MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scott_w | 2026-01-27 21:30:06+00:00
Did you miss this:

> UK Government cannot determine its agenda or directly influence its funding.

> The BBC will regularly criticise the government

The funding is set for a 10 year cycle, beyond the scope of any individual government specifically to protect the BBC from editorial interference by the government. That’s why it’s a publicly funded broadcaster, not “state media.”

The onus is now on you and the OP to prove your claim that the BBC is state media.
by Dig1t | 2026-01-27 21:30:12+00:00
>It would be currently impossible for desalination to meet the immense water demands of the midwest.

Any evidence for this?

First principles reasoning about the problem shows this to be eminently doable.

How much ocean water is available in the world? Virtually unlimited compared to human need.

How much energy can we produce to power desal plants? Well we can easily calculate the amount of fissile material we can produce. We have enough available material to power for all of humanity's energy needs (carbon free) just from nuclear alone for many hundreds of years.

There is nothing stopping us, with our vast wealth from desalinating ocean water. Israel has already demonstrated it's feasible on a large scale and can provide water for millions.

Also your choice of the midwest as an example is baffling. That is the one part of the US that will never have a real water shortage. The great lakes, tons of rainfall, and plentiful groundwater (the water table is like a few feet down isn't it?) mean that talking about the midwest makes absolutely no sense.

Places like California, Nevada, Arizona are the places that have real water problems. Yet they also happen to be right next to the ocean. California has so much vast wealth they could easily build enough desal capacity to provide water for the western states. It could be pumped to neighboring states via pipelines in the same way that oil is currently piped.
Show HN: Duperr – On-device voice cloning using Qwen3-TTS for iOS
by ahampt | 2026-01-27 21:30:52+00:00
I built an iOS app that runs Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B locally on your phone. No server calls, no data leaves your phone.

You can record a voice, generate speech, export audio files, and share custom voices. The model is quantized to 8-bit to run on iPhone. One-time purchase for export/import features when it launches, but generation will remain unlimited when launched. No subscription.

Beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/98d1hB6U

Happy to answer any questions!
by shuntress | 2026-01-27 21:31:07+00:00
Baseball is killer in-person but it's also pretty nice to just have on TV. There is nothing else like the tension of a critical at-bat.

Football is actually really really weird for a spectator sport and, I think, is generally presented very poorly. 80% of the game is deciphering opposing formations to determine what they each are predicting the opposing formation is about to try to do.
by MisterTea | 2026-01-27 21:31:08+00:00
All the second amendment fans I have met voted for the current regime. The vibes I get from many of them is they would absolutely love to cosplay military or police officers. The current regime loves painting their opponents as their enemy. I can easily imagine a future where gun toting regime supporters can be deputized to fight the "enemy within." They'll line up with enthusiasm to appease their ruler.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-27 21:31:27+00:00
> We limit screen time pretty aggressively, but it's getting harder as they get older.

Curious into what kind of example you as a parent are setting in limiting screen time for yourself. For me, it's easy as I'm an old fart that has had a longer time without devices than with one while also not participating in the socials. We now have parents that have had a device for the majority of their life having kids that will never know a time without devices. So this is an honest bit of curiosity at the risk of sounding judgemental.
by mrandish | 2026-01-27 21:31:34+00:00
Highly relevant Simpsons clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no_elVGGgW8

While being an insightful satire of mass training LLMs with (negative) reinforcement learning, it's actually from the 1993 episode "Last Exit to Springfield", thought by many (including me) to be the single greatest Simpsons episode of all time (https://www.reddit.com/r/Simpsons/comments/1f813ki/last_exit...).
by relaxing | 2026-01-27 21:31:36+00:00
You’re right to be thinking of second- and third-order solutions to these problems, which unfortunately the commenters in these threads aren’t prepared to engage with.

But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-01-27 21:31:46+00:00
There is definitely a difference between how senior researchers and students go about making publications. To students, they get told basically what topic they should write a paper on or prepare data for, so they work backwards: try to write the paper (possibly some researching information to write the paper), then add references because they know they have to. For the actual researchers, it would be a complete waste of time/funding to start a project on a question that has already been answered before (and something that the grant reviewers are going to know has already been explored before), so in order to not waste their own time, they have to do what you said and actually conduct a comprehensive literature review before even starting the work.
by vessenes | 2026-01-27 21:31:46+00:00
Hmmm. NFL revenue continues to grow, with something like half of it from media licensing. So, I think you’re wrong. My son watches NFL on his laptop, but there’s little to distinguish how he watches it from the experience he would have on a Samsung tv - he’s not like in some chat group trying to get Ochocinco to write his name on a jersey - he’s passively consuming an edited video feed of a football game with commentary.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-27 21:31:50+00:00
It's a really basic browser. It's made less as an independent thing, and more as a reply to https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents, so as long as it does more or less the same as theirs, but is less LOC, it does what I set out for it to do :)

> I get to evaluate on stuff like links being consistently blue and underlined

Yeah, this browser doesn't have a "default stylesheet" like a regular browser. Probably should have added that, but was mostly just curious about rendering the websites from the web, rather than using what browsers think the web should look like.

> It may be that some of the rendering is not supported on windows- the back button certainly isn't.

Hmm, on Windows 11 the back button should definitively work, tried that just last night. Are you perhaps on Windows 10? I have not tried that myself, should work but might be why.
by danudey | 2026-01-27 21:32:02+00:00
99% of climate scientists: human-triggered climate change is real

1% of climate scientists: climate change is probably just something that happens and we can't do anything about it

Legacy media: it's important that we give equal time to both sides of this argument.

Social media: climate change is a lie and you can tell because 99% of climate scientists all agree that it's real! That's how you know it's a conspiracy! You can't trust the institution! Also buy these supplements, they cure covid and cancer and chemtrails!

We're doomed.
by adev_ | 2026-01-27 21:32:13+00:00
> what do you think the mid-term (next ~decade) looks like if the US is somehow able to flush the toilet and do a complete 180 from a policy and administration perspective?

I honestly do not know.

Academia works with networking between peers and moves where the money is.

In Academia, the relation between researchers and the 'names' in the domain matters a lot. But the money stream matters even more.

When relations are created, I do not see them 'ending' just because US decided to play the good guys again and open the money stream again.

It will help to restore some links yes, but will probably not cut any ties created with other countries.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-27 21:32:14+00:00
Not much.

Class action suites suffer immensely from bad actors freeloading on the backs of people actually harmed. I have a friend who practices law in the area on some pretty high profile medical cases, it's a chronic problem trying to weed out people who were affected from people who shamelessly want money. Basically people playing victim to steal from actual victims, and even worse, the side doing the weeding is the side who originated the harm.
by roenxi | 2026-01-27 21:32:16+00:00
> ... I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.

It isn't usually a question of efficiency, it is a question of damage. Technically there is an argument that something like the holocaust was inefficiently executed, but still a good reason to actively prevent governments having ready-to-use data on hand about people's ethnic origin.

A lot of the same observations probably apply to the ICE situation too. One of the big problems with the mass-migration programs has always been that there is no reasonable way to undo that sort of thing because it is far too risky for the government to be primed to identify and deport large groups of people. For all the fire and thunder the Trump administration probably isn't going to accomplish very much, but at great cost.
by sethops1 | 2026-01-27 21:32:25+00:00
I have... so many questions. Not the least of which is, why? I gave TikTok maybe 10 minutes of my time, once a year just to see what others are seeing. And each time, it was always meaningless junk. I'd uninstall the app after; it does nothing for me. Why did it captivate you?
by jcranmer | 2026-01-27 21:32:26+00:00
The first casualty of LLMs was the slush pile--the unsolicited submission pile for publishers. We've since seen bug bounty programs and open source repositories buckle under the load of AI-generated contributions. And all of these have the same underlying issue: the LLM makes it easy to do things that don't immediately look like garbage, which makes the volume of submission skyrocket while the time-to-reject also goes up slightly because it passes the first (but only the first) absolute garbage filter.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-27 21:32:43+00:00
Not the second time, the third time. Remember that Biden whooped Trump's ass once and could have whooped his ass a second time, but the donor class (career retards) got cold feet when they were forced to confront his senility, and instead of letting the election be one senile old man against another senile old man, they replaced Biden with the archetype of an HR bitch. I hope nobody thinks it a coincidence that the two times Trump won were the two times he was up against a woman. Americans don't want to vote for their mother-in-law, nor for the head of HR. And yes, that certainly is sexist, but it is what it is.

I just pray they run Newsom this time. Despite his "being from California" handicap, I think he should be able to easily beat Vance by simply being a handsome white man with a white family. Vance is critically flawed and will demoralize much of the far right IFF his opponent doesn't share those same weaknesses.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-27 21:32:47+00:00
> What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows a lot.

I was thinking about this the other day as relates to the DevOps movement.

The DevOps movement started as a way to accelerate and improve the results of dev<->ops team dynamics. By changing practices and methods, you get acceleration and improvement. That creates "high-performing teams", which is the team form of a 10x engineer. Whether or not you believe in '10x engineers', a high-performing team is real. You really can make your team deploy faster, with fewer bugs. You have to change how you all work to accomplish it, though.

To get good at using AI for coding, you have to do the same thing: continuous improvement, changing workflows, different designs, development of trust through automation and validation. Just like DevOps, this requires learning brand new concepts, and changing how a whole team works. This didn't get adopted widely with DevOps because nobody wanted to learn new things or change how they work. So it's possible people won't adapt to the "better" way of using AI for coding, even if it would produce a 10x result.

If we want this new way of working to stick, it's going to require education, and a change of engineering culture.
by YetAnotherNick | 2026-01-27 21:32:53+00:00
With optimizations and new hardware, power is almost a negligible cost. You can get 5.5M tokens/s/MW[1] for kimi k2(=20M/KWH=181M tokens/$) which is 400x cheaper than current pricing. It's just Nvidia/TSMC/other manufacturers eating up the profit now because they can. My bet is that China will match current Nvidia within 5 years.

[1]: https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...
by Bender | 2026-01-27 21:32:54+00:00
The NAZI rhetoric is beyond old at this point. If that were a thing today there would be exactly zero protestors, rioters, illegal immigrants, people looking at one of the SS, deportation. There would just be one big ditch in each city, many bags of lye and a bulldozer. All of these events would have lasted a few hours and we would instead be trying to figure out who is missing.
by csa | 2026-01-27 21:32:58+00:00
> I'd consider 5'8 and 210lbs morbidly obese. An average male at 5'8 should generally weigh about 150lbs and no more than 164lbs

You would consider incorrectly then.

This person has ~155 pounds of lean body mass. 164 would put him at roughly a body builder level of fat, which basically requires a part time job in cooking and nutrition to maintain.

For reference, I’m in a similar situation to this person. I’m 5’11” (180cm) and about 200 lbs (91kg) with about 170 lbs of lean body mass. My dexa scan says that I’m 15% body fat, but I get the same lectures from doctors about being obese and needing a lifestyle change, all based on BMI and (I assume) my size (I’m barrel chested). It’s completely absurd.
by roan-we | 2026-01-27 21:33:10+00:00
I had developed a side project with AI agents to help me summarize the research papers and extract key citations, and I was repeatedly hitting the same annoying pattern. I would finetune everything with GPT4 to perfection, and then in a couple of weeks, it would start hallucinating references or missing citations. I used to waste my Saturday mornings changing prompts and switching models instead of really using the thing.

Kalibr pretty much freed me from that loop.

I basically arranged GPT-4 and Claude as two different routes, explained that success means accurate citations that I can verify, and now it just works.

Last week, GPT-4 oddly started being very slow on longer papers, and by the time I realized it, the traffic was already automatically diverted to Claude.

It's like the difference between caretaking an agent and actually having a tool that remains functional without constant supervision.

Honestly, I wish I had discovered this a few months ago hehe
by jader201 | 2026-01-27 21:33:11+00:00
> having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024

That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.

This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.
by graemep | 2026-01-27 21:33:11+00:00
Why do we need to push people into the workforce? There are a lot of social benefits to people being stay at home parents (which will be the commonest reason for doing so).

What fraud?

> You will then get the argument of "why should I be taxed more because I'm single"?

You might, but its a dishonest argument. You are taxing households together. You are giving each individual the same amount of tax free income and the same amount in the lower bands.

It is already possible for self employed people to do this by making their spouses a partner or shareholder in the business or similar. This is just extending the same rights to employed people.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2026-01-27 21:33:23+00:00
This isn't a problem for evolutionary theory. It's literally a necessary prediction of it. Most recent common ancestor of humans and chimps is 5-10 million years ago. Since we have observed tool usage in modern chimps and lots of very complicated tool use in humans, the necessary prediction is that some amount of tool use goes back at least ~5-10 million years, with increased complexity roughly tracking with the continuous increase in braincase size.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-27 21:33:48+00:00
There's this thing where all the thought leaders in software engineering ask "What will change about building about building a business when code is free" and while, there are some cool things, I've also thought, like it could have some pretty serious negative externalities? I think this question is going to become big everywhere - business, science, etc. which is like - Ok, you have all this stuff, but do is it valuable? Which of it actually takes away value?
by shit_game | 2026-01-27 21:34:04+00:00
What is the endgame here? Obviously "heightened security" in some kind of sense, but to what end and what mechanisms? What is the scope of the work? Is this work meant to secure forges and upstream development processes via more rigid identity verification, or package manager and userspace-level runtime restrictions like code signing? Will there be a push to integrate this work into distributions, organizations, or the kernel itself? Is hardware within the scope of this work, and to what degree?

The website itself is rather vague in its stated goals and mechanisms.
by vessenes | 2026-01-27 21:34:16+00:00
Tao’s doing a lot of related work in mathematics, so I can say that first of all literature search is a clearly valuable function frontier models offer.

Past that, A frontier LLM can do a lot of critiquing, a good amount of experiment design, a check on statistical significance/power claims, kibitz on methodology..likely suggest experiments to verify or disprove. These all seem pretty useful functions to provide to a group of scientists to me.
by sfink | 2026-01-27 21:34:19+00:00
Yes. That part of the video was straight-up "here's how to automate academic fraud". Those papers could just as easily negate one of your assumptions. What even is research if it's not using cited works?

"I know nothing but had an idea and did some work. I have no clue whether this question has been explored or settled one way or another. But here's my new paper claiming to be an incremental improvement on... whatever the previous state of understanding was. I wouldn't know, I haven't read up on it yet. Too many papers to write."
by ashishb | 2026-01-27 21:34:40+00:00
> I think there's just not enough money in the county to induce more babies.

The surrogacy market charges $200K, and that too just for ~12 months (9-months of pregnancy + fertilization).

At that rate, to produce 1 million children, you have to pay $200 Billion.

So, ~ one trillion a year to produce 4 million babies in the US to maintain the population.
Who will fund it?
by danudey | 2026-01-27 21:35:09+00:00
Taking away people's guns is unamerican, unless you're taking them away from someone I consider to be unamerican, like an immigrant or a liberal; in that case, it's for the good of America that we take away their guns, and the people who wrote the constitution never intended for it to apply to all people the way it says, but only white people and non-white people those white people find to be convenient allies for the time being.
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-01-27 21:35:10+00:00
I 100% agree with the premise that TikTok is addictive and even dangerous to consume in large amounts (that's why I don't consume it at all).

But I feel the exact same about cheeseburgers. Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?

Again, I get the danger here, and I don't like TikTok as a whole. I just don't really know where the line is between something that the parent is allowing kids to do (like spending a billion hours on TikTok), versus something they have no control over (like a company badly constructing a car seat, or similar).
by publicdebates | 2026-01-27 21:35:17+00:00
Scrolling videos, commenting, expanding my algorithm by searching for similar stuff to what I liked, sometimes watching lives, sometimes hosting lives or joining lives. Maybe about 70% scrolling videos and 28% lives and 2% creating.

I should mention that I was very financially successful due to TikTok. Around Christmas of 2023, my book got over 20M views and shot up to #122 on all Amazon books, until KDP just stopped offering it within a few hours. I wonder how high it would have gone.

But due to that success, I lost both drive and purpose. I had already made it, and it wasn't clear what else I could offer the world. So while I thought about it, I scrolled to pass the time. But that scrolling was endless and addictive. And I never made any progress on figuring out the question of what I'm good for.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-27 21:36:00+00:00
> Impeached and replaced with someone just as bad. This just happened with Tom Homan getting Bongino's spot

Bovino (Border Patrol “at large” Commander who may or may not have lost that title and been returned to his sector command), not Bongino (the podcaster-turned-FBI Deputy Director who resigned to go back to podcasting), and Homan didn't get Bovino’s job, only his spotlight (he was already the head of border policy for the White House.)
by bijant | 2026-01-27 21:36:08+00:00
Thank you for putting my feelings into much better words than I ever could.I'm not a SJW by any means and have not renamed my git branches to main and always supported meritocracy over quotas and yet there is something that just rubs me the wrong way about an office of that size (not a garage based start-up) where the only females or PoCs are to be found in the secretarial or cleaning staff if at all. Having interacted with some of the people involved in the past I have a gut feeling of why that might be.
by ModernMech | 2026-01-27 21:36:32+00:00
They can cut budgets without Congress by reappropriating money now, it's one of the powers they've managed to usurp. But they don't have to cut anything, they manage to curb spending by throwing a wrench in the whole machine and watching awards crawl to a halt. They cancel grants, fire or drive out reviewers to increase review times, or delay follow-up funding. Maybe the funding comes through eventually but students need to be funded continually; the government will pull their visas if they don't have funding to enroll.

They're also straight up harassing and arresting foreign students for no reason, so they don't even have to muck with the budget at all to materially ruin things.
by Veen | 2026-01-27 21:36:56+00:00
It's not. The guy behind Moltbot dislikes crypto bros as much as you seem to. He's repeatedly publicly refused to take fees for the coin some unconnected scumbags made to ride the hype wave, and now they're attacking him for that and because he had to change the name. The Discord and Peter's X are swamped by crypto scumbags insulting him and begging him to give his blessing to the coin. Perhaps you should do a bit of research before mouthing off.