MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2026-01-12 02:10:47+00:00
I imagine the best way to do this will be whatever quickly evokes a large amount of highly-correlated tokens for the kind of fictional character the user wants to see in the story.

In other words, the completeness or scientific rigor of the original categorization and naming is irrelevant, compared to its consistency and presence in the training data.

In some cases, the most straightforward approach might be to name a particularly popular character by name.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-12 02:11:09+00:00
I understand the theory of steelmanning, but in cases like this it's just an high-brow version of the "both sides" style of journalism where you pretend like both sides are similarly plausible and deserve equal consideration. At the extremes, the steelmanning can turn into a game of giving the other side more consideration.

> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed

That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.

And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-12 02:12:58+00:00
> For example, a startup that's iterating quickly with a small, skilled dev team. A bunch of documentation is a liability, it'll be stale before anyone ever reads it.

This is a huge advantage for AI though, they don't complain about writing docs, and will actively keep the docs in sync if you pipeline your requests to do something like "I want to change the code to do X, update the design docs, and then update the code". Human beings would just grumble a lot, an AI doesn't complain...it just does the work.

> Just grabbing someone and collaborating with them on what they wrote is much more effective in that situation.

Again, it just sounds to me that you are arguing why AIs are superior, not in how they are inferior.
by dangus | 2026-01-12 02:13:00+00:00
No off-site backup for me, these items aren’t important enough, it’s more for “oops I broke my computer” or “set my new computer up faster” convenience.

Anything I really don’t want to lose is in a paid cloud service with a local backup sync over SMB to my TrueNAS box for some of the most important ones.

An exception is GitHub, I’m not paying for GitHub, but git kinda sorta backs itself up well enough for my purposes just by pulling/pushing code. If I get banned from GitHub or something I have all the local repos.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-12 02:13:50+00:00
Debt is a major problem for sure, and a cornerstone of our economic system. There should have been mandatory debt protection during that lockdown but there wasn't.

UBI potentially leads to inflation. If everyone has X amount of income then rents and prices go up accordingly.

Taxation is totally unfair. 20% of most of what we buy here is going into government coffers, raising our cost of living. We get less and less in return as public services are slashed. Add onto that other taxes, and it is the government, not just corporations who are major instigators of debt and the poverty trap...
by moonlet | 2026-01-12 02:14:10+00:00
To me ‘a sandbox’ is a secured context, which is specific to whatever is in it. It is not a generic thing unless we are literally referring to a real-world box with sand in it, and I’ve kinda hit the breaking point with the term in tech. ‘A sandboxed application’ to me is an instrumented and controlled deployment of an application that can only make the sys/network/ipc calls the deployer expects and appreciates, which are then themselves filtered and monitored. A sandboxed deployment of an application? Sure. That’s a thing to me. But each application needs different privileges and does different things. Sandboxing an application may involve lots of different technologies. Eg the way I think about it, things like seccomp, apparmor, et al also aren’t themselves ‘sandboxes’, they’re enforcement mechanisms which rely on knowing and configuring them to monitor and enforce what the app should and shouldn’t do. A lot of things that assist with sandboxing may also be combined in different ways to get to a more secure environment, in which the app is sandboxed.
by DivingForGold | 2026-01-12 02:14:19+00:00
The article is outdated.

Up to date news is that Polymarket has recently faced significant backlash for refusing to pay out bets related to the odds of a U.S. military invasion in Venezuela, not specifically a single $400,000 bet, but involving a large number of affected users and over $10.5 million in total. Some expect lawsuits to follow.

Appears they are in the same boat as Ebay, whom has been stone walling payments to merchants often over dubious claims for many years. It should be noted that Ebay has been class action sued more than once. Here on HN you can search for and discover many similar claims against the payment processor STRIPE.
by chadcmulligan | 2026-01-12 02:14:24+00:00
I'm using a MacBook Pro 2016 for dev still works great, and its still better than every windows laptop available now. The touchpad itself is still superior - its crazy when you think about it. I know people on their 3rd or 4th windows laptop since I've been using mine. I tried a M4 recently and its battery life is fantastic, and its faster so I'll probably upgrade when this one dies, but it still works well.

Edit: just did a google and it seems I can still sell it for about $600AUD, I don't know how anyone is buying a non apple lap top.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-12 02:15:13+00:00
> One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch

The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.

The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.

We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
by nachbo | 2026-01-12 02:15:13+00:00
To relax and reset at the end of the day, my wife plays this simple tetrisy game - fill rows and cols to make points and try not to die. But the game and many of its ilk are super frustrating. They have ads and arbitrarily make it impossible at some point to keep going (in order to show more ads I assume.) So I combined my love of roguelike deck-builders and made a game for her. It's the same basic premise of filling rows and columns but it has a deck you improve over several boards of ever-increasing complexity. And it has cards with special powers (of course.) It turned out to be really fun both to build and play. I'm still working out a few kinks (I built it in Love2D but running inside iOS is a challenge...) But it's live in the App Store. Check it out if you're interested and hmu if you'd like a free offer code - the game is fully playable without paying, but keeps some options behind an in app purchase. https://tetranea.net/

EDIT: It's only on iPhone and iPad for now. Android version coming soon.
by throw0101c | 2026-01-12 02:15:27+00:00
> It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.

The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGsLhyNJBh8

The GOP let (?) the inmates run the asylum.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-12 02:15:38+00:00
Hmm, I suppose people can see words in very different ways. If you're mother asked why the printer never works for her would you tell her she's uneducated and unsophisticated for not knowing before sending a link to the manual? It sounds like perhaps you would, but I wonder how many would really agree that's a neutrally worded approach.

Not for me to decide alone any more than anyone else alone I suppose. Thanks for sharing your perspective on it.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-12 02:15:52+00:00
I consider January 6 to have falsified all research along these grounds. I acknowledge, sure, that virtually nobody wants to see gun battles in the street. But if you can talk yourself into believing that a mob sent to overturn the election and install the loser doesn't count as partisan violence, you can talk yourself into believing all kinds of catastrophes don't count.
by s-sameer | 2026-01-12 02:15:57+00:00
This is something I had built a few months ago: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chatgpt-saved-chats...

I often find myself losing important conversations/chats when talking to ChatGPT over time. So I created an extension that enables you to bookmark conversations within the UI. Just hover over any chat and click on the save button. Hope you find it useful.
by m0llusk | 2026-01-12 02:16:42+00:00
Building is much cheaper than renovation which is much cheaper than preservation. Ambitious project goals preserving unique historical assets make this project inherently expensive.

From https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/building-project-faqs.ht... which includes much more detail.

> ... complete overhaul and modernization that preserves two historic buildings that have not been comprehensively renovated since their construction in the 1930s ...
by kettlecorn | 2026-01-12 02:16:56+00:00
I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.

For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-12 02:17:05+00:00
>
There's a reason why bagpipes are banned under the Geneva convention!

I know this is not Reddit, but when I see such a comment, I can't resist posting a video of "the internet's favorite song" on an electrical violin and bagpipes:

> Through the Fire and Flames (Official Video) - Mia x Ally

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVOBpboqCgQ
by layer8 | 2026-01-12 02:17:11+00:00
Trump has partly himself to blame here. From https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/federal-reserve-renovation-co...:

“Trump appointees to the US Commission of Fine Arts, however, required the project use more white marble to align with a proposed presidential mandate from the president that all new federal buildings be neoclassical in style. This luxury white marble comes from Georgia and has been used extensively in the construction of national landmarks including the U.S. Capitol. Aside from Georgia marble, the materials used throughout the Fed’s renovation are required to be sourced domestically.

“And to match the original marble facades and detailed interiors, the Fed is required to use specialized processes more costly than those allowed in Washington buildings without historical significance or not on the National Mall.”
by akkad33 | 2026-01-12 02:17:29+00:00
There's no skill in using AI. I spent 3 hours trying to build something like a table visualiser that creates a visualization of SQL schema relationship. I wrote simple prompts, tailored them using LLMs and fed them back into another LLM. Went on about 2 hours iterating on outputs until it looked like what I want. Result? It produces an output. The outputs worked well for most part but the results were variable. The arrows would sometimes not be in place. Sometimes you get 100 instead of 1. It was slow. And what I did learn from this that I didn't already know? Zero! On the other hand if I'd tried to figure out myself how to do it, I would have built something not only deterministic and faster , but I'd have gained some new experience and skills along with it of solving a problem.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-12 02:17:47+00:00
The US drift into Adam Curtis' broad thesis in hypernormalisation(a) continues apace I see. Great to see J Pow putting up a fight but I fear this is all going one way.

(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-12 02:18:27+00:00
That's a fair question, but we do live in a surprisingly secretive society. I think that shifted over a lot during the Cold War period. It became acceptable to hide large sections of public spending from the public.

We also live in a corrupt society and occasionally that emerges as a scandal.

Certain secrets are kept better than others. Now and then real conspiracies do become public knowledge like the Tuskegee Experiment or Scientology's infiltration of parts of the US government.
by addaon | 2026-01-12 02:19:20+00:00
I suggest looking at a rotating lidar with an infrared scope... it's super, super informative and a lot of fun. Worth just camping out in SF or Mountain View and looking at all the different patterns on the wall as different lidar-equipped cars drive by.

A typical long range rotating pulsed lidar rotates at ~20 Hz, has 32 - 64 vertical channels (with spacing not necessarily uniform), and fires each channel's laser at around 20 kHz. This gives vertical channel spacing on the order of 1°, and horizontal channel spacing on the order of 0.3°. The perception folks assure me that having horizontal data orders of magnitude denser than vertical data doesn't really add value to them; and going to a higher pulse rate runs into the issue of self-interference between channels, which is much more annoying to deal with then interference from other lidars.

If you want to take that 20 kHz to 200 kHz, you first run into the fact that there can now be 10 pulses in flight at the same time... and that you're trying to detect low-photon-count events with an APD or SPAD outputting nanoamps within a few inches of a laser driver putting generating nanosecond pulses at tens of amps. That's a lot of additional noise! And even then, you have an 0.03° spacing between pulses, which means that successive pulses don't even overlap at max range with a typical spot diameter of 1" - 2" -- so depending on the surfaces you're hitting, on their continuity as seen by you, you still can't really say anything about the expected time alignment of adjacent pulses. Taking this to 2 MHz would let you guarantee some overlap for a handful of pulses, but only some... and that's still not a lot of samples to correlate. And of course your laser power usage and thermal challenges just went up two orders of magnitude...
by cosmicgadget | 2026-01-12 02:20:26+00:00
Congress: anyone falling out of line will lose his support in midterms.

Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.

Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
by jmyeet | 2026-01-12 02:21:04+00:00
> Spent fuel is a solved problem, we just store it securely

This is simply untrue. Depending on the type and enrichment of the fuel it will need to be actively cooled for some period, possibly decades. After that you can bury it. You need facilities for all of this. You need personnel (done by the NRC currently) to transport and install new fuel, remove old fuel and transport it to suitable sites as well as manage those sites. Before they even make it to storage sites they'll typically be stored onsite or in the reactor for years.

> Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?

Given the current administration, almost nobody. The state of drinking water in places like Flint, MI is a national disagrace. The continued existence of lead pipes that leech lead into drinking water in many places is a national disgrace. The current administration gutting the EPA and engineering the Supreme Court to overturn things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are just the cherry on top.

A significant ramp up of nuclear power would necessitate a commensurate ramp up of the NRC in all these capacities.

> Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out

Like I said, hand waved away.

> Where are you getting this number?

Multiple sources [1][2]. Fukushima requires constantly pumping water to cool the core. That water needs to be stored (in thousands of tanks onsite) then processed and ultimately released back into the ocean, which itself is controversial. Removing the core requires inventing a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet. The decomissioning process itself is something most of us won't live to see the end of [3].

The $1 trillion and a century for 1 nuclear plant. Pro-nuclear people will point to the death figure because it suits their argument. It's economically devastated that region however.

And as for Chernobyl, billions of euros was spent building a sarcophagus for the plant, only to have the integrity of that shield destroyed by a Russian drone.

[1]: https://archive.ph/EBhF7

[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[3]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fukushima
by epolanski | 2026-01-12 02:21:37+00:00
One of the very few lonely voices.

It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.

Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.

From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
by wasmperson | 2026-01-12 02:21:57+00:00
I extracted the linux executable and was surprised to find that both readelf and objdump choke on it despite it loading and running correctly. Some investigation reveals that the name of the dynamic linker was shoved into the "unused" fields in the PT_DYNAMIC header entry to save space:

Program Headers:
Type Offset VirtAddr PhysAddr
FileSiz MemSiz Flags Align
INTERP 0x0000000000000088 0x0000000000010088 0x0000000000010088
0x000000000000001c 0x000000000000001c 0x0
[Requesting program interpreter: /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2]
DYNAMIC 0x00000000000000e0 0x00000000000100e0 0x6c2f343662696c2f <-- "/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2"
0x2d78756e696c2d64 0x732e34362d363878 0x322e6f
readelf: Error: the dynamic segment offset + size exceeds the size of the file
LOAD 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000010000 0x0000000000000000
0x0000000000001dc0 0x0000000000005660 RWE 0x1000

Two questions:

1. Was this done manually or is there a tool you're using which does this? I see other size-reduction tricks in here as well.

2. Does anybody know of a tool for examining executables which doesn't crap out on binaries like this?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-12 02:22:05+00:00
Is there some well of non-rabid Trump supporters that I'm not aware of? I'm always open to the idea that I'm in a bubble, but my experience is that even the least rabid Trump supporters are completely unwilling to criticize him or oppose something he wants. Did any Trump supporters, for example, criticize the prosecution of James Comey?
by CityOfThrowaway | 2026-01-12 02:22:05+00:00
You say that there's no skill in using AI, and then go on to explain how you used AI in an unskilled way to produce something that neither worked correctly nor taught you anything.

It strikes me that if you developed your skill set around using AI more effectively, you could have both developed a deep understanding and gotten what you wanted, and done it in less time and at higher quality than you could have done solo.

That said, the fact that you can use AI in an unskilled way to produce something kinda cool... is itself kinda cool! It means there's an on-ramp to using AI! People with no skills can get started, same day, and make stuff. And over time, can learn to make even better stuff! That's pretty cool to me.
by mmooss | 2026-01-12 02:22:49+00:00
> I fear this is all going one way

That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
by egonschiele | 2026-01-12 02:23:30+00:00
Maybe the most incredible part – did Claude write a recursive descent parser from scratch for this? https://github.com/enspirit/elo/blob/9f07fefcdf65c169089f123...

Not that it's super complex, but I'm surprised it didn't pick up an npm package. I wrote tarsec[1] and have been eyeing ohmjs[2]. And of course nearley is a classic.

[1] https://github.com/egonSchiele/tarsec
[2] https://ohmjs.org
[3] https://nearley.js.org
by boringg | 2026-01-12 02:23:37+00:00
Again I don't know why people do this framing that its either renewables or nuclear. We can and should develop and have both - they provide different energy products to the grid. Solar and storage ARE NOT viable at scale for 99.99% uptime requirements or industrial facilities that are in remote locations.

Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.

Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
by rdiddly | 2026-01-12 02:24:47+00:00
You're saying anyone using force to enforce the Constitution (yes, the current one, thanks for specifying) is automatically acting illegitimately. The Constitution isn't a nonviolence treatise; nowhere in it does it forbid the use of force to enforce itself. Also, I notice you appear to apply no such restriction upon the treasonous and the lawless, who are already working to undermine and oppose the Constitution and are apparently free to use violence to do that. This is literally the opposite of the truth and not how laws work. Unless you're saying all police enforcing laws are illegitimate? But then that means ICE is also illegitimate. It's a perfect catch.
by OutOfHere | 2026-01-12 02:25:34+00:00
Shut down the Fed. Why do they need $8 billion per year to do what they do? That's almost as much money as used by the entire federal Bureau of Prisons to house all federal inmates for a year.

Granted, the Fed is not funded by taxpayer money, but it's entirely circular since it loans money to banks, and the government has to routinely bail out the same banks.

The interest rate can be set via a comprehensible algorithm learned over historical data, a job for a mid-level data scientist or increasingly just for an AI. As for bank regulation, let the bad banks fail and die. The stock market will manage just fine without their manipulation.

Those downvoting me favor obscurity over transparency, and don't really have a counterargument.
by SchemaLoad | 2026-01-12 02:25:43+00:00
Self hosting for me is important because I want to secure the data. I've got my files and photos on there, I want to have the drive encrypted with my key. Not just sitting on a drive I don't have any control over. Also because it plugs in to my smart home devices which requires being on the local network.

For something like a website I want on the public internet with perfect reliability, a VPS is a much better option.