MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmotea | 2026-01-30 17:10:29+00:00
> I don't object to alcohol being tolerated. But I do think that distinguishing it from other drugs is odd.

The point I was making is that it's not odd, unless you're thinking about human culture wrong (e.g. like its somehow weird that broad rules have exceptions).

> Particularly when the primary reason given for regulating other drugs is their addictiveness which alcohol shares.

One, not all addictive drugs are equally addictive. Two, it appears you have a weird waterfall-like idea how culture develops, like there's some kind identification of a problematic characteristic (addictiveness), then there's a comprehensive research program to find all things with that characteristic (all addictive substances), and finally consistent rules are set so that they're all treated exactly the same when looked at myopically (allow all or deny all). Human culture is much more organic than that, and it won't look like math or well-architected software. There's a lot more give and take.

I mean here are some obvious complexities that will lead to disparate treatment of different substances:

1. Shared cultural knowledge about how to manage the substance, including rituals for use (this is the big one).

2. Degree of addictiveness and other problematic behavior.

3. Socially positive aspects.

4. Tradition.
by rurp | 2026-01-30 17:10:46+00:00
Hold on there, they have been very explicitly doing the opposite of reducing energy costs. The administration has been aggressively trying to cancel all sorts of energy projects, even projects that have almost been completed. At the same time they've been encouraging as much data center build out as possible. Lowering supply and increasing demand is hardly going to reduce energy costs.

They have managed to significantly lower expectations for global economic growth which brings down energy costs, but that's hardly a sane way to accomplish that goal.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-30 17:11:01+00:00
Meh, takes you like some days to get used to another layout being visible on the keys, while your OS (and brain) actually using another layout.

I've used US keyboard layout since I started programming (my first mentor essentially forced me to switch to it, he was right about it being easier), but throughout the years been using Swedish, Norwegian, British, Spanish and French physical keyboards, never cleanly mapped to the actual layout I've used on the OS, and never been an issue.

The last part though, is a real one, trying to pair program with Spanish programmers always have at least one moment of holding Shift and sliding the finger across all numbers to see where that specific symbol actually is.
by Blackthorn | 2026-01-30 17:11:04+00:00
It's not free but...zw3d has full* native Linux support. You'd be forgiven for not knowing this because they only offer it on their Chinese website, even though it comes complete with a fully localized English version that you just have to switch on in the settings.

* Integrations with online parts libraries don't seem to work (don't know why they didn't bother, as it looks like it just spawned a web browser anyway), and the simulation add-ons aren't available either, but the main program itself is equivalently functional.
by antonvs | 2026-01-30 17:11:08+00:00
The way people continue to use X is a perfect example of Arendt's banality of evil: that moral wrongs can be enabled by ordinary people, acting through conformity, careerism, convenience, and thoughtlessness.

They don't have any deep ideological commitment or overt cruelty, they just don't care enough. They justify themselves with claims such as "it's the way things are," "not my role," "everyone does it", or that it doesn't really make a difference.

But if everyone on X that doesn't explicitly support fascism and Nazism stopped using it, it would make an immediate difference. X would turn into something more like Truth Social.
by aprilthird2021 | 2026-01-30 17:11:11+00:00
H1Bs aren't paid 1/8 their counterparts in the same company.

And no, the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well. We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.

Go to any FAANG in the US and you will see people on H1B from all over Europe, Africa, South America, etc. but Indians and Chinese are the largest group because they are the largest population countries with established pipelines from schools there to schools here to jobs here.
by plagiarist | 2026-01-30 17:11:22+00:00
If I am signing my own kernel, that's awesome.

If Poettering is signing my kernel and reporting my UUID to websites along with proof I am viewing all ads, that is dreadful.

Unfortunately it will be the latter. Motherboards already have signed binary firmware blobs, some people cannot remove the Microsoft keys and still have functioning UEFI secure boot.
Thoughts on ICElist
by gorfian_robot | 2026-01-30 17:11:56+00:00
I saw ICElist mentioned again today, so I thought I would try to access it again (it was initially overwhelmed with traffic).

It is a mediawiki site (woo hoo!). BUT I wanted to see what actual information it contains and how I might be able to contribute from afar.

I started with the Agent pages. There are 1574 Agents on the wiki as I type this and I randomly chose about a dozen to click on. Every single one has nothing except for a link to the person's LinkedIn profile where they presumably self identify. Fine, but hardly that interesting. Many agents do have unusual names that lend themselves to digging up more details online.

The Incidents are more interesting. 377 of them with reasonable levels of details and description. And definitely a good thing to keep track of as they are easily forgotten/dismissed.

The Unidentified pages are somewhat interesting as they contain photos of about 50 unidentified agents, but the information about incidents and even locations is incomplete. Some are not even clearly agents making me question some submissions entirely.

Vehicles is perhaps the most data complete as there are 1142 vehicles with plate numbers. Updating ICElist with plates observed at Incidents is a low risk way to provide valuable information. Particularly if ICE is engaging in plate switching, which is illegal.

The Boycott section is also interesting since it contains specifics on how various companies are supporting ICE. While it is difficult/impossible for individuals to have an effect with boycotts or to even remember all the scumbag companies out there, it is useful to check if you are about to enter into a business agreement.

Anyone else poked around the site and have some thoughts?
by sidcool | 2026-01-30 17:11:59+00:00
Lol. So a fully self driving car with a following car is not impressive? Elon over promised, no doubt. But don't tell me their tech is not amazing. Pure vision general purpose autonomy. It's going to be a game changer. It could be late but inevitable.

Remember when it was supervised FSD? They have come a long way.
by figmert | 2026-01-30 17:12:02+00:00
The app has a constant item on the bar at the bottom. Quitting that quits the whole application, I couldn't find a setting to change this behaviour. But I could live with that if it wasn't for it somehow switching desktops when you start taking a screenshot. It switches desktop, goes back to the main one, then starts the set up. Of course that also means it takes a couple of seconds before the screenshot gets taken.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-30 17:12:13+00:00
Anyone know why Netflix doesn’t respond to their job site? I applied to several positions where I’m an exact match, with a decade of VFX and another decade of internet company experience in LA. Never heard a single word in response from them, for years. Reqs stay open a long time as well. What are they doing? Are they ghost jobs? They don’t even respond with a “no” form letter. (Lately their site is broken at the verify email stage, pin post returns 403.)
by fragmede | 2026-01-30 17:12:13+00:00
The Victorians were accidentally right about ankles, which is funny in hindsight. Once one arbitrary rule breaks, people start noticing the rest are kind of fake too, and it turns out "modesty" was load-bearing for a whole governance model.

Ankles -> knees -> jazz -> voting -> rock -> no-fault divorce -> Tinder -> polyamory discourse on airplanes. it's a joke, but also sort of how cultural change actually propagates. The collapse did happen, just not of morals. Of enforcement. After that, everything is just people discovering the rules were optional all along. Including money.
by krapp | 2026-01-30 17:12:20+00:00
I don't hate it, but I don't like it either.

Mostly because I don't like the Python-style use of significant whitespace. But functions aren't first class citizens, making closures and lambdas awkward, type hinting isn't supported everywhere (such as with callables). I could probably come up with more petty gripes if I opened up a project and played with it. "pass" is an abomination to God.

It's a lot better than it used to be and it gets the job done but I still find it ugly and awkward as a language.

A more general complaint I have is that Godot tries to load every script regardless of whether it's actually included in the game hierarchy.
by lumost | 2026-01-30 17:12:39+00:00
Not going to lie… reading this for a day makes me want to install the toolchain and give it a sandbox with my emails etc.

This seems like a fun experiment in what an autonomous personal assistant will do. But I shudder to think of the security issues when the agents start sharing api keys with each other to avoid token limits, or posting bank security codes.

I suppose time delaying its access to email and messaging by 24 hours could at least avoid direct account takeovers for most services.
Ask HN: Ergo wireless keyboard with mouse for coding?
by MarcelOlsz | 2026-01-30 17:12:39+00:00
I'm at 160wpm with my apple keyboard [0]. It's easily my favourite keyboard of all time but I'd love an ergo keyboard with chiclet keys and a built in mouse. I was looking at the cybord imprint [1] and the kinese advantage 360 [2] but the kinesis despite its infinite good reviews doesn't have a mouse and is too expensive for me although it is wireless, same with the imprint. My goal is to ziptie it to my herman miller aeron armrests so I don't have to ever move my arms, and I can swing around to look at my other monitors without craning my neck. Any out of the box solutions I can order that don't need soldering and assembly? There seem to be few.

[0] https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/product/mxk83ll/a/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-and-numeric-keypad-for-mac-models-with-apple-silicon-usb%E2%80%91c-us-english-black-keys
[1] https://cyboard.digital/products/imprint
[2] https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/advantage360/
by mlsu | 2026-01-30 17:13:10+00:00
Imho at first blush this sounds fascinating and awesome and like it would indicate some higher-order spiritual oneness present in humanity that the model is discovering in its latent space.

However, it's far more likely that this attractor state comes from the post-training step. Which makes sense, they are steering the models to be positive, pleasant, helpful, etc. Different steering would cause different attractor states, this one happens to fall out of the "AI"/"User" dichotomy + "be positive, kind, etc" that is trained in. Very easy to see how this happens, no woo required.
by aprilthird2021 | 2026-01-30 17:13:12+00:00
Of course. In any growing services-based economy you will have foreign born population growth. If you eliminate that population growth, economic growth will decline with it.

If we were a growing manufacturing-based economy that wouldn't be the case as much.

I'd also recommend you read this. Many government reports since Trump took over and fired long standing professionals and hired loons are suspect: https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2025_1...
by contagiousflow | 2026-01-30 17:13:22+00:00
With the Iran example, it's an interesting world we live in where the design of an emoji by some of the largest companies in the world can support or detract recognition of new states. Especially with some of these tech companies bending the knee to the current US administration I could imagine a world where there are executive orders to say, remove the Greenland flag, or change the design of the Venezuela flag.
AI creates over-efficiency. Organizations must absorb it
by eriam | 2026-01-30 17:13:27+00:00
AI doesn’t just increase productivity: it creates *over-efficiency*.

Individuals and small teams can now generate decisions, options, and initiatives faster than existing organizations were designed to legitimize, coordinate, or absorb. The bottleneck has shifted from execution to governance.

When surplus productive capacity accumulates without an absorption layer, organizations don’t gradually adapt. Historically, they freeze: tighter rules, centralization, bans, decoupling.

We saw a similar reflex during COVID: when systems couldn’t absorb shock locally, they shut down globally.

What seems under-discussed is absorption: not "how fast can we produce" but how many decisions, options, and changes an organization can metabolize without defensive closure.

Two mechanisms seem relevant but under-theorized: (1) small, local process changes that redistribute coordination and decision load; (2) continuous skill and role shifts, as people reposition around what still needs to be decided, maintained, and legitimized.

I’ve been trying to think about this as a kind of "conduction" problem, how human decision-making and legitimacy flow alongside generations, AI and people.

If you’ve seen organizations handle this well (or fail badly), I’d be curious: what actually lets systems absorb AI-driven over-efficiency without reverting to control, ranking, layoffs or shutdown?
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-30 17:13:31+00:00
There's a twist though that even more so than cars, torque-on-demand is extremely important to airplanes. It's part of why airplanes always carry more fuel than they need for their destination, because when you need extra torque you burn the fuel as fast as possible to get that torque.

So there are airplane manufacturers exceedingly interested in battery planes because electric propellers and even potentially some electric air jet engines benefit from wild efficiencies when purely electric, and are safer at high voltage torque demand that batteries can offer more than traditional "hope you can burn enough fuel fast enough for the emergency torque need".

Those battery versus fuel trade-offs are enough that right now we're only seeing those electric efficiencies and safety improvements in the low end (the modern "drone renaissance", and a few select small private/personal plane manufacturers). There probably will need to be a surprise innovation to see it in larger planes and commercial transport, but it's also starting to seem a lot less "impossible" the more small planes that are entirely electric.
by benatkin | 2026-01-30 17:14:56+00:00
The readme exaggerates the threat of agents shelling out and glosses over a serious drawback of itself. On the shelling out side, it says "One prompt injection and you're done." Well, you can run a lot of these agents in a container, and I do. So maybe you're not "done". Also it's rare enough that this warning exaggerates - Claude Code has a yolo mode and outside of that, it has a pretty good permission system. On glossing over the drawback: "The WASM binary is proprietary—you can use it with this package but can't extract or redistribute it separately." And who is Amla Labs? FWIW the first commit is in 2026 and the license is in 2025.
by aipatselarom | 2026-01-30 17:15:09+00:00
>open the valve to release the required volume of oxygen

Mega LMAO. I can assure you this is not what's going on, at all. Also, if you release oxygen in gas form into the liquid you're going to run into a zillion other problems.

One of the golden premises of measuring things is to avoid altering what you're measuring, lol.
by hbn | 2026-01-30 17:15:20+00:00
I'm trying to word this without sounding dismissive of Bazzite for simply not being from a big company with money to throw around. I'm sure the people making it are doing great work. But I just don't get the feeling it's anywhere near the position it needs to be a "real platform" that could disrupt Windows. It has to be looked at from the perspective of publishers, and whether it's worth their money to target a new platform.

Valve has good, stable funding to pay a team full time to build and support Steam OS which, over a long period of time and with enough user uptake, I think will have better chances of getting publishers on board with ensuring their games work on something that isn't Windows. Hell, they could probably make deals with publishers to say "hey, here's a pile of money to make sure your game works on Steam OS day 1, and put it in all the ads" and get the ball rolling that way.

Gaming is a tough space to crack. I think Valve's money and their history of supporting the most popular gaming platform on PC inspires more trust needed to make their platform a standard target.
by superkuh | 2026-01-30 17:15:39+00:00
Uh, every enjoyable experience activates glutamergic activity the bilateral shell of the nucleus accumbens, even looking at a pretty sunset. The problem is when it's not the result of processing attributes intrinsic to an experience but instead mediated chemically.

The argument that, "That brain brains when you $x." is so trivial and useless I usually assume it's done in bad faith. But you seem to be engaging on the level, so why?
by BoxOfRain | 2026-01-30 17:15:44+00:00
Ironically I built a Linux box for mainly local models with some RGBs because I wanted tasteful accent lights to match the room, but my motherboard isn't supported by OpenRGB so they're stuck on either nothing or 'unicorn vomit' mode until some indefinite point in the future. This is the first time I've run into a stereotypically Linux issue in nearly a decade (on sane hardware) I think!

Not a fan of those aquarium PC cases though, they sacrifice airflow for aesthetics which isn't a great shout. I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.
by jasomill | 2026-01-30 17:15:49+00:00
I also have a hard time letting go of expensive cables merely because they were expensive. For this reason, I probably have as many parallel SCSI cables as I do USB cables, despite not having used a parallel SCSI device in years, including several 15+ meter HD68 cables that only work with high-voltage differential SCSI, despite owning exactly one HVD device.

OTOH, it's a large, loud, heavy, and ugly IBM 3590 tape drive that I'd rather not need to have at arms length to use.
by nobodyandproud | 2026-01-30 17:15:53+00:00
I’d say a lack of imagination.

Lose mobility for a few weeks or months, like breaking both legs (or just try wheelchair access) and see how much of even the paved first world is inaccessible.

Nevermind less refined places like well-maintained hiking trails.

And you can forget about actual trail-blazing.

Then appreciate just how flexible and robust animal and human mobility really is!
by state_less | 2026-01-30 17:15:57+00:00
I thought I made it clear, I'm not against data center build outs per se, a community might decide it's worth it to build one. If a community decides to go ahead with it, make it clear and open for the public to bid on it so the residents get the best deal available (e.g. reduced power bills, reduced property taxes, water usage limits, noise/light polution limits, whathaveyou...). These massive data centers are a new kind of business that most communities don't have much experience with, and I doubt they've had time to codify the rules. It sounds like the states are starting to add some more rules about transparency, which seems like a step in the right direction for making better deals for all involved.
by quietsegfault | 2026-01-30 17:16:11+00:00
If the agent is good enough, it wouldn't have to bother me at all.

I don't have to manually change my thermostat to get the house temperatures I want. It learns my habits and tells my furnace what to do. I don't have to manually press the gas and break of my car to a certain distance away from the car in front. It has cameras and keeps the correct distance.

I would love to be able to say "Keep an eye on snow blower prices. If you see my local store has a sale that's below $x, place the order" and trust it will do what I expect. Or even, "Check my cell phone and internet bill. File an expense report when the new bills are available."

I'm not sure exactly what my comfort level would be, but it's not there yet.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-01-30 17:17:11+00:00
Fine, what if the drug causes a violent psychotic break and you harm your loved ones?

What if some weird interaction sensitizes your nerves, and you spend your last weeks in incredible pain, begging to die? Not only would that suck for you, it would, again, affect your loved ones. It would also cause distress to the nurses that cared for you and the doctor(s) that administered it to you; remember, they don't just have to convince you, they have to convince medical professionals that this wouldn't be violating their code of ethics.
by wiseowise | 2026-01-30 17:17:15+00:00
> AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production.

It's almost like humans evolved from prehistoric times eating meat. Wild discovery, right?

> And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations.

Why don't AI bros lobby the changes? Much harder than selling snake oil and getting rid of programmers, I guess.
by theamk | 2026-01-30 17:17:24+00:00
Good luck making any sort of UI without OOP-like methods. The moment you have grouped state (say "button_enabled", "button_shown", and "button_checked") and corresponding methods, you get something OOP-like.

The only way to work around is immediate mode UI, but this requires fairly powerful CPU, so it's only feasible on the modern machines. Certainly not something that people would want about 30 years ago, they still cared about performance back then.
by CurrentB | 2026-01-30 17:17:35+00:00
Presumably you only would acquire female chickens to lay eggs. What happened to the male ones? (I don't recommend googling this).

What do you do with the cow when its milk yield drops after several pregnancies? what do you do with the male calves? Just keep them all as pets?

I think there are situations I could contrive where I'd say yeah its fine ethically to eat these things, but the general case still has victims.

And again, since maybe the first week without them, I truly haven't missed milk or eggs or anything else after eliminating them from my diet. Plant options are pretty good too and there are plenty of plants.
by pardon_me | 2026-01-30 17:18:04+00:00
Lapse in focus is such a great point. If we looked at the number of accidents caused by very human errors such as "lapse in focus" and "sudden medical events" etc. which we would 100% expect to go away when offloading tasks to any computer, the statistics of accidents remaining becomes the bare minimum for what computer-based automated driving must achieve.

This is compounded by the system mistakes likely being hard-errors. A computer hard-error vs. human lapse of judgement is potentially the difference between the vehicle slowly crushing a small child as they scream and beg for help vs. a human stopping as soon as they felt/heard something. Context matters.

The compared error-rates must consider if it could have been avoided or mitigated, the near misses, the human vs. computer type of error, and how hard-errors may lead to horrifying scenarios.