MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2026-01-06 20:59:18+00:00
>American capitalism, has done far more to getting us closer to post-scarcity than anything else, with US-centric agriculture innovation being the shining example

Uh, the American food industry, like nearly every first world food industry, is super state run. We stopped letting capitalism run farms because regular famine was awful.

Have you seen how much we pay per bushel of corn? Our beef is not cheaper because of capitalism. It's cheaper from enormous state subsidies that are designed to ensure we grow shitloads of certain crops regardless of economic or market factors.

But it stopped all the crazy boom-bust cycles of farming that kept ruining farms, harming farmland, and starving Americans.

Even food stamps is largely about giving farmers more state money for growing things that aren't strictly profitable.
by aeturnum | 2026-01-06 20:59:24+00:00
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.

To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.

If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.

[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover

[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/
by masklinn | 2026-01-06 20:59:43+00:00
> Even if fossil LNG is used, it releases less CO2 per unit energy.

However released methane has a significantly worse greenhouse effect than CO2 (80x over 20 years, 28 over 100, 8 over 500 — this decreases because methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 years and decays to CO2). So leakage in the LNG chain is a massive problem.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-06 20:59:48+00:00
It’s already booked 130 orders.

I really don't believe this. Even the Boom website says that most of these are "options" to purchase, but I'm guessing the "firm" orders are basically just non-binding letters of intent that effectively say "Sure, if you build it with these specs, we'll buy some at price X. Unless we change our mind."

And I'm further guessing that the terms include dates that Boom has zero chance of hitting. The author estimates that these won't be in commercial service before 2033, but I think that's still optimistic. My understanding (could be wrong, not an expert) is that new regular airliners take many billions and 10+ years to design, build, and certify, and that's without the complications of supersonic and brand new engine designs.

The Boom stories have been circulating on HN for a decade now [1], and they originally were claiming two years to have a manned prototype, which was obviously untrue. I guess they are like the Tesla of the sky in that regard.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286
by krschacht | 2026-01-06 21:00:53+00:00
I don’t lock down my kids computer use. I know risks exist, but I think their unrestricted access to computers and the internet is far more beneficial than harmful.

I know I’m highly unusual amongst my friends. I’ve also found it odd that the more knowledgeable someone is about tech, the more scared they are of their kids using the internet.

But just like riding a bike and swimming in a pool are extremely dangerous, yet I encourage my kids to do both of these things and instead just educate them about risks. Similarly, I think the benefit-vs-risk of the internet is FAR better than a bike & pool, so I just educate them.
by wffurr | 2026-01-06 21:01:01+00:00
https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/contai... mentions that b-tree maps hold multiple values per node, which makes them more cache-friendly than the red-black trees used in std::map.

You use either container when you want a sorted associative map type, which I have not found many uses cases for in my work. I might have a handful of them versus many instances of vectors and unsorted associative maps, i.e. absl::flat_hash_map.
by firstplacelast | 2026-01-06 21:01:03+00:00
I agree here. I more often see bakeries selling sandwiches that they make in house (although no clue as to the volume/financials of it), but rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking. The independent ones out-source to a bakery and if it's a known independent bakery, they will advertise where they get their bread.
Ask HN: Launching niche service soon, how should I prepare?
by thedangler | 2026-01-06 21:01:30+00:00
Hello,
I've been working on a niche product MVP for little over a month and I believe its ready for beta testing.

What are some steps to help with a solid beta launch?

Here is my list before launching:

1. Web page demonstrates features and what problem it solves.
2. Join a beta wait list that adds to a community, for support, videos, feature requests.
3. Posting messages on specific communities on social sites like Reddit, discord.
4. Offer lifetime pass for decent price that will give the users a boosted plan.

Current issues:
I have no idea how to price it out. It will be broken down into 3 plans for most people, then special cases will have 2 additional plans.

Some features have real measurable costs for example bots, SMS, etc. Not sure how to mark those up. Make them A-la-cart?

I still need to build iOS and Android applications but won't do that without real feedback and an API built.

Any thoughts, feedback, how to figure out price, how to market without making it feel like marketing? Different Prep ideas?

Appreciate your feedback.
by beingflo | 2026-01-06 21:01:33+00:00
I only use the built-in diffing by Playwright. It comes with a nice overview page [0] that shows all the failed tests including traces and screenshots. There you have a pixel diff. If you have some notion of irrelevant changes that shouldn't warrant a test failure, I wouldn't know of a way to pull that off.

[0] https://playwright.dev/docs/trace-viewer-intro#opening-the-h...
by hbn | 2026-01-06 21:01:40+00:00
Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000. In fact Instagram ads have led me to discover some fantastic small artists, so I'll happily give that out to whoever cares.

I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.

Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.

Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO
by sp9k | 2026-01-06 21:01:49+00:00
Early on in my programming life, I had very limited access to a computer. I did much of my coding in my head while walking around. In some cases, I'd literally write code in my head and dump it out when I had computer access, but abstract and creative problem solving were especially natural in a detached setting. I truly believe this time was more valuable than the time at the keyboard.

If anything, I want to do more of that: get away from the device to let my mind wander. "Doom" coding sounds apt.
by ragequittah | 2026-01-06 21:01:51+00:00
"Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” — Stephen King, On Writing

You need to design the code in order to tell the LLM how to write it. The LLM can help with this but generally it's better to have a full plan in place to give it beforehand. I've said it before elsewhere but I think this argument will eventually be similar to the people arguing you don't truly know how to code unless you're using assembly language for everything. I mean sure assembly code is better / more efficient in every way but who has the time to bother in a post-compiler world?
by sokoloff | 2026-01-06 21:01:52+00:00
> First class on international also just gets you the 15 degrees and 1 or 2 fewer chairs per row, it's business that gets you the lie downs and such.

This is not my experience at all. First class is better than business class on international (and domestic, though relatively few domestic routes have three cabin service [counting all the economy levels as one cabin]).
by marcoaapfortes | 2026-01-06 21:02:35+00:00
Thanks for the kind words and for giving Mantic.sh a spin, excited to hear how it works for your personal assistant!

The cost estimates were rough illustrations for high-usage cloud setups (100 devs × 100 searches/day = ~3.65M queries/year):

Vector embeddings: ~$0.003/query (OpenAI embeddings + managed DB like Pinecone) → $10,950/yr
Sourcegraph: Older Enterprise rate (~$91/user/mo) → $109k/yr
Mantic: $0 (local, no APIs/DBs)

You're spot on—these are high-end, Weaviate (esp. self-hosted/compressed) can be way cheaper for moderate use like your ~60 users.

I leaned toward worst-case managed pricing to highlight the "no ongoing cost" upside.

Let me know how the trial feels!
by pseudosavant | 2026-01-06 21:02:37+00:00
Isn't it though? I've worked with plenty of devs who shipped much lower quality code into production than I see Claude 4.5 or GPT 5.2 write. I find that SOTA models are more likely to: write tests, leave helpful comments, name variables in meaningful ways, check if the build succeeds, etc.

Stuff that seems basic, but that I haven't always been able to count on in my teams' "production" code.
by briangray | 2026-01-06 21:02:53+00:00
I have a good amount of experience with this and wrote up a very long recommendation. Many of the parents I've worked with have different reasons for introducing their kids to tech. Without knowing your 'why', I thought I'd just post the bullet points.

- Set up a mini PC/Raspberry Pi. Use a simple Linux distro or older version of Windows and install GCompri on it. No need for internet. Show them how to open notepad, paint, and just let them play.

- At a later age, build a PC with them. Linux Mint gives all the basic software needed. Let them continue to explore.

- Set up some tools for access control and monitoring. Then talk to them about the internet and slowly introduce them to it.

Overall, this has been a fantastic way to introduce technology, its benefits and downsides, without giving in to the firehose of the modern internet or strictly blocking it out entirely.
by anthk | 2026-01-06 21:03:13+00:00
The first years of Francoism Spain were just the Catholic Sharia but with the Bible. Even under Democracy women weren't allowed to open a bank account until 1978 (3 years after Franco's death).

Have you ever been curious about what the life could been under MAGA's with the Christianism raised with full powers? Read about the first years of that regime, from 1939 to 1953.

Replace Catholicism with Evangelism or any major American Christian branch and that's pretty much the same.

Oh, and the economic collapse. That would be a thing, too. When the scientists are fed with bullshit and flee away your whole economy collapses.
by jaredcwhite | 2026-01-06 21:03:27+00:00
Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.

I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.

So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
by lbrito | 2026-01-06 21:03:45+00:00
I'd like to challenge that. Historical comparisons aside, looking just at today, if you're saying that social mobility is very good in the USA compared to most of the world, what are you basing that claim on?

I would think something like Gini combined with HDI and GDP per capita, on which the US only fares well on the latter. I found out there is something called Global Social Mobility Index, done by the WEF, and it places the US in 27th.
by wismwasm | 2026-01-06 21:03:45+00:00
That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:

- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves

- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
by 1shooner | 2026-01-06 21:04:34+00:00
>you will need many empty cars on the roads at all times

Not necessarily. FSD services would probably optimize for occupancy, which would mean limited and unpredictable availability for customers. Since the fleet is a capital investment rather than being floated by gig workers, supply would presumably be more constrained than Uber etc are now, and we see what happens at peak demand with them. I don't see that business logic changing between Uber drivers and FSD.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-01-06 21:04:41+00:00
> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads

You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.

Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-06 21:05:06+00:00
Once went to a pub which was all 'stock market themed' and the prices went up and down second by second.

Time things well and you could get a pint for a dollar, but order after 10 other people ordered the same thing and you might pay $20.

The price was set at the moment the staff member keyed it into the till, which was obviously a minute or so after you ordered it and the drink was poured, which leads to you often choosing what appears best value at the time, and then paying more.
by nomadygnt | 2026-01-06 21:05:17+00:00
This is fun! I thought I did pretty good with 123.

I found a path from Books to Rainbow with 123 generated topics!
Books → Johannes Gutenberg (people)
Johannes Gutenberg → Printing press (broader)
Printing press → Sedition (evil)
Sedition → Peaceful protest (good)
Peaceful protest → Social movement (similar)
Social movement → Black Lives Matter (places)
Black Lives Matter → Alicia Garza (people)
Alicia Garza → Reproductive rights (similar)
Reproductive rights → Feminism (broader)
Feminism → Women's studies (similar)
Women's studies → Gender studies (similar)
Gender studies → Queer Studies (deeper)
Queer Studies → LGBTQIA Studies (similar)
LGBTQIA Studies → LGBTQIA History (good)
LGBTQIA History → LGBTQ movements (broader)
LGBTQ movements → Galden LGBTQ Center (places)
Galden LGBTQ Center → LGBTQ community organizations (similar)
LGBTQ community organizations → LGBTQ advocacy groups (similar)
LGBTQ advocacy groups → GLAAD (places)
GLAAD → Gay rights movement (broader)
Gay rights movement → LGBTQ rights movement (deeper)
LGBTQ rights movement → Pride flag (deeper)
Pride flag → Rainbow flag (similar).

Try it yourself at www.llmgame.ai
by akpa1 | 2026-01-06 21:05:41+00:00
I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-06 21:06:23+00:00
Part of the issue may also be that to many companies rely on selling ads as their main source of revenue and there simply isn't enough money in "good ads" to fund all the services we've come to expect to be free.

There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.

Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.
by modernerd | 2026-01-06 21:06:33+00:00
I buy my music from Bandcamp and similar and drop it into YouTube Music.

It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en

It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.
by Frotag | 2026-01-06 21:06:40+00:00
I've tried self-hosting with navidrome [0] / plex / jellyfin but the thing I miss most is music discovery via radios / discover weekly. I've tried replicating it a few times with embedding vectors + vector search but at best it finds songs in the (sub)-genre with the tempo / mood being pretty different.

Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]

[0] - https://www.navidrome.org/

[1] - https://musicbrainz.org/

[2] - https://github.com/LAION-AI/CLAP

[3] - https://github.com/SonyCSLParis/music2latent

[4] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.06405
by sarchertech | 2026-01-06 21:06:55+00:00
That depends on where you’re at. I live in a neighborhood with 2-5 acre lots. I can’t hear any of those things unless my immediate neighbors are doing them, which they rarely are.

I can hear leaf blowers constantly though because you can hear them in a quarter mile radius.

Also local ordinances in most places ban loud noises without a permit. But lawn maintenance equipment is a specific exception.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-06 21:07:20+00:00
That's the just flight time, but you've also got travel to/from the airport, parking, maybe shuttle bus/monorail, and checking/security/wait time at the airport as well.

So, add an hour for door-door travel to airport, and 2-hr before flight check-in, and now the comparison isn't 3 vs 6hr but 9 vs 12hr, which doesn't sound so worthwhile, although no doubt there are customers for it.

For longer flights it'd be much more attractive, but this is never going to be an affordable service for the masses.
by krschacht | 2026-01-06 21:07:35+00:00
Here are two of mine:

Volumetric displays: https://youtu.be/na7pvihXhYs?si=cIWIk2yrv-WVbe4x

Physically adaptive desktop: https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/transform-as-dynamic-...

I'm eager to learn about ones I've never seen!
by r14c | 2026-01-06 21:07:40+00:00
> You see that ignorance quite commonly in stuff like climate activism. Young activists are convinced that nobody is working on the problem.

IMO the complaints here are well-founded, but maybe some wires have gotten crossed in communication. There are many climate related companies out there (with varying levels of actual utility). People are obviously working on the problem, but the policy side is largely captured by big oil and other monied interests who would lose a lot of money if any meaningful shift away from fossil fuels were to happen.

Addressing the climate crisis using minimally subsidized market forces is way too slow to be effective at reaching even the bare minimum Paris Accords numbers. Even those policies at this point are being dismantled and called a "climate hoax". The market side work is laudable, but the climate crisis cannot be averted without a supportive policy framework.

I do a lot of activism work and the critique is typically centered on "nobody in the government is making progress on climate policy", not "nobody is doing anything at all". Though maybe we're talking to different groups of people lol
by poisonborz | 2026-01-06 21:07:55+00:00
I see these posts left and right but no one mentions the _actual_ thing developers are hired for, responsibility. You could use whatever tools to aid coding already, even copy paste from StackOverflow or take whole boilerplate projects from Github already. No AI will take responsibility for code or fix a burning issue that arises because of it. The amount of "responsibility takers" also increases linearly with the size of the codebase / amount of projects.
by kristianp | 2026-01-06 21:08:16+00:00
6GB of VRAM isn't that much for an LLM. The game itself recommended GPU is a 6GB part. It's kind of surprising that an in game LLM hasn't been done outside of research. It been almost 3 years since "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior": https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442
by oliwarner | 2026-01-06 21:08:31+00:00
Is he? I thought he'd always claimed to be a democratic socialist. What has he said or done that makes him a communist? I only see a lot of other people labelling him as one as a lazy adhom.

It's not communism to support public-owned public services, even public-owned competitive services where no commercial competition exists. Capitalism in tight spaces, creates monopolies and market quirks that harm consumers, harm renters, harms tourists. These harms are toxic to NYC. He's right to address them.
by xenadu02 | 2026-01-06 21:08:42+00:00
I'm just going to say: I bet it will eventually come out that RAM prices are yet another instance of illegal cartel collusion. For which all the RAM manufacturers have been convicted. More than once! If past incidents are any indication anytime there is a perceived "hot" market the RAM makers agree to limit production to current levels allowing market demand to increase prices, followed by production cuts if the market starts to soften.

GPU is a function of limited manufacturers and vendor lock-in combined with massive capex required to compete(). Like some (but not all) price inflation during and post COVID: rising prices can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all your customers expect prices to rise might as well meet their expectations and get while the gettin' is good.

() Like a new CPU architecture only worse. The amount of engineering required as "table stakes" increases exponentially while at the same time the manufacturing expertise does the same. This suddenly and rapidly raises the barrier to entry. Anyone who can survive the early squeeze can do quite well in such markets.