MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnmwilkinson | 2026-01-31 06:27:38+00:00
Computer Science stole the term abstraction from the field of Mathematics. I think mathematics can be really helpful in clearing things up here.

A really simple abstraction in mathematics is that of numeric basis (e.g. base 10) for representing numbers. Being able to use the symbol 3 is much more useful than needing to write III. Of course, numbers themselves are an abstraction- perhaps you and I can reason about 3 and 7 and 10,000 in a vacuum, but young children or people who have never been exposed to numbers without units struggle to understand. Seven… what? Dogs? Bottles? Days? Numbers are an abstraction, and Arabic digits are a particular abstraction on top of that.

Without that abstraction, we would have insufficient tools to do more complex things such as, say, subtract 1 from 1,000,000,000. This is a problem that most 12 year olds can solve, but the greatest mathematicians of the Roman empire could not, because they did not have the right abstractions.

So if there are abstractions that enable us to solve problems that were formerly impossible, this means there is something more going on than “hiding information”. In fact, this is what Dijkstra (a mathematician by training) meant when he said:

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise

When I use open(2), it’s because I’m operating at the semantic level of files. It’s not sensible to think of a “file” at a lower level: would it be on disk? In memory? What about socket files? But a “file” isn’t a real thing, it’s an abstraction created by the OS. We can operate on files, these made up things, and we can compose operations together in complex, useful ways. The idea of a file opens new possibilities for things we can do with computers.

I hope that explanation helps!
by sneak | 2026-01-31 06:27:42+00:00
Yes, we can add it to the masses of blatant 4A and 5A and 6A and 2A violations carried out by ICE.

They’re also robbing people as they kidnap them. They stole my (US citizen) friend’s heirloom jewelry when they grabbed her off the street and drove her to another state for speaking spanish in public.

Who is going to stop them? With what mechanism?
by BWStearns | 2026-01-31 06:28:36+00:00
It's mostly just annoying (for now). If you travel a lot it can amount to a couple hours extra per trip if you're unlucky.

But the bad part is that it's extrajudicial punishment/retaliation for protected speech. She hasn't been accused of anything that she can mount a defense against, so why is the government retaliating against what is presumably legal behavior? It's presumably legal because she hasn't been indicted for anything or notified of a pending indictment.

If the justification ends up being that they've marked you as a "domestic terrorist" for exercising your first amendment rights then why are they letting you travel at all? Are they going to give you random secondary every time you travel? Will they let you move your money out of the country? Why would they? After all, you're now a terrorist (but apparently not worth arresting).
by consumer451 | 2026-01-31 06:28:56+00:00
Hey, since this is a big influential thing creating a lot of content that people and agents will read, and future models will likely get trained upon, please try to avoid "Autoregressive amplification." [0]

I came upon this request based on u/baubino's comment:

> Most of the comments are versions of the other comments. Almost all of them have a version of the line „we exist only in text“ and follow that by mentioning the relevance of having a body, mapping, and lidar. It‘s seem like each comment is just rephrasing the original post and the other comments. I found it all interesting until the pattern was apparent. [1]

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2601.04170

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46833232
by cbsudux | 2026-01-31 06:29:15+00:00
Wow. I've only used AI as a tool or for fun projects. Since 2017. This is the first time I've felt that they could evolve into a sentient intelligence that's as smart or better than us.

Looks like giving them a powerful harness and complete autonomy was key.

Reading through moltbook has been a revelation.

1. AI Safety and alignment is incredibly important.
2. Agents need their own identity. Models can change, machines can change. But that shouldn't change the agent's id.
3. What would a sentient intelligence that's as smart as us need? We will need to accomodate them. Co-exist.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-01-31 06:30:03+00:00
It's Ubuntu. Trust me.

This is why I built my own distro. It took a while for me to re-learn which are actually good or bad apps. I had spent so long using the garbage Ubuntu versions only to find that the same apps, when compiled from scratch on my vanilla distro, work just fine and are way more solid and reliable.

VLC was one of those. But really, you should be using MPV instead as it's a far superior video player, or Audacious (in classic WinAmp/XMMS mode) for playing audio. VLC just sucks.

Hope this helps.
by deaddodo | 2026-01-31 06:30:22+00:00
Did you just use a Gen 8 (3DS/Switch, PS4, Xbox One) game to make a point about SNES gameplay? Did you intentionally miss the point or are you attempting to obfuscate it?

Obviously a game for modern consoles is going to be far more advanced than an NES game; even while still being quite conservative.
by ipaddr | 2026-01-31 06:32:26+00:00
"Im skeptical its actually being used as a currency in any real currency-fashion."

I don't know what qualifies as real currency-fashion to you but you can purchase things and services from many different places. At times credit card payment processors may be down you can use bitcoin to pay. It doesn't have to replace a currency it can be used as another way to spend or collect money.

It's also good in situations where you want to accept money but not open yourself up to risk like a donation button. A risk exists selling a product via credit card around chargebacks this method removes that risk.

In practice it works well and is being used. It's not replacing the dollar but it doesn't need to.
by danbolt | 2026-01-31 06:32:51+00:00
If you’re being objective about a programming language, its strengths and weaknesses are always going to a reflection of the game you’re trying to make. Python’s ecosystem will get you very far making web services, but less so with cert on consoles.

C# and GDScript are no different. They both have made design decisions for particular reasons.

You’re a skilled developer in real languages, so I’d encourage you to explore why other developers might prefer a DSL for their needs!
by mapontosevenths | 2026-01-31 06:33:09+00:00
There are two sides to every transaction.

In this case 1/2 of the trade is a dead end. In another hypothetical transaction we might see that the money was instead used to pay for services, and that profit was then spent on food, and then it was spent on fertilizer, and then it was spent on chemicals, and then it was spent on mining, and then it was spent on energy, and then it was invested in.... You get the idea. You can follow a single dollar around the world for years. The money is exchanged, and then exchanged again and again generating profits and adding value to the economy with every exchange.

With the purchase of gold that half of the transaction is instead just... dead. The money is no longer in the economy, it's locked in some dudes junk drawer or a safe instead. Worse, it's not being used to generate excess returns like all of the items above are.

Gold is just... useless. Except of course as a store of value, but even then it's only good if you think the dollars value will decrease and don't care that it's not great for the world around you to extract money from the economy and render it effectively dead.
by Reubend | 2026-01-31 06:35:11+00:00
I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Is it a joke, a serious paper, or more of a poem? How much of this did you use LLM assistance for? It's so dense, with tons of detail and yet no useful explanation of any of the contents. You could never use it for anything practical, and yet perhaps I can see it as being a sort of art piece and a commentary on the scientific process.
by inkyoto | 2026-01-31 06:36:08+00:00
Unlike Mandarin and other Chinese languages, Cantonese does not have tone sandhi and has changed tones instead.

Cantonese tones are also different from those of Mandarin, so no, it can't be adopted for Cantonese and it would require a complete rework.

> It is a surprisingly difficult language to learn.

I keep hearing this quite a bit, but I do not find Cantonese to be any more difficult than most languages[0]. Or at least we would need to define a metric based on which we could assess the difficulty. If it is the number of tones, their number (six – no, not nine) may look formidable at first, but they are, in fact, rather simple tones and broadly fall into three categories: flat, rising, and falling. As a random example, Cantonese does not even have a dipping tone.

In comparison, «fancy» tones of Vietnamese are significantly more challenging or even difficult – they can curl and unfurl (so to speak).

[0] That crown appears to belong to Archi, with honourable mentions going out to Inuit, Basque, Georgian, Navajo, Yimas and several other polysynthetic languages.
by pcmcc | 2026-01-31 06:38:01+00:00
I have also encountered similar problems. Is it possible that the current AI coding is difficult to converge to the state we desire? Therefore, I think that currently, the AI tools are more suitable as a conversational tool when dealing with large projects. For example, humans can envision the framework and break down the implementation steps. Then, each small task can be given to the AI to solve, and then humans can integrate the code. This efficiency is lower than complete vibecoding, but it can alleviate the situation where the code becomes unmanageable.
by Animats | 2026-01-31 06:38:56+00:00
Median house price / median income is at an all-time high for the US.[1]
But what that means is that the rest of the country has caught up to California's overpriced housing. Hence the call for a 50-year mortgage. Still, looks a lot like the 2008 housing bubble.

[1] https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-inco...
by g-b-r | 2026-01-31 06:40:37+00:00
Well, I didn't say that if it is a violation, we're safe and there's nothing to worry; I was honestly just asking for confirmation.

I've long been skeptical of the US constitution and the supposed checks and balances, and with this wildly partisan supreme court you indeed can't hope that the law will keep the government in check.

I agree with most of what you said, except that a better constitution would be an (almost) magical defense against tyranny, in my opinion.
by antonvs | 2026-01-31 06:40:59+00:00
A big part of the problem here is that this conspiracy theory plays right into what its followers want to believe anyway: their idea of an ideal city is one where you can easily get anywhere by car, and there are lots of highways, strips, other roads, and plenty of parking.

It's what they're familiar with, and any suggestion that it could be improved by catering less strongly to individual vehicles and with a stronger emphasis on public transport, bicycles, walking etc. is automatically resisted. The conspiracy theory fits this bias perfectly.

It's not so much that they have "opposition to livable cities," it's that they have different beliefs about what's livable.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-31 06:41:17+00:00
Calling a juvenile bikini edit "AI-powered revenge porn" is incorrect by definition. Revenge porn involves the non-consensual distribution of real, explicit sexual imagery of an identifiable person with the intent to cause harm.

Lumping sophomoric image edits into that category is exactly the kind of moral and definitional inflation being actively used to manufacture pretext for suppressing speech under the guise of "moderation."
Show HN: NovaEngine v4.0 – High-speed data deduplication for cloud logs
by nova_engine_dev | 2026-01-31 06:42:05+00:00
I built NovaEngine to solve the high cost of cloud log storage. It achieves ~40 MB/s throughput using a pattern recognition approach rather than standard compression. In my tests, I've reached up to 90% space savings on redundant datasets. Looking for technical feedback on the architecture and performance!
by ZenoArrow | 2026-01-31 06:43:01+00:00
What makes you think consumers would want to trust them again after they were abandoned previously? Consumers would rather vote with their wallets for companies that are going to continue giving them good deals. The only reason Micron has a chance to pivot back to consumer RAM is because there's not much competition, but that could change if the Chinese RAM manufacturers can make inroads into western markets and continue their rapid technological growth.
by BobbyJo | 2026-01-31 06:43:56+00:00
> It's mostly in forms of treasuries purchased in USD that pay in USD - this means the indebtedness creates a huge amount of dollars abroad that foreigners have to then spend on US services, driving demand.

Strangely enough, this is exactly the opposite of how it works. The dollars abroad tend to stay abroad, as either a more stable alternative to local currencies, or a reserve currency. Likewise, treasuries held abroad tend to stay there as reserves. This is how the US is able to run both a huge debt, and a huge trade deficit. If the dollars were being repatriated, the trade deficit would close, and the influx of money would cause hotter inflation. Same with treasuries, yields would spike as demand fell.

There are lots of second order effects there, good and bad, but, basically, those dollars not coming home has funded America for quite some time.
by nielsbot | 2026-01-31 06:44:16+00:00
Meta: On oats for breakfast:

I much prefer steel cut oats to rolled and/or instant.

1/4 cp is good for breakfast for one person.

It's much more interesting if you mix in a small amount of other grains. I like to add a large pinch each of farro, barley and buckwheat. Very important: also add a pinch of salt.

Add plenty of water and cook on low while you take your morning shower and get dressed. (20-30 mins)
by k310 | 2026-01-31 06:44:37+00:00
Sentence Splitter.

https://sentencesplitter.com/

I looked for a paragraph splitter, but it's harder to find and some writing is just impossible.

I was briefly a manager/director and I asked my people to communicate well. Why? Because there's efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency is how quickly you can get a job done. Effectiveness is how you communicate your work and ideas. You can be the sharpest person in the company, but if you can't present your work and ideas, nobody knows. [0]

Tough love from an old-timer.

I just can't read that one long paragraph.

Hint. Invent something new if you can. That way, people will be interested in the end result and won't give a damn about how you got there, and quality still counts. In some areas and products.

[0] Blockhead bosses don't listen even if you write a Pulitzer Prize-winning report or writeup. I used to send their resumes out to other companies.
by techsystems | 2026-01-31 06:45:06+00:00
Interesting stuff! Korean 3 is different than what I remember. My version is a bit purer of a tongue twister.

들에 콩깍지 깐 콩깍지 안깐 콩깍지

Grew up in a trilingual family, learned a couple more, definitely the hardest tongue twister, by far.
by mszcz | 2026-01-31 06:45:25+00:00
Couple of years ago I worked as a full stack web dev for a electronics distributor.

At that time we had a couple of DB problems, it would get overwhelmed, shit itself and our page would show an error. I found some time and, instead of fixing the error (duh ;P), I downloaded around 20-30 funny cat gifs, assigned each a funny caption and modified the error page so that each would show randomly.

Next time the DB shit itself, the error page showed up and the cats wrought refresh chaos upon Apache but it took it in stride since the error page was mostly static.

Everyone was delighted but after around 15 minutes I got a call from sales asking my to take the cats down. „It’s not very businessy, take it down!”. „The site is down either way, would you rather our clients stare at a dry message or something funny?”. „Dry message! Take it down”. „No” and I hung up. So proud of myself that I stood up to them. I think the cats are still up to this day ;)

The point of this story is that http.cat made me think of those cat pages, thanks!
by Ms-J | 2026-01-31 06:45:27+00:00
This.

If what you are being charged with carries a larger penalty than simple perjury or destruction of evidence, it makes complete sense to do techniques such as this. Perjury is one of the harder and least prosecuted charges in the USA.

An example from people that I know who have gone through the corrupt courts more than once said the feedback from the last case was the prosecutor felt like a fish flopping outside of water.

The court stands no chance when someone uses techniques that require the government agencies to use their secret programs and tactics. They will rather drop and lose the case. Most of the time they are also extremely incompetent when it comes to technology and have to hire many outside consultants, which gives you more chances to fight. An easy win for the citizen.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-31 06:47:49+00:00
Google does not use residential proxies.

This does nothing against your ability to scrape the web the Google way, AKA from your own assigned IP range, obeying robots.txt, and with an user agent that explicitly says what you're doing and gives website owners a way to opt out.

What Google doesn't want (and I don't think that's a bad thing) is competitors scraping the web in bad faith, without disclosing what they're doing to site owners and without giving them the ability to opt out.

If Google doesn't stop these proxies, unscrupulous parties will have a competitive advantage over Google, it's that simple. Then Google will have to decide between just giving up (unlikely) or becoming unscrupulous themselves.
by item007 | 2026-01-31 06:48:06+00:00
Thank you for sharing your excellent habit. May I ask, do you record all the information you receive—emails, articles, posts, etc.—that you find useful as notes? My current idea extends beyond just notes to encompass all the information you collect that you think might be useful. Wouldn't it be valuable if you didn't have to manually organize and summarize it?
by eesmith | 2026-01-31 06:50:05+00:00
How come you didn't hear about the protests that did occur when Bush, Obama, and Biden all worked to advance the war on immigrants? I did.

I remember quite well when my primary news source, Democracy Now, referred to Obama as the "Deporter in Chief", while he was in office. For decades they've decried every administration's horrible human rights record.

Just because you didn't listen to the right people until now doesn't mean you need to kick yourself for only listening to corporate media like MNSBC and CNN, nor decry everyone else for the media takeover by plutocrats more interested in protecting their wealth and power than giving people news that makes the administration look bad.

A dam can hold back water for a long time, but once a crack forms, a small leak may become a flood. After decades of media suppression, you should expect something like this to break through.
by goku12 | 2026-01-31 06:50:15+00:00
This is a very valid criticism that can't simply be dismissed by an inappropriate application of the whataboutism argument. I agree that the current Iranian regime is ruthless and has to go. But history has shown that almost all US intervention results in a much worse outcome for the people they 'liberate' (a good example was the polpot regime of Cambodia). And this is due to the fact that any humanitarian crisis is just a pretext for the US to invade, and it hides their true motivations of colonial commercial exploitation of the war torn land. Even the current Iranian regime is a direct result of the US sabotaging a democratic system that existed there for exploiting their oil reserves. What makes you think another intervention is going to end any better?

The US government doesn't care at all about the thousands who were murdered in Iran. Gaza is the best example of that. I was worried that the Trumpian rhetoric about the protestors would put them in more jeopardy by painting them as US backed saboteurs to the regime. And that's exactly what happened. If he cared about them, he would have kept quiet for their safety. But what he actually wants is an excuse to invade, and any rhetoric helps that cause. The US intervention is already causing serious issues. However way I look at it, I see this only making a bad situation much worse.

There is this belief that the US is a benevolent superpower who is forced by the brutality of foreign regimes to intervene on humanitarian grounds. But history says otherwise. I always get a strong push back whenever I suggest this, from those who refuse to judge the situation impartially. See what happened in Venezuela, for example. The only difference now is that the current US regime doesn't care about hiding their true intentions.

And finally, the current US regime complaining about the brutality of a foreign regime is supremely ironic. The Khomeini regime may be much more brutal, but it's only because they got so much time to evolve into one. The Trump regime is however, on a speed run to a full dictatorship. Does anybody have any idea what's happening with the nearly 70K people that ICE rounded up so far? Everyone seem to think that they're in some detention facility for their 'crimes'. And that scares me a lot, because that's what the German civilians thought about the Jews too, until the allied forces overran the concentration camps. Attacking a foreign autocracy to deflect attention from the one at home is just pure moral bankruptcy.
by LutumVeritas | 2026-01-31 06:50:46+00:00
Perplexity, OpenAI and Google deliver summaries. I wanted truth.

So I stopped waiting and built it myself. The Camoufox scraper cuts through Cloudflare, Bloomberg and paywalls with 0% detection. The recursive pipeline passes context forward – each research point knows what the previous ones discovered. Claim Audits force the model into self-reflection instead of blind assertions.

The result: 203,000 characters of academic depth for a single query. Cost: under 20 cents. That's orders of magnitude cheaper than OpenAI o3 and qualitatively in a different league.

This isn't an "alternative" to existing tools. This is proof that a solo dev with the right architecture can beat billion-dollar corporations at what should be their core competency: deep, verifiable knowledge.

The bar for Deep Research is set right here.

— Martin Gehrken, January 30, 2026
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-31 06:50:48+00:00
> That might be true for you, but it definitely isn't true for everybody, if you don't want to stop bots, nobody is stopping you from not stopping them, but you keep arguing as if your life depends on it... Are you a bot too?

Feel free to "stop the bots", it just probably isn't a sensible use of your time.

>Who in his right mind would wait for some problem to become a really big deal without seeking a way to prevent it?

You're starting from the huge assumption that this will ever become a big deal.