MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by touisteur | 2026-01-03 12:58:25+00:00
I think it's something to do with the expectations of automation. We seem to be wired or trained to trust the machines fully, and enter a state of helplessness when we think we are driven by a machine.

I've seen this with gnss-assisted driving, or with automated driving, or with aircraft autopilot. Something disengages, gives unwarranted trust, we lose context, training fades ; and when thrown back in control, the avalanche of context and responsibility is overwhelming, compounded by the lack of context about the previous intermediate steps.

One of the most worrying dangers of automation, is this trust (even by supposed knowledgeable technicians) and the transition out of the 'the machine is perfect' and when it hands you back the helm on a failure, an inability to trust the machine again.

The way to avoid entering this state, seems to stay deeply engaged in the inputs and decisions of the system (read 'automation should be like iron man, not like ultron') and have a deep understanding of the moving parts, critical design decisions of the system, and traces/visualization/checklist of the intermediate steps.

I don't know where the corpus of research about this is (probably in safety engineering research tomes), but it crystallized for me when comparing the crew reactions and behaviour of the Rio-Paris Air France crash, and the Quantas A380 accident in Singapour.

For the first one, amongst many, many other errors (be it crew management, taking account of the weather...) and problematic sensor behaviour, the transcript tells a harrowing story of a crew not trusting their aircraft anymore after recovering from a sensor failure (that failure ejecting them from autopilot and giving them back mostly full control), ignoring their training, and many of the actual alarms the aircraft was rightly giving, blaring at them.

In the second case, a crew that tries to piece out what capabilities they still have after a massive engine failure (explosion), wrecking most of the other systems with shrapnel. And keeping enough in the loop to decide when the overwhelmed system is giving wrong sensor instructions (transfering fuel from the unaffected reservoirs to actually destroyed, leaky ones).

Human factor studies are often fascinating.
by krona | 2026-01-03 12:58:33+00:00
Many might not like it, but given US interests and Chinese ambitions, the Monroe doctrine is one of the few parts of American foreign policy that makes sense (in a realpolitik way) in the current geopolitical landscape.

The state sponsored drug smuggling is symbolic of a country not paying sufficient fealty to its master, but is secondary to the larger strategic issues in play.
by reaperducer | 2026-01-03 12:59:35+00:00
Yeah, we know this is all about oil

"War for oil" is always the easy go-to to criticize any American military action, even in countries that don't have oil.

And while Venezuela has oodles of oil, is this really the case of America wanting Venezuelan oil?

America has more oil than it knows what to do with, and because of that, prices are so low that there are lots of newspaper articles about how American oil companies have dramatically slowed exploration and production. Plus, even under the current administration, America is using more and more renewable energy sources (some states now get more than 50% of their energy from wind/solar).

With the whole Chevron situation, I'm willing to think that oil may play a role here, but again the "war for oil" seems like nothing more than a convenient slogan for a high schooler's protest sign.
by Fade_Dance | 2026-01-03 12:59:59+00:00
In general, that term is mostly used outside of the borders of a country looking in. After all, "illegitimate leaders" tend to be authoritarians who take power and quell dissent within the borders.

Not at all arguing that it somehow leads to justification for an illegal invasion.

In this specific case the claim comes down to assertions of a sham election. If this was indeed the case (with the lens of an international survey obviously the US view is suspect considering the attack), then the Venezuelan people themselves do not view him as a legitimate leader, which simplifies the situation.
by shaftoe | 2026-01-03 13:01:13+00:00
I completely agree.

It's worth remembering the UN fought in the Korean war and wasn't was always a place for authoritarian regimes to pass useless resolutions and make noise.

The fact we, as humanity, have allowed so many genocides and slave nations to exist, and to treat them with a measure of equality, is a failing.

And, to be clear, I'm not talking about people I disagree with politically. I'm talking about places and peoples like North Korea and Cambodia and Sudan. There's a ton of shades of gray, but some situations really require a special kind of blindness to pretend are gray.
by hnarn | 2026-01-03 13:02:01+00:00
Boot environments are awesome but it’s worth reading up on what is _not_ included in the snapshot. It’s really only the ”base system” and a rollback will keep whatever is in /var, /home and many other directories, so it’s good to know what to expect.

I use ZFSBootMenu with Linux and in that setup, the entire root dataset is in the snapshot, so it’s a ”complete” restore.
by kypro | 2026-01-03 13:02:08+00:00
That's good to hear. As a European, I do hope our leaders keep this in mind... It may be an unconventional move, but it's hard to argue this is a bad outcome.

I get the concern about forever wars some are raising, but this clearly isn't going to be a forever war for the reasons you state. Plus if the US secures some oil and the Venezuela people get to live better lives, that's ultimately a great outcome for everyone.

It's controversial to say these days, but I think this is exactly how the West should be using it's military force – to promote democracy and freedom around the world.
by Saline9515 | 2026-01-03 13:02:14+00:00
Every culture consumes drugs. There was a massive heroine consumption problem before WWI in the US, which was largely mitigated by making it illegal to sell it over-the-counter.

It's far easier to reduce consumption by cutting the supply entering your country, than solving the self-actualization issues (is it even one?) of your population.

People selling drugs such as fentanyl or cocaine have various techniques to hook consumers and keep them addicted regardless of their mental state. Selling hard drugs is criminalized for a good reason.
by armchairhacker | 2026-01-03 13:02:51+00:00
> There's no more proof that any Venezuelan election's results has been tampered with than with any US election

This is false (if by “proof” you mean “evidence” and not absolute certain knowledge).

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the election results:

US 2024 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

> The Republican Party's ticket—Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, and JD Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio—defeated the Democratic Party's ticket—Kamala Harris, the incumbent U.S. vice president, and Tim Walz, the incumbent governor of Minnesota.

US 2020 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_elections

> The Democratic Party's nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, defeated incumbent Republican president Donald Trump in the presidential election.

Venezuela 2024 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Venezuelan_presidential_e...

> The election was contentious, with international monitors calling it neither free nor fair,[4] citing the incumbent Maduro administration's having controlled most institutions and repressed the political opposition before, during,[2][5] and after the election. Widely viewed as having won the election, former diplomat Edmundo González…
by exabrial | 2026-01-03 13:03:27+00:00
The whole thing is so weird; both sides are coy.

Venezuela is playing the usual card about America trying to seize oil; US playing usual card about narcotics. You can believe what you want, or buy into whatever mainstream narrative you want, I’m not here to judge, but I’ve seen these cards played out so many times in my lifetime.

Neither makes sense to me for this level of resistance and response from the US. I have a feeling this has to do far more with Iran, Russia, and China, than Venezuela/drugs.

For instance next-door, China is active around the Darien gap region, developing roads and highways. Allegedly this is for port infrastructure, but given Chinese history of low intensity conflicts and island building techniques in the South China sea, this could be a land version of that strategy.

I need to read up about Venezuelan and Iranian Russian connections and interactions. I think the most underrated piece of news is the seizure of tankers under embargo, with blowing up drug boats as the distraction.

One thing is for sure; even the most hard core right of uneasy to support Trump in a new war, and Trump has publicly lamented the expense (of all things) of war.

Myself: no thanks. No more wars please.
by p91paul | 2026-01-03 13:03:38+00:00
IANAL, but I think open source started with software since software has source and binary form. Now with compression and other shenanigans, probably even videos or images could be argued to have a source and binary form. I don't know a thing about multimedia, but people here saying this "open source" release is a good thing mention specifically the fact that it's the uncompressed version, or as the FSF would call it, "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it".
by orangeboats | 2026-01-03 13:03:57+00:00
You clearly do not understand networking. Or else you won't make such a statement:

>This is stuff that could be implemented in any ipv4 stack in some days of work.

The sysadmins across the world, who had to deal with decades-old, never-updated devices facepalmed in unison.

At least the other comment agreed that "IPv4+" hosts will never be able to talk to IPv4 hosts.

>IPv6 is overengineered, thats the reason why it's not adopted after 30 years.

It is already adopted in many countries. Don't blame the protocol for your countrymen's incompetence.
by throw0101a | 2026-01-03 13:04:09+00:00
> Many European nations contributed, it wasn't just the UK. The french were basically the only NATO members who didn't contribute

Can you outline how Canada contributed? Because I distinctly remember our PM at the time, Chretien, saying 'no thanks'.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_and_the_Iraq_War

How about Germany?

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/06/iraq.johnhoope...
by dizhn | 2026-01-03 13:04:20+00:00
> The maker of this has taken a deterministic problem (substring matching transaction descriptions) that could be solved with a 50-line Python script

I had a coding agent write this for me last week. :D

It takes an excel export of my transactions that I have to download obviously since no bank is giving out API access to their customers. It uses some python pandas and excel stuff and streamlit to classify the transactions and "tally" results and show on the screen as color coded tabular data. (Streamlit seems really nice but super super limited in what it can do.) It also creates an excel file (with same color coding) so I can actually open it up and check if necessary. This excel file has dropdowns to reclassify rows. The final excel file also has formulas in place to update live. Code can also compare its own programmatic calculations with the result from formulas from excel. Why not? My little coding sweatshop never complains. (All with free models and clis by the way. I haven't had a reason to try Claude yet.)
by libertine | 2026-01-03 13:04:32+00:00
That's just an opinion, the fact is they haven't.

Russia in the last 30 years invaded and occupied Moldova, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria - not to mention the atrocities committed in Africa.

But with the exception of Syria, Russia always had genocidal intent - deny cultures, erase them, and make those countries as unstable as possible while remaining occupied.

I'm not saying what the US did was good, or right, but there's a big difference.

The US never denied the existence of cultures, languages, etc.
by hnarn | 2026-01-03 13:05:05+00:00
> It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...?

It depends on whether you’re interested in it or not. There are multiple benefits with ZFS over your current setup, such as snapshotting, compression and the fact that it’s a virtual volume manager similar to LVM, ie more control over the things I just mentioned on a subset of the storage.

I also avoid hardware raid controllers like the plague for the simple reason that you are then ”vendor locked”, which you wouldn’t be with ZFS, you could easily move the disk(s) to another chassi.
by vintermann | 2026-01-03 13:05:58+00:00
Blair didn't believe it either. Nobody did. What everyone banked on (including e.g. Hillary Clinton) was that the invasion would be so awe-inspiring, popular and such an obvious unqualified success that everyone who opposed it would be embarrassed, and the WMD claims would quietly be forgotten (or maybe they could scrounge up a trailer with chemicals or something).

And for months, years even, that "can't argue with success" strategy worked great. Some help from a loyal press was necessary, of course.

This is what the architects of this invasion (it's hardly Trump alone) are banking on, too. We WILL get told that suddenly life is so much better for everyone in Venezuela, and for a while it might even be true - it's very cheap for the US to provide, after all. The serious, realistic position will be that this was a shrewd thing to do, and the Nobel Peace prize committee showed great foresight and were vindicated in their choice.

But then the Furies will come knocking.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-03 13:06:21+00:00
I can't honestly claim to have paid attention to the whole interview and followed all of his rambling, but he seemed to express in the Tucker interview that he views Ukraine as traditional/rightful Russian territory. Tucker was trying to lead Putin into the claim that the invasion was prompted by NATO doing NATO things (which is the talking point favored by right-aligned American commenters, who want to somehow blame Obama/Biden foreign policy for the war), but Putin just wanted to talk about shit that happened centuries ago.
by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-03 13:06:48+00:00
You’re leaning very hard on the Clever Hans story, but you’re still missing why the analogy fails in a way that should matter to an engineer.

Clever Hans was exposed because the effect disappeared under controlled conditions. Blind the observers, remove human cues, and the behavior vanished. The entire lesson of Clever Hans is not “people can fool themselves,” it’s “remove the hidden channel and see if the effect survives.” That test is exactly what has been done here, repeatedly.

LLM capability does not disappear when you remove human feedback. It does not disappear under automatic evaluation. It does not disappear across domains, prompts, or tasks the model was never trained or rewarded on. In fact, many of the strongest demonstrations people point to are ones where no human is in the loop at all: program synthesis benchmarks, math solvers, code execution tasks, multi-step planning with tool APIs, compiler error fixing, protocol following. These are not magic tricks performed for an audience. They are mechanically checkable outcomes.

Your framing quietly swaps “some people misunderstand the tech” for “therefore the tech itself is misunderstood in kind.” That’s a rhetorical move, not an argument. Yes, lots of people are confused. That has no bearing on whether the system internally models structure or just parrots. The horse didn’t suddenly keep solving arithmetic when the cues were removed. These systems do.

The “it’s about the people” point also cuts the wrong way. In Clever Hans, experts were convinced until adversarial controls were applied. With LLMs, the more adversarial the evaluation gets, the clearer the internal structure becomes. The failure modes sharpen. You start seeing confidence calibration errors, missing constraints, reasoning depth limits, and brittleness under distribution shift. Those are not illusions created by observers. They’re properties of the system under stress.

You’re also glossing over a key asymmetry. Hans never generalized. He didn’t get better at new tasks with minor scaffolding. He didn’t improve when the problem was decomposed. He didn’t degrade gracefully as difficulty increased. LLMs do all of these things, and in ways that correlate with architectural changes and training regimes. That’s not how self-deception looks. That’s how systems with internal representations behave.

I’ll be blunt but polite here: invoking Clever Hans at this stage is not adversarial rigor, it’s a reflex. It’s what you reach for when something feels too capable to be comfortable but you don’t have a concrete failure mechanism to point at. Engineers don’t stop at “people can be fooled.” They ask “what happens when I remove the channel that could be doing the fooling?” That experiment has already been run.

If your claim is “LLMs are unreliable for certain classes of problems,” that’s true and boring. If your claim is “this is all an illusion caused by human pattern-matching,” then you need to explain why the illusion survives automated checks, blind evaluation, distribution shift, and tool-mediated execution. Until then, the Hans analogy isn’t skeptical. It’s nostalgic.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-01-03 13:07:05+00:00
Which ones? This one in particular is special? See the problem? I still need to trust some authority on which ones to spend time on.

I think the parent was implying that we should try to avoid bias by reading it ourselves, but I still need to trust someone, so still getting biased feedback. "reading the paper" does not remove the bias, because I still need to narrow it down to read only specific ones.
by dabinat | 2026-01-03 13:07:36+00:00
Trump is a man who will push boundaries further and further until someone physically stops him from doing so. But you don’t need to justify anything if you have full control over people who would normally investigate, prosecute or restrict such things.

Then you put your thumb on the scale (i.e. Texas) so you don’t cede power to the other party in the midterms and then you never need to worry about consequences for your entire term.

It’s a bit more of a problem in 2028 but Trump is term-limited so that’s someone else’s problem.
by codeforafrica | 2026-01-03 13:08:03+00:00
Location: Africa or REMOTE

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes, to any location in Africa, where I can get the necessary permission to live and work. Occasional travel is possible.

Technologies: Linux, Front or Backend Web Development, General Software Development, System Administration.

Résumé/CV: on request (software development, CTO, mentoring, training, fluent in English and German, german citizenship)

Contact: Email: see profile or http://codingforafrica.at/

Like this Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31518945], I am looking for similar work, but I am open to work on any interesting project. I am a European software developer who has lived and worked on four continents. Now it's time to move on and so I am in the process to relocate to Africa.

I have more than a decade of experience running a company, doing software development, support and training and mentoring adults and students, as well as working on educational projects, and I am willing to take on a mixture of roles as needed to support a project.

I value good teamwork over fancy tech, and I don't shy away from working on legacy code. I am primarily motivated by solving problems, so let me help you solve your problems.

I am open to work for a company anywhere as long as the work can be done fully remote from Africa.

While I could find a job elsewhere I believe that the experience living in an area where my work is going to have an impact gives me a better understanding of the needs of the location I am serving. Whether it is through direct contact with clients and users or just by being part of a local community and learning about the reality of living there.

In addition, I want to use some of my income to hire local interns and junior developers and train them in order to pass on my experience. I also sponsor children that otherwise can't afford to go to school (see my website). If you want to support this, I would love to work with you. Also if you are interested in hiring African developers yourself. I can help you build up a team for you.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-03 13:08:59+00:00
So at that point a ton of people are going to be forced onto Linux?

I don't really disagree with you. More and more I see people living with just their phones. Personally it's not for me, but it's getting more and more prevalent. Even some business just have people using iPads/tables in the field, no point in lugging a laptop around when you're only using one or two apps and email.

For developers and systems administrators though, we're going to need the desktop for decades to come. Nothing else comes close in terms of flexibility. Just think how many SREs live in the terminal still. Not because there aren't UIs and applications, but because those applications can only be installed and configured from the command line.

Accounting is also a long way away from dropping the desktop, again, they need a ton of flexibility.

Microsoft is probably "correct" in that it's not really worth spending to much time on the desktop, because the average user launched a browser, Steam or some custom piece of software and just stays there all day. It's not really financially viable to make something good for the last 10%, on the other hand, those people would probably be fine with being stuck on the Windows 2000 or XP UI.
by bokenator | 2026-01-03 13:09:07+00:00
The crypto model of single entries with "from" and "to" field works well for transactions. For example you move $100 from checking to savings account, something like the following will capture it perfectly.

```json
{
"from": "Checking",
"to": "Savings",
"amount": 100
}
```

This is basically what a crypto ledger does.

But the main reason why we need double entry accounting is that not all accounting entries are transfers. For example, is we are logging a sales, cash increases by $100, and revenue increases by $100. What's the "from" here? Revenue isn't an account where account is taken from, it is the "source" of the cash increase. So something like the following doesn't capture the true semantics of the transaction.

```json
{
"from": "Revenue",
"to": "Cash",
"amount": 100
}
```

Instead, in accounting, the above transaction is captured as the following.

```json
{
"transaction": "Sale",
"entries": [
{
"account": "Cash",
"debit": 100,
"credit": null
},
{
"account": "Revenue",
"debit": null,
"credit": 100
}
]
}
```

It gets worse with other entries like:

- Depreciation: Nothing moves. You're recognizing that a truck is worth less than before and that this consumed value is an expense.
- Accruals: Recording revenue you earned but haven't been paid for yet. No cash moved anywhere.

The limitation of ledgers with "from" and "to" is that it assumes conservation of value (something moves from A to B). But accounting tracks value creation, destruction, and transformation, not just movement. Double-entry handles these without forcing a transfer metaphor onto non-transfer events.
by sipofwater | 2026-01-03 13:09:10+00:00
"Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level" "In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/trump-imperia... (www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/trump-imperial-presidency.html) ... Mirror: https://archive.ph/YGtu3