MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nickpinkston | 2026-01-16 03:40:29+00:00
In the US context that's largely true, with the government providing useful regulations after the fact (allowing national corporations, railroad right-of-way law, etc.).

The exception being guys like JP Morgan who organized industry cartels that acted as private "central planners", part of which turned into the current Federal Reserve Bank.

But for countries like China and many others in Asia with strong state capacity, industrial policy was planned top-down for the "commanding heights" of industry like: roads, rail, shipping, airlines, telecom, steel, energy, etc., and that actually worked very well, faster than private markets alone, with the benefit of existing tech and models to follow.
by lmz | 2026-01-16 03:40:51+00:00
In the poorer parts of the world, people absolutely detest illegal immigrants (or basically most working migrants as well) because they are taking jobs from the locals. They hate refugees because there's not enough resources to go around to use in feeding and housing them.

Welcoming people in because "no-one wants to do those jobs" is very much a luxury belief of the well off.
by abbeyj | 2026-01-16 03:41:30+00:00
It depends on what you want. If you want to install an old copy of Visual Studio from 20 years ago then you should be able to write a program and compile it and have that work on XP. But that comes with limitations. You're not going to be able to use even C++11 and will be stuck with C++03, or maybe even C++98. If that's acceptable to you then it can work. But if you want to compile something that somebody else wrote or want to use some library that somebody else wrote, it probably won't work in that environment.

Or you could install and old copy of Cygwin or MinGW.

Do you want to run a modern Visual Studio and target XP? Maybe you can make that work if you install an old platform SDK and set WINVER and _WIN32_VERSION and work around all the warnings and compatibility problems that you'll run into. It is fighting an uphill battle and it will continue to get worse with each new version of VS that you want use.

For rust there is Rust9x https://seri.tools/blog/announcing-rust9x/. But I think this is the effort of handful of people. It is behind the upstream rust and it could go away at any time. If you want to write a toy program in Rust then it is fine, but if you want something that's going to be supported long-term you're rolling the dice.

Python 3.4.4 is the last version of Python that will run on Windows XP. That's 10 years old and many things on PyPI now require newer versions of Python so you'd be stuck with old, unsupported versions of those modules, possibly containing security issues.
by strken | 2026-01-16 03:41:57+00:00
Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.

They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.

It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-16 03:42:33+00:00
Does anyone remember yik-yak? It wasn't anonymous and resilient like briar, but it was great in its time to discover people near-by and start chatting.

Does anyone if briar relays traffic? like if at least one person in a wifi network has briar and they also connect by bluetooth to another person within an adjacent wifi network, does it relay messages from one end of the city to the other over dozens of devices?
by barbs | 2026-01-16 03:42:54+00:00
Shame, Amyl and the Sniffers would've put on a hell of a show ;)

I agree though, Melbourne is absolutely bursting at the seam with events, groups and activities in almost anything you could possibly be interested in. It's particularly noticeable for me coming from Sydney. I saw someone in a local FB group suggest holding a whip-cracking jam meetup in a park and it generated significant interest.
by neuralkoi | 2026-01-16 03:43:19+00:00
You might be interested in Arweave or IPFS:

Arweave network is like Bitcoin, but for data: A permanent and decentralized web inside an open ledger. [0]

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized protocol, hypermedia, and peer-to-peer (P2P) network for distributed file storage and sharing. The shadow libraries Anna's Archive and Library Genesis host books via IPFS. [1]

[0] https://www.arweave.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
by perrygeo | 2026-01-16 03:43:23+00:00
I don't know what it is about observability that brings out the over-engineering in us. I haven't actually measured it but I suspect many startups doing things the "modern" way (ie logs, distributed traces, metrics, ci/prod/stage/dev environemts etc going to a dozen different services) generate more metadata than actual data. I mean, we need to observe your systems but ultimately that data is a second class citizen to what we're observing in the first place, the application.

At the most absurd, I've seen observability systems replicated across 3 data centers for an application that hadn't been built yet. But don't worry, by the time it was released, they'd have an observability system so good it couldn't fail (narrator: "It did, in fact, fail.")
by pessimizer | 2026-01-16 03:43:34+00:00
> It had been assumed that Byfield died around 1850, but O'Keeffe's discovery of the veteran's 1851 memoir, along with additional evidence from newspapers and archives, adds new chapters to his astonishing life story.

I hate to be obnoxious, but what O'Keeffe did was happen upon a rare book in a small library the he recognized had been written by a semi-famous author. Instead of scanning it (or having it scanned) and putting it on archive.org, then writing his article, he's actively concealing these "new chapters" from the world. My assumption is that he's planning to put it into print in order to make a few bucks.

According to the Google Books entry (which I don't quite trust, because why would there be a Google Books entry?), it's 80 pages, so he'll either have to write a hefty introduction of what seems to be a story about a disabled vet talking about Jesus, or he'll combine the war narrative and the post-war narrative (both obviously long out of copyright) into a single volume and hawk that, and the article he's written will be the introduction.

I guess I advise him to self-publish and to make sure to also target Christian bookstores rather than just academic libraries? Survey a brick and mortar Christian bookstore of possible and get an idea about what covers sell?
by chrismccord | 2026-01-16 03:43:39+00:00
We use dns_cluster, which ships with all phoenix apps. libcluster achieves the same, so whatever works. Ultimately dist erl just needs a way to reach the nodes and you call Node.connect/1 on a hostname and off to the races. It's similar to FLAME, in that the erlang VM allows sending functions over the wire as a regular transparently encoded/decoded datastructure, but in this case it's just simple built-in erlang erpc, ie `:erpc.call` underneath rather than FLAME where we are managing a pool of elastic nodes, then rpc'ing them.
by dharmatech | 2026-01-16 03:44:14+00:00
> the character of God is frequently portrayed as nothing short of sociopathic and psychopathic.

I've heard critics of religion make this claim but I don't fully understand it.

I of course wouldn't expect you to go forth with a thesis here on this topic. :-)

So I'll ask, do you think there's a good author that makes this case? I'm sure someone has written on that.

I'm familiar with Bart Eherman's work. He left the faith due to "the problem of evil".
by atonse | 2026-01-16 03:45:32+00:00
Did you read the details of the article?

The regulator fined them for not hacking DNS to the whims of the media companies in Italy that want to clamp down on piracy by altering the way DNS works. DNS. The actual "open internet"

I think you may have this backwards.

To me it seems like something they should talk to local Italian ISPs about, not Cloudflare.
by doorhammer | 2026-01-16 03:45:57+00:00
I'm wildly out of my depth here, but sometimes I find I learn quickly if I try out my intuition publicly and fail spectacularly :)

> "This is necessary for optimization but can lead to invalid programs."

Is this not the case? It feels right in my head, but I assume I'm missing something.

My understanding:
- Backtracking gets used to find other possible solutions
- Cut stops backtracking early which means you might miss valid solutions
- Cut is often useful to prune search branches you know are a waste of time but Prolog doesn't
- But if you're wrong you might cut a branch with solutions you would have wanted and if Prolog iterates all other solutions then I guess you could say it's provided an invalid solution/program?

Again, please be gentle. This sounded reasonable to me and I'm trying to understand why it wouldn't be. It's totally possible that it feels reasonable because it might be a common misconception I've seen other places. My understanding of how Prolog actually works under-the-hood is very patchy.
by dharmatech | 2026-01-16 03:46:52+00:00
> I don't respect the religion at all, nor any Abrahamic religion, as it's built upon falsehoods that justify prejudiced, authoritarian behavior. These religions have been the basis for untold amounts of conflict, conquest and cultural destruction.

Many people claim that the Bible, the church, their faith, etc has helped them. What's your take on that? Do you feel that the bad has outweighed the good in terms of its effects on people? This is a tough one because people, if they're biased, look to examples that favor their view.

I would imagine that if more bad than good came out of religion, then that religion would eventually fade to nothing.

For every evil religious person I've met, I tend to know a few good and even awesome ones.
by judahmeek | 2026-01-16 03:46:55+00:00
A LinkedIn comment I made on an adjacent topic:

> If the job market is unfavourable to juniors, become senior.

That requires networking with a depth deep enough that other professionals are willing to critique your work.

So... open-source contributions, I guess?

This increases pressure on senior developers who are the current maintainers of open-source packages at the same time that AI is stealing the attention economy that previously rewarded open-source work.

Seems like we need something like blockchain gas on open-source PRs to reduce spam, incentivize open-source maintainers, and enable others to signal their support for suggestions while also putting money where their mouth is.
by netcoyote | 2026-01-16 03:47:00+00:00
Here are my open-source (MIT) solutions for Mac development:

SandVault [0]: Run AI agents isolated in a sandboxed macOS user account

ClodPod [1]: Run AI agents isolated inside an OSX virtual machine

0: https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault

1: https://github.com/webcoyote/clodpod
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-16 03:48:05+00:00
> So far that belief has held. No matter how advanced the model gets, you'll get better results if you can clarify your thoughts well in written language.

I've heard it well described as a k-type curve. Individuals that already know things will use this tool to learn and do many more things. Individuals that don't know a whole lot aren't going to learn or do a whole lot with this tool.
by dwattttt | 2026-01-16 03:49:00+00:00
Is it your contention that the author doesn't understand that that Prolog predicates don't "return" anything, that they were expecting assignment rather than unification? I would read it again, their examples clearly state these (noting that the author does say "return", but also clearly shows bidirectional examples).

Both you and GP have had some fairly strong responses to what looked like mild complaints, the kind I would expect anyone to have with a language they've used enough to find edges to.
by quchao | 2026-01-16 03:49:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Hytale Calculator, a fan-made Chinese calculator + data hub for Hytale players. The short version: it’s the site I wish existed when I’m about to sink an entire evening into “just one more run” and realize I’m missing 17 tiny materials I should’ve planned for.

What it does

The site focuses on the unglamorous but strangely satisfying parts of sandbox RPGs:

Crafting/material calculator: pick a target item, set a quantity, and it tells you the total ingredients you’ll need (and breaks them down cleanly).

Drop expectation & probability: choose a monster / resource, set attempts, and get an estimated expected drop count (and probability where we have enough data).

Gear/stat comparisons: compare equipment stats and see the delta in a way that makes “upgrade” decisions less emotional.

Build & progression planning: rough planning tools for build choices and upgrade paths so you can prep before jumping in.

Searchable database: items, recipes, and resources are searchable so you can treat it like a lightweight reference.

It’s mobile-friendly, and supports bookmarking and sharing, because half of the time you’re looking at this stuff while someone’s yelling “go go go” in voice chat.

Why a Chinese site?

A lot of Hytale resources are English-first, and the Chinese community tends to fragment across screenshots, group chats, and scattered notes. I wanted a single place that’s:

usable in Chinese,

calculator-first (not a giant wiki wall), and

fast enough that you don’t lose your flow mid-session.

Also, I’m one of those people who actually enjoys turning messy game data into something structured. That’s either a useful skill or a cry for help.

Data & accuracy (the honest part)

The data is compiled from public community sources (wikis and guide sites) and then normalized into a consistent structure. It updates over time as sources change.

A few important notes:

This is not an official Hytale site.

Results are best-effort estimates, because community data can be incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated.

When assumptions are used (e.g., uncertain drop rates), I try to label them clearly.

If you spot incorrect numbers, missing recipes, or weird edge cases, I’d genuinely appreciate reports — the community feedback loop is the whole point.

How it’s built (briefly)

I kept it intentionally simple: structured data + fast search + a UI that stays out of your way. The “calculator” part is mostly deterministic math on top of a normalized dataset. The hard part is not the math; it’s the “please don’t let this data become spaghetti” problem.

What I’d love feedback on

Which calculator is most valuable first? (crafting vs drops vs gear vs builds)

What do you consider “must-have” filters for search?

Should sharing focus on shareable links, exportable build codes, or both?

Anything you hate about the UX on mobile?

If you’re a Hytale player (or you’ve built fan tools before), I’d love to hear what you think — especially what’s missing.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any blunt feedback.
by dasil003 | 2026-01-16 03:49:52+00:00
> …when you’re in a position to help

This clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting. One needs to have good judgement about when and how to help. A lot of people can imagine how things could go better if a bunch of other people changed their behavior in surprisingly simple ways. It's a much smaller subset of people that can correctly push the right buttons to get the other people to actually make those changes succeed at a systematic level.

In a small org it's actually not too hard for good ideas and feedback to get traction. In a larger org for concerns with a lot of stakeholders it can be fiendeshly difficult. Often the reason why a large project will fail is only truly knowable by a few senior technical people with enough experience and broad context to see the forrest for the trees. Past a certain quantity of stakeholders you can not explain to people why it will fail fast enough to offset the army of clueless stakeholders incentivized to socialize a good-sounding narrative convincing everyone that we need to try. In these cases reductive explanations can work, but they require significant reputational or hard authority to pull off.

This is why the article advocates picking your battles in a large org. Often the chance of actually helping is much lower than destroying your own reputation, even if you're right.
by upghost | 2026-01-16 03:50:45+00:00
Author: "Not my favorite language"

Prolog: "Mistakes were made"

As an avid Prolog fan, I would have to agree with a lot of Mr. Wayne's comments! There are something things about the language that are now part of the ISO standard that are a bit unergonomic.

On the other hand, you don't have to write Prolog like that! The only shame is that there are 10x more examples (at least) of bad Prolog on the internet than good Prolog.

If you want to see some really beautiful stuff, check out Power of Prolog[1] (which Mr. Wayne courteously links to in his article!)

If you are really wondering why Prolog, the thing about it that makes it special among all languages is metainterpretation. No, seriously, would strongly recommend you check it out[2]

This is all that it takes to write a metainterpreter in Prolog:

mi1(true).
mi1((A,B)) :-
mi1(A),
mi1(B).
mi1(Goal) :-
Goal \= true,
Goal \= (_,_),
clause(Goal, Body),
mi1(Body).

Writing your own Prolog-like language in Prolog is nearly as fundamental as for-loops in other language.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@ThePowerOfProlog

https://www.metalevel.at/prolog

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmBkU-l1zyc

https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/
by dhsysusbsjsi | 2026-01-16 03:50:53+00:00
They tried a variant of this in Australia for a short period of time before realising IP blocking accidentally takes down thousands of legitimate businesses on shared hosting.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-17/concern-over-asic-int...

They didn’t repeal the law but instead worked out better ways of using the existing powers after a review.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/austra...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-16 03:51:17+00:00
v2 is not a MitM concern (but it is a malicious code concern). Before quibbling about this consider that if v2 qualifies as a MitM concern then pretty much every other piece of software also does. That isn't in keeping with the spirit of the term.

The outrage is threefold, because there is no viable alternative, because it infantilizes users, trampling their agency, and because it clearly serves corporate interests at the expense of the user.

As to your proposed solution - the rewriting needs to happen on a separate device in order to avoid pushing extra data across the network. If you're already self hosting that service then there's no need for a transparency ledger.
by fragmede | 2026-01-16 03:51:20+00:00
Because they are getting better. They're still far from perfect/AGI/ASI, but when was the last time you saw the word "delve"? So the models are clearly changing, the question is why doesn't the data show That they're actually better?

Thing is, everyone knows the benchmarks are being gamed. Exactly how is besides the point. In practice, anecdotally, Opus 4.5 is noticably better than 4, and GPT 5.2 has also noticably improved. So maybe the real question is why do you believe this data when it seems at odds with observations by humans in the field?

> Jeff Bezos: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.

https://articles.data.blog/2024/03/30/jeff-bezos-when-the-da...
by weslleyskah | 2026-01-16 03:51:24+00:00
> The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.

€14 million? What the hell is this desperate witch hunt on piracy lately?
by _ache_ | 2026-01-16 03:52:56+00:00
It's very impressive!
I'm mean, it's better than other <200M TTS models I encounter.

In English, it's perfect and it's so funny in others languages. It sounds exactly like someone who actually doesn't speak the language, but got it anyway.

I don't know why Fantine is just better than the others in others languages. Javer seems to be the worst.

Try Jean in Spanish « ¡Es lo suficientemente pequeño como para caber en tu bolsillo! » sound a lot like they don't understand the language.

Or Azelma in French « C'est suffisament petit pour tenir dans ta poche. » is very good.I mean half of the words are from a Québécois accent, half French one but hey, it's correct French.

Però non capisce l'italiano.
by raincole | 2026-01-16 03:53:11+00:00
> At the heart of the conflict is Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield,’ a system designed to combat illegal live streams of sports events, such as Serie A football matches. The law requires internet service providers to block reported piracy sites within 30 minutes. AGCOM insists that Cloudflare comply with these demands through its public DNS service, 1.1.1.1. When Cloudflare allegedly failed to do so, the regulator imposed a fine of over €14 million.

Doesn't EU have some kind of net neutrality act? Italy gov can ask DNS resolver to just block pirate sites?
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-16 03:53:38+00:00
>> Cut stops backtracking early which means you might miss valid solutions

That's right, but missing valid solutions doesn't mean that your program is "invalid", whatever that means. The author doesn't say.

Cuts are difficult and dangerous. The danger is that they make your program behave in unexpected ways. Then again, Prolor programs behave in unexpected ways even without the cut, and once you understand why, you can use the cut to make them behave.

In my experience, when one begins to program in Prolog, they pepper their code with cuts to try and stop unwanted bactracking, which can often be avoided by understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place. But that's a hard thing to get one's head around, so everyone who starts out makes a mess of their code with the cut.

There are very legitimate and safe ways to use cuts. Prolog textbooks sometimes introduce a terminology of "red" and "green" cuts. Red cuts change the set of answers found by a query, green cuts don't. And that, in itself, is already hard enough to get one's head around.

At first, don't use the cut, until you know what you're doing, is I think the best advice to give to beginner Prolog programmers. And to advanced ones sometimes. I've seen things...
by CJefferson | 2026-01-16 03:56:41+00:00
But cloudflare do block things. They tend to block things as a rule the American government wants blocking.

The problem is they want to be the people who choose what gets blocked, rather than elected governments.

To me, this whole thing is crazy, certainly pull out if you like, but I'm shocked how many people seem to be siding with the profit-making company over an elected government.
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-01-16 03:56:45+00:00
Because reducing emissions is good on its own.

- Using renewable energy in most applications is now several times cheaper than constantly importing coal, oil and gas. It's weird to suggest using renewables hurts a country economically.

- Not burning fossil fuels in your country improves air quality and correspondingly health outcomes.

- Not importing fossil fuels gives your country geopolitical security

- And when has the goodness of a deed ever been dependent on what others are doing.