MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mr_00ff00 | 2026-01-15 20:30:48+00:00
Can you give an example of a better method?

The one that I can think of is the government sets the amount of electricity produced, and then it’s rationed. But I doubt the UK would be happy with rationed electricity where your power shuts off the second it’s over. That would be essentially mandatory blackouts all the time.

Not to mention the cost would be held by the government, so you end up paying it in taxes anyway.
by jahsome | 2026-01-15 20:30:51+00:00
Scheduling a "bulk trash" pick up at my current home is only accomplished by calling my landlord, who then calls the trash company, who then calls back with some arbitrary date and time a month or more in the future. When I have crap I want to get rid of it, I don't want to deal with any of that. I'll take the "inefficiency" of storing and maintaining a second vehicle -- which my family would easily make use of other than hauling duties -- over dealing with the bureaucratic nuisance.

There are private options, of course, but the fees are nowhere near "small" for this service.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-01-15 20:31:08+00:00
I read the Wiki page for Thurgood Marshall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood_Marshall

This part surprised me:

> Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas.

I remember watching the hearings about Clarence Thomas as a kid. At the time, I had no idea what a legal giant was Thurgood Marshall.
by hitekker | 2026-01-15 20:31:21+00:00
You missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion". Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it." Instead he immediately became defensive, even angry.

The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!)

I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-15 20:31:33+00:00
> new power generation capability will need to be built to compensate for the intermittency of wind

The new wind power is mostly idling natural gas power plants, which can spin up on the rare occasions there's no wind in the North Sea. Then the UK only uses the expensive shipped LNG a few days a year. The much cheaper piped natural gas is already allocated.
by palmotea | 2026-01-15 20:32:01+00:00
> 1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.

I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.

What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
by terminalshort | 2026-01-15 20:32:06+00:00
You don't need it, but you want it, which is why you buy it. The vast majority of the economies of all post-industrial nations are dedicated not to needs, but wants. And convenience is one of the biggest ones. Go ahead, call me a prick, but you're a good customer, and I know you'll keep buying. We didn't loot your data. You gave it freely in exchange for the extremely convenient services that are built on it. You can go ahead and not use Google Maps next time you need to get somewhere you don't know the route. You can buy a map book and put it in your car and navigate the old way. But we both know you won't.
by mildmelon | 2026-01-15 20:32:20+00:00
Author here.

It's a fun experiment into WebGL and graphics programming. I intended it to be a cool tool for getting inspiration for designing and creating other art in general. I do eventually want to build this out into a larger set of tools that would allow you to quickly iterate and build out various aesthetics for designing.

In it's current state, it's mostly practical for creating pretty images and videos that you could use in other projects. If there's more interest I could possibly turn it into more, would love to hear ideas and suggestions!
by XenophileJKO | 2026-01-15 20:32:24+00:00
It's really way more interesting that that.

The act of compression builds up behaviors/concepts of greater and greater abstraction. Another way you could think about it is that the model learns to extract commonality, hence the compression. What this means is because it is learning higher level abstractions AND the relationships between these higher level abstractions, it can ABSOLUTELY learn to infer or apply things way outside their training distribution.
by wwweston | 2026-01-15 20:32:32+00:00
> Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University

“Work” and “University” are so wildly different as institutions that to use them this way makes it perfectly clear how little merit your point has.

It’s an empty character attack - possibly a reflection of your own - meant to appeal only to the worst despairing suspicions of others. It does nothing to illuminate specific dynamics of group knowledge negotiation.

Anyone who has participated knows there can be conflict and abuse — and more about how that’s addressed than someone throwing drive-by distrust.
by kevinsundar | 2026-01-15 20:33:14+00:00
So you think there no other way in the world that ice agent would have a bruise? Is there any proof the bruise was from this incident? Did he have any bruises before from any other ice activity?

They are grabbing people day in and day out.

Again, think.

This was the same incident where the administration said they guy was fighting for his life after being struck by the car however:

“Eventually, the agent who shot the motorist approaches the vehicle. Seconds later, he turns back around and tells his colleagues to call 911. Agents blocked several bystanders who attempt to provide medical care, including one who identifies himself as a physician. At the same time, several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”

Think for yourself.
by tag_coder | 2026-01-15 20:33:19+00:00
If you identify with that problem,
and you want to solve it,
and you are open to advice...

Go to church, and be intentional to connect. Find a bible study, fellowship group, volunteer opportunity, or prayer meeting. Sit at church on Sunday with somebody from the bible study. Get lunch with one of those people. Find somebody at church who shares a hobby. Do your hobby together.

You have to put in the effort.
Growth is uncomfortable.
Real connection takes time.

Maybe you find something similar in other spaces, but I am certain you can find it in church.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-01-15 20:33:21+00:00
You know that both can be true right ?

If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.

Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
by acdha | 2026-01-15 20:33:39+00:00
If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.
by v0id24 | 2026-01-15 20:33:59+00:00
Democracies are vulnerable to many things: populism, vote-rigging, importing migrants to vote for a given party, and much more. Without a reboot, many democracies slide into autocracy. First, the government bans weapons, then curtails civil rights under the guise of child protection, offending religious sensibilities, blocks websites, and gradually tightens penalties for free speech. It all happens gradually. And suddenly you can't write your opinion online without being arrested. The UK is a case in point. Unarmed people are doomed to change things not only in authoritarian countries, but even in nominally democratic ones. Examples include peaceful and not-so-peaceful protests in Iran, Belarus, and Russia in the struggle against the authorities. Peaceful protests without the support of the army and the elite always end in failure. Another example is the protests in the UK against the influx of Muslim migrants, where the authorities support the latter.
by ako | 2026-01-15 20:34:20+00:00
> I agree, but I think I'm less optimistic than you that Claude will be able to catch its own mistakes in the future. On the other hand, I can definitely see how a ~more intelligent model might be able to catch mistakes on a larger and larger scale.

Claude already does this. Yesterday i asked it why some functionality was slow, it did some research, and then came back with all the right performance numbers, how often certain code was called, and opportunities to cache results to speed up execution. It refactored the code, ran performance tests, and reported the performance improvements.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-15 20:34:34+00:00
I have lived in many metropolitan areas and have seen the gamut of homelessness. As I mentioned in a downline comment, the trick is to ignore the people who are not in a position to receive help, and actively seek those who are in such a position. I am not suggesting walking up to random homeless folk in San Francisco who are tweaking out and hanging out with them. I am not suggesting to risk your safety by approaching the first person you see. You live in your area; study it, pay attention, and over time you'll start seeing some familiar faces. This has worked for me in New Orleans, it worked for me in Texas and worked for me in California.

So I'm willing to bet that my understanding of homelessness is more nuanced/holistic than even yours. I have been homeless. Have you?

What progress do you feel is being hindered by a collective display of compassion?
by kmeisthax | 2026-01-15 20:35:09+00:00
> It is also a courtesy that free countries respect US copyright

Which, itself, is downstream of the US signing onto the Berne convention. American copyright actually used to be reasonable and (western) Europe was the insane one with life terms. All that is ugly about the US was buried so deeply in Europe that it is outside, here, with us.

Then America had the extremely short-sighted idea to assign copyright to software, and then use software to enforce copyright, and then make it independently illegal to tell anyone how to bypass that enforcement software. This was all then foisted back onto Europe, whose creative industries begged them for it, not knowing that it basically meant surrendering to the US before the war had even started.

Seizing American copyright would be a good start, but what you really want is to drop anti-circumvention law. Because that's the first domino[0] in the chain. Europe is chock full of businesses that would absolutely fall in line around a tyrant king just like American businesses have, and laws like that enable such businesses to exist.

[0] https://pooper.fantranslation.org/@kmeisthax/110771126221131...
by fennecbutt | 2026-01-15 20:35:18+00:00
I agree somewhat, but more when it comes to its use of logic - it only gleans logic from human language which as we know is a fucking mess.

I've commented before on my belief that the majority of human activity is derivative. If you ask someone to think of a new kind of animal, alien or random object they will always base it off things that they have seen before. Truly original thoughts and things in this world are an absolute rarity and the majority of supposed original thought riffs on what we see others make, and those people look to nature and the natural world for inspiration.

We're very good at taking thing a and thing b and slapping them together and announcing we've made something new. Someone please reply with a wholly original concept. I had the same issue recently when trying to build a magic based physics system for a game I was thinking of prototyping.
Ask HN: Estimating % of dev using coding assistants
by japoneris | 2026-01-15 20:35:33+00:00
Hello all,
I discovered two months ago how helpful ai agents are. On HN, everyday, there are new articles about claude code or its friends.
I feel like ''this is a very hot topic'', and happy to know a bit more everyday.

Yet, when i ask my collegues or friends, i feel very alone, where developpers are only asking a few questions to copilot, nothing more.

HN is a microcosm of geeks/early adopters.
How is it around you ? Which percentage of people around you ''adopted'' coding agents ?
Is there reluctancy to use AI ?
by wcoenen | 2026-01-15 20:35:38+00:00
The article talks about strike prices but doesn't provide much context.

The context: this is about bids from wind farm operators to win "contracts for difference" with the Low Carbon Contracts Company, an entity owned by the UK government. It's essentially a subsidy scheme where the wind farms can lock in a specific price per MWh for all the electricity they will produce over a certain period. But only if they bid low enough to be among the winners of the auction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
by jacobolus | 2026-01-15 20:36:03+00:00
It's extremely difficult to write math articles for a general audience which are both accessible and accurate, and the number of excellent writers working on Wikipedia math articles is tiny.

Please get involved if you want to see improvement. There are some math articles which are excellent: readable, well illustrated, appropriately leveled, comprehensive, and many, many others which are dramatically underdeveloped, poorly sourced, unillustrated, confusing, too abstract, overloaded with formulas, etc.
Show HN: The Hessian of tall-skinny networks is easy to invert
by rahimiali | 2026-01-15 20:36:10+00:00
It turns out the inverse of the Hessian of a deep net is easy to apply to a vector. Doing this naively takes cubically many operations in the number of layers (so impractical), but it's possible to do this in time linear in the number of layers (so very practical)!

This is possible because the Hessian of a deep net has a matrix polynomial structure that factorizes nicely. The Hessian-inverse-product algorithm that takes advantage of this is similar to running backprop on a dual version of the deep net. It echoes an old idea of Pearlmutter's for computing Hessian-vector products.

Maybe this idea is useful as a preconditioner for stochastic gradient descent?
by sillygoose_189 | 2026-01-15 20:36:27+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm 17, built an AI memory platform, and made $1.3k MRR in the first 30 days.

Not impressive revenue, but way more than the $0 most side projects make.

The playbook covers how I validated in Week 1 (before writing code), built a minimal MVP in 2 weeks, and launched to get paying customers by Day 30.

It includes the cold DM script that got me 5 paying customers before launch, pricing strategy, launch breakdown, and what didn't work.

Free download, no email required (ok fine, email required for delivery but no spam).

Currently using the same approach to launch repo20 (dependency monitoring for devs).

Happy to answer questions about any of this.
Show HN: GoGen – A simple template-based file generator written in Go
by zaheer9360 | 2026-01-15 20:36:34+00:00
Hi HN, I recently open-sourced GoGen (https://github.com/zaheershaikh936/gogen), a tool to automate file generation using templates.
I'm trying to grow the project and reach my first 10 contributors to get listed on various open-source directories. If you have 5 minutes, I'd love feedback on:
The ease of use of the CLI.
The roadmap (I'm planning to add nested templates and better variable support).
I've marked a few issues as "Good First Issue" for anyone who wants to contribute to a small, fresh Go project.
by gruez | 2026-01-15 20:36:41+00:00
>* the gas price in the article includes the government’s self-imposed carbon tax. The actual cost of gas (£55) is FAR lower than the £91.20 strike price Milibad has set for wind.

Is that unreasonable? Carbon dioxide is an externality, and it needs to be accounted for accordingly. Suppose the government is tendering contracts for milk for school lunches. One farm runs a CAFO[1] that pollutes the local river. The other has cows on a pasture that doesn't. Is it that unreasonable for the government to be like "well hang on, the CAFO farm might be cheaper the grass fed farm, but it'll cost us money to clean up all the shit they're dumping into the river, so we're going to impose a tax on the CAFO farm for their pollution"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_animal_feeding_op...
by barrell | 2026-01-15 20:36:43+00:00
All great feedback! Thanks. Two questions if I may:

1. Where did the complexity start on the page for you? From the top it did it lose you somewhere?

2. Did you watch the video, and was that included in the complexity comment?

Can’t say I’m able to quickly get to any of your feedback but I’ll take it to heart and apply it over the coming weeks/months :)
by StevePerkins | 2026-01-15 20:36:50+00:00
Nonsense. It's fine to be boring, and to have boring friends. This expectation that you need to be travel influencer or a deep philosopher in order to have anything to talk about is an artifact of social media.

I'm old enough to remember what socialization was like pre-Internet. And by curated social media standards, it was really boring. It was also great.
by subroutine | 2026-01-15 20:36:51+00:00
If you think we are pissed about someone making a fun short video scrolling app then why have so many Americans downloaded it?

What our government is concerned about is that China does not allow big social media tech companies access to their markets, so allowing Chinese social media companies access to US markets is unfair, and a legitimate social influence concern. Nevertheless, tiktok is still operating here.

But you are right, we do walk around wringing our fists that Spotify is dominating music streaming, going goddamnit we don't even like music but something should be done.
by codingdave | 2026-01-15 20:36:54+00:00
It doesn't have to be an office - young people just need to get out and engage with the world in whatever way works for them. I tell this to my teenagers all the time. They are used to our nice house in the woods, 10 minutes outside of town, where their old parents work remotely and relax at home. But I remind them that this is a good place for our old age, not their youth. I spent my 20s exploring the world, climbing mountains, meeting new people, making mistakes, learning, and growing. They would be happier if they likewise got out and explored... hopefully with fewer mistakes.

But there is far more to the world than offices, so while I agree 100% with the sentiment, I'd broaden those horizons.
by phkahler | 2026-01-15 20:36:54+00:00
>> If there's a 3-band EQ built in, it should probably be an 8-band instead.

My thoughts exactly. When I used OBS there was no equalizer. Later I decided to try making one and found they had a new 3-band which was useful for learning how to make audio tools and I was happy to bring my 8-band idea to life. I submitted a PR and one of the devs shepherded me through a few cleanups to make it acceptable. Then they rejected it as somehow non wanted in the project. As an OSS maintainer myself I get it - even though I don't understand the reasons they seemed divided on it since one of them helped with the PR. I try not to speculate on the why, so I have just kept my fork there with the 1 commit to add the 8-band. It's probably way out of date so I should rebase it on latest release. Sounds like there might be some naming convention changes too but I need to find time to look into it.
by mildmelon | 2026-01-15 20:36:54+00:00
Author here, yes you're correct. The name is a bit of misnomer, and to do it truly with ASCII I'd have to move data back to the CPU which had pretty bad performance. I took a bit of artistic liberty and decided to draw my own ASCII-esque glyphs using signed distance functions. I'm considering adding a setting to swap the modes so that it does use true ASCII but again it'd be pretty rough performance on large screens.
by Lerc | 2026-01-15 20:36:55+00:00
Rechargable, motion sensing led strips for inside my wardrobe. Not a big thing but improved my ability to find things no-end. The only issue is they don't turn on when it is light enough to see and we slightly disagree on how light that is.

Ceramic head tweezers. ~$3 on AliExpress, indispensable for some tasks.

An import die grinder that cost about the same as a new power switch for my Dremel. More powerful, better speed control, better chuck.

The dirt cheap rechargable die grinders. Noisy, not much torque, but cheap enough that you can have a few lying around for odd-jobs. Their low power also means they lack the ability to completely destroy your work in 0.3 seconds. Whereas the one mentioned above managed to shear off a shaft spinning in air when I accidentally turned it up instead of off.

Generaly replacing anything AAA powered by rechargable USBc
by jacobolus | 2026-01-15 20:37:07+00:00
The articles about Fourier series and Fourier transform currently begin with:

> A Fourier series is a series expansion of a periodic function into a sum of trigonometric functions. The Fourier series is an example of a trigonometric series. By expressing a function as a sum of sines and cosines, many problems involving the function become easier to analyze because trigonometric functions are well understood.

and

> In mathematics, the Fourier transform (FT) is an integral transform that takes a function as input, and outputs another function that describes the extent to which various frequencies are present in the original function. The output of the transform is a complex valued function of frequency. The term Fourier transform refers to both the mathematical operation and to this complex-valued function. When a distinction needs to be made, the output of the operation is sometimes called the frequency domain representation of the original function. The Fourier transform is analogous to decomposing the sound of a musical chord into the intensities of its constituent pitches.
Show HN: Crystal Unified – Search compressed archives without decompressing
by danebl | 2026-01-15 20:37:21+00:00
Crystal Unified lets you grep through compressed archives (700MB logs, etc.) in milliseconds without extracting.

Other features:
- Binary delta patching for firmware/OTA updates
- Block-level random access
- 10x+ compression on logs
- Genomic data: 4:1 on 2-bit encoded DNA, 111,000:1 with reference compression
- Parallel compression, 1GB/s+ decompression

https://github.com/powerhubinc/crystal-unified-public
by breve | 2026-01-15 20:38:00+00:00
> The actual cost of gas

The actual cost has to price in the impact of using it.

For example, it's cheaper for UK water companies to pump sewage into rivers and onto beaches:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9kz8ydjpno

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67357566

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yprnd848ko

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/16/sewage-o...

But maybe it's a nice idea to force them to deal with sewage properly so you don't have to live in rivers of shit.