MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-19 10:34:09+00:00
> International law has no enforcement mechanism

International law has a number of enforcement mechanisms.

> it depends on willingness of countries to follow it or force others to.

All law depends on the willingness of its subjects to follow it, and failing that of its other subjects to force them to. This is not unique to international law.

Some systems of law (e.g., typical modern national criminal law) may have a particular group of people (usually with a formal heirarchy) who are expected to do the executive part of enforcement, and a similar (possibly the same or overlapping, but often distinct) group of people employed to do the adjudicative part of enforccement. International law has the latter (in several forms), but lacks the former. But anyone who is familiar with more than a narrow range of the most idealistic systems of national law will be aware that that that executive body can be a single point of failure—the real problem with international law isn't that it lacks such a single dedicated executive body, but that the important issues under it frequently involve significant conflicts of interest for any of the groups with the capacity to take on the executive role in the particular case, which is problematic under any system of law whether it has a single dedicated body for the executive part of enforcement or whether it relies on ad hoc case-by-case posses for that purpose.
by karmakurtisaani | 2026-01-19 10:34:17+00:00
> Well, what if one becomes unmaintained or has issues that only affect your project.

This happens, but very rarely compared to changes in your own code base. If a library breaks, you can usually find an alternative, but even in that case you need to know how to modify your own code.

The difference with generated code is that you are tasked to maintain the generated code.
by chrisjj | 2026-01-19 10:34:31+00:00
... computation produces dramatically less carbon than alternatives. Google had estimated that a single web search query produces 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. In contrast, driving from my home to the local library to look up a fact would generate about 400 grams

So, how much less carbon is produced by a Gas Town run than the equivalent number of drives to the library?

/i
by physicsguy | 2026-01-19 10:34:32+00:00
> every combination of compiler, optimization setting and platform I intend to support, disassemble all the resulting binaries, and analyze the disassembly to try to figure out if it did autovectorization in the way I expect

I just used to fire up VTune and inspect the hot loops... typically if you care about this you're only really working on hardware targeting the latest instruction sets anyway in my experience. It's only if you're working on low level libraries I would bother doing intrinsics all over the place.

For most consumer software you want to be able to fall back to some lowest-common-denominator hardware anyway otherwise people using it run into issues - same reason that Debian, Conda, etc. only go up to really old instructions sets.
by jgrahamc | 2026-01-19 10:34:33+00:00
As immortalised in the 1978 song "Greased Ligthnin'" from the film Grease:

Well, this car is automatic
It's systematic
It's hydromatic
Why it's greased lightnin' (greased lightnin')

I am pretty sure that "hydromatic" there is actually "Hydramatic" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydramatic).
by pendenthistory | 2026-01-19 10:34:35+00:00
Knowing and acting on it will have grave consequences though. The US's main allies will stop buying American military equipment for one, trade will go down and the largest economic block in the world will align itself closer to China (who does not directly threaten them with invasion). What a self own.

As a European who's been as continue to be against Chinese authoritarianism, I have to admit that China looks like the better partner going forward.
by microtonal | 2026-01-19 10:34:41+00:00
The default OS is not de-googled Android though, but regular Android. You have to buy the /e/OS variant, which is slightly more expensive (or flash it yourself).

But with the long-term support and access to spare parts (the university can stock them), this seems like a good move. Also happy for FairPhone that they are getting more traction.
Show HN: Goxe – High-performance log reducer to lower observability costs
by nxus_dev | 2026-01-19 10:34:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I built goxe, a tool designed to tackle one of the most annoying (and expensive) problems in infrastructure: log spam.

When a service starts failing, it often floods your pipeline with thousands of identical log lines. This doesn't just create noise; it increases bandwidth usage and inflates storage costs in platforms like Datadog or Splunk.

Goxe sits in your pipeline (currently via Syslog/UDP), normalizes incoming logs by stripping timestamps and variable noise, and aggregates them in real-time. Instead of 10,000 lines of the same error, you get one line with an occurrence count: error: connection failed (x10000).

Key Features:

Performance: Written in Go with a worker pool architecture and streaming design for low memory overhead.

Normalization: Strips dates, converts to lowercase, and removes whitespace to ensure near-identical logs are grouped correctly.

Clustering: It handles similarity clustering to catch messages that are almost the same.

Transparency: Apache 2.0 license.

I’m currently moving towards v1.0 and just implemented similarity clustering and syslog ingestion. I’d love to get feedback on the architecture or features you'd like to see next (e.g., more ingestion backends like Kafka or Promtail).

Repo: https://github.com/DumbNoxx/Goxe

Thanks for checking it out!
by StrauXX | 2026-01-19 10:35:32+00:00
When I looked into to the then common libraries back in 2024, Guidance seemed to be by far the most technically sound. Their approach of token masking seems moch more "engineering minded" than what most libraries back then did: repromting.

I don't know if other libraries hace since adapted Guidances approach. It's also somewhat sad that their approach isn't mentioned more prominently in their readme.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-19 10:36:07+00:00
Let's not label ourselves. Once we do it, we have this tendency to think in black and white terms. Like, I wish people didn't divorce, so kids could have stable families, does this make me a conservative? Maybe yes, or maybe no, because I don't want to FORCE people to stay married.

But once I label myself a conservative, I am stuck, and now have a new set of friends with the same label, because I am labeled myself, and they have all those radical ideas, and then I have to pretend to believe and ending up believing them too.

Of course, the same applies when you label yourself a progressive.
by reneberlin | 2026-01-19 10:36:08+00:00
I know that error since, dunno, i guess: 1995. No other OS has this unprofessional and annoying bug. And no other OS vendor managed it to drag a bug like this for 30 years. None that i know of.

Don't forget there are younger people, thats maybe new to them, or they seek the error on their own side. Just unbelievable to read that 30 years later.
by Kina | 2026-01-19 10:36:26+00:00
I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.

Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-19 10:36:31+00:00
Not true. There is no requirement that the user be incapable of cloning or recreating the possession. That's an additional constraint that some parties choose to impose for various reasons (some understandable, some BS).

In the end it's all just hidden information. The question is the difficulty an attacker would face attempting to exfiltrate that information. Would he require physical access to the device? For how long? Etc.

If the threat model is a stranger on the other side of an ocean using a leaked password to log in to my bank account but I use TOTP with a password manager (or even, god forbid, SMS codes) then the attack will be thwarted. However both of those (TOTP and SMS) are vulnerable to a number of threat models that a hardware token isn't.
by jannesblobel | 2026-01-19 10:36:36+00:00
A current concern of mine, also when using Claude Cowork, is that I don’t want files to be modified if I can’t control their versions/ if they aren’t versioned at all.

And even though it doesn’t actually get full sudo access, giving an LLM permission to edit files without being able to track exactly what it’s doing still feels risky.
by markus_zhang | 2026-01-19 10:36:48+00:00
It is from my observation that more and more companies, even FAANG, not only encourage fast iteration with LLM tools, but discourage true study and thinking through. The later is inevitably slow, which is not favourable for today’s fast iteration world. This makes me think that it is so important to get into the right team, otherwise one runs the risk of not properly thinking and experimenting again.
by throwaway290 | 2026-01-19 10:36:58+00:00
I have unlimited PTO.

It's not company policy. I don't take time off.

It's not law, which says 7 days per year is legal.

I just do what I want. Like not showing up saying I'm sick or "working" from home for a week.

Or doing my stuff on my laptop at the office.

If manager asks about something I say I'm working on it.

But no one asks. They don't want to be cause of a good employee quitting.

I set conservative estimates and I do literal minimum to technically reach them.

Everybody loves this system. No one can tell I'm slacking and I'm more chill as a person.
Do we need AI tools to simplify on-page search?
by ProtosGalaxias | 2026-01-19 10:37:32+00:00
I was recently browsing a page with API documentation and couldn’t find a specific detail - and this, after 10 minutes of meticulous search. I was refusing to ask AI to help me at first, I was determined to do it on my own.

After I finally found it (by myself), I thought: ok, I am this stubborn fool who searched for a quick self-recognition after completing a “difficult” task but how many are there like me?

I think most of the folks would ask ChatGPT or their browser assistant to help them.

Is it the websites and docs that are made poorly or are we are getting dumber with all the noise surrounding us and AI at hand?

Curious to have your opinion.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2026-01-19 10:37:46+00:00
It’s a little disturbing seeing the complete lack of historical understanding in the comments here. Yeah, international law isn’t perfect and certainly wasn’t perfectly followed.

But the U.S., and most other countries, did heavily constrain themselves by it, primarily for their own good.

Some of this is clearly evident from the fact that many of the actions the U.S. has taken, such as kidnapping Maduro, doesn’t really help the U.S. at all, or plans on taking, such as annexing Greenland, will end up being a massive net negative.
by wongarsu | 2026-01-19 10:38:05+00:00
If the university didn't make phone repairs themselves they would have to send the phones off for repair, or contract with a local phone repair shop. Or the secret third option: telling your employees to get it fixed and send you the invoice. None of them are cheap, and some of them will make you very annoyed with your billing/procurement/finance people. After a certain scale doing it inhouse makes sense, and with the right phone it's not much more difficult than fixing a business laptop, which is also commonly done inhouse with available spare parts
by sam_lowry_ | 2026-01-19 10:38:14+00:00
Server? what server? Ghostscript is available in virtually any Linux distro, on Mac with and without brew and even on Windows.

I have no confidence in any website, especially the one that claims to be local-only but can technically change on a whim of the developer once it starts getting enough traffic from users.

OTOH, I trust 30+ years old software sitting on on my hard drive not to phone home on every keystroke.
by fredley | 2026-01-19 10:39:45+00:00
Yes, laws only matter if they are collectively believed in. International law just the same. This has always been the case, but largely speaking in the West, for the last century or so, the rule of law has been broadly believed in, including international law.

The story here is that the US seems to not currently believe international law is an effective tool for projecting its power. Whether correctly or otherwise, it has believed that up until now.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-01-19 10:39:47+00:00
I don't see how it could even have any measurable torque.

You could improve it by making the cylinders have sticky-out bits that would scoosh the fluid around better, like little paddle wheels, and if you wanted to get some serious torque transfer you'd push the two paddle wheels so close together that the paddles actually kind of intersect.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-19 10:39:57+00:00
You'd think American defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan would have tempered them I guess the American view is that the problem was they didn't napalm the population enough.

I have no doubt that the international community will cave in an allow America to annex a land 1,200 miles away from it's nearest border, just like it allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia in 1938. Trump needs breathing room.
by epolanski | 2026-01-19 10:40:03+00:00
I find your kind of comment pointless.

The term back pressure actually comes from mechanical engineering in the context of steam engines.

It first appeared in a dictionary 160 years ago.

Words are just words. Mathematicians very well understand that words mean nothing, what matters are definitions and the author provides one.

E.g. natural numbers may or may not contain the number 0, but that's irrelevant, because what mathematicians care for are definitions, so they will state that natural numbers are a given a set of positive whole numbers (including or not the number 0) and avoid arguing about labels. You can call them funky numbers or neet numbers, doesn't matter.

Same applies here. Your comment is pointless because the author does provide a definition for back pressure in the context of his blog post and what matters is discussing the concept he labels in the context of LLMs.
by SamPatt | 2026-01-19 10:40:08+00:00
What term would you use? You can't say "a finished product" because it may never be finished, but something that other people find valuable seems like a good definition.

I get the argument. Sometimes I really enjoyed the actual act of finally figuring out a way to solve a problem in code, but most of the time it was a means to an end, and I'm achieving that end far more often now via AI tooling.
by timschmidt | 2026-01-19 10:40:32+00:00
> The facts that these exist and the programmer has to always be consciously be aware of it

This is what separates a systems programming language suitable for OS and embedded development from managed languages, which are not.

The complexity ultimately stems from unavoidable details of the hardware implementation. Languages which do not offer similar representations will be incapable of making full use of the underlying hardware, including writing certain projects like bootloaders, firmwares, OSes, etc. Rust is pretty close to state-of-the-art in terms of providing reasonable abstractions over the hardware.

It sounds to me like you're used to managed languages with a runtime which are great for certain applications, but unable to be specific enough about memory layout, how data is formatted in memory, etc. for some tasks. Those choices were made for you by the language runtime's authors and necessarily limit the language's applicability to some problems. Rust, C++, and other systems programming languages don't have such limitations, but require you to understand more of the complexity of what the system is actually doing.

Any language which provides adequate representations for taking full advantage of the hardware is going to be on a similar order of complexity as Rust, C++, or other systems programming languages, because the hardware is complex. Managed languages can be nice for introducing folks to programming, precisely because much of the complexity is hidden in the runtime, but that can be a double edged sword when it comes time to approach a systems level task.
by azangru | 2026-01-19 10:41:00+00:00
HMRC style guide: "Avoid the shorter en dash as they are treated differently by different screen readers" [0].

But I see what you mean. There used to be a distinction between a shorter dash that is used for numerical ranges, or for things named after multiple people, and a longer dash used to connect independent clauses in a sentence [1]. I am shocked to hear that this distinction is being eroded.

[0] https://design.tax.service.gov.uk/hmrc-content-style-guide/

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~tmj32/styleguide/
by bonesss | 2026-01-19 10:41:07+00:00
I’m pro LLM and use them, but crikey: if they’re so good at code why aren’t these people with all the attention, branding, and connections in the world unable to capitalize them?

I believe Google that uses their internal Gemini trained on their internal infrastructure to generate boiler plate and insights for older, less mature, code in one of the worlds biggest and most complicated anythings, ever. But I don’t see them saying anything to the effect of “neener neener, we’re using markov chains so 10x our stock ‘cause of the otherwise impossible face melting Google Docs 2026.”

OpenAI is chasing ads, like Reddit, to regurgitate Reddit content. If this stuff is worth the squeeze I need to see the top 10 LLM-fluencers refusing to bend over for $50K. The opposite is on display.

So hypotheses: Google’s s-tier geniuses and PMs are already expressing the mature optimum application. No silver bullets, more gains to be had ditching bad tech and extraneous vendor entanglements (copilot, 365).
by lxgr | 2026-01-19 10:41:25+00:00
Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.

The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.

We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-19 10:41:34+00:00
Biometrics are "something you are" but they are not a good substitute for either "something you have" or "something you know".

My concern with them nearly always comes down to privacy. They are far too easy to abuse for collecting and selling user data. There are probably ways around that but how much will you ever be able to trust an opaque black box that pinky promises to irreversibly and uniquely hash your biometric data? It's an issue of trust and transparency.
by Someone | 2026-01-19 10:41:43+00:00
> Ever driven a vehicle with an automatic transmission rather than a manual gearshift with a clutch? Then you almost certainly used a fluid coupling

Are you sure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmis...:

“The most common type of CVT uses a V-belt which runs between two variable-diameter pulleys.

[…]

A belt-driven design offers approximately 88% efficiency, which, while lower than that of a manual transmission, can be offset by enabling the engine to run at its most efficient speed regardless of the vehicle's speed.

[…]

Disadvantages of a hydrostatic CVT include:

Reduced efficiency. Gears are one of the most efficient methods of mechanical power transmission, with efficiencies as high as 90 percent in many cases. In contrast, few hydrostatic transmission systems achieve more than about 65 percent efficiency”
by mlrtime | 2026-01-19 10:42:07+00:00
On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones?

For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap.

Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
by physicsguy | 2026-01-19 10:44:24+00:00
This one I always found super weird, because typically in Europe you just can't carry days over beyond the current year, so that argument for it never really held.

In the UK we're typically by law entitled to 25 days inc. bank (i.e. public) holidays, but most 'professional' jobs will give you at least 25 days plus bank holidays giving a total of ~33ish days per year of leave. When one of the bank holidays would fall on a weekend (e.g. Christmas Day) then it's transferred to the Monday following. Very very occasionally, there are additional bank holidays added e.g. for the Royal Wedding in 2011 one was created.

Often companies will give you a few more days after a number of years of service e.g. an additional 4 days after 5 years. Public sector jobs are usually more generous again e.g. 32 days + bank holidays plus some 'closure' days meaning ~42ish days of leave.
by throwaway290 | 2026-01-19 10:44:56+00:00
I'm having my thumbs-up back >:(

My first post took around 6 min & a dictionary. This post took 3. It's a quick skill.

No LLMs. Ctrl+f shows you all your 'e's without switching away from this tab. (And why count it? How many is not important, you can simply look if any occur and that's it)
by Y_Y | 2026-01-19 10:45:14+00:00
Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.

Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.

It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.

edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
by WillAdams | 2026-01-19 10:46:34+00:00
Thanks!

I'm pretty sure it was the first book in the series, _Weapon_:

https://www.goodreads.com/series/386853-weapon-solo

Didn't know that there was a sequel, so added it to my "Want to Read" list on Goodreads (and the first to my "Read" books).
by surgical_fire | 2026-01-19 10:47:48+00:00
What I find almost satisfying to watch is how the US throws away the soft power it spent nearly a century building for very little benefit in return.

The thing is that soft power is extremely effective. Many other countries, including China, try hard at acquiring a fraction of the soft power US naturally had.

Trumps administration, sooner or later, will pass. Whether it is voted away, or if it turns into a form of dictatorship, at some point in the future it will not be there anymore. The US won't be able to return to "how things were" when that happens. New trade deals, new alliances, a different ordering of things will be in place.
by retired | 2026-01-19 10:48:20+00:00
Made in Suzhou, China.

As far as I know only Gigaset and HMD manufacture in Europe. And even those two only do final assembly in Europe, the components are still made in China.

Technically Fairphone could ship you a box of parts and have you assemble the phone yourself. Then it would be "Made in Europe" (or where-ever you live).