MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mempko | 2026-01-15 17:42:58+00:00
I have a message to all Palantir employees. You can quit, you don't have to make this technology. Palantir cannot function without you.

Let me tell you a story. When I was young, just out of college, I worked for a tech startup. The tech startup was a mapping company. At some point I overheard the company CEO talking about how the software I built was being used. I thought it was being used to help track miners and equipment working in mines so that if there is an accident, they know where all the people and equipment are so they can be saved.

I learned by overhearing him that the software was being used in the Iraq war to track people to kill. I wasn't supposed to know since I didn't have a security clearance to know.

I quit that job over this.

I told this story because there are certainly employees there that don't have the clearance to know what is happening. But the reporting is making it clear. You can quit your job. They can't function without you.
by klaff | 2026-01-15 17:43:06+00:00
I've assumed or guessed that the noisy bulb had weak spots in the coiled coil filament that changed how they mechanically respond to the temperature cycling at 120 or 100 thermal cycles per second, thereby making them noisier at end of life. I don't know if I read that or am just extrapolating from how burned out bulbs look. Halogen lamps extend the life of incandescent lamps by allowing evaporated tungsten to redeposit on the filament, which says something about the general failure mechanism.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-15 17:43:09+00:00
>So you are not seeing the same news the outside world are seeing?

Yes. Me personally, at least, in that I don't watch broadcast television at all. Hell, quite alot of it from the same links and tweets you click on. No Fox News or anything like that, but I suspect that if I gave you my personal opinions you'd swear that I was parroting those outlets. (Something I've noticed all my life... most people can't accept that I might independently arrive at the same conclusions.)

>it's brutal murder of civilians,

I watched it from 5 angles. It wasn't murder, it was self-defense. Open and shut. Cars are deadly weapons, she pointed the car at him as if she was bullet-proof. Found out otherwise. Everything to the contrary is sophistry. "Sure, she waved a gun around, but she didn't point it at his face!" and so forth. He had milliseconds to react, but he's supposed to see the wheels that he's not looking at turned away and he's supposed to care when on a Minnesota road with a bad driver and slush the direction the wheels point might not even matter.

>Obama did a better job at kicking out illegals,

Perhaps. So? If Trump appoints him deportation czar, I won't object.

>yet without these public broad-daylight murders. How does that compute to be "enforcing immigration laws"?

Plainly false. Did you bother to look this up? Not only were federal agents accused of this during his tenure, several of them were ICE and CBP in manners similar to what we're seeing now. Maybe the news outlets you favor didn't bother to report those, selectively.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-15 17:43:20+00:00
Those things work in democratic and ordered societies though, and you need to figure out other approaches when democracy and freedom stops being something the government still cares about. The current leader of the country attempted an insurrection, yet was still allowed to become the leader after that? I think you're beyond being able to change this through just peaceful protests, although it's definitively a part of the answer.

Who are you gonna report this brutality to, when the judicial arm of the government is just following the directions of the administration? How do you hold people accountable, when the system to hold anyone accountable is being undermined?
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-15 17:43:31+00:00
You've got three groups here. Federal cops, undocumented immigrants and the kind of people who turn out to protest the former acting against the latter. Very few people in this country finds any one of these groups particularly sympathetic and there's wide demographic swaths of the country that actively hate two if not all three of them. So yeah, everyone sees stuff that's very, very, wrong here, but nobody's really in any rush to intervene except the people who already are protesting.

A political solution will likely come of this, as everyone with a brain knows that the preconditions for all this shit are something that need to be prevented in the future.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-15 17:43:31+00:00
I am very unhappy with the increased RAM prices - and now general increase in prices for hardware. To me this is collusion, a de-facto monopoly. Governments that don't stop this practice are also part of the mafia.

We really need many more smaller, more independent manufacturers. All the big guns, from NVIDIA, Apple, Intel, AMD, etc... have massively disappointed about 99.9% of us here now.
by alex43578 | 2026-01-15 17:43:45+00:00
It’s a disservice to the horrors of the Holocaust to implicitly compare returning Mexican nationals to Mexico, Somalis to Somalia, or hell, even Venezuelans to El Salvador with sending box cars of people to death camps.

The US has had and enforced immigration laws for decades, with Obama alone deporting 3 million people.

What aspect of Trump doing it is uniquely fascist/authoritarian?
by johnisgood | 2026-01-15 17:43:53+00:00
"Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely correct answer, and it is what the model produces because the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3" with "5" in truthful contexts.

And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one.

The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 17:43:55+00:00
> So this was the whole point with the 2nd amendment right, that when/if the government repress you in that way, you have weapons to fight back?

The point of the second amendment was, in no small part, so that the central government wouldn't deny the states the means to commit genocide against the indigenous population on their own, because the states didn't trust he central government to be sufficiently enthusiastic about it. That was the major security concern alluded to by the “necessary to the security of a free state” bit.
by t-3 | 2026-01-15 17:44:00+00:00
> So how do spoons make a profit?

Think about the price of a keg of beer - much cheaper/pint than buying beer at a pub or from anywhere else in a smaller size. Very high-volume customers have contracts with distributors that can get them even better deals, sometimes significantly better.

Alcohol is pretty much always sold at a huge markup though - 4-5x is standard in the US. UK regulation might be different, but it's likely that the majority of costs in the pub business are in insurance and licensing rather than alcohol and rent.
by mindslight | 2026-01-15 17:44:15+00:00
> It makes perfect sense to concentrate law enforcement in a state that is in defiance

Using the word "defiance" indicates that your perspective is decidedly not American.

Both the States and the Federal government are co-sovereign. The Federal government is currently in willful default of its own founding charter - both overall in terms of how it is supposed to function (offices being executed in good faith forming checks and balances), as well as openly flouting the test cases outlined in the Bill of Rights. As such, the Federal government has lost all legal authority to dictate anything to the States.

It is of course still prudent to recognize the realpolitik of the "Federal government" having command of a lawless paramilitary force currently unleashing terror and mayhem on civil society. But the point is that we need to work towards re-establishing law and order in terms of the remaining sovereigns.
by dzink | 2026-01-15 17:44:17+00:00
Make your own. Your mental health loves you when you come up with stuff. Humanity has generated so much content and none of us have the lifetime to consume it all, but that shouldn't stop you from making your own any chance you get.

Make music - you don't need an instrument if you can whistle.
Make stories - just say them to a recorder or your kids or write them down.
Make food experiments - nothing will please your taste-buds more than listening to them and iterating on ways to get better.
Make your own apps or experiences - with AI or by hand, your ideas may be surprising and worthwhile.
Knit or make your own clothes, toys, wearable tech.
Design your own 3D objects and maybe print them or animate them.

We know that workouts lead to endorphins for the body, but the brain version of that is not only enjoyable but also can be scaled to be enjoyed by other humans too sometimes. Don't go through life without trying your own things.
by 2b3a51 | 2026-01-15 17:44:42+00:00
Perhaps a rough look-up table for (say) each 10 degrees of azimuth around the observing point that gives the altitude to solve for? Finally a couple of iterations to find what azimuth the Sun will be nearer the actual setting time, perhaps taking the 'flat horizon' setting time as a starting value?

https://stjarnhimlen.se/comp/riset.html#2

I live in a street that faces roughly north/south so we get an early dusk at this time of year in the front room. I feel a spreadsheet coming on...
by FiveOhThree | 2026-01-15 17:45:01+00:00
I meant that I disagree that Wikipedia is really trying to give a general view of events. That might have been the original intention, but it's not what it's doing in practice.

It does all hinge on that important list of acceptable vs unacceptable sources. In the last few decades there's been an increasing trend for news outlets to take a political position and decline to report on stories which would damage that position, which becomes most obvious whenever the US holds an election.
by honktime | 2026-01-15 17:45:25+00:00
I'd love a black mesa style recreation of thief. I played it recently (its older than me) and I enjoyed it a lot, but its pretty rough in parts for me and my modern sensibilities.

The Dark Project is really cool as a platform, and seems like it'd be ideal for that sort of recreation, but the community seems pretty nervous of the legalities of such a project which is a shame.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-15 17:46:04+00:00
I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".
by arthurnogman | 2026-01-15 17:46:15+00:00
Yes. There are parallels, thanks a lot for sharing this! Especially on emergence, and explaining quantum effect.
The better news for me:
- I did follow though their step 1 and 2 from the start, and I noticed that the LLMs hallucinate, confirming some apparent nonsense, specifically ChatGPT. So I cross checked Grok, Sonnet, Gemini, DeepSeek. With 0 context on me.
- I did the dereivation of logic independently of llms, the only thing I asked is "cosmetic" and even that cosmetic I checked with cross-reference
I'd be glad to see the other "genuises" and their work, to understand what exactly am I dealing with here. Because "quantum-consciousness" crowd was there forever long before LLMs and they just likely to amplified with LLMs saying them how unique they are.
by Maxatar | 2026-01-15 17:46:20+00:00
In C++ you do it the other way around, have a single class that is polymorphic over templates. The name of this technique within C++ is type-erasure (that term means something else outside of C++).

Examples of type erasure in C++ are classes like std::function and std::any, and normally you need to implement the type erasure manually, but there are some library that can automate it to a degree, such as [1], but it's fairly clumsy.

[1] https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/doc/html/boost_typeera...
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-15 17:46:47+00:00
Oh, I am talking about democracies and lecturing. You are right, i have to be very careful with my othering/stereotypes but given the current state of afairs, i think im in a strong position to do so. Trump would have never gotten my vote.

My take about democracies not failing meant, only the people in it can fail. There is certainly some civic due diligence for electoral decisions. My tribalism discerns between people who at least try to come to an educated decision and dipshits. Ask yourself, why putin might start to love _our_ democracies again.

You could easily be better represented by some outsider convincingly lecturing you on important topics you didnt know you should care about, if you just cared to listen and think.
by shevy-java | 2026-01-15 17:46:51+00:00
In the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe.

I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin.

I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-15 17:47:05+00:00
Obama was "Deporter in chief"

You are just wrong.

America didn't even really have borders for most of it's existence, as the very idea of a Nation wasn't really a thing until into the 1800s.

We had a purposely pourous border with Mexico until relatively recently.

How many mexican immigrants do you happen to think live in Minneapolis?
by brightball | 2026-01-15 17:47:15+00:00
The “those people” comment is kinda the issue though isn’t it?

I generally try to assume that everyone has good intentions, but we’re all being fed massive amounts of different information. I learned years ago that it wasn’t an issue of people reporting things that were factually inaccurate, it was an issue of people leaving out details to frame the story in the context that supports your readers/viewers belief system.

And then there are the Stanford studies like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553818
by skeeter2020 | 2026-01-15 17:47:29+00:00
during the pandemic I was exposed to the "Today I learned" comment in slack, and I really liked it because it was usually something interesting (or comical, or painful) and relevant, and also helped me connect with my coworkers. I highly recommend sharing both here and in your group/team message channel random & interesting things you learned today with the #TIL tag.
by chrisweekly | 2026-01-15 17:47:33+00:00
Hey FWIW Relay is AWESOME!!
The granular sharing of a given dir within a vault (vs the whole thing) finally solves the split-brain problem of personal (private) vault on my own hardware vs mandated use of a company laptop... it's fast, intuitive, and SOLVES this long-time thorn in my side. Thanks for creating it, high five, hope it leads to massive success for you! :)
Show HN: I built a 'state reset' tool for my brain. Proper dark mode, no extras
by _Phantomcode | 2026-01-15 17:47:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a developer who struggles with the mental cost of context switching. When I sit down to code after a chaotic day, my brain often feels like a browser with 20 tabs open (I call this "Browser Brain"). I usually freeze up before I can even write the first line of code.

I tried using standard productivity apps to fix this, but they were part of the problem. They were too bright, too complex, and felt like "marketing" tools rather than "builder" tools.

So, I built Inspiropage to solve my own Internal Obstacle.

What it is: It’s a "digital quiet space." Think of it as a clear command for your mind. It serves a single quote, a mini-story, or a micro-action to help you perform a "state reset" before deep work.

Design Decisions (For Devs):

Proper Dark Mode: I didn't use funky marketing colors or high-contrast neons. It is a strict, neutral dark theme designed to sit comfortably on a second monitor next to your IDE without causing eye strain.

Zero "Engagement" Features: No gamification, no streaks, no notifications. The goal isn't to keep you in the app; the goal is to get you off the app and into your flow state.

The Honest Constraint: This app won't manage your JIRA tickets or optimize your sprint velocity. It is strictly a utility for that 5-minute window where you need to transition from "Chaos" to "Focus."

You can try it here:
[ https://inspiropage.pages.dev/ ]

I’d love feedback on the dark mode implementation—I aimed for something that feels native to a developer's workflow.
by bakugo | 2026-01-15 17:47:39+00:00
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.

There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
by piva00 | 2026-01-15 17:47:42+00:00
Ronald Lauder, the billionaire, has floated the idea about buying Greenland with Trump since his first time in office.

The same Ronald Lauder then started buying businesses in Greenland.

The Guardian put out a good article on it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...

As usual with Trump, it's just brazen corruption.
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-15 17:48:19+00:00
I still remember the email I got telling me that they were going to upgrade the RAM of the 256Mb Model B I ordered and that I would receive a brand new model with 512Mb for no extra cost. Hard to believe that was nearly 14 years ago.

Was very helpful in me learning Linux. The only alternative I had at the time was a few old Pentium 4 machines, which were very noisy and my parents didn't like me leaving turned on for a long time.
by wcallahan | 2026-01-15 17:48:39+00:00
I do a lot of maps API calls, and found I get better results (and can save money) by using multiple providers.

So I use Apple Maps, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap, and Google Maps… sometimes to check the results with multiple providers, and sometimes to divvy up the free allotment.

For anyone using Java/Kotlin/JVM, I made an SDK for Apple Maps: https://github.com/WilliamAGH/apple-maps-java which is one with a generous included tier.
by quesera | 2026-01-15 17:48:43+00:00
These are good points, but having worked on a few older houses, I usually see overextended and overloaded circuits, not the opposite.

Standard small-house service used to be 60A, sometimes as few as 4 circuits! It's now 100A minimum by code, with 200A common.

Ovens/ranges have gone from 30A to 50A (dedicated) circuits by code. Microwaves also require dedicated circuits now. Gaming computers with big GPUs are common. Air fryers and electric pressure cookers are common countertop appliances. People definitely use resistive electric space heaters more now (very cheap, much safer than the older options). And there's a trend away from gas and to electric ranges and water heaters. Heat pumps are also increasingly common. You mentioned air conditioners and EV chargers. Kitchens and bathrooms are now required to have dedicated (and GFCI) circuits. Household sizes are smaller, but houses are larger.

So I guess I'd say that, properly expanded, individual circuits should draw less power than they used to. But very often, appliances (AC, microwave, gaming rig, air fryers), are just "plugged in" to an unexpanded system, with varying results.

If you're lucky, they pop a breaker and you call an electrician. If you're not lucky, they push the power draw into uncomfortable zones, esp for Al wire.
by simonebrunozzi | 2026-01-15 17:49:12+00:00
In 2026 I started writing letters. I mean, docs on my computer that will end up printed in physical form, then handed to someone, or shipped to someone in an envelope with a stamp.

I feel I will do more and more of this, this year, as a little experiment. I will most likely experiment with different types of papers, etc.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-15 17:49:14+00:00
Not all European countries have media markets dominated by American conglomerates.

In France's case, it's French conglomerates like Bolloré, Lagardère, Illiad, Dassault, and LVMH that dominate media IP.

In Spain, it's Grupo Planeta and Burlesconi owned Fininvest that dominate IP ownership.

In Italy, it's Burlesconi owned Fininvest that dominates IP ownership.
by asa400 | 2026-01-15 17:49:18+00:00
First, all of what you say is true. I'm going to try to add a little context as someone who is here on the ground, in the city in question.

There is the imminent threat of mass death, and no one here is under any illusions about it.

Every ICE agent is armed, and most have ready access to automatic weapons. These are not well-trained members of an elite organization with a storied, patriotic culture. ICE is a personalist paramilitary organization, and the president has indicated that these ICE agents are immune from consequences, even if they kill people. These are people who volunteered knowing they were going to go into American cities and do violence to people they perceive as their political enemies.

Most of these agents are inexperienced, jittery, poorly trained new recruits away from home. They aren't locals. Their nexus of power and governance isn't local. These are not our community members, they aren't from here, they don't know us or care about us, so they do not empathize with us.

In addition to this, the American citizenry is shockingly well armed. Because everyone involved is so well armed, everybody is slightly touchy about this descending into rioting, because there is a very short path from light rioting to what would essentially amount to civil war. The costs of such any such violence will overwhelmingly be borne by the innocent people who live here, and we know it.

So, people are trying to strike a balance of making sure these people know they aren't welcome here while trying to prevent the situation from spiraling into one in which some terrified agent mag-dumps a crowd of protestors and causes a chain reaction that results in truly catastrophic mass death.

Wish us luck, we're trying.
by ferguess_k | 2026-01-15 17:50:05+00:00
Yes we did hire SREs, unfortunately they are in another continent and they only know how to pull others into the chat. We also have some AI too, do you want to try them? They are pretty good SREs, one of them wrote 100K lines of code in a week while another one reviews every line along the way. It was fantastic! Fantastic!! FANTASTIC!!!

OK I have no idea about MSFT SREs, just to be /s.