MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Not15CharsLong | 2026-01-18 17:30:17+00:00
This is not quite the outcome I foresaw. I genuinely expected Trump to entirely ghost Rodriguez, because she had the gall to accept the Peace Prize, whereas she should, of course, have refused it outright and demanded it to be awarded to Trump instead.

Absent that scenario, I fully expected a tearful ceremony in the Rose Garden, where she would hand the medal to him, as the only True Recipient. That didn't happen either, and what we got right now seems a bit... forced? Like: Trump's advisors got through to him (no simple feat!) and positioned her as the only slightly viable path toward success in Latin America, and got him to take the L?

Anyway, total insanity...
by babblingfish | 2026-01-18 17:30:31+00:00
Why AI-generated novels will always feel like something's missing.

This post was inspired, in part, by a post last week of someone asking if they should start a blog in the age of LLMs. I hope my main argument here helps encourage people to pursue their own writing!

If you have any questions for me, you can drop a comment here or on the article. Thanks for reading!
by pfdietz | 2026-01-18 17:30:42+00:00
The cost of atorvastatin is about $100/year. The value of avoiding a cardiac event might be in the millions of dollars, so 25% reduction of a 3% risk sounds like a good deal.

This analysis ignores the issue of negative side effects. The most serious, rhabdomyolysis, occurs in about 0.1% of those taking statins. Liver issues are more common, and the cost of monitoring that might affect the cost/benefit ratio.

It would be nice to have a next generation statin that didn't have the muscle side effect (which appears to be independent of the primary mode of action of statins.)
by zahlman | 2026-01-18 17:30:53+00:00
> Big companies will often tithe to these megachurches. Some churches are bigger than others. The Linux Foundation makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller foundations like the Python Software Foundation have to make do with only a few million.

This hides essential detail that would seem to very much weaken the argument. You have the Linux Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation that "make hundreds of millions of dollars", and then everyone else is orders of magnitude smaller. Python might be in third place, for all I know (or maybe it's Apache).

> It shows how most open source projects aren’t some giant megachurch like group. These projects are one person.

> It’s easy to assume everyone else is also a megachurch member, even if they are not. The church members are pretty noisy and get a lot of attention.

I suspect most of those random bazaar vendors would like to have a respectable church-sized building. Or at least a proper stall.

> If you look at modern day open source, it sometimes feels like the megachurch open source is better because they have a nice parking lot, give out donation receipts, and it doesn’t smell like kabobs.

Well, no; it has more to do with the sense that outsiders are taking the bazaar seriously.
by jhbadger | 2026-01-18 17:30:59+00:00
As mentioned, the word "trope" dates back to ancient times, although generally meaning rhetorical devices like similes and metaphors rather than in the "reused plot" sense generally used today. But even the ancients still recognized those. Aristotle's Poetics deals with plays in addition to poems, and he discusses what sort of plots work in tragedies.
by mxkopy | 2026-01-18 17:31:00+00:00
The problem is deeper than economics. It’s the festering wound of reconstruction turning putrid. It doesn’t have to be the end of the US, but it certainly can be.

Also, I’m not sure the US economy was even great for most of the periods you mentioned. The question of if the US survives to have the same economic standing that it did in the 1800s is not that compelling
by TrackerFF | 2026-01-18 17:31:12+00:00
The other day I read this article about Grigori Perelman, Russian mathematician who declined to accept any medal or prize related to him solving the Poincaré conjecture. He declined the fields medals and millennium prize on the basis that he didn't view himself as a hero, and thought such awards were irrelevant.

And then you have Trump, on the complete other side of that spectrum.
by xg15 | 2026-01-18 17:31:24+00:00
If we're working with those metaphors, I think it's useful to read up on how actual, real-life bazaars are operating.

In particular:

> A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small stalls or shops [...] They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets that have doors on each end and served as a city's central marketplace.

> Merchants specialized in each trade were also organized into guilds, which provided support to merchants but also to clients. The exact details of the organizations varied from region to region. Each guild had rules that members were expected to follow, but they were loose enough to allow for competition. Guilds also fulfilled some functions similar to trade unions and were able to negotiate with the government on behalf of merchants or represent their interests when needed.

> Historically, in Islamic cities, the muḥtasib was the official in charge of regulating and policing the bazaar and other aspects of urban life. They monitored things such as weights and measures, pricing, cleanliness, noise, and traffic circulation, as well as being responsible for other issues of public morality. They also investigated complaints about cheating or the quality of goods.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazaar )

So not quite the anarchocapitalist, self-organizing utopia that tech people seem to imagine there - in fact, they have a lot of organization, both between merchants as well as on the bazaar as a whole.

Seems to me, this model is more similar to the "privately-owned marketplaces" we see increasingly in the digital world: App stores, merchant sites like Amazon, etc.

In that sense, "most of open-source" being on Github which is now owned by Microsoft is ironically more similar to a real bazaar.

With one difference: At least the administrators of real bazaars were public officials with a mandate to keep the market fair - and there was organization among the vendors in form of guilds. With digital marketplaces, the markets themselves are private assets and the administrators are blatantly self-interested. And there doesn't seem to be any kind if higher-order organization across different open source projects, everyone is fighting on their own.

So maybe it would do the open source community good to become more like an actual bazaar.
by rwmj | 2026-01-18 17:31:57+00:00
The Indian government was actually a very early adopter, they had one of the first RISC-V processors that wasn't based on the vanilla Rocket designs, starting back in like 2016 or so. Unfortunately they made some other weird decisions, like not supporting compressed instructions so the chip wasn't compatible with any mainstream Linux distros, and I don't think the project really went anywhere. Although looking at Wikipedia the project seems to still exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKTI_(microprocessor)
by Eggpants | 2026-01-18 17:31:57+00:00
OpenAI and Microsoft have defined AGI as a revenue number so yeah maybe using that definition.

I believe AGI will require the ability to self tune its own Neutral network coefficients which the current tech cannot do because I can’t deduce it’s own errors. Oh sorry “hallucinations”. Developing brains learn from both pain and verbal feedback (no, not food!) etc.

It’s an interesting problem where just telling a LLM model it’s wrong is not enough to adjust Billions of parameters with.
by hnuser123456 | 2026-01-18 17:32:01+00:00
Tesla was winning because they had insight and balls to make electric cars that actually looked and worked like normal fucking cars. Everyone else who was making EVs failed to resist the temptation to reinvent the definition of the car, throwing out a century of wisdom and natural selection of features of good car design, to the point that it seemed like nobody wanted to succeed.

As soon as they forgot this, their downfall began.
by 986aignan | 2026-01-18 17:32:04+00:00
Not all answers are conducive to such subtle manipulation, though. If the user asks for an algorithm to solve the knapsack problem, it's kind of hard to stealthily go "now let's see how many Coca Colas will fit in the knapsack". If the user asks for a cyberpunk story, "the decker prepared his Microsoft Cyberdeck" would sound off, too.

Biasing actual buying advice would be feasible, but it would have to be handled very carefully to not be too obvious.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-18 17:32:37+00:00
It is always the "what if" when looking back at the opportunities that presented themselves in life that eat at you. Things that might have been were it not for the lack of courage to try.

I rarely regret the things I did that didn't work out, it is always the things I could have done but didn't do. Reducing the number of compelling yet unexplored branches in life significantly increases life satisfaction.
by frognumber | 2026-01-18 17:32:48+00:00
I had a physics professor I worked with who had a Nobel Prize.

He didn't win it. It was won by a team of students / collaborators / mentees, who felt he deserved it. I can't disagree with them. Among the nicest people in the world.

I don't think anyone meant it in the sense of "You're a Nobel Prize Winner," so much as "We couldn't have done this without your mentorship, and you deserve to hold onto this." He certainly doesn't consider himself to be a Nobel Prize winner.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-01-18 17:33:59+00:00
This very much reminds me how the earliest users get a bit screwed due to high costs and low quality. Maybe these users are caused enthusiasts, so they don't care. The next set of users get higher quality and lower costs. These are your big winners in the timeline of a technology.

The middle users get benefits, but aren't treated quite like the previous set.

Then you have your late adopters, these are the ones that are lightly abused, but they get a mature product, so it isn't that bad.

Finally you have your last users. These are milked for every drop. They have irrational loyalty or are locked in.

I imagine AI will follow this trend and we are entering past those middle users as we speak. Seeing how little difference there was between GPT 3.5 and 4, and how computationally expensive 4.5 was, I think we've hit the end. Now its just how many prompts do you want to run for COT/Thinking?

GPT 5.2 is cheap and they are proposing ads. They see the end is near and need to capture profit before local models take over.
by gruez | 2026-01-18 17:34:17+00:00
>Maybe Henry Ford was on to something when he shocked the world by paying his employees enough to afford the product they were making (more than doubling many workers' wages)...

That's a nice story to tell, but the economics never works out if you do the math. Whatever extra wages you pay, you only get a fraction of that back in increased sales. How much percent of a worker's income do you think is spent on a car? As a rough measure we can use the BLS's CPI weights for "new and used vehicles", which comes in at 7.4%, with an extra 1.4% if you include maintenance and parts. By that alone "paying his employees enough to afford the product they were making" is going to be a losing proposition, because Ford can only hope to get 8.8% of whatever they paid in wages back as revenue. And all of this is ignoring the fact that you can't pay extra wages out of revenue, only profit, so you can only hope to recoup a fraction of that 8.8%.
by dilawar | 2026-01-18 17:34:18+00:00
The current prime minister of India once announced that he has Ph.D. in "all of the political science". Asked for proof, they produced his degree from Delhi University. No one who got their degree at that place during that time can't recall seeing him in the classroom!

But that's nothing compared to this man. I usually avoid his news but seeing him grabbing fifa peace price wasn't a good sight.
by epolanski | 2026-01-18 17:34:21+00:00
Complex APIs that require intimacy with internals with their gotchas.

Complex rendering model and hard to tame lifecycle since they ditched the class component. Very hard to get performant websites (but you're free to link me what you've produced with React and prove me wrong).

Also, biggest issue: severely misused for websites that are mostly static content and are nowhere near "app-like" nor have any particular reactivity need. 95%+ of react "applications" would've benefited from being written with a templating language instead.

E.g. Github was miles better under all aspects when it used ruby but of course somebody had to sell to upper management their promotion case.
by jimbohn | 2026-01-18 17:34:36+00:00
IMO, China will get back Taiwan without firing a single shot, the US is slowly de-risking itself from it and will eventually make Taiwan redundant. After seeing how the US is "helping" Ukraine, will the Taiwanese think fighting an all-out war with allies like this is worth it? China doesn't have the same genocidal intentions russia has towards Ukraine, so less reasons for people to fight it out
by rramadass | 2026-01-18 17:35:43+00:00
William James i have read, both "Pragmatism"(not completely though) and "Talks to Teachers" (my favourite) but not much of Wittgenstein.

There is a lot here which jives with ancient Hindu Schools of Philosophy, specifically; Nyaya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyaya), Vaisheshika (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaisheshika) and Charvaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka).

Bayesian epistemology with priors have always been problematic since if there were no constraints on prior beliefs than anything goes. But in order to constrain the priors you need to know the distribution to calculate probabilities.
by adventured | 2026-01-18 17:35:43+00:00
The goal in Ukraine for the US is to bleed Russia. While Russia is busy in Ukraine, it's losing its influence and positions, from Syria to Iran.

The ideal for the US superpower right now, is to collapse Iran's regime while Russia is kept busy in Ukraine. It's unable to lend support to prop up its allies. The peace efforts are fake, meant to maintain a constant back and forth that never really goes anywhere. The US system has been focused on trying to strip Russia out of that region for decades, since before 9/11. Iraq was about Russia. Syria was about Russia. The first Gulf War was about decimating the Soviet supplied Iraqi army with the latest generation of US weapons, to put them to the test.

Most of the agenda exists from one administration to the next. The Pentagon works on its strategic aims across decades (see Bush & Obama & Trump and pivoting against China).

The US superpower is interested in the great power conflicts, it's not interested in Iraq because of oil, or Venezuela because of oil. It's about Russia and China, the other components (oil, chips, weapons, etc) are mere strategic calculations on the board.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-18 17:35:51+00:00
> The Ftrace mechanism can be disabled at run time, of course — so Singularity helpfully enables it automatically and blocks any attempts to turn it off.

Can a kernel be compiled with Ftrace forced off? If it can be disabled at runtime, I take it it's not mandatory for the kernel to work. And I don't just mean off: I mean striping the Ftrace code path (dead code elimination or whatever).

I'm also interested in other measures, like a unified kernel moreover without the ability to load modules but this is not what my question is about. I'd like to know if Ftrace can just be turned off for good at kernel compile time.
by estimator7292 | 2026-01-18 17:36:37+00:00
Pretty much any time I cross domains with another engineer. I'm an embedded engineer in a team of highly advanced RF and FPGA engineers. Every time I'm given a task it ends up something like "this board has 6 active ICs and I'm spinning up an FPGA to read an encoder knob, can you find an LED driver?" And then I replace the entire circuit with a single microcontroller.

Conversely, my uninformed suggestions on their work often winds up being incredibly overcomplicated because I don't understand the domain as well.

That's one of the benefits of being in a well balanced team. We can collectively converge on ideal solutions where individually we couldn't.
by Not15CharsLong | 2026-01-18 17:37:02+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delcy_Rodr%C3%ADguez

Delcy Eloína Rodríguez Gómez (born 18 May 1969) is a Venezuelan lawyer, diplomat, and politician who has served as the acting president of Venezuela since 3 January 2026, after the United States captured and de facto removed President Nicolás Maduro from power.

But you're right she is not the Nobel laureate. Quite an embarrassing brainfart from my side, possibly instigated by the fact that Machado would have been president now, if not for her obstinacy...
by alnico | 2026-01-18 17:37:17+00:00
Congrats to everyone involved in the jQuery 4.0 release.

For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for a more structured approach on top of jQuery, JsViews (https://jsviews.com) provides a reactive templating and data-binding system that’s been around and stable for many years.

It hasn’t seen the same level of adoption as newer frameworks, but it may still be of interest to people who prefer the jQuery ecosystem.
by babblingfish | 2026-01-18 17:37:56+00:00
As someone who reads newsletters for fun, my suggestion would be to subscribe to less newsletters, and focus on the ones you enjoy reading the most. The product design seems to me motivated by FOMO and wanting to get all the info from all the newsletters. Think of newsletters less as a bucket you fill up and need to empty, and more as a river you can dip in and out of. Don't stress out about staying on top of all the hype. (I know you asked for product feedback but you got philosophical feedback instead.)
by moron4hire | 2026-01-18 17:38:01+00:00
You're going to have to explain to me how a parametrized request/response system like calling a Web API or making a SQL query can be mapped to reading files. I've seen some stuff that people do with FUSE and it looks like ridiculous circus hoop jumping to making the Brainfuck-is-Turing-complete version of a query system. We have syntax for a reason.
by adventured | 2026-01-18 17:38:05+00:00
Up it to $5 million per Greenlander then. The US can afford to pull the trigger on a $250-$280 billion acquisition. The EU can't afford to counter it. To put that sum into perspective for the US economy: that's merely 2.x years of operating income for Google. There's no scenario where the people of Greenland reject that $250b offer in a free vote.
by feraloink | 2026-01-18 17:39:03+00:00
I know, right? Look at this, what Liv Ullman said. https://deadline.com/2026/01/norwegian-star-liv-ullmann-comm... I don’t understand what Liz Ullmann means here. The Nobel people said the prize can’t be revoked, shared, or transferred so it is just the gold medal that María Corina Machado gave to Trump. It is a very nice medal to have! But it isn’t anything to get upset about if she chooses to give her medal to someone. Norway isn’t going to invade the USA to get it back.

>“I’m Norwegian, we give a Nobel Prize to somebody who deserved it and suddenly that Nobel Prize is going to somebody else. It’s so strange, so strange and that’s why I’m happy specifically now that we have laws that say that if you misuse the Nobel Prize we take it away from you. Somebody in power in the United States may be disappointed. He will lose it… I am happy.”
by hexbin010 | 2026-01-18 17:39:10+00:00
Don't lecture me in a condescending manner. I'm British, I've taken the train all my life, and for years have worn NC headphones to counter the incessant announcements and anti social behaviour. I also have to my play my own music to drown it out

Also: generalising about Europeans is quite ignorant. As is ignoring recent data and recent risks and just citing long term data to insinuate people are being hysterical
by catapart | 2026-01-18 17:40:09+00:00
yeah yeah yeah, everyone get on the AT protocol, so that the bluesky org can quickly get all of these filthy users off of their own servers (which costs money) while still maintaining the original, largest, and currently only portal to actually publish the content (which makes money[0]). let them profit from a technical "innovation" that is 6 levels of indirection to mimic activity pub.

if they were decent people, that would be one thing. but if they're going to be poisoned with the same faux-libertarian horseshit that strangled twitter, I don't see any value in supporting their protocol. there's always another protocol.

but assuming I was willing to play ball and support this protocol, they STILL haven't solved the actual problem that no one else is solving either: your data exists somewhere else. until there's a server that I can bring home and plug in with setup I can do using my TV's remote, you're not going to be able to move most people to "private" data storage. you're just going to change which massive organization is exploiting them.

I know, I know: hardware is a bitch and the type of device I'm even pitching seems like a costly boondoggle. but that's the business, and if you're not addressing it, you're not fomenting real change; you're patting yourself on the back for pretending we can algorithm ourselves out of late-stage capitalism.

[0] *potentially/eventually
by whacked_new | 2026-01-18 17:40:25+00:00
I spent some time reorganizing the code in my gist into a repo for better change tracking at https://github.com/whacked/inline-interactive-forms.el

I also pulled vui.el into the dev setup and basically instructed the agents to reach feature parity. I ran out of CC credits fast so switched to codex. Codex makes a lot of unbalanced parenthesis mistakes even in agent, although it does eventually get it right by telling it to run emacs itself. Codex wasn't able to reach feature parity though, like the background color indications (I supply a video in the readme). I didn't look too deep yet.