MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rakoo | 2026-01-06 15:10:36+00:00
> Western-style billionaires do the former, as their wealth is created by providing services to people

I'm sorry but this is just not based on reality. Wealth has always been formed by taking away from those who produce value. No one asked for 1000 new phone models every year, no one asked for 1000 new car models every year, no one asked for a million new kind of clothes every year. Services aren't provided, they are forced on people who just are not allowed to function without them and must work with and in those services, while billionaires don't produce anything, don't do anything yet get all the money.
by _heimdall | 2026-01-06 15:10:43+00:00
For the insurance example, you're describing insurance as a forcing function for better made, safer buildings. That's what building codes are for though, we shouldn't need to have both and building codes are a more efficient and direct way of ensuring safe buildings.

For car seats, I'm not sure how we could know that people wouldn't buy them. I don't expect anyone would propose dropping the requirement to see how the market responds, and probably rightfully so. If car seats are much safer though (and I'm obviously not disputing that), people that can afford one would buy it anyway.
by 4ggr0 | 2026-01-06 15:11:16+00:00
> a "Svalbard" single hand automatic

nice, so i'm not the only one with a single hand Svalbard watch :D one day i thought "i wonder if there's a watch with one hand and 24h", pretty soon landed on the Svalbard website and ordered one. i must say that i rarely wear it as it's pretty hard to get an accurate time reading from it, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a watch.

but i did get lots of comments when wearing it...
by 7777777phil | 2026-01-06 15:11:19+00:00
I don't see any issues on my side

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 0.5 s
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.01
First Contentful Paint (FCP): 0.5 s
Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.3 s

Also not on the Clodflare Dashboard. If the issue persists could you please send me the error message and console output. Thanks!
by ddltodata | 2026-01-06 15:11:29+00:00
Appreciate the Snaplet comparison, they were doing good work. You're right that realistic looking strings are the easy part. We're focused on relational integrity first (FKs, constraints, realistic cardinality), but business domain logic is the next layer. What kinds of rules would be useful for you? Things like weighted distributions, time-based patterns, conditional relationships?
by SirMaster | 2026-01-06 15:11:30+00:00
Building a PC price is not double lol and RAM is nowhere near up 6-8x

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-overclocking-32g...

That 32GB for $274 was not $34-$45 in the summer. RAM is up like 3x, but RAM is one of the cheaper parts of the PC.

RAM that was $100 in summer is like $300 now when I look. So that's an extra $200 maybe $300, on say a $1500 build. GPUs are not up, they are still at MSRP:

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-prime-nvidia-geforce-rt...

SSDs are up marginally, maybe $50 more lets say for a 2TB.

So from summer you are looking at like a $250-350 increase on say a $1500 PC
by nostrademons | 2026-01-06 15:11:59+00:00
I sometimes wonder if this is the real reason for the AI bubble. Major cloud providers are trying to front-load their computing purchases in case geopolitical trouble makes it impossible to get computers. At cloud scale, that's billions of dollars in new investment. So they kick off a new computing paradigm, hype it up, and now their cost of capital for this new investment is significantly lower because they can sell it as getting a piece of future revenues. Basically just a way to make shareholders pay for geopolitical hedging.
by theodorethomas | 2026-01-06 15:12:14+00:00
The sheer amount of dedication is awe-inspiring. In the 80s, at Imperial College, London, Theoretical Physics Group, we came across some correspondence intended for one of the professors, I think. This person had evidently "translated" his native Spanish into English, laboriously, via some dictionary we thought. We spent many tea breaks puzzling over phrases such as

"Is well-knew the refran: of the said to made it has a good road."
by javcasas | 2026-01-06 15:12:24+00:00
Because I have this condition.

Because I am depressed.

Because I don't have time to cook.

Because the portions are too large.

Because I am anxious.

Because I don't want to turn down a dinner offer.

Because that food doesn't taste good.

Because I'm tired and fast food is easy and convenient.

Because I have a slow metabolism.

All those have fixes and work arounds, may be willpower, may be meditation, maybe doctors, may be medication.

But all those excuse the cake getting in.
by c-linkage | 2026-01-06 15:12:28+00:00
We focus on negative outcomes because that relates directly to survival. Our brains are wired for it. Talking about negative outcomes means we learn about them and have a better chance of avoiding them. Plus, the fear response is much stronger and lasts longer than the happy / joy response.

Note that for humans and other social animals "survival" doesn't always mean life or death -- it can mean being included or excluded from a social group which indirectly affects survival chances.
by petercooper | 2026-01-06 15:12:49+00:00
Airing dirty laundry is in some jurisdictions a legal offence.

In the UK, the place where the site in the original link is, it's okay to state facts about a business transaction in public if it's not a malicious falsehood, a violation of contract, or a violation of privacy laws (e.g. sharing emails or recorded calls). But yes, I agree, the issues leading up to this should all be tackled by the contract up front.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-06 15:13:08+00:00
> It doesn't even significantly matter whether it's a bubble or not, but whether its a "bad" bubble.

there are billions and billions of dollars invested in there -- it matter significantly to a lot of people.

the bubble popping may trash the US and possibly global economy. "it doesn't matter" has to be one of the worst AI takes I've seen...
by masklinn | 2026-01-06 15:13:40+00:00
C++ strings are not "optimized so". C++ strings (generally) do SSO (up to 23 bytes depending on implementation), these also do SSO but only 8 bytes (to a total of 12), the first 4 bytes are always stored inline for fast lookup even when the rest of the string is on the heap (in which case they're duplicated), and the strings are limited to 4GB (32 bits length). IIRC they also have a bunch of other limitations (e.g. they're not really extensible, by design).

Which is why they're "everywhere"... in databases, especially columnar storage.
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-06 15:13:45+00:00
If it's hot/cold, elderly/vulnerable people tend to die pretty quick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_heatwaves

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

You'll get some food poisoning deaths from food that got too warm in fridges. People who rely on home medical equipment like oxygen concentrators. Car crashes in busy intersections that no longer have traffic lights. Fires from candles. etc. etc. etc.

Even critical infrastructure eventually craps out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/science/atomic-clock-late...
by darfo | 2026-01-06 15:13:50+00:00
This article uses quantities when percentages provide a different perspective.

"The country is down 65k industrial jobs over the last year..."

The second graph for US Blue Collar employment shows 100K jobs lost from the 2025 peak to the end of the graph.

Jobs went from 29.05 million down to 28.93 million [visual guess on my part].

My take: less than 1% drop in industrial jobs in since 2025 peak could be simple adjustment after pandemic induced flucutations.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-01-06 15:14:09+00:00
> That sounds wrong if you were trained the traditional way. We are taught to keep things clean, keep things modular, optimize early, avoid waste, and get it right on the first pass.

I must have been a bad scholar. I've always been more a member of the think it, do it, do it righter, do it faster school of thought.
by kllrnohj | 2026-01-06 15:14:12+00:00
> Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge.

Well yes, of course. And for cloud compute you get that same uptime expectation. Which if you need it is wonderful (and for something like data arguably critical for almost everyone). But if we're just talking something like a video game console? Ehhh, not so much. So no, you don't include the backup system cost just because cloud has it. You only include that cost if you want it.
by troyvit | 2026-01-06 15:14:19+00:00
Open source must be a part of Europe's digital sovereignty (a crucial piece of a post-american internet). The continent otherwise doesn't have the resources to pull it off. Projects like https://eurostack.eu/ are a baby step in that direction.

Unfortunately that's just one piece of the puzzle. They also need a level of physical infrastructure that will take ages (or a miraculous breakthrough) to build. That too is a hard problem.
by dmix | 2026-01-06 15:14:30+00:00
We’re discussing a post about DMCA in this thread which is a policy pushed by the UN and adopted by the US as DMCA. Not sure what your point is.

DMCA is one of the worst parts of the internet and for some reason capitalism is the boogieman in this thread. IP law has become hyper restrictive/excessive, with little oversight, and favours large companies with teams of lawyers.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-06 15:14:48+00:00
Possibly related: In the last year or two, I find myself downvoting far more than I used to. I see far more comments that are personal attacks (at least borderline), ideological battle, arguing but with no actual substance, or just bizarre comments that don't actually make any sense.

Did HN get overrun by trolls, shills, and bots? Or did I just get more cranky?
by rvz | 2026-01-06 15:14:50+00:00
Nothing more like playing Russian roulette with your own machine, hoping that when it needs to delete, move or rename a file, you sure hope it doesn't begin running either (especially do not run with --dangerously-skip-permissions):

rm -rf ~/

rm -rf /

mv ~/ ./

Or even creating a faulty symbolic link and above your home directory and suggesting to remove it, then it actually removes everything in that folder including your files in the home folder.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2026-01-06 15:14:57+00:00
Interesting to see a deepdive about string formats. I hadn't thought very deeply about it before.

I do agree with the string imutable argument. Mutable and imutable strings have different usecases and design tradeoffs. They perhaps shouldn't be the same type at all.

The transient string is particularly brilliant. Ive worked with some low level networking code in c, and being able to create a string containing the "payload" by pointing directly to an offset in the raw circular packet buffer is very clean. (the alternative is juggling offsets, or doing excessive memcpy)

So beyond the database usecase it's a clever string format.

It would be nice to have an ISO or equivalent specification on it though.
by qwertfisch | 2026-01-06 15:15:18+00:00
It’s almost not necessary. Windows has – in contrast to Linux – a very good and long compatibility guarantee. You can put up any program from 1995 (at least being 32-bit) and it will start and run.

The things GOG is improving are some bugs that occur mostly in games, e.g. something with color palettes in pre-2002 games. But I think every game using DirectX 9 or later will work without any adaptations, even ten years from now.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-06 15:15:26+00:00
Although Mozilla's reason to pay for Rust R&D was because of problems with C++ it's probably not most helpful to think of Rust (let alone F#) as an attempt to specifically fix those problems.

C is a Worse is Better language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better). The bet is that if it's simpler to implement then the fact that what you're implementing isn't great will be dwarfed by that ease of implementation. And it worked for decades which is definitely a success.

You can make a similar argument for Go, but not really for Rust. The other side of the Worse is Better coin is that maybe you could make the Right Thing™ instead.

Because implementing C is so easy and implementing the Right Thing™ is very difficult, the only way this would compete is if almost nobody needs to implement the Right Thing™ themselves. In 1970 that's crazy, each Computer is fairly custom. But by 1995 it feels a lot less "out there", the Intel x86 ISA is everywhere, Tim's crap hypermedia experiment is really taking off. And when Rust 1.0 shipped in 2015 most people were able to use it without doing any implementation work, and the Right Thing™ is just better so why not?

Now, for an existing successful project the calculation is very different, though note that Fish is an example of this working in terms of full throated RIIR. But in terms of whether you should use C for new work it comes out pretty strongly against C in my opinion as a fairly expert C programmer who hasn't written any C for years because Rust is better.
by msichert | 2026-01-06 15:15:45+00:00
We chose 4B because that was the maximum number of bytes that would be unused otherwise (4B for the length, 8B for the pointer leaves 4B), the UTF8 encoding doesn't really matter.

Also, for UTF8 specifically, cutting code points in half is fine as long as all strings are valid UTF8. The UTF8 encoding is prefix free, i.e., no valid code point is a prefix of another valid code point, so for prefix matching we can usually just compare bytes.

It only gets more complicated if you add collations or want to match case-insensitively. But at that point you need to take into account all edge cases of the Unicode spec anyway.
by rakoo | 2026-01-06 15:15:56+00:00
That's assuming that the population has any power, which in pretty much all countries in the world is not true. "Democracy" isn't just a value to behold, if the population has no power, it has no power and a country can't be called as such out of nowhere. Now, the people might have no actual power, but it's in their hands to get it.
by paodealho | 2026-01-06 15:16:52+00:00
Edit: HN filters emojis in comments. TLDR: the bots reply with various sea-related emojis and can't explain that there's no seahorse emoji.

on Meta (whatsapp) chatbot:

me: what is the seahorse emoji?

bot:

me: this is not a seahorse

bot: You got me! The actual seahorse emoji is . Want me to use it in a fun sentence?

on Bing/Copilot:

me: show me the seahorse emoji

bot:

------------

Here you go: — actually, that’s a fun combo, but the real seahorse emoji is … wait, not quite! The correct one is for jellyfish and for unicorn, but the seahorse emoji itself is ? Let me clarify:

The official seahorse emoji is: ? No — correction! It’s for unicorn. The actual seahorse emoji is: ?

Let’s be precise: the seahorse emoji is ?

Oops — I misspoke earlier. The true seahorse emoji is: ?

Wait — let’s settle this cleanly:
The seahorse emoji is: ?

Actually, the correct one is: ?

---------------

In some instances, Copilot answers that "there's no seahorse emoji _and that's why I keep running in circles_". This is just pasting answers, as this is a popular problem discussed on the internet. If the bot were reasoning, it would just answer "there's no seahorse emoji, please stop asking".
Show HN: Ledger – A private workspace for Engineering Managers
by caiobzen | 2026-01-06 15:16:55+00:00
Hi HN

I’m an Engineering Manager, and over the years I struggled with one recurring problem:
important management signals (1:1 notes, concerns, feedback, missed check-ins, context, achievements) were always scattered across tools or stuck in my head.

Ledger is a tool I started building to solve that for myself:
• One private space for EMs (not HR, not employees)
• Capture 1:1 notes, concerns, and follow-ups
• Simple tracking of people journey, not tickets
• Optional AI summaries to support reviews and coaching (very conservative by design)

The goal isn’t to replace judgment or conversations, but just to reduce memory bias and make better decisions with less mental load.

It’s early, opinionated, and shaped by real EM work rather than frameworks.
I’d love feedback, especially from people managing engineers or managers of managers.

Link: https://l3dger.com

Happy to answer questions or discuss what shouldn’t exist in tools like this.

— Carlos
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-06 15:16:59+00:00
Really cool experiment Phillip, thanks for sharing!

This makes me recall a conversation from a podcast with Sam Harris where he discusses the “pornography of doubt”

Here is the YouTube clip, less than a minute long

https://youtube.com/shorts/ybUfy3DZK0U?si=o0t8AiLZE4XEeEYV
by saubeidl | 2026-01-06 15:17:06+00:00
Thank you for the thoughtful response. While we still disagree, I understand your hesitation.

When I think of this, I think not of Robespierre, but of Tito, who managed to liberate his own country from the Nazis and keep the reactionaries (of which there are many in the region!) at bay through state repression.

Of course, it all fell apart once he died and the subsequent weakening of repressions created an opening for the reactionaries to return.

However, while Tito ruled Yugoslavia he created the country with the strongest passport in the world (the only one that could travel to both Cold War blocks!), free education, an economy centered around worker-owned coops and liberal freedoms unseen in other Socialist nations.

It's not without reason Yugonostalgia is still a strong force in the Balkans. [0]

I believe freedom needs to be protected from those willing to harm it - aggressively so. We cannot stand by idly while those that wish to harm us set their machinations in place - we need to stomp them out before they do it to us.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo-nostalgia
by ramraj07 | 2026-01-06 15:17:06+00:00
Part of growing up is also knowing WHEN to do the extra, thinking about whether this will undermine people who dont like to be undermined, and then more fundamentally, what the hell am I doing in such a politically toxic place?

Its not just about going above and beyond. Its going above and beyond exactly where it will get you the best outcome and nowhere else.
by bjourne | 2026-01-06 15:17:08+00:00
"Optimized" string types are everywhere and I bet that multiple people have already created string types almost identical to German strings. But the memory savings are small and they are not more efficient than ordinary strings. For string comparison you compare the pointers, which is cheaper than comparing two pairs of registers. If the pointers mismatch you compare the (cached) hashes and only if they match do you need to compare characters. For the prefix query, starts_with(content, 'http'), just store a string of the four-character prefix. With immutable strings the overhead is just one pointer.
by hmry | 2026-01-06 15:17:13+00:00
The ones that come to mind immediately are more ALTER statements (especially adding non-virtual columns), DATE, TIME, and TIMESTAMP types and their associated functions, and ARRAY types. Although I don't wish to disparage SQLite, they do support a lot of features. Just that I constantly run into the ones they don't, with my use cases.

And beyond standard SQL, stuff like hashmap/bloom filter/vector indices, nearest neighbor search, etc...
by ajross | 2026-01-06 15:17:13+00:00
> cost cutting on Lunar Lake

It's... the launch vehicle for a new process. Literally the opposite of "cost cutting", they went through the trouble of tooling up a whole fab over multiple years to do this.

Will 18A beat TSMC and save the company? We don't know. But they put down a huge bet that it would, and this is the hand that got dealt. It's important, not something to be dismissed.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-01-06 15:17:50+00:00
In my opinion; the technical critique is often thin, an edge case at most, or something overly pedantic; solely to make a negative claim.

“The sky is blue.”

“Technically speaking, no; it’s just a reflection, and at night it’s basically black, so you’re wrong even the majority of the time!”

As such I still completely back that article years ago calling this place lovably toxic. It’s gotten worse since then.
by CurleighBraces | 2026-01-06 15:17:53+00:00
Duolingo:

I am learning Greek at the moment, with codex I was able to produce a microsite and a prompt that can generate a lesson per day. It's pretty cool as it does both TTS and speach to text so I can actually practice generated conversations with myself.

Calorie Tracking:

Now I just send a picture or text into a Telgram channel, agent pics it up classifies it as "food info" sends to another agent for calculating calories either a best effort guess or if I've sent nutritional information in the pic reads it and follows up asking for portion size.

Workout Tracking:

Same telegraph channel, again just free text of what I've lifted/exercises I've done and it all gets stored. There's then an agent that uses this and the calories submitted to see if I am on track to reach my goals or offers tweaks as I go.

Reminders:

Same telegraph channel ( there's a theme here ) send reminders in, it's stored and a scheduler runs that sends me a push notification when the even is due. It's simple but just way better than googles offering

Then there's some other personal assistant stuff, for example I get a lot of emails from my kids school that contains important dates/requests for money, before this was a PITA to extract, now I just have an agent that reads the emails/extracts the documents and scans them for relevant information and adds to my calendar, or sends me payment reminder requests until I've paid them.

I'm pretty early days but I can just see this list expanding.
by xantronix | 2026-01-06 15:17:58+00:00
I have been waiting for quite some time for some sort of reckoning with our glut for compute resources, but for years I had optimistically assumed this would be due to physical constraints rather than artificial socioeconomic ones. Now is the most advantageous time to be a retrocomputing enthusiast as the definition of "retrocomputing" may seek to expand to engulf the whole category of home computing.
by R_D_Olivaw | 2026-01-06 15:18:10+00:00
And yet, when we make bad calls or do illogical things, because of hormones, emotions, energy levels, etc we still calling it reasoning.

But, to LLMs we don't afford the same leniency. If they flip some bits and the logic doesn't add up we're quick to point that "it's not reasoning at all".

Funny throne we've built for ourselves.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-06 15:18:13+00:00
> most code is not in a position to do anything other than crash in an OOM scenario.

That's intentional; IOW the "most code" that is unable to handle OOM conditions are written that way.

You can write code that handles OOM conditions gracefully, but that way of writing code is the default only in C. In every other language you need to go off the beaten path to gracefully handle OOM conditions.
by valdair3d | 2026-01-06 15:18:23+00:00
nice, KV + Postgres covers most of our use cases. the TTL on KV is useful for caching auth tokens between invocations without worrying about cleanup.

for long-running tasks we've been using a queue pattern anyway - worker picks up task, does a chunk, writes state to KV, exits. next invocation picks up where it left off. works around timeout limits and handles retries gracefully. websockets would be nice for real-time feedback but polling works fine for now.

will keep an eye on the durable objects progress. that's the main thing missing for stateful agent workflows where you need guaranteed delivery.