already clear, but in case not: we don't have any problem with the OP and did turn off the flags on it. Same as the last time it was discussed:

Overly analytical guide to escorting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28924751 - Oct 2021 (440 comments)

Btw I do think that some of the flags may have been because of the "whorelord" bit in the title, which counts as linkbait in HN's sense (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That's why we took it out.
by notahacker | 2026-01-21 18:45:04+00:00
No, it wouldn't work without the bond repayments being owed by a single fiscal entity, and hard to imagine Europe doing this for the foreseeable future even if they agree more tax harmonization and budget deficit rules.

But from the bondholder perspective, being able to pick and choose which countries to hold Euro denominated debt according to their risk tolerance is an advantage anyway.
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-21 18:45:11+00:00
> what matters in the end is what the code does, not what it looks like

That is true in a way, although even for agents readability matters.

But the code here does not actually do the right thing, and the way it is written also means it never could.

Web devs do care whether the engine runs their code according to Web standards(otherwise it's early IE all over), and end-users do care that websites work as their devs intended to.

Current state is throw-away level quality.

I've critiqued it at length in the other post, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705625
by fancy_pantser | 2026-01-21 18:46:07+00:00
It's a fun setup that quickly devolves into the Shakespearian! The plots don't always work, but seeing their reasoning get increasingly complex is interesting.

"When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious... and Brutus is an honourable man.
by acdha | 2026-01-21 18:46:23+00:00
> Pollution doesn't make academics use terms like my truth, your truth or "indigenous ways of knowing".

First, it absolutely does those first two things: climate change denial has been a half century of pretending that scientific truths, even those confirmed by e.g. Chevron’s own employees in the 70s, were just some subjective opinion to be argued with. The modern right-wing attacks are founded on the legacy of trying to exempt policies from rational examination and are very much about constructing your own personal truth which is just as valid as the experts.

Secondly, even to the extent that you’re not grossly exaggerating, you’re describing things which not even a majority of academics believe. Maybe there is someone in the anthropology department who really does believe in the caricature you portrayed but they don’t represent a majority of even their university. What you’re saying is like saying everyone on HN are crypto grifters trying to get rich quick, simply asserting without evidence a claim which is known to be false when applied to a large group.
by was8309 | 2026-01-21 18:46:46+00:00
"Loss of privilege feels like oppression". I see the numbers showing hiring shifts, but i don't see any numbers backing up the claim that there was once an pure and fair "American meritocracy" that has now been "gutted". and this [1] seems to show that the privilege has not actually been lost

[1] <https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/what-does-th...>
by vintermann | 2026-01-21 18:47:04+00:00
You have to at one point do something to another player, which they thought and hoped you would not do. But since you both know that, whether you lie or not is really quite irrelevant. It's not your assurances (or lack of them) they put faith in, unless they have misunderstood the game.

To take your example, instead of "you're right, makes sense" (arguably a lie, maybe), you can just say "That may seem sensible" or "I hear you" (definitively not lies). It should rationally not make a difference for their actions in the game.
by brokencode | 2026-01-21 18:47:28+00:00
You are exposing your lack of learning how to use the tools.

Tools like GitHub copilot can access the CLI. It can look up commands for you. Whatever you do in the terminal, it can do.

You can encode common instructions and info in AGENTS.md to say how and where to look up this info. You can describe what tools you expect it to use.

There are MCPs to help hook up other sources of context and info the model can use as well.

These are the things you need to learn to make effective use of the technology. It’s not as easy as going to ChatGPT and asking a question. It just isn’t.

Too many people never get past this low level of knowledge, then blame the tool.
by tastyface | 2026-01-21 18:47:32+00:00
Different caliber, but same thing happens with Grok.

New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it.

Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag.

Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information!

Sigh.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-21 18:47:42+00:00
Presumably that is only one of two purposes, with the other being to test your ability to efficiently read, understand, and edit low level code that you didn't write. I imagine you'd regularly run into raw PTX if you worked for them in the relevant capacity.

And perhaps a third purpose is to use the simulator to test your ability to reason about hardware that you are only just getting familiar with.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-21 18:48:15+00:00
If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it

A very analytical, technological, short-sighted view of things. But not necessarily how the customers think.

For many customers, a company that isn't growing is shrinking. If a company isn't willing to invest in growth, that's a red flag.

I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

You can make all the analogies and excuses you like, but look at Vimeo's sister properties (Evernote, etc.) Are they better off since they were gutted? Are they delivering more value to the customers, or just funneling money to the parent company and its investors?

I think a better analogy is some big Wall Street investment company buying up nursing homes, and making lots of noises about "efficiency." That never works out well for the patients/customers. Only for the company.
by badc0ffee | 2026-01-21 18:48:19+00:00
On paper a 386sx is slower than a 386dx, and certainly is in terms of RAM access. But in practice you'd need some expensive hardware to fully take advantage of that speed, like EISA cards and a motherboard that supported them (or, MCA cards on one of the higher end IBM PS/2 models). The typical ISA cards of the era were limited to 8 MHz and 16 bits no matter what processor or motherboard you used.

The 386dx could also use a full 32-bit address space, whereas the 386sx had 24 address lines like the 286. But again, having more than 16 MB would have been expensive at the time.
by measurablefunc | 2026-01-21 18:48:54+00:00
This has nothing to do w/ me & consistently making it a personal problem instead of addressing the claims is a common tactic for people who do not know what it means to present evidence for their claims. Anthropic has not provided the necessary evidence for me to conclude that their LLM is not cheating. I have no opinion on their competence b/c that is not what is at issue. They could be incompetent & not notice that their LLM is cheating at their take home exam but I don't care about that.
by timmg | 2026-01-21 18:48:59+00:00
I just had a fun conversation with Claude about its own "constitution". I tried to get it to talk about what it considers harm. And tried to push it a little to see where the bounds would trigger.

I honestly can't tell if it anticipated what I wanted it to say or if it was really revealing itself, but it said, "I seem to have internalized a specifically progressive definition of what's dangerous to say clearly."

Which I find kinda funny, honestly.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-01-21 18:49:02+00:00
The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]:

With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.

It's easy for companies to fall into such pits of inefficiency because climbing out of those pits entails utterly gutting the headcount [*].

I wonder if the same is true at Vimeo, which employed ~250 engineers [1], which seems high for a mature product that's deliberately conservative (most of Vimeo's customers are B2B whitelabelers, for whom a constantly changing product is a massive downside.) It's not like video codecs or storage systems or web standards are changing daily. I would imagine a well-engineered codebase from 10 years ago would work well today with only minimal changes, mostly centered around updating libraries for security patches. The fact that they had 250 engineers on staff who presumably did more than play ping-pong all day makes me wonder if the codebase was not, in fact, well-engineered.

[0] https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

[1] https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/vimeo

[*] Imagine the equivalent for a building: "we don't have automatic circuit breakers in this building; instead, we have a 24 hour staff of electricians who measure current with an ammeter and manually cut the power if it gets too high."
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-21 18:49:27+00:00
I mean I think that’s exactly my point this concept that there’s some kind of like ideal or coherent version of the American voting public it just doesn’t exist

Donald Trump is an irrational randomly reactive, incoherent person who doesn’t know what he wants other than to just be in charge and to do whatever he wants all the time

If that doesn’t describe the median American voter I don’t know what does
by refulgentis | 2026-01-21 18:49:36+00:00
I'd love to do this and have a quite marketable resume, but it is extremely, extremely, unclear to me how you build a clientele or where you'd even start.

Only road I can imagine is highly specialized industry, with money, that often has time-sensitive needs, and smart management that knows how to recognize value or trusts their tech management. And even then I think you'd have to start in the coal-mines version of it, $50K/year flat salary, and building a reputation without management taking credit for your successes, somehow.
by hhh | 2026-01-21 18:49:51+00:00
I use the constitution and model spec to understand how I should be formatting my own system prompts or training information to better apply to models.

So many people do not think it matters when you are making chatbots or trying to drive a personality and style of action to have this kind of document, which I don’t really understand. We’re almost 2 years into the use of this style of document, and they will stay around. If you look at the Assistant axis research Anthropic published, this kind of steering matters.
by neilv | 2026-01-21 18:50:09+00:00
I don't know how to appeal the deleted account, but regarding not triggering this check again...

Emphasize your own brands, and make the other brands more clearly a description, in the Amazon item title?

FooCorp TagTeam (sleeve mount holder to attach Apple AirTag to Samsung TV remote)

(Background on a simple filter: On eBay, it seemed like someone told counterfeit sellers that all they had to do was to copy&paste the string "For" in front of the brand name and model number, and then they could sell counterfeits. And sometimes black out the counterfeited brand name in the photos. So an item title might be of the format "For <brand> <model>", and mean it's definitely a counterfeit or knockoff of "<brand> <model>".)
by Nya-kundi | 2026-01-21 18:50:29+00:00
Thanks! Honestly, the ergonomics of Go for this are a double-edged sword. On one hand, using os/exec and syscall packages feels much more 'human-readable' than raw C. It definitely makes the kernel primitives feel less like black magic.
The tricky part is the Go runtime—since it's multi-threaded by default, you have to be really careful about runtime.LockOSThread() when manipulating namespaces so you don't 'leak' a namespace change to the wrong thread. If you're looking to learn the basics, I think the Go codebase is way easier to digest than a massive C project!
by LeFantome | 2026-01-21 18:50:34+00:00
> no uses RISC-V anyway

Here is an article from a company called Qualcomm from two years ago saying that they had, at that time, already shipped 650 million RISC-V cores.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/09/what-is-risc-v-and...

I notice that the three benefits they flag for RISC-V are: flexibility, control, and visibility.

I wonder how they felt about "control" after ARM tried to stop them from commercializing the value of their Nuvia acquisition? I wonder if it had anything to do with their next big acquisition being RISC-V based instead?

I also wonder, why on their Oryon page does Qualcomm never meanion ARM. Not even once. Even to the question, is Oryon x86, they do not answer that it is ARM. Why not?

https://www.qualcomm.com/processors/oryon
by RobMurray | 2026-01-21 18:50:34+00:00
This is great news, thank you. I have been looking into a way to port Soundscape Community [1], a navigation app for the blind to Android without having two codebases to maintain. Skip looks ideal; I was planning on asking you about licensing for a very small team with almost no funding.

Someone else already asked about talkback accessibility; I assume it will work because it translates to native UI controls on android. Is that correct?

[1] https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-21 18:50:36+00:00
The article gets the part about organic data dying off right. Look at Google SERP's for an example. Almost nobody clicks through to the source anymore, so ad revenue is drying up for them and people are publishing less or publishing in places that pay them directly and live behind a paywall like Medium. Which means Google has less data to work with.

That said, what it misses is that the AI prompts themselves become a giant source of data. None of these companies are promising not to use your data, and even if you don't opt-in the person you sent the document/email/whatever to will because they want it paraphrased or need help understanding it.
by mikestorrent | 2026-01-21 18:51:33+00:00
I submit that the problem was Solaris 9 just being massively overtaken by desktop Linux in every way - easier to install, faster, simpler to patch, better GUI, more software available. Solaris 10 was too little too late; it already had to compete with mature Linux offerings that had a greater mindshare, and the excellent features like Zones were too far ahead of their time (and lacked the centralized store of downloadable Zone-prepackaged apps that is really the reason for Docker's success).

Purity doesn't matter in practice - especially in a world where OS installations are increasingly ephemeral and ideally immutable.

I always hear DTrace is awesome, but have never used it. And seem to have gotten by just fine... what am I actually missing?

ZFS, on the other hand, was so good that it has outlived Solaris itself and is at the core of e.g. TrueNAS as a commercial product.
by slowmovintarget | 2026-01-21 18:51:33+00:00
Their top people have made public statements about AI ethics specifically opining about how machines must not be mistreated and how these LLMs may be experiencing distress already. In other words, not ethics on how to treat humans, ethics on how to properly groom and care for the mainframe queen.

The cups of Koolaid have been empty for a while.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-01-21 18:51:59+00:00
The solution I describe merely serves for being an easier to parse way of nesting code blocks. I don't mean it to serve for any syntax highlighting, as I am understanding is your impression. That would only be an outcome for tools that act upon the AST generated by the parser. Tools that can take code of a programming language and color it. Not the job of a markdown parser, for which my idea is meant.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-01-21 18:52:16+00:00
I write like some of the retro stuff people are doing with AI, like: https://youtu.be/yt1DVkV3muQ and https://youtu.be/uRzNHSBDdgU

Derivative (much!) but I've been impressed with the turn the "fan films" have taken with AI, like this: https://youtu.be/eJu8rYLjNak