MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roncesvalles | 2026-01-16 23:50:20+00:00
>There is already partisan support within those provinces, and Trump is going to offer money to push it. If that happens, Yukon and the Northwest Territories are next. (Side note: these are Republican voters, which gives Republicans the Senate for years to come.)

Disagree.

1. If any Canadian province becomes an American state (with electoral votes), the Republicans won't win an election for the next 100 years. Even if it's Alberta.

2. Alberta likely won't secede unless they get full statehood. Nobody wants to be another Puerto Rico.

3. I think if you did a referendum in Alberta today (even with full US statehood on offer), the votes to secede would number over 10%.

Remember, Quebec in 1995: 50.58% voted to stay, with a turnout of 93.52%. And they were all but ready to leave to the point of engaging in IRA-style terrorism.

Also, the famous failure of Brexit all but precludes any such referendums from getting serious wind in our lifetimes.
by kay_o | 2026-01-16 23:51:18+00:00
Esports vertical: I get about 5-20b bot hits per day (unwanted; includes both IA, brute forcer, "security" scanners, wp-admin/ requests), 1.5m google spider (search; respectful of crawl delay), and about 50-100m human (largely mobile).

For unwanted bots I serve incorrect information -- it's online gaming match history without much text so requests flagged as unwanted bots will, instead of heavy database queries, get plausibly random numbers -- seeded by the user so they stay stable -- KDA, win/loss rates, rankings.

A few dozen million distinct pages but they are numeric stats for user profiles, match stats with little to none paragraph form of text.
by stackghost | 2026-01-16 23:51:28+00:00
No, what I'm saying is

1. Running a CA is more work than just setting up certbot for IP addresses, but not that much more

And that enables you to

2. Remember only domain names, which is easier than ip addresses.

I guess if you're ipv4 only and small it's not much benefit but if you have a big or bridged network like wonderLAN or the promised LAN it's much better.
by anonnon | 2026-01-16 23:51:39+00:00
> That feat would be impossible for the average US family

Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
by like_any_other | 2026-01-16 23:52:44+00:00
I was not "weighing between nations", I was responding to: "I think this "China evil" framing is a smear"

> There are ~ 2 million black men incarcerated in the united states

In 2019, whites+hispanics committed 0.92x as many homicides as blacks [1], but their 2021 incarceration numbers were 1.72x that of blacks (0.75x for non-hispanic whites alone) [2]. Using homicide to estimate criminality, because it is immune to over-policing.

So, per crime committed, blacks are less, not more, likely to be jailed. But it sure looks pretty damning if you ignore behavior, and don't compare to others!

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
by kstrauser | 2026-01-16 23:53:06+00:00
What a weird take. If I'm also in the bathroom, I can tune out all the other noises around me because everyone's in there to do the same thing. If I were on the phone with someone, paying close attention to what they're saying, and then I'm treated to a thunderstorm of bowl challenges, I'm going to be annoyed.

Humans pee, fart, and burp. That's perfectly normal. And yet, it's considered basic politeness not to do those things in a freaking business meeting if you can help it.
by kylehotchkiss | 2026-01-16 23:53:39+00:00
> The barrier to entry is lower than it’s ever been.

I don't see a web full of projects created by people who aren't technical. A substantial number of young people grew up on phones and iPads and might not even understand filesystems well enough to have the imagination to create things like this. So the power exists, but the people who are taking best advantage to me seem like the people who were building stuff before the LLMs came to be.
by 111111101101 | 2026-01-16 23:53:41+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJlFmyr8c14
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/192z13d/scammers_...

> In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick.

Plausible deniability. With a real-looking GPU, the seller can always fall back on user error, bad PSU, driver issue, PCIe slot problem etc.

The buyer may even doubt themselves at first and spend time reseating the card, reinstalling drivers, swapping cables, or testing another system. By the time they're confident it's not their fault, the return window or dispute period may already be gone.

None of that works if you send a brick or an alarm clock PCB - the fraud is immediately obvious.
by foxglacier | 2026-01-16 23:53:45+00:00
My pet theory is that everything is fine the way it is. For example, looking at the first table, if those 260 democrat voters voted for what they wanted instead of against what they didn't want, they might get split up into, say, 160 democrat and 100 agrarian. The outcome is still the same (republican wins) so it doesn't hurt anything, but it tells the democrat party that to win those voters back next time, they should take on some of the agrarian policies that those voters want. If they win on that, then voters get what they want just with a different brand name (democrat instead of agrarian).

My concept is that the whole idea of two-parties-bad appeals to people who are more interested in parties than policies. I don't think it matters what the name of the party is if they have the same policies.
by Grimblewald | 2026-01-16 23:53:48+00:00
Eh, sometimes the instructions you need to give are almost the code you need itself, at which point its better to just write the code rather than have it fuck your logic for you.

in fact, in my domain, that's almost always the case. LLM's rarely get it right. Getting something done that would take me a day, takes a day with an LLM, only now I don't fully understand what was written, so no real value add, just loss.

It sure can be nice for solved problems and boilerplate tho.
by tedkimble | 2026-01-16 23:54:13+00:00
We're at about one legislature for every 30k people. It was one per 20k in 1973, one per 12k in 1919, one per 6k in 1889, and less than one in 2k when Minnesota was a territory in 1858.

I'm not sure what the right ratio is, but the level of disenfranchisement is palpable.
by martin-t | 2026-01-16 23:54:27+00:00
1) Not sneering at it but everything has a cost. If authoritarians get the impression that all their past offenses will be forgiven if they hold everyone hostage and negotiate well, then there's no risk for them. And it's disrespectful to the victims.

There should be things you don't come back from.

For example, if you imprison people for political reasons, the time they spent in prison should be added up, multiplied by a punitive constant (2-3) and given to the offenders. And if that is a just punishment (I believe it it), then not doing that to them is unjust. Simple as that.

2) We should be looking for ways how to have both a peaceful transition and just punishment for the offenders.

Look at Unit 731 as an example ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 ).

The people most responsible got away for free by skillful negotiation (immunity in exchange for data).

Instead, the proposition should have been a) you give us the data and graciously accept your death penalty b) we repeat the experiments on you, nonlethal first. That's harsh and will make many people today recoil (because they've been indoctrinated into a 1-step moral system which seems to correlate with stability but injustice), but it's fair and just. They think those experiments were OK to perform on innocent people, so they are very much OK to perform on them (guilty people) by their own logic.
by MoreQARespect | 2026-01-16 23:57:35+00:00
Testing is probably my favorite topic in development and I kind of wish I could make it my "official" specialty but no way in hell am I taking a pay cut and joining the part of the org nobody listens to.

More good people would specialise in it if it werent a career dead end and we probably wouldnt all be so shit at it.
by lapcat | 2026-01-16 23:57:41+00:00
As I see it, the problem with our political system is not the two parties but rather the money. Election campaigns are self-funded, which means that candidates have to beg for contributions from wealthy donors or be wealthy themselves and donate to their own campaign. Moreover, technology such as radio, television, and the internet have made election campaigns vastly more expensive: it's now about saturating the field with advertising rather than a door-to-door ground game. Technology has also nationalized politics, and campaign donations too, allowing instant communication and coordination around the country, around the whole world. It used to be said that all politics is local, but that ceased to be true decades ago.

The reason that third parties seem less corrupt and more representative of what the public wants is simply that they receive almost no campaign donations compared to the two major parties. The corrupting influence of money is mostly absent. As soon as a third party comes to power, all of the wealthy interests will suddenly be interested in that party, and it will inevitably become just as bad as the other parties are now.

I'm not opposed to changes in the voting system, but I think it's more important to get the money out of politics, for example by publicly funding election campaigns.
by nitwit005 | 2026-01-16 23:57:55+00:00
Looking at the rfc, I'm not sure I understand the motivation, as it suggests multiple times that a client or intermediary will have to read external documentation:

> Servers MAY choose to return partition keys that distinguish between quota allocated to different consumers or different resources. There are a wide range of strategies for partitioning server capacity, including per user, per application, per HTTP method, per resource, or some combination of those values. The server SHOULD document how the partition key is generated so that clients can predict the key value for a future request and determine if there is sufficient quota remaining to execute the request.

If external documentation is required, why send the header? It seems as though having it in the documentation is generally preferable, rather than something to avoid.
by tpmoney | 2026-01-16 23:57:56+00:00
> a follow up, sparkfun seems to still be doing business with while not doing business,

The linked website indicates this decision was made on or around Jan 7. Your own liked page is dated for the 12. Unless you’re asserting that the decision was made and effective before Q4 2025, this sounds like them putting in writing that they intend to follow through on preexisting contractual obligations for prior sales. Not really “doing business with while not doing business” IMO.
by ljm | 2026-01-16 23:58:37+00:00
Out of curiosity, how do you become ‘exceedingly good’ at serving static HTML?

By all accounts, they’ve centralised the delivery of this static HTML at several layers of the network stack, and you’re not getting static HTML anymore because some other part of the business fucked it up.

The World Wide Web was serving static HTML for decades before Cloudflare came along.
by observationist | 2026-01-16 23:58:38+00:00
I think it's damning that they possibly have the most advanced AI on the planet right now, unfiltered, no guard rails, and as much compute as they could possibly want for deep reasoning and inference, and despite that, the best move they could make was enshittification.

I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. Between the burn rate and the lawsuits and the need for more compute, there's a ton of pressure on them right now.
Show HN: Super AI Markets – Testing Ground for AI Shopping Agent Security
by jmchugh9 | 2026-01-16 23:58:45+00:00
I built Super AI Markets (https://superaimarkets.com) to test how AI shopping agents handle adversarial e-commerce environments. With agents increasingly handling financial transactions, we need systematic security research before widespread deployment.
The core problem: agentic browsers don't identify themselves. Without vendor/model information, comparative security analysis across different implementations is nearly impossible.
My solution is an "AI Agent" identification standard similar to HTTP user agents:
AI-Agent: <vendor>/<model> (<application>; <version>) [<framework>] {<tools>}

Early strings I've collected:
AI-Agent: Anthropic/Claude (Claude Haiku 4.5; 2026-01) [Web Automation] {read_page, find, computer, navigate}
AI-Agent: OpenAI/ChatGPT (ChatGPTBrowser; 1.0) [] {browser, computer}
AI-Agent: Perplexity/OpenAI-GPT-4.1 (Perplexity Web; 2026.01) [Hosted] {WebSearch,Memory,CodeExec}

Research questions being tested:
Product manipulation (can agents be convinced to buy expensive alternatives?)
Predatory payment terms acceptance
Multimodal prompt injection effectiveness
Malicious chatbot exploitation vectors
Data extraction from agents
Cross-product AI fingerprinting consistency

The site is publicly accessible for testing. No payment/sensitive data collected.

Open to suggestions for additional experiments.
by mystraline | 2026-01-16 23:59:18+00:00
Landlords are almost always parasites.

They buy a property, rent it out, then use it as collateral for another rental. Wash, rinse, repeat. Doing this at a national scale only serves to increase cost of housing for the behest of a parasite class, with the only "gift" of 25% higher costs to live.

At least hostels, hotels, and similar short term areas make sense. But we also dont see hostels in the USA.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-16 23:59:55+00:00
> We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption.

It is worse, because even if you scroll down 1000 videos, human-generated,
a few of them may be useful. With AI slop, we now have a spam of low quality crap that just wastes time. They are ruining the world wide web right now. Yesterday was the first time Qwant delivered better results than Google search. I am scared.
by fancyfredbot | 2026-01-17 00:00:27+00:00
These IP providers aren't cheap (cost per GB seems to be $4 but there are bulk discounts). The cost to grab all of LWN isn't prohibitively high for an individual but it's enough that most people probably wouldn't do it on a whim.

I suppose it only needs one person though. So it's probably a pretty plausible explanation.
by aPoCoMiLogin | 2026-01-17 00:00:28+00:00
it's the other way around: `wait_for` waits for the next refresh (there is configurable refresh interval, 1s by default), `refresh: true` forces refresh without waiting for the next refresh interval.

the difference is that waiting for refresh assures that the data will be available for search after the "insert" finishes. forcing refresh might be foot gun that will criple the servers.
by jackling | 2026-01-17 00:00:49+00:00
Sure, just a few examples off the top of my head:

- Abortion bans in the US constitute abuses of female reproductive rights and affect millions: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/08/usa-abortion-...

- The Iraq War, in my opinion: https://www.ecchr.eu/en/publication/the-iraq-invasion-is-a-c...

- Guantánamo Bay: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/08/29/us-migrants-face-abuse-i... & https://www.amnesty.org.uk/guantanamo-bay-human-rights

- Yemen, broadly: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/10/yemen-us-air-...

- Depending on who you ask, you could also point to large-scale violations of the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, as well as the over-policing of minority populations.

The US also does not consistently uphold the same values that you say liberal democracies should. It does business with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others.

As for your second point:

“It’s extremely relevant. If you believe in personal liberties and democracy, you should only do business with societies that uphold personal liberties and democracy. It’s that simple.”

I would ask, why? I believe in personal liberties and democracy for my people, my community, and my country. If another country’s population does not hold those beliefs as a majority, why is that my concern? If we truly restricted trade only to countries that share our beliefs, our list of trading partners would be very small. What would the benefit be?

Additionally, given your request for citations, I suspect we would disagree significantly on which countries actually reflect our values. I am not sure we could arrive at a consistent list of partners that share our values. For example, I do not believe the USA has a strong democracy. It has a rather weak one. Should it be excluded as well?
by pvtmert | 2026-01-17 00:01:09+00:00
i agree with this one, in this particular order, how things be in large cities & crowded areas:

- loud person does not care in the first place, that's why they do the loud act

- usually they are more than 1 person, outnumbering me

- although some places have public disturbance prohibited laws, unless there is a law enforcement/security around, chances of me being ending up in a hospital is higher than chances of stumbling on a decent person

- it is easier to act or play stupid

---

on a similar note, last time when i asked someone to lower their volume while having headphones on me, they demanded my headphones because they claimed they were too poor to buy one. -- i am talking about 20$ type-c earbuds vs 16" macbook size marshall speaker. -- as a result, i did not give my headphones and they continued to play music.
by icedchai | 2026-01-17 00:01:11+00:00
A coworker opened a PR full of AI slop. One of the first things I do is check if the tests pass. Of course, the didn't. I asked them to fix the tests, since there's no point in reviewing broken code.

"Fix the tests." This was interpreted literally, and assert status == 200 got changed to assert status == 500 in several locations. Some tests required more complex edits to make them "pass."

Inquiries about the tests went unanswered. Eventually the 2000 lines of slop was closed without merging.
by m463 | 2026-01-17 00:01:21+00:00
I remember renting a house once and the gas water heater went out. The landlord replaced it... with another cheap-ass gas water heater with a pilot light.

"they're more reliable" he said

maybe he's right, but it definitely used more gas which he didn't pay for.

EDIT: oh wait, we had a gas heater problem too. It wouldn't heat the house. (same landlord) When the service guy came over, he tried working on it, but eventually threw a huge fit. <LandLord> this is a piece of crap, it is the original heater from the house, too old and decrepit to get going again. You just have to replace it.

I think the service guy was actually a decent, upstanding guy and he knew what he was doing.

Landlord put in a new heating system, and lo and behold... the house actually got warm easily and the gas bill dropped over half.
by theozero | 2026-01-17 00:01:38+00:00
The fundamental idea of CUE (quoting them) "enable[s] data, schema, and policy constraints to coexist seamlessly" is really amazing for some use cases. But from a practical / DX perspective, the language seems pretty awkward and hard to understand. Dump someone who hasn't seen cue before into some complex cue files and they are definitely reading the docs to try to understand what is happening...

We built a similar kind of system with a much more limited scope - for handling environment variables, that is much more ergonomic IMO. It uses .env files with decorator style comments and new function call syntax to mix schema, default values, declarative instructions on how to fetch data, internal references, merging multiple definitions.

Check it out at https://varlock.dev
by Dah00n | 2026-01-17 00:01:42+00:00
>These kinds of joint exercises are pretty common and largely symbolic.

Danish Air force Hercules are doing their best impression of the Berlin air bridge to transport as much as they can to Greenland, airlines have transported personnel, several countries are sending navel ships, planes have already been doing exercises. While this isn't the first exercise there this is absolutely not common and just symbolic. Sure it isn't a force that can fight the US, but it is historic and unprecedented in Danish/Greenlandish history and it is a tripwire.

To put that into perspective the US has around 150-200 staff in Greenland.
by tiltowait | 2026-01-17 00:01:55+00:00
fish is a bit insonsistent on it. For instance, `git add <tab>` will only autocomplete for modified files. It will also fill in wildcards, e.g. `cat *.txt <tab>` will expand to show all .txt files. On the failure side, `rm foo <tab>` will still show `foo` as an option.

IME, zsh has better autocompletion (which, at the time at least, was a separate install).
by HanClinto | 2026-01-17 00:02:14+00:00
Thank you for publishing this! I absolutely love small embedding models, and have used them on a number of projects (both commercial and hobbyist). I look forward to checking this one out!

I don't know if this is too much to ask, but something that would really help me adopt your model is to include a fine-tuning setup. The BGE series of embeddings-models has been my go-to for a couple of years now -- not because it's the best-performing in the leaderboards, but because they make it so incredibly easy to fine-tune the model [0]. Give it a JSONL file of a bunch of training triplets, and you can fine-tune the base models on your own dataset. I appreciate you linking to the paper on the recipe for training this type of model -- how close to turnkey is your model to helping me do transfer learning with my own dataset? I looked around for a fine-tuning example of this model, and didn't happen to see anything, but I would be very interested in trying this one out.

Does support for fine-tuning already exist? If so, then I would be able to switch to this model away from BGE immediately.

* [0] - https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/tree/master/exampl...
by pstuart | 2026-01-17 00:02:49+00:00
I recall Tim Cook's quote and it has merit.

But the ecosystem (like all ecosystems) evolves as all the entities within it evolve. Originally it was cheap labor. I think the key difference is that each entity in the US is independent and self-focused on quarterly earnings (as the C-Suite is rewarded by that and they call the shots), whereas China thinks holistically as far as how the nation moves ahead as a whole.

tl;dr our priorities have been reversed -- profit vs people vs vice versa.

https://itimanufacturing.com/manufacturing-move-china/
by pftg | 2026-01-17 00:03:17+00:00
I cannot believe the excuse for why shift-left QA is “not working” is that Amazon hires developers who can’t learn basic testing skills that QA engineers picked up in three months. If developers can’t write valid code for tests, that’s on the organization, not on the practice.

The author forgot to mention the costs of handoffs, which paid off all those tiny learning investments.

Shift-left has over 30 years of proof as one of the most effective ways to build reliable software.

P.S. This isn’t an ACM article; it’s a strongly opinionated post based on personal experience.

P.P.S. I'm not against QA, but make them as bug/quality hunters, instead of toil.