MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-29 00:59:39+00:00
> Another $100,000 will be in the form of a guaranteed benefit for their families after they pass away.

> So half of it will never be seen by the athlete

This can't be right, right? I never heard of people "receiving a donation" that you get the promise of now, but will be given to your family once you die, sounds a bit macabre. And as you mention, also pointless, how would that make them "break through new frontiers of excellence" when they may not be able to afford rent while being alive?
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-29 00:59:52+00:00
in this case a more appropriate term for the mob is "the people" because one defining dynamic of the rollout of this technology is that a minority of people seem to be extremely invested to shove it into the faces of a majority of people who don't want it, and then claim that they are visionaries and everyone else is 'the mob'.

Just like with Mark Zuckerberg's "Metaverse" we're now in a post-market vanity economy where not consumer demand but increasingly desperate founders, investors and gurus are trying to justify their valuations by doling out products for free and shoving their AI services into everything to justify the tens of billions they dumped into it
by jaybrendansmith | 2026-01-29 00:59:53+00:00
Yes, this. After watching all the video angles, to have seemingly intelligent people come to some crazy conclusion means they are hopelessly mindfucked. It's really hard to understand how these groupthink spells work, but clearly they do. I think my perspective is so focused on facts that my mind is having trouble bending to the fact that MANY people do not critically think from first principles, about nearly everything. It's troubling to me, making me feel somewhat alienated to at least 40% of the human race.
by nichochar | 2026-01-29 01:00:15+00:00
We're building an AI powered app builder. We use elixir, phoenix and of course OBAN.

It feels like such a super power. What you're describing is particularly important in the era of long running AI processes. Something as simple as running a deploy creates pressure on your agent orchestration. But if everything is powered by OBAN you have wonderful ways to build durability.

By the way, it's all "free" and built-in.

In other language ecosystems, people literally pay for durability that has this shape (like temporal)
by jrgoff | 2026-01-29 01:00:19+00:00
I like digging into well designed puzzles and figuring them out, but also - like the author, I like interacting with friends around puzzles and the group dynamic and power of bouncing things off of each other, as well as the reduced likelihood of stupid blind spots.

When I played through Blue Prince, I had an important area of the game undiscovered for in game weeks because I just didn't notice a path that was not meant to be hidden. It was in an area that it made no sense for me to further explore because it was challenging to get to and seemed to have nothing else to offer (I presumed until I had unlocked something further in the game). It was a big relief when I was talking through my progress with a friend who was further along than I, and they prompted me to go back and look again.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-29 01:00:22+00:00
You ask a just question and shouldn't be downvoted.

A friend of mine is an ex-pro tennis player. She's nearing 60 years old now. She's been n 1 in her country and n 2 worldwide in doubles.

And it's not easy for athletes once they age: when they're still young, they make money doing their sport. Then they find other things, often related, to do: for example she trained a world number one for years.

But later on, it gets more difficult: she became a tennis teacher. And the country's sport federation gives her money for quite a few years... But not until 65 years old.

It's precisely later in life that many pro athletes do need money.

Only those at the very, very, very top do make a really good living. For the others, it's hard.

So $100K at 45 is welcome.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-01-29 01:00:53+00:00
We have an amazing gov.uk web team, they could have expanded that and built it in house with civil servants costing £60k ea per annum at the very most.

£120k, double it for stupid amounts of testing, double it again for managers to tell the people doing the work "do the work". We're still only at £500k.

Gov.uk web team are supposed to be award winning. Why are we picking shitty slop-corps to do this work?
by ajkjk | 2026-01-29 01:01:09+00:00
if you make a thing and the thing is going to be inevitably used for a purpose and you could do something about that use and you do not --- then yes, it exists for that purpose, and you are responsible for it being used in that way. you don't get to say "ah well who could have seen this inevitable thing happening? it's a shame nobody could do anything about it" when it was you that could have done something about it.
by lmm | 2026-01-29 01:01:14+00:00
> You know what also helps social cohesion?

> Someone who realizes that they've got more than enough money, and realizes that they don't have a life-or-death need for more, and is happy to pay their taxes.

Sure. And the best way to make that happen is to make a tax system that feels fair to everyone.

> Because they've literally got billions of dollars, and the tax credit system was not designed with extreme outliers in mind. "Oh jeeze, I'm just a billionaire, woe is me, I'm not eligible for a $2k tax refund, the world will end".

Why shouldn't they be eligible? If we think giving $2k to those who have children is in the public interest (and I do!), it's still in the public interest when it's a billionaire.
by jjwiseman | 2026-01-29 01:01:42+00:00
Just because I don't often get a chance to talk about this, I'll mention that there was a malfunction/accident/bug that caused what you might call spoofed signals to go out around Long Island and New York. Really interesting case where it seems that an FAA system wasn't handling magnetic declination correctly, which led to it generating false TIS-B targets that were rotated 13 degrees from real aircraft positions, from the radar antenna point of view: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1508505542423064578

(TIS-B is a system that broadcasts ADS-B-like signals for aircraft that are being tracked by radar but either don't have ADS-B Out or otherwise might not be picked up by other aircraft with ADS-B In, e.g. maybe they're at a low altitude.)

There have been a couple other incidents with the TIS-B system. E.g. this apparent test near Dallas in 2022 that generated dozens of false targets in an interesting pattern: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1481712428932997122 There was a similar incident around LAX several months later.
by bdangubic | 2026-01-29 01:01:44+00:00
> they managed to pull off something similar to Waymo despite being so much worse at it, yes?

similar?! what exactly is your definition of similar? tesla and waymo are so far apart that it is difficult to accept any argument that tries to make this comparison. they cannot co-exist in the same sentence unless to explain one’s success against the other’s failures
by brikym | 2026-01-29 01:01:59+00:00
I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on.
Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain.
Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine.

For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
by teraflop | 2026-01-29 01:02:00+00:00
I'd guess that everybody involved (including the coroner's office) tacitly understands that even if the baby was deliberately or negligently killed, there's very little chance after 20 years of finding evidence of who did it, in order to demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.

The scientific case about infant opioid poisoning in general is a separate issue, of course. But assigning blame in this particular case doesn't have any bearing on that.
by esseph | 2026-01-29 01:02:27+00:00
When will we start?

Did you miss the thread about us losing 10,000 PhDs already because of these policies?

Or the threads about people looking for and starting to build alternatives for US tech?

These are wounds that will take a long time to play out, but your kids generation will feel it, though they may never realize what we lost.

Also, we already are:
https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/news/americas-own-g...
by karim79 | 2026-01-29 01:02:44+00:00
What I've noticed about Netflix's supposedly 4k content is that it looks like crap compared to the same show downloaded through illicit means (and viewed on Plex or something else).

What's the deal with Netflix's not-very-good 4k streams? Colour quantization or something? It's not just a one-off, why do 4k netflix shows look like rubbish compared to a moderately encoded whatever from bittorrent?
by Zak | 2026-01-29 01:02:55+00:00
Allow me to present LineageOS 23 for the Nexus 5: https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-unofficial-lineageos-23-0-for-ne...

That's Android 16 on a 13 year old phone. It looks to be a little glitchy and it takes some work to install, but it's possible.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-29 01:03:54+00:00
As an open source maintainer, I'm not stoked and I feel pretty much the opposite way. I've only become more annoyed when trying to adopt these tools, and felt more creative and more enabled by reducing their usage and going back to writing code by hand the old fashioned way. AI's only been useful to me as a commit message writer and a rubber duck.

> I do not have selective guilt over modern generative tools because I understand that one day this era will be history and society will be as integrated with AI as we are with other transformative technologies.

This seems overly optimistic, but also quite dystopian. I hope that society doesn't become as integrated with these shitty AIs as we are with other technologies.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-29 01:04:14+00:00
If Trump got "dragged through the mud" on Venezuela, he did it to himself. What we know about that operation indicates it's clearly a Trump op.

But overall, I also disagree. The press has been very easy on Trump, from going easy on the grab then by the pussy tape, to never saying that he lies, to not making an issue out of his mental decline.
by simoncion | 2026-01-29 01:04:19+00:00
> The problem is as soon as you run something new and it doesn't scale properly in X11...

QT, GTK, FLTK, and friends handle scaling correctly. Perhaps in the future there will be a Wayland-only GUI library, but I'm not sure why anyone would bother when there exist Wayland backends for the major existing ones.

> Pipewire

I don't use it. I use JACK2 with a PulseAudio fallback for Steam games and other programs that don't know how to hook into JACK.

> - No screen tearing by default

If you're using an AMD graphics card, the TearFree option gives you this. If your distro hasn't enabled it by default, then it's two minutes work, and work that I did years ago.

> - Per-monitor refresh rates

$ xrandr | grep -A2 DisplayPort
DisplayPort-0 connected primary 3840x2160+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 698mm x 393mm
3840x2160 60.00 + 60.00 50.00 59.94 30.00*
2560x1600 59.94
--
DisplayPort-1 connected 1200x1920+3840+0 left (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 546mm x 352mm
1920x1200 59.95*+
1920x1080 60.00 50.00 59.94 59.99
--
DisplayPort-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-A-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

The rest of your concluding list is just as poorly-informed.
by nobody9999 | 2026-01-29 01:04:58+00:00
>think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).

Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.

Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone
by alemonti06 | 2026-01-29 01:05:06+00:00
Hi HN, I've been working on the P vs NP problem from an information theory perspective rather than a pure combinatorial one.
My paper introduces the S-operator, which treats complexity as 'information noise' (\mathcal{N}) that can be filtered.
This leads to a linear-time resolution for NP-complete structures.
I'm looking for rigorous feedback on the entropy reduction step.
You can find the full paper on Zenodo (CERN repository) here: https://zenodo.org/records/18395618
by dylan604 | 2026-01-29 01:05:27+00:00
Nobody said the police are not policing. They have their own jobs and not there to do the bidding of the federal government. You're saying this like the local authorities are meant to drop what they are doing at the drop of dime because the feds have a request. These are not dangerous criminals that require a timely response before causing more harm. These are people trying to live their lives and it will not harm the rest of the citizens by doing immigration enforcement at a slower pace.
by jaccola | 2026-01-29 01:05:33+00:00
Interestingly, the UK PM (and allies) just blocked a would-be political rival Andy Burnham standing as an MP.

One of the given reasons is because Burnham is currently mayor of Greater Manchester, and running a new election there would cost approx £4m(!!) which is a huge waste of taxpayer money.

I was surprised that they even gave this as a faux reason since it seems like the sort of money they would spend on replenishing the water coolers, or buying bic pens, or... building a static website!
by navigate8310 | 2026-01-29 01:05:41+00:00
> I want to be able to leverage Hollywood grade VFX and make shows and transform my likeness for real time improv.

While i certainly respect your interactivity and subsequent force multiplayer nature of AI, this doesn't mean you should try to emulate an already given piece of work. You'll certainly gain a small dopamine when you successfully copy something but it would also atrophy your critical skills and paralyze you from making any sort of original art. You'll miss out on discovering the feeling of any frontier work that you can truly call your own.
by IGHOR | 2026-01-29 01:06:12+00:00
Hi HN, I built Parall, a macOS utility that generates small shortcut app bundles.

In the new v2.0 update, those shortcuts can drive animated Dock icons and visual effects per shortcut. It is basically a way to "theme" the native Dock icon by icon, without replacing the Dock and without overlays. Effects include rotation, pulsing, opacity, grayscale, and transforms.

The interesting part is that effects are state-aware. You can set different visuals for each combination of:
- AC or Battery
- App Running or Closed

So you can keep icons fully normal while running, but fade and desaturate them when closed, or disable animation on battery.

Parall originally started as a way to run multiple instances of the same macOS app with optional data separation (useful for things like two Discord accounts, two Dropbox accounts, or separate Chrome environments). v2.0 keeps that, but the Dock effects are the "new capability" part.

It does not patch macOS or modify target apps. It just generates shortcuts that you can pin to the Dock, and you can remove them to revert.
by esseph | 2026-01-29 01:06:21+00:00
Yes, please tell me about how it's my personal responsibility that a corporation that has millions of employees took over so much.

Was it the laws I passed to make them more profitable? Did I just start burning down the neighboring bookstores?

Absolutely not. In fact, if I were never even born, Amazon would be just as big and powerful today.

Wait, maybe it was all the time they bought out a small company and I told them they could!
by emptybits | 2026-01-29 01:06:27+00:00
I had to read what Berners-Lee's solution "Solid Protocol" was all about.

https://solidproject.org/

"Solid is a file system for the Web ... Solid lets you put documents into an online file system where you have control over which people, applications, and AI agents can read and edit them. Users have personal online data stores called Pods. Solid applications can read and write documents directly from your Pod. You choose which applications to use with your data rather than being locked into specific platforms."
by gessha | 2026-01-29 01:06:41+00:00
I used to look up to Google and Googlers but that was a big mistake on my part because that only made the following disappointment ever so hurtful. All of the product killing, services/APIs lockdown and disrepair that has been their modus operandi over the last decade made them into just another corporate software company.

> Google doing so has surprised me
Google are absolutely interested in this because more and more people are installing ad blockers and since their main game is advertisement, they can't allow that. The older the retired Google elites become and the less filtered their language becomes, the more you can peer into their minds and decisions leading up to now. Just look at what Eric Schmidt has been doing and saying.
by freeopinion | 2026-01-29 01:07:01+00:00
I guessed the same thing. Probably the fault of employer-mandated software gumming things up. But since the only reason to run Windows is because my employer mandates it, almost all of my Windows experiences involve enterprise-managed lag in the extreme.

It may not exactly be Microsoft's fault, but it piles nicely onto a pre-disposition against them and all pro-MS IT departments who can't seem to tie their own shoelaces. It takes a maturity that is sometimes lacking in moments of frustration not to blame all the world's problems on MS.
by solid_fuel | 2026-01-29 01:07:13+00:00
> True, but no more true than it is if you replace the antecedent with "people".

Incorrect. People are capable of learning by observation, introspection, and reasoning. LLMs can only be trained by rote example.

Hallucinations are, in fact, an unavoidable property of the technology - something which is not true for people. [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11817
by JoshuaDavid | 2026-01-29 01:07:43+00:00
The following by "Claude Slopson" (Claude Opus asked to write an answer that was obviously AI) scored 87% authentic:

> Ah, what a fantastic question

> For me, it's Breaking Bad–and honestly? It's not just a show, it's a masterclass in storytelling that fundamentally reshaped the television landscape.

> What keeps drawing me back? The way it seamlessly blends moral complexity with edge-of-your-seat tension is nothing short of breathtaking. Walter White's transformation isn't just compelling–it's a profound meditation on identity, ambition, and the human condition itself.

> But here's the thing–it's also deeply rewatchable. Every frame is meticulously crafted. Every detail matters. The foreshadowing alone is chef's kiss!

> Whether you're a first-time viewer or a seasoned fan, Breaking Bad offers something for everyone. It's a testament to what happens when visionary creators push the boundaries of their medium.

> In an era of endless content, some shows simply transcend. This is one of them.

> 10/10, would recommend! What's YOUR comfort rewatch? Drop it below!

(HN strips the emojis, but don't worry–they were there)
by Chronoz99 | 2026-01-29 01:07:51+00:00
I have noticed this while working in a startup, how efficiency gains impacted work in the last 3 months with better coding models coming in. If you have someone senior that is effective at using these tools and can own the outputs and be capable of correcting things that are sloppy, you are immensely more valuable than 2-3 more developers in the same area of work. It's actually faster to empower fewer people than try to have 3 fast guys where there would be coordination overhead, which would become a bottleneck and bring down a lot of the efficiency gains. A good full stack engineer who can work with these tools at speed with caution is more valuable similarly as it requires less coordination. 3 junior devs shipping 90% good code and 10% slop would make the senior who is reviewing everything the bottleneck.
by gerdesj | 2026-01-29 01:08:22+00:00
Please show me on the doll where ISO 9000 hurt you!

I have been an MD for 25 years. ISO 9001 reg. since 2006. Its been a bit of a pain at times but it does concentrate the mind towards doing things right. We've never used consultants, we've always just read and followed the standards.

What is your experience?

PS During our last assessment, the assessor described a few recent AI written efforts they had come across. Laughable.

PPS I've been doing this for over 25 years and I think that a quality based approach to running a company is a good idea ... you?
by tialaramex | 2026-01-29 01:08:26+00:00
I think it is worth knowing that the spookiness isn't for everybody and is the part most likely to turn some players off. The game offers features to make it as mild as possible without destroying their narrative intent, but it is definitely there.

If you know that you frighten easily and don't react well to it - like maybe you went in a haunted house ride once and then couldn't sleep for a week, this might not be your jam and that's OK.

It's not a skill issue, the game has been conceived so that if you scare easily but keep playing you can work around the issue and succeed. But obviously if after that initial moment of terror you just can't face playing any more that's not a good purchase.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-01-29 01:08:34+00:00
just mutate the syntax and features based on arbitrary but readable factors that llms easily trip up on and are highly contextualized.

Change capitalization of keywords based on filename length. If for odd length IF for even. iF for prime numbers.

variables named in English are strongly typed, variables in Spanish are weakly typed.

change symbols based on line absolute number. && on even lines AND on odd.

line terminators differ based on the number of consonants in the method name

every 5th consecutive line should begin with the symbol for comments unless there's a real comment more than 10 lines above but less than 23.

closing brackets are left brackets when the file-size is over 3k

switch assignment evaluation left vs right based on folder depth.

all conditions that an IDE could handle in a rote, calculated way real-time but would probably make the training data nonsensical. An LLM might produce the code based on language features but likely will never get the syntax right making any LLM output largely useless.
by 5- | 2026-01-29 01:08:52+00:00
perhaps similar in scope to the hdl used in 'the elements of computing systems' aka nand2tetris.org ?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dPj4XNby9iuAs-47U9k3xtYy9hJ...

honorary mention: https://www.funghisoft.com/mhrd
by ebbi | 2026-01-29 01:09:10+00:00
Having worked in large corporates (and some government projects) issuing out RFPs, the final decision tends to go: let's just go with an established name like PwC even if they're more expensive (and given we have the budget approved already) as opposed to a small firm down the road that has a great portfolio, because if something goes wrong, I can say I relied on this big, proven firm, and not be criticized for using an unknown firm for such crucial work.

It's frustrating, because these larger firms most always churn out subpar work and this mindset just keeps funding it so they don't improve.