MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flowerthoughts | 2026-01-27 08:51:10+00:00
Those are rookie numbers.

This guy [1] (in Swedish) was digitizing a municipal archive. 25 years later, the IT department (allegedly) accidentally deleted his entire work. With no backup.

Translated:

> For at least 25 years, work was underway to create a digital, searchable list of what was in the central archive in Åstorp municipality. Then everything was deleted by the IT department.

> “It felt empty and meaningless,” says Rasko Jovanovic.

> He saw his nearly 18 years of work in the archive destroyed. HD was the first to report on it.

> “I was close, so close to taking sick leave. I couldn't cope,” he says.
The digital catalog showed what was in the archive, which dates back to the 19th century, and where it could be found.

> "If you ask me something today, I can't find it easily, I have to go down and go through everything.

> “Extremely unfortunate”

> Last fall, the IT department found a system that had no owner or administrator. They shut down the system. After seven months, no one had reported the system missing, so they deleted everything. It was only in September that Åstorp discovered that the archive system was gone.

> “It's obviously very unfortunate,” says Thomas Nilsson, IT manager.
Did you make a mistake when you deleted the system?

> “No. In hindsight, it's clear that we should have had different procedures in place, but the technician who did this followed our internal procedures.”

In typical Swedish fashion, there cannot have been a mistake made, because procedures were followed! Or to put it in words that accurately reflect having 25 years of work being removed: "Own it, you heartless bastard."

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/helsingborg/rasko-digitali...
by ravibhatt | 2026-01-27 08:52:52+00:00
Hi HN,

I built BrickCheck because I got tired of having 20 tabs open every time I found a house I liked. I wanted to see the actual data (crime rates, internet speeds, school ratings) right next to the listing, without jumping between different government websites.

The Problem: Rightmove and Zoopla give you the sales pitch, but they don't easily show you the "red flags" or the raw financial reality (like true monthly cost vs. yield).

The Solution: BrickCheck is a dashboard that aggregates data from the Land Registry, Ofsted, Police.uk, and Ofcom.

Key Features:

Deep Data: Instantly pulls crime rates, broadband speeds, and school ratings for any postcode.

Smart Stats: Calculates Price/sq ft and calculates stamp duty.

Floorplans: Uses vision analysis to break down room sizes and flag "box rooms" that are listed as double bedrooms.

Financials: You can set your custom Deposit & Mortgage Rate preferences to see the real monthly cost for every property.

Tech Stack: It’s a React/Next.js app wrapped with Capacitor for mobile.

It’s currently in v1. I’d love feedback on which data points you find most critical when comparing homes!

Link: https://brickcheck.io/
by ben_w | 2026-01-27 08:52:56+00:00
> Far-right leaders join Trump in welcoming Boris Johnson to No 10

Exactly what I said didn't count.

> Sorry – we haven’t been able to serve the page you asked for.You may have followed an outdated link, or have mistyped a URL. If you believe this to be an error please report it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atheguardian.com+%22fa...

14900 results*

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atheguardian.com+%22fa...

14700 results*

Also, you seem to have moved your goalposts, your original claim was "the only right wing people are "far right" or "alt right" to these people", so here are the results for simply "right wing" with and without the hyphen:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atheguardian.com+%22ri...

38900 results*

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atheguardian.com+%22ri...

40300 results*

* The exact number varies with every refresh of the Google search results, but are consistently around this
by Nursie | 2026-01-27 08:53:54+00:00
I'm not convinced it's that hard. I've pointed out a few ways that it differs significantly.

There are others major differences like the lack of infinite doomscrolling, or the personalised feed to optimise engagement.

To the wider point that maybe we should be preventing kids from accessing classes of things rather than particular services - yeah probably, but it's much easier to manage a blocklist starting with the worst offenders, and that might be a good enough start down the path of harm reduction.
by matwood | 2026-01-27 08:53:55+00:00
> They don't stop hijackings (locking the cockpit door does that)

9/11 also stopped all future hijackings. Up to that point passengers were trained that if they stayed calm they would likely survive. Now? Short of the hijackers getting guns on the plane, passengers will absolutely fight back.

> they don't stop bombings (there are much better targets for that, which don't involve killing the bomber)

Suicide bombers are probably the main vector that TSA helps avoid even if they miss some items sometimes.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-01-27 08:54:46+00:00
I had had my fair share of data loss lessons. For us, it is easy to say, “Why didn’t you back up?” But most people have an innate trust in tools, especially from big companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook/Meta. I have heard so many people happily claim, “I won’t worry. I have it on Google.”

Even for my daughters’ much simpler school homework, projects, and the usual drawings/sketches, I’ve set up Backups so they don’t cry when their work gets lost. I set up the Macs I handed down to them to be backed up to iCloud, and added a cheap HDD for Time Machine. They think I’m a Magician with Computers when I teach them to use the Time Machine and see the flying timeline of their work. The other thing is the Google Workspace for Schools. I have found that having a local copy always available via a tool (such as InSync) does wonders.

The only sob story now is Games. They sometimes lose points, the game coin thingies, and developer-kids with bugs that reset gameplay earnings. I have no idea how to help them there besides emotional support and how the world works — one step at a time.

How about if ChatGPT/Claude writes a local Markdown copy of each conversation? Won’t that be Nice?
by kinj28 | 2026-01-27 08:55:32+00:00
I am the founder of Dronahq - bootstrapped Low code platform. I fully concur with how AI is eating low code platforms for breakfast.

However underlying principles haven’t changed.

-Engineering bandwidth is minimally available for Internal tools.
-Enterprise controls/guardrails are important needs
- bringing in data to your app is a must have
- maintaining code vs low code apps — low code has been a lot easier

In a conversation with a CTO at VC fund - he predicts that 4-6 quarters and you shall see demand back to peak in low code segment!

In a customer conversation— customer made one tool with cursor and he was very successful but by the time he started adding features for 2.0 everything started breaking and he wanted to move back to lowcode.

As a low code vendor- we just added internal tool building agent that underneath writes react code and leverages the other core capability of the platform thereby giving users best of both the worlds.

But surely interesting times ahead for the category. Let’s see if it survives or dies!

My personal take— it will survive and converge with agentic ai!
by haritha-j | 2026-01-27 08:55:34+00:00
> to write e-mails, draft course descriptions, structure grant applications, revise publications, prepare lectures, create exams and analyse student responses, and even as an interactive tool as part of my teaching.

So your grant applications were written by AI, your lectures were written by AI, your publications were written by AI, and your students exams were marked by AI? Buddy what were YOU doing?
by komali2 | 2026-01-27 08:55:55+00:00
You said "value" of labor, not salary. Salary indicates at best, market rate, but often not even that. Value is something else entirely, and that something seems to be completely disconnected from capitalist measures of market price. See: investment banker salaries vs teachers. See also: the price of a monkey JPEG. Even capitalist value is disconnected from market price, see the current stock market.

> Nobody has ever found a better system.

Anarchists in Spain did in 1936 when they syndicalized the majority of the economy. BTW Walter I'm not sure you remember but I'm fairly certain you've replied these exact words to me before.
by int_19h | 2026-01-27 08:56:31+00:00
Anecdotally this does seem to be true in US. I know several Iranians in US, from completely different social circles, but all of them strongly anti-clerical and not shy about it.

Also, as a Russian who left Russia, it's certainly a familiar pattern.

Note, by the way, that this doesn't really imply anything about whether those people are wrong to be antagonistic.
by energy123 | 2026-01-27 08:56:56+00:00
I share your vision about what ideal regulation looks like.

I don't share your cynicism pertaining to motives. Well, I am cynical about it, but in a different way.

Politicians are feckless trend followers, cowardly in their disposition, preferring to follow the path of least resistance, and they lack any substantial vision or imagination themselves.

That explains why nothing bold is happening. And that lack of boldness is not unique to social media regulation.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-27 08:57:04+00:00
My rule of thumb: unit test logic, integration test plumbing.

If a function does actual computation or has branching logic that could go wrong in subtle ways, unit test it. If it's mostly wiring things together (fetch data, transform, save), an integration test catches more real bugs.

The "unit test everything" era came from a time when spinning up test databases was painful. Now with Docker and in-memory DBs, integration tests are often faster to write AND more useful.

Where unit tests still win: algorithmic code, parsing, anything with lots of edge cases. Writing unit tests forces you to think about boundaries. Integration tests just tell you "it worked this time."

The worst outcome is having tests that make refactoring painful but don't catch real bugs. I've seen codebases where every internal method signature change breaks 50 unit tests that were essentially testing implementation details.
by lelanthran | 2026-01-27 08:58:03+00:00
I do wordle, strands and, when available (once a week) I do the midi.

Wordle and strands together usually take less than 5m. The midi ranges from 3m30 (my best time) to ~12m (my worst).

Not done Letterbox, Pips and Tiles, but I figured that all their puzzles are at the same level of difficulty.

It's interesting, to me, that (from my reading of the paper, which was very quick) they they consider it hard/easy based on a sort of brute-force attempt to find all the answers.
by inopinatus | 2026-01-27 08:58:21+00:00
Many of those metrics are population or sampling measures and are confounded by many factors at an individual level. The most notorious of which is BMI; it is practically a category error to infer someone's health or risk by individual BMI, and yet doing so remains widespread amongst people that are supposed to know better.

Instrumentation and testing become primarily useful at an individual level to explain or investigate someone's disease or disorder, or to screen for major risk factors, and the hazards and consequences of unnecessary testing outweigh the benefits in all but a few cases. For which your GP and/or government will (or should) routinely screen those at actual risk, which is why I pooped in a jar last week and mailed it
by ordu | 2026-01-27 08:58:35+00:00
> I keep struggling with is understanding how a particular state came to be — especially with concurrency or events that happened much earlier.

Yeah, I faced this problem. I have no general solution to it, but I wonder if a fuzzer can be bred with a debugger to get a tool that can given two states of a program to find inputs that can transition program from state A to state B. Maybe you would need to define state A and/or B with some predicates, so they would be a classes of states. Or maybe the tool could fuzz the state A to see what part of it are important to transition to the state B eventually.
by shenberg | 2026-01-27 08:59:42+00:00
I don't understand how using group-theory language to describe number-theoretic properties provides extra insight in this case (e.g. conjecture: all perfect numbers are even is more concise than the group-theoretic description given in the page). Can you expand on why you believe the tools of group theory have something to say about this?
(e.g. for polynomial roots, the connection with symmetry groups comes from symmetries of factorized polynomials, while there's no obvious-to-me connection here as there is no unique-up-to-symmetry integer factorization)
by wodenokoto | 2026-01-27 09:00:32+00:00
A lot of snark in the comments, but I think author is absolutely right: this should har come with a big warning and that warning should have had 3 options:

1) go ahead and delete everything 2) back up and then go ahead 3) abort and keep things as they are

ChatGPT definitely wants to be the copilot of all your work. Guy didn’t just have chats, he had drafts that his virtual assistant helped formulate and proof read. Give how big and used ChatGPT has become, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone tech savvy that this is being used for serious work outside of vibecoders.
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-27 09:00:49+00:00
Hot take: Actual "irreversibly delete x stuff with the next action" is simply too powerful and bad design for most people, and has probably caused considerably more harm than good in the world. It's particularly silly with software, where few reasons exist for this to be an actual thing.

What the average human needs is laws and enforcement, and trust in both.
by tracknetworth | 2026-01-27 09:00:53+00:00
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by aleph_minus_one | 2026-01-27 09:00:55+00:00
> once upon a time i had a boss who asked for a "super admin" account to "trump" the domain administrators..and a "master key" to decrypt any file , in case the user lost their key.

Key escrow is a well-known concept in cryptography:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_escrow

It's just that these "master keys" are super-dangerous to handle for obvious reasons.
by delbronski | 2026-01-27 09:00:57+00:00
Most software engineers were not “crafting” before AI. They were writing sloppy code for the sake of profit, getting a pay check, and going home. Which is why AI also outputs the same crappy code.

Rumor has it there were a few elite crafters among the lot. Software wizards who pondered about systems and architecture as they had a $10 espresso macchiato.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-27 09:01:45+00:00
Wax is great for road riding. I ride in Auckland where it’s wet half the time (all the time this summer). I re-wax every 400 or so km. It’s clean running and beautiful compared to the expensive oils I was using, and lasts longer.

Wear appears to be down too.
The reduction in grease and dirty chain makes is so nice.
by bjoli | 2026-01-27 09:01:54+00:00
On the other hand, I could never imagine moving to the US. It seems like such a third world country in so many ways. The amount of households that cant afford a sudden $400 expense without borrowing. The childhood poverty rates. The maternal mortality rate. The traffic deaths (en even worse, the pedestrian traffic deaths going in the wrong direction fast), people dying at work, the fact that you managed to get hookworm BACK, the power grid (I love in a small society in Sweden and I have averages 6 minutes of power outages per year), people being functionally illiterate.

I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.

I am not sure I would be able to stand that.
by Dansvidania | 2026-01-27 09:01:58+00:00
I giggled when I saw this article quoted here after watching her video.

I particularly feel close to the “how do you just admit to this and publish it on nature” feeling.

Are we getting desensitised to the boundary between self and ai?

On the other side of it, if we speak of AI as a tool, does it not count as work to prompt and converse ?
by adev_ | 2026-01-27 09:02:30+00:00
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol

The comparison is wrong.

It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".

Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.

Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.

Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=14350...

And lets face it: Over the last 10y, any attempt to regulate the platforms responsible of that failed miserably.
by sunshine-o | 2026-01-27 09:02:33+00:00
I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.

> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behavior

Yes but the problem is much deeper.

I often observer various "families" with their kids on holidays. The French and the Brits are really a nightmare, strangely the same countries who are now banning social media. But my guess is this is more of chicken than an egg problem.

You will often have an hysterical woman, totally deranged and often alone, screaming constantly on the kids for no reasons. You wish you could call child protective services on them and this is only when they are "relaxing" on holiday.

We know those kids are gonna get into weird internet things and drugs anyway to escape this world. France can write any law they want it is not gonna solve the problem and send them back to any "equilibrium".

Blaming TV, video games and now social media 20 years late is just a way to avoid talking about the real problem.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-27 09:02:34+00:00
> Actual conservatives wouldn't support Trump

It's quite honestly amazing how much conservative propaganda has warped the liberal mind. So many liberals actually believe that conservatives just want a slow measured pace of change and to balance budgets, but that's literally never been what they have actually legislated for or accomplished. Liberals are the only people in my lifetime who have actually held those values. They are also the only ones who believe conservatives hold those values. Conservative's know better. And they demonstrated it with their vote. You can no-true-Scotsman until you're blue. There has literally never been a time in this nations history when that was an accurate depiction of conservatives.

Consistently throughout this country's history, conservatives rally to oppose rights being shared with a broader group of people. Conservatives fought a civil war to maintain slavery. They fought for Jim Crow laws. They fought against anti-miscegenation laws. They fought against women's right to vote. They fought and are still fighting against gay rights and recognizing trans people as humans. Literally every single time there is a minority "at risk" of having a better lot in life, there are conservatives turning out to fight against it. When the fuck will you give up the benefit of the doubt on conservatives?
by globular-toast | 2026-01-27 09:02:38+00:00
Something I don't get is if you search Spotify for some classic mixes, like Sasha and Digweed's Northern Exposure, for example, you'll find that someone has compiled a playlist of all/most/many of the individual tracks from the mix. But of course listening to the individual tracks is a completely different and much less enjoyable thing. I also don't get why people spend their time doing things like that on closed platforms.

Most of my favourite mixes, like the Global Underground series aren't on there at all. And that's just stuff that came out on CD. Some of the best mixes are things like Radio 1 Essential Mixes or live events.

I've also noticed some artists "redoing" their own tracks on Spotify. If you look for Chicane's Behind the Sun on there you won't even find the original, only a redone version that's nothing like the one you remember.

So yeah, having a personal music collection is still very important.
by Terr_ | 2026-01-27 09:02:50+00:00
Meta/WhatsApp could be weasel-wording here, where they technically do have "end to end encryption"... but also a process which bypasses it.

That might mean access to the automatic chat-backups which by default are not end-to-end encrypted (so that Archetypal Aunt Tillie can get her chats back when her phone is lost) or some mechanism that controls the client-program.

By default, WhatsApp chats are backed up to Google (Apple?) storage in an unencrypted form.
by clarus | 2026-01-27 09:03:31+00:00
What should be added, I think, to code reviewing is that it can get really complex, for example if we add formal verification in the mix to catch very subtle bugs.

So in the end I think there will still be some disappointment, as one would expect it should be fully automated and only about reading the code, like this article suggests. In reality, I think it is harder than writing code.
by ale42 | 2026-01-27 09:03:48+00:00
Switzerland created a digital ID platform (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45407657), that has been open sourced, and that would allow people to prove for example their age without revealing any other personal details. It's maybe not the perfect solution, but I find this highly preferable to sharing my ID with some social media platform.
by physicsguy | 2026-01-27 09:03:49+00:00
What a bizarre comment. Take something like NumPy - has a hard dependency on BLAS implementations where numerical correctness are highly valued for accuracy and require deep thinking for correct implementation as well as for performance. Written in a different language again for performance so again an LLM would have to implement all of those things. What’s the utility in burning energy to regenerate this all the time when implementations already exist?