MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iLemming | 2026-01-10 23:08:32+00:00
> We do not need another competing standard here

I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system.

Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on.

Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata.

You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose:

- Task state tracking

- Code execution

- Agenda queries

- Time-based organization

- Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things

These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions.

When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
by Nevermark | 2026-01-10 23:08:52+00:00
The scary thing is this is what Facebook, Google, and OpenAI are working to provide.

I think the pervasive lack of privacy, mixed with improving AI, is a first class security disaster. As in, orders of magnitude more serious than buffer overflows.

At some point, our culture and legal system are going to have to bend to fix the pervasive surveillance problem. Or we will all be at a tremendous disadvantage to all the entities collating our lives.
by mittensc | 2026-01-10 23:08:53+00:00
> The gap: If I want my family across 3 countries to see updates (like Facebook), but don't trust Meta with the data, what do I use?

Google photos, shared album?

Any messager group so people just chat.

Talk to them directly?

I'm not sure what another social network would bring... I'm not exactly using any of the existing ones anymore anyway.

good luck either way.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2026-01-10 23:09:10+00:00
> 100 books is too small a datasize

this to me sounds off. I read the same 8, to 10 books over and over and with every read discover new things. the idea of more books being more useful stands against the same books on repeat. and while I'm not religious, how about dudes only reading 1 book (the Bible, or Koran), and claiming that they're getting all their wisdom from these for a 1000 years?

If I have a library of 100+ books and they are not enough then the quality of these books are the problem and not the number of books in the library?
by al_borland | 2026-01-10 23:09:42+00:00
How does RHD make it easier to do things with your right hand?

I’m right-handed in a LHD country, and this means I used my right hand for almost everything. The gear selector, radio, climate controls, GPS… all done with my right hand. My left hand controls the turn signal, that’s about it. I think I’d have a very hard time with a RHD car where I need to be precise with buttons and touch screens using my left hand.
by tombert | 2026-01-10 23:09:44+00:00
During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job".

The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst management but even with engineers, came down to "try and justify your existence in the company". Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, and then drop constant references to your management about how hard what you're doing is.

The manager didn't like this response, and got more defensive, we ended up going back and forth, and eventually the interview ended and despite taking a pretty considerable paycut I was ok with my decision.

I didn't know the term "Resume Driven Development" until after I left, but that was a pretty accurate description.

[1] Not completely wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of their sins.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-10 23:09:44+00:00
I find it crazy that people would buy ton of stupid stuff from amazon, aliexpress or Shein but would not check the delivery option for stuff that is actually annoying to carry around yourself.

People who need a pickup bed for work usually buy those that come with the chassis of a commercial VAN which have a much bigger bed than you'd ever dream of on a Ford F series.

The rest are simply getting delivered or using trailers, either rented when used sporadically or bought. A trailer is usually at a more decent height and you don't have to carry the weight and have to manage a huge vehicle when you actually don't need all the space.
by getpost | 2026-01-10 23:09:46+00:00
Brad Marshall[0] makes a case for the benefits of stearic acid (C18:0), which is predominant in beef tallow and cocoa butter. It acts as a beneficial metabolic signal that promotes mitochondrial fat oxidation, higher energy expenditure, and leanness—counteracting the obesogenic effects of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs), especially linoleic acid.

[0] https://fireinabottle.net/every-fire-in-a-bottle-post-from-t...

EDIT: I'm sympathetic to Brad's argument and I'm concerned that RFK Jr's incompetence will interfere with ongoing research in this area of metabolism.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-10 23:11:21+00:00
> It's weird, I feel like we're arguing over saying the same thing

Yea, I think from the looks of it there's a bit of mutual confusion over terminology being used, but we are largely aligned

> Internet wasn't invented yet, memes couldn't depose kings

I'm using the Rene Girard definition of a "meme" before it got co-opted into internet speak.
by postpriorx | 2026-01-10 23:12:08+00:00
I was a transfer to UCSD - the transfer community itself is pretty large and one college (Sixth) houses a significant percentage, with dorms specifically for transfers. IMO there was far higher interesting diversity of folks there compared to rest of campus: veterans, addicts who got their shit together, tons of immigrants who couldn't afford going straight to UC (as well as your standard mostly 20-22 year old SoCal transfers) from which most people I know formed good networks.
by amadeuswoo | 2026-01-10 23:12:29+00:00
The pipeline and incentive structure probably isn't there yet. I've hung out with game designers who are either bullish on AI but haven't integrated it, or just aren't tapped in at all.

Reminds me of the web3 wave a few years back, lots of people trying to make games with no actual understanding of what makes games fun and popular, not just profitable. The tech isn't the bottleneck, the taste is. Same applies to AI art
by maegul | 2026-01-10 23:13:23+00:00
Also, not just followers. There’s a kinda “merchant” behaviour too I think … signalling and trading in hype perspectives.

But to be fair, I’m not sure what the average dev/eng is supposed to do against a climate of regular change, many disparate opinionated groups with disparate tech stacks, and, IMO a pretty pure engineering culture of actually weighing the value of tech/methods against relevant constraints and trade offs.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-10 23:13:53+00:00
It's an elite program within a non-prestigious university. It goes to show how concepts like prestige are truly performative in nature.

Even at my Ivy League alma mater, a traditional public school like UIUC or UW was well regarded by most departments, but society at large pedestalled my alma mater to an unrealistic degree.

Pierre Bourdieu tends to dig deeper into the sociology of elitism, and is in my opinion a must-read.
by phantom784 | 2026-01-10 23:13:54+00:00
> 1. Winner takes all. You may have been voted by 50% + 1 (even less) citizens but the other half is totally not represented like in a parliament.

I agree with your argument in general, but couldn't this still happen with a parliament? If a party controls 50% + 1 of the parliament, then they're in control. Still, it's better than that control being given to a single person of course.
by grvbck | 2026-01-10 23:14:03+00:00
> MacOS/iOS/iPadOS were never for sale separately

Mac OS was though. OS X 10.0/10.1 were sold for $129 as an upgrade for Mac OS 9 users. Apple continued to offer OS X as a paid software product up to 10.5 or 10.6 (though it was also bundled with new Mac purchases).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history]
by johnwatson11218 | 2026-01-10 23:14:05+00:00
I did something similar whereby I used pdfplumber to extract text from my pdf book collection. I dumped it into postgresql, then chunked the text into 100 char chunks w/ a 10 char overlap. These chunks were directly embedded into a 384D space using python sentence_transformers. Then I simply averaged all chunks for a doc and wrote that single vector back to postgresql. Then I used UMAP + HDBScan to perform dimensionality reduction and clustering. I ended up with a 2D data set that I can plot with plotly to see my clusters. It is very cool to play with this. It takes hours to import 100 pdf files but I can take one folder that contains a mix of programming titles, self-help, math, science fiction etc. After the fully automated analysis you can clearly see the different topic clusters.

I just spent time getting it all running on docker compose and moved my web ui from express js to flask. I want to get the code cleaned up and open source it at some point.
by keeda | 2026-01-10 23:14:26+00:00
One of the biggest shortcomings of Open Source was that it implicitly defaulted to a volunteer model and so financing the work was always left as an exercise for the reader.

Hence (as TFA points out) open source code from commercial entities was just a marketing channel and source of free labor... err, community contributions... to auxiliary offerings that actually made money. This basic economic drive is totally natural but creates dynamics that lead to suboptimal behaviors and controversy multiple times.

For instance, a favorite business model is charging for support. Another one was charging for a convenient packaging or hosting of an “open core” project. In either case, the incentives just didn’t align towards making the software bug-free and easily usable, because that would actively hamper monetization. This led to instances of pathological behavior, like Red Hat futzing with its patches or pay-walling its source code to hamper other Linux vendors.

Then there were cases where the "open source" branding was used to get market-share, but licenses restricted usage in lucrative applications, like Sun with Java. But worse, often a bigger fish swooped in to take the code, as they were legally allowed to, and repackage it in their own products undercutting the original owners. E.g. Google worked around Sun's licensing restrictions to use Java completely for free in Android. And then ironically Android itself was marketed as "open source" while its licensing came with its own extremely onerous restrictions to prevent true competition.

Or all those cases when hyperscalers undercut the original owners’ offerings by providing open source projects as proprietary Software as a Service.

All this in turn led to all sorts of controversies like lawsuits or companies rug-pulling its community with a license change.

And aside from all that, the same pressures regularly led to the “enshittification” of software.

Open Source is largely a socialist (or even communist) movement, but businesses exist in a fundamentally capitalistic society. The tensions between those philosophies were inevitable. Socialists gonna socialize, but capitalists gonna capitalize.

With AI, current OSS business models may soon be dead. And personally I would think, to the extent they were based on misaligned incentives or unhealthy dynamics, good riddance!

Open Source itself will not go away, but it will enter a new era. The cost of code has dropped so much, monetizing will be hard. But by the same token, it will encourage people, having invested so much fewer resources creating it, to release their code for free. A lot of it will be slop, but the quantity will be overwhelming.

It’s not clear how this era will pan out, but interesting times ahead.
by bitexploder | 2026-01-10 23:14:50+00:00
Are you sure?

Sydney heart diet study: Seed oil group had something like 62% higher death rate.

Minnesota coronary experiment: replaced saturated fats with seed oil, cholesterol dropped, but for every 30 mg/dL drop risk of death went up something like 20%.

Several recent meta analyses also indicate no real benefit migrating from saturated fats to seed oils. The only silver lining I have seen is there is some evidence replacing them for people who have had a coronary event already. So, no, I don't think the evidence supports "seed oils do much better" in a general sense.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-10 23:15:05+00:00
Every disease can be treated without a vaccine. But treatments aren't 100%, and treatments come with their own risk. Taking medicine isn't risk-free, and certainly not necessarily less risky than vaccinations. So, even if you believe it's fine to just treat the disease instead of trying to prevent it, that doesn't mean you skip out on risk. You could have more, just from the medicines alone, not even considering the effects of the disease itself.
by einr | 2026-01-10 23:15:22+00:00
I don't think it's sentimentality, exactly. Who picks Azure or OneDrive or AD or Office 365 or Sharepoint or Teams or any Microsoft product or service if they're not already running Windows? The desktop operating system, "legacy" though it may be, has near universal reach and has therefore been key in pushing people to their more lucrative services. But they pushed too hard, it's too obviously shit, and now people and enterprises are looking for an exit. What then?
by maxbond | 2026-01-10 23:15:29+00:00
> Without space travel, there is no near-term incentive to develop those technologies.

Of course there is. Our climate is getting less hospitable, right now, in our lifetime. Storms are stronger, wildfires are more frequent and severe, we're beginning to strain our fresh water aquifers, etc. We are seeing really alarming rates of decline of flying insect biomass and other signs of an ecosystem in distress, and that ecosystem provides us with trillions of dollars of value. There is no human industry without our ecosystem to support us.

Solar, wind, etc. are also getting more and more competitive with fossil fuels, providing a purely monetary incentive.

And if we disregard all long term incentives, who cares about space? Even if we use very optimistic figures we're not going to be exploiting extraterrestrial resources for a few decades. And if we encounter significant setbacks (which I have to imagine we will) that take quite a long time.

> China and America are technologically within a decade of establishing Moon and Mars bases.

I'll believe it when I see it. But if this is true, then wouldn't you say, by your logic, that this is a near term incentive for developing sustainable technologies?

> But there are reasons to be optimistic...

I agree. I don't think we really disagree in principle on any of this. I think we have different values and different levels of skepticism (or perhaps are skeptical of different things) but broadly/directionally agree.
by michaelt | 2026-01-10 23:15:46+00:00
> it feels like there's been a shift since Labour came into power. Historically this overbearing surveillance has been held back.

I had hoped Labour would roll back the anti-protest legislation, snooper's charter, internet censorship and voter ID laws.

After all, it was mostly left-wing climate protesters getting arrested, and young (more left-leaning) voters being prevented from voting.

Turns out no, quite the opposite - if anything, Labour thinks these laws didn't go far enough.

With hindsight, it was naive of me to think the former Director of Public Prosecutions would share my scepticism about expanding the powers of the system the Director of Public Prosecutions stands at the head of.
by cowthulhu | 2026-01-10 23:15:59+00:00
To expand on this - an LLM will try to play (and reason) like a person would, while a solver simply crunches the possibility space for the mathematically optimal move.

It’s similar to how an LLM can sometimes play chess on a reasonably high (but not world-class) level, while Stockfish (the chess solver) can easily crush even the best human player in the world.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-10 23:16:09+00:00
> This is a personal essay. It reflects the views of the author.

> By Christopher Henner - schiste · January 10, 2026. Former Chair of the Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation. 20-year Wikimedian

Anecdotally, I strongly prefer Wikipedia (when available) over LLMs, because Wikipedia is not only more reliable but also more concise. I will keep preferring Wikipedia unless LLMs become more reliable and concise, and if that ever happens I think Wikipedia is doomed no matter what.

If there are ways to gain views without sacrificing quality, like better search, I’m all for them. But I don’t see an urgent need for change; Wikipedia has plenty of funding, volunteers, and users like me.
by lanfeust6 | 2026-01-10 23:16:27+00:00
Omega ratio matters most taking total intake of 3 and 6 into account. Since tallow is overwhelmingly saturated fat, it's a moot point what the ratio is. The remedy to low omega-3 is just to consume more dominant EPA/DHA and even ALA sources. Omega 6 won't fly off the charts except through consuming lots of packaged boxed foods and ultraprocessed foods, which overwhelming use vegetable oils like soybean or sunflower (North American fat consumption has skyrocketed over a century mostly owing to these foods). Even if you consume some nuts or seed oil now and then, just consume fish or a supplement.

Arguably the "healthiest" cooking oil is olive oil. If we're looking at just the fatty acids though, replacing SFA with PUFAs is a stronger predictor of lower CVD and all-cause mortality.
by just-ok | 2026-01-10 23:16:36+00:00
Interesting idea, but look at it from the applicant’s perspective: you’d have to front like $50,000 to apply to just 5 schools (if you call $10k the average price for a semester). Even if you solved the financial aid question here, admissions is a numbers game for students, usually, so getting accepted to more than one school would dig the student loan debt hole that much deeper across the board.
by zahlman | 2026-01-10 23:16:37+00:00
This shouldn't be possible as long as you get a wheel (try configuring the installer to require wheels). The download script in the source distribution can do what it wants, of course, and I agree that this isn't the greatest behaviour.

My guess is that they do this in order to put the binary in a specific location of a container, as part of their own build process. The ecosystem doesn't distinguish between "source distributions" intended to build on a user's vs. developer's machine.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-01-10 23:17:55+00:00
> Arguably, China is subsidizing everything with a low currency

Not really. "Subsidizing everything" is an oxymoron, if you subsidize some production it must be at the expense of other production that is providing the subsidies.

> It may cancel out (or maybe more than cancel out) those tariffs.

The opposite is true, tariffs reduce demand for Chinese products and thus for Chinese currency, which leads to lower yuan.

If you want higher yuan, remove the tariffs.
by timoth3y | 2026-01-10 23:18:34+00:00
Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing?

I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What else does this general principle apply to?

I'm perfectly willing to believe that I am missing something here. But reading thought many of the supportive comments, it seems more likely that this is an LLM Rorschach test where we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them.

I love reading. These are great books. I would be excited if this tool actually helps point out connections that have been overlooked. However, it does not seem to do so.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-10 23:18:37+00:00
Mexico also began enacting extremely heavy handed tariffs against China and other Asian exporters like South Korea, India, and Vietnam in 2023 onwards [0][1][2][3] in order to protect their domestic manufacturing capacity against an export-driven supply shock, which hit Mexico really badly in the 2000s [4].

> Was going well (as per the paper) until US / China relations went in the toilet

Yep, but as long as Mexico continues to enact trade barriers to protect against an Asian export shock, the APIs needed for synthesis will remain difficult for organized crime to acquire.

Already, cartels have begun tariff arbitraging by targeting the CEE and the Balkans as a new base for synthetic opioid operations [5][6][7], especially because Romanian [8] and other CEE gangs had been collaborating with Mexican organized crime on financial and human trafficking crimes in Mexico for over a decade now.

[0] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-imposes-tempo...

[1] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-reinstates-ta...

[2] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-proposes-sign...

[3] - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/mexico-formalizes-an...

[4] - http://international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf

[5] - https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/larg...

[6] - https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/24/fentanyl-central-europe...

[7] - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-foreign-policies-of-t...

[8] - https://www.occrp.org/en/project/how-a-crew-of-romanian-crim...
by burnte | 2026-01-10 23:19:32+00:00
> If you’re trying to make the case that things are just as good under Tim Cook as they were under Jobs,

I never made such an argument.

> paywalling commonly-used features behind a monthly subscription is not an argument in your favor.

Blame Paypal, not Apple. Apple's to blame for plenty anyway.

> Using an adapter means I can’t charge the device while I’m using headphones. It’s also pointlessly cumbersome.

It's not cumbersome AT ALL if you're already carrying headphones. Many phones charge wirelessly so you CAN charge them while using a USB-C headphone adapter.
by coppsilgold | 2026-01-10 23:19:35+00:00
It takes skill to make a GUI that integrates dynamic information a good UX. For things like WiFi I discovered that modifying config files is an infinitely better experience than any GUI on Linux.

Also for some reason DE's sometimes fail to automatically connect to an AP when it's right there and I have to click for them to do it. This issue literally never happened to me when just using wpa_supplicant, for years whenever an AP is operational then so is the connection without fail.