MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2026-01-19 22:46:29+00:00
> setting up a global system of economical hegemony and become the wealthiest nation on the history of mankind?

The U.S. was already the richest country in the world before either world war, coming out of a long period of economic isolation.

> The same applies to your background, it helped to build the USA as it exists today

The U.S. was already the richest countries in the world before mass immigration from countries like mine.
by kshri24 | 2026-01-19 22:46:48+00:00
> The US will have lost a lot of political goodwill by then

Not really. All Governments across the World have undergone similar crisis in their own Countries, in different points in time in their own history, and know well to differentiate an erratic Government from its populace. I bet no one has ill-will towards Americans (unless you are into terrorism) and so will obviously want to mend ways once a better admin is elected and put in place.

The issue really though is not about political goodwill. It is about business that gets moved elsewhere. Once moved, it is really hard to bring it back. So US will then have to make a lot of concessions when it comes to that. The reason rest of the World is upset with the new tariff regime is not because they are being affected by it monetarily (which they actually are not), but because they do not want to sever a well established system and go looking for new buyers. For example, China decided to stop buying soybeans from US (after Trump threatened tariffs) and switched to buying from Argentina. Now once a new US admin is in place, it will have to give a better deal for China to switch its already established supply chain with Argentina to US again. Inertia is a good thing in trade. Infact, I feel it is even more important than building a moat. People are willing to continue paying higher price (even if something cheap is available elsewhere) because they do not want to go through the hassle of move away from already established supply-chains and renegotiate new deals.

> really unpopular measures to clean up the mess

Agreed.

> Once those are running there's no incentive to look at US ones again

They will if US comes with better deals. This is the "unpopular measures to clean up the mess" you were pointing to earlier. Right now there is a mismatch between what US is actually worth and what it is projecting. I am not saying it is not a superpower anymore. It still very much is. But it is failing to recognize the rise of great powers in the rest of the World. And is unable to reconcile with multi-polarity that has already arrived and exists. As long as US is in denial of this reality, it will continue to make mistakes.

> And any geopolitical influence that was lost will already have been filled by other players who will entrench themselves

I agree but I'll go further and argue that the Trump admin is behaving erratically because it has realized it has lost geopolitical influence and that other players have already entrenched themselves. Trump has diagnozed the problem correctly (that US has lost its hegemony in many areas) but has no expertise (or even experts around him) to advice him on the right course of action.
by gjm11 | 2026-01-19 22:47:01+00:00
I'm having trouble finding any evidence for that. E.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20030808111721/https://edition.c... -- here's a thing from February of that year that (if I'm understanding right) reports Ventura leaving the Reform Party because he didn't like its endorsement of Pat Buchanan for president; it mentions Trump, but only as one person Ventura might have supported as a presidential nominee, and it actually quotes Trump saying to Ventura "you're the leader". Trump was never the Reform Party's nominee nor anyone else's. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential... says that "he never expanded the campaign beyond the exploratory phase".)

It's not entirely clear to me that there was actually such a thing as the leader of the Reform Party, especially in early 2000 when there was a lot of infighting, but if there was one it seems to me that it might have been Ventura but certainly wasn't Trump.

What am I missing?
by dijit | 2026-01-19 22:47:26+00:00
Fair enough. We've found the actual disagreement.

You're right that cost is a real barrier, and it's a legitimate concern. If people can't afford proper representation, then the "choice" to take a plea isn't fully voluntary. That's a structural problem worth addressing.

Where we differ is on scale and characterisation. You say "the vast majority of people feel unsafe going to trial." That's a strong empirical claim that needs evidence. Feeling unsafe and actually being coerced are different things, and both matter, but they're not the same.

The original claim upthread was that the law is rarely applied justly. You've now moderated that to "the process is unfair for people who can't afford defence, and this produces some incorrect sentences." That's a much more limited claim, and one I'd largely agree with. Structural inequality in access to justice is a real problem.

But that's not the same as "the system is fundamentally unjust" or "plea bargains routinely coerce false confessions." Those are the claims that sparked this entire thread, and you've now acknowledged you don't have evidence for them.

So: agreed that cost barriers create real injustice. Disagreed that this means the system is unjust more often than just, which was the original claim.
by marcoshernanz | 2026-01-19 22:47:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ChatVault because I was frustrated with WhatsApp's native search. It relies on exact keyword matching, which makes finding old messages ("where was that sushi place?") impossible if you don't remember the exact phrasing.

I wanted semantic search, but I wasn't willing to upload my chat history to a cloud vector database or an LLM API.

So I built a strictly local-first search engine using Rust compiled to WebAssembly.

The Architecture:
1. Inference: It runs a quantized BERT model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) directly in the browser using Candle (Hugging Face's Rust ML framework). No ONNX runtime, just pure Rust Wasm.
2. Vector Store: I implemented a custom in-memory vector store in Rust. It performs normalization on insertion, allowing for fast dot-product similarity searches.
3. Performance: To prevent blocking the main thread during indexing (computing embeddings for thousands of messages), the Wasm module runs inside a Web Worker. 4. The UI (Next.js 16) stays responsive at 60fps.
Search: I implemented a hybrid scoring algorithm: (Vector_Score * 0.5) + (Keyword_Score * 0.5) to balance semantic meaning with exact matches.

The app works 100% offline once the model weights (~90MB) are cached.

Live Demo: https://chat-vault-mh.vercel.app/

I'm a student looking to get deeper into systems programming/Rust. I'd love feedback on the memory management between JS and Wasm, as passing strings back and forth was the biggest bottleneck I encountered.
by wellpast | 2026-01-19 22:48:14+00:00
Someone might run:

curl -s https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/resources/bad-words.txt | tr -d '\r' | while read -r w; do curl -s -X POST https://subth.ink/api/thoughts -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d "{\"contents\":\"$w\"}"; done
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-19 22:48:31+00:00
They can't both be true if we're talking about the premise of the article, which is the subject of the headline and expounded upon prominently in the body:

The Industrialisation of Intrusion

By ‘industrialisation’ I mean that the ability of an organisation to complete a task will be limited by the number of tokens they can throw at that task. In order for a task to be ‘industrialised’ in this way it needs two things:

An LLM-based agent must be able to search the solution space. It must have an environment in which to operate, appropriate tools, and not require human assistance. The ability to do true ‘search’, and cover more of the solution space as more tokens are spent also requires some baseline capability from the model to process information, react to it, and make sensible decisions that move the search forward. It looks like Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 possess this in my experiments. It will be interesting to see how they do against a much larger space, like v8 or Firefox.
The agent must have some way to verify its solution. The verifier needs to be accurate, fast and again not involve a human.

"The results are contigent upon the human" and "this does the thing without a human involved" are incompatible. Given what we've seen from incompetent humans using the tools to spam bug bounty programs with absolute garbage, it seems the premise of the article is clearly factually incorrect. They cite their own experiment as evidence for not needing human expertise, but it is likely that their expertise was in fact involved in designing the experiment[1]. They also cite OpenAI as their other piece of evidence for this theory, which is worth about as much as a scrap of toilet paper given the extremely strong economic incentives OpenAI has to exaggerate the capabilities of their software.

[1] If their experiment even demonstrates what it purports to demonstrate. For anyone to give this article any credence, the exploit really needs to be independently verified as what they say it is and how it was achieved.
by rwmj | 2026-01-19 22:48:32+00:00
With the exploits, you can try them and they either work or they don't. An attacker is not especially interested in analysing why the successful ones work.

With the CVE reports some poor maintainer has to go through and triage them, which is far more work, and very asymmetrical because the reporters can generate their spam reports in volume while each one requires detailed analysis.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-19 22:48:41+00:00
That's a very capable machine. It doesn't really matter if it's slow by today's standards. It's fine, particularly if it's not running Windows. I recently bought a couple of machines that were older and less capable than that, but were plenty good enough for what I wanted them for.

Just because a machine isn't up to the latest specs doesn't mean it's not good, or that there isn't a market for it.
by 9cb14c1ec0 | 2026-01-19 22:48:45+00:00
Is it just me, or has Claude Code gotten really stupid the last several days. I've been using it almost since it was publicly released, and the last several days it feels like it reverted back 6 months. I was almost ready to start yolo-ing everything, and now it's doing weird hallucinations again and forgetting how to edit files. It used to go into plan mode automatically, now it won't unless I make it.
by mitemte | 2026-01-19 22:49:11+00:00
I can see a lot of negatives in relation to removing the human readable aspect of software development. Thorough testing would be virtually impossible because we’d be relying on fuzzing to iron out potential edge cases or bugs.

In this situation, AI companies are incentivised to host the services their tooling generates. If we don't get source code, it is much easier for them to justify not sharing it. Plus, who is to say the machine code even works on consumer hardware anyway? It leads to a future where users specify inputs while companies generate programs and handle execution. Everything becomes a black box. No thank you.
by asdff | 2026-01-19 22:49:13+00:00
Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run. We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development. What is a bird but the output of a random walk algorithm selected by constraints bound by so many latent factors we might never fully grasp?
by awesome_dude | 2026-01-19 22:49:15+00:00
I remember seeing an article that quoted parents complaining about their children/teens spending large amounts of their time wasting it away... reading fictional novels

Very much the same tone as people that disparage children/teens spending time on video games.

Edit: Found an example
https://magazine.1000libraries.com/how-fiction-sparked-outra...

> Critics of the time worried that people were slipping into a fantasy realm and losing their grip on reality. Novels were blamed for basically just about everything, from increasing promiscuity in young women to encouraging suicide and self-harm in young men.

One of these critics, Vicesimus Knox, called for the banning of novels altogether, arguing that people should instead read “true histories.” An article in Gentleman’s Magazine put forward the idea of a “sin tax,” with the hopeful notion of dissuading people from wasting their time with frivolous fiction
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-19 22:49:20+00:00
Good resource, but it's also a bit sad such a list is needed. The idea of banding 4together to collectively bargain against a soulless corporation shouldn't be such a controversial take. But I guess the sentiment of "“I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half.” ended up being more true than the quoter ever intended it to be.
by odshoifsdhfs | 2026-01-19 22:49:32+00:00
I will say it for you though. If the calculator doesn't work or shows wrong results, then it is shit. I don't care if made with AI, humans or monkeys.

`Professional Calculators

Free, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for finance, math, and everyday calculations.`

So yeah, fuck this. Website looks 99% similar to the many shadcn themes available, has some errors in the calculations and then have a new account propagating 'ohhh look at me, I did all this with Claude/GPT/my aunt's raspberry pi running X, AI is amazing. All Hail AI.` is tiring and I'm just going to assume it is either paid marketing, people invested directly or indirectly in these companies or just sycophant idiots.

Also, anyone knows an extension or website where I can just filter submissions if they include AI or LLM or Clause in the title? Getting really tired of this shit.
by Mister_Snuggles | 2026-01-19 22:49:40+00:00
Running two Lenovo ThinkVision displays off of my work MacBook Pro.

On the MBP built-in display, the upper-left and upper-right corners are rounded. I believe this is due to the shape of the display. The bottom corners are not rounded.

On the external displays, the corners are all square.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-01-19 22:49:50+00:00
Aren't you a lawyer?

Article 6 of the United States Constitution says international law is United States law. US courts are the enforcement mechanism as far as the United States Constitution is concerned.
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land" https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-6/

In the Treaty of the Danish West Indies (so according to the US Constitution, the law of the USA unless Congress withdraws from the treaty) the US will "not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland"
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-39/pdf/STATUTE-3...

Why do you so carelessly and reckless disregard the Constitution of the United States, especially being a lawyer?
by kjs3 | 2026-01-19 22:49:53+00:00
I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things

If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.

For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.

And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).

It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.
by general1465 | 2026-01-19 22:50:14+00:00
Not that bizarre when you are paying something like 5-10 cents per SMS (~2010), you will quickly find alternative solutions. WhatsApp was just there, communication for free. Then you Viber, Telegram and others.

I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-19 22:50:20+00:00
I can tell you why this won't go this way:

Customers.

When you sell them a technological solution to their problem, they expect it to work. When it doesn't, someone needs to be responsible for it.

Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see any of the current AI leaders being like, "Yeah, you're right, this solution didn't meet your customer's needs, and we'll eat the resulting costs." They didn't get to be "thought leaders" in the current iteration of Silicon Valley by taking responsibility for things that got broken, not at all.

So that means you will need to take responsibility for it, and how can you make that work as a business model? Well, you pay someone - a human - who knows what they're looking at to review at least some of the code that the AI generates.

Will some of that be AI-aided? Of course. Can you make a lot of the guesswork go away by saying "use commonly-accepted design patterns" in your CLAUDE.md? Sure. But you'll still need someone to enforce it and take responsibility at the end of the day if it screws up.
by dns_snek | 2026-01-19 22:51:02+00:00
And how exactly do you foresee probabilistic systems working out in real life? Nobody wants software that seldom does what they expect, and which tends to trend toward desirable behavior over time (where "desirable" behavior is determined by the sum of global feedback and revenue/profit of the company producing it).

Today you send some money to your spouse but it's received by another person with the same name. Tomorrow you order food but your order gets mixed up with someone else's.

Tough luck, the system is probabilistic and you can only hope that the evolutionary pressures influence the behavior to change in desirable ways. This fantasy is a delusion.
by mutagen | 2026-01-19 22:51:14+00:00
A few years ago I met a guy at the Smith Creek hot springs out in the middle of the Nevada desert towing a glider. He told me about glider flights from Truckee CA or Minden, NV to Utah and I was amazed then.

Another impressive journey was Truckee CA to Nephi, UT and then back again against the prevailing winds.

https://youtu.be/4xb-CKa-FPI

https://www.weglide.org/flight/407896
by owisd | 2026-01-19 22:51:28+00:00
Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 for a taxi but have to wait 30 mins when it’s busy. With surge pricing at busy times it’s $120, so people who can afford $120 wait 0 minutes but people who can only afford $60 have to wait 2 hours for surge pricing to end. “Economists generally” would say surge pricing was better, but voters and politicians are considering the wider trade off of whether it’s fair some people get to jump the queue and some people have to wait longer. There’s also usually a bait-and-switch where the people having to wait 2hrs are told that the $120 will generate more in taxes so if they vote for surge pricing they’d actually be better off, then the $120 is spent lobbying to ensure the taxes never materialise.
by spankalee | 2026-01-19 22:52:19+00:00
> There is no DOM primitive that allows for interoperable composition with fine-grained reactivity. Your framework offers fine-grained reactivity (Virtual DOM for React/Preact, signals for Angular, runes for Svelte, etc.) and any component that contains another component has to coordinate with it.

This just isn't true - composition and reactivity are completely orthogonal concerns.

Any reactivity system can manage DOM outside of the component, including nodes that are projected into slots. The component's internal DOM is managed by the component using whatever reactivity system it desires.

There are major applications built this way. They make have a React outer shell using vdom and Lit custom elements using lit-html for their shadow contents.

On top of those basics you can also have cross-shadow interoperable fine-grained reactivity with primitives like signals. You can pass signals around, down the tree, across subtrees, and have different reactivity systems use those signals to update the DOM.
by asdff | 2026-01-19 22:52:21+00:00
If a bug rears its head it can be dealt with. Again, this is essentially already practiced by humans through breeding programs. Bugs have come up, such as deleterious traits, and we have either engineered solutions to get around them or worked to purge the alleles behind the traits from populations under study. Nothing is ever bug free. The question is if the bugs are show stoppers or not. And random walk iteration can produce more solutions that might get around those bugs.
by jedberg | 2026-01-19 22:52:34+00:00
A related problem is other parents. Even if you want to let your kid be free, you can't, because nosey neighbors will report you to the police.

It happened to us. We let our kids stay in the car, during COVID, while we quickly shopped.

After we got home, the cops showed up and told us someone reported us for neglecting our kids. My wife just kept asking "did we do anything illegal?" and finally they admitted that no, we didn't. They just said

"it just doesn't look good, with all the crime out there".

I said "what crime?". Then they had to admit that crime is way down over the last 30 years, and is especially low in our area.

They eventually left, but it has a chilling effect on letting our kids be kids for fear that it will happen again.
by slow_typist | 2026-01-19 22:52:48+00:00
I was looking for an efficient algorithm calculating variance of a sliding window of the last n values an ongoing signal, and this came up.

Besides the content of the paper, the metadata on page 2 is interesting, as well as the barcode on the front page as well as the machine readable font accompanying the bar code. Did not know that was a thing in 1969 but maybe it was attached later in time.
by ebiester | 2026-01-19 22:52:58+00:00
Oh, I get them all the time. Usually from junior engineers. I don't hold it against them - it's good advice.

So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"

I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-19 22:53:05+00:00
> The App Store is an integrated component of the iPhone experience.

It's an App Store. The .IPA is an integrated component of the iPhone experience, the App Store is an optional storefront. Again, look at the Mac.

You're repeating the same limp defenses that Apple has already watched get torn down by the EU and Japanese courts. We've solidly moved onto the "beg Trump for help" phase, which is miles worse than the humiliation of allowing sideloading.

Do you still want to know why they're putting ads into the only integrated storefront on iOS? It's real simple from where I'm standing.