MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gMan1 | 2026-01-20 18:27:09+00:00
Agreed. I’m not trying to make YAML more powerful, more trying to make the complexity that already exists easier to review (K8s/CI configs already live in YAML).

In my head it’s “diff + guardrails” so behavior changes don’t get buried in big files.

Always wonder what’s bitten people more.... unreadable diffs, or YAML being used like a programming language (templating/anchors/etc.)?
by Terretta | 2026-01-20 18:27:17+00:00
> so much of a complicated nuisance that most people simply give up

Most people should give up.

The number of legitimate unsigned apps for MacOS that your grandparents should frictionlessly one-click-to-install is essentially nil.

Meanwhile, they're receiving countless bullying demands a day to install keyloggers and drain their bank accounts.

The threat model tradeoffs are clear.
by beeflet | 2026-01-20 18:27:23+00:00
We live in a world that is largely still pre-cloning and pre-surrogacy. It will take a couple generations for these new sexual strategies to propagate (for example https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire...).

I would describe the current state of disaster, where reproduction is limited by sexual competition and not by resources as similar calhoun's rat utopia. In the western world, it is also driven by market factors such as land ownership and cultural expectations around that. Whereas in china there are population limits resulting from the one-child policy (anti-malthusian policy). I maintain that my position in my previous comment is true in the large despite these local effects.

In countries where you have a welfare system, you tend to see new strategies emerge after a couple of generations. In the USA, a significant number of african-american households are dependent on EBT. In Israel, the population of "Haredi" ultra-orthodox subgroup is subsidized and has grown year over year (https://youtu.be/ST_eZwBIMDA). I suggest that it is largely a social effect, because it is effected by the rate of cultural diffusion between the welfare/reproduction maximizing subgroup and the broader society. But it still represents an adaptation.
by saltcured | 2026-01-20 18:27:25+00:00
It's these discussions where I realize people use phones in such different ways.

I abandoned Nova last year when I read about this looming problem. I found that Fossify Launcher beta (from F-Droid) works well enough for me on my Pixel 8a.

I don't really need much out of a launcher. My main goal was to have one like my older Android and not be forced to have a search bar or assistant triggers on my home screen.

All I need from the home screen is to be able to place basic widgets like clock and calendar and shortcuts for the basic apps I use frequently. A plain app drawer is fine for the rest, because I don't really install that many apps and instead disable/remove many. My app drawer shows 35 apps and has several blank rows remaining on the first page with 5 icons per row.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-20 18:27:26+00:00
I have a legal background and am used to HN saying quite...interesting...things, and I've been here for 16 years, so I think I can translate the last one.

The idea is the Meta researcher who said every time they put on a headset, they ended up seeing sexual acts from adults directed at children, was the problem because they were collecting data on children.
by alphazard | 2026-01-20 18:27:40+00:00
It depends on the person making the bet. With sophisticated enough brain scanning technology, we could distinguish between "placing the bet to achieve a feeling" vs. "placing the bet because they believe it is mispriced".

It's not possible for a 3rd party to, at a distance, determine why someone placed a bet in a prediction market.
At a casino, it is possible. Most of the games are negative EV. So if someone plays any of the games, then it can't be because they are trying to maximize EV, it must be for some other reason (like a feeling).
by nonethewiser | 2026-01-20 18:27:44+00:00
I partially agree. But the EU is in a pretty unstable state as incomplete government structure over a collection of peers. "Unstable" does not mean it's going to fall apart. It means it's going to fall apart or coalesce into a single thing (a new country). Or maybe a little of both (a new country with some fringe members leaving).

It might not be in 5 or 10 years but it's inevitable. It's not going to operate like this for 50, 100 years.

Just run a mental simulation of WW2 playing out except Europe had the EU.

So while I agree the EU is becoming more an more normal and important to the average citizen, there will come a time when it has to either solidify further or break apart, and I think it's basically a crapshoot to predict how that will go now when we have basically zero info.
by josefritzishere | 2026-01-20 18:28:03+00:00
I am genuinely worried that my life savings will be destroyed by high inflation and the decreasing value of the dollar. This is the 3rd major market "correction" in my career and it looks like it will be the worst. Trump is doing so much economic damage to America... the outcomes are unthinkable for working people. I have trouble imagining what life will be like on the other side of this period of financial chaos.
by pear01 | 2026-01-20 18:28:19+00:00
Ah yes, human history is full of societies that never legislated morality. They always trusted in the individual. After all we all remember the nature of God's law and the ten commandments - Thou shalt follow your conscience.

Humanity is a largely defined by our exercise of legislating morality. For a lack of insight into history you should consult a mirror.
by tracker1 | 2026-01-20 18:28:34+00:00
I'm mixed on HTMX for going a step beyond interactive forms, it's fine... but much more and I find HTMX and server-side Blazor for that matter really janky... button events with a round trip to the server can just feel wrong.

FWIW, also hated the old ASP.Net Webforms round trips (and omg massive event state on anything resembling dialup or less than a few mbps in the early 00's).

I just wish that React and other SPA devs kept some awareness of total payload sizes... I'm more tolerant than most, but you start crossing over/into MB of compressed JS, it's too much. Then that starts getting janky.
by BunsanSpace | 2026-01-20 18:29:06+00:00
> The truth is though that Europe is dead weight. Their economy is anemic, their still too fragmented militarily

What an incredibly ignorant statement. Europe's economy in real terms is doing fine, their productivity is growing. The US's economy only looks good on paper, but outside of the AI bubble, companies aren't growing wages are stagnant with inflation.

Europe is also on the verge of federalization. But you have to understand getting over two dozen countries with vastly different cultures, histories and languages to cooperate is a gargantuan task. One the EU has been incredibly successful at.
by klik99 | 2026-01-20 18:29:08+00:00
I think it's a great idea to highlight that companies that fail in the VC context aren't necessarily bad ideas for companies - there is just a specific business model that thrives with VC funding (extremely high scalability, reliable unit costs) and companies that don't fit that or fail to develop in that direction may still be great businesses but get driven into the ground by VCs trying to find the one unicorn out of 15 in the profile.
Ask HN: Burned out from tech, what else is there?
by bleosh | 2026-01-20 18:29:30+00:00
I’ve hit a point after working as a dev in SV for about 10 years where I just don’t feel interested in the space anymore. It’s almost impossible for me to motivate myself to care about whatever it is I’m doing at work, and I’m just irritated by people around me at work. I’ve switched companies a few times thinking that it was just environment, what the company was working on didn’t interest me, etc but always feel this same sense of dread after while at any place I go to which has made me think it’s time to move on to something else.

Has anyone transitioned out of being purely an engineer to something else and found more happiness? I’m ok with moving out of this area and not making as much money
by tialaramex | 2026-01-20 18:29:38+00:00
Rejoining is seen as politically too risky in the short term. As you observe, the UK would not get back its privileged position, there are probably some bargains to be struck but a track to the Euro currency is almost certainly mandatory and that'd be unpopular because people really like our banknotes for some reason and the Euro deliberately just looks like play money, the illustrations deliberately don't show real structures to avoid associations with the nations where those things were built.

But while "Leaving was a bad idea" isn't enough to seriously push for actual re-entry to the EU it's certainly a good sign for the EU and for the Euro. The EU is a massive bureaucracy, and I think we underestimated how much "a massive bureaucracy" might be the thing we wanted in this role..
by liuliu | 2026-01-20 18:29:44+00:00
> I think the US could seriously pull out of NATO and leave the EU to fend off Russia by itself. It'll have to start spending enormous tax dollars on defense and war.

Disagree. If US pulls out of NATO, most likely scenario is EU continue to concede to Russia. I think EU will concede on Greenland too, but likely won't do it without any military action (unclear whether that will trigger nuclear escalation and how that can end).
by causalscience | 2026-01-20 18:29:54+00:00
Lawyers are intellectual prostitutes. Think about it. They will defend whatever position you pay them to defend.

Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". In any other profession this would be corruption, but when it comes to lawyers that's their job. Intellectual prostitutes.
by mysteria | 2026-01-20 18:30:09+00:00
I mean from a privacy perspective alone its clear that Meta throws its ethics out the door in that regard. There's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the more recent incident with Instagram bypassing Android OS restrictions for more tracking, and many many other examples.

Their apps also regularly nag you to allow access to stuff like contacts and the photo gallery when you've already said no the first time.

And for a personal anecdote: I was recently helping a senior setup Whatsapp Desktop on her Windows computer. It could chat fine but refused to join calls, displaying an error that said there was no microphone connected. I mean, there is a mic connected and it could record voice notes fine. Turns out that error actually meant that there was no webcam connected, and a webcam was required to join calls. I think it's the same way in the mobile app where you need to give it the camera permission to join a video call even if you turn the video off. Meanwhile Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others allow you to join any call without a mic or camera.

As she didn't have a webcam I first tried the OBS virtual camera but Whatsapp refused to recognize that despite all other apps working fine with it. Somehow Droidcam with no phone connected worked fine, displaying a black screen in the virtual camera feed, and that got Whatsapp to join the call successfully. Absolutely ridiculous and it's clear to me how desperately they want that camera access and that sweet data.
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-20 18:30:24+00:00
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg

I'm sure folks will come out of the woodwork to say that this isn't relevant as it was 20 years ago and Zuckerberg was just a wee lad at the time. However, I've never seen any evidence that Meta's attitude towards its users has changed since this quote was written. Every new Meta scandal just helps keep this thing relevant for another year or two.
by FireBeyond | 2026-01-20 18:30:34+00:00
> Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.

It's almost as if there is nothing insurance-like about US health "insurance" but the name.

Picture health insurance models laid on top of your car. Imagine your car gets totaled:

Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25,000 for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. Buttttt... that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."
by rincebrain | 2026-01-20 18:30:47+00:00
A fsck could pretty readily notice and repair the spacemap inconsistencies - zdb already generates its own spacemaps and compares to reality on import.

If you have the keys, technically nothing stops a fsck from noticing the encryption problems, but yes, usually it wouldn't unless you had some known issue you added special detection for, like when XFS years ago had problems with if you mounted it with inode64 once and then not the next time so the inode numbers would wraparound.
by dkarl | 2026-01-20 18:30:50+00:00
> the ways in which I myself am dysfunctional: specifically, my addiction to being useful. (Of course, it helps that my working conditions are overall much better than Akaky’s). I’m kind of like a working dog, in a way. Working dogs get rewarded with treats4, but they don’t do it for the treats. They do it for the work itself, which is inherently satisfying

I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.

If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.
by rdtsc | 2026-01-20 18:31:10+00:00
> In June 2025, 56% of people in Great Britain thought it was the wrong decision:

How many thought it was the right decision at the time?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_U...

Remain was 48% so it's actually not that large of a swing in total. It's not like it was 5% remain and now it would be 56% or something.

But it does indicate if the referendum was taking place today it might swing the other way.
by cheald | 2026-01-20 18:31:22+00:00
Technical analysis is the projection of future price data through analysis of past price data (usually for the purpose of trying to create trendlines or find "patterns"). Options pricing is quite a different beast - it encodes marketwide uncertainty about the future price of the underlying, which has little to do with the past price action of the underlying, and everything to do with all known information about the actual underlying company, including fundamentals analysis, market sentiment, future expectations and risks, etc.

To put it another way, to price an option I need a) the current price of the underlying, b) the time until option expiry, c) the strike price of the option, and d) the collective expectation of how much the underlying's price will vary over the period between now and expiry. This last piece is "volatility", and is the only piece that can't be empirically measured; instead, through price discovery on a sufficiently liquid contract, we can reparameterize the formula to empirically derive the volatility expectation which satisfies that current price (or "implied volatility"). Due to the efficient market hypothesis, we can generally treat this as a best-effort proxy for all public information about the underlying. None of this calculation requires any measurement or analysis of the underlying's past price action, patterns, etc. The options price will necessarily include TA traders' sentiments about the underlying based on their TA (or whatever else), just as it will include fundamentals traders' sentiments (and, if you're quick and savvy enough, insiders' advance knowledge!) The price fundamentally reflects market sentiment about the future, not some projection of trends from the past.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-20 18:31:23+00:00
> Every language over time becomes more and more unnecessarily complex.

Of course someone eventually will, so I might as well: Well, except for lisp-likes. I think the main reason programming languages grow and grow, is because people want to use them in "new" (sometimes new-new, sometimes existing) ways, and how you add new language features to a programming language? You change the core of the language in some way.

What if instead you made it really easy to change the core language from the language itself, when you need to, without impacting other parts of the codebase? Usually if you use a language from the lisp-"family" of languages, you'll be able to.

So instead of the programming language everyone is using grows regardless if you need it or not, it can stay simple and relatively small for everyone, while for the people who need it, they can grow their own hairballs "locally" (or be solid engineers and avoid hairballs in the first place, requires tenure/similar though).
by lumost | 2026-01-20 18:31:29+00:00
>The case where Canada must be annexed is if Greenland somehow remains part of Denmark.

How does this follow? The US/Canada have previously made numerous mutual defense and land concession deals for joint infrastructure projects and defensive purposes. It's been USA policy for 150 years not to allow foreign interference in the Americas, and potential for Mexican or Canada to be used as grounds for continental attacks on the USA has been the cause of several pre-emptive wars.

If the US desired a military port in the arctic, such a deal could assuredly be negotiated again. As Canada's #1 trading partner, we also have significant leverage on negotiating mineral access and equitable property rights.

What does inheriting Canada's internal challenges including Quebec Succession discussions grant the USA? What makes the US "need" to own Canada?
by bflesch | 2026-01-20 18:31:37+00:00
Love your ignorance. What you call freedom is your freedom to hurt others through your ignorance:

- freedom to be racist against people of color

- freedom to do hitler salutes wherever you want

- freedom to carry a gun to school or to mcdonalds

- freedom to get lead poisoning from your municipal drinking water

- freedom to coal roll your truck next to people

- freedom to have car tires without any profile that can explode any time

- freedom to get bankrupted by uninsured asshat's car crashing into you

- freedom to work at age 80 as a walmart greeter
by polyglotfacto | 2026-01-20 18:32:22+00:00
I don't think it's all copy/pasted; it is quite an original byzantine architecture.

You're right that lots of code appears only used in unit-tests, of which there is an enormous amount(making it hard to tell whether what is being tested makes sense). In Servo we don't have a single line of unit-tests in the script component, because all of it is covered by the WPT integration test suite shared with all other engines...
by hashstring | 2026-01-20 18:32:23+00:00
As strong as ever…

The US has a strong military but its dominance position is declining rapidly. It’s going around threatening the whole world.

It’s failing to effectively address their problem with China and Russia.

Domestically, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, you have ICE running around and Medicaid being slashed to afford that.

All the leaves are brown…
by refulgentis | 2026-01-20 18:32:29+00:00
It comes across as boorish, on an article about widespread sexual exploitation including children and 17-strike sex trafficking policies, to write a long rant about whether the trillion dollar company has a long-term business strategy that'll give it more power.

That is quite clearly not what they are asserting, discussing, or even adjacent to conversationally.

It doesn't help when you're exaggerating to make it have some foundation, and obviously so. (they pivoted from VR to crypto? pulled the plug on AI?)
by arter45 | 2026-01-20 18:32:33+00:00
There are two dimensions to this: knowing stuff and act on stuff.

On one side, you have technical knowledge. At the extremes you have people who can’t even power on a laptop and expert developers in 10 languages and SREs and everything else.

Something (almost) completely orthogonal is how often you apply your technical knowledge in tasks that don’t fall into your job description. On one side you have a completely hands off manager. The other extreme is full-on micromanaging.

This basic analysis means there are at least 4 kinds of managers:

1) the non technical manager who is also completely hands off,

2) the non technical manager who always interferes with technical people’s work (maybe only based on buzzwords),

3) the technical manager who is also hands off,

4) the micro-managing technical manager.

More technical knowledge is almost always a good thing (although too much knowledge can be pointless for work purposes - if I can write ASM blindfolded but we are just writing restaurant websites, I’m not getting a real professional benefit).

More technical action is not always an advantage, to you (more work) and to others (micromanaging).

The reason this works with startups at an early stage is, simply, that few tasks are outside the manager’s job description, since they are essentially founders+marketing+finance+everything else. However, when you have to scale, you need to act less from a technical standpoint even if your knowledge is useful to understand stuff.
by kwanbix | 2026-01-20 18:33:05+00:00
Related to your comment. I was a "desktop" developer many years ago (about 20). Back then I mainly coded in Assembler, Visual Basic, and Delphi, and I also learned COBOL, C, and Java.

Just this week, I decided to start learning Kotlin because I want to build a mobile app.

Everything was going great until I reached lambda functions.

Honestly, I can't wrap my head around either their purpose or their syntax. I find them incredibly confusing. Right now, they feel like something that was invented purely to confuse developers.

I know this might just be one of those topics where you suddenly have an "aha" moment and everything clicks, but so far, that moment hasn't come.

Did anyone else coming from older, more imperative languages struggle this much with lambdas? Any tips or mental models that helped you finally "get" them?
by crq-yml | 2026-01-20 18:33:06+00:00
TBH I think the greatest benefit is on the documentation/analysis side. The "write the code" part is fine when it sits in the envelope of things that are 100% conventional boilerplate. Like, as a frontend to ffmpeg you can get a ton of value out of LLMs. As soon as things go open-ended and design-centric, brace yourself.

I get the sense that the application of armies of agents is actually a scaled-up Lisp curse - Gas Town's entire premise is coding wizardry, the emphasis on abstract goals and values, complete with cute, impenetrable naming schemes. There's some corollary with "programs are for humans to read and computers to incidentally execute" here. Ultimately the program has to be a person addressing another person, or nature, and as such it has to evolve within the whole.