MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-05 22:11:16+00:00
>Humans do not exist for the profits of others

They don't, but they voluntarily take the risk trade-off. If you are the profit of someone else, it also means you are the liability of someone else.

Working for someone else has become so prevalent and so much the norm, that people have completely lost sight of the downsides of working for yourself.

It's not at all surprising that people opt for steady paycheck over erractic income and full liability for their mistakes/short-comings (despite the allure of fully reaping the upside). I've seen dudes making $40k/yr destroy $500k of product and still get their paycheck the following week.
by bwestergard | 2026-01-05 22:11:36+00:00
This post says: "For the first time, wind and solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while plug-in vehicles accounted for more than a quarter of new car sales."

This does not mean that wind and solar are replacing coal, oil, or wood, all of which were produced and used in greater volumes in 2025, so far as I can tell.

https://www.coalage.com/departments/closing-notes/global-coa...

All past price declines in energy commodities have lead to increased consumption of other energy (and raw materials) commodities. The production of whale oil declined, but only due to environmental regulation. For more, see: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/464145/more-and-more-and-mor...
by xpltr7 | 2026-01-05 22:11:37+00:00
Have you ever heard the phrase:
"To stop a hacker you have to think like a hacker."
Thats cyber security 101. Without tthe hackers knowledge or programs...you're just a victim or target. But, with this knowledge made available, now you are aware of this program/possibility. Its like when companys deploy honeypot servers to capture the methods & use cases of hackers attacking the server, to build stronger security against their methods and techniques.
by chaps | 2026-01-05 22:11:40+00:00
You seem to have faith in the courts still. It was not a bribe. Here's a short exchange between me and the court reporter who did indeed sent me the transcripts after payment:

"Out of curiosity, is it normal to pay court reporters over venmo like this? To be honest I was pretty surprised when I heard this. And funny enough when I asked folk on twitter, a scammer tried to "help out" with some "scam recovery" service for $500."

"That's hilarious! Since the pandemic, it really took off because we were working remotely, and some of the Cook County judges and reporters remain remote to this day and may be permanently working on Zoom. I work at 26th Street so we've worked through most of the pandemic in person, but the courthouse was not open to the public. Zelle is a way you can get payment to us quickly to get your transcript faster.

Most private attorneys use Zelle now because they want the reporter to start transcription sooner rather than later, but we also accept checks or if you prefer to send a check in the mail, you can do that. Very rarely does an attorney come into our office these days.

It's just a matter of preference."
by HanClinto | 2026-01-05 22:12:17+00:00
I don't know how related this is or not, but one thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the "How to awaken your LLM!" and "Secret prompt to turn on the personhood of your ChatGPT!" types of guides use role-playing games as a foundation.

One prompts the LLM: "Imagine a fantasy scenario where XYZ is true, play along with me!"

I think this is another part of the reason why these discussions remind me of the D&D panic, because so many of the dangers being pointed to are cases where the line is being blurred between fantasy and reality.

If you are a DM in an RPG, and a player is exhibiting troubling psychological behavior (such as sociopathy, a focus on death and/or killing, etc), at what point do you decide that you think it's a problem, or else just chalk it up as regular player "murder hobo" behavior?

It's very much not cut-and-dry.

> I guess similar to maybe how non-flammable furniture is now regulated even though setting fires is not the materials' fault?

Tort is not something I'm very familiar with, but adding "safeties" to tools can easily make them less powerful or capable.

Your analogy of flammable furniture is a good one. The analogy of safeties on power tools is another one that comes to mind.

What are reasonable safeguards to place on powerful tools? And even with safeguards in place, people have still sued (and won) lawsuits against table-saw manufacturers -- even in cases where the users intentionally mis-used the saw or disabled safety features.

In this case, what can be done when someone takes a tool built and targeted for X purpose, and it's (mis)used and it leads to injury? Assuming the tool was built with reasonable safeties in place, even a 99.9999% safety rating will result in thousands of accidents. Chasing those last few decimal points in a pursuit of true 100% (with zero accidents) is a tyranny and futility all its own.
by fragmede | 2026-01-05 22:12:21+00:00
You're assuming good faith and while I am not questioning yours, the added friction for spammers who aren't engaging in good faith to have to email with a personal message serves as enough additional friction to disuade casual spammers. At a guess, anyway. I don't work here and aren't privy to any internal information. So, sorry to say, but no, I personally wouldn't support that.
by graboy | 2026-01-05 22:12:34+00:00
> This is why the paper presented does not support the claim that LDL is the sole source of heart disease

Is that what we were arguing about? I guess it was. At some point in thinking about this my frame must have shifted into agreement with you. Of course there are other causes of heart disease besides LDL, like blood pressure, duh. The smooth dose response is about the particular gene not being linked to heart disease through something other than LDL, roughly.
by alexgotoi | 2026-01-05 22:12:41+00:00
You might be talking about this daily newsletter? https://buttondown.com/tech-daily

This is run by the same person who runs https://hackernewsletter.com/, but just checked my email and got today’s issue and the last one was on 2nd of Jan (sent only on week days).

Shameless plugin: I also run a hacker news curated links newsletter, focused on AI threads. If interested, here is the latest issue: https://eomail4.com/web-version?p=df548fb0-e8b0-11f0-97f9-35...
by runako | 2026-01-05 22:12:53+00:00
Economic rules are all subject to externalities like the effects of taxes, regulations, etc. I mean there is no rule in the sense that some of the jobs that are poverty wage in the US are not poverty wage in other countries due to the impact of regulation.

It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are free to make different choices.
by xg15 | 2026-01-05 22:13:02+00:00
Wasn't there also drug honey a few weeks ago?

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803097

We also got blue honey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801032 ) and cannabis honey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221651 )
by BizarroLand | 2026-01-05 22:13:33+00:00
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.

But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.

If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
by 578_Observer | 2026-01-05 22:13:46+00:00
@PostOnce, thank you for your honest explanation. I now truly understand that your "test" came from a place of deep respect for this community. I apologize for the repetitive phrasing.

You caught me on "a veteran like you." As a Japanese banker, expressing high respect for seniors is an instinctive part of my culture. Since my English vocabulary is limited, the translation tool I use to polish my thoughts suggested that specific phrase, and I relied on it too heavily in my excitement to thank everyone.

I believe that in our AI-driven society, "Trust" is more valuable than ever. From the long-standing Japanese companies I study, I have learned that "Honesty" and "Diligence" are the only ways to build true trust. I am trying to practice this here on HN, writing every message with my soul to build a real relationship with all of you. I hope my "heart" reaches you beyond the translated text. Thank you for guarding the quality of this forum.
by Someone1234 | 2026-01-05 22:13:58+00:00
People love to frame this as "patient choice" but this:

> They will recommend that decisions on vaccinations against flu, Covid-19 and rotavirus be based on “shared clinical decision-making,” which means people who want one must consult with a health care provider.

Will directly mean that a vaccine, which used to be free, will now cost a doctor-consultation fee (between $35 and $100+ depending on insurance plan). So for the poor they actually lose the "choice" if they cannot afford the new higher cost.

For example in my state, COVID-19 which was free last year, cost a doctor visit this year ($110) even if the actual vaccine remains 100% covered.
by mrtesthah | 2026-01-05 22:14:05+00:00
Primarily, I want to run agents with a flag like --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox to benefit from newer models' improvements in long-horizon tasks. For that to work, I need solid guarantees it won't rm -rf / my entire system while still allowing full stack access for installing and configuring databases, server daemons, etc. Ultimately that means working within some sort of container and/or VM.

Facilitating long-running tasks makes multiple parallel agents much more compelling.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-05 22:14:16+00:00
That presumes that SCOTUS represents the "general" attitudes of all Americans. But when they overturned Roe v. Wade, they explicitly went against the majority consensus of Americans.

General != majority, but SCOTUS is not a gauge of American opinion. Perhaps a better example is Brown v. Board of Education, at a time when a very large portion of the public was not in favor of integrating the races in public schools.

TL;DR: Protection is absolutely provided by the courts, which is the highest authority on what the Constitution (and Amendments) and other laws mean.
by observationist | 2026-01-05 22:14:37+00:00
We've shaped the world to be useful to humans with tools used by and for humans. It's going to be very advantageous to have generally capable humanoid robotic platforms that can take advantage of all of the shortcuts and hacks and efficiencies we tailored to ourselves.

If we get there, and I think we are there now, then the worst case scenario is having to tediously implement the hundreds of thousands of little tasks and skills needed to be effective for a particular job.

The best case scenario is we run training videos for AI that gets cloned to fleets, and then you can deploy the equivalent of robotic Amish carpenters to build housing, or robotic warehouse operators, and you're paying a tenth of the cost with a hundredth of the hassle for the same work output as a human, and the efficiency and effectiveness only go up year over year, while human labor has more or less peaked.

I'd rather have a fleet of general purpose robots which I can put to any use within the human repertoire than technically more efficient and cheaper specialty robots that only perform singular tasks in an assembly line.
by kachapopopow | 2026-01-05 22:14:41+00:00
I genuinely don't understand why there's no movement to just shove solar panels onto every apartment building subsidizing the initial cost in form of a loan that gets repaid as paying for power bills - the cost wouldn't change or even be lower than current power bills in a lot of european countries.

It really makes no sense to not use solar except in very few exceptions where it's genuinely never sunny and doesn't have that many sunny days, but hey estonia is making it work.

obviously there is some added maintenance like cleaning the panels, but that also applies for general services that residents of buildings already share.
by investmentcalc | 2026-01-05 22:15:05+00:00
Hey everyone
I recently launched a free, early-stage finance & investment calculator website, and I’m looking for honest feedback to make it better, especially around accuracy, usability, and missing features.

Site: https://investment-calculator.net

What you can currently do (EN / NL / FR / DE):
* Investment calculators
* Compound interest
* Goal / target-date mode
* historical S&P 500 backtesting
* ROI calculator (total + annualized, by dates or duration)
* DCA calculator with schedule + chart
* Crypto calculator with monthly projections (assumed returns after last known data)
* Inflation calculator (CPI-based value comparison between two dates)
* Loan calculator
* Amortization schedule
* Monthly / yearly / one-time fees
* Origination %
* Principal vs interest vs fees breakdown
* VAT calculator
* Net ↔ gross
* Quantity-aware
* Per-unit + totals
* Tax pie chart
* Discount calculator
* Percentage, fixed, or buy-X-get-Y
* Per-unit savings, total savings, effective %
* Age calculator (full breakdown + days until next birthday)
There’s also an Explore page, short investment & crypto guides, and the usual legal pages.
Tech / UX notes
* Prerendered for speed & SEO
* Language switcher
* Remembers theme & currency preferences

What I’d love feedback on:
* Do the inputs & outputs feel correct and transparent?
* Any edge cases or bugs you can break?
* Wording or localization issues in your language?
* What calculators or features would you personally want next?

I’m not trying to spam or sell anything, I just genuinely want to build something useful. Thanks in advance for any feedback
by refulgentis | 2026-01-05 22:15:33+00:00
I'm a bit confused.

If I'm understanding correctly, I'm reminded of an old saw I think I made up:

You can lie (shade people's interpretations) by either using percentages, or gross amounts.

I'm sure that's a TON of oil, gross amount.

I'm also sure 8% is "not particularly huge".

For instance, if I could get you without this frame, and told you that you got a 92% on a test, you got an "absolutely bonkers amount" of questions wrong...you'd argue with me.

If you started crying when I told you that you got a 92% on the test, then told you that's a "not particularly huge" amount to get wrong, I think you'd agree, if not be consoled.
by JasonADrury | 2026-01-05 22:16:08+00:00
Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country.

The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.
by sahila | 2026-01-05 22:16:40+00:00
> Pebble proves that a simple, shallow, and linear menu system works great!

Hard to say this is true when Garmin watches are far more successful than Pebble. That aside, the forerunner is a sports watch first where you want lots of physical buttons that don't get bothered by sweat. The better Garmin comparison is the Venu series which only have two buttons https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/wearables-smartwatches/?serie....
by Jiro | 2026-01-05 22:16:47+00:00
There's a ton of apps and watchfaces on the existing Pebble appstore that showed the weather back when the earlier Pebbles were new. I don't think any of them still work, because they depend on being able to access services that were around back then. These new Pebbles conspicuously don't list the ability to show the weather.
by tmcz26 | 2026-01-05 22:17:01+00:00
I don’t know. I see more comparisons with Libya or Syria or Central America in the 60s-70s-80s. Invasions and government toppling of non-central countries that draw a frown, but that nobody would actually jump in the fire to save.

Denmark? An EU, NATO country? Shit that would really be unprecedented.
by bccdee | 2026-01-05 22:17:19+00:00
That worst case shouldn't happen. When you do something like this:

let data = serialize(&doc)
.or_raise(|| StorageError::permanent("serialization failed"))?;

you're burying the error thrown by `serialize(&doc)` in such a way that you have to dig for it dynamically to recover it.

The closure in `or_raise` should take the error from `serialize(&doc)` as an argument and save the actionable details. It makes sense to have an "outermost error" when you're talking about a context trace that provides information to humans, but an error which a machine responds to should be flat & statically matchable.

Something like this:

let data = serialize(&doc)
.or_raise(|e| Exn::with_message(
"serialization failed",
StorageError::fromInner(e)))?;

where `StorageError::fromInner` decides whether the error should be permanent or not based on the contents of `e`, and saves any details that would be relevant for automatically recovering from the error.
by erxam | 2026-01-05 22:17:25+00:00
Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement.

Even now, the EU Commission is trying to 'defuse' the Greenland situation by trying to invoke NATO's fifth article, as if that's worth anything without the will of the USA behind it. You know, instead of like actually drawing out plans for a military alliance, economic retribution (remember all those sanctions against Big Tech which fell apart the moment Trump made even the slightest comment against them?) or… just about anything.

Laws are worth even less than the paper they're written on, and no amount of naïve idealism (and calling it that is me being generous!) will change that. NATO membership is worthless other than as an aesthetic signifier.
by t0mas88 | 2026-01-05 22:17:55+00:00
What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect.

For example, maybe some misconfiguration caused these routes to be published because another route was lost. Which could very well be the actual cyber attack, or the effect of jamming, or breaking some undersea cable, or turning off the power to some place.
by dnautics | 2026-01-05 22:17:56+00:00
> For example if after one branch you don't converge, but after two you do, do you accept that?

you should refactor so that it's representable.

> Add dynamically sized values (e.g. arrays) and loops/recursion and now you also need to simulate a possibly unbounded number of iterations.

regions are hard. You kinda have to reject regions that are not uniform. loops you can find a fixpoint for.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-05 22:18:02+00:00
I hadn't thought about the 4 year aspect. That is a great insight. I am against the current US healthcare system in general but I wonder if decoupling healthcare from employment (slightly) could help. Maybe employers should be required to pay for coverage that an employee selects? (clearly a lot of hand waiving of the exact mechanism here but..) This would incentivize healthcare plans to actually compete for someone to sign up with them and to give them an incentive to keep that person healthy since they would likely stick around longer with them.
by lightcrafter | 2026-01-05 22:18:03+00:00
Lead mechanical engineer of the original Roomba here. The article is good on the behavior based algorithmic approach, but equal weight should be given to both the clever sensor design, and the extremely unusual 'passive feedback' cleaning head system the team came up with.

The bump sensor, cliff detection, and wall detection were all implemented with plain IR LED emitter/receiver pairs, and very carefully shaped plastic enclosures so that the sensors provided a binary signal (floor vs. cliff, wall present/absent, etc.) that would hold up for the millions of cycles the machines racked up. This 'filtering in the sensor' simplified the inputs to the 8 bit 8051 microcontroller, and lowered the cost to a couple of cents for each detector.

The cleaning head used the torque of the brush motor to actively control the height of the cleaning head as the machine moved from carpet to hard floors and back. That's the 'core trick' that let the Roomba clean well on multiple surfaces with about 15 watts of brush power. Details in the now-expired patent -- https://patents.google.com/patent/US6883201B2/en.

Dave Nugent came up with the original torque lift idea, and then we worked it into the 'floating pulley' approach used in the final design. It seems obvious now, but at the time this was a radically different approach to mobile cleaning. Everyone else (Electrolux, Karcher, etc.) tried to make a miniature vacuum, but that burned too much power for a mobile system.

Joe Jones (project originator and team physicist) wrote a book about the original team and our development process that I recommend: https://dancingwithroomba.com/

Minor tech notes: Phil Mass did the original programming on the first generation Roomba in C on the aforementioned Winbond 8051 microcontroller. I think it had 256 bytes (!!!) of RAM and 4K of ROM.

The code was burned into the chip at its creation (no onboard flash!) so it had to be right the first time. For the 2nd generation system they ported the behavior code to the internal LISP dialect in use at iRobot.

It was a wild ride. I'm both proud of what we did, and dismayed (but not surprised) at what happened afterwards.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-05 22:18:05+00:00
again here, in case someone wants to argue that the css itself has mutated the state, no it hasn't.

JS with CSSOM can read what the value .myspan, .one span and .two span all are.

because this is the point where CSS breaks down as a db holding properties, it is here that it is instructions for the HTML language on how it is to run transformations.
by rayiner | 2026-01-05 22:18:35+00:00
Jobs aren’t good or not because they government declares it so by fiat, there’s substantive differences between different kinds of jobs. “Service jobs” are bad because they typically require little skill, just a human body physically present in the U.S.

In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
by lenerdenator | 2026-01-05 22:18:54+00:00
It's pick-your-poison, really.

Technology is notoriously expensive to develop and manufacture. One must either have native capacity (and thus, the wealth) to do so, or must get it from someone else.

Other Western/US-aligned countries might have the ability to do so, albeit at geopolitical and economic cost, because the only thing you're likely to gain from kicking the US out of your tech stack and infrastructure is a tech stack and infrastructure free of the US. Meanwhile American companies will be developing new features and ways of doing things that add economic value. So at best, a wash economically. Maybe the geopolitical implications are enticing enough.

Places like Venezuela? Nah. They'll be trading the ability of Americans to jack with their tech infrastructure for the ability of the PRC, Non-US Western nations, or Russia to jack with their tech stack.

The geopolitics of technology are a lot like a $#1+ sandwich: the more bread you have, the less of someone else's $#1+ you have to eat.