MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-01 18:12:34+00:00
Everyone's take on the 1980s has been perverted by an internet viewpoint written by a bunch of weeb fanboys projecting the state of the car market in 2006 onto 1985. The actual cores components of the cars themselves are basically within spitting distance for Japan vs Domestic. These were not high quality cars. They were all low quality cars. But Japan was making the king of low quality cars that people wanted. (And by 1990 all these early 1980s platforms from all makes were all comparatively trash).

In the late 1970s early 1980s if you tried to buy a compact american car it was like buying the burger at a fish restaurant or the vegetarian option at a steakhouse. It was there to check a box. It wasn't well thought out or a core product they gave a shit about and they were almost always last to get any innovations. You want power widows AND an automatic, sorry we'll have to special order that, we don't stock those on the lot.

In contrast, the Japanese gave a shit about those product lines. So someone making "In better times I'd be buying a bigger car from Chevy" money could go to them and get something configured how they wanted without being told no a bunch of times and the sales guy trying to get them into something bigger car didn't want like would happen at the Chevy dealer. Toyota or Honda or whoever literally didn't have those products to upsell you into. Yeah I guess they could sell you a landcruiser but people didn't buy SUVs then. That would be like trying to sell an Econoline to some rich woman who's shopping for a 3row Landrover.

At the end of the 1980s the domestics were basically back with their own new "modern" FWD platforms (e.g. Taurus) and new larger stuff (minivans, midsize SUVs) which made money hand over fist for 10yr or so. The Japanese were basically on the sidelines for all of this. Like yeah they had the 4Runner and Pathfinnder and Passport and stuff but no amount of 2020s fanboyism is gonna make those sales numbers any less of a joke. What the Japanese did do very well though was give a crap about their smaller cheaper offerings, Rav4s and CRVs and small and midsize sedans which the domestics neglected. So when the SUV craze came to an end with the high gas prices and bad economy of the mid-late 2000s they were there ready to be bought. And it's this great success from the mid 2000s that every idiot on the internet seems to want to project back into the 1980s when the 1980s were far different.
by djoldman | 2026-01-01 18:12:42+00:00
These seem like great examples of features with minuscule benefits on average:

> Imagine:

> Your thermostat adjusting the temperature automatically as you enter the room.

> Your TV resuming your favorite show that you were watching yesterday as you sit on the couch

> Your car door automatically opening when approach the vehicle and adjusting its seat position and temperature based on your preferences

The vast majority of people want a thermostat that maintains a constant temperature everywhere.

Clicking one or two buttons to resume a TV show is minor.

Pulling the handle on a door and pressing a preset seat position button is a minor inconvenience if that.

Add the above to the possibly flawed assumption that folks may not actually want the automatic behavior makes the "value" negative in some cases.

None of this is worth internet connectivity.

The driver pushing this is that internet connectivity enables data collection that can be sold.
by woodruffw | 2026-01-01 18:12:58+00:00
Can you explain what you mean by “defying Federal law”? I just checked the NY DMV, and they require proof of citizenship and/or lawful status for a REAL ID. I don’t know about other states, but I would be surprised if any state were to try to issue REAL-specific IDs without complying, given that they can always issue non-REAL IDs anyways.
by shimman | 2026-01-01 18:12:58+00:00
Self hosting nowadays is way way way way easier than you're thinking. I'm involved working with various political campaigns and the first thing I help every team do is provision a 10 year old laptop, flash linux, and setup a DDNS. A $100 investment is more than enough for a campaign of 10-20ish dedicated workers that will only be hitting this system one/two users at a time. If I can teach a random 70 year old retiree or 16 year old on how to type a dozen different commands, I'm sure a paid professional can learn too.

People need to realize that when you selfhost you can choose to follow physical business constraints. If no one is in the office to turn on a computer, you're good. Also consumer hardware is so powerful (even 10 year old hardware) that can easily handle 100k monthly active users, which is barely 3k daily users, and I doubt most SMBs actually need to handle anything beyond 500 concurrent users hardware wise. So if that's the choice it comes down to writing better and more performant software, which is what is lacking nowadays.

People don't realize how good modern tooling + hardware has come. You can get by with very little if you want.

I'd bet my years salary that a good 40% of AWS customers could probably be fine with a single self hosted server using basic plug in play FOSS software on consumer hardware.

People in our industry have been selling massive lies on the need for scalability, the amount of companies that require such scalability are quite small in reality. You don't need a rocket ship to walk 2 blocks, and it often feels like this is the case in our industry.

If self hosting is "too scary" for your business, you can buy a $10 VPS but after one single year you can probably find decade old hardware that is faster than what you pay for.
by legitster | 2026-01-01 18:13:09+00:00
My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer and his generation just accepted his oddities as part of his personality.

I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.
by krick | 2026-01-01 18:13:11+00:00
Not sure why it gets attention here. The "finding" is the long standing assumption as it is, absolutely nothing new discovered here. It could be notable if it was of some particularly high quality, but here it is 20 untrained individuals doing some dubious exercise regime for 10 weeks and finding out that on average one dubious exercise pattern wasn't particularly better than the other, and overall exercising seemed to be good for all of them, although inter-personal coefficient of variation is up to 28.3%… Like, really? That was the study that impressed 211 upvoters?

These journals keep publishing such studies, because there is nothing better to publish in this branch of, uhm, "science", and I would even argue it's not a bad thing, because something is better than nothing, and it's basically impossible today to do more impressive research in this field (because testing humans is far costlier and logistically more complicated than writing equations and running simulations on your PC). But it's funny that it gets someone's attention.
by arcanemachiner | 2026-01-01 18:13:37+00:00
Of course. It's just a coincidence that they're placing onerous restrictions on competi- I mean alternative browser engines. Restrictions which, of course, they're not obliged to follow themselves.

I am sure that Apple will make no other efforts to impede others from unwalling the garden. That would be completely ridiculous, and frankly, un-Apple-esque.
by promptfluid | 2026-01-01 18:13:37+00:00
I’ve been updating this interactive system on a fixed cadence (the 1st and 15th of every month) as a constraint. No exceptions.

Last night’s update wasn’t a redesign or feature drop. It marked a transition into a new era: traversal changed, tools expanded, and the system crossed a structural threshold.

I’m sharing it here less as a launch and more as documentation of an experiment in continuity, cadence, and single-founder systems that evolve in public.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2026-01-01 18:13:50+00:00
I wasn’t the one opening up those sites and besides, we were teenagers. Somebody had had the great idea of placing a PC in the hallway for kids to use during breaks, so of course it was positively toxic the whole machine - I refused to go go one metre closer to it. I remember the site, or one of them, having nude women on it, so I doubt it was that one.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-01 18:13:53+00:00
Yes, exactly. Just as in the US, when an enterprise gets wiped out and recapitalized, all of the physical assets remain. In China’s case, they are the backstop of last resort, and will always recapitalize according to their nation state planning and target outcomes. They allow companies to operate the assets as long as they’re willing to allow it, but they remain assets of China.

What Is State Capacity? Does China Have It? Does America Really Lack It? - https://www.governance.fyi/p/what-is-state-capacity-does-chi... - November 13th, 2025
by rdiddly | 2026-01-01 18:13:57+00:00
It gives me hope for the future to see the young'uns recognizing instances where progress isn't necessarily progress. If you oversimplify audio history as 70s=vinyl, 80s=cassettes, 90s=CDs, 00s=MP3s, and 10s=streaming, they've parted ways somewhat with the current moment and gone all the way back to the 70s. Ironically as an older fart myself, who once owned numerous records ("vinyls" is a newer term), and later cassettes, and later CDs, I guess I eventually decided I'd had enough authenticity and converted the whole lot to MP3s and stuck with that when streaming came around. So when I parted ways with the now, I only went back to the 00s, and that was mainly to retain control/ownership rather than having yet another damn algorithm mediating my experience. It's a sweet spot for me - maximum convenience while not giving up intentionality.
by EddieDean | 2026-01-01 18:14:08+00:00
Author here. I've been working on optimizing Python data processing and created
arrayops, a library that accelerates Python's built-in array.array type using Rust.

The Problem:
Python's array.array is memory-efficient but slow. NumPy solves this but is
heavyweight and often overkill for 1D data.

The Solution:
arrayops provides fast operations directly on array.array:
- 10-100x faster than pure Python
- Zero dependencies
- Works with array.array, numpy (1D), memoryview, Arrow

Performance (1M int32 array):
- sum(): 50ms → 0.5ms (100x faster)
- scale(): 80ms → 1.5ms (50x faster)
- All operations use zero-copy buffer access

Key Features:
- Production ready (1.0.0, 100% test coverage)
- MIT licensed
- Full type hints and documentation

GitHub: https://github.com/eddiethedean/arrayops
Docs: https://arrayops.readthedocs.io
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/arrayops/

I'd love feedback, especially on:
- Performance optimization approaches
- API design decisions
- Use cases I might have missed

Built with PyO3 (Rust-Python interop) and maturin (packaging).
by hollerith | 2026-01-01 18:14:15+00:00
Pop-ups these days are implemented with position:fixed. If my browser could be set to ignore (i.e., to refuse to render) all elements with the position:fixed property (indiscriminately) I would set it to do that.

Yes, a few web site would become unusable under that setting, but the trade-off would be worth it to me. (Better would be if position:fixed had never been introduced.)
by Recurecur | 2026-01-01 18:14:17+00:00
> Agreed. We will be screwed once China surpasses us in chip fabs, and they will. The idea that we can get a "durable advantage" by reaching AGI a few years before China is ridiculous. Using that to justify bans that only slow them down a few years at the cost of creating a chip fab juggernaut later is folly.

I’m quite sure advanced semiconductor fabs are considered a strategic necessity by China regardless of restrictions. Further, China is now getting the H200 chip…

> Tesla has rare earth free alternatives. There is no urgent need for them right now but they can switch if necessary.

There are also plenty of rare earth extraction projects coming online outside of China!
by nativeit | 2026-01-01 18:14:25+00:00
This seemed like a good read for New Year's Day. It's describing a concept that appears in Byung-Chul Han's 2009 book "A Scent of Time". It explores a cyclical, contemplative worldview, contrasting with today's fragmented, fast-paced life; it's an ideal state where humans experience time richly, finding meaning in lingering and connecting with the 'other', rather than just constant work, emphasizing reflection over hyperactivity. Han critiques modern society for losing this capacity, leading to emptiness and a crisis of love, where everything becomes self-reflection rather than true connection.

Happy New Year's HN!
by greiskul | 2026-01-01 18:14:30+00:00
It is literally done for strategic reasons to put a stranglehold on innovations on the web, so that there is no risk of web app technology developing to a point to threaten the dominance of native apps and the app store.

Anybody that thinks otherwise is hopeless naive, Steve Jobs himself envisioned a web app future as the future of technology; before Apple found out the gold mine that the app store became.
by dang | 2026-01-01 18:14:49+00:00
Could you please not post this sort of snarky-generic-meta comment? They attract upvotes and then stick at the top of the thread, choking out actually interesting discussion. (That's where this one was, but I'm going to mark it off topic and downweight it now.)

I completely understand your frustration about how common shallow-indignant comments are. But it doesn't help to post shallow-indignant or snarky comments of your own about it - it just produces even more of the same, or worse.

The way to combat shallow-indignant, predictable, tedious, etc., threads is to find something that you're genuinely curious and open about, and post from that place instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-01 18:15:10+00:00
From what I can gather, the underlying feature that enables this is vontextual alternates[1], primarily intended to adjust letters based on adjacent letters to improve legibility.

edit: I see the referenced inspiration[2] explains it in detail.

[1]: https://typenetwork.com/articles/opentype-at-work-contextual...

[2]: https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig...
by oarfish | 2026-01-01 18:15:13+00:00
No one claims you can do nothing, exercise has numerous benefits that extend beyond hypertrophy or even strength. i think the point is that you have way less control over the outcome than youd like, because individual responses vary so wildly. You can improve your odds by ticking the usual boxes and finding and following a custom program that works for you, but none of that is going to make as big of a difference than your genetic base.
by Heddline | 2026-01-01 18:15:29+00:00
Full Stack Developer
Heddline | United Kingdom | Full-time | Remote or On-site

About Heddline

Heddline is building verified digital infrastructure for people and businesses in the United Kingdom.

The platform combines identity verification, payments and escrow, messaging, marketplaces, property, services, and digital communities under a single compliance led system. Everything is designed to operate lawfully, transparently, and at scale within UK regulations.

This is infrastructure, not a social media app or a growth experiment. It is built carefully and designed to last.

Role

We are looking for a Full Stack Developer to help build Heddline’s core platform.

This is a hands on, full-time role, available remote or on-site. You will work on backend and frontend systems at the heart of a multi vertical, compliance driven platform.

The platform is fully designed in a 600 screen Figma prototype and documented in a 400 page whitepaper that serves as a detailed blueprint for the system. Your job will be to turn these designs and specifications into a robust, secure, and scalable platform. You will work directly with the founder on technical decisions and delivery. This is collaborative, high responsibility work, not ticket driven or siloed.

What You Will Do

• Build and maintain backend services, APIs, and microservices guided by the platform blueprint and whitepaper
• Develop frontend interfaces from the Figma prototype
• Translate complex product flows into reliable production systems
• Design and integrate secure data flows across services
• Implement payments, escrow, and identity integrations with regulated partners
• Ensure system security, audit logging, permissions, and safeguards
• Write clear, maintainable, and well-structured code
• Debug, optimise, and improve performance and reliability
• Contribute across the full development lifecycle from design to production

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for someone who:

• Is backend first, even if full stack, and prioritises correctness, security, and data integrity
• Thinks in systems, not individual features, and understands the long-term cost of shortcuts
• Writes maintainable, scalable code for long-term infrastructure
• Is careful, methodical, and comfortable with high responsibility
• Works well independently and in a small team, communicating clearly
• Understands that some bugs or failures are unacceptable
• Is comfortable working in a regulated environment (FCA, ICO, SRA, CMA, Ofcom) and following strict operational constraints
• Has experience in regulated environments such as fintech, payments, identity, or govtech, which is a strong advantage but not required
• Values practical experience and sound judgement over formal qualifications

Why This Role Matters

You will be building the foundational systems that support secure payments, verified identity, property transactions, and governance across multiple sectors. Your work will directly impact trust, compliance, and transparency for real users and businesses. This is long term infrastructure engineering, not short lived product development.
by mswtk | 2026-01-01 18:15:30+00:00
Sure, you can do that. The parent's point is that if you want this mapping to obey the rules that an actual definition in (say) first-order logic must obey, you run into trouble. In order to talk about definability without running into paradoxes, you need to do it "outside" your actual theory. And then statements about cardinalities - for example "There's more real numbers than there are definitions." - don't mean exactly what you'd intuitively expect. See the result about ZFC having countable models (as seen from the "outside") despite being able to prove uncountable sets exist (as seen from the "inside").
by bob1029 | 2026-01-01 18:15:42+00:00
> It brings the power of edge computing to your own infrastructure.

I like the idea of self-hosting, but it seems fairly strongly opposed to the concept of edge computing. The edge is only made possible by big ass vendors like Cloudflare. Your own infrastructure is very unlikely to have 300+ points of presence on the global web. You can replicate this with a heterogeneous fleet of smaller and more "ethical" vendors, but also with a lot more effort and downside risk.
by moffkalast | 2026-01-01 18:16:16+00:00
Because they don't understand the rules of the game.

If you create something in a field that is so infinitely commoditized that there aren't even any paid options and thousands of competitors that would instantly jump at the chance to be a replacement just for popularity's sake, you are frankly deluded to expect anything in return for your work. Best you can expect is to have some influence over others through your direction of the project, which is something that you could actually sell and I'm sure they do. Just look at Zig.

Any donations they get are completely against any market common sense and just people's good will. Demanding anything is so hilariously out of touch with reality.
by leptons | 2026-01-01 18:16:25+00:00
The US DOJ was attempting to sue Apple in an antitrust suit for many things, including blocking every browser engine except their own Safari browser on iOS.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

Who knows if this will actually move forward now that "Tim Apple" gave the current leader a meaningless golden trophy.
by mrob | 2026-01-01 18:16:36+00:00
Music doesn't need so much support from imagination. You could argue that 24 fps film is a good thing (I disagree), because special effects are expensive and the bad motion quality obscures the flaws, but the same doesn't apply with music. Every major city has an orchestra full of skilled musicians and a concert hall with good acoustics. Just record it as it sounds in the room and put it on CD. You can apply the same philosophy to popular music genres too. CD quality is good enough for this to work. The only imagination needed is to pretend that stereo audio is the full surround sound experience, and that's not difficult when you're sitting in the right position.
by lucasar | 2026-01-01 18:16:47+00:00
Yes, that is used to exchange information between iDevices. The "Find my" mechanism is proprietary and closed source, so you cannot categorically discard the possibility of iOS using such tunnel to send/receive/forward such information.
Yes it could be something else. But if we want to be rigorous, we cannot discard possibilities we aren't 100% sure about.
by wiml | 2026-01-01 18:16:54+00:00
That appears to be the size of the list itself, not including the objects it contains: 8 bytes per entry for the object pointer, and a kilo-to-kibi conversion. All Python values are "boxed", which is probably a more important thing for a Python programmer to know than most of these numbers.

The list of floats is larger, despite also being simply an array of 1000 8-byte pointers. I assume that it's because the int array is constructed from a range(), which has a __len__(), and therefore the list is allocated to exactly the required size; but the float array is constructed from a generator expression and is presumably dynamically grown as the generator runs and has a bit of free space at the end.
by staeff777 | 2026-01-01 18:16:58+00:00
I really like this idea and just tried some steps for myself.
create user with homedir: sudo useradd -m agent
add myself to agent group: sudo usermod -a -G agent $USER

Allow agent group to agent home dir: sudo chmod -R 770 /home/agent

Start a new shell with the group (or login/logoff): newgrp agent
Now you should be able to change into the agent home.

Allow your user to sudo as agent: echo "$USER ALL=(agent) NOPASSWD: ALL" |sudo tee -a /etc/sudoers.d/$USER-as-agent
now you can start your agent using sudo: sudo -u agent your_agent

works nice.
by stevenicr | 2026-01-01 18:17:10+00:00
sadly I used similar words recently when attempting to discuss DNS records with godaddy support via text messaging.

SMS text as an option is fine to have, and was good for the situation in which this came up for me - but the delayed back and forth and then switching to other support people who did not seem to know the previous messages turned it into a real drain and I gave up with 'I hate this. done.'
by drweevil | 2026-01-01 18:17:26+00:00
Anymore? Photos have always been imperfect approximations of the truth that should be considered with appropriate skepticism. Photographers choose when, where, and what/who their subjects are, when they frame their image and release the shutter. Editors choose which ones to include in a story. AI may be doing us a favor by making this more obvious.

As with other media the solution has been and still is corroboration. Are there several, independent photographs of the same event? Great! Otherwise, treat with due skepticism. This is good news, as it doesn't require all the tech ("fingerprints and cryptographic signing of images from the cameras that took them") that Mosseri proposes.