MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by refulgentis | 2026-01-09 19:57:52+00:00
This is 100% true, and what I'm about to describe isn't an attempt to falsify it: took me 11 years and 3 cities to figure it out.

You don't have to exercise so much as get moving.

I'm the best I've been in my life, and it's because in August I started forcing myself to just keep walking whenever I went outside to have a cigarette in my usual spot. I was in Boston and would end up ~nowhere and exhausted at first.

Then started doing random stuff: "might as well walk to Harvard Square instead of just walking a bike path" "might as well go to the bookstore in Back Bay instead of just going to a random location" "I should use the skate park sure I don't fit in but I miss rollerblading from middle school"

Then my dog died, 2 days later I severely sprained my ankle at the skate park and couldn't walk anywhere substantive for a couple weeks. By the time I'm able to do a sustained 10m+ walk it's winter.

Went to visit California as a not-tech-employee for the first time, so I saw San Luis Obispo and Los Angeles for the first time. And the same habit I built in Boston kicked in, in SLO I ended up hiking for the first time on what I find out later was not a real trail, end up hiking every day that week.

Get to LA and it's nothing like I would have thought 37 years into my life, tons and tons and tons of stuff to do so whenever I get antsy there's somewhere to go.

Ended up deciding to move away from Northeast for the first time in my life, because I could see me just spending another 4 months decaying in Boston until its slightly warmer out, and got tired of the cycle. So far, best decision I've ever made.

All that to say, I'm fit, I had a great career in high school sports, I played basketball occasionally, but couldn't really get active consistently. Treadmill was never stimulating enough to keep my attention on anything other than being bored. In retrospect, I really wish I heard this old saw ~all of us know and heard it as "moving around" instead of exercise.

(n.b. this was all under active mental health care x medications spanning a decade+. It's not that the mental health care was useless, I don't think I could have done what I did without it. But it couldn't "fix" me on it's lonesome, only enable me to find a path.)
by quotemstr | 2026-01-09 19:58:05+00:00
> not really into the brush aspect so you pay someone to paint what you describe. That’s not doing, it’s commissioning.

What if I have a block of marble and a vision for the statue struggling from inside it and I use an industrial CNC lathe to do my marble carving for me. Have I sculpted something? Am I an artist?

What if I'm an architect? Brunelleschi didn't personally lay all the bricks for his famous dome in Florence --- is it not architecture? Is it not art?
by kokanator | 2026-01-09 19:58:24+00:00
I think your experience is one of conditioning or even breed type. I have German Wirehair Pointers which I keep in top athletic shape.

When we are in the field they will triple my distance travelled ( verified by GPS ). My outings are typically 8-12 miles and thus 24-36 miles for the dogs. Of course I need to keep them hydrated during this activity.

The behavior of running forward and looking back is most likely what we refer to as checking in. The dog is trying verify where you are heading/doing. In my dog's case they will range out to around 400 yards and then return to with 20 yards and run passed making eye contact as they run by.
Show HN: I made a platform for consensual comedy roasts
by RoastFeast | 2026-01-09 19:58:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Roast Feast as a solo dev project to solve a cultural itch: I love the comedy of roasts but hate how online "dunks" are mean-spirited and lack consent. This is a space to bring back the fun of roasting among willing participants.

The core is consensual, structured humor:

Verified Consent: To host a roast, you upload a photo holding a "Feast!" sign. No surprises.

Private & Safe: Create unlisted, invite-only events for friends, coworkers, or communities. Nicknames are platform-assigned (Adjective+Noun) to prevent impersonation.

Tech Stack: Nuxt 3 (SSR), Supabase (Auth/DB/Realtime), Vuetify. I even wrote a custom PostgreSQL function to enforce the nickname format at the database level.

I'm launching by being the first roast target (my "Feast!" sign is already up).

I'd love your feedback, especially on:

The consent verification flow – does it feel clear or like unnecessary friction?

The platform interface

And a broader question: Do you think structured, consensual humor platforms like this have a future, or is the chaotic dunk the permanent norm online?

Try a roast or start your own: https://roastfeast.com
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-09 19:58:51+00:00
> You can buy rootable phones.

Eh yeah but the problem is of course being locked out of apps if you actually root it.

I don't want Google or Apple to decide what I can do with my phone. Or the government like in this case. This also opens the door for evil spyware like chatcontrol in europe.

> People overwhelmingly choose iPhones instead.

Maybe in America, not here in Spain. I guess not in Vietnam either.
by hephaes7us | 2026-01-09 19:58:52+00:00
The evil is enshrining other people's choices into law, unnecessarily.

There was never going to be anything preventing non-technical folks from buying iPhones. They can and should have what they like.

Why should there be a law that forces that same compromise onto anyone who can only afford a single device and needs to use it to access their bank?
by ryandrake | 2026-01-09 19:59:03+00:00
Maybe it's different for non-homeowners or people without kids. Just looking back at my records for about 2 years, I've written 36 paper checks in that time, not including the "online bill pay" provided by my bank which are often just physical checks they send in the mail: Kids extracurricular activities, school PTA donations, memberships in local clubs, pool service, home improvement jobs like fences and concrete, appliance repair, and, of course, property taxes.
by alfalfasprout | 2026-01-09 20:00:34+00:00
For a senior engineer, some very odd takes here:

> Our ability to zoom in and implement code is now obsolete
Even with SOTA LLMs like Opus 4.5 this is downright untrue. Many, many logical, strategic, architectural, and low level code mistakes are still happening. And given context window limitations of LLMs (even with hacks like subagents to work around this) big picture long-term thinking about code design, structure, extensibility, etc. is very tricky to do right.

If you can't see this, I have to seriously question your competence as an engineer in the first place tbh.

> We already do this today with human-written code. I review some code very closely, and other code less-so. Sometimes I rely on a combination of tests, familiarity of a well-known author, and a quick glance at the code to before saying "sure, seems fine" and pressing the green button. I might also ask "Have you thought of X" and see what they say.

Trusting code without reading all of it isn't new, we're just now in a state where we need to review 10x more code, and so we need to get much better at establishing confidence that something works without paying human attention all the time.

We can augment our ability to write code with AI. We can augment our ability to review code with AI too.

Later he goes onto suggest that confidence is built via TDD. Problem is... if the AI is generating both code and tests, I've seen time and time again both in internal projects and OSS projects how major assumptions are incorrect, mistakes compound, etc.
by somekyle2 | 2026-01-09 20:01:10+00:00
I suspect that lots of developers who are sour on relying on AI significantly _would_ agree with most of this, but see the result of that logic leading to (as the article notes) "the skill of writing and reading code is obsolete, and it's our job to make software engineering increasingly entirely automated" and really don't like that outcome so they try to find a way to reject it.

"The skillset you've spend decades developing and expected to continue having a career selling? The parts of it that aren't high level product management and systems architecture are quickly becoming irrelevant, and it's your job to speed that process along" isn't an easy pill to swallow.
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-09 20:01:19+00:00
I'd argue that depression kills and optimal therapy is: anti-depressants, exercise AND talking therapy and the time to start is NOW.

I wouldn't knock the effectiveness of any of them with the caveats that: (1) you can get anti-depressants from you primary care doc, the best practice is to start on something, ramp up your dose and try something different if it is not working or you don't like the sides. I really thought Vanlafaxine was a comfortable ride but it raised my blood pressure to the "go to the ER" range. Call on the phone and lean in about adjusting your meds. (2) Getting an appointment for talk therapy can take a while these days. (3) In a hard case you can get a more complex medication cocktail from a psychiatrist but the wait could be worse than the talk therapy. (4) People in the military do insane amounts of cardio because it helps dealing with insane amounts of stress. 2 hours a day of cardio helped me deal with a business development process that went on for years before ultimately failing.
by thrance | 2026-01-09 20:01:20+00:00
See, you're doing it again. For god's sake just stop. Pulling a gun and firing at someone is murder. Her vehicle escaped without harming any of the masked gestapo thugs going after her, she did her best to quickly get out of a life threatening situation from people who are known to resort to violence for no good reason.

Oh look, two more victims in Portland today. Will you also claim that they were terrorists and deserved immediate execution? Do you actually like living in a country where masked federal agents can arrest you whenever they feel like, and murder you just for annoying them?
by Fraterkes | 2026-01-09 20:01:26+00:00
Hey, you've probably seen these already, but Redblobgames has a great series of posts about creating good labels for maps:
https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2024-08-20-labels-on-maps/
https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2024-10-09-sdf-curved-text...
(There's a few others too)
by tim333 | 2026-01-09 20:01:38+00:00
I did a similar route for similar money in 1991 with a Dragoman overland truck from Kathmandu to London. They used to do it regularly like a couple of times a year but don't seem to do that route anymore. The political instability was an issue - it was originally supposed to go through Yugoslavia but that was in the messy process of ceasing to exist at the time so they had to use a ferry to Italy. Also half the passengers had to fly over Iran due to the Iranians being difficult with visas. Still some problems there.
by cathyreisenwitz | 2026-01-09 20:01:47+00:00
No one asked me, but I think a cause that is important, neglected, and (less-so, probably) tractable is loneliness/atomization/lack of meaning among Westerners in the bottom-half of income and education.

If fact, I think it might be the world's most underrated problem. I feel like it's neglected, but I'm sure someone somewhere is working on it. (I mean besides the populists and nationalists and others who are making things overall worse.)
by alfalfasprout | 2026-01-09 20:02:14+00:00
Yeah... don't get me wrong I find a lot of value in these tools. They do help with a lot of the tedium, can be helpful as debugging assistants, and in the right hands (with the right oversight) can indeed generate solid code.

But we are, even as of Opus 4.5, so wildly far away from what the author is suggesting. FWIW my experience is working in the AI/ML space at a major tech company and as a maintainer + contributor of several OSS projects.

People are blindly trusting LLMs and generating mountains of slop. And the slop compounds.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-09 20:02:21+00:00
And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen.

We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.
by duxup | 2026-01-09 20:02:23+00:00
><plaintext> is a funny one. It does what it says on the tin – that is, tells the browser to interpret everything after it as plain text. Of course, this means that any potential closing tag is also interpreted as plain text and therefore not parsed by the browser.

Wait wut?

That's sort of wild, closing tags is ... kinda an html thing, but this one just wouldn't honor it?
by buellerbueller | 2026-01-09 20:02:27+00:00
The title is genius; it uses the same psychological trick as the phishers are, to point out to us how vulnerable we are. Obviously, for you to know the title is clickbait, you'd've had to click through and read it, which is the exact social engineering vulnerability the author is trying to demonstrate being exploited.

I thank the author for getting me this way, as I would have likely fallen for the unsubscribe trick.
by tsukikage | 2026-01-09 20:02:34+00:00
> is more fun because you don’t have to “wrestle the computer”

Indeed, of all the possible things to say!

AI "development" /is/ wrestling the computer. It is the opposite of the old-fashioned kind of development where the computer does exactly what you told it to. To get an AI to actually do what I want and nothing else is an incredibly painful, repetitive, confrontational process.
by buellerbueller | 2026-01-09 20:02:35+00:00
It is also more likely than not for assault victims that their assaulter is known to them, which goes back to the original point: how much more likely is a woman traveling the world to be assaulted or killed than one who is just existing in her everyday environs?

My original point still stands: the commenter made a big claim: world travel is (more) risky for women (than not world travel), but provided little evidence to support said claim.
by hephaes7us | 2026-01-09 20:02:45+00:00
In other areas of life, people self-select at their own risk. You can diagnose medical issues yourself, buy power tools you don't know how to use safely, and invest in assets that you don't understand.

All other things being equal, we should try to protect people. But we shouldn't force everyone to make the choices that are best for the people with the least comprehension of what they're doing.
by oytis | 2026-01-09 20:02:52+00:00
Who is locked up for criticizing the government in Germany? You can be fined for insulting a government official, and I think it's a bad law and should be retracted, but a) insulting is not the same as criticizing and b) I've never heard of a single person locked up because of it - you'd basically need to deliberately refuse paying the fine for that
by fabbbbb | 2026-01-09 20:02:52+00:00
Totally there’s correlation, and to some extent causality. And it’s mostly right. But it’s also wrong. You can pick healthy packaged food in the supermarket. Durability doesn’t require additives in many cases.

Mainly, it will be very hard to change the cooking habits of people in this sense. Chopping your own vegetables is much harder than buying the right (processed) food that doesn’t change anything else about your habits. It sounds super “free” - I doubt it will have large scale impact on the US average diet. Better regulate your food.
by sgc | 2026-01-09 20:03:29+00:00
Security question:

Could we have the same level of security - or very close to it - from requiring a secure enclave like a vm running on the device for banking apps with hardware passthrough, or would there be no way for that vm to verify it has actual hardware passthrough and that it's not being tampered with?

That way you would just get the entire vm with the app from the Play Store or Apple, and nobody needs to worry about root?
by torginus | 2026-01-09 20:04:03+00:00
I think youre referring to PNaCl(as opposed to Native Client), which did away with the arch-specific assembly, and I think they shipped the code as LLVM IR. These are 2 completely separate things, I am referring to the former.

I don't see an issue with shipping uArch specific assembly, nowadays you only have 2 really in heavy use today, and I think managing that level of complexity is tenable, considering the monster the current Wasm implementation became, which is still lacking in key ways.

As for out of process sandboxing, I think for a lot of things it's fine - if you want to run a full-fat desktop-app or game, you can cram it into an iframe, and the tab(renderer) process is isolated, so Chrome's approach was quite tenable from an IRL perspective.

But if seamless interaction with Web APIs is needed, that could be achieved as well, and I think quite similarly to how Wasm does it - you designate a 'slab' of native memory and make sure no pointer access goes outside by using base-relative addressing and masking the addresses.

For access to outside APIs, you permit jumps to validated entry points which can point to browser APIs. I also don't see why you couldn't interleave stack frames, by making a few safety and sanity checks, like making sure the asm code never accesses anything outside the current stack frame.

Personally I thought that WebAssembly was what it's name suggested - an architecture independent assembly language, that was heavily optimized, and only the register allocation passes and the machine instruction translation was missing - which is at the end of the compiler pipeline, and can be done fairly fast, compared to a whole compile.

But it seems to me Wasm engines are more like LLVM, an entire compiler consuming IR, and doing fancy optimization for it - if we view it in this context, I think sticking to raw assembly would've been preferable.
by superkuh | 2026-01-09 20:04:15+00:00
>Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online. That, of course, is DISGUSTING

What's equally disgusting is that one corporation has managed to put itself in the position to dictate these things instead. Cloudflare has literally been running a denial of service on congress.org (any many other important domains) for at least 3 years if you aren't running latest chrome or latest firefox or similar.

Like a broken clock, he's not wrong. But it's the pot calling the kettle black.
by jimmySixDOF | 2026-01-09 20:04:21+00:00
I like it but my only problem with markdown apps like Obsidian or GitHub et al is you cant handle prompt templates with byo <xml tags> unless you ``` code box ``` them or the rendering thinks you have bad html and mess up the remaining markdown display. Properly separating text section for LLMs makes a big difference in prompt performance and </xml tags> are more expressive at doing this than ### markdown headers. Other than that I have almost completely shifted to calling markdown files into context.
by cess11 | 2026-01-09 20:05:09+00:00
No, they reject zionism:

"20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus."

Which is a very reasonable position, since it is a movement predicated on genocidal violence and the crime of apartheid. If the state of Israel were to reform or through revolution become democratic and stop its incessant aggression towards both neighbours and more distant countries, I'm sure Hamas would "recognise Israel".

But as I said, this is not an acceptable alternative to the jewish israeli mainstream, nor the zionist movement generally.

The palestinians are actually pretty good at not killing "innocent[s]". Much better than the israelis, who have made sport, commerce and dating out of humiliation and terror perpetrated against palestinians.
by sodapopcan | 2026-01-09 20:05:18+00:00
Seems some people I know who really like AI aren't particularly good with their editors. Lots of AI zealots use the "learn your tools" when they are very slow with their editors. I'm sure that's not true across the board, but the sentiment that it's not worth it to get really advanced with your editor has been pretty prevalent for a very long time.

I don't care if you use AI but leave me alone. I'm plenty fast without it and enjoy the process this author callously calls "wrestling with computers."

Of course this isn't going to help with the whole "making me fast at things I don't know" but that's another can of worms.
by harles | 2026-01-09 20:05:24+00:00
~20 years working in tech for me, mostly big companies, and I’ve never been more miserable. I also can’t stop myself from using Claude Code and the like.

I think it’s a bit like a gambling addiction. I’m riding high the few times it pays off, but most of the time it feels like it’s just on the edge of paying off (working) and surely the next prompt will push it over the edge.
by drdaeman | 2026-01-09 20:05:57+00:00
> managing an open source codebase of this size would add real strain to our small team

Can you please elaborate what do you mean when you say this? This is something I do not understand. How licensing terms affect your codebase management beyond setting things up so the code is available to users?

Publishing something under a FLOSS license doesn’t mean anything except that you grant end-users certain rights (the four essential freedoms). The rest (like accepting patches or supporting external developers) is customary but by no means obligatory. You don’t have a capacity for it - don’t do it, easy. There are thousands of developers who do that - they just dump whatever they have under a nice license and that’s it.

Unless you’re saying your legal department doesn’t have capacity to handle licensing concerns, especially if you’re using or potentially using non-FLOSS third party components. That I can totally understand, it could be pretty gnarly.

Please don’t be mistaken: Free Software is a purely legal matter of what you allow users to do with your work - not some operating principles or way of organizing processes.

Note: All this said, I can understand that you may not want to grant some freedoms to the end users, particularly the freedom to redistribute copies, because this could affect your plans of selling the licenses. But that’d be a whole different story than codebase management concerns.
by zokier | 2026-01-09 20:06:17+00:00
> The two beams (split in the beam splitter—the little rectangle with a diagonal in the center) add or subtract constructively at the output, which yields fringes that are visible to the naked eye. These fringes will move as light from one of the arms of the interferometer takes a longer or shorter path

This explanation is bit incomplete. If you align the interferometer perfectly then it should not have any fringes, the fringes indicate that there is some angle between the light beams. If you get the interferometer aligned then the beam intensity varies as function of the difference of beam path lengths.