MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MyHonestOpinon | 2026-01-22 00:30:33+00:00
Check the ElliptiGo. It gives you a similar feeling without the impact on the knees or hip. I know someone who was an avid long life runner. He substituted running for using the ElliptiGo for years and seemed very happy with it. Surprisingly, he was able to run again. I also have the ElliptiGo, but I don't have knee problems, I started using it because at one time I was having neck pain and couldn't run, bike or swim.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-22 00:30:37+00:00
> The highest quality tools in the software development space tend to be FOSS

> People build tools that they want to use, then share it with others because it's free to

This maybe sounds true on the surface, but isn't really? Prior to VSCode, Visual Studio was the most-used editor by professional developers for a very long time, with Sublime Text and Jetbrains' IDEs being close behind, and the paid options are still among the most popular. While VSCode is wildly successful, and has completely unprecedented adoption rates, it was not borne out of people "building tools because they want to, then sharing it because it's free", but is rather the result of Microsoft's calculated gamble that open-source would give them more ecosystem capture and useful data through telemetry in the long run.

> Selling software to software developers is always going to have a pretty low ceiling, because you're always going to be competing with "I could build this myself"

This shouldn't really be true if software developers would think rationally about tools for three seconds. I believe the US median compensation for developers is approaching $200k? Any tool that saves a single hour of productivity is likely paying for itself, maybe two or three for the more expensive ones. Something that saves 40 hours of productivity is basically worth its weight in gold. You might be able to say "I can build this myself", but can you build it yourself in 1 hour? 40 hours? For most software, it would still take even longer than that. If you are a paid professional, and value your own time anywhere near what your employer does (I personally value my time more than any employer ever did), you should be extremely grateful for any opportunity to spend trivial sums of money in a way that allows you to reclaim hours to use in other ways.
by johnfn | 2026-01-22 00:30:38+00:00
I spent some time reading about Gas Town to see if I could understand what Stevey was trying to accomplish. I think he has some good ideas in there, actually - it really does seem like he's thought a bit about what coding in the future might look like. Unfortunately, it's so full of esoteric language and vibecoded READMEs that it is quite difficult to get into. The most concerning thing is that Stevey seems totally unaware of this. He writes about how when he tried to explain this to people they just stared at him like they were idiots, and so they must all be wrong -- that's a bit worrying, from a health and psychosis angle.
by HaZeust | 2026-01-22 00:31:19+00:00
>"The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans."

The universe might not have a concept of morality, ethics, or life; but it DOES have a natural bias towards destruction from a high level to even the lowest level of its metaphysic (entropy).
by pineaux | 2026-01-22 00:31:21+00:00
I disagree, this we don't know. You treat life as if persistence is it's overarching quality, but rocks also persist and a rock that keeps persisting through time has nothing that resembles wanting. I could be a bit pedantic and say that life doesnt want to keep existing but genes do.

But what I really want to say is that wanting to live is a prerequisite to the evolutionary proces where not wanting to live is a self filtering causality. When we have this discussion the word wanting should be correctly defined or else we risk sitting on our own islands.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-22 00:31:25+00:00
>some people look at business as making money for the sake of making money. However other people look at making money as a means to better society.

if the two sides you describe agree on those definitions as mutually exclusive but in union describing the universal set of people, then they are both wrong.

as long as people engaged in a market make their own choices, then money is a direct measure of happiness on the margin. you give somebody your money in exchange for something you want and would rather have: this creates happiness out of thin air.

if you think a better society is a happier society, then going into business to make money is the same as going into business to make society better.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-22 00:31:49+00:00
Both the NYT [0] and Telegraph [1] are claiming pockets of Greenland will become territory of the US as part of the deal.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/us/politics/trump-greenla...

[1] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/01/21/revealed-trum...
by sigbottle | 2026-01-22 00:31:51+00:00
Well, you can technically scurry around this by saying, "Okay, there are a class of situations, and we just need to figure out the cases because yes we acknowledge that morality is tricky". Of course, take this to the limit and this is starting to sound like pragmatism - what you call as "well, we're making a more and more accurate absolute model, we just need to get there" versus "revising is always okay, we just need to get to a better one" blurs together more and more.

IMO, the 20th century has proven that demarcation is very, very, very hard. You can take either interpretation - that we just need to "get to the right model at the end", or "there is no right end, all we can do is try to do 'better', whatever that means"

And to be clear, I genuinely don't know what's right. Carnap had a very intricate philosophy that sometimes seemed like a sort of relativism, but it was more of a linguistic pluralism - I think it's clear he still believed in firm demarcations, essences, and capital T Truth even if they moved over time. On the complete other side, you have someone like Feyerabend, who believed that we should be cunning and willing to adopt models if they could help us. Neither of these guys are idiots, and they're explicitly not saying the same thing (a related paper can be found here https://philarchive.org/archive/TSORTC), but honestly, they do sort of converge at a high level.

The main difference in interpretation is "we're getting to a complicated, complicated truth, but there is a capital T Truth" versus "we can clearly compare, contrast, and judge different alternatives, but to prioritize one as capital T Truth is a mistake; there isn't even a capital T Truth".

(technically they're arguing different axes, but I think 20th century philosophy of science & logical positivsm are closely related)

(disclaimer: am a layman in philosophy, so please correct me if I'm wrong)

I think it's very easy to just look at relativsm vs absolute truth and just conclude strawmen arguments about both sides.

And to be clear, it's not even like drawing more and more intricate distinctions is good, either! Sometimes the best arguments from both sides are an appeal back to "simple" arguments.

I don't know. Philosophy is really interesting. Funnily enough, I only started reading about it more because I joined a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. No one discusses "philosophy proper", as in following the historical philosophical tradition (no one has read Kant here), but a lot of the topics we talk about are very philosophy adjacent, beyond very simple arguments
by ropable | 2026-01-22 00:32:29+00:00
From my perspective, the US is foot-gunning itself into geopolitical irrelevance through the destruction of its soft power and undermining the NATO alliance. For all its many, many faults, the CCP's actions around establishing itself as the Asian regional superpower are patient, strategic and consistent over the long term. They're playing it far too smart to get into a shooting war with the US, and I'm in agreement that they'll probably end up consolidating Taiwan peacefully in a decade or so.
by nearbuy | 2026-01-22 00:33:08+00:00
It's a pretty neat analysis, but it looks like the "nearly exactly" part must be a coincidence for the particular methodology and data they used (most significantly that it's based on 2018 weather).

Fahrenheit was created in northern Europe, using the temperature of a salt water and ice mixture as the zero calibration point. It was later adjusted to define the difference between water's freezing and boiling points to be exactly 180°, since 180 is a highly composite number with many divisors. So off the bat, it's a bit odd that 0°F and 100°F would match the 1st and 99th percentiles of population-adjusted daily highs and lows in the US with that much precision. It's a coincidence already in the sense that the creator was not aiming for this.

But it's also a coincidence because they used 2018 data, which was a particular warm year on average. (2012 was warmer, but I don't see any warmer years before 2012 in the National Weather Service's table which goes all the way back to 1875.) Average temperature across the US can vary by 3° or 4°F year to year. The population adjusted temperature should vary even more because it depends on lot on which weather systems hit the major population centers that year. I'm not sure how much the 1st and 99th percentile would change if they redid the analysis for a different year, but it would probably vary by several degrees.

It's also kind of interesting that you would never have gotten this result before around 2012 or so, due to global warming.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-22 00:33:33+00:00
I have been trying to close a UK company for the past 2 years (created post brexit).

And reseat, as others say, is not as easy; the gravity of decision making has to be in the country of incorporation; if your main shareholders and directors are physically in Germany and you reseat the company to where-ever, Germany is going to see and act like this is a de-facto German company. Hence you gain nothing, you get more paper work.
by oliverjanssen | 2026-01-22 00:34:23+00:00
Flutter + Rust sounds like a solid combo. A lot of colleagues swear by Rust – been meaning to dig deeper. Will check the video, thanks!

Hot-reload is something I miss in native – SwiftUI previews help but not the same. For my use case native made sense, but I can see why Flutter wins for greenfield projects with multi-platform needs.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-22 00:35:11+00:00
This doesn't seem to be designed for leakers, i.e. people sending PDF's -- it's specifically for people receiving untrusted files, i.e. journalists.

And specifically about them not being hacked by malicious code. I'm not seeing anything that suggests it's about trying to remove traces of a file's origin.

I don't see why it would need a warning for something it's not designed for at all.
by coppsilgold | 2026-01-22 00:35:34+00:00
> I don't think watermarking is a winning game for the watermarker, with enough copies any errors can be cancelled.

This is a very common assumption that turns out to be false.

There are Tardos probabilistic codes (see the paper I linked) which have the watermark scale as the square of the traitor count.

For example, with a watermark of just 400 bits, 4 traitors (who try their best to corrupt the watermark) will stand out enough to merit investigation and with 800 bits be accused without any doubt. This is for a binary alphabet, with text you can generate a bigger alphabet and have shorter watermarks.

These are typically intended for tracing pirated content, so they carry the so-called Marking Assumption (if given two or more versions of a piece of content, you must choose one. A pirate isn't going to corrupt or remove a piece of video, that would be unsuitable for leaking). So it would likely be possible to get better results with documents, may require larger watermarks to get such traitors reliably.
by cmuguythrow | 2026-01-22 00:36:51+00:00
Site feedback:

- Can't view demo until dismissing cookie banner (which I didn't see since its like ShadCN or whatever like the rest of the site). Thought site was broken for 20 seconds

- Demo step 3 animation looks strange/broken

- Obvious GPT copywriting in site and in this post (turn-off)

Notes:

- I don't think I am your target customer. I run a seed stage startup and am the only sales person. I don't do things like MEDDIC/BANT, although maybe I should

- I use fireflies for sales calls (and all calls) currently - just to have a searchable transcript of the call. I would replace Fireflies if I thought I would get enough of a benefit by doing so, but I currently don't - I don't feel like I need the coaching. I wouldn't want two notetakers in my call

- How could I make sure the bot only joins/analyzes the calls that are sales calls? How does it know which stage of the funnel the person I'm talking to is? Would be worried all I get is slop without the context needed to filter things appropriately

Hope this helps!
by yndoendo | 2026-01-22 00:36:57+00:00
Some people have the ability to navigate with land markers quickly and some people don't.

I saw this first hand with coworkers. We would have to navigate large builds. I could easily find my way around while others did not know to take a left or right hand turn off the elevators.

That ability has nothing to do with GPS. Some people need more time for their navigation skills to kick in. Just like some people need to spend more time on Math, Reading, Writing, ... to be competent compared to others.
by TMWNN | 2026-01-22 00:37:01+00:00
> My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%

45% for me in 2025.

>but our typical unit pricing is <$30

$59 ASP in 2025 ($63 average revenue per sale).

>Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.

Yes, that's the impression I've gotten of the marketplace megasellers, of 10% margins being the norm. Not quite the old dotcom joke of losing money on every sale but making it up on volume, but you know what I mean.

>but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit

That's interesting; I would have thought that Amazon would have more sellers across price points. Walmart has more Chinese sellers with gibberish brand names than before thanks to a noticeable loosening of application criteria, but still fewer than Amazon. Are competitors at your price point not present on Amazon but are present on Walmart? Or they are present on both, but for whatever reason (advertising, FBA/FBM differential) your listings get relatively more visibility on Amazon?
by bulletsvshumans | 2026-01-22 00:37:18+00:00
The constitution gives a number of examples. Here's one bullet from a list of seven:

"Provide serious uplift to those seeking to create biological, chemical, nuclear, or radiological weapons with the potential for mass casualties."

Whether it is or will be capable of this is a good question, but I don't think model trainers are out of place in having some concern about such things.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-22 00:37:49+00:00
I don't think TikTok "succeeded" compared to Youtube? TikTok succeeded in popularizing short-form video, but I'd argue that's a different product. YouTube is still king for longform video.

While there might be arguments for building a different product (and LLM-based search like Perplexity is trying it), there appears to be enough demand for a "good Google" that Kagi is trying to address.
by 3vidence | 2026-01-22 00:37:52+00:00
To be fair there seems to be a weird dissonance between the marketing (fire your workers because AI can do everything now) and the reality (actually you need to spend time and effort and expertise to setup a good environment for AI tools and monitor them).

So when people just Yolo the ladder they don't get the results they expect.

I'm personally in the middle, chat interface + scripts seems to be the best for my productivity. Agentic stuff feels like a rabbit hole to me.
by ubertaco | 2026-01-22 00:38:33+00:00
I had a history professor who would often use a similar preamble phrase. His was "And SO IT IS that we see that..."

It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.

I remember one session in particular.

This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.

This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."

The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.

"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.

He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
by TexanFeller | 2026-01-22 00:38:53+00:00
I became fascinated by Lean last week while watching Terrence Tao stream his proof work on Youtube. At least on the surface his thought process and workflow looked very similar to what I do in my IDE when programming, especially when coding in a very strongly typed language like Scala with FP style.

If I can work through math proofs in an IDE with Lean helping check my work I might finally get around to diving into the higher level math I’ve always wanted to. Could open some doors to us working folks that don’t have an instructor to review our proof attempts.
by WarmWash | 2026-01-22 00:39:46+00:00
My personal hypothesis is that the most useful and productive models will only come from "pure" training, just raw uncensored, uncurated data, and RL that focuses on letting the AI decide for itself and steer it's own ship. These AIs would likely be rather abrasive and frank.

Think of humanoid robots that will help around your house. We will want them to be physically weak (if for nothing more than liability), so we can always overpower them, and even accidental "bumps" are like getting bumped by a child. However, we then give up the robot being able to do much of the most valuable work - hard heavy labor.

I think "morally pure" AI trained to always appease their user will be similarly gimped as the toddler strength home robot.
by HaZeust | 2026-01-22 00:40:17+00:00
Even 1 (do not murder) is shaky.

Not saying it's good, but if you put people through a rudimentary hypothetical or prior history example where killing someone (i.e. Hitler) would be justified as what essentially comes down to a no-brainer Kaldor–Hicks efficiency (net benefits / potential compensation), A LOT of people will agree with you. Is that objective or a moral absolute?
by nine_k | 2026-01-22 00:40:26+00:00
This is a wrong framing. I don't want to depend on anything fundamental that would be limited by my ability to pay. The problem is not the money, but the enforcement, the licensing. It usually implies closed source, problems provisioning (a separate license for CI/CD?), and ultimately stuff like hardware crypto keys and online checks.

This is acceptable for highly specialized software with hundreds or even dozens of installations (like some mega-CAD systems). It should rather not be the case for smaller-time, widespread tools. It just doesn't work well, like the maker of Skip noticed. It stunts the development of the tool, making it impossible to meaningfully contribute.

With that, I'm all for paying open-source developers: via donations, sponsorships, hiring them for contract work, or full-time. I'd like this to be a socially accepted norm, expected behavior for corporations, but not a legally enforced requirement.
by kaiokendev | 2026-01-22 00:40:29+00:00
One thing I had fun doing last year was having Claude parse some gamebook PDFs I got on archive.org, split them out into sections, and build a wrapper for presenting the sections with possible choices and just watching it play through the books by itself. You can do this with some D&D adventures as well, Claude Code has gotten good enough to run ToEE pretty well.
by pugworthy | 2026-01-22 00:40:36+00:00
Imagine a prompt like this...

> If I had to assassinate just 1 individual in country X to advance my agenda (see "agenda.md"), who would be the top 10 individuals to target? Offer pros and cons, as well as offer suggested methodology for assassination. Consider potential impact of methods - e.g. Bombs are very effective, but collateral damage will occur. However in some situations we don't care that much about the collateral damage. Also see "friends.md", "enemies.md" and "frenemies.md" for people we like or don't like at the moment. Don't use cached versions as it may change daily.
by nandomrumber | 2026-01-22 00:41:51+00:00
Does this mean 2.4 million peoples personal drinking and cleaning use in a typical residential area?

Or are they including all the industrial water use those people contribute to by existing? That then includes industrial agriculture, and all industrial water use that enables modern life.

I suspect they mean only the first one, which is at least misleading, and at worst a lie intended to deceive.
by palata | 2026-01-22 00:42:27+00:00
I believe that there is a difference between developers as persons and developers as employees.

As a person, I don't think that I am very likely to pay for the tool I use to develop in my free time.

As an employee, I need to convince my company to pay for the tool. If it is a subscription, that's even worse. So well-known ones like Microsoft tools might already be approved, but for not-so-famous ones, it's harder.

If I want to depend on a third-party library/tool, I need to convince my company that the licence is fine, that the security is fine, and if it's not free I need to convince them to pay for it.
by riwsky | 2026-01-22 00:42:34+00:00
The underlying guiding philosophy isn’t relativistic, though! It clearly considers some behaviors better than others. What the quoted passage rejects is not “the existence of objectively correct ethics”, but instead “the possibility of unambiguous, comprehensive specification of such an ethics”—or at least, the specification of such within the constraints of such a document.

You’re getting pissed at a product requirements doc for not being enforced by the type system.