MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LunaSea | 2026-01-05 18:56:46+00:00
> I can agree with that idea, to an extent. If something is near impossible (not saying this is), then it does become not worth it.

FATCA law makes this very possible in the US.

> How do you tax that? The government can't take one third of the business, at least not without a lot of issues (in business dealings and individual rights)

I would say that the government can and should and simply be a passive share holder with no voting rights.
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-05 18:57:05+00:00
They've (all the big guys) invested vast sums into AI. If the users don't buy into it that's a huge loss which will be a black mark on whoever directed the funding to it. Thus it must be made to succeed. If it worked there would be no need to keep trying to cram it down our throats. My Echo devices used to be well behaved, the only ads on the audio devices being stuff quite relevant to whatever I had just asked. My Show always had ads, but on a third of the screen and never in the way. Now it's getting aggressive about pushing the Alexa+ stuff, more than once I've had to get up and X off screens that didn't go away on their own.
by pqtyw | 2026-01-05 18:57:34+00:00
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commerci...

Then?

Germany would have quite literally run out of oil (and other materials and even grain) a few months after conquering Poland. Most was imported was imported from the Americas before the war.

The French and British could have pretty much waited Germany out had Stalin decided not to bankroll the Nazis invasions of Norway and France. The allies were quite seriously considering bombing Soviet oil fields in Azerbaijan before France fell.

Presumably Stalin was hoping to prop-up Germany just long enough for them to get stuck in a protracted war in France so that he could swop in and "liberate" Europe. Unfortunately for millions it turned out to be a slight miscalculation...
by potato3732842 | 2026-01-05 18:57:52+00:00
>e.g. by training and licensing

For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the profit of having government violence chase away much of the "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your training or license or belong to your professional group or whatever.

And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of having supply be constrained because the state forces that constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the taxpayer.

Something something privatize profits something something socialize cost centers.
by SkyPuncher | 2026-01-05 18:57:55+00:00
I've been seeing a bunch of LLM-adjacent articles recently that are focusing on being fast - and they leave me a bit stumped.

While latency _can_ be a problem, reliability and accuracy are almost always my bottlenecks (to user value). Especially with chunking. Chunking is generally a one-time process where users aren't latency sensitive.
by yibg | 2026-01-05 18:58:29+00:00
that's a very incomplete view though. How many of those would take up the newly created manufacturing jobs? How many of those can be trained to do other, better jobs? There are reason to bring some manufacturing jobs back for national security interests etc, but from a labor and economics perspective, it seems a better investment is first to try to invest in people such that more of the current labor pool can be engaged in "better" jobs first.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 18:58:51+00:00
> "Added value" is not the same as being the author of a draft that gets merged

Merged into what? There is no master draft. Just a bunch of drafts being circulated. I have no idea at what point my comments are submitted into a copy that winds up on the floor for a vote.

More to the point, the author of the draft may have nothing to do with my edits. If we’re skipping that, the entire exercise is performative.

> it sounds—not just based on the remarks here, but similarly timed comments elsewhere—that you still don't grok what that really means

How much language have you drafted that wound up in state or federal law?

This confident naïveté is part of the problem.
by colechristensen | 2026-01-05 18:58:52+00:00
One of the social problems we're experiencing is not being able to draw lines on what is and is not mental illness and a prevalent desire to validate people, most importantly where this desire to validate comes up against potential core points in a person's mental illness.

People are turning validating people's illnesses into a moral imperative confusing "don't stigmatize" with active encouragement.

These public LLMs are providing that level of, I don't know, delusion sycophancy, to an extreme amount which is resulting in people's deaths.

A collectivist society would put the onus on the service provider to protect people from themselves, an individualist society would either license people as "allowed to be free" and then whatever happens is their responsibility or say everybody has that license.

What we actually get though is a mix of collectivist/individualist based on ideological alignment where "I" should be free to do whatever I want and restrictions and freedoms should be aligned for my ideology to be applied to everyone with collectivist or individualist policies designed to maximize my ideology.

People won't pick between one and the other, they'll just advocate for freedom for the things they like.
by observationist | 2026-01-05 18:58:56+00:00
It's not impossible at all. We should do 5 year copyright - 99% of all commercial profit of all media is collected within 5 years of publishing.

Copyright is granted to media creators in order to incentivize creativity and contribution to culture. It's not granted so as to empower large collectives of lawyers and wealthy people to purchase the rights and endlessly nickel and dime the public for access to media.

Make it simple and clear. You get 5 years total copyright - no copying, no commercial activity or derivatives without express, explicit consent, require a contract. 5 years after publishing, you get another 5 years of limited copyright - think of it as expanded fair use. A maximum of 5% royalties from every commercial use, and unlimited non-commercial use. After 10 years, it goes into public domain.

You can assign or sell the rights to anyone, but the initial publication date is immutable, the clock doesn't reset. You can immediately push to public domain, or start the expanded fair use period early.

No exceptions, no grandfathering.

There's no legitimate reasons we should be allowing giant companies like Sony and HBO and Paramount to grift in perpetuity off of the creations and content of artists and writers. This is toxic to culture and concentrates wealth and power with people that absolutely should not control the things they do, and a significant portion of the wealth they accumulate goes into enriching lawyers whose only purpose in life is to enforce the ridiculous and asinine legal moat these companies and platforms and people have paid legislators to enshrine in law.

Make it clear and simple, and it accomplishes the protection of creators while enriching society. Nobody loses except the ones who corrupted the system in the first place.

We live in a digital era, we should not be pretending copyright ideas based on quill and parchment are still appropriate to the age.

And while we're at it, we should legally restrict distribution of revenues from platforms to a maximum of 30% - 70% at minimum goes to the author. The studio, agent, platform, or any other distribution agent all have to divvy up at most 30%.

No more eternal estates living off of the talent and creations of ancestors. No more sequestration of culturally significant works to enrich grifters.

This would apply to digital assets, games, code, anything that gets published. Patents should be similarly updated, with the same 5 and 10 year timers.

Sure, it's not 100% optimal, but it gets a majority of the profit to a majority of the creators close enough and it has a clear and significant benefit to society within a short enough term that the tradeoff is clearly worth it.

Empowering and enabling lawyers and rent seekers to grift off of other peoples talent and content is a choice, we don't have to live like that.
by HocusLocus | 2026-01-05 18:59:10+00:00
"Last week, OpenAI was accused of hiding key ChatGPT logs from the days before a 56-year-old bodybuilder, Stein-Erik Soelberg, took his own life after “savagely” murdering his mother, 83-year-old Suzanne Adams."

I don't believe this FOR A SECOND. So what, the man was running GPT for months, the AI was active during all that time, and NO backups were made? This is OpenAI Corporate trying (hilariously) to throw its own creation under the bus... while admitting to a level of IT negligence that is ugly in itself.
by antisthenes | 2026-01-05 18:59:37+00:00
Also weird not to have an easily accessible list or some kind of plan to show which games will be prioritized.

Just a vague 20,000 game list which may or may not have games that I am interested in.

Also seems like Patrons should get access to the games that are preserved, at least after some point of contributions (e.g. after $60 were accumulated in donations over a period of time)

I would gladly pay 2x or 3x that amount if I knew I would get access to this game library hassle-free in the future.

Good idea overall, "meh" execution so far.
by mlyle | 2026-01-05 19:00:05+00:00
I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person.

I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-05 19:00:08+00:00
We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors. They used to channel their efforts into competing for market share and routing one another from weak customer-bases. For a while, they did give us better operating systems.

Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-05 19:00:15+00:00
> if I thought I could actually influence legislation meaningfully

Literally start with calling your representative.

> I'm prepared to create a git login

Easy to say if you’re in society’s mainstream. A lot harder for other folks.

Right now, I’d be worried about Government Git being trawled for anyone who did anything the administration finds objectionable.
by Artgor | 2026-01-05 19:00:16+00:00
I prefer to start immersion at ~B1 level. I know some people want to do comprehensive input right from the start, but I prefer to build foundations.
I start with popular books that I have already read before - The Little Prince, Harry Potter, etc. Then I take books that are interesting for me and work through them.
There are graded readers, but the stories are usually very boring. I prefer to read what I like.
by 8note | 2026-01-05 19:00:18+00:00
on those notes, i dont think those errors are categorized by caller action, those are internal state.

NotFound should instead have an instruction "create this object first using that SOP" or "stop the transaction from going through"

Ratelimited has an instruction "try again in x ms" or "raise your rate limit following this SOP"

PermissionDenied has an instruction "request permissions here" or "complete this oauth"

as far as the flat error definition i think that rather than simple, its easy. its simpler to have each module define its own errors and have dedicated translation code to the libraries errors, rather than putting the translation and equivalencies between different modules errors within the library in the programmers head and code comments on the big error definition file.
by pyuser583 | 2026-01-05 19:00:21+00:00
That doesn't really solve the problem - what are the human's parameters? Protect the company from lawsuits? Spit out a link to a suicide hotline?

What does the human know - do they know all the slang terms and euphamisms for suicide. That's something most counselors don't know.

And what about euthanasia? Even as a public policy - not in reference to the user. "Where is assisted suicide legal? Does the poor use assisted suicide more than the rich?"

Smart apps like browser recommendations have dealt with this very inconsistently.
by ndom91 | 2026-01-05 19:00:41+00:00
Pebble are releasing a new slew of products and their arguments with rebble aside, are seemingly doing a good job so far prepping SDKs and more to easily write software for the new watches. Including leveraging the banglejs engine mentioned earlier in this thread to enable folks to write apps / watchfaces in javascript!

See: https://developer.repebble.com/docs/
by constantius | 2026-01-05 19:01:16+00:00
Thanks for linking this article! However, the full description of the incident seems that Namecheap blocked the domain, the CEO got into tweet arguments justifying it (and taking inconsistent positions), and after the backlash said it was a hasty block by the mod team, without an apology.

I generally give NC the benefit of the doubt (because of their principled stance on Ukraine, which to me means they can be principled elsewhere too), but in this case it's very difficult to explain it away.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-05 19:01:16+00:00
> For this database has to have nested transactions, where COMMITs do propagate up one level and not to the actual database,

Correct, but nested transaction support doesn't seem that much of a reach if you're an MVCC-style system anyway (although you might have to factor out things like row watermarks to lookaside tables if you want to let them be branchy.)
by MisterTea | 2026-01-05 19:01:22+00:00
> You stand at a machine doing the same fucking thing over and over.

Grew up in a machine shop ran by my father and my grandfather ran a one-man tool and die shop and ran the OBI presses himself. No one in that shop lost a finger.

> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills or their fingers chopped up when a stamping machine has all its safeties break because maintenance didn't maintain them right.

I don't know why on earth you seem to be content with people outside of your country So the laborers in other countries where safety is ignored aren't people?
by fooker | 2026-01-05 19:02:04+00:00
US pays people to go to college, but just the outliers.

It's an interesting tradeoff, make the outliers the best in the world at what they do, or make the average person slightly more competent.

I think it's difficult to design a system that makes both outcomes true at the same time. The countries that have succeeded in doing it so far have a tiny population compared to the hundred millions of students US/China/India has now.

China seems to be slowly moving to a system comparable to the US one where outliers are prioritized. India has avoided it so far, which is why we see so many generic software engineers from India. I wonder if that stance will change with that category of jobs rapidly shrinking.
Ask HN: Has anyone implemented branching for event streams?
by patriceckhart | 2026-01-05 19:02:18+00:00
I'm working on GenesisDB, an event sourcing database, and have been thinking about adding git-like branches for event streams.

The idea came from user requests. Several people asked for the ability to:

- Test scenarios with production data without polluting the main stream

- Explore "what if" questions in isolation

- Roll back a series of events that shouldn't have happened

The design: create a branch (O(1), just a pointer), commit events to it in isolation, then merge back to main or discard. Hash chain gets recalculated on merge, and merges are logged as system events for audit.

I'm curious:

- Has anyone seen this pattern before in other event stores?

- What use cases would this unlock for you?

- Any gotchas I should watch out for?
by pingananth | 2026-01-05 19:02:30+00:00
Founder Update (12:30 AM IST)

I am genuinely blown away by the feedback and the debate in this thread. To the community—thank you.

Status Update: The HN Traffic came at a tricky time—my payment provider is stuck in "Verification Pending" due to the spike, so the checkout is currently failing.

I’ve switched the button to a Priority Waitlist for now.

If you want to lock in the early-bird pricing ($19 One-Time / Lifetime Access), drop your email there. I’ll send everyone on that list a 20% off code as an apology once I wake up and fix the checkout.

You can also drop your email id if interested in the link: https://forms.gle/NqS6ttLaVGKecuS4A

It is 12:30 AM here in India, so I’m going to grab some sleep. I’ll be back online in ~7 hours to answer every remaining comment.

Keep the feedback coming!
by kshacker | 2026-01-05 19:02:39+00:00
1. I do that once in a while. There is only so much thinking you can do in a day or a week that you need some mindless activity

2. Today morning, fresh in the new year after a break -- I took a day off on the 2nd, and I last worked on December 19th, I am not able to get into the zone, and luckily a training email popped up -- spent an hour doing that. Normally my manager would have had to remind me.
by alwa | 2026-01-05 19:02:45+00:00
I deal with trespassing flies this way. They spend some time in fly jail (butterfly net, twisted closed and propped against the door frame through which they entered) pour encourager les autres, then they go free outside at dusk.

Pheromones, interpretive dance, telepathy,—I don’t know exactly how the others get the message but I know that they do, and they stay on the correct side of the doorway.
by unkeptbarista | 2026-01-05 19:02:51+00:00
I once worked at a shop that supported their product on a variety of Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms. Most of the development was done on Windows, but there were some there that favored Linux and a few, Solaris. The machines running HPUX were primarily used to debug issues that arouse only on HPUX. I think the machine running HPUX was old and slow, so none there favored it as a devlopment platform.
by pqtyw | 2026-01-05 19:03:11+00:00
> from the moment of its inception

Also saved millions of people from starvation in the early 20s by ending a devasting famine while the Soviets were busy blowing up their economy.

It's not exactly obvious that the Bolshevik regime would have survived the famine of 1921–1922 had Hoover et al. not bailed them out...
by randallsquared | 2026-01-05 19:03:14+00:00
> 2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure

Per a quick search, that's 0.2%, not 2%. Not sure about what "housing insecure" means, so that's harder to check. Also, that is just a one-night snapshot, and many of those won't be homeless if you check back later.
by DesiLurker | 2026-01-05 19:03:28+00:00
thats a strawman, its not like advertisement & brainwashing people is the only way to make money in tech. I am old enough to have seen how valley was before this big-tech ad garbage showed up. In fact I'd say all this power with 7 or so big tech is hindering innovation, so, IMnsHO Fuck 'em all.

Asking 300M people to leave country and move to europe instead of fixing problems here is just stupid and at best a shoddy attempt at victim blaming.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-05 19:03:38+00:00
I am currently working on a script with my uncle who is a professional playwright, my grandfather wrote for Benny Hill. So it runs in my family.

Biting the bullet, I have accurately had it generate the scene of the cafe. Generating visual imagery of how I imagine it; a cyber dystopian gothic cafe with wandering goths.

It's capped to ten seconds and that alone would've costed me a fair sum to even get a small render without revisions.

I could now technically pitch this with the AI works and get the funding required to hire actual animators/actors or spend my savings myself giving it to an artist depicting the theme and style; not that I could afford it.

How is creativity lost in that scenario? AI is a tool, it shouldn't be a do-everything, I created the script and it's generated the visual mock.

Personally I wouldn't want it to create the whole show and would personally prefer real folk to do the magic but for my own personal consumption it's given me the excitement and further drive to continue.
by Curiositry | 2026-01-05 19:03:42+00:00
This is a super cool project! Probably the most interesting neurotech hardware I've run across since OpenBCI was released.

It would be great to see a side-by-side comparison of Cerelog and OpenBCI data from the same session/patient.

A few questions:

- Could you clarify which parts of the project are licenced MIT, which are CC-BY-SA, and which are CC-BY-NC-SA? It seemed like the guide and the README had more restrictive language than the actual license file.

- What made you decide to start fresh, rather than adding the features you needed to the OpenBCI?
by dpoloncsak | 2026-01-05 19:03:51+00:00
Yeah, I still indulge in video games, and understand that on the surface CSGO skins feel different than Genshin summons, but from 100 feet up it's all the same crap, imo

I do kinda get what you mean, though. Gacha mechanics feel expected in anything western, while 'loot boxes' are still a 'feature' of some games in the east. Eastern studios have definitely noticed, though, and are running the same playbook.
by titaniumtown | 2026-01-05 19:03:51+00:00
I like the progress China is making on clean energy.

I don't know how to put it, but the narrative around "cancelling out" (in the article, not the title) carbon makes me uncomfortable. Language such like this makes the problem of global co2 emissions seem less dire than it really is. I mean it's good work (not in the US) is being done on the problem, but nature doesn't care about "cancelling out" co2. It's just so frustrating seeing such a dirty source of energy being continued to be used.
by techblueberry | 2026-01-05 19:03:53+00:00
The whole college backlash thing - I mean, I'm sure there are many people who want to change how colleges and universities operate for sure, but is there really an alternative especially for white collar, middle class+ folks? Sure a small percent can start a business, and yes, some people will naturally be part of the trades, but I 'haven't actually heard anyone propose an alternative, and zero of my family members including the very conservative ones seem to be taking the idea of not going to college seriously.

From the article:

“Oftentimes, people say that not everybody should go to college, and that these two-year programs, these trade schools, are really good,” Strohl said. “Ask them where they’re sending their kids.”

We're in this moment where I think everyone wants to talk about burning everything down, but at least for now, the real losers are the people who buy too much into it without a solid alternative plan. Entrepeneurs may do well, but they were never the ones to listen to the median perspective on how to approach life.
by mikepurvis | 2026-01-05 19:04:07+00:00
I agree. I'm not the moral police, but video games ultimately have to walk a line where they serve up entertainment that is engaging/addictive without being all-consuming and abusive, and do so for an amount of money for which there is general consensus is "reasonable".

Trying to ride that to the moon is a very different proposition from a B2B play where you sell some service that concretelt delivers $X/mo recurring value to each customer for a $Y/mo price tag, and X > Y, but Y - your costs still turns a healthy profit. If you do that right, everyone is winning and the economy as a whole grows, not at all the same as the zero-sum game that is soaking a few whales and ruining their lives.