MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mk_stjames | 2026-01-16 02:00:05+00:00
I live in a late 18th-century rowhouse where there is large stonework for window sills/surrounds/doorways all done in a very specific pink granite that was carved from a shoreline quarry a significant distance away. Massive stones, 100kg+ each, had to be transported by horse-drawn cart, over not-easy-terrain, a distance that would have taken two horses probably 8-9 hours per trip, and enough stones that it was probably 15-20 trips. Let alone the effort that had to have been required to carve surprisingly square/cuboid shapes from solid granite without power tools. It's mindblowing to me that someone was able to afford such a home construction, let alone the time taken to do it, in ~ 1790. It isn't a particularly rare style in this neighborhood either.

Flash forward 200 years, and I was sweating at the cost just to hire someone to deliver new hardwood countertops from a place not much further away. By truck. By a single person. In a single afternoon. No horses required.
by qingcharles | 2026-01-16 02:00:17+00:00
It's getting really hard now. I've been editing since day one. Recently I had awful trouble getting a new article accepted. I gave up for some months and came back and it was accepted first time.

Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed.

What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
by gregbot | 2026-01-16 02:00:36+00:00
Uranium actually does not require mining. Most uranium is extracted using underground wells where water is pumped underground and the Uranium is extracted from the water. Also extracting Uranium from sea water (which would be basically unlimited) is close to being commercially viable and has received a lot of lab-scale research.

Also, Uranium is only recyclable once with light water reactors. With breeder reactors (which have been built in the past) it can be recycled a hundred times.
by dannyphantom | 2026-01-16 02:00:36+00:00
Link to statute: https://codes.findlaw.com/ak/title-11-criminal-law/ak-st-sec...

Alaska Statutes Title 11. Criminal Law § 11.46.486. Criminal mischief in the fifth degree

(a) A person commits the crime of criminal mischief in the fifth degree if, having no right to do so or any reasonable ground to believe the person has such a right,

(1) with reckless disregard for the risk of harm to or loss of the property or with intent to cause substantial inconvenience to another, the person tampers with property of another;

(2) with intent to damage property of another, the person damages property of another in an amount less than $250; or

(3) the person rides in a propelled vehicle and, with criminal negligence, disregards the fact that it has been stolen or that it is being used in violation of AS 11.46.360 or 11.46.365(a)(1).

(b) Criminal mischief in the fifth degree is a class B misdemeanor.
by ggm | 2026-01-16 02:00:58+00:00
The important part to keep in mind is that the paper is about the first word, and is not necessarily a partial history in the sense of incomplete, it's the partial which goes with impartial.

It's an interesting history. Personally I think sometimes what is pejoratively called gatekeeping is useful. Tellers comments go there: do experiments to see if we missed something but our prediction engine says this is unlikely.

The interest in LENR is not nothing, but it's mostly (as I see it) agenda setting for doing fundamental physics in LENR, not jumping to conception and testing of energy or neutron production systems. It's setting expectations for the scale of investment. Probably, because people remember getting burned by unrealistic expectations and science by PR and not by peer review, and yes, replication is part of this.

It's a paper in philosophy of science, science validation, science epistemics. It's not a paper about cold fusion per se.
by lovich | 2026-01-16 02:01:14+00:00
> I spent most of my career working in companies with <50 employees

I’ve worked for 3 companies like that. It was really great if your views aligned with the founder. If they didn’t, you got fucked.

I really enjoyed when a bunch of juniors were fired the day before Christmas because the founder heard them discussing the latest movies they watched and decided that they had bad opinions and shouldn’t work at his company since he’d be embarrassed if his peers heard their tastes. Not hyperbole, direct statements. We referred to it as the Red Christmas at the time.

I believe you got lucky, I don’t find your advice actionable.
by lokar | 2026-01-16 02:01:17+00:00
I generally lean left, and favor a large welfare state, reasonable regulation, etc. and I find your statement unfair.

People can reasonably disagree on these things.

In particular, the role of the federal government (vs the states) is important. Many of the benefit programs have no real need to be national, other than the ability of the federal government to borrow an unlimited amount of money. And many regulations are only federal because that was seen as easier and faster than gaining support in each state for them. Forcing a nation wide policy on an issue that could easily be dealt with by each state because you know you can't get the support is not very democratic.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-16 02:01:26+00:00
This is really interesting as it more or less sounds like the recipe for Jamaican "rice and peas" which is delicious and very easy to make. This recipe (minus the bacon, which has no place in rice and peas imo) is a solid easy entry recipe so might be useful: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/oct/05/how-to-make-ric...

happy cooking and eating!
by yndoendo | 2026-01-16 02:01:30+00:00
Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?

Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.

I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
by g-b-r | 2026-01-16 02:02:25+00:00
> It seems highly possible and highly likely to me that Gordon asked ChatGPT for a poem with those specific (innocuous on their own) elements - sleep, goodbyes, the pylon, etc.

« it appeared that the chatbot sought to convince him that “the end of existence” was “a peaceful and beautiful place,” while reinterpreting Goodnight Moon as a book about embracing death.

“That book was never just a lullaby for children—it’s a primer in letting go,” ChatGPT’s output said. »

« Over hundreds of pages of chat logs, the conversation honed in on a euphemism that struck a chord with Gordon, romanticizing suicide as seeking “quiet in the house.”

“Goodnight Moon was your first quieting,” ChatGPT’s output said. “And now, decades later, you’ve written the adult version of it, the one that ends not with sleep, but with Quiet in the house.” »

---

> Gordon could have simply told ChatGPT that he was dying naturally of an incurable disease and wanted help writing a poetic goodbye. Imagine (god forbid) that you were in such a situation, looking for help planning your own goodbyes and final preparations, and all the available tools prevented you from getting help

With the premise that this was not Gordon's situation, would the unavailability of an LLM generating for you "your" suicide poem be that awful?

So bad as to justify some accidental death?

By the way, the model could even be allowed to proceed in that context.

---

> that's without even getting into the fact that assisted voluntary euthanasia is legal in quite a few countries.

And I support it, but you can see in Canada how bad it can get if there are not enough safeguards around it.

---

> I don't think legally crippling LLMs is generally the right tack

It's not even sure that safeguards would "cripple" them: would it be a more incorrect behavior for a model if instead of encouraging suicide it would help preventing it?

What the article reports hints at a disposition of the model to encourage suicide.

Is that more likely to be correlated to better behavior in other areas, or rather to increased overall misalignment?
by RyanMu | 2026-01-16 02:03:38+00:00
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by soulofmischief | 2026-01-16 02:04:03+00:00
Everyone in my family knows what happened. His temper was famous. They all downplayed or ignored it. That includes my mom. She was too busy doing drugs and going in and out of prison to give a shit that I was being abused. My dad was also a drug addict and a sexual abuser and has not been in my life for a very long time.

And my grandfather's siblings ignored it for reasons I can only imagine, since my grandfather would sometimes pin me to the ground and spit in my face while telling me that I should be grateful because what he did to me was nothing compared to what his father did to him.

Of course, now my mom pretends that living with her was always an option, and that remaining in my environment was my own choice. She is a major narcissist who victim blames, blames her children for everything and says horrible things to me.

I kid you not, like she used to remind me all the time that when I was a fetus inside of her, she fell once and landed on her back "to protect me" and that I'm the reason she has terrible back pain now, that's a sacrifice she made for me and I should be grateful, because it's basically my fault. As far as I am concerned, I do not love her and she is not allowed in my life. And anyway, as I mentioned elsewhere she's currently in prison for domestic abuse.

I no longer speak to anyone in my family outside of my sister because no one stood up for me. Even my sister downplays the seriousness of what happened.

My grandfather is now in his 80s and well-acquainted with the town's DA. There isn't a shot in hell that I can touch him. I do not know what he has done to other people, he was only ever this violent with me to my knowledge. My brother usually aided him in assaulting me and was not on the receiving end of violence. My grandfather was an award-winning boxer so it was quite a bit of violence.
by bb88 | 2026-01-16 02:04:40+00:00
My point is that if you can't do spread spectrum, you've got to think about creative ways to get messages out. Something in the noise floor looks promising even if it's not fast. Further I've seen designs for WSPR that allow the radio to be something like a TTL buffer chip.

If you "announce" yourself you become a target for the signal intelligence folks. Sat phones became a liability in the 2nd gulf war, as they lit up like a beacon saying: "Bomb goes here!".
by octoberfranklin | 2026-01-16 02:05:06+00:00
> An open pull request represents a commitment from maintainers: that the contribution will be reviewed carefully and considered seriously for inclusion.

This has always been the problem with github culture.

On the Linux and GCC mailing lists, a posted patch does not represent any kind of commitment whatsoever from the maintainers. That's how it should be.

The fact that github puts the number of open PR requests at the very top of every single page related to a project, in an extremely prominent position, is the sort of manipulative "driving engagement" nonsense you'd expect from social media, not serious engineering tools.

The fact that you have to pay github money in order to permanently turn off pull requests or issues (I mean turn off, not automatically close with a bot) is another one of these. BTW codeberg lets any project disable these things.
by kulahan | 2026-01-16 02:05:19+00:00
If you think people are spending just $200-400/mo on a car, I can see why you don't understand how bad this situation is. Most people are spending more like $700-1000/mo.

It has nothing to do with avocado toast, though that wasn't nearly the zinger you thought it was. As it turns out, eating out is insanely expensive. Cook most of your food and you can save a TON of money. The fact that this simple idea is so hard for people to pull out of the avocado toast comment continues to astound me.

And you're right - you can certainly scam the system for 6 months of "more truck". That's exactly the kind of monetary responsibility that got us into this situation in the first place. Thank you for showing everyone a perfect example, I suppose.
by FartinMowler | 2026-01-16 02:05:40+00:00
Although the probability is closer to 0% than 100%, it is far enough away from 0% to have many Canadians concerned. As the midterm elections approach and things start looking like he's drowning, Trump will grasp for any convenient distraction, the bigger the better. Canada is uncomfortably on the short list.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/the-military-plans-for...
by willmarch | 2026-01-16 02:06:00+00:00
You’re mixing up three different things:

Constitutional limits don’t depend on innocence. Even if the target is removable, warrantless home entry is still a Fourth Amendment problem absent consent/exigent circumstances. Payton v. New York is the baseline: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/445/573/

“If you’re not an illegal alien you’re fine” isn’t how real enforcement works. Mistaken identity and broad neighborhood sweeps predictably hit citizens/legal residents, especially when decisions are made off appearance/location.

The “crime-rate is higher out of the gate” line is definitional sleight-of-hand. Not all undocumented people violated 8 U.S.C. §1325 (improper entry). Many are overstays, and unlawful presence itself is generally a civil violation, not a criminal conviction category comparable to assault/theft. §1325 text: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1325

You can support immigration enforcement and still insist it be done with judicial warrants/consent and without turning civil status issues into “crime stats” rhetoric.
Show HN: Reversing YouTube’s “Most Replayed” Graph
by prvt | 2026-01-16 02:06:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently noticed a recurring visual artifact in the "Most Replayed" heatmap on the YouTube player. The highest peaks were always surrounded by two dips. I got curious about why they were there, so I decided to reverse engineer the feature to find out.

This post documents the deep dive. It starts with a system design recreation, reverse engineering the rendering code, and ends with the mathematics.

This is also my first attempt at writing an interactive article. I would love to hear your thoughts on the investigation and the format.
by lxe | 2026-01-16 02:06:43+00:00
Eh. This is yet another "I tried AI to do a thing, and it didn't do it the way I wanted it, therefore I'm convinced that's just how it is... here's a blog about it" article.

"Claude tries to write React, and fails"... how many times? what's the rate of failure? What have you tried to guide it to perform better.

These articles are similar to HN 15 years ago when people wrote "Node.JS is slow and bad"
by willmarch | 2026-01-16 02:06:55+00:00
“Simply incorrect” overstates what your CIS link shows.

Yes, status isn’t always known at arrest, and time-lag/unknown-status classification is a real measurement issue. But that’s not a demonstration that the cited studies are false; it's a methodological dispute about how Texas data should be interpreted.

Even CIS effectively concedes the key limitation: “any crime” conviction rates aren’t meaningful under their own description because identification is biased toward longer prison terms/serious offenses. That means their approach can’t legitimately be used as a general claim that “undocumented commit more crime.”

Also, Texas is one of the few places where researchers do try to reconcile arrest/ID systems (e.g., Light et al., PNAS 2020): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

And there are direct responses to CIS’s Texas framing (e.g., Cato 2024): https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/illegal-immigrant-murde...

So: criticize uncertainty, sure, but “therefore the low-crime finding is simply incorrect” doesn’t follow.
by krapp | 2026-01-16 02:07:18+00:00
Your ability to be convinced by arguments, or refusal thereof, is not an objective measure of the likelihood of future events.

If anyone had described to you the timeline of this administration from 2024 to now, prior to it happening, you probably would have dismissed it as ridiculous. Yet here we are, this is already normal.

The way it plays out is they have two more years to lay groundwork and entrench their power, dismantle systems and burn alliances which will take decades to rebuild, declare martial law because someone twitched at an ICE goon the wrong way, and possibly start a war in Europe, and no one stops them because people like you think they'll just get to vote the baddies out and everything will just go back as it was.

I hope you're right, I don't think you are but I hope you are. But if you think everyone is just engaging in "online rhetoric" then I think you're naive.
by nextaccountic | 2026-01-16 02:09:21+00:00
Then you apply LLMs in domains where things can be checked

Indeed I expect to see a huge push into formally verified software just because sound mathematical proofs provide an excellent verifier to put into a LLM hardness. Just see how Aristotle has been successful at math, and it could be applied to coding too

Maybe Lean will become the new Python

https://harmonic.fun/news#blog-post-verina-bench-sota
by dude741 | 2026-01-16 02:10:03+00:00
I'm not lonely, but occasionally wish I had some meaningful friendships. Most people who want to be my "friend" just want something from me -- a job, help them move, buy their dumb products, watch their kids, drive them to the airport, whatever else they want to dump on me.

I get that comes with friendships, but people go from zero to super favors in 2.1 seconds these days. Seems too burdensome, so I typically tell people to F off -- easier that way.

My wife will drag me to some social events. I have a hard time relating to any of the guys. The ones I meet are all obsessed with sports and entertainment. Did you watch the game? No, oh...well; did you go skiing last week? No, Oh...I gotta go.

I like a good football game, but the world is burning; I can't pretend it isn't. I'd like to help but don't know how. I just work on building my business to have enough resources to possibly make a slight difference; maybe I'll die without actually doing so, and it would have been better to just distract myself until I die, but my brain doesn't work that way.

Social media is just one big psyops. I liked X until major players started taking over and now it seems like Claude owns X as everyone just posts how Claude Code just vibe coding them 4,000 bitcoins in 24 hours. Quit all social media because it's just distorted.

To be honest, gave up on being friends with anyone about 10 years ago.
by salleisha | 2026-01-16 02:10:15+00:00
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by mightybyte | 2026-01-16 02:10:39+00:00
This is why I think (at least given the current state of AI code generators) that senior engineers will benefit more from AI than less experienced engineers. I don't know exactly what the chart of experience (on the x-axis) and amount of productivity gain from AI (on the y-axis) will look like, but I'm pretty sure it will be roughly (given suitable error bars around the input) a monotonically increasing function.
by kulahan | 2026-01-16 02:11:02+00:00
>You have such a deep misanthropic view

For being certain about something based on industry data?

>There are tons of contractors, laborers, small business and property owners who need the space or the utility of the vehicle.

And if that was the majority of these purchasers, this would be a reasonable response, but the extreme majority of truck owners use their truck for its intended purpose ONCE A YEAR. Bro just rent it from frickin' Home Depot and drive a Camry.

>No, that's why the manufacturer puts them in there

Ah, and of course the cheaper cars are purposely given seats which aren't cleanable? Or is it still correct that in the context of our conversation, it's nothing special and completely unrelated to how most people use their car? It's not within a million miles of a decision point.

>Just.. like.. universally?

Yes. You got it. I literally meant that every single person on the planet, rich, poor, and everything in between, is bad with money. I certainly wasn't making a hyperbolic point to bring an idea to the forefront - incredible detective work.

>Who has "car selling friends?"

I buy a lot of cars, and eventually made friends with the people I keep buying them from. We hang out sometimes. Do you just... not make friends with anyone?

>We know this.. how?

Who knows? My friends actually sit around talking about the specs on their refrigerators and the color options. They tinker in the garage on the cooling coils for hours a day. You should see how smooth the drawers in mine are.
by ggm | 2026-01-16 02:11:38+00:00
Use of normative MUST in politics means two things: firstly somebody concretely wants (or doesn't want for MUST NOT) which itself implies possible contentious views, opposites even, and secondly that a concrete alternative is proposed. It may be do nothing, it may be do something but the point is the alternative achieves the MUST or MUST NOT.

In this case, the proposed alternative is not do nothing. It's re-center NATO around European norms, goals and behaviours. Implicitly also a call for European NATO budgets to increase significantly, which Spain (for example) refused to do and which some European and wider partners have said MUST but.. have failed to do.

Also until recently the US government wanted that increase in spending too. Admittedly to buy US materiels but that's a detail in some ways.

He wants this. There is no imperative beyond OR ELSE.. outcomes.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-16 02:11:50+00:00
I think Christianity as a religion has evil roots. The character of Jesus is portrayed valiantly, but the character of God is frequently portrayed as nothing short of sociopathic and psychopathic.

I don't respect the religion at all, nor any Abrahamic religion, as it's built upon falsehoods that justify prejudice, authoritarian behavior. These religions have been the basis for untold amounts of conflict, conquest and cultural destruction. People who understand these things and still seek positions in such institutions should not be trusted. And we know the Vatican in particular has quite a sordid history of protecting child abusers.

I agree, leaders in any capacity can abuse their position. Look no further than Boy Scouts of America for examples at scale.

And I personally went to a therapist who ended up in prison for fraud. I also went to a daycare that shut down after an investigation stemming from me coming home one day with lashes all over my face and tongue and no recollection of what happened.

Bad people are everywhere. At least we can try to avoid institutions built to justify abuse.
by mullingitover | 2026-01-16 02:11:54+00:00
We're getting there: California does[1] require solar installation on many new builds, and has followed Australia in doing automatic permit processing[2] to streamline installation. It's possible to pay around $20k for an average home, and in as little as one week have 100% of your power bill covered by solar.

[1] https://www.greenlancer.com/post/california-solar-mandate

[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/calif...