MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eddythompson80 | 2026-01-20 01:44:29+00:00
You’re absolutely right. Shocking, rage bait, sensational content was always there in social media long before algorithmic feeds. As a matter of fact “algorithmic feeds” were in a way always there it’s just that back in the day those “algorithms” were very simple (most watched/read/replies today, this week, this month. Longest, shortest, newest, oldest, etc)

I think the main thing algorithmic feeds did was present the toxicity as the norm, as opposed to it being a choice you make. Like I used to be part of a forum back in the early 2000s. Every few weeks the top most replied thread would be some rage bait, or sensational thread. those threads will keep getting pushed to the top and remain at the top of the forum for a while and grow very quickly as a ton of people keep replying and pushing it to the top. But you could easily see that everyone else is carrying on with their day. You ignore it and move on. You sort by newest or filter it out and you’re good. It was clear that this is a particular heated thread and you can avoid it. Also mods would often move it to a controversial sub forum (or lock it all together if they were heavy handed) So you sort of had to go out of your way to get there and then you would know that you are actively walking into a “controversial section” or “conspiracy” forum etc. It wasn’t viewed as normal. You were a crazy person if you kept linking and talking about that crazy place.

With algorithmic feeds, it’s the norm. You’re not seeking and getting to shady corners of the internet or subscribing to a crazy usenet newsgroup to feed your own interest in rage or follow a conspiracy. You are just going to Facebook or twitter or Reddit or YouTube homepage. Literally the most mainstream biggest companies in the US homepages. Just like every one else.
by noduerme | 2026-01-20 01:45:15+00:00
I find Polish or Reverse Polish notation jarring after a lifetime of thinking in terms of operator precedence. Given that it's fairly rare to see, I wonder what about it would be more LLM-friendly. It does lend itself better to "tokenization" of a sort - if you want to construct operations from lots of smaller operations, for example if you're mutating genetic algorithms (a la Eureqa). But I've written code in the past to explicitly convert those kinds of operations back to infix for easier readability. I wonder if the LLMs in this case are expected to behave a bit like genetic algorithms as they construct things.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-20 01:46:29+00:00
Agreed.. but this is pretty out of date, mostly about politics from April/2025 and a 2024 Book "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them". Notes politics are "fast moving", I'm not sure that Aziz Rana or Noah Feldman would say the same now.
by ecshafer | 2026-01-20 01:46:59+00:00
The US constitution is working great. Democracy isn't necessarily good. If we had a national vote where 51% of the people voted to kill 49% of the people, that would be bad. More democratic institutions also have a tendency to favor hand outs to people, people vote for the policy that gives them free stuff, or rather that robs other people and enriches them.

The issue is a cultural one, where people are looking out for themselves over their country. Where politicians seek to enrich themselves, people just want to get a hand out, and lobbyists write sections of laws.

Where democracy shines is that we can leverage democracy to amend the constitution. If they think that moving to a pure popular vote or something would be better, then get that amended into the constitution, we have a process for this, just get 2/3s of states to vote for it.
by jleyank | 2026-01-20 01:48:00+00:00
Yup. There were supposed to be 3 separate, contentious arms of the government: executive, legislative and judicial. The problem, and I honestly can't see a solution to it, is that the same party/group controls all three and nobody's willing to buck the trend. The "guardrails" are there, it merely turns out they're only weakly enforced.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-20 01:48:50+00:00
FDR was taking drastic actions in response to a depression within the United States. In addition to many other issues like having old blue collars rotting on the street, expanding benefits for soldiers to boost morale (just in time for the 2nd world war), and setting some basic standards in the job market that we still enjoy today. Yes, if we're going to push the envelope, it should be in times of crisis and for the people.

Trying to compare that to what happened in 2025 just feels dishonest. But yes, if I had to sacrifice fast response to crises to not allow a felon executive to destroy the country in the course of 12 months, I vote to limit all the powers.
by ggm | 2026-01-20 01:48:54+00:00
I think a lot of people are missing a point here. Cars are not (just) use-values. They are expression of desire. They are, for some brands, classic Veblen Goods.

Porche possibly could sell more by putting the price up

They put their marque behind EV and Hybrid. It worked. Their brand sold well. This is in contradistinction to vendors who won't think about this market niche in positives, but are being dragged into it.
by defrost | 2026-01-20 01:49:02+00:00
If you're a regular to the Australian beaches and headlines I visit you'll see a shark every week .. sometimes daily - and after five decades of swimming once a week if not daily you might get brushed up against once or twice - but it's unlikely you'll be bitten.

You will, however, almost certainly know or meet someone that can flash the scars of a bite.

Shark bites - rarer than the headlines make out.

Jellyfish - seasonal and locational. There are areas where you just shouldn't go in the water for a couple of weeks. Nasty.

Melbourne's currently got a bloom of lion's mane jellyfish that'll leave a welt (tingly red strip on the skin) for a couple of days.

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-19/lions-mane-jellyfish-...

As far as sea misadventures go, easily the funniest thing I've seen (sorry, we're like that, laughing at danger) was a young kid surfing with a pod of dolphins getting fully pancaked by a breaching dolphin that cleared a wave top, made serious air, and landed smack centre on the kid and his board.

He (the kid) got winded pretty hard, did get his (damaged) board back, and was laughing about it afterwards.

The dolphin was not available for comment.

( Addendum: Dolphins being cheeky is more common than reported in W.Australia - here's one that did get captured on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa7dSv3NBB0 )
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-20 01:49:12+00:00
- If it runs Python and pip/pipx, and you can pull in the required packages via pip/pipx, it'll run Reticulum.

- On 32-bit x86 platforms it has to build the PyCA/cryptography module, but works fine after it does that.

- Reticulum supports a number physical interfaces, serial is one of them. It of course has the "RNode" intefaces for LoRa radios. For Ethernet, there is "AutoInterface" which uses IPv6 autoconfiguration for peer discovery and IPv6 UDP for transport but doesn't rely on DNS, DHCP, or anything else. If your PC, phone, or other involved devices on the same network have IPv6 enabled and no filtering is happening on layer 2 then it's dead simple - any device there will see announces from others and be able to transact with you not doing much more than spinning up MeshChat.

- Other interface types are TCP client, TCP server, IPv4 UDP, I2P, and a pipe interface. The pipe interface is interesting as it's basically stdin/stdout to an executable of your choice, so you can use that to make Reticulum available over really anything you could dream up, such as an SSH tunnel.
by strken | 2026-01-20 01:51:08+00:00
I would be interested in hearing an actual historian's opinion on whether conditions were better or worse in England at the height of the British Empire, compared to continental Europe.

I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.
by inkyoto | 2026-01-20 01:51:33+00:00
This could be a great fit for Prolog, in fact, as it excels at the search.

Each resolved record would be asserted as a fact, and a tiny search implementation would run after all assertions have been made to resolve the IP address irrespective of the order in which the RRsets have arrived.

A micro Prolog implementation could be rolled into glibc's resolver (or a DNS resolver in general) to solve the problem once and for all.
by api | 2026-01-20 01:51:39+00:00
I agree with those things but they were not rollbacks of executive power. That was Obama using executive power to reel in bad policy, not ceding the power entirely.

Of course perhaps he couldn’t. Congress needs to do that, and the courts, and neither seem interested in doing their job. Lower courts sometimes step up but the Supreme Court seems to be on the side of a dictatorial executive for some time now.

What does Congress even do these days? Seems like half crackpot debate club and half hospice care facility.
by efitz | 2026-01-20 01:51:41+00:00
It’s a feature, not a bug. The United States federal government was set up as a representative republic, not a democratic republic, and not a democracy. We are supposed to be a federation of fairly-independent state governments with just enough federal scaffolding to keep the peace between the states. We were not set up with the intention of having a do-everything federal government ruling over the states.
by netsharc | 2026-01-20 01:51:51+00:00
There's probably still plenty of value in the name, who knows if the audience who are impressed if you say "I've got a Porsche" vs "I got a Zeekr/BYD/Xiaomi" is growing or shrinking, if it shrinks fast enough, then Porsche is in trouble.

It's like bragging about having a Hermes bag vs a Temu brand bag. Yeah it's all irrational, but if the world was a rational place we'd not have a man-child threatening wars and invasion because he didn't get the peace prize he wanted...
Ask HN: How do engineers and inventors do prior-art searches in practice?
by wireless_eng | 2026-01-20 01:52:06+00:00
For people working on inventions or standards, how do you usually approach prior-art searching?

Keyword search seems to work up to a point, but I’ve found it breaks down when the same technical idea is described very differently across patents, papers, or standards documents. I’ve also tried approaches beyond pure keyword search, but they still feel brittle for nuanced technical concepts.

Curious what people actually rely on in practice — lots of query iteration, classifications, specific tools, or something else. Would be interested in hearing what’s worked well (or badly) for others.
by dijit | 2026-01-20 01:52:22+00:00
Explain.

If you go to trial you are saying you are not guilty of the offence.

If you are not guilty the ideally you are acquitted.

if you are guilty, you’re hoping to get away with it.

I struggle to see how hoping to get away with it, is showing remorse. If anything I certainly think it says that it shows little or no remorse, since you believe that other people should receive no justice for crimes that you committed against them.
by sponnath | 2026-01-20 01:53:00+00:00
There's honestly not much you can do to prevent the "oily cubes" problem, especially if you keep the laptop docked often. You'll just have to clean the screen more often.

I've seen some people place a keyboard-sized microfibre cloth in between the keyboard and display but I'm not sure how well that actually works in practice. It might cause other issues.
by bickfordb | 2026-01-20 01:53:27+00:00
The constitution been absurdly broken by a cult of partisan federal judges claiming to be textual, but then inventing an absurd canon of non-laws no one can reference:

* Unitary executive theory. Congress can't create a federal reserve, except for when the supreme court likes it.

* Major questions doctrine. Congress can't create an EPA and give it open ended authority to regulate its way to clean air

* Qualified immunity. Congress can't stop ICE agents from murdering people

* Historical tradition as regard to the 2nd amendment. Congress can't ban everyone from walking around with military assault weapons.

I don't see how Congress can easily fix this.
Show HN: Create-Vibe-App
by evil_yam | 2026-01-20 01:53:28+00:00
Inspired by create-react-app, but significantly more lightweight, this is a language-agnostic scaffold designed specifically for AI coding. It is still at a very early stage, and feedback of any kind is very welcome.

Design philosophy: [I Did Everything I Could to Make AI Do the Work — My Vibe Coding Cognition Upgrade Journey | Changqin](https://yam.gift/2026/01/18/AI/2026-01-18-Upgrade-VibeCoding...)
by robmurraylyon | 2026-01-20 01:54:06+00:00
Pólya's 1919 conjecture (L(n) ≤ 0 for all n ≥ 2) was disproven in 1958, but the failure pattern is interesting.

I ran L(n) to 100 million and found:

- Failures occur only at odd composite numbers
- Even variant: L(n) ≤ 0 holds for all even n (zero exceptions)
- Prime variant: L(n) ≤ 0 holds for all primes (5.76M tested)

The failures cluster in regions with large prime gaps. Found a predictive formula:

E[Σλ] ≈ -0.39 + 0.083g
where g is gap size. Larger gaps push L(n) positive.

Code and data in the Zenodo link. Curious if these restricted variants are known in the literature - couldn't find
references.
by Steven_Vellon | 2026-01-20 01:54:22+00:00
New England had a male literacy rate of around 70% compared to Britain's 60% in 1800. But New England was one of the most literate regions in America around the time of the founding, including the other American regions into the literacy rate would bring the literacy rate down (even more so when if one includes the enslaved population). Comparing the literacy rate one specific region of one country, to the national average of another country is comparing apples to oranges.

But the important thing is, the 1900 Britain's male literacy rate was 97%. Illiteracy went from something that was fairly common to exceptionally rare.
by gnabgib | 2026-01-20 01:54:27+00:00
From the same company as:

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore (113 points, 6 months ago, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575

(143 points, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44625119
by gruez | 2026-01-20 01:55:07+00:00
>All of these problems have been solved on the web

Have they? The solution to IP addresses is basically "use a VPN", which you could do also on a phone. SNI leaks have been around since forever, and despite eSNI, still isn't close to being widely fixed. There's MAC address randomization, but only because LANs and wifi networks are basically an unregulated free for all, so spoofing doesn't really matter. It's far less viable with controlled access networks like cellular. Some countries even have regulations banning spoofing/changing IMEIs.
by mothballed | 2026-01-20 01:55:14+00:00
OK but the constitution effectively cannot be amended now (the last one, in the early 90s, took 202 years to pass [no not a typo]) and we're stuck with what we have. The population also isn't even remotely good with the powers restrained by the 10th amendment and hasn't been since at least the 1930s and maybe even before that, and there is zero chance the court changes that.

So what is next. It seems the only option is to just use the courts to re-interpret the constitution, so that things like growing your own wheat is "interstate commerce" and so that stuff like a post-86 machinegun isn't an arm even within the context of being a member of (by federal statute) the unorganized militia.
by qiqitori | 2026-01-20 01:55:46+00:00
I keep seeing "underequipped technologically relative to their Chinese peers" on HN. What kind of stuff is missing? This is not a loaded question, I only drive a couple times a month, and the vehicle I'm driving is an older Prius, so I probably lack imagination. EVs are supposed to be technologically pretty simple, most of an EV's value being in the battery packs. I've been thinking about upgrading, perhaps to a Nissan Sakura (which probably doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles either).

Now I kinda wish my Prius had a 3.5mm aux-in jack but I get by with an FM transmitter.
by efitz | 2026-01-20 01:56:43+00:00
What do you mean no one is willing to buck the trend? It’s almost a certainty that Republicans will lose the house this year and maybe the senate.

On the other hand we have federal district court judges in podunk deciding that they have the unilateral ability to stop the president from exercising executive authority. It wouldn’t be so comical if they didn’t ultimately lose in most cases; our judges are the real Constitutional crisis right now.

I have not seen the Trump administration fail to obey a single court order; I just don’t see Trump as a crisis. His policies, you could make a good case. His rhetoric, yes. His official acts, not so much.
by oogabooga13 | 2026-01-20 01:57:12+00:00
I was in engaged in a similar discussion with a co-worker where I was defending my view that I'd rather read the news than try to trust a brief video clip presented to me. I feel like I'm constantly keeping an eye out for excessive biases creeping into my 'trusted' sources. For a civilian like me, it's quite hard to grasp what lens the story is being presented to me as. Casually reading the news isn't a thing for me...it usually involves a little bit of research to ensure I'm not getting duped. The dead internet theory is important.
by phil21 | 2026-01-20 01:57:21+00:00
So long as the description stays it's not actually OEM - I see zero problem with this.

The title is not misleading in this case - it's how you discover the item to being with, but if the description says "Samsung" as manufacturer I'd send it back.

There are certain times you want an OEM part for good reason (e.g. safety critical/expensive items) but most of the time aftermarket is perfectly fine and sometimes even desirable. Most wear items in cheap appliances and the like are made in china anyways and typically are low quality to start with.
by zuoning | 2026-01-20 01:57:28+00:00
Kutt AI is a professional AI video generation platform that turns text prompts or images into cinematic videos in seconds. You can create lifelike speaking avatars, swap faces or bodies, and animate characters with action imitation, all in HD and ready to share. The platform bundles top models like Wan and Seedance, offers over 100 effects, fast rendering, and commercial-use rights, so creators and teams can produce social clips, promos, and short films without complex editing.
by p_ing | 2026-01-20 01:57:31+00:00
ReFS doesn't give you any more rollback capability than NTFS in that sense. ReFS supports file level snapshots, not volume.

And on a client machine, it's of much less importance overall (to you, it may be super important and I don't want to discount that). And on the server side, that's why we have n+2 failovers. No single machine of importance should ever be a point of failure... I realize that's not always reality but it's more or less Microsoft's position; after all, why sell one Windows Server license when you can sell 3!
by adventured | 2026-01-20 01:58:07+00:00
The US doesn't need oil, it's the world's largest producer and has enormous estimated recoverable oil reserves comparable to Venezuela or Russia.

Greenland is either about Trump intentionally causing chaos with NATO for the benefit of Russia (depending on your politics), or it's the Pentagon & Co. looking to lock down strategic territory for the near future superpower stand-off with China, which will be a global conflict (and may involve China and Russia on one side). Controlling Greenland and Alaska would provide the US with enormous Arctic Ocean positioning. Now what does that have to do with China you may ask? Trade, transit and military asset positioning. The US is looking to secure what it regards as its hemisphere, while China is about to massively push outward globally with a projection navy. The US has less than ~20 years to lock down its hemisphere (again, what the US believes to be its hemisphere) before China starts showing up with its navy everywhere. There will be constant navy-navy challenges everywhere. China will constantly probe the US points of control, for all the obvious reasons. The US will want to keep China as far away as possible.
by sneak | 2026-01-20 01:58:18+00:00
i have my starlink plugged directly into a gl.inet router that runs a wireguard client. all of the clients connect to the gl.inet wifi. absolutely nothing unencrypted goes out the starlink wan.

it works fine.

i have the exact same setup at home with cox cable, because they will data mine the shit out of your traffic (and they have your phone number and home address to link it to). most terrestrial residential isps do this shit. vpn everything.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-01-20 01:58:26+00:00
They're being too greedy. Cut out the middle man and give most of the benefit to the consumer. 3% cash back or better, and you'll sizable sign up. No profit now, but now you've got control of the situation, which is huge, and gives you more opportunities for the future. You've also got leverage for your negotiations with the merchant card banks.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2026-01-20 01:58:29+00:00
Any larger corporation does this, since at least decades.

It's called "strategische Konzernentwicklung" in german, meaning "strategic development(forecasting) of the corporation" and its markets. A global insurance company I've worked for had something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environ... in 2001. I've been involved in planning, installing and operating it. But not the responsible patsy :-) . Which didn't went that smooth, because most users were higher management, and needed holding hands for all the 'complicated stuff', like loading in data, and playing scenarios with those. Also bulky 3D-glasses, and jerky updates, making most people dizzy when standing. All in all several million of Euros for fancy Silicon Graphics hardware and supercustom wall displays and projection, with not so fancy OS and applications. Excel was percieved as more 'productive'.

The demo Formula 1 simulator had its fans, though :-)
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-01-20 01:59:09+00:00
Both can be true if each group selectively provides LLM output supporting their position. Essentially, this situation can be thought of as a form of the Infinite Monkey Theorem[0] where the result space is drastically reduced from "purely random" to "likely to be statistically relevant."

For an interesting overview of the above theorem, see here[1].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

1 - https://www.yalescientific.org/2025/04/sorry-shakespeare-why...
by username223 | 2026-01-20 01:59:14+00:00
> It feels like the only solution is to go live in a forest, and disconnect from everything.

As much as I approve of living in forests, you don't need to go that far. Tech bros are fond of things being "frictionless," so add some friction. Delete the social media apps from your phone and use their websites instead. Don't bookmark the sites, but make yourself type in the URLs each time you want to visit. If each visit is intentional, instead of something you do automatically when you're bored, you'll have a better experience.