MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lysace | 2026-02-11 22:27:58+00:00
This is too poignant not to quote, apologies in advance.

The lyrics of the original German version tell a story: 99 balloons are mistaken for UFOs, causing a military general to send pilots to investigate. Finding nothing but balloons, the pilots put on a large show of firepower. The display of force worries the nations along the borders and the defence ministers on each side encourage conflict to grab power for themselves.

In the end, a cataclysmic war results from the otherwise harmless flight of balloons and causes devastation on all sides without a victor, as indicated in the denouement of the song: "99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger," which means "99 years of war left no room for victors." The anti-war song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a single balloon. The description of what happens in the final line of the piece is the same in German and English: "'Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen," or "Think of you and let it go."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons#Lyrics)
by jad-nohra | 2026-02-11 22:28:19+00:00
I've been working on a Rust course that takes a different approach from what I could find.

I can't memorize rules. God knows I've tried. But if I understand the system that produces them I can, because systems have structure and my brain can compress them.

The course starts from CS fundamentals, computer architecture, and compilability and arrives at the borrow checker as a consequence.

I also built a proc macro that decompresses Rust's syntax. For example:
`let mut &mut x = r;` becomes
`let owner(rebindable(x)) = mem_copy(at(r));` spelling out what's happening.

Still very much WIP, building in public. Would appreciate eyes on it.
by apparent | 2026-02-11 22:28:21+00:00
The situation with the Nancy Guthrie disappearance and Nest camera footage is related, and interesting. It seems that she had a Nest doorbell camera, but didn't pay for the subscription plan ($100/yr?). As a result, the camera records short snippets but doesn't save them to the cloud in a user-accessible way.

After a week, Google finally hunted down/coughed up the footage. I imagine there were some people within Google who realized that if they provided the footage immediately, then it could discourage people from paying for the subscription.

Of course, they must also realize that by not providing the footage sooner, they may have allowed the perp to get away, or the victim to be killed.
by qwery | 2026-02-11 22:28:38+00:00
the recent google report claimed that less than 0.1% of users have javascript disabled ... like for every website, or just some, or?

your PNG/GIF thing is nonsense (false equivalence, at least) and seems like deliberate attempt to insult

> I'm marginally sympathetic

you say that as if they've done some harm to you or anyone else. outside of these three words, you actually seem to see anyone doing this as completely invalid and that the correct course of action is to act like they don't exist.
by siofra | 2026-02-11 22:28:41+00:00
Beautiful walkthrough. The key insight people miss is that "looks unreadable to humans" and "is information-theoretically destroyed" are very different bars. The blur looks opaque because our visual system is bad at detecting small per-pixel differences, but the math does not care about our perception.

Same principle applies to other "looks safe" redactions — pixelation with small block sizes, partial masking of credentials, etc. If you can describe the transform as a linear operation, there is probably a pseudoinverse waiting to undo it.
by kube-system | 2026-02-11 22:29:47+00:00
> If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it.

Sure, I would. Maybe a lot of people on this forum would. But we're 0.0001% of people that use light bulbs. Our personal persuasions are pretty irrelevant in context. And most of the time it doesn't make financial sense for us to do it, it is just personally satisfying.

The vast majority of people have no interest in repairing their own electronics, period. If it is cheap to replace, they will just get a new one. If it was a big investment, then it's important enough to call a professional to fix. In the middle ground you've got people who will ask their handy nephew to try to fix it before they run out to the store, and he'll open it up and look for a blown fuse or a loose wire before giving up. The type of people who can do board level repairs are so rare as to be completely irrelevant to the waste stream of electronics.

Even if we repaired 100% of broken electronics, we'd only make a tiny dent in the volume of waste electronics. Most electronics simply fall out use before they ever break.
by dreamiurg | 2026-02-11 22:30:16+00:00
AI coding agents inherit your shell environment, which means every secret in your env vars and dotfiles is one prompt injection away from exfiltration. I wrote up a quick post the low-cost method to reduce the attack surface. It does not prevent the problem completely, but combined with other classical mitigations like sandboxing it can surely help to reduce the chances of pwnage.

I'd be curious to learn what else you all are doing in this domain.
by mqus | 2026-02-11 22:31:10+00:00
I "solved" this by adding a fail2ban rule for everyone accessing specific commits (no one does that 3 times in a row) and then blocking the following ASs completely (just too many IPs coming from those, feel free to look them up yourself):
136907 23724 9808 4808 37963 45102. And after that: sweet silence.

How to block ASs? Just write a small script that queries all of their subnets once (even if it changes, its not so much to have an impact) and add them to a nft set (nft will take care of aggregating these into continouus blocks). Then just make nft reject requests from this set.
by matthewdgreen | 2026-02-11 22:31:51+00:00
Exactly. The point of this sort of tax should not be to collect revenue, it should be to ensure that non-biodegradable bags are being disposed of correctly. To the extent that this is not happening, any bag tax is malfunctioning. Such a tax is either insufficient or poorly-designed. (Our city just banned chain stores from giving out plastic bags under 4 mils thick, and stores now give out paper and sell re-usable bags.)
by jongjong | 2026-02-11 22:31:59+00:00
After being an open source dev for over a decade, I've built up a kind of moral objection to certain kinds of open source.

If it was truly "for everyone" then we'd be seeing many more small tech startups succeed and a more vibrant ecosystem where open source devs would be supported and have access to opportunities. Also, getting traction would be more merit-based.

Currently, open source, in certain domains, is almost exclusively monetized by users whose values oppose my own. I'd rather sell or even give away cheap unlimited, permissive licenses to users of my choice, one by one and give them an actual competitive edge, than this faux "share with everyone" attitude. I explicitly don't want to share with bad actors. I explicitly don't want to empower bad actors.

The value extraction pipelines in the economy are too strong, all the value goes into a tiny number of hands. It's so direct and systematic, I may as well just hand over my project and all IP rights exclusively to big tech shareholders. This is an immoral or amoral position given the current system structure.

Open source is fundamentally not what it used to be because the composition of beneficiaries of open source software are fundamentally different. Well I guess it depends on what kind of software but for what I'm doing, it's definitely not going to benefit the right people.
by foobarian | 2026-02-11 22:32:19+00:00
These kinds of resignations are interesting. The character is such a good protagonist, he resigns rather than do Bad Thing. But that pretty much guarantees the boss will hire someone more pliable. Why not instead swallow the pride and do Bad Thing but with some level of moderation? That would surely be a better outcome overall.

The argument is that it would destroy the character's honor or whatever. But that is also a kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Maybe a lot of those are in fact happening but just not visible.
by bcherny | 2026-02-11 22:32:26+00:00
I think folks might be crossing wires a bit. To make it so you can see full file paths, we repurposed verbose mode to enable the old explicit file output, while hiding more details behind ctrl+o. In effect, we've evolved verbose mode to be multi-state, so that it lets you toggle back to the old behavior while giving you a way to see even more verbose output, while still defaulting everyone else to the condensed view. I hope this solves everyones' needs, while also avoiding overly-specific settings (we wanted to reuse verbose mode for this so it is forwards-compatible going fwd).

To try it: /config > verbose, or --verbose.

Please keep the feedback coming. If there is anything else we can do to adjust verbose mode to do what you want, I'd love to hear.
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-11 22:32:38+00:00
It’s not uncommon. Green Arrow the same.

The popular ones with extra-human abilities - Flash, Superman, Spiderman, Captain America, etc, have more normal backgrounds.

Boys with toys though - Batman, Ironman, The Atom, are the 1%. Ant Man I guess is more normal, but he stole his suit (but Hank Pym was reasonably normal too)
by johndough | 2026-02-11 22:32:48+00:00
DeepSeek had a theoretical profit margin of 545 % [1] with much inferior GPUs at 1/60th the API price.

Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a bit bigger, but they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...
by tylervigen | 2026-02-11 22:32:56+00:00
For 2026 SOTA models I think that is fair.

For the last generation of models, and for today's flash/mini models, I think there is still a not-unreasonable binary question ("is this a pelican on a bicycle?") that you can answer by just looking at the result: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/25/pelicans-on-a-bicycle/
by terminalshort | 2026-02-11 22:33:04+00:00
And you have every right to express that annoyance without fear of prosecution. I find the Epstein affair to be very underwhelming. Running a prostitution ring is criminal, and rich men (or poor men) fucking a 17 year old (or 18 year old) prostitute is gross, but not particularly surprising, and isn't even pedophilia. If Epstein had been in Nevada and not the US Virgin Islands and his youngest girls were a year older, it wouldn't even be illegal.
by scoofy | 2026-02-11 22:33:13+00:00
Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections. If it really did, Hillary Clinton would have been president twice. It's just that candidates with a ton of support tend to raise a ton of money.

Low-information elections are where money seems to help. I think we can throw that on the pile of 'your democracy is only as good as your electorate', and we have an electorate where most people can't even name their US House rep, much less their representatives in state and local politics.
by m0llusk | 2026-02-11 22:33:13+00:00
> Funny how “game engines” are now car parts in 2026.

Seems almost inevitable. Game engines end up supporting user interface elements and text with translations, but with an emphasis on simplicity, performance, and robustness. Many currently trending user interface stacks readily generate bursts of complexity, have poor performance even with simple usage, and are buggy and crash prone.
by kshri24 | 2026-02-11 22:33:20+00:00
Can easily detect the AI slop. It is like how ads were splattered everywhere (and still do) in some old school websites and you would train your brain to ignore those ads. This is coming for AI slop as well. As more and more people realize they are reading AI generated vomit, they will instantly close whatever they are reading.

Use AI creatively. This is not it.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-11 22:33:30+00:00
This is so completely dishonest and fraudulent, but also completely in line with the kind of corporate bribery and favoritism towards the family and friends and donors and bribers/lobbyers of the Trump administration.

SpaceX is not a mail carrier or common carrier by any means. It is executing contracts for launches. And comparing it to railroads and classifying it similarly is also unethical. Railroad workers have been grossly abused by companies like BNSF, with terrible working conditions and pay and little ability to push back.

Finally, the fact that the Trump administration would apply this to all of SpaceX, including Twitter, is also insane.
by aylmao | 2026-02-11 22:33:44+00:00
Elections are important, but they're just one part of the political system. A lot of machinations and politics occurs outside the scope of elections or even of the public eye.

Money doesn't just buy ads. It influences the decision of who is a candidate in the first place. It buys operational range. It pays salaries for the right friend of X, the right family member of Y, etc. It buys other bribes, etc.
by mrandish | 2026-02-11 22:33:54+00:00
I don't have a Nest but I suspect it's even simpler than that. She didn't have a subscription but the devices still store video locally up to the capacity of onboard storage. These recent local clips used to all be user accessible but to "increase subscription value", Google started making that locally stored data inaccessible to users except for the last 10 seconds of video.

However, it's a rolling buffer and the clips beyond the last 10 seconds are still there in local RAM and either not shown in the interface or deleted in the file system (but just by blanking the name in the directory, not a secure overwrite erase). Either the FBI forensic data recovery people or Google/Nest finally ran a sector-by-sector file recovery. I'm just surprised it took so long. I assume maybe because the local storage on those doorbells isn't a removable SD card so they had to gain access some other way.

Frankly, I'm surprised how many people buy devices which are cloud-only. At this point, I generally won't consider any IOT devices if the manufacturer even offers an optional cloud subscription (unless the firmware is open source). Too many companies have now locked down previously open devices to force cloud subscription (looking at you Chamberlain/LiftMaster assholes).
by dekhn | 2026-02-11 22:34:34+00:00
Good stuff- I had to learn most of this on my own.

Pro-tip: most of what you describe and document is already built into Qt, in the Graphics View Framework. It handles all the gunk around coordinate systems, canvas, zoom, scrollbars, and scaling, along with item groups, hit testing, multiple views of the same model, and extensive performance optimizations.

I have recently used Gemini to write an entire 2D CAD system based on this and it worked pretty well (I've already written one by hand).
by written-beyond | 2026-02-11 22:35:16+00:00
Writing the spec is becoming the default for pet projects. Which would be a good thing if the spec wasn't also partly written by an LLM.

You can already see people running into these issues, they have a spec in mind. They work on the spec with and LLM, the spec has stuff added to it that wasn't what they were expecting.

And again, I am not against LLMs but I can be against how they're being used. You write some stuff down, maybe have the LLM scaffold some skeleton for you. You could even discuss with the LLM what classes should be named what should they do etc. just be in the process so the entire code base isn't 200% foreign to you by the time it's done.

Also I am no one's mother, everyone has freewill they can do whatever they'd like. If you don't think you have better things to do than to produce 3-5 pieces of abandonware software every weekend then good for you.
by derektank | 2026-02-11 22:35:23+00:00
To be clear, the source would still be the consumer. Hydrocarbons can be used for non-CO2 emitting purposes such as chemical feedstock for pharmaceuticals, solvents, etc. We should only be levying a tax upon uses that emit CO2 into the atmosphere, i.e. burning them in your ICE vehicle. It’s not the fracking company that’s emitting the CO2 (unless they’re gas flaring or similarly emitting carbon during extraction but this is a rounding error on total emissions).
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-11 22:35:35+00:00
I refuse to believe that anyone reading this is incapable of remembering at least five historical examples in which the public was happy to treat an unpopular group unjustly.

There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.
by twoodfin | 2026-02-11 22:35:36+00:00
Apparently, 25% of Americans over age 50 are millionaires by wealth, and so if you don’t expect those figures to go down, your odds of living to be a millionaire are pretty good!

https://www.fool.com/retirement/2024/05/27/heres-how-many-mi...

Yeah yeah, illiquid household wealth … but millionaires nonetheless.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-02-11 22:36:44+00:00
It's important to remember that in REALISTIC worse case emissions projections, by 2050 - we will have CO2 higher than levels seen in the last 10 million years - but there was a 500 million year period where CO2 levels were an order of magnitude higher than that - and there's NO WAY we're getting there without destroying civilization first, so there's no chance on current trajectories that we turn the planet into Venus.

The super danger zone is ~1000 PPM CO2 - where ocean chemistry changes. In worst case scenarios in 50-60 years, we could get there - but there's a lot of reason to believe we won't, and we DEFINITELY aren't getting there by 2050.

The graph the main source shows is cherry-picked. Look at this: https://co2coalition.org/facts/for-most-of-earths-history-it...

Saying we're on a "hothouse" trajectory plays into the Apocalypse / Earth Becomes Venus trope, which is so ridiculous for our lifetime even under the absolute worst case realistic scenarios.
by mcswell | 2026-02-11 22:36:52+00:00
In addition to the volume issue, there's the composition issue. When I was a kid, we recycled all our flint cores. Well, not quite that far back... Milk came in glass bottles, and the person who delivered the bottles of milk to our house picked up the empties to take back to the dairy. There were also steel cans for canned food and soft drinks (which eventually rusts away), and of course lots of other glass bottles. Now more and more of those kinds of things come in plastic, of which little gets recycled. And cans are often aluminum, which doesn't rust away.

Furniture was wood and fabric and (maybe) springs, with a little bit of pressboard (which was itself recycled paper and textile, usually used on the back of desks etc.). Now furniture is particleboard (made from sawdust), with lots of glue and some kind of plastic veneer if it's in a place that shows. Wood is genuinely recyclable (or re-usable as antiques!); I don't think particleboard is recyclable, although I could be wrong.

Automobiles were steel, fabric, glass and copper wire (with rubber insulation); plus of course rubber tires. Now they are those things plus a lot more plastic. Tires, both then and now, are essentially un-recyclable (although occasionally turned into artificial reefs).

I could go on, but there are probably more authoritative (= better) studies of this. But I suspect in general that we have lots less recyclable "stuff" these days than we used to.
by mystraline | 2026-02-11 22:36:53+00:00
15 years ago, I worked at Walmart. Note the poverty income, no unions, no real savings. Basically average US citizen, not the HN bubble.

I got injured with a malfunctioning pallet jack. Went to ER and got Xrays.

Week later, was fired. My paperwork explicitly said I got fired for getting injured at work and costing the company money.

Went to 6 different lawyers. Had to ask for pro-bono. I couldn't afford a lawyer.

All refused. Why? None of them could deal with a Walmart lawsuit. None.

I had them dead-to-rights with a wrongful termination. Double manager signature. Even recorded their termination on my phone, on the sly (in single party state). They even admitted to forging a different manager. None of it matters.
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-11 22:36:57+00:00
I don't think they were competetive for most goods once the railways came, but I understand they were still working (with engines) right up to the 1960s. I guess not all goods needed to arrive quickly. I believe the canals freezing in winter added to the problems. I just checked Wikipedia and some went on to the 1980s!

Railway companies did buy and close them though. On one local one they made permanent destructive changes to stop them being easily reopened.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-02-11 22:37:11+00:00
> There was a time when if you'd put a fresh XP install on the Internet you'd get 5-10 minutes until it would get restarted.

This is still true, though 5-10 minutes is slightly pessimistic. Source: https://youtu.be/6uSVVCmOH5w

TL;DW - Guy installs XP and makes it internet accessible, only takes 15 minutes before the first malware appears on it.
by coldtea | 2026-02-11 22:37:14+00:00
>Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last...

Not at all the experience of users past 2025. The biggest sentiment with model updates was dissapontment and even worries of nerfing.

>But it's time now. Not in an "eventually we should talk about this" way. In a "this is happening right now and I need you to understand it" way. (...) And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest. (...) We're not making predictions. We're telling you what already occurred in our own jobs (...) It wasn't just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions."

Clear AI slop writing patterns.

The guy works in AI space and is fuelling the hype with slop as a content-strategy.
by noodletheworld | 2026-02-11 22:38:21+00:00
How do you respond to the comment that; given the log trace:

“Did something 2 times”

That may as well not be shown at all in default mode?

What useful information is imparted by “Read 4 files”?

You have two issues here:

1) making verbose mode better. Sure.

2) logging useless information in default.

If you're not imparting any useful information, claude may as well just show a spinner.
by justinzhou01 | 2026-02-11 22:38:27+00:00
I built PTE Core Practice for people preparing for the PTE Core exam for Canada PR.

The current version includes 12 exam-style task types and 728 curated questions across speaking, writing, reading, and listening. It provides instant AI scoring, pronunciation/fluency breakdowns, and a built-in PTE-to-CLB converter.

There is a free tier with daily limits, and paid plans for unlimited practice.

I’d really value feedback on:
1. How realistic the scoring feels
2. Which task type we should improve first
3. What would make daily practice easier to stick to