MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw0101a | 2026-01-02 14:03:39+00:00
>> Newcomen, Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont ... and Hero of Alexandria

> Thomas Savery too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery

Savery is referenced in the "Watt steam engine" Wikipedia article.

Also worth noting that even though Watt improved on Newcomen's design to improve efficiency, Watt's design still sucked: it took Wilkinson's boring technology to actually get them to work well.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist)...

People underestimate how much improving precision over the years/decades/centuries has allowed technology to progress:

* https://www.simonwinchester.com/precision-praise

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...
by silvestrov | 2026-01-02 14:04:27+00:00
e-boks sends a text message to the phone, so I see it much faster than a paper mail.

e-boks is like gmail (and others) in that it keeps your old mail. So you can easily find old stuff, a great improvement on paper mail.

I don't even check my physical mailbox once a week.

Denmark is one of the very most digital countries. Physical mail is very much on the way out. We no longer has mailboxes to send mail, you have to go to a shop to send letters, which now cost at last $6 per letter due to the low amount of mail sent.

It is only a matter of less than 10 years before letters will be fully gone.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-02 14:04:35+00:00
> That increase is likely being driven by users migrating away from Windows 10 as its end-of-life occurs, but could also be a surge of new users from devices like the Xbox Ally or other Windows handhelds.

My kneejerk says it is more likely the first explanation as it’s either leave windows (unlikely) or finally go to 11 whereas the latter is about making a deliberate, pricey purchase. But I don’t have a lick of data to support that of course ha
by fastasucan | 2026-01-02 14:04:42+00:00
I found that doing anything too detailed was too big of a chore for what I got out, and that I didnt get much from doing budgeting.

I ended up just logging my total holding of cash and stocks spread over my different bank accounts and my investment portfolio. Doing it every few months helped me make sure that my overall holdings went up. As long as I pay off my bills and then save enough to see my holdings rise I am happy. However I can see that having a more detailed overview over your spending might help you cut down even more.
by chuckadams | 2026-01-02 14:05:02+00:00
Docker OTOH composes whole services nicely: if my project needs a redis cache and postgres instance, I don't have to faff about with local ports, traefik can pick up my web server, and so on. I use a flake to create and lock a local development toolchain, but it's no help in managing the services.

One thing I haven't tried yet is building a container from a flake, which would have obvious benefits for reproducibility. Still don't think it would help with service orchestration though.
by rswail | 2026-01-02 14:05:17+00:00
I thought private business competing in a free market would always out do a centrally planned economy with state owned enterprises.

We've been told that in the West since Reagan, when we decided to forget all the advantages of a Keynesian economy.

So the actual concept of having an industrial strategy was and is considered against all economic orthodoxy in the West.

BYD is not a "copy" of Porsche, they hired European designers, Xioamoi made mobile phones before they started making cars.

The problem of China appropriating intellectual property has been known for decades, but access to the market was considered more important. The governments and industries could have decided that the market was less important and stopped transferring technology, but they didn't.

Chinese IP has been developing on its own at an accelerated pace now.

Most of the technology in Western vehicles is using chips built in Chinese or Taiwanese fabs and if China wanted to subvert the vehicle supply chains in EU or US, I'm sure they could.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-02 14:06:07+00:00
Something people overlook with these things is that you don't actually need to fully charge batteries because they won't be completely empty and probably a 70-80% charge is more than enough for a single crossing with a healthy safety margin. Also charging speeds are non linear. Charging speeds typically drop when the battery gets closer being full. Charging from 80% to 100% is a lot slower than charging from 20% to 80%. And depending on the battery chemistry, completely discharging or charging them to the max isn't necessarily great for battery longevity.

Another point with battery powered ships is that the rate at which they discharge is speed dependent and that's a non linear relationship because the drag increases quadratic with speed. So, if you are at 30%, you can still make it across. Just not at the full speed. This is less about range anxiety than it is about just being able to stick to schedules. If the ship did not charge enough it would have to go slower. But it would still get there. This ship is designed to go quite fast which means it would have a lot of wiggle room. So they might make it across at full speed even at maybe a 60% charge. The risk is that they'd run low and might have to slow down a bit. It would get there but with a delay if that happens. And then it would have to sit there a bit longer recharging leading to more delays.

The trick is optimizing the amount of batteries to minimize turnover and delays; not around being able to charge them from 0 to 100%. The sweet spot is probably around the 20-80% mark, meaning you'd want to be able do a crossing at full speed using about 50-60% of the battery capacity. The rest is just there as safety margin to avoid delays. If you burn into that, you need to charge a bit more. With 40-50 minutes turnover, there's plenty of time to do that typically.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-01-02 14:06:25+00:00
> And at least this is kept and collected.

Just to expand on this, there is a reasonable distinction made between multi-use and single-use plastics. Things like a shampoo bottle, plasticware, drink bottles, etc. are considered single-use. (Yes, even the shampoo bottle despite being in your bathroom for weeks because its thrown out when it's empty.) As the parent comment mentions, purchasing a vinyl record does little—practically nothing—to contribute to daily plastic waste, especially with how few customers there are (compared to shampoo bottles).
by ubermonkey | 2026-01-02 14:06:34+00:00
Yeah, this.

Vinyl absolutely CAN sound great. If you have a nice amp and good speakers, modern listeners will be amazed at the fidelity possible from vinyl played back on a good turntable with a decent signal chain.

BUT.

CD is still better. CD is simpler. You don't have to faff about with cleaning them, or treat them like hothouse flowers. The platform is incredibly portable.

And yet: Vinyl is more fun.

We moved last year. Our audio room can play streaming, CD, or vinyl. It's the first and third options that get by FAR the most usage. CD comes up once in a blue moon.
by juujian | 2026-01-02 14:06:48+00:00
> Linux slipped 0.01% month-on-month

That's just noise

Use habits in Dec diverge from the rest of the year because of the holidays. People are gifted new systems that come with windows 11 pre installed, and people who don't usually have time to game come online. I would not take this to mean that anything has stopped using Linux and is using windows 11 instead.
by kherud | 2026-01-02 14:07:18+00:00
One interesting detail: In previous years, Joscha Bach gave a talk on AI, consciousness, and related topics (see e.g. [0]). A similar talk was planned for this year as well, but after emails between him and Epstein were made public (see his comment on this in [1]), his talk was canceled. Instead, there appears to have been an event that critically addressed the situation [2]. Unfortunately it was not recorded. Did anyone attend? A discussion between Joscha and his critics would have been really interesting.

[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-self-models-of-loving-grace

[1] https://joscha.substack.com/p/on-the-jeffrey-epstein-affair

[2] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/en/event/detail/tech...
Tell HN: The US NE Weather Service to end technical Area Forecast Discussions
by sklargh | 2026-01-02 14:07:21+00:00
Several Eastern NWS offices, including Boston and New York, are transitioning away from the detailed technical discussions that explain forecaster reasoning. The new “warnings first” format aims to reduce “redundancy” by focusing on hazard information. Does anyone know why this is occurring? The stated reasons do not make sense.

For non-weather people. This means the Area Forecast Discussions which are extremely valuable for understanding why forecasters reached their conclusions will largely duplicate the warnings and zone forecasts already available everywhere else, in a nonsensical format.

The meteorological reasoning that made AFDs useful to enthusiasts and professionals alike is being stripped out. It is hard for me to understand how this is an improvement or anything other than wholesale downgrading of service by some of the US’s most important weather regions.

A summary of the changes is available here: https://partnerservices.nws.noaa.gov/products/cache/350-2025/PNSOKX/554ebc63d53efc7a5c2b325ce4223fbc
Boston has already switched. Here’s what the new format looks like: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=BOX&issuedby=BOX&product=AFD&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1&highlight=off
by 7x | 2026-01-02 14:07:24+00:00
@aminbabu

Exponential 6.x (Formerly eZ Publish 6; 100% Compatible APIs) has surprisingly changed very very little in the core kernel changes to maintain the software stack as it was (nearly perfect, reliable and stable).

This is a brief summary of what we do differently with Exponential (PHP8.5 from 7x) vs eZ Publish (PHP 5.x from eZ Systems; Deprecated/Replaced):

Bundled Community Extensions/Plugins: See most changes came when Exponential was released as a feature complete upgrade to existing eZ Publish 4/5 websites bundled with the most commonly used stable Exponential extensions available in the community by default reducing time to build further advanced combinations of -all- the available software from our community and corporate GitHub Repositories. This allows more freedoms and free features; many enabled and available by default via the Admin/Editor.

This was a radical idea from 7x to ensure more of the software available could be used instantly instead possibly.

Enhanced PHP5 Code changes to support PHP7, PHP7.x, PHP8, PHP8.x all so small and minimal you would laugh if you only knew the full history of the Exponential PHP Kernel. We just don't have to rewrite code because the original architecture design quite simply was future oriented throughout it's history and almost never made choices in code form which later required major refactoring or changes to continue to run as designed.

Regular versioned released. This guideline from 7x allows end users in the community to stay up to date and secure with less hassle long term support being always available to customers and end users in the community. We support PHP8, PHP 8.3+ (Basic, Platform, Platform Legacy), PHP 8.5+ (Exponential 6.x). We release on a nearly monthly schedule ensuring it's easy to keep your website running and available with enterprise grade stability and reliability.

TL;DR: All of the architecture is still original. We merely patch PHP for minor language usage conflicts, bundle additional features in extensions / plugins and extend template design themes to provide a fresh vibrant look and feel to amazing cms features that never fail (TM*).

Happy Hacking!
7x
by ixwt | 2026-01-02 14:07:45+00:00
I've been using YNAB 4 (aka YNAB Classic on Android) for some time. I got a new phone, and the phone app finally won't run on the new phone. YNAB 4 is also quite buggy on my Arch based setup (someone maintains a package on AUR using Wine). So I think it's finally time to move on, which I think I'm doing this year.

My only issue with Buckets is that the YNAB importer doesn't take into account that YNAB will take your overspending and take it from your next month's income. I have some bad habits that means I was really using YNAB as more of a financial tracker than an actually budget system. That's my own fault though. The envelope in question comes out to $-10k... That's all my own fault though. It just means I have to massage it into Bucket's system, or start a new budget.
by vyskocilm | 2026-01-02 14:07:48+00:00
> I don’t feel like a consumer, but a janitor. I don’t want this.

I think it was Jorge Castro, the creator of Universal Blue, who called it the sysadmin culture. Most Linux distros are made by sysadmins for sysadmins, and you're expected to change and configure your system. I was a sysadmin myself for a long time. I used Slackware; switched from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6; tweaked CFLAGS on Gentoo; replaced SysV init with systemd; used PipeWire from the earliest versions - you name it, I did it.

Nowadays I use https://aeondesktop.github.io/ - an immutable system with Btrfs snapshots. Everything is installed from Flathub. The major roadblock is that much of the Linux world expects you to modify the system one way or another, so your mileage may vary. I replaced my printer because I did not wanted to install binary blobs from HP/Samsung.

> Perhaps I haven’t found «the right distro»

I’d look at immutable or image-based offerings, which aims at low or no maintenance: Aeon Desktop, Universal Blue, Endless OS. There are reviews on sites like LWN.net
by Chronoz99 | 2026-01-02 14:08:05+00:00
This sounds like a good idea for execution of small ideas but most innovative things are actually very fragile in the early stage. Its almost the opposite of failing fast for those type of projects that truly makes them successful, for example the ASML EUVL would have failed instantly given how "impractical" it was according to every major expert at the time. I think it is more useful to think of a balance between exploration and this type of fail-fast aproach.
by simonw | 2026-01-02 14:08:19+00:00
It looks like there are two maintained implementations of this at the moment - one in C# https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson/wiki/.NET-Library and another in TypeScript/JavaScript https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJsonJs. They each have their own test suite.

There's an older pure Python version but it's no longer maintained - the author of that recently replaced it with a Python library wrapping the C# code.

This looks to me like the perfect opportunity for a language-independent conformance suite - a set of tests defined as data files that can be shared across multiple implementations.

This would not only guarantee that the existing C# and TypeScript implementations behaved exactly the same way, but would also make it much easier to build and then maintain more implementations across other languages.

Interestingly the now-deprecated Python library does actually use a data-driven test suite in the kind of shape I'm describing: https://github.com/masaccio/compact-json/tree/main/tests/dat...

That new Python library is https://pypi.org/project/fractured-json/ but it's a wrapper around the C# library and says "You must install a valid .NET runtime" - that makes it mostly a non-starter as a dependency for other Python projects because it breaks the ability to "pip install" them without a significant extra step.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-02 14:08:55+00:00
I kind of agree in principle but there are a multitude of clever benchmarks that try to measure lots of different aspects like robustness, knowledge, understanding, hallucinations, tool use effectiveness, coding performance, multimodal reasoning and generation, etc etc etc. all of these have lots of limitations but they all paint a pretty compelling picture that compliments the “vibes” which are also important.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-02 14:09:33+00:00
The average believer in orthodox economics tends to forget that for all practical purposes customers and workers are the same entity.

China understands that and they prioritize employment over consumption (of course, not having the printing press for the world’s reserve currency kinds of force their hands into it).

America’s deindustrialization and financialization went too far. Consumption levels and waste are well out of any sustainable level. An adjustment would have to happen and Trump’s tariffs are just a desperate attempt to restore American Industry (with scarce chances of success).

It is not like China is an enthusiastic adopter of free trade. They notoriously never played by the same rules in terms of market access, exchange rates, subsidies and trade barriers. It is utterly stupid to open your market to china without reciprocity, and this is what the west has been doing for decades making baking and investors richer while completely decimating what was once a thriving middle class.

Even the racial issues in the current times are heavily linked to this. The fall of Detroit was felt disproportionately heavier by the blacks, Wall Street basically took the ladder from the feet of a rising blue collar middle class of blacks.

I sincerely don’t give a fuck if we can’t buy cheap BYD cars.
by troupo | 2026-01-02 14:09:37+00:00
It's worse. There's also the war periods for which copyright time is extended in some countries like France.

For example, lyrics to The Internationale were composed in 1871 and music in 1888. They fully entered public domain... in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale#Authorship_... Over 140 years of copyright.
by fennecfoxy | 2026-01-02 14:09:50+00:00
Great observations.

I'm not surprised; large companies are like...large cities or towns. I've been at several companies as they've grown from small to medium, medium to large and essentially the same thing happens every single time.

Knives come out, people are smiling but not with their eyes. Meritocracies crumble into cronyism.
by xpe | 2026-01-02 14:10:07+00:00
> Great post. This should be the default configuration, community can make discussions, contributors can make issues.

1. We often say 'should' too easily. The post isn't making such a claim is it? I would shift away from saying 'should' to saying: start somewhere that works for your project, gather feedback and evidence, and adjust thoughtfully. You'll end up in a place that feels authentic.

2. If anything, I would prefer the default be random. Then projects end up being natural experiments. See [1]

3. At a meta level, this reminds me of Brian:

> Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!

> Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!

> Brian: You're all different!

> Crowd: Yes, we are all different!

> Man in crowd: I'm not...

> Crowd: Shhh!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment
by d-us-vb | 2026-01-02 14:11:41+00:00
The real problem is with trust and encroachment. I think a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time on their computers start to feel like their OS is their home and they go on excursions through apps. Previously, ads were limited to apps you had to go to yourself. Ads showing up as wallpaper in your house would be unsettling, and it reveals that your homeownership was illusory from the start: you never really controlled anything.

Yes, you can use cleanup software to fix the symptoms, but that's not the real issue here.

Edit: further research revealed my original first point was a false assumption.
by shoknawe | 2026-01-02 14:11:49+00:00
I used a Windows 95 version of MS Money for years. After I switch over to Linux full time years ago, I kept running it in Wine with little problem. About 3 years ago I decided to try GnuCash.
It is a perfect replacement for MS Money and and has many excellent features. With GnuCash, I am never overdrawn and always know my cash flow situation.
Works with multiple currencies, for Linux, Windows and Mac.
by mikaelsouza | 2026-01-02 14:12:20+00:00
Oh... You're totally right. I was just able to reproduce this.

Maybe that's the reason I sometimes get a green dot when I am unlocking my phone.

Tyvm for sharing this. IIRC, it's possible to change the camera icon in the lock screen to something else. Since I never use this button (I am one of those weirdos that use the camera control button instead), I think I'll change to something else.
by simonw | 2026-01-02 14:12:32+00:00
For covering the risk of mistakes I suggest considering ways of "visually quoting" the documents.

If the summary says "closing timeline: X" but there's an icon I can click that pops open an overlay with a visual cropped screenshot of that part of the original PDF - maybe even with a red circle around that detail - I can trust those summaries a whole lot more.

Gemini 2.5 has image bounding box and masking features that can help with this (sadly missing from Gemini 3.)
by rswail | 2026-01-02 14:12:35+00:00
They have their own internal market, which now has a middle class equal in size to the entire US population.

They have all of Asia, with a market of another ~2B, and a completely undeveloped market in Africa of another 1B people.

That's part of what the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is, an industrial policy to establish trade links and infrastructure dependencies across the world that uses Chinese direct FDI and industrial policy to establish new markets for their own industries.

Which is exactly the same policy that the US adopted as part of the Marshall Plan and its use (up until 2025) of soft power to promote US FDI across the world.

It's the US that is dependent on a defense industry and foreign sales for its industrial capacity.

That's why the US defense budget is 50% of the total and over USD1T/year and is why the US is demanding that NATO nations buy US defense equipment.
by jghn | 2026-01-02 14:12:36+00:00
Also Gen X. Stopped purchasing physical media altogether ~2010 after trailing off once the iTunes store opened up. My old physical media are all down in the basement somewhere. I don't own anything that'd be able tp lay any of it.

Instead, all of my music is digital, mostly purchased on Bandcamp. I have a full archive on my NAS, also in the basement. I use iTunes Match so that i'm able to stream any of my music on demand to any of my devices. I have 0 desire to ever go back to physical media. It's far more convenient and space efficient to do it this way.
Show HN: Pocketwise – a privacy-first, double-entry finance tracker
by ashish01 | 2026-01-02 14:12:44+00:00
Working on pocketwise. Yet another personal finance tracker :)

Privacy update since my last post: all user data is encrypted on the server. Only the user can see their data in plain text. Even someone with direct server access cannot read it. This came directly from feedback on my previous post, financial data is deeply personal, and putting minutia of ones personal finance on a remote server feel off.

I started with double-entry accounting using hledger. It was always a great financial realization for me, but I would stop using it after a couple of weeks. So I started writing a web interface for my ledger file, with the intent to make it simple enough that I actually stick with it. Over time, this became Pocketwise.

Pocketwise does not need any bank credentials. Instead, you do the data entry yourself.

To make this easier, you can type (or say) natural-language descriptions of your expenses like
“Chipotle $15 cash” or “Netflix 19.89 Apple Card”, and it stores them as proper double-entry records like:

2025-11-11 Chipotle
Expenses:Food & Dining $15.00
Assets:Cash $-15.00

2025-11-11 Netflix
Expenses:Subscriptions $19.89
Liabilities:Credit Card:Apple Card $-19.89

There’s a 7-day free trial. If you try it, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks for reading