MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by some_furry | 2026-01-07 21:38:20+00:00
The maintainer seems to have abandoned it: https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues

I wrote a shim library and posted it on their issue tracker: https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/343

Unfortunately, adoption seems slow. I'm talking with a few people about how to move the ecosystem to something more secure like noble-curves, but it's tricky.
My first paper: A practical implementation of Rubiks cube based passkeys
by acorn221 | 2026-01-07 21:38:56+00:00
I'm not super experienced with cryptography but I had some spare time on my hands so I decided to make CubeAuthn and turn it into a paper.

Repo here: https://github.com/Acorn221/CubeAuthn. Feel free to ask questions!

---

Abstract:

We present a novel authentication system that transforms a Rubik's cube into a physical key for digital authentication. By reading the cube's specific arrangement among 43 quintillion possible configurations, our system generates FIDO2-compatible credentials on-demand. Unlike traditional security tokens that store credentials, the cube itself becomes part of the key with its physical state forming a deterministic seed for keypair generation. Our proof-of-concept, CubeAuthn, demonstrates this concept with a browser extension that authenticates users on WebAuthn-enabled sites using the cube's physical state as the cryptographic seed.
by pedalpete | 2026-01-07 21:38:58+00:00
This reads to me as protein first, then veg.

American's don't seem to have a protein restriction problem. Look at your average burger, it is mostly meat, a bit of lettuce, and a bunch of low-quality bread.

I had a "salad" in SF when I was visiting, it was the largest chicken breast I've ever seen, a bunch of bacon and I had to practically go searching for the few leaves of spinach.

Lastly, is it really the guideline that are going to help, or is it accessibility?
by sallveburrpi | 2026-01-07 21:39:03+00:00
All the downsides you listed can be solved by public open source models.
The ones we have are pretty good already and I would hope that they only get better in the near future.
Once you can it on your machine you can safely give it all your data and much more.
Of course i would still like a human doctor but it might be a better tool for personal research before you see an expert than what we had in the past.
by cyberax | 2026-01-07 21:39:06+00:00
> The problem with this is that you can’t forcibly reduce population.

We don't need to. The population growth in the Western world is mostly over, the US will likely peak at barely +10% to the current population numbers. Europe is likely already at or near the peak number.

And Tokyo managed to get a bubble within a country with a _falling_ population. Not just stagnant like in Europe, but actually numerically decreasing.

> Halting growth in one area just displaces it.

That's EXACTLY what we need. The US already has 1.1 houses per household, except that they are not where the demand is.

So the fix is to shift the demand, not try to satisfy it. Ironically, this is exactly the same method that urbanists propose to fight congestion: instead of just adding more lanes to busy roads, you shift people to other modes of transportation.

How can this be done? Exactly like we did it with pollution: tax negative externalities, incentivize clean technology. For cities: tax dense office space (cap-and-trade can also work), incentivize work-from-home, incentivize offices in less dense cities, etc.

This doesn't even have to be a huge policy shift.
by MC995 | 2026-01-07 21:39:10+00:00
> The video shows the ICE agent just straight up killing her unprovoked, against the narrative they're currently trying to setup that she was a terrorist

Don't try to bend the facts while there's literal video of the confrontation, as you yourself noted.
She was being commanded to step out of the vehicle (My speculation: to be arrested) and refused to do so while accelerating the vehicle quickly with an officer standing in front of her vehicle. If the drivers intent was to commit vehicular homicide or not is obviously unknown (and at this point unknowable), it was not unprovoked in any way.

Intentionally or not she was accelerating her vehicle toward someone. Regardless of if the reaction of the agent was justified, it was 100% provoked by the driver.
by aldarion | 2026-01-07 21:39:39+00:00
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28442474/
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/51/15/1111

Matter of the fact is that the entirety of belief that saturated fat "clogs the arteries" was based on the epidemiological studies which failed to adjust for other risk factors such as trans fat intake, intake of processed foods, and many more.

We should not throw away "80+ years of scientific studies and data" because... said "80+ years of scientific studies and data" do not exist. Not a single actual study had ever been made. The best we have are epidemiological studies, and these have massive issues.

"This is an insane take and thoroughly discredits anything you have to say. Science has some basis in reality, even if it is somewhat flawed. The idea that we should throw out all science food guidelines because it's not perfect is completely crackpot.

I have no idea why nutrition brings out the crazy left field engineer types but it's a common pattern."

It is not an insane take, you are just being a dumbass. Doctors do not have any training in nutrition. When I asked my doctor - doctors, actually, plural - for dietary advice, literally all of them told me "I don't have knowledge to advise you on that, figure it out on your own".

Science has basis in reality, yes. But doctors aren't scientists.
by devedse | 2026-01-07 21:39:48+00:00
Hey Kenton & the others,

What version of linux are you using? I did try to get it to work with a few and I believe only managed to make CachyOS work

Besides that, today I also finished my own netboot solution (that still uses Windows). I'm quite happy with the state now where it's able to inject drivers (so it works on multiple systems with different hardware), and also fix an issue with the latest Win11 Nov update where it suddenly didn't netboot anymore.

If anyone is interested I actually made a small post on it today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1q6kpto/devepxeboo...
by baggachipz | 2026-01-07 21:39:57+00:00
> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.

I can think of one issue here. Ultra-processed foods, candy, and sugary drinks are cheap and shelf-stable. They're cheap because they're subsidized. Fruits and vegetables are more expensive, and they don't last very long. So a person on a very limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new restrictions.

The answer, of course, is to make it so that fresh produce and other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food. I have a hard time seeing that happening, given how susceptible the administration is to being "lobbied".
by reify | 2026-01-07 21:40:07+00:00
Having been a methadone dispenser and alcohol group worker in the NHS for many years people seem to forget, that prior to 2004, addiction, whether alcohol or drugs was treated under the medical model.

A heroin user could be fast tracked to methadone maintenance or reduction precribing service, detox, rehab and full support, using the cycle of change as a base.

I found this model to be quite good at moving clients from addiction to living life as fully functioning members of society.

However, around 2005, the Labour government decided that addiction was no longer deemed a medical problem but a criminal justice matter.

So, 8 minor criminal offences were chosen as a way to enforce drug and alcohol assessments while addicts were in custody at police stations.

The outcome of this useless government intervention!

The revolvoing door of the prison service, which accounts for todays prisons being full to the brim with short sentences of drug users.

It starts like this:

initially they might get a 28 day prison sentence for shoplifting a bottle of Whiskey. They get released from prison and have to attend the probation service with strict protocols.

but being a drug user, the first thing they do is go to the off-licence and buy a bottle of booze. get totally drunk. do not attend probation, the terms of prison release are broken and they are arrested and returned to prison.

the next time they get arrested for stealing a bottle of booze, they get 6 months, the next time they get a year in prison, and so it continues. there is no escape once they become part of the criminal justice system. There is no justice!

round and round they go for years and years. never ever adressing the addiction.
for the last 20 years this is what being an addict is like in the UK.

back in 2005 it used to cost £400 per week to keep a man in prison, It cost £500 per week to send a man to rehab. yet successive governments choose to put them in prison.
by downrightmike | 2026-01-07 21:40:23+00:00
They aren't a bank. Banks get paid in interest for the risk they take in making the loan. Student Loans have no risk because you can't discharge them. But they carry high interest rates.

Schools made bad predatory loans. Schools colluded with other schools to raise tuition. And schools made loans to any warm body they could to get them in the door. They did discount some tuition, but that was only enough to justify it as charity and not have to pay taxes. Its all a fraudulent scam.
by WackyFighter | 2026-01-07 21:40:33+00:00
When you are referring to a military action, invasion has a particular meaning.

The definition on Wikipedia seems reasonable:

> An invasion is a military action consisting of a large armed force of one geopolitical entity entering the territory of another with the goal of militarily occupying part or all of the invaded polity's territory, usually to conquer territory or alter the established government

What the US did wasn't a military invasion by that definition as they left after they grabbed Maduro.
by emodendroket | 2026-01-07 21:40:41+00:00
I think that it is simultaneously the case that 1) SO Jobs had job-seekers who loved it 2) it was not actually a major draw to the site 3) it didn't make money, despite 4) being primarily intended as a monetization mechanism. You are starting from different premises you didn't bother stating and then accusing me of being dishonest for not divining them.
by jesup | 2026-01-07 21:40:42+00:00
I'm down to 7800 tabs (30 windows) on my main desktop. 4K on my other, 2K on my laptops. High was >11000 tabs. Firefox makes this easy; takes ~30 seconds to open all those windows and load a tab per window (plus ~8 pinned tabs)

"% string" in the awesome bar completes against tabs only. Helps a ton, along with some about:config settings that open new tabs from pinned tabs at the right (end) of the tab list. Also windows for separate contexts (though tab groups may also work here now, and avoid the overhead of opening a window/loading a tab at startup).

And "About Tabs" extension from glandium (who works for mozilla)
by Krei-se | 2026-01-07 21:40:50+00:00
I think you misunderstand how an LLM works.

You assume that the LLM has no idea about a working compiler implementation (it does and has it in its training set) thus it would on-the-fly be able to take your question and task, then fit both your task and the compilation rules into its attention vectors and output a working result but that is not the case.

The rules to provide a working binary are the same as to provide somewhat valid text so if you are accustomed to an LLM not making grammatical errors or typos you should not be surprised it can create a binary to spec too - its the same kind of rules.

What it cannot do is take unknown new rules and apply them during its context window because it will be too small. And that is why it cannot build complex business or system logics you create on your own - these rules are not in its training set yet.

So no, its not insanely difficult because the compiler rules are way more easy to derive than our grammatical rules for languages.

Maybe if this still does not click, ask yourself the following: How hard is it for the LLM to use trainingsets for human language from one phrase into another language as a training set and how hard is it to provide code and the resulting binary code for them as training data? Synthetic training data with known 100% correct output is super easy to create in vast amounts to train any network.

Compiling code to binary might be the simplest task you can have an LLM train against because its so easy to generate known working input-output pairs.
by whalesalad | 2026-01-07 21:41:14+00:00
most doctors - like most mechanics - are the worst debuggers in humankind.

I once went to the UCSF er 2x in the same weekend for an issue. On day one, I was told to take some ibuprofen and drink water - nothing to worry about. I went home, knowing this was not a solution. Day two I returned to the ER because my situation had gotten 10x worse. The (new) doctor on day 2 said "we need to resolve this asap" and I was moved into a room where they gave me a throat-numbing breating apparatus and then shoved a massive spinal tap needle in my throat to drain 20ml of fluid from behind my tonsil. I happened to bump into the doctor from the previous day on my way out and gave him a nice tap on the shoulder saying, thanks for all the help, doc. UCSF tried to bill me 2x for this combined event, but I told them to get fucked due to the negligence on day one. The billing issue disappeared.

I had a Jeep that I took into the shop 2, 3, 4 times for a crazy issue. The radio, seat belt chime, and emergency flashers all become possessed at the same time. Using my turn signal would cause the radio to cut in and out. My seat belt kept saying it was disconnected. No one could fix it. What was the issue? A loose ground on the chassis that all of those different systems were sharing. https://www.wranglerforum.com/threads/2015-rubicon-with-elec...

These are just two examples from my life, but there are countless. I just do everything myself now, because I trust no one else.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-07 21:41:26+00:00
In any other domain, I would agree with you 100%. But nutrition science really is that bad, in my experience and opinion. With some exceptions (e.g. the need for vitamins to avoid things like scurvy, or the relationship between salt intake and blood pressure), even long-standing nutrition beliefs and practices have been overturned (e.g. consumption of cholesterol, or the discovery of the role of dietary fiber), and some of the newer research is likely to overturn others (e.g. with the role and diversity of gut microbiomes, it's likely other nutrition advice will depend to some extent on your specific microbiome).

The reason for this is fairly simple to see: the methods of science that work so well in other areas of biology are completely impractical in nutrition because of

1. The difficulty of ascertaining and maintaining compliance with a specific diet for a long term study

2. The very long-term effect of some food choices

3. The unknown degree of inter-personal variance in food consumption

4. The expected low effect size of dietary recommendations

5. The huge variety of possible dietary effects

6. The huge amount of possible confounding factors in any population-level study

As you'd expect from this combination, the only effects we really have good science about are those that are relatively fast acting (e.g. salt intake increases BP in less than a day) or have very strong effect sizes (e.g. lack of vitamins or certain amino-acids produces severe diseases). For things like life-long effects, or even effects over multiple years, especially where the correlation is slight, you're left with very unclear science where the unknown possible confounding factors dominate any conclusion.

Edit to add: even today, there is a clear disconnect in nutrition science between people who advocate mostly for relatively simple guidelines and the avoidance of processed foods, usually recommending a preference for vegetables over animal-based products; and the older style of guidelines that you suggest, that say a grilled steak is much worse for you than, say, a stevia-sweetened granola bar you'd buy in a super market.
by w10-1 | 2026-01-07 21:41:36+00:00
As others have noted:

- Whether this is needed or helps depends not on percentage of owners or buyer/sellers, but on the effect in the market of such players. REIT's have an outsize effect because they are repeat players, and thus lucrative clients for brokers, who qualify themselves by skewing local markets accordingly.

- Policy-wise, it's hard to distinguish by size: second homes, mom-and-pop with a few rentals, REIT, private equity. (This is how corporations get free-speech rights.)

- Politically, it's a shame that a real problem is addressed via scapegoating

- Practically, it will have little effect since REIT's and home builders are sitting on a lot of inventory that they can't sell, so they've stopped accumulating (and they're resorting to secondary offerings to pay off the original investors). Indeed, to the extent this stimulates buying, they're all for it.

- Ethically, the US has been a magnet for money laundering, much of it via real estate, which has pushed up asset prices and de-conditioned professionals. Scapegoating only delays reform.
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-07 21:41:37+00:00
I don't think 2,000 years is enough, but am not an expert. The main thing that grains and bread did was make it a lot easier for more people to get through lean times without starving. It also allowed people to specialize: not everyone needed to be a hunter/gatherer.

20,000 years maybe yes. But we have not been agricultural for that long. And that's why grain-based food still is not something we're well adapted to.
by satvikpendem | 2026-01-07 21:41:46+00:00
Depends on the product itself. For example I use an LLM for tracking calorie data by telling it or providing a picture of the food I had, and it does a web search to find those details. The problem is it doesn't actually remember past meals, so I wrapped this API call in a simple app that just tracks the calorie numbers like a traditional app.

Just having an LLM is not the right UX for the vast majority of apps.
by great_wubwub | 2026-01-07 21:41:47+00:00
No, what I meant was "haven't we been basically ignoring science on nutrition since the 80s?" I think we have.

For those who don't believe me - go find some old family photos of your parents or grandparents, whichever generation would have been young adults in the 1960s or 1970s. Compare them to people of the same age born any time after, say, 1990. Nothing come of one sample, but people from the previous generation just weren't fat in their 20s like we are.

Yes, there's more to it than that. But food is a big part of it.
by beacon294 | 2026-01-07 21:41:49+00:00
These are called flat because they are defined in flat files.

Apparently researchers call non-hierarchical state machines "flat machines" / "flat agents". Oh well!

I think editing post content locks after some time or edit count.

Well-formatted examples:

* https://github.com/memgrafter/flatagents/tree/main/sdk/pytho...

* https://github.com/memgrafter/research-crawler-flatagents

* https://github.com/memgrafter/claude-skills-flatagents
by tootie | 2026-01-07 21:41:51+00:00
Yeah, this move is maybe a net positive, but will have a tiny impact on actual home prices. It is absolute red meat for the internet conspiracy machine though. Especially on the left.

I also have no idea what statutory authority he has to enforce this. Surely it requires Congress or at least the FTC chair. And if there's enough vested opposition it's going to be challenged in court pretty quickly.
by foster_nyman | 2026-01-07 21:42:05+00:00
Given sufficient historical context, this should not be surprising; Paul Graham's influence on Hacker News is foundational, as he created the platform to foster an intellectual community, personally shaping its culture, design, and moderation policies.

For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."
by kalaksi | 2026-01-07 21:42:26+00:00
> I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.

You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!

I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.

> Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab.

Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.
by tazjin | 2026-01-07 21:42:39+00:00
My current take is that if you start an open-source project now, you should go full AGPL (or similar copyleft license), and require a CLA for contributors.

If your thing ends up actually good you now have a defence against exploitation, and a way to generate income reliably (by selling the code under a different license). afaik, organisations like the FSF even endorse this.
by midldei | 2026-01-07 21:42:58+00:00
But this is a 'cart before the horse' situation.

What evidence do you have that providing your health information to this company will help you or anyone (other than those with financial interest in the company)?

There is a very real, near definite, chance that giving your, and others', health data to this company will hurt you and others.

Will you still hold this, "I personally don’t care who has access to my health data", position?
by willio58 | 2026-01-07 21:42:58+00:00
Wow. This is wild. I have a mix of empathy for the guy and also a feeling like he has no idea what he's doing running a business.

> Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

So his idea is to make Tailwind less modern than competitors by throwing a wrench in this tool that makes it easier to write tailwind with AI, simply because he thinks the only way Tailwind can make money is if actual human beings come to read the docs site? If that's the case, your income is based on products that's are not high enough value to potential customers, or you're marketing it poorly, or both.

> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month.

I get priorization but this isn't really that. He's not saying "I'll get to this when I find some time. Busy with high-priority business-related things right now.". He's saying "AI is going to be the end of profits for tailwind and instead of coming up with an alternative income stream I'm going to just block anything making tailwind easier to use with tailwind. And also stop complaining about it."

It sucks to fire people, but that doesn't mean you have to spread the flames out to open source contributors trying to make tailwind better for everyone. Look for new income streams, ideally ones that can be sold to people that control the money in companies (that isn't often the devs that are in your docs).