MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Mag World – develop an intuitive sense of scale
by saulpw | 2026-01-15 16:13:29+00:00
Hey hackers,

A couple weeks ago I launched the podcast I've been working on for the past several months, called Mag World.

Mag World is an effort to develop an intuitive sense of scale-–not just “bigger” or “smaller”, but how much bigger, and how much smaller. And what are each of the levels of scale like?

To develop fluency, we use a simplified notation for numbers that focuses on the magnitude. We apply this notation broadly to get a perspective on life and the universe and everything.

You may remember Mag Wealth on the front page of Hacker News a few months ago. It was one of the first articles I'd written for Mag World, and the subject got me thinking about the entire project. Now, we have a website at magworld.pw, including 3 finished episodes queued up for January (episode 2, Mag Perception, comes out today), and more episodes in the works.

The podcast is listed on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and can listen directly on the website. I'd love to hear your feedback!

Saul
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-15 16:13:53+00:00
So at a rough guess would that be expected to put them on the equivalent of TSMC 7 nm a few years from now?

I wonder if a bunch of consumer electronics will move back to something like 12 nm for a while? Seems like there's a lot of capacity in that range. Zen 2 wasn't so bad, right?
by landl0rd | 2026-01-15 16:13:54+00:00
Weird take. If you want to undertake approximately a bajillion dollars in capex to prove out and scale up a new node, it is extremely to have one massive, anchor customer who will promise well in advance to offtake basically the entire thing for a bit and who has creditworthiness exceeded by few non-sovereign entities, and thus is able to write contracts against which it is easy to lend. Also this customer makes little chips (when your defect rate is higher) and bigger chips (when your defect rate is lower). Of course you don't try to synthesize this profile out of a bajillion tiny customers.
by bound008 | 2026-01-15 16:13:56+00:00
This is such an HN comment and I love it. Get a cheap kitchen scale (with 0.1g accuracy) and weigh everything when you want a snack or an individual meal.

For family meals or when you want leftovers convert your common recipes to being weight based. On some common seasonings (Costco sized) I write the conversion for that seasoning for 1 tablespoon in grams. So much easier to combine dry ingredients without needing a litany of measuring utensils.
by csh602 | 2026-01-15 16:13:57+00:00
Hi HN! We're Weston and Clark, founders of EasyDex.

We are in the very early stages of creating a cloud-backed contacts app that gives users the power to control who sees their most important information (name, email, phone, address, social handles, etc.).

The main idea is, when you update your information, it automatically arrives in others' lists. Permissions and sharing are highly customizable and we're working on exporting to OS contacts apps.

The superpower will be the ability to integrate with businesses so that things like the worst part of moving (updating address with 30+ businesses/govt agencies) is all but eliminated.

We're trying to see if this is a thing people will want and use.
Have you seen this before? What makes or breaks an actually good contacts app? What features are a must-have?

Whether you are a potential user or business, your feedback would be invaluable.

Try the beta and let us know what you think!
by freedomben | 2026-01-15 16:14:04+00:00
I would buy a second hard drive and replace your current and install Linux on that. That way you can swap them back without issue. If you feel satisfied and ready to wipe windows, and have open slots, you can add the original drive back to your motherboard and mount it in pretty seamlessly (or entirely seamlessly with LVM).

I wouldn't try to dual boot, mainly from past experience. Linux is very fine with it, but Windows can aggressively try to repair itself and break other things, or end up broken itself.
by CapricornNoble | 2026-01-15 16:14:13+00:00
Nah, free blood money was when my General Dynamics shares went from $60->$120, then did a stock split and went from $60-> ~$100. I think that was in....2005? The Stryker (a GD product) was coming into service in Iraq, which drove my purchasing decision. I was an E-4 in Korea at the time and thought I was a defense stock-picking genius.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-01-15 16:14:18+00:00
If your kid genuinely enjoys those things, you should teach them math and CS anyway so that they have a shot at being one of the people designing the AI or supervising it to discover new math. LLMs have broad but shallow knowledge and can brute-force certain well defined tasks but the holes in their capabilities become very apparent once you go beyond undergraduate level studies.

The uproar you see on HN is because most developers are web front-end or back-end developers and LLMs do especially well at those tasks because they have a lot of training data to work with and also because there are also a lot of influencers, snake-oil peddlers, and doomsayers trying to hype AI up for their own gain.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-01-15 16:14:26+00:00
There's 3 parts to that problem, every part is critical to get right. Yes, all 3 are critical for the operation. If you're loading it wrong, you are doing it wrong, etc.

Loading up. If you're not loading it up, the rest of the loop is useless. If you're loading it incorrectly, the arm doesn't spin and you are better off not having a machine doing it. Also, consistently loading it optimally is of course best. Throwing everything in the box and hoping it gets sorted before running is the worst way to approach the job. You don't start playing Tetris on line 14, you start on line 0.

Running optimally. Running it when 100% full is not the ideal option. You are best off running on a schedule that best allows time for the next step. Usually overnight and middle of the day are good but it entirely depends on when you expect to have free time for the last step.

Unloading. Just do it. Do it before picking up anything else. It comes before everyone gets to bother you with anything. You can't eat until everything is back where it should be. And you need to eat.
by integralid | 2026-01-15 16:14:44+00:00
Yes, HN is my safe space. I have enough politics in my daily life, I don't need it when I'm with phone in my bed trying to wind down.

And which politics? American internal politics are foreign and distant to me. How much do you care about my country internal affairs? Probably not much. And it's OK, you can't fix every country in existence, and if you tried to care you would get insane.
by stevenjgarner | 2026-01-15 16:14:59+00:00
Michael Levin’s research fundamentally challenges the traditional biological view that intelligence is exclusive to the brain, proposing instead that "mind" and agency are distributed throughout all levels of biological organization. By studying how cellular collectives communicate via bioelectric networks, Levin demonstrates that cells cooperate toward a specific "target morphology," or anatomical goal, independent of a fixed genetic blueprint. This is most vividly illustrated by the creation of Xenobots—synthetic lifeforms made from frog skin cells that spontaneously reorganize into new organisms with novel behaviors, such as kinematic self-replication. This "scale-free cognition" suggests that evolution provides a versatile toolkit rather than a rigid instruction manual, allowing biological systems to solve problems and adapt their forms in ways that transcend their natural evolutionary history.

The implications of this work extend into a "new frontier" of regenerative medicine and philosophy, shifting focus from genomic editing to cracking the bioelectric code that governs complex growth. Levin envisions a future where we can "reprogram" cellular collectives to trigger organ repair, limb regeneration, or the reversal of birth defects by communicating with the system’s inherent intelligence. As the boundaries between biological, synthetic, and mechanical life continue to blur through the creation of hybrids and cyborgs, his research forces a re-evaluation of what it means to be an individual. Ultimately, Levin argues for moving past historical philosophical taboos to embrace a science focused on outcomes, potentially transforming our approach to aging, disease, and the very definition of human agency.

See also his interviews with Lex Fridman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049043)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp0rCU49lMs
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-15 16:14:59+00:00
> 1. The "major questions doctrine". This is simply the idea that if the impact of legislation that is passed by Congress and signed by the president is "large" then the Supreme Court gets to overrule the other two branches of government because they want to. Where is that in the Constitution?

That is a wildly inaccurate take on the "major questions doctrine". You are actually describing SCOTUS power to determine if laws are "constitutional", which was decided (by SCOTUS) in 1803 (Marbury v. Madison).

2 and 3 are well-made points.
by BobBagwill | 2026-01-15 16:15:22+00:00
Because everyone uses airgapped disposable micro VM's for everything, right? No one would be stupid or lazy enough to run them on their development laptop or production server, right? Right!?!

Maybe the good side-effect of LLM's will be to standardize better hygiene and put a nail in the coffin of using full-fat kitchen sink OS images for everything.
by tapoxi | 2026-01-15 16:15:23+00:00
I built a new PC in May of 2024 and decided to put Linux on it. Partly as a challenge to see how long I could last with it, partly because I want my kid to know how a computer works and use a platform that respects the user.

I went with Fedora Kinoite, and everything worked perfectly fine. I did choose an AMD GPU for this experiment, going with a 7800 XT.

Later that summer I decided to rebase (not reinstall, rebasing in fedora atomic is neat) to Bazzite, a more gaming focused version with some convience features, but that's about it.

Everything I want to do on my computer works fine, I don't feel hamstrung by it and really enjoy using it. The only game I regularly play that doesn't work is Battlefield 6, which I had a small Windows drive for, but I stopped playing that after the hype died down. The Finals, Arc Raiders, CS2, Hunt Showdown, Guild Wars 2, all run great.
How do you pick a Coding Agent HN?
by hmokiguess | 2026-01-15 16:15:41+00:00
There's lots of models benchmark out there, but how do you evaluate coding agents?

I've been seeing a lot of OpenCode fuzz on HN lately, because of Anthropic disabling their access to the private subscription endpoints, and I confess it made me feel like I could be missing out on something though I can't tell for sure.

There's also Amp Code who seems to be picking up traction, and, although more on the IDE side, I have tried Kiro through AWS Credits and it surprisingly outperforms Claude Code for me in some cases but didn't fully bait me into the switch.

Codex works as good as Claude Code for me but I like Claude's UX and Opus 4.5 better.

Are there any reliable Coding Agents benchmark out there? What is your take?
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-15 16:17:28+00:00
That they neutered themselves doesn't make them any less neutered.

I'm skeptical about their ability to reclaim it, too. Lots of them remember being terrified and running away Jan 6, even if many now pretend not to... and SCOTUS has been on a tear wiping out long-standing legislation Congress was quite clear about like the Voting Rights Act.
by SanjayMehta | 2026-01-15 16:17:30+00:00
Sheer coincidence, this came out a couple of days ago.

"Iran (1953), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Russia (2022), Syria (2024), and now Venezuela (2026). The common denominator underlying the U.S. attacks and economic sanctions against all these countries is America’s weaponization of the world’s oil trade."

What is it that you say to each other: "thank you for your service." Service to whom is left unsaid.

https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/venezuela...
by garbawarb | 2026-01-15 16:17:41+00:00
Why does being rules-based have anything to do with it? Innovation industries, especially software, have been the massive driver of GDP growth globally since the 1990s. The US and China have been excellent at nurturing those industries domestically (China with its heavy hand of government, the US with the rawest capitalistic structures to support innovation investments) while Europeean countries haven't.
by mkozlows | 2026-01-15 16:17:44+00:00
It gave me pause in the sense that it doesn't feel true.

I mean, yes, I've had to look things up to see how to do things in Linux. I've also had to do that on MacOS. (Just the other day, I couldn't remember what the Task Manager-equivalent on MacOS was, and nothing I typed into the launcher was coming up with an appropriate app, so I had to ask the robot what it was named.)

But dozens of hours? Maybe back in the Red Hat 4.2 days, but not now. Some of that is obviously just that I have a lot of knowledge about things, but even so.
by vbelenky | 2026-01-15 16:18:06+00:00
Shrug. Nothing is 'harmless', including far-uv. Going outside in the sunshine isn't harmless. The stove in your kitchen isn't harmless. Can you prove your stove isn't going to explode some day and kill you? No, but you don't expect it to, in part because it complies with consensus product safety standards--germicidal UV products have their own standard, UL8802.

Far-uv is relatively new tech so it's reasonable to be wary, but I'm persuaded on the merits of evidence. Viruses definitely aren't harmless, and I'd rather not be catching random bugs on the regular if I can avoid it, or worry about my grandma catching flu in the hospital. Everyone has to make reasonable tradeoffs about risks and benefits.
by andruby | 2026-01-15 16:18:52+00:00
Mr "free speech" Musk (/s)

If it is this tweet you are referring to, it's about _teaching_ hate, which is only a slight nuance and still a terrible point to make for a self-labeled "free speech absolutist"

> Teaching people to hate America fundamentally destroys patriotism and the desire to defend our country.

> Such teachings should be viewed as treason and those who do it imprisoned.

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2011519593492402617#m
by GJim | 2026-01-15 16:19:07+00:00
> Why do individual European countries seem so obsessed with blocking Pirate sites?

Ask the Disney Cooperation.

A facetious, but true, remark that describes the influence the large American media companies can have in combating piracy over here. Sir should recall the pressure the USA put on Sweden to close down the Pirate Bay; a Swedish site running in Sweden.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-15 16:19:40+00:00
Was curious, so I did a 30 second search:

"The US Geological Survey estimates that onshore northeast Greenland (including ice-covered areas) contains around 31 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in hydrocarbons – similar to the US’s entire volume of proven crude oil reserves."

Source: https://theconversation.com/greenland-is-rich-in-natural-res...
by jrmg | 2026-01-15 16:19:57+00:00
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.

I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
by NickC25 | 2026-01-15 16:20:00+00:00
>All that said, I don’t think wind and solar are the answers

Found the Oil & Gas lobbyist / apologist.

China might not have oil, but at least they are trying to figure something else out. Credit to them. Say what you want about The Party (I certainly have) but gotta give credit where and when its due. They have an interest in pushing alternative fuels, and by god they are doing it.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-15 16:20:08+00:00
> It's self-centered to want others to communicate well to you when they aren't attempting to communicate with you in the first place.

For private communication, of course.

For public communication? On a .com? It's simple politeness, courtesy, and respect. It's about not wasting other people's time unnecessarily. It's just decency. I'm amazed that you can be arguing against basic decency and respect here.
by iproduceideas | 2026-01-15 16:20:21+00:00
Salesence is an AI-powered platform for e-commerce sellers.

I’m building a platform that helps sellers manage, improve, and scale their marketplace operations from a single place, with a strong focus on time savings and decision clarity.

Current MVP:
– Product listing scorecard and analysis
– AI-generated product images
– Product description generation (final testing phase)

Early stage, actively iterating with real sellers and shaping the roadmap based on usage and feedback.
by rvnx | 2026-01-15 16:20:23+00:00
LLMs have their issues too.

In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds

some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased)

Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions.

Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be.

But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk.

For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
by swid | 2026-01-15 16:20:27+00:00
If you had infinite compute and time could you not just simulate all of “earth” itself? I think the compute needed for that would be absurd and unreasonable to build, but such a simulation would obviously have natural selection going on inside of it.

If that is possible; then perhaps there are many simplified simulations that can still be large and fast enough to support evolution. Or we can leverage actual reality as well, to give digital life embodied experiences in the real world.

Thinking the simulation needs to spread is the wrong way to think about it. The universe does not need to multiply into more universes. If I replace simulation with universe in your final paragraph, the argument makes little sense to me. There can be competition within a simulation, and consciousness seems useful where competition and survival are somehow part of that.
by pankajhbk007 | 2026-01-15 16:20:42+00:00
I found 2 super cool blogs today, and spent most of my time digging into it

For understanding how internet works https://how-did-i-get-here.net/

How a computer runs our code (or anything in genral) https://cpu.land/

Also spent some time on reading about E2EE encryption because of some blog on HN I think :)
by DrNefario | 2026-01-15 16:21:15+00:00
I used 'Nazi' in reference to the series of tweets about a polite Nazi. (Forgive the Reddit link)
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

Take it to mean a literal straight out of 1942 National Socialist if you like, it doesn't change what I was trying to convey.

If you want a historical comparison to BLM, how about the suffragettes. I can guarantee that there were grifters looking to make money off the movement, which would be a subset of it, but I think it's quite fair to say the suffragettes were objectively not grifters.

I would also say that Christianity is objectively not a grift, despite the fact that there are many grifters within the faith. If the core ideas of a movement are spread by people that truly believe in them, and are not controlled by any individual, then how exactly could it qualify as a grift?

Legitimately, I don't understand how a decentralised set of ideas could be a grift. Do you have any examples?

"Diversity only within their own strictly defined boundaries" is exactly right, but you don't seem to understand that those boundaries are what let's diversity thrive. Without rules against bigotry, LGBTQ+ people are far less able to express themselves due to the increased scrutiny from people that refuse to accept them.

When there are people in a community that denegrate others for being themselves it creates a toxic environment where being different makes you a target, so everyone either falls in line or leaves.
by geoduck14 | 2026-01-15 16:21:29+00:00
Old-school UVC lights do produce ozone, and it needs to be taken care of.

Newer lights (might) use LEDs that do not produce ozone. I only use LED uvc lights. Also, and this is key: DO NOT look at the uvc light. It can damage your eyes. It is safe for your skin, but it is not safe to look at.
by alnwlsn | 2026-01-15 16:21:33+00:00
The Z80-MBC (the original breadboard version [0]) was actually the second Z80 computer I built. I first tried out one of the Grant Searle designs [1] on a breadboard, and it worked!... for literally 8 seconds, then the single ACIA chip I had waited weeks to get died for no reason. But I didn't have any way to debug what was wrong.

It also didn't help that I didn't have many EEPROMs or an EEPROM programmer at the time, but the ATMega32A can be programmed with an ordinary Arduino.

[0] - https://hackaday.io/project/19000-a-4-4ics-z80-homemade-comp...

[1] - http://searle.x10host.com/z80/SimpleZ80.html
by rpcope1 | 2026-01-15 16:21:54+00:00
This is why I keep buying 3B+ and Zero 2 W and not any of the newer versions...it's much more in keeping with the relatively low cost board with GPIO and reasonable compute. It's kind of the last one they made that does what I kind of expected out of a Raspberry Pi at a reasonable price point. If I needed more compute I would have skipped the travesty that is ARM and just bought an x86 system.
by zer00eyz | 2026-01-15 16:22:01+00:00
Its not

Go price out a used 1l form factor PC.

After you buy a case, and a real disk, the pi, cost savings is gone.

Meanwhile you can pick up a used 8th gen intel 1L form factor for about 100 bucks. You can pick up one that will take a PICE card for 150ish bucks, with remote management.

The 8th gen or better intel has all sorts of extra features that may make it worth while (transcoding/video support).
by clpwn | 2026-01-15 16:22:03+00:00
Certainly you must be aware that there are not just binary values of morality in life. The obvious answer is yes they are stained, as we all are through our participation in various systems, but with vastly varying amounts.

Is the manufacturer of the bomb responsible for when Israel drops it on a family home in Gaza? Yes. Is it the same responsibility as the general who gave the order? No. Is it the same as the pilot who followed the order? No.

Does that make it useless to hold people accountable? Of course not.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-15 16:22:03+00:00
> I do not assume that some `.com` website is American.

If it's clearly local to somewhere (news, shopping, etc.) as opposed to global or a webapp or something, and doesn't say it's specific to any other country, then yes people generally assume it's American.

Because when sites are intended for audiences in other countries, they usually use a country-specific TLD. Which, for historical reasons, never became a convention in the US since it's where the Internet was invented.

If you haven't noticed that this is a clear pattern, I don't know what to tell you.
by brightball | 2026-01-15 16:22:04+00:00
I'm going to defend the HN "no politics" rule here.

The reason "no politics" zones exist is because there are enough people going out of their way to shout at everybody, everywhere, in every corner of the internet and enough people are tired of it that they flock to...no politics zones. In real life, a person like that confronts you...you remove yourself from the situation, because that person who can't stop shouting at everybody comes across as nuts.