MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-22 18:07:57+00:00
Unfortunately your comment still doesn't address my concerns on how this model is supposed to be sustainable to work in the future given the new economic realities of Germany's faltering industry, and especially the existing intra-EU disparity between german labor and eastern European labor, let alone international labor.

You're reiterating the pros of why it's been good SO FAR, but you don't drive on the road by looking in the rearview mirror, if you get what I mean.

My take is that the german government will have to do another "agenda 2010" row of cuts to union and labor rights, if it wishes to keep jobs in the country and remain a competitive export economy, hell, even Switzerland has significantly less labor rights than Germany. Not saying that's a good thing, but it seems like that's one of the necessary evils if you want to have a growing economy, and not turn into Italy or France.
by mort96 | 2026-01-22 18:08:06+00:00
I just did some interactive shell loops and globs to compress everything and output CSV which I processed into an ASCII table, so I don't exactly have a pipeline I can modify and re-run the tests with compression speeds added ... but I can run some more interactive shell-glob-and-loop-based analysis to give you decompression speeds:

~/tmp/pdfbench $ hyperfine --warmup 2 \
'for x in zst/*; do zstd -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done' \
'for x in gz/*; do gzip -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done' \
'for x in xz/*; do xz -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done' \
'for x in br/*; do brotli -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done'
Benchmark 1: for x in zst/*; do zstd -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
Time (mean ± σ): 164.6 ms ± 1.3 ms [User: 83.6 ms, System: 72.4 ms]
Range (min … max): 162.0 ms … 166.9 ms 17 runs

Benchmark 2: for x in gz/*; do gzip -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
Time (mean ± σ): 143.0 ms ± 1.0 ms [User: 87.6 ms, System: 43.6 ms]
Range (min … max): 141.4 ms … 145.6 ms 20 runs

Benchmark 3: for x in xz/*; do xz -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
Time (mean ± σ): 981.7 ms ± 1.6 ms [User: 891.5 ms, System: 93.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 978.7 ms … 984.3 ms 10 runs

Benchmark 4: for x in br/*; do brotli -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
Time (mean ± σ): 254.5 ms ± 2.5 ms [User: 172.9 ms, System: 67.4 ms]
Range (min … max): 252.3 ms … 260.5 ms 11 runs

Summary
for x in gz/*; do gzip -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done ran
1.15 ± 0.01 times faster than for x in zst/*; do zstd -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
1.78 ± 0.02 times faster than for x in br/*; do brotli -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
6.87 ± 0.05 times faster than for x in xz/*; do xz -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done

As expected, xz is super slow. Gzip is fastest, zstd being somewhat slower, brotli slower again but still much faster than xz.

+-------+-------+--------+-------+
| gzip | zstd | brotli | xz |
+-------+-------+--------+-------+
| 143ms | 165ms | 255ms | 982ms |
+-------+-------+--------+-------+

I honestly expected zstd to win here.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-22 18:08:09+00:00
And location. While going to school my family lived in a 2 bedroom that was, I think, just under 600 square feet. The fridge was in the living area. The kitchen was a space so small you could touch every surface/cabinet if you stood in the middle of it. But we were right in the middle of amazing services. A park was a 3 minute walk away. My first class was visible from my bedroom window as was the shared play area of the apartments around me so I could let my 6yo 'go to the park' and play but still watch him if I wanted to. All the shopping was local and actual businesses that did actual things were in walking distance. We had many friends that lived/worked/played/shopped all within walking distance and that tiny apartment didn't feel small at all because the real living room was the city.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 18:08:16+00:00
Studies like this remind me of early concerns about calculators making students "worse at math." The reality is that tools change what skills matter, not whether people think.

We're heading toward AI-first systems whether we like it or not. The interesting question isn't "does AI reduce brain connectivity for essay writing" - it's how we redesign education, work, and products around the assumption that everyone has access to powerful AI. The people who figure out how to leverage AI for higher-order thinking will massively outperform those still doing everything manually.

Cognitive debt is real if you're using AI to avoid thinking. But it's cognitive leverage if you're using AI to think faster and about bigger problems.
by autoexec | 2026-01-22 18:08:52+00:00
It's not about "product availability" it's about "product affordability"

> "Google Trends data shows that ultra-fast fashion clothing retailer Shein is searched more often in states with high poverty percentages." (https://cnsmaryland.org/2022/11/17/popularity-for-shein-surg...)

That's not to say that rich people don't enjoy a deal, but poor people shop where they can afford. I try not to go into Walmart, but when I have its hard not to notice that the people shopping there don't look very wealthy (In fairness, people with money who buy things at Walmart tend to order online). Even Walmart admits this (https://www.businessinsider.com/wal-mart-says-food-stamps-ar...). 1 out of every 8 Americans is on food stamps, Many of those not on food stamps are struggling to stay off of them. A lot of Americans would love to pay a little more to shop at nicer places.
by softwaredoug | 2026-01-22 18:09:11+00:00
It used to be the big worry among climate activists that you'd never get every country organize and move in one direction. Like you'd need some global body to clean everything up.

That's very fragile.

Luckily, we're moving to a world where a disjoint, self-interested response can be an advantage. Countries decide, for their own selfish reasons, to adopt green energy. For energy independence, affordability, clean air, etc.

So when one country politically rotates out for dumb reasons, other countries pick up the slack and make a bit of progress.
by usrusr | 2026-01-22 18:09:45+00:00
But do you really have to cram in as many residents as you could with a purpose-built tenement? There must be ways to keep headcount in the range the infrastructure can support and still provide a lot more housing than just leaving them as empty decaying offices owned by the last one holding the bag. Intersperse flats with windowless storage units (you have a depth problem anyways), low density commercial use like workshops with live-by flats and so on. Large units designed to attract high squarefeet/low headcount tenants, not bunk bed families. Add regulation only as a fallback limiter. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-01-22 18:09:46+00:00
I thought this was a really interesting writeup of a "normal person's" sincere attempt to try out vibe coding. The author is probably a far outlier on technology awareness and competence but does not have a technical background or (much?) programming experience. Basically what I would expect is the ideal stance for a non-programmer to use these tools, if they can be used effectively by nonprogrammers right now.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 18:09:50+00:00
Exactly this. The shift from "writing code" to "reviewing code and focusing on architecture" is the natural evolution. Every abstraction layer in computing history freed us to think at higher levels - assembler to C, C to Python, and now Python to "describe what you want."

The people framing this as "cognitive debt" are measuring the wrong thing. You're not losing the ability to think - you're shifting what you think about. That's not a bug, it's the whole point.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-22 18:10:05+00:00
> But it is not just mad king. If republicans as a party did not supported it, they would vote in cogress to block and stop him. It would need just a few republican votes.

That's directly due to the mad king. Trump's the head of the party, and he's used to running an organization where no one questions him, because that's what he did at the Trump Organization for decades. If you vote against him - and some GOP senators did recently - you "receive pressure" to change your mind. What does "receive pressure" mean? I'm not in DC and not in politics, so I can't say for sure, but my guess is it can include things like backing primary/caucus candidates that will be a reliable vote for Trump's agenda come the next election cycle, public disparagement on Truth Social, and tacit threats to derail the representatives' personal agendas for their constituents.

Could it be even more direct, like threats of violence or blackmail? Maybe. It wouldn't surprise me with Trump.

This has existed throughout history in a number of systems of government, but it seems especially bad now in the US because you have someone who came from a system where he never had to encounter any sort of resistance who is now running the executive. Prior to Trump, all modern presidents had at least some experience in government, and it was understood that there was bargaining involved in the system.

I've maintained since the 2015 primaries that you simply cannot have someone from the private world be in such a high office, and this is exactly why.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 18:11:00+00:00
Banning AI agents is the new "banning mobile browsers." Companies tried that too in the early smartphone era - remember when sites blocked mobile user agents to force desktop views?

The businesses that win will be the ones that build AI-agent-friendly interfaces, not the ones that try to ban them. eBay is protecting their ad revenue and impulse-buy funnel in the short term, but they're ceding the future to whoever figures out how to make agent-compatible commerce work.

Every product and platform will eventually have an "agent API" alongside their human UI. The only question is who builds it first.
by listenallyall | 2026-01-22 18:11:11+00:00
You said: I mentioned the Vimeo thing in a meeting this morning, and the head of Communications immediately said he's going to start looking for alternatives.

And now you're saying he might have a "cronjob" constantly searching for alternatives? Well then your original point is neutered, he's not going to "start" since he's already been looking.

And video is only a small part? Not an "important piece"? Well then why should Vimeo's owners manage their company based upon what low-level users think? Again, you've minimized the point of your original post to irrelevancy.
by bedatadriven | 2026-01-22 18:11:17+00:00
I can remember something like this a few years ago when a customer emailed our helpdesk with their own internal IT support desk in copy. Our helpdesk at the time sent a complete new email acknowledging the request, which the customer's desk ALSO acknowledged in a new thread...

I think it took us a good hour and a few hundred tickets to get the helpdesks to stop fighting with each other!
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-22 18:11:26+00:00
If you have a strong grip on exactly what it means, sure, but look at any HN thread on the topic of fraud in science. People think replication = validity because it's been described as the replication crisis for the last 15 years. And that's the best case!

Funding replication studies in the current environment would just lead to lots of invalid papers being promoted as "fully replicated" and people would be fooled even harder than they already are. There's got to be a fix for the underlying quality issues before replication becomes the next best thing to do.
by Proclus | 2026-01-22 18:12:16+00:00
It seems they're using the standard dictionary, which is utterly bizzare.

The standard Brotli dictionary bakes in a ton of assumptions about what the Web looked like in 2015, including not just which HTML tags were particularly common but also such things as which swear words were trendy.

It doesn't seem reasonable to think that PDFs have symbol probabilities remotely similar to the web corpus Google used to come up with that dictionary.

On top of that, it seems utterly daft to be baking that into a format which is expected to fit archival use cases and thus impose that 2015 dictionary on PDF readers for a century to come.

I too would strongly prefer that they use zstd.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 18:12:26+00:00
Great analysis of the real motivation here. But this feels like the record labels trying to ban MP3 players. You can protect the impression funnel today, but the trajectory is clear - consumers will increasingly delegate purchasing decisions to agents, and the platforms that adapt will capture that flow.

The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping. The one that bans agents becomes a legacy system humans have to manually navigate when the agent can't help.

eBay's current business model may be a "nightmare customer" for AI agents, but that's a problem with the business model, not with the agents.
by wing-_-nuts | 2026-01-22 18:12:34+00:00
As someone who lives in a 700 sq ft 1bd apartment, I guess maybe you could pack in another two bedrooms in with 300 more sq ft (my bedroom is ~ 120-130 sqft w ~ 25 sqft of closet space). You wouldn't have a whole lot of elbow room. Still makes more sense than the 2500+ sqft monstrosities we regularly build in the states.
by scrumper | 2026-01-22 18:12:55+00:00
Been years too but yes, he gets to live back on earth and shacks up with his girlfriend if I remember correctly. I remember even as a kid thinking it was tonally a bit weird but I need to re-read the entire series with adult eyes.

I was going to reply to jacquesm's comment above about Forrest - they both embody some stoic qualities - but you touched on that anyway.

> Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind

Yossarian! Outstanding. Bit of a cynic more than a stoic perhaps? You're right about Bilbo. Frodo I think not so much. And Samwise of course is pure American.
by cyberax | 2026-01-22 18:13:33+00:00
> SLAAC is more complex than IPv4 w/ NAT w/ DHCPv4? Serious?

Yes? Has this ever been in question?

Stateful DHCP provides a _reliable_ way to configure clients, while SLAAC is anything but. It's also insufficient in itself if you want to configure things like NTP servers.

But that's not the main issue. The main issue is that with SLAAC you are supposed to hand out real routable addresses. That are _not_ controlled by you, so the end devices need to be able to handle prefix withdrawals and deprecations. This can lead to your printer not working if your ISP connection goes down and it has no more active IPv6 prefixes.

So you also need a stable ULA. But even that is not a guarantee because source IP selection rules are, shall we say, not the best.

But wait, there's more! You can trivially load-balance/failover NAT-ed IPv4 network over two WAN connections. Now try to do that with IPv6. Go on. I'll wait.
by coldtea | 2026-01-22 18:13:39+00:00
>My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems

Solve enough problems relying on AI writing the code as a black box, and over time your grasp of coding will worsen, and you wont be undestanding what the AI should be doing or what it is doing wrong - not even at the architectural level, except in broad strokes.

One ends like the clueless manager type who hasn't touched a computer in 30 years. At which point there will be little reason for the actual job owners to retain their services.

Computer programming on the whole relying on the canned experience of the AI data set, producing more AI churn as ratio of the available training code over time, and plateuing both itself and AI, with the dubious future of reaching Singularity its only hope out of this.
Show HN: Bashme_a_script_that", generate and cache bash scripts via promptcmd
by tgalal | 2026-01-22 18:13:44+00:00
This is an example tool I created using my tool (promptcmd) for turning prompts into "native-looking" executables:

Usage: bashme_a_script_that [OPTIONS] <query>...

Prompt inputs:
--stdin accept stdin input
<query>... positional query. Can be spaced and with/without quotes

It makes use of caching responses: if I review the generated script and it looks good (or incomprehensible and I'm in YOLO mood), I run the command again and pipe directly into bash. It'll use the reviewed response instead of generating a new one.

Would love to get feedback or ideas for promptcmd:

Github: https://github.com/tgalal/promptcmd/

Documentation: https://docs.promptcmd.sh/

Examples: https://promptcmd.sh/lib/
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 18:14:16+00:00
This assumes the LLM ecosystem stays centralized. Open source models running locally or on user-controlled infrastructure flip this - the agent works for you, not for whoever pays the model provider.

The race is already happening: open weights models are getting good enough that "your personal shopping agent" doesn't need to phone home to a company with ad incentives. The future probably looks more like ad blockers than ad platforms - agents that aggressively optimize for user preferences, not platform revenue.
by ottah | 2026-01-22 18:14:32+00:00
I strongly disagree agree with the classics having any cultural relevance outside of the elite class. It entirely dismisses the bulk of all media commonly enjoyed by people in the period, which has more significance to society and its politics. Focusing on the classics filters everything through the point of view of the people in power, which is an incredibly poor way of understanding the world.

Besides the classics were elite fashion. Like speaking French or fencing. They were a means to distinguish class, with hard to access knowledge and habits. It wasn't because these things were good, it was because the average person could not easily attain access to them.

The great books canon was partly constructed retroactively by people with agendas about what civilization meant. A real collection of classics would have much more folk stories, common herioc figures and fantasies.
by XORD_IO | 2026-01-22 18:14:37+00:00
NeuralVoid is a one-click hosts-file blocker that cuts off telemetry from major AI-powered tools: GitHub Copilot, Grammarly, Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop/Firefly), Microsoft Windows/Edge Copilot, and more.

It adds precise domain blocks to your hosts file (with backup/restore) to stop the constant phoning-home of usage data, keystrokes, and context snippets to train their models. No background processes, no firewall rules—just surgical DNS blocking.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-22 18:15:42+00:00
I've had Waymos in SF take very strange routes. It seemed to really strongly avoid ever using Market St, generally preferring a long right-angle route over the perfect hypotenuse. Sometimes this delayed me very considerably, doubling my ride time compared to the Google Maps estimated time.

That said, I've never felt unsafe or uncomfortable. But I have jumped out halfway through the ride and grabbed an eScooter instead.
by jeyjeyemem | 2026-01-22 18:15:47+00:00
Emissary is a simple-to-use, no dependency, yet BLAZING FAST messaging library for decoupling messages (requests and events) and message handlers.

Emissary aims to take advantage of the simplicity of using the annotations for handlers (e.g. @RequestHandler/@EventHandler) without the drawbacks of reflection (slow).

What differentiates Emissary from other messaging/dispatch libraries? It takes advantage of java.lang.invoke.LambdaMetafactory to avoid the cost of invoking methods reflectively. This results in performance close to directly invoking the request handler and event handler methods.

~ 1000% more throughput compared to other similar libraries (Spring's ApplicationEventPublisher, Pipelinr, EventBus)
~ 90% faster compared to other similar libraries (Spring's ApplicationEventPublisher, Pipelinr, EventBus)

Benchmarks found on the GitHub repository: https://github.com/joel-jeremy/emissary?tab=readme-ov-file#p...
by cyberax | 2026-01-22 18:16:02+00:00
> That's an understatement, my carrier has disabled MMS years ago. Still, that's not an issue with the MMS protocol, just an issue with carriers.

If a protocol requires something specific from carriers, then it's an issue with the protocol.

> The American carriers including Jibe in their network still speak RCS to clients.

Sure, and? It's still useless for me because it can't be used without Google Play.
by owenversteeg | 2026-01-22 18:16:15+00:00
I mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better in mild climates.

That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-22 18:16:57+00:00
> Most employees are incapable of rating their manager. They can complain or praise, but they're not competent to judge whether the manager is competent.

Disagree. I think most employees are qualified to judge whether their manager facilitates or hinders their team's work.

Servant-leader is one (among many competing) valuable manager traits because it does press managers to align part of their focus on enabling their team to get work done, instead of simply taking credit for work their team does without manager involvement.

Sure, you're going to get volatility in direct reports' rankings of their manager (versus an objective truth), but...

(a) You get that with manager rankings of their direct reports too

(b) Individual rankings aren't the signal: the signal is median ratings. If managers have entire teams that universally hate them, that's not noise
by CanadianLaw | 2026-01-22 18:17:03+00:00
It appears that some time in November, Y Combinator changed its investment eligibility to only US, Cayman and Singapore companies. As linked in the Way Back Machine post, they had previously accepted Canadian companies but subsequently removed them from consideration. Has anyone seen any official news statements or posts considering this or has it simply been a sneaky move for them to discontinue investment in Canadian companies? Also open to any insight as to possible reasons for the change (e.g. taxes, tariffs, immigration, etc...).
by dyauspitr | 2026-01-22 18:17:06+00:00
Homer is a great example for this. However, at the end of the day, through all his incompetence and bumbling, he wins. He has a wonderful wife, kids and a home. He has friends and always has an upbeat “winner” attitude. You see him and see a happy, successful person inspite of his failings.

Same with Peter Griffin but he is confident and fiercely dominant. He doesn’t feel like a loser.

Even Michael from the office who is a “loser”, has a lot of redeeming qualities like genuine care for his employees, terrific salesman and a position of leadership.
by whinvik | 2026-01-22 18:17:16+00:00
Haha something that I want to try out. I have started using voice input more and more instead of typing and now I am on my second app and second TTS model, namely Handy and Parakeet V3.

Parakeet is pretty good, but there are times it struggles. Would be interesting to see how Qwen compares once Handy has it in.
by mw1 | 2026-01-22 18:17:16+00:00
The only solution is to provide stable long-term housing and social support. Most else has been tried, but it doesn’t seem that you can punish people and make them less poor. Cops continue to sweep through and steal their belongings, but that clearly won’t solve the problem, and hasn’t. You can throw them all in jail, but that’s more expensive than providing non-jailed housing and rehabilitation services. You can forcefully or enticingly move them along with cops or free bus tickets, but that just shifts the problem elsewhere temporarily. As long as we continue to decide to solve this by increasing funds for cops above all other services in a city, this is the result we will get.