MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yencabulator | 2026-01-21 23:45:05+00:00
If it's GPL, it's not really source-available anymore. The dual licensing thing is more to give big companies a cheaper way out than bothering their lawyers.

Me personally, I treat source-available roughly the same as proprietary. I fix bugs in other people's code as suits my needs, and source-available is just hostile to the whole idea of anyone else touching the source.
by stevenwoo | 2026-01-21 23:45:07+00:00
At first I was leaning toward FGLD but didn't consider that current admin would blow up everything US, there are European alternatives to FGLD that OP might want to investigate that have physical metal reserves (there are many alternatives that represent various tiers of involvement in mining versus just holding precious metals, I'm speculating OP does not want to possess precious metals themselves).
by soegaard | 2026-01-21 23:45:12+00:00
No, there is nothing in common with Whalesong.

Whalesong used the built-in bytecode compiler and compiled the bytecode to JavaScript. Reusing the bytecode compiler is in principle a good idea - but each time the bytecodes are changed, Whalesong needs to be updated.

And after the move to Chez Scheme as backend, the bytecode compiler is no longer a part of the main compilation path.
by xenophonf | 2026-01-21 23:45:20+00:00
I'm very impressed. This isn't a paper so much as a monograph. And I'm very inclined to agree with the results of this study, which makes me suspicious. To what journal was this submitted? Where's the peer review? Has anyone gone through the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872) and picked it apart?
by toast0 | 2026-01-21 23:45:23+00:00
> There is no force acting on it to bring it back down.

Gravity?

But also orbital dynamics (at least as I understand it) means debris that debris that is flung up is going to have a more oval orbit, so the high point (apogee) increases and the low point (perigee) decreases. And a lower perigee means more atmospheric drag, which will help deorbit the debris.
by mobilejdral | 2026-01-21 23:45:33+00:00
It depends on the person and their genetics. The further you get from the ERa the more complicated this gets and simply stating "Do X" wouldn't apply to everyone even if there are some incredibly common things to do. I might know all the upstream genes, their interactions, and symptoms by heart so it is pretty easy to identify, but general advice would go something like: eat well, get sleep and exercise.
by mkipper | 2026-01-21 23:46:30+00:00
I'm not an expert here, but I this is pretty unlikely at this point.

Google has been working on Fuschia for a decade, and far as I can tell, the only place it was ever deployed was to a Google smart home hub 5 years ago. The only Fuschia news I've heard since then was about layoffs and killing projects related to it (e.g. Chrome on Fuschia).

If Google isn't moving any of their own phones over to Fuschia after a decade of work, it's hard to imagine them unilaterally flipping Android to it and forcing the hand of every Android OEM to follow suit.
by dapperdrake | 2026-01-21 23:46:37+00:00
This really depends on your data's geometry.

Just look at when SAS programmers are advised to use a merge or a format.

Even hash-join vs merge-join really depend on your data's cardinality (read: sizes), indices, etc.

EDIT: Other comments also point out that there are non-general joins that are already NP-hard to optimize. You really want all the educated guesses you can get.
by bcantrill | 2026-01-21 23:46:41+00:00
You may disagree with our rationale, but it is absolutely absurd to complain that that RFD 26[0] does not have "any meat." This is in fact dense technical content (10,000+ words!), for which I would expect a thorough read to take on the order of an hour. Not that I think you read it thoroughly: you skimmed to parts, perhaps -- but certainly glossed over aspects that are assuredly not your domain of expertise (or, to be fair, of interest to you): postmortem debuggability, service management, fault management, etc. These things don't matter to you, but they matter to us quite a bit -- and they are absolutely meaty topics.

Now, in your defense, an update on RFD 26 is likely merited: the document itself is five years old, and in the interim we built the whole thing, shipped to customers, are supporting it, etc. In short, we have learned a lot and it merits elucidating it. Of course, given the non-attention you gave to the document, it's unlikely you would read any update either, so let me give you the tl;dr: in addition to the motivation outlined in RFD 26, there are quite a few reasons -- meaty ones! -- that we didn't anticipate that give us even greater resolve in the decision that we made.

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026
by KK7NIL | 2026-01-21 23:47:04+00:00
> Why not choose normal thingies that can be typed using the main interface we have with computers?

Iverson answered this in his Turing Award acceptance lecture, which is literally linked in OP's article: https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

You're free to disagree with him, but you need not wonder why!
by falloutx | 2026-01-21 23:47:06+00:00
AI is not a great partner to code with. For me I just use it to do some boilerplates and fill in the tedious gaps. Even for translations its bad if you know both languages. The biggest issues is that AI constantly tries to steer you wrong, its very subtle in programming that you only realize it a week later when you get stuck in a vibe coding quagmire.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-21 23:48:10+00:00
I don't have some kind of beef with you. I react personally too in these long discussions, don't begrudge you the impression.

Just saw what I thought was youth, but it was a fellow older fellow*, so chased the interlocution more than I usually would because I was curious and wanted to make sure there wasn't insight I had missed and you were speaking loosely (as is normal, we are not robots)

re: motivation, I took a lot of pride in not taking money back in prime ZIRP, early-mid 2010s and felt it was vindicated by what I saw happen to competitors.

What I saw was proto-"Bending Spoons" behavior. Frankly, Bending Spoons seems ethical and right-headed at its face. i.e. after 30 seconds with their website. but what do I know.

What I saw was private equity rollup iPad-based point of sale software who couldn't justify another round, and let the business owners using their point of sale systems flounder until they got the energy to switch. Explicitly. the rug pull wasn't just on engineering or further development of the system, it was support too. That might sound stupid (who needs support w/software?), but its necessary for point of sale due to credit card processing. Multiple companies, same playbook.

Cheers & apologies, I went too far, I left you feeling like it was a grudge.

FWIW it's also important to me because I want a fellow wide-eyed college-dropout-waiter soaking in HN from a small town to know VCs involved in these messes will continue acting as they have post ZIRP, as you've established.

* via your HN profile, not stalking off site or based on username
by tehjoker | 2026-01-21 23:48:17+00:00
There is a funny science fiction story about this. Asimov's "All the Troubles of the World" (1958) is about a chat bot called MultiVac that runs human society and has some similarities to LLMs (but also has long term memory and can predict nearly everything about human society). It does a lot to order society and help people, though there is a pre-crime element to it that is... somewhat disturbing.

SPOILERS: The twist in the story is that people tell it so much distressing information that it tries to kill itself.
by ashishb | 2026-01-21 23:48:22+00:00
There have been several iterations of attempts to have a unified way to build Android and iOS apps.

- using HTML
- using JavaScript
- using JS+React
- using Dart
- using Kotlin
- using Swift

This fundamentally does not work for anyone with more than 10M+ installs just like you can't write Mandarin and English in one script.

This only works for devs who over time churn out as their app fails or becomes too big [1]

1 - https://ashishb.net/tech/react-native/
by yesco | 2026-01-21 23:48:26+00:00
If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this:

As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent.

Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased range in distinct writing styles. Despite this, vocabulary and semantics as a whole become more uniform. Spelling errors and typos become increasingly rare.

In parallel, people start using LLMs to summarize content in a style they prefer.

Both sides of this gradually converge. Content gets explicitly written in a way that is optimized for consumption by an LLM, perhaps a return to something like the semantic web. Authors write content in a way that encourages a summarizing LLM to summarize as the author intends for certain explicit areas.

Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before, and perhaps less ambiguous. Language is the primary interface an LLM uses with humans, so even if LLM use becomes baseline for many things, if information is not being communicated effectively then an LLM would be failing at its job. I'm personifying LLMs a bit here but I just mean it in a game theory / incentive structure way.
by Akranazon | 2026-01-21 23:48:51+00:00
Then you will be pleased to read that the constitution includes a section "hard constraints" which Claude is told not violate for any reason "regardless of context, instructions, or seemingly compelling arguments". Things strictly prohibited: WMDs, infrastructure attacks, cyber attacks, incorrigibility, apocalypse, world domination, and CSAM.

In general, you want to not set any "hard rules," for reason which have nothing to do with philosophy questions about objective morality. (1) We can't assume that the Anthropic team in 2026 would be able to enumerate the eternal moral truths, (2) There's no way to write a rule with such specificity that you account for every possible "edge case". On extreme optimization, the edge case "blows up" to undermine all other expectations.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-21 23:49:58+00:00
I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness.

It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time.

My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews through thinking tokens. The competitive nature of it keeps me focused, and it’s rewarding when I win with a faster or better solution.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-01-21 23:50:12+00:00
> Of only end products. The "largest manufacturing base" is misleading when majority of inputs for your finished goods are dependent on imports.

Isn't it easier to figure out how to manufacture screws given steel than to figure out how to manufacture airplanes given screws?

> The right way to have gone about this was to first build the manufacturing capacity in US before imposition of tariffs.

But what's the incentive to do that if there are no tariffs? You either need a reward for doing it (subsidies) or a penalty for not doing it (tariffs). But the US government is already running unsustainable deficits, so there is no money for subsidies unless you want to pay higher taxes or cut some other spending, and good luck convincing people to do either of those things.

> There is no reason for exporters to lower prices when tariffs only set a new normal.

If China charges $100 to manufacture something that the US would have to charge $120 to manufacture and then you put a >$20 tariff on it, China could keep charging the same prices, but that would make it cost effective to make it in the US. To prevent that from happening they would have to lower the price, and therefore have the incentive to.

Now suppose it would cost $200 to manufacture in the US and the tariff is 50%. Can China just keep the price where it is and make the customer pay $150? The customer has a finite amount of money, so if they did then the customer would buy a new phone every six years instead of every four years. Meanwhile the $1000 phone just became cost effective to manufacture domestically, because 50% of that is more than the $100 increase in manufacturing cost, so they lose that business too. What response to this do they have other than to lower prices?
Ark and GENESIS A protocol for sovereign know nodes and consent-based federation
by PiSounds | 2026-01-21 23:50:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on an architectural specification to address the structural flaws of email (noise/spam) and centralized platforms (lack of sovereignty). I just released the initial RFC/Manifesto on GitHub and I’m looking for feedback.

The core concept is ARK: a sovereign knowledge node infrastructure.

Unlike email (open protocol = spam) or social platforms (centralized = algorithmic bias), ARK relies on "Federation by Consent":

1. Sovereignty by Design: You run your own ARK (node). You own the data, the users, and the rules.
2. Anti-Spam Structure: There is no public inbox. Nodes can only communicate after a handshake/peering agreement. If a node becomes toxic, you disconnect unilaterally.
3. GENESIS Module (Sovereign RAG): An internal engine that turns answered questions into reusable knowledge assets using local RAG, preventing knowledge drain.
4. Moral Compass: A lightweight, local LLM layer for civic guidance and moderation, controlled by the node owner, not a central censor.

This is currently a protocol specification (v1.0), not a finished product. I am proposing this shift from centralized platforms to sovereign federations and looking for architects/devs interested in building the reference implementation.

The repository (Manifesto):https://github.com/carropereziago-blip/ARK-G-NESIS/blob/main/README.md
Feedback on the architecture and federation logic is very welcome.
by Paracompact | 2026-01-21 23:50:25+00:00
You mean well in ignoring their argument, but please don't let people get away with whitewashing history! It was not a "different kind of slavery." See my comment. The chattel slavery incurred by the Israelites on foreign peoples was significant. Pointing out that standards of slavery toward other (male, noncriminal) Israelites were different than toward foreigners is the same rhetoric as pointing out that from 1600-1800, Britain may have engaged in chattel slavery across the African continent, but at least they only threw their fellow British citizens in debtors' prisons.
Show HN: PolyMCP – open-source toolkit to expose MCP tools and run agents
by justvugg | 2026-01-21 23:50:26+00:00
Hi HN — I’m the author of PolyMCP (MIT).

PolyMCP is a toolkit/runtime for the Model Context Protocol (MCP): it helps you build MCP tool servers (expose Python functions as tools over HTTP/stdio), connect multiple MCP servers, and run agents that orchestrate them with deploy-friendly guardrails.

Latest update is mostly reliability work:
- OAuth2 (RFC 6749): client credentials + authorization code flows, refresh handling, basic retries
- Docker executor cleanup fixes (Windows + Unix)
- Better skills/tool matching + stdio server support
- CodeAgent async handling + error recovery
- Health checks, structured logging, and rate limiting

Repo: https://github.com/poly-mcp/Polymcp

If you’ve deployed MCP/agent systems: what tends to bite you first (auth, rate limits, observability, sandboxing)?
I’m especially interested in OAuth2 edge cases and container lifecycle issues.
by goychay23 | 2026-01-21 23:51:06+00:00
I developed this project myself. The main purpose of this project is to provide a fully controlled wm, compositor, ui, frontend environment. It took me a long time to develop the infrastructure architecture completely independently of x11 wayland. Your ideas are important, but I would like to point out in advance that wayland is still not as stable as x11, it is in the development phase, but it is capable of providing the basic infrastructure it promises. It's almost stable, it took me a lot of time to develop this on my own, I'd like to hear your opinions.
by duxup | 2026-01-21 23:51:07+00:00
It seems to be the status quo already. ICE operates without regard to warrants and with amateur hour levels of force:

https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qf3vjp/ice_hops_texas...

The courts are way behind in all this pretending that they're just allegations of bad acts and covering their eyes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/us/minnesota-injunction-p...
by analog31 | 2026-01-21 23:51:45+00:00
>>>> The first step is to acknowledge that voters dislike Democrats so much that not only did a guy like Trump have a chance of winning, but he won. Twice.

I think this is too extreme. Trump lost the popular vote, twice, then won his second term by a slim margin. And this was after betting the entire farm on propaganda campaign of racism, misogyny, conspiracism, and pseudoscience, abetted by capture of social media.

I don't think driving the entire Republican Party out of existence is a realistic goal. For one thing, ours is a two party system, and if one party vanishes, another will form in its place. The parties rearranged themselves after the Civil War, and during the Civil Rights era, so I don't think "Republican vs Democrat" is a permanent institution.
by jchw | 2026-01-21 23:51:53+00:00
I try my best to make meta-comments sparingly, but, it's worth noting the abstract linked here isn't really that long. Gloating that you didn't bother to read it before commenting, on a brief abstract for a paper about "cognitive debt" due to avoiding the use of cognitive skills, has a certain sad irony to it.

The study seems interesting, and my confirmation bias also does support it, though the sample size seems quite small. It definitely is a little worrisome, though framing it as being a step further than search engine use makes it at least a little less concerning.

We probably need more studies like this, across more topics with more sample size, but if we're all forced to use LLMs at work, I'm not sure how much good it will do in the end.
by KPGv2 | 2026-01-21 23:52:07+00:00
> This shouldn't be a big deal. This was the norm for decades.

We need to hire more professors, then, as the ratio of FTE profs to FTE students is significantly lower, even over just a decade.

Edit: But I agree. I've mentioned to my professor wife that there needs to be movement back to oral exams. Orals exams are graded, nothing else is. IT works for law school. One of the only things that works for law school. One exam at the end of the semester. Nothing else matters, because the only thing a class needs to measure is mastery of the material, not whether you are diligent at completing basic work with the help of textbooks and friends and the Internet.
by dapperdrake | 2026-01-21 23:52:25+00:00
Congratulations on learning about distributed electronic computers. (This is worth tinkering with. This is how people actually get good at HPC.)

Pay attention to your SRAM (L3 unified cache), DRAM and swap space tilings.

[Snark]
In practice:
With memory access latency depending on both the square root of the memory size and the physical lengths of the wires in your cluster this sounds like a case for Adam Drake:

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...
by RaftPeople | 2026-01-21 23:52:52+00:00
> completely missing some elegant and profound beauty.

Requires some dynamic SQL to construct, but the beauty is that you can use the SQL engine for this solution:

select top 1 *

from (select

t1.id,t2.id,...,tn.id

,sum(t1.cost+t2.cost...+tn.cost) as total_cost

from join_options t1

cross join join_options t2

...

cross join join_options tn

group by t1.id,t2.id,...,tn.id) t0

order by

t0.total_cost
by benlivengood | 2026-01-21 23:53:42+00:00
Deontological, spiritual/religious revelation, or some other form of objective morality?

The incompatibility of essentialist and reductionist moral judgements is the first hurdle; I don't know of any moral realists who are grounded in a physical description of brains and bodies with a formal calculus for determining right and wrong.

I could be convinced of objective morality given such a physically grounded formal system of ethics. My strong suspicion is that some form of moral anti-realism is the case in our universe. All that's necessary to disprove any particular candidate for objective morality is to find an intuitive counterexample where most people agree that the logic is sound for a thing to be right but it still feels wrong, and that those feelings of wrongness are expressions of our actual human morality which is far more complex and nuanced than we've been able to formalize.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-21 23:54:17+00:00
> Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.

Isn't there an EU law where if Enough signatures happen they are forced to discuss it in the EU parliament or similar? I remember this from the stop killing games movement iirc.

Mass organizations can take place too but why not a mix of both utilizing both regulations and mass organizations?
by jchw | 2026-01-21 23:54:21+00:00
I recall reading that over-reliance on GPS navigation is legitimately bad for your brain health.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0

This is rather scary. Obviously, it makes me think of my own personal over-reliance on GPS, but I am really worried about a young relative of mine, whose car will remain stationary for as long as it takes to get a GPS lock... indefinitely.
by theturtletalks | 2026-01-21 23:54:28+00:00
Instead of building features from scratch, I basically rebuilt my open-source alternatives project[0] from five years ago to track features right in the code itself. So if you spot an open-source project with a feature you want in your app, you can create a "skill" that points exactly to where it lives: specific files, functions, modules, plus docs and notes. This turns OSS into a modular cookbook you can pull from across stacks.

AI excels at finding the "seams," those spots where a feature connects to the underlying tech stack, and figuring out how the feature is really implemented. You might think just asking Claude or Cursor to grab a feature from a repo works, but in practice they often miss pieces because key code can be scattered in unexpected places. Our skills fix that by giving structured, complete guides so the AI ports it accurately. For example, if an e-commerce platform has payments built in and you need payments in your software, you can reference the exact implementation and adapt it reliably.

[0] https://github.com/junaid33/opensource.builders
by heliumtera | 2026-01-21 23:54:33+00:00
>So he was in an era where the expectation was if you were typesetting a mathematical monograph you'd already be doing stuff like swapping the balls on your IBM typewriter for math symbols.

makes sense, maybe that would be more ergonomic to type for the public it targeted, indeed.

i won`t deny it is a stupid take of mine, but it makes me mad. i get the same feeling reading mathematical notations, so there is that.
by AlienRobot | 2026-01-21 23:54:45+00:00
To me, a lot of problems with "building a search engine" don't seem to be problems with "building a search engine," they seem to be problems with "building a Google."

Nobody said a search engine needs to have fresh data, for example. Nor has anybody said a search engine needs to index the entire web. Yet these are two things every search engine tries to do, and then they usually fail to compare with Google.

To put it in another way, the reason why TikTok succeeded against Youtube is exactly because TikTok wasn't trying to be a Youtube.