MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wrs | 2026-01-06 19:15:47+00:00
I call it the “sandwich fallacy”.

A lot of good bakeries decide to start making sandwiches. It’s an obvious value-add and adds margin. But sandwich customers are different from bakery customers, a sandwich shop has a different layout from a bakery, and making a great sandwich is a very different skill set from making great bread. So it’s not easy to stay a successful bakery and add on a successful sandwich business.

On the other hand, a great sandwich shop can pretty easily hire a baker and set up an oven to make exactly the bread that it needs to elevate its sandwiches.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-01-06 19:16:05+00:00
> Maduro and his top people have all been indicted by the United States for narco-terrorism and other charges, and there is a $50 million
reward for his capture by the U.S. government. Maduro lost the last election and he has tanked the economy, but kept in power anyway and as a result millions of Venezuelans have entered the US. Should we arrest Maduro and take him to the U.S. to face trial or not try to arrest him? Given this situation on the ground, should the president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro be removed from office or not?

This is the very definition of a leading question, with extremely slanted language at that. Judging by others instances of this in the poll, I can’t take this pollster seriously.
by tensor | 2026-01-06 19:16:38+00:00
Yeah, I think Tesla from a few years ago was the sweet spot. A small number of multifunction physical buttons for all the things you need while driving. I've driven a number of cars over the years with a mess of physical buttons like VW is introducing, and the result is that I've never actually used them because it's too complicated to locate the right button while driving. So usually I either just don't use the features in those cars, or end up having to stop to figure how to adjust some basic ass thing.
by blahblaher | 2026-01-06 19:16:41+00:00
It will have to quintuple or more to make business sense for Anthropic. Sure, still cheaper than a full time developer, but don't expect it to stay at $200 for a long time. And then, when you explain to your boss how amazing it is, and can do all this work so easily and quickly, it's when your boss start asking the real question: what am I paying you for?
by jonny_eh | 2026-01-06 19:17:02+00:00
> So, for example, Android applications written in Java are able to invoke SQLite (through an adaptor). Maybe it would have been more convenient for Android if SQLite had been coded in Java as that would make the interface simpler. However, on iPhone applications are coded in Objective-C or Swift, neither of which have the ability to call libraries written in Java. Thus, SQLite would be unusable on iPhones had it been written in Java.

This feels like they're responding to people asking for SQLite to be rewritten in Java. Who are these people?!
by SR2Z | 2026-01-06 19:17:06+00:00
Not all intellectual property is the same. Trademarks have to be registered, patents have to be filed, but copyright is automatically granted by law whenever someone creates a work.

Trademark issues are therefore really simple: is the user of the trademark the one who has it registered or not?

But copyright holders don't have any standard, obvious evidence they can point to that shows it's really their copyright. They can file a DMCA, in which case companies normally just assume the complaint is accurate - but if the party on the other end objects, the case has to go to a judge who will determine who actually has the copyright and if infringement occurred.
by pixelesque | 2026-01-06 19:17:23+00:00
Roughly that figure (45%) was used to get to Mach 2.0 at 60,000 feet, about 45 minutes after takeoff from LHR (normally over the Bristol channel) to JFK.

Takeoff and climb / accel to Mach 1.7 was done with re-heat (afterburners), which did use a lot of fuel. After that, normal power (no re-heat) was used to get to Mach 2.0 and cruising (supercruise).
Show HN: Bull.sh: Financial Modeling Agent CLI
by workworkwork71 | 2026-01-06 19:17:26+00:00
Built a free open source agentic CLI tool for financial modeling & analysis. Hadn't played around with real equity valuation modeling for awhile and wanted to build tooling to get myself back into the game.

Bull.sh lets you query & store 10-Qs, 10-K in a local vector store to chat with them, build investment thesis from scratch or build full framework models through the CLI to export into excel.

It's open source, just requires your own Anthropic API key and (optionally) AlphaVantage Free API key if you want save some tokens from scraping. Feel free to play around with it.

Some ideas I have for features (amongst improvements to the existing orchestration & valuation frameworks):

1. Bull vs. Bear Agent Debate

Spawn two adversarial agents: one argues the bull case, one argues the bear case. They critique each other's assumptions, then a moderator agent synthesizes a balanced thesis. Surface the strongest counterarguments automatically.

2. Earnings Call Analyzer

Auto-fetch earnings call transcripts (or transcribe audio), detect management tone shifts vs. prior quarters, extract forward guidance, flag hedging language ("we believe", "challenging environment"). Compare CEO sentiment to online & social sentiment.

3. Supply Chain Knowledge Graph

Parse 10-K supplier/customer disclosures + news to build a graph of company relationships. Visualize dependencies, detect concentration risk, propagate shocks ("if TSMC goes down, who's exposed?"). Use Neo4j or networkx.

4. Real-time 8-K Alert System

Monitor SEC EDGAR for new 8-K filings, classify by materiality (executive departure, M&A, guidance change), push alerts via webhook/Slack/email. Let users set watchlists and filter by event type.

5. Thesis Backtester

Save thesis snapshots with timestamps. When the stock moves ±20%, resurface the original thesis and score which predictions were right/wrong. Build a track record dashboard showing analyst accuracy over time.
by chasd00 | 2026-01-06 19:17:34+00:00
I'll never forget one of my freshman "intro to engineering" courses in college the professor spent probably 15 min on the very first day going on about peak oil and how we were all doomed. He said this to a class full of kids enthusiastic about their future who want to build and make the world a better place. To this day, it was the single most toxic thing i've ever experienced and this was in the mid/late 1990's! If only one kid took his brain/soul poison to heart it would be a tragedy.
by zipy124 | 2026-01-06 19:17:41+00:00
That is true, but the worst offenders are about 300ms, and out of the 515 rtings have tested, only 5 have a worst case more than 200ms. A typical 'bad' LCD would be somewhere closer to 50-100ms usually.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag
by wat10000 | 2026-01-06 19:17:47+00:00
I'd guess not. It was aging, maintenance was getting ever more expensive, Airbus didn't really want to support it anymore, and it faced ever more competition from better first-class amenities on regular planes, and from the internet reducing the need for fast business travel. It was modestly profitable in its heyday once the capital costs were written off, but it didn't have a lot of headroom.

Jet fuel cost about $1/gallon when Concorde retired. Five years later, it would hit $3/gallon. I have to imagine that would have ended it if nothing else had by that point.
by IncreasePosts | 2026-01-06 19:17:54+00:00
Obviously she was not everyone's first choice. She was almost no one's first choice. Democrat voters let her know that when they only gave her ~7% support in the 2020 primaries. Maybe a messy primary that everyone feels a part of would have been better than a few leaders of the Democratic party attempting to anoint the next president. Maybe you think it was the responsible choice, but that certainly isn't what Obama thought in 2024, since he was pushing for open primaries before his hand was forced into endorsing Harris.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both performed significantly better than Harris did in the 2020 primaries. Maybe one of them would have been the responsible choice.
by berdario | 2026-01-06 19:18:05+00:00
Good point... It depends on what I would turn up.

It it's something public/political like a Lemmy/Mastodon instance, I would pick a foreign jurisdiction which is unlikely to enforce something like the UK's OSA or USA and EU sanctions... I don't know where it would be best, some country in the Balkans, maybe?

If it's a service (even commercial) meant to be used only by a few people that I have direct (personal or business) relationships, I'd just ask their preferences (and bias towards the cheapest jurisdiction for hosting).

If it's something B2C, hosting exclusively outside of Europe would probably just make things more difficult to me, so it'd probably be within the EU (Hetzner?)
by lgl | 2026-01-06 19:18:08+00:00
I am not a python guy so I did not know this person nor his framework.

But the tone of this message from his peers and the fact that this man kept working and contributing to open source (and software in general) until the end is deserving of more than 0 comments on hn.

My condolences to the family, friends and best of luck to the rest of the team that is working on (t)his framework.

RiP Mr Joe Mancuso.
by Reason077 | 2026-01-06 19:18:13+00:00
> ”the 767 burns about a tonne taxiing”

This seems incredibly inefficient. Is there a future for hybrid aircraft, which would feature both traditional turbofans and large batteries for energy storage?

Batteries would eliminate the need for an APU and power the aircraft during taxi, allowing the engines to be started just before actual takeoff, and shut down immediately after landing.

Either the batteries could power wheel motors directly during taxi, or the aircraft could mix turbofans with e-fans (which could also allow energy recovery during descent and help power the aircraft during cruise, reducing fuel consumption further).
by _petronius | 2026-01-06 19:18:26+00:00
Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read).

The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.
by prof-dr-ir | 2026-01-06 19:18:53+00:00
The article is just generally sloppy.

> .. my recent trip from Abu Dhabi to LA. 24 hours door-to-door. We have the technology to reduce that to under 10.

The direct flight (by Emirates) takes 16h15 mins, so that leaves 7h45 mins not in flight. If we want to bring that down to 10 hours just by making the flight supersonic then that would require a flight time of 2h15, corresponding to a (ridiculous) speed well over Mach 4.
by barbazoo | 2026-01-06 19:19:14+00:00
Sure obviously you're right. I think it's shitty of them because I learned about it after already setting up everything because I thought this was basic functionality. My bad.

So it would be more like Ferrari giving me the car for free, and then after a while when it starts raining I find out the windshield wipers are behind a paywall. Sure that would also be my fault, technically but it's also a shit company for doing that.
by hermitcrab | 2026-01-06 19:19:35+00:00
>I don't think that's a usage of high level abstraction I'm familiar with

The 'primitives' you are presented with are generally at a lot higher level of abstraction in a visual language ('join' node vs '+'). Obviously you can build any level of abstraction using these primitives.

>The geometry node editor in Blender has tons of hidden state - what are the inputs to your program, what are the outputs, how is it applied, etc

I'm not overly familar with Blender. But aren't the inputs and outputs shown as connections? if so, they aren't hidden in the same way they are in code.

>There's still syntax, it's just visual syntax.

You don't have to remember the name of the function, you usually just have to drag it from a list of functions and there is no list of arguments to remember either.

>I don't think there's anything stopping a visual programming language from offering functions, looping, and recursion.

Both are possible in principal.

>Most visual programming languages are purely data flow, but I think a control flow graph programming language would be very good at this.

Trying to mix the two in one environment sounds like a recipe for a lot of additional complexity.

>Another advantage of visual programming languages is you don't need to come up with names in order to reuse values

Good point.

>That said, there's no need to force these to be mutually exclusive.

Indeed. Most visual programming environments include scripting nodes, to get the best of both worlds.
by reactordev | 2026-01-06 19:19:50+00:00
Let’s be clear, I am not advocating for this. Just stating that communism doesn’t recognize a state, not even of the proletariat.

I’m not advocating for this transition. I’m on the side of peace and pacifism. I see no man as above me, or below me. Marx may be right but who really wants to try and test it? History has shown that regimes who try, fail. Those who stop short and just be all dictatorships, end up destroying their own. So, I guess cheers (champagne glasses) to the sinking ship.
by strange_quark | 2026-01-06 19:19:54+00:00
Sure, business travel is definitely still a thing. But every company I’ve ever worked at has sort of accepted that travel days are lost anyways because people come in from all over the country, get in at different times, have delayed flights, etc. My point being that I’m skeptical that companies are going to start paying 2x, 3x, 4x the cost so that their employees can get there a few hours faster, especially when, at least in my experience, it’s hard to get them to even pay for seats with extra legroom.
by nonameiguess | 2026-01-06 19:20:12+00:00
We badly need to set some sort of standards on what constitutes a product for the purposes of "productivity." It's well-defined economically, revenue earned by a firm per labor hour. Are you earning 50x the revenue per hour of work or have you just pushed 50x lines of code into a repo with an automated build pipeline? Do you have 50x the users? Any users at all?

I try to think of what this would look like at my company and I can't even really conceive of what this dream scenario is supposed to be. We have maybe 6-10 legitimately revenue-earning products with a meaningful user base and it took about a decade to get there. There is no reasonable world in which you say we could have done that in 10 weeks instead, which would be roughly 1/50th the time. It takes at least that long typically just to get a contract completed once a prospective customer decides they even want to make a purchase. Writing code faster won't speed that process up. Can we push features 50x faster? No, we can't, because they come as a response to feature requests from users, which means we need to wait to have users who make such requests, and you can't just compress 10 years of that happening into 10 weeks. That's to say nothing of the fact that what we work on now is a response to market and ecosystem conditions now, not conditions as they were 10 years ago. If we'd pushed what we were doing now to having done it then instead, we'd have just been working on the wrong things.

Think about what it would mean to produce cars 50x faster than using current processes. What good would that even do? The current processes already produce all the cars the world needs. Making them 50x faster wouldn't give you a larger customer base. You'd just be making things no one needs and then throwing them away. The only sensible version of this is doing the same thing at roughly the same speed but at 1/50th the cost. I don't doubt that faster code generation can cut cost but not to 1/50th. Too much of the cost in creating and running a company has nothing at all to do with output.

Show us the financial statements from your company you started in 2019 and your company today. I would be absolutely thrilled to see somebody concretely show they earn the same revenue for 1/50the the cost, or 50x revenue for the same cost. The fact that you push 50x the number of commits or lines of code to Github means nothing to me.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-06 19:20:33+00:00
And used intel Mac minis are cheap and work. They're pretty handy and upgradable actually.

I'm tired of maker-washed overpriced slow gear that was supposed to be cheap, but is expensive and impossible to find. There are infinitely better choices than RPis. I recently went through having to make a custom shielded M.2 cable (by wrapping it in aluminum foil and Kapton tape) and stability burn-in testing for an SBC that would otherwise spontaneously hang. I'm tired of craptastic SBCs.

PSA: Please reuse old stuff first and stop buying new, new, new when alternatives exist that are suitable for a particular use.
by ricw | 2026-01-06 19:21:06+00:00
Went down a minor rabbit hole and Claude gave me this interesting tidbit:

The Tu-144 had several significant design and engineering problems that contributed to its troubled history:

Aerodynamic Compromises

The Tu-144 was rushed into development partly to beat Concorde, and this showed in its design. The aircraft required retractable canard wings near the nose just to maintain stability at low speeds during takeoff and landing—a workaround that added weight and complexity. Its delta wing design was less refined than Concorde's, resulting in higher drag and worse fuel efficiency.

Engine Problems

The Kuznetsov NK-144 engines were underpowered and inefficient compared to Concorde's Olympus engines. They couldn't sustain supersonic cruise without afterburners, which consumed enormous amounts of fuel and drastically limited range. The engines were also unreliable and ran hot, creating maintenance nightmares.

Structural and Systems Issues

The airframe experienced fatigue problems, the hydraulic systems were prone to failures, and the flight control systems lacked the redundancy of Western designs. Cabin noise levels were so extreme that passengers reportedly couldn't hold conversations.

The 1973 Paris Crash

The crash at the Paris Air Show killed all six crew and eight people on the ground. The exact cause remains somewhat disputed, but the investigation pointed to the crew making an abrupt evasive maneuver (possibly to avoid a French Mirage jet that was filming nearby without their knowledge), followed by an overly aggressive recovery that overstressed the airframe. A canard retraction issue or engine failure may have also played a role. The aircraft broke apart in flight.

The Tu-144 was ultimately retired from passenger service after just 55 scheduled flights—a testament to how many compromises were made to achieve a political goal.
Show HN: Doom Playable in a GitHub Readme
by kuberwastaken | 2026-01-06 19:21:17+00:00
GitHub READMEs don’t support JavaScript, iframes, or WebAssembly,
so how does someone run DOOM on it at all?

I built DoomMe (great name, I know) with a stateless graph of 8000+ Markdown files and WebP images of every possible position you can be or face towards on the E1M1 map to make it one very big "choose your own adventure" book on GitHub.

Open Source with MIT License

- GitHub repo: https://github.com/Kuberwastaken/DoomMe
- Play it on my profile: https://github.com/Kuberwastaken
by mrec | 2026-01-06 19:21:27+00:00
This was the bit that caught my eye:

> Blake’s pitch to airlines is enticing: “You’re already flying this route with a 300-seat plane where 80+ people in business class generate most of your profit. Give those passengers a supersonic plane, cut the flight time in half, and charge the same price.”

And now most of the profit for the 300-seater is gone. What does this do to flight pricing for those who were flying economy?
by zamadatix | 2026-01-06 19:21:53+00:00
Ah, that makes sense. I only have just the media files (no metadata) stored flat in a single SSD based mount and the background autoscan seems to pick up changes/additions consistently for that snappy (especially since I only add new content but once a week or so) but if I were constantly adding things I wanted to watch on demand, used a more complicated directory structure, stored any metadata locally, had a bit more latency in the storage, or had multiple sources I'm sure that would turn into a bit of a sync mess real quick.

I also found Infuse's scanning performance to be absolute dog shit over even clean 5 GHz Wi-Fi. I solved that with a wire, but it sounds like middleware would have skipped that problem as well.
by nospice | 2026-01-06 19:22:01+00:00
I'm saying it's aggressively moderated in some respects (off-topic content, politics, etc), but it's not moderated to root out a certain breed of snarky, I'm-smarter-than-you negativity. Many other forums police that second part and are doing just fine. This includes forums dedicated to technical hobbies.

In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep rationalizing it.

I remember working on a technical blog post for my company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could. And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to expect in our industry.
by NickAndresen | 2026-01-06 19:22:04+00:00
Subtitle: On Thinkish, Neuralese, and the End of Readable Reasoning

When OpenAI's GPT-o3 decided to lie about scientific data, this is what its internal monologue looked like: "disclaim disclaim synergy customizing illusions... overshadow overshadow intangible."

This essay explores how we got cosmically lucky that AI reasoning happens to be readable at all (Chain-of-Thought emerged almost by accident from a 4chan prompting trick) and why that readability is now under threat from multiple directions.

Using the thousand-year drift from Old English to modern English as a lens, I look at why AI "thinking" may be evolving away from human comprehension, what researchers are trying to do about it, and how long we might have before the window gets bricked closed.
by subdavis | 2026-01-06 19:22:18+00:00
It's so wonderfully fitting that the original story was posted twice and got 620 upvotes while this flies by unacknowledged.

Thread 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461563 620 points

Thread 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461578 159 points
by jeremysalwen | 2026-01-06 19:22:22+00:00
As someone who implemented some RL algorithms and applied them to a real world game, (including all the ones mentioned in the article), I would be surprised if the implementation is not buggy. That is one of the most striking things about RL, the extent to which it is hard to find bugs, since they generally only degrade the performance instead of causing a crash or obviously wrong behavior. The fact that he doesn't mention a massive amount of time spent debugging, and the longish list of things that were tried that really should have worked but didn't, suggests to me it's probably still buggy. I suppose it is possible that LLMs could be particularly good at RL code since it's seen it repeated so many times... But I would be skeptical without hard evidence.
by nvarsj | 2026-01-06 19:22:36+00:00
I went down the rabbithole when I started getting into seasonal Anime watching. Doing that manually is a huge PITA for every show/episode.

Now I just get a pop-up on my phone that Plex has the latest episode. I sit on my couch, hit play on my nvidia shield, and watch on my giant OLED. It's great - and I've been doing this for years now.

Once you go through the initial set up, the UX is fantastic. Far better than anything Netflix, or any commercial provider has ever built.

And for music - Plexamp is an ode to Winamp and is worth it alone. It completely brought me back to the pre-Spotify world of music enjoyment.