MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pseudosavant | 2026-01-16 18:45:27+00:00
When ads were introduced into Google, it objectively made the search product worse. You no longer saw what they thought would be the most relevant result. You literally saw Google's most profitable (it is an auction) result.

If we apply that kind of thinking to chat LLMs, it means instead of getting the most relevant tokens, you'll be shown the most profitable tokens. Maybe the most relevant tokens will be below the fold (like unpaid search results) now.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-16 18:45:35+00:00
> There are a couple of interesting implications from this outcome, should it hold. The first of those is that, as Rust code reaches more deeply into the core kernel, its code for concurrent access to shared data will look significantly different from the equivalent C code, even though the code on both sides may be working with the same data. Understanding lockless data access is challenging enough when dealing with one API; developers may now have to understand two APIs, which will not make the task easier.

The thing is, it'll be far less challenging for the Rust code, which will actually define the ordering semantics explicitly. That's the point of rejecting the READ_ONCE/WRITE_ONCE approach - it's unclear what the goal is when using those, what guarantee you actually want.

I suspect that if Rust continues forward with this approach it will basically end up as the code where someone goes to read the actual semantics to determine what the C code should do.
by primitivesuave | 2026-01-16 18:45:37+00:00
The fact that this occurred in Bombay is important context. In India, the culture amongst older people is to have a clear sense of where you fit in the hierarchy. You might be verbally abusive to those who you consider below you, but you will remain silent and deferent to those who are considered economically/socially superior. This manifests as a certain class of people who have never been called out on any of their obnoxious behavior, because their economic/social status has shielded them from criticism for their entire lives. Meanwhile a majority of society is perfectly accustomed to being verbally abused, to the point where someone like me saying "please" and "thank you" makes it clear that I am of the Indian diaspora.

By the way, I've noticed that the younger crowd in India leans much more toward egalitarianism and tends to reject bizarre social constructs like caste. The fact that a young guy also thought of this solution speaks to their ingenuity as well.
by dylan604 | 2026-01-16 18:45:38+00:00
Yes, you are a crank, but you are not alone. Either way, we should at least acknowledge the crankiness.

Not everyone owns headphones. Some people might have received the speaker as a gift or decided on the speaker instead of headphones. How people spend their time outdoors is not up to you or I to decide. If they want to listen to music from a bluetooth speaker, that's what they want to do. There's a lot more outdoors for you to use as well so rather that stewing, just find more outdoors. Especially on trails. Just keep going. Or wait until they have kept going. I've never seen a bluetooth speaker that's big enough for someone to be on a trail with that doesn't "go away" after a minute or so.

I have discussed the speaker on trails issue with friends, and we've noticed that the louder one's speaker is the shittier the music it is playing.
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-16 18:45:42+00:00
>The US has turned into something much more vindictive and unpredictable, including threatening to invade Canada.

The thing about China is that they are basically hard on the up slope of their advancement as a society/economy/nation, just like US was post ww2.

US on the other hand, has flatlined to the point where we think stuff like trans athletes in sports are a drastic enough reason to elect a president who is a convicted Felon.

China is def gonna outpace US in the next 10 years as the strongest economy, but the interesting thing is gonna be is if they are gonna fall in the same trap as US does in 20 or 30 years.
by m4ck_ | 2026-01-16 18:45:51+00:00
To be clear, I'm not saying that advertising under whatever slop chatgpt outputs is killing humanity, I'm more thinking of the industry as a whole. They use lies and deception to influence behavior and push products; even if they're fully aware that the claims they're making are blatant lies and the products are harmful. If that industry disappeared humanity would be better off for it.

and to be fair the industry doesn't need to be banned, just heavily regulated, fully transparent, and there should be exponential consequences for their lies (such as, claiming cigarettes are healthy while knowing they're addictive and cause cancer; anyone involved in decisions like that should be in Angola growing tobacco for 13 cents an hour.)
by thayne | 2026-01-16 18:45:54+00:00
They can stay open source, but stop putting any effort into supporting deploying to cloudflare's competitors, including accepting PRs for such improvements.

Or they could add features that only work if you deploy via cloudflare.

I also take anything said in an acquisition announcement with a grain of salt. It is pretty common for companies to make changes they said they wouldn't a few years after an acquisition.
by probably_wrong | 2026-01-16 18:46:23+00:00
> OpenAI says ads will not influence ChatGPT’s responses, and that all ads will appear in separate, clearly labeled boxes directly below the chatbot’s answer

Those of young old enough to remember when Google said the exact same thing about clearly labeled ads can make your bets on how long it will take for those ads to be indistinguishable from the content.

Given how quickly OpenAI is running through the entshittification guidebook I'd say 5 years.
by IgorPartola | 2026-01-16 18:47:28+00:00
Because social anxiety, typically. “What if the person tells me to fuck off? What if they make a scene of it?” Especially if six years ago you are the person who was in your teenage years, chances are your social skills are not what they could be if you didn’t spend a year in lockdowns.

Conversely, if you are the kind of person able to come up to a stranger and ask them (politely and respectfully!) to change what they are doing, you likely the person with the social skill to do other things well too.
by desmondl | 2026-01-16 18:47:29+00:00
This new product might be better, but Shimmer was publicly criticized exploitative when it launched. I saw those criticisms at the time, gave the product a fair chance anyway, and unfortunately found them to be accurate.

I used Shimmer in 2022. The app had poor UX and frequent bugs, and the core offering (weekly Google Meet sessions with a “coach”) felt like generic self-help and not personalized coaching. The promised between-session support mostly consisted of DM'd article links, even after I raised that concern directly.

The sessions themselves often felt unprofessional, with background noise, unstable connections, and poor audio quality. The coach WFM'd on their couch during call. Given the price (hundreds of dollars per month at the time), the gap between what was marketed and what was delivered was significant.

Hopefully the new product addresses these issues, but I’d encourage people evaluating it to look at Shimmer’s prior execution and customer feedback, not just the announcement.
by ericmay | 2026-01-16 18:47:36+00:00
This is a bad argument because you're assuming that the US needs to compete with China on EVs or that not competing results in somehow "losing". A car is a car, at the end of the day. Frankly, the best car is no car, but I'll leave that for some other discussion around transit.

China has gone all-in on EVs because over the years they smartly built up the world's best rare earth refining capabilities and immense manufacturing prowess while the United States has undoubtedly secured the global oil supply (remember tanks and fighter jets to fight wars aren't running on batteries) which, even amongst the doomiest of doomers will last quite a while.

China was never going to be an oil-producing powerhouse, but it did have the ability to leverage alternative energy sources so that it wasn't quite as beholden to the petrodollar institution, so that is what they did. And of course running cars on batteries and doing so at a very cheap cost makes sense there.

Meanwhile, the US can obviously produce good cars at a good enough price and with cheap oil for the foreseeable future it's hard to argue in favor of EVs as a national policy. What, we're going to switch to EVs? Who is going to build them? Tesla? We don't have access to the rare earth refining capabilities to meet demand. It's just physics. And if China is using less oil, that means more for the United States and others.

As you said, China has taken these actions out of self interest, but the self interest isn't "clean environment" or anything like that, it's just down to being not as reliant on the US for energy. Though that's a nice benefit. I do own an EV and I think the driving experience is superior but geopolitically things seem to be trending in a different direction.
by user_7832 | 2026-01-16 18:47:59+00:00
> I suspect that the ADHD audience on HN would skew towards people who have already developed coping mechanisms...

Can't speak for everyone, but as one guy - I wish lol. I'm just raw dogging life - to use Gen Z (or is it Alpha?) lingo.

(I wanted to add a sarcastic thing to my message but I'm too tired to even do that without sounding rude.)
by EvanAnderson | 2026-01-16 18:48:00+00:00
I saw a video a few years ago with people speaking into microphones connected to a digital delay attached to headphones they wore. With something like a 200 - 300ms delay most people could only speak a few words before becoming unable to speak intelligibly.

Something like that, with a directional microphone and one of those eerie directional speaker rigs I find in retail stores could be tons of fun for those irritating people who insist on using speaker phone in public.
by nozzlegear | 2026-01-16 18:48:10+00:00
> I had moved out from Gatsby to Astro on my blog/site (username.com), mostly because the enormous dependency hell full of security issues, I know it's just things to generate static files, but it was causing a lot of headaches to upgrade and remove the issues.

That's exactly what made me move to Astro. I would've been happy sticking with Gatsby since it still technically does what it says on the tin, but there were so many security warnings and issues with upgrading dependencies that I gave up.
by vilhelm_s | 2026-01-16 18:48:11+00:00
But he had not been an apprentice before making this, he started the apprenticeship that year, and this is supposed to be the first thing he ever painted.

> Michelangelo's biographers—Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Ascanio Condivi (1525–1574)—tell us that, aside from some drawings, his first work was a painted copy after a well-known engraving by Martin Schongauer (1448–1491) showing Saint Anthony tormented by demons. Made about 1487–88 under the guidance of his friend and fellow pupil Francesco Granacci, Michelangelo's painting was much admired; it was even said to have incited Ghirlandaio's envy.
[https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2009/michelan...]
by publicdebates | 2026-01-16 18:48:45+00:00
From personal experience, I know that interacting with people on social media barely helps with loneliness, especially with an increase in bots.

What I know would help me is to have genuine relationships, friendships where we both care about each other, even if it's something as small as having coffee with them every day, learning about the other person, asking how their day was, and having these things be reciprocated voluntarily.

Even something so small would mean the world to someone like me, as long as it's coming from someone who I respect, who has something I admire about them. This part is important for a friendship. It can't just be any random person, it has to be someone with qualities I admire. I'm still trying to work out what that means and why it is.
by jofla_net | 2026-01-16 18:48:52+00:00
>> TLS certs should be treated much more akin to SSH host keys in the known hosts file. Browsers should record the cert the first time they see it and then warn me if it changes before it's expiration date, or some time near the expiration date.

This is great, and actually constructive!

I use, a hack i put together
http://www.jofla.net/php__/CertChecker/
to keep a list (in json) of a bunch of machines (both https and SSH) and the last fingerprints/date it sees.
Every time it runs i can see if any server has changed, just is a heads-up for any funny business.
Sure its got shortcommings, it doesnt mimmic headers and such but its a start.

It would be great if browsers could all, you know, have some type of distributed protocol, ie DHT where by at least some concensus about whether this cert has been seen by me or enough peers lately.

Having a ton of CAs and the ability to have any link in that chain sing for ANY site is crazy, and until you've seen examples of abuse you assume the foundations are sound.
by voxic11 | 2026-01-16 18:48:54+00:00
Well yeah, but that just means you also have to record both the GP you spend and the GP you receive and the fair market value at the time of spending or receiving it.

Unless you are thinking that you only would need to file taxes if you were to sell the GP for some kind of normal currency. That isn't how income tax works, you can't avoid or delay being taxed by receiving your salary as gold or bitcoin or some non-currency asset, all "clearly realized accessions to wealth" count as taxable income. And so just as you have to pay income tax on the fair market value of bitcoin or gold whenever you mine or otherwise earn it, you would also have to do that with GP whenever it was earned.
by mpeg | 2026-01-16 18:48:55+00:00
Not sure how to feel about this! I’ve been known to use em dashes every now and then, but I am indeed a fellow human.

I’m close to the vite plugin in particular and have contributed to multiple frameworks around cf integration (simply because I use cf), that’s why I chose it as an example (and it’s one of Astro 6’s biggest features)
by pixl97 | 2026-01-16 18:49:44+00:00
This is one half of it that's correct, but the other half is the US is in a late stage capitalism death spiral.

On a huge number of products in the US there is little to no US competition. Instead of using product means (build it better) they use capital means (use your size to get loans to buy up anyone that looks like they could compete in the future).

Lots of US companies minimize actual competition via civil contracts. Cola companies are a great domestic example of this. You give them all the space they want and crowd out competition or you get 'standard pricing', which is way more.

A sizeable portion of the large US companies moved away from making products to printing money via becoming a financial institution. Car companies are a notorious example.

Simply put making products is a side gig, rent seeking is the primary goal. Until we kill that off, we're in for a worsening level of hurt.
by gouthamve | 2026-01-16 18:50:00+00:00
I just setup mine today, and I am not sure I recommend it.

I went from a 40" to a 52", and I'm just moving my head waaay too much and my shoulders hurt. It is curved, but very little imo, it's almost like it's flat. I'm going to try it for a week before making the call on whether to return it.

I feel like this needs a workflow where you do work in the middle and use the fringes for other applications that you rarely look at. Otherwise you're moving your head waaay too much and squinting a bunch.
by maerF0x0 | 2026-01-16 18:50:19+00:00
I'm with you. IMO sound pollution is no different than 2nd hand smoke. IMO It should not be anyone's right to impose upon others, especially when there are lower externality options. Wear headphones.

"Not everyone owns headphones" is such a dumb response because 1. This entertainment is purely optional (not needed for survival) and 2. There are $4 headphones on amazon making me believe in cheaper/poorer markets you could get them for about 1/2 that.
by danaris | 2026-01-16 18:51:18+00:00
Well...millionaires and billionaires aren't exactly the same group, are they?

An ordinary person, working diligently at a decent-paying job, can save up a million dollars if they're not unlucky.

Even a million-dollar-a-year salary is only 10x a fairly modest tech salary of 100k.

But a billion dollars a year is 1000 times that.

So...no, I don't know any billionaires personally either. I'm extrapolating from the things they say and do. But frankly, with the way the media is today, do you really think that more than a tiny fraction of it is trying to portray billionaires as worse than they are? Given how much of it is actually controlled by them, and bears the clear marks of their editorial hand?
by lazarus01 | 2026-01-16 18:51:25+00:00
Very funny!

I believe the concept of public decency is entirely cultural and has less to do with courage.

Where I live, if someone is being loud in public, you usually keep to yourself. So long as they are not being overtly offensive or profane.

In other countries, like the Netherlands for example, people will have no problem telling you to be quiet or verbalize any violation of cultural norms. I believe it's like that in Germany and Scanda as well, from what I hear.
by PeterStuer | 2026-01-16 18:51:29+00:00
It is fairly simple. US law and regulations stipulates Azure can never secure your data from US agencies, no matter what Microsoft writes.

They can not even tell you your data was requested and handed over.

I'm not implying US bad, rest of the planet good. Just, no, US companies have to comply with their jurisdiction's regulation, and that means, they demand, we give, without telling you.
by yibg | 2026-01-16 18:51:36+00:00
I know in the US we value individualism responsibility. But the reality is many things are encouraged / discouraged, made easier / harder collectively.

Of course if you never go out of your house, you're not going to have many social interactions. But your environment and the culture you live in makes a difference too. You can quit smoking yourself clearly, but the collective push to discourage smoking has done a lot to reduce the overall use of cigarettes.
by synsqlbythesea | 2026-01-16 18:51:37+00:00
That’s a fair question!

A concrete case where this comes up is multi-omics research. A single study routinely combines ~20k gene expression values, 100k–1M SNPs, thousands of proteins and metabolites, plus clinical metadata — all per patient.

Today, this data is almost never stored in relational tables. It lives in files and in-memory matrices, and a large part of the work is repeatedly rebuilding wide matrices just to explore subsets of features or cohorts.

In that context, a “wide table” isn’t about transactions or joins — it’s about having a persistent, queryable representation of a matrix that already exists conceptually. Integration becomes “load patients”, and exploration becomes SELECT statements.

I’m not claiming this fits every workload, but based on how much time is currently spent on data reshaping in multi-omics, I’m confident there is a real need for this kind of model.
by brap | 2026-01-16 18:51:38+00:00
Well this wasn’t really aimed at individual devs, but the team/company standards.

I’ve worked at several teams and it was always the norm that all PRs come with tests. There was never a dedicated QA person (sometimes there would be an eng responsible for the test infra, but you would write your own tests).

I would never accept a PR without tests unless it was totally trivial (e.g. someone mentioned fixing a typo).
by tristor | 2026-01-16 18:51:43+00:00
> Not everyone owns headphones. Some people might have received the speaker as a gift or decided on the speaker instead of headphones. How people spend their time outdoors is not up to you or I to decide. If they want to listen to music from a bluetooth speaker, that's what they want to do. There's a lot more outdoors for you to use as well so rather that stewing, just find more outdoors. Especially on trails. Just keep going. Or wait until they have kept going. I've never seen a bluetooth speaker that's big enough for someone to be on a trail with that doesn't "go away" after a minute or so.

I am very open to the argument of "you do you", which is pretty much my philosophy also. But I do think there are /some/ limits to this, because some behaviors are inherently anti-social. My philosophy is more than "you do you" should apply to policy and regulation, meaning that we should not criminalize or directly punish anti-social behaviors that don't cause direct and immediate harm. But that definitely does not mean that we should not shame people for acting in completely inappropriate ways, or directly inform them that their behavior is unwelcome, or otherwise seek to ensure that we act to exist in spaces devoid of anti-social behavior.

I've had this same exact scenario happen, and I simply spoke to the person and told them to lower the volume, use headphones, or stop altogether because they were scaring away the wildlife that I was there to see and photograph. They apologized, lowered the volume, and we both went back to doing our own thing. Most people are reasonable, and act in anti-social ways due to lack of awareness not malice. We are both sharing the trail, and we are both there to experience nature, and that very well might include many different modalities (including accompanying music), but if someone is acting in a way that completely prevents me from enjoying nature I definitely have the right to say something, to complain about it, and to complain about it after the fact, and "you do you" is not a valid argument in response to that.
by arjie | 2026-01-16 18:51:43+00:00
There was an exhibit at the Exploratorium demonstrating a similar effect. You speak into a device and it plays your voice back to you delayed. If you're also listening for the other person this makes it impossible to speak. You can easily ignore it by just not paying attention to the audio back but it's surprising how, if you have to listen, this delay ruins everything. Someone saying a different thing, on the other hand, is easy to listen to while speaking.
by pkulak | 2026-01-16 18:51:47+00:00
> How people spend their time outdoors is not up to you or I to decide.

Oh no, it absolutely is. Societies have laws, and even just social norms, that don't stop applying "outdoors". Unless you're in the ocean, I suppose.

Pack out what you pack in. Stay on the trail. No loudspeakers. Very simple.
Show HN: Galaxy visualization using Redshift data (Raylib, C)
by avicted | 2026-01-16 18:51:54+00:00
I've been iterating on a small galaxy visualization project that originally started as a university course assignment, using only provided sample data (no real astronomical distances).

Recently, I updated it to include redshift-based distance data, which makes the 3D structure more meaningful and closer to real large-scale galaxy distributions.

Repo:
https://github.com/Avicted/galaxy_visualization_raylib

Demo video (3D navigation + galaxy structures):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC83RDWuPvw

Current state:

- Written in C (C99 standard) using Raylib

- Realtime 3D visualization with free camera movement

- Uses redshift values to approximate distances

- Cross-compiled builds via mingw64 (Linux & Windows releases on GitHub)

Still very much a learning / exploration project

There's plenty that could be improved (accuracy, performance, interaction, visuals), but I figured I'd share the update in case it's interesting or sparks suggestions.

Happy to hear feedback or pointers to better approaches or datasets. Thanks!