MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ddellacosta | 2026-01-21 17:56:34+00:00
> In hindsight, the ‘seemingly’ part is key. When astronomers first gazed beyond the solar system, they noticed systematic deviations from the predictions of Newtonian gravity. Most scientists assumed that the problem was due to missing mass. But today, there is mounting evidence that this hypothesis is false, and that the observed discrepancy is caused by a breakdown of Newtonian physics. However, like the geocentric model of antiquity, the dark-matter paradigm lumbers on as the dominant belief, largely unfazed by the challenging evidence.

Yeah given that this blog is about "new ideas in economics and the social sciences" I was already feeling a bit skeptical, but when I got to this point and saw no mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster (I did not bother looking at the 4-year-old video linked to in that paragraph), I had to put this piece down. I subscribe to a number of astronomy youtubers and I have not heard anyone with data to back them up making this assertion.

As a counterpoint example, here's Dr. Becky (https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/smethurst) from ~4 months ago obviously not coming from the perspective that dark matter is being ruled out, and right out of the gate she refers back to another piece talking about why we are (so far) convinced dark matter is legitimate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyyZzzgoLNE

So, yeah, as jfengel says...this seems like more MOND again from a dilettante. Skip it
by Supermancho | 2026-01-21 17:56:39+00:00
> US that broke the deal,

Changed the deal.

A deal is between 2 parties in agreement.

When both parties agree to terms that are written out, the one party (Europe) is given a document with modified terms, the provider (US) broke convention. The receiver of the modified document stopped the negotiation. Suspended is sufficient to describe the situation. This isnt complicated, sheesh.
by stackghost | 2026-01-21 17:56:52+00:00
Avalanches can start with a single stone.

EU together with UK and Canada hold more Treasurys than the entire rest of the world combined, and if they dumped them all at once it would be significantly painful for the average American as interest rates would spike, as would inflation. The Dollar would decline against most other major currencies.

However dumping that much debt all at once would require the sellers to heavily discount a large portion of their bonds, earning them increasingly fewer, and paying in (depreciating) dollars.

It's exceedingly likely that de-dollarization accelerates from here, but it's also unlikely that even the Norwegian government sells it all at once. Rather than mass selling, expect EU entities to curtail or even cease buying US bonds altogether if the geopolitical situation doesn't improve.
by nine_k | 2026-01-21 17:57:11+00:00
I think it should be stupid simple to create a small company, Sorry, "stupid" is important here, anything lesser would not convey the meaning against the EU background. Something like a proof of identity, a one sheet stating the structure of the company (a sole proprietorship or a small LLC with limited funds and employees), the nature of the business (e.g. "software development"), and a moderate processing fee. The process should be serving a notification, not obtaining a permission.

It should be equally simple to shut down a small company, once all its dues are paid.

Once a company grows larger (say, past 15 full-time employees, or past €10M in revenue), maybe something additional might be asked, because now the company would be able to afford handling it.

And, of course, sensitive things like selling food or medicines would require extra licensing, but it's not that the lack of bakeries or pharmacies what's holding back the tech industry progress in the EU.
by visviva | 2026-01-21 17:57:44+00:00
Totally agree. Cool little project, but I cannot think of one use case where this is needed.

> But "fine" starts to feel slow when you need dense time resolution. Generating a month of ephemeris data at one-second intervals is 2.6 million propagations per satellite.

Ok, except SGP4 loses its accuracy over WAY shorter time frames than a month (think hours/days)

> Pass prediction over a ground station network might need sub-second precision across weeks.

a) sub-second ephemeris for antenna pointing is crazy overkill, and b) same comment about accuracy as above.
by pessimizer | 2026-01-21 17:57:56+00:00
It was a marketing campaign ("Switch") during the rise of web programmers and web designers who didn't really know how computers worked, during the hot period of startups when all of them were making a lot of money for the first time and it was sold as a status symbol. Not having a MBP among web programmers was like having greentext among highschoolers.

Now, they didn't know how computers worked because they "didn't have time or interest to worry about that stuff, they wanted something that just worked" it wasn't because they were limited as computer professionals.

And of course, it was unix, so it was at least minimally usable for actual programmers, and then you got homebrew so you had package management and normal software available, and they all started using Linux VMs to run the important stuff, so in the end it was all Linux anyway.

With all that, there was no reason not for it to gradually become a totally adequate environment to work in. Plus you got to buy the exact same thing as everyone in your social group. Talk about the next one like you would talk about the next year of a sportscar model. Have it match your phone. Get excited when they did that yearly thing where they all got on stage and sold the new line, then read Daring Fireball's take.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-21 17:58:09+00:00
It is indeed not even close, but not in the way you are asserting. It takes a second to dip a measuring cup into the flour and level it off. So if I need 4c of flour, it takes me about 4 seconds. Meanwhile, to measure with a scale I have to slowly, carefully pour into the bowl so that I don't overshoot the amount I'm going for (and then then sometimes I overshoot and have to try to scoop the ingredient out a bit). Volume measurements are damn near an order of magnitude faster than weight measurements. And it's not like the extra accuracy from weight measurements is actually that important 95% of the time. Baking is not that precise, contrary to popular belief.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-01-21 17:58:31+00:00
More broadly, Linux doesn't appeal to me as a primary OS because there's no desktop environment that's a full equivalent of macOS, both in spirit and function. Existing DEs might have some vaguely Mac-like shape or can be configured to be slightly more Mac-like, but nothing gets you the full package (consistent application of a well thought out HIG, holistic approach to design, full embrace of progressive disclosure [as opposed to the extremes of IKEA minimalism or dumping everything and the kitchen sink], etc). Additionally, some things are bizarrely involved to set up despite being commonly needed (see virtualization under Fedora) or will randomly break once in a blue moon (usually after a system upgrade) and require diving beneath the hood to fix.

For laptops in particular, it's the absence of laptops that 1) are good at being laptops (great battery life and standby time, are solid but aren't bricks, are inaudible except when being pushed for extended periods, and don't throttle to netbook speeds when unplugged), 2) are designed to be Linux-first, and 3) aren't just a half-baked rebadge of pre-existing models from ODMs like Clevo/Tongfang/Compal.

Funny enough, the closest thing to a great Linux laptop is actually the Steam Deck. Nothing else on the market is as competently integrated. If Valve got into the laptop business I'd be interested.

I could see myself daily driving Linux on a custom built desktop long before I could on a laptop, but the aforementioned broad challenges remain.
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 17:59:05+00:00
Thank you, nice catch. I will patch that today. And cutoff date is almost certainly why it happened.

It wasn't "vibe coded" in the sense that I was just describing what I want and letting the agent build it. But it definitely was built indirectly, and in an area that is not my primary focus. A charitable read is that I am borrowing epistemic fire from the gods; an uncharitable one is that I am simply playing with fire.

I am not apologetic about this approach, as I think it's the next step in a series of abstractions for software implementation. There was a time when I sometimes took some time to look at Java bytecode, but doing so today would feel silly.

Abstracting to what is in essence a non-deterministic compiler is going to bring with it a whole new set of engineering practices and disciplines. I would not recommend that anyone start with it, as it's a layer on top of SWE. I compare it to visual vs instrument flight rules.
by fragmede | 2026-01-21 17:59:06+00:00
Syntax != semantics. The LLM being able to adhere syntax is one thing, the LLM picking up various language-isms is another. In Python, you don't want to see

for i in range(len(arr)):
something(arr[i])

because the pythonic way is simply:

for i in arr:
something(i)

or even:

[something(i) for i in arr]

The first version is absolutely syntactically correct, but terrible python. How do you teach the LLM that?

Bugs don't come from syntax errors. If you've got a syntax error, it doesn't compile/fails to run entirely. So we're not talking about the LLM learning the syntax, I'm asking the LLM learning the deeper semantics of lanng.
by bri3d | 2026-01-21 17:59:13+00:00
Note that it's really easy to conflate TPM and hardware root of trust (in part because UEFI Secure Boot was awfully named), and the two things are linked _only_ by measurements.

What a TPM does is provides a chip with some root key material (seeds) which can be extended with external data (PCRs) in a way which is a black box, and then that black box data can be used to perform cryptographic operations. So essentially, it is useful only for sealing data using the PCR state or attesting that the state matches.

This becomes an issue once you realize what's sending the PCR values; firmware which needs its own root of trust.

This takes you to Intel Boot Guard and AMD PSB/PSP, which implement traditional secure boot root of trust starting from a public key hash fused into the platform SoC. Without these systems, there's not really much point using a TPM, because an attacker could simply send the "correct" hashes for each PCR and reproduce the internal black-box TPM state for a "good" system.
by brk | 2026-01-21 17:59:21+00:00
When you say "Art" can only come from a person who drew a line directly with their own hand, vs. a person who told a computer to draw a line, it's false scarcity. Both lines could wind up looking identical, but the Artist is trying to make the world believe only one of those lines is truly valuable.

I'd be interested to see you expand your comment beyond what you wrote. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm a terrible Artist and have no interest in using my time to create visual baubles with AI. I just see it as an interesting thing that is playing out.
by huntergemmer | 2026-01-21 17:59:22+00:00
Great suggestion - density mapping is a really effective technique for overplotted data. Instead of drawing 1M points where most overlap, you're essentially rendering a heatmap of point concentration. WebGPU compute shaders would be perfect for this - bin the points into a grid, count per cell, then render intensity. Could even do it in a single pass. I've been thinking about this for scatter plots especially, where you might have clusters that just look like solid blobs at full zoom-out. A density mode would reveal the structure. Added to the ideas list - thanks for the suggestion!
by zzyxy | 2026-01-21 17:59:38+00:00
Thank you for this description. It almost exactly matches my experience that I had trouble putting into words. I can "model" the things I'm asked to remember/visualize, but I do not really "see" it.

The closest physical world analogy is moving in a familiar room in the darkness -- you kind of know where the corners are, and where to find the light switch, so you can move around, and tell, if asked, what's where... But there's no seeing involved.

So, when asked to imagine something, for me the process is akin to drawing a blueprint, and then mentally modeling how that contraption could work in real life, without actually building it. Imagination is certainly involved, but it may not be the kind of imagining the requester assumed.
by Herring | 2026-01-21 17:59:49+00:00
That's kind of a question for your priest, but I'll give it a go.

https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

I like to spend a lot of time at the World Happiness Report because it gives me a better sense of economic well-being. You can't just look at GDP, you need a sense of which countries are burning human capital to fuel GDP and generate billionaires. That's a very common short-term tactic, so the WHR gives you a better sense of long-term political stability. Unhappy people tend to vote for strongmen. It's basically impossible to get to Finland-levels without bringing everyone along, not just internally like getting rid of 996, but also including Taiwan/Ukraine cause corruption tends to leak back in.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-21 18:00:04+00:00
> Having said that, I'm progressively migrating from MacOS to Linux as MacOS is starting to "get in the way" enough to bother me.

Same here. macOS has been death by a thousand little cuts, and I'm finally accelerating my move away from it, as Apple locks it down more and more, and as they spend their engineering talent on crap I ultimately don't care about.

While I've switched most of my computers over to Linux, I still have not moved my daily driver over. There are so many silly little things Linux (and its various desktop environments) gets wrong and are just annoying enough to make me not want to use it every day, like scrolling with a trackpad.
by GeoAtreides | 2026-01-21 18:00:10+00:00
dang, it's not like I don't understand what HN is trying to do (...on paper, at least). I know how it works (or, how you wanted it to work).

The problem is that there is a fundamental tension between an user-controlled ranking system and an editorial board.

And make no mistake, the mod team + few (trusted) people that flag stories constitute an editorial board.

I would be very happy if HN would plastered somewhere, really visible, the fact the content is editorialized and, while the upvotes matter, they're not the whole story. Not that I can see that happening, I can imagine the shitstorm coming from the wider (more naive) audience.

In the end, as the audience grows, it will become harder and harder to reconcile this two systems. People will grow angrier and angrier as they are unable to discuss the things they want to discuss. Not that they can leave, everywhere else is shit. And so, the grumbling will continue, and the huge war-chest of good you amassed these past years will slowly go down until there's nothing left.
by _verandaguy | 2026-01-21 18:00:25+00:00
The Whigs would be new ground for me, but I'm quite familiar with modern Poland. The closest they've come was probably under the living Kaczynski's tenure as premier, or during Duda's early days as president, and neither have come close to what's going on with the police state in the US as it is today.

I'll read up on the Whig party, though if you have ledes that'd be good to start with, I'd love some links.
by cyberax | 2026-01-21 18:00:28+00:00
> And why is that? Assuming your carrier bothers to run RCS, the protocol works just like MMS and SMS do.

Correct. And it took more than a decade to get MMSC interoperability. It's still not perfect even now.

And mobile network operators were incentivized to enable MMSC peering because it was typically a pay-per-message service with hefty fees.

> Annoying, though hardly unexpected at this point. Still, that only poses a problem for Google's RCS servers, not for RCS itself.

That's a distinction without difference in the US.
by cyberax | 2026-01-21 18:00:35+00:00
Yes, the upstream can hack my private wallet. But it's a CGNAT device somewhere in the TMobile network, and hacking it is not at all trivial.

And it's true for most NAT users. Even with the cheapest possible devices.

Of course, in practice most NAT devices _are_ firewalls because they do block incoming packets that are not a part of an established connection. After all, it adds only an insignificant overhead because a NAT device has to track connections anyway.

With IPv6 this is not the case. A router with misconfigured connection tracking will still work. And I actually have seen this in practice on a device that had a missing IPv6 conntrack kernel module.
by evil-olive | 2026-01-21 18:00:56+00:00
I see this argument repeated every single time someone tries to defend Fahrenheit.

if "room temperature" was smack in the middle, at 50 degF, you might have a point.

but no, it's pure post-hoc rationalization.

being naked at 0 degF will kill you. being naked at 100 degF will (usually) not. they're not remotely equivalent.

instead, think of it this way - human beings are mostly water, and 0 to 100 degC is "percentage of the way from water's freezing point to boiling point".

room temperature is "about 20% of the way to boiling". 40% or higher starts to cause our bodies to overheat. a typical sauna will be somewhere between 50 and 70% of the way.
by evolution777 | 2026-01-21 18:01:00+00:00
I also have been guilty of not doing this, possibly a reason I got fired from Google in August 2025.

"If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all" is a famous quote from Disney's movie Bambi, spoken by the character Thumper to teach kindness, meaning it's better to stay silent than to speak unkind or hurtful words, a principle that encourages positive communication and consideration for others' feelings, often applied to social media and daily interactions.

Origin: The line comes from a scene where Thumper's mother corrects him for calling Bambi "kinda wobbly".
Meaning: It's a reminder to pause before speaking and ensure your words are kind, positive, and constructive, promoting empathy and reducing harm.
Application: The advice is widely used as a guide for polite behavior, especially online, suggesting silence is preferable to negativity.
Variations: Sometimes called the "Thumperian principle," "Thumper's rule," or "Thumper's law".

Even though I still firmly believe I was trying to push for positive change, and was not violating this spirit in my heart, I can see why my team could have felt that way.

I would like to apologize to my teammates for that reason. I wish I had been able to figure out a better way, because I truly believe that they were also acting with good intentions, but could not understand my perspective, because of my poor communication skills.

So I still wish then and Google and Google Cloud all the best.

Lastly, and selfishly, please learn and improve, so that the world benefits (including me) from your innovations. And also keep improving that stock price so that I don't have to find another job, but can focus deeply on my interests! Which I hope can also benefit society in some small way!

I hope @elonmusk, @realDonaldTrump, President Putin, and others can also utilize this principle to actually fulfill their genuine and noble goals for their own, their family's, their descendants, their country's, humanity, the world and the universe's benefit. God bless.

(Supposed) Einstein quote: You never fail until you stop trying.

This is not just a meme, but something I have actually lived. In early 2023, I had clinical depression and felt hopeless and worthless and in a bad moment, I attempted suicide.

I have since resolved to never ever give up on anything.
by metawake | 2026-01-21 18:01:15+00:00
Great suggestion!! this is exactly the right methodology for establishing confidence intervals.

I've added this to the roadmap as `--bootstrap N`:

ragtune simulate --queries queries.json --bootstrap 5

# Output:
# Recall@5: 0.664 ± 0.012 (n=5)
# MRR: 0.533 ± 0.008 (n=5)

The implementation would sample N random subsets from the query set (or corpus), run each independently, and report mean ± std.

This also enables detecting real regressions vs noise eg "Recall dropped 3% ± 0.8%" is actionable, "dropped 3%" alone isn't.

Will ship this during next few weeks. Thanks for the push toward more rigorous methodology, this is exactly what's missing from most RAG benchmarks.
by dotBen | 2026-01-21 18:01:31+00:00
If your comment is referring to the bending spoons business model, it's worth pointing out they are not VC, they are private equity.

If your comment is referring to the software company's exiting to provide a return to shareholders, that happens all the time whether it's venture-backed or privately owned. The owners of privately held bootstrapped companies still want an exit one day too.

As an open source software engineer who is now a venture capital investor, respectfully, I think your beef is with capitalism, not with the institutional investors.
by cestith | 2026-01-21 18:01:38+00:00
Technically an LLM is a tool for extracting candidate responses to plain-text requests. Since (textual) programming languages are languages, they can create passable candidate responses to queries about those. Certain LLMs such as Copilot and Claude have had their training focused a bit more towards programming tasks, but saying that LLMs as a class are for coding assistance is a little narrowly stated.

It would maybe be handy to feed the responses from an LLM through a computational reasoning engine to grade a few of them.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-21 18:01:42+00:00
Sovereign debt of a more politically stable nation state or other monetary union, if you are investing at these levels. If you're an individual, you have more options, although there will be fierce debate about the risk profile (as US Treasuries were historically considered to be risk free).

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=449401
by gadders | 2026-01-21 18:01:50+00:00
You could always read the Maria Dahvana Headley translation that starts with "Bro!":

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/beowulf-bro

"Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

In the old days, everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound.

Only stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times."
by agentcoops | 2026-01-21 18:02:17+00:00
It seems to all be debt financed, i.e. just a private equity model slightly specialized for tech. The "innovation" is that Bending Spoons has an in-house engineering team it seems they try to keep constant yet scale out to all the acquisitions. I hadn't looked into them much before, but https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma... is an interesting report -- though not focused on the finance side.
by WJW | 2026-01-21 18:02:50+00:00
It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same.

The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.