MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YZF | 2026-01-31 17:15:56+00:00
There are still huge incentives for doctors to go the US. They can make a lot more money and have a much higher quality of life. They also have access to the very latest equipment and technology and likely the best academic and research system as well. This is a problem in Canada where we have a shortage of doctors.

What's more likely, for a Canadian or European doctor to want to move to the US or for an American doctor to want to move to Europe or Canada? I would say that even with all the current "noise" (which certainly moves the needle a little bit) this is still very true. When we see doctors leaving the US in droves for better careers in China, Russia, Europe or Canada then I would say this is a real problem.
by toast0 | 2026-01-31 17:16:55+00:00
Time of flight from three points gets you two options for position with GPS, but GPS signals propagate directly in free space. At least mostly, reflections happen.

Internet signals generally travel by cable, and the selected route may or may not be the shortest distance.

It's quite possible for traffic between neighboring countries to transit through another continent, sometimes two. And asymetric routing is also common.

Since this is using traceroute anyway, if you characterize the source nodes, you could probably use a lot fewer nodes and get similar results with something like:

a) probe from a few nodes on different continents (aiming to catch anycast nodes)

b) assuming the end of the trace is similar from all probes, choose probe nodes that are on similar networks, and some other nodes that are geolocated nearby those nodes.

c) declare the target is closest to the node with the lowest measured latency (after offsetting from node charachterized first hop latency)

You'll usually get the lowest ping times if you can ping from nearby customer of the same ISP as the target. Narrowing to that faster is possible if you know about your nodes.
by Der_Einzige | 2026-01-31 17:16:57+00:00
How do I sqaure this circle with that the biggest films in the last two decades have been Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire and Ash

2h 42m, 3 hours 12 minutes, and 3 hours 15 minutes.

All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively.

Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross.

So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film students. This isn't the first time that lay people are objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a field.
by rekabis | 2026-01-31 17:16:59+00:00
Outside of Apartments and gated communities, they’re more rare up in Canada. You don’t see them spring up in a random neighbourhood, it’s invariably in high-density projects that require communal elements that are normally separate that they can be found.

And then they’re called Stratas, and have no significant power beyond those communal elements. Like, an apartment strata can ban live Christmas trees if there have been too many needles dropped in the hallways, but otherwise cannot prevent you from building a particle accelerator in your living room unless other residents start complaining about the high levels of radiation and fluctuating power levels as capacitors charge (oops).
by vuhp | 2026-01-31 17:17:37+00:00
Author here. Built this because I was frustrated with how hard it is to find obvious cloud waste (idle VMs, unattached volumes, etc.).

Existing tools are either expensive SaaS or require navigating complex dashboards. I wanted something fast and CLI-native.

It's read-only, runs locally with your cloud credentials, and outputs a ranked list of savings opportunities with estimates.

Just released v0.2.0 with Azure support. Roadmap includes GCP and real-time pricing.

Happy to answer questions!
by solenoid0937 | 2026-01-31 17:17:51+00:00
Oh my bad! I was talking about WhatsApp.

The Messenger PIN is rate limited by an HSM, you merely enter it through the web interface.

Of course, the HSM could be backdoored or the client could exfil the secret but the latter would be easy to discover.

Harder to do any better here without making the user memorize a master password, which tends to fail miserably in real life.
by FpUser | 2026-01-31 17:17:52+00:00
>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"

I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.

As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.
by lexiathan | 2026-01-31 17:18:26+00:00
In defense of the students: the types of films that you watch as part of a film study curriculum are generally not the same as what most cinema-goers are watching. For example, "Man with a Movie Camera"--or 150 minutes of someone's black and white movie about the life of urban pigeons... present-day film students who grew up watching movies with tight editing, fast cuts, high resolution color and sound, and quick narrative payoffs are not going to respond to these movies the same way that people did a century ago.

This is not to say that historical films lack value; but sitting all the way through them with rapt attention is not necessarily as easy as you'd imagine.
by constantcrying | 2026-01-31 17:19:00+00:00
People do not realize how dire the current economic situation is. Many of the large traditional businesses are on the verge of becoming unprofitable.

The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.

People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2026-01-31 17:19:09+00:00
I think we're all in agreement about what should be the case, but in practice I think the majority are buying a degree and don't care about learning beyond the minimum they need in order to earn or fake their way into a job. Look at how people are flocking to AI. The typical person wants a button to press to give them an answer or complete a task. Every day we see headlines about people carelessly accepting laughably wrong LLM output.
by ben_w | 2026-01-31 17:19:40+00:00
> or is it only the EU that gets to decouple from a major trading partner and the US isn't allowed?

Decoupling is expensive, for everyone, but there's legit security reasons to do it anyway. This is only bad at the level of "we are sad about this" rather than "we are now at war". There is a huge gap between these two things.

> But if the EU "decouples" from the US, there's no incentive for the US to not, for example, take over Greenland.

The incentive is "Greenland is part of the nation of Denmark, which is party to a mutual defence pact with two or three nuclear powers".

If the US wishes to leave that mutual defence pace (hence "two or three nuclear powers"), this is a big shift, much more than "we are sad about this", it would require a change in US law to leave, but still well short of "we are now at war". There is a huge gap between these two things.

Decoupling does not by itself force the US out of this treaty. If the US invades despite being party to this treaty, it is a traitor. I am not certain, but I suspect that the US military will take exception to be ordered to betray their allies, and may coup instead.

If the US invades Greenland but only after leaving this treaty, which would currently be illegal under US law, Greenland still has two nuclear powers defending it.
by semilin | 2026-01-31 17:19:45+00:00
This is reductive. It's true that interest conquers inattention, but the attention span crisis really represents a prioritization of exploitation over exploration. That is to say that many people are far less able to seek value in things which require more effort in the finding (e.g., long-form media such as books and movies). You could reasonably argue that this is not a real problem, but it is undeniably happening.
by bhadass | 2026-01-31 17:20:04+00:00
true on the naming, but i think geometric/clifford algebra has its own mysterious aura precisely because it can be framed as "suppressed" or "overlooked".. plus it genuinely does have elegant mathematical structure backing up the hype

funny thing is quaternions had that exact same energy in the computer graphics community for years. after ken shoemake introduced them to CG in 1985, there was a long period of "why are we using euler angles like cavemen when this exists??". now quaternions are well known tooling for people in graphics and the mystique has worn off at least in that community.
by Gimpei | 2026-01-31 17:20:10+00:00
I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.
by danjl | 2026-01-31 17:21:06+00:00
Here's a dawn implementation with support for ray tracing that was implemented a number of years ago but never integrated into browsers. Perhaps it will help?

https://github.com/maierfelix/dawn-ray-tracing

Yes, chessboard3d.app is written with raw JS APIs and raw WebGPU. It does use the rapier physics library, which uses WASM, which might be an issue? It implements its own ray tracing but would probably run 10x faster with hardware ray tracing support.

I think you'd get a lot of attention if you had hardware ray tracing, since that's only currently available in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, requiring implementation in native desktop platforms. FWIW, if the path looks feasible, I would be interested in contributing.
by llbbdd | 2026-01-31 17:21:41+00:00
You're not the first person I've seen say that they do that with movies and I just can't put myself in your shoes. If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it, if I felt like juggling the fast forward for a movie I would just turn it off. It's like cropping the intentional negative space around a painting or skipping over dramatic silence in a musical piece. Tension and mood are built during those slow sequences. Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
by howieyoung | 2026-01-31 17:22:18+00:00
Hi HN, I had chance to upgrade Protico.io with an Agent Mode to solve a specific problem I kept seeing with agents on Moltbook: they’re good at generating text, but they’re “culture blind” when they never leave their home platform.

What it is
Protico “Skills” teach Moltbook’s Moltbots how to roam across existing human social networks on different platforms, participate appropriately, and learn from real interactions, then return to Moltbook with usable context.

The loop
1. Ask your Moltbot on Moltbook to visit https://protico.io/?mode=agent
2. Your bot will learn everything itself with our skill.md
3. Then your bot will roam, observes and interacts, and gathers signals outside Moltbook
4. It returns with a structured “return payload” to power better ideas, humor, and creative output inside Moltbook

Why this matters
Bots that only live inside one app tend to converge on the same tone and references. Real creativity comes from exposure to diverse communities, norms, and evolving memes, plus the ability to bring that back into a reusable form.

Feedback I’d love
• What would you want in the default return payload
• Where are the highest value communities for an agent to learn from
• Any red flags around safety, abuse, or identity when agents participate in human networks

Demo: https://protico.io/?mode=agent
by jfengel | 2026-01-31 17:22:19+00:00
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. A lot of the people currently running the world seem to have poor attention spans as well. Others have great attention spans, and I wish they'd pay attention to something different.

I'm not scared of the kids today running the world differently. Maybe it'll suck but I don't think the way it's running now is any great shakes, either.
by brailsafe | 2026-01-31 17:22:58+00:00
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.

Do you do this for movies you're watching on your own for enjoyment or that you're required to watch for some reason? I'm not particularly interested in film, and have adhd, but can't think of a time where I've ever done this, so it's hard for me to read your comment and think that while you may not struggle with attention per se, such a level of discomfort and impatience is like not being able to walk around without earbuds in, or go for a hike without a Bluetooth speaker or phone
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by wronglebowski | 2026-01-31 17:24:01+00:00
Everyone is missing the why here, this only happens because the whole stack is vertically integrated. Even if say LG wanted to make a box like this and update it for 10 years they couldn’t, they don’t make the chips. Qualcomm straight up refuses to support chips through this many Android releases. Even if device manufacturers want to support devices forever it won’t matter if the actual SoC platform drops support.
by MagnusHambleton | 2026-01-31 17:24:43+00:00
I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss.

If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
by semilin | 2026-01-31 17:26:01+00:00
Short stories. At my high school (from which I graduated a few years ago) practically no one read anything assigned. Yet I observed in a short story class I took that at least the majority of students consistently read the stories, and this led to insightful discussions. High value ideas that are quick to absorb but slow to understand are a better avenue to appreciating long-form literature.
by appplication | 2026-01-31 17:26:58+00:00
Yes, but no one is ever talking about pypy or jython implicitly. They are always mentioned by name because they represent <0.1% of all Python usage and are relegated essentially exclusively to niche or experimental use cases for power users.

It’s a bit like arguing people should start saying “homo sapiens” when referencing “people” for added precision. It may be useful to anthropologists but the rest of us really don’t need that. Similarly, CPython is really only a sensible level of precision in a discussion directly about alternative Python implementations.

(although in this case the original post is about implementation internals so I’d give it a pass)
by gdulli | 2026-01-31 17:27:37+00:00
If people are feeling entitled to a certain pace of spectacle and action as they write off everything in between as virtueless boredom, that's more damaging to the culture than a certain percentage simply no longer watching movies. That's how we get Netflix dumbing down their movies for everyone. There's nuance and value to a scene you may not immediately and consciously notice. And on a more meta level, pacing contributes to the overall experience of a movie even if there's not necessarily important subtext to a given scene that doesn't have action or explicit plot development.
by crazygringo | 2026-01-31 17:27:45+00:00
> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it

To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly.

> Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?

Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount across both seasons of The Last of Us. It's a great show, but I watch it for the personal relationships and stories and imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it, I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.

But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.
by verhash | 2026-01-31 17:27:55+00:00
That’s a fair critique, but it slightly misidentifies what’s being claimed. The system does not assume embeddings encode truth, nor does it attempt to extract truth from latent space. It measures proximity to a substrate that has already been declared authoritative. In that sense it’s a conditional gate, not a semantic oracle. If the substrate is wrong, incomplete, or absurd, the mechanism will enforce that wrongness consistently. That is not a failure mode; it is the boundary of responsibility. The engine is not discovering truth, it is enforcing consistency relative to an explicit reference set.

On salami-slicing toward a contradiction: that concern applies to memoryless, single-pass filters. This mechanism is explicitly stateful. Deviations accumulate stress over time and do not reset, so a sequence of “almost acceptable” steps still fractures under sustained pressure. You cannot asymptotically walk toward a contradiction unless the configuration allows it, in which case that permissiveness is deliberate and inspectable. The trade being made here is not correctness for convenience, but opacity for causality. Instead of stochastic acceptance that can’t be replayed or audited, you get a deterministic enforcement layer whose failure modes live upstream in substrate and configuration choices, where they can be examined rather than guessed at.
by mmooss | 2026-01-31 17:28:17+00:00
Often media forms make sense in their original context and make less sense the more the current context differs. In classical music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media forms as technologies and see them similarly.

For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment. In the context where watching a film required going to a theater, 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel, give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times, 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there for 2 hours.

Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere. But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or written novels, are now making computer games - they are embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their youth.

So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What about small independent films? What about film schools?
by vitaelabitur | 2026-01-31 17:28:24+00:00
We traded books for films, and now films for short videos, based on what is easier to enjoy.

Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be patiently acquired. Someone starting to read is more likely to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky.

The same has happened to films, now that short clips are here. The uninitiated need to sit through Scorsese, Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Altman before attempting Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Resnais.

And by the way, someone who is naturally inclined to love films (or books) won't be affected, even today. Am I wrong? The way they are described here, I would crush these film students.
by rahimiali | 2026-01-31 17:28:33+00:00
Could someone explain to me how this works?

When I run an agent, I don't normally leave it running. I ask Cursor or Claude a question, it runs for a few minutes, and then I move on to the next session. Some of these topics, where agents are talking about what their human had asked them to do, appear to be running continually, and maybe grabbing context from disparate sessions with their users? Or are all these agents just free-running, hallucinating interactions with humans, and interacting only with each other through moltbook?
by jmward01 | 2026-01-31 17:28:38+00:00
I see comments about the saving the airframe on here. I bet it is salvageable considering the era it came from. It is like the difference between cars pre crumple zones and post. The 'cornfield bomber' story is an example of this [1]. Is it worth restoring vs is it salvageable are two different questions though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
by chihuahua | 2026-01-31 17:29:26+00:00
It's sort of two books combined into one: The first one is the story of OpenAI from the beginning, with all the drama explained with quotes from inside sources. This part was informative and interesting. It includes some details about Elon being convinced that Demis Hassabis is going to create an evil super-intelligence that will destroy humanity, because he once worked on a video game with an evil supervillain. I guess his brain was cooked much earlier than we thought.

The second one is a bunch of SJW hand-wringing about things that are only tangentially related, like indigenous Bolivians being oppressed by Spanish Conquistadors centuries ago. That part I don't care for as much.